Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900 (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) 9781906165789, 9781787077607, 9781787077614, 9781787077621, 1906165785

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Biological Discourses The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900

ROBERT CRAIG AND INA LINGE (EDS)

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION The relationship between biological thought and literature, and between science and culture, has long been an area of interest by no means confined to literary studies. The Darwin Anniversary celebrations of 2009 added to this tradition, inspiring a variety of new publications on the cultural reception of Darwin and Darwinism. With a fresh scope that includes but also reaches beyond the ‘Darwinian’ legacy, the essays in this volume explore the range and diversity of interactions between biological thought and literary writing in the period around 1900. How did literature uniquely shape the constitution and communication of scientific ideas in the decades after Darwin? Did literary genres dangerously distort, or shed critical light upon, the biological theories with which they worked? And what were the ethical and social implications of those relationships? With these broad questions in mind, the contributors consider the biological embeddedness of human nature, perspectives on sexual desire, developments in racial thinking and its political exploitation, and poetic engagements with experimental psychology and zoology. They also range across different literary traditions, from Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, to Britain and the USA. Biological Discourses provides a rich crosssection of the contested relationship between literature and biological thought in fin-de-siècle and modernist cultures. Robert Craig is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg in Germany. He holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis examined the dialectic of nature and self in the work of the modernist author Alfred Döblin (2016). He has also published articles on Günter Grass and on the philosophy of social networking technologies. His work has been funded by the AHRC and the DAAD. Ina Linge is Associate Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. She holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis focused on the performance of queer livability in German sexological and psychoanalytic life writings, c.1900–1933 (2016). She has published articles on fin-de-siècle and modernist literature and culture, and the interdependence of sexology and autobiography. Her work has been funded by the AHRC, the MHRA, and the Wellcome Trust.

www.peterlang.com

Biological Discourses

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 27 EDITORIAL BOARD

RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Biological Discourses The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900 Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017007741

Cover Image: ‘Chordaria Flagelliformis’ by Anna Atkins. From Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, London(?), 1843–1853, 3 vols, Vol. II © British Library Board (C.192.c.1 Vol. 2, p. 89). Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-1-906165-78-9 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-760-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78707-761-4 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-762-1 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2017 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Robert Craig and Ina Linge have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgementsix Robert Craig and Ina Linge

Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language? Part I:  Legacies of Evolution Introduced by Staffan Müller-Wille

1

31

Elena Borelli

1 The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the Italian Fin de Siècle

39

Anahita Rouyan

2 Resisting Excelsior Biology: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Late Victorian (Mis)Representations of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

63

Pauline Moret-Jankus

3 Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence of Haeckelian Biology on Fin-de-Siècle French Literature

87

Godela Weiss-Sussex

4 The Monist Novel as Site of Female Agency: Grete MeiselHess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911)

111

vi William J. Dodd

5 Darwin’s Imperialist Canvas: Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (1938) as Cultural History in the Shadow of National Socialism

135

Part II:  Constructions of Desire Introduced by Heike Bauer

159

Michael Eggers

6 Cryptogamic Kissing: Adalbert Stifter’s Novella Der Kuss von Sentze (1866) and the Reproduction of Mosses

169

Charlotte Woodford

7 Biology, Desire, and a Longing for Heimat in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Novel Das Haus (1921) and Her Essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (1900)

189

Linda Leskau

8 Botanical Perversions: On the Depathologization of Perversions in Texts by Alfred Döblin and Hanns Heinz Ewers

211

Cyd Sturgess

9 (Re-)Constructing the Boundaries of Desire: Sexual Inversion and Sapphic Self-Fashioning in Josine Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (1937)

235



Part III:  Projections of Otherness Introduced by David Midgley

vii

259

Aisha Nazeer

10 Scientific and Gothic Constructions of the Degenerate, Racial ‘Other’: Reading the Abject in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887)

269

Michael Wainwright

11 Narratives of Helminthology: Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Bram Stoker, and The Lair of the White Worm (1911)

291

David Midgley

12 A Journey into the Interior: The Self as Other in Robert Müller’s Novel Tropen (1915)

317

Part IV:  The Poet, the Senses, and the Sense of a World Introduced by David Midgley

339

Sarah Cain

13 Attention and Efficiency: The Experimental Psychology of Modernism

349

David Wachter

14 Amoeba, Dragonfly, Gazelle: Animal Poetics Around 1908 

371

viii Robert Craig

15 The City as Creature: Reconfiguring the Creaturely Self in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)

397

Notes on Contributors

423

Index429

Acknowledgements

The publication of this volume was supported by grants from the Association for German Studies (AGS) and the German Endowment Fund of the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge. We are extremely grateful to both for making the volume possible. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to all our contributors. We thank them for all their hard work and patience throughout the editing process, and for helping to make the work on this volume such an enriching and enjoyable experience. Biological Discourses grew out of an international, interdisciplinary conference that took place on 10 and 11 April 2015 at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. The conference was supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Schröder Fund (Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge). We would like to thank them for their generous support, without which we would not have been able to host such an inspiring gathering of presenters and delegates from far and wide. The conference was organized by the editors of this volume and David Midgley, Annja Neumann, and Godela Weiss-Sussex. They sparked the conversation around the theme of ‘biological discourses’, and helped to craft the programme that became the book. Angus Nicholls’s excellent conference commentary, in turn, helped us to decide what kind of book we wanted to produce. We would also like to thank the British Library for giving us permission to reproduce Anna Atkins’s cyanotype impression ‘Chordaria flagelliformis’ from Photographs of British Algae (1843) to serve as the cover image for this volume. Finally, a special thank you goes to David Midgley, who has supported our work on this volume from the very first day, has shared his knowledge and experience with us, and has offered invaluable support and suggestions for improvements during the editing process. We would also like to

x Acknowledgements

thank Christian J. Emden for supporting the publication of this volume; Laurel Plapp, our commissioning editor at Peter Lang, for her assistance in steering it to completion; Andrew J. Webber for his feedback on a draft of the Introduction; and our anonymous peer reviewers for their time and useful advice.

Robert Craig and Ina Linge

Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language?

Perceptions of the relation between literature and biology in the Englishspeaking world tend to be dominated by associations with Charles Darwin. A little more than a week after the Darwin Year of 2009 had drawn to a close, the historian of science Steven Shapin took stock of what it had (or hadn’t) added to our understanding of the Victorian gentleman naturalist. History’s ‘biggest birthday party’, as he called it in the London Review of Books, was both Darwin’s 200th and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. The anniversary was marked by an unprecedented array of smaller parties across the globe, from conferences, through theatre performances, exhibitions, and pilgrimages to the Galápagos Islands, to banknote re-issues and even folksy bumper stickers. Darwin’s latent importance to countless aspects of modern self-understanding – our crumbling sense of human uniqueness, our ethics, our politics, our culture, our religion – found recognition in myriad quarters, whether scientific, literary or even ecclesiastical. From Richard Dawkins to the Vatican, authorities of all kinds paid homage.1 But in spite of their focus on the ‘dangerous idea’ of evolution by natural selection, to quote Daniel Dennett’s famous title from 1995,2 Shapin had his doubts about the curiously de-historicized character of the celebrations: the sense that the Darwin mythos had transcended any attempt to relate it back to the cultural context of Victorian Britain.

1 2

Steven Shapin, ‘The Darwin Show’, London Review of Books 32:1 (2010), pp. 3–9 [accessed 21 September 2016]. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London 1995.

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This volume is certainly not only concerned with Darwin or Darwinism. We look beyond Darwin, and travel beyond Victorian Britain, to investigate other dimensions of the complex relationship between literature and biological thought around 1900. Nonetheless, the contrived commemorations of the Darwin bicentenary are so revealing because they remind us that the supposedly timeless ideas of science are in fact intensely historical products. Even in the face of the ‘verifiability’ or ‘falsifiability’ of empirical evidence (itself a socially contested authority),3 scientific theories emerge and develop as the subject matters of particular conversations that are by no means limited to the realm of the strictly scientific. In 1995, Dennett famously suggested that as a kind of ‘universal solvent’, natural selection might both account for, and further, the development of humanity’s biological, social, and cultural processes.4 But this suggestion of an all-encompassing triumph has obscured a far more convoluted story. The radical materialism of natural selection, as first expounded in the Origin of 1859, was facing growing opposition by the turn of the nineteenth century. Alternative evolutionary models, notably that of Lamarckism, appeared to some to be a better fit for an intellectual culture still shaped by a sense of compatibility between evolution and theistic design; apparent discontinuities in the fossil record cast doubt on the timescales of natural selection; and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s theories of inheritance around 1900 seemed for several decades to provide a more immediate account of development than the gradualism of natural selection.5 It was only in the period between the world wars that the so-called modern ‘evolutionary synthesis’ 3

For a seminal intervention in the modern ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ 1985. With a focus on the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over Boyle’s air-pump experiments in the 1660s, the work demonstrated the extent to which supposedly objective ‘knowledge’ is the product of ‘human actions’ in response to sets of social and political conditions and demands: see especially pp. 332, 344. 4 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 521; see also p. 63. 5 See Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900, Baltimore, MD 1983, pp. 22–3, 44–7; and Steven Rose, ‘How to Get Another Thorax’, London Review of Books 38:17 (2016), pp. 15–17 [accessed 13 December 2016]. See Rose, ‘How to Get Another Thorax’. As Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon have recently shown, theories of organic development from the simple to the more complex had their roots in the ‘ancient idea of the Great Chain of Being’, which descended from the thought of Plato and Aristotle. See ‘Introduction’, in Lightman and Zon (eds), Evolution and Victorian Culture, Cambridge 2014, pp. 1–15: pp. 2–3, 9. See Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, Chicago, IL 2008, pp. 8–9; see also Nicholas Saul, ‘Darwin in Germany Literary Culture 1890–1914’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, vol. III, London 2014, pp. 46–77: especially pp. 50–1. The concept of deus sive natura finds

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Haeckelian appropriations fed into radically different literary attempts to reconfigure the human being’s meaning in relation to itself, its society and its natural world. Currents of Darwinism also mixed with the ateleological pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of Will and Eduard von Hartmann’s conception of ‘the Unconscious’, ideas which were particularly prominent in European intellectual culture in the years leading up to 1900. Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud forged unique brands of thinking in response to these inheritances, reconceiving the embodied self in ways that drew upon scientific and literary methods. Fin-de-siècle and modernist bodies (individual and politic) became the shifting screens for biological, social, and political projections that often had little in common with Darwin’s circumspect and, as Nicholas Saul puts it, ‘speculation-averse’ theories of natural selection.9 But even in specialisms apparently removed from the reaches of evolution, new developments were quietly reshaping the disciplinary landscape of the life sciences. In German laboratories, the 1870s and 1880s witnessed new modes of quantitative measurement in experimental psychology, against the backdrop of a growing challenge to a biological and physiological determinism that had seen its European heyday some forty years earlier.10 By contrast, the first three decades of the twentieth century saw the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) develop radically new qualitative methods for observing animal behaviour and agency: Uexküll’s

its origins in Spinoza’s pantheism: see Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford 2000, p. 226 (part IV, preface) and p. 231 (part IV, axiom, proposition 4). 9 For a brief discussion of Darwin’s own studious avoidance of racial categorizations in The Descent of Man (1871) – and his articulation by contrast of ‘gradations’ in human characteristics – see David Midgley’s introduction to Part III of this volume; cf. Saul, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture 1890–1914’, p. 50. 10 On the history of modern experimental psychology as it emerged in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt, see Mathias Kiefer, Die Entwicklung des Seelenbegriffs in der deutschen Psychiatrie ab der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts unter dem Einfluss zeitgenössischer Philosophie, Essen 1996, pp. 67–74. On the Anglo-American development of experimental psychology, and its significance for T. S. Eliot’s poetry, see Chapter 13 of this volume.

Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language?

5

aim was to pursue a biology independent of the positivist foundations of physics and chemistry, and of Haeckel’s seemingly anthropomorphic conception of evolution.11 To put it simply, Darwinism and its descendants were far from being the only games in town around 1900. The literary works of the period crystallized different ways of rethinking questions of identity, ethics, and society through a loosely interlinked but diverse set of scientific ideas, as this volume demonstrates: psychotechnics and modernist poetry come together to explore human attention and efficiency; animal agency is shown to be debated in ecological, zoological, and poetic works alike; and German sexological theories are re-negotiated in Dutch lesbian fiction. In tracing that rich diversity, we also invite readers to consider anew the famous (and remarkably persistent) sense of cultural dichotomy laid out by C. P. Snow in his Rede Lecture of 1959, The Two Cultures.12 Snow’s strong sense of the opposed academic cultures of literary studies and the natural sciences was very much the product of the Cambridge of the late 1950s, and yet another example of the historical mutability of disciplinary boundaries and battlegrounds. Snow saw science and literature as standing in an antithetical relationship and competing with one another for attention and resources within the educational sphere. In contrast to what he saw as the reactionary potentials latent in modernist literary explorations of alienation, he situated scientists and engineers well and truly on the side of intellectual, social, and political progress.13 The notoriously bitter dispute that ensued between Snow and F. R. Leavis harked back to the cultural politics of a debate of the 1880s between T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold. Huxley’s advocacy of the physical sciences as the basis for a new educational model drew Arnold’s vigorous defence of a traditional diet of the literary classics.

11 12

13

See Malte Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134:1 (2001), pp. 553–92: 569–70. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, ed. with an Introduction by Stefan Collini, Cambridge 1998. For a thorough exploration of the ‘two cultures’ controversy and its broader repercussions, see Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain, Cambridge 2009. See Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy, pp. 26–34.

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Yet even that controversy was not fought out in the stark terms of mutual exclusion, revealing a complex history to the relationship between science, society, and the world of letters. The nineteenth century saw a looser connection between the main branches of the life sciences than twentieth-century developments might suggest. ‘Biology’ first emerged in the years around 1800 as a designation of the study of human life, but in English it was only in the 1850s that its modern meaning started to enter into general currency.14 The term covered two broadly different disciplinary orientations: physiology, bacteriology, cell biology, and neurology focused on forms and functions, and fed into modern cultures of experimentalism; whereas theories of evolution came to deal with questions of organic transformation over unimaginable stretches of time.15 The sociologists Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) saw a deep interdependence between these perspectives. Haeckel’s biogenetic law, which stated the single organism’s recapitulation of every stage of its species’ evolution, came to the fore in Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology (1876). On that basis, in 1882 he would argue that ‘the law of organic progress is the law of all progress’, resulting in the evolution ‘of the simple into the complex, through the process of continuous differentiation’ in both the natural world and human society.16 As Anne-Julia Zwierlein has noted, Comte’s and Spencer’s theories of organicism – and most notably Spencer’s theory of the ‘Social Organism’ – highlighted the ramifying affinities between biological forms on the one hand, and the configurations of the late Victorian ‘social body’ on the other. In contrast to a more recent sense of incompatible cultures, the biological sciences and the humanities still largely spoke a shared language.17 14 See here Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900, London 1984, pp. 12–13 15 For an excellent account of these distinctions, see Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ‘Unmapped Countries: Biology, Literature and Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London 2005, pp. 1–12: pp. 2–3. 16 Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 17:2 (1882), p. 234. See here also Lightman and Zon, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 17 See here Zwierlein, ‘Unmapped Countries’, p. 4; cf. p. 1.

Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language?

7

Within that context, Thomas Huxley had spoken in 1854 of ‘the science of society or Sociology’ as a ‘higher division of science’ that might explicitly deal with ‘the relation of living beings to one another’.18 This idea was echoed in ‘Science and Culture’, an essay originally delivered as an address in Birmingham in 1880, where he argued that literature was important for a complete intellectual culture. This in turn found something of a mirror image in Arnold’s insistence, in ‘Literature and Science’ (1882), that ‘a genuine humanism is scientific’.19 And as we move forward into the debate’s twentieth-century incarnation, we find nothing fundamentally new in C. P. Snow’s suggestion in 1963, after the unanticipated public interest sparked by his Rede Lecture, that forms of social scientific inquiry might come to constitute a kind of ‘third culture’ in addressing ‘the human effects of the scientific revolution’.20 The further diversification of disciplines in more recent decades has led to ever more sophisticated attempts to reach across the boundaries. In his essay of 1980, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project?’, Jürgen Habermas pointed to the need to find effective modes of communication beyond the ‘esoteric bastions’ of different disciplines.21 In the wake of national reunification, German universities have played host to numerous public debates over the relationship between the Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences) and the Geisteswissenschaften (approximately, the humanities).22 One such

18

Thomas H. Huxley, ‘On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences’ [1854], in Science and Education: Essays, New York 1893, p. 58. 19 Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’, in Science and Culture and Other Essays, London 1888, p. 18; see also Matthew Arnold, ‘Literature and Science’ [1882] [accessed 22 September 2016]. For the background to this debate, see Lightman and Zon, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. 20 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 70. 21 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’ [1980], in Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA 1997, p. 38ff. 22 The German debates of the 1990s also entailed a re-evaluation of the social function of the traditional Geisteswissenschaften and, in some instances, their re-designation as Kulturwissenschaften.

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conversation, between philosopher Jürgen Mittelstraß and literary critic Ulrich Gaier, brought to the fore the vital role of the arts in pointing to elements of experience that challenge our understanding of the world we inhabit, and in highlighting the constitutively narrative processes of interpretation which make us who we ‘are’.23 However, even that now seems to present too clean a division between science and literature. More recently still, Elinor Shaffer has shown how, after the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, the notion of a ‘third culture’ has come ever more explicitly to characterize academic investigations into the relationship between the disciplines: one grounded in an on-going (if often unacknowledged) interaction through which literature and science have in different ways – sometimes antagonistic, sometimes co-constitutive – emerged as the products and producers of ‘discourse’.24 In his lecture, C. P. Snow had intimated that ‘it is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art’.25 According to Snow, scientific knowledge had hardly ever made its way into art and literature and, in the rare cases where this ‘assimilation’ had taken place, poets only seemed to be getting it wrong. The present collection aims to paint a far more nuanced picture of an epistemic and aesthetic exchange between literature and the biological sciences. The scholarship on the relationship between ‘literature’ and ‘biology’ after Darwin is voluminous, with Darwin himself often providing the main focal point. Gillian Beer’s classic Darwin’s Plots (1983) not only excavated 23

See Jürgen Mittelstraß, ‘Geist, Natur und die Liebe zum Dualismus: Wider den Mythos von zwei Kulturen’, in Helmut Bachmaier and Ernst Peter Fischer (eds), Glanz und Elend der zwei Kulturen: Über die Verträglichkeit der Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften, Konstanz 1991, pp. 9–28: p. 10. Cf. Ulrich Gaier, ‘Verfehlte Gewohnheiten im Denken und Handeln: Die zwei Kulturen sind weniger wichtig als eine vierte Gewalt’, in ibid. pp. 91–106: p. 96. 24 See Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Introduction: The Third Culture – Negotiating the “two cultures”’, in Shaffer (ed.), The Third Culture: Literature and Science, Berlin 1998, pp. 1–12: especially pp. 2–3. See also George Levine, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’, in Levine (ed.), One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, Madison, WI 1987, pp. 3–34: especially pp. 8–9, 12–14. 25 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 16.

Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language?

9

the younger Darwin’s considerable repertoire of reading, from Shakespeare and Milton to Wordsworth and Byron; Beer also sounded out the deep poetic and metaphorical resonances in the gestating versions of the Origin, not to mention the potential for (mis)interpretation.26 Darwin’s world was one in which natural theology still shaped the concepts of natural history, and from within that world he was eking out a precise yet adaptable language to describe not a teleological sense of purpose, but an ‘uncontrollable welter of [evolutionary] possibilities’.27 Following in a similar vein, the volume Science, Literature, and the Darwin Legacy (2010) underlined the interconnections of genre and form between literary and biological writing in nineteenth-century culture.28 Subsequent collaborations have adopted a range of approaches to the ‘Darwin Legacy’ in literary cultures. Darwin in Atlantic Cultures (2010) explicitly followed Foucault in reconstructing a ‘Darwinist episteme’ around a group of thematic areas, including gender and sexuality, race, and colonization and ‘progress’.29 In an ambit that reaches right up to the present day, The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures (2011) moves beyond conventional questions of historical reception in a bracing yet (admittedly) elusive search for ‘an authentically Darwinist, evolutionary aesthetic’.30 Returning to a more contextual approach, The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe

26 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009, pp. 26–44, 45–52. See especially pp. 26–8 for a detailed exposition of Darwin’s range of reading. 27 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. xviii. 28 See Paul White, ‘Introduction’, in White (ed.), Science, Literature, and the Darwin Legacy. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 11 (2010), pp. 1–7: pp. 2–5. 29 See Jeannette Eileen Jones and Patrick B. Sharp (eds), Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, London 2010. Cf. Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries, which investigated the cultural resonances of a range of nineteenth-century scientific disciplines, from parasitology to anthropology. 30 Nicholas Saul and Simon J. James, ‘Introduction: The Evolution of Literature’, in Saul and James (eds), The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Culture, Amsterdam 2011, pp. 9–18: p. 15; see also pp. 10–11. Cf. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, New York 2004.

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(2014), as the latter half of a four-volume set on Darwin’s influence, has presented the most comprehensive survey yet of his cultural impact across the continent.31 Broad-based surveys of the literary impacts of Darwinism combine with examinations of evolutionary resonances in such authors as Zola and Proust; and through an engagement with lesser-known literary figures, a number of our chapters build on that groundwork. Regardless of natural selection’s empirical durability and explanative scope,32 literature is certainly not ‘just’ another evolutionary product; and in precisely that light, we want to ask if its cultural relationship with biology around 1900 is simply one of historical ‘reception’ or ‘assimilation’. A number of publications have already beaten new paths in challenging any notion of a one-way street. In The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900, Peter Morton pointed to a dynamic relationship between the late Victorian literary imagination and natural selection, Galtonian eugenics, and Lamarckian reconceptions of inheritance. The close links between Victorian literature and biology owed much to the intellectual accessibility and imaginative resonance of contemporary theories of evolution and heredity.33 Staffan Müller-Wille argues in the introduction to our first section that biological works – both in British and German culture – constituted a best-selling ‘genre’; but as Beer has shown, the connections have to do with more than just a lively culture of intellectual exchange between biologists, journalists, and writers. The resources of myth and metaphor fed not simply into a new theory of natural selection, but a powerful new conceptual vocabulary. More recently, scholars have ventured beyond Darwin to consider lesser-explored examples of the interplay of ‘the aesthetic’ and ‘the scientific’ in fin-de-siècle and modernist cultures. With a focus on parasitology and contagion, the volume Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933 (2013) explores the topic of ‘contagion’ as both a concept and a trope that is co-constructed through medical discussions, 31 32 33

Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, London 2014. See Saul and James, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. Peter Morton, The Vital Science, especially pp. 36–50.

Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language?

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concepts in the social sciences, and literary and visual-aesthetic representations.34 In that direction, the German-speaking world, in particular, has recently played host to new developments in the so-called ‘poetology of knowledge’ and ‘literary anthropology’.35 Building upon Foucault’s archaeologies of knowledge, the former highlights the senses in which the ‘objects’ of knowledge are constituted through rhetorical, performative, and literary strategies. Literary anthropology has taken a more explicitly existential approach to the ways in which twentieth-century literature has shaped forms of knowledge about our hybrid existences in the discursive spaces between biology, psychology, and sociology – knowledge that might transcend the explanative limitations of the natural sciences.36 We draw upon aspects of these trends; but like a collection of connected case-studies, our close readings aim to let authors and texts reveal their sui generis engagements with scientific ideas, rather than filtering them through a single set of presuppositions about ‘the way’ in which biology related to literature. The ‘discourses’ of our title bring into play a terminology that reaches back to Foucault’s famous treatment of the concept in Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966); and this collection relates to that work’s ‘archaeological’ attempt to situate the modern notion of humanity, from the nineteenth century onwards, at a point of conjunction between biological, socio-economic, and philological thought. But we also go beyond Foucault’s specific sense of an ‘épistémè’ as the unified and unifying a priori that is the defining condition for the horizon

34 Thomas Rütten and Martina King (eds), Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin 2013. 35 See here Albrecht Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1999; and Joseph Vogl (ed.), Poetologien des Wissens um 1800, Munich 1999. ‘Literary anthropology’ can be traced back to the debate between Mittelstraß and Gaier. 36 See, for example, Armin Schäfer, ‘Poetologie des Wissens’, in Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben (eds), Literatur und Wissen: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Stuttgart 2013, pp. 36–40; and Wolfgang Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014, especially pp. iv–xxv.

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of possible knowledge – and its constituent discourses – in a particular epoch.37 Instead, we aim to bring into view a looser and more permeable sense of a discourse as an historically variable nexus of collective rules for thinking, speaking, and acting: a nexus which, as the literary scholar Jörg Schönert has cogently argued, has no existence in and of itself, but rather emerges through processes of retrospective ‘reconstruction’.38 Both forms of knowledge (literary and scientific) occupied creative and cultural spaces in which ideas, concepts, and trends were co-constructed rather than simply exported and imported. If the present volume’s approaches are shaped by the current critical resources of a ‘third culture’, then its chapters themselves probe elusive ‘third cultures’ around 1900:39 ambiguous sites of confrontation and appropriation which traversed national, imperial, and disciplinary borders, forming a network of rhizomatic connections – as is suggested by Anna Atkins’s cyanotype image of seaweed on our front cover.

Circulations and exchanges: A common language? Our contributors visit various sites of exchange between ‘the literary’ and ‘the scientific’ around 1900, many of which extended markedly beyond both Darwin and Darwinism(s). One particular ‘site’, which straddled the disciplinary boundaries of science and literature in the early years of the

Cf. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris 1966, pp. 355–9. 38 See Jörg Schönert, ‘Bilder von “Verbrechermenschen” in den rechtskulturellen Diskursen um 1900’, in Schönert (ed.), Erzählte Kriminalität, Tübingen 1991, pp. 497–531: p. 497. 39 See Angus Nicholls, ‘Conference Commentary’ for the conference Biological Discourses, St John’s College, Cambridge, April 2015, pp. 1–8: p. 4 [accessed 11 December 2016]. 37

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twentieth century, was that of sexuality and biological reproduction. The sexual sciences of psychoanalysis and sexology, which provide the theoretical orientation for a number of our investigations, stand as examples of a complex interplay of biological inquiry and literary insight in the years around 1900. In their exploration of desire, sexual behaviour, and the sexed biological body, these ‘disciplines’ drew deeply from literary sources. Take, for example, Sigmund Freud’s The Schreber Case (1911), in which the key psychoanalytic concepts of transference and the Oedipus complex come to bear on Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s autobiographical and highly literate account of his illness. Here, Freud’s position as analyst in the clinical setting is transposed to the encounter with an autobiographical text. Freud becomes a literary critic – and not for the last time. While the myth of Oedipus took centre stage in the development of his psychoanalytic theory of the human psyche, his analysis of Hilda Doolittle, the American poet and novelist better known as H. D., centred on the figurine (and Greek mythological figure) of Athena. Freud’s admiration of Arthur Schnitzler’s work, his psychoanalytic reading of Vilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva (1906), his analysis of Goethe’s childhood memory, all speak to a deep concern for literature and a literary way of narrating what in fact are clinical case studies which serve to illuminate his scientific investigations. As much as his medical, physiological, and zoological training, then, myth and literature also shaped Freud’s psychoanalytic inquiry. Sexology, the twin science of psychoanalysis, equally relied on literary sources to build its terminological repertoire. Krafft-Ebing’s notorious Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in 1886) contained clinical case studies and literary examples, side by side. The Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Types), the main platform for sexological discussions in Berlin from 1899, featured a regular section entitled ‘Biographisches und Literarisches’ (biographical and literary miscellanea). But not only did the sexual sciences rely heavily on profoundly literary examples, which fundamentally shaped their clinical encounter; literature, in turn, popularized sexological and psychoanalytic discourses. As Anna Katharina Schaffner has argued in Modernism and Perversion, the modernist works of Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust,

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Franz Kafka, and Georges Bataille all engaged with so-called perversions as they were discussed by both psychoanalysts and sexologists. Schaffner thus reveals that, in the context of the sexual sciences and European modernist literature, ‘the conceptual transfer between literature, medicine and psychology […] works in both directions’.40 In English Literary Sexology, Heike Bauer, who introduces Part II of this volume, also showed that British sexologists, such as John Addington Simmons, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter, were more closely linked to social reform movements, rather than originating from the medical profession as did their counterparts in mainland Europe. Bauer shows that it was Victorian women writers in particular, such as Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, and Edith Ellis, who engaged with the theorization of masculinity, femininity, and sexual inversion, and shaped the ways in which gender and sexuality could be understood.41 We shall re-encounter the contribution of these so-called New Women, along with the fear of them, in the course of this volume, not just in Victorian Britain (Nazeer), but also in Germany (Weiss-Sussex) and the Netherlands (Sturgess). A number of the chapters more broadly illustrate the significant role of literature in shedding light on philosophical and ethical questions surrounding sexuality, biological reproduction, and ‘embodiment’ itself at the fin de siècle. Through an exploration of a wide range of inter-related topics, from eugenics (Woodford), sexual pathology (Leskau), bryological reproduction (Eggers), and sexual ethics (Weiss-Sussex), to psychoanalysis (Wainwright) and sexological discourses (Sturgess), we explore how literature and biological discourses came together to explore how issues of

40 Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930, Basingstoke 2012, p. 23. 41 Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930, Basingstoke 2009. For a further discussion of how sexual sciences exceeded the medical realm, see also Kate Fisher and Jana Funke, ‘British Sexual Science Beyond the Medical: Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Historical, and Cross-Cultural Translations’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 95–114.

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gender, sexuality, and reproduction could be rethought at the turn of the twentieth century. A further dimension of the relationship between biological thought and literature, in particular in the context of discussions around heredity and genetics, was the question of human-animal kinship. Darwin’s writings on biological evolution, natural selection, and a common ancestral species were quickly and prolifically (mis)appropriated in myriad ways. As Elena Borelli will show in Chapter 1, late nineteenth-century ‘Darwinian’ anthropological models, grounded in a sense of the pursuit of human evolution towards rationality, crossed with the philosophical works of Schopenhauer and Hartmann and their pessimistic view of desire, leading to a rejection of the ‘beast within’ in the intellectual and literary culture of fin-de-siècle Italy. In this figuration the human subject is understood as split between rational human thought and animalistic desire. Human-animal kinship brings humans and non-human animals conceptually closer, only to immediately wish them apart, as the human subject is filled with a desire to overcome its bestial instincts as the only way to become sovereign. Darwinian evolutionary thought and its appropriations thus propelled the figure of the animal into the domain of the human. At the height of its colonial enterprise, Victorian Britain saw the white Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement; the same could be said of the European nations in general. This point of perceived climax was marked both by convictions of human progress, and a terror of evolutionary degeneration into simpler organic forms. When H. G. Wells’s famous Time Traveller reaches the distant future, one half of humanity’s offspring (as he interprets it) appears as ape-like beasts, while the other half has become effete and docile. Darwinian thought certainly triggered a fear of the ‘beast within’, stemming from an awareness of a shared ancestry between humans and non-human animals. Yet, as Anahita Rouyan argues in Chapter 2, H. G. Wells held the concept of ‘degeneration’ to be a critique of myths of inevitable socio-biological progress; and his narrative is a vivid literary projection – beyond even the conceptual reach of Darwinian evolutionary theory – of disintegrated future forms and possibilities. Such strange figurations stalked the literary imaginations of the fin de siècle, and intertwined with a set of broader cultural, social, and biological

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concerns. Perhaps no genre more urgently explored the convergence of biological discourses, and its themes of gender, sexuality, and species differentiation, than that of the Gothic novel. In The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Kelly Hurley argues that fin-de-siècle Gothic was profoundly concerned with the ‘defamiliarization and violent reconstitution of the human subject’, a process she describes as reflecting a concern with the ‘abhuman’.42 This concept of the ‘abhuman’ is akin to Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the ambivalent psychic trait whereby the ego at once defends a sense of self-identity and welcomes the erosion of its boundaries. Taking its cues from the natural disorder described by Darwin, and from sexological, pre-Freudian, anthropological, and degeneration theories, the Gothic novel remodels the human ‘as bodily ambiguated or otherwise discontinuous in identity’, bringing in its wake a loss of sexual and species specificity.43 In this volume we dissect several famous examples. Wells’s Time Traveller encounters this dissolution of the future human subject into disparate parts (or indeed new species). As Aisha Nazeer discusses in Chapter 10 on Haggard’s She, the frightful goddess Ayesha meets her end in a moment of devolution, which reduces her to an abject and ape-like figure. Finally, in Chapter 11, Michael Wainwright shows how Bram Stoker presents us with literary enactments of parasitic infestation that turn both body and text into abhuman figurations. Stoker’s work unveils the subversive power of Gothic tropes in tracing the helminths’ violations of the discursive taboos imposed upon them: their bodily and their disciplinary intrusions. Biological theories of species differentiation and medico-scientific inquiries into the distinction of sexual and pathological types also went hand in hand with the taxonomical ordering of races, hence with the reinforcement of boundaries and hierarchies. Precisely this Victorian enthusiasm for racial and biological classification in turn re-emerged in the medicine and anthropology of the fin de siècle. Building on earlier works by Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the nineteenth-century 42 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 1996, p. 4. 43 Ibid. p. 5.

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physical anthropology of Arthur de Gobineau and Karl Vogt extended the taxonomy of nature to the classification of man into different types and physiologically differentiated races. The ‘negroid type’ was considered to represent the most primitive surviving variety. The literary works of colonialism imagine the consequences of this taxonomical categorization. In Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, as Nazeer shows, the female vampire Harriet sucks the psychic energy from those who come too close to her. We are led to believe that Harriet is a danger to European society because of her blood relation to her Jamaican grandmother who was bitten by a vampire bat. It is here that animal, racial, and sexual others come together as a threat to Western society. But in the logic of this Gothic narrative, it is not Harriet’s miscegenated maternal blood alone that positions her as a threat to society, but also her relationship to her father, Henry Brandt, a scientist expelled from a Swiss hospital for conducting illicit experiments. He later flees to Jamaica to set up a laboratory, where he experiments with vivisection on animals and humans alike. Marryat’s critique of vivisection, not uncommon in Victorian society, expresses the fear of a movement from experimenting on animals to experimenting on humans. Even this fear, though, finds its shadow-side in the racialized sense of a collapse of clear distinctions between the human and the animal. Time and again, then, we can see how biological ideas were distorted to ideological ends. Peter Morton suggests that late nineteenth-century biology offered up ‘malleable’ concepts, quite ready to ‘plasticise under pressure and ready to fill every cranny of whatever mould had been prepared to receive them’.44 The tension between evolutionary ‘progressivism’ and ‘degeneration’ is a powerful case in point – and it also shows that philosophical and scientific ideas themselves helped to reshape the very moulds into which they flowed. As we shall encounter in different shapes and forms, a growing fear at European populations’ biological proximity to their ‘others’ gave birth to ever more noxious attempts to shore up a sense of cultural, moral, and racial superiority.

44 Peter Morton, The Vital Science, p. 224.

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Nonetheless, the intermixing of literature, biological theories, and philosophy also allowed for the shaping of moulds of very different kinds. In her study of French literary and cultural receptions of Ernst Haeckel in Chapter 3, Pauline Moret-Jankus shows how philosophical monism’s unification of matter and spirit made it a foundation for an ideology in which heredity and race might become all-explaining categories for human thought and action – a world view which, through the work of Paul Bourget and other prolific novelists, ambiguously seeped into French literary culture in the 1880s and 1890s. But, as Charlotte Woodford demonstrates in Chapter 7, a doctrine predicated on the interconnection of the natural world and the human mind also held open the promise of a mystical and material reaffirmation of human life and its deep kinship with animals: a sense of restored wholeness that found expression in the psychoanalytic thinking of Lou Andreas-Salomé in the early years of the new century. And in her reading of the German-Jewish author Grete Meisel-Hess, active in the same period, Godela Weiss-Sussex, in Chapter 4, argues that monism’s removal of dualistic distinctions between mind and matter helped to open up an exemplary aesthetic space in which the social and sexual liberation of women might be championed. Literature thus discloses its subversive function in helping us to reflect upon the ways in which science relates to both self and society. That function becomes all the more vital as we consider the toxic discourses that flourished in European society as the twentieth century progressed. William J. Dodd’s chapter (Chapter 5), for example, reveals how a rhetorically brilliant misreading of natural selection from 1938 served as a veiled attack on National Socialism’s murderous social Darwinism. And yet early twentiethcentury literary forms might also offer us more hopeful perspectives on the ethical question of how to live in the world in relation to other beings of all kinds. One such example, as we see in David Wachter’s reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dinggedichte (thing poems) in Chapter 14, concerns the perceptual fields of animals, and the poetics of observation (and ethological knowledge) that emerge from our encounters with them. Here and elsewhere, the figure of the animal becomes a place of convergence between biological research and literary reflection.

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Literary discourses, then, allow us to explore alternative spaces, unknown future forms and territories, and possibilities of knowledge that remain beyond the reach of scientific methods. We can certainly speak of shared discursive spaces between literature, biology, and philosophy; but it is perhaps in literary works that the biological sciences are most keenly brought to bear on the messiness, the contradictoriness, of human life. *** Our book is divided into four parts. Part I focuses on evolutionary theory and its cultural appropriations. Elena Borelli takes us first to fin-de-siècle Italy with her study of literary diffusions of what she calls a Darwinian ‘anthropological model’. Her focus is on three of the era’s most prominent literary figures: the prolific novelist Antonio Fogazzaro, poet and classicist Giovanni Pascoli, and the larger-than-life Gabriele D’Annunzio, now most familiar to us for his role in the history of twentieth-century Italian nationalism. ‘The beast within’ is an embodiment of desire, understood in the wake of Schopenhauerian philosophical pessimism as a nexus of residually animalistic impulses and instincts, to be enlightened and overcome through ‘will’ and ‘volition’. The post-Darwinian figure of the ‘split subject’ is variously enacted in the work of each of these writers: striving towards a perfectly rational re-configuration of human nature, he – and typically it is he – is forced continually to suppress his own bestial awakenings. If D’Annunzio finds an answer to the ‘split subject’ in the image of the ‘body-machine’, Anahita Rouyan, in Chapter 2, is concerned with a different kind of machine, and a different set of cultural representations. Against the backdrop of scientific specialization and popularization in late Victorian intellectual culture, she offers a subtle new reading of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), one of the pioneering works of modern science fiction and a touchstone in any discussion of literature and science. In the light of Wells’s own journalistic stances towards Victorian popular science, Rouyan focuses on the figure of the Time Traveller, presented to us as an expert scientist fully wedded to an ‘Excelsior’ concept of evolutionary biology: the idea of a progression towards ever higher and better species, its apex unsurprisingly to be found in the Victorian gentleman.

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The Traveller’s encounters with bizarre future forms forces him back onto his anthropocentric assumptions, caught between a sense of man’s progress and the ingrained fear of degeneration. Rouyan shows us how this gentleman naturalist, from the vantage point of literature’s first modern time machine, indirectly channels Wells’s critique of discourses of scientific popularization and utopianism in Victorian England. Pauline Moret-Jankus then takes us to France with her examination of the dissemination of Haeckelian biology in fin-de-siècle French literature in Chapter 3. A now virtually forgotten figure, the anti-Semitic thinker Jules Soury was indisputably influential in his time. His interpretations of Ernst Haeckel infused Haeckel’s evolutionary monism with a strong current of racial anti-Semitism. The chapter then turns to the immensely prolific and widely read novelist Paul Bourget who, as Moret-Jankus argues, incorporated aspects of Soury into his own works: both Soury’s appropriations of Haeckelian ideas, and even Soury the ‘bilious’ ascetic himself. Once again, we are invited to contemplate the ways in which literature becomes an ambivalent, even slippery, gatekeeper between scientific theories and a broader cultural landscape. Moving forward a few years and crossing into Germany, Godela WeissSussex and William J. Dodd bring our first part to a close with two very different kinds of reception in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively. By the age of twenty-two, the prodigious novelist and essayist Grete Meisel-Hess was already recognized as one of the most promising figures in the German women’s movement. Weiss-Sussex reads her novel, Die Intellektuellen (The Intellectuals, 1911), against a very different social and political understanding of metaphysical monism. By rethinking human life in continuation with the laws of nature, the writings of Haeckel, Wilhelm Bölsche, and Auguste Forel offered the scope for a wide-ranging re-conception of sexual ethics and social conventions. As a literary reflection of the reformist movement in eugenics, through the powerful lens of monism, the novel itself emerges as an intriguing mix: of its time, to be sure, but shrewdly committed to radical visions of sexual and social agency. William J. Dodd then explores a very different kind of ‘use’ for biological discourses. The political theorist Dolf Sternberger, best known today in Germany for his later coinage of the term ‘Verfassungspatriotismus’ (Constitutional Patriotism) in 1979,

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is presented here in the German tradition of ‘inner emigration’ under the Nazi regime. Sternberger’s collection of essays, Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, 1938), is ostensibly a polemical critique of the social and political implications of natural selection; but Dodd also uncovers a masterful piece of veiled resistance, and raises difficult questions about the divergence of scientific theories and their political (mis)appropriations. Against this post-Darwinian backdrop, Part II turns its focus to literary representations of sexual desire. It begins with a view of nineteenth-century German literature in Michael Eggers’s chapter (Chapter 6) on Adalbert Stifter’s novella Der Kuss von Sentze (The Kiss of Sentze, 1866). In Stifter’s novella, a kiss between relatives becomes much more than a ritual sign of peace-making passed on through the generations of the family of Sentze. Indeed, Eggers argues that this kiss functions analogously to an evolutionary jump from asexual to sexual procreation in the lives of mosses. Over the course of his argument, Eggers reveals how Stifter’s work drew on the botanical and zoological works of Carl Linnaeus and the botanical (in particular the bryological) work of Johannes Hedwig. Just as the family tradition has to undergo a generational shift from a kiss of peace to a kiss of love in order to conserve the Sentze species, the German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister showed that generations of mosses that reproduce sexually and those that do not must alternate regularly in order to maintain the species. Eggers thus shows that Stifter’s characters are not only closely bound to their natural surroundings, but that human and botanical spheres here function according to the same rules of evolution. In Chapter 7, Charlotte Woodford explores Lou Andreas-Salomé’s novel Das Haus (The House, 1919) and her essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Sexuality, 1900), which engage with evolutionary thought in a very different way. Here, Woodford shows how Andreas-Salomé’s writing expresses a desire to find meaning in human existence, a desire not met by the post-metaphysical, Darwinian story of evolution and origin. Here, too, questions of family and inheritance play a major role. The question of genetic inheritance turns into another one: how can one live on through a biological line? The German evolutionary biologist Wilhelm Bölsche, who posits a theory of a consolatory kinship

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across the generations, thus provides the impetus for Andreas-Salomé’s exploration of kinship. But for her, the question of the meaning of human existence is not answered here, because despite this living on through the next generation, genetic inheritance pays no attention to individuality and autonomy. In response, her writing portrays a sense of psychic longing for a harmonious union of self and world. Woodford’s chapter takes us through Andreas-Salomé’s psychoanalytical, biological, and monist ideas, which critically navigate contemporaneous discourses of heredity, race, and sexuality. Her chapter shows how, for Andreas-Salomé, succession and heredity not only relate to discussions of race, sexuality, and illness, but also to questions about the meaning of human existence. Linda Leskau next draws our attention, in Chapter 8, to the demarcation of ‘normality’ from ‘abnormality’ in biopower as it first emerged, on Michel Foucault’s account, during the second half of the eighteenth century. She situates Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s work on psychopathologies in this discursive field, pointing in turn to German Expressionism’s preoccupation with taboos and abnormalities of disease, crime, and sexuality. This is the basis of a discussion of texts by Alfred Döblin and Hanns Heinz Ewers. Döblin’s novella Der schwarze Vorhang (The Black Curtain, 1912) and his short story Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup, 1910) enact what Leskau calls ‘botanical perversions’: disturbing crossovers between vegetal and botanical metaphors and scenes of sexual and physical violation. Ewers’s novel Alraune (Mandrake, 1911) also embodies this figurative ambiguity, albeit in a world in which gendered distinctions of sadism and masochism are breaking down. But it is in their blurring of deeper distinctions – between humanity and nature, and between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ – that both Döblin and Ewers challenge psychiatric and sexological criteria for defining and categorizing perversions and pathologies in the years around 1900. Cyd Sturgess’s chapter (Chapter 9) concludes this part with an exploration of literary representations of same-sex desire amongst women in the Dutch context. Her reading of Josine Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (Back to the Island, 1937), a little-discussed text despite being the first of its kind in the Dutch language, investigates how literary explorations of lesbian love critically engaged with the biologically founded sexological discourse of

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the time. Although sexologists like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Auguste Forel, and Magnus Hirschfeld discussed at length the origins and implications of same-sex desire amongst men, lesbian desire remained a little-explored phenomenon, either described as a temporary affliction (Forel) or characterized by the psychological as well as anatomical masculinity of the lesbian lover (Hirschfeld). Yet Sturgess shows how Reuling’s novel subverts the rigidity of contemporary sexological paradigms by rejecting the idea of lesbian love as a form of masculine desire. Sturgess reveals that Reuling’s writing thereby redefines the boundaries of ‘normative’ desire and offers a model of identification and promise of possibility. The literary text is shown to powerfully reject and correct biological discourses. Part III investigates different representations of the sexual and racial ‘Other’, with a particular focus on projections of pathology and contagion. Aisha Nazeer’s reading of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), in Chapter 10, explores how the Victorian Gothic novel provided a platform for the discussion of scientific theories of degeneration. She argues that scientists themselves reveal a Gothic sensibility in their terminology and desire to classify and point out difference, distinction, and dissimilarity. In fin-de-siècle cultures, discourses around race crossed over with medical discourse and became infused with a language of disease, such that questions of race intermixed with questions of pathology and its diagnoses. Nazeer’s postcolonial reading understands the pathologization of racial otherness as an Orientalist style of classification, portrayed in the novels of Haggard and Marryat. Nazeer also shows how racial otherness becomes linked to perverse sexuality, in a manner similar to the depiction of the New Woman, who threatened to infect other women with her independence and confident sexuality. Accordingly, the female racial Other becomes a particular threat – only for the link to be made back to the Victorian woman, accusing her, too, of sexual savagery. Nazeer’s conclusion shows that both biological discussions of race and the Gothic novel depict miscegenated racial types as monstrous, abject, and outside the norms of Victorian culture. In a further exploration of degenerationist discourses, we then join Michael Wainwright in Chapter 11 on a journey through Bram Stoker’s digestive tract. Opening with a discussion of scientific discourses and their

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boundaries, and the taboos that determine what cannot be talked about, he homes in on the helminth (the parasitic worm) as a figure of discursive exclusion, transgression, and re-infestation. Through metaphors of parasitic invasion, Wainwright shows how parasitology and helminthology entered British scientific discourse, notably through Thomas Spencer Cobbold’s Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of Helminthology (1864), only to become subject to new taboos in the face of cultural fears of species degeneration. The plethora of signs and symptoms in Bram Stoker’s fictions is then read, with a fine-grained methodology that draws upon psychoanalysis and deconstruction, to trace out his literary enactments of these discursive (and corporeal) taboos. With a powerful new take on The Lair of the White Worm (1911), Wainwright raises unsettling questions about the complex relationship between medical discourses, literary production, and the body of the author. David Midgley rounds off Part III, in Chapter 12, with a fresh reading of Robert Müller’s novel Tropen (1915), a work that has attracted much recent scholarly interest in the German-speaking world. Tropen consists of the frame narrative of an expedition to set up a Freeland colony in the border region between Venezuela and Brazil that had been overtaken by an Indian revolt in 1907. Midgley shows how this account, a fictional posthumous manuscript by the German expedition member Hans Brandlberger, takes on a dual significance: ostensibly the encounter of a supposedly ‘civilized’ European mind with an Amazonian world supposedly ripe for colonization, it also provides a richly layered exploration of that mind’s proximity to its own physiological underpinnings. Through its intricate traces of Haeckel, Nietzsche, and Freud, the novel draws into question the suitability of Brandlberger for this imperial mission. But for all of Müller’s personal attachment to ideas of Empire, his ‘brainteaser’ of a novel – as Midgley puts it – suggests that this endeavour to transcend European constraints leads all the more destructively back into the nature that lurks just beneath them. Part IV considers poetic responses to the impulses of experimental psychology, along with human (self-)representations in a world where we finds ourselves unnervingly close to modes of animal existence. Sarah Cain opens in Chapter 13 by exploring the rise of experimental psychology in Anglo-American thought. She illuminates the influence of the work of

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Hugo Münsterberg, a pioneer of applied psychology, on his students T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Cain shows that more than any other individual before or since, he shaped the scope and future directions of experimental psychology throughout the twentieth century. Münsterberg’s work was multi-disciplinary and included the earliest study of the psychology of film. Cain’s chapter shows that for Stein and Eliot, he provided a productive counterpart to their own modernist explorations of the interrelation between aesthetic practice and psychology, and revealed a shared interest in human energy, attention, monotony, and efficiency. In our penultimate chapter, David Wachter outlines points of contact and divergence between scientific and literary texts in their engagement with animal poetics. Wachter’s chapter shows that the pioneering work of Karl Möbius in the field of ecology, the zoological writings of Jakob von Uexküll, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke uniquely negotiate an encounter with the animal at a remove from anthropocentric assumptions. Derived from poiesis, the Greek word for ‘production’, the concept of animal poetics signifies a site for construction and activity, but poetics also encompass a sense of beauty that the biological works of Möbius and the poetry of Rilke share. Wachter’s focus on poetics also foregrounds the significance of narrative, rhetoric, and linguistic form in both biological and literary works. At the turn of the twentieth century, cultural perspectives on the status of the non-human animal shifted, as both biological thought and literature developed from passive object to constructive producers of environment and subjects of perception. Wachter closes his chapter with a powerful conclusion: the relationship between literature and biology is a multifaceted one, not of unidirectional transfer, but of co-existing approaches to complex problems. Literature’s unique analytical role and the methods of the humanities have the potential to articulate how biological discourses participate in the processes by which human beings understand themselves. Robert Craig brings the volume to a close in Chapter 15 by revisiting Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a modernist masterpiece that prompts rather different reflections on the problem of human selfconception. As a medical doctor with a strong interest in nature philosophy, Döblin’s eclectic work has recently attracted much attention for its

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richly interdiscursive qualities. The chapter begins by examining Döblin’s biologically inflected aesthetics and anthropology, briefly setting them in counterpoint to Haeckel’s famous attempt to link the laws of nature and the laws of art. Following a critique of Franz Biberkopf ’s repeated attempts to achieve some kind of sovereignty over himself and his environment, the chapter then turns to consider the novel’s creaturely dimensions. By drawing upon Eric Santner’s conception of the creature, Craig shows that Berlin Alexanderplatz repeatedly exposes the proximity of modern urban existence to a barely concealed animal condition. And yet that uncanny closeness may provide an aesthetic point of departure for reconfiguring the place of the individual right at the heart of the modern city. As this final chapter suggests, the resources of literature may yet help us to think modern humanness as amounting, however improbably, to far more than its biological reality.

Bibliography Ajouri, Philip, ‘Darwinism in German-Speaking Literature (1859–c. 1890)’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, vol. III, London 2014, pp. 17–45. Arnold, Matthew, ‘Literature and Science’ (1882) [accessed 22 September 2016]. Bauer, Heike, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930, Basingstoke 2009. Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009. Bowler, Peter J., The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900, Baltimore, MD 1983. Buchanan, Brett, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, Albany, NY 2008. Carroll, Joseph, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, New York 2004. Dennett, Daniel, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London 1995.

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Fisher, Kate, and Jana Funke, ‘British Sexual Science Beyond the Medical: CrossDisciplinary, Cross-Historical, and Cross-Cultural Translations’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 95–114. Foucault, Michel, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris 1966. Gaier, Ulrich, ‘Verfehlte Gewohnheiten im Denken und Handeln: Die zwei Kulturen sind weniger wichtig als eine vierte Gewalt’, in Helmut Bachmaier and Ernst Peter Fischer (eds), Glanz und Elend der zwei Kulturen: Über die Verträglichkeit der Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften, Konstanz 1991, pp. 91–106. Glick, Thomas F., and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, London 2014. Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’ [1980], in Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA 1997. Herwig, Malte, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134:1 (2001), pp. 553–92: pp. 569–70. Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 1996. Huxley, Thomas H., ‘On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences’ [1854], in Science and Education: Essays, New York 1893. ‘Science and Culture’, in Science and Culture and Other Essays, London 1888. Jones, Jeannette Eileen, and Patrick B. Sharp (eds), Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, London 2010. Kiefer, Mathias, Die Entwicklung des Seelenbegriffs in der deutschen Psychiatrie ab der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts unter dem Einfluss zeitgenössischer Philosophie, Essen 1996. Koschorke, Albrecht, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1999. Levine, George, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’, in Levine (ed.), One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, Madison, WI 1987, pp. 3–34. Lightman, Bernard, and Bennett Zon (eds), Evolution and Victorian Culture, Cambridge 2014, pp. 1–15. Mittelstraß, Jürgen, ‘Geist, Natur und die Liebe zum Dualismus: Wider den Mythos von zwei Kulturen’, in Helmut Bachmaier and Ernst Peter Fischer (eds), Glanz und Elend der zwei Kulturen: Über die Verträglichkeit der Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften, Konstanz 1991. Morton, Peter, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900, London 1984.

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Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity, Chicago, IL 2012. Nicholls, Angus, ‘Conference Commentary’ for the conference Biological Discourses, St John’s College, Cambridge, April 2015, pp. 1–8 [accessed 11 December 2016]. Ortolano, Guy, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain, Cambridge 2009. Richards, Robert J., The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, Chicago, IL 2008. Riedel, Wolfgang, Nach der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014. Rose, Steven, ‘How to Get Another Thorax’, London Review of Books 38:17 (2016), pp. 15–17 [accessed 13 December 2016]. Rütten, Thomas, and Martina King (eds), Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin 2013. Saul, Nicholas, ‘Darwin in Germany Literary Culture 1890–1914’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, vol. III, London 2014, pp. 46–77. and Simon J. James, ‘Introduction: The Evolution of Literature’, in Saul and James (eds), The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Culture, Amsterdam 2011, pp. 9–18. Schäfer, Armin, ‘Poetologie des Wissens’, in Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben (eds), Literatur und Wissen: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Stuttgart 2013. Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930, Basingstoke 2012. Schönert, Jörg, ‘Bilder von “Verbrechermenschen” in den rechtskulturellen Diskursen um 1900’, in Schönert (ed.), Erzählte Kriminalität, Tübingen 1991, pp. 497–531. Shaffer, Elinor S., ‘Introduction: The Third Culture – Negotiating the “two cultures”’, in Shaffer (ed.), The Third Culture: Literature and Science, Berlin 1998, pp. 1–12. Shapin, Steven, ‘The Darwin Show’, London Review of Books 32:1 (2010), pp. 3–9 [accessed 21 September 2016]. and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ 1985. Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures, ed. with an Introduction by Stefan Collini, Cambridge 1998.

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Spencer, Herbert, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 17:2 (1882). Spinoza, Benedict de, Ethics, ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford 2000. Vogl, Joseph (ed.), Poetologien des Wissens um 1800, Munich 1999. White, Paul, ‘Introduction’, in White (ed.), Science, Literature, and the Darwin Legacy. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 11 (2010), pp. 1–7. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia, ‘Unmapped Countries: Biology, Literature and Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London 2005, pp. 1–12.

Part I

Legacies of Evolution Introduced by Staffan Müller-Wille

Darwin, as literary scholars such as Gillian Beer or George Levine have argued, was not only a naturalist; he was also a skilled author who tailored his many books to the sensibilities and tastes of Victorian reading publics.1 On the Origin of Species (1859) sold impressively well and went into several editions and translations; but the same is also true for Darwin’s many other books that dealt with such varied topics as climbing and insectivorous plants, orchid contraptions to trick insects into pollination, the intricacies of self- and cross-fertilizing, expressions of emotion in humans and animals, and the descent of man and sexual selection. Darwin’s last book – a fable on the evolutionary meaning of work, leisure, and death, which used earthworms as its protagonists – was also his best-selling: 6,000 copies had been sold, with translations into French, German, Italian, and Russian at the ready, little more than a year after its publication in 1881.2 And Darwin was not at all alone among biologists enjoying literary success. Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann, to name only two German examples, were likewise best-selling authors. Biology, one can state without exaggeration, was just as popular a genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it is today. This has caused problems for commentators, from Sir Karl Popper to the American creationist Richard Weickart, who have sought to construct lines of influence connecting Darwin and nineteenth-century Darwinians with right-wing ideologies of the twentieth century, especially Nazism.3 First, biological literature in the nineteenth century on the subjects of inheritance, development, and evolution was just too varied to be reducible to just one fatal idea. A good indicator of this richness is a slim book 1 2

3

See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009; and George Levine, Darwin the Writer, Oxford 2011. Charles R. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, London 1881. On the publication history and various editions of this book, see R. B. Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist, 2nd edn, Hamden, CT 1977, pp. 164–8. See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, London 1957, Chapter 4; and Richard Weickart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Basingstoke 2004.

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published by the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen in 1914 on ‘false analogies with respect to similarity, affinity, inheritance, tradition, and evolution’.4 Johannsen was one of the founders of genetics, and in his polemical account of nineteenth-century biology, Darwin was not foregrounded as having introduced the concept of natural selection, but for his ‘provisional hypothesis of pangenesis’ which imputed agency to the microscopic units – cells or ‘gemmules’ as Darwin called them – of which organic bodies were made up. Secondly, and more importantly, the popularity of biological theorizing in the nineteenth century implies that it actually resonated with popular notions of life, its meaning, and its destiny. ‘Popularization’ was not tantamount to filling in the tabula rasa of a lay public, but also aimed to meet demands for entertainment and enlightenment by reading audiences. From this perspective, public opinion shaped science just as much as science shaped public opinion. With one tell-tale exception, the contributions to this part reflect this by focusing on aspects of Darwinian and Darwinist theorizing that defy the optimistic picture of inexorable progress by natural selection and reveal that ‘biology’ was also associated with the irrational and unconscious, hence with threats and fears. Elena Borelli sets the scene from the start with a chapter that explores how fin-de-siècle Italian writers dealt with one of the big themes in nineteenth-century philosophy, the Unconscious in the form of instinct or desire. Darwin’s work resonated well, and in often surprising ways, with the outlook on desire and its rational sublimation that writers like Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D’Annunzio developed; and this is neither an accident nor due to a ‘misreading’ of his work. Atavism, or regression, was one of the key concepts of Darwinian evolution, and the ‘obscure energy of instinct’, as Borelli puts it, was posited as an essential condition of progressive evolution. Of necessity, evolution produces subjects ‘split’ between a primitive past and a superior future in

4

Wilhelm Johannsen, Falske analogier med henblik paa lighed, slægtskab, arv, tradition og udvikling, Copenhagen 1914. This wonderfully sarcastic pamphlet was unfortunately never translated, except for a rather superfluous translation into Swedish (Stockholm 1917).

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an endless race for adaptation and perfection, with the post-human ‘bodymachine’ of the futurists as its logical outcome. While the Italian authors that Borelli covers remain wedded, in the final analysis, to a progressivist vision of evolution, Anahita Rouyan revisits a well-known literary masterpiece, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine: a work which struggled to convey an understanding of evolution without direction, neither ‘up’, nor ‘down’, nor ‘back’. We are familiar with the startling and disruptive turns that the Time Traveller’s investigation of the symbiotic relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks takes. What Rouyan’s chapter reveals is that this resulted from a deliberate strategy that Wells chose as an ‘educator and popularizer’. By telling his story, he revealed that there was not one story to be told about evolution. What seems refined and accomplished can turn out degenerate and abject, and what seems primitive and brutish can turn out advanced and even superior. Pauline Moret-Jankus turns to Jules Soury, ‘France’s propagator of Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary monism’, and his influence on a number of French authors, especially Paul Bourget. Soury used Haeckel’s work, which he translated copiously and freely, to promote a vicious and radical version of anti-Semitism. Moret-Jankus identifies Soury as the model for one of the main characters of Paul Bourget’s novel Le Disciple (1889). In doing so, she uncovers how Soury’s influence was due to a complex amalgam of ‘scientific’ ideas: race and the struggle for existence, to be sure, but also Haeckel’s biogenetic law (according to which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), his theory of ‘cellular souls’, and the mystic depths of the Unknowable. Bourget, in fact, was a conservative, and depicted these ideas as destructive of the traditional order of society. At the same time, this only further demonstrates the sway that a biologist like Soury held over public discourse: in the words of Anatole France, he, too, was an ‘admirable writer’ whose style was ‘supple, vigorous, colourful and sometimes of a strange splendour’. Haeckelian influence is also the subject of Godela Weiss-Sussex’s chapter on the novel Die Intellektuellen (The Intellectuals), published in 1911 by Grete Meisel-Hess. The author was a public figure already, well known for her feminist attack on Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903) and a book entitled Die sexuelle Krise (The Sexual Crisis, 1909). Weiss-Sussex asks, in her own words, whether the background of

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‘monist philosophy and biological science […] allows Meisel-Hess to present an emancipatory, progressive model of female agency’. And her short answer is: it does. Die Intellektuellen is a piece of Weltanschauungsliteratur, parading protagonists who, unhampered by the constraints of traditional society, follow their instincts and act in accordance with biological principles, thus realizing the monist ideal of a union of instinct and intellect, and in that sense, a eugenic future. Instinct here is anything but deterministic. It spurs subjects on to act, but what shape those actions take depends on rational deliberation. The final chapter in this part, by William J. Dodd, takes us into the 1930s, hence into a period when Darwinism found itself increasingly associated with natural selection and right-wing totalitarian ideologies. Analysing Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, 1938), a remarkable product of the ‘inner emigration’ of a cultural philosopher, Dodd takes us back to the origins of the grand narrative that it was the ‘rise of a scientific world view and its challenges to democratic, enlightened, and religious (Christian) values’ that led to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Dodd reveals the misrepresentations of Darwinian theory on which this grand narrative was constructed, especially the idea that Darwin brought ‘the whole mass of organic forms and millennia under the sway of a single power’. But he also draws attention to the fact that Sternberger’s work instrumentalizes tropes and genres shared between scientific and political discourse ‘to challenge the primacy of the biological and re-focus attention on the ethics of being human’. What all five chapters thus reveal is the subversive power of biological discourses. It is true that biology is sometimes invoked to cement prejudice and insulate traditional institutions from critique. But a ‘science of life’ deals by definition with the restless, the temporary, and the Unconscious. Biology, and especially evolutionary biology, is the quintessentially modern science.

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Bibliography Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009. Darwin, Charles R., The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, London 1881. Freeman, R. B., The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist, 2nd edn, Hamden, CT 1977. Johannsen, Wilhelm, Falske analogier med henblik paa lighed, slægtskab, arv, tradition og udvikling, Copenhagen 1914. Popper, Karl, The Poverty of Historicism, London 1957. Weickart, Richard, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Basingstoke 2004.

Elena Borelli

1 The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the Italian Fin de Siècle

abstract In this chapter I explore the depiction of desire in the works of three late nineteenthcentury Italian authors: Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. I claim that their representation of desire is embedded in an anthropological paradigm much indebted to the popularization of Charles Darwin theories. In this context, desire is seen as the remnant of mankind’s brutish ancestors, and, therefore, something to be repressed and overcome. In portraying desire as an obscure inner force, Fogazzaro, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio reappropriate not only Darwin’s theory, but also Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of the Will, and Eduard von Hartmann’s idea of the Unconscious. The texts I analyse show that this biological discourse of fin-de-siècle Italy in turn anticipated the advent of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.

In the posthumous collection of aphorisms published under the title The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche gives a brief account of the Zeitgeist of the past centuries in Europe. When he arrives at the nineteenth century, the philosopher describes it as more animalistic and subterranean, uglier, realistic and vulgar, and precisely for that reason ‘better’, ‘more honest’, more submissive before every kind of ‘reality’, truer; but weak in will, but sad and full of dark cravings, but fatalistic. Not full of awe and reverence for either ‘reason’ or ‘heart’; deeply convinced of the rule of desires (Schopenhauer spoke of ‘will’ but nothing is more characteristic of his philosophy than the absence of all genuine willing). Even morality reduced to one instinct, pity.1

1

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York 1967, p. 59.

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Nietzsche’s Aphorism 95 aptly captures the nineteenth century’s obsession with desire, which is seen as an obscure force that cannot be subjugated completely to intellect and reason. Much like instinct, of which it is only a more refined form, desire stems from that part of human nature that we share with the animals, and that derives from our brutish ancestors. In the late nineteenth century, desire was intended as one of the many manifestations of the Will, and as such, akin to both instinct and volition. For instance, in his two-part The World as Will and Representation (1819, 1844), which gained particular currency in the 1890s,2 Arthur Schopenhauer postulates that gravity is to nature what instinct is to animals, and desire to humans.3 The same concept occurs in Eduard von Hartmann’s The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869): ‘Will stands behind its concrete dispositions, which then, conceived and informed by the will, are called impulses, and is realised in the resulting volition, which receives its particular content through the psychological mechanism of motives, impulses and desires.’4 This nineteenth-century depiction of desire is deeply embedded in an anthropological paradigm that derives from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Within this framework, human nature is split between a rational, ‘Apollonian’ part, towards which the process of evolution is directed, and an obscure, irrational one, which is a remnant of the earlier stages of evolution, and which manifests itself in instincts and uncontrollable desires. The idea of an instinctual, unknown side of human nature prepares the way for the notion of the Unconscious, which came to light in the early twentieth century. In fact, the discovery of the ‘Unconscious’, intended as the domain of those mental processes that are not directly present in awareness, but whose existence can be inferred from experience,5 precedes Freud by at least a century and

2 3 4 5

Ritchie Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self 1890–1924’, in Nicholas Saul (ed.), Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990, Cambridge 2002, pp. 150–96: p. 151. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York 1969, I, p. 156. Eduard von Hartmann, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. C. K. Ogden, New York 2000, I, p. 171. Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud, New York 1960, pp. 21–5.

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a half, as both Lancelot Law Whyte and Henri Ellenberger have shown.6 The thinkers who postulated a hidden dimension within the human mind mostly drew attention to unconscious processes such as ‘instinct’, ‘vitality’, ‘will’, ‘imagination’, ‘dissociation’, ‘dream’, and ‘mental pathologies’, among others.7 Freud, on the other hand, expounded the connection between instincts and the structure of human mind: ‘To the oldest of these mental provinces or agencies we give the name of id. It contains everything that is inherited […] above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate in the somatic organization and which find their first mental expression in the id in forms unknown to us.’8 The Darwinian model of evolution, within which desire is chastised as the ‘beast within’, both encountered and interacted with the philosophical currents of late nineteenth-century pessimism, most notably Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s respective works. Both texts, which became very influential in fin-de-siècle Europe, discuss desire: the former prescribes the annihilation of desire, and the latter ‘the clarification of instinct into rational will’, and ‘the deepening and magnifying of the sphere of consciousness at the expenses of the Unconscious’.9 According to Hartmann, civilization proceeds towards the enlightenment of the Unconscious into consciousness, and towards the complete revelation of all unconscious motives behind people’s actions.10 The idea of the progressive purification of instinct, along with late nineteenth-century anthropological speculations on the evolution of mankind towards perfect rationality, foregrounds the proto-futurist and futurist fantasy of the body-machine: that is, a body without desire, or, in other words, a body that has cut its ties with the animalistic roots of the human species.

6 7 8 9 10

See previous footnote; see also Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, New York 1970. Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud, p. 67. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, New York 1949, p. 2. Hartmann, XI, p. 39. Hartmann, I, p. 133.

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In this chapter, I want to bring these discursive strands together by focusing on the diffusions and reappropriations of a Darwinian ‘anthropological model’, within which the negative view of desire is embedded, amongst the most prominent authors of Italian fin de siècle. These authors are deeply indebted to late nineteenth-century Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy), that is, a body of thought that ultimately derived from Darwin’s theory and its popularizers, but also meshed with Schopenhauer’s ideas, resurgent as these were around the turn of the century.11 In particular, I analyse the works of Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–1911), Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), and Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), the most prominent literary figures of late nineteenth-century Italy. All of these three figures variously re-elaborate and put into play the notion of the ‘split subject’,12 which derives from a certain reappropriation of Darwin’s theory. The ‘split subject’ is a subject in the making, heading towards the perfected version of human nature, but haunted inside by the remnants of its bestial origins. In all of these authors one can trace the occurrence of an unstable view of human nature which, in spite of the direction of evolution, is constantly threatened with the possibility of regression. The return to the beast is invariably signalled, in the texts I examine, by the awakening of desire. Specifically, I use ‘desire’ as an umbrella term, covering a number of concepts such as impulse and instinct, thus following Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will, of which desire is an individual manifestation. Like desire, these phenomena are characterized by a conscious mental representation and an unconscious source, originating in our brutish nature. Will and volition, on the contrary, are those in which the obscure energy of instinct has been completely enlightened by reason.13 As I have suggested, 11 12

13

See Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self 1890–1924’, p. 151. The paradigm of the ‘split subject’, dominating late nineteenth-century Italian literature, has been convincingly illustrated by Vittorio Roda in two seminal studies: Homo duplex: Scomposizioni dell‘io nella letteratura italiana moderna (Bologna 1991); and Il soggetto centrifugo: Studi sulla letteratura italiana tra Otto e Novecento (Bologna 1984). The distinction between desire and volition becomes important when Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer’s condemnation of desire. For Nietzsche, when the subject freely embraces his or her own desires, he or she turns them into conscious will, which

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the nineteenth-century speculation on desire, informed by evolutionism, envisioned the progressive transformation of instinct into rational will. Indeed, in the works of Gabriele D’Annunzio, and those of Mario Morasso (1871–1938), whom I also consider in this chapter, the theme of the sublimation of desire into pure rationality and a strong will is embodied in the image of the body-machine.

Darwinism in Italy The diffusion of Darwin’s ideas in Italy began soon after the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) and lasted well into the twentieth century. As Giuliano Pancaldi has shown, the success of Darwin’s theory in Italy was due to the existence of a pre-evolutionistic background of scientific research in the fields of anthropology and zoology, which was moving towards the discussion of man’s place in nature.14 Darwin’s ideas were enthusiastically adopted by the scientific community in Italy: in 1881, one member of the

14

is no longer a source of slavery and suffering: ‘Schopenhauer’s basic misunderstanding of the Will (as if craving, instinct, drive were the essence of the Will) is typical: lowering the value of the Will to the point of making a real mistake […] [This is a] great symptom of the exhaustion or the weakness of the Will: for the Will is precisely that which treats cravings as their master and appoints to them their way and measure’ (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 52). However, as early as The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann considers volition to be the endpoint of a process of ‘wanting’, where all motives, even the unconscious ones, are unearthed, and the subject fully embraces his or her will. This idea marks the difference between Hartmann and Schopenhauer, inasmuch as the latter calls for the suspension of desire, and the former the necessity of knowing what we want, and why, before embracing it. Cf. Giuliano Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy: Science Across Cultural Frontiers, Bloomington, IN 1991, p. 88: ‘In sum, there is enough evidence to show that, in spite of the novelty of its concepts and the hopes it raised for a new synthesis of recent work in biology – evolutionism was viewed by Canestrini and many of his Italian colleagues as being profoundly grounded in the zoology of the first half of the century.’

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Italian parliament even observed that the names Darwin and Spencer were so popular that simply mentioning them in conversation was hardly a marker of intellectual sophistication.15 This huge success, however, did not betoken a thorough knowledge of Darwin’s theory, as very few of the politicians, academics, and intellectual figures responsible for the diffusion of evolutionism in Italy had actually read Darwin’s books. His ideas were shrewdly used as a means of imparting a positivistic belief in progress to the Italian population, and educating the new nation, where before only the Catholic Church had maintained a monopoly of instruction. Furthermore, although in The Origin of Species Darwin makes no mention of humans, in Italy evolutionism became a theory of descent: a new vision of the human race was created on the basis of semi-scientific speculations. These speculations can be grouped together under the name of ‘social Darwinism’, a Weltanschauung in which the circulation of ideas such as natural selection and evolution formed an anthropological model, as well as a social theory, in which man was seen as evolving towards an increasingly perfect version of the race. One need only look at the titles of books that appeared in Europe in the years immediately following the publication of The Origin of Species: Thomas Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (1863); Charles Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man (1863); Carl Vogt’s Vorlesungen über den Menschen (Lectures on Man) (1863); and, in Italy, Giovanni Canestrini’s Origine dell’Uomo (The Origin of Man) (1866). Canestrini, the first Italian translator of The Origin of Species, contributed to the perception of evolutionism not as a hypothesis but as a proven theory and focused on the idea of a progressive betterment of the human race, which in turn helped to shape the concept of desire. It is only in The Descent of Man, of 1871, that Darwin directly tackles the question of human beings. This book was immensely successful in Italy, mainly because it found fertile ground in a myriad of pre-Darwinian theories on the evolution of mankind, and in the widespread faith in progress and civilization. As early as the 1850s, the writings of Cesare Lombroso, a prominent criminologist better known for his theory of atavism, show the

15 Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy, p. 152.

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circulation of pre-Darwinian ideas concerning the betterment of mankind, and the inevitable movement of evolution towards complete rationality: ‘All social progress’, Lombroso writes, ‘is marked by the victory of reason over instinct’.16 Conversely, the criminal and the insane are more inclined to recklessly follow their instincts, and therefore bear the signs of an occasional regression to the condition of the animal ancestors of the human species.17 A similar notion is present in Darwin’s The Descent of Man. In discussing the relationship between impulses and the social instinct, which he sees as the source of rational morality, Darwin affirms that: Man, prompted by his consciousness, will through long habit acquire such perfect self-command, that his desires and passions will at last yield instantly and without a struggle to his social sympathies and instincts, including his feeling for the judgment of his fellows. Thus at last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited habit, that it is best for him not to obey his more persistent impulses.18

The positivistic elite ruling the country embraced this paradigm of moral progress, appropriating it as a cultural weapon to impose a normative view of morality as imbued with rationality. The case of Lombroso is emblematic of late nineteenth-century Italian positivism. Within this context, Darwin’s theory was distorted to fit a triumphant worldview: the survival of the fittest would inaugurate a better society of stronger and healthier individuals, a notion that is not at all present in Darwin’s writings. Although in Italy the biological doctrines of evolution did not lend themselves to racial or political propaganda to the extent seen in Germany, for instance, Darwinism nonetheless became the cornerstone of an anthropological and sociological theory. Another author who was deeply indebted to Darwin’s theories of evolution, and was very popular in fin-de-siècle Italy, was Max Nordau, in particular on account of his treatise Degeneration (1892). Nordau describes Cesare Lombroso, Influenza della Civiltà su la Pazzia e della Pazzia su la Civiltà, Milan 1856, p. 106. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Italian texts are my own. 17 Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy, p. 148. 18 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, London 1871, p. 90. 16

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the end of the nineteenth century as the ‘unchaining of the beast’ and ‘the shameless ascendency of base impulses and motives’,19 and he reads the cultural manifestations of this time as a sort of regression to lower stages of evolution. Interestingly, the degeneration characterizing fin-desiècle culture is seen by Nordau as the product of ‘excessive emotionalism, impulsiveness’ and the proclivity to recklessly follow one’s desires: ‘[For degenerate people] there exist no law, no decency, no modesty. In order to satisfy any momentary impulse, or inclination, or caprice, they trespass with the greatest calmness and self-complacency and they do not comprehend that other persons take offence thereat’.20 In contrast to the present generation of weak, degenerate people, Nordau describes the future generation, whose members will be able to dominate their impulses completely: ‘[The generation of the twentieth century] will know how to find its ease in the midst of a city inhabited by millions, and will be able, with nerves of gigantic vigour, to respond without haste or agitation to the almost innumerable claims of existence.’21 In foreshadowing the future state of human evolution as a condition of full rationality, Nordau echoes both Darwin and Lombroso: ‘Psychology teaches us that the course of development is from instinct to knowledge, from emotion to judgment, from rambling to regulated association of ideas.’22 This image in turn anticipates the idea of the body machine, which I will discuss below. The writings of Antonio Fogazzaro represent a particularly striking example of the incorporation of the Darwinian model of the split subject. Fogazzaro was one of the most prominent intellectual figures of the newly founded kingdom of Italy: a prolific writer, and the author of many successful novels, he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature on several different occasions, and was elected Senator for life in the Italian parliament. His novels put into play the dichotomy between passion and duty, between feelings and reason, and the clash between the world before Italy’s unification and the advance of modernity. Although Fogazzaro was 19 20 21 22

Max Nordau, Degeneration, London 1895, p. 25. Ibid. p. 35. Ibid. p. 541. Ibid. p. 543.

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a fervent Catholic, he was also a supporter of the modernist reform of the Church, to the extent that one of his novels, Il Santo (The Saint) (1905), was included in the index of forbidden books by the Catholic Church. In particular, throughout his life Fogazzaro strove to reconcile the Christian belief in creationism with the Darwinian theory of evolution, which he had enthusiastically adopted. Fogazzaro found in Saint Augustine’s theory of an original matter, which develops independently in accordance with God’s will, an important precedent for the notion of an imperfect brutish body, which changes over time to become more refined. Man evolves from being a brute, blindly prone to succumb to his most primeval instincts, to becoming a fully rational and moral being. The evolution of fleshly instinct into a noble and spiritual inclination represents the core concept of his collection of essays Ascensioni umane (Human Ascensions) (1842–1911), in which he attempts to find various points of contact between Darwinism and the Christian faith. Indeed, desire, as embodying the full spectrum of human tendencies, from blind instinct to rational volition, is the central concern of Fogazzaro’s concept of the evolution of mankind, in its development ‘from innocence to virtue’,23 through a progressive detachment from the natural world. In particular, sexual desire is the quintessential manifestation of instinct, and the drive that, even more than others, will have to be purified through the process of evolution: Ma se una legge d’infinito progresso davvero governa l’universo, anche dalla specie umana uscirà, poco importa come, una specie superiore; e se l’istinto sessuale, che salì sempre più vivace per la scala degli organismi ha preparato l’amore umano, anche l’amore umano prepara una ignota forma futura di sentimento, e l’evoluzione sua continua nella vita tenuta sin qua che conduce ad un raffinamento sempre maggiore della materia, ad una potenza sempre maggiore dello spirito.24 (But provided that a law of indefinite progress really rules the universe, a superior species will emerge even from the human race, no matter how and when; and if sexual instinct, which has so quickly ascended the ladder of organisms, has given birth to human love, then certainly it will be transformed into an unknown future

23 Antonio Fogazzaro, Ascensioni umane, Milan 1899, p. 44. 24 Ibid. p. 113.

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Elena Borelli form of feeling; its evolution continues, in the present day, towards an increasingly refined form of matter and higher power of spirit. It is written in nature that from an inferior species a superior one will emerge, effortlessly, and that it will move in the direction of its most perfect form.)

Echoing Lombroso’s notion of regression, Fogazzaro acknowledges the persistent presence, even at the present stage of evolution, of the ‘beast within’, that is, the remnant of our bestial origins, which manifests itself in uncontrollable impulses and desire. The ghost of the brute needs to be constantly fought, in order to promote the advent of the fully rational human being, which will constitute the endpoint of evolution. In psychoanalytic terms, Fogazzaro advocates the suppression of the libido in favour of the victory of the super-ego: Spesso mi pareva di sentir nel mio profondo tutto il tormento della vita inferiore ond’è uscita passo a psso l’umanità, un fermento che ha strane e impetuose maree, che sale talvolta a strepitar nel cuore con mille avidi sinistri clamori bestiali, e poi, domato o pago, ne ridiscende, lasciandovi un silenzio triste.25 (Often I thought I felt deep in my heart the turmoil of the various inferior lives from which step by step human nature emerged, a turmoil that has strange and impetuous tides, that sometimes climbs up and cries within my heart with a thousand greedy and sinister bestial cries, and then, once it is satisfied and sated, it subsides leaving a sad silence behind.)

A similar view of desire informs the Weltanschauung of Giovanni Pascoli, whose poetry, which is replete with disquieting and uncanny images, has invited psychoanalytic readings. However, it is in his very personal interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy that the influence of evolutionism is most evident. Pascoli’s exegetical work encountered very little critical acclaim during his lifetime, in spite of his expectations of great fame. The lack of academic recognition that accompanied his Dante scholarship probably owed much to his peculiar methodological approach, which had little to do with the principles of textual philology in vogue at the time. Pascoli’s

25

Ibid. p. 118.

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‘proto-structuralist’26 analysis of the Comedy aims not for an historical reconstruction of the text, but rather an unveiling of the poem’s deep message. On his reading, the Divine Comedy is a multi-layered parable of the passage from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, which signifies the progressive abandonment of all earthly desires in favour of a state of perfect morality. At the same time, Pascoli interprets the Divine Comedy as a metaphor for the evolution of mankind. Mankind initially found itself in a state of innocence similar to that of animals and children – a condition that is not innocent or pure, but rather full of uncontrollable desire. The course of evolution will bring mankind to tame and overcome desire, and to embrace a fully rational morality. Concurrently, the evolution of mankind is replicated exactly in the life of the individual (an idea that he derives from Ernst Haeckel’s principle of recapitulation),27 such that the brutish phase of the human species corresponds to childhood.28 The idea of the ‘beast within’ appears in Pascoli’s writings in a way that almost echoes Fogazzaro: né io ho racchiuso nella mia natura tanti bestiali empiti e bramiti, e non posso farne carico ai miei genitori, né essi ai loro; ma non perció io sento meno il loro strepito, che giunge dai lontanissimi primordi sino a me, perché è in me, e si compone di tutti i gridi, dal gorgogliare del batraco allo squittire del piteco, dal grugnito del ciacco al ruggito del leone e all’ululo del lupo. Noi fuggiamo …29

26 Guido Gugliemi, ‘Pascoli Lettore di Dante’, in Testi ed esegesi pascoliana: Atti del convegno di studi di San Mauro Pascoli 23–4 Maggio 1987, Bologna 1988, pp. 75–87: p. 81. 27 See Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Berlin 1866, p. 8: ‘The second and most significant step […] is the recognition that the natural system is the family tree of all organisms; the highest significance of the history of the individual’s development can be explained on the basis of the fact that the development of a single organism is the shorter and more compact repetition, actually, a recapitulation of the paleontological development of the species, that is, phylogeny.’ The translation is my own. 28 Intriguingly, in those years, independently of each other, both Pascoli and Sigmund Freud reconfigured childhood as a condition of wholeness but also as the lack of human identity – as a semi-animalistic state. See Maria Truglio, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli, Toronto 2007, pp. 56–7. 29 Giovanni Pascoli, L’Era Nuova, Milan 1984, pp. 181–2.

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Elena Borelli (I’m not the one who’s imbued my own nature with so many bestial cries, and I cannot blame my parents for it, either; nor can they blame their parents, but that does not mean that I do not hear their noise, which reaches me from our remote origins, and encompasses all the animalistic cries, from the croaking of the frog to the squeal of the ape, and from the grunting of the hog to the roaring of the lion and the howling of the wolf. We flee from this …)

The ascent to contemplation, which constitutes the main theme of the Divine Comedy, can be read, in Pascoli’s interpretation, as an allegory of the human evolution towards the progressive transformation of instinct into rational will. The ‘beast within’, of Darwinian derivation, will be progressively tamed and transformed into the homo humanus, the endpoint of evolution. In the preface to La Mirabile Visione (The Marvellous Vision) (1902), Pascoli acknowledges his debt to Darwin, and points out the similarities between the message of the Divine Comedy and evolutionism: Dante credeva in una Grazia misteriosa, pari ad una luna che fosse piena nella nostra notte, e pur non fosse veduta, la quale faceva usci l’uomo dal suo fatale aggrovigliamento vegetativo, risvegliandone nel suo torpor di piant la volontà. Ora, la scienza non ci dichiara come l’uomo sia diventato uomo se non con una parola, ‘evoluzione,’ che ripete la domanda e non le risponde; con una parola misteriosa quanto la Grazia […] Dante spiegava la nostra ascensione come la spieghiamo noi, ossia non la spiegava, ossia non la dichiarava spiegabile.30 (Dante believed in a mysterious Grace, similar to a moon in the night sky, full though invisible, which makes men grow out of their vegetal entanglement, waking the will in them from their plant-like sleep. Now, science does not explain how men became men, but it uses a word, ‘evolution’, which repeats the question without answering it; with a word as mysterious as ‘grace’, […] Dante explained our ascension the way we do; in other words, he did not explain it, but neither did he claim that it was explicable.)

Pascoli was very much aligned with late nineteenth-century evolutionism and the model of the split subject derived from it. The advent of the homo humanus requires not only that we purge ourselves of the brute within us, but that we also remove ourselves from the life of engagement, the vita activa, where worldly ambitions and individual desires prevail. Thus, Pascoli 30 Pascoli, Prose, ed. Augusto Vicinelli, Milan 1952, III, p. 770.

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equates the instinct that rules the animal world with the desire that is the propeller of every human action, and which pushes the human species to improve its condition on earth: È un vecchio concetto, codesto, e non vero, che sia l’intelligenza che distingua l’uomo dal bruto. Non è vero: le case le edifica anche la rondine, e di fango impastato come noi; e la lucciola ha saputo, con lunga esperienza, scegliere tali sostanze con cui aver luce nelle sue notti, e con lunga esperienza ha saputo l’ape scegliere tale cibo con cui fare il miele e la cera; o le formiche hanno i loro granai, e i castori hanno le loro città. L’intelligenza e la conservazione della vita sono tra loro in tal nesso, che se chiamate istinto naturale quest’ultima, dovete chiamare istinto anche quella prima. E istinto vuol dire qualcosa a cui non possiamo sottrarci, e che s’impone come una necessità. e non c’è mirabile opera umana, non c’è macchina, non c’è traforo di monti, non c’è navigazione di mari, non c’è volo tra le nubi, non c’è asservimento di forze cieche e libere che, considerati da esseri più perfetti, i quali dimorino in altri pianeti, non facessero loro pensare che noi abbiamo ubbidito, con ciò, alla stessa necessità a cui i conigli, che so io, gli uccelli e gli insetti alati, le lucciole e i ragni.31 (It is an old concept, this one, and a mistaken one, that it is intelligence that distinguishes men from brutes. This is simply not the case: swallows, too, build houses, made of mud like ours; […] Intelligence and the preservation of life are connected to each other in such a way that if you call the latter ‘instinct’ you have to give the same name to the former. And instinct means something we cannot avoid, which imposes itself upon us as a necessity. And there is no wondrous human work, no machine, no tunnel in the mountains, no navigation on the seas, no flight among the clouds, no enslaving of blind and free natural forces that, if more perfect beings from other planets were to look upon us, would prevent them from thinking that we obeyed the same necessity as that of, say, rabbits, birds or winged insects, or fireflies, and spiders.)

Moral evolution, Pascoli affirms, comes from the taming of desire, both in the form of the instinct and the desire that turns humans towards more and more ambitious conquests in the fields of science and technology. While sharing the faith in the progressive ascent of man, which informed the contemporary belief, then, Pascoli stresses the importance of a moral evolution, based on the suppression of the beast within.

31 Pascoli, L’Era Nuova, p. 157.

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Desire in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novels The ‘third crown’ of fin-de-siècle Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio, was one of the most prolific authors of his time, as well as a notorious figure, always in the spotlight: not only was he a poet, a novelist and a playwright, but he also served as a member of the Italian Parliament and as a soldier in World War I. He had a flamboyant personality, multiple love affairs, and an adventurous and extravagant lifestyle, which contrasted strikingly with Pascoli’s isolated, simple life and humble demeanour. However, both authors enact in their work the paradigm of the split subject and the notion of desire as the mark of the ‘beast within’. Jared Becker has convincingly illuminated the Darwinian underpinnings in D’Annunzio’s works.32 Becker illustrates how the notion of the ‘struggle for life’ influences D’Annunzio’s early works, such as the poetry collection Canto Novo (New Song) (1882) and the novel Le vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks) (1895). In this novel, in particular, Becker sees the Darwinian narrative of the survival of the fittest turning into ‘the story of the uplift and renewal, especially a national and imperialistic renaissance of the Italian people’.33 I want to suggest that we can find traces of the Darwinian influence on D’Annunzio’s works, particularly in the paradigm of the ‘split subject’, which characterizes the male protagonists in his novels from Il Piacere (The Child of Pleasure), published in 1889, to Il Fuoco (The Flame) in 1900. The male protagonist is a quintessential modern man, according to Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s definition: ‘Moderno è Paolo Bourget, è Buddha, è il divider gli atomi, è il giocare a palla con il tutto; moderno è decomporre un capriccio, un sospiro, uno scrupolo’34 (Modern are Paul Bourget and the Buddha; modern is the splitting of the atom, playing ball with the 32 33 34

See Jared Becker, ‘D’Annunzio and Darwinism: from the Giaguaro Famelico to the Nazione Eletta’, Italica 67:2 (1990), 181–95. Ibid. 186. Quoted by Gabriele D’Annunzio in D’Annunzio, Scritti giornalistici, ed. Annamaria Andreoli, Milan 1996, II, 159.

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universe: modern is the dissection of every whim, every sigh, every scruple). In other words, D’Annunzio portrays a man equipped with a hypertrophic brain, prone to analyse every experience, and feeding on art and culture; at the same time, this man is haunted by desire, specifically erotic desire, which exerts a tyrannical power on him, tearing up the unity of his soul. This desire, as a force that is antithetical to the sophisticated intellect of the modern man, is seen as the mark of the brute, and the remnant of our animalistic ancestors. The Child of Pleasure rightfully belongs to the canon of decadent literature. It is the story of a wealthy Italian young gentleman, Andrea Sperelli, who has a talent for art and literature, but lacks a clear direction in life, and is completely dominated by his erotic desire. In fact, the novel revolves around Sperelli’s conquest of two women, who embody two antithetical aspects of femininity, the voluptuous Elena Muti and the chaste Maria Ferres. Indeed, the novel can be read as a parable of the dangers of desire. Desire, the forza sensitiva,35 is a force that is alien to the complex, educated, and sophisticated nature of the modern man, and as such, it threatens to precipitate the disintegration of his self. Interestingly, Andrea Sperelli, along with many of the male protagonists in D’Annunzio’s novels, attempt to recompose the rupture in the self created by their double nature through the temporary wholeness that comes with the possession of a woman. However, this attempt invariably fails, and carnal desire always triumphs. The opposition portrayed here is between desire in its most animalistic form, sexual drive, and the harmonious unity of rationality and action that is the trait of the evolved man. Here D’Annunzio is much indebted to late nineteenth-century evolutionism, and to the fantasy of the fully rational man constituting the endpoint of evolution. On the contrary, desire is, in the words of Maria Ferres, ‘something obscure and burning – a something

35

Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il Piacere, in Prose di romanzi, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, Milan 1998, I, p. 37. English translation: Georgina Harding (trans.), The Child of Pleasure, New York 1990, p. 24.

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that has suddenly awakened in me like a latent disease, and now begins to creep through my blood and into my soul in spite of myself ’.36 Throughout the novel, Sperelli tries to sublimate or suppress his uncontrollable desire by engaging the Schopenhauerian solution of artistic contemplation. Beauty seems, at times, to soothe desire and provide an axis to his unbalanced nature.37 However, this strategy is bound to fail miserably: the novel ends with him falling even more deeply into an abyss of depravation, after obtaining the love of Maria Ferres, whom he has deceivingly seduced under the pretence of noble and chaste feelings. Actually, as Guido Baldi has observed, the artistic patina with which Sperelli coats his love affairs is nothing but a clever stratagem for the ‘beast within’ to achieve its goal. This is particularly visible in the conquest of Ferres, during which Sperelli pretends he wants to redeem himself from his dissipated life. In order to seduce this pious lady, he engages all his knowledge of courtly love poetry and confessional literature. Art, which in the model of the split subject belongs to the sphere of the rational man, is bent to serve the ends of lust and the goal of desire. In his novels of the early 1890s, D’Annunzio’s protagonists are truly from the same mould as Sperelli, inasmuch as they live out an internal conflict between their bestial lust and their over-analytical and sophisticated intellect. Furthermore, all these novels put into play the failure of strategies to overcome desire, strategies that were inspired by the doctrines of late nineteenth-century pessimism, such as Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. This is particularly evident in Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death) (1894), with which D’Annunzio completes his first cycle of novels entitled Il Ciclo della rosa (The Cycle of the Rose). The Triumph of Death can be read as a critique of philosophical pessimism, and the theme of the

36 D’Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure, 158; Prose di romanzi, I, p. 211: ‘Una cosa oscura bruciante è in fondo a me, una cosa che è apparsa d’improvviso come un’infezione di morbo e che incomincia a contaminarmi il sangue e l’anima, contro ogni volontà, contro ogni rimedio; il Desiderio.’ 37 Guido Baldi, Le ambiguità della ‘decadenza’: D’Annunzio romanziere, Naples 2008, p. 11.

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annihilation of desire as portrayed in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, of which the final scene of D’Annunzio’s novel is a parody. Giorgio Aurispa, the protagonist of The Triumph of Death, is a victim of his overactive brain, his oversensitive soul, and his strong carnal desire, which terrifies and disturbs him. He wishes to recompose the unity of his ruptured self by possessing his partner, Ippolita, body and soul; however, as the woman is also seen as the cause of his desire, Aurispa slowly turns his love for her into hatred, and kills her at the end of the novel, before committing suicide himself. The Darwinian model of the split subject is present not only in the psychological conflict of the protagonist, but is also illustrated through a narratological device of mise en abîme: Aurispa has two father figures, his actual father and his uncle, who embody the opposite ends of both the evolutionary spectrum and his own divided personality. Giorgio’s uncle Demetrio is the perfect representation of the Schopenhauerian contemplator, a purely intellectual figure, living only for art and music, and despising the world. In fact, Demetrio brings Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the evil of desire to its most logical consequence by committing suicide: he embodies the inability of the man of pure intellect to live in this world. On the other hand, Giorgio’s father is the embodiment of the Darwinian brute: vulgar, unsophisticated, and completely beholden to his base instincts: Pingue, sanguigno, possente, quell’uomo pareva emanare dalle sue membra un perpetuo calore di vitalità carnale […] La carne, la carne, questa cosa bruta, piena di vene, di tendini, di glandule, d’ossa, piena d’istinti e bisogni; […] Io, io sono il figliolo di quest’uomo!38 (Stout, sanguine, powerful, the man seemed to exhale from his whole body an inexhaustible warmth of carnal vitality […] His flesh, that coarse stuff full of veins, nerves, tendons, glands and bones, full of instincts and necessities […] And I, I am that man’s son!)39

38 D’Annunzio, Prose, I, p. 719. 39 Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Triumph of Death, trans. Arthur Hornblow, New York 1896, pp. 86–7.

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The horror and morbid fascination Giorgio feels towards his father reveals his awareness that the same brutish nature is in himself, manifest in his obsession with Ippolita’s body: ‘Egli portava nel suo organismo i germi ereditati dal padre- Egli, l’essere d’intelligenza e sentimento, portava nella carne la fatale eredità di quell’essere bruto’40 (At the profoundest depths of his substance he bore the germs inherited from his father. He, the creature of thought and sentiment, had in his flesh the fatal heredity of that brutish being).41 The only solution to the problem of the demons of desire in D’Annunzio’s novels is for the male protagonist to push desire onto the woman, who is usually his lover. He either kills her, or transposes onto her the torment of desire by using her, and then abandoning her. However, in his last novel Forse che si forse che no (Maybe Yes Maybe No) (1910), D’Annunzio inaugurates a new solution to the problem of desire. Not only is the woman cast away, but the protagonist transforms his own desiring body into a body without desires thanks to his interaction with the machine. Paolo Tarsis is a pilot of planes and cars, the new technological wonders of the time. The story narrates his tormented love for the enigmatic Isabella, as well as his flying and racing adventures. The relationship with Isabella is torturous because he cannot completely possess the woman’s ambiguous and mysterious personality. When his love story ends, as Isabella goes mad and ends up in a mental asylum, Paolo finds solace in his passion for the new machines. Paolo’s lustful love for Isabella is portrayed in the novel as an imbestiamento, the victory of the bestial side of human nature that traps the man into his fleshly body. The prison of lust is described in almost Gnostic tones, by employing the semantic opposition between the earth and the sky, low and high: the body, with its brutish needs, chains man to this earth. This idea finds a counterweight in the near-divine freedom with which the man is invested when he experiences the flight. The novel ends not only with the expulsion of the woman from the narrative, but also with the mystical experience of Paolo’s flight on a plane over the seas, in which he finally feels at one with the universe. Free at last of his love for Isabella, he compares his body to the machine he is piloting: 40 D’Annunzio, Prose, I, p. 788. 41 D’Annunzio, The Triumph, p. 170.

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Il moto dei congegni non aveva risonanza ma era simile al moto del cuore e delle arterie, che l’uomo non ode quando egli è in armonia con sé e con l’Universo […] ed egli aveva perso la memoria della riva di giù, ma non di quel viaggio, ché egli si ricordava di averlo compiuto.42 (The motion of the engine had no resonance but it was similar to the beating of the heart and the pulsing of the arteries, which one does not feel while being in harmony with oneself and the Universe […] and he had lost the memory of the shore below, but not of the journey, as he remembered he had finished it.)

In D’Annunzio’s last novel the liberation of the ‘beast within’ is obtained by substituting a machine for the fragile human body. The mechanical body represents the true endpoint of evolution in the early twentieth-century reflection on the post-human, which perhaps brings Darwinism to its logical conclusion. Within that context, the equivalent of Pascoli’s homo humanus is the machine, which in this case is no longer a moral being, but a mechanical body that has annihilated all instincts and desires. Furthermore, the adoption of the model of the machine as the product of man’s intellect and high intelligence implies that the human body becomes more powerful, less fragile, and less subordinated to the laws of nature. This idea is embodied in his image of the ‘centaur of modernity’, which D’Annunzio describes in one article published in 1907 in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della sera: Non è raffigurata in quell’attitudine la specie tragica e ascetica dell’uomo nuovo che, avendo impresso alla sua propria vita i più terribili impulsi degli Elementi, solleva in sommo il suo spirito per signoreggiare l’eccesso di quella veemenza pronta a travolgerlo e ad annientarlo s’egli per un attimo interrmpa la sua disciplina o allenti il suo volere?43 ([In the Centaur] we see the ascetic and tragic nature of modern man, who, containing within himself the strongest impulses of the Elements, lifts up his spirit to rule over that violence that can easily annihilate him if he relents in his discipline and his control.)

42 D’Annunzio, Prose, II, pp. 865–6. 43 Gabriele D’Annunzio, Prose di Ricerca, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti, Milan 2005, II, pp. 1577–8.

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Here it is the human part, responsible for creativity and technological progress, which imparts order to the bestial side, as well as taming desire. The opposition between the ingenious, creative part of man and desire is not new: indeed, it is the central theme of an essay by Mario Morasso, called La nuova arma: La macchina (The New Weapon: The Machine) (1905). Morasso’s writings are quite significant in the panorama of early twentieth-century Italian literature, to the extent that they prefigure many central themes of Italian futurism, such as the cult of speed and the exaltation of technological modernization. Morasso anticipates the speculation on the human evolution towards a mechanical body, or the body-machine, which can be found, for instance, in the influential writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.44 Morasso’s essay The New Weapon: The Machine had a significant impact on the first generation of Italian futurists, and in it, Morasso talks about the multiplication of desires characterizing modernity: in the modern metropolis, with its fast pace, and in modern democracies, where everything seems within reach for everyone, desires are multiplied: Talché a misura che noi ascendiamo, la maggiore quantità di desideri che noi possiamo soddisfare va a giacere presso quelli che già ci infastidiscono, mentre altri di nuovi e sempre più vasti, più grandiosi e numerosi pullulano nel nostro essere, accrescendo la nostra incontentabilità e la nostra smania. e per quanto si acceleri la velocità della nostra ascesa, per quanto si accresca la possibilità di accontentare un maggior numero di desideri, si accrescono e si ingigantiscono e con altrettanta maggiore velocità nuovi desideri da soddisfarsi, così che la nostra situazione resta invariata se pur non peggiore.45 (Therefore, the more we ascend, the number of desires that we can satisfy lies by those which are still troubling us, while new ones, larger, grander, and more numerous ones, pullulate within ourselves, increasing our unhappiness and our restlessness. And no matter how much the speed of our ascent increases, no matter how much larger the possibility of satisfying a larger number of desires is, the new desire increases faster, so that our situation is unchanged, or worse.)

44 See for instance Marinetti’s novel Mafarka le Futuriste (1909), which ends with the protagonist generating a son who is a mechanical creature. 45 Mario Morasso, La nuova arma, la macchina, Turin 1994, p. 12.

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Morasso foresees a new generation of people for whom the interaction with the machine has become the way to overcome the strength of desire, as we read in the following passage: E così è: il giovane moderno che è a contatto con questa forza bruta e gigantesca, che la soggioga e la guida, che ha acquistato l’esperienza di questi impeti formidabili di corsa e che inmezzo a tale follia dello spazio e delle cose mantiene la sua via dritta fermamente, ha avuto una scuola di volontà e di energia più efficace di qualsiasi altra; tale via egli non smarrirà e la meta raggiungerà anche in altre corse pazze, quelle della passione, o in mezzo agli odi e agli amori, dove altri periscono. Un po’ del suo cuore egli ha dato al mostro di metallo e fuoco, ma il mostro lo ha ricambiato con un po’ della sua possa e durezza.46 (And so it is the modern young man, who is in touch with this brutal and gigantic force, who subdues it and guides it, who has acquired the experience of this formidable running impetus, and who amidst the madness of space and things firmly sticks to his course, and has received the most effective training for his will and energy: he will not lose his way, and he will reach his goal even in other mad competitions, those of passions, amongst love and hate, where other men perish. A bit of his heart he has given to the monster of metal and fire, but in exchange the monster has given him some of his power and force.)

The dream of the body-machine, as portrayed by both D’Annunzio and Morasso, anticipates and parallels one of the most important ethical facets of futurism: the machine as the realm in which humankind experiences a rebirth that will lead to a new understanding of humankind itself.47 D’Annunzio and Morasso represent an important link between the late nineteenth-century speculation on the origin and evolution of mankind and the early twentieth-century discussion of the post-human. The bestial origins of mankind surface in the consciousness of the modern man through his most uncontrollable desires. The goal of evolution is to purge desire; and Pascoli’s and Fogazzaro’s homo humanus, or the senseless machine, represent the necessary outcomes of this process. 46 Morasso, La nuova arma, p. 38. 47 Ernesto Livorni, ‘The Machine as the Rebirth of Humankind: Marinetti and First Futurism’, in Giuseppe Gazzola (ed.), Futurismo: Impact and Legacy, Stony Brook, NY 2011, pp. 110–16: p. 100.

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Pascoli, along with Fogazzaro, foresees the advent of a fully moral man, a man who has overcome desire and incorporated it into a fully rational mind. This process inaugurates a new humanism, and new sense of brotherhood among men. Pascoli for his part does not include technological modernization as part of the ascension of the human race. On the contrary, he sees technology as a way of feeding man’s most dangerous desire, namely, the desire for power and supremacy over others.48 Conversely, for D’Annunzio, Morasso, and the early twentieth-century generation of Italian futurists, the problem of desire finds a solution in the merging of human impulses into the disciplined power of the engine, and in the equation of the human body with a body-machine. The authors whose work I have discussed in this chapter variously engage with the sociological and anthropological reappropriations of Darwin’s theory of evolution circulating in Italy in the late nineteenth century. As Ritchie Robertson observes, the interconnection between these theories and their literary dramatizations can be found in the concept of the self,49 which is a core concern of each of these authors. The dissociated self, the animalistic self and its counterpart, the mechanical self, characterize the writings of Fogazzaro, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio. These concepts reflect the notion of a rupture of the human self, an idea which in turn found deep resonance in contemporary biological and philosophical discourses, and which paved the way for the Freudian Unconscious.

Bibliography Baldi, Guido, Le ambiguità della ‘decadenza’: D’Annunzio romanziere, Naples 2008. D’Annunzio, Gabriele, The Child of Pleasure, trans. Georgina Harding, New York 1990. Prose di Ricerca, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti, Milan 2005.

48 See Pascoli’s discussion on the impact of technology on the evolution of humans in L’Era nuova, pp. 157–9. 49 Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self ’, p. 152.

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Prose di romanzi, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, Milan 1998. Scritti giornalistici, ed. Annamaria Andreoli, Milan 1996. The Triumph of Death, trans. Arthur Hornblow, New York 1896. Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, London 1871. Ellenberger, Henri, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, New York 1970. Fogazzaro, Antonio, Ascensioni umane, Milan 1899. Freud, Sigmund, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, New York 1949. Guglielmi, Guido, ‘Pascoli lettore di Dante’, in Testi ed esegesi pascoliana: Atti del convegno di Studi S. Mauro Pascoli 23–4 Maggio 1987, Bologna 1988, pp. 75–87. Haeckel, Ernst, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Berlin 1866. Hartmann, Eduard von, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. C. K. Ogden, New York 2000. Law Whyte, Lancelot, The Unconscious before Freud, New York 1960. Livorni, Ernesto, ‘The Machine as the Rebirth of Humankind: Marinetti and First Futurism’, in Giuseppe Gazzola (ed.), Futurismo: Impact and Legacy, Stony Brook, NY 2011, pp. 100–16. Lombroso, Cesare, Influenza della civiltà su la pazzia e della pazzia su la civiltà, Milan 1856. Morasso, Mario, La nuova arma, la macchina, Turin 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York 1967. Nordau, Max, Degeneration, London 1895. Pancaldi, Giuliano, Darwin in Italy: Science Across Cultural Frontiers, Bloomington, IN 1991. Pascoli, Giovanni, L’Era nuova, ed. Rocco Ronchi, Milan 1994. Prose, ed. Augusto Vicinelli, Milan 1952. Robertson, Ritchie, ‘Modernism and the Self 1890–1924’, in Nicholas Saul (ed.), Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990, Cambridge 2002, pp. 150–96. Roda, Vittorio, Homo Duplex: Scomposizioni dell’io nella letteratura italiana moderna, Bologna 1991. Il soggetto centrifugo: Studi sulla letteratura italiana tra Otto e Novecento, Bologna 1984. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York 1969. Truglio, Maria, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli, Toronto 2007.

Anahita Rouyan

2 Resisting Excelsior Biology: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Late Victorian (Mis)Representations of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

abstract The chapter analyses H. G. Wells’s characterization of the The Time Machine’s protagonist and narrator, the Time Traveller, whose story serves as part of Wells’s broader strategy for criticizing late Victorian modalities of science communication to non-specialist audiences.1 The Traveller’s ability to translate his scientific expertise into economic and social mobility is accompanied by ‘gift of speech’ which positions him as a potential popularizer of scientific knowledge. Wells addresses this capacity in his narrative of the future, which is embedded in late Victorian cultural discourses founded on misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. As a scientist who fails to distance himself from popular fallacies about evolution, the Traveller’s persona reflects deep frustration with widespread misunderstandings of science: a frustration which Wells concurrently expressed in his journalism.

Four months after the publication of The Time Machine in 1895, Israel Zangwill dedicated his Pall Mall Magazine column to a review of the first scientific romance authored by Herbert George Wells. Zangwill argued that contrary to literary utopias produced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, The Time Machine did not portray the future as either ‘grey with evolutionary perspectives’ or ‘gay with ingenuous fore-glimpses of a

1

I would like to thank Giuliano Pancaldi for his advice and encouragement in examining the persona of the young H. G. Wells.

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renewed golden age of socialism and sentimentality’.2 Wells’s text offered a ‘severer and more scientific form of prophecy’.3 The reviewer did, however, detect two elements compromising the value he ascribed to the text. One of them was the characterization of its protagonist and narrator, the Time Traveller. Despite appearing ‘a cool scientific thinker’, the character ‘behaves exactly like the hero of a commonplace sensational novel, with his frenzies of despair and his appeals to fate […]’.4 Zangwill interpreted the dissonance between the cultural expectations of scientific behaviour and the Time Traveller’s demeanour as a shortcoming undermining Wells’s sober vision of humanity’s future. In this chapter I shall argue that the disruptive characterization of the Traveller served as part of Wells’s strategy for criticizing late Victorian modalities of science popularization, revealing the author’s anxiety about potential risks involved in communicating expert scientific knowledge to non-specialist audiences. Wells’s representation of the Time Traveller as a potential communicator of scientific knowledge is apparent in different versions of The Time Machine, a text with an unusually complex bibliographical history.5 The classic edition published by William Heinemann in Great Britain merely implied the Traveller’s combination of wit and charming personality. The principal source for this chapter is a preceding version printed in New York by Henry Holt. The American edition of The Time Machine depicted the

Israel Zangwill, ‘Without Prejudice’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, London 2002, pp. 40–2: p. 40. For examples of Victorian utopian fiction to which Zangwill might have been referring, see Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race, London 1871; Samuel Butler, Erewhon, London 1872; Richard Jefferies, After London, London 1885; William H. Hudson, A Crystal Age, London 1887; Walter Besant, Inner House, London 1888; William Morris, News from Nowhere, London 1890. 3 Zangwill, ‘Without Prejudice’, p. 40. 4 Ibid. 5 For a comprehensive analysis of the complicated publication history of The Time Machine, see Bernard Bergonzi, ‘The Publication of The Time Machine 1894–5’, The Review of English Studies 11:41 (1960), 42–51; Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (eds), H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Berkeley, CA 1975, pp. 47–56. 2

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protagonist as a well-known figure in London’s scientific circles, as well as an accomplished businessman: ‘He did not confine himself to abstract science. Several ingenious, and one or two profitable, patents were his: very profitable they were, these last, as his handsome house in Richmond testified.’6 The Time Traveller’s ability to translate his scientific expertise into economic and social mobility recalls not only Wells’s own career path, but also that of his mentor and key influence, Thomas Henry Huxley.7 Both the British and American versions of The Time Machine suggested that the Traveller enjoyed entertaining guests with stories – in the Holt manuscript, he is described as possessing a ‘gift of speech’, allowing him to express opinions about scientific topics with such zest that he appears ‘as unlike the popular conception of a scientific investigator as a man could be’.8 His account of the future is recognized for its narrative value when, at the end of the second chapter, the Editor cries ‘Story!’ and offers the Time Traveller ‘a shilling a line of verbatim note’,9 clearly signalling the character’s potential as a communicator of knowledge, a position reinforced by his social status of a scientist.10 This capability is addressed by Wells in the Traveller’s narrative of the future, which is situated in cultural discourses founded on misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection that were circulating in late Victorian culture. Coming of age during that period, Wells had witnessed Darwin’s theory fall victim to

All quotations from The Time Machine are drawn from the Holt manuscript of the novel: Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention, New York 1895, p. 1. 7 Wells himself repeatedly acknowledged the influence of Huxley on his work and life, see Herbert George Wells, ‘Huxley’, Royal College of Science Magazine, 13 April 1901, pp. 209–11; Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), Philadelphia, PA 1967, p. 161. For a more recent reflection, see Leon Stover, ‘Applied Natural History: Wells vs. Huxley’, in Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe (eds), H. G. Wells Under Revision: Proceedings of the International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986, London 1990, pp. 125–33. 8 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 2. 9 Ibid. p. 34. 10 For a reflection on Wells’s literary depictions of scientists’ position in the social fabric, see Colin Manlove, ‘Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), H. G. Wells, Philadelphia, PA 2005, pp. 11–33: p. 22. 6

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sensationalism and misrepresentation. The frustration with a widespread misunderstanding of science that Wells expressed in his early journalism found an outlet in his mocking description of the Traveller, a scientist who in constructing his narrative fails to distance himself from popular fallacies about evolution. Recent criticism has frequently positioned Wells’s very first protagonist as a figure portraying the faults of the late Victorian middle class.11 While scientific themes in Wells’s early writings have received a considerable amount of scholarly attention, his approach towards popularizing science has been overlooked by critics who have examined his early literary creations.12 The present study offers a new reading of the Time Traveller’s narrative by interpreting The Time Machine alongside Wells’s early journalistic pieces, where he repeatedly expressed a dissatisfaction with the state of public knowledge about science. Wells articulated his views on science and its role in social development in articles published in newspapers and periodicals between 1887 and 1896, the period during which he produced five different versions of The Time Machine. In his account of the future, the Time Traveller constructs a number of hypotheses to explain the sociobiological order that he encounters. The reasoning and language of the story’s protagonist and narrator are informed by widespread and highly influential interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution, such as the view of evolutionary progressivism or the notion of degeneration. The Time Traveller’s narrative is recounted by an unnamed narrator, accurately compared by Charlotte Sleigh to a young scientist writing an article for 11

12

For a selection of scholarship examining the Time Traveller, see Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, Manchester 1961; Robert J. Begiebing, ‘The Mythic Hero in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine’, Essays in Literature 11:2 (1984), 201–10; John Batchelor, H. G. Wells, Cambridge 1985, p. 1ff. For a review of criticism, see Martin T. Willis, ‘Edison as Time Traveler: H. G. Wells’s Inspiration for His First Scientific Character’, Science-Fiction Studies 26:2 (1999), pp. 284–94: pp. 284–5. For studies of scientific topics in Wells’s early fiction, see Roslynn D. Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future, The Influence of Science on His Thought, London 1980; Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science, Basingstoke 2009.

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Nature.13 Through his incorporation of the Time Traveller’s narrative, Wells introduced a distance between readers and the text, providing a space for critical reflection about the problem of cultural authority for communicating scientific knowledge ascribed to expert scientists, represented by the figure of the Time Traveller.

Science popularization in late Victorian England Coming of age at the height of the Victorian era, Wells witnessed science becoming professionalized and highly specialized, breaking out of the ‘common intellectual context’ shared with other areas of culture and developing a register inaccessible to non-expert audiences.14 The professionalization of science generated a need for popularization among a Victorian public interested in the broader significance of new discoveries and technologies appearing on the intellectual landscape.15 Wells launched 13

14

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Charlotte Sleigh, ‘This Questionable Little Book: Narrative Ambiguity in Nineteenth Century Literature of Science’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, London 2005, pp. 15–26: p. 24. The notion comes from a series of essays by Robert M. Young. See ‘Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of Common Context’, in Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge 1985, pp. 126–63. A classic study exploring this common context is Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009. For recent examinations, see James Moore, ‘Wallace’s Malthusian Moment: The Common Context Revisited’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, Chicago, IL 1997, pp. 290–311; Jonathan R. Topham, ‘Beyond the “Common Context”: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises’, Isis 89:2 (1998), 233–62. For a selection of the immense scholarship examining science popularization during the Victorian era, see Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge 1984; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, IL 1998;

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his career as a science journalist at a time when the periodical press served as a significant, if not the primary, medium for disseminating scientific knowledge, chosen by major scientific figures as their preferred communication platform.16 While developing the narrative of The Time Machine, first serialized in the National Observer and later in the New Review, Wells published a considerable number of press articles and consequently gained an in-depth understanding of editorship and its role in the construction of science popularization accounts. Wells’s formative period in London furnished him with experiences that shaped his views about the value of science popularization for British society. His scientific outlook crystallized during the first years of his scholarship in London, studying at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington under Thomas Henry Huxley, whom he considered ‘the acutest observer, the ablest generalizer, the great teacher, the most lucid and valiant of controversialists’.17 Recalling the first year at the Normal School in his autobiography, Wells represented this period as a point of departure for his later career:

James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago, IL 2000; Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, Chicago, IL 2007; Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago, IL 2007. Science professionalization is examined by Richard Yeo in Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain, Cambridge 2003. 16 Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Introduction’, in Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth Century Periodicals, Cambridge, MA 2004, pp. 1–15: pp. 2–7. The role of periodical press in science popularization is examined in Geoffrey Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge 2004. 17 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 160. For scholarship on Huxley’s popularization activities, see Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, p. 353ff.; Adrian J. Desmond, Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple, London 1994; J. Vernon Jensen, Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science, London 1991.

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That year I spent in Huxley’s class was beyond all question, the most educational year of my life. It left me under that urgency for coherence and consistency, that repugnance from haphazard assumptions and arbitrary statements, which is the essential distinction of the educated from the uneducated mind.18

Anne DeWitt notes that Wells was an inheritor of the ‘dual legacy of scientific naturalism’, where science represented not only a profession, but a philosophy – acknowledged by Wells himself as a specific ‘vision of life’.19 Following that first year of study, Wells became deeply disillusioned with British science education, a sentiment only strengthened by his subsequent occupation as a science teacher at a variety of educational institutions.20 Journalism opened the door to a career which allowed him to extend the scope of his educational activities and take the science popularization scene by storm. That Wells was deeply involved with the topic of public scientific education is evident in his early pedagogic and journalistic works. Between April 1894 and August 1895, he produced a biology textbook and wrote numerous essays devoted to subjects ranging from scientific education to popularization.21 In 1894 alone, he dedicated three articles to the former

18 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 161. 19 Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, Cambridge 2013, p. 168; Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 164. 20 For instance, he accused institutions of producing a ‘swarm of mechanical, electrical and chemical business smarties, guaranteed to have no capacity for social leadership, constructive combination or original thought’ (Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 169). Wells also noted that graduates of English educational institutions were ‘grossly ignorant of physical science, history or economics […] and with just enough consciousness of their deficiencies to make them suspicious of, and hostile to, intellectual ability and equipment’ (Experiment in Autobiography, p. 265). 21 The full list of relevant articles published in this period includes: ‘Flat Earth Again’ (Pall Mall Gazette 58, 2 April 1894); ‘Popularising Science’ (Nature 50:1291, 26 July 1894); ‘Science, in School and After School’ (Nature 50:1300, 27 September 1894); ‘Peculiarities of Psychical Research’ (Nature 51:1310, 6 December 1894); ‘The Sins of the Secondary Schoolmaster’ (Pall Mall Gazette 59, 15 December 1894); ‘The Sequence of Studies’ (Nature 51:1313, 27 December 1894); and ‘Bio-Optimism’ (Nature 52:1348, 29 August 1895). Selections of these early articles have been reprinted

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issue and did not shy away from expressing his dissatisfaction with ‘a fundamentally faulty system of scientific education’ in other formats, for instance in a lecture entitled ‘Science Teaching – an Ideal, and some Realities’ delivered before the Royal College of Preceptors at the end of 1894.22 Wells found disseminating scientific knowledge to non-specialist audiences just as challenging as had his mentor, Thomas Henry Huxley, almost forty years previously. Contrary to Huxley, Wells did not need to negotiate the social boundary between scientific practitioner and mere popularizer, but he shared with his mentor a preoccupation with controlling public perceptions of science.23 In an article entitled ‘Popularising Science’ published in an 1894 edition of Nature, Wells presented a critique of contemporary modalities of science popularization, stating how ‘a considerable proportion of the science of our magazines, school text-books, and books for the general reader, is the mere obvious tinctured by inaccurate compilation’.24 Wells condemned as inadequate what he believed to be two prevailing popularization models followed by professional scientists, proposing a novel strategy based on inductive reasoning. ‘Intelligent common people’, argued Wells, ‘come to scientific books neither for humour, subtlety of style, nor for vulgar wonders of the “millions and millions and millions” type, but for problems to exercise their minds upon’.25 Pointing to detective fiction authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, Wells suggested that the popularity of their works demonstrated that ‘the public delights in the ingenious unravelling of evidence’.26

in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, and John S. Partington (ed.), H. G. Wells in Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader, Frankfurt am Main 2008. 22 Herbert George Wells, ‘The Sequence of Studies’, in Partington, H. G. Wells in Nature, pp. 59–62: p. 59. The lecture was later printed as ‘Science Teaching – an Ideal, and some Realities’, Educational Times, 1 January 1895, pp. 23–9. 23 For Huxley’s approach to science popularization, see Lightman, Victorian Popularizers, pp. 353–97. 24 Herbert George Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, in Partington, H. G. Wells in Nature, pp. 21–6: p. 21. 25 Ibid. p. 24. 26 Ibid.

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David Hughes and Robert Philmus note that Wells’s model of communicating scientific knowledge finds a parallel in the narrative structure of his early scientific romances, but the implications of this suggestion for the text of The Time Machine remain unexplored.27 As the Time Traveller observes what he believes to be the future descendants of humankind and produces several hypotheses formulated on the basis of highly limited evidence, his line of reasoning clearly follows the logic of Wells’s rule for science popularization: ‘First the problem, then the gradual piecing together of the solution.’28 Wells exploited this model of inductive reasoning in the Traveller’s narrative to expose the fallacy behind late Victorian cultural and political interpretations of the evolutionary theory.

The Time Traveller’s evolutionary imagination In his autobiography, Wells remarked that the last two decades of the nineteenth century had witnessed a rise of public interest in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which ‘remained […] a field for almost irresponsible speculation’.29 Evolution served as a significant source of inspiration for Wells, a theory he employed with equal passion in his literary and

27

See David Y. Hughes and Robert M. Philmus, ‘The Early Science Journalism of H. G. Wells: A Chronological Survey’, Science-Fiction Studies 1:2 (1973), pp. 98–114: p. 100. 28 Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, p. 24. For a close reading of the Time Traveller’s reasoning process, see Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution and Ecology, Farnham, UK 2012, pp. 157–70. 29 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 161. Wells’s reflection echoed Huxley’s contemporary assessment captured in the prologue to his 1892 collection of essays published in periodicals such as Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century, where he stated that ‘so many strange misconceptions are current about this doctrine – it is attacked on such false grounds by its enemies, and made to cover so much that is disputable by some of its friends’: see Thomas Henry Huxley, Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions, London 1892, p. 37.

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journalistic writings.30 A fundamental misrepresentation present in the reception of the evolutionary theory examined by Wells was the understanding of evolution as a necessarily progressive process. That entanglement of evolution and progress had powered the sensational account of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which captured the Victorian imagination for the better part of the century.31 In an article entitled ‘Zoological Retrogression’, Wells complained that the educated audience has decided that in the past the great scroll of nature has been steadily unfolding to reveal a constantly richer harmony of forms and successively higher grades of being, and that it assumes that ‘evolution’ will continue under the supervision of its extreme expression – man.32

The article offered Wells’s most spirited attack on what he called ‘Excelsior’ view of biology, ‘a popular and poetic creation’ expressing ‘that inevitable tendency to higher and better things with which the word “evolution” is popularly associated’.33 Wells alluded to this view throughout his early journalistic writings. In ‘The Man of the Year Million’ he quoted from an imagined volume: ‘Evolution is no mechanical tendency making for perfection according to the ideas current in the year of grace 1892.’34 He later satirized the progressive view of evolution in ‘Concerning the Nose’, imagining how ‘[o]ne may conceive “advanced” noses, inspired with an evolutionary striving towards something higher, remoter, better – we know not what’.35 Wells paired this critique with a reflection on the anthropocentrism inherent in narratives of natural progress that often followed the logic of the Great Chain of Being, imagined as ordering the animal kingdom in

30 W. Warren Wagar, ‘Wells’s Scientific Imagination’, in Harold Bloom, H. G. Wells, pp. 1–9: p. 2. 31 See Secord, Victorian Sensation, pp. 11–17. 32 Herbert George Wells, ‘Zoological Retrogression’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, pp. 158–68: p. 158. 33 Ibid. p. 159. 34 Herbert George Wells, ‘The Man of the Year Million’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6 November 1893, p. 3. 35 Herbert George Wells, ‘Concerning the Nose’, The Ludgate, l April 1896, pp. 678–81.

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the Christian doctrine and translated into an ascending scale of animal kingdom in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s doctrine of transformism.36 He dramatized this perspective in a short narrative written while still a student at South Kensington for Science Schools Journal in 1887. ‘Vision of the Past’ depicts a narrator dreaming of a distant past where he encounters a tribe of ‘strange beasts’ characterized by ‘grotesque features’, who nevertheless consider themselves representatives of the peak of evolutionary progress. One of the tribe members expresses this view in the following speech: [L]ook at the wondrous world around, and think that it is for our use that this world has been formed […] and the facts which record of the past history of this earth during the many ages in which it has slowly been preparing itself for the reception of us, the culminating point of all existence, the noblest of all beings who have ever existed or ever will exist.37

A similar viewpoint informs the narrative of The Time Machine, where the Traveller, motivated by an anthropocentric ‘curiosity concerning human destiny’, builds a machine which allows him to visit the future and witness what he expects to be the results of a progressive biological, social, and technological evolution of humankind.38 Instead of hope and fascination, the Traveller’s first moments in the new world are marked by uncertainty and fear. Upon encountering the figure of the White Sphinx, the scientist instantly articulates a common Victorian fear of degeneration: ‘What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?’39 This concern intermingles with the Traveller’s strong belief in humanity’s continuous progress, in particular when he represents himself in contrast 36

For a classic examination of the concept of the Great Chain of Being, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, Cambridge, MA 1936. Lamarck postulated that species changed in response to environmental alterations in a progressive manner: see Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, Berkeley, CA 2003, pp. 82–9. 37 Herbert George Wells, ‘Vision of the Past’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, pp. 153–7: pp. 154–6. 38 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 155. 39 Ibid. p. 48.

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to the future civilization as ‘an old-world savage animal’.40 The tension between the expectation of progress and fear of degeneration is temporarily resolved upon the first encounter with the inhabitants of the future. Depicting the Eloi within the framework of the Victorian race discourse as childlike and ‘indescribably frail’, the Traveller regains his confidence and asserts his physical superiority in the vein of that ‘savage animal’ he previously envisioned himself to be: ‘I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like ninepins.’41 As soon as the Traveller notes that the frail bodies of the Eloi do not house a remarkable intelligence, he ceases to hide his disregard for the species, exclaiming how they seem ‘to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children’.42 Observing physical resemblances between male and female Eloi, conveyed as ‘the same girlish rotundity of limb’,43 the Time Traveller emphasizes his superiority to ‘this fragile thing out of futurity’,44 exhibiting a mindset worthy of a British Empire colonialist. While the Eloi are granted a degree of humanity, Morlocks are nothing but ‘queer little ape-like figure[s]’, ‘human spider[s]’, ‘Lemurs’, ‘vermin’, or ‘brutes’, the latter a common contemporary term for describing organisms located lower on the evolutionary scale.45 Evaluating his status in the future society composed of two humanoid species, the Traveller constantly refers to the ascending scale of animal kingdom as his organizing metaphor and foundation for inferences about the prevailing social order amongst the Eloi and Morlocks. His narrative is informed by an anthropocentric view on evolution where the Victorian white gentleman figures as its most sophisticated product. Exploring the future reality and discovering new 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. pp. 48–53. For an examination of late Victorian scientific concept of race, see John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900, Carbondale, IL 1971. 42 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 55. 43 Ibid. p. 66. 44 Ibid. p. 52. For a reflection on the loss of ‘manliness’ exhibited by the Eloi, see Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration in the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 1996, pp. 82–5. 45 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 108–9, 119, 160.

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facts about the relationship between the two species, he is forced to question his previous assumptions and consequently suffers from a condition Patrick Parrinder aptly calls ‘a sense of dethronement’.46 Nevertheless, the scientist strives to maintain his superior status, convinced of his belonging to the Victorian society which, as he believes, represents ‘the ripe prime of the human race’.47 Wells problematized the Time Traveller’s superiority on numerous occasions by exploiting the tension between human reason and animal instinct, a common trope in late Victorian fiction and of particular importance to the author’s own The Island of Dr. Moreau, published less than a year after The Time Machine. Wells had challenged the Traveller’s humanity in an episode which appeared exclusively in the New Review serialization of the narrative. Entitled ‘The Further Vision’, the chapter presented the Traveller as a caricature of a Victorian amateur naturalist as he kills a creature, a ‘grey animal or grey man, whichever it was’, in an effort to acquire a specimen for his collection. As he proceeds with an anatomical examination in search for human characteristics, he feels ‘disagreeable apprehension’ at the thought of this humanoid species having descended from the Victorians.48 For Kathryn Hume, the episode signals the anthropocentric disposition of the Traveller who ‘cherishes himself for being the only “real” human and therefore the only creature with rights’.49 The American and British editions of The Time Machine include an episode which questions the emotional detachment that Wells considered to be part of scientific inquiry. The scene brought up by Zangwill in his review of The Time Machine sees the scientist facing the disappearance of his invention and experiencing an ‘anguish of mind’.50 This is also when the

46 Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, Syracuse, NY 1995, p. 49. 47 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 137. 48 Herbert George Wells, ‘The Further Vision’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, pp. 96–104: pp. 97–8. 49 Kathryn Hume, ‘Eat or Be Eaten: H. G. Wells’s Time Machine’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), H. G. Wells, pp. 35–51: p. 37. 50 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 82.

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Time Traveller returns to describing himself as ‘a strange animal in an unknown world’, problematizing his own status on the ascending scale of the animal kingdom.51 During the course of his narrative, the Traveller offers a number of hypotheses explaining the biological and social order governing the society of the Eloi and Morlocks. His inferences are, however, products of hasty judgements founded on limited evidence. Despite assuming that the Eloi serve as a ‘more convenient breed of cattle’ to Morlocks,52 he proposes a predator-prey relationship, ignoring the mutual interdependence of the two humanoid species. Wells problematized the logic of the evolutionary scale by destabilizing gender traits exhibited by the Eloi and Morlocks, which the scientist imagines to underpin the system governing the species.53 In his final musings about the future of humanity, the Time Traveller desperately attempts to stabilize the rank of the two species on the evolutionary scale by granting the feature of humanity to the Eloi and animalizing Morlocks. He suggests that the Eloi ‘had forgotten their high ancestry’, and Morlocks are nothing else than ‘white animals’, ‘scarcely to be counted as human beings’.54 It is only by reconstructing the familiar socio-biological order that the Traveller can rehabilitate his superior position on the evolutionary scale. Situating his narrative in a widespread Victorian imagination of the ascending scale of animal kingdom and placing himself on the very top of it, the Traveller clearly embodies the progressive interpretation of the evolutionary theory criticized by Wells in his early journalism.

51 52 53

Ibid. p. 83. Ibid. p. 71. For a detailed examination of gender representations in The Time Machine, see Hume, ‘Eat or Be Eaten’, pp. 38–42. 54 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 145–7.

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The Time Machine: A degenerationist romance? The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a concept which challenged the progressive view of evolution and its accompanying sense of ‘cosmic optimism’. Famously articulated during the last decade of the nineteenth century by a German physician, Max Nordau, the notion of degeneration had woven itself into scientific and cultural discourses of the Victorian period. Notably, the English translation of Degeneration was published in 1895, the same year as The Time Machine.55 Daniel Pick remarked that for the Victorians, degeneration was ‘more than simply an instrument of […] sciences’, or a theory circulating among select social groups. ‘[I]t could not easily be put back or abandoned even in the face of specific, powerful technical critiques, precisely because it remained for so many commentators an assumed common sense, an inevitable home truth’.56 In the context of the Victorian utopian imagination, degeneration inspired a new metaphor of humanity’s progress as a parabola. Frank Hill Perry Coste captured the complexity of this novel conceptualization of progress in a theoretical work published just a year before The Time Machine, where he constructed the following vision of evolution: ‘Humanity’s perfection will prove to be only the halting halfway-house whence are beheld in retrospect primeval barbarism, and in prospect terminal barbarism’. He continued: ‘To use a favourite expression – Huxley’s simile – existence is a double cone’,57 suggesting that living organisms emerge from a multitude 55

For studies on degeneration in British culture and literature, see William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, Cambridge 1994; Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body; Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (eds), Decadence, Degeneration and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, New York 2014. The most comprehensive study of Wells’s position in fin-de-siècle culture remains Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells, pp. 1–22. 56 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918, Cambridge 1989, p. 203. 57 Frank Hill Perry Coste, Towards Utopia: Being Speculations in Social Evolution, New York 1894, p. 3. Huxley did use the expression ‘double cone’ when referring to cellular division: see Thomas Henry Huxley, The Crayfish: An Introduction to

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of possibilities and generate an equally vast number of possible future developments. When discussing Wells’s take on degeneration, scholars point to Edwin Ray Lankester’s influential 1880 study, perhaps overlooking the fact that Wells’s views on degeneration differed from those of his instructor and later friend.58 In his work, Lankester remarked upon the popular misinterpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution, only to commit a similar error himself when comparing evolution to the development of human societies.59 He defined degeneration as ‘a loss of organization making the descendant far simpler or lower in structure than its ancestor’ and ‘a gradual change of the structure in which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life’.60 His terminology clearly suggests that he endorsed the progressive view of evolution. Lankester ended his study on an optimistic note, suggesting that since for ‘us’, Western societies, ‘it is possible to ascertain what will conduce to our higher development [and] what will favour our degeneration’ by means of scientific inquiry, thus ‘it is possible for us to control our destinies’.61 He concluded: ‘The full and earnest cultivation of Science […] is that to which we have to look for the protection of our race – even of this English branch of it – from relapse and degeneration.’62 Even if a modicum of a similar hope guided Wells in his understanding of the role science played in social development, he

the Study of Zoology, London 1880, pp. 200–1. To my knowledge, the only relevant simile describes life following the trajectory of a ball fired from a mortar: see Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘The Struggle for Existence in Human Society’, in Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. 9, New York 1911, pp. 195–236: p. 199. I would be grateful for suggestions regarding the source of Perry Coste’s quotation. 58 Richard Barnett, ‘Education or Degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The Outline of History’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2006), pp. 203–29: p. 212. 59 Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London 1880, pp. 58–62. 60 Ibid. pp. 30–2. Emphasis in the original. 61 Ibid. p. 61. 62 Ibid. p. 62.

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rejected Lankester’s model of socio-biological degeneration in favour of Huxley’s interpretation of the process. In The Time Machine, Wells created a protagonist and narrator whose entire reasoning is founded on the tension between the dream of evolutionary perfection and the nightmare of degeneration, captured in the entropic metaphor of ‘the sunset of mankind’.63 The Time Traveller states that absence of environmental limitation produces ‘[a]n animal perfectly in harmony with its environment […] a perfect mechanism’, almost quoting verbatim another Victorian cultural appropriation of the evolutionary theory, the view of degeneration articulated by Samuel Butler in his utopian novel of 1872, Erewhon.64 The Traveller’s narrative of degeneration is shaped by his readings of texts ranging from 1870s utopian fiction and the social investigations of Charles Booth to the discourse of the ‘Population Question’.65 He initially presents the social organism of the future as struck with degeneration deriving from the ‘subjugation of Nature’66 and the consequent security granted by human civilization, represented as ‘an odd

63 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 70. 64 Ibid. p. 187. I am referring to the following fragment from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: ‘[The writer] feared that the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism [the later edition reads: an intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action]’ (Samuel Butler, Erewhon, pp. 221–2). 65 The Population Question was a late Victorian current of thought advertising modern methods of birth control as the answer to social ills, initiated by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh’s provocative reprint of a birth control handbook, Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832). Early in the text, the Time Traveller presents a Malthusian vision of a world ‘where population is balanced and abundant, [where] much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State’ and ‘the specialization of the sexes’ is no longer required for the development of society (Wells, The Time Machine, p. 67). In a later reflection, he again brings up a Malthusian theme when examining the future society of the Eloi and Morlocks: ‘Possibly the checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary’ (ibid. pp. 76–7). 66 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 71.

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consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged’.67 The Traveller’s hypothesis of degeneration is based on a belief in the regulatory mechanism of natural selection, creating ‘conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall’.68 It is certain that Wells supported the view that environmental security led to biological degeneration. In 1895, he presented it to Huxley as the central theme of his romance.69 However, Wells’s notion of degeneration represents a variant of evolutionary adaptation rather than descent on the ‘scala naturae’ of the animal kingdom; a decline understood in moral terms emerging from the entanglement of the concept of ‘scale’ with the theological concept of the Great Chain of Being. But observing the relations between the Eloi and Morlocks, the Traveller adjusts his theory of degeneration, this time proposing the reality of the future to be the result of Victorian capitalist relations of production. This hypothesis clearly suggests that his logic of degeneration is based on an assumption that the Eloi and Morlocks had descended from human species. The ruins of human civilization, the presence of cultural artefacts, or the engineering expertise of Morlocks, provide enough proof for the Traveller, who never considers an alternative explanation of the origin of the two humanoid species. The anthropocentric perspective of the Time Traveller clearly resonates with his audience, reiterating Wells’s motivation for assuming a cautionary approach towards the capacity of cultural narratives for appropriating and reshaping biological discourses in directions which he deemed ‘unscientific’. Indeed, this perspective stands in stark contrast to the viewpoint reflected in Wells’s journalistic pieces, where he repeatedly entertained a vision of precarious humanity which will either lead itself to extinction or fall prey to a better-adapted product of evolution, something he described as ‘the

67 Ibid. p. 70. 68 Ibid. p. 73. 69 Wells sent a copy of the text to Huxley together with a covering letter which suggested the central idea of the work to be ‘degeneration following security’: see here Harry M. Geduld, The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, Bloomington, IN 1987, p. 5.

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Coming Beast’.70 Familiar with the many late Victorian literary utopias, Wells had been aware of the contemporary tendency to imagine the future exclusively in terms of humanity’s development and achievement – in ‘On Extinction’, he wrote that ‘[w]e think always with reference to man. The future is full of men to our preconceptions, whatever it may be in scientific truth’.71 For Wells, degeneration provided a challenge to the widespread belief in evolutionary progressivism, an antidote to the ‘Excelsior’ view of biology. Rather than serving as ‘an exemplary “blue-print” of degenerationist concerns’,72 The Time Machine emerges as a text which contrasts Wells’s vision of science popularization with contemporary public discourses of evolution, exposing the Time Traveller’s narrative to be a product of popular strategies for representing the evolutionary theory during the final decades of the nineteenth century. The scientific method of observation, interpretation, and generalization employed by the Traveller to explain the sociobiological order of the future is informed by widespread misinterpretations of the evolutionary theory. Described as ‘one of our most conspicuous investigators in molecular physics’, the Traveller may be expected to rely on ‘that urgency for coherence and consistency’ which Wells considered paramount to scientific inquiry.73 And yet, what he produces are precisely ‘haphazard assumptions and arbitrary statements’, founded on partial evidence and fuelled by misrepresentations of scientific knowledge.74 Writing about Wells’s third scientific romance, The War of the Worlds, a reviewer from Nature described Wells as a novelist who ‘was not only familiar with scientific facts, but who knew them intimately enough to

70 This theme in Wells’s non-fiction writings is examined in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, pp. 148–52. 71 Herbert George Wells, ‘On Extinction’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, pp. 169– 72: p. 171. 72 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 157. On Victorian fears of degeneration more generally, see Edward J. Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, New York 1985; and Pick, Faces of Degeneration. 73 Ibid. p. 1; Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 161. 74 Ibid. p. 161.

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present a view of the future’.75 During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Wells had been just as concerned with the future of humanity as with its present, in particular the contemporary modalities of science popularization and education. At an early stage in his career, Wells placed an emphasis on communication in scientific training, viewing it as ‘a training in babbling, in blurting things out, in telling just as plainly as possible and as soon as possible what it is [that the scientist] has found’.76 Wells’s concern about the scientific education of the general public, evident in his early journalistic and literary work, would gradually lead him to assume the role of Britain’s primary public educator at the dawn of the new century. Interestingly, Wells’s protagonist and narrator does not concern himself exclusively with the future, either. The Time Traveller seems to be well aware of the conventions governing the genre of his story. He first criticizes the unrealistic tendency of Victorian utopian fiction to provide detailed descriptions of utopian realities, but more importantly, he reflects on his own tendency to project Victorian social and cultural norms onto the future reality: ‘And it was natural to assume that it was in the underworld that the necessary work of the overworld was performed. This was so plausible that I accepted it unhesitatingly.’77 Wells’s pessimistic outlook on the state of public knowledge about science and his constant effort to educate nonspecialist audiences suggest that what he held responsible for limiting the imagination of the Victorians was the circulation of inaccurate scientific interpretations: a dissemination of discourses which fuelled the tension between the progressive view of human evolution and its potential degeneration. The conflict rendered alternative futures invisible to a society where cultural authority for communicating scientific knowledge belonged to figures who did not shy away from adding a ring of sensationalism to their accounts of science, consequently perpetuating scientific misinformation in the style of The Time Machine’s narrator. Richard Gregory, ‘Science in Fiction’, in Parrinder, H. G. Wells in Nature, pp. 179–81: p. 179. 76 Herbert George Wells, New Worlds for Old, in W. Warren Wagar (ed.), H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy 1893–1946, Boston, MA 1964. 77 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 95–6, 113. 75

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Wells launched his career as both a science popularizer and a writer of fiction, acutely aware of the role storytelling played in the dissemination of contemporary evolutionary discourses. As I hope to have shown, The Time Machine reflects Wells’s dual preoccupation through the characterization of the Time Traveller. Turning to literature as a means for communicating the intricate relationship between science and society, however, he did not dismiss storytelling itself as a dangerous practice that might distort legitimate scientific discourses. In his later career as an educator and popularizer, indeed, he would repeatedly employ literary narratives to express his views about the role of science in the context of a mass democracy, acknowledging the value of the discursive space offered by literature for critical engagement with scientific discourses circulating among the British public. The Time Machine’s particular construction as a nested narrative – as the Traveller’s story is situated in the story of a different narrator – allowed Wells to open up a space for critical reflection on the authoritative status of scientists as communicators of expert knowledge in Victorian society.

Bibliography Barnett, Richard, ‘Education or Degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The Outline of History’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2006), 203–29. Batchelor, John, H. G. Wells, Cambridge 1985. Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009. Begiebing, Robert J., ‘The Mythic Hero in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine’, Essays in Literature 11:2 (1984), 201–10. Bergonzi, Bernard, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, Manchester 1961. ‘The Publication of The Time Machine 1894–5’, The Review of English Studies 11:41 (1960), 42–51. Besant, Walter, Inner House, London 1888. Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea, Berkeley, CA 2003.

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Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, The Coming Race, London 1871. Butler, Samuel, Erewhon, London 1872. Cantor, Geoffrey et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge, MA 2004. Cantor, Geoffrey, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth Century Periodicals, Cambridge, MA 2004. Chamberlain, Edward J., and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, New York 1985. Cooter, Roger, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge 1984. Desmond, Adrian J., Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple, London 1994. DeWitt, Anne, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, Cambridge 2013. Fyfe, Aileen, and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: NineteenthCentury Sites and Experiences, Chicago, IL 2007. Geduld, Harry M., The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, Bloomington, IN 1987. Greenslade, William, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, Cambridge 1994. Gregory, Richard, ‘Science in Fiction’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells in Nature, pp. 179–81. Haller, John S., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859– 1900, Carbondale, IL 1971. Härmänmaa, Marja, and Christopher Nissen (eds), Decadence, Degeneration and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, New York 2014. Haynes, Roslynn D., H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future, The Influence of Science on His Thought, London 1980. Hudson, William H., A Crystal Age, London 1887. Hughes, David Y., and Robert M. Philmus, ‘The Early Science Journalism of H. G. Wells: A Chronological Survey’, Science-Fiction Studies 1:2 (1973), 98–114. Hume, Kathryn, ‘Eat or Be Eaten: H. G. Wells’s Time Machine’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), H. G. Wells, Philadelphia, PA 2005, pp. 35–51. Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration in the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 1996. Huxley, Thomas H., The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, London 1880. Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions, London 1892. ‘The Struggle for Existence in Human Society’, in Collected Essays, vol. IX, New York 1911. Jefferies, Richard, After London, London 1885.

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Jensen, J. Vernon, Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science, London 1991. Lankester, Edwin Ray, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London 1880. Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, Chicago, IL 2007. Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, Cambridge, MA 1936. McLean, Steven, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science, Basingstoke 2009. Manlove, Colin, ‘Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), H. G. Wells, Philadelphia, PA 2005, pp. 11–33. Moore, James, ‘Wallace’s Malthusian Moment: The Common Context Revisited’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, Chicago, IL 1997, pp. 290–311. Morris, William, News from Nowhere, London 1890. Page, Michael R., The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution and Ecology, Farnham, UK 2012. Parrinder, Patrick, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, Syracuse, NY 1995. Partington, John S. (ed.), H. G. Wells in Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader, Frankfurt am Main 2008. Perry Coste, Frank Hill, Towards Utopia: Being Speculations in Social Evolution, New York 1894. Philmus, Robert M., and David Y. Hughes (eds), H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Berkeley, CA 1975. Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918, Cambridge 1989. Secord, James A., Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago, IL 2000. Sleigh, Charlotte, ‘This Questionable Little Book: Narrative Ambiguity in Nineteenth Century Literature of Science’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, London 2005, pp. 15–26. Stover, Leon, ‘Applied Natural History: Wells vs. Huxley’, in Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe (eds), H. G. Wells Under Revision: Proceedings of the International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986, London 1990, pp. 125–33. Topham, Jonathan R., ‘Beyond the “Common Context”: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises’, Isis 89:2 (1998), pp. 233–62. Wagar, W. Warren, ‘Wells’s Scientific Imagination’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), H. G. Wells, Philadelphia, PA 2005, pp. 1–9. Wells, Herbert George, ‘Concerning the Nose’, The Ludgate, l April 1896, pp. 678–81.

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Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), Philadelphia, PA 1967. ‘The Further Vision’, in Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (eds), H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Berkeley, CA 1975, pp. 96–104. ‘Huxley’, Royal College of Science Magazine, 13 April 1901, pp. 209–11. ‘The Man of the Year Million’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6 November 1893, p. 3. New Worlds for Old, in W. Warren Wagar (ed.), H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy 1893–1946, Boston, MA 1964. ‘On Extinction’, in Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (eds), H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Berkeley, CA 1975, pp. 169–72. ‘Popularising Science’, in John S. Partington (ed.), H. G. Wells in Nature, 1893– 1946: A Reception Reader, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 21–6. ‘Science Teaching – an Ideal, and some Realities’, Educational Times, 1 January 1895, pp. 23–9. ‘The Sequence of Studies’, in John S. Partington (ed.), H. G. Wells in Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 59–62. The Time Machine: An Invention, New York 1895. ‘Vision of the Past’, in Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (eds), H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Berkeley, CA 1975, pp. 153–7. ‘Zoological Retrogression’, in Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (eds), H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Berkeley, CA 1975, pp. 158–68. Willis, Martin T., ‘Edison as Time Traveler: H. G. Wells’s Inspiration for His First Scientific Character’, Science-Fiction Studies 26:2 (1999), pp. 284–94. Winter, Alison, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, IL 1998. Yeo, Richard, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain, Cambridge 2003. Young, Robert M., ‘Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of Common Context’, in Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge 1985, pp. 126–63. Zangwill, Israel, ‘Without Prejudice’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, London 2002, pp. 40–2.

Pauline Moret-Jankus

3 Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence of Haeckelian Biology on Fin-de-Siècle French Literature

abstract This chapter aims to show how Haeckel’s monism influenced the French scholar Jules Soury, who used the Haeckelian take on Darwinism to fuel his racial and anti-Semitic ideology, and who, in turn, influenced French literary culture through Paul Bourget’s novels and essays. It thus intends to shed light on the propagation of the biological discourses from the scientific field to the cultural field as well as from Germany to France, but also to illustrate the intricate relationship between literary and biological discourses.

This chapter proposes to analyse the biological theories of Jules Soury (1842–1915), a scholar who specialized in the history of religions and neuropsychology, who was well known for his anti-Semitism, and who had a significant impact on French literature around 1900. To this end, I shall first present Soury’s life and his work’s main characteristics, before examining his intellectual relationship with Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). This will shed light on the elaboration of biological science in a European context, and specifically of the elaboration of the concept of race. Finally, I shall argue that Soury’s work, though sometimes abstruse, and always rather extreme, has considerably influenced French writers – most notably, the likes of Paul Bourget (1852–1935) and Maurice Barrès (1862–1923). For reasons of space, this chapter will focus on Paul Bourget’s novels and essays.

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Jules-Auguste Soury In his recent bibliography of the political right in France, Alain de Benoist writes that, to date, no detailed research has been dedicated to Jules Soury’s work.1 De Benoist does cite articles by Toby Gelfand and Pierre Huard,2 and valuable analyses have also been contributed by Pierre-André Taguieff, Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, and Daniel Gasman,3 but his claim remains to some extent justified: the reception of Soury by French literary circles, in particular, has not been thoroughly studied.4 It also shows how forgotten this figure has now become. Soury’s social climbing is a legend of its own and one which he never hesitated to cultivate.5 Born in May 1842 to a poor Parisian family – his 1 2

3

4 5

Alain de Benoist, ‘Jules Soury’, in Bibliographie générale des droites françaises, IV, Paris 2005, p. 401. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this chapter are mine. I am indebted to Julia C. Hartley for her kind help in reviewing my English. Toby Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism: The Career of Jules Soury’, in Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1994, pp. 248–79; Pierre Huard and M.-J. Imbault-Huard, ‘Jules Soury 1842–1915’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 23:2 (1970), pp. 155–64. Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Soury, Jules, 1842–1915’, in Pierre-André Taguieff (ed.), Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris 2013, pp. 1715–30; Pierre-André Taguieff, La Couleur et le Sang: Doctrines racistes à la française, new edn, Paris 2002, pp. 150–97; Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, ‘Jules Soury: Le drame moderne de la connaissance’, in Jean-Claude Pont, Laurent Freland, Flavia Padovani, and Lilia Slavinskaia (eds), Pour comprendre le xixe siècle: Histoire et philosophie des sciences à la fin du siècle, Florence 2007, pp. 511–29; Daniel Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, New York 1998. Zeev Sternhell has examined the links between Soury and Barrès, a point to which I shall return later. See the autobiographical text Ma Vie (My Life) in Jules Soury, Campagne nationaliste, Paris 1902, pp. 17–71; and the article ‘Soury, Jules-Auguste’ in Claude Augé (ed.), Le Nouveau Larousse illustré, Paris 1897–1904, VII, p. 770. In a letter to Anatole France, Soury claims that all facts and dates from this small biography were provided by himself (letter from 27 October 1891, BnF, Paris, Département des Manuscrits, NAF 15438, fo 575). In this same private letter, he again tells the story of his life, with

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father was a hand-worker and made optical instruments – Soury would have to work night and day to be able to study. He read Buffon, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Clever and talented, he earned a diploma of archivist-palaeographer in 1867, faithfully followed Ernest Renan and Michel Bréal’s lessons, and broke through all obstacles until he achieved his final accolade: the award, in 1881, of his own chair at the prestigious École Pratique des Hautes Études, shortly after having successfully presented his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. Soury’s first books belong to the field of the comparative study of the history of religions, but he also rapidly developed an interest in more scientific fields, such as physiological psychology and neuropsychology, of which he is now regarded as one of the founding fathers.6 His book of 1878, Jésus et les Évangiles ( Jesus and the Gospels), caused a scandal. In this text, Soury tried to go even further than Renan and his well-known ‘Jésus, cet homme admirable’ by applying Moreau de Tours and Lélut’s theories of genius as a mental illness7 in order to demonstrate that Jesus was nothing more than a sick man, a victim of some brain disease (meningoencephalitis): ‘Jésus fut atteint de cette maladie mentale; il en mourut: voilà tout’ ( Jesus suffered from this mental illness; it caused his death: that is all).8 An extreme pessimist, Soury saw the world as a ‘hospice banal’ (dull almshouse).9 Some private letters also attest to his peculiar personality. In 1891, he wrote to Anatole France the following lines:

main points, and even whole sentences, that are similar to what will later become Ma Vie. 6 More specifically, he is recognized as one of the founders of the history of neurology. Francis Schiller and Webb Haymaker (eds), The Founders of Neurology, 2nd edn, Springfield, IL 1970, pp. 573–6; and Pierre Huard and M.-J. Imbault-Huard, ‘Jules Soury 1842–1915’, pp. 155–6. 7 Jacques Moreau de Tours, La Psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire, ou de l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel, Paris 1859. Louis-Francisque Lélut, in Du démon de Socrate: spécimen d’une application de la science psychologique à celle de l’histoire, Paris 1836, tried to demonstrate that Socrates was a madman. 8 Jules Soury, Jésus et les Évangiles, Paris 1878, p. 18. 9 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, p. 67.

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Pauline Moret-Jankus Les opérations sanglantes, même sur cadavre, vous seraient-elles déplaisantes? La vue et l’odeur du sang déterminent en moi des réactions toutes contraires. L’espèce d’ivresse qu’elles m’apportent m’est délicieuse. Mes deux ans de clinique chirurgicale de Saint-Louis m’ont laissé le souvenir des plus violentes voluptés que j’aie éprouvées.10 (Are bloody operations, even on a corpse, unpleasant to you? The sight and smell of blood have quite the opposite effect on me. The sort of ecstasy they bring me is delicious. My two years at the clinical surgery of Saint-Louis have left me memories of the most violent delights I have ever felt.)

A strong advocate of Darwin’s theories, Soury was France’s propagator of Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary monism, and therefore one of the French representatives of social Darwinism, as Pierre-André Taguieff puts it.11 As a staunch materialist, he believed that everything could be brought back to purely anatomical considerations. It was this conviction, as well as a strong traditionalist stance,12 which brought about a furious racialism and an enraged anti-Semitism. Thus, as we shall see, for Soury ‘le judaïsme n’est pas un fait confessionnel, mais un fait de race’ ( Judaism is not a religious fact, but a racial fact).13 His anti-Dreyfus commitment stemmed logically from such thoughts. ‘Le Juif Alfred Dreyfus est certainement un traître […], encore qu[e ce mot] ne signifie guère appliqué à un Étranger, à un être d’une autre race, d’une autre espèce peut-être, et partant, d’une mentalité différente de la nôtre’ (The Jew Alfred Dreyfus is certainly a traitor […], although [this word] has little meaning for a foreigner, a being from another race, from another species maybe, and therefore, with a mind different from ours).14

10

Letter to Anatole France, 25 October 1891, BnF, Paris, Département des Manuscrits, NAF 15438, fo 573. 11 Taguieff, ‘Soury, Jules’, p. 1716. 12 Ibid. pp. 1720–1. Toby Gelfand argues that Soury’s anti-Semitism could also have been the result of a personal rancour regarding his professional ambitions, which led him to believe in a conspiracy against him instigated by his Jewish and Protestant colleagues. See Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism: The Career of Jules Soury’, p. 257. 13 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, p. 106. 14 Letter from Soury to Louis Havet, 2 May 1902, Bnf, Paris, Département des Manuscrits, NAF 24506, fo199–200.

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Furthermore, Soury claimed to be a ‘clérical athée de tradition catholique’ (an atheist clericalist in the Catholic tradition).15 Although he believed only in science, he did indeed see himself as the heir of a French Catholic tradition. But beyond tradition, the source of this paradoxical position can be found in his adherence to Emil du Bois-Reymond’s ignoramus et ignorabimus (we do not know and will not know),16 a motto which Soury would keep on repeating throughout his works, and which he probably came across while translating Haeckel’s response to the criticisms of Rudolf Virchow, which appeared in French under the title Les Preuves du transformisme in 1878, and in English as Freedom in Science and Teaching (1879). Ironically enough, in this book, Haeckel opposes the ignoramus doctrine because, he explains, professing the limits of scientific knowledge leaves too much room for a renewed religious faith.17 And yet it is precisely this contradictory marriage of ‘the oratory and the laboratory’ which took place in Soury’s thought.18

Promoting German biology in France Soury translated works by several German biologists: Eduard Oscar Schmidt (1823–86),19 William Thierry Preyer (1841–97),20 and above all, Ernst Haeckel. He also wrote a foreword for the translation of Hugo 15 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, p. 52. 16 Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens: Die sieben Welträthsel: Zwei Vorträge [1872], Leipzig 1898, p. 51. 17 Ernst Haeckel, Les Preuves du transformisme: Réponse à Virchow, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1878, pp. 119–20. 18 This is an expression taken from Soury’s text entitled ‘Oratoire et laboratoire’, in Campagne nationaliste, pp. 233–94. 19 Eduard Oscar Schmidt, Les sciences naturelles et la philosophie de l’inconscient, trans. Jules Soury and Edouard Meyer, foreword by Soury, Paris 1879. 20 Although Preyer was an Englishman, he worked in Germany most of his life – eventually holding a chair at Jena. He also wrote in German. William Thierry Preyer, Éléments de physiologie générale, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1884.

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Magnus’s study on colours.21 However, it is his relationship with Haeckel which most interests us, for Ernst Haeckel, a professor at the University of Jena, was widely regarded as Darwin’s German heir,22 fostered psychology as a branch of physiology, promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (the so-called biogenetic law, which will be discussed in greater detail below),23 and applied evolutionary theory to men. Daniel Gasman famously argued that Haeckelian monism was a source of fascism and that it contributed to a ‘scientific legitimation of Fascist ideology’.24 Jules Soury significantly contributed to promoting Haeckel’s work and theories in France, mainly through his translations. Thus Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre (1878) became Les Preuves du transformisme (1879); Das Protistenreich (1878) was turned into Le Règne des protistes (1879); and parts of the Gesammelte populäre Vorträge aus dem Gebiet der Entwicklungslehre (1878–9) appeared as Essais de psychologie cellulaire (1880). As a translator, Soury was sensitive to all aspects of the books. He strived to adapt

See Hugo Friedrich Magnus, Histoire de l’évolution du sens des couleurs, foreword by Jules Soury, Paris 1878. 22 Unlike Darwin, Haeckel proposed clearly and directly that men came from apes. See, for instance, The Riddle of the Universe [1899], trans. Joseph McCabe, London 1929 (3rd impression, 1934), p. 71. 23 Ontogeny designates the development of the individual; phylogeny, the development of the species. Haeckel’s idea was that an organism, from embryo to its death, goes through the same steps and stages as the species itself. 24 Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism, p. vii. This book has sparked a fierce debate among historians of science, and many have criticized Gasman’s theory. Weikart, for instance, writes that ‘Gasman’s approach is too blinkered’ (Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, New York 2006, p. 216), but he does caricature him when claiming that it is merely a ‘Haeckel-to-Hitler’ hypothesis. Gasman’s scope is much broader and more nuanced: he sees Haeckel as ‘one of the earliest and prime exponents of the movement towards cultural “wholeness” and organicism that mesmerized German civilization after the middle of the nineteenth-century’ (pp. 11–12), and insists several times that Haeckelian monism is, of course, not an exclusive source of fascism. See also Paul Weindling’s review in The British Journal for the History of Science 35:3 (2002), issue 1, 117–18; and Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, Chicago, IL 2008, pp. 269–76. 21

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Haeckel’s texts to make them more acceptable to what he thought was the French taste in the matter: he proposed new titles,25 wrote enthusiastic prefaces,26 compared and dealt with various publishers,27 and refused any kind of salary for his task because, in these translations, he saw a work of philosophical propaganda, a way of preaching a new gospel.28 In addition, Soury reviewed many of Haeckel’s publications in French journals, such as the Revue internationale des sciences, La République française or the Revue scientifique de la France et de l’étranger; and to fuel this output, he repeatedly urged the biologist to send him everything he published, books and articles alike, so that he could continue to propagate Haeckel’s ideas and discoveries among the French public.29 Finally, in 1878 Soury organized a banquet at the Grand Hôtel in Paris, in honour of Haeckel’s visit.30 25

A letter to Haeckel, dated 2 August 1878, states: ‘[…] ne pensez-vous pas qu’un autre titre conviendrait mieux pour l’édition française, un titre qui viserait moins la polémique avec M. Virchow que le contenu même du livre, c’est-à-dire la théorie de la descendance, la psychologie cellulaire, etc., et surtout la grande conception de l’évolution universelle opposée à l’idée caduque d’une création?’ ([…] do you not believe that another title would suit the French edition better, a title that would aim less to argue with Mr Virchow and reflect the actual substance of the book, that is to say the descent theory, the cellular psychology, etc., and above all the grand conception of universal evolution as opposed to the obsolete idea of creation?). And in another letter, dated 24 October 1878, he argues that, at least in France, shorter titles are preferable. Archives of the Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, Jena, Soury file [hereafter Ernst-Haeckel-Haus]. 26 With a hint of nostalgia, Soury wrote to Haeckel in 1914: ‘Quelles Préfaces j’écrivis alors, dans mon enthousiasme et ma foi! Et cette foi en la Théorie de l’Evolution est demeurée entière, et mon enthousiasme pour le maître d’Iéna a toujours grandi’ (What prefaces did I write then, out of enthusiasm and faith! And this faith in Evolutionary Theory has remained unaffected, and my enthusiasm for the master of Jena has always grown). Letter of 17 February 1914, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. 27 His preference went to the publishing house Baillière rather than Reinwald, because the former could advertise much more widely, whereas the latter published the books with many errors left uncorrected. Letter of July or August 1879, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. 28 Letter of 8 November 1878, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. 29 Letter of July or August 1879, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. 30 See the account published in the journal Le Temps: ‘Discours de M. Haeckel. L’évolution et le transformisme’, Le Temps, 30 August 1878, p. 3.

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Such a close intellectual relationship would, unsurprisingly, rub off on Soury, as Gasman has already shown.31 Just like Haeckel, Soury saw the field of psychology as ancillary to physiology: ‘Jamais je n’ai rien pu entendre à une proposition quelconque de psychologie sous laquelle il m’est impossible de voir une structure et une texture d’éléments anatomiques’ (I have never been able to understand any psychological proposition under which I have not been able to see a structure and a texture made of anatomical elements).32 But it is mainly Soury’s racial, anti-Semitic view of biology that retains the influence of Haeckelian Darwinism. This does not necessarily imply that Haeckel’s theories were anti-Semitic,33 but that Soury used his understanding of Haeckel to sustain his own views. As Linda L. Clark reminds us, Soury’s anti-Semitic views were profoundly different from Édouard Drumont’s – the journalist and writer who wrote La France juive ( Jewish France, a best-selling anti-Semitic pamphlet of 1886): as opposed to Drumont, ‘Soury’s anti-Dreyfusard polemics explicitly enlisted Darwinism to buttress racial theories’.34 For Soury, the world is a ‘war of races’,35 and in the following correspondence with Haeckel in 1881, we can clearly see the alliance between a version of Darwinism and racial anti-Semitism: J’applaudis au mouvement antisémitique de votre nation. Mais il faut bien qu’on sache que le judaïsme n’est pas un fait religieux, mais un fait de race, qu’un juif baptisé, germanisé, francisé, italianisé, etc. n’en reste pas moins toujours un juif, un sémite, dont la patrie véritable est dans la vallée du Jourdain. Les Sémites et les Indo-européens constituent deux races humaines absolument hétérogènes, et, dans la lutte, pour l’existence civile, sociale, économique, les Sémites, plus souples, plus capables de s’adapter aux conditions extérieures, l’emporteront à la fin, si l’on n’y prend garde, sur

31 Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism, pp. 101–33. 32 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, p. 59. 33 This is, again, a controversial point. Robert J. Richards argues that Haeckel was not anti-Semitic, since he placed Semites ‘at the pinnacle of his tree of human progress’ (The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 274), whereas Gasman claims that Haeckelian monism held the Jews accountable for the invention of a monotheistic God (Haeckel’s Monism, pp. 25–6). 34 Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France, Tuscaloosa, AL 1984, p. 97. 35 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, p. 7.

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les Indo-Européens. Cette fois, ce ne seront pas les meilleurs, au moins moralement, mais les plus aptes, qui triompheront, au grand dommage de la civilisation moderne. Bon courage donc, et sus aux Juifs!36 (I applaud your nation’s anti-Semitic movement. It must be acknowledged that Judaism is not a religious fact, but a racial fact, and that a baptised Jew, or a Jew who has become German, French, Italian, etc., is nevertheless a Jew, a Semite, whose real motherland is located in the valley of the River Jordan. Semites and Indo-Europeans constitute two human races that are absolutely heterogeneous, and, in the struggle for civil, social, economical existence, the Semites, who are more flexible and better able to adapt to external conditions, will eventually prevail, if we are not careful, over the Indo-Europeans. This time, it is not the best – at least in a moral sense – that will triumph, but the fittest, at the great expense of modern civilization. Stay strong, then, and have at the Jews!)

The expressions ‘la lutte pour l’existence’ and ‘les plus aptes’ clearly point towards a Darwinism applied to civilization; while ‘deux races humaines absolument hétérogènes’ expresses a deep belief in evolutionary inequality and possibly in polygeny.37 As in this example, evolutionary science, and in particular Haeckelian science, is often used and perverted by Soury in order to sustain and strengthen his racial theories. In Études historiques sur les religions, les arts, la civilisation de l’Asie antérieure et de la Grèce (1877), Soury attempted to demonstrate that Semitic mythology and religion are intrinsically poor because they are the product of ‘cerveaux racornis’ (shrivelled brains).38 Much later, he expanded this idea in Campagne nationaliste (Nationalist Campaign, 1902), where he explained that the monotheistic God is a Semitic concept, ‘un résidu de la poubelle judaïque, 36 37

38

Letter of 2 January 1881, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. As for all the letters cited here, Haeckel’s answers have not been preserved. The monogenist theory proposed that men descend from only one stem, whereas polygenists believed that human differences could be explained by the fact that men have evolved from separate origins. Haeckel claimed to be essentially monogenist, but nonetheless argued that an analysis of human language proves that the races of men have evolved independently from different sorts of apes (Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte [1868], 8th edn, Berlin 1889, pp. 720–1). Jules Soury, Études historiques sur les religions, les arts, la civilisation de l’Asie antérieure et de la Grèce, Paris 1877, p. 3.

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particulièrement étranger au génie de notre race. Un Aryen […] ne demande pas de compte à l’univers comme on en demande à son banquier’ (some residue of the Judaic rubbish bin, particularly foreign to our race’s mind. An Aryan […] does not ask the universe for an account as one asks a banker).39 This bitter philippic can find its origins in Haeckel’s belief, expressed in Die Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe, 1895–9), that ‘anthropomorphic monotheism’ originated ‘in an imaginative enthusiast of the Semitic race’40 – although, unlike Soury, Haeckel considered it as an ideology rather than a biological deformity. In Études historiques, Soury also recommends reading Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The Natural History of Creation, 1868) even more than Darwin, in order to understand evolution and heredity, which constitute the basis for a ‘history of races and nations’,41 and a few lines further on, he refers to Haeckel’s classification of human races.42 In the same chapter, Soury gives Sparta and Rome as examples of societies that managed to build their political philosophy on the laws of selection: ‘Dans l’ancien monde, Sparte et Rome ont surtout excellé à dresser les hommes et à produire par ce genre de sélection les plus admirables types de puissance virile, de santé morale et de rude vertu’ (In the ancient world, Sparta and Rome excelled especially in taming men and in producing through that sort of selection the most admirable types of virile strength, of moral health, and sturdy virtue).43 As Gasman has already noted44 this is an appropriation of Haeckel’s argument in Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte where he praised the Spartans for their biological selection, based on the elimination of weak children.45 As in the other examples cited above, it is clear that Soury, while focusing mainly on the most ambiguous passages, used Haeckel as a scientific seal to legitimate his own radical writings.

39 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, pp. 46–7. 40 Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, p. 230f. 41 Soury, Études historiques, p. 317. 42 Ibid. p. 319. 43 Ibid. p. 321. 44 Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism, p. 115. 45 Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 153.

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The case of Paul Bourget Un point d’histoire littéraire incontestable et que les critiques et les historiens littéraires ne veulent pas connaître (il leur serait évidemment pénible de lire et de suivre les x–1870 grandes pages du Système Nerveux Central de Jules Soury) est celui-ci: […] Maurice Barrès a emprunté toutes ses théories, toutes ses idées générales à Jules Soury […].46 (An unquestionable fact of literary history, and which critics and historians do not wish to acknowledge (it would clearly be unpleasant for them to read and understand the x–1870 great pages of Jules Soury’s Central Nervous System), is the following: […] Maurice Barrès has borrowed all his theories, all his general ideas, from Jules Soury […].)

This is how Camille Vettard, a French literary scholar of the early twentieth century, sums up the intellectual relationship between the well-known French writer Maurice Barrès and Jules Soury, a connection that has been further developed by Zeev Sternhell in his studies of French fascism and other far-right movements.47 In similar vein, I want to suggest that Paul Bourget’s novels and essays transmit aspects of Soury’s thoughts and, through Soury, aspects of Haeckel’s take on biology – and we should bear in mind that Bourget was one of the most prolific and famous writers of the turn of the century. In a short opuscule published in 1904, Joseph Grasset, a medical doctor, demonstrated that biology in Paul Bourget’s novels is ‘la charpente de fer qui soutient l’édifice’ (the iron framework

46 Camille Vettard, ‘Le fournisseur d’idées de Barrès: Jules Soury’, in Du côté de chez … Valéry, Péguy et Romain Rolland, Proust, Gide, Barrès et Soury, Sartre, Benda, Nietzsche, Albi 1946, p. 61. Vettard’s emphasis. 47 Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, Paris 1972; ‘Le déterminisme physiologique et racial à la base du nationalisme de Maurice Barrès et de Jules Soury’, in Pierre Guiral and Émile Temime (eds), L’Idée de race dans la politique française contemporaine, Paris 1977, pp. 117–38; La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme, Paris 1978.

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supporting the edifice).48 Yet linking Bourget and Soury may seem, at first sight, rather paradoxical. Indeed, Bourget is better known for being a moralist, a conservative writer, who had little esteem for science, which brings only ‘un pain d’amertume et un breuvage de mort’ (a bread of bitterness and a beverage of death).49 This seems to suggest nothing in common with Jules Soury’s radical atheism. But a close reading of Bourget’s texts tells a different story, a reappraisal supported by the fact that Bourget attended Soury’s lessons at the École Pratique des Hautes Études,50 and wrote a vibrant in memoriam after his death.51 The novel Le Disciple (1889) depicts how a young man, Robert Greslou, seduces the daughter of a noble family. The plot seems at first rather predictable, for the lady ends up killing herself out of despair for having lost her honour, and Greslou is shot dead by her brother. But if Greslou courts the young Charlotte de Jussat, it is, at first, not out of love, and not even out of pure desire, but for the sake of science, or biological science and philosophy, to be more precise. Greslou is the disciple of Adrien Sixte, a well-known scientist and philosopher, who professes Darwinian and Spencerian theses: religion is a sickness, only science is true, men come from apes, and everything – even our feelings – can be analysed as physiological

48 Joseph Grasset, L’Idée médicale dans les romans de Paul Bourget, Montpellier 1904, p. 79. 49 Bourget, Outre-Mer, Paris 1895, I, p. 7. That being said, Bourget’s thoughts on the matter evolved: if he was at first a republican and an anti-moralist, in 1900 he had fully converted to monarchism and to Roman Catholicism, as Emilie Sonderegger explains in Paul Bourget et l’étranger, Fribourg 1942, p. 15. Another sort of criticism of Darwinian theories can be found in Sternberger’s text, analysed by William J. Dodd in Chapter 5 of this volume. 50 Dr Mousson-Lanauze, ‘Jules Soury’, Paris médical: La semaine du clinicien 66 (1927), pp. 30–5: p. 31. 51 This in memoriam was published in the right-wing journal L’Action française, under the pseudonym of ‘Junius’. Vettard later reported that Bourget had told him he was the author of this small obituary. See Camille Vettard, Du côté de chez …, p. 84.

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and mechanical facts. Seducing Charlotte was, for Greslou, just another way of corroborating Sixte’s ideas.52 Many have seen in Sixte a portrayal of Hippolyte Taine, Immanuel Kant or Herbert Spencer.53 It is undeniable that these figures, among others, influenced Bourget – Sixte is even, at one point, nicknamed ‘le Spencer français’.54 Sandrine Schiano-Bennis and Toby Gelfand, however, claim that Sixte is a disguised portrait of Soury,55 and I intend to provide further proof of that. Indeed, many points correspond to Soury’s biography: Sixte’s father is a hand-worker (here, a clockmaker); he is very chaste, if not a virgin;56 he has specialized in brain physiology,57 just as Soury had in 1899 published a monumental work, Le Système nerveux central (The Central Nervous System), consisting of two volumes and nearly 2000 pages;58 he hates Christianity as a mere sickness of humanity; and he has published a Psychologie de Dieu (Psychology of God) that caused a scandal, just as Jésus et les Évangiles did.59

52

Wilhelm Bölsche’s description of the monist novel as a place where writers should demonstrate ‘that love is determined by natural laws and functions, which take their fixed and proper position in the state of cells of the human organism’, as quoted and brilliantly analysed by Godela Weiss-Sussex in Chapter 4 of this volume, corresponds perfectly to Greslou’s, Sixte’s, and Soury’s ideas on feelings. In that sense, we could certainly call Le Disciple an anti-monist novel. 53 Jean Borie, ‘Esquisse d’une étude littéraire et idéologique du Disciple de Paul Bourget’, in Marie-Ange Fougère and Daniel Sangsue (eds), Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget?, Dijon 2007, pp. 9–20: p. 10; Niklas Bender, ‘La théorie et ses abîmes: Herbert Spencer dans le Disciple de Paul Bourget’, Arts et Savoirs 4 (2014), pp. 81–91. 54 Paul Bourget, Le Disciple, Paris 1889, p. 2. 55 Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, ‘Jules Soury: Le drame moderne de la connaissance’, p. 514; Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism’, p. 266. 56 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 12, 21. Regarding Soury’s misogyny, see Camille Vettard, ‘Maurice Barrès et Jules Soury’, Mercure de France 170:68, March 1924, pp. 685–95: p. 688. 57 Bourget, Le Disciple, p. 13. 58 Jules Soury, Le Système nerveux central. Structure et fonctions, histoire critique des théories et des doctrines, Paris 1899. 59 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 18, 13.

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Physical characteristics also indicate a link between Soury and Sixte. In his in memoriam, Bourget describes Soury as a ‘tout petit homme, entièrement rasé, de mine chétive et qui vivait dans un ascétisme sans concessions. On n’en trouverait l’équivalent de nos jours que chez les religieux’ (very small man, entirely shaved, of puny appearance, and who lived in an uncompromising asceticism. Nowadays, only among clergymen would we find anything equivalent).60 Likewise, Sixte shows a ‘visage rasé […], un teint bilieux […] – voilà sous quelles apparences se présentait ce savant, dont toutes les actions furent dès le premier mois aussi méticuleusement réglées que celles d’un ecclésiastique’ (a shaved face […], a bilious complexion […] – thus were the scientist’s looks, whose actions were all from the very first month as meticulously organized as those of a clergyman).61 Last but not least, Bourget is alleged to have said privately that Adrien Sixte was indeed Soury, although he had not yet met him by the time he wrote Le Disciple.62 Soury’s influence on Le Disciple is paradoxical, since, as its plot shows clearly enough, this novel is a stark denunciation of how – in Bourget’s conservative opinion – evolutionary science can destroy traditional society, embodied by Charlotte. In this regard, the description of a personal tragedy through the alternation of a third-person and a first-person narrative (Greslou’s diary) creates a captivating and lively text, one that manages to be critical without being too overtly moralizing. But at the same time, the first-person narrative, as a textual construction, also makes Greslou’s character more endearing to the reader. And after all, Greslou is not guilty of any crime; he really was in love with Charlotte, his death is dignified (he refuses to run away);63 and the very last page shows Greslou’s mother, in the attitude of the Virgin Mary, keeping a vigil over her son’s mortal remains, while Sixte is silently crying. I want to suggest, then, that the literary ‘discourse’ that was supposed to undermine the biological discourse may even ultimately reinforce it.

60 Junius, ‘Le billet de Junius’, L’Écho de Paris, 16 August 1915, p. 1. 61 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 5–6. 62 Camille Vettard, ‘Le drame de Jules Soury’, p. 259. 63 Bourget, Le Disciple, p. 358.

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However, even deeper links emerge if we look beyond the roman à clef aspect of Bourget’s production. We can distinguish three main strands: at the forefront, an obsession with the concepts of race and heredity; secondly, Haeckel’s biogenetic law and theory of cellular souls; and finally, the problem of the ignoramus et ignorabimus doctrine. If in French the word race had various possible meanings at that time,64 it is clear that the biological perspective is what worries Bourget when in Cosmopolis, a novel that describes the international society of Rome around 1890, he explores the family of Florent Chapron, the great-grandson of a black woman: they have ‘le sang des esclaves’ (slave blood).65 Florent’s father died young, because his body was typical of what ‘le croisement de la race noire et de la race blanche […] produit souvent, athlétiques d’apparence, mais d’une sensibilité trop vive et chez qui la résistance vitale n’est pas en proportion avec la vigueur musculaire’ (what the crossing of black race and white race often produces: athletic on the outside, but of too vivid a sensitivity and in whom vital resistance is not in proportion with muscular vigour);66 his sister Lydia, a ‘femme stérile de toutes manières, demeurée étrangère à la volupté comme à la maternité’ (a barren woman in all senses, who remained foreign to pleasure as well as to motherhood).67 The descriptions of Florent’s father and sister both suggest that human interracial crossing leads to the same results as animal crossings between different species: weak and infertile beings.68 Such a conclusion can only lead to a racialist view of human nature. In the same novel, the writer Julien Dorsenne declares that

64 Race could simply describe a social group or any group (thus Bourget at one point mentions the ‘race féminine’, in Cosmopolis, Paris 1894, p. 302), or a noble lineage (as in the adjective racé – see Arlette Jouanna, L’Idée de race en France au xvie siècle et au début du xviie siècle, revised edn, Montpellier 1981). 65 Bourget, Cosmopolis, p. 198. 66 Ibid. pp. 202–3. 67 Ibid. p. 286. 68 Two animals are said to belong to different species when they cannot procreate, or when their offspring is infertile.

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And just as Soury spoke of a war of races, Bourget predicts ‘des conflits de caractères et presque d’espèces’.70 Although Bourget was also an antiDreyfusard,71 one important difference lies in the fact that anti-Semitism is not significantly present in his novels. Of course, Justus Hafner is presented as a Jew whose main love is money, and mundane vanity (he leads a ‘struggle for high life’);72 but none of this is comparable to Soury’s profound hatred of Jews. Haeckel’s theories on cellular psychology, much praised by Soury,73 also appear in places, as in Le Disciple, where Sixte’s intellectual work is described in the following terms: Grâce à une lecture immense et à une connaissance minutieuse des Sciences Naturelles, il a pu tenter pour la genèse des formes de la pensée le travail que Darwin a essayé pour la genèse des formes de la vie. Appliquant la loi de l’évolution à tous les faits qui constituent le cœur humain, il a prétendu montrer que nos plus raffinées sensations, nos délicatesses morales les plus subtiles, comme nos plus honteuses déchéances, sont l’aboutissement dernier, la métamorphose suprême d’instincts très simples, transformation eux-mêmes des propriétés de la cellule primitive ; en sorte que l’univers moral

69 Bourget, Cosmopolis, p. 30. 70 Ibid. p. 31. 71 Yehoshua Mathias reminds us that, although Bourget signed the anti-Dreyfusard petition of the Ligue de la patrie française, he never really engaged with social and political affairs publicly: his ideas were almost exclusively expressed through his novels. See ‘Paul Bourget, écrivain engagé’, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire 45:1 (1995), pp. 14–29: p. 16. 72 Bourget’s italics. Cosmopolis, p. 54. 73 See, for instance, his foreword to Haeckel’s Essais de psychologie cellulaire, pp. v–xxix.

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reproduit exactement l’univers physique et que le premier n’est que la conscience douloureuse ou extatique du second.74 (Thanks to his considerable learning and a meticulous knowledge of the Natural Sciences, he was able to attempt, for the genesis of forms of thought, the same work that Darwin has undertaken for the genesis of forms of life. By applying the laws of evolution to all of the facts that constitute the human heart, he strived to show that our most refined sensations, our most subtle moral delicacies, as well as our most shameful degradations, are the final outcome, the supreme metamorphosis of very simple instincts, which themselves are transformations of the primary cell’s properties; in such a way that the moral universe is an exact replication of the physical universe, and the former is nothing more than the painful or ecstatic awareness of the latter.)

It is apparent here that Sixte’s ideas stand for Haeckel’s work in France. Many passages from Les Preuves du transformisme, Haeckel’s text as translated by Soury, can help to substantiate this connection, not least this one: [L]a nature de l’homme, comme celle de tout autre organisme, ne doit être conçue que comme un tout unique, que le corps et l’esprit sont inséparables et que, comme tous les autres phénomènes de la vie, les phénomènes de la vie psychique reposent sur des mouvements matériels, sur les changements mécaniques (physico-chimiques) des cellules.75 ([M]an’s nature, like that of any other organism, must be conceived of only as a unique whole, where body and mind cannot be separated and where, as with all other phenomena in life, the phenomena of psychic life are based on material movements, on the mechanical changes (physical and chemical) of cells.)

I also maintain that Haeckel’s biogenetic law was known to Bourget via Soury. Revealingly, these are the exact terms in which Haeckel expressed the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: ‘die individuelle Entwicklungsgeschichte [ist] eine schnelle, durch die Gesetze der Vererbung und Anpassung bedingte Wiederholung der langsamen paläontologischen Entwicklungsgeschichte’ (the history of individual development is a rapid recapitulation of the slow history of paleontological development,

74 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 20–1. 75 Haeckel, Les Preuves du transformisme, p. 70.

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according to the laws of heredity and adaptation).76 Bourget seems to make a veiled reference to it in Le Disciple, when Greslou says he is ‘persuadé […] des lois de l’atavisme préhistorique’ (convinced […] by the laws of prehistoric atavism).77 Although fascinating in many aspects, Greslou is nonetheless described as despicable throughout the novel. Bourget’s reference can therefore be read as a critique of a theory that would hardly suit his religious views. In contrast, in L’Étape (The Step – another moralistic novel, this time denouncing social climbing), we read the following lines: [C]haque génération n’est réellement qu’une minute d’une même race, l’épisode d’une même histoire. Alors les parents peuvent soutenir de leur expérience un enfant qui n’est qu’eux-mêmes prolongés, un aîné devenir l’éducateur de cadets qui ne sont que lui-même commençant.78 ([E]very generation is ultimately nothing more than a minute in one and the same race, the episode of one and the same history. Thus, with their experience, parents can support a child, who is nothing other than an extension of themselves; and a firstborn can become the educator of his younger siblings who are no more than himself starting out.)

Indeed, the words ‘minute’, ‘épisode’, and the expression ‘lui-même commençant’ allude to a conception of human history that is not only circular, but in which offspring are a repetition, on a smaller scale, of the whole race – a word, which, unsurprisingly, also appears many times in L’Étape. It seems that in this later novel (1905, as opposed to Le Disciple of 1889), Bourget has finally adopted these theories. Finally, I want to consider the ignoramus doctrine. In Le Disciple, a novel that develops the drama of immoral atheism, the doctrine’s contradictory stance offers space for theoretical reflections that digress from the narrative plot. For instance, Sixte is the auteur du livre sur Dieu, et qui avait écrit cette phrase: ‘Il n’y a pas de mystère, il n’y a que des ignorances, …’ se refusait à cette contemplation de l’au-delà qui […] amène

76 Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 10. 77 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 253–4. 78 Bourget, L’Étape, pp. 331–2.

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la Science à s’incliner devant l’énigme et à dire un ‘je ne sais pas, je ne saurai jamais,’ qui permet à la Religion d’intervenir.79 (author of that book about God, who had written this sentence: ‘There is no mystery, there are only unknowns …’, refused this contemplation of the hereafter that […] leads Science to kneel in front of the enigma and say the ‘I do not know, I will never know’ that allows Religion to intervene.)

Elsewhere, Sixte reflects: ‘Ce que nous appelons notre personne, c’est une conscience si vague, si trouble des opérations qui s’accomplissent en nous’ (What we call our person is such a vague and unclear awareness of the operations that take place within ourselves).80 Sophie Spandonis argues that it may reflect Bourget’s own dilemmas: on the one hand, a deterministic and positivistic conception of the Self, following Hippolyte Taine’s ideas, and on the other hand, the Spencerian unknowable81 – an expression that appears as such in the novel.82 Likewise, in L’Étape, the novel’s hero Jean Monneron, although at first a staunch atheist, rapidly acknowledges the existence of the unknowable.83 In both cases, the ignoramus is the central idea around which moral dilemmas can be built, and upon these dilemmas are built the novels themselves. What is implied by the ignoramus, however, goes beyond mere narrative facts. We have already seen that Haeckel’s criticism of Du BoisReymond’s discourse was based on the idea that the unknowable could be the source of religious or mystical feelings. A paradoxical criticism, insofar as Haeckel’s monism is also deeply mystical. This was precisely the reason why Soury had embraced it so firmly: it perfectly fitted his desire for an almighty science, together with a traditionalist worldview.84 The 79 Ibid. p. 329. 80 Ibid. pp. 64–5. 81 Sophie Spandonis, ‘Bourget, de Taine à Spencer, ou les paradoxes de l’“inconnaissable”’, in Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget?, pp. 61–73: pp. 62–3. 82 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 17–18. 83 Paul Bourget, L’Étape, Paris 1902, pp. 36–7. 84 However, when Haeckel’s mysticism increased to the point where monism appeared to be a sort of new religion, Soury declared he would not go so far as that. See his letter of 27 December 1892, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, in which we read the following lines:

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oratory and the laboratory, faith and science, can live together. Is this not exactly what we read in Bourget’s discourses on the American educational system? His essay Outre-Mer (Overseas, 1895) demonstrates ‘la réconciliation possible de la Religion et de la Science par l’agnosticisme’ (the possible reconciliation of Religion with Science through agnosticism), and this, he says, is precisely because religion’s object is the ‘Inconnaissable’ (the Unknowable).85 If Spencer’s First Principles are referred to, Soury may also be seen as a probable source. This seems all the more likely when we note that, in Études et portraits, Bourget proclaims: je suis persuadé qu’il y a une unité absolue dans l’action de la nature, mais que cette unité ne peut être saisie par l’esprit que métaphysiquement. Elle rentre dans cette catégorie de l’Inconnaissable dont aucun savant de bonne foi ne nie l’existence. Puis, quand il s’agit pour eux de conclure, ils ne veulent jamais prononcer cet ignoramus et ignorabimus que Dubois-Reymond a eu le courage de proclamer en Allemagne, et M. Jules Soury en France.86 (I am convinced that there is a total unity in nature’s action, but that this unity can only be grasped metaphysically. It belongs to this category of the Unknowable, of which no honest scholar denies the existence. Then, when they have to conclude, they never wish to pronounce this ignoramus et ignorabimus that Dubois-Reymond was brave enough to claim in Germany, and Mr Jules Soury in France.)

And in L’Étape, Victor Ferrand cites the name of Jules Soury, saying that he is a ‘savant qui n’est pas encore chrétien, lui, mais qui comprend la croyance’ (a scholar who is not yet a Christian, but who understands faith) and ‘distingue les certitudes du laboratoire et celles de l’oratoire’87 (distinguishes

‘Jusqu’à ce manifeste religieux [Der Monismus], j’ai été votre disciple, votre admirateur enthousiaste. Mais ici je m’arrête, je ne vous suis plus, je refuse énergiquement d’entrer dans l’Église nouvelle que vous dédiez à la Trinité du monisme!’ (Until this religious manifesto, I was your disciple, your enthusiastic admirer. But I must stop here, I cannot follow you, I refuse to enter into the new Church that you dedicate to the monist Trilogy!). 85 Bourget, Outre-Mer, II, p. 323. 86 Paul Bourget, Études et portraits: Sociologie et littérature, Paris 1906, p. 19. 87 Bourget, L’Étape, p. 35.

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between the certainties of the laboratory and those of the oratory), obviously quoting Soury’s formula too. Toby Gelfand reminds us that ‘Soury’s historical significance […] lies […] in his remarkable appeal to his contemporaries and his stature among intellectuals of the 1890s’.88 Paul Bourget’s novels and essays are one source of evidence among many others of this stature. But how can we explain this influence of Soury and, through him, of Haeckelian biology, on fin-de-siècle novels, such as Bourget’s? On the one hand, there is the remarkable quality of his writing. According to André Rouveyre, Remy de Gourmont said of Campagne nationaliste that it was perfect in character and in writing.89 Maurice Barrès praised his ‘sublime poetry’ and Charles Maurras referred to his writing as the ‘grande prose française’.90 Even Anatole France spoke highly of Soury’s literary skills: ‘[…] ce savant est un écrivain admirable. On ne sait pas assez que son style, moulé sur la pensée, est souple, vigoureux, coloré et parfois d’une splendeur étrange’ (this scholar is an admirable writer. It is not recognized enough that his style, which is modelled on thought, is supple, vigorous, colourful, and sometimes of a strange splendour).91 It is not surprising, then, that his works found such an echo in literary production. On the other hand, Soury’s view of biology, just like Haeckel’s monism, proposed a seductive totalizing Weltanschauung where heredity and race could explain all individual actions or thoughts. It also had the considerable advantage of offering space for an alliance between faith and science, a problem of major importance for Bourget, who wished to reconcile his new Catholic beliefs and his education, and thus enthusiastically embraced this means to be ‘scientifically a Catholic’ – ‘catholique scientifiquement’.92 It cannot be emphasized enough, again, that Bourget was at that time a best-selling author. In that light, the analysis of these influences gives us

88 Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism’, p. 263. 89 André Rouveyre, Souvenirs de mon commerce, Gourmont, Apollinaire, Moréas, Soury, Paris 1921, p. 233. 90 Quoted by Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism’, trans. Gelfand, p. 264 and p. 276. 91 Anatole France, ‘M. Jules Soury’, Le Temps, 8 November 1891, p. 2. 92 Bourget, L’Étape, p. 509.

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an initial idea of how, in turn, Bourget’s novels and essays may have disseminated Haeckelian biology, mixed with Soury’s racial views, throughout French literary culture. As we have noted in the case of Le Disciple, this circulation of ideas is all the more striking when we consider that the literary ‘discourse’, because it is in essence fluid and ambiguous (if not uncontrollable), arguably serves to bolster precisely the biological discourse that it at first sets out to denounce. Perhaps what most clearly differentiated Bourget from his intellectual predecessors, though, was that he vividly foresaw the future consequences of biological theories of this kind. In his essay Outre-Mer, we read the following prophetic lines: L’idée de la Race enfin, et qui semblait si généreuse, si logique […], dans quelle menace de barbarie elle s’est résolue, aujourd’hui que toute cette Europe du progrès n’est plus qu’une suite de camps retranchés, où des millions d’hommes attendent derrière des canons chargés l’heure stupidement criminelle d’une extermination comme l’histoire n’en a pas connu! …93 (Finally, the idea of Race, which seemed so generous, so logical […], in what threat of barbarism did it resolve itself today, when all this Europe of progress is nothing more than a succession of entrenched camps, where millions of men are waiting behind loaded canons for the stupidly criminal moment of an extermination such as history has never known! …)

Bibliography Augé, Claude (ed.), Le Nouveau Larousse illustré, Paris 1897–1904. Bender, Niklas, ‘La théorie et ses abîmes: Herbert Spencer dans Le Disciple de Paul Bourget’, Arts et Savoirs 4 (2014), pp. 81–91. Benoist, Alain de, ‘Jules Soury’, in Bibliographie générale des droites françaises, IV, Paris 2005. Bois-Reymond, Emil du, Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens: Die sieben Welträthsel: Zwei Vorträge [1872], Leipzig 1898. 93

Outre-Mer, I, pp. 7–8.

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Bourget, Paul, Le Disciple, Paris 1889. L’Étape, Paris 1902. Études et portraits: Sociologie et littérature, Paris 1906. Outre-Mer, Paris 1895. Clark, Linda L., Social Darwinism in France, Tuscaloosa, AL 1984. ‘Discours de M. Haeckel: L’évolution et le transformisme’, Le Temps, 30 August 1878, p. 3. Fougère, Marie-Ange, and Daniel Sangsue (eds), Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget?, Dijon 2007. France, Anatole, ‘M. Jules Soury’, Le Temps, 8 November 1891, p. 2. Gasman, Daniel, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, New York 1998. Gelfand, Toby, ‘From religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism: The Career of Jules Soury’, in Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1994. Grasset, Joseph, L’Idée médicale dans les romans de Paul Bourget, Montpellier 1904. Haeckel, Ernst, Essais de psychologie cellulaire, Paris 1880. Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte [1868], 8th edn, Berlin 1889. Les Preuves du transformisme: Réponse à Virchow, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1878. Le Règne des protistes, Paris 1879. The Riddle of the Universe [1899], trans. Joseph McCabe, London 1929 (3rd impression, 1934). Huard, Pierre, and M.-J. Imbault-Huard, ‘Jules Soury 1842–1915’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 23:2 (1970), pp. 155–64. Jouanna, Arlette, L’Idée de race en France au xvie siècle et au début du xviie siècle, revised edn, Montpellier 1981. Junius, ‘Le billet de Junius’, L’Écho de Paris, 16 August 1915, p. 1. Lélut, Louis-Francisque, Du démon de Socrate: spécimen d’une application de la science psychologique à celle de l’histoire, Paris 1836. Magnus, Hugo Friedrich, Histoire de l’évolution du sens des couleurs, foreword by Jules Soury, Paris 1878. Mathias, Yehoshua, ‘Paul Bourget, écrivain engagé’, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire 45:1 (1995), pp. 14–29. Moreau de Tours, Jacques, La Psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire, ou de l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel, Paris 1859. Mousson-Lanauze, Jean-Baptiste, ‘Jules Soury’, Paris médical: La semaine du clinicien 66 (1927), pp. 30–5. Preyer, William Thierry, Éléments de physiologie générale, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1884. Richards, Robert J., The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, Chicago, IL 2008.

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Rouveyre, André, Souvenirs de mon commerce, Gourmont, Apollinaire, Moréas, Soury, Paris 1921. Schiano-Bennis, Sandrine, ‘Jules Soury: Le drame moderne de la connaissance’, in Jean-Claude Pont, Laurent Freland, Flavia Padovani, and Lilia Slavinskaia (eds), Pour comprendre le xixe siècle: Histoire et philosophie des sciences à la fin du siècle, Florence 2007, pp. 511–29. Schiller, Francis, and Webb Haymaker (eds), The Founders of Neurology, 2nd edn, Springfield, IL 1970. Schmidt, Eduard Oscar, Les sciences naturelles et la philosophie de l’inconscient, trans. Jules Soury and Edouard Meyer, foreword by Soury, Paris 1879. Sonderegger, Emilie, Paul Bourget et l’étranger, Fribourg 1942. Soury, Jules, Campagne nationaliste, Paris 1902. Études historiques sur les religions, les arts, la civilisation de l’Asie antérieure et de la Grèce, Paris 1877. Jésus et les Évangiles, Paris 1878. Le Système nerveux central: Structure et fonctions, histoire critique des théories et des doctrines, Paris 1899. Sternhell, Zeev, ‘Le déterminisme physiologique et racial à la base du nationalisme de Maurice Barrès et de Jules Soury’, in Pierre Guiral and Émile Temime (eds), L’Idée de race dans la politique française contemporaine, Paris 1977, pp. 117–38. La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme, Paris 1978. Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, Paris 1972. Taguieff, Pierre-André, La Couleur et le Sang: Doctrines racistes à la française, new edn, Paris 2002. ‘Soury, Jules, 1842–1915’, in Pierre-André Taguieff (ed.), Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris 2013, pp. 1715–30. Vettard, Camille, Du côté de chez … Valéry, Péguy et Romain Rolland, Proust, Gide, Barrès et Soury, Sartre, Benda, Nietzsche, Albi 1946. ‘Maurice Barrès et Jules Soury’, Mercure de France 170:68, March 1924, pp. 685–95. Weikart, Richard, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, New York 2006. Weindling, Paul, review of Daniel Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, The British Journal for the History of Science 35:3 (2002), issue 1, pp. 117–18.

Godela Weiss-Sussex

4 The Monist Novel as Site of Female Agency: Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911)

abstract This chapter discusses the German-Jewish author Grete Meisel-Hess’s 1911 novel Die Intellektuellen (The Intellectuals) in the context of post-Darwinian biologistic ethics and Wilhelm Bölsche’s literary aesthetics. Embracing monist philosophy and following a didactic programme of providing positive models of behaviour in literature, Meisel-Hess endows her female protagonists with remarkable social and sexual agency and reproductive responsibility. An ambivalent picture emerges, however, as her Jewish characters’ life choices also reflect the restrictive aspect of biologistic – and eugenic – thinking.

The advertisement that the publishing house Oesterheld & Co issued to announce the publication of Grete Meisel-Hess’s novel Die Intellektuellen (The Intellectuals) in 1911 attests to their belief in its significance: ‘das bisher noch ungeschriebene Epos der Moderne’ (the previously unwritten epic poem of modernity), they call it, and ‘der Roman der Moderne’ (the novel of modernity) par excellence.1 No doubt this hyperbolic description reflects the eagerness of the salesman, but it also indicates the significance of the monist world-view in the early years of the twentieth century, which the novel embraces.2 Indeed, as Horst Groschopp comments in his 1997 study 1 2

Oesterheld & Co., advertisement 1911, Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, University of Frankfurt am Main; provenance unknown. Literary historian Monika Fick describes the ‘Zeit der Moderne’ (period of modernity) in literature as a ‘monistische Bewegung’ (monist movement), citing in particular the literature of avant-garde reformists such as the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis. See Fick, Sinnenwelt und Weltseele: Der psychophysische Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende, Tübingen 1993, pp. 354 and 365.

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on free-thinkers and German culture: ‘Und als [Meisel-Hess] sich dann mit […] dem Zeitroman Die Intellektuellen in die damalige Berliner Literaturund Wissenschaftsszene einmischte, stand sie endgültig im Rampenlicht als Verfechterin weiblichen Aufbegehrens’ (And when Meisel-Hess intervened in the contemporary Berlin literary and scientific circles with her social novel Die Intellektuellen, she secured her place in the spotlight as a champion of female protest). 3 In fact, Meisel-Hess had already established a name for herself as a pugnacious, astute speaker and writer for the feminist cause. Even in 1901, aged only twenty-two, she had already been hailed as one of the ‘trefflichsten geistigen Vorkämpferinnen der modernen Frauenbewegung’ (best intellectual leaders of the modern women’s movement).4 In 1904, she published her polemic repudiation of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903) under the title Weiberhass und Weiberverachtung (The Hatred and Disdain of Women), according to Agatha Schwartz one of the most effective attacks on Weininger’s misogynist writings5 – and in 1909, she attracted further attention with her study Die sexuelle Krise (The Sexual Crisis), a widely read critique of contemporary sexual morality. It is not surprising, then, that Meisel-Hess’s novel Die Intellektuellen, which, in the words of a contemporary reviewer, tackles ‘die großen Fragen unserer Zeit’ (the big questions of our time), made quite an impact.6 It will not be possible here to discuss Die Intellektuellen in its entirety, but this chapter aims to show how, in the wake of Wilhelm Bölsche’s literary programme, the novel mediates a world-view based on monist philosophy 3 4 5 6

Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland, Berlin 1997, p. 239. Anon., [review of Meisel-Hess’s lecture] ‘Die moderne Weltanschauung’, Wiener Bilder, 22 May 1901. See Agatha Schwartz, ‘Austrian Fin-de-Siècle Gender Heteroglossia: The Dialogism of Misogyny, Feminism, and Viriphobia’, German Studies Review 28 (2005), pp. 347–66. By 1912, Meisel-Hess even attained a certain celebrity status, as a postcard printed on the occasion of the 1912 conference of the Monistenbund in Magdeburg proves, which shows her as one of five prominent members of the organization. See postcard in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach, manuscript section; A: Diederichs, HS.1995.0002.

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and biological science, and to ask to what extent the biologistic background allows Meisel-Hess to present an emancipatory, progressive model of female agency. Monism was propagated in Germany primarily by post-Darwinist thinkers such as Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Bölsche, and Auguste Forel, who opposed the distinction between body and mind and declared the balance of intellect and instinct the goal for human development.7 If, as the monists posited, the separation of a person’s psychological and physical constitution is invalid, the rules that govern the functioning of the human body should also be applicable to the regulation of social life and sexual morality. Consequently, the Deutsche Monistenbund (German League of Monists), founded in 1906, campaigned for the promotion of ‘eine in sich einheitliche, auf Naturerkenntnis gegründete Welt- und Lebensanschauung’ (an integral view of the world and of human life that is based on the understanding of the laws of nature).8 Science, in other words, should replace religion as the principle on which all moral standards be based. Auguste Forel, to cite one example, declared the aim of his influential study Die sexuelle Frage (The Problem of Sexuality) of 1905 to be that of constructing ‘eine Ethik auf Grundlage des erblichen ethischen Gefühls oder Instinktes’ (ethics based on the innate ethical feeling or instinct).9 Instinct, indeed, is a key concept in monist thought, as, according to Darwin, it is the principle underlying the evolutionary ‘advancement of

See, for example, Ernst Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte: Gemeinverständliche wissenschaftliche Vorträge über die Entwicklungslehre im Allgemeinen und diejenige von Darwin, Goethe und Lamarck im Besonderen [1868], Berlin 1873; Wilhelm Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie: Prolegomena einer realistischen Ästhetik, ed. Johannes Braakenburg [1887], Tübingen 1976; Auguste Forel, Kulturbestrebungen der Gegenwart, Munich 1910. 8 Taken from paragraph 1 of the founding document of the German League of Monists, quoted in Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1848–1914, Munich 1998, p. 217. 9 Forel, Kulturbestrebungen der Gegenwart, quoted in Heiko Weber, ‘Der Monismus als Theorie einer einheitlichen Weltanschauung am Beispiel der Positionen von Ernst Haeckel und August Forel’, in Paul Ziche (ed.), Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung, Berlin 2000, pp. 81–127: p. 95.

7

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all organic beings’.10 Many monists, among them Meisel-Hess, took this evolutionary emphasis further to advocate eugenic responsibility, in other words, the effort to improve the genetic health of the human race. It is important to remember that the eugenic movement, in the early years of the twentieth century, was not the sinister ideology of the radical right, which we tend to think of in hindsight; rather, it was a concern shared by a wide range of social movements: by socialists, conservatives, völkisch and Jewish groupings alike.11 Their interest was fuelled by an alarming reduction in the birth rate and the spread of what were then deemed to be hereditary illnesses, such as syphilis, tuberculosis, and alcoholism.12 These various groupings based their thinking on Darwin’s theory of evolution, even if, following Ernst Haeckel’s appropriations of Darwin, they regarded human evolution not only as a process of optimal adaptation to a given environment but also as a process of perfection and as synonymous with progress.13 We must distinguish between two main branches of the eugenic movement. The social Darwinists of the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft

10 11

12 13

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London 1859, p. 244. See Stefan Kühl, Die Internationale der Rassisten: Aufstieg und Niedergang der internationalen Bewegung für Eugenik und Rassenhygiene im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 28; also Malcolm Humble, ‘Monism and Literature in the Later Years of the Kaiserreich’, in Christian Emden and David Midgley (eds), Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination, Oxford 2005, especially pp. 57–79. Similarly, Groschopp explains with reference to the Fabian Society and the British Labour Party that eugenic thinking was one of the ‘kulturelle[] Grundannahmen’ (basic cultural tenets) across national borders (Groschopp, Dissidenten, p. 232). If, in the following, eugenic ideas are largely cited without commentary in order to illustrate early twentieth-century thinking, this does not preclude an awareness of the danger of misappropriation of these ideas, which is all too obvious in view of later twentieth-century developments. See Kühl, Die Internationale der Rassisten, p. 28. The point has been made repeatedly – and rightly – that the principle of eugenic selection actually contravenes Darwin’s thinking, as it implies a human intervention in natural processes. See, for instance, Anette Herlitzius, Frauenbefreiung und Rassenideologie: Rassenhygiene und Eugenik im politischen Programm der ‘Radikalen Frauenbewegung’ (1900–33), Wiesbaden 1995, p. 47.

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für Rassenhygiene’, such as Alexander Tille and Alfred Ploetz, argued for the selection of the best genetic material, and rejected any ‘protection of the weak’ as hindering evolution. Their ideas were incompatible with socialist and feminist thought: as their main aim was to increase the birth rate, women were seen as instruments of their policies and their interests in individuation were disregarded.14 In contrast, the reformist wing of the eugenicists’ movement, who based their thinking on ideas of the progressive social reformer Havelock Ellis, among others, went hand in hand with socialist as well as with feminist demands. They did not reduce their interpretation of Darwin’s theories to a simple and anti-humanist ideology of the ‘survival of the fittest’, but complemented biological arguments with a campaign for innovative social policies.15 One of the main proponents of this reformist branch of eugenic thinking was the ‘Bund für Mutterschutz’ (League for the Protection of Mothers), of which Meisel-Hess was an active and vociferous member. The Bund, founded in Berlin in 1905, brought together socialists, feminists, and sexual scientists and campaigned, under the leadership of Helene Stöcker, for the state-organized provision of care for unmarried mothers and their children. They combined this social and political work with the demand to free questions of sexual morality from the constraints of Christian ethics and social convention and to consider them instead in the context of Darwinian evolutionary theory and monist thought. One of the main emphases of their endeavours was on providing the best possible conditions for the production of healthy offspring – a cause they saw as related to achieving women’s free choice of sexual and reproductive partner.

14

15

See Alexander Tille, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche, Leipzig 1895, p. 231. Heide Schlüpmann summarizes the controversy between Tille and Helene Stöcker, the leader of the Bund für Mutterschutz, on this subject. See Heide Schlüpmann, ‘Nietzsche-Rezeption in der alten Frauenbewegung: Die sexualpolitische Konzeption Helene Stöckers’, in Walter Gebhard (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Strukturen der Negativität, Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp. 129–56: p. 136. See Ann Taylor Allen, ‘German Radical Feminism and Eugenics’, German Studies Review 11:1 (1988), pp. 31–56.

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Recognizing that reproductive agency is contingent on economic independence, they supported women’s aspirations to work outside the home.16 Meisel-Hess’s novel Die Intellektuellen reflects this reformist background. Configuring the early twentieth century as a time of transition, the author focuses on progressive social circles who have left outdated traditions behind in the quest for a higher stage of development, ein ‘ganzes Menschtum’ (state of wholeness).17 She discusses various avant-garde movements, includes debates on social and ethical issues, on the role and future of women and the position of the Jewish intellectual. Meisel-Hess guides the reader through this panorama of modernity by focusing on the personal and intellectual development of her young Jewish protagonist, Olga Diamant, a character based on autobiographical experience. Born in the Silesian provinces, Olga follows her brother Stanislaus to Berlin, where she enters a short and unhappy relationship with the ‘zerrissene’ (torn) intellectual Werner Hoffmann (I 149), gains access to circles of neo-Romantics and Symbolists and finds fulfilment in her work for a thinly veiled fictional equivalent of the Bund für Mutterschutz. When the Bund’s leader, the charismatic Manfred Wallentin, dies, Olga dedicates her life to continuing his work of reformist campaigning. Meisel-Hess made no bones about the didactic intention behind the novel. In an article in the progressive journal Die Aktion, published in the same year as Die Intellektuellen, she describes the literary writer’s duty to promote ‘[d]ie aus [dem] Trieb zur Arterhaltung kommenden, altruistischen Gebote und sittlichen Richtungslinien’ (the altruistic laws and moral guidelines that follow from the drive to the preservation of the species).18 She thus places her writing in the context of the ‘Weltanschauungsliteratur’ (literature promoting a world-view) called for in monist circles: a literature whose role it is to communicate the ethics derived from monist thought. The Viennese philosopher Friedrich Jodl, for instance, had claimed in 16 17 18

See Grete Meisel-Hess, Die sexuelle Krise, Jena 1909, pp. 14–17. Grete Meisel-Hess, Die Intellektuellen, Berlin 1911, p. 225. From here on, references to the novel appear in brackets in the text, abbreviated as I, followed by the page number. All translations are my own. Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Reisesplitter’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 874–8: 876.

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1892: ‘Was uns fehlt und unsere möglichen Erfolge hemmt, ist, wie mir oft scheint, eine freidenkerische Literatur in Deutschland, welche Kühnheit und Klarheit des Gedankens mit Schwung und Idealität der Gesinnung verbindet’ (What is hampering our success, it seems to me, is the lack of a free-thinkers’ literature in Germany, which would combine boldness and clarity of thought with energy and idealism of conviction).19 And Auguste Forel, in many ways Meisel-Hess’s mentor, defined art and literature as a ‘Produkt des Gehirns im evolutionären Prozeß’ (product of the brain in the evolutionary process), whose task it was to move the human soul and make it receptive to the teaching of ethical values.20 A similar reference to the principles of Aristotelian poetics is discernible in Meisel-Hess’s own literary aesthetics. On the basis of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis – and the premise that true art imitates and approximates nature – she argues: ‘Die Natur hat keinerlei moralische Absichten […], [d]arum muß alle echte Kunst […] in diesem Sinne unmoralisch sein’ (Nature has no moral intentions […], therefore all true art has to be immoral in this sense). Art, she adds, should portray the laws of causality that govern nature as the only authoritative moral guidelines.21 In Die Intellektuellen, this ambition is realized primarily through the emphasis on reproductive responsibility in the service of an evolutionary philosophy of progress. Meisel-Hess frees her representations of love and sexuality from romantic conventions22 – thus following the approach that Wilhelm Bölsche had suggested in his ‘Prolegomena einer realistischen Ästhetik’ (prolegomena to a realist aesthetics), published 19

Friedrich Jodl, letter to Bartholomäus von Carneri, 29 March 1892, quoted in Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz in Österreich, 1859–1914, Vienna 1999, p. 401. 20 Auguste Forel, Kulturbestrebungen der Gegenwart (1910), quoted in Weber, ‘Der Monismus als Theorie einer einheitlichen Weltanschauung’, p. 96. See also Auguste Forel, ‘Zum Begriff des Monismus’, Der Monismus 3 (1908), 10–14. 21 Meisel-Hess, ‘Reisesplitter’, p. 876. 22 See I, 334: ‘Man kann sich die Liebe von niemandem erobern oder verscherzen. Denn die Zellen lieben sich und nicht die Willen, die Zellen ziehen sich an oder stossen sich ab!’ (You can neither win nor lose anyone’s love, it’s the cells that attract or repel each other!).

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in Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie (The Scientific Basis of Literature) in 1887. Rather than perpetuating the ‘widerwärtige Sentimentalität’ (repugnant sentimentality) of traditional representations of love, writers should demonstrate, Bölsche continues, ‘dass die Liebe auf natürlichen Gesetzen und Functionen basirt, die ihre feste und geordnete Stellung im Zellenstaate des menschlichen Organismus einnehmen’ (that love is determined by natural laws and functions, which take their fixed and proper position in the state of cells of the human organism).23 But how best to realize this didactic programme in a work of fiction? Bölsche recommends a technique that Meisel-Hess employs to great effect in Die Intellektuellen: the foregrounding of positive model characters and their actions. ‘Ich fordere neben vollkommen scharfer Beobachtung eine bestimmte Tendenz’ (alongside the very keenest observation I demand a certain bias), Bölsche writes in Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie, and he defines this bias as ‘die Richtung auf das Normale, das Natürliche, das bewusst Gesetzmässige’ (the tendency towards the normal, the natural, to that which is in compliance with [natural] laws).24 Thus distinguishing his aesthetic programme decisively from Émile Zola’s ‘Neigung für das Pathologische’ (predilection for the pathological), he advocates instead the representation of an optimistic philosophy of progress. And inscribing a utopian element into this concept of realism, he proclaims: ‘Realismus ist in Wahrheit der höchste, der vollkommene Idealismus’ (In truth, realism is the highest, the perfect idealism).25 It is precisely in this sense that Meisel-Hess constructs Die Intellektuellen as an ‘optimistic’ novel – as contemporary critics repeatedly remarked. Victor Noack, for instance, writing in the journal of the Bund für Mutterschutz, Die Neue Generation, declares the optimism of Meisel-Hess’s novel to be the true expression of the author’s ‘wirklich bewusste[] Weltanschauung’ (truly aware world-view);26 similarly, the reviewer for the Teplitzer Zeitung 23 Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, p. 59. 24 Ibid. p. 66. 25 Ibid. pp. 66 and 92. 26 Victor Noack, ‘Grete Meisel Hess, Die Intellektuellen’, Die Neue Generation 7 (1911), pp. 487–8: p. 487. A similar view is expressed by the reviewer for Die Wage (Vienna),

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underlines the book’s model character, calling it a ‘Wegweiser für die Tastenden und Suchenden, eine Rückschau für die Gewordenen und Gefestigten’ (a guidebook for those who seek and feel their way, a reflection on the past for those who have found and confirmed it).27 Three female figures stand out in this novel, and it is worth examining their characterization more closely in order to determine the exact parameters of their exemplarity. The unmarried mother Lore Wigolski, firstly, rebels against the practices of patriarchal Wilhelmine society that claim the right to determine the ‘Geschlechtsschicksal[] eines Menschen’ (a person’s sexual destiny) (I 245). Establishing her own economic, intellectual, and emotional independence, she decides to bear a child outside the constraints of marriage. Seen in the context of contemporary literature, Lore is one of a surprisingly large number of unmarried mothers depicted in novels particularly by female authors. In 1912, Adele Schreiber remarked: ‘In der schönen Literatur spielt gegenwärtig die Gestalt der unehelichen Mutter, die sich “allen Gewalten zum Trotz” durchbringt, sich und ihrem Kinde einen Platz an der Sonne erkämpft, eine grosse Rolle’ (The figure of the unmarried mother, who makes it ‘against all odds’ and gains a place in the sun for herself and her child, plays a major role in contemporary fiction).28 Predominantly, however, these novels either evoke pity for the plight of single mothers and criticize their social exclusion, or represent motherhood, in defiance of social convention, as a necessary part of female individuation.29 Meisel-Hess’s depiction deviates very clearly from both who refers to the ‘fruchtbaren Optimismus’ (fertile optimism) of the novel (quoted on the order form for Die Intellektuellen issued by the publisher Oesterheld & Co., Archiv Bibliographia Judaica (provenance and year unknown)). 27 Order form Oesterheld & Co. 28 Adele Schreiber, ‘Die Ansätze neuer Sittlichkeitsbegriffe im Hinblick auf die Mutterschaft’, in A. Schreiber (ed.), Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter, Munich 1912, pp. 163–85: p. 185. 29 Examples are Adele Gerhard’s Pilgerfahrt (pilgrim’s journey) (1902) and Franziska zu Reventlow’s Ellen Olestjerne (1903). For a discussion of the development of the literary figure of the single mother around the turn of the twentieth century, see Godela WeissSussex, ‘Von der “Gefallenen” zur “Hüterin der Zukunft”: Außereheliche Mutterschaft in literarischen Texten des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts’, in Christine Kanz

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these traditions. Her single mother Lore no longer has the status of a social outsider – she is neither a shunned victim nor a bohemian spirit intent on self-fulfilment. Rather, she is depicted as a role model, who follows her instinct and determines the right time for motherhood according to biological principles. Rather than submitting herself to the long wait for ‘Mr Right’, a social convention she condemns as ‘Torheit, überlieferte Lüge, verhängnisvolle[n] Betrug!’ (stupidity, a lie passed down the generations, disastrous deceit) (I 251), Lore follows ‘der auffordernden Mahnung der Natur’ (nature’s warning call) and decides to mother an illegitimate child when the time is right. Not waiting for marriage, which, as Meisel-Hess points out elsewhere, is often only entered into at a point when men have squandered their best energies in life’s struggles,30 is presented here as the right course of action for the good of society – although it means breaking this very society’s moral code. ‘Die Unehelichen sind oft biologisch das wertvollste Material’ (illegitimate children are often biologically the best material), Meisel-Hess declares (I 392), and although this biologistic wording may have a worrying ring for the twenty-first-century reader, it is nothing short of revolutionary when considered in the context of early twentieth-century discourses on illegitimacy. Meisel-Hess here intervenes in the dominant discourse of the time, which defined reproduction out of wedlock as degeneration – and turns this definition on its head. The conservative sociologist Othmar Spann, for instance, had defined illegitimate reproduction as ‘eine Erscheinungsform der Bevölkerungs-Erneuerung, welche außerhalb des normalen Organs hierfür, der Familie, sich vollzieht und gemäß den abnormalen Bedingungen, unter denen sie steht, in vieler Hinsicht als soziale Degenerations-Erscheinung sich darstellt’ (a form of population renewal, which occurs outside the normal organ dedicated to this (the family), and according to the abnormal conditions in which it occurs must

and Frank Krause (eds), Zwischen Demontage und Sakralisierung: Revisionen des Familienmodells in der europäischen Moderne (1880–1945), Würzburg 2015, pp. 151–68. 30 Meisel-Hess, Die sexuelle Krise, p. 11.

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be seen in many respects to be a manifestation of social degeneration).31 Degeneration is here understood as a form of moral deviancy.32 On the basis of eugenic – or biologistic – thinking, by contrast, Meisel-Hess can argue that it is precisely the children who are born out of wedlock (i.e. before marriage becomes economically possible) who promise to bring an end to the degenerative diseases associated with older parents. And the fact that Meisel-Hess can refer to the scientific nature of eugenic discourse and frame her argument by embedding it in the widespread concern for the health of the nation, invests Lore with an energy that makes the utopian project of female self-determination of sexuality and reproduction appear within easy grasp. ‘Und wenn die Dichter wirklich “die Spiegel sind, die uns die Strahlen kommender Zeiten zuwerfen”’, Adele Schreiber comments, ‘so sind die Tage der erstrebten Gerechtigkeit nicht mehr fern’ (and if the writers of fiction really are ‘the mirrors which show us the rays of times to come’, the days of justice we long for are no longer far off ).33 Elsewhere, Meisel-Hess uses the technique of contrasting her model characters with a negative figure in order to emphasize their exemplarity. This is the case with the well-balanced, idealized Geneviève, who is pitted against the one-sided intellectual Lucinda. Meisel-Hess particularly condemns Lucinda’s ‘Unvermögen zur Produktion der stärksten weiblichen Gefühle’ (inability to produce the strongest feminine feelings) (I 435) and her teleological, deterministic world-view, which stands in opposition to the author’s trust in a natural law that is non-teleological but rests firmly on the principles of congruence and ‘eherne Folgerichtigkeit’ (iron logic) (I 435), principles that characterize the history of evolutionary development according to Darwin. The inability to combine her strong intellect with feminine emotion marks Lucinda out as an ‘Übergangsgeschöpf [auf dem Weg zu] einer

31 32

33

Othmar Spann, Die Stiefvaterfamilie unehelichen Ursprungs, Berlin 1904, p. 3. In the early 1900s, the term ‘degeneration’ is often used in collocation with notions of deracination, alienation, and corruption of social norms. See Sybille Buske, Fräulein Mutter und ihr Bastard: Eine Geschichte der Unehelichkeit in Deutschland 1900–70, Göttingen 2004, p. 83. Schreiber, ‘Ansätze’, p. 185.

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höheren Lebensform’ (creature of transition [on the way to] a higher form of life) (I 196). In Meisel-Hess’s definition of the ‘Übergangsgeschöpfe’ – a term that significantly also appears in Haeckel’s description of the process of evolution34 – as individuals whose intellect has not yet fused with their instincts to form a harmonious ‘Ganze[s]’ (whole) (I 31), we find a reference to the monist ideal of the marriage between rational thought and instinct. Like Haeckel and Bölsche before her, Meisel-Hess cites Goethe as a crucial authority for this ideal of ‘wholeness’. The novel is bursting with quotations from Goethe and, crucially, the author quotes from Faust II when characterizing the purely intellect-driven creatures of the ‘Zwischenstufe’ (intermediary stage) as ‘schlotternde Lemuren, […] aus Bändern, Sehnen und Gebein geflickte Halbnaturen’ (wambling, shambling creatures! […] makeshift things of skin and bone, Poor patched up, half-made natures!)35 (I 32). In opposition to this negative image of decadence, personified in Lucinda, stands the figure of Geneviève, conceived as feminine ideal, a woman without ‘Riß’ (rift) or ‘Bruch’ (fissure) (I 30), ‘eine Ganze unter Zerrissenen, […] eine naturhaft Starke unter Verbogenen und Beschädigten’ (a whole person among the broken, […] a naturally strong person among the bent and damaged) (I 108). Significantly, her name is mostly used in its shortened form ‘Eva’; and further underlining the idea of the natural feminine principle, Meisel-Hess adds: ‘Wenn Mutter Natur sprechen könnte, so würde sie so [wie Geneviève] sprechen’ (If Mother Nature could speak she would speak [like Geneviève]) (I 114). In her concept of the idealized feminine principle as personified nature, Meisel-Hess not only invokes the instinctual and caring nature of women – a widespread cliché at the time – but emphasizes the close connection between healthy instinct and ‘Vernunft’ (reason) (I 127). Geneviève trains as a language teacher so as to be able to leave a loveless marriage – and ultimately finds a perfectly matched partner in the reformist leader Manfred Wallentin, who fathers her child. The rational preparation of her 34 See Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 243. 35 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, A Tragedy, Parts One and Two, Fully Revised, trans. Martin Greenberg, New Haven, CT 2014, ll. 11870–3.

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independence is based on her ‘instinktstarke[s] Vertrauen in den logischen Sinn des eigenen Seins’ (instinctive trust in the logical essence of her own being) (I 128), a trust which guarantees that she recognizes the right moment for the step into a self-directed life. Geneviève’s decision is not based on intellect but, rather, is ‘tiefste Vernunft der Natur, die, ohne zweckhaft zu sein, mit unberechenbarem Drang den Weg der Erhaltung der tauglichen Arten sucht’ (the most fundamental reason of nature, seeking, with unpredictable drive and without being bound to a predefined outcome, the conservation of viable species) (I 128–9). This description approximates – almost synonymously – the definition of instinct given by Darwin in his Origin of Species (1859) as an action performed ‘without any experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose’, ‘as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die’.36 The notion of instinct, the key concept in Die Intellektuellen, acts as guiding principle, too, for the main protagonist Olga’s development towards maturity. And whereas Meisel-Hess’s characters discussed so far may be of great interest as models for female agency but have remained somewhat one-dimensional in literary terms, the narrative strand that focuses on the author’s alter ego Olga shows a far more complex treatment of character. Olga’s progress forms the backbone of the novel’s plot. Building on Goethe’s and Hedwig Dohm’s models of the Bildungs- and Entwicklungsroman,37 Meisel-Hess constructs her main protagonist’s journey to maturity as a struggle between various psychological and mental variables, which eventually synthesize to form an harmoniously integrated organic unity, a ‘whole’ personality. Established literary genre characteristics, originally focused – in Goethe’s and Dohm’s hands – on depicting an individual’s struggle to establish a balance between their own desires and the demands society places upon them, are here appropriated to mediate monist discourses of 36 Darwin, The Origin of Species, pp. 207 and 244. 37 For a discussion of Meisel-Hess’s adaptation of these traditions, see Godela WeissSussex, Jüdin und Moderne: Literarisierungen der Lebenswelt deutsch-jüdischer Autorinnen in Berlin, 1900–18, Berlin 2016, Chapter 4.

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personality development. For first and foremost, Olga’s development consists in the successful regulation of the sexual drive through the application of reason and the trust in instinct, a process that reflects the constitution of personality as defined by monist philosophy.38 Though obeying a didactic general principle, the narrative does not lack a certain sophistication, as the author takes the psychological motivation of character and plot very seriously. Indeed, in 1912, she claimed: ‘Das Epos unserer Zeit, der moderne Gesellschaftsroman, kann seinem innersten Wesen nach die Begründung der Geschehnisse durch seelische Notwendigkeiten nicht entbehren’ (By its very nature the epic poem of our time, the modern social novel, cannot dispense with psychological necessities as motivation for the plot).39 Instead of the ‘wirre Tatsachenhäufung’ (confused cumulation of facts) offered by the lowbrow fiction of family magazines, the quality novelist must develop the plot according to ‘inneren Nötigungen’ (inner necessities), which are to manifest themselves ‘in äußeren Schicksalen’ (in observable destinies).40 Olga, thus, is a rounded individual with psychological depth, but she is a model character as well. Having won her internal battles, she emerges as a leading figure in the movement for ethical and social reform, an emancipated, independent woman. And yet, one doubt remains: for a writer who emphasizes the link between emancipation, individuation, and motherhood as strongly as Meisel-Hess does, it is striking that her main protagonist, and the voice of her social and political convictions, remains childless. MeiselHess is silent on the subject. She simply underlines Olga’s great talent for ‘feurige Lehre’ (fiery teaching) (I 459), implying that the commitment

38

In an essay that provides provides the psychological explanation and template for the depiction of Olga’s development, Meisel-Hess defines ‘jene[n] Schnittpunkt, an dem der betreffende Mensch sich über sein Triebleben klar wird’ (the point of intersection at which the person concerned gains clarity regarding their sexual drive) as the crucial point at which the individual becomes a ‘Persönlichkeit’ (personality). Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Die Persönlichkeit’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 295–8. 39 Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Vom Psychologischen’, Der Weg 4 (1912), cols 132–4: col. 132. 40 Meisel-Hess, ‘Vom Psychologischen’, 134.

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to wider social issues supplants the wish for motherhood. Yet, Olga is described as Wegebahnerin der Kommenden, jener Frauen, die mit instinktstarkem Willen ein ganzes Menschtum forderten, die nicht mehr satt wurden in generativer Beschränkung, die es aber auch nicht ertragen mochten, aus dem Zauberkreis der Gattung ausgeschlossen zu bleiben (a pathbreaker for those who will come, for those women, who – with their will guided by instinct – demand to be full, whole human beings; who are no longer satisfied living within the limitations of propagation, but who cannot bear, either, to be excluded from the magic circle of the species) (I 225)

This wording stresses the dual claim made by the Bund für Mutterschutz regarding women’s sphere of activity and influence. On the one hand there is the call for opportunities for individuation and social agency outside the circle of activities recognized as ‘feminine’. On the other, however, the invocation of the ‘Zauberkreis der Gattung’ refers to the simultaneous insistence on the right to motherhood.41 The reader is tempted to look for a reason why Olga is only accorded the role of the ‘Wegebahnerin’, why she remains partner- and childless rather than playing her own part in the ‘“Hinaufpflanzung” der Menschheit’ (genetic improvement of mankind) promoted by the Bund für Mutterschutz42 – and whether her childlessness might in fact be part of the character’s model function in a eugenic sense. Is there an anti-Semitic undertone to be detected? It seems unlikely, as Meisel-Hess, though a highly acculturated member of the Berlin Bildungsbürgertum, stood proudly by her Jewishness. Still, the thought does present itself, since Olga’s brother Stanislaus, too, remains childless.

41

It is this dual claim that defines one of the main faultlines between the radical feminists of the Bund für Mutterschutz and the mainstream bourgeois women’s movement (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine) led by Gertrud Bäumer, Helene Lange, and others. See Ute Gerhard, Unerhört: Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Reinbek 1990. 42 Max Rosenthal, lecture given on the occasion of the First International Congress for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform in Dresden, 28–30 September 1911, quoted in Groschopp, Dissidenten, p. 241.

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Indeed, he lives a deliberately celibate life, and the reason for this is set out in no uncertain terms: Die Erkenntnis, die ihm Vernunft und Gewissen mit unbarmherziger Nüchternheit diktierten, sprach zu ihm, – daß er selbst verzichten müßte, die ewige Substanz des Lebens weiter zu bauen. Er durfte nicht […] einen Menschen erwachsen lassen, der die Lasten seiner eigenen, beladenen Körperlichkeit mitbekam; er war streng und unerbittlich in diesem Punkt. (The realization dictated to him by reason and conscience with merciless clarity was that he had to withhold from contributing to the propagation of the eternal substance of life. He was not […] to beget a human being who would be carrying the burden of his own, encumbered body; he was strict and inexorable on this point.) (I 126–7)

Stanislaus’s renunciation of fatherhood is cast as a tribute to reason and conscience, in other words as an ethical decision. This understanding of ethics goes back to the principle of a moral code validated by natural laws, which include an accountability towards the evolutionary development of the human species. But what exactly are the ‘Lasten seiner […] beladenen Körperlichkeit’ that he resolves not to pass on to the following generation? Meisel-Hess describes them in some detail: ‘mit schlechter, vorgebeugter Haltung, breitem, gewölbten Rücken, wirkte [Stanislaus] engbrüstig. Die Beine schienen zu schwach für den massigen Rumpf. Der große Kopf hing der Brust zu […]’ (with his bad, hunched posture and his broad, rounded back, [Stanislaus] appeared narrow-chested. The legs seemed too weak for the massive body. The big head hung down towards the chest […]) (I 20). Furthermore, we are told that he has blueish-black hair and a massive, protruding forehead, that his ears have bat-like incisions, his head sits on too short a neck and his long and narrow nose bends downward towards the thin, straight line of his mouth (see I 20). This description carries traits that are stereotypically associated with the Jewish body, as a comparison with Edouard Drumont’s portrait of a ‘typical’ Jew in La France juive of 1887 reveals, which Ritchie Robertson has characterized as the best compilation of core stereotypes. In Robertson’s translation of the French original we read: ‘The principal signs by which one can recognize the Jew are the notorious hooked nose, […] protruding ears, […], an

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excessively long torso, flat feet, bow legs, and the soft, greasy hand of the hypocrite and the traitor’.43 With her suggestion that physical features stereotypically associated with Jewishness should be removed from the gene pool, Meisel-Hess seems indeed to reveal an anti-Semitic attitude. The matter is more complicated, however, for it has to be borne in mind that – in contrast to our understanding of eugenic ideology today – the link between eugenic thought and anti-Semitism was not a matter of course in the early twentieth century. In his study of the eugenic movement in socialist and social-democratic circles Michael Schwartz summarizes: Gegenüber dem Rassismus war die […] Eugenik in weiten Teilen vor 1933 sogar klar ablehnend eingestellt. Darum war es nicht zuletzt den Sozialisten jüdischer Herkunft möglich, einerseits Rassismus und Antisemitismus entschieden abzulehnen, andererseits eugenikpolitische Initiativen engagiert zu befürworten. (Largely, the eugenic movement before 1933 dissociated itself from racism. This is why it was possible for socialists of Jewish descent among others to decisively repudiate racism and anti-Semitism while at the same time wholeheartedly supporting eugenic policies.)44

Indeed, it is clear from a series of articles Meisel-Hess wrote in response to Werner Sombart’s theses on the ‘Zukunft der Juden’ (future of the Jews) that she rejected the concept of race, insisting that any physical manifestation is but a transient state in the larger context of evolution.45 I would like to argue, therefore, that Meisel-Hess’s endorsement of Stanislaus’s celibacy is not based on anti-Semitism as a racial concept, but, rather, on an internalization of the predominant ideal of beauty of her time. 43 Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents, Oxford 1999, p. 187. Original text quoted here: Edouard Drumont, La France juive, 1887, I, p. 35. 44 Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Bonn 1995, p. 16. 45 See Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Die Zukunft der Juden’, Der Weg 3 (1911), cols 768–71; Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Die Judenfrage in romantischer Behandlung’, Der Weg 3 (1911), cols 801–5.

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For crucially, she characterizes Stanislaus’s negative physical attributes as ‘beladen’ (encumbered) and as a burden, but precisely not as ‘Jewish’, and she individualizes the description rather than making a generic statement. The discursive context in which her assessment must be read is that of the striving for the ‘planmäßige Hervorbringen des schönen Menschen […] durch Begünstigung aller jener Momente, von denen sein Erscheinen und Bestehen abhängt’ (planned generation of beautiful human beings […] through the support of all the factors on which their creation depends).46 This aim is not intrinsically racist; and yet it is highly problematic for the reason that there are no objective, that is, universally valid criteria of human beauty. Meisel-Hess bases her assessment on the contemporary idealization of the ‘Nordic’ or the ‘Arian’ body, as propagated by Arthur de Gobineau, Stuart Houston Chamberlain, and others; but the construction of these ideals included a contrastive positing of stereotypical aspects of the Semitic body as the ‘ugly’ Other. It is important to stress that Meisel-Hess does not conceive of Stanislaus’s ‘ugliness’ as inextricably linked with his Jewishness; she strictly separates the physical attributes from any concept of race as well as from her characters’ mental and ethical qualities – and shows them as surmountable in the evolutionary process.47 In fact, subscribing to another contemporary stereoptypical belief, she stresses the outstanding intellectual capacity of her Jewish characters.48 When Stanislaus eventually marries the single mother Lore, therefore, this is, according to the author’s thinking, a perfect association between ‘Jewish’ intelligence and the clarity of instinct that is exemplified in Lore’s biologically motivated decision to carry an illegitimate 46 Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Typus und Original’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 395–6: col. 396. 47 In her essay ‘Reisesplitter’, mentioned previously in this chapter, Meisel-Hess describes a beautiful, fair-haired girl from Moscow ‘mit einem süßen, veritablen Engelsköpfchen’ (with a sweet, veritable angel’s head), who declares: ‘Ich bin nicht Russin, verstehen Sie – ich bin Hebräerin’. (I am not Russian, you know – I am Hebrew.) Where the physical attributes ascribed to the Semitic body do not manifest themselves, MeiselHess shows a thoroughly positive attitude to Jewishness; in this case, she extols the pride, courage, and self-confidence of the girl. Meisel-Hess, ‘Reisesplitter’, p. 878. 48 For the linkage between intellectuality and Jewishness, see Sander Gilman, The Smart Jew: The Construction of Jewish Superior Intelligence, Lincoln, NE 1996.

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child. Via the concept of the ‘Stiefvaterfamilie’ (stepfather family), which she also propagated in various other publications,49 Meisel-Hess thus on the one hand excludes a ‘beladene Körperlichkeit’ from the evolutionary process and, on the other, binds ‘Jewish’ intellectuality into the process of educating the next generation. There is no such happy outcome for Olga, and given the negative verdict on her brother’s physical traits, it might be surmised that Meisel-Hess also had reservations regarding her female protagonist’s genetic ‘aptitude’. Indeed, she tells us that with her ‘herben, fast eckigen Zügen’ (austere, almost angular face) and her ‘rostrote Haarbusch’ (rusty-red bush of hair), with her anaemia and her flawed complexion, Olga has continually suffered under her ‘besondere[] Häßlichkeit’ (exceptional ugliness) (I 22 and 88), especially as a young girl. As in the case of Stanislaus, this ‘Häßlichkeit’ also carries connotations of Jewish stereotypes: like him, Olga has a ‘gedrungenen […] Körper’ (stocky […] body) and a ‘stark gebogene[], vorspringende[] Nase’ (strongly bent protruding nose) (I 22). In the mature woman, these features are less noticeable – Olga’s sparkly eyes and her ‘frauenhafte[] Blüte’ (feminine blossoming) reflect her newly acquired inner strength (I 453–4) – but the hereditary disposition to bodily features that Meisel-Hess might have described as ‘belastet’ (burdened) is unquestionably there. It is not too far-fetched, therefore, to consider this disposition a factor in the exclusion of her main protagonist from the ‘Zauberkreis der Gattung’. Following this train of argument, Olga’s abstention from parenthood might well be seen as a further aspect contributing to the character’s model function. The misguided aspect of eugenic thinking is brought home rather poignantly in this literary figure’s destiny. The biologistic thinking here denies agency rather than affording it. Overall, then, the analysis of the main female protagonists of Meisel-Hess’s novel has revealed an ambivalent picture. While the ethical principles derived from monist philosophy and the recourse to the biology of evolution allowed Meisel-Hess to cast figures 49 See, for instance, Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Mutterschutz als soziale Weltanschauung’, Die Neue Generation 7 (1911), pp. 150–9; and Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Vater eins und Vater zwei’ in Geister. Novellen, Leipzig 1912, pp. 137–48.

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like Lore and Geneviève as model characters leading the way towards a future that accords women an extraordinary degree of social and sexual agency, her Jewish protagonists are denied parenthood by the very same ethical tenets. Yet, it is worth stressing that the concern for the greater good that underlies their celibacy allows Meisel-Hess to cement their position as role models at the heart of German society – a very shrewd move at a time when anti-Semitic sentiments were running high. Meisel-Hess’s influence as provocative promoter of change should not be underestimated, even today; for even if, to our twenty-first-century minds, she may have overplayed the importance of the reproductive process and the physical dimension of motherhood, she was right to point out the importance of sexual and economic liberation in any movement of women’s political emancipation. She was one of the radical feminists, Ute Gerhard writes, who already in the early twentieth century had touched upon the controversies that still bedevil the feminist movement today: ‘Aus heutiger Sicht verblüfft die Erkenntnis, dass im Grunde in den von den Radikalen thematisierten Streitfragen bereits alle gegenwärtigen, noch immer nicht gelösten Probleme der Frauenbefreiung angesprochen und öffentlich diskutiert wurden’ (What is striking, from today’s point of view, is that the radical feminists already addressed and publicly discussed all the current problems of women’s liberation that we still haven’t solved today).50

Bibliography Allen, Ann Taylor, ‘German Radical Feminism and Eugenics’, German Studies Review 11:1 (1988), pp. 31–56. Anon. [review of Meisel-Hess’s lecture] ‘Die moderne Weltanschauung’, Wiener Bilder, 22 May 1901.

50 Gerhard, Unerhört, p. 276.

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Bölsche, Wilhelm, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie: Prolegomena einer realistischen Ästhetik, ed. Johannes Braakenburg, Tübingen 1976 [reprint of the first edition of 1887]. Buske, Sybille, Fräulein Mutter und ihr Bastard: Eine Geschichte der Unehelichkeit in Deutschland 1900–70, Göttingen 2004. Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London 1859. Daum, Andreas, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1848–1914, Munich 1998. Fick, Monika, Sinnenwelt und Weltseele: Der psychophysische Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende, Tübingen 1993. Forel, Auguste, ‘Zum Begriff des Monismus’, Der Monismus 3 (1908), pp. 10–14. Gerhard, Ute, Unerhört: Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Reinbek 1990. Gilman, Sander, The Smart Jew: The Construction of Jewish Superior Intelligence, Lincoln, NE 1996. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, A Tragedy, Parts One and Two, Fully Revised, trans. Martin Greenberg, New Haven, CT 2014. Groschopp, Horst, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland, Berlin 1997. Haeckel, Ernst, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte: Gemeinverständliche wissenschaftliche Vorträge über die Entwicklungslehre im Allgemeinen und diejenige von Darwin, Goethe und Lamarck im Besonderen [1868], Berlin 1873. Herlitzius, Anette, Frauenbefreiung und Rassenideologie: Rassenhygiene und Eugenik im politischen Programm der ‘Radikalen Frauenbewegung’ (1900–33), Wiesbaden 1995. Humble, Malcolm, ‘Monism and Literature in the Later Years of the Kaiserreich’, in Christian Emden and David Midgley (eds), Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination, Oxford 2005, pp. 57–80. Kühl, Stefan, Die Internationale der Rassisten: Aufstieg und Niedergang der internationalen Bewegung für Eugenik und Rassenhygiene im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main 1997. Meisel-Hess, Grete, Die Intellektuellen, Berlin 1911. ‘Die Judenfrage in romantischer Behandlung’, Der Weg 3 (1911), cols 801–5. ‘Mutterschutz als soziale Weltanschauung’, Die Neue Generation 7 (1911), pp. 150–9. ‘Die Persönlichkeit’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 295–8. ‘Reisesplitter’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 874–8. Die sexuelle Krise, Jena 1909. ‘Typus und Original’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 395–6.

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‘Vater eins und Vater zwei’, in Geister. Novellen, Leipzig 1912, pp. 137–48. ‘Vom Psychologischen’, Der Weg 4 (1912), cols 132–4. ‘Die Zukunft der Juden’, Der Weg 3 (1911), cols 768–71. Michler, Werner, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz in Österreich, 1859–1914, Vienna 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin 1967ff., VI, pp. 49–155. Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large, Oxford 1998. Noack, Victor, ‘Grete Meisel Hess, Die Intellektuellen’, Die Neue Generation 7 (1911), pp. 487–8. Robertson, Ritchie, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents, Oxford 1999. Schlüpmann, Heide, ‘Nietzsche-Rezeption in der alten Frauenbewegung: Die sexualpolitische Konzeption Helene Stöckers’, in Walter Gebhard (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Strukturen der Negativität, Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp. 129–56. Schreiber, Adele, ‘Die Ansätze neuer Sittlichkeitsbegriffe im Hinblick auf die Mutterschaft’, in A. Schreiber (ed.), Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter, Munich 1912, pp. 163–85. Schwartz, Agatha, ‘Austrian Fin-de-Siècle Gender Heteroglossia: The Dialogism of Misogyny, Feminism, and Viriphobia’, German Studies Review 28 (2005), pp. 347–66. Schwartz, Michael, Sozialistische Eugenik: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Bonn 1995. Spann, Othmar, Die Stiefvaterfamilie unehelichen Ursprungs, Berlin 1904. Tille, Alexander, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche, Leipzig 1895. Weber, Heiko, ‘Der Monismus als Theorie einer einheitlichen Weltanschauung am Beispiel der Positionen von Ernst Haeckel und August Forel’, in Paul Ziche (ed.), Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung, Berlin 2000, pp. 81–127. Weiss-Sussex, Godela, Jüdin und Moderne: Literarisierungen der Lebenswelt deutschjüdischer Autorinnen in Berlin, 1900–18, Berlin 2016. ‘Von der “Gefallenen” zur “Hüterin der Zukunft”: Außereheliche Mutterschaft in literarischen Texten des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts’, in Christine Kanz and Frank Krause (eds), Zwischen Demontage und Sakralisierung: Revisionen des Familienmodells in der europäischen Moderne (1880–1945), Würzburg 2015, pp. 151–68.

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Archive materials Advertisement Oesterheld & Co. (1911), Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, University of Frankfurt am Main; provenance unknown. Order form for Die Intellektuellen issued by the publisher Oesterheld & Co., Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, University of Frankfurt am Main; provenance and year unknown. Postcard of prominent members of the Deutsche Monistenbund (1912), Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, manuscript section; A: Diederichs, HS.1995.0002.

William J. Dodd

5 Darwin’s Imperialist Canvas: Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (1938) as Cultural History in the Shadow of National Socialism

abstract This chapter presents a reading of Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama, and specifically the discussion of Darwin in Chapter 5 of that work. My reading seeks to adopt the position of Sternberger’s implied reader, a fellow inner exile in Germany in 1938, to explore the contemporary resonances of his critique. I argue that this attack on the historical Darwin, as an apologist for empire, monopoly capitalism, and racial superiority, is also guided by the impulse to critique the regime, leading to some perhaps wilful misreadings of Darwin’s ethical position. In critiquing the overlaps between biological, political, and everyday discourses, Sternberger re-instumentalizes these same overlaps to argue for the primacy of the ethical in our understanding of what it is to be human. This counter-critique is made possible by the fluidity of the boundaries between science, literature, and everyday discourse as discursive sources of information and knowledge.

a note on the text Unless otherwise indicated, English translations (prefaced by E and page number) are from Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, introduced by Erich Heller, Oxford 1977. The illustrations in the English translation are not found in the original text. References to the German text (prefaced by P and page number) are to Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburg 1938. For comparison (with very minor alterations), see also Volume V of Sternberger’s collected works (Schriften, Frankfurt am Main 1981).

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The historical context In scholarship and popular discourse, the question has long been debated of whether, and to what extent, National Socialism can be seen as a legacy of Darwin’s work in the social, economic, and political fields. The present chapter focuses on a neglected contribution to this debate, published in Germany in 1938 and, crucially, part of an ‘inner exile’ coded oppositional discourse on Nazism.1 Its author, Dolf Sternberger (1907–89), is perhaps best remembered today as the influential political scientist in the formative first decades of the Federal Republic who in 1979 coined the term Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism), which was taken up by Jürgen Habermas in his writings on how German political identity should be reshaped in the wake of National Socialism. Until 1945, however, he was a cultural philosopher and commentator. He studied philosophy under Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, was briefly close to Adorno and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt before its closure by the Nazis in 1933, and joined the editorial team of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1934, remaining until shortly before its closure in August 1943, despite having a Jewish wife (Ilse, née Rothschild). By 1938, Sternberger was viewed with disdain by Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both of whom were in territorial exile. On the publication of Panorama, Benjamin wrote a damning (and in my view misjudged) review for Adorno (unpublished until 1972), and complained that the book was an opportunist plagiarism and accommodating dilution

1

See W. J. Dodd, ‘Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama: Approaches to a work of (inner) exile in the National Socialist period’, Modern Language Review 108:1 (2013), pp. 180–201. A useful introductory text in English to the literature of coded meaning is Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey (eds), Aesopic Voices: Re-framing the Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2011.

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of his own work.2 At a number of points, this fascinating, and still moot, relationship of convergence and conflict between Sternberger’s text and the work of the Frankfurt School, and Benjamin in particular, will become apparent. The prominent place occupied by Darwin in Sternberger’s text might indeed be seen as an example of Benjamin’s concept of the ‘now of recognition’, when a historical moment opens a window of unique insight into the past. Panorama is a densely crafted work comprising a series of critical essays on aspects of cultural and social history in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and particularly the Gründerzeit of the Second Empire. Key to its function as a coded commentary on Nazism is a technique of dual perspective, already contained in the ambiguous German subtitle ‘Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert’: views of the nineteenth century (from the twentieth), but also views from the nineteenth century (to the twentieth). The coded juxtaposition of past and present creates a shifting layer of allusion and analogy in an implicit exploration of the question of how fascism could have gained popular support in Germany (and Europe). As a whole, the book sketches a grand narrative of the failure of the middle classes (Bürgertum) to engage with the social, religious, and political implications of the rapid scientific and technological advances in communication, popular entertainment media, travel, discovery of exotic cultures, and above all with the rise of a scientific world-view and its challenges to democratic, enlightened, and religious (Christian) values. Sternberger constructs this narrative with the help of two key metaphors: the historical panorama as the central trope, and ‘genre’ as the critical angle of approach. The book begins with an account of the Sedan Panorama constructed by Anton von Werner on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and opened by the Kaiser in 1883, on the thirteenth anniversary of the Prussian victory over Napoleon III on 1 August 1870. This Panorama, depicting the point in the battle at which Prussian victory was secured, was a circular wall painting 2

A comprehensive intellectual biography of Sternberger’s career to 1945 is found in my study Jedes Wort wandelt die Welt: Dolf Sternbergers politische Sprachkritik, Göttingen 2007.

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(Rundgemälde) in a specially constructed building, with a viewing platform at the centre from which the observer could see the entire scene in perfect perspective. In Sternberger’s text, the Sedan Panorama serves as a metaphor for all carefully constructed viewing platforms offering viewers this illusion of centrality at the focal point of a vista which is in fact carefully arranged for them. Sternberger is at pains to stress that this is, of course, an illusion, and that the fascination of the spectator lies in the knowledge that it is an illusion (E 11, P 16). In a lengthy footnote, the rise and demise of the panorama as a popular entertainment form is shown to coincide almost exactly with the beginning and end of the century (E 185–9, P 213–16). ‘Genre’ is understood not in the sense of a special branch of art or learning,3 but as a way of viewing, and as a ‘need’ in the spectator for ‘an arranged, expectant scene’ (E 53, ‘Bedürfnis nach arrangierter, erwartungsvoller Szene’, P 77). ‘Genre’ responses in literature, painting, and popular discourses on science, are the theme of Panorama. A ‘dual perspective’ reading suggests that at various points twentiethcentury analogues are latently available to the implied reader in the account of nineteenth-century phenomena. For example, the panorama as a palace of illusions has a correlate in the cinema, and the use of the Sedan Panorama for nationalistic and military propaganda has an analogue in the Wochenschau newsreels. The most obvious analogue of all, however, is that between the theory of Natural Selection and National Socialist racist ideology and legislation in the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935, an event which could not fail to exercise Sternberger and his Jewish wife. Indeed, in defiance of a secret instruction from the Propaganda Ministry that the Race Laws were to be printed in newspapers without any commentary,4 the Frankfurter Zeitung published Sternberger’s article ‘A noteworthy

3

4

On the position of genre painting as the third of five categories established by the Académie Royale at the Louvre in the seventeenth century, and to ‘moral painting’ in Diderot’s sense, cf. Michelle Facos, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art, New York and London 2011, p. 9. Gabriele Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit: Edition und Dokumentation, vol. III.2 [1935], Munich 1987, p. 586 (ZSg. 101/6/109/Nr. 1645, 16.9.1935).

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anniversary’ (‘Ein merkwürdiges Jubiläum’) on 17 September 1935, on page three, facing the texts of the new laws.5 In that article Sternberger noted the remarkable coincidence that on this day exactly one hundred years before, Darwin had set foot on the Galápagos Islands, to change human history and civilization for all time, and not for the better. It should perhaps be stressed at this point that Sternberger explicitly disavowed a narrowly teleological view of history, a methodological issue which has dogged the reception, to take a prominent example, of Richard Weikart’s study From Darwin to Hitler.6 Sternberger is arguably less immune, however, to another criticism levelled at Weikart, namely that of misreading or misrepresenting Darwin’s moral and philosophical position. This raises important questions about the general validity of Sternberger’s reading of Darwin beyond its immediate historical context, questions which, I would suggest, apply to all cultural-historical accounts irrespective of their scientific competence in the field of evolutionary developmental biology. In the present case, it is worth noting the significance of the fluid boundary between science and literature as vehicles of knowledge. Panorama, whilst critiquing the overlap between the biological, the sociopolitical, and everyday discourse, also exploits this overlap to re-instrumentalize key tropes of (social) Darwinism and their popular ‘genre’ function in the service of a counter-discourse designed to challenge the primacy of the biological and re-focus attention on the ethics of being human.

5 6

Dolf Sternberger, ‘Ein merkwürdiges Jubiläum’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 September 1935, p. 3. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, New York and Basingstoke 2004. Weikart’s study has also been criticized for advancing a theological agenda (‘Intelligent Design’). See, for example, Peter Bowler’s charge of a ‘simple “blame game”’ in the cause of a creationist vision of history: ‘Do we need a non-Darwinian industry?’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (20 December 2009) [accessed 8 May 2016].

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‘The magic word “Evolution”’ Darwin’s theory – ‘without exaggeration the most potent, popular, and effective ideological novelty of the nineteenth century’ (E 79, ‘ohne Übertreibung die mächtigste, populärste und einflußreichste ideologische Neuerung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, P 92) – is presented as a panorama which, like Werner’s Sedan Panorama, shows the victor’s view of the battlefield and serves similar ideological purposes: nationalism, imperialism, capitalism (in the variant of English mercantilism), and finally racial superiority. It was Darwin, to stay with Sternberger’s analogy, who constructed the most influential viewing platform of the century. But Sternberger is intent on showing what has been excluded from this painting, what has been pushed off the edge of the canvas, or is concealed on its reverse. In the course of the Darwin chapter and the book as a whole the following charges are brought against Darwin and his theory: •

• • • • • •

Natural Selection is a panorama justifying the existing hierarchy of individuals and peoples and the economic and political ideologies underpinning this hierarchy (class, capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, race). It is a celebration of (human) survivors by survivors, obliterating the memory of exterminated individuals and species. What is presented as a narrative of progress towards ever more perfect forms is in fact the result of chance, the ability to accommodate to new environments. The insistence on eliminating intermediate species from the panorama is a gesture of imperialism and control. Natural Selection leads to ‘dispensed monopolies’ (as with the giraffe), at which point it ceases to operate. Mankind has acquired the power to opt out of Natural Selection. Darwin introduces a secular worldview which displaces religion and ethics: geological time replaces the concept of eternity. ‘Civilized’ mankind has found comfort in this new conceptual habitat, which situates us within natural history whilst confirming our

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centrality and primacy, but ‘civilized’ peoples are the most barbarous, and are exterminating ‘barbaric’ peoples. As a panorama, Natural Selection satisfies a need for ‘genre’ responses (as in the trope of the Noble Ape and the Crude Barbarian). The materialism underlying Natural Selection is transfigured by Darwin’s disciple Bölsche into a new metaphysics of ‘the higher’ (E 111–29, P 130–50). Darwin’s intention is to overthrow the theory of separate creations; his method is not one of disinterested scientific inquiry.

These arguments are distributed over the chapter’s eight main sections: A Long Haul; Darwin’s Intentions; Man and Natural Selection; The Return of Chance; The Monopoly of the Giraffe; The Suppressed Transitions;7 Replacement of Eternity; The Noble Ape and the Crude Barbarian. In the introductory section (E 79, P 92), Sternberger stresses the theoretical nature of Darwin’s thesis and particularly its legacy in the ‘struggle for survival’ (‘Kampf ums Dasein’, in quotation marks in the original) in the era of free capitalism (‘Zeitalter des freien Kapitalismus’), with its ‘continual extinction of inferior and less powerful enterprises (and people)’ (‘fortwährende Vernichtung der geringwertigeren und weniger mächtigen Unternehmen (und Personen)’). Natural history, Sternberger observes, appears as ‘an enormous confirmation and justification of competitiveness’ (‘ungeheuere Bestätigung und Rechtfertigung des Konkurrenzkampfes’). The social and political correlates which have attached to Darwin’s theory since its publication are thus immediately brought into view. It would be a mistake, however, to see Darwin as a mere proxy: the attack on him is real in its own terms and Sternberger makes no attempt to rescue Darwin from the legacy of Darwinism (nor did he in subsequent editions).8 With supporting evidence from Malthus, Darwin paints ‘an imposing picture of

7 8

‘Die verdrängten Übergänge’, rendered in the English translation as ‘The Exterminated Transitions’ (E 94). See the 1955 and 1981 Forewords (in German) in Schriften, V (1981), and the retrospective essay ‘Sternberger über Sternberger: “Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert”’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 May 1988.

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nature’s eternal warfare’ (E 79, ‘ein imposantes Gemälde vom ewigen Kriege in der Natur’, P 92), which always produces the correct outcome in that the victor proves his right to win simply by winning. Survival for Darwin may be a matter of chance but it is also part of an evaluative narrative of progress. Indeed, Darwin and his followers offer ‘the simplest theodicy or justification of God imaginable’ (E 81, ‘die einfachste Theodizee oder Rechtfertigung Gottes […], die sich denken läßt’, P 94): There is no injustice in the world, says Darwin’s rationale, since the victors, by being victors, by being victorious, irrefutably prove that they are the finest, the strongest, the best ‘adapted’,9 which means the best. (E 82) (es ist überhaupt gar kein Unrecht in der Welt, sagt sie, da ja überall diejenigen, welche den Sieg davontragen, dadurch unwidersprechlich beweisen, daß sie die Fähigsten, die Stärksten, die am besten ‘Angepaßten’ und das heißt die Besten sind.) (P 96)9

The victims, on the other hand, Sternberger remarks caustically, have ‘withdrawn from observation and scientific study by their nonexistence’ (E 80‚ ‘sich ja der Beobachtung und wissenschaftlichen Kenntnis durch Nichtexistenz entzogen’, P 93), with the result that the picture thus painted presents us with ‘progress from death to life, and from senselessness to meaningfulness’ (‘Fortschritt vom Tode zum Leben, vom Unsinn zum Sinn’) in the formation of ever more perfect surviving species whose representatives survey the comforting panorama from their privileged, and de facto merited place on the viewing platform. Sternberger then alights on a passage in the concluding pages of The Descent of Man in which Darwin steps out of the role of natural historian into that of social engineer, asserting that ‘the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best or having the largest 9

‘die am besten “Angepaßten”’ (P 96). ‘Sich anpassen’ has the meaning ‘accommodate oneself to’. Placing the word in quotation marks might be taken as a sign that it is a translation (of ‘adapted’), but then a great many such terms would have to appear in quotation marks, and this is not the case. In the Nazi context the quotation marks take on an ironic function, suggesting contemporary strategies for survival by falling into line or not standing out from the crowd. This is an example of ‘dual perspective’ at work.

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number of offspring’ (E 81, cf. P 94).10 But, Sternberger objects, Darwin’s ‘should’ properly has no place in the theory of Natural Selection. The paradox of Darwin’s dalliance with legislation to protect the fittest and best adapted is seen to subvert the premise on which that natural order is supposed to rest. The contemporary analogue, in the Nuremberg legislation, needed no elaboration in 1938. It is geological time which underlies the vista of ever more perfect forms arrayed next to each other in the ‘more pleasant front view’ (E 84, ‘die angenehmere Vorderansicht’, P 99) of Darwin’s panorama. Sternberger, however, is intent on putting back on display the ‘back view’ (‘die rückwärtige Seite der Darwinschen Theorie’), the concealed element of ‘annihilating competition’ (‘vernichtende Konkurrenz’). Having shifted the focus from the vanquished to the victors, Darwin’s panorama concentrates our attention on ‘an unbroken chain of animal forms, in which every new species points back to an earlier one; in which no individual remains isolated; in which everything, on the contrary, has an origin and a genesis, a link backwards and (except for man) also forwards’ (E 82, ‘Anblick einer lückenlosen Folge von Formen tierischen Lebens, in der jede neue Spezies auf andere ältere zurückweist, in der nichts Einzelnes isoliert bleibt, alles vielmehr Abkunft und Genesis hat, Verbindung nach rückwärts und (vom Menschen abgesehen) auch nach vorwärts’, P 96). In thrall to this magnificent façade, we are encouraged to be forgetful of the piles of corpses left behind on the battlefield: Only on rare occasions does a tiny, barely perceptible aperture permit a furtive glance at what Natural Selection (quite properly capitalized) leaves behind on its battlefield during its both ruthless and solicitous advances. (E 83) (Nur bei seltenen Gelegenheiten noch erlaubt eine kleine, kaum merkliche Öffnung den verstohlenen Durchblick auf das, was die Natürliche Zuchtwahl – mit Fug wird sie groß geschrieben – bei ihrem ebenso unerbittlichen als sorgsamen Fortschreiten hinter sich läßt, auf ihr Schlachtfeld.) (P 96)

10 Cf. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, with an Introduction by James Moore and Adrian Desmond, London 2004, p. 688. The English translation of Panorama wrongly attributes this passage to The Origin of Species.

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In some respects, this image strikingly anticipates Walter Benjamin’s now famous reading, in 1940, of Klee’s Angelus Novus as the Angel of History, driven by the storm ‘into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm’ (‘Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm’).11 Like Benjamin’s angel, we find ourselves looking back in Sternberger’s presentation at the debris of Natural Selection, piles of corpses which have been air-brushed out of the panorama. Darwin’s declared intention to overthrow the dogma of separate creations12 reveals not only the pre-determined outcome of his project but also its ‘imperialistic gesture’ (E 86, ‘imperialistische Geste’, P 101) that necessitates ‘getting the whole mass of organic forms and millennia under the sway of a single power’ – Natural Selection (E 86,13 ‘die ganze Masse der organischen Gestalten und der Jahrtausende unter die Botmäßigkeit einer einzigen Macht’, P 101). Ostensibly impelled by the search for greater explanatory power, Darwin’s theory is, Sternberger insists, an ‘unsurpassable instrument of mastering’ (E 86, ‘ein unübertreffliches Instrument der Bewältigung’, P 101). Darwin is here presented as the representative and apologist of the dominant imperial power of the nineteenth century, his theory as an ‘imperialistic gesture’ and an ideological tool for justifying the Empire, a mix of objective law and hermeneutic principle, demanding 11

12

13

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. IV [1938–40], ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA 2003, p. 392. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I.2: Abhandlungen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 697f. The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 82. Against Sternberger’s reading, see Bowler’s observation that ‘Darwin’s appeal to the model of common descent was intended to checkmate a theory of racial inequality based on the idea of separate creation for the different races’ (‘Do we need a non-Darwinian industry?’, op. cit.). Unlike the English translation, ‘Natural Selection’ is rendered here and elsewhere with initial capitals, as it appears throughout in the German. See the above quotation (E 83, P 96). An abstruse contribution to the ‘dual perspective’ is an intriguing possibility here, connecting Natürliche Zuchtwahl, Natural Selection, and Nationalsozialismus.

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admiration but above all ‘submission’ (E 87, ‘Unterwerfung’, P 101). Natural Selection, by joining together the previously separated forms of organic nature into an ‘unbroken gliding sequence of changing images’ (‘zur bruchlos fortgleitenden Reihe wechselnder Bilder’, P 101), offers this imperialistic construct ‘to the scientist, a further traveller on the railroad’ (E 87, ‘dem Forscher als einem anderen Reisenden auf der Eisenbahn’, P 101). This last reference is to the new tourists introduced in a previous chapter who frame their ‘genre’ image of exotic lands through the window of the passing railway carriage. The view thus framed is comforting, Sternberger suggests. Mankind finds ‘shelter’ (E 87, ‘Schutz’, P 102) in this new identity as a gradual emergence from within nature rather than (invoking the biblical account) as the ‘free outcast’ (E 87, ‘des frei Ausgesetzten’, P 102) from creation. But man nevertheless remains detached, ‘twofold’ (‘doppelt’): ‘He is the product of Natural Selection, and it is also his tool’ (E 87, ‘Er ist Produkt der Natürlichen Zuchtwahl, und diese ist doch zugleich sein Werkzeug’, P 102). The presentation of agency is curiously confused, Sternberger points out, in Darwin’s account, as when Natural Selection takes on properties of an agent in the passage on the formation of the eye in The Origin of Species. There, this ‘power’ (‘Kraft’) assumes the identity of a ‘being’ (‘Wesen’), yet it is denoted not by an agentive term such as ‘breeder’ (‘Züchter’), but by ‘the more colourless name of “selection”’ (‘den blasseren der Zuchtwahl’). This force carries ‘the name of a constant action rather than of an actor. It is virtually a neuter’ (E 88, ‘nicht den eines Handelnden, sondern den einer beständigen Handlung. Er ist gleichsam ein Neutrum’, P 103). Furthermore, Sternberger insists, Natural Selection ‘does not so much create as choose among already created things to foster new ones that seem worth fostering and have proven themselves’ (E 89, ‘nicht sowohl schafft als unter schon Geschaffenem auswählt und fördert, was fördernswert erscheint und sich bewährt hat’, P 104). Thus Natural Selection is at best a secondary power, the primary question of creation remaining beyond the theory’s grasp. It can only act on chance variations in creation. But for Sternberger it is the relatively dominant role given to Natural Selection, and the accordingly minor role accorded to chance, that fascinates. The evolutionary panorama seeks to impose order, but cannot quite conceal,

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at its lower edge, the ‘scraps of unconquered chance – a chaos of irritating aspect’ (E 89, ‘Brocken des unbewältigten Zufalls […], ein Wirrsal von irritierendem Anblick’, P 104). Here, Sternberger homes in on a criticism of Darwin’s theory voiced by many of his contemporaries, including St George Jackson Mivart and Friedrich Albert Lange, namely that it failed to explain the ‘incipient stages in a line of evolution’ (E 89, ‘die jeweiligen Anfangsstufen einer Entwicklungsreihe’, P 104). These, Sternberger argues, raise the question of the relationship between accident and expedience, between ‘useless’ forms randomly generated and ‘useful’ forms which appear in Darwin’s theory as well-defined species. In answer to Mivart’s question why other hoofed quadrupeds had not, like the giraffe, developed elongated necks, Darwin clarifies that, in Sternberger’s words, ‘only the field of a possible immediate competition can also be the field of Natural Selection’ (E 92, ‘daß nur das Feld einer möglichen unmittelbaren Konkurrenz auch das Feld der Natürlichen Zuchtwahl sein kann’, P 108). This limitation of the theory is, Sternberger contends, remarkable,14 particularly since Darwin appears to assume that during the time it took for this development to evolve, the giraffe had no competitors in other species. Indeed, the other species in Darwin’s presentation appear to be already fully evolved, so that competition is ‘between giraffe and giraffe’. The answer to this conundrum, Sternberger finds, reveals the essence of competition in Darwin’s model: ‘Sooner or later the racing stops, namely at the point when a monopoly is reached’ (E 93, ‘Einmal kommt der Wettlauf zum Stillstand. Dann nämlich, wenn ein Monopol erreicht ist’, P 110). Notwithstanding chance variation, competition, and Natural Selection, a stage of development is eventually arrived at in which the process comes to rest in ‘a state of dispensed monopolies’ (E 94, ‘Zustand der verteilten Monopole’, P 110). The critical point here, and one which has resonances for the ‘dual perspective’ of the work, is that acquired power (monopoly) halts the process that produced it, in Natural Selection, in economics, and by extension in politics. The example of the giraffe demonstrates this, against Darwin’s intention, and reveals ‘the “national-economic” framework’ (E 94, ‘das 14 Cf. Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. with an Introduction by J. W. Burrow, London 1985, pp. 206–11.

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“nationalökonomische” Gerüst’, P 110) of this natural history, which is at the same time ‘the machinery, so to speak, of the mobile panorama of evolution’ (‘gleichsam die Maschinerie des beweglichen Panoramas der Entwicklung’). It is not a coincidence, Sternberger continues, that Darwin’s account seems ‘prophetic’ of the age of free capitalism as it surges towards an age of stable monopolies. These deliberations on the justification of monopoly in nineteenth-century theorizing on natural history foreground the links to socio-economic theories justifying the development of free market capitalism into monopoly capitalism, and invoke political analogues justifying empire and territorial expansionism. In Darwin, too, Sternberger argues, we are presented with a picture of settled monopolies in which the simultaneity of ‘completed’ species, viewed against the geographical area they populate, is not justified by some law of nature, but is a product of chance, a mirage produced by the arrival of monopolies: But when this stop-signal resounds, and what peculiar frozen ensemble of completed shapes we get to see at that point (and only at that point, since previously, after all, during the ‘journey’, everything was steadily involved in modifications and transitions), are again a matter of chance. Chance is the beginning, chance is the end of evolution. (E 94) (Wenn aber dies Haltesignal ertönt, und welches sonderbaren erstarrten Ensembles fertiger Gestalten wir in diesem Augenblick ansichtig werden – und in diesem Augenblick zuerst, da denn zuvor, während der ‘Fahrt’, alles beständig im Wechsel und Übergang war: dies ist wiederum Zufall. Zufall ist der Anfang, Zufall das Ende der Entwicklung.) (P 111)

It is evident that Sternberger’s commentary has immediate application to human societies. The thrust of this critique is that mankind can step out of this man-made panorama of natural history and paint a different picture of our place in the natural world. Sternberger’s commentary on the giraffe’s monopoly must have resonated with readers in National Socialist Germany, a society now frozen in its development by the current monopoly holders, who have gained their monopoly not by an ineluctable law of nature, but by chance, and are held in place by the exercise of power in a (for the moment) stable (international) ecology of dispensed monopolies. These resonances are even more marked when Sternberger turns away from the

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focus on completed species to ask what role the transitional varieties play in the Darwinian panorama. The section titled ‘The Suppressed Transitions’ (‘Die verdrängten Übergänge’) focuses on Darwin’s theorizing, in The Origin of Species, on the mechanisms by which these intermediate species are eliminated from natural history. It concludes with Sternberger pointing to a paradox which lies ‘concealed’ (E 98, ‘verborgen’, P 115) in Darwin’s theory of transitions, namely that the ‘civilized races’, which have gained the upper hand in this history, ‘are really for this reason more savage than the savages’ (E 98, ‘eben aus diesem Grunde wilder als die wilden’, P 115). The argument proceeds incrementally. Evolution as a frozen panorama, Sternberger observes, presents us with clear delineations between species, ignoring process and transition, suppressing the fact that the figures of this panorama were in constant flux (E 95, P 111). Yet it is process that is at issue here, and it is process with which Darwin engages. Sternberger follows Darwin’s own attempts in Chapter 6 of Origin of Species (‘Difficulties of the Theory’) to address the problem of why there are clearly differentiated species rather than a number of intermediate forms. This aspect of the theory, Sternberger notes, is ‘the strange, defiant thing requiring justification and “explanation” more urgently than anything else’ (E 95, ‘das Merkwürdige, Anstößige, Widerständige, welches der Rechtfertigung und “Erklärung” dringender bedarf als irgend etwas sonst’, P 112). Darwin’s initial explanation, relying solely on the theory of Natural Selection, observes that since extinction is integral to the process, when we look at an example of a species, ‘both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of the formation and perfection of the new form’ (E 95, ‘so werden Urstamm und Übergangsformen gewöhnlich schon durch den Bildungs- und Vervollkommnungsprocess der neuen Form selbst zum Aussterben gebracht worden sein’, P 112).15 Sternberger recognizes in these words ‘the phenomenon of advanced competition’ (‘Phänomen der fortgeschrittenen Konkurrenz’), thus glossing Darwin, once again, with a discourse of capitalist commerce in which the poorly adapted enterprises

15 Cf. The Origin of Species, op. cit., p. 206.

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are ‘in economic jargon that seems quite fitting here – “swallowed up”’ (E 96, ‘um einen nationalökonomischen Slangausdruck zu gebrauchen, der hier durchaus zuständig erscheint – “geschluckt” werden’, P 112). The economic analogy, in which the geographical habitat is explicitly equated to ‘the market’, is developed further in the somewhat cryptic observation: The annihilation of transitional varieties can all the more aptly be described as an absorbing or ‘swallowing up’ in that their trend is preserved and realized in the organization with the greatest usefulness, with which the individual evolution always terminates. (cf. E 96)16 (Die Vernichtung der Übergangsformen kann um so zutreffender als ein Aufzehren oder ‘Schlucken’ bezeichnet werden, als deren Tendenz ja in der Tat in der Organisation von höchster Nützlichkeit, mit der die Entwicklungsreihe jeweils endigt, aufbewahrt und zum Ziel gebracht ist.) (P 112)

Thus, it is the inherent value of these enterprises (their trend) which is absorbed, swallowed up – and not destroyed – by the historical victor, the better-adapted enterprise of highest utility in each evolutionary sequence. This is rather different from an interpretation of history as the survival of the fittest, for here, the ‘weaker’ enterprises are simply incorporated by the historically privileged enterprises. The explicitly drawn parallel with the macro-economic jargon of ‘swallowing’ the competition is a minor tour de force, subtly revealing the biological discourse as a source of metaphor in socio-economic and political discourses and invoking the nation state as a Darwinian organization of greatest utility. On this reading, the National Socialist state, in legislating to ‘Aryanize’ Jewish enterprises, is appropriating value, not creating it. This also applies to its expansionist territorial claims. The absence of transitional forms particularly exercises Sternberger. Darwin’s explanation uses an imagined scenario: from three varieties of sheep, through intensive breeding, two distinct species evolve.17 Those grazing on the uplands and those grazing on the plain eventually invade

16 17

The English translation translates ‘deren’ as ‘its [annihilation’s] trend’. I read it, however, as ‘their [the transitional varieties’] trend’. Cf. ibid. p. 210.

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the grazing area of the intermediate variety grazing on the transitional tract, whilst remaining distinct varieties. Sternberger’s commentary on this scenario is that the occupation ‘could be called unlawful if the best adaptation provided rights and not merely power’ (E97, ‘könnte man eine widerrechtliche nennen, wenn anders die bestmögliche Anpassung ein Recht, und nicht bloß eine Macht verliehe’, P 114). In terms of contemporary international relations, it is not difficult to transfer this image to the struggle between nation states for possession of disputed territories with ‘mixed’ populations, and specifically to the expansive territorial ambitions of Nazi Germany, for example, in the ensuing observation that close examination of Darwin’s theory exposes ‘the last, feeble legitimation of power – its selection of the fittest; he who has the power uses it even beyond the borders of his fitness. And the struggle for survival is forthwith decided’ (E 97f., ‘die letzte, schwache Legitimation der Macht, die der Auslese der Geeignetsten; wer die Macht einmal hat, gebraucht sie auch über die Grenzen seiner Eignung hinaus. Alsobald ist auch der Kampf ums Dasein schon entschieden’, P 115). Thus, the unfortunate intermediate varieties, though they may be perfectly adapted to their environment, are shown to be consigned to the concealed burial ground of Darwin’s panorama by ‘the sheer mass, the dense weight of sheer number (accumulated capital)’ (‘die bloße Masse, das stupide Übergewicht der bloßen Zahl (des angesammelten Kapitals)’). Here, and throughout Panorama, the dual aspect of Sternberger’s language and choice of topics creates an allusive field of potential analogy for the implied reader to traverse. In this case, more than one analogue may spring to mind: the treatment of Jews (of which more below), or the coup de grâce delivered to the SA and the ‘socialist’ wing of the party in the ‘Night of Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934. A passage from The Descent of Man is then quoted in which Darwin predicts a future in which ‘the savage races’ will have been exterminated (‘ausgerottet’, P 115) by ‘the civilized races’, and envisages the eradication of the anthropomorphous apes, thus removing further intermediate layers from the panorama:

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The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.18 (E 98) (Der Abstand zwischen dem Menschen und seinen nächsten Verwandten wird dann noch weiter sein; denn er tritt dann zwischen dem Menschen in einem noch civilisierteren Zustande als dem kaukasischen, wie wir hoffen können, und irgend einem so tief in der Reihe stehenden Affen wie einem Pavian auf, statt daß er sich gegenwärtig zwischen dem Neger oder Australier und dem Gorilla findet.) (P 115)

For Sternberger, this passage clearly situates Darwin’s theory in a hierarchical discourse on race, with ‘Caucasians’ at the summit, and a focus on the proximity of ‘lower’ races to anthropomorphous apes. Jews are not mentioned, but occupied an analogous position to apes in Nazi discourse, and it is difficult to imagine that they were not invoked in such passages for many contemporary readers. Indeed, a more specific, though characteristically loose analogy may suggest itself in the matter of Darwin’s scenario of the three varieties of sheep. The Nuremberg Race Laws were designed to put people into one of two categories, ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ – the discriminatory nichtarisch was a key word in the contemporary political and social discourse. In this particular context, ‘mixed race’ marriages (in 1930s Germany, the dominant meaning of the term Mischehe (mixed marriage)) and especially the various intermediate categories of Mischling to which the offspring of these marriages were assigned, created a subset of the population analogous to Darwin’s intermediate variety. The analogy breaks down, of course, or breaks off, at the point where the question of co-existence or competition between the two ‘distinct’ varieties (‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’) arises. The final section of Sternberger’s chapter focuses on the ‘genre’ function of Natural Selection, specifically in Darwin’s use of the tropes of the ‘Noble Ape’ and the ‘Crude Barbarian’ (constructs as sentimental, and as suspect, the reader infers, as the noble, ‘Christian’ death of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, discussed in the chapter titled ‘Genre’, cf. 18 Cf. The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 183f.

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E 56–60, P 67–71). In Darwin’s account, Sternberger insists, ‘the direction in which the origin of man is contemplated is, in a certain way, different from the direction of viewing of all other stages of evolution or products of Natural Selection’ (E 102, ‘Nun ist die Richtung, in welcher die Entstehung des Menschen betrachtet wird, in bestimmter Weise verschieden von derjenigen bei der Betrachtung aller übrigen Stadien der Entwicklung oder Produkte der Natürlichen Zuchtwahl’, P 120). The incipient man, in his proclivity to act savagely, is seen to embody modern man’s essential nature. It is as if his place in the story of evolution ‘were not so much developed as enveloped’ (E 103, ‘nicht so sehr weiter entwickelt als vielmehr eingewickelt’, P 121). The semantic distinction in the German is important: when it comes to mankind, Darwin’s panorama ‘enfolds’ us in its narrative. ‘Einwickeln’ – to enfold, envelop, swathe, wrap up, also in the sense of ‘embroiling’ someone in a (dubious) scheme – connotes moral entanglement more strongly than its near-synonym ‘einbinden’: to involve someone in, or bind someone into, a programme of action. These connotations are present in the German, and even spill over into the use of ‘einrollen’ (roll up) when Sternberger describes how the end-point of the panorama is ‘rolled up so that it may not elude us and lead us into a pathless jungle’ (E 103, ‘eingerollt, damit es nicht entwische und ins Weglose führe’, P 121). The enfolded nature of the panorama conceals its teleological design in respect of mankind. The ‘spontaneous caution’ (E 103, ‘spontane Vorsicht’, P 121) of those who present it to us prevents them from ‘letting the machinery keep operating and the tableaux keep unfolding’ (E 103, ‘die Maschinerie weiterarbeiten, die Bilder sich weiter entfalten zu lassen’, P 121). This truncated account leaves out of the picture, in Sternberger’s view, our potential for aesthetic and moral awareness, and for humane behaviour. Instead, we are enfolded into a levelling narrative of our natural history which is corrosive of human achievements, so that there is not much reason left for pride in being human (cf. E 102, P 120), since all the characteristics of man are already present to some degree among the higher and sometimes even less high-ranking animals. But ‘Truth, Justice, Beauty, God’ (E 103, cf. P 121) are absent from this picture of man’s place in the world. Were they to be included, Sternberger continues with an image revealing his own iconoclastic intent, they ‘would quickly destroy the fine uniformity of the

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unrolled painting, virtually punch holes in it or open unexpected issues from the tempered interior of the natural time-space […]’ (‘würden […] alsbald auch schon die schöne Gleichförmigkeit des entrollten Gemäldes zerstören, gleichsam Löcher dahineinstoßen oder unerwartete Ausgänge aus dem abgedämpften Inneren des natürlichen Zeit-Raums eröffnen’). The illusory space fostered by the panorama is likened here to an intellectual and spiritual padded cell. In Chapter 3 of The Descent of Man Darwin speculates on the relative distance separating man from the lower species, and from his closest relatives, the higher apes, ‘even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest savages […] with that of the most highly organised ape’.19 The interval from the lowest fishes to the higher apes, he finds, is much greater than that from ape to man, and also marked by more gradations. Sternberger reads these deliberations against Darwin’s ostensible elevation of humankind, stressing instead the picture it paints of our animal provenance, a picture he regards as grossly foreshortened: ‘A shove from behind makes the tableaux squeeze together’ (E 104, ‘Schon macht hier ein Schub von rückwärts die Bilder eng zusammenrücken’, P 122). What may prompt this hostile response is Darwin’s reflection in the quoted passage on the three Fuegians who had been brought to England by James Cook, and were returned on The Beagle to their homeland. Darwin records being struck by how these savages (although the Fuegians ‘rank amongst the lowest barbarians’) could ‘talk a little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties’. Without the existence of the higher apes, and their mental faculties, Darwin observes, we might have difficulty in convincing ourselves ‘that our high faculties had been gradually developed’. Sternberger is incensed at the ‘civilized Englishman’s’ surprise at discovering that these savages ‘are also human beings’, a sentiment which entirely reflects this English gentleman’s privileged place in his self-constructed panorama (E 104, P 123). The combative ferocity of Sternberger’s argument is striking here. Out of ostensible common ground, he generates opposition. The reason for this hostility may lie in the subsequent passage, as Darwin continues:

19

The Descent of Man, p. 86. Cf. E 103, P 121.

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William J. Dodd Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or a Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or a Shakespeare. Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other. My object in this chapter is to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.20

Here, Sternberger objects, there can be no evolutionary linkage of gradation between the murderer and the philanthropist, ‘but only a weighing judgment’ (E 105, ‘nur wägendes Urteil’, P 123). In Darwin’s deliberations on the development of ‘moral disposition’, good and evil, virtue and vice appear as correlates of the evolutionary phases of human development, represented by the ‘low’ barbarian and the ‘higher’ civilized man. Moreover, the distribution of vice and virtue in Darwin’s examples is conveniently Anglocentric: ‘evil is chained to its place (very remote, incidentally) and good is chained to the other place (close by and ogled with satisfied pride)’ (E 105, ‘das Böse ist an seinem, übrigens sehr fernen, das Gute an dem anderen, nahen und mit wohlgefälligem Stolze betrachteten Orte an die Kette gelegt’, P 124). It is the particulars of this ‘anecdotal genre picture’ that rankle, its convenient, evaluating distribution of the humane and inhumane, its attempt to monopolize the ‘civilized’ in the here and now of the English gentleman, as if child murder were impossible in Darwin’s England and gestures of altruism unthinkable in ‘barbarian’ cultures: Howard is nobler than the barbarian who kills the child, Newton or Shakespeare nobler than the three Fuegians who shipped along on the Beagle, and they, in turn, are a wee bit nobler than their stay-at-home fellow tribesmen – because of their experience and education in London. (E 107)

20 The Descent of Man, p. 66. Cf. E 104f., P 123. The references are to John Howard (1726–90), English penal reformer, and Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), anti-slavery campaigner.

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(Howard ist edler als der Barbar, der sein Kind totschlägt, Newton oder Shakespeare edler als die drei Feuerländer, die auf dem ‘Beagle’ mitfuhren, diese wiederum schon um einiges edler – infolge der zu London genossenen Erfahrung und Erziehung – als ihre daheim gebliebenen Stammesgenossen.) (P 126)

Precisely this kind of ‘genre’ picture is the manifestation and the motor, in Sternberger’s view, of our ‘envelopment (of both morality and intelligence) in the development’ (E 106,21 ‘Einwicklung (der Moral wie der Intelligenz) in die Entwicklung’, P 125). Here Sternberger invokes Darwin’s pathetic reference to the dog facing its vivisector, and another passage from The Descent of Man in which Darwin cites evidence from Whewell and Rengger of maternal affection in monkeys and hylobates,22 even though Darwin is at pains to deprive them of any emotive significance, stressing instead that amongst social animals, including man, such instincts can very easily be imagined as developing into moral sense, and even conscience. Any resemblance between Darwin’s image of civilized man’s moral sensibility and Kant’s understanding of culture and humanitas as distinguishing features of humankind, Sternberger insists, is deceptive. On the contrary, with Darwin ‘the essence was lost’ (E 107, ‘das Wesentliche hierin ging verloren’, P 127) in an empiricist understanding of culture in which the nobler and higher moral senses have been ‘transformed into a mobile scene, an admirable monument to Howard or Newton […]’ (‘zur beweglichen Szene, zum bewunderungswürdigen Denkmal eben Howards oder Newtons verwandelt’). This panorama has no place for the doctrines of Enlightenment and of Christianity, which impose ‘demand and consequence’ (E 108, ‘Forderung und Konsequenz’, P 127) on human beings. But Darwin, whilst acknowledging in The Descent of Man that ‘with the more civilized races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality’, insists that ‘the first foundation of the moral sense lies in the social instincts’ gained through Natural Selection.23 Darwin’s ‘thoughtless justification for the real imperialism of perfect civilization’

21 22 23

Translation emended (‘in’ for ‘is’). The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 70. Ibid. p. 626f. Cf. E 108, P 127f.

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(E 108, ‘unbedenkliche[n] Rechtfertigung des wirklichen Imperialismus der vollendeten Zivilisation’, P 127), Sternberger insists, is encapsulated in The Descent of Man in Darwin’s subsequent observation: ‘[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world’. To Sternberger, whose article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 17 September 1935 had noted the ‘remarkable centenary’ linking Darwin’s arrival on the Galápagos Islands and the publication of the Nuremberg Race Laws, Darwin’s prognosis must have appeared far too conservative, and shocking in its contemplation of the annihilation of individuals and species as a necessary consequence of all natural history in its progression towards ever greater perfection. How, Sternberger asks, does the civilization of the civilized differ from the savagery of the savages? – a question that does not even arise in the Darwinian panorama. The adjacency of Nazi discourse is almost tangible here, as Darwin is chided for making civilization the property of certain ‘higher’ races. In this concept of civilization, Sternberger remarks, ‘we have before us its palpable transformation in language into an attribute of the race’ (E 108,24 ‘und hier haben wir ihre Verwandlung zum Attribut der Rasse sprachlich greifbar vor uns’, P 128). A further illustration of ‘genre’ nationalism and racism is detected in the conclusion of The Descent of Man, in the passage in which Darwin recalls his amazement at first encountering the natives of Tierra del Fuego and reflecting, somewhat uncomfortably, that ‘such were our ancestors’ – although he cannot suppress his distaste at this thought, and remarks that he would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs – as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the greatest superstitions.25

24 Translation emended to include ‘sprachlich greifbar’. Sternberger’s focus is unrelentingly on discourse. 25 The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 689. Cf. E 109, P 128f.

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Darwin’s ‘genre’ arrangement of this scene, Sternberger remarks, makes it easy for the spectator to admire the baboon without giving up his own superior vantage point, which also looks down on the Fuegians: ‘and thus the loftier observer can blithely close the panorama in which he himself is now so fully captured’ (E 109, ‘und mit Befriedigung vermag er die Betrachtung des Panoramas zu beschließen, in welches er selber nun vollends mit eingefangen ist’, P 129). In conclusion, I hope to have demonstrated both the line of attack on Darwin’s theory and the potency of this attack for a readership trapped, like Sternberger, in inner exile from National Socialism. I have also suggested how this critique exploits the fluid boundaries between scientific, socio-political, and everyday discourse, exploiting their shared rhetorical features and re-instrumentalizing tropes (and their ‘genre’ impacts) in an attempt to counter the primacy of the biological discourse. In Panorama, the dictates of coded commentary demand recourse to proxies and ciphers for a discourse on Nazism. Sternberger’s attack is targeted quite clearly on the historical Darwin, and not as a simple proxy for Hitler. On the other hand, Natural Selection provides Sternberger with a powerful proxy and indeed a cipher for National Socialism in its entirety. The line of attack focuses on Darwin’s conveniently edited version of natural history for ‘genre’ consumption, fashioning a narrative of civilization which serves to justify the socio-economic, national, and racial foundations of free market capitalism and empire. The potency of this critique is that it is developed in an allusive space which at a number of points invites the implied (oppositional) reader to pursue analogues in National Socialist ideology and praxis, particularly in the area of racial theory. The (perhaps wilful) misreadings of Darwin’s thought and purpose become more understandable when seen as part of a discourse against Nazism, and demonstrate the paradox that such misreadings, given powerful rhetorical force, can serve positive critical ends. But even discounting the demonstrable misinterpretations, I would suggest that Sternberger’s view of the historical Darwin’s place in our cultural and political history poses some uncomfortable questions for modern readers.

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Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1980. Selected Writings, vol. IV [1938–40], ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA 2003. Bowler, Peter, ‘Do we need a non-Darwinian industry?’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (20 December 2009) . Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, with an Introduction by James Moore and Adrian Desmond, London 2004. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. with an Introduction by J. W. Burrow, London 1985. Dodd, William J., ‘Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama: Approaches to a work of (inner) exile in the National Socialist period’, Modern Language Review 108:1 (2013), pp. 180–201. Jedes Wort wandelt die Welt: Dolf Sternbergers politische Sprachkritik, Göttingen 2007. Facos, Michelle, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art, New York and London 2011. Reifarth, Gert, and Philip Morrissey (eds), Aesopic Voices: Re-framing the Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Newcastle-uponTyne 2011. Sternberger, Dolf, ‘Ein merkwürdiges Jubiläum’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 September 1935, p. 3. Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburg 1938. Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main 1981 (Schriften, V). Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, introduced by Erich Heller, Oxford 1977. ‘Sternberger über Sternberger: “Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert”’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 May 1988. Toepser-Ziegert, Gabriele, NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit: Edition und Dokumentation, vol. III.2 [1935], Munich 1987. Weikart, Richard, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, New York and Basingstoke 2004.

Part II

Constructions of Desire Introduced by Heike Bauer

A defining, yet often overlooked, feature of nineteenth-century biological discourses is their concern with sexual matters. In the 1850s and 1860s the rise of evolutionary theory gave centre stage to issues of reproduction, which, bolstered by developments such as the advances in germ theory and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work and attendant formation of genetics around 1900, prompted new debates about heredity that soon spilled out of the scientific laboratory and into the realm of the social.1 If Darwin and his scientific colleagues were concerned with sexual matters primarily for the role they played in the evolution of species, evolutionary thinking affected much broader discursive transformations, which were soon applied to social debates about gender, morality, and society. It is perhaps no surprise that at a time of imperial expansion and modern European nationbuilding efforts, it was especially the potential consequences of real and perceived sexual transgressions that came under scrutiny.2 In England, for example, it was the campaigns to control the spreading of venereal diseases, which prompted some of the earliest public debates about sexual conduct.3 Targeting garrison towns, they especially focused on women who sold, or

1

2

3

A key text for understanding the nineteenth-century reach of evolutionary thinking remains Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London 1983. For more specific discussions of the interlinked scientific and social debates about ‘sex’ and heredity, see, for example, Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America, Chicago, IL 2014; and Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford 2003. For a critique of the interlinked histories of sexuality and colonialism, see, for example, Anjali Arondekar, ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 14:1/2 (2005), pp. 10–27; and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC 2005. For an overview of the debates, see Emma Liggins, ‘Prostitution and Social Purity in the 1880s and 1890s’, Critical Survey 15:3 (2003), pp. 39–55. Ann Heilmann and Stephanie Forward have gathered an impressive collection of texts that indicate the intricacies of these debates in their (eds) Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, 4 vols, London 2000. Anne R. Hanley presents a detailed study of ‘how medical professionals acquired, developed and applied their knowledge of venereal diseases’ in her

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were suspected to sell, sex. Any women walking out in public – in other words, working, rather than middle- or upper-class women – could be forced to undergo an invasive medical screening procedure designed to test if they were infected with venereal diseases. Garrison towns were targeted because of the realization that venereal diseases were rampant amongst the military, prompting fears about the real impact of ‘improper’ sexual conduct on the health and strength of the nation. Feminist campaigners, especially those advocating ‘social purity’ via the abolishment of prostitution, soon challenged the blaming of women for the spread of contagious diseases, pointing out that it was the men who paid for sex who brought disease into the (in this instance largely middle-class) home, thus fundamentally threatening the well-being of its inhabitants and any future offspring.4 Yet while the debates about venereal diseases indicate how sex came to be spoken publicly in gendered and classed reproductive terms that focused on the health – and evolution – of the nation, empire, and ‘race’, it was especially those bodies and desires that did not conform to reproductive norms and gendered social expectations that would come under scrutiny as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In 1886 the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, a textbook based on patient case studies, which inaugurated the emergence of a dedicated, if in disciplinary terms porous, sexual science.5 Psychopathia Sexualis helped to publicize recent coinages such as ‘homosexuality’ and

4 5

Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886–1916, Basingstoke 2016, p. 3. See Lesley Hall, ‘Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism, Social Purity and Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History 16:1 (2004), pp. 36–56. For studies of the emerging sexual science and the critical issues at stake in the modern construction of sexuality and gender, see, for example, Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860–1930, Basingstoke 2009; Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Cambridge 1998; Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experiences of Modern War, Chicago, IL 2013; Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion, Basingstoke 2013; Siobhan Somerville, ‘Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body’, Journal for the History of Sexuality 5:2 (1994), pp. 243–66; Susan

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‘heterosexuality’, and introduced new sexual classifications such as ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’. This vocabulary shifted the focus of attention away from reproduction and onto a catalogue of sexual desires and practices, which indexes the emergence of a modern concept of sexuality, understood as a form of identity and identification gathered around sexual desires and object choice. The new vocabulary of sex was primarily associated with deviancy from an implicit, yet largely untheorized ‘heterosexuality’ (itself a product of the nineteenth century when the term was first coined if little used). Not long after the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing took up a prestigious chair in psychiatry at the University of Vienna where he came into contact with the young Sigmund Freud, who would become another hugely influential figure in the conceptualization of modern sexuality. In contrast to Krafft-Ebing, whose work exemplifies the scientific investment in classifying sex including for use in the courtroom to aid the establishment of culpability of the accused, Freud’s psychoanalysis turned attention to relationship between taboos, unconscious desires, and subjectivity. Sexology and psychoanalysis both made extensive use of the so-called ‘case study’, an analytical method based on patient accounts.6 While Freud’s case studies gave precedence to his own interpretation of the dreams and other stories told to him by the people who came to his consulting room, Krafft-Ebing enlarged the different editions of Psychopathia Sexualis by including a growing number of autobiographical and biographical life narratives, which were derived from his clinical encounters as well as from the letters he received by readers who felt inspired to send him their own accounts of their intimate desires and sexual practices. These ‘case studies’, which were anonymized and typically included information about the person’s age, sexual development, and health of their parents, constitute an overlooked link between the emerging sexual sciences and the older discipline of biology. For around 1900, ‘biology’ still retained some of its

6

Stryker, Transgender History, Berkley, CA 2008; Robert Deam Tobin, Peripheral Desires: The German Invention of Sex, Philadelphia, PA 2015. Joy Damousi, Birgit Lang, and Katie Sutton (eds), Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge, New York 2015.

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associations with ‘biography’, as biology could be used to describe the ‘study of human life, character, or society’ broadly, even as it increasingly came to mean specifically the scientific study of living organisms.7 The conceptual overlaps between sexual and biological discourses, and their loose formal links to life writing, indicate that the conception of desire was a dynamic process. Despite the measurable influence of sexological terminologies and psychoanalytical conceptions of subjectivity on the emergence of modern sexual subjects, it would be reductive to conceptualize the way in which humans came to think of themselves as sexual beings as a sterile product of the clinic. Individual and collective articulations of the visceral and emotional aspects of desire emerged not merely in response to pathologizing discourses or the legal and political contexts that governed intimacy, but as part of long cultural histories. Literature, for example, played a role in the emergence of concepts such as ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’, which were coined by Krafft-Ebing after reading the works of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Krafft-Ebing was quick to read fiction back onto everyday life, scientifically framing – and claiming – sexual practices that would in turn be reclaimed by subjects who saw their own desires reflected or attacked by the sexological discourses.8 The complexity of this process exceeds Foucault’s notion of ‘reverse discourse’, according to which sexual discourse was produced within the scientia sexualis and then adapted by the subjects whose desires fit the sexological classifications.9

7 8

9

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘biology’. See for instance Katie Sutton’s discussion of this complex process in ‘Representing the “Third Sex”: Cultural Translations of the Sexological Encounter in Early TwentiethCentury Germany’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 53–71. For nuanced analyses of the complex links between discourse, narrative, and subjectivity see also Jana Funke, ‘The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer: Narrating “Uncertain Sex”’, in Ben Davies and Jana Funke (eds), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Basingstoke 2009, pp. 132–53; and Ina Linge, ‘Gender and Agency Between “Sexualwissenschaft” and Autobiography: The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren’, German Life and Letters 68:3 (2015), pp. 387–404. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, London 1990, p. 101.

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Instead, as the chapters in Part II indicate, the constructions of desire are products of intricate negotiations between disciplinary, socio-political, and cultural factors, which bring individual experience into proximity with real and imagined communities. The contributions brought together here turn attention to the oftenoverlooked discursive, conceptual, and formal links between biological and sexual discourses around 1900. Taking as their focus ‘desire’, rather than the loaded terminologies of sexual identity, they cover topics relating to evolution, reproduction, perversion, and inversion, key concepts in modern debates about sex, science, and society. The first three chapters, by Michael Eggers, Charlotte Woodford, and Linda Leskau, all turn to biological discourses to explore how love and desire were articulated against and through the social taboos that surrounded them. While here the focus lies primarily on individual experience, the final chapter in this section, Cyd Sturgess’s exploration of female same-sex desire in Berlin and Amsterdam, examines how a collective ‘Sapphic self-fashioning’ challenged and expanded the male-dominated sexological and biological discourses about gender and desire. Together, these chapters show that desire has complex social and cultural contingencies, which exceed reductive claims about scientific ‘truth’ – claims that are still all too often made in relation to gender, the body, and desire, as evidenced, for instance, by stranglehold of evolutionary psychology on popular debates about the behaviour of human and non-human animals today. By teasing apart the specificities, distinctions, and overlaps between biological and sexual discourses, the chapters reveal the importance of culture for the articulation of desire, critique the shape and impact of gendered social norms, and explore the politics and aesthetics of desire around 1900. Demonstrating that the borders between science and literature remained wide open at the fin de siècle, this work traces the most intimate aspects of human existence to show that sexual subjectivity is not merely the product of scientific and clinical environments or isolated psychic processes, but deeply enmeshed in cultural and social life.

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Bibliography Arondekar, Anjali, ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 14:1/2 (2005), pp. 10–27. Bauer, Heike, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860–1930, Basingstoke 2009. Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plot: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London 1983. Bland, Lucy, and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Cambridge 1998. Damousi, Joy, Birgit Lang, and Katie Sutton (eds), Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge, New York 2015. Doan, Laura, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experiences of Modern War, Chicago, IL 2013. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, London 1990. Funke, Jana, ‘The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer: Narrating “Uncertain Sex”’, in Ben Davies and Jana Funke (eds), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, Basingstoke 2009, pp. 132–53. Hall, Lesley, ‘Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism, Social Purity and Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History 16:1 (2004), pp. 36–56. Hamlin, Kimberly A., From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America, Chicago, IL 2014. Hanley, Anne R., Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886–1916, Basingstoke 2016. Heilmann, Ann, and Stephanie Forward (eds), Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, 4 vols, London 2000. Liggins, Emma, ‘Prostitution and Social Purity in the 1880s and 1890s’, Critical Survey 15:3 (2003), pp. 39–55. Linge, Ina, ‘Gender and Agency Between “Sexualwissenschaft” and Autobiography: The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren’, German Life and Letters 68:3 (2015), pp. 387–404. Richardson, Angelique, Love and Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford 2003. Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Modernism and Perversion, Basingstoke 2013. Somerville, Siobhan, ‘Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body’, Journal for the History of Sexuality 5:2 (1994), pp. 243–66.

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Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham 2005. Stryker, Susan, Transgender History, Berkley, CA 2008. Sutton, Katie, ‘Representing the “Third Sex”: Cultural Translations of the Sexological Encounter in Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 53–71. Tobin, Robert Deam, Peripheral Desires: The German Invention of Sex, Philadelphia, PA 2015.

Michael Eggers

6 Cryptogamic Kissing: Adalbert Stifter’s Novella Der Kuss von Sentze (1866) and the Reproduction of Mosses

abstract As late as 1851, the German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister discovered that the recreational pattern of an alternation of generations, which had first been observed in lower animals like jellyfish, also applies to mosses and ferns. Organisms that procreate according to this pattern alternate between asexual and sexual generations. Hofmeister’s discovery facilitated the scientific reception of Darwin’s theory to a large degree. This chapter shows that this botanical law is a scientific subtext of Adalbert Stifter’s novella Der Kuss von Sentze (The Kiss of Sentze, 1866). The social structure of the noble Austrian family of Sentze and its kissing rituals are analogous to the reproductive techniques of the mosses that the protagonists study and collect.

The tales and novels of Adalbert Stifter, one of the most prominent Germanspeaking authors of the nineteenth century, deal with generations. As has been noted recently, ‘the works of Stifter constantly reconstruct familial prehistories that lead up to the present events of the narration, which in turn aim at the production of new generations, resulting in a never-ending chain of generations’.1 Many, if not most of Stifter’s narratives would serve as examples to illustrate his concern with the relation of parents to their

1

‘Stifters Werk arbeitet immerfort an der Rekonstruktion familialer Vorgeschichten für das gegenwärtige Geschehen, das wiederum auf die Schaffung neuer Generationen und auf das Nichtabreißen der Generationenkette zielt’: Ohad Parnes, Ulrike Vedder, and Stefan Willer, Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008, p. 164.

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descendants, or vice versa. Stifter tells us of voluntary or non-voluntary bachelors, of sons and daughters who pursue their parents’ way of life, or of the need to respect and love one’s grandparents. It is obvious that a focus on the theme of generation offers Stifter the possibility to explore the moral and ethical implications of inter-generational relations and that the always rather limited number of characters and events are only patterns for a larger frame that is society. Bit by bit and often very slowly and hesitantly, the stories tell of odd or eccentric characters who lead a life apart from society, reminiscent of their literary precursors in the works of other authors in the first half of the nineteenth century like Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, or Franz Grillparzer. In the course of the stories, the question regularly arises whether these outsiders can be integrated in their families or in society as a whole, or whether they are destined to keep following their solitary course. In almost all of Stifter’s texts, this social, or rather micro-social, dimension is complemented by a strong sense of the presence of nature. Natural settings are not only described elaborately and extensively, taking up large portions of the texts; nature also plays an active part. Human characters interact very closely with nature, for example by cultivating land in innovative and responsible ways (Brigitta, 1844), by growing, collecting, and classifying flowers (Nachsommer, 1857; Zwei Schwestern, 1850), or by using natural materials to build their home and to construct their furniture with (Der Kuss von Sentze, 1866); but they are also threatened by the forces of nature, by the icy desert of glaciers (Bergkristall, 1853), by devastating hail (Katzensilber, 1853) or thunderstorms (Kalkstein, 1853), or by destructive fire (Katzensilber). It may not come as a surprise that the most intimate companions of nature are Stifter’s mavericks and loners. It is they who withdraw from society to live in the woods or in the countryside, who succeed in reading subtle meteorological signs or in making use of nature for their own benefit. Nature’s regular course of life promises stability: plants and animals live and behave just like their ‘ancestors’ did and conflicts between generations occur only rarely. Those who flee others find refuge and comfort in natural environments. Stifter is well known for the poetic principle of the ‘gentle law’ (sanftes Gesetz) that he proclaims in the preface of one of his collections of stories. It aligns the blowing of the wind, the rippling of

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water, the growing of grain, the surge of the sea, the turning of the seasons, the blazing of the sky, the shimmer of the stars with the ‘Kräfte, die nach dem Bestehen der gesamten Menschheit hinwirken’ (powers that help to secure the existence of humanity), that is, social qualities like love, affection, reliability, and responsibility.2 In the interaction of individual characters with their natural environment, Stifter’s main topics meet quite obviously on the level of the storyline. I would like to show, referring to Stifter’s The Kiss of Sentze, that this close diegetic involvement with nature may also surpass analogies of the more obvious kind, creating a very fundamental equivalence of the human and the botanical sphere and a scientific biological subtext, or, as Christian Begemann puts it, ‘that Stifter’s narrative techniques – primarily, but not exclusively within the realm of nature – are themselves determined by scientific knowledge and techniques’.3 The main section of The Kiss of Sentze consists of the last part of the family chronicle of the aristocratic lineage of Sentze, written by Rupert, the last male descendant of the family. The family of Sentze, whose history dates back to the Middle Ages, resides in three houses in the forest of Lower Austria. In the course of time, the members of the family have invented certain rituals to secure their existence as a hereditary community. According to these rituals, which have also been written down as rules for the generations to come, conflicts between family members are settled by the decision of the quarrelling parties to kiss each other, thus signalling their mutual consent to live peacefully afterwards. As the brief frame narrative tells us, from such peaceful coexistence there emerges at times not only harmony and friendship but, when it so happens that a male and a female descendant kiss each other according to the rule, even love 2 3

‘Vorrede’ to Bunte Steine, in Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff., II.2, p. 10. It is Stifter’s typographic idiosyncrasy to sometimes leave out commas in enumerations. ‘[…] daß Stifters literarische Darstellungsverfahren – vor allem, aber nicht allein im Bereich der Natur – selbst weithin von Erkenntnissen und Verfahren der Naturwissenschaft bestimmt sind’. Christian Begemann, ‘Metaphysik und Empirie: Konkurrierende Naturkonzepte im Werk Adalbert Stifters’, in Lutz Danneberg and Friedrich Vollhardt (eds), Wissen in Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, Tübingen 2002, pp. 92–126: p. 92.

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and marriage, so that eventually a new generation will follow in the family line. Consequently, the first, pacifying kind of kiss came to be called ‘kiss of peace’ and the second kind, from which originated marriage, ‘kiss of love’. Rupert’s account is the final passage in the family chronicle and covers the recent past, beginning in 1846 and ending in November 1849. Stifter’s story itself was published in the year 1866 in the first issue of Die Gartenlaube für Österreich, the Austrian version of the immensely successful German magazine of the same title (I mention these dates because they will become important for the following argument). Having come of age at twenty-five, Rupert fulfils the wish of his father to pay a visit to his cousin Hiltiburg who lives with her mother and sisters in Vienna. Hiltiburg is his female counterpart, being, just like him, the last descendant of the Sentze. It is Rupert’s and Hiltiburg’s mission to get to know each other better and to consider carefully whether they want to kiss each other just peacefully, sealing a friendship that their fathers held on to before, or lovingly, thus securing the future existence of their family. After having met a few times, however, it turns out that they rather dislike each other. Rupert criticizes her pride, her magnificent and expensive dresses. He even begins to despise her.4 Turning his back on Hiltiburg and on the prospect of becoming her husband, he diverts his passions to patriotism instead and decides to join Radetzky’s campaign against the Italian insurrection.5 He declares that he wants to set out on this journey at nighttime and without farewell, to avoid ‘circumstances or trouble and emotions’.6 Just before he leaves the house in complete darkness, he unexpectedly feels a female embrace and receives a very passionate kiss on his lips. Unable to recognize the person who kissed him, he keeps the memory of this extraordinary moment during

4

5 6

Adalbert Stifter, Der Kuß von Sentze, in Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff., III.2, pp. 143–74: p. 153 (hereafter referred to as KS). All translations of this text are my own. For the historical background of the story see Frühwald’s important essay: Wolfgang Frühwald, ‘“Tu felix Austria …”. Zur Deutung von Adalbert Stifters Erzählung Der Kuß von Sentze’, VASILO 36 (1987), pp. 31–41. KS, p. 155.

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his military mission. The description of the kiss is one of the few passages where the otherwise extremely sober and unemotional style of Rupert’s account gives way to a much more agitated language, where the paratactic narration that the reader has already become used to at this point of the story is replaced by hypotaxis. Dieser Kuß war so süß und glühend, daß mein ganzes Leben dadurch erschüttert wurde. Die Gestalt wich in die Finsternis zurück, ich wußte nicht, wie mir war, und eilte auf dem Gange fort, über die Treppe hinab, durch das geöffnete Pförtchen hinaus, auf dem Wagen zur Post, auf dem Postwagen in der Richtung nach meinem Reiseziele dahin, und konnte den Kuß nicht aus dem Haupte bringen. Ich bin später bei Wachtfeuern gewesen, auf der Vorwacht in der Finsternis der Nacht, auf wüsten Lagerplätzen, in Regensturm und Sonnenbrand, in schlechten Hütten und in schönen Schlössern, und immer erinnerte ich mich des Kusses und dachte, welches der Mädchen mußte das Ungewöhnliche getan haben. Das erkannte ich, daß der Kuß ein tiefes Geheimnis sein sollte, ich forschte nicht und sagte keinem Menschen ein Wort davon. 7 (This kiss was so sweet and burning that it unsettled my whole life. The figure retreated into darkness, I was confused and rushed through the hallway, downstairs, through the little gate that I found open, with the carriage to the post office, with the post coach onward in the direction of my destination, and couldn’t get the kiss out of my head. Later I kept watch, close to the fire, I was the outpost in the darkness of night, I was at desolate camps, in rainstorms and in glowing heat, in poor huts and in beautiful castles, and always I remembered the kiss and wondered which of the girls would have done this extraordinary thing. I realized that the kiss was meant to be a profound secret. I didn’t make any inquiries and didn’t say a word to anybody.)

After his return home, Rupert seeks out Hiltiburg’s father Walchon who lives reclusively in the woods and pursues his ‘Lieblingswissenschaft’ (favourite science), the study of mosses.8 Walchon represents a typical Stifter character: he lives a solitary life according to rules and regularity, embedded in a natural environment. He spends much of his time collecting and classifying the various species of mosses that can be found in the mountain forest. 7 8

KS, pp. 155–6. KS, p. 147.

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It has already been noted that there is a close analogy between the family system of the Sentze and the biological concept of classification. Birgit Ehlbeck states that there is a link between bryology and genealogy, that is, between the science of mosses and the kinship system of the Sentze family. She identifies the double meaning of the term ‘family’ as one of the points of convergence and indicates more narrative details.9 Furthermore, Rupert’s father uses figurative language taken from botany to describe the family history, for example, when he says: ‘[S]o sind nun unsere zwei Kinder die letzten des Stammes; wenn es doch wieder würde wie damals, und noch einmal eine Blüte emporkeimte’ (Now our two children are the last ones of our family tree. If only things would be as they were then and a new bloom might bud.).10 Of course, figurative vocabulary referring to plants is widespread in narrative prose, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the parallel between human family genealogy and botanical classification that informs the text turns such a word choice into much more than mere poetical illustration. During his stay in the house of Walchon, Rupert also tries his hand at collecting mosses and his awakened interest in bryology brings him closer to his host. ‘So war nun ein Band zwischen uns gefunden’ (now a tie between us had been found),11 he informs the reader, emphasizing the importance of the activity of botanizing for the cohesion of the family. When Hiltiburg arrives and, in contrast to her former conduct in Vienna, adopts the simple and modest lifestyle of the two men, he begins to teach her what he has learned. The preoccupation with mosses thus becomes a symbol for a frugal life and for a commitment to the family. It is an initiation into the necessity, felt by the Sentze fathers, to show loyalty to their own kind.12 The final part of the story builds up to the act of kissing. Because their acquaintance did not prove as promising as their fathers had hoped,

9 10 11 12

Birgit Ehlbeck, Denken wie der Wald: Zur poetologischen Funktionalisierung des Empirismus in den Romanen und Erzählungen Adalbert Stifters und Wilhelm Raabes, Bodenheim 1998, p. 142. KS, p. 147. KS, p. 166. See Ehlbeck, Denken wie der Wald, p. 143.

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Walchon begs Hiltiburg and Rupert to give each other the kiss of peace as the sign of their consent not to do any harm to one another. They agree and begin to do what the family tradition requires at this point. They spend three days praying, reading, and contemplating the oath of the kiss of Sentze, separated from each other. On the morning of the fourth day, they carry out the ritual ‘ohne einen einzigen Zeugen, als Gott’ (with no witness other than God).13 The passage describing the kiss is remarkable because it is syntactically extremely reduced. It is an extreme example of Stifter’s late prose style in which short, simple, and repetitive sentences abound and which is largely free from psychological introspection. Such paratactical language must surely be interpreted as matching the fictional purpose of the text, the bulk of which forms part of the family chronicle of the Sentze. As such, it is nothing more than a written and factual record of the past. With regard to the affective and psychological content of the story, however, the stylistic sobriety may also be Rupert’s narrative and linguistic antidote to the memory of Hiltiburg’s glamorous outfits and narcissistic behaviour that he creates with his report.14 In the case of the decisive kissing scene, this stylistic minimalism creates a tension that perfectly captures the ambivalence of the two kinds of kiss, with an erotic passion always lurking behind the family politics of the mere ritual: Am Morgen des vierten kleidete ich mich festlich und ging in den Saal. Er war noch leer. Gleich darauf trat Hiltiburg herein. Sie war wieder in Linnen gekleidet, aber in weißes, und hatte keinen Hut auf dem Haupte. Ich ging ihr entgegen, und

13 14

KS, p. 169. An analogous line of argument leads to Frühwald’s convincing hypotheses that Stifter’s late and well-ordered style, as displayed paradigmatically in Der Kuß von Sentze, is a reaction to an Austrian society in political and cultural disorder after the revolutions and at the outset of the conflict between Prussia and Austria in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. See Frühwald, ‘Tu felix Austria …’. See also Werner Michler, ‘Adalbert Stifter und die Ordnungen der Gattung: Generische “Veredelung” als Arbeit am Habitus’, in Alfred Doppler et al. (eds), Stifter und Stifterforschung im 21. Jahrhundert: Biographie – Wissenschaft – Poetik, Berlin 2007, pp. 183–99. Michler suggests that not only Stifter’s style but also his preoccupation with biological classifications is a sign of his deep dissatisfaction with the political upheavals that he witnessed.

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Michael Eggers wir grüßten uns stumm. Dann blieben wir einen Augenblick stehen, dann trat ich in der Mitte des Saales zu ihr, und sagte: ‘Hiltiburg, hast du die Schriften gelesen?’ ‘Ich habe sie gelesen’, antwortete sie. ‘Ich habe sie auch gelesen’, sagte ich. Dann sprach ich wieder: ‘Weißt du das Wort?’ ‘Ich weiß es’, antwortete sie. ‘Ich weiß es auch’, sagte ich. Dann fragte ich: ‘Soll ich das Wort sprechen?’ ‘Sprich es’, antwortete sie. Sie stand da, da sie dieses sagte, vor mir und hatte ihre beiden Arme an den Körper nieder hängen. Ich legte meine Hände auf ihre Schultern und sagte leise: ‘Hiltiburg, mit Gott.’ ‘Rupert, mit Gott’, antwortete sie noch leiser. Darauf neigte ich mein Angesicht gegen das ihrige, sie neigte das ihrige gegen mich, und wir drückten die Lippen aneinander. Da es geschehen war, rief ich: ‘Hiltiburg, ich kenne den Kuß’. Sie wendete sich plötzlich ab, ging gegen das Fenster, und blieb dort mit dem Rücken gegen mich stehen, als wollte sie in die grauen Steine hinaussehen. Ich ging hinter ihrem Rücken gegen sie, dann ging ich gegen die Tür, dann ging ich wieder gegen sie. Dann sagte ich: ‘Hiltiburg, ist das nur ein Kuß des Friedens gewesen?’ Ich hörte, daß meine Stimme zitterte, als ich die Worte sprach. Sie wendete sich um, auf den rosenroten Wangen war die Glut des Himmels, und die wundervollen Augen leuchteten wie das Licht der Sonne. ‘Rupert!’ rief sie. ‘Hiltiburg!’ rief ich. Und mit eins hatten wir uns in den Armen und faßten uns und drückten die Lippen wieder aneinander, so fest und innig, als sollten wir sie immer und ewig nicht mehr von einander trennen. Sie begann zu schluchzen, ich fühlte mein Wesen erbeben, und schluchzte auch wie in tiefster Reue.15 (On the morning of the fourth day I put on festive clothes and went into the hall. It was still empty. Not much later, Hiltiburg arrived. As before, she wore linen, this time in white, but she didn’t have a hat. I approached her and we greeted silently. Then we stood for a moment, then I stepped towards her in the middle of the hall and said: ‘Hiltiburg, have you read the scriptures?’ ‘I have read them’, she replied. ‘I have read them, too’, I said.

15

KS, pp. 170–1.

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Then I said: ‘Do you know the word?’ ‘I know it’, she said. ‘I know it, too’, I said. Then I asked: ‘Shall I speak the word?’ ‘Speak’, she said. As she said that, she stood before me with her arms hanging down at the sides of her body. I laid my hands on her shoulders and said quietly: ‘Hiltiburg, with God’. ‘Rupert, with God’, she replied, even more quietly. So I bent my face towards hers, she bent hers against mine and we pressed our lips together. As it was done, I cried: ‘Hiltiburg, I know that kiss’. Suddenly she turned away, went towards the window and stood there with her back towards me as if she wanted to gaze at the grey rock outside. I approached her, then went towards the door and then again towards her. Then I said: ‘Hiltiburg, was that only a kiss of peace?’ I heard my voice shaking when I said these words. She turned around, her rosy cheeks had the redness of the sky and her wonderful eyes glowed like sunlight. ‘Rupert!’, she cried. ‘Hiltiburg!’, I cried. At once we were in each other’s arms and held each other, and again we pressed our lips together, so tightly and intensely, as if we would never divide them anymore. She began to sob, I felt a shiver deep inside and sobbed as well, in deep remorse.)

A kiss is not just a kiss. It is a contractual act that obliges the two parties to behave in a certain manner. In a recent article, Marcus Twellmann has shown that there is a long tradition of such ritualized kissing, dating back to early Christianity. Within the first three centuries, the osculum pacis was integrated into Eucharistic liturgy as a ‘Zeichen der Versöhnung und Einheit’ (sign of reconciliation and unity). In the Middle Ages it was transferred into secular jurisdiction, came to be called osculum reconciliatorum and was performed ‘zur Beilegung von Streitigkeiten und Absicherung von Friedensabkommen’ (to settle disputes and to secure peace agreements).16 In practice and theory, regulated kisses were differentiated from sinful

16

Marcus Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie nach Adalbert Stifter: Der Kuß von Sentze’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 128 (2010), pp. 531–44: p. 531 and p. 533.

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kissing and were limited to men only.17 With the portrait of the Sentze, whose old German first names he takes from historiography, embedding the family genealogy in real Austrian history,18 Stifter extends the tradition of regulated kissing into the nineteenth century. The ambivalence he creates in the final kissing scene has been described before in medieval literature,19 so the story does not only sketch a long generational history but resumes a literary history of the motif of the kiss between ceremony and passion. In its ambiguity, it indicates a subtextual incest that seems to lurk behind the sexual liaisons within the Sentze family.20 As I want to show in what follows, what might be perceived as an ambiguous, incestual form of passion has a botanical equivalent. Hence, the novella also presents, alongside the classification of mosses, a classification of kisses and bryology as related to osculology, that is, the science of kisses. Stifter’s narrative presentation of generational, familial, and erotic relations represents his conviction of the inseparability of the human and the natural sphere as well as his belief that steadiness and regularity are at the heart of things and have to be rated higher than singular events such as the overwhelming experience of a kiss. Taking into consideration also the historical facts about bryology and plant classification, it is noteworthy that, as Martin Selge puts it, from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards the remarkable diversity of moss species was considered as one of the most difficult problems to solve for botanical systematics and taxonomy of Stifter’s time’.21 Walchon’s and

17 18

Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 532. See Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 533, n.11. Twellmann refers to the sources mentioned in Moriz Enzinger, ‘Zu Stifters Erzählung Der Kuß von Sentze’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Adalbert Stifter, Vienna 1967, pp. 255–66. More information about the provenance of the name Sentze and the family forefathers Huoch and Roudpret (see KS, p. 145) can be found in Wolfgang Beck, Huoch, Beiträge zur Namenforschung, N. F. 43 (2008), pp. 179–80. 19 Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 539. 20 Evi Fountoulakis, Die Unruhe des Gastes: Zu einer Schwellenfigur in der Moderne, Freiburg im Breisgau 2014, p. 81. 21 Martin Selge, Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft, Stuttgart 1976, p. 113. See also Ilse Jahn, ‘Biologische Fragestellungen in der Epoche der Aufklärung (18. Jahrhundert)’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien,

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Rupert’s efforts to collect these plants and put them in the right order is an example of the widespread general interest in natural history that, as early as the eighteenth century, extended way beyond the academic sphere. The philosophical, literary, and scientific (re)discovery of nature brought about a popular movement to observe, classify, and collect natural objects.22 While the two protagonists’ activities still follow this trend, they also correspond to the scientific endeavours of their time. For mosses posed a problem for natural history’s belief in systems, not only because there were so many species of them but also because they had no flowers and thus it seemed doubtful whether they had any sexual organs at all. Johannes Hedwig, who is seen as the founder of modern bryology, describes the problem that he sets out to solve as follows: because Carl Linnaeus ‘had based his whole system on copulation and its instruments’, it was necessary, in order to carry out a more detailed classification of mosses, to discover ‘their genitals, their seeds and, as in all other plants, the reproduction process to be

Methoden, Institutionen, Kurzbiographien, Jena 1982, pp.  231–73: pp.  243–4; and Twellmann: ‘Wohl nie sind so viel Veröffentlichungen zur Moosflora und Moosvegetation erschienen wie in dem Jahrzehnt von 1860 bis 1870’: Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 540. 22 Nicholas Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences, Oxford 1991, p. 16. Referring to the article ‘histoire naturelle’ in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Jardine mentions the striking ‘extent of popular interest in natural history. Throughout the century, not only Paris, but the whole of Europe, was swept by a series of collectors’ crazes – for “formed stones”, for pickled monstrosities, for stuffed birds, for pinned insects, for shells, for aquatint miniatures and spectacular folios illustrating natural curiosities. There was an extensive market in exotic specimens, complete with regular auctions, professional collectors, dealers and speculators and spectacular booms and slumps. In its emphasis on study in the wild and on the benefits to body and mind of natural history, the article also reflects the new responsiveness of the period to the sights, sounds and odours of untrained nature’. See also Michler, ‘Adalbert Stifter und die Ordnungen der Gattung’, p. 195: ‘[E]s wird selten so enthusiastisch botanisiert, gesammelt, geordnet, klassifiziert wie in dieser Epoche; Stifters Sammel-, Identifikations- und Züchtungsleidenschaft hinsichtlich Rosen, Kakteen und anderem mehr wird vor diesem Hintergrund weniger idiosynkratisch erscheinen’.

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carried out with it’.23 In his Genera plantarum (1737), Linnaeus had classified all plants according to the number and position of their reproductive organs, as they could be discerned in the flower, into twenty-four classes. This, however, could not be done for lower and flowerless plants like ferns, fungi, or mosses, simply because they did not display any such organs and it was unknown how they procreated. Therefore, Linnaeus resorted to inventing a twenty-fourth and final class of plants and called them cryptogamia or cryptogams.24 The word is composed from the Greek κρυπτός, kryptos, ‘hidden’, and γαμέω, gameein, ‘to marry’, and it means, literally, to marry in hiding, so cryptogamia are those plants that, in Hedwig’s words, ‘sich gleichsam im verborgenen begatten’ (copulate, as it were, in secrecy).25 While Linnaeus himself could not identify their sexual organs and reproductive process, he dealt with the problem by distinguishing them from phanerogamic flowering plants that pollinate observably. Taxonomists put considerable effort and imaginative energy into investigating the classificatory problems posed by the class of cryptogamic plants, whose seemingly middle position between plants and animals seemed mysterious.26 Hedwig,

23

‘[…] sein ganzes System auf die Begattung und die dazu gehörigen Werkzeuge errichtet hatte’, ‘ihre Geschlechtstheile, ihren Saamen, und aus diesen, wie bey den andern Gewächsen, zu erfolgende Fortpflanzung’. Johannes Hedwig, ‘Vorläufige Anzeige meiner Beobachtungen von den wahren Geschlechtstheilen der Moose und ihrer Fortpflanzung durch Samen’, in Sammlung seiner zerstreuten Abhandlungen und Beobachtungen über botanisch-ökonomische Gegenstände: Erstes Bändchen mit fünf illuminirten Kupfertafeln, Leipzig 1793 [1779], pp. 1–23: p. 2. 24 Carl Linnaeus, Caroli Linnaei Genera Plantarum Eorumque Characteres Naturales Secundum, Numerum, Figuram, Situm, et Proportionem Omnium fructificationis Partium, Leiden 1737, p. 320. 25 Hedwig, ‘Vorläufige Anzeige’, p. 2. 26 Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, Baltimore, MD 2012, pp. 32–6. Kelley argues that organisms like cryptogams, which defy neatly designed botanical systems, are a challenge not only to botanists but also animate the intellectual and artistic imagination: ‘botany is the cultural imaginary of romantic nature’ (p. 11). Analysing the Romantic fascination with plants, Robert Mitchell also exploits the imaginary potential of the term in his chapter ‘Cryptogamia’: see Mitchell, Experimental life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature, Baltimore, MD 2013, pp. 190–217.

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a true follower of Linnaeus, was the first to discover the sexual organs of mosses. In 1779 he sketched his discovery in a short essay and announced a more detailed and reliable description that followed three years later in a monograph.27 When, in The Kiss of Sentze, Walchon mentions books about moss classification that he owns and makes use of,28 we can imagine that he refers to books like these. The analogy between the human and the botanical family system in Stifter’s tale turns out to be a structure that informs the text, including the central kissing plot. It is not by chance that Walchon chooses to collect and study mosses, of all plants. It is a long time before Rupert knows who kissed him in the dark and it seems that he and Hiltiburg need a long time to find out about their passionate feelings towards each other. Their ‘cryptogamic’ passion, too, remains latent for some time and when Rupert recognizes the kiss it becomes the solution to the generational problem of the Sentze family, just as it took a long time for the sexuality of mosses to be discovered which, in its turn, turned out to be the key to the problem of moss classification. There is, however, another correspondence between bryology and Stifter’s text. Many biologists had doubts about the sexual reproduction of plants until the mid-nineteenth century.29 There were competing theories claiming that they propagate either asexually or sexually, and despite Hedwig’s discoveries moss belonged to those plants which were persistently regarded as asexual.30 It took another discovery that decided this issue in a seemingly diplomatic way: German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister managed to compare the reproduction of ferns and mosses in much more detail than had been possible before and demonstrated the law that governs the whole process: the alternation of generations. According to this law, generations that reproduce sexually and those that do not alternate at

Johannes Hedwig, Fundamentum historiae naturalis muscorum frondosorum, Leipzig 1782. See Hedwig, ‘Vorläufige Anzeige’, p. 1. 28 KS, p. 165. 29 Vera Eisnerova, ‘Botanische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie, pp. 314–15. 30 Eisnerova, ‘Botanische Disziplinen’, p. 305. 27

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regular intervals. The article about Hofmeister in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie summarizes the discovery in 1880 as follows: The development process of a great number of incidentally very different plant organisms […] is governed by a common basic law: that of the alternation of generations. Everywhere we can see two quite different generations, an asexual and a sexual one, following each other, while despite all analogies there is a difference in appearance to be seen that separates the above mentioned groups of plants into just as many individual types.31

The law itself was not new to the scientific community. It was known to apply to organisms that were considered as lower animals, like algae or jellyfish, but had not been observed in plants before. Interestingly, it was a literary author who first discovered the alternation of generations: the Romantic poet Adelbert von Chamisso, author of the famous novella Peter Schlemihl and at the same time a successful botanist, observed alternating generational patterns in salps, small gelatinous marine animals, in 1815.32 His explanations, published in a monograph in 1819, were much contested and controversies ensued as to how his findings were to be interpreted.33 As such, the phenomenon itself was already known when Hofmeister successfully traced it in moss and fern in his landmark publication of 1851.34 This 31

‘Den Entwickelungsprozeß einer großen Reihe im übrigen höchst verschiedener pflanzlicher Organismen […] beherrscht ein gemeinsames Grundgesetz: das des Generationswechsels. Ueberall sehen wir zwei durchaus verschiedene Generationen, eine ungeschlechtliche und eine geschlechtliche, im Wechsel mit einander auftreten, während doch zugleich, trotz aller Analogien unter einander, eine Verschiedenheit der Ausbildung sich hierbei offenbart, welche die oben genannten Formenkreise von Gewächsen als ebensoviele individuelle Typen von einander scheidet’. Ernst Wunschmann, ‘Hofmeister, Wilhelm’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. Historische Commission bei der
Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Leipzig 1875–1912, XII, pp. 644–8: p. 646. 32 Adelbert von Chamisso, De Salpa, Berlin 1819. 33 Armin Geus, ‘Zoologische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie, pp. 340–2; Armin Geus, ‘Der Generationswechsel: Die Geschichte eines biologischen Problems’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 7 (1972), pp. 159–73. 34 Wilhelm Hofmeister, Vergleichende Untersuchung der Keimung, Entfaltung und Fruchtbildung höherer Kryptogamen (Moose, Farn, Equisetaceen, Rhizocarpeen und

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verification was of immense biological significance, because it paved the way for a theory of evolution: suddenly, looking at the reproduction process, a transition could be made from water to land and it was possible to see an ontogenetic connection between algae, lower land plants like moss or fern, and seed plants like conifers. Botanist Julius Sachs, who was mentored by Hofmeister, described the importance of the discovery in 1875 as follows: Alternation of generations, lately shown to exist though in quite different forms in the animal kingdom, proved to be the highest law of development, and to reign according to a simple scheme throughout the whole long series of these extremely different plants. […] The reader of Hofmeister’s Vergleichende Untersuchungen was presented with a picture of genetic affinity between Cryptogams and Phanerogams, which could not be reconciled with the then reigning belief in the constancy of species. […] That which Häckel, after the appearance of Darwin’s book, called the phylogenetic method, Hofmeister had long before actually carried out, and with magnificent success. When Darwin’s theory was given to the world eight years after Hofmeister’s investigations, the relations of affinity between the great divisions of the vegetable kingdom were so well established and so patent that the theory of descent had only to accept what genetic morphology had actually brought to view.35

The correspondence between the social and the biological, or rather, bryological sphere that I have tried to demonstrate is apparent with regard to the kissing act, too. The alternation of asexual and sexual generations is the biological pattern that matches the two kinds of kisses of Sentze, ‘die zwei Arten’ (‘Art’ can be translated as species here),36 the kiss of peace and the kiss of love. Walchon’s semi-scientific study of mosses is an obvious link of the two spheres in the storyline. Taking into consideration pertinent biological knowledge of the time of the publication of the text helps to

35

36

Lycopodiaceen) und der Samenbildung der Coniferen, Leipzig 1851. For a detailed scientific history of the alternation of generations, see John Farley, Gametes and Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction 1750–1914, Baltimore, MD 1982, pp. 82–109. Farley ranks Hofmeister’s book ‘among the world’s greatest scientific masterpieces’. Julius Sachs, History of Botany (1530–1860), trans. Henry E. F. Garnsey, 2nd impression, Oxford 1906, pp. 200–2. German: Geschichte der Botanik vom 16. Jahrhundert bis 1860, Munich 1875, p. 217. A condensed explanation is presented in Paul A. Keddy, Plants and Vegetation: Origins, Processes, Consequences, Cambridge 2007, pp. 415–18. KS, p. 144f.

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identify Stifter’s generation story as being modelled on methods of botanical reproduction, or at least as telling a tale that assimilates human generational patterns to those of plants.37 We can only speculate whether Stifter, who, as a teacher of natural history, had profound biological knowledge,38 knew of the recent scientific findings concerning the alteration of generations. Even if he had written his story in complete ignorance of Chamisso’s and Hofmeister’s discoveries, the analogy of moss reproduction and the kissing regulations of the Sentze is nonetheless apparent. In the text, human history, exemplified by the house of Sentze, is deeply integrated into nature. Stifter’s social genealogy follows the laws of organic reproduction in plants as they were discovered in science shortly before. It would be wrong, therefore, to describe the use of botanical vocabulary and knowledge in the tale as merely metaphorical. In this case, the natural and the social sphere simply cannot be separated. At the same time, well-ordered relations between generations are literally of vital importance both for the maintenance of the patrilineal heritage of the Sentze and for the natural reproduction of mosses. The close association between the social and the biological sphere inscribed in the story also correlates with the history of the concept of generations which, according to Parnes, enters biological and social scientific thinking simultaneously in the first decades of the nineteenth century.39 Stifter’s tale demonstrates how literature can amalgamate scientific and narrative discourses without letting one determine the other. Biology may be something like a ‘deep structure’ of fictional narrative here, but it remains implicit, will only be noticed by readers with the respective knowledge and – most importantly – never actually causes the events of the story. At the end of the text, ‘evolution’ seems to run its course. Hiltiburg and Rupert happily marry and ‘es scheint auch von ihnen die Folge ausgehen zu wollen’ (a succession seems set to proceed from them [or from

37 38 39

See Fountoulakis, Die Unruhe des Gastes, p. 82. See Begemann, ‘Metaphysik und Empirie’, pp. 93–106, for Stifter’s education and reading in natural history, which was substantial if outdated in some respects. Ohad Parnes, ‘Generationswechsel – eine Figur zwischen Literatur und Mikroskopie’, in Bernhard J. Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel (eds), ‘fülle der combination’: Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Munich 2005, pp. 127–42: p. 128.

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their union]) just as it was before, when two ancient members of the lineage first exchanged the kiss of love. When the two protagonists finally give each other the wedding kiss, Rupert’s father exclaims: ‘Das ist ein Liebeskuß der Palsentze, möge nie mehr in dem Geschlechte noth sein, daß ein Friedenskuß gegeben werde’ (This is the kiss of love of the Palsentze. May the Sentze never again be in need to give the kiss of peace).40 The ritualized kiss that was necessary to secure peace and harmony has lost its reason to exist and, should this wish be fulfilled, may become extinct, with the kiss of love having proved much more successful for the conservation of the Sentze species.

Bibliography Beck, Wolfgang, Huoch: Beiträge zur Namenforschung, N. F. 43 (2008), pp. 179–80. Begemann, Christian, ‘Metaphysik und Empirie: Konkurrierende Naturkonzepte im Werk Adalbert Stifters’, in Lutz Danneberg and Friedrich Vollhardt (eds), Wissen in Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, Tübingen 2002, pp. 92–126. Chamisso, Adelbert von, De Salpa, Berlin 1819. Ehlbeck, Birgit, Denken wie der Wald: Zur poetologischen Funktionalisierung des Empirismus in den Romanen und Erzählungen Adalbert Stifters und Wilhelm Raabes, Bodenheim 1998. Eisnerova, Vera, ‘Botanische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien, Methoden, Institutionen, Kurzbiographien, Jena 1982, pp. 302–23. Enzinger, Moriz, ‘Zu Stifters Erzählung Der Kuß von Sentze’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Adalbert Stifter, Vienna 1967, pp. 255–66. Farley, John, Gametes and Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction 1750–1914. Baltimore, MD 1982. Fountoulakis, Evi, Die Unruhe des Gastes: Zu einer Schwellenfigur in der Moderne, Freiburg im Breisgau 2014. Frühwald, Wolfgang, ‘“Tu felix Austria …”: Zur Deutung von Adalbert Stifters Erzählung Der Kuß von Sentze’, VASILO 36 (1987), pp. 31–41.

40 KS, p. 174.

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Geus, Armin, ‘Der Generationswechsel: Die Geschichte eines biologischen Problems’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 7 (1972), pp. 159–173. ‘Zoologische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien, Methoden, Institutionen, Kurzbiographien, Jena 1982, pp. 324–55. Hedwig, Johannes, Fundamentum historiae naturalis muscorum frondosorum, Leipzig 1782. ‘Vorläufige Anzeige meiner Beobachtungen von den wahren Geschlechtstheilen der Moose und ihrer Fortpflanzung durch Samen’, in Sammlung seiner zerstreuten Abhandlungen und Beobachtungen über botanisch-ökonomische Gegenstände: Erstes Bändchen mit fünf illuminirten Kupfertafeln, Leipzig 1793 [1779], pp. 1–23. Hofmeister, Wilhelm, Vergleichende Untersuchung der Keimung, Entfaltung und Fruchtbildung höherer Kryptogamen (Moose, Farn, Equisetaceen, Rhizocarpeen und Lycopodiaceen) und der Samenbildung der Coniferen, Leipzig 1851. Jahn, Ilse, ‘Biologische Fragestellungen in der Epoche der Aufklärung (18. Jahrhundert)’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien, Methoden, Institutionen, Kurzbiographien, Jena 1982, pp. 231–73. Jardine, Nicholas, The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences, Oxford 1991. Keddy, Paul A., Plants and Vegetation: Origins, Processes, Consequences, Cambridge 2007. Kelley, Theresa M., Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, Baltimore, MD 2012. Linnaeus, Carl, Caroli Linnaei Genera Plantarum Eorumque Characteres Naturales Secundum, Numerum, Figuram, Situm, et Proportionem Omnium fructificationis Partium, Leiden 1737. Michler, Werner, ‘Adalbert Stifter und die Ordnungen der Gattung: Generische “Veredelung” als Arbeit am Habitus’, in Alfred Doppler, Hartmut Laufhütte, Johannes John, and Johann Lachinger (eds), Stifter und Stifterforschung im 21. Jahrhundert: Biographie – Wissenschaft – Poetik, Berlin 2007, pp. 183–99. Mitchell, Robert, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature, Baltimore, MD 2013. Parnes, Ohad, ‘Generationswechsel – eine Figur zwischen Literatur und Mikroskopie’, in Bernhard J. Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel (eds), ‘fülle der combination’: Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Munich 2005, pp. 127–42. Ulrike Vedder, and Stefan Willer, Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008. Sachs, Julius, Geschichte der Botanik vom 16. Jahrhundert bis 1860, Munich 1875. History of Botany (1530–1860), trans. Henry E. F. Garnsey, 2nd impression, Oxford 1906.

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Selge, Martin, Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft, Stuttgart 1976. Stifter, Adalbert, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff. Twellmann, Marcus, ‘Literarische Osculologie nach Adalbert Stifter: Der Kuß von Sentze’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 128 (2010), pp. 531–44. Wunschmann, Ernst, ‘Hofmeister, Wilhelm’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. Historische Commission bei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Leipzig 1875–1912, XII, pp. 644–8.

Charlotte Woodford

7 Biology, Desire, and a Longing for Heimat in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Novel Das Haus (1921) and Her Essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (1900)

abstract The essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Love, 1900) by the prominent German intellectual, Lou Andreas-Salomé, draws on ideas on the evolution of sexual reproduction from Wilhelm Bölsche’s Love-Life in Nature. The question of gender identity, for Andreas-Salomé, is thus grounded in the biological, yet her writings nevertheless show the effect of the biological on the psyche to be far from straightforward. Andreas-Salomé’s essay conceptualizes feminine subjectivity as firmly connected to corporeality and she places a particular emphasis on women’s maternal role. Here, the essay will be read against her novel Das Haus (The House, 1921), which also explores the psychic power of sexual desire. In Das Haus, Andreas-Salomé engages from a psychoanalytic perspective with the role of the feminine as representative of the Heimat, and draws attention to the ambivalent relationship between the erotic power of the foreign and a primal longing for homecoming.

It is small wonder that the title of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Love, 1900) alludes to erotic desire as a problem, given the taboos on the expression of female sexuality around 1900.1 But for Andreas-Salomé, sexuality is also a problem in the sense of an enigma, a complex combination of the body’s psychic 1

Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, in Die Erotik: Vier Aufsätze, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Munich 1979, pp. 47–73. All page references are taken from this edition. First publ. in Neue deutsche Rundschau 11 (1900), pp. 1009–27.

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and physical responses. Furthermore, her works address the problem of the erotic life of the feminine subject as still needing to be written at a time when the prevailing discourses were dominated by male perspectives. The essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ draws on biological discourses of the evolution of sexual reproduction and gives women’s maternal role a special status, while also framing the erotic as emancipatory, even if it does not result in reproduction. Andreas-Salomé would later become one of the first female psychoanalysts, and is one of the first women writers to theorize so extensively the psychic effect of sexual desire and also the maternal bond. She is, moreover, an early voice in women’s attempts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to conceptualize the relationship between feminine subjectivity and corporeality.2 For Andreas-Salomé, it was essential to root theoretical writing on the psyche in a consideration of the materiality of the female body, and she rejected the body-mind dualism of earlier systems of philosophical thought, drawing for this among other sources on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. As Gisela Brinker-Gabler points out, Andreas-Salomé challenges ‘the alignment of maleness with psychoanalytic meaning production’.3 Her essays contribute importantly to the overwhelmingly male discipline of sexology and participate in women’s attempts around 1900 to re-claim the discourses through which their minds and bodies were written.4 Lou Andreas-Salomé’s early theoretical writings include an account of Nietzsche’s work which drew on a close personal relationship with the philosopher.5 Her essay of 1899, ‘Der Mensch als Weib: Ein Bild im Umriß’ (The Human as Woman: An Image in Outline), is an analysis of the feminine grounded in the materiality of the body, and for Brinker-Gabler it 2 3 4

5

See, for example, Elizabeth A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, IN 1994. Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé, London 2012, p. 47. See also Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860–1930, Basingstoke 2009, pp. 95–103; and Charlotte Woodford, Women, Emancipation and the German Novel: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context 1871–1910, Oxford 2014, pp. 75–88 and 93–7. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, Dresden 1894.

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questions what the era framed as ‘“objective accounts” of sexual scripts’.6 Andreas-Salomé’s essay ‘Die Erotik’ (1910), drafted in 1904, bears witness to the extensive engagement with psychoanalysis which preceded her training in 1912 with Freud, after which she practised professionally in her home town of Göttingen.7 An engagement with the psyche and with sexual identity is central to Andreas-Salomé’s fiction too. Her novel, Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts (The House: A Family Story from the End of the Last Century, 1921), also mostly written around 1904, explores not only the structures of desire between husband and wife, but also between mother and son.8 Her essay ‘Die Erotik’ suggests that these two relationships are symbolically linked. Andreas-Salomé suggests that a woman arouses in her lover the feeling ‘als ob er wieder vom Allmütterlichen umfangen würde, das ihn umfing, ehe er war’ (as if he were once again embraced by the universal motherliness which surrounded him before he existed).9 Erotic desire, as conceptualized in ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, too, is closely connected to ‘eine geheime Grundsehnsucht’ (a secret basic desire) to rediscover a lost unity with the world (‘Gedanken’, 48). Das 6 Brinker-Gabler, Image in Outline, p. 20. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib: Ein Bild im Umriß’, Neue deutsche Rundschau 10 (1899), pp. 225–43, repr. in Die Erotik, pp. 7–44. See also Nicholas Saul, ‘“Das normale Weib gehört der Zukunft”: Evolutionism and the New Woman in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Frieda von Bülow and Lou Andreas-Salomé’, German Life and Letters 67 (2014), pp. 555–73. 7 Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Die Erotik’, first published in Die Gesellschaft: Sammlung sozialpsychologischer Monographien 33, ed. Martin Buber, Frankfurt am Main 1910. All quotations taken from ‘Die Erotik’, in Die Erotik, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, pp. 85–145. See also In der Schule bei Freud: Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912/13, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Zurich 1958; Andreas-Salomé also published an influential study of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, her former lover, with whom she enjoyed a life-long friendship. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rainer Maria Rilke, Leipzig 1928. 8 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts, first published 1921, Bremen 2011, p. 16. Serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in fifty-nine parts, 22 March–2 June 1921, nos 135–254. 9 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Die Erotik’, p. 119. All translations my own. An English translation of ‘Die Erotik’ is also available: Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Erotic, trans. John Crisp, New Brunswick, NJ 2012.

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Haus, like Andreas-Salomé’s early novel Ma (1901), reveals her fascination with the idealized maternal feminine, embodied here in the mother figure, Anneliese.10 Through the figure of the self-sacrificing Anneliese and the psychological significance of the maternal bond to her adult son, Balduin, Andreas-Salomé explores not just familial ties but also longing for the home and homeland (Heimat) as a further manifestation of this longing for lost unity. The concept of Heimat grew in significance in Germany in the early twentieth century, as a point of stability in the face of rapid social change.11 Motherly figures often have a representative function in literature engaged with Heimat, and the concept of Heimat is itself strongly gendered. According to the Staatslexikon from 1927, ‘Heimat ist mütterlich, ist Lebenschoß’ (Heimat is motherly, is the womb).12 In the equivalence made in that quotation between longing for the mother and for the home, the image of the womb is a telling one: the concept of Heimat expresses longing for lost unity through the desire for a home which can no longer be recaptured: ‘Man kann sie Heimat nennen, leben aber kann man nicht mehr darin’ (you can call it your home, but you can no longer live there, Das Haus, 85). Similarly, in the maternal bond is an unconscious longing to recreate the lost union with the mother. As Lou Andreas-Salomé suggests: ‘Unser erstes Erlebnis ist, bemerkenswerter Weise, ein Entschwund’ (our first experience, remarkably, is of irrevocable disappearance).13 Desire thus derives an unconscious component from a bodily memory of unity. In Andreas-Salomé’s theoretical writings, a focus on the emancipatory nature of the erotic draws, among other sources, on Nietzsche’s polemical 10 See Muriel Cormican, Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating Identity, Rochester, NY 2009, pp. 45–68; and Muriel Cormican, ‘Authority and Resistance: Women in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus’, Women in German Yearbook 14 (1998), pp. 127–42. 11 See Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat — A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990, Oxford 2000, p. 2. 12 ‘Heimat’, Staatslexikon, 5th edn, ed. Görres-Gesellschaft, Freiburg 1926–32, 5 vols, 2, 57, cited by Gisela Ecker (ed.), Kein Land in Sicht: Heimat — weiblich?, Munich 1997, p. 14. 13 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick: Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen, 2nd rev. edn., ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 9.

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overturning of conventional morality and society’s repression of the sexual. Around 1900, other women intellectuals, for example, Ellen Key and Helene Stöcker, formulated critiques of conventional morality with regard to women’s maternal role, emphasizing the vitality which accompanied sexual desire and using this to call for a new sexual ethic, including challenging social taboos on extra-marital pregnancy.14 Andreas-Salomé’s celebration of the transformative power of the erotic in her essays ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ and ‘Die Erotik’ has a latent political dimension, yet she does not seek primarily to politicize desire so much as to conceptualize it. Andreas-Salomé emphasizes the productive role of sexual desire in overcoming the dualism of mind and body and affecting a rejuvenating wholeness of self; she writes that the sexual act is one ‘in dem der Liebende Körper und Seele in inniger Umschlingung in sich eins fühlt und daher jenes Gesunden, jene kraftvolle Erneuerung verspürt wie nach einem göttlichen Wunderbad’ (in which the lover feels at one with himself, with body and soul intimately entwined, and so senses a powerful renewal as if from being immersed in divine miracle waters‚ ‘Gedanken’, 57–8). While the reproductive potential of sexuality shows it to be a vital physical force, its productive potential on a psychic level is important as a source of new energy and creativity (‘Gedanken’, 52). A relationship based on erotic desire, she asserts, should by no means be seen as a meaner or lower form of relationship to one based on spiritual or intellectual closeness. There is also a covert political potential, especially for the woman reader, in her praise of the abundant power and vitality of a sexual relationship that is intense but short-lived. Much later, reflecting on the end of her sexual relationship with Rainer Maria Rilke, she included in her memoirs a sentence she had found in an old diary: ‘Ich bin Erinnerungen treu für immer; Menschen werde ich es niemals sein’ (I am faithful to memories for ever, but I will never be faithful to people).15

14 For example, Ellen Key, ‘Weibliche Sittlichkeit’, Dokumente der Frau 1:7 (1899), pp. 171–84; Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes, Berlin 1902; and Helene Stöcker, ‘Zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik’, Mutterschutz 1 (1905), pp. 3–12. 15 Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 147.

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In her essays on the erotic, biological images that act as a stimulus for Andreas-Salomé’s thought are drawn from the evolutionary narrative Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe (Love-Life in Nature: The Story of the Evolution of Love, 1898–1902) by her friend Wilhelm Bölsche, an important member of the Friedrichshagen poets’ circle in Berlin, whose science writing for the general reader reached a wide public.16 The three-volume work, indebted to the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, is a hybrid of science writing and literature, a fin-de-siècle work of social emancipation which emphasizes the erotic as a universal principle in nature and suggests that human erotic desire replicates the same behaviour as the single-cell organisms from which all life originated.17 In 1898, Andreas-Salomé enthusiastically reviewed the first volume of Bölsche’s Liebesleben.18 She highlights the equivalence Bölsche makes between human sexuality and the behaviour of the micro-organisms whose discovery in the late nineteenth century added new impetus to the evolutionary narrative: ‘Im Liebesaufruhr des Menschen […] läuft es etwa noch analog dem ab, was sich im uralten Reich der kleinen Einzeller begiebt, wenn diese ohne Weiteres ganz zu verschmelzen streben’ (In the commotion of human love […] what happens is analogous to that which takes place in the primal realm of single-cell organisms when these readily seek to fuse completely with another).19 Moreover, in Das Liebesleben in der Natur, Bölsche evokes an emotive link between the protozoa of the earliest life forms and the readers in the present: ‘mit allen diesen Wesen, die du waren und doch nicht du vor Äonen der Zeit, hängst du zusammen 16

17

18 19

Wilhelm Bölsche, Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe, 3 vols, Florence and Leipzig 1898–1902, I, p. 6. See Nicholas Saul, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture, 1890–1914’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, London 2014, pp. 46–77. On Bölsche and the bacillus imagery, see Martina King, ‘Anarchist and Aphrodite: On the Literary History of Germs’, in Thomas Rütten and Martina King (eds), Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin 2013, pp. 101–30, see especially pp. 112–14 (and Liebesleben, I, pp. 130–40). Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Physische Liebe’, Die Zukunft 25 (1898), pp. 218–22: p. 218. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Physische Liebe’, p. 221.

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durch die ungeheure Weltenkraft der Liebe, der Zeugung, des ewigen Gebärens und Werdens’ (you are connected with all these beings who were you and yet not you before all the ages of time, through the enormous strength of the world’s love, of generation, of eternal reproduction and becoming).20 Bölsche’s Liebesleben offers a way of making sense of the human through a world-view which emphasizes the natural world and the human mind as one and as comprised of the same matter.21 In ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, and ‘Die Erotik’, Andreas-Salomé takes up some of Bölsche’s imagery, in particular the theme of the ‘Liebesleben der Tiere’ (love life of animals) as analogous to human sexuality (‘Gedanken’, 56). She suggests that the human experience of sexual desire replicates unconsciously the longing to recreate the complete physical fusion of the micro-organisms which form our primitive ancestors: Blicken wir in das Reich niederster Lebewesen hinab, so finden wir, daß die kleinen Amöben sich begatten und fortpflanzen, indem sie sich paarweise ineinanderdrücken, absolut zu einem Lebewesen verschmelzen und dieses wiederum in Kinder-Amöben zerfallen lassen. (‘Gedanken’, 75–6) (When we look down on the realm of the lowest organisms we find that the small amoebae unite and reproduce by pressing themselves against each other in pairs and fusing absolutely to make a single life form before allowing this to split up into children-amoebae.)

She emphasizes that human consciousness and the human libido are descended from a consciousness that is attributed to the most primitive life forms and imprinted with a physiological memory of a primal harmony.22 As Monika Fick and Wolfgang Riedel have noted, Andreas-Salomé, like Bölsche, argues that body and psyche are formed of the same substance, a monist position which undermines the dualism of the Kantian

20 Bölsche, Liebesleben, I, p. 6. 21 See Nicholas Saul, ‘Foundations and Oceans: Monistic Religion and Literature in Haeckel and Bölsche’, in Ritchie Robertson and Manfred Engel (eds), Kafka, Religion and Modernity, Würzburg 2014, pp. 55–70. 22 Brinker-Gabler refers to such a memory as ‘bio-psychic’, in Image in Outline, p. 70.

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philosophical tradition.23 An emphasis on the materiality of the evolution of the psyche reinforces Andreas-Salomé’s argument for the interconnectedness of mind and body. In her review of Das Liebesleben in der Natur, Andreas-Salomé points out: ‘Der Geist ist nur ein kleiner, armer Schuljunge an der Hand seines großen, sehr weisen Lehrers, des Körperlichen. Erst kürzlich, erst gestern, ward er geboren’ (the mind is but a poor little school boy holding the hand of his great and very wise teacher, the body. He was born but a short time ago, only yesterday).24 Moreover, in ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, Andreas-Salomé describes the birth of the psychic ‘aus dem großen, allumfassenden Mutterleibe des Physischen’ (out of the great, all-encompassing body of the mother which is the physical self ). Nevertheless, this imagery shows the pervasive nature of the traditional gendering of the mind as masculine and the body as feminine, a metaphor which arguably informs the image of the mind as a small schoolboy, too. For modern feminist critics these gendered associations need to be overcome as a prerequisite for any emancipatory re-evaluation of feminine bodily processes.25 Andreas-Salomé suggests that a desire for fusion with the Other acts out in the erotic an unconscious desire for homecoming or Heimat, a manifestation of a longing for the primal union with the mother, and symbolic of a longing for transcendent wholeness. For Andreas-Salomé the physiological mother-child relationship represents psychoanalytically a primal community of subject and world, resembling the oceanic harmony offered by a monist oneness with all organic nature.26 In ‘Gedanken über Saul, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture’, pp. 46–9; Monika Fick, Sinnenwelt und Weltseele: Der psychophysiche Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende, Tübingen 1993, pp. 130–3; Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’, pp. 279–80; see also Peter Sprengel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1870–1900, IX: Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Jahrhundertwende, Munich 1998, I, p. 83. 24 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Physische Liebe’, p. 222. 25 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, IN 1994, pp. 3–4. See also Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Durham, NC and London 2011. 26 Wolfgang Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Berlin 1996, pp. 280–1. 23

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das Liebesproblem’ and the novel Das Haus, Andreas-Salomé suggests that this symbiotic closeness with the mother forms the archetype for the subject’s future relationships with the world. Andreas-Salomé sensitively explores the Oedipal dimensions of the close relationship which ensues between mother and son in Das Haus; Anneliese’s love for her son Balduin engenders an emotional estrangement from her husband, while Balduin’s love for her takes on a quasi-erotic dimension, as indicated, for example, by the emotional intensity of the language of the following passage: ‘Meine liebe Mutter!’, sagte er sich selber vor, fast rein worthaft, bis das Wort ihn fasste, sich ihm vertiefte zu einer unendlichen Süße und Bedeutung – bis es wie brausende Dichtung, die er noch nie ausgeschöpft, ihm wieder und wieder kam: ‘Meine liebe Mutter!’ (124) (‘My dear mother!’, he whispered to himself, almost clearly worded, until the phrase took hold of him, engrossed him with an infinite sweetness and meaning – until it came back to him again and again like a thundering poetry, such that he had never brought forth before: ‘My dear mother!’)

His mother, the source of his Oedipal longing, represents the Heimat for him, and stimulates his poetic creativity by providing the stable point from which he can explore the world.27 Andreas-Salomé is also drawing on the rodina or motherland discourse of her own birthplace, Russia, in which, as Peter Blickle points out, the mother figure carries mythic associations which are ‘powerfully eroticised and incestuous’.28 In Andreas-Salomé’s novel, the libidinal longing for this primal harmony is a psychic source of Balduin’s creativity as an artist. For Andreas-Salomé, tracing the origins of consciousness back to primal, microbiological forms also offers evolutionary evidence to undermine the Kantian dualism of analysis and intuition.29 In ‘Gedanken über 27 See Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, pp. 2–3. 28 Peter Blickle, A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Rochester, NY 2002, p. 2. See also Andreas-Salomé’s later novel Ródinka: Russische Erinnerung, Jena 1923. 29 Paul Guyer, ‘Absolute Idealism and the rejection of Kantian dualism’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Idealism, Cambridge 2000, pp. 37–56.

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das Liebesproblem’, Andreas-Salomé uses the term ‘Überschwang’ to describe a psychic response to desire, a form of intuitive experience which transcends rational analysis. The mother’s love of the child, like the lover’s attraction to a sexual partner, generates ‘reiche Überschwänglichkeiten’, a rich exuberance, through which the Other, the object, is perceived in a transfigured form, as a delightful illusion (‘liebliches Blendwerk’, ‘Gedanken’, 58). Andreas-Salomé also uses the language of the uncanny to describe the relationship between mind and body: Die Liebe ist eben sowohl das physischeste wie auch das scheinbar spiritualistischeste, geistesgläubigste, was in uns spukt; sie hält sich ganz und gar an den Körper, aber an ihn ganz und gar als Symbol, als Gleichnis für den Gesamtmenschen und für alles, was sich durch die Pforte der Sinne in unsere verborgenste Seele einschleicht, um sie zu wecken. (‘Gedanken’, 81) (Love is thus not only the most physical but also the most obviously spiritualistic quality which haunts us, the most superstitious, it adheres well and truly to the body, but to the body entirely as a symbol, as a parable for the whole person and for everything which creeps into the most hidden places in the soul through the gateway of the senses in order to arouse the soul.)

This imagery of haunting emphasizes the hidden psychological dimension to the ostensibly physical experience of erotic love, reiterating the idea that the erotic is a synthesis of physical and psychic urges, the analysis of which necessitates the use of a new kind of language, in which literary symbolism can facilitate the expression of unconscious ideas and associations. In ‘Die Erotik’, this passage, repeated with only minor rephrasing (‘Die Erotik’, 106–7), is followed by the idea that in the erotic we find not merely the expression of desire for the love object but also of a longing for something which transcends the everyday: ‘allem Hohen noch, dem wir darin entgegenträumen’ (for every higher object towards which we direct our dreams, ‘Die Erotik’, 107). In Andreas-Salomé’s novel Das Haus, the capacity for intuitive experience is feminized, though it is not the sole preserve of female protagonists. The rational, scientific mindset of Frank Branhardt, the husband and doctor who dismisses the poetic imagination as ‘krankhaft’ (pathological), is contrasted with his wife, artistic son, and daughter, who have a tendency towards

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sentiment or ‘Überschwenglichkeiten’ (effusiveness). The poet Balduin’s sensibilities perhaps bear traces of Andreas-Salomé’s relationship with Rilke, since, when addressing him in her memoirs, she also writes of the ‘Überschwang Deiner Lyrik’ (the exuberance of your poetry) and ‘die Überschwenglichkeit in Deinen tagtäglich mir folgenden Briefen’ (the effusiveness of the letters which you send me every single day).30 In her novel, ‘Überschwang’, or effusive sentiment, is often the expression of a form of intuitive knowledge which serves as an attempt to break down the barriers to the Other and enter into their experience. This emphasis on the truth of intuitive knowledge, and the search for a new form of linguistic or poetic expression for it, is reminiscent of Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition, expressed in the translation from 1912 of his essay of 1903, Introduction à la métaphysique as ‘the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible’.31 As David Midgley points out, inherent in this idea is also that intuition leads ‘towards knowledge of the absolute’.32 Andrew Bowie suggests that ‘intuition […] stands for a ground of truth which is “immediate” and therefore not susceptible to further explanatory analysis of the kind which is applicable to determinate objects in the world’.33 Bergson’s writings were immensely popular in German translation.34 According to her biographer, Andreas-Salomé engaged extensively with his work in its original French during a stay in Paris in 1911.35

30 Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 140. 31 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, New York 1912, p. 7. 32 David Midgley, ‘After Materialism – Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’, in John Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism, II, Historical, Social and Political Thought, Cambridge 2013, pp. 161–85: p. 172. 33 Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory, London 1997, p. 155. See also Leonard Lawlor, ‘Intuition and Duration: An Introduction to Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics”’, in Michael R. Kelly (ed.), Bergson and Phenomenology, Basingstoke 2010, pp. 25–41. 34 See Irmgard Heidler, Der Verleger Eugen Diederichs und seine Welt (1896–1930), Wiesbaden 1998, pp. 339–46. 35 Stéphane Michaud, Lou Andreas-Salomé: L’Alliée de la vie, Paris 2000, p. 218. Andreas-Salomé also loaned Rilke Bergson’s Matière et mémoire and L’Evolution

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As Angelique Richardson argues, in the late nineteenth century ‘the love plot began to appeal as much to the biologist as to the novelist’.36 From a eugenic perspective, it seemed that ‘rationalized, family history might serve a useful purpose in improving the biological quality of future generations’.37 Richardson, in her study of eugenics discourses in late nineteenth-century English fiction, shows convincingly that notions of rational reproduction inform the romantic plots of novelists such as Sarah Grand, whose novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) emphasizes the need for women to select a mate carefully for the sake of the next generation.38 The hygiene movement in Germany also stressed the importance of reproductive health and sought to ensure the general public were aware of ‘[d]ie Notwendigkeit einer vernünftigen Zuchtwahl und der Rassenhygiene, d.h. der Hygiene der lebendigen Vererbungssubstanz, des “Idioplasmas” oder “Keimplasmas”’ (the necessity of reproduction informed by rational choice and of racial hygiene, namely the hygiene of the living hereditary substance, the ‘idioplasm’ or ‘germ plasm’).39 Parenting issues in Das Haus have a biological dimension, too. The carefully planned family of Anneliese and Frank Branhardt, parents of two student-aged children, Gitta and Balduin, is contrasted, as I have argued elsewhere, with the prolific pregnancies of their daily housekeeper, many of whose sickly offspring perish in infancy.40 Anneliese and Frank

créatrice in editions printed in 1912. See Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel, rev. edn, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 575, cf. Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 2 December 1913, p. 306; and Rilke to LAS, 9 June 1914, p. 324. I am grateful to David Midgley for drawing my attention to these references. 36 Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford 2003, p. 78. 37 Richardson, Love and Eugenics, p. 83. 38 Ibid. pp. 95–131. 39 ‘Internationale Hygieneausstellung in Dresden 1911 – Halle 55: Gruppe Rassenhygiene’, Offizieller Katalog der Internationalen Hygieneausstellung Dresden: Mai bis Oktober 1911, Berlin [1911], pp. 258–9, cited in Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Kurt Nowak, and Michael Schwartz (eds), Eugenik, Sterilisation, ‘Euthanasie’: Politische Biologie in Deutschland 1895–1945: Eine Dokumentation, Berlin 1992, pp. 10–11: p. 10. 40 Das Haus, pp. 8–10, see also Woodford, Women, Emancipation and the German Novel, p. 114.

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also turn to questions of heredity to try to understand the artistic Balduin, on the point of abandoning his studies in order to write poetry, since he resembles so little his successful father. The parents ask themselves about their son: ‘von wem hatte er etwas krankhaftes?’ (From whom did he get his sickly nature?, Das Haus, 16). Anneliese is haunted by ‘schwarze Vererbungsschatten’ (the dark ghosts of inheritance) when she considers her son’s temperament and searches in her own family papers for more information on a grandfather who suffered a mental decline (32). But letters from her grandmother reassure her in an unexpected way. Detailed diary entries, which chronicle the grandmother’s life, turn out to be written with ‘eine Einfalt und Macht, wie beabsichtigt von einem großen Dichter’ (a simplicity and a power, such as a great poet might have deliberately crafted, 32). Anneliese concludes: ‘Von Dichterblut gewesen war die Frau’ (The woman had a poet’s blood, ibid.). Delving into the secrets of family history appears to provide a forbear who shared the son’s artistic ambitions. In the light of this genetic explanation for her son’s disposition, Anneliese appears to feel that there is genealogical legitimacy for Balduin’s artistic temperament. Sigrid Weigel interprets the expression of hope for the future success of genetic heirs as a coping strategy for a secular age, a desire to overcome individual mortality through redemption in the form of successors who take forward a part of the self. She emphasizes the importance of the phantasma, or imaginary construct, of living on through a biological line,41 and points out: ‘Das Erbe ist also die herausragende Technik der Sorge um das Fort- und Nachleben des Eigenen nach dem Tode in einer säkularen Kultur’ (In a secular culture, the heir is thus the mechanism par excellence for the survival and continuation after death of what belongs to the self ).42 Yet, in Das Haus, in the light of Balduin’s surprising reluctance to continue in the rational scientific tradition of his father, Branhardt comments pessimistically on the uncontrollability of the genetic legacy, for all that parents attempt to shape the next generation with care:

41 Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kulturund Naturwissenschaften, Munich 2006, pp. 9–10. 42 Weigel, Genea-Logik, pp. 62–3.

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Charlotte Woodford In jedem neuen Menschenkind ist eben so viel Neues, Fremdes, davon unser Fleisch und Blut nicht weiß – und was doch wir selber weitergeben, mit blinden Händen, schuldlos, letzten Endes verantwortungslos. – Da ist ein Unberechenbares uns unzugänglich. Eine Schranke, errichtet zwischen den Generationen. (Das Haus, 17) (In every new human child there is so much that is new, strange, which our flesh and blood did not know – and which we nonetheless pass on ourselves, with blind hands, guilt-free, in the end without responsibility. – Inaccessible to us there is something incalculable. A barrier, set up across the generations.)

In her essay ‘Die Erotik’ (1908), Andreas-Salomé also reflects on how the idea of living on through an heir is undermined by the realization that acquired characteristics cannot be passed on, although they contribute immeasurably to human individuality: im Kinde [findet] lediglich eine Übertragung dessen [statt], was die Liebenden selber schon von den Voreltern übernommen. Der schwerste und kostbarste Erwerb, der persönlich errungene, bleibt außerhalb des Vorgangs stehen, und damit die Individualität in ihrer unwiederholbaren Ganzheit, des Lebens Lebendigstem: Verwalterin ist sie nur, eine bessere oder schlechtere, dem geschlechtlichen Erbstück.43 (Lovers only transmit to the child what they themselves have received from their ancestors. That which has been acquired at greatest cost, the personal achievements, remain outside of the process and with that individuality in its unrepeatable entirety, that which animates life to the full: it is only the custodian, for better or worse, of the genetic inheritance.)

Although Andreas-Salomé notes the continuity of the genetic material from one generation to the next, she attributes more significance for human individuality to the aspects of the self which have been shaped by experience, something which cannot be straightforwardly inherited by future generations. If desire is on the one hand an unconscious longing for the homely, it is also provoked, argues Andreas-Salomé, by the exotic or foreign, by ‘[der] Reiz der Neuheit’ (the attraction of the new, ‘Gedanken’, 50). She suggests ‘daß unsere Nerven einer fremden Welt entgegenzitterten, 43 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Die Erotik’, p. 121.

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in der wir nie so heimisch werden können wie im eigenen, bequemen, gewohnten Alltag’ (that our nerves tremble towards a foreign world in which we can never become so at home as in the comfortable everyday world of our own which we inhabit, ‘Gedanken’, 51). She links this idea to the same biological discourse on microorganisms, writing in ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ that just as the sexual act brings together different microorganisms to form a new life (‘das Zusammenkommen möglichst differenter Protoplasmakörperchen’, 50), so the body, too, is attracted by those who appear exotic, ‘fremd’, a principle which, she emphasizes, is shared by ‘das ganze Tierreich’ (the whole of the animal kingdom).44 Through the relationship in Das Haus between Gitta and the Jewish doctor Markus Mandelstein, Andreas-Salomé confronts the ambivalent relationship between the erotic intoxication aroused by the foreign, and the longing for closeness or fusion with the Other sought in homecoming. In this she also shows desire to have a haunting or uncanny effect, which cuts across ideas of rational choice of partner and defies the possibility of controlling genetic heritage. Markus Mandelstein in Das Haus is an eastern Jew, from Romania, and, before meeting his future wife, Gitta, he is known to her father for his experimentation on great apes (Das Haus, 134), a practice which the historian Paul Weindling identifies as particularly associated with Jewish doctors in the early twentieth century.45 Female apes were used in research on the syphilis bacillus, among other experiments.46 The reputed Jewishness of vivisection and animal experimentation was connected to an association made between fears of modern, experimental medicine and fears of the racial Other. From the vantage point of monism, whose ideas on the oneness of all living things spoke strongly to Andreas-Salomé, animal experimentation had strong negative connotations; it was seen as the epitome

44 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, p. 50, cf. Bölsche, Liebesleben, I, pp. 158–9. 45 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, p. 170, who points out that by the 1890s, ‘scientific medicine became stigmatized as inhumane’, p. 169. 46 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, p. 169.

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of instrumental rationality.47 In the novel, Gitta has a strong aversion to the experiments conducted by male doctors on female apes, and Markus’s involvement with experimental science seems intended to emphasize his Jewishness and connect him with scientific, rational discourses, in contrast to the intuitive spontaneity demonstrated by Gitta. Attracted by the exotic, Gitta falls in love with barely any knowledge of Markus’s character or origins. Her attraction to him on a physical level has a profound psychic effect, making her prone to weeping and other spontaneous unconsciously motivated reactions. Her love is powerful and instinctive. She describes it as overpowering her ‘mit großen Glocken, oder wie Sturm oder Gesang. – Man fühlt es – man fühlt es!’ (with the sound of great bells or like a storm or a song. – I just feel it – I just feel it!, Das Haus, 55). Markus’s racial origins are the source of tension within Gitta’s family. Thus her mother, Anneliese, asks her father: ‘Du erwähnst sein Judentum. Bist du denn dagegen – ich meine, zum Beispiel, würde dir denn eine Mischung mit jüdischem Blut – immer und in allen Fällen unerwünscht scheinen?’ (You mentioned his Jewishness. Are you against it, then – I mean, would you for example regard a union with Jewish blood – as undesirable, always and in every case?, Das Haus, 70). His Jewishness is treated as a eugenic question, the father anxious for the future bloodline of the family. The doctor Frank Branhardt needs little time to reflect before answering in the affirmative: ‘Fremdestes, ja Gegensätzliches erregt bekanntlich die tollsten Leidenschaften. Nur – die Frage bleibt: ob es auch zu verschwistern vermag.’ (It is well known that opposites attract, that what is foreign arouses the most violent passion. But – the question remains: should it be allowed to form a close union, ibid.). The narrative voice comments of Gitta’s brother Balduin: ‘Am Judentum von Gittas Auserkorenem nahm er nicht den mindesten Anstoß’ (he did not take the slightest offence at the Jewishness of Gitta’s chosen one, 80). Yet Balduin does go so far as to tease Gitta, reminding her of her preference for Aryan rather than Jewish girls at school, and he asks her maliciously (‘böse’) how she likes the sound 47 Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Monism and Suffering: A Theosophical Perspective’, in Todd H. Weir (ed.), Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, New York 2012, pp. 91–106: p. 97.

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of ‘Brigitte Mandelstein’ as her new name (80). Gitta pronounces herself none too happy about it, though she is anxious retrospectively to revise her opinion of the Jewish girls in her class for the sake of her feelings for Markus. The conversation suggests that racial difference is taken for granted by the family as a biological fact. Gitta avoids thinking of the Mandelstein family in Romania, and tries to separate the image of Markus from his Jewish roots (97). Gitta’s words ‘ich wünsche so sehr, Sie möchten bleiben, wie von irgendwoher heruntergefallen’ (I do so wish that you might stay as if you had just fallen from the sky, 97), that is, without heritage, imply that his heritage is a barrier to their intimacy. She also comments to her mother: ‘Mandelstein. Ich wollte, er hieße rumänisch’ (Mandelstein. I wish he had a Romanian name, 54), presumably, a Romanian surname rather than a Jewish one. Markus’s Jewishness is used by Andreas-Salomé to conceptualize the destabilizing effect of homelessness. Moreover, Gitta’s emotional closeness to Markus by the end of the novel suggests that the tension between the homely and the foreign can be overcome. As an eastern Jew, Markus is marked out as sharing in the fate of his race in diaspora, ‘dieses durch die Jahrtausende wandernde Volk’ (this people, wandering for millennia, 84). His Jewishness allows for a consideration of the loss of Heimat in modernity, and as Cornelia Vuilleumier suggests, it allows for parallels also to be drawn between Markus and Balduin, the latter a vulnerable figure who expresses through poetry his longing for stability through Heimat.48 By refusing to accept his heritage and family, Gitta intensifies Markus’s feelings of deracination. However, when she eventually engages emotionally with his heritage, Gitta is able to cross boundaries and offer a corrective viewpoint to her father’s fear of the foreign. Markus suggests that it is only through family that Heimat can be recaptured, through the affective bonds which enable a sense of belonging. In their marital home, Markus’s longing for his homeland is evident in his choice of a Romanian servant with a poor command of the German language and ‘die nirgend hereinpassenden Möbel’ (furniture that does not fit anywhere) which he has insisted 48 Cornelia Pechota Vuilleumier, Heim und Unheimlichkeit bei Rainer Maria Rilke und Lou Andreas-Salomé: Literarische Wechselwirkungen, Hildesheim 2010, pp. 193–4.

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on transporting from Romania (116). His sense of homesickness forms a barrier to his intimacy with Gitta, metaphorically expressed through the mosquito nets which Gitta complains formed a barrier between them in their separate beds in their honeymoon (‘dafür wurden wir freilich auch nicht gebissen!’ – Well, it meant of course that we didn’t get bitten!, 115). Yet this barrier proves permeable. Gitta is reconciled with Markus after a separation by listening to him tell stories of his family, and through these stories his father and other family members suddenly cease being distant figures and instead become ‘wie Tiefvertraute’ (deeply familiar, 208). Gitta restores his Heimat to him through her intimate emotional engagement with his blood relatives; this leads to a psychic closeness previously lacking in their relationship and enables a new physical closeness, whereby she herself becomes the embodiment of Heimat. Gitta is presented as no less than the source of his redemption, with the concept of Heimat shown clearly to be a secularization of religious longing (‘sie brächte […] die Heimat, das ewige Leben zurück’ – she brought back his homeland, his eternal life, 210). Sexual union brings about psychic wholeness and also mystical transcendence. As Andreas-Salomé suggests in ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, it is ‘als sei die Geliebte nicht nur sie selbst, sondern auch noch die ganze Welt, auch noch das gesamte All. – ’ (as if the beloved were not just herself but also the whole world, also the whole universe. –, ‘Gedanken’, 69). In ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, Andreas-Salomé is indebted to a biological narrative of human origins. The conceptual framework for that narrative draws on discourses of gender and racial difference which, around 1900, seemed to be newly affirmed by the biological sciences, and which show starkly how scientific concepts themselves are embedded in the social and political framework of their era. This biological narrative is far from a ‘post-metaphysical story of the origin and evolution of life’.49 Rather, her essays and the discourse of Heimat in Das Haus show how such a post-metaphysical narrative fell short of meeting the contemporary search for meaning in human existence. Andreas-Salomé supplements a

49 Saul, ‘Das normale Weib’, 555.

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psychoanalytic exploration of the human libido with a vitalist affirmation of the transcendence made possible through the erotic. Reading Das Haus alongside ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ shows the symbolic connection between erotic love and an unconscious desire to recapture lost memories of wholeness, explored in the novel through the Heimat imagery. Central to desire, Andreas-Salomé contends, is a longing for a harmonious union with creation which cannot be captured through rational discourse but rather only through imagery and linguistic innovation, and whose expression thus falls first and foremost to the poet, rather than the scientist.

Bibliography Andreas-Salomé, Lou, Die Erotik: Vier Aufsätze, Munich 1979, containing the essays ‘Der Mensch als Weib’, pp. 7–44; ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, pp. 47–73; and ‘Die Erotik’, pp. 85–145. Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, Dresden 1894. Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts, first published 1921, Bremen 2011. In der Schule bei Freud: Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912/13, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Zurich 1958. Lebensrückblick: Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen, 2nd rev. edn, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt am Main 1968. ‘Physische Liebe’, Die Zukunft 25 (1898), pp. 218–22 [review of Wilhelm Bölsche’s Das Liebesleben in der Natur]. Rainer Maria Rilke, Leipzig 1928. Bauer, Heike, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860–1930, Basingstoke 2009. Bergson, Henri, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, New York 1912. Blickle, Peter, A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Rochester, NY 2002. Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat – A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990, Oxford 2000. Bölsche, Wilhelm, Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe, 3 vols, Florence and Leipzig 1898–1902.

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Bowie, Andrew, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory, London 1997. Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé, London 2012. Cormican, Muriel, ‘Authority and Resistance: Women in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus’, Women in German Yearbook 14 (1998), pp. 127–42. ‘Marriage and Science: Discourses of Domestication in Das Haus’, Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating Identity, Rochester, NY 2009, pp. 45–68. Ecker, Gisela (ed.), Kein Land in Sicht: Heimat – weiblich?, Munich 1997. Fick, Monika, Sinnenwelt und Weltseele: Der psychophysiche Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende, Tübingen 1993. Grosz, Elizabeth, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Durham, NC and London 2011. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, IN 1994. Guyer, Paul, ‘Absolute Idealism and the rejection of Kantian dualism’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Idealism, Cambridge 2000, pp. 37–56. Heidler, Irmgard, Der Verleger Eugen Diederichs und seine Welt (1896–1930), Wiesbaden 1998, pp. 339–46. ‘Internationale Hygieneausstellung in Dresden 1911 – Halle 55: Gruppe Rassenhygiene’, Offizieller Katalog der Internationalen Hygieneausstellung Dresden: Mai bis Oktober 1911, Berlin 1911. Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph, Kurt Nowak, and Michael Schwartz (eds), Eugenik, Sterilisation, ‘Euthanasie’: Politische Biologie in Deutschland 1895–1945: Eine Dokumentation, Berlin 1992. Key, Ellen, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes, Berlin 1902. ‘Weibliche Sittlichkeit’, Dokumente der Frau 1:7 (1899), pp. 171–84. King, Martina, ‘Anarchist and Aphrodite: On the Literary History of Germs’, in Thomas Rütten and Martina King (eds), Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin 2013, pp. 101–30. Lawlor, Leonard, ‘Intuition and Duration: An Introduction to Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics”’, in Michael R. Kelly (ed.), Bergson and Phenomenology, Basingstoke 2010, pp. 25–41. Michaud, Stéphane, Lou Andreas-Salomé: l’Alliée de la vie, Paris 2000. Midgley, David, ‘After Materialism – Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’, in John Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism, II, Historical, Social and Political Thought, Cambridge 2013, pp. 161–85. Richardson, Angelique, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford 2003. Riedel, Wolfgang, ‘Homo Natura’: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Berlin 1996.

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Rilke, Rainer Maria, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel, rev. edn, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt am Main 1975. Saul, Nicholas, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture, 1890–1914’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, London 2014, pp. 46–77. ‘Foundations and Oceans: Monistic Religion and Literature in Haeckel and Bölsche’, in Ritchie Robertson and Manfred Engel (eds), Kafka, Religion and Modernity, Würzburg 2014, pp. 55–70. ‘“Das normale Weib gehört der Zukunft”: Evolutionism and the New Woman in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Frieda von Bülow and Lou Andreas-Salomé’, German Life and Letters 67 (2014), pp. 555–73. Sprengel, Peter, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1870–1900, IX: Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Jahrhundertwende, Munich 1998. Viswanathan, Gauri, ‘Monism and Suffering: A Theosophical Perspective’, in Todd H. Weir (ed.), Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, New York 2012, pp. 91–106. Vuilleumier, Cornelia Pechota, Heim und Unheimlichkeit bei Rainer Maria Rilke und Lou Andreas-Salomé: Literarische Wechselwirkungen, Hildesheim 2010. Weigel, Sigrid, Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kulturund Naturwissenschaften, Munich 2006. Weindling, Paul, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870–1945, Cambridge 1989. Woodford, Charlotte, Women, Emancipation and the German Novel: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context 1871–1910, Oxford 2014.

Linda Leskau

8 Botanical Perversions: On the Depathologization of Perversions in Texts by Alfred Döblin and Hanns Heinz Ewers

abstract The following chapter offers a reading of Alfred Döblin’s novel Der schwarze Vorhang (1912), his short story Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (1910), and Hanns Heinz Ewers’s novel Alraune (1911).1 All three texts were published at the beginning of the twentieth century, a period which was characterized by mutual exchanges of knowledge between literature and science, such as sexual science, which became an important topic during this time. Therefore, the chapter’s principal focus is on the various interrelations between sexual science – as it is portrayed in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis – and these literary texts. Döblin’s as well as Ewers’s works directly address these intertwining relations between literary writing and sexuality by using different approaches to articulate sexual ‘abnormality’ through botanical imagery. The chapter closes by investigating the extent to which these texts’ botanical imagery reflects the depathologization of sadism and masochism as perversions within sexual-scientific discourses in the German-speaking world of the early twentieth century.

‘One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.’2 With this famous quotation Michel Foucault marks the emergence of a new strategy of power that has progressively taken the place of the negative power symbolized by sovereign rule and the sword. This so-called power over life or biopower is

1 2

I would like to thank Petra Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell for their help in translating this chapter. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality I, London 1998, p. 138.

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a positive power aimed at productivity. It evolved in two basic forms, the first of which is to be attributed to the seventeenth century and the latter to the second half of the eighteenth century. The first form of the power over life is discipline, centred on the individuals and their bodies; the second form is regulation in which, for the first time, the population shifts into a political and economic focus.3 Sexuality lies at the heart of the efforts directed towards power over life and connects the two poles of disciplining and regulatory control. The centring of sexuality in the wake of the new techniques of power gave rise to a dispositive of sexuality in the nineteenth century, to which four strategic unities can be assigned: 1) a hysterization of women’s bodies; 2) a pedagogization of children’s sex; 3) a socialization of procreative behaviour; and 4) a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.4 This last point comprises the extensive analysis, management, and regulatory control of perverted lust or of the sexually abnormal individual: Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination.5

As the quotation illustrates, biopower is organized around the concept of normality as opposed to abnormality. This is why Foucault refers to the emergence of a ‘normalizing society’.6 The centring on the dichotomy of normal/abnormal can also be observed in another important change: the transformation of medical knowledge.7 Until the end of the eighteenth century, on Foucault’s account, medicine is centred around the dichotomy of health and illness, focusing on the illness itself rather than the patient.

3 See ibid. pp. 139–40. 4 Ibid. pp. 104–5. 5 Ibid. p. 36. 6 Ibid. p. 144. 7 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London and New York 2003, pp. 40–1.

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In the nineteenth century medical interest then shifts to the opposing concepts of normal versus pathological or normal versus abnormal. It is this reference to the abnormal – which not only extends to medicine but also, in particular, to psychiatry and the area of justice – that, in connection with the formation of the biopolitical power, brings about the creation of the group of (sexually) abnormal individuals over the course of the nineteenth century. Against the background of the dispositive of sexuality, the category of abnormality is occupied with sexuality in two ways: First of all, the problem or at least the identification of phenomena of heredity and degeneration is immediately applied to the general field of abnormality as an analytic grid by which the field is codified and subdivided. […] To that extent, medical and psychiatric analysis of the functions of reproduction becomes involved in the methods for analyzing abnormality. Then, within the domain constituted by this abnormality, the characteristic disorders of sexual abnormality are, of course, identified. Sexual abnormality initially appears as a series of particular cases of abnormality and then, soon after, around 1880–90, it emerges as the root, foundation, and general etiological principle of most other forms of abnormality.8

Abnormality thus becomes sexual abnormality and therefore perversion. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s well-known study Psychopathia Sexualis is an important part of this development. This highly successful clinical study on sexual psychopathy was first published in 1886 and reproduced in subsequent editions in later years, earning Krafft-Ebing the reputation as the founder of sexual science or sexual pathology. In his Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing classifies deviations from so-called normal sexuality, that is, procreative sexuality, into disorders, illnesses, and perversions. In doing so, he establishes a comprehensive systematic catalogue of sexual abnormalities. This is in line with the approach taken by the German-language science of sexuality around 1900, which dedicated itself to the general categorization of human sexuality, thus not only focusing on normal sexuality, but particularly on those forms of sexuality stigmatized as being abnormal. Krafft-Ebing, as a representative of this pathologizing approach to sexual science, is convinced that literature,

8

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–75, New York 2003, pp. 167–8.

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unlike science, neglects the aspect of abnormality: ‘He [the poet] cannot discern deep shadows, because he is dazed by the blazing light and overcome by the benign heat of the subject.’9 According to Krafft-Ebing, it is the task of science to deal with the so-called dark sides of sexual life: ‘The scientific study of the psychopathology of sexual life necessarily deals with the miseries of man and the dark sides of his existence, the shadow of which contorts the sublime image of the deity into horrid caricatures, and leads astray aestheticism and morality.’10 But German literature at the turn of the century paints a completely different picture. Above all, Expressionist literature is marked by an interest in taboos: disease, crime, sexuality, and insanity are just some of the topics which are drawn upon repeatedly.11 However, it is important to note that the exchanges of knowledge between literature and sexual science are by no means unilateral, but rather reciprocal.12 For it is not only literature that makes reference to sexological topics. Sexual science, too, often refers to and draws upon literature: ‘Not only do the early sexologists adopt terms and concepts from fictional sources […], but literary texts frequently serve as evidence in their works, and fictional representations are treated as case studies which are deemed just as valid as empirical observations.’13 Despite the differentiation between Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With special reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-forensic Study, trans. F. J. Rebman from the 12th German edn, New York, undated, p. V [accessed 18 March 2016]. For a comparison of the German original with the English translation provided by F. J. Rebman, see Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930, London 2009, pp. 34–42. 10 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. vii. 11 In this context, Michael Cowan goes so far as to speak of an ‘obsession with modern pathologies’, which manifests itself in Expressionism: see Cowan, ‘Die Tücke des Körpers: Taming the Nervous Body in Alfred Döblin’s “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume” and “Die Tänzerin und der Leib”’, in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43:4 (2007), pp. 482–98: p. 482. 12 See Heike Bauer, ‘Literary Sexualities’, in David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds), The Cambridge Companion to The Body in Literature, Cambridge 2015, pp. 101–15: p. 108. 13 Anna Katharina Schaffner, ‘Sexology and Literature: On the Uses and Abuses of Fiction’, in Oliver Böni and Japhet Johnstone (eds), Crimes of Passion: Repräsentationen 9

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literature and science in the preface to the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, this study is a case in point for the intertwining relationship between literature and sexual science around 1900.14 Of special note in this context is that Krafft-Ebing draws on the literary works of Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch when coining the terms sadism and masochism for the two types of perversion.15 In the course of this chapter, I shall offer a reading of texts published in the twentieth century by Alfred Döblin and Hanns Heinz Ewers, writers who took different approaches to articulating the taboo subject of sexual abnormality in literary form. The primary focus will be on the various intertwinings between sexual science and the literary texts, and the question as to what extent the use of botanical and floral imagery in these texts reflects the depathologization of sadism and masochism as perversions within the sexual-scientific discourse in the German-speaking world. In considering this question, I will first highlight those passages in each of the texts that deal with perversions, and then proceed to reveal their similarities at a metaphorical level.

Sadomasochistic perversions in literature Döblin’s novel Der schwarze Vorhang (The Black Curtain) was written between 1902 and 1903 and first published in 1912. It tells of the transformation of the protagonist Johannes, who evolves from having sadistic and masochistic fantasies to behaving sadistically towards animals, and

der Sexualpathologie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin and Boston, MA 2015, pp. 37–48: p. 37. 14 Thus, in his preface to Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing speaks quite positively of literary writers when he writes: ‘The poet is the better psychologist […].’ KrafftEbing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. V. 15 See ibid. pp. 80 and 132.

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ultimately murders his girlfriend, Irene, in a fit of lust.16 Against the background of sexual science, several passages in the text reveal that Johannes and Irene have a sadomasochistic relationship, as we can see in the following quotation: ‘Die Friedgewohnte [Irene] aber liebte in seiner Nähe die Angst, die ihr in den Knieen [sic] prickelte, und die leichte Wolke von Grauen, die seine Gegenwart ihr über die Haut, die Arme und Schultern jagte’17 (In his presence, she [Irene], so accustomed to peace, loved the fear that triggered prickling sensations in her knees and the light cloud of horror that raced over her skin, her arms and her shoulders). If it is not clear enough from this passage that Irene has already wholeheartedly embraced the submissive role in this relationship, her masochism is made more explicit in the following passage: O in welche Schmach wirft es mich, daß ich ein Weib bin. Genug duldete ich in mir und nun wälzt es mich vor deine Füße hin. Komm zu mir, du Entsetzlicher. Ich bin ganz von mir abgedrängt, das Stumme in mir hast du sprechen machen; nun bette mich auch und laß mich büßen, daß ich Weib bin. Schlürftest nie an meiner Seele so bang und durstig. Meine Hände wollen in deinen zucken, wie Efeu wollen dich meine Glieder bedrängen. Du darfst mich ganz vernichten, denn nur für dich bin ich aufgegrünt; für dich verfinsterte und hellte sich mein Mädchenblut und immer wieder weinte es quellend um dich, Johannes. (SV 132)

16

17

On the topic of sadism and masochism in Döblin’s Der schwarze Vorhang, see Roland Dollinger, ‘Sadomasochismus in Alfred Döblins Der schwarze Vorhang’, in Ira Lorf and Gabriele Sander (eds), Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium: Leipzig 1997, Bern 1999, pp. 51–65; Petra Porto, Sexuelle Norm und Abweichung: Aspekte des literarischen und des theoretischen Diskurses der Frühen Moderne (1890–1930), Munich 2011, pp. 191–217; and Linda Leskau, ‘Sadismus/Masochismus in Alfred Döblins Der schwarze Vorhang: Eine Analyse der reziproken Wissenswanderungen zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft’, in Oliver Böni and Japhet Johnstone (eds), Crimes of Passion, pp. 139–56. Alfred Döblin: ‘Der schwarze Vorhang: Roman von den Worten und Zufällen’, in Alfred Döblin, Jagende Rosse, Der schwarze Vorhang, Frankfurt am Main 2014, pp. 67–167: p. 111. Further quotations from this edition will be indicated in the text by the abbreviation SV. All quotations from Döblin’s texts are translated by Petra Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell.

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(Oh how humiliated I feel to be a woman. I have tolerated enough inside of me and now it throws me at your feet. Come to me, you dreadful one. I have been utterly forced away from myself; you made the silence in me talk; now bed me and let me atone for being a woman. Never before have you slurped my soul with such fear and such thirst. My hands want to flinch in yours; my limbs want to beset you like ivy. You may destroy me entirely, as it was only for you that I have flourished; for you my maiden blood darkened and became light again and repeatedly shed tears for you, Johannes.)

Irene physically longs to experience the fear that Johannes evokes in her. The desire she feels when being humiliated and repressed, when experiencing cruelty and violence, is unambiguously spelled out. It is also remarkable that Irene in fact calls Johannes by his name at one point, yet never reveals her own name, using woman as a collective singular noun instead. She is the one woman who wants to suffer for all other women. In doing so, she assumes the role assigned to her by Johannes; namely, to atone for the entire female race. The sadomasochistic bond thus appears as a holistic concept: Johannes’s sadism is entirely complemented by Irene’s masochism. The relationship finally ends when Irene is sadistically murdered by Johannes,18 as both of them have longed for: Dann ergriffen seine Hände ihre Arme, sie blühte ihm mit Gelächter, steil wie er, entgegen. Schrie gell auf. Denn wie er sie umschlang, hatten seine Zähne tief in den weißen Hals und die Kehle geschlagen, das Gesicht in den Blutstrom gedrückt, schlürfte er an ihrem Halse, die mit leisem Keuchen gegen seine Umklammerung anrang. Er seufzte mit gepreßten Kiefern und zitterte: wie warm, wie warm. Es quoll wie ein Bad über sein Gesicht, lag wie ein [sic] rote Binde über seinen Augen. Den bittern Blutdunst atmeten sie: sie kannten sich beide nicht. Durch das Weib rauchte weiß und immer dichter die tödliche Lust; rührte ihr Stirn, Auge und Knie. Sie wuchs in die Umarmung hinein, in die Schwere seiner mörderischen Hände, den erstickenden Druck seines Leibes. Aus seinen Armen, die sich lösten, glitt sie seufzend

18

Lindner points out that Döblin’s novel Der schwarze Vorhang is the only text of its time to elaborate on the act of lust murder in literary form: see Lindner, ‘Der Mythos “Lustmord”: Serienmörder in der deutschen Literatur, dem Film und der bildenden Kunst zwischen 1892 und 1932’, in Joachim Lindner and Claus-Michael Ort (eds), Verbrechen – Justiz – Medien: Konstellationen in Deutschland von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart, Tübingen 1999, pp. 273–305: p. 287.

218

Linda Leskau an ihm herunter, er stand über ihr gebückt, deren Mund offen war, deren Adern an den Schläfen stärker blauten. […] Sie spritzte ihr Blut nach ihm, mit tiefen Schauern, träumend. Ihre Finger kratzten den Waldboden; sie zuckte, als er sie aufhob. Noch als sie erkaltete, suchten ihre Lippen nach seinem Munde. (SV 162–3) (His hands then grabbed her arms; she flourished towards him, laughing, just as upright as he was. She let out a piercing scream. Because in his embrace he had sunk his teeth deep into her white neck and throat. With his face pressed into the stream of blood, he slurped at her throat while she wrestled against his embrace with a quiet gasp. He sighed, his jaws pressed together: how warm it was, how warm. It washed over him, covered his eyes like a red ribbon. Both breathed in the bitter fume of blood; both out of their minds. The deadly lust rushed through the woman’s body, like white smoke getting thicker and thicker. She grew into the embrace, into the gravity of his murderous hand, the suffocating weight of his body. From his loosening arms she slid down, sighing, he was standing above her, she whose mouth was open, whose veins were turning a darker blue at the temples. […] She sprayed her blood on him, shivering violently, dreaming. Her fingers scratched at the forest floor; she twitched when he took her up in his arms. Even as she went cold her lips were still searching for his mouth.)

This scene can clearly be interpreted as a lust murder as defined by KrafftEbing, for whom lust murders represent the most extreme form of sadism. Krafft-Ebing defines sadism, the active combination of cruelty and lust, as follows: ‘Sadism is thus nothing else than an excessive and monstrous pathological intensification of phenomena, […] which accompany the psychical vita sexualis, particularly in males.’19 The quotation illustrates that Krafft-Ebing understands sadism as a male perversion corresponding to the male sexual character. According to this view, it is in man’s nature to play the active, aggressive part, manifesting a strong sexual desire, while the woman is passive by nature, and her libido weak. It is for this very reason that the masochistic role is assigned to the woman, a passive combination of cruelty and desire: ‘Thus it is easy to regard masochism in general as a pathological growth of specific feminine mental elements, – as an abnormal intensification of certain features of the psycho-sexual character of

19 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 86.

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women, – and to seek its primary origin in that sex […].’20 Döblin’s text supports the view of gender binarism as presented by Krafft-Ebing, under which even perversions are subordinated to enforced gender binarism, as it is, after all, the sadistic man, Johannes, who carries out the lust murder on his masochistic girlfriend Irene. The murder scene in Döblin’s Der schwarze Vorhang can be clearly identified as a lust murder. Döblin’s second narrative, however, is perhaps a less obvious candidate. Döblin’s short story Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup) was written between 1904 and 1905 and first published in 1910. This is the story of a small businessman named Michael Fischer who beheads a buttercup with his walking stick during a stroll in the forest and subsequently tries to compensate for his feelings of guilt with a number of different actions.21 At the beginning of the story Fischer is taking a walk in the forest when the following incident happens: Es [das dünne Spazierstöckchen] blieb, als der Herr immer ruhig und achtlos seines Weges zog, an dem spärlichen Unkraut hängen. Da hielt der ernste Herr nicht inne, sondern ruckte, weiter schlendernd, nur leicht am Griff, schaute sich dann am Arm festgehalten verletzt um, riß erst vergebens, dann erfolgreich mit beiden Fäusten das Stöckchen los und trat atemlos mit zwei raschen Blicken auf den Stock und den Rasen zurück, so daß die Goldkette auf der schwarzen Weste hochsprang. Außer sich stand der Dicke einen Augenblick da. Der steife Hut saß ihm im Nacken. Er fixierte die verwachsenen Blumen, um dann mit erhobenem Stock auf sie zu stürzen und blutroten Gesichts auf das stumme Gewächs loszuschlagen. Die Hiebe sausten rechts und links. Über den Weg flogen Stiele und Blätter.22

20 Ibid. p. 196. 21 On the topic of sadism and masochism in Döblin’s Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, see Linda Leskau, ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume als literarische AbFallgeschichte gelesen’, in Lucia Aschauer, Horst Gruner, and Tobias Gutmann (eds), Fallgeschichten: Text- und Wissensformen exemplarischer Narrative in der Kultur der Moderne, Würzburg 2015, pp. 153–78. 22 Alfred Döblin, ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume’, in Alfred Döblin, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume: Gesammelte Erzählungen, ed. Christina Althen, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 59–71: p. 59. Further quotations from this edition will be indicated in the text by the abbreviation EB.

220

Linda Leskau (It [the thin walking stick] got entangled in some sparse weeds while the man was walking along calmly and carelessly. Yet the stern man did not stop and instead pulled slightly at the handle while still strolling on. Pulled by the arm he turned around, looking offended, and tried to tear the stick loose, first in vain, then successfully with both hands as he stepped back hurriedly and breathlessly, with two rapid glances at his walking stick and the grass, so that the gold chain sprang up and out of his black waistcoat. The stout man stood there for a few moments, beside himself with rage; his stiff hat at the back of his neck. He stared at the deformed flowers and then rushed at them with his stick raised up high and a blood-red face, and started beating the silent plant. The strokes swished right and left. Stems and leaves flew across the path.)

The incident is recounted again shortly afterwards, but this time in the form of a hallucination: Plötzlich sah Herr Michael Fischer, während sein Blick leer über den Wegrand strich, wie eine untersetzte Gestalt, er selbst, von dem Rasen zurücktrat, auf die Blumen stürzte und einer Butterblume den Kopf glatt abschlug. Greifbar geschah vor ihm, was sich vorhin begeben hatte an dem dunklen Weg. Diese Blume dort glich den anderen auf ein Haar. Diese eine lockte seinen Blick, seine Hand, seinen Stock. Sein Arm hob sich, das Stöckchen sauste, wupp, flog der Kopf ab. Der Kopf überstürzte sich in der Luft, verschwand im Gras. Wild schlug das Herz des Kaufmanns. Plump sank jetzt der gelöste Pflanzenkopf und wühlte sich in das Gras. (EB 60) (Suddenly, with his eyes gazing emptily over the wayside, Herr Michael Fischer saw how a stout figure, he himself, stepped back from the grass, rushed at the flowers and immediately decapitated a buttercup. Before his very eyes the same thing happened that had occurred earlier on the dark path. That very flower over there is a dead ringer for the others. This particular one caught his eye, his hand, his stick. His arm had risen into the air, the stick whipped down, and snap, off flew the head. The head tumbled through the air, disappearing into the grass. The businessman’s heart beat wildly. Dumpily, the cut-off plant head sank and burrowed into the grass.)

Even though it is implied by the title of the story, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, it is far from self-evident that this scene is to be interpreted as a murder. From January 1872 until September 1941, Section 211 of the German Criminal Code read as follows: ‘Wer vorsätzlich einen Menschen tödtet, wird, wenn er die Tödtung mit Überlegung ausgeführt hat, wegen

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Mordes mit dem Tode bestraft’23 (Whosoever kills a person intentionally shall be punished by death for murder if the killing was done with deliberation). This means that only people can be murdered, but not buttercups. Yet I plead for using the term murder, since there are several passages in the text which illustrate that the buttercup takes the role of a woman: it is constantly anthropomorphized by Fischer. On several separate occasions he talks about murdering the flower (see EB 61–3), and about a ‘Pflanzenleiche’ (EB 62) (plant corpse), and he gives the buttercup the female Christian name Ellen (see EB 64). Even if it is possible to call this a murder on the basis of anthropomorphism, it remains to be determined whether it can be described as a lust murder, in which the killing is coupled with sexual desire. To answer this question, we need to subject the text’s gendered characters to a similar analysis to that undertaken with Döblin’s Der schwarze Vorhang. For it is just as much the case that the gendered characters in the story Die Ermordung einer Butterblume are used as signifiers for the gender characteristics that define the essential being of men and women. The narrative style used to describe the incident in the forest makes it clear early on that Herr Fischer, as the male, takes on the active role: he jerks, tears, attacks, and hits, whereas the flowers with their female connotations endure his aggression and violence silently and passively. And it is finally the man, Herr Fischer, who murders the anthropomorphized, female buttercup. It is noteworthy that Fischer is sexually aroused after the murder: ‘Wild schlug das Herz des Kaufmanns’ (EB 60) (The businessman’s heart beat wildly). If this physical excitement is interpreted as sexual arousal, the murder happens as a combination of active violence and lust, and can therefore also be characterized as a sadistic lust murder. Finally, I wish to discuss the novel Alraune written by Hanns Heinz Ewers, which was first published in 1911. It tells the story of the human creature Alraune (German for mandragora or mandrake), who was created as a kind of experiment to verify the truth about the myth of the 23

Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code) [accessed 5 May 2016]. Translation of the German Criminal Code provided by Prof. Dr Michael Bohlander.

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mandrake root.24 During a soirée, Attorney Manasse tells his guests the legend of the Alraune: Im frühen Mittelalter, im Anschluss an die Kreuzzüge, entwickelte sich dann die deutsche Alraunsage. Der Verbrecher, splinternackt am Kreuzwege gehenkt, verliert in dem Augenblicke, in dem das Genick bricht, seinen letzten Samen. Dieser Samen fällt zur Erde und befruchtet sie: Aus ihm entsteht das Alräunchen, ein Männlein oder Weiblein. Nachts zog man aus, es zu graben; wenn es zwölf Uhr schlug, musste man die Schaufel unter dem Galgen einsetzen. Aber man tat wohl, sich die Ohren fest zu verstopfen, mit Watte und gutem Wachs, denn wenn man das Männlein ausriss, schrie es so entsetzlich, dass man niederfiel vor Schreck – noch Shakespeare erzählt das. Dann trug man das Wurzelwesen nach Hause, verwahrte es wohl, brachte ihm von jeder Mahlzeit ein wenig zu essen und wusch es in Wein am Sabbattage. Es brachte Glück in Prozessen und im Kriege, war ein Amulett gegen Hexerei und zog viel Geld ins Haus. […] Aber bei alledem schuf es doch Leid und Qualen, wo immer es war. Die übrigen Hausbewohner wurden verfolgt vom Unglück, und es trieb seinen Besitzer zu Geiz, Unzucht und allen Verbrechen. Ließ ihn schließlich zugrunde gehen und zur Hölle fahren.25 (The German alraune story began in the early Middle Ages in connection with the crusades. Known criminals were hung stark naked from a gallows at a crossroads. At the moment their neck was broken they lost their semen and it fell to the earth fertilizing it and creating a male or female alraune. It had to be dug out of the ground beneath the gallows when the clock struck midnight and you needed to plug your ears with cotton and wax or its dreadful screams would make you fall down in terror. Even Shakespeare tells of this. After it is dug up and carried back home you keep it healthy by bringing it a little to eat at every meal and bathing it in wine on the Sabbath. It brings luck in peace and in war, is a protection against witchcraft and brings lots of money into the house. […] Yet it also brings sorrow and pain where ever [sic] it is. The house where it stays will be pursued by bad luck and it will drive its owner to greed, fornication and other crimes before leading him at last to death and then to hell.)26

24 On the topic of sadism and masochism in Ewers’s Alraune, see Porto, Sexuelle Norm und Abweichung, pp. 265–91. 25 Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune: Die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens, Berlin 2014, p. 30. Further quotations from this edition will be indicated in the text by the abbreviation A. 26 Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune, trans. Joe E. Bandel [accessed 16 November 2015], Ch2C – ‘The Alraune’.

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Against the background of this legend, the Privy Councilor Jakob ten Brinken and his nephew, the student Frank Braun, decide to create a human mandrake (see A 31). They choose the convicted lust murderer Weinand Noerrissen as the father. During his execution they take possession of some of his semen, just as the legend has it, and use it to inseminate the prostitute Alma Raune. The pairing of Alraune’s father, a lust murderer, and her mother, a prostitute, already suggests a union of cruelty and lust, the foundation for the perversions of sadism and masochism. As I shall argue below, Alraune herself also unites violence and lust. In and of itself, Alraune’s birth reflects some aspects of the myth: she is born around midnight with a terrible shrieking, her mother dies an agonizing death and her thighs have grown together as with a mandrake root (see A 90–1). In what follows, the reader is told about a number of phenomena and incidents alluding to the myth. Yet it never becomes clear whether these are just fortunate or unfortunate coincidences or whether Alraune is really the cause of all these incidents. Let us begin with the luck she brings. From the time Alraune comes into the house of ten Brinken, her foster father becomes successful even when embarking on the most risky and hopeless transactions, as long as they have something to do with earth (see A 99), and he amasses a considerable fortune. But at the same time, Alraune for the most part brings great sorrow to the people around her. Even when very young, she forces other children to torture animals: Er [Wölfchen] kniete auf der Erde, vor ihm saß auf einem Stein ein großer Frosch. Der Junge hatte ihm eine brennende Zigarette in das breite Maul gesteckt, tief hinein in den Rachen. Und der Frosch rauchte in Todesangst. Er verschluckte den Rauch, sog ihn in den Magen, mehr und immer mehr; aber er stieß ihn nicht wieder aus – so wurde er dicker und dicker. Wölfchen starrte ihn an, dicke Tränen liefen ihm über die Wangen. Aber er zündete doch, als die Zigarette heruntergebrannt war, eine zweite an, nahm den Stummel dem Frosch aus dem Hals, steckte ihm mit zitternden Fingern die frische ins Maul. Und der Frosch schwoll unförmig an, dick quollen ihm die großen Augen aus den Höhlen. Es war ein starkes Tier: Zwei und eine halbe Zigarette konnte es vertragen, ehe es zerplatzte. (A 110)

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Linda Leskau (He [Wölfchen] was kneeling on the ground. In front of him sat a large frog on a stone. The youth had lit a cigarette and shoved it in the wide mouth and deep down its throat. The frog smoked in deathly fear, swallowing the smoke, pulling it down into its belly. It inhaled more and more but couldn’t push it back out so it became larger and larger. Wölfchen stared at it, fat tears running down his cheeks. But he lit another cigarette when the first one burned down, removed the stub from the frog’s throat and with shaking fingers pushed the fresh one back into its mouth. The frog swelled up monstrously, quivering in agony, its eyes popping out of their sockets. It was a strong animal and endured two and a half cigarettes before it exploded.)27

Although it is Wölfchen who tortures the frog, this and other scenes of animal torture reveal that the children are forced to act in this way and do not perform the cruelties of their own free will. The joy in cruelty must be assigned merely to Alraune. Krafft-Ebing points out that sadistic acts perpetrated on animals are often a substitute for sadistic acts on humans.28 In fact, Alraune finds pleasure in extending her cruel games to people. Two of her lovers, who are best friends, are subjected to her sadistic desire to such an extent that they engage in a duel. The duel, having been settled on a single exchange of bullets at twenty paces, is only supposed to have symbolic value. Nonetheless, the Count of Geroldingen dies: Die Kugel war in den Unterleib gedrungen, hatte alle Eingeweide durchschlagen und war dann im Rückgrat steckengeblieben. Aber es war, als ob es dahin gelockt worden sei mit geheimer Kraft: Gerade durch die Westentasche war sie gedrungen, durch das Brieflein Alraunens, hatte das vierblättrige Kleeblatt durchschlagen und das liebe Wörtlein: ‘Mascotte’ – (A 146) (The bullet was in the abdomen; it had penetrated through all the intestines and impacted against the spine where it was now lodged. It was as if it had been drawn there by a mysterious force, straight through Alraune’s letter, through the four-leaf clover and the beloved word, ‘Mascot’.)29

27 Ibid. Chapter 7 – A: ‘She Never Tortures Animals’. 28 See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 125. 29 Ewers, Alraune, Chapter 9 – C: ‘The Duel’.

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This is the fate of Alraune’s lovers: they die. The last of them is Frank Braun, one of her creators. Their relationship is marked by mutual humiliation and cruelty: Ihre grünen Blicke lachten hinüber, aufreizend, höhnisch und frech. Er schloss die Augen, biss die Lippen aufeinander, krampfte die Finger fest zusammen. Aber sie stand auf, wandte sich um, trat ihn mit dem Fuße, nachlässig und verächtlich. Da sprang er hoch, stand vor ihr, kreuzte ihren Blick – Nicht ein Wort kam aus ihren Zähnen. Aber sie spitzte die Lippen, hob den Arm. Spie ihn an, schlug ihm die Hand ins Gesicht. Und er warf sich auf sie, schüttelte ihren Leib, wirbelte sie herum an ihren Locken. Schleuderte sie zu Boden, trat, schlug sie, würgte sie eng am Halse. Sie wehrte sich gut. Ihre Nägel zerfetzten sein Gesicht, ihr Gebiss schlug sich in Arme und Brust. Und in Geifer und Blut suchten sich ihre Lippen, fanden sich, nahmen sich, in brünstigen Schmerzen – (A 228–9) (Her green gaze smiled over at him, provoking, mocking and impudent. He closed his eyes, bit his lips together, and curled his fingers into fists. Then she stood up, turned around and kicked him with her foot, carelessly and contemptuously. He sprang up at that, stood in front of her, their glances crossed – Not one word came out of her mouth, but she pouted her lips, raised her arm, spit at him, slapped him in the face with her hand. Then he threw himself at her, shook her body, whirled her around by her hair, flung her to the ground, kicked her, beat her, choked her tightly by the neck. She defended herself well. Her nails shredded his face, her teeth bit into his arm and his chest. And with blood foaming at their mouths, their lips searched and found each other, took each other in a rutting frenzy of burning desire and pain –)30

In contrast to Döblin’s two narratives, there is no clear distinction in the relationship between the sadistic man on the one hand and the masochist woman on the other. Both protagonists, regardless of sex and gender, act sadistically, which allows their relationship to degenerate into a continuously cruel, lustful battle of the sexes. Having explored the presentation of sadomasochistic perversion within the three narratives, I want to turn now to an analysis of the texts’ literary forms, which I suggest exhibit fundamental commonalities.

30 Ibid. Chapter 15 – B: ‘Come Bianca’.

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The representation of sadomasochistic perversion by means of botanical and floral imagery All three narratives are conspicuous for their use of floral and botanical imagery for the literary treatment of the sadistic and masochistic perversions. In Der schwarze Vorhang, Irene is ever more completely botanized in the context of the sadomasochistic relationship and her lust murder. In several places, we are told that ‘wie Efeu wollen dich meine Glieder bedrängen’ (SV 132) (my limbs want to beset you like ivy); ‘nur für dich bin ich aufgegrünt’ (SV 132) (it was only for you that I have flourished); ‘sie blühte ihm mit Gelächter, steil wie er, entgegen’ (SV 162) (she flourished towards him, laughing, just as upright as he was); and ‘[s]ie wuchs in die Umarmung hinein’ (SV 163) (she grew into the embrace).31 Irene ultimately dies in the forest and Johannes scatters ‘[d]ürres Holz, Laub und Moos’ (SV 163) (dry wood, leaves, and moss) over her corpse, so that at the end of her life she is almost unidentifiable as a person, lying on the forest floor covered in plants, coalescing with nature. The passages quoted above illustrate the extent to which Irene is progressively and irreversibly botanized as the narrative proceeds, to the point that we can even speak of a botanical metamorphosis. In Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, the metamorphosis proceeds in the opposite direction. The murdered buttercup, as previously discussed, is bestowed with an increasingly female form by Fischer’s anthropomorphisms. Shortly after the hallucinatory murder of the buttercup, he christens the flower with the female name Ellen and hopes that, by assuming the role of her doctor, he may still be able to save her: Er wußte nicht einmal, wie sie hieß. Ellen? Sie hieß vielleicht Ellen, gewiß Ellen. Er flüsterte ins Gras, bückte sich, um die Blumen mit der Hand anzustoßen. ‘Ist Ellen hier? Wo liegt Ellen? Ihr, nun? Sie ist verwundet, am Kopf, etwas unterhalb des Kopfes. Ihr wißt es vielleicht noch nicht. Ich will ihr helfen: ich bin Arzt, Samariter. Nun, wo liegt sie? Ihr könnt es mir ruhig anvertrauen, sag ich euch.’ Aber wie sollte

31

The emphases are my own.

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er, die er zerbrochen hatte, erkennen? Vielleicht faßte er sie gerade mit der Hand, vielleicht seufzte sie dicht neben ihm den letzten Atemzug aus. Das durfte nicht sein. (EB 64–5) (He did not even know her name. Was it Ellen? Maybe her name was Ellen, definitely Ellen. He whispered to the grass, bending down so that he could stroke the flower with his hand. ‘Is Ellen here? Where is Ellen? You, now? She is injured, with a wound on her head, or just below her head. Maybe you don’t know it yet. I want to help her: I am a doctor, a Samaritan. Now, where is she? You can trust me, don’t you worry.’ But how should he identify the one he had broken? Perhaps he was just touching her, perhaps she was just exhaling her final breath close to him. That would not do.)

The humanization, or rather the feminization, of the buttercup, does not cease even after Fischer has left the forest and returned home. Instead, the process assumes ever more grotesque traits: Am Nachmittag legte er selbst das Geld in einen besonderen Kasten mit stummer Kälte; er wurde sogar veranlaßt, ein eigenes Konto für sie [Ellen] anzulegen; er war müde geworden, wollte seine Ruhe haben. Bald drängte es ihn, ihr von Speise und Trank zu opfern. Ein kleines Näpfchen wurde jeden Tag für sie neben Herrn Michaels Platz gestellt. (EB 68) (That afternoon, Fischer dropped the money into a special box with cold indifference; he even considered opening a separate account for her [Ellen]; he was tired of all this, he just wanted to be left alone. He was soon overcome by the desire to offer her something to eat and drink. He would set a small bowl out for her every day, right next to Herr Michael’s place at the table.)

Just like a loved one lost to death’s cold embrace, the buttercup retains a firm place in Fischer’s life. Right up to the end of the narrative, he treats the dead buttercup as if it were a woman, suggesting that we should view this process as another metamorphosis, but this time involving the transformation of a flower into a woman. The third text, Ewers’s Alraune, is more complex, particularly as it does not portray a unidirectional metamorphosis, as is the case in Döblin’s texts. Rather, an overwhelming ambiguity regarding the distinction between the human and the botanical dominates from the very beginning. The name of the protagonist, Alraune, refers to a plant, and the plant, that is, the mandrake, is described as human-like, as its roots resemble the shape of

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a human being. In Ewers’s Alraune, the protagonist’s legs are described as having grown into one another at the time of her birth, creating a striking resemblance to the mandrake root: Die Hebamme habe beim Baden sofort bei dem überhaupt sehr zarten und dürftigen Kinde eine außergewöhnlich stark entwickelte Atresia vaginalis [Fehlbildung, bei der die Vagina verschlossen ist, L. L.] festgestellt, so zwar, dass auch die Haut beider Beine, bis oberhalb der Knie, zusammengewachsen sei. Diese merkwürdige Erscheinung sei aber nach eingehender Untersuchung nur eine oberflächliche Verbindung der Epidermis, die durch eine baldige Operation leicht behoben werden könne. (A 91) (The midwife while bathing the delicate and thin child immediately noticed an unusually developed atresia Vaginalis [a condition in which the vagina is closed, L. L.] where the legs halfway down to the knees had grown together. After further investigation it was found to be only the external skin that was binding the legs together and could be corrected later through a quick operation.)32

Both the name itself, Alraune, and Alraune’s appearance as a newborn signify the symbiosis of the human and the botanical. In summary, we can observe that Döblin’s texts present firstly a metamorphosis from woman to plant (Der schwarze Vorhang) and secondly from flower to woman (Die Ermordung einer Butterblume), while in Ewers’s novel the character of Alraune is representative, both in terms of her name and her appearance, of the synthesis of the human and the botanical.

The depathologization of sadomasochist perversion It is revealing that it is the woman who undergoes botanical metamorphosis in all three texts. The narratives hereby evoke the analogy between woman and nature, in contrast to male culture, as was typical for the time around

32 Ewers, Alraune, Chapter 5 – B: ‘Alraune’s Conception’. Original set in italics.

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1900:33 ‘Geschlechterbinarität und die Unterscheidung von Natur und Kultur sind reziprok verschränkt: Dabei dominiert insbesondere die Frau als Repräsentantin der “Natur” in ästhetischen Entwürfen des beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts […]’34 (Gender binary and the distinction between nature and culture are reciprocally interlaced, with the woman, in particular, dominating as the representative of ‘nature’ in aesthetic drafts of the early twentieth century […]). At first glance, the narratives seem to support and reproduce the gender binary by naturalizing the woman. However, it can be shown that the female protagonists in the narratives are by no means consistently modelled on the female gender character. One of the key divisions of gender binary is the dichotomy of activity/ passivity, with the passive role assigned to women. However, it is precisely this role assignment that is broken by the lust murder scenes in Döblin’s narratives. Although it is Irene who, being a masochist, is murdered, she plays the active role in many passages: ‘sie blühte ihm mit Gelächter, steil wie er, entgegen’ (she flourished towards him, laughing, just as upright as he was); ‘[s]ie wuchs in die Umarmung hinein’ (she grew into the embrace); ‘[s]ie spritzte ihr Blut nach ihm’ (she sprayed her blood on him); and in the end ‘suchten ihre Lippen nach seinem Munde’ (her lips were still searching for his mouth) (SV 162–3). The quotations ‘steil wie er’ and ‘spritzte […] nach ihm’ also leave room for another interpretation: Irene not only has the active part. In fact, the quoted phallic symbolism, implying an erection, also gives her a male coding. And unlike the incident in the forest, in which the flowers passively endure Fischer’s violence, the female buttercup assumes the active role in the lust murder scene. Herr Fischer can do nothing more than react:

33 34

See here Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture, and Society, Stanford, CA 1974, pp. 67–87. Stephanie Catani, ‘Kultur in der Krise: Zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit bei Alfred Döblin und Robert Musil’, in Sarah Colvin and Peter J. Davies (eds), Masculinities in German Culture, trans. Petra Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell. Rochester, NY 2008, pp. 149–69: pp. 150–1.

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Linda Leskau Und von oben, aus dem Körperstumpf, tropfte es, quoll aus dem Halse weißes Blut, nach in das Loch, erst wenig, […] dann in dickem Strom, rann schleimig, mit gelbem Schaum auf Herrn Michael zu, der vergeblich zu entfliehen suchte, nach rechts hüpfte, nach links hüpfte, der drüber wegspringen wollte, gegen dessen Füße es schon anbrandete. (EB 60/61) (And from above, from the stump of the body, white blood was dripping, gushing from the neck into the hole, at first only a little, […] then a thick stream, oozing with yellow foam, flowing towards Herr Michael, who tried in vain to escape, hopping to the right, hopping to the left, attempting to jump over it, as it had already begun surging against his feet.)

Furthermore, the buttercup, just like Irene, is also described as male, that is, phallic. From its body stump, white blood is dripping and gushing in a thick stream, oozing with yellow foam. The parallel here with the male ejaculation is obvious. The association with sexual penetration becomes complete when, in conclusion, this white and oozing liquid is said to be trickling into the hole. Such gender confusion can also be found in Ewers’s Alraune. There are several passages where the protagonist, Alraune, is characterized as sadistic. For instance, as a young girl she enjoys having animals tortured: ‘Es ist wohl wahr’, schrieb die révérende mère, ‘dass das Kind [Alraune] nie selbst Tiere quält; wenigstens ist sie nie dabei ertappt worden. Aber es ist ebenso wahr, dass alle kleinen Grausamkeiten – die sich die Schülerinnen zuschulden kommen lassen, in ihrem Kopfe entstanden sind. […]’ (A 108) (‘It is entirely true’, writes the Reverend Mother, ‘that the child [Alraune] herself never tortures animals. At least she has never been caught at it – But it is equally true that all the little cruelties committed by the other girls originate in her head. […]’)35

Alraune also enjoys causing other people’s death, as has been shown with regard to the Count of Geroldingen (see A 146). And in her relationship with Frank Braun, she indulges in inflicting violence upon her partner (see A 228–9). However, sexual science around 1900 considers sadism, whether directed towards animals or humans, exclusively as a male perversion, since 35 Ewers, Alraune, Chapter 7 – A: ‘She Never Tortures Animals’.

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it corresponds with the ‘masculine sexual character’,36 thus being opposed to the female character. In characterizing Alraune as sadistic, Ewers is characterizing her as male. This gender confusion is further underlined by the fact that Alraune, from the beginning, is described both as a boy and a girl: ‘Die da, Alraune, war ein Mädel und ein Bub zugleich’ (A 121) (She, Alraune, was both a boy and a girl).37 It is this androgyny in particular which excites the passion of her creator, ten Brinken and the reason why he often asks her to present herself to him dressed as a boy (see A 162–3). In conclusion, we can see that none of the three female characters (Irene, Ellen, and Alraune) is described as unambiguously female. Their gender remains vague and eludes a precise gender categorization, leading to ambiguity, or even to the dissolution or neutralization of the gender binary. Moreover, through the very process of the protagonist’s de-gendering, the close intertwining of femininity and nature ultimately breaks down.38 However, in addition to the intertwining of nature and femininity, we can point to another link with nature around 1900: Wer um 1900 – sei’s biologisch, philosophisch (lebensphilosophisch) oder literarisch – von Natur reden will, muß von der Sexualität reden. Hierin gründet eines der augenfälligsten und gleichwohl am wenigsten bedachten Charakteristika der modernen Dichtung, der Dichtung im technischen Zeitalter, nämlich daß sie, ziemlich genau ab 1900, zu einem Diskurs über die Sexualität geworden ist.39 (Anyone who wants to speak of nature around 1900 – whether on a biological, philosophical (the philosophy of life) or literary level – has to speak of sexuality. This is the foundation of one of the most conspicuous, yet the least considered characteristic

36 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 129. 37 Ewers, Alraune, Chapter 8 – A: ‘Mistress of the House of Brinken’. 38 With regard to Alraune, it is also her unnatural creation – by way of artificial insemination – that evokes a disturbed intertwining between women and nature: see Tanja Nusser, ‘Es war einmal: Der Mörder, die Dirne, der Arzt und die künstliche Befruchtung. Hanns Heinz Ewers Alraune’, in Tanja Nusser and Elisabeth Strowick (eds), Krankheit und Geschlecht: Diskursive Affären zwischen Literatur und Medizin, Würzburg 2000, pp. 179–93. 39 Wolfgang Riedel, Homo Natura: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, trans. Petra Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell, Würzburg 2011, pp. 13–14.

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Linda Leskau of modern poetry, the poetry in the age of technology, namely the fact that it has evolved into a discourse on sexuality, since quite precisely 1900.)

As we can see here, the convergence of nature and sexuality is not only restricted to literature around 1900. This relationship also becomes evident in the sexual science of that period – which again shows how closely literature and sexual science are intertwined. In his Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing, for instance, states that only sexuality serving the purpose of propagation can be seen as natural and thus normal: ‘every expression of it [the sexual instinct] that does not correspond with the purpose of nature – i.e., propagation – must be regarded as perverse.’40 According to this, sexual science uses the term ‘propagation’ to refer to natural sexuality, around 1900. The German word for propagation is Fortpflanzung.41 It contains the word Pflanze (plant), so the name itself already implies a connection to plants and nature. In the early sexual science, this natural procreation is contrasted with unnatural perversions, because, as clearly stated in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, every form of sexuality not serving the purpose of procreation is seen as perverse. Our readings of Döblin’s and Ewers’s works have, however, illustrated the ways in which precisely these perverse sadistic or masochistic sexualities are in fact deeply intertwined with the forms and processes of nature. For these perversions, presented in the texts in terms of botanical and floral metaphors, are thereby inextricably interwoven with what is construed as normal and natural propagation (Fortpflanzung). In other words, this metaphoric representation brings supposedly anomalous and perverse sexual desire into proximity with natural sexuality. Consequently, the literary use of botanical or floral imagery in Döblin’s and Ewers’s texts serves to 40 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 79. 41 Jacobs, too, points to this link between reproduction and plant life in the German word ‘Fortpflanzung’, setting it against the background of a general move to human sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century: see Joela Jacobs, Speaking the NonHuman: Plants, Animals, and Marginalized Humans in Literary Grotesques from Oskar Panizza to Franz Kafka, Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Division of the Humanities, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago, December 2014, p. 55, n.16.

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challenge and elicit a subversive reflection on sexual science’s definition of, and differentiation between, natural and perverse sexuality. This leads – at least rudimentarily – to a depathologization of perversions at precisely those points where a clear distinguishing line can no longer be drawn between natural and abnormal sexuality, or between normality and sexual deviation, as viewed by the early sexual science so profoundly shaped by Krafft-Ebing.

Bibliography Bauer, Heike, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930, London 2009. ‘Literary Sexualities’, in David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds), The Cambridge Companion to The Body in Literature, Cambridge 2015, pp. 101–15. Catani, Stephanie, ‘Kultur in der Krise: Zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit bei Alfred Döblin und Robert Musil’, in Sarah Colvin and Peter J. Davies (eds), Masculinities in German Culture, Rochester, NY 2008, pp. 149–69. Cowan, Michael, ‘Die Tücke des Körpers: Taming the Nervous Body in Alfred Döblin’s “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume” and “Die Tänzerin und der Leib”’, in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43:4 (2007), pp. 482–98. Döblin, Alfred, ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume’, in Alfred Döblin, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume: Gesammelte Erzählungen, ed. Christina Althen, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 59–71. ‘Der schwarze Vorhang: Roman von den Worten und Zufällen’, in Alfred Döblin, Jagende Rosse, Der schwarze Vorhang, ed. Christina Althen, Frankfurt am Main 2014, pp. 67–167. Dollinger, Roland, ‘Sadomasochismus in Alfred Döblins Der schwarze Vorhang’, in Ira Lorf and Gabriele Sander (eds), Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium: Leipzig 1997, Bern 1999, pp. 51–65. Ewers, Hanns Heinz, Alraune, trans. Joe E. Bandel [accessed 16 November 2015]. Alraune: Die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens, Berlin 2014. Foucault, Michel, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–75, New York 2003. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London and New York 2003. The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality I, London 1998.

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Jacobs, Joela, Speaking the Non-Human: Plants, Animals, and Marginalized Humans in Literary Grotesques from Oskar Panizza to Franz Kafka, Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Division of the Humanities, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago, December 2014. Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis: With special reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-forensic Study, trans. F. J. Rebman from the 12th German edn, New York, undated [accessed 18 March 2016]. Leskau, Linda, ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume als literarische AbFallgeschichte gelesen’, in Lucia Aschauer, Horst Gruner, and Tobias Gutmann (eds), Fallgeschichten: Text- und Wissensformen exemplarischer Narrative in der Kultur der Moderne, Würzburg 2015, pp. 153–78. ‘Sadismus/Masochismus in Alfred Döblins Der schwarze Vorhang: Eine Analyse der reziproken Wissenswanderungen zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft’, in Oliver Böni and Japhet Johnstone (eds), Crimes of Passion: Repräsentationen der Sexualpathologie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin and Boston, MA 2015, pp. 139–56. Lindner, Martin, ‘Der Mythos “Lustmord”: Serienmörder in der deutschen Literatur, dem Film und der bildenden Kunst zwischen 1892 und 1932’, in Joachim Lindner and Claus-Michael Ort (eds), Verbrechen – Justiz – Medien: Konstellationen in Deutschland von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart, Tübingen 1999, pp. 273–305. Nusser, Tanja, ‘Es war einmal: Der Mörder, die Dirne, der Arzt und die künstliche Befruchtung: Hanns Heinz Ewers Alraune’, in Tanja Nusser and Elisabeth Strowick (eds), Krankheit und Geschlecht: Diskursive Affären zwischen Literatur und Medizin, Würzburg 2000, pp. 179–93. Ortner, Sherry B., ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture, and Society, Stanford, CA 1974, pp. 67–87. Porto, Petra, Sexuelle Norm und Abweichung: Aspekte des literarischen und des theoretischen Diskurses der Frühen Moderne (1890–1930), Munich 2011. Riedel, Wolfgang, Homo Natura: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Würzburg 2011. Schaffner, Anna Katharina, ‘Sexology and Literature: On the Uses and Abuses of Fiction’, in Oliver Böni and Japhet Johnstone (eds), Crimes of Passion: Repräsentationen der Sexualpathologie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin and Boston, MA 2015, pp. 37–48. Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code) [accessed 5 May 2016].

Cyd Sturgess

9 (Re-)Constructing the Boundaries of Desire: Sexual Inversion and Sapphic Self-Fashioning in Josine Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (1937)

abstract During the late nineteenth century, the Netherlands witnessed an unprecedented surge in discourses of sexuality and desire. Influenced by developments taking place in Germany, Dutch literary authors began to experiment with, and challenge, sexological paradigms in their writings. Josine Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (Back to the Island, 1937) is one of the first literary attempts to subvert the binary designations developed by sexologists and to counter the image of the lesbian as a masculine ‘Other’. Reuling’s descriptions of a feminine lesbian protagonist challenge contemporary theories that suggested lesbian desires must be coded masculine in order to be perceived as ‘authentic’. Following a discussion of the development of theories on female homosexuality in the Netherlands, this chapter will explore the extent to which Reuling’s novel subverts the rigidity of contemporary sexological structures. It will be suggested that while Reuling’s writing appears to inscribe a new regime of gendered norms and boundaries on her protagonist, her novel can also be read as an entirely unique document of its time, one that attempts to offer alternative configurations of queer female identity and desire.

From the earliest fragments of poetry composed by Sappho for her female lovers, to the gendered ambiguity of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body (1992), representations of lesbian love in literature offer the presentday reader a window into the myriad ways in which same-sex desire has been imagined and configured across cultures and times. While some fictive forms explicitly articulate lesbian desires through textual declarations of love and lust, in others the ‘lesbian’ element is produced as an unintentional

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offshoot of the complex interaction between reader and text.1 In the early twentieth century, fictional texts, in conjunction with contemporary medico-legal discourses, played a fundamental role in the self-reflexive understanding of female same-sex desires and identities. Indeed, in the autobiographical collection De homosexueelen (The Homosexuals, 1939), collated by Dutch lawyer and activist Benno Stokvis prior to the German invasion, for example, it is possible to detect a direct correlation between literature, sexological research, and women’s realizations of their own sexual difference: ‘Toen ik ongeveer 29 jaar was, las ik “De bron van eenzaamheid”. […] En met groote blijdschap, ik zou haast zeggen: dankbaarheid, ontdekte ik dat liefde tusschen twee vrouwen mogelijk is’ (When I was about twenty years old, I read The Well of Loneliness. […] And with great joy, I would even go so far as to say: gratitude, I realized that love between two women is possible).2 Presenting at once a model of identification and the promise of possibility, the synthesis of contemporary sexological research with the literary imagination provided an essential platform for the exploration of same-sex desires and the specificity of women’s struggles with sexual labels and sexological categories. Against the backdrop of a growing interest in sexual behaviours and preference, queer desires became an increasingly popular subject in literature at the fin de siècle. Drawing on scientific models of ‘inversion’, a theory that posited same-sex desire as the result of an inborn reversal of psychic and somatic gendered traits, the masculine homosexual woman became a familiar figure on the literary landscape. Self-identified invert 1

2

The use of the category ‘lesbian narrative’ carries with it certain implications and definitional issues. Throughout this chapter the term ‘lesbian narrative’ will be used in order to denote texts exploring feelings of same-sex female desire, female homosexual identification, or those that are open to subtextual readings of either of these stipulations. For further reading on the complexities of defining lesbian narratives, see Marylin Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, New York 1996; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York 1992; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from Renaissance to Present, New York 1981. Benno Stokvis, De homosexueelen: 35 autobiographieën, Lochem 1939, p. 163. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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Stephen Gordon, heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s ground-breaking novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), is one such example. As a novel that was incredibly popular in Dutch lesbian circles, Hall’s publication, later banned as an ‘obscene libel’, offered one of the first affirmations of lesbian identity and, as can be seen in the abovementioned quote, a protagonist that gave gender non-conformists and women-who-desired-women ‘a name and an image’.3 In a country characterized by the moral crusade of its religious government, literary depictions such as Hall’s established an arena like no other for the exploration of female same-sex desires in Dutch society.4 Yet, although the archetypal mannish lesbian presented in The Well propelled the discussion of lesbian desire into the Dutch social and cultural sphere, Hall’s safeguarding of the binary that positioned female homosexual desires as ‘abnormal’ and ‘masculine’ was deemed by some authors and activists as detrimental to the wider interests of social progress and emancipation.5 In a bold attempt to challenge the arbitrary designations developed by sexologists – and further perpetuated by the conceptual transfer taking place between imaginary and scientific narratives – Dutch author Josine Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (Back to the Island, 1937) stands in stark contrast to Hall’s earlier publication.6 After Reuling published her debut novel in 1927, she found critical acclaim in the Dutch press for her authentic

3 4

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‘The Banned Book’, Hull Daily Mail, 16 November 1928; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulations of Sexuality Since 1800, London 2014, p. 146. For further reading on sexuality and morality in the Netherlands, see Regulating Morality: A Comparison of the Role of the State in Mastering the Mores in the Netherlands and the United States, ed. Hans Krabbendam and Hans-Martien Ten Napel, Antwerp 2000; Hans Boutellier, Crime and Morality: The Significance of Criminal Justice in Post-modern Culture, London 2000. In her work The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life, Amherst, MA 1997, Sherrie Inness discusses the lesbians and gay men who were critical of The Well of Loneliness. While some critics read the novel’s unhappy ending as ‘anti-homosexual propaganda’, others, like writer and socialite Violet Trefusis, believed Stephen Gordon to be a ‘loathsome example’ of lesbianism that confirmed rather than challenged the heterosexual ‘norm’. See pp. 13–16. Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850–1930, Basingstoke 2013, p. 23.

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and original depictions of modern life and became known for her popular psychological novels. Focusing increasingly on more marginal figures as her career progressed, Reuling’s novel Terug naar het eiland counters the image of the lesbian as an easily recognizable ‘Other’ by presenting a lesbian protagonist who is a ‘normal’ feminine woman. Reuling’s decision to have a feminine lesbian protagonist who has neither been seduced into homosexuality nor fallen victim to substance abuse, confronts the contemporary medical models that presented ‘authentic’ lesbian desire in terms of gendered inversion and, according to some sexological theories, linked it to the great evil of the turn of the twentieth century, degeneration. Yet, despite the subversive potential of Reuling’s writing, scholarly attention to her work has been limited only to a few notable discussions of the historical developments of Dutch lesbian literature.7 Reading Reuling’s text as a challenge to the socio-cultural and medico-legal binaries that constituted that which is not heterosexual as ‘non-normative’ opens the text up to far more radical interpretations of its content as a form of resistance to the discourses that posited lesbian desire as ‘abnormal’ and ‘sick’. Following a discussion of the development of theories on female homosexuality in the Netherlands, this chapter will explore the extent to which Reuling’s novel subverts the rigidity of contemporary sexological paradigms and will demonstrate the ways in which biological discourses were not simply used as systems of knowledge to inform literary texts, but were also criticized, rejected, and revised in a popular form. It will be suggested throughout this chapter that while Reuling’s writing appears to inscribe a new regime of gendered norms and boundaries on her protagonist, her novel can also be read as an entirely unique document of its time,

7

Judith Schuyf does suggest in her study Een stilzwijgende samenzwering: lesbische vrouwen in Nederland 1920–70, Utrecht 1994, that Reuling’s protagonist offers an alternative image to that of the ‘Third Sex’. However, the radical potential of Reuling’s feminine lesbian character is not discussed in her exploration. See also Myriam Everard ‘Galerij der vrouwenliefde: “Sex Variant Women” in de Nederlandse literatuur, 1880–1940’, in Homojaarboek 2: Artikelen over emancipatie en homoseksualiteit, Amsterdam 1983; Xandra Schutte, Damesliefde: de beste lesbische verhalen uit de Nederlandse literatuur, Amsterdam 1995.

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challenging both the social discourses that classed homosexual desires as ‘abnormal’ and the sexological theories that suggested lesbian desires must be coded masculine in order to be perceived as ‘authentic’.

An ‘age of masks’: Sexology and sexuality in the Netherlands The inspiration for protagonists such as Hall’s Stephen Gordon can be found in the scientific studies that began to emerge during the late eighteenth century, a time at which moral panics about ‘onanism’ and sexual excess were informing many of the initial theories on human sexual behaviour.8 Aside from a sustained interest in masturbation and madness, however, early sex research also paid close attention to the nature of ‘Socratic love’ and the social implications of ‘sodomy’. As early nineteenth-century ‘sodomites’ were not believed to be fundamentally different from any other citizen, however, sodomy was seen as more sinful and socially dangerous than other sexual vices, with many people fearing the possibility that any (male) individual could fall foul of such urges.9 It was only with the advent of a scientia sexualis during the mid-nineteenth century that the homosexual, as Foucault has most famously stated, became ‘a personage, a

8 9

See, for example, Samuel Auguste Tissot’s L’Onanisme, Lausanne 1760; Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions, Geneva 1782–9. Although crimes of sodomy had become more closely associated to sexual acts between men by the early nineteenth century, sodomy was used as a broad referent to describe a diverse range of vices ‘against nature’ and was not reserved exclusively for the description of male same-sex intercourse. For further reading on the linguistic development of the terms sodomy and sodomite, see Arthur Gilbert, ‘Conceptions of Homosexuality and Sodomy in Western History’, Journal of Homosexuality 6:1/2 (1981), pp. 57–68; Gert Hekma, ‘A History of Sexology: Social and Historical Aspects of Sexuality’, in Jan Bremmer (ed.), From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality, New York 1991.

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past, a case history, and a childhood’.10 Inspiring a succession of sexological studies on the subject of homosexual desire, lawyer and classicist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s theory on the existence of a ‘third sex’ offered one of the first comprehensive and affirmative frameworks of same-sex desire and identity. Developed over a series of twelve publications on the ‘riddle’ of ‘man-manly love’ (Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe, 1864–79) and published under the pseudonym Numa Numantius, Ulrichs’s theory suggested that homosexual desire was the result of a female ‘spirit’ (anima) in a male body. While Ulrichs did not deny the existence of females with a ‘masculine love drive’, the subject was examined only briefly in his work, owing to the fact that the lawyer claimed he was not ‘personally aware’ of any such cases.11 It was not until the turn of the twentieth century, however, that more comprehensive studies on the particularities of female same-sex desire began to emerge. Influenced by Ulrichs’s suggestion of a ‘third sex’, sexologists such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis began to examine more closely cases of ‘sexual inversion’: individuals who were not only marked by a psychic inversion of gendered traits but, furthermore, by a congenital inversion of their primary sex characteristics. While some theorists, such as Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel, focused primarily on the significance of sartorial and stylistic transgressions, others, like Ellis, foregrounded the physical signs of inversion. In the second volume of his Studies on the Psychology of Sex (1920), for example, Ellis wrote extensively about the female invert, describing her as an individual marked by a ‘distinct trace of masculinity’.12 According to Ellis, these ‘traces’ were often accompanied 10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York 1978, p. 43. 11 Ulrichs first suggested that male homosexual desire was the result of a ‘passive animal magnetism’, although he later dismissed this notion in favour of his theory of the existence of a ‘third sex’ (drittes Geschlecht). For further information on the development of Ulrichs’s theory, see: Hubert Kennedy, ‘Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality’, in Vernon Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities, New York 1997. 12 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion, 3rd edn, Philadelphia, PA 1920, p. 222.

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by a series of ‘anatomical modifications’, which might include a ‘decidedly masculine type of larynx’, the ‘arrested development and infantilism’ of the sexual organs, and the atrophy of the ‘natural’ feminine form. Even the work of pioneering and progressive sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who dismissed the existence of ‘true’ forms of femininity and masculinity as ‘constructed abstractions’, frequently paired the desires of female inverts with masculinity.13 Indeed, in his discussions on the gender presentation of homosexual women, Hirschfeld asserted that although ‘the most feminine’ female invert was ‘essentially more feminine than the virile homosexual woman’, she could not be considered to be as feminine ‘as a woman’.14 Although this suggestion conforms to Hirschfeld’s much broader sexuelle Zwischenstufenlehre (theory of sexually intermediate stages), his belief that the femininity of a ‘feminine’ invert was somehow lesser than that of a ‘normal’ woman still served to conflate the homosexual desires of feminine women with a degree of gender non-conformity.15 The sexological conflation of anatomy and psychology, and with it gender role reversal and homosexual desire, fundamentally shaped the discussion of ‘feminine’ lesbian desires at this time. Although masculinist theories concerning the impulses of ‘manly’ men towards their own sex had achieved an increased sense of credibility towards the 1930s with the support for organizations such as Adolf Brand’s Gemeinschaft der Eigenen

13

Although Hirschfeld did agree that ‘true’ congenital inversion was marked by a pronounced effeminacy of the male and a strong virilization of the female, with the publication of his ground-breaking Die Transvestiten (The Transvestites, 1910), Hirschfeld moved away from the notion of a distinct ‘third sex’ and instead professed the existence of an infinite range of intermediary forms between the poles of the idealized ‘true’ male-bodied masculinity and ‘true’ female-bodied femininity. Given the nature of this spectrum, the feminine female invert could not assume the same location on the scale as the feminine heterosexual woman, which means, however, that the outcome of Hirschfeld’s theory remains problematic. 14 Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin 1920, p. 109. 15 Ibid.

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(Community of the Special),16 the homosexual desires of feminine women remained firmly within the remit of ‘pseudo’ or ‘acquired’ homosexuality. In Auguste Forel’s The Sexual Question (1908), a publication that enjoyed great success in the Netherlands,17 the existence of a strict distinction between ‘acquired’ and ‘congenital’ homosexual drives is challenged by its author, who suggests that the origins of both ‘temporal’ and ‘fixed’ homosexuality lie in the correspondingly ‘weak’ or ‘developed’ hereditary predisposition of the subject. Yet, in his judgement of the ‘normal’ feminine girl, Forel argues that any desires for the same sex are the temporary result of the ‘voluptuous sensations’ stimulated by the advances of a virile female invert. The ‘diagnosis’ of pseudo-homosexuality, Forel suggested, presented a ‘relatively favourable case’ that offered an optimistic chance for treatment. Many sexologists believed that the maternal instincts of the feminine woman would eventually override the degenerate sexual drive, which was perceived to be ‘circumstantial rather than innate’.18 Furthermore, the

16 Brand’s Gemeinschaft der Eigenen was a literary and cultural circle of homosexual men who separated themselves from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee) and the ‘Third Sex’ theory in 1903. The name of Brand’s organization has inspired various translations into English. While the most popular translation appears to be the ‘Community of the Special’, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen has also been translated as the ‘Community of Self-Owners/ the Self-Determined’, and also as the ‘Community of Free Spirits’, foregrounding the separatist (and elitist) nature of the organization. The term ‘Eigen’, in both the name of Brand’s organization and his publication Der Eigene (The Self-Owner), was inspired by Max Stirner’s philosophy put forth in his seminal Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own, 1844). For more on Stirner’s influence on early homosexual theorizing, see Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, New York 2014. 17 For further insights on the popularity of Forel’s work in the Netherlands, see Schuyf, Een stilzwijgende samenzwering; Anja van Kooten Niekerk and Sacha Wijmer, Verkeerde vriendschap: Lesbisch leven in de jaren 1920–60, Amsterdam 1985. Here: Auguste Forel, The Sexual Question: A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic, and Sociological Study for the Cultured Classes, trans. C. F. Marshall, New York 1908. 18 Karla Tonine Huebner, Eroticism, Identity, and Cultural Context: Toyen and the Prague Avant-garde, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2008, p. 160.

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inherently passive nature of the feminine woman was evidence enough for many sexologists that, through marriage, there was a distinct possibility for the eventual return to a normative sex impulse. Despite the veritable explosion of scientific discourses on sexual behaviour in Central Europe at the fin de siècle, original Dutch research on the subject of sexuality did not appear in the Netherlands until the late 1920s, although German and British studies were already popular and existed in translation.19 Prior to the publication of Benno Stokvis’s De homosexueelen in 1939, Dutch women-who-desired-women received scant attention in scientific literature in the Netherlands. Stokvis’s study, mentioned briefly in the introduction to this chapter, comprised a collection of autobiographies commissioned by the Dutch homosexual rights movement, the Nederlandsch Wetenschappelijk Humanitair Komitee (NWHK, Dutch Scientific Humanitarian Committee), which included a lengthy introduction in which the author attempts to make a case for the rights of homosexuals who were ‘by nature’ inverted.20 In the earlier publications produced and disseminated by the NWHK, little interest had been shown in representing the needs and concerns of female inverts. Joannes Henri François’ Open brief aan hen die anders zijn dan anderen; Door een hunner (Open Letter to Those who are Different from the Others; By One of Them, 1916), for example, is one of the first Dutch pamphlets

19

One of the first original studies to appear on the subject of sex and sexuality in the Netherlands was Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde’s Het volkomen huwelijk: Een studie omtrent zijn physiologie en zijn techniek (Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, Leiden 1926). As Maurice van Lieshout has noted, the impact of German research on Dutch sexological developments means that the history of sexological research in the Netherlands cannot easily be separated from that of its German neighbour. Yet, as Pieter Koenders has discussed further, despite a growing interest in the subject at the fin de siècle, the Netherlands played no significant role in the development of sexology and made no serious contributions to the disciplinary field. See Maurice van Lieshout, ‘Lustvijandig, wetenschappelijk, voorzichtig en volhardend; de nederlandse homobeweging in het begin van de 20e eeuw’ [accessed 27 July 2015], p. 59; Pieter Koenders, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland, The Hague 1983, p. 23. 20 Benno Stokvis, De Homosexueelen: 35 autobiographieën, Lochem 1939, p. 14.

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to demand the social recognition of the invert’s ‘right to love’.21 Much like Ulrichs, however, François does not speak at length on the subject of female same-sex desire as he claims that the conditions of female experience were ‘less well known’ to him. Despite his self-professed ignorance on the subject, François nevertheless argues that life is much easier for the ‘zoo-aangelegde vrouw’ (woman of this disposition) than her male counterpart because ‘intimate social intercourse’ between two women was given ‘much less attention’ than that between two men. Although a more traditional homosocial structuring of society still characterized Dutch culture in the early twentieth century, arguably making the intimate interactions of female lovers less conspicuous than those between men, homosexual acts between women were nevertheless subject to the same law as those of their male counterparts.22 The emergence of a religious political hegemony in the Netherlands in 1906, which brought the liberal rule following the 1848 revolution to an end, saw the beginning of a state regulation of morality.23 As the religious majority attempted to consolidate its power after the turn of the century, it enacted a number of laws to regulate behaviours that were considered onzedelijk (immoral). Introduced as part of this moral legislation was ‘Article 248bis’, an act that made homosexual contact with an individual under the age of twenty-one illegal for both women and men.24 Combined

Joannes Henri François’ Open brief aan hen die anders zijn dan anderen; Door een hunner, The Hague 1916, was originally published under the pseudonym Charley van Heezen. François further published two popular homosexual novels under this name, Anders (1918) and Het Masker (1922). Here: p. 36. 22 For a more developed discussion on the impact of the homosocial structuring of Dutch society on the lives of lesbian women, see Cyd Sturgess, ‘Subtle Shifts, Sapphic Silences: Queer Approaches to Female Same-Sex Desire in the Netherlands (1914– 40)’, Journal of Dutch Literature 6:2 (2015), pp. 21–36. 23 Joyce Outshoorn, ‘The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands’, in Outshoorn (ed.), European Women’s Movements and Body Politics: The Struggle for Autonomy, London 2015, p. 144. 24 Although Article 248bis was peculiar because it targeted both male and female homosexuals (in many other European countries such as Germany and France only male homosexual acts were prohibited), it signalled a break in the systematic silencing 21

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with laws against public indecency and cross-dressing – primarily targeting men – the sexual and gendered expression of Dutch citizens was policed by a vice squad in each of the major districts. Although it could be suggested that the restriction of homosexual acts fundamentally served to unite and galvanize what had previously been a disparate civil rights organization, the law regulating homosexual contact and gender deviance ultimately shaped the increasingly conservative manner in which homosexuality was discussed in the Dutch public sphere. As sexological literature became more widely available to the general public, the responses of the Catholic and Protestant pillars in the Netherlands became increasingly reactionary. Organizations such as the Bond voor Groote Gezinnen (League for Large Families) and the Catholic Actie voor God (Action for God) were established in a bid to protect traditional family values, and Catholic Father L. Bender produced a pamphlet entitled Verderfelijke Propaganda (Pernicious Propaganda, 1937) in which he openly attacked the activities of the NWHK. With increasing numbers of individuals being arrested for breaching Article 248bis of the Dutch criminal code, and a growing level of social antipathy towards the homosexual cause, depictions of same-sex desire in literature began to reflect more fully the conservative climate in which they were being written.25 Many authors adopted pseudonyms before publishing their work and began to shroud their subject matter in symbolism and metaphor.

25

of same-sex desire, particularly for women. What had once been an ‘unmentionable vice’ became explicitly outlined in the Dutch penal code: ‘De meerderjarige, die met een minderjarige van hetzelfde geslacht wiens minderjarigheid hij kent of redelijkerwijs moet vermoeden, ontucht pleegt, wordt gestraft met gevangenisstraf van ten hoogste vier jaar’ (The adult who commits fornication with a minor [someone under the age of twenty one] of the same sex, whose minority status he knows or should reasonably suspect, shall be punished with a prison sentence of up to four years). After the introduction of Article 248bis in 1911, two arrests were brought before a court of law that year. By 1938 the number of individuals brought before a court of law on the grounds that they had committed ‘fornication’ (‘ontucht’) with a minor of the same sex had risen to 105 cases. See Anna Tijsseling, Schuldige Seks: Homoseksuele zedenlichten rondom de Duitse bezettingstijd, Utrecht 2009; Koenders, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland.

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Prior to the introduction of Article 248bis, however, there had existed a relatively relaxed approach to the censorship of texts on the subject of homosexuality. Jacob Israël de Haan’s explicit novel Pijpelijntjes (Scenes from the Pijp) published in 1904, for example, was one of the first literary texts to appear in the Netherlands in which a homosexual relationship was explicitly thematized.26 Linking same-sex desire to sadism, the novel caused controversy at the time of its publication and lost de Haan his job as a children’s writer at the national newspaper Het Volk.27 That the novel could be published at all, however, highlights the relatively low level of censorship prior to the introduction of the morality laws. Indeed, as Gert Hekma has noted, the introduction of the Article 248bis forced the subject of homosexuality in Dutch literature, and in society more generally, into an ‘era of masks’.28 Reflecting the difficult social and political context in which it emerged, Josine Reuling’s novel Terug naar het eiland highlights the complexity of articulating lesbian desire in an increasingly conservative climate. By exploring the ways in which Reuling’s writing dually challenges the social and religious rhetoric that positioned homosexuality as an ‘immoral’ and ‘abnormal’ vice and the sexological discourses that denied femininity a place within ‘true’ lesbian experience, the following section of this chapter will examine how Reuling’s novel can be read as an attempt to redefine the boundaries of ‘non-normative’ desire in Dutch literature.

26 The homosexual relationship portrayed in the novel between protagonists Sam and Joop was said to have been a thinly veiled account of de Haan’s own alleged relationship with author and criminal anthropologist Arnold Aletrino. The initial publication of the text included a dedication to Aletrino who, along with de Haan’s fiancée Johanna van Maarseveen, bought almost the entire print run of the text to try, unsuccessfully, to prevent a scandal. For more on de Haan, see Gert Hekma, Homoseksualiteit, een medische reputatie: de uitdoktering van de homoseksueel in negentieende-eeuws Nederland, Amsterdam 1987; Robert Deam Tobin, Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex, Philadelphia, PA 2015. 27 Tobin, Peripheral Desires, p. 214. 28 Gert Hekma, Homoseksualiteit, een medische reputatie: de uitdoktering van de homoseksueel in negentieende-eeuws Nederland, Amsterdam 1987, p. 47.

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Sapphic self-fashioning in Terug naar het eiland Born in Amsterdam in 1899, Gerardina Anna Reuling spent much of her youth travelling in Russia with her family before returning to the Netherlands as a young adolescent. Characterized by the Bohemian lifestyle of her opera-singing parents, Reuling’s upbringing in Eastern Europe inspired many of her early publications, which appeared under her childhood nickname ‘Josine’. After the publication of her debut novel Siempie (Siempie, 1927), Reuling was praised widely for producing a ‘wonderful fragment of humanity’, and her subsequent Sara Vierhout (Sara Vierhout, 1932) found further acclaim in the press for its authentic and original depictions, cementing Reuling’s place in the Dutch-speaking literary world. With the release of her novel Intermezzo met Ernst (Intermezzo with Ernst, 1934), however, the first in a series of more psychological publications, there appears to have been a shift in the critical reception of Reuling’s work. Challenging the increasingly conservative social attitudes towards sexuality and gender, Reuling’s detailed depictions of figures on the margins of society were received negatively by the religious press as portrayals of ‘abnormal’ lifestyles.29 Religious newspaper De Tijd (The Times), for example, believed there was ‘no place in Catholic libraries’ for Reuling’s independent female characters, particularly Intermezzo’s modern protagonist Bep, whose lifestyle and behaviours, according to the newspaper, showed ‘unforgivable weaknesses’.30 Yet, none of Reuling’s chosen subject matters incited as much discussion and criticism as her portrayal of the ‘afwijkende genegenheid voor de eigen sekse’ (abnormal affection for one’s own sex), which formed the premise of her fourth novel Terug naar het eiland (1937).31 Denounced by the Sumatra Post as a ‘meesterwerk der 29 ‘Boek en Blad: Intermezzo met Ernst’, in De Tijd, 11 October 1934, p. 2. 30 Ibid. 31 At this juncture it should be noted that there was a difference in the receptions of the novel between the colonial and ‘native’ Dutch press. In the Netherlands, Terug naar het eiland received relatively mixed reviews; while the liberal and socialist newspapers remained generally indifferent to the release of the novel, religious newspapers were

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nederlandse pornographie’ (masterpiece of Dutch pornography), Terug naar het eiland was the first novel originally published in the Dutch language to explicitly thematize the nature of love between women.32 Although Reuling’s text does not make explicit use of terms such as ‘homosexual’ or ‘invert’, love – and lust – between female characters is the fulcrum upon which the narrative turns. Charting the life of a young woman from a rich Swedish family, Terug naar het eiland explores the early childhood experiences of writer Brita Salin before chronicling the consequences of the protagonist’s Bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Through detailed descriptions of Brita’s development into a much-desired debutante, Reuling’s writing initially explores the societal inarticulability of feminine lesbian desire. After Brita’s mother curtly, and apparently ignorantly, dismisses her daughter’s claims that she ‘does not love men’ and ‘is not suitable for marriage’, the protagonist’s inability to confess to her desires and to articulate them into anything more than ‘incomplete phrases’ tragically sets the scene for her later love affair with the young artist Renée. Despite the initial difficulties of broaching the subject of same-sex desire, however, the topic is tackled with increasing commitment by the protagonist after her parents receive a poison pen letter from one of Brita’s scorned female lovers. Outlining the nature of Brita’s ‘perverse’ sexual inclinations, the letter serves as a stimulus for the gradual dismantling of the boundaries that define normative and non-normative

32

far more negative in their descriptions of the text. The press in the Dutch colonies, however, was united in its dismissal of the novel and openly attacked the literary merit of the author and her chosen subject matter. For a more comprehensive discussion of the reception of the novel, see Cyd Sturgess, ‘“Anders dan de anderen”: Articulating female homosexual desire in queer Dutch narratives (1930–9)’, Internationale Neerlandistiek 53:3 (2015), pp. 193–211. Here: ‘Het nieuwe boek: Terug naar het eiland, door Josine Reuling’, in De Sumatra Post, 16 October 1937, p. 12. As Myriam Everard has noted, forty-seven literary works containing references to female same-sex desire were published in the Dutch language between the years 1880 and 1940, of which thirty-six were written originally in Dutch. Over half of the total number were written by female authors. Yet, it was not until Reuling’s publication that love between women became visible as a central theme in Dutch literature. See Everard, ‘Galerij der vrouwenliefde’.

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desires, and allows Reuling to challenge the sexological paradigms of her era. Although Brita is disinherited by her family after the revelation, and, in the typical tradition of the lesbian romance novel, she is killed in a car crash on her way to reunite with Renée, Reuling’s writing is suggestive of a search for more positive models of representation that resist readings of feminine lesbian desire as ‘pseudo-homosexual’ or ‘degenerate’. Furthermore, Reuling’s reluctance to promote the congenital invert as a paradigm for female same-sex desire and her persistent representation of lesbian desire as ‘normal’ radically subverts the rigid sexological parameters that coded lesbian desire as ‘non-normative’. Throughout the novel it becomes clear that Brita exhibits an unwavering sense of the normalcy of her desires. However, in a series of flashbacks depicting Brita’s affairs with women in France, the reader is offered insights into the more complex conflict between society and self, and the negative views of wider society on the subject of homosexual desire. Recalling a brief liaison with a young woman in Paris, for example, Brita recounts an incident in which the girl’s mother discovers the pair together in a bar. In a fervent tirade, the woman declares that Brita’s ‘type’ should be ‘burned alive’, denouncing her behaviour as ‘vulgar’ and claiming that the protagonist should be put ‘on the funeral pyre’.33 The verbal conflict takes a physical turn and the daughter is beaten ‘black and blue’ once she returns home with her mother. Despite the abuse, however, the girl returns to the bar unable to deny her true feelings. While the affair is of little consequence to the main narrative trajectory, the inclusion of such episodes serve to highlight the implications of making visible a desire that was socially unacceptable, making Brita’s claim regarding the normalcy of her inclinations appear even more radical and surprising. Reuling does not only highlight the brunt of moral outrage experienced by minor characters, however, but she also explores more fully the sexological and psychoanalytic discourses that portrayed homosexual desires of feminine women as ‘false’ and ‘curable’. One of Brita’s closest friends, ‘doctor of psychology’ Hans Thorstadt, is shown to make regular attempts to persuade the protagonist to undergo

33

Josine Reuling, Terug naar het eiland, Amsterdam 1937, p. 139.

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psychoanalytic treatments to enable her to ‘control’ her desires. With the help of psychoanalysis Hans believes that Brita could be healed, allowing her to be happy, get married and, most importantly, become a mother.34 Although Brita persistently declines his offers of help, the implications of Hans’s suggestion that she is ‘sick’ and in need of ‘treatment’ lead her to a moment of melancholic reflection about the way in which she, and others like her, are perceived within society: Volgens de leer van Freud – en dus van Hans – was zij ziek. Volgens de leer van het Christendom was zij zondig. Volgens de wetenschap was zij een physieke afwijking. Volgens de opvattingen van de massa was zij raar, griezelig, onzedelijk, ongelukkig, zielig; dit laatste was al uiterst clement. (According to the teachings of Freud – and therefore Hans – she was sick. According to the teachings of Christianity, she was sinful. According to science she was a physical abnormality. According to public opinion she was strange, sinister, immoral, miserable, pitiful; and the latter was incredibly mild.)35

Thinking back to her first romantic encounter with her classmate Vera in her childhood, Brita attempts to counter the idea that her desires are ‘sick’, however, by offsetting her own inclinations against the untempered passions of her young friend: ‘Toen was Vera ziek geworden en had niets anders gedaan dan huilen en reopen om Brita – ach, met veertien jaar 34 While Brita forcefully rejects the notion of gender inversion, she appears to accept more willingly the theories of psychoanalysis, claiming at one point that if she were ‘rijper’ (more mature) she would have a child. Although, interestingly, during this inner monologue she does not believe that becoming a mother would make her ‘heterosexual’ and, further, she does not envisage bringing up her child with a man. Throughout the novel it is possible to discern various overlaps between biological and psychological discourses. Although these imbrications will not be discussed further in this chapter, it would be an interesting avenue to pursue for any further studies of Reuling’s work. 35 In fact, Freud did not classify homosexuality as a sickness and argued that humans were born inherently bisexual. Freud remained unconvinced that homosexuality could be cured through psychoanalytic treatment and, therefore, the quote suggests either a wilful misreading of Freud’s teachings or a misinterpretation of them. Ibid. p. 136.

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konden meisjes zo overdriven doen! Gelukkig, dat zij spoedig beter werd’ (Then Vera became sick and did nothing but weep and call out for Brita – well, at fourteen years of age girls can behave so excessively! Fortunately, she was soon better).36 Vera’s inappropriate and ‘excessive’ passions thus become associated by Brita with sickness and a temporal deviation from the norm – Vera ‘recovers’ from her ‘illness’ after she moves to Switzerland and breaks off contact with Brita – while the protagonist considers her own controlled passions to be healthy and normal. In spite of the deep-seated social antipathy towards homosexuality and Hans’ desperate attempts to cure her of her ‘abnormal sympathies’, Brita forcefully rejects the idea that her desires deviate from what should be considered ‘normal’. In a radical claim that it is she who is normal and women who desire men who are not, Brita subverts the contemporary dyad that pitted ‘normative’ heterosexual desires against ‘non-normative’ homosexual inclinations: Nu zij, Brita Salin, verklaarde, dat zij zichzelf normaal vond en alle anderen, die niet waren zoals zij: abnormaal. Voor haar was elke vrouw, die ernaar verlangde, een man te omhelzen, die in staat was haar liefde, haar hartstocht te geven aan een man, een wonder, een haar volkomen onbegrijpelijk wezen, dat zij met verbazing en heimelijke afkeer bekeek. (And now she, Brita Salin, declared that she found herself to be normal, and all the others, who were not like her: abnormal. For her every woman who desired to hold a man, who was capable of giving her love, her passion, to a man, was a wonder, an entirely incomprehensible figure, that she scrutinized with astonishment and concealed aversion.)37

36 37

The use of free indirect speech makes it difficult to distinguish between the voice of the narrator and the views of ‘wider society’. It could also be argued, therefore, that Brita is ironically mocking society’s perception of girlhood ‘crushes’. Ibid. pp. 164–5. While activists such as Anna Rüling, who presented the first political speech on the issues faced by homosexual women (1904), argued that homosexual women were ‘normal’ and, indeed, often superior to heterosexual women, it is Reuling’s decision to position Brita as a feminine homosexual woman that makes this example so novel and radical. Femininity is not anchored to heterosexuality but, nonetheless, is used to reinforce a sense of normality. Ibid. p. 138.

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Brita’s contempt for women who desire the opposite sex appears as part of an attempt to establish an alternative hierarchy of desire in which heterosexual instincts are perceived to be base and objectionable. While Brita claims that she is simply doing ‘exactly the same thing to [heterosexuals] as [they] were doing to her’, her rejection of the heterosexual sex instinct serves, in a way, to legitimate the nature of her own homosexual desires as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. Ultimately, then, the existence of a ‘normative’ and ‘non-normative’ binary does not appear to be challenged in Reuling’s writing, rather it is inverted. Reuling’s subversion of an existing framework enables her to position homosexual desires as something that is ‘normal’, but only at the cost of heterosexuality’s hegemonic position as the norm. Brita’s contrary sense of what is ‘gewoon’ (normal) is further indicated by examples of the ‘naturalness’ of her contrary instincts. When Hans suggests that the power of his love could cure her, for example, the reader is told that Brita is overwhelmed by a ‘wee gevoel van walging’ (sick feeling of disgust) when he embraces her, the kind ‘dat je maag samenkneep en in je neus omhoogsteeg’ (that knots your stomach and rises into your nose).38 The intuitiveness of Brita’s reaction to Hans’s embrace is used to suggest that the protagonist’s aversion to the opposite sex originates from an inherently physical and biological impulse. Yet despite a brief recourse to biological discourses, Reuling makes no attempt to present love between women in terms of gendered inversion, choosing instead to challenge the medical models that coded desire for women as a masculine drive. During one of the flashbacks to Brita’s past, the reader is told that the protagonist avoids ‘special bars’ in her search for a love interest because she finds the patrons distasteful and unfathomable: Waarom imiteerden die vrouwen een sexe, waar zij een afkeer van hadden? Waarom kleedden zij zich als mannen, met overhemden en dassen en kortgeknipte haren en hadden bruuske mannelijke bewegingen? […] Zij had het nooit begrepen.

38

Ibid. p. 143.

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(Why did those women imitate a sex to which they had an aversion? Why did they dress as men, with shirts and ties, closely cropped hair, and brusque masculine movements? […] She had never understood it).39

Furthermore, in the images offered of Brita’s childhood there is nothing to be seen of the ‘masculine’ congenital invert that was visible in the works of Hirschfeld, Ellis, and Stokvis. Reuling neither attempts to confirm the inherent nature of Brita’s desires with lengthy accounts of childhood tomboyism, nor does she claim that the protagonist’s development into adolescence brings with it any notable markers of gendered deviance. Throughout her childhood Brita is consistently referred to as a ‘sweet’ and ‘amiable’ girl and, as she reaches the point of womanhood and is ready to be ‘presented’ to society, she is described by her father as an ‘exceptionally pretty girl, extremely sporty yet so feminine, so charming’.40 The frequent descriptions of Brita’s beauty and charm stand in contrast to the depictions of the feminine homosexual in sexological literature. Described by Havelock Ellis as ‘the pick of the women whom the average man would pass by’, the feminine homosexual woman was said to turn to her own sex because of a lack of attention from male suitors.41 Brita, however, has a seemingly endless line of male admirers, including the undeterrable Hans, and Reuling positions her as a highly desirable feminine figure for both men and women. Indiscernible as a queer ‘Other’, then, Brita’s overt femininity is critical to her own underlying sense of herself as ‘normal’. Although her desires deviate from the socially accepted norm, Brita remains fully committed to the idea of traditional femininity claiming that ‘zij was blij dat zijn een vrouw was, zij wilde niets anders zijn dan vrouw’ (she was happy that she was a woman, she wanted nothing other than to be a woman).42 The protagonist’s distaste for the masculine and virile element can also be seen in the choice of her female partners, all of whom are presented as being feminine. Even Brita’s ultimate partner Renée, who is given an 39 Ibid. p. 140. 40 Ibid. p. 32. 41 Havelock Ellis, ‘Sexual Inversion in Women’, Alienist and Neurologist 16 (1895), pp. 141–58: pp. 147–8. 42 Reuling, Terug, p. 140.

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androgynous name and described by Hans as ‘mischievous’ and ‘boy-like’, is ultimately prescribed traditionally feminine qualities. In her role as nurse for her sick neighbour, for example, Renée is shown to have a caring and nurturing nature, which is continually foregrounded over her tomboyish brazenness. When Renée later adopts a stray kitten and nurses it back to health, Reuling emphasizes the inherently maternal nature of Renée’s character. Yet, although Brita champions the figure of the feminine lesbian, there appear to be certain limits and boundaries as to what can be deemed acceptable and appropriate desires. In the protagonist’s relationship with the Hungarian socialite Marja Woustowskja, the woman responsible for the poison pen letter to her parents in the beginning of the novel, the reader is presented with an example of what the protagonist perceives to be an unacceptable form of queer feminine desire. When Brita refuses to take Marja home with her to visit her parents and friends, Marja’s determination to climb the social ladder drives her to a desperate and unforgivable act. Seeing no other alternative to achieve her goals, Marja resorts to positioning herself as a femme fatale and the reader is confronted with an excessive and exaggerated performance of femininity in her flirtatious encounters with the Swedish consul, a man who she believes will ensure her entrance into the upper echelons of Swedish society. After Marja arranges a secret meeting with the consul, however, telling Brita that she is going to a lecture, the protagonist breaks off all contact with her once she discovers Marja’s deception, and denounces her as a ‘vergissing’ (mistake). Brita’s previous condemnation of the heterosexual impulse in conjunction with Marja’s display of excessive femininity leads the protagonist to reject her partner and distinguish her own desires clearly from those of her ex-lover: ‘zij was niet zoals ik – ik heb mij in haar vergist’ (she was not like me, I was mistaken).43 Brita’s dedication to more traditional forms of femininity thus sees her arguably create her own rigid gendered and sexual orthodoxy. The protagonist not only renounces the idea of inversion and with it the presumably ‘third sex’ patrons of the ‘special bars’ in Paris, but she further rejects the image of the bisexual femme

43 Ibid. p. 49.

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fatale and the unbridled passions of her young classmate Vera in her bid to promote a controlled and acceptable form of ‘true’ feminine lesbian desire. Through her position as an overtly feminine woman who desires women, Brita is able to challenge the sexological depictions of the lesbian as a masculine woman and the suggestion of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld that the femininity of the female homosexual was in any way ‘lesser’ than that of a heterosexual woman. Although Brita’s ultimate demise in a car crash could be interpreted as a failure to create an alternative discourse of lesbian desire, Reuling’s depiction of a feminine lesbian protagonist nevertheless challenges the boundaries of ‘normal’ desire and gives voice to a figure that was invisible in sexological theory and the civil rights movements that were said to represent her.

Conclusion Although biological and psychological explanations of same-sex desire provide a clear framework for examining Brita’s journey in Terug naar het eiland, Reuling’s novel certainly does not appear to be an attempt to reproduce the rigid sexual paradigms created by contemporary sex researchers. Challenging the social and religious discourses that classed homosexual desires as ‘abnormal’ and the sexological theories that suggested ‘true’ homosexuality was inseparable from gender deviance, Reuling’s novel presents a search for a model of homosexual desire that destabilizes the relationship between gender inversion and sexual desire. Although Reuling’s writing appears to inscribe a new regime of gender norms and boundaries, leaving little room for ‘excessive’ passions or bisexual impulses, the very presentation of a feminine homosexual woman challenges the singular contemporary discourse of the virile female invert. While sexologists claimed that the inherently passive and temporal nature of the feminine woman’s desires meant that there existed a distinct possibility for her return to a normal heterosexual relationship, Brita’s homosexual desires remain unwavering throughout the text, indicating the constant and congenital nature of her

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sex instinct in spite of her position as a feminine woman. Furthermore, Brita’s relationships with other feminine women serve to disrupt the binary opposition of masculinity and femininity, placing feminine lesbian desire outside the dominant active-passive dichotomy. As Heike Bauer has noted of the imbrications between sexology and literature more generally at this time, Reuling’s attempt to create new paradigms for the expression of lesbian desires serves ‘as a reminder of the fact that the relationship between desire and identity is not necessarily negotiated through a set of commonly used labels’.44 Although it would be problematic to perceive Reuling as a champion for the freedom of lesbian expression in all of its various forms, her work is indicative of the complexity of the dialogue that existed between medico-legal discourses on (homo)sexuality and literature at this time. Further explorations of Dutch women’s writing on the subject of female sexuality in light of the conservative socio-cultural climates in which they emerged will make it possible to garner more comprehensive understandings of the ways in which authors challenged dominant biological discourses in their writings in an attempt to adequately reflect the complexity of their desires.

Bibliography ‘Banned Book, The’, Hull Daily Mail, 16 November 1928. Bauer, Heike, ‘Literary Sexualities’, in David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Cambridge 2015. Beachy, Robert, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of Modern Identity, New York 2014. ‘Boek en Blad: Intermezzo met Ernst’, in De Tijd, 11 October 1934. Boutellier, Hans, Crime and Morality: The Significance of Criminal Justice in Postmodern Culture, London 2000.

44 Heike Bauer, ‘Literary Sexualities’, in David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Cambridge 2015, p. 109.

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Ellis, Havelock, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion, 3rd edn, Philadelphia, PA 1920. Everard, Myriam, ‘Galerij der vrouwenliefde: “Sex Variant Women” in de Nederlandse literatuur, 1880–1940’, in Homojaarboek 2: Artikelen over emancipatie en homoseksualiteit, Amsterdam 1983. Faderman, Lillian, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from Renaissance to Present, New York 1981. Farwell, Marylin, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, New York 1996. Forel, Auguste, The Sexual Question: A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic, and Sociological Study for the Cultured Classes, trans. C. F. Marshall, New York 1908. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York 1978. François, Joannes Henri, Open brief aan hen die anders zijn dan anderen; Door een hunner, The Hague 1916. Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York 1992. Gilbert, Arthur, ‘Conceptions of Homosexuality and Sodomy in Western History’, Journal of Homosexuality 6:1/2 (1981), pp. 57–68. Haan, Jacob Israel de, Pijpelijntjes, Amsterdam 1904. Hekma, Gert, ‘A History of Sexology: Social and Historical Aspects of Sexuality’, in Jan Bremmer (ed.), From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality, New York 1991. Homoseksualiteit, een medische reputatie: de uitdoktering van de homoseksueel in negentieende-eeuws Nederland, Amsterdam 1987. ‘Het nieuwe boek: Terug naar het eiland, door Josine Reuling’, in De Sumatra Post, 16 October 1937. Hirschfeld, Magnus, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin 1920. Huebner, Karla Tonine, Eroticism, Identity, and Cultural Context: Toyen and the Prague Avant-garde, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2008. Inness, Sherrie, The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life, Amherst, MA 1997. Kennedy, Hubert, ‘Karl Heinrich Ulrichs First Theorist of Homosexuality’, in Vernon Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities, New York 1997. Koenders, Pieter, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland, The Hague 1983. Kooten Niekerk, Anja van, and Sacha Wijmer, Verkeerde vriendschap: Lesbisch leven in de jaren 1920–60, Amsterdam 1985. Krabbendam, Hans, and Hans-Martien Ten Napel (eds), Regulating Morality: A Comparison of the Role of the State in Mastering the Mores in the Netherlands and the United States, Antwerp 2000.

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Lieshout, Maurice van, ‘Lustvijandig, wetenschappelijk, voorzichtig en volhardend; de Nederlandse homobeweging in het begin van de 20e eeuw’ [accessed 27 July 2015]. Naerssen, A. X. van (ed.), Interdisciplinary Research on Homosexuality in the Netherlands, London 1987. Outshoorn, Joyce, ‘The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands’, in Outshoorn (ed.), European Women’s Movements and Body Politics: The Struggle for Autonomy, 2015. Reuling, Josine, Terug naar het eiland, Amsterdam 1937. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, The Confessions, Geneva 1782–9. Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature 1850–1930, Basingstoke 2013. Schutte, Xandra, Damesliefde: de beste lesbische verhalen uit de Nederlandse literatuur, Amsterdam 1995. Schuyf, Judith, Een stilzwijgende samenzwering: lesbische vrouwen in Nederland 1920– 70, Utrecht 1994. Stokvis, Benno, De homosexueelen: 35 autobiographieën, Lochem 1939. Sturgess, Cyd, ‘“Anders dan de anderen”: Articulating female homosexual desire in queer Dutch narratives (1930–9)’, Internationale Neerlandistiek 53:3 (2015), pp. 193–211. ‘Subtle Shifts, Sapphic Silences: Queer Approaches to Female Same-Sex Desire in the Netherlands (1914–40)’, Journal of Dutch Literature 6:2 (2015), pp. 21–36. Tijsseling, Anna, Schuldige Seks: Homoseksuele zedenlichten rondom de Duitse bezettingstijd, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Utrecht 2009. Tissot, Samuel Auguste, L’Onanisme, Lausanne 1760. Tobin, Robert Deam, Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex, Philadelphia, PA 2015. Velde, Theodoor Hendrik van de, Het volkomen huwelijk: Een studie omtrent zijn physiologie en zijn techniek, Leiden 1926. Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulations of Sexuality Since 1800, London 2014.

Part III

Projections of Otherness Introduced by David Midgley

Students of cultural theory will be familiar with the human tendency to stylize other individuals, and groups of individuals, according to sets of attributes that they are presumed to possess. Feminist theory, for example, speaks of the stylization of women on the basis of their biological classification as ‘essentialism’ and has become skilled in negotiating the tension between the assertion of sexual difference on the one hand and the need to combat preconceived notions of sexual identity on the other.1 The categorization of people in racial terms has been similarly recognized as ‘a form of cultural self-definition’ which served, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to maintain a ‘hierarchy of values through which European culture defined itself by placing itself at the top of a scale against which all other societies, or groups within society, were judged’.2 The self-serving nature of such racial stereotyping in the age of colonialism was neatly illustrated by Aimé Césaire in his essay Discourse on Colonialism (1950) with a quotation from Ernest Renan’s book La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Intellectual and Moral Reform, 1871), in which Renan had sought to underpin his views on how the future well-being of nations should be secured, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the experience of the Paris Commune, with the observation that the Chinese were natural workers, the Negroes contented tillers of the soil, and the Europeans born masters and soldiers.3 Students of cultural theory will probably also be familiar with the concept of ‘abjection’, as used in Aisha Nazeer’s chapter in Part III that follows. It was devised by Julia Kristeva and applied, in her book Powers of Horror, to the powerful sense of revulsion that arises in the face of an experience which endangers our sense of distinction between subject and object, self and Other.4 Kristeva’s argument builds on a key idea of Freud’s

1 2 3 4

See Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, New York 1995, pp. 47–54. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, London 1995, pp. 93–4. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, New York 2000, p. 38; the relevant passage is reproduced in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead 1993, p. 175. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York 1982, p. 1.

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about the process by which the ego is initially constituted and by which it defines itself in relation to that which is external to it. Freud’s description of an aspect of that process in his essay ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915) gives the notion of ‘projection’ a more specific meaning than the broad sense of one person’s mental image being applied to another person or object, which the term often conveys in general psychological usage.5 (The title of Part III is itself intended to invoke both the narrower psychoanalytic meaning and the broader connotation.) Freud argues that an organism can defend itself relatively easily against unpleasant sensory stimuli from the outside world, but that defending itself against unpleasant stimuli that arise from within, through the operation of the instincts, requires a more complex technique, which takes the form of mentally expelling or projecting outwards the source of the displeasure.6 As Freud puts it in his essay ‘The Unconscious’, which also dates from 1915, ‘[t]he ego behaves as if the danger of a development of anxiety threatened it not from the direction of an instinctual impulse but from the direction of perception’.7 By 1933, this conception of ‘projection’ was being put to work in the analysis of the psychology of fascism: impulses – particularly sexual impulses – that were negatively connoted within the society to which the fascist belonged were ‘projected’ outwards onto other ethnic groups who were held in contempt.8 The public culture of Western Europe in the period around 1900 shows plentiful evidence of stereotyping based on long-standing preconceptions about race and sexuality, and also on new ideas about ‘degeneracy’ and madness. Sander Gilman’s 1985 book Difference and Pathology remains a valuable guide to the way those stereotypes presented themselves in various European countries. But the late nineteenth century was also a time when a variety of developments in the scientific investigation of biological phenomena and the workings of the human mind were creating the basis on

5 6 7 8

Cf. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London 1973, pp. 349–56. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIV, London 1957, pp. 134–6. Ibid. p. 184. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, London 1972, p. 100f.

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which the critical reappraisal of the human imagination and the thought structures with which it operates became possible. Before Freud, Darwin and Nietzsche had also made important contributions to that process of reappraisal – albeit not without occasional endorsements of the limiting preconceptions about women that were prevalent in their lifetimes. In his major publications (The Origin of Species, 1859; and The Descent of Man, 1871), Darwin can be seen to have engaged with a wide range of nineteenth-century discourses about the relationship between human beings and the animal kingdom. In his chapter ‘On the Races of Man’ in The Descent of Man, for example, he lists the attempts of thirteen different authors to enumerate the various ‘species’ of mankind, coming up with numbers that range from one to sixty-three.9 For his part, he had reviewed the available descriptions of physiological differences and concluded in that chapter that, since the evidence of variety within particular ‘races’ was so strong, and the evidence of significant differences between them so unstable, it was on the whole more meaningful to think in terms of gradations in characteristics (or ‘characters’, in the technical sense in which biologists use the term) than of clear-cut differences between the ‘races’. In The Descent of Man he went on to explore in depth the role of sexual selection in the development of those gradations.10 It was not until the early decades of the twentieth century, however, that a combination of lines of scientific inquiry, including the study of the structure and replication of cells, embryology, and the observation of inherited features in particular species, led eventually to an understanding of the function and chemical nature of genes: precisely the understanding on which the modern conception of genetics is based.11

9 10

11

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond, London 2004, p. 203. For the strength of Darwin’s commitment to the notion of the descent of all ‘races’ from a common ancestor, see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, London 2009, especially pp. 348–76. See Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance, Cambridge, MA 1982, pp. 727–807.

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A factor that delayed the integration of scientific findings into the overarching schemes of evolutionary biology as we now know them was the division of inquiry in the late nineteenth century into specialisms that focused on the structures and functions of organisms on the one hand, and the investigation of organic development on the other.12 A remarkable feature of the philosophical inquiry that Nietzsche developed in the 1870s and 1880s was that, in its pursuit of a critical understanding of how human beings work, it took account not only of the latest findings in such areas as physiology, experimental psychology, and experimental physics, as well as zoology, but also of the methodological thinking by which scientists reached their findings. As Christian Emden has shown in his latest book on Nietzsche, the famous inquiry into the origins of moral values that Nietzsche conducted in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) self-consciously adopts techniques of examination, interrogation, dissection, and vivisection (as Nietzsche puts it) that parallel the practices of biological and medical science.13 Emden is alluding here to the opening section of Part V of Beyond Good and Evil, which is entitled ‘On the natural history of morals’.14 There Nietzsche speaks, in an exact analogy of the zoologist’s work, of the need to collect material, formulate concepts, and put into order ‘the tremendous realm of tender value feelings and value distinctions that live, grow, reproduce, and are destroyed’, with a view to achieving a ‘typology of morals’.15 Nietzsche’s purpose, as he describes it at a later point, was to strip away the illusions and preconceptions with which we are given to concealing our natural selves from ourselves in order to enable the human being to ‘stand before the human

12

13 14 15

See ibid. pp. 112–20. For an account of the various non-Darwinian ways of thinking about evolution that were prevalent in the period around 1900, see Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900, Baltimore, MD 1983. Christian Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge 2014, p. 7; cf. also p. 58. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge 2002, p. 76 (§186). Ibid. p. 75 (§186).

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being, just as he already stands before the rest of nature today’.16 Whatever else might be said about the provocative nature of Nietzsche’s writings, it was his contribution to the critical understanding of the ‘projections’ of the human mind that made him an important mediator between the discourses of biology and literature in the period around 1900. Another nineteenth-century challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between mankind and nature – and indeed of the boundaries of the self – was presented by advances in the scientific understanding of bacteria and parasites.17 As Anne-Julia Zwierlein has shown, the scientific discourse did not always make a sharp distinction between the two phenomena, and the reactions of Victorian writers ranged from the extreme fastidiousness of John Ruskin to the relative ease with which George Eliot and George Henry Lewes could accommodate the notion that a parasitic relationship between an organism and its environment could be a pervasive feature of the natural world and might even apply to the place of mankind within it.18 In the days before it was widely recognized quite how many microbes inhabit the human body,19 however, the notion of a hidden enemy, invisible to the naked eye, preyed on the public imagination and led to a proliferation of graphic representations of the invader, often in anthropomorphic forms.20 Following the publication of Robert Koch’s theory of the transmission of disease by germs in 1879, Henrik Ibsen was quick to recognize the capacity of the subject to stir up political passions,

16 17

Ibid. p. 123 (§230). See Thomas Rütten and Martina King, Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin 2013. 18 Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ‘From Parasitology to Parapsychology: Parasites in NineteenthCentury Science and Literature’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London 2005, pp. 155–72: pp. 156f., 162f., 168. 19 See Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, London 2016. 20 See Martina King, ‘Staatsfeind und Schönheitsgöttin: Bakteriologisches Wissen in Wilhelm Bölsches populärdarwinistischen Schriften’, in Gerd-Hermann Susen and Edith Wack (eds), ‘Was wir im Verstande ausjäten, kommt im Traume wieder’: Wilhelm Bölsche 1861–1939, Würzburg 2012, pp. 287–319.

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and in his play An Enemy of the People (1882) he presents the situation of a scientist who discovers bacilli in the waters of a spa town and thereby focuses upon himself the suspicion of the populace and the ire of the local dignitaries who find their businesses threatened as a result. And as we move forward from the 1880s to the 1930s, of course, metaphors of ‘germs’ and pathogenic ‘parasites’ notoriously assume virulent forms in the context of political rhetoric.21 The symptomatic display of stereotypes, preconceptions, and instinctual revulsions, together with the theoretical means to interpret them – such is the legacy of the period around 1900 that we find discussed in the chapters that follow with regard to novels by Rider Haggard, Florence Marryat, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad, and the Austrian Robert Müller.

Bibliography Bowler, Peter J., The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900, Baltimore, MD 1983. Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, New York 2000. Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond, London 2004. Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, London 2009. Emden, Christian J., Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge 2014. Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIV, London 1957. Gilman, Sander, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, Ithaca, NY 1985. Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time, and Perversion, New York 1995.

21

See, for example, Paul J. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945, Oxford 2000.

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King, Martina, ‘Staatsfeind und Schönheitsgöttin: Bakteriologisches Wissen in Wilhelm Bölsches populärdarwinistischen Schriften’, in Gerd-Hermann Susen and Edith Wack (eds), ‘Was wir im Verstande ausjäten, kommt im Traume wieder’: Wilhelm Bölsche 1861–1939, Würzburg 2012, pp. 287–319. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York 1982. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London 1973. Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance, Cambridge, MA 1982. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge 2002. Reich, Wilhelm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, London 1972. Rütten, Thomas, and Martina King (eds), Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin 2013. Weindling, Paul J., Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945, Oxford 2000. Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead 1993. Yong, Ed, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, London 2016. Young, Robert J. C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, London 1995. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia, ‘From Parasitology to Parapsychology: Parasites in NineteenthCentury Science and Literature’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London 2005, pp. 155–72.

Aisha Nazeer

10 Scientific and Gothic Constructions of the Degenerate, Racial ‘Other’: Reading the Abject in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887)

abstract Through examination of two late Victorian novels, read alongside nineteenth-century medical and anthropological writings, this chapter seeks to scrutinize the role of the relationship between literature and science in the perception and construction of racial difference. By investigating how both discourses draw upon a Gothic lexicon, fin-de-siècle depictions of the feminized racial ‘Other’ will be analysed in view of Victorian fears of miscegenation, new gender and sexual identities, and degeneration. Both Florence Marryat’s novel The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s novel She (1887) are read in this chapter as typical examples of late Victorian Gothic texts which incorporate medicoscientific theory in order to diagnose and pathologize the destabilizing threat of racial difference. This threat will be explored in light of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, to reveal the essential role of the Gothic in defining the strict boundaries between normal and abnormal, healthy and diseased, White and ‘Other’.

The Victorian period was an age of obsessive taxonomical and classificatory activity. Male-dominated medical and anthropological sciences sought to organize human life into discrete groups, frequently stratifying gender, race, and sexuality, by dividing society into two major camps: the dominant group being healthy, normal, and moral, and the constructed ‘Other’ being pathological, abnormal, and depraved. This scientifically informed binary often served to uphold a status quo which distanced the White, heterosexual male from the threat of the female, racial degenerate. The nineteenth-century anxiety concerning otherness is never more

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apparent than in Gothic texts of the period, which manifested the outlandish and monstrous scientific theories of degeneration. However, when discussing the fin-de-siècle author’s incorporation of scientific discourse into the Gothic novel, the scientist’s own exploitation of a Gothic lexicon to endorse divisions between himself and the ‘Other’ must be acknowledged. In addition to this Gothic inscription of otherness, the liminality imposed on miscegenated racial types that defied the strict stratifications of Victorian culture was interpreted by both science and the Gothic novel as markedly monstrous and pathological. Two nineteenth-century texts which explore late Victorian depictions of racial difference as monstrous and diseased are H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897). While Haggard’s novel tells the tale of a man and his adoptive son’s journey to the African Kor in search of the zombie-like Queen Ayesha, and Marryat’s text recounts the arrival of the vampiric, Jamaican Harriet into European society, both books centre on indecorously strong, sexual, female characters, whose miscegenated ethnicities threaten social order. By examining Haggard’s and Marryat’s novels alongside nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race, I will read each text as Orientalist endorsements of a classificatory system that labelled the feminized non-White body as both Gothic and diseased. In trying to understand why scientific and literary discourses located otherness in the Gothic, I will examine the role of the abject in the exposition and containment of the threatening, racial ‘Other’. The Victorian drive to classify phenomena is never more evident than in the taxonomical ordering of race by scientific discourses at the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, scientific classification of race is preVictorian, with eighteenth-century scientists such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach each extending the binomial taxonomy of nature to the classification of man into different types. The term ‘race’ was first used in a scientific context by Georges Buffon in his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière of 1749. While Buffon did not use the term to classify the races of man, he did record distinct variations between people living in

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different geographical locations.1 Similarly, in the numerous editions of Systema Naturae published multiple times between 1735 and 1793, Linnaeus records distinctions between people living in different geographical sites. Linnaeus supplements Buffon’s work by classifying human beings into four distinct types. While Linnaeus does not explicitly place the types into a hierarchy, the characteristics assigned to each race suggest a Eurocentric bias. For example, while he refers to the Europeanus’s physical and mental advantages, the Africanus is described as ‘sly, lazy, [and] careless’.2 Interestingly, in contrast to the four types of homo sapiens, Linnaeus also discussed a category he named homo monstrosus, which included numerous people whom Linnaeus considered to be abnormal. Amongst this group which resembled Victorian conceptualizations of the Gothic, were several racial ‘Others’, including the ‘Hottentots, […] as they were supposed to only have one testicle’.3 In 1775, Blumenbach adapted Linnaeus’s four main racial types (ignoring the monstrosus group), suggesting instead five groups of man in his medical dissertation titled De generis humani varietate nativa. Blumenbach’s work represents two important shifts in scientific perceptions of race. Firstly, Blumenbach cited physical characteristics as the grounds for classification; he described the skeletal variations of skulls of the five varieties of man. Secondly, as Stephen Jay Gould argues, Blumenbach’s addition of a fifth race ‘radically changed the geometry of human order from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a hierarchy of worth based upon perceived beauty, and fanning out in two directions from a Caucasian ideal’.4 Blumenbach’s emphasis upon both anatomical difference and the hierarchical classification of race formed the backbone of nineteenthcentury physical anthropology. One of the most significant examples of the

Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Oxford 1997, p. 100. 2 Margareta Nisser-Dalman, ‘What’s more important, a good story or a true story? The merging of facts and fiction at Linnaeus’ houses in Uppsala’, The Linnaean Legacy: Three Centuries after his Birth 8 (2008), pp. 20–7: p. 25. 3 Ibid. 4 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘The Geometer of Race’, Discover 15 (1994), pp. 65–9: p. 67. 1

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hierarchical classification of the races by anatomical measurements is Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–5). Gobineau looked at skeletal difference in order to taxonomically group the races into three broad kinds. He states, ‘I find these races naturally divided into three, and three only – the white, the black, and the yellow’.5 The term ‘naturally’ encapsulates the coercive tone employed by Gobineau throughout his work, whereby anthropological measurements were wielded to naturalize a racial hierarchy in which the ‘negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder’.6 The contrived inferiority of Black people was based upon two strands of evidence: behavioural traits and physical characteristics. The most prominent behavioural trait was an animalistic and at times a mechanical inhumanity. Gobineau draws upon the Gothic lexicon to describe ‘this human machine, in whom it is so easy to arouse emotion, [and who] shows, in the face of suffering, either a monstrous indifference or a cowardice that seeks a voluntary refuge in death’.7 Black people’s physicality was described as having an ‘animal character’ which Gobineau explains ‘appears in the shape of the pelvis’.8 In Leçons sur l’homme: sa place dans la creation et dans l’histoire de la terre (1864), Karl Vogt advanced this concept, describing Black people as noticeably simian. In his Lectures on man, having listed their supposed inferior physical traits, he positions Black people as distinctly ‘Other’ by aligning them with animals, stating that ‘these external characteristics remind us irresistibly of the ape: the short neck, the long lean limbs, the projecting pendulous belly – all this affords a glimmer of the ape beneath the human envelope’.9 While naturalists recorded their classifications of race for over a century, it was not until the fin de siècle that racial difference became infused with a language of disease. Those same traits which allowed naturalists to

5 6 7 8 9

Arthur de Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Races, trans. Adrian Collins, London 1915, p. 146. Ibid. p. 205. Ibid. p. 206. Ibid. p. 205. Karl Vogt, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth, ed. James Hunt, London 1864, p. 12.

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define a hierarchy of race now existed within a medical discourse, licensing clinicians to diagnose racial difference. One of the main scientists to bridge the gap between anthropology and medicine was William Flower. Initially a zoologist, Flower was also a medical doctor. Through his ability to diagnose racial variations, Flower is representative of a movement at the end of the nineteenth century to pathologize the racial ‘Other’. An example of one of his lectures exposes the degree to which anatomical variations were used to authorize the racial hierarchy. In the ‘Abstract Report of Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy of Man’, we are told that Flower foregrounds ‘the relative length of toes as a characteristic which might mark a difference between Europeans and Negroes’.10 These discourses on race held great authority, transforming social attitudes; perhaps never more so than the influence of Gobineau, who is known to be ‘one of the spiritual progenitors of Hitler’s Mein Kampf’.11 Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) can elucidate how science influenced race relations at the fin de siècle. Said’s discussion of how the Orient or the racial ‘Other’ was constructed by European discourses, sought to expose the artificiality of the seemingly natural hierarchy between the Occident and the Orient. Said describes this constructed hegemonic discourse, which he terms Orientalism, as ‘a library or archive of information commonly, and in some of its aspects, unanimously held’.12 The ideas within this archive ‘explained the behaviour of Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere, […] to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics’.13 A considerable share of this ideological archive was founded upon scientific classifications such as Gobineau’s, Vogt’s, and Flower’s anatomical measurements. Said explains that one important ‘element preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into types’.14

10 William Flower, ‘Abstract Report on the Comparative Anatomy of Man’, British Medical Journal 6:1 (1880), p. 687. 11 Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, p. 79. 12 Edward Said, Orientalism, London 1985, p. 42. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. p. 119.

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This Orientalist classification can be read in Marryat’s and Haggard’s novels. Both texts incorporate medico-scientific discourses to authorize the oppression of the racial ‘Other’. In The Blood of the Vampire, Marryat’s characterization of Dr Phillips, a clinician with an in-depth knowledge of Harriet’s lineage, represents the amalgamation of Linnaean-style classification with medicine. His role as doctor authorizes his diagnosis and subsequent control of the Gothic character, Harriet. In a similar style to Flower’s concern with minute physical indicators of racial difference, Dr Phillips draws attention to Harriet’s ethnicity through scientific observation of her physical features. He notes her ‘long-shaped eyes […], her wide mouth and her blood red lips’ (Vampire, 77), and as a result of these signs, Dr Phillips declares his findings that Harriet ‘comes from terrible parentage’ (Vampire, 67), referring to her Jamaican grandmother.15 Being a medical clinician, Dr Phillips’s classification of Harriet’s miscegenated ancestry is also a diagnosis. He asserts that because of her heritage, ‘an acquaintance with her is dangerous’ (Vampire, 70), warning others of a risk of contagion. In Powers of Horror (1980), Julia Kristeva examines the relationship between the abject and the self, exploring the role of society’s monsters in the reproduction of cultural hierarchies. She describes the abject as ‘that which does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.16 Similarly, contagion transgresses borders, breaking down the boundaries between self and ‘Other’, thus disintegrating order. Dr Phillips’s diagnosis of Harriet as contagious positions her as the abject and therefore as threatening to the Caucasian self and social order. Like Dr Phillips, Ludwig Horace Holly, the main narrator of Haggard’s novel, seizes the authoritative position of scientist through his classification of nature and man. Seemingly inspired by the Linnaean theory of nulla species nova, a theory which dictates that no new species will come into existence and thus nature can be catalogued in its entirety, Holly and his adoptive son Leo seek to kill and collect as many species of plant and animal as they can during their exploration of the African Kor. Alongside the mission to 15 16

All quotations from The Blood of the Vampire in this chapter are taken from Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, Brighton 2010. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York 1982, p. 4.

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find the mysterious Ayesha, Holly’s and Leo’s adventure is enhanced by the prospect of ‘some first-class shooting’ (She, 50).17 Indeed, once in the Kor, Holly revels in his and Leo’s killing of ‘a specimen of a peculiarly graceful hornless buck’ (She, 71). Colonial hunts and collections such as this are explained by Mary Louise Pratt as having ‘asserted an urban, lettered, male authority over the whole planet’.18 The men are asserting their dominance through the collection and taxonomical ordering of the foreign environment. As Sondra Archimedes infers, through his scientific observations, Holly establishes ‘his superiority and fitness to rule while appearing to be merely seeking knowledge for its own sake’.19 Throughout his quest, Holly classifies the mysterious creatures which he encounters, such as ‘a wild goose, which in addition to the sharp curved spurs on its wings, had a spur about three quarters of an inch long growing from its skull’ (She, 65). In much the same way as his collection of natural specimens lends Holly an authority over this foreign land, Holly’s subsequent classification of foreign peoples insidiously imposes a power differential in the White explorer’s favour. When Holly first meets the Amahaggar, the ‘savage’ tribe which worships Queen Ayesha, the academic instinctively catalogues the new race, ordering them within a spectrum of known racial variations which echo Gobineau’s simplistic grading of racial difference. Holly states that the Amahaggar were miscegenated, and thus ‘varied in their degree of darkness of skin, some being as dark as Mahomed, and some as yellow as a Chinese’ (She, 78). Holly’s taxonomy of the Amahaggar mimics his naturalist documentation of the wild goose in its objectifying ability to control through classification. By mapping his scientific taxonomies upon the African environment and the Amahaggar, Holly is reducing his new acquaintances to little more than specimens in his collection.

17 18 19

All quotations from She in this chapter are taken from H. Rider Haggard, She, Oxford 1991. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism, London 1992, p. 38. Sondra Archimedes, Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel, London 2005, p. 109.

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Scientific discourses concerning race not only catalogued physical difference, but also attributed generalized behavioural traits to the ‘Other’. One characteristic of the constructed Orient was their perverse sexuality. H. L. Malchow, in his study of Gothic representations of race, states that ‘the racial fiend is often a sexual threat and a sexual pervert’.20 The diagnosis of sexual perversity is one of many points of convergence between nineteenthcentury representations of the racial ‘Other’ and similar depictions of the female body. While science constructed strict racial taxonomies, scientific theories such as those of Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson perpetuated ideologies of gender difference which reinforced the mental and physical inferiority of women. These theories of gender difference were not just descriptive, but prescriptive, advising ideal feminine behaviour. Any variation upon this ideal, posed a threat to the gender hierarchy, and was thus deemed pathological, much in the same way as the non-Caucasian. The transgressive female body therefore became a potential site of disease. It was also cast as the monstrous, aligning it with the abject, which Kristeva explains, ‘disturbs identity, system, order’, in the same way as the transgressive female threatens the status quo.21 Never was this more evident than in scientific and literary depictions of the New Woman. Reacting to her disruption of gender classifications and her prioritization of female relationships, which signalled her threat to heteronormativity, the New Woman was portrayed as aberrantly masculine and hyper-sexed. Similarly, the ethnic ‘Other’ also came to embody those elements of human behaviour which the hegemony could not admit as its own. Said explains, ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate’.22 Haggard explores this distinction between the White male and the female, racial ‘Other’, through the male explorer’s reaction to the aggressive sexuality of the female Amahaggar. Holly describes the courtship of his adopted son Leo by an Amahaggar woman, explaining how she ‘deliberately advanced to him, and, in a way that would have been winning 20 Howard Le Roy Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Stanford, CA 1996, p. 148. 21 Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 4. 22 Said, Orientalism, p. 3.

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had it not been so determined, […] kissed him on the lips’ (She, 78). It is the aggressive nature of the Amahaggar’s lust that revolts Holly, since it departed from the European construction of the sexually passive woman. Moreover, similar to the New Woman’s perceived rejection of heteronormative paradigms which aligned her with lesbianism, people from non-White racial origins were often diagnosed with an indiscriminate sexual perversity. There was a widespread social fear that the New Woman’s regard for non-heterosexual relationships would spread amongst women, rendering men redundant. Sian Macfie argues that the tradition of describing the body in pathological terms was ‘linked with the notion of moral contagion and especially with the “contamination” of lesbianism’.23 This portrayal of contagious female sexuality once again aligns the New Woman with the abject. Both Harriet Brandt and Queen Ayesha epitomize the interconnected Gothic and disease-ridden descriptions of the female, racial, pervert. Marryat endows her racial ‘Other’, Harriet, with a ferocious bisexuality. Harriet’s initial attack against heteronormativity is her sexual interaction with the traditional mother-figure, Margaret Pullen. Harriet quickly initiates an intimate relationship with Mrs Pullen. While speaking to her, Harriet ‘crept closer and closer […], and now encircled her waist with her arm and leaned her head upon her shoulder’ (Vampire, 17). In casting Margaret as the ideal paragon of heteronormative femininity, Marryat shows Margaret Pullen rebuffing Harriet’s sexual advances. Despite resisting the contagion of lesbianism, after her ‘sexual’ encounter with Harriet, Margaret is not left unscathed. She admits feeling ‘so strange, so lightheaded […], as if [she] had been scooped hollow’ (Vampire, 18). Octavia Davis discusses the scientific theory of the gendered usages of energy, distinguishing between ‘the male katabolic expenditure of energy and the female anabolic absorption of energy’.24 Davis’s research focused on John

23

Sian Macfie, ‘“They Suck Us Dry”: A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Projections of Vampiric Women’, in Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (eds), Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, London 1991, pp. 58–67: p. 60. 24 Octavia Davis, ‘Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik (ed.), Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, Jefferson, NC 2007, pp. 40–54: p. 45.

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Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes’s The Evolution of Sex (1889), which examined the biological differences between males and females. Thomson and Geddes argued that the one feature distinguishing the sexes is ‘that the female is the outcome and expression of preponderant anabolism, and in contrast the male of preponderant katabolism’.25 Pre-empting current scientific definitions of anabolism as a series of metabolic processes whereby energy is used to build larger molecules from smaller base units, and catabolism which involves the breakdown of molecules, thus releasing energy, Thomson and Geddes discuss anabolism as the female storage and containment of energy, while katabolism comprises the male release and active use of energy. Outside of heteronormative marriage, in which female anabolism is stabilized by male katabolism, the woman’s anabolic potential drains her environment. Harriet’s unnatural fixation upon Margaret results in her anabolic depletion of the traditional mother-figure’s energy. To further highlight the danger of the racialized sexuality of the New Woman, Marryat depicts Harriet’s anabolic capabilities as Gothic. It is her vampire blood, inherited from her Jamaican grandmother who was bitten by a vampire bat, again aligning the non-Caucasian with the animal, which allows her to drain people. Marryat continues to interweave the Gothic with the medical by selecting Dr Phillips to be the one to diagnose Harriet, who explained to her that because of the vampire blood, ‘you will always exert a weakening and debilitating effect upon [your friends]’ (Vampire, 161). While Harriet’s bisexuality is suggestive of the perversity of the racial fiend, it is Marryat’s characterization of Harriet’s mother which emphasizes the links between the female body, the racial ‘Other’, and perverse sexuality. Through the classificatory authority of Dr Phillips’s medical observations, Harriet’s mother comes to embody all the negative stereotypes of the oversexed, racial reprobate. Described as ‘an epitome of lust’ (Vampire, 71), and a ‘revolting creature’ with ‘sensual lips’ (Vampire, 76), the Creole woman is distinguished from the Victorian conception of femininity by Dr Phillips’s conclusion that ‘she was not a woman, she was a fiend’ (Vampire, 68). Marryat’s treatment of Harriet’s mother is reminiscent

25

Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex, London 1889, p. 132.

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of the nineteenth-century exploitation of a Khoisan woman, objectionably renamed the Hottentot Venus. With no record of her birthname, records call her Saartjie Baartman; ‘Saartjie’ being an Afrikaans diminutive of ‘Sarah’, and a highly derogatory designation of non-white women and girls. In an account of Baartman’s life, Rachel Holmes explains how the woman was exhibited in London and Paris, turning the racial body into a hypersexualized spectacle.26 Studied by numerous scientists, Baartman was reduced to a specimen whose individual anatomical curiosities were catalogued by men of science. One set of observations, made by the zoologist Henri de Blainville, epitomizes the degrading nature of Baartman’s treatment. Blainville catalogues Baartman’s ‘extraordinary enlargement of the buttocks and the prolongation of the labia minora’.27 The image of the feminine, hypersexualized racial body permeated nineteenth-century race discourses, and Darwin’s assertion that Khoisan women’s bottoms provided ‘a somewhat comic sign of the primitive, grotesque nature of black, female sexuality’, typified the European opinion concerning the racial, sexual ‘Other’.28 Marryat draws upon this discourse, allowing Dr Phillips to sexualize Harriet’s mother. Exaggerating her uncontrollable sexuality, Harriet’s mother is described as having a ‘sensual mouth’ and ‘greedy eyes’ (Vampire, 68). The relationship between sexuality and food is one of the most curious ways through which Marryat characterizes Harriet and her mother. Interestingly, Gobineau claimed to have observed an increased appetite in ‘the negro’, theorizing that ‘All food is good in his eyes, nothing disgusts or repels him. What he desires is to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess’.29 We witness this conflation of appetite, sexuality, and racial difference when Dr Phillips diagnoses Harriet’s racial background in part ‘by the way she eats her food’, stating that ‘she had inherited her half-caste mother’s greedy and sensual disposition’ (Vampire, 77). Similarly, Haggard’s African tribe, the Amahaggar, are described as cannibals, signalling the threatening perversity of their 26 Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus, London 2007, p. 1. 27 Ibid. p. 144. 28 Ibid. p. 166. 29 Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Races, p. 205.

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appetites. Prior to the attempted consumption of the male explorers’ Arabic guide, Holly ‘noticed, with horror and a rising of the hair, that the woman next to Mahomed began to fondle him’ (She, 94). This sexual foreplay, which prefaces the attempted cannibal feast, once again links hunger and sexual appetite, making the Amahaggar’s sexuality monstrous. Despite Ayesha’s sexuality being heightened in the same way as the stereotypical racial ‘Other’, her control over her ‘appetites’ distinguishes her from the Amahaggar. Ayesha is aware of her sensuality, wrapping herself in gauze so as not to ignite the lust of those around her. Having warned Holly of her sexual appeal, she removes her coverings and Holly is so awed by her beauty that he falls ‘absolutely in love’ (She, 147). Despite her sexuality, Ayesha tells Holly that she is a ‘virgin goddess’ and has remained one for her twothousand-year life, ‘not to be moved of any man, save one’ (She, 144). This monogamous attitude, which adheres to the nineteenth-century understanding of a culturally evolved rather than promiscuous sexuality, is in conflict with her ‘savage’ sexual appeal. As Kelly Hurley discusses, sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing argued that ‘cultural evolution could be defined as a progression from the promiscuous or perverse sexuality of “primitive” societies to the institutionalization of monogamy […] characterized in modern Christian nations’.30 Ayesha, unlike the Amahaggar, has complete control over her sexual appetite. This is highlighted by her almost anorexic eating habits which contrast with the Amahaggar’s cannibalism, since ‘naught but fruit doth ever pass my lips’ (She, 142). Tamar Heller explains that ‘both Ayesha’s desire and her ability to suppress it encode an autonomy that reflects the late nineteenth-century climate of changing female roles’.31 While Ayesha’s sexual abstinence elevates her above the ‘savage’, it does not entirely distance her from depictions of women as sexual objects in Victorian marriage transactions. However, the control which she exhibits

30 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 1996, p. 72. 31 Tamar Heller, ‘The Unbearable Hybridity of Female Sexuality: Racial Ambiguity and the Gothic in Rider Haggard’s She’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik (ed.), Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, Jefferson, NC 2007, pp. 55–66: p. 56.

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in response to men’s advances is suggestive of a transgressive female power. Indeed, certain feminist movements at the fin de siècle prescribed celibacy to women as a form of protection against syphilis as well as a rebellious appropriation of sexual control. Despite nineteenth-century cultural and scientific discourses which sought to categorize women’s sexual desires as either non-existent or unquenchable, Ayesha is both aware and in control of her sexuality, and this is part of what makes her and the New Woman so threatening to masculinity. Once again drawing upon the comingled nineteenth-century depictions of the grotesque female body and the ethnic ‘Other’, there is some suggestion in each novel that the European woman is not distinctly different from the hypersexualized ‘savage’ feminine. Karl Vogt was one of a number of scientists to posit that women and non-Caucasians were at a similar point on the evolutionary scale, stating that ‘the child, the female and the senile white all have the intellect of the grown up negro’.32 In other words, the woman and the non-White were considered less evolved than the Caucasian male. Therefore, we can read in Marryat’s and Haggard’s works the insinuation that the European woman was not totally dissimilar from the Oriental female. The racialized characteristics which Marryat attributes to Harriet and her mother are also present in other women in the novel. Baroness Gobelli, a domineering and unattractive woman who befriends Harriet, sexually leers at her husband, eats her food greedily like Harriet, and is described as ‘an enormous woman of the elephant build, with a large, flat face and clumsy hands and feet’ (Vampire, 5). She is European, and yet her ‘savage’ sexuality and ‘degenerate’ physicality link her with the constructed racial ‘Other’. Similarly, in Haggard’s She, Holly, about to meet Ayesha for the first time, asks who will appear before him, ‘some naked savage queen, a languishing oriental beauty, or a nineteenth-century young lady drinking afternoon tea?’ (She, 131). Ardel Haefele-Thomas notes that ‘the nineteenth-century young lady ready to have her tea and the savage queen can and do exist within one body’.33 The scientific discourses surrounding gender and race allowed for this conflation, merging 32 Vogt, Lectures on Man, p. 192. 33 Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, Cardiff 2012, p. 89.

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the threat of the feminized, racialized ‘Other’ into one singular opposition to the White male. This conflation of the racial and female bodies in Marryat’s and Haggard’s novels highlights the tendency to feminize the racial ‘Other’. As Said states, the Orient was constructed around ‘its feminine penetrability’.34 Orientalism itself, like medico-scientific discourses of race, ‘encouraged a peculiarly male conception of the world’.35 In fact, Orientalism can be read as part of a wider ideological effort to reassert traditional masculinity at the fin de siècle. The ideological fiction of Orientalism connected African and Asian landscapes with the passive, disordered, pathological female body in order to justify imperialism; the White, male hero coming to save the diseased, weak, and wild feminine Orient from itself. Included in the discourse of Orientalism was imperial Gothic fiction. In her analysis of Haggard’s novel, Sondra Archimedes argues that imperial Gothic novels like She were responding ‘to a perceived crisis of masculinity, relating to changes occurring in the social and economic structure of Britain in the latter decades of the century’.36 Haggard clearly sets up the gender binary in She by beginning his novel in the homosocial environment of the University of Cambridge and moving into the threatening, feminized surroundings of the African Kor. The homosocial environment is exaggerated by Holly’s self-proclaimed misogyny. Called upon to raise his only friend’s son Leo, Holly insists that ‘I would have no woman to lord it over me about the child, and steal his affections from me’ (She, 26). So, Holly hires the equally misogynistic male assistant Job to help raise Leo in this distinctly homosocial rewriting of the family unit. As Showalter comically infers, ‘Holly thus miraculously achieves virgin fatherhood, paternity without the need for contaminating intercourse with women’.37 Showalter goes on to argue that in novels such as She, the Oriental or African landscapes provide an ‘anarchic space’ in which ‘men can be freed from the constraints 34 Said, Orientalism, p. 206. 35 Ibid. p. 207. 36 Archimedes, Gendered Pathologies, p. 92. 37 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London 1992, p. 84.

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of Victorian morality’.38 However, I would argue that this is a misreading of Haggard’s male quest. Rather, the adventure into the feminized body of Africa was to destroy anarchy, specifically female anarchy in the shape of Ayesha. The racial body of Africa does not provide a welcome escape, but set against the safety of the homosocial environment of the University of Cambridge, Haggard uses the quest to highlight the threat of the racial and female ‘Other’. As this homosocial unit travels into the African continent, seeking out the Queen of the savages, Haggard presents the homosocial not only as penetrating the feminized body of Africa, but moreover as coming under attack from the contagious and hypersexualized, female/racial ‘Other’. There are three threatening feminized ‘bodies’ which comprise the ethnic ‘Other’ in this novel: the African landscape, the Amahaggar, and Ayesha. The landscape itself becomes the hypersexualized and diseased female body, with its ‘swelling grassy plains’ and ‘cup-shaped hills’ (She, 75), and putrid swamps which infect Leo with malarial fever (She, 109), drawing upon the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the syphilitic female body. The aggressively sexual Amahaggar, though male and female, are feminized by their matrilineal culture whereby ‘descent is only traced through the line of the mother […] they never pay attention or even acknowledge any man as their father’ (She, 79). Standing in contrast to Leo’s homosocial family, in which the mother and virtually all female ancestry has been omitted from Holly’s account, the Amahaggar’s feminization is seen as challenging in that it reveals alternative power structures. Finally, Queen Ayesha is particularly threatening to Holly’s masculine family on two counts. Firstly, her sexuality disrupts the homosocial bonding which the quest served to emphasize. Upon seeing Ayesha’s beauty, Holly immediately feels the competition which the beautiful Leo would present to him, momentarily wishing his adopted son dead, since ‘if he lived he would perhaps be my rival with Ayesha’ (She, 148). The homosocial bond which Holly had safeguarded by the exclusion of a mother-figure from Leo’s life is now under threat from Ayesha. The second threat to the homosocial appears in the

38

Ibid. p. 81.

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form of Ayesha’s status as ‘phallic female’. The New Woman threatened masculinity through her ability to break down the boundaries of the ‘separate spheres’ ideology and to encroach upon male social territory. Ayesha’s gender liminality disgusts Holly, as he calls upon the Burkean gendered opposition of the sublime and the beautiful to cast Ayesha as the abject, stating ‘beauty made sublime […], with all its loveliness and purity, was evil’ (She, 143). Moreover, Ayesha usurps the traditionally masculine characteristic of physical strength as she strikes Leo, causing him to relate to Holly that he felt ‘as if all the manhood had been taken out of him’ (She, 203). Perhaps the most interesting subversion of the gender hierarchy involves Haggard’s deployment of allusions reminiscent of the categories constructed by Victorian evolutionary theory. Throughout the novel, Holly is described as a ‘gorilla’ (She, 11) and later as a ‘long-armed old baboon’ (She, 101). As well as being reminded of Vogt’s spurious correlations between Black people’s appearances and simians’ physical traits, the incongruity between Holly’s unattractive physical appearance and his intellect is suggestive of miscegenation. Gobineau argued that ‘the white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or if intelligent, both weak and ugly’.39 Despite the suggestion of miscegenation, Haggard elevates the White, male Holly over Ayesha’s otherness. On his way to meet Ayesha for the first time, one of the Amahaggar insists that Holly get down on his hands and knees to meet her. Holly’s response is to try to correct the gender and racial hierarchies which Ayesha has upturned. He says to himself, ‘I was an Englishman, and why […] should I creep into the presence of some savage woman as though I were a monkey’ (She, 130). He is resisting the racial and gender inversion which Ayesha has created. Rebecca Stott relates that ‘from this point his investigations are directed towards reversing this humiliating defeat, directed towards proving her inferiority by demonstrating her barbarism’.40 However, it is not until the 39 Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Races, p. 209. 40 Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale, Basingstoke 1992, p. 106.

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final scene that the hierarchies are re-established. Entering the flame which she thought would extend her life, Ayesha begins to degenerate, becoming the racialized troglodyte of anthropological discourse. The three men watch as ‘her skin changed colour, [turning] a dirty brown and yellow’ (She, 257). She begins to shrink ‘till she was no larger than a baboon’ (She, 257). Highlighting the scientific claims that the racial ‘Other’ and the woman were less evolved, this final scene corrects the hierarchy, recuperating masculinity by removing the woman from the pinnacle of power and reminding the reader of her racial and gender inferiority. Both Holly and Dr Phillips demonstrate how Orientalism with its authorization rooted in medico-scientific discourses, was able to contain the threat of the racial ‘Other’. As an ideological discourse, Orientalism sets up a ‘them and us’ scenario, identifying both the Occident and the Orient in opposition to one another, thus maintaining clear and impassable boundaries between the two. However, Harriet Brandt and Queen Ayesha’s racial otherness is not contained so easily. In fact, both women further threaten the clear boundaries set by Linnaeus, Gobineau, and others, due to their racial liminality. Harriet’s skin is described as ‘colourless but clear’ (Vampire, 4), while Ayesha’s hand is as ‘white as snow’ (She, 131). Octavia Davis examines the role of racial liminality, stating that ‘the surface of Harriet’s body exhibits conventional white middle class feminine delicacy that belies […] the racial and social origins of the “primitive” other’.41 In an age when heredity became subsumed with frightening rhetoric about degeneration and latent hereditary deformities, the concept of hidden genealogy and miscegenation was a topic of great concern. The miscegenated ‘half-caste’ defied the authority of scientific classifications. The inability to class them not only threatened the stability of the scientists’ definition of the Orient, but in conjunction, the stability of their own identity as the Occident came under attack. Representative of the threat which the ‘half-caste’ bore social order, racial liminality was located as monstrous, diseased, the abject. There are two main interconnected facets to Kristeva’s discussion of abjection which illuminate the treatment of miscegenation at the fin de 41 Davis, ‘Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire’, p. 44.

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siècle: the ambiguity and anarchy of the abject, and its ability to stabilize and destabilize society and the individual. Kristeva describes the abject as ‘that which does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between’.42 The refusal of the mixed-race person to be classified into a type with definite, predictable physical and behavioural traits, links the miscegenated to the abject, and their joint disrespect for the hierarchical taxonomies at the basis of Victorian society. In Haggard’s She and Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, the miscegenated are made abject through their link with infection. Contagion, like the abject, ignores boundaries and borders. At the fin de siècle, miscegenation was discussed in pathological terms. While many believed that racial miscegenation would lead to degeneration, demonstrated by Ayesha’s violent degeneration at the end of She, a more popular theory was that the ‘half-caste’ was the bearer of contagion. Malchow asserts that this might well have stemmed from the fact that ‘the close and unsanitary quarters of immigrant ships were often associated with both excrement and promiscuity’, therefore conflating racial mixing with disease.43 Thus, Harriet’s life-draining capabilities can be understood as representative of the disease which miscegenation would bring into society, while the sickly bodies of the racially impure Amahaggar and the infecting of the European Leo by the African landscape exemplify the risk which racial liminality bore Victorian society. Furthermore, in much the same way as the New Woman’s rejection of heteronormativity threatened the status quo, the racially miscegenated ‘Other’ disrupts the Victorian classificatory systems of order which were at the basis of society and identity. In this sense, the resulting monstrous manifestations of phallic females and racial fiends in Gothic fiction can be interpreted as society’s attempt to acknowledge, classify, and contain the threat of these ever-evolving roles within a monstrous, abject category. Just as Linnaeus contained the unexplainable and incongruent within the gruesome group monstrosus, Haggard and Marryat characterize liminality as Gothic. In doing so, both authors acknowledge the racially miscegenated as that which threatens both the status quo and the identity of the White 42 Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 4. 43 Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, p. 163.

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male. At the same time, however, by containing it within the category of the Gothic, they are separating it from themselves, making it ‘Other’. Thus, the identity of the White male is stabilized in the face of all that he is not. Haefele-Thomas argues that ‘Ayesha’s […] monstrosity lies in Holly’s (as well as the late Victorian reader’s) inability to categorize her. She is not completely human, nor completely female’.44 Indeed, Ayesha’s indeterminable race is one of several Victorian binary oppositions which are transgressed or confused by Ayesha. Consequently, Haggard depicts Ayesha in Gothic terms in order to transform her threatening existence into the abject. He does this by expanding Ayesha’s disregard for boundaries to include her disrespect for the distinction between life and death. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva cites the corpse as the ‘utmost abject’.45 The image of the corpse destroys the barrier between life and death, and Kristeva explains that ‘it is death infecting life’.46 Ayesha is herself clothed in ‘soft, white gauzy material in such a way as at first sight to remind [one] most forcibly of a corpse’ (She, 132). She sleeps in caves which Holly explains ‘were nothing more or less than vast catacombs’ (She, 126) and she goes as far as to declare her disregard for the distinction, stating ‘there is no such thing as death, though there be a thing called change’ (She, 138). In The Blood of the Vampire Harriet’s mixed racial origins are made monstrous, thus enhancing the threat of miscegenation. Dr Phillips exposes her lineage, revealing the dangerous liminality which Harriet had previously hidden. He discloses that Harriet’s grandmother, a Black Jamaican slave ‘was bitten by a vampire bat when pregnant with Harriet’s mother’ (Vampire, 69). However, the vampiric blood does not seem to terrify the other characters nearly so much as the fact that she is a ‘quadroon’ (Vampire, 77). Dr Phillips is not warning people against a vampire, but against the threat of miscegenation, stating ‘When the cat is black, the kitten is black too’ (Vampire, 77). Victorian anthropological and medical discourses on race sought to classify humans into types, frequently endorsing a sustained subjugation of the feminized, racial ‘Other’. While numerous nineteenth-century Gothic 44 Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, p. 90. 45 Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 4. 46 Ibid.

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narratives, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s mid-century ‘Lois the Witch’ (1859) and Robert Lewis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), can be read as criticizing the scientific portrayal of a feminized, ethnic threat to the hegemony, both Marryat’s and Haggard’s novels became co-constructors of this abject fiend. Drawing upon a shared Gothic lexicon, both the biological sciences and fin-de-siècle literature worked in dialogue to fabricate a binary that positioned the White, heterosexual male against the threatening, feminized, racialized villain. The incorporation of anthropological and zoological classifications of man into clinical medicine not only resulted in the doctor’s licence to diagnose racial difference, but, moreover, racial variation became inscribed by a language of pathology; the feminized, racial body became the scapegoat carrier of infection, disease, and malformation at the end of the nineteenth century. The vampiric Harriet and zombie-like Ayesha epitomize the threat of new female and racial roles, both unsettling the naturalized power hierarchies upheld by scientific discourses. However, Marryat and Haggard’s complicity in the Orientalist’s mission is exposed through the violent deaths of both Gothic miscreants, quelling the threat to the status quo, and reasserting a male, White supremacy.

Bibliography Archimedes, Sondra, Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel, London 2005. Davis, Octavia, ‘Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik (ed.), Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, Jefferson, NC 2007, pp. 40–54. Flower, William, ‘Abstract Report on the Comparative Anatomy of Man’, British Medical Journal 6:1 (1880), p. 687. Geddes, Patrick, John Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex, London 1889. Gobineau, Arthur de, An Essay on the Inequality of the Races, trans. Adrian Collins, London 1915. Gould, Stephen Jay, ‘The Geometer of Race’, Discover 15 (1994), pp. 65–9.

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Haefele-Thomas, Ardel, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, Cardiff 2012. Haggard, H. Rider, She, Oxford 1991. Heller, Tamar, ‘The Unbearable Hybridity of Female Sexuality: Racial Ambiguity and the Gothic in Rider Haggard’s She’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik (ed.), Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, Jefferson, NC 2007, pp. 55–66. Holmes, Rachel, The Hottentot Venus, London 2007. Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 1996. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York 1982. Macfie, Sian, ‘“They Suck Us Dry”: A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Projections of Vampiric Women’, in Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (eds), Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, London 1991, pp. 58–67. Malchow, Howard Le Roy, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Stanford, CA 1996. Marryat, Florence, The Blood of the Vampire, Brighton 2010. Montagu, Ashley, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Oxford 1997. Nisser-Dalman, Margareta, ‘What’s more important, a good story or a true story? The merging of facts and fiction at Linnaeus’ houses in Uppsala’, The Linnaean Legacy: Three Centuries after his Birth 8 (2008), pp. 20–7. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism, London 1992. Said, Edward, Orientalism, London 1985. Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London 1992. Stott, Rebecca, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale, Basingstoke 1992. Vogt, Karl, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth, ed. James Hunt, London 1864.

Michael Wainwright

11 Narratives of Helminthology: Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Bram Stoker, and The Lair of the White Worm (1911)

abstract In 1862, at British Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomas Spencer Cobbold argued ‘in favour of a more extended prosecution of experimental research in the department of human helminthology’. Thanks to Cobbold’s exhortation, the subject started to flourish in Britain, and within two years, he could report that ‘no department of Natural History science has attracted more attention than that of the study of internal parasites’. Yet, one of the gatekeepers to the lay community, a discursive controller from the arts, John Ruskin, fought to maintain the British taboo on parasitology; in consequence, human invermination remained a taboo in the wider discursive community. This chapter breaks that silence in drawing on the discursive history of parasitology to unmask hidden but telling literary delineations of helminthic infestation in the works of an author environed by and alerted to the parasitic, the discourses and practices of medicine, and parasitology: Bram Stoker.

This chapter, which devotes its opening pages to a discursive phenomenon that plagued nineteenth-century British science until the early 1860s, speculates on the parasitological embedment of Bram Stoker (1847–1912). This speculation, which draws on Thomas Spencer Cobbold’s (1828–86) explicit challenge to a taboo on parasitology, John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) wish to maintain that silence, and the Stoker family’s intriguing reticence concerning Bram’s blighted infancy, unearths figurations of the parasitic across Stoker’s canon from The Primrose Path (1875) to The Lair of the White Worm (1911). That lair, to take Zoonomia; Or, the Laws of Organic

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Life (1794) colloquially, is located in ‘the intestines’.1 The immediate discussion, therefore, concerns helminths (or entozoa) rather than terrestrial annelids (or earthworms), Erasmus Darwin (1732–1802) rather than Charles Darwin (1809–82), and eighteenth- rather than nineteenthcentury parasitological discourse. Zoonomia emphasizes that helminths, as a parasitic class that includes the threadworm (white in colour), the roundworm (white or light brown in colour), and the tapeworm (white in colour), have deleterious effects on their hosts, and within ten years of Darwin’s publication, Italian physician Valeriano Luigi Brera (1772–1840) implicitly endorsed this opinion in Lezioni medico-pratiche sopra i principali vermi dell’organismo vivente e le così dette malattie verminose (1802) and Traité des maladies vermineuses, précédé de l’histoire naturelle des vers et de leur origine dans le corps humain (1804). Brera’s expositions were the first major nineteenth-century works devoted to the subject of helminths, and within fifteen years, the Swedish-born naturalist Karl Asmund Rudolphi (1771–1832) published two fundamentally important treatises of related interest: Enterozoorum, Sive Vermium Intestinalium: Historia Naturalis (volume I [1808]; volume II [1810]) and Entozoorum Synopsis: Cui Accedunt Mantissa Duplex et Indices Locupletissimi (1819). Rudolphi, as ‘the foremost parasitologist of his day’, as G. C. Cook chronicles, ‘contributed the most important parasitological work[s] of the early nineteenth century’.2 ‘By far the most important parasitological works of the early nineteenth century’, concurs William Derek Foster, ‘were those of K. A. Rudolphi’.3 Rudolphi’s natural history of intestinal worms posited its author as the undisputed father of helminthology; his entozoic synopsis consolidated that status. Indeed, as Fatik Baran Mandal documents, ‘Rudolphi coined the word, “Entozoa” to describe parasitic worms living inside the bodies of other animals’.4 Yet, as Foster observes, ‘of parasitological literature in

1 2 3 4

Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; Or, the Laws of Organic Life, 1794, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London 1796, I, p. 53, p. 63, p. 66, p. 431. G. C. Cook, ‘History of Parasitology’, in Stephen Gillespie and Richard D. Pearson (eds), Principles and Practice of Clinical Parasitology, Chichester 2003, pp. 1–20: p. 2. William Derek Foster, A History of Parasitology, Edinburgh 1965, p. 17. Fatik Baran Mandal, Human Parasitology, New Delhi 2011, p. 139.

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English there was at this period virtually nothing’, excepting A Treatise on the Nature and Cure of Intestinal Worms in the Human Body (1829), a slim volume by a surgeon named William Rhind (1797–1874).5 This void resulted from a contextually specific form of discursive demarcation. A discourse is a transpersonal language system that embodies the ideas, values, and vocabulary of a discipline (or community of knowledge) and that operates according to particular constraints.6 These restrictions make their presence felt in facilitating a specific set of users. Scientific discourses, in particular, are demarcated; ‘that is’, as Michel Serres expounds, boundary markers indicate where scientists ‘reign supreme as the owner[s]’ of those discourses.7 This well-defined possession protects against unchecked access and unchecked intervention. The twofold demarcation of British parasitology at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, was exceptionally restrictive. On the one hand, Erasmus Darwin had seemingly left no habitable space, or ‘wiggle room’, for further discursive consideration. On the other hand, the subject of parasites remained a taboo among the British scientific community. The internal, structural necessities of language make external, interrelational communication possible, but this potential facilitates contagion as well as communication – and taboo attempts to pre-empt discursive infection. ‘Taboo’, as Mary Douglas explains, ‘protects the local consensus on how the world is organized’.8 The attendant safeguards, which threaten dangers if disrespected, apply to both physical and discursive bodies. Douglas argues that ‘some of the dangers which follow on taboo-breaking spread harm indiscriminately on contact. Feared contagion extends the danger of a broken taboo to the whole community’. Taboo fragments the discursively unpalatable, and where possible, imposes silence, withholding discursive

5 Foster, A History of Parasitology, p. 19. 6 For a discussion of this Foucauldian understanding of discourse, see Paul H. Fry, Theory of Literature, New Haven, CT 2012, pp. 16–17. 7 Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? [2008], trans. AnneMarie Feenberg-Dibon, Stanford, CA 2011, p. 64. Emphasis in the original. 8 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, London 2002, p. xi.

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accreditation from external users. Criticism is ‘suppressed’, she concludes, ‘whole areas of life become unspeakable’, and even ‘unthinkable’.9 Taboo shores up territorial vulnerabilities by protecting against intercorporeal and interdiscursive creep.

British parasitology after Zoonomia Regarding the parasitological void in English after the publication of Zoonomia, British science did not seem to want ‘foreign’ ideas, nor ideas deemed ‘dirty’ in themselves, infecting an accepted and acceptable discourse. This negative desire was particularly strong because parasitology, like taboo, concerns not only bodily, but also discursive margins. ‘Any structure of ideas’, as Douglas asserts, ‘is vulnerable at its margins’. Thus, ‘the orifices of the body’, as Douglas reasons, ‘symbolize its specially vulnerable points’,10 and helminths are parasites capable of transgressing, occupying, and irritating these bodily openings. Unlike the Freudian explanation of taboo, in which public rituals are adult versions of infantile phantasies, an anthropological explanation of customary prohibition draws selectively on body symbolism, thereby appreciating the cultural specificity of bodily and discursive margins; as a result, anthropology correctly posits a contextually specific response to human parasites. ‘In Europe in the eighteenth century the presence of worms in children was regarded as beneficial by many peoples’, as Foster chronicles, while in nineteenth-century Ethiopia ‘almost 100 per cent. of Abyssinians were infested with T. saginata’, the beef tapeworm; ‘indeed, they regarded infestation as a normal condition and considered it unhealthy not to have a tapeworm’.11 Cultural environment prescribes the bodily margins to which a belief system attributes power. What a community considers dangerous 9 Ibid. p. xiii. 10 Ibid. p. 150. 11 Foster, A History of Parasitology, p. 3, p. 49.

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leads to that community’s concern with a particular set of access points and interstitial spaces (at both individual and communal levels). The British Empire of the first half of the nineteenth century remained anxious about foreign pressure on its colonial boundaries, on the one hand, and the aliens encountered and absorbed into the expanding imperial body, on the other hand; the vestigial belief in helminthic benefits among the foreigners of the European continent amplified this response; and this taboo, like the Empire itself, remained largely unchallenged until 1857, the year of the First Indian Rebellion (or Sepoy Mutiny). In Britain, that year witnessed the publication in English by the Sydenham Society of Friedrich Küchenmeister’s (1821–90) Manual of Animal and Vegetable Parasites and Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold’s On Tape and Cystic Worms. Although treatises on parasitology were now available in English, these were transitive discourses, translations that shifted meaning from its original site to a neighbouring or para-site; as such, their ability to convince remained vulnerable to intercultural disparagement. In fine, the discursive taboo remained resistant to British science. A multidirectional attack on the scientific mainstream analogous to that of helminths within their hosts was required. This need potentialized the discourse of scientific gentlemen, who formed a marginal force of notable social standing, one at the periphery of current discursive governance. Unlike their European counterparts, who belonged to their respective discursive communities, the scientific gentlemen of Britain were marginal players. Whereas Rudolphi and von Siebold held university chairs, Charles Darwin and Thomas Spencer Cobbold were independent scientists without academic tenures. Charles Darwin had considered the parasites of birds at some length in A Naturalist’s Voyage (1839), and in the definitive sixth edition of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1861), he again cites the parasitic alongside the avian when discussing the phenomenon of co-adaptation – but the parasites of humans, it seems, were less to his taste. Nonetheless, along with the widespread dissemination of his work, developments in the sectioning and staining of anatomical specimens, on the one hand, and the effects of Thomas Carlyle’s Germanizing mission, on the other hand, encouraged a

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positive re-evaluation of continental science in England, promoted nonsectarian education, and connected, as Gisela Argyle states, ‘the scientific enterprise with notions of German rigour, industry, and professionalism’.12 Disciplines emergent in English academia, therefore, received unprecedented support, scientific research benefited from strong ties with foreign institutions, and important European treatises in the natural sciences were translated into English. Cobbold, as he chronicles in Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of Helminthology (1864), responded to this discursive development, appearing at the Cambridge Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science of 1862, where he argued strongly ‘in favour of a more extended prosecution of experimental research in the department of human helminthology’. His exhortation met with success, the discourse of parasitology started to flourish in Britain, and within two years Cobbold could report that ‘no department of Natural History science has attracted more attention than that of the study of internal parasites, and it may also be affirmed that no separate branch of biological inquiry has in recent times advanced more rapidly’.13 The marginal players of British science had won discursive acceptance; and Cobbold’s publication of Entozoa marked this victory. His introduction to this volume, which immediately and explicitly breaks the discursive taboo on helminths, displays the parasitical transgression of boundaries so redolent of parasitic worms. Put succinctly, Cobbold aims at lay readers (from the bottom up) and science readers (from the top down), and does so wholeheartedly. ‘Without any customary apology, either to the general public or to the members of the medical profession’, he states, ‘I introduce this elementary treatise’.14 Cobbold compiled his volume with recourse not only to translations, but also to discursive fragments dispersed over the preceding sixty years by the English taboo on parasitology: ‘the

12 13 14

Gisela Argyle, Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s–1930s, London 2002, p. 106. Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of Helminthology, with Reference, More Particularly, to the Internal Parasites of Man, London 1864, p. 145, p. 3. Ibid. p. vii.

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void’, he explains, ‘has been more or less completely occupied by several able translations’ and ‘a laborious search after entozoological facts, scattered through upwards of twelve hundred British and American volumes’.15 Entozoa promoted Cobbold to foremost among the gentlemen pioneers who fought and won over the sentinels of a particular scientific discourse in Britain. ‘The taboo-maintained rules will be as repressive as the leading members of the society want them to be’, but ‘when the controllers of opinion want a different way of life’, as Douglas notes, ‘the taboos will lose credibility and their selected view of the universe will be revised’.16 Not everybody of renown, however, welcomed Cobbold’s revisionary success. One of the gatekeepers to the lay community, a discursive controller from the arts, John Ruskin, wished to maintain the British taboo on parasitology. Ruskin, as if anticipating the era of decadence that would shortly follow, found the parasitological sciences deplorable. ‘The instinct for the study of parasites, modes of disease, the lower forms of undeveloped creatures, and the instinctive processes of digestion and generation, rather than the varied and noble habit of life, – which shows itself so grotesquely in modern science’, he lamented in 1875, ‘is the precise counterpart of the forms of idolatry (as of beetle and serpent, rather than of clean or innocent creatures,) which were in great part the cause of final corruption in ancient mythology and morals’.17 Ruskin recognized, but decried, what poststructuralists would call the deconstructive potential of parasitology. ‘Earlier writings on primitive religion found taboos alien and irrational’, as Douglas maintains. ‘The concept of dirt makes a bridge between our own contemporary culture and those other cultures where behaviour that blurs the great classifications of the universe is tabooed. We denounce it by calling it dirty and dangerous; they taboo it’.18 For Ruskin, parasitological discourse was at once dirty and dangerous because it held social boundaries in little hierarchical regard; he 15 Ibid. p. viii. 16 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. viii, p. xiii. 17 John Ruskin, ‘Letter LI’, May 1875, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, New York 1894, pp. 395–411: p. 410n. 18 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xi.

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wanted to maintain a taboo that supported present societal structures; he sought to demarcate the social proprieties; in short, he wished to maintain the seam between seemliness and unseemliness. Science had to be an elevating influence, not a degrading investigation into the physiological causes of orificial restlessness. The focus on parasitological discourse was going beyond obsession and becoming biologically ingrained; the ‘memes’ of parasitology – to retrospectively apply a neologism from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) for the structural carriers of cultural inheritance – were colonizing the British scientific mind in a culturally parasitic manner.19 In Ruskinian effect, parasitologists were in danger of either recidivism or insanity; and criminals and the hereditarily insane, according to Ruskin’s attestation of 1872, were ‘partly men, partly vermin; what is human in them you must punish – what is vermicular, abolish’.20 To be fair, Ruskin was aware of social parasitism not only in the criminal form, but also in the capitalist form of worker exploitation, yet he could not help but value a purified society above an egalitarian one. Paradoxically, then, Ruskin’s own discourse was self-defeating on the issue, with parasitologists presented as a contaminating rather than a cleansing social force: their work infested the higher social echelons. Some scientific support – a sort of old-guard reactionism – remained for Ruskin’s attitude. ‘The notion that species could actually adapt to worsening physical and moral conditions’, as Jenny Bourne Taylor relates, was ‘elaborated in England by the eminent zoologist E. Ray Lankester, whose Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism appeared in 1880’.21 For Lankester, as Carl Zimmer traces, ‘some species not only stopped rising but actually surrendered some of their accomplishments. They degenerated’. Parasites were archetypically degenerate, and ‘since there was no divide between the ascent of life and the history of civilization, Lankester saw in parasites a

19 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene [1976], 3rd edn, Oxford 2006, p. 192. 20 John Ruskin, ‘Madness and Crime: To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette’, November 1872, Fors Clavigera, pp. 318–19: p. 319. 21 Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Psychology at the Fin de Siècle’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 2007, pp. 13–30: p. 15.

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grave warning for humans’.22 The British individual and the British Empire were at once germane to this constitutional caution. ‘The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization’, reasons Lankester, ‘just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world’.23 The constitutional body that accommodates parasites shares their degenerate nature. By implication, parasitology was a symptom of degeneration, and those who practised it were degenerates. ‘People had been referred to as parasites before the late 1800s’, as Zimmer remarks, ‘but Lankester and other scientists gave the metaphor a precision, a transparency, that it never had before’.24 That pellucid accuracy threatened to turn the figurative literal. The confluence of Lankester’s and Ruskin’s thoughts realized that danger in Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883). In this collection of essays, Drummond rails against parasitism as ‘one of the gravest crimes in nature’, the exception that proves the rule, ‘a breach of the law of Evolution’.25 Such parasitological interventions by degenerationists sought to establish an interdiscursive injunction. If successful, this sanction would seal the bottleneck between a scientific discourse, as a mental and recondite discipline, and common discourse, as mainstream and physiological practices. Ironically, however, this sanction relied on the same discursive and corporeal routes as parasitology did, and was obliged to inscribe itself within the common orifices, passages, and territory that concerned helminthology; in trying to silence parasitology, the degenerationists unwittingly emphasized its interdiscursive as well as its figurative force. Degenerationism, as Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals (1879) makes plain, was the sort of ‘educated ignorance’ that Cobbold decried. He dismissed the notion that parasitic hosts are either

22 Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, London 2003, p. 16, p. 17. 23 E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London 1880, p. 33. 24 Zimmer, Parasite Rex, p. 18. 25 Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World [1883], Cambridge 2009, p. 319.

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physically or morally lax. ‘Most people, not excluding even the votaries of the healing art, following tradition’, declares Cobbold, ‘regard the internal parasites or entozoa as creatures either directly resulting from certain diseased conditions of their hosts or as organisms which would not have existed if their bearers had been perfectly healthy. Nothing’, he asserts, ‘can be more absurd’. Cobbold effectively identified degenerationism as a parasitizing set of delusional memes. ‘The biologist may say what he lists’, he laments, but he knows perfectly well that the superstitious mind will continue to ignore the precious and elevating results of scientific research, and that it will perseveringly continue to persuade itself that internal worms, parasites, and entozoa, of whatever kind, belong to the category of ‘plagues’ liable to be distributed as special punishments for human wrong-doing.26

The case of Bram Stoker Applied retrospectively, degenerationism would have singled out the young Bram Stoker – who ‘from the moment of his arrival’, as Harry Ludlam records, ‘was expected to die; for the third born of Abraham [1799–1876] and Charlotte Stoker [1818–1901] was a sick and feeble child, prone to every ailment’ – as a case of special punishment.27 Parasitology, however, would have posited an alternative diagnosis, one that indicted environing conditions. Stoker was born in Clontarf, Dublin, on 8 November 1847, during the Great Famine (1845–51) caused by the parasitic Phytophthora infestans (or potato blight). This devastating infestation overshadowed a second, less-documented, but equally widespread and parasitically related problem, which came under scrutiny in 1848, when the first serious attempt 26 27

Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals, including Some Account of the Ectozoa, London 1879, p. 2, p. 1 (emphasis in the original), p. 2. Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker, London 1962, p. 11.

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to assess the effects of invermination on the health of humans as well as domesticated animals in Britain was conducted. That assessment revealed a second Irish blight. O’Bryen Bellingham (1805–57), a doctor and surgeon at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, investigated this additional human scourge, not only diagnosing symptoms of helminthic infestation in patients, but also recording the occurrence of intestinal worms in fresh cadavers. ‘Bellingham affirms’, states his Anglo-American contemporary Robley Dunglison, that the threadworm ‘is very common in Ireland, or at least in Dublin’, where, according to Bellingham himself, this type of helminth is ‘found in onefifth of the individuals examined between the ages of three and ten’.28 Was Bram Stoker one of these sufferers? The silence on human invermination that the degenerationists were so keen to preserve volubly responds to this question. The young Bram’s ill health was a continuous condition that the Stokers, as a family overloaded with physicians, tabooed; as a result, the cause of his illness remains a mystery. ‘In spite of the preponderance of medical doctors in the Stoker family’, remark Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker, ‘no explanation for this mysterious illness has ever been provided’.29 William Stoker, the boy’s grandfather, was a well-known physician both within and beyond the medical profession, as was his son, Edward. ‘Throughout his illness’, as Barbara Belford states, ‘Stoker was cared for by [his] uncle, who was associated with Dublin’s Fever Hospital and House of Recovery’, but neither Edward nor William Stoker – each a published author in his lifetime – is quotable on the subject of Bram’s health, and their loyalty to this interdiscursive injunction seems to have infected Bram himself.30 For, Bram’s adult discourse in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) recalls the early phase

28 Robley Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, A Treatise on Special Pathology and Therapeutics, 3rd edn, 2 vols, Philadelphia, PA 1848, I, 188; O’Bryen Bellingham, ‘Dr. O’Bryen Bellingham on Irish Entozoa’, The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Zoology, Botany and Geology, XIII (1844), pp. 167–74: p. 168. 29 Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker (eds), The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker: The Dublin Years, by Bram Stoker, London 2012, p. 120. 30 Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, London 1996, p. 19.

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of his life in a detached, impersonal, and succinct manner that presents neither a diagnosis nor diagnostic suppositions. ‘In my babyhood I used, I understand to be, often at the point of death’, he writes. ‘Certainly till I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright’.31 Could invermination account for this condition, one that suddenly and completely disappeared, and one that Stoker seemingly left so far behind that, as Joseph S. Bierman reports, he would ‘become the Athletic Champion of Dublin University’?32 The threadworm that infested Dublin’s children, according to Dunglison, was of the long ‘white’ variety; Rudolphi, also according to Dunglison, notes that ‘more than one thousand’ have been found in the human intestines; and ‘large numbers occur in children, in whom’, as Cobbold relates in Entozoa, ‘they are particularly frequent’.33 When intestinal parasites ‘are present in great numbers or size, in the intestinal canal, it is owing to a particular condition’, adds Dunglison, which is termed ‘Worm Disease’, and some doctors during the period of Stoker’s childhood illness still deferred to the ‘worm fever’ of Erasmus Darwin’s discourse.34 Unequivocal signs of worm disease are rare, concedes Dunglison, but ascribable symptoms include a ‘tumid, pale, or livid face’, ‘epistaxis’ (bleeding from the nose), ‘moroseness; stubbornness; frightful dreams’, ‘chorea; risus sardonicus; vertigo; delirium, and stupor’.35 The treatment for invermination at this time exhibited various degrees of unpleasantness. Without recourse to anthelminthic pharmaceuticals, doctors used emetics, enemas, complementary anthelminthics, such as santonine (wormwood) or ascaridole (wormseed), and panaceas. The available treatment had somewhat evolved over the preceding century, but the practical options remained the same. Threadworms ‘are said to be weakened by twenty grains of cinnabar and

Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving [1906], 2 vols, London 1907, I, p. 31. 32 Joseph S. Bierman, ‘Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad’, American Imago 29:2 (1972), pp. 186–98: p. 186. 33 Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, I, p. 193, p. 188; Cobbold, Entozoa, p. 309. 34 Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, I, p. 187; Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, p. 104. 35 Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, I, p. 190. 31

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five of rhubarb taken every night’, documents Erasmus Darwin. ‘Clysters of Harrowgate water are recommended’, but ‘might not a piece of candle, about an inch long […] smeared with mercurial ointment, and introduced into the anus at night’, he suggests, ‘be effectual?’36 Although helminthic infestation is unlikely to have caused an illness of seven years’ duration, Bram Stoker may well have suffered from helminths as an occasional supplement to the underlying cause of his childhood condition; and, as a bedridden patient, he would have been susceptible to re-infestation, with the ingestion of helminthic eggs a constant danger. Almost certainly, given the scientific discourse concerning the prevalence and symptoms of invermination in Dublin, Stoker would have been treated on several occasions and in various ways for helminths. Indeed, Edward Stoker administered emetics to hospital patients, and these cases presumably included sufferers of worm disease. Put succinctly, a young child subjected to anthelminthic treatments, especially of the procedurally invasive kind, was bound to suffer thereafter from the most frightful dreams. Freud might struggle to explain the cultural specificity of taboo, but his dream-work concept helps to interpret nightmares as a type of eidetic discourse. The dream-work displaces, condenses, and symbolizes tabooed subjects. Such transformations enable monstrous helminths to pass through the barrier of conscious censorship; they openly lodge in the mind in other guises; most notably as snakes: the displacement from worms to snakes is easily negotiable, the condensation of small worms into larger snakes is similarly navigable, and the symbolism of snakes becomes significant beyond the standard phallic connotation. Hence, an argument about discursive evolution supplied by Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm, which points to a psychological displacement by natural (or savage) man of his sufferings from invermination, marks a discursive path for the feverish thoughts that articulate the Stokerian oeuvre. ‘In the dawn of the language’, remarks Stoker’s fount of etymological reasoning, Sir Nathaniel de Salis, ‘the word “worm” had a somewhat different meaning from that in use to-day. It was an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon “wyrm”, meaning a dragon or snake; or

36

Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, pp. 55–6.

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from the Gothic “waurms”, a serpent; or from the Icelandic “ormur”, or the German “wurm”’ [sic].37 Hence, in passing from the Real of linguistic absence through the Imaginary of body imaging to the Symbolic of linguistic omnipresence, the maturing Stoker acquired a discursive proficiency that filled the void left by the permanent injunction on his childhood illness.38 Stoker’s literary conceptions were freighted with helminthic trauma, his discursive practices were salted with verminous significance, and self-expression courted expressive similitude: he was at once an ‘ebullient figure of restless, urgent energy’, as Ludlam relates, and a writer who thematically delineated the scourge of invermination.39 Recourse to the Gothic, with its elements of pollution, invasive threats, hidden but manifest dangers, and what Julie Cross calls the ‘less palatable undertones of life’s unfairness’, suited Stoker.40 The parasite that comes to the sufferer from without, and the helminth that prosecutes this invermination from within, articulate a dreaded and unwanted form of alien invasion. Stoker’s physically mature body and the body of his maturing literary work both limited and constrained these parasitic characteristics in respective processes of external expression. While helminthic vigour, agility, and flexibility, as the adult Stoker’s physical prowess seemingly testified, appeared to have inscribed his homeostatic state, creative writing expelled yet retained Stoker’s discursive invermination; in consequence, his texts

Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm [1911], London 2008, p. 36. Three phases characterize Jacques Lacan’s model of psychic development: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The Real is the pre-linguistic and pre-unconscious order of original unity (or fullness); the Imaginary, which appeals to an evolutionarily fostered fascination with form, is the pre-linguistic and pre-unconscious domain that promotes a sense of identity; the Symbolic is the linguistic order of predetermined relations that governs society through the repression of antisocial impulses. Repression, which begins during the second phase and attains full functioning in the third, creates the subject’s unconscious. 39 Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula, p. 149. 40 Julie Cross, ‘Frightening and Funny: Humour in Children’s Gothic Fiction’, in Anna Jackson, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats (eds), The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, Abingdon, UK 2008, pp. 57–76: p. 71. 37 38

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demonstrate the autarky of parasitism: this recurrent theme confronting the forces arraigned against it with reactions that displace, reinforce, and increase the embodied points of resistance. The censorship imposed by Stoker’s conscious mind, his inculcated obedience to the interdiscursive injunction on the parasitic, produced a deluge of signs. Stoker’s discursive obsession with the ophidian usefully filters this deluge. In Stoker’s first novel, The Primrose Path, the Mephistophelean innkeeper, Grinnell, whose skeletal features suggest dissipation from within, is the titular snake of Chapter 9, ‘The Trail of the Serpent’, that brings low the protagonist Jerry O’Sullivan. In ‘The Rose Prince’ from Under the Sunset (1881), which reworks the story of David and Goliath, Prince Zaphir kills the giant around whose prostrate body ‘snakes crawled’, but W. Fitzgerald and W. V. Cockburn’s accompanying illustration, which seemingly conforms to Stoker’s nightmarish discourse, shows a creature that looks more like a worm than a snake.41 Nor is the giant’s death the end of the kingdom’s vulnerability. For a ‘plague […] was coming upon’ a moral dissolute people, as the title of the next story in Under the Sunset implies, in the form of ‘The Invisible Giant’.42 Only the chaste Zaya, and the hermit Knoal, anticipate the coming blight, preparing ‘herbs and simples’ to administer to its victims.43 In short, Under the Sunset conflates three contagions: the cholera epidemic of Charlotte Stoker’s youth; the potato blight of the Great Famine into which she delivered Bram; and the widespread invermination that environed Irish life. Charlotte claimed to have seen the cholera epidemic, ‘which swept through Western Europe, and across Ireland in 1832’, as Stoker’s greatnephew Daniel Farson relates, looming over her hometown of Sligo.44 A disease from abroad (or an alien infection) exposed the territorial vulnerabilities of the lands it crossed. In response, taboos sprang up forbidding association with outsiders and prohibiting particular practices. ‘Taboo 41 42 43 44

Bram Stoker, Under the Sunset [1881], London 1882, p. 42. Ibid. p. 56. Ibid. p. 55. Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker, London 1975, pp. 13–14.

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is a spontaneous coding practice’, as Douglas explains, ‘which sets up a vocabulary of spatial limits and physical and verbal signals to hedge around vulnerable relations’.45 Like the bodies of their inhabitants, houses were especially vulnerable at their orifices, as were settlements at their crossing points or boundaries. ‘Trenches were […] cut across the roads in the direction in which the cholera was said to come’, recalled Charlotte, ‘concisely for the purpose of stopping all intercourse with the infected districts’. To Charlotte’s superstitious mind, however, Sligo’s allotted punishment was especially but deservedly severe; the outer limits of spatial protection were breached; they were ‘no use, no use’, so after the epidemic reached the town, ‘we stayed pretty much in the house’. Now ‘there was a constant fumigation kept up. Plates of salt on which vitriolic acid was poured from time to time were placed outside all the windows and doors’.46 A terrifying silence, or discursive void, isolated the individual living spaces of the town. Charlotte would pass the frightening but necessary sense of this taboo on to her children. It appears that Bram, owing to the reticence surrounding his childhood illness, was particularly sensitive to this inheritance, which he later transformed into a form of cleansing mission. Thus, in The Snake’s Pass (1890), Stoker’s interdiscursive approach, which sets up intertextual relays with the Old Testament, on the one hand, and with the Irish environing of his eidetic nightmare, on the other hand, ultimately concerns the discourse of parasitology. ‘It has been suggested’, as Foster notes, ‘that the Mosaic prohibition on certain animals as food for the Israelites was based on a knowledge that they were infested with parasites and that the plague of fiery serpents that afflicted them during their wanderings was an outbreak of guinea-worm infestation’ – and Stoker’s novel recalls St Patrick driving all but the King of the Snakes out of Ireland, driving them through the pass, or stratigraphic orifice, to which they give their name, and into the cleansing sea.47 In ‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’ (1893), the narrator rescues the decaying body of Old Hoggen from the sea. ‘I had hardly taken a step’, he recalls, 45 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xiii. 46 Charlotte Stoker quoted in Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula, p. 26. 47 Foster, A History of Parasitology, pp. 1–2.

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‘when, with an impulse which I could not restrain, I let it slip – or, rather, threw it – to the ground. It had seemed to me to be alive’. ‘I grew ashamed of my impulse’, however, ‘and, with another, effort, took it up and started again. Again there was the same impulse, with the same cause – the body seemed alive’. The narrator tries for a third time, but on this occasion, Old Hoggen ‘parted in the middle’, and ‘on a survey of the wreck I saw, to my intense astonishment, some large crabs walking out of the body’.48 Are these crabs, with the signified of lice that cling to this signifier in addition to that of crustaceans, another dream-work displacement of parasitic worms? Stoker employs another means of accommodating yet breaking the interdiscursive injunction on parasitical discourse in Dracula (1897) with Professor Abraham van Helsing as a doctor of two cultures – his qualifications are ‘M.D., D.Ph., D.Lit., etc., etc.’.49 Count Dracula, as diagnosed by this unconventional professor, is a parasite. Although Stoker’s novel does not contain the word ‘parasite’, or its derivatives or extensions, ‘van Helsing’, as Athena Vrettos states, ‘applies Lombroso’s theories to Dracula’, and these hypotheses deny the notions of degenerationism.50 The physician Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), who founded the Italian school of criminology, echoed Cobbold’s belief (from Parasites) in the ‘precious and elevating results of scientific research’.51 Unlike Ruskin, Lankester, and Drummond, Lombroso ‘insisted that science was not a symptom of degeneration, but’, as Daniel Pick reports, ‘a means of regeneration’.52 Parasites are deleterious, but parasitologists are not, and Dracula presents informed yet openminded medical men in Professor van Helsing and Dr John Seward who are willing to learn about these intimate invaders.

48 Bram Stoker, ‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’ [1893], in John Edgar Browning (ed.), The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker, New York 2012, pp. 25–55: p. 37. 49 Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897], Mineola, NY 2000, p. 97. 50 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford, CA 1995, p. 172. 51 Cobbold, Parasites, p. 2. 52 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918, Cambridge 1989, p. 116.

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While resistance and manipulation respectively relate host and parasite physiologically, the linguistic body maintains this relationship discursively, and speaking from the scarred memory of his physical body, the helminth in Stoker’s canon is a slippery agent of constant motion, a flagellating signifier that puts polysemy into play. The lair of the white worm, to repeat the colloquial reference to Zoonomia that opens the present chapter, is located in ‘the intestines’, but the helminthic lifecycle involves transiting to and from the anus for the laying of eggs. This middle passage finds its discursive complement in what Carol A. Senf calls Stoker’s general ‘interest in geology’, and in Count Dracula’s relocation from the bowels of Europe, in Transylvania, to just beyond the continental edge, in Britain.53 The geometric demarcations imposed by the encompassing geographical body constitute what can be termed a ‘parasitic phase space’. The parasite, Stoker’s Count Dracula in this instance, leaves the now barren spaces of Transylvania for the prospectively reinvigorating spaces of England. The count, as Stoker’s parasitic agent, socially pollutes. Property purchases, rather than a formal invitation, facilitate his settling in England; he bypasses border security, entering the country in the form of a monstrous and uncatchable hound; and although he is a nobleman, his origins are foreign. Both the count’s mesmerism (as a form of parapsychology) and his vampirism conflate such transgressions. Count Dracula, as his effects on Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker evince, gets inside his victims. Like the parasitic worms of which Erasmus Darwin writes, and as the cases of Lucy and Mina attest, the count ‘is very tenacious of life’, and almost impossible to unseat.54 Indeed, Freud’s acolyte Ernest Jones would have made much of the ‘helmin’ that infiltrates Mina’s full Christian name of Wilhelmina, and this discursive intimacy prefigures the parasitic infiltration identified by present-day genetics in which ‘plasmids and other fragments of DNA’,

Carol A. Senf, Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction, Westport, CT 2002, p. 116. 54 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, p. 55. 53

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as Dawkins expounds in The Extended Phenotype (1982), ‘literally insert themselves in the host chromosomes’.55 Recourse to Zoonomia, which identifies guinea worms, tapeworms, roundworms, and threadworms as the most common helminths in (late eighteenth-century) humans, extends this line of argument. The first of these offenders, which is ‘a thin worm […] found in the interstices of the muscles’, which might account for the Mosaic prohibition on particular foods, and which can parasitize everything from dogs and horses to monkeys and humans, has the parasitological name Dracunculus medinensis.56 Guinea-worm infestation causes dracunculiasis (or dracontiasis). ‘Among the first scientifically trained persons to give attention to the problems of dracontiasis’, documents Foster, ‘were British Army medical officers serving in India about the beginning of the nineteenth century’.57 Doctors rarely encountered the disease in England, but Stoker’s youngest brother, George (1854–1920), as a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland) and a Licentiate of the King’s and Queen’s College of Physicians (Ireland), had served with the Red Crescent in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–8), and ‘during the 19th and 20th centuries’, as Benjamin Jelle Visser documents, ‘dracunculiasis was common in much of Southern Asia’.58 Bram and George were close, sharing tales of their professional lives with each other, and the ‘dracu’ of ‘dracunculiasis’ appears as an appellative plasmid in ‘Dracula’. Whereas van Helsing eventually eradicates the parasitic Count Dracula, Stoker continued to battle with invermination, and one should note in passing that The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) would refigure not only the medical figure of two cultures, with Eugene Corbeck (‘Master of Arts and Doctor of Laws and Master of Surgery of Cambridge; Doctor of Letters of Oxford; Doctor of Science and Doctor of Languages of London University; Doctor of Philosophy of Berlin; Doctor of Oriental Languages

Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene [1982], Oxford 1999, p. 226. 56 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, p. 56. 57 Foster, A History of Parasitology, p. 107. 58 Benjamin Jelle Visser, ‘Dracunculiasis Eradication – Finishing the Job Before Surprises Arise’, Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Medicine 5:7 (2012), pp. 505–10: p. 505. 55

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of Paris’), but also the invermination of names, with the Egyptian goddess Tera’s ultimate power over Margaret Trelawny prefigured in the plasmid ‘t’, ‘e’, ‘r’, ‘a’ that battens in reverse onto ‘Marg’, its linguistic hostess.59 Seven years after the publication of The Jewel of Seven Stars, helminthic discourse continued to play in the interstices of Stoker’s mind, as his praise for Paracelsus in the nonfiction work Famous Impostors evinces. ‘His intellectual attitude’, asserts Stoker, ‘was that of a true scientist – denying nothing prima facie but investigating all’, and in this role, as the Encyclopedic Reference of Parasitology relates, Paracelsus ‘introduced inorganic salts (e.g. zinc salts) as anthelminthica’.60 This aspect of the Paracelsian found its fictional counterpart in Stoker’s canon a few months after the appearance of The Jewel of Seven Stars, and a year before Stoker died, with the publication of the disconcertingly restless and disorientingly anthelminthic Lair of the White Worm.

An end to invermination When considering this novel in a parasitic context, one must take account of Stoker’s death and the medical controversy that provides the complementary bookend to his life. Stoker died on 20 April 1912. ‘The death certificate’, as Belford reports, ‘gave three causes: “Locomotor Ataxy 6 Months, Granular Contracted Kidney, Exhaustion”’. Farson, ‘curious about whether the drugs Stoker took for gout had stimulated’ the authorial ‘disorientation’ that characterizes The Lair of the White Worm, as Belford relates, ‘consulted the family physician, who examined the death certificate’ and interpreted ‘locomotor ataxy’ as a ‘euphemism’ for tertiary syphilis.61 ‘One 59 Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars [1903], London 2008, p. 80. 60 Bram Stoker, Famous Impostors, London 1910, p. 73; Heinz Mehlhorn and Philip M. Armstrong (eds), Encyclopedic Reference of Parasitology: Biology, Structure, Function, Berlin 2001, p. 289. 61 Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 319–20, p. 320.

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of the prevalent diseases of the nineteenth century’, as Belford observes, ‘syphilis, like tuberculosis, was frequently overdiagnosed’.62 In fact, the first symptom on Bram’s death certificate can also be correlated with the effects of worm-disease listed by Dunglison. Accurately adduced, while locomotor ataxia is the inability to control one’s body with precision, chorea is a characterized by jerky involuntary movements that especially affect the hips, shoulders, and face. If the rapidly declining Stoker felt that his body was beyond his control, owing to an affliction from within that body, then his final months may well have recapitulated and recalled his childhood sufferings. Read with this diagnosis in mind, The Lair of the White Worm, with parasitological protagonist Adam Salton as a figuration of a robust, fit, and determined Stoker, is a literal projection of Stoker’s helminthic nightmare. That Stoker wrote his novel while propped up in bed ‘evinced’, as Farson maintains, ‘his bitter struggle against a wretched disease and failing powers’. This battle produced the ‘jerky’ writing that critics find so perturbing. Farson’s ‘overall feeling’ on first reading the novel, for example, ‘was one of some deep mystery between the lines – the mystery of the mind of the man who wrote it’.63 That deep mystery is almost certainly helminthic in character. The Lair of the White Worm, as the incubation and condensation of a recurring incubus, which combines white threadworms into a gigantic white tapeworm, not only breaks the interdiscursive taboo on helminthic infestation, but also speaks narratologically of that invermination with its elliptical comments, interruptive, independent clauses set off by em dashes, and breakdowns in narrative continuity. These discursive events, which various editorial interventions, or deinfestments, have tried to round off, smooth out, excise, or eradicate, betray authorial confusion, disruption, and interruption. Indeed, W. Foulsham and Company republished an abridged and partly rewritten version of the novel, which contained twenty-eight rather than the original forty chapters, as early as 1925. The Lair of the White Worm was Stoker’s last chance to solve the helminthic dilemma for good. Just as Stoker was constantly composing out of 62 Ibid. p. 320. 63 Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 148.

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forces that he wished to expunge, so Salton dedicates himself to eradicating the creature that is, in turns, Lady Arabella March (or the parasitic spinster in search of a wealthy husband) and the great white worm (or the antediluvian helminth of gigantic proportions that plagues the people among whom it dwells). Intriguingly, the ghostwriter of the 1925 edition appears to invoke aspects of Stoker’s childhood malaise and sudden recovery in detailing an ophidian crisis during Lady Arabella’s early years. ‘When still a young girl’, De Salis tells Salton, ‘Lady Arabella wandered into a small wood near her home, and did not return. She was found unconscious and in a high fever’. The family ‘doctor said that she had received a poisonous bite, and the girl being at a delicate and critical age, the result was serious – so much so that she was not expected to recover’. Even ‘a great London physician […] could do nothing’, and all hope seemed lost, ‘when, to everyone’s surprise, Lady Arabella made a sudden and startling recovery’. Unlike Stoker, however, ‘she developed a terrible craving for cruelty’. She revealed this new trait in ‘maiming and injuring birds and small animals – even killing them’.64 Lady Arabella’s cruelty, which extends to humans, epitomizes the nightmare of invermination; Salton must act as an authorial cleansing agent; and, in titularly recalling Charlotte Stoker’s witnessing of ‘plates of salt on which vitriolic acid was poured’ during the cholera epidemic of 1832, he puts salt (one might say Glauber’s salt [or sodium sulphate] – a key ingredient in complementary anthelminthics such as ‘Holloway’s Pills’) onto the monstrous Lady Arabella. In addition, The Lair of the White Worm revives the theme of parapsychology from Dracula with Edgar Caswall’s mesmeric attempt to overcome Lilla Watford, on the one hand, and Mimi Watford’s similar ability to thwart Caswall, on the other hand. It is only when Caswall, the parapsychologist, and Lady Arabella, the parasite, combine that Lilla is defeated: she and Mimi believe they have seen off their antagonists, but authorial irony soon strikes home when Lilla collapses and dies: ‘Lady Arabella […] did for Lilla’ who had ‘felt as though a new life had suddenly developed within her’.65 Mimi’s failure at parapsychology leaves Adam, administering 64 Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm [1925], London 1945, p. 87. 65 Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm [1911], p. 193.

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the physiological standard of the enema, to overcome the parasitic worm. Salton, as with Stoker himself, ‘wanted to know and to feel that he had seen the last of the White Worm’.66 He discovers that Lady Arabella’s house encloses a shaft. This wormhole sends ‘up such a stench’ that it can lead only to the bowels of the earth.67 Adam’s cure is to pack this offensive orifice with a suppository of sand and dynamite. When detonated, this explosive cure – which evacuates and macerates simultaneously – not only destroys the helminthic Lady Arabella and the parapsychological Caswall, but also lays to rest the frightful dream that had haunted Bram Stoker since his childhood. This necessarily unpleasant yet necessary expulsion for good of Stoker’s lifetime obsession with parasitic worms – Salton’s post-operative inspection reveals a ‘horrid mass of blood and slime, of torn, evil-smelling flesh and the sickening remnants of violent death’; ‘is there anything more disgusting than what has no name in any language’, asks Serres, ‘the stench emanating from a mass grave?’68 – left him free to accept the ultimate of discursive boundaries: the restful silence of death.

Bibliography Argyle, Gisela, Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s–1930s, London 2002. Belford, Barbara, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, London 1996. Bellingham, O’Bryen, ‘Dr. O’Bryen Bellingham on Irish Entozoa’, The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Zoology, Botany and Geology XIII (1844), pp. 167–74. Bierman, Joseph S., ‘Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad’, American Imago 29:2 (1972), pp. 186–98. Cobbold, Thomas Spencer, Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of Helminthology, with Reference, More Particularly, to the Internal Parasites of Man, London 1864.

66 Ibid. p. 311. 67 Ibid. p. 123. 68 Ibid. p. 231; Serres, Malfeasance, p. 6.

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Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals, including Some Account of the Ectozoa, London 1879. Cook, G. C., ‘History of Parasitology’, in Stephen Gillespie and Richard D. Pearson (eds), Principles and Practice of Clinical Parasitology, Chichester, UK 2003. Cross, Julie, ‘Frightening and Funny: Humour in Children’s Gothic Fiction’, in Anna Jackson, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats (eds), The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, Abingdon, UK 2008, pp. 57–76. Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia; Or, the Laws of Organic Life [1794], 2nd edn, 2 vols, London 1796. Dawkins, Richard, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene [1982], Oxford 1999. The Selfish Gene, 1976, 3rd edn, Oxford 2006. Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, London 2002. Drummond, Henry, Natural Law in the Spiritual World [1883], Cambridge 2009. Dunglison, Robley, The Practice of Medicine, A Treatise on Special Pathology and Therapeutics, 3rd edn, 2 vols, Philadelphia, PA 1848. Farson, Daniel, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker, London 1975. Foster, William Derek, A History of Parasitology, Edinburgh 1965. Fry, Paul H., Theory of Literature, New Haven, CT 2012. Lankester, E. Ray, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London 1880. Ludlam, Harry, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker, London 1962. Mandal, Fatik Baran, Human Parasitology, New Delhi 2011. Mehlhorn, Heinz, and Philip M. Armstrong (eds), Encyclopedic Reference of Parasitology: Biology, Structure, Function, Berlin 2001. Miller, Elizabeth, and Dacre Stoker (eds), The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker: The Dublin Years, by Bram Stoker, London 2012. Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918, Cambridge 1989. Ruskin, John, ‘Letter LI’, May 1875, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, New York 1894, pp. 395–411. ‘Madness and Crime: To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette’, November 1872, pp. 318–19. Senf, Carol A., Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction, Westport, CT 2002. Serres, Michel, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? [2008], trans. AnneMarie Feenberg-Dibon, Stanford, CA 2011. Stoker, Bram, Dracula [1897], Mineola, NY 2000. Famous Impostors, London 1910. The Jewel of Seven Stars [1903], London 2008.

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The Lair of the White Worm [1911], London 2008. The Lair of the White Worm [1925], London 1945. ‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’ [1893], in John Edgar Browning (ed.), The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker, New York 2012, pp. 25–55. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving [1906], 2 vols, London 1907. Under the Sunset [1881], London 1882. Taylor, Jenny Bourne, ‘Psychology at the Fin de Siècle’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 2007, pp. 13–30. Visser, Benjamin Jelle, ‘Dracunculiasis Eradication – Finishing the Job Before Surprises Arise’, Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Medicine 5:7 (2012), pp. 505–10. Vrettos, Athena, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford, CA 1995. Zimmer, Carl, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, London 2003.

David Midgley

12 A Journey into the Interior: The Self as Other in Robert Müller’s Novel Tropen (1915)

Nur die Seele hat noch seltsame Kontinente. (It is only the psyche that still contains strange continents).1 abstract Robert Müller’s Tropen has excited a lot of interest in the German-speaking world in recent years, but appears to be virtually unknown outside it. The title carries two meanings – ‘tropics’ and ‘tropes’ – and literary scholars have been fascinated by the way the narrative self-consciously plays on the artificiality of language and of fiction, as well as the way it develops themes associated with colonialism and the exoticism prevalent in European culture around 1900. This chapter focuses on the prominence the work gives to the issues of biological origin, sexual desire, and racial distinction, and how the device of a first-person narrator is used to allude to aspects of human thought processes and behavioural impulses that appear to remain obscure even to the person experiencing them.

Tropen (Tropics), by the Austrian author Robert Müller (1887–1924), appears to be virtually unknown outside the German-speaking world. But it was held in high regard by better-known novelists of the early twentieth century such as Alfred Döblin and Robert Musil,2 and since the 1990s it has attracted very substantial interest among literary scholars within the

1 2

Robert Müller, ‘Der Kolonialmensch als Romantiker und Sozialist’ (1919), in Ernst Fischer (ed.), Kritische Schriften II, Paderborn 1995, pp. 338–44: p. 339. All translations are my own. See Helmut Kreuzer and Günter Helmes (eds), Expressionismus – Aktivismus – Exotismus: Studien zum literarischen Werk Robert Müllers (1887–1924), Göttingen 1981, pp. 289–320.

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German-speaking world. The reasons for that explosion of interest are intimately connected with the development of intercultural studies and inquiries into German colonial writing, and with the emergence of ‘literary anthropology’ as a distinct sub-discipline.3 In this chapter I shall not attempt to make reference to all the critical perspectives that have been brought to bear on Müller’s fiction to date, but I have aimed to provide enough information to enable others to take the investigation further if they wish. What makes Müller’s novel, which dates from 1915, a suitable case for treatment in this volume is the prominence within the narrative of such issues as biological origin, sexual desire, and racial distinction, and the particular roles that these issues play in the process of self-scrutiny that is also a prominent feature of the text. In Tropen Müller adopts one of the stock devices of nineteenth-century realist fiction: the frame narrative. The text we are about to read is presented to us as a posthumous manuscript and described on the title page as ‘Urkunden’ (i.e. documentation of the life) of a German engineer, published with a preface by an editor called Robert Müller. The work also has a subtitle, ‘Der Mythos der Reise’ (the myth of travel), which adumbrates the sense in which the main narrative debunks the fashionable interest in journeys to ‘exotic’ places, and also anticipates a theme that becomes explicit around the midpoint of the narrative, where it is said that people travel ‘um den Menschen in sich zu erreisen’ (to explore the person inside them) (118).4 It also becomes clear as the narrative progresses that the deliberate ambiguity of the main title – the German word ‘Tropen’ can mean either ‘tropics’ or ‘tropes’ – itself signals a theme on which the text self-consciously plays. But ostensibly, the main story is the account of a journey into the Amazonian jungle narrated in the first person by Hans Brandlberger, a young German engineer who, we are told in the preface, later perished as a member of an expedition to

3

4

See Christian Liederer, Der Mensch und seine Realität: Anthropologie und Wirklichkeit im poetischen Werk des Expressionisten Robert Müller, Würzburg 2004; Nicola Gess, Primitives Denken, Munich 2013; Wolfgang Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014. Page references shown in the main text relate to Robert Müller, Tropen. Der Mythos der Reise: Urkunden eines deutschen Ingenieurs, ed. Günter Helmes, Paderborn 1990.

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set up a Freeland colony in the border region between Venezuela and Brazil that was overtaken by an Indian revolt in 1907 (5).5 Brandlberger’s narrative tells of his experiences on an earlier expedition to the same area, led by a cosmopolitan figure with depth of experience and ambitious aims as a colonist, a North American by the name of Jack Slim, in search of a treasure believed to have been left behind by a previous expedition. Brandlberger’s diary-style account increasingly comes to focus on the character and mental condition of individual members of the expedition, including himself, and on the behaviour of the natives, on whom they depend for assistance, but whose attitudes and expectations remain inscrutable to them. The expedition is increasingly attended by confusion and destructive violence, and ends in disaster amid intimations of cannibalism. This scenario is likely to remind readers of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which Müller evidently much admired (another precedent for the use of a journey into the jungle as an objective correlative for the exploration of the human mind and of biological origins can be found in the fiction of Johannes V. Jensen, which was popular in Germany around 1900),6 and a comparison of the two texts is indeed a useful starting point for bringing out the distinctive qualities of Müller’s novel. Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, tells of the river journey he made into the interior of the Congo in order to bring back Kurtz, a man who is much admired by others for his prowess as a colonist and for his grand ideas, but whose mental and physical health is giving cause for concern. The scene that Marlow encounters when he arrives at Kurtz’s base (the ‘Inner Station’) displays features 5

6

The project of founding Freeland colonies in ‘virgin’ territory, which was popular around 1900, was promoted by the Jewish-Hungarian-Austrian economist and journalist Theodor Hertzka (1845–1924) amongst others. For the relevance of the idea to Müller’s novel, see Thomas Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen: Ein Reiseführer in den imperialen Exotismus, Heidelberg 2006, pp. 86–9. For a succinct discussion in English of Hertzka’s utopian colonial ideas, as presented in his novel Freiland (1890), see Ulrich E. Bach, Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire, New York 2016, Chapter 3. For the connection to both Conrad and Jensen, see Volker Zenk, Innere Forschungsreisen: Literarischer Exotismus in Deutschland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, Oldenburg 2003, p. 103.

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suggestive of human sacrifice or ritualized execution. The only female figure he sees there – it may be inferred from what we are told about her that she is Kurtz’s former lover – is elaborately adorned, described as ‘wild and gorgeous’, with an air of ‘brooding over an inscrutable purpose’, and given to raising her arms heavenwards in what might pass for a hieratic gesture, although it is also described by Marlow as ‘tragic’.7 The men are warriors who melt into the jungle, from which they pose the threat of unforeseen attack on Marlow’s party both before and after their arrival at the ‘Inner Station’. In its build-up to this encounter, Marlow’s narrative frequently alludes to the commonplace notion that life in the jungle can play havoc with a man’s mind and his nerves; he has likened the journey up-river to ‘travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’;8 and for all that he recognizes his own ‘remote kinship’ with the natives at the ‘Inner Station’,9 he describes them, too, as ‘prehistoric’ and belonging to ‘the beginnings of time’.10 Marlow’s narrative is clear in its expressions of disgust towards the commercial exploitation and degradation of the natives by colonial enterprise, and particularly by the Belgians in the Congo, but his generic term for native Africans is ‘cannibals’. It was the sense that Africa and its inhabitants were being presented as ‘the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization’ that gave rise to Chinua Achebe’s famous denunciation of Heart of Darkness, in 1975, as a racist text.11 At the same time, Conrad’s text contains plentiful signs that the regression to the ‘primitive’ – in both a psychological and a cultural sense – that appears to be epitomized in the figure of Kurtz and in his jungle Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn, New York and London 1988, pp. 60, 67. 8 Ibid. p. 35. For the intellectual context of this thinking in Victorian England, see Paul Goetsch, ‘The Savage Within: Evolutionary Theory, Anthropology and the Unconscious in Fin-de-siècle Literature’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London 2005, pp. 95–106. 9 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 38. 10 Ibid. p. 42. 11 Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 251–62 (here pp. 252 and 257). 7

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regime is also a possibility that lives on within ostensibly civilized minds as well. Marlow’s recurrent evocation of the ‘darkness’ to which Kurtz is said to have succumbed is even prefaced with an intimation of the ‘utter savagery’ that lurks equally in the world of his listeners – as it had done on the wild shores of the Thames at the time when the Romans arrived.12 When it comes to specifying the nature of those savage impulses within the human mind and their potential effects, however, Heart of Darkness is bound to appear vague and abstract by comparison with the techniques for depicting the life of the mind that were developed by the major European literary modernists in the decades after 1900. Conrad’s intimations of what has actually happened to Kurtz, or what Marlow has experienced, are limited to invocations of ‘darkness’, ‘menace’, and – in Kurtz’s much-quoted iteration – ‘the horror’. In Müller’s novel we find a similar constellation of elements. In the jungle village that Brandlberger and his party use as a base camp, there is a priestess, Zana, with whom the leader of the expedition, Slim, establishes a sexual relationship. Brandlberger explicitly records the manifestations of his jealousy towards Slim and his contempt for the personality and attitudes of the only other European in the party (a Dutch former colonial officer and merchant called van den Dusen), as well as his own fervid erotic interest in other females in the village. His diary-style notes indicate clearly that ‘jungle fever’ is one of the effects that he expects to manifest itself as the party moves deeper into the interior, but also that he recognizes a deep affinity between his own physical and mental being and the natural surroundings in which he now finds himself. In other words, Müller uses the jungle setting as a means of articulating perceptions of the biological foundations of human thoughts and impulses, and Brandlberger’s narrative is notable both for its explicit reflections on ideas associated with those perceptions and for what it reveals about the mentality of a young modern European male encountering a ‘primitive’ world. But not only is Müller’s text considerably more direct and explicit than Conrad’s in its discussion of personalities and relationships, it also develops, as a theme in its own

12 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 9–10.

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right, the issue of how the communication of human experience is necessarily conditioned by the self-interest of the communicator – in this case, the first-person narrator Brandlberger. A little biographical information about Müller will help to supply a sense of the historical context for what the novel depicts.13 He was born on 29 October 1887 into a middle-class Viennese family and was educated at one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in Vienna, the Piaristengymnasium in the Josefstadt. He was an unruly pupil, however, and was obliged to transfer to another school in order to complete his preparation for university entrance; having done so, he began to study philology at Vienna University in 1907, but left two years later in order to travel to America. His exact movements during the next few years are unclear. It has been established that he spent the period from December 1909 to summer 1910 in New York, working for a German-language newspaper, and subsequently travelled further; but there is no clear evidence that he ever travelled in the Caribbean or further afield, as has sometimes been claimed.14 Müller returned to Vienna in 1911 and published essays there that characterize New York as a ‘jungle’ which displays ‘tropical’ growth, and the sense of affinity between modern urban culture and life in the jungle is also a recurrent theme in his novel. In 1912 he hosted what turned out to be the last public appearance of Karl May, whose style of popular adventure novel provides certain of the plot elements with which Tropen begins.15 When the First World War broke out, Müller leapt at the opportunity to enlist, and he served on the Isonzo front, where he suffered shell shock in 1915. That experience appears to have blunted his enthusiasm for warfare, but not his engagement as a writer on behalf of German imperialism. Müller prided himself on the fact that his mother was Scandinavian, and when he attempted to establish his own publishing house in 1924 he called it ‘Atlantic’ and gave it the emblem of a Viking ship. His early 13 14 15

For a fuller account, see Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, pp. 35–8 and 194–219. For the background to this controversy, see ibid. p. 35. See Florian Krobb, ‘“Bis zum Horizonte dieser kleinen Welt”: Travel Writing, Utopianism and Karl May. Robert Müller’s Tropen’, Modern Language Review 110 (2015), pp. 1067–85: pp. 1070–6.

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writings also display a fascination with the role of the barbarian in processes of cultural change – evidently inspired by the writings of Nietzsche and the Viennese essayist Hermann Bahr.16 He became a prolific writer, and his early essays contain open and explicit displays of the racial prejudices and stereotyping that were prevalent at the time.17 He wrote with particular enthusiasm for the colonization of Africa, treating the aspect of brutal subjugation (of which Müller, like Conrad, presents the Congo as the prime example) as an acceptable side-effect;18 and his commitment to an imperialist role for the German nation remained strong through all the political vicissitudes of the war and the post-war years. It was a notion that he could easily transfer from the nationalism of 1914 to the radical socialism he came to identify with by the end of the war, because he had already integrated the intellectual traditions of socialism and anarchism into his general conception of the German spirit in what is probably his most significant political statement, the pamphlet Macht (Power), which he published in 1915.19 The model of the German character that he invokes there is recognizably modelled on Nietzsche’s descriptions of the process by which old moral systems are challenged and broken, and new ones are established in their place,20 and is summed up in the words, ‘Lösend – setzend: anarchisch – konservativ: dies, nie eins allein ist unser deutsches

Cf. Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, p. 33f. See especially the essay ‘Was erwartet Österreich von seinem jungen Thronfolger?’ [1914], in Robert Müller, Gesammelte Essays, ed. Michael M. Schardt, Hamburg 2011, pp. 5–81. 18 Robert Müller, ‘Der Roman des Afrikanismus’, in Kritische Schriften I, ed. Günter Helmes and Jürgen Berners, Paderborn 1993, pp. 203–5. This is a review of the book Afrikanische Köpfe (1915) by the notorious German colonialist Carl Peters. See also Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, p. 66. 19 Robert Müller, Macht: psychopolitische Grundlagen des gegenwärtigen atlantischen Krieges, Munich 1915; reprinted in Müller, Gesammelte Essays, pp. 83–140. See especially pp. 94 and 106. 20 See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge 2006, pp. 156–73 (‘On Old and New Tablets’); Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge 2002, pp. 30–1 (§30) and 105–6 (§211). 16 17

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Sein’ (Dissolving [old rules] – setting up [new ones]; anarchical – conservative; this, never one thing alone, is our German being).21 Overall he appears, as Helmut Kreuzer noted in his introduction to the earliest attempt at a comprehensive account of Müller’s writings, to be one of the many German intellectuals of his generation who were able to entertain the thinking of both political extremes simultaneously.22 The terms in which Müller urges his fellow Germans to prepare themselves to assume the mantle of power that seems to be coming their way in the First World War are on the one hand idealistic: the great benefit of German imperialism that he holds out to the world at large is vested in the accomplishments of German thinkers, artists, and academics.23 But on the other hand his vision acquires an aspect of ruthless arrogance when he argues – against the well-known condemnations of Germany’s military aggression in 1914 from Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, and others – that the Germans, with their technological and intellectual achievements, had earned the envy of the world,24 and urges them to assume responsibility, from this moment, for humanity at large: ‘Wir Deutsche übernehmen von Stund an die Verantwortung für den Menschen’.25 Neither line of argument is quite untypical of the responses of German writers and intellectuals to the wartime situation,26 but Müller displays rather more than average bravado when he proclaims the Germans to be the imperialist nation par excellence and effectively adopts the taunt of ‘barbarianism’ as a badge of pride.27

21 Müller, Gesammelte Essays, p. 99. 22 Kreuzer and Helmes (eds), Expressionismus – Aktivismus – Exotismus, p. 13. 23 Müller, Gesammelte Essays, p. 139. Cf. p. 109: ‘der Deutsche […] ist Physiker aus Metaphysik; Techniker aus Spekulation; […] Eroberer aus Geist’. 24 Müller, Gesammelte Essays, pp. 95–6. 25 Ibid. p. 107. Müller does, however, disclaim the notion of the German as ‘Beherrscher’ (p. 131) and he distances himself from the pursuit of annexations (p. 135). 26 See, for example, Thomas Mann, ‘Gedanken im Krieg’ (1914), in Schriften zur Politik, Frankfurt am Main 1970, pp. 7–23; Alfred Döblin, ‘Reims’ [1914], in Schriften zur Politik und Gesellschaft, Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau 1972, pp. 17–25. 27 Müller, Gesammelte Essays, p. 94; cf. Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, p. 39.

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The scenario that Müller develops in Tropen is clearly related in some senses to his passionate advocacy of an imperial role for Germany, but it is also a highly complex exploration of issues that might at first appear to be only tenuously connected with that interest. For all the elaborate pretence of an authentic historical background to the narrative we read, the setting is easily recognizable as an imaginary one: while the initial explanation of relations within the native village in terms of the defeat and subjugation of Arawaks by Caribs (61) might be said to echo historical accounts of relations between the native peoples of Central America, both the name that is subsequently used for the tribe – Dumara28 – and the location – the Rio Taquado – are evidently invented. As for the narrator figure, the German engineer Brandlberger, the memory of him is linked, at the very start of the preface, to an ostensibly genuine colonial enterprise, but one that came to grief in 1907. Moreover, we are explicitly warned in the preface about the nature of both Brandlberger’s personality and his manuscript. He has the German virtue of thoroughness, but he is neither particularly gifted, nor does he have a distinctive character, and he is over-inclined to indiscriminate brooding over particular issues – the image that is applied to his mental activity is that of a burrowing animal, a ‘Wühltier’ (7), and it is an image that may well have a calculated resonance within the text because the verb ‘wühlen’ (to burrow) carries a commonplace association in German with the undermining of authority. His manuscript is similarly acknowledged to be marred by extravagant elaborations and ‘monstrous’ philosophical digressions (6); it aspires to be honest about what it records, but about certain things it is also manifestly less than honest (10). What the fictitious editor is wryly preparing us for, then, is the fact that Brandlberger’s account of his journey is not just about the encounter of a trained European mind with the Amazonian world it hopes to subjugate, but also an exploration of that mind’s perceptions of human cultures, of the biological factors at work in 28

The name may be modelled on that of a Bantu tribe – Duruma – which is mentioned in Theodor Hertzka’s book Freiland (1890): see Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, p. 86. There is also an area of Namibia that was known to the German reading public around 1900 as ‘Damaraland’: see Kleiner Deutscher Kolonialatlas, Berlin 1899 (reprint Augsburg 2002), map 5: ‘Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika’.

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human instincts and thought processes, and of the capacity of the human imagination to determine the future course of history – all in terms of the thinking that Brandlberger has brought with him from Central Europe, and always open to the suspicion of self-delusion. Brandlberger’s first experience of the jungle is in fact evoked as a moment of self-recognition; but it is a self-recognition imbued with a developed sense of evolutionary descent and organic inter-connectedness. This world of abundant and irrepressible growth is somehow familiar to him. As the initial canoe journey up-river proceeds, the vines and blossoms around him come to resemble fingers, tongues, human heads – and foetuses (16f.). What Brandlberger claims to have recognized is the stirring within him of the memory of his time in the womb, which is simultaneously an evolutionary memory, ‘eine Stimmung aus der Vorzeit von Millionen Wesen’ (a state of mind from the pre-history of a million creatures) (17). The sense of relation between self and the natural world that is elaborately evoked here echoes the ‘biogenetic law’ propounded by Ernst Haeckel – the notion that every embryo, as it develops, recapitulates the evolutionary development of its kind – which is explicitly mentioned later in the narrative (115f., 118). Brandlberger’s sense of identification with his natural surroundings is also expressed as a sense of the ultimate oneness of all being and explicitly linked with a motif from European intellectual history that was popularized by Schopenhauer in the form of the Sanskrit formulation tat tvam asi (thou art that),29 but with the added sense that this unity takes a physical form: Brandlberger comes to think of himself as a ‘naschhaftes Zellenbündel’ (sweet-toothed bundle of cells) and of his own physiological system as ‘eine vielfach verbesserte Tropenlandschaft’ (a much improved tropical landscape) (18–19). Having arrived at this radical conclusion about his own path to individuality, however, he goes on to exhibit a common male prejudice of his time by associating the realm

29

Cf. Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung, p. 123f. Both Brandlberger (33–4) and Slim (60, 68) invoke the cultures of Asia when imagining a mystical transcendence of the age in which they perceive themselves to be living; see also Müller, Tropen, pp. 83 and 115f.

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of nature firmly with the female,30 even asserting that, whether they live in the jungle or the modern city, women have ‘never left the tropics’ (23; cf. 106–7). A further discovery that the three Europeans are said to make about themselves is the unleashing of primal urges within them. The crucial moment occurs when they have left the river and have been hacking their way inland through the jungle with their machetes for four days: they spy their first native Indian woman, gathering firewood. She crouches in what appears to be a part-defensive, part-submissive posture, but as the situation is described from Brandlberger’s perspective (and arguably in an adumbration of the mayhem that later ensues) she appears to be exposing the nape of her neck to the advancing blades of the machetes. As if in explanation of that image, he adds that the group had been working like madmen, their nerves were racked to the point where they could not be held accountable for their actions, and the humility of the woman’s posture ‘machte schwach vor Wollust’ (made us weak with lust). They had, he concludes, ‘become barbarians’ (39). Moreover, they had not just sighted the woman through the forest, they had ‘scented’ her: the predatory aspect of male sexuality could scarcely be made clearer than it is in this text. Self-identification with the hunting instinct – going back not only to human pre-history but to the early stages of the evolution of mammals, in the Tertiary Period – and the notion of a mutual relationship between hunter and hunted subsequently also become stock features of Brandlberger’s reflections (72), along with the sense that ‘das Gedächtnis meiner Eingeweide’ (the memory of my gut) retains impulses that are more fundamental than those of the mind (85), and that it is into the depths of that memory that he is journeying (115). In the meantime, Brandlberger the engineer, the self-conscious representative of the machine age (45), has claimed to have discovered a treasure that makes the ostensible purpose of the expedition appear irrelevant. Inspired by the rhythmic motion of the canoers as they paddle up-stream 30

Silvia Bovenschen, in the first part of her classic study Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen, Frankfurt am Main 1979, shows how prevalent this thinking was in the intellectual culture of the period around 1900.

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and the awareness that the landscape can appear to be moving past the traveller as much as the traveller through the landscape,31 he has arrived at a conception of historical progress as a rhythmic shifting of emphasis from one cultural norm to its opposite, which he calls its ‘paradox’ (33–4; cf. 116). This, it appears, is the insight that prompts him to describe the book he now sees himself writing as a ‘catechistic’ one (35), designed to provide instruction in a new faith, the faith in a new age. He also hits on a colourful neologism with which to characterize the sort of idea that will bring the new age about: he calls it a ‘phantoplasm’ (118). Possibly by analogy with Haeckel’s conception of ‘protoplasm’ as the substance out of which all life forms on Earth subsequently developed, but also in association with elements of the physiologically orientated psychology of the time,32 Müller allows his first-person narrator to conceive the ‘phantoplasm’ as the form in which a product of the human imagination materializes, or in which, as he initially defines it, a whole system of logical explanations coalesces into an image (109). His own phantoplasm, Brandlberger later muses, will distinguish itself from its precursors by incorporating the idea of progress (125). He has already imagined himself as the progenitor of a new breed, here in Brazil (83f.); now he conceives the ‘phantoplasm’ of the future age to be that new human type, characterized as the hunter-observer (118); and he already has a model for this ‘new humanity’ before him in the figure of Slim, the epitome of human universality, who appears to be as much at home in the Amazonian jungle as in the capital of European intellectual refinement, Paris (69f.). Within the constellation of European figures in the novel, the easiest one to characterize is the Dutchman van den Dusen. Brandlberger describes him, at a point where he catches sight of him emerging from his sleeping quarters incongruously dressed in striped bathing trunks, as an ‘average European’ (113). In contrast to the sinewy athleticism of the native males, 31

32

On the significance of this motif in the intellectual culture of the time around 1900, see Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung: Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne, Freiburg im Breisgau 2005, pp. 363–5. Cf. Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, pp. 368–75.

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the portly and ungainly van den Dusen can scarcely avoid appearing as a decadent figure; but his implacable sense of the innate superiority of the European is repeatedly made apparent through the contemptuous remarks he makes about the customs and the physical appearance of the natives, both male and female (57, 80). The highly colourful characterization of Slim, on the other hand, draws on a richer palette of racial stereotypes. The editorial preface has told us that he is an international celebrity and, moreover, that the basis of his fame bears comparison with that of the eighteenthcentury Italian adventurer Cagliostro (7). He owes his surname to his Arab grandfather Selim Bukabra (again, the grandfather’s surname appears to be invented, or is perhaps of Indonesian or Australian aboriginal origin), who was an officer of the Ottoman Empire at the time when the Prussian Count Helmuth Moltke was serving in Turkey, had married the daughter of a German army officer, and had emigrated with her to the United States, where he served in the Navy. Their son Jack, also a sailor, had opted to base himself in Peru, where he forged a relationship with a native woman. The offspring of that liaison is the Jack Slim of Müller’s novel, of whom it is given out that he was on intimate terms with Gauguin and Tolstoy, as well as frequenting Viennese literary circles; that he had grandiose plans for reorientating German unity in the direction of Catholicism and establishing a German world empire extending far into Arabia; and that it was he who had persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm II to send his notorious telegram (in 1896) congratulating the Boers on warding off the imperialist encroachment of the British (8). To that extent, Slim comes across as the perfect imaginary idol of Müller’s political dream – in which connection it is worth noting that it is a dream sustained by the imagined potential of interbreeding rather than racial purity. But it is the tangled relationship between Slim and the narrator Brandlberger that is central to the brainteaser that Müller has constructed in this novel, and it may be that we should note the close resemblance between the names Brandlberger and Brandenburg as one of the hidden jokes of Müller’s text and an allusion to the traditional rivalry between Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia. In the early stages of the main narrative, Slim is described in terms that suggest that Brandlberger goes in awe of him: he is referred to as ‘a late descendent of a family of conquistadors’ (11) and as a modern Pizarro

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(30). It also soon becomes apparent that Slim is better adapted to the environment, both natural and human, in which they find themselves because – whether by innate ability, which the text tends to attribute to racial character, or by experience – he is more in tune with it (28, 63) than Brandlberger, whose habit of showing off his prowess with fire-arms – using butterflies for target practice (74–6, 82f.) – manifestly fails to meet with the approval of the natives and leaves him with a sense of his own inadequacy (83). Brandlberger would like to think of himself as the agent of a cultural transformation that will combine the unleashing of instinctive urges with the application of advanced technology, and for a while he can imagine himself to be Slim’s equal in that project: they are both, as he puts it, modern types in whom the aptitude for analysis has become energized (71). But it is Slim – the ‘Weltmensch’, that is, someone who is perfectly at home in the world and enjoys its pleasures (77) – who is more adept at articulating the ideas that we see Brandlberger groping his way towards, such as the notion that thought is merely ‘a secretion of the gland called feeling’ (66) or that what we call consciousness is ‘eine Lustmaschine’ (a desiring machine) (68). Brandlberger also recognizes that Slim has led the way in shaking off the fashionable European fascination with ‘moonshine’ exoticism, for which Pierre Loti serves as the emblematic example (71, 86); and he comes to endorse Slim’s manifest indifference to specific geographical location as ‘die erlösende Haltung’ (the attitude that brings release) (115). Slim, in other words, is the sort of person that Brandlberger would like to become (77), but the limits to his ability to emulate Slim become more insistently apparent when the conclusions of his own laboured conjectures are reflected back at him in Slim’s more elegant aperçus. In a real sense, Brandlberger’s notion of the ‘phantoplasm’ – as an image in which a whole system of logical explanations is condensed (109) – is an arduously constructed description of the intuitive mode in which Slim naturally functions. When Brandlberger tells him that he has invented this concept, Slim is impressed; but he turns out to have already had much the same idea himself, even if he gives it a slightly different name (137), and once again, Brandlberger is left with a sense of his own inadequacy (138f.). Slim also appears to have anticipated Brandlberger’s notion of every reality containing within it the potential for its own antithesis (203; cf. 33–4); and

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in what is perhaps the most elegantly executed sequence of the whole text, Slim tells Brandlberger about his own ideas for a novel that would depict the nature of the new breed as the agent of cultural transformation and inaugurator of a new historical epoch (202f.). Not only does the plan he describes closely resemble the one that Brandlberger has already shared with the reader (184f.); the very title Slim has in mind for it is also identical with Brandlberger’s. He wants to call it Tropen, or more precisely Die Tropen – and the insight on which that choice of title is based, in Slim’s case as in Brandlberger’s, is the recognition that the human capacity to conceive of and communicate about the world is inescapably constrained within the medium of figures of speech. For both of them, then, ‘Tropen’ implies tropes as much as tropics, and in Slim’s version, there will be an added twist to the narrative in that it will be told by someone – a Nordic type – who has never actually been to the tropics, but who, as Brandlberger has discovered in his own way, has the tropics inside him (184, 202). In Slim’s conception, moreover, the novel is to be a ‘comedy of ideas’ (210) – ideas that we have seen Brandlberger treating with deadly earnest. Brandlberger has conceived his novel in a moment of feverish self-doubt and near-despair, as an expression of the passion that he imagines to be uniquely his (185). Slim describes his novel shortly before a fishing expedition that will lead to his death in circumstances that the eye-witness Brandlberger only sketches in vague and evasive terms, and which involve a ‘projectile’ (a paddle?) descending on Slim’s head after he has lost his balance and fallen into the river (213). The secondary literature has noted many allusions to Nietzsche’s writings in this novel.33 On the one hand, the fascination that Müller’s characters display for the possibility of a new human type that will transcend the cultural condition of the present undoubtedly carries echoes of the idea of the ‘Übermensch’ and of associated motifs from Thus Spoke Zarathustra which also occur in Müller’s political writings. On the other hand, the 33

A good sense of the range of the allusions to Nietzsche is provided by Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, pp. 360–78. There are also recognizable echoes of the views of such well-known popularizers of Nietzsche as Julius Langbehn, who promoted the notion, in Rembrandt als Erzieher (Leipzig 1890), that the age of scientific analysis was about to be superseded by an age of cultural synthesis; cf. Müller, Tropen, p. 201.

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overall conception of Tropen is strongly related to the notion of ‘translating humanity back into nature’, as Nietzsche expresses it in §230 of Beyond Good and Evil.34 But in the context of the present chapter I would want to highlight the connection between two motifs that are also echoed in Tropen, and which occur in close proximity in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. One is an allusion to Nietzsche’s notorious evocation of the ‘blond beast’ at work in all cultural innovators, which occurs when van den Dusen describes the Goths of late antiquity as ‘blond Indians’ (221); the other is the notion of a ‘slave mentality’, which Slim attributes to the Germans in general, and by implication also to Brandlberger (142f.); and together they seem to me to provide a significant clue to the characterization of Brandlberger that does not appear to have been previously discussed in the secondary literature. It is in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Section XI, that Nietzsche describes the behaviour of people who have ordinarily been ‘held in check by custom, respect, habit, gratitude and even more through spying on one another and through peer-group jealousy’ when those constraints are removed: [I]n the wilderness they compensate for the tension which is caused by being closed in and fenced in by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who perhaps go away having committed a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student’s prank, convinced that poets will now have something to sing about and celebrate for quite some time. At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again,

34 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 123. A particular impetus for Müller’s novel may have been provided by the imagery in §197 of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche argues against the tendency of European moralists to regard the predatory behaviour of tropical beasts and such ruthless historical individuals as Cesare Borgia as a form of sickness: ibid. p. 84f.

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must return to the wild: – Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings – in this requirement they are all alike.35

Nietzsche goes on to say that ‘the noble races’ had invariably left ‘the concept of “barbarian”’ behind them wherever they asserted themselves historically, and that is the sentiment with which the passage is most commonly associated. But his argument in this section has begun, not with the behaviour of what he calls the ‘noble’ type who spontaneously and straightforwardly distinguishes between what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’, but with that of its obverse, the ‘man of ressentiment’, who has brewed up his sense of ‘evil’ in the ‘cauldron of unassuaged hatred’ and whose enmity is therefore directed precisely against the ‘noble’ type.36 It is to the emotional force of ressentiment that Nietzsche, in the preceding section of On the Genealogy of Morality, has attributed the historical origins of the obverse of the ‘noble’ type by a process that he calls the ‘slaves’ revolt in morality’.37 His argument at the beginning of Section XI continues as follows: ‘[O]ne should ask who is actually evil in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The stern reply is precisely the “good” person of the other morality, the noble, powerful, dominating man, but re-touched, re-interpreted and re-viewed through the poisonous eye of ressentiment.’38 Alongside the manifestations of barbarity that we find Nietzsche associating with the origins of historical cultures, then, we also find in this famous passage the exposition of a psychological insight that is fundamental to Nietzsche’s conception of the historical origins of contrasting moralities. And in Müller’s novel we find suggestive evidence that both these dimensions of Nietzsche’s argument are used to intimate to readers of the time, who could be expected to be familiar with Nietzsche’s ideas, a Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge 1994, p. 23. 36 For the implications of Nietzsche’s use of the (originally French) word ressentiment and the sense of a grudge that it carries in German, see Rüdiger Bittner, ‘Ressentiment’, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Berkeley, CA 1994, pp. 127–38. 37 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 21. 38 Ibid. p. 24. 35

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conceptual framework within which the relationship between Brandlberger and Slim should be understood. Slim, with his spontaneous apprehension of the world and the behaviour of others, and his straightforward sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, is characterized broadly in line with Nietzsche’s ‘noble’ type. Brandlberger may aspire to be such a type himself, and on the last page of the novel we find him imagining that, like the historical examples of ‘nobility’ that Nietzsche describes, he will have given the poets ‘something to sing about’.39 But the evidence of his apparent behaviour, as it comes through the text, is more clearly aligned with the model of the ‘man of ressentiment’, whose ‘unassuaged hatred’ asserts itself with disastrous consequences for the expedition and for his two European companions in particular. The storyline of the novel, we might conclude, need not be thought of as challenging or undermining the sense of imperial mission to which the author, Robert Müller, evidently remained committed; but in the figure of Brandlberger it portrays a human type that is unfit to sustain such a mission. Nietzsche’s psychology is clearly one recognizable reference point for the representation of Brandlberger’s mental processes; another is Freud’s interpretation of dreams. On this issue, too, it is Slim who achieves the simplest and most cogent formulation, after Brandlberger has previously reached his own conclusions about the potency of dreamlike experience (113): the dream contains nothing that is there by chance or without cause, Slim avers, and therefore it alone is rational (195). His words are again loaded with menace for Brandlberger, because Slim goes on to recall the discovery of the corpse of one of the Indian women as the party left the village, evidently killed by two knife wounds, one below the breast and a larger one in the groin (152–6): had Brandlberger had no contact with the woman on the night in question (197)? Brandlberger is unable to answer with certainty because, as his narrative has told us in explicit detail, he had 39

‘Es ist auch möglich, daß ich wie Slim den allerlächerlichsten Tod finde. Dann springt der Dichter ein, dann ist es Zeit für den Dichter, die Tragikomödie liegt fix und fertig vor ihm da’ (244). (It is also possible that, like Slim, I shall meet my death in the most ridiculous way. Then the poet will have to intervene, then the poet’s moment will have come, the tragicomedy is all set out before him.)

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dreamed that night of an erotic encounter with that very woman (150). He had also gone on to dream of a scene heavily laden with phallic symbolism and the threat of castration, in which the priestess Zana was conjuring up snakes that Slim promptly cut down with his machete (151); and a machete that fits the description of the likely murder weapon had featured at an earlier point in the dream, held by van den Dusen (148). Müller, it seems, has laid a rich trail for those conversant with Freud’s dream theory to follow: is the attribution of the machete to van den Dusen merely a displacement,40 and did Brandlberger’s sexual fantasy, imbued with predatory and lethal overtones as it patently is (148), lead in reality to the death of the woman? A further implication of Brandlberger’s dream is clearly that the intellectual rivalry between him and Slim is also energized by a basic sexual rivalry focused on the figure of Zana. Issues such as these lend the text the aspect of an elusive detective novel and make Brandlberger’s narrative look increasingly like the documentation of a psychopathological case; indeed the text itself, on its closing pages, archly draws attention to the possibility of viewing it in these ways (240–2). And since the reliability of Brandlberger’s testimony has been so heavily called into question, we are bound to wonder whether the killing of van den Dusen in turn – during a phase of the action where fever and starvation have induced a delirious condition in the narrator (236–9) – is not also a consequence of Brandlberger’s vengefulness.41 On the closing pages of Brandlberger’s narrative we find him fantasizing various ways of realizing his ambition of taking Slim’s place and achieving sexual union with the ‘Urweib’ (primal woman) Zana – fantasies that remain heavily imbued with images of the predatory life, and of looking death in the face, but through which he can persuade himself that he is

40 For the significance of this notion, see in particular Chapter 6 of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). 41 See Florian Krobb, ‘“Vertuschungsversuche”. Robert Müllers Tropen: Kriminalroman und Tragikomödie’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 89 (2015), pp. 2, 235–64: pp. 255 and 258f., for more detailed discussion of the indications that Brandlberger is the murderer; also p. 249 for the relevance of contemporary criminal psychology, notably the writings of Erich Wulffen and Eugen Bleuler, to the characterization of Brandlberger.

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‘the’ new human type and has achieved the heightened sensual awareness of the ‘primitive peoples’ (237–8) – before she apparently succeeds in conveying him, via the Amazon, back to the world of the reading public. For that public he can rationalize his experiences and present himself as the ‘inheritor’ of Slim’s ideas (241). In Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Berlin he can proclaim that whatever human beings seek to discover they will find within themselves; that the tropics are the foundation of the human organism, and the human race merely ‘a trope of the tropics’; and that the human being of the future will be able to say, in a phrase that could be taken as much as an assertion of dominion as of self-knowledge, ‘die Tropen bin ich’ (I am the tropics) (243–4). The complexities and convolutions of Müller’s novel have attracted a number of different lines of critical investigation. Some of these have focused on its significance as a challenge to the fashionable exoticism of the period around 1900,42 while others have concentrated on the relationship in which it stands to the colonial ambitions and the anthropological assumptions that were equally characteristic of that time.43 Yet others have argued, in the light of the elaborate ways in which the text of Tropen draws attention to the artificiality of its own construction as a fiction, that its self-reflective character is the basis of its unique contribution to the development of literary modernism.44 The line of argument I have developed here does not, I think, invalidate any of those approaches. But it does highlight an additional reason for regarding Müller’s novel as a landmark 42 See Stephanie Heckner, ‘Das Exotische als utopisches Potential: Zur Neubestimmung des Exotismus bei Robert Müller’, Sprachkunst 17 (1986), pp. 206–23; Zenk, Innere Forschungsreisen; Michael Mayer, ‘Tropen gibt es nicht’: Dekonstruktionen des Exotismus, Bielefeld 2010, pp. 144–78. See also Michaela Holdenried, Künstliche Horizonte: Alterität in literarischen Repräsentationen Südamerikas, Berlin 2004, pp. 263–76, with further references. 43 See Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen; Gess, Primitives Denken, pp. 195–212; Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung, pp. 110–25. 44 See Thomas Köster, Bilderschrift Großstadt: Studien zum Werk Robert Müllers, Paderborn 1995; Stefan Dietrich, Poetik der Paradoxie: zu Robert Müllers fiktionaler Prosa, Siegen 1997; Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. See also Holdenried, Künstliche Horizonte, pp. 276–95, with further references.

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literary text for its time, namely as a radical representation of the senses in which humanity, in the very endeavour to transcend its actual cultural condition, remains a prey to the physiological and psychological impulses that constitute its fundamental biological nature.

Bibliography Bittner, Rüdiger, ‘Ressentiment’, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Berkeley, CA 1994, pp. 127–38. Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn, New York and London 1988. Dietrich, Stefan, Poetik der Paradoxie: Zu Robert Müllers fiktionaler Prosa, Siegen 1997. Gess, Nicola, Primitives Denken, Munich 2013. Heckner, Stephanie, ‘Das Exotische als utopisches Potential: Zur Neubestimmung des Exotismus bei Robert Müller’, Sprachkunst 17 (1986), pp. 206–23. Holdenried, Michaela, Künstliche Horizonte: Alterität in literarischen Repräsentationen Südamerikas, Berlin 2004. Köster, Thomas, Bilderschrift Großstadt: Studien zum Werk Robert Müllers, Paderborn 1995. Kreuzer, Helmut, and Günter Helmes (eds), Expressionismus – Aktivismus – Exotismus: Studien zum literarischen Werk Robert Müllers (1887–1924), Göttingen 1981. Krobb, Florian, ‘“Bis zum Horizonte dieser kleinen Welt”: Travel Writing, Utopianism and Karl May. Robert Müller’s Tropen’, Modern Language Review 110 (2015), pp. 1067–85. ‘“Vertuschungsversuche”. Robert Müllers Tropen: Kriminalroman und Tragikomödie’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 89 (2015), p. 2, pp. 235–64. Liederer, Christian, Der Mensch und seine Realität: Anthropologie und Wirklichkeit im poetischen Werk des Expressionisten Robert Müller, Würzburg 2004. Mayer, Michael, ‘Tropen gibt es nicht’: Dekonstruktionen des Exotismus, Bielefeld 2010. Müller, Robert, Gesammelte Essays, ed. Michael M. Schardt, Hamburg 2011. Kritische Schriften I, ed. Günter Helmes and Jürgen Berners, Paderborn 1993. Kritische Schriften II, ed. Ernst Fischer, Paderborn 1995. Tropen. Der Mythos der Reise: Urkunden eines deutschen Ingenieurs, ed. Günter Helmes, Paderborn 1990.

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Müller-Tamm, Jutta, Abstraktion als Einfühlung: Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne, Freiburg im Breisgau 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge 2002. On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge 1994. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge 2006. Riedel, Wolfgang, Nach der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014. Schwarz, Thomas, Robert Müllers Tropen: Ein Reiseführer in den imperialen Exotismus, Heidelberg 2006. Zenk, Volker, Innere Forschungsreisen: Literarischer Exotismus in Deutschland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, Oldenburg 2003. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in NineteenthCentury Literature and Culture, London 2005.

Part IV

The Poet, the Senses, and the Sense of a World Introduced by David Midgley

Within the proliferation of new specialisms that we noted in the introduction to Part III, the study of biological phenomena in the second half of the nineteenth century faced a fundamental methodological dilemma: should living organisms be conceived in terms of the familiar principles of physics and chemistry, or was some other explanation needed for their behaviour? It was a question that divided scientists in their efforts to understand the mutation of species, the development of organisms from embryo to maturity, and the physiological operation of individual organisms. It also presented an acute challenge to traditional philosophical assumptions about the relationship between body and mind. The earlier part of the century had seen the dominance of positivism in France (Auguste Comte) and of scientific materialism in Germany (Karl Vogt and Ludwig Büchner), and the application of quasi-mechanical thinking in the domain of biology was carried through to the end of the century, notably in the representation of the evolutionary process by Ernst Haeckel in Germany and by Herbert Spencer in England. But mechanistic assumptions were challenged by embryological experimentation between the 1890s and the 1920s which prompted speculation about the internal impulses that might account for the development and organization of the organism. In its strongest form, this alternative thinking was known as vitalism, and while its propositions faded out of serious biological discourse within a few decades, it was highly prominent in the first decade of the twentieth century, when it also prompted the philosophical speculation about the distinctive qualities of life processes and the trajectory of evolution that is commonly referred to as Lebensphilosophie and epitomized in Henri Bergson’s popular book Creative Evolution, first published in 1907.1 1

See David Midgley, ‘After Materialism: Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’, in John Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. II: Historical, Social and Political Thought, Cambridge 2013, pp. 161–85; and ‘“Creative Evolution”: Bergson’s Critique of Science and its Reception in the German-Speaking World’, in Simon J. James and Nicholas Saul (eds), Evolution of Literature, Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, Amsterdam 2011, pp. 283–97. For a still readable account of the divergent currents in biological thinking from the perspective of 1909, see Emanuel Rádl, History of Biological Theories, trans. and adapted by E. J. Hatfield, London 1930. For a more

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In that historical context, the development of psychology as an empirical science was strongly associated with laboratory experiments designed to measure the relation between a controlled sensory stimulus and the perception or sensation experienced by a human subject. Pioneered in Leipzig by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87) and continued by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), this work established the notion of a clear correlation between physical and mental processes (psychophysical parallelism) and refrained from inferring any causal relation between the two.2 Wundt in particular championed the experimental approach against the intuitive route to self-knowledge (which was promoted around 1900 by William James, for example), asserting that experimental methods alone could establish an objective basis for understanding ‘inner experiences’.3 The legacy of this approach to psychology was one that Freud inevitably had to counter when seeking to establish the scientific respectability of psychoanalysis in the early decades of the twentieth century, but traces of Fechner’s mechanistic understanding of processes in the mind and nervous system persisted in Freud’s thinking, too, notably in his ‘metapsychological’ writings, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923).4 An important later development of the experimental approach was Gestalt psychology, which provided insights into the way the brain recognizes physical shapes from the visual information reaching it through

2

3 4

recent analysis of the terms in which organic phenomena were discussed in the early twentieth century, see Donna J. Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology, New Haven, CT 1976. For fuller theoretical analysis, see T. J. Horder, J. A. Witkowski and C. C. Wylie (eds), A History of Embryology, Cambridge 1986. See Jean Piaget, Paul Fraisse, and Maurice Reuchlin (eds), Experimental Psychology: Its Scope and Method, vol. 1: History and Method, London 1968, pp. 15–69; Thomas Hardy Leahey, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought, London 2004, pp. 210–11 and 233–43. Wilhelm Wundt, ‘Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung’ [1888], Kleine Schriften, vol. 3, Stuttgart 1921, pp. 423–40: p. 437f. See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVIII, London 1955, p. 8f., and vol. XIX, London 1961, p. 47.

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the optical nerve.5 Another was the practical application of psychological findings in the world of work. Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), who became a leading proponent of this approach in the USA around 1900, completed his PhD research under Wundt in 1885, but his ideas for putting psychological knowledge to practical use did not meet with Wundt’s approval. He found an institutional base at Harvard in 1892, however, with the support of William James (1842–1910), who was ready to hand over responsibility for teaching experimental psychology at that time precisely because the focus of his own interests was moving towards philosophical investigation instead. In Harvard, Münsterberg was able to develop his thinking about, and practical observation of, the interaction of mental and physical activities that he called ‘psychotechnics’, and to press his case for applying his findings in the workplace. His ideas meshed well with the drive for assembly-line efficiency promoted at the time by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), but were regarded with suspicion by those who recognized the dehumanizing potential of such doctrines.6 It was not until after the First World War that Münsterberg’s thinking became known in Germany and was put to work there, too.7 But as students at Harvard, young people such as Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), who were later to become prominent exponents of literary modernism, absorbed Münsterberg’s key ideas and integrated them into their own psychological thinking, as Sarah Cain shows in her chapter. The scientific work of Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) excited the interest of writers and intellectuals in the German-speaking world in ways that were superficially similar to the public profile of Münsterberg in America,8 but there are marked differences between their respective ways

5 6 7 8

For an account of Gestalt psychology in relation to psychophysics – and to other, rival contemporary schools of psychological thought – by one of its pioneers, see Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, London 1930. See David Hothersall, History of Psychology, New York 1995, Chapter 5. See Dominik Schrage, Psychotechnik und Radiophonie: Subjektkonstruktionen in artifiziellen Wirklichkeiten 1918–32, Munich 2001, pp. 109–15. See Malte Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, in Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 553–92.

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of thinking. Whereas Münsterberg promoted a strongly mechanistic and quantitative approach to assessing physiological and mental performance, Uexküll emphasized the need to understand physiological phenomena in terms that went beyond the physico-chemical, and to take a holistic approach to interpreting the behaviour of organisms. His speciality was the spatial awareness of animals, more particularly the sense in which each organism constructs its own conception of the world it inhabits; and the conceptual model he used in the explanation of what he observed was that of an inherent ‘building-plan’ (Bauplan) that determined the organism’s perception of its world and its behaviour within it.9 Uexküll’s thinking was controversial because it appeared to imply an individualistic model for understanding biological phenomena, as David Wachter shows in the opening paragraph of his chapter. Indeed, while the German term Uexküll uses to denote an organism’s sense of world is ‘Umwelt’, which would ordinarily be translated as ‘environment’, he was also content to have his key concept glossed as ‘Eigenwelt’, that is, ‘own-world’.10 Precisely that emphasis on a subjective relationship with the world seems to have chimed in well with early twentieth-century literary writers, however, and a strong affinity with Uexküll’s notion of a species-specific world-view has been detected in Kafka’s ‘Investigations of a Dog’ (1922), for example,11 as well as in the poetry of Rilke, who knew Uexküll personally. It was at the end of the 1920s that German philosophers started to show interest in Uexküll. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who knew him as a colleague at Hamburg University drew attention to his thinking in a presentation he gave in March 1929, and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who was in the audience on that occasion, went on to develop his own thoughts about Uexküll’s biological discoveries in the lectures he gave the

9 10 11

See Carlo Brentari, Jakob von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics and Theoretical Biology, Dordrecht 2015, pp. 57–63. See Florian Mildenberger and Bernd Herrmann, ‘Zur ersten Orientierung’, in Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [1909], Berlin 2014, pp. 1–12: p. 9f. See Kristina Jobst, ‘Pawlow, Uexküll, Kafka: Forschungen mit Hunden’, in Harald Neumeyer and Wilko Steffens (eds), Kafkas Betrachtung / Kafka interkulturell, and Kafkas narrative Verfahren / Kafkas Tiere, Würzburg 2015, pp. 307–33.

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following winter.12 Heidegger had published Being and Time in 1927, and one line of thinking he pursued in the lectures was concerned with the question of what distinguishes the relation that human beings have to the world from that of animals. The physiological evidence that Uexküll had collected interested Heidegger because it seemed to show that, by comparison with humans, the perception of the world that animals in general have was strictly circumscribed or, in a sense, depleted: as Heidegger puts it, animals are ‘weltarm’ (poor in world)13 and remain ‘captivated’ by their sense of an environment that is generated by their functional relation to it.14 As the nature of Heidegger’s inquiry required, the remainder of the lectures took the form of a long and elaborate investigation of the senses in which animals inhabit a depleted world, while human beings were capable of forming theirs (they are ‘weltbildend’). At the end of the section of his lectures that was devoted specifically to the nature of the animal’s awareness of world, Heidegger made an allusion to the passage in St Paul’s epistle to the Romans (8:18–22) which evokes the ‘earnest expectation of the creature’ awaiting revelation and redemption,15 and this allusion was taken up and developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book The Open (L’Aperto) in 2002. (Agamben’s title alludes to a motif in Rilke’s evocation of the way animals relate to the world in the Eighth Duino Elegy, an evocation that Heidegger had criticized elsewhere as an idealization of the animal.)16 Agamben reviews the arguments of both Heidegger and Uexküll, drawing out their implications, and concludes that the human condition can be represented in terms of a transition out of the animal state: ‘This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious

Cf. Brentari, Jakob von Uexküll, pp. 188–94 and 198–204. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (winter semester 1929/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington, IN 1995, pp. 176–273. 14 Ibid. p. 238f. 15 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 273. 16 Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington, IN 1998, pp. 152–8. 12 13

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and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human.’17 It is by achieving conscious and critical awareness of its underlying animal condition, in other words, that humanity can rise above it. Agamben’s investigation provided Eric Santner in turn with the conceptual frame of reference for his inquiry, in his book On Creaturely Life (2006), into the thematic concerns that characterized a prominent tradition in twentieth-century German – and notably German-Jewish – writing. For Santner, the notion of ‘creatureliness’, while related both to the possibility of subsiding into creaturely existence in the mode of melancholy and to the possibility of transcending it, signifies ‘a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field’.18 There are, then, several steps in the transition that takes us from the scientific investigation of the mysteries of the organism around 1900 to the terms in which we find philosophers and literary critics exploring the dilemmas of humanity in our own time. But these developments show how the conceptual language of contemporary critical thought is organically related to the biological and psychological experimentation that was taking place around 1900 and why the various strands of that relationship warrant further investigation. Any apparent similarities between the themes of Alfred Döblin’s famous city novel of 1929 and the subject matter of Heidegger’s lectures of the following winter are probably a reflection of the broad intellectual atmosphere of the time rather than any more direct connection, but as Robert Craig shows in his chapter on Döblin, by viewing that novel in the terms of contemporary critical discourse we can hope to refine our sense of what an awareness of our animal natures can contribute to our understanding of the existential position of humanity in industrial – and post-industrial – society.

17 18

Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford, CA 2004, p. 70. Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago, IL 2006, p. xix.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford, CA 2004. Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, London 1911. Brentari, Carlo, Jakob von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics and Theoretical Biology, Dordrecht 2015. Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVIII, London 1955. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIX, London 1961. Haraway, Donna J., Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in TwentiethCentury Developmental Biology, New Haven, CT 1976. Heidegger, Martin, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (winter semester 1929/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington, IN 1995. Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington, IN 1998. Herwig, Malte, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-century Literature’, in Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 553–92. Horder, T. J., J. A. Witkowski and C. C. Wylie (eds), A History of Embryology, Cambridge 1986. Hothersall, David, History of Psychology, New York 1995. Jobst, Kristina, ‘Pawlow, Uexküll, Kafka: Forschungen mit Hunden’, in Harald Neumeyer and Wilko Steffens (eds), Kafkas Betrachtung / Kafka interkulturell, and Kafkas narrative Verfahren / Kafkas Tiere, Würzburg 2015, pp. 307–33. Köhler, Wolfgang, Gestalt Psychology, London 1930. Leahey, Thomas Hardy, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought, London 2004. Midgley, David, ‘After Materialism: Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie: Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’, in John Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. II: Historical, Social and Political Thought, Cambridge 2013, pp. 161–85. ‘“Creative Evolution”: Bergson’s Critique of Science and its Reception in the German-Speaking World’, in Simon J. James and Nicholas Saul (eds), Evolution of Literature, Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, Amsterdam 2011, pp. 283–97. Mildenberger, Florian, and Bernd Herrmann, ‘Zur ersten Orientierung’, in Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [1909], Berlin 2014, pp. 1–12. Münsterberg, Hugo, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, London 1913.

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Piaget, Jean, Paul Fraisse and Maurice Reuchlin (eds), Experimental Psychology: Its Scope and Method, vol. 1: History and Method, London 1968, pp. 15–69. Rádl, Emanuel, The History of Biological Theories, trans. and adapted by E. J. Hatfield, London 1930. Santner, Eric, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago, IL 2006. Schrage, Dominik, Psychotechnik und Radiophonie: Subjektkonstruktionen in artifiziellen Wirklichkeiten 1918–32, Munich 2001. Wundt, Wilhelm, ‘Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung’ [1888], Kleine Schriften, vol. 3, Stuttgart 1921, pp. 423–40.

Sarah Cain

13 Attention and Efficiency: The Experimental Psychology of Modernism

abstract The German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) occupies a unique yet underexamined position in relation to the history of modernist literature: as director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory at the turn of the twentieth century, he taught psychology and philosophy of mind to both T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. More widely, his role in the history of American thought has often been obscured by the opprobrium he received after refusing to relinquish his German citizenship during World War I. This chapter seeks to recover the neglected link between the psychological and physiological discourses of Münsterberg’s experimental work, and literary modernism’s intense preoccupation with discourses of human energy, attention, monotony, and efficiency. It examines how Münsterberg’s thinking inflected and shaped modernist concerns about the biological response to modernity, tracing his influence on Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and Stein’s experiments in prose form and the attentional processes of literary reading.

At the turn of the twentieth century, experimental psychology started to take shape as an academic discipline out of an unusual conjunction between Germanic science and Anglo-American thought. In the America of the late nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century, the new experimental psychology saw itself as having more in common with the research methods of the hard sciences than the curative, medical, or therapeutic praxis of psychoanalysis. Despite an aversion to psychoanalytic models, this American psychology turned out to be influenced by a different kind of Germanic connection: the borrowing of new laboratory techniques from German research institutes of experimental psychology, and their vocabularies of biological determinism, physiology, and economics, rather than the therapeutic discourses of neurosis and dream-logic.

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Here, I explore a curious, and until now neglected, conjunction between German experimental psychology and American transatlantic literary modernism. This unusual relationship between turn-of-the-century Germanic biological discourses and literary works came about through the interdisciplinary work of the expatriate philosopher and psychologist Hugo Münsterberg. Münsterberg taught psychology and philosophy of mind to Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot, amongst many others, at Harvard, and was also the founder, amongst other fields, of a new subfield of applied psychology that he called ‘psychotechnics’. Well known and influential in the scientific community and popular press in the first decades of the twentieth century, Münsterberg was subsequently effectively airbrushed out of American intellectual history, and shunned by his Harvard colleagues, after his refusal to renounce his German citizenship during the First World War. As a German national who would not compromise his neutral political stance in support of the allied forces, he was even suspected by his university colleagues of being a spy. Though he still continued to perform his job despite being ostracized by his American colleagues, he eventually collapsed and died whilst giving a lecture in 1916; most probably from a brain haemorrhage, but one which his family believed was due to the stress and emotional devastation of the way he had been treated both by his former friends and by the university.1 Largely because of this, Münsterberg’s status in early twentieth-century experimental science and intellectual history has been significantly undervalued. This chapter traces the connections between the physiological and psychological discourses of his experimental work, and transatlantic literary modernists’ aesthetic preoccupations with discourses of human energy, attention, monotony,

1

Münsterberg, who had styled himself as a German psychologist of ‘American Traits’, had already fallen out of good relationships with his colleagues over his outspoken criticism of what he saw as a ‘feminized’ American intellectual culture, as opposed to a more ‘vigorous’ and masculine Teutonic one. See Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War, Cambridge, MA 1979; Frank J. Landy, ‘Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?’, Journal of Applied Psychology 77:6 (1992), pp. 787–802; and the 1922 biography of Münsterberg by his daughter: Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work, New York 1922.

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and efficiency. I suggest that aspects of Münsterberg’s research inflected or helped shape early modernist concerns about the biological response to modernity: this influence most notably appears in Eliot’s early poems of the 1910s and 1920s, but also makes itself felt in other modernist American literary texts, such as Stein’s experimental writing. Hugo Münsterberg was born in Danzig, Germany, on 1 June 1863: his father, Moritz Münsterberg, was a Jewish lumber merchant, and Hugo was his son by his second wife, Anna. Anna died in 1875, tragically, when the young Hugo was only twelve years old; his father also died six years later, in 1881. Münsterberg threw himself into academic study: as well as achieving academic success in his Abitur, he studied in Leipzig for both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees under the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who in the 1880s founded the first laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig.2 Together with William James at Harvard, Wundt is now regarded as the founder of the modern discipline of experimental psychology; and Münsterberg’s early work built on Wundt’s interest in the observable and measurable connections between physiological and mental processes of consciousness and sense-perception. Hired to teach at the University of Freiburg (though initially without a salary), Münsterberg fitted out two rooms in his own house to set up a laboratory for experimental psychological research that was similar to Wundt’s at Leipzig, along with a research programme investigating sensory and motor reactions and attention spans in school children and university students. The publication of three major books on the methodology of experimental psychology between 1889 and 1891 won him an established professorship: this drew him to the attention of William James, who in 1892 invited Münsterberg to spend a five-term sabbatical at Harvard, awarded

2

See William Stern, ‘Hugo Münsterberg: In Memoriam’, Journal of Applied Psychology 1 (1917), pp. 186–8; Matthew Hale, Jr, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology, Philadelphia, PA 1980; Jutta Spillman and Lothar Spillmann, ‘The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993), pp. 322–38.

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specifically so that Münsterberg might set up and direct a laboratory for physiological psychology modelled on his own laboratory in Freiburg.3 William James, who saw himself first and foremost as a philosopher and disliked laboratory work, was happy to give over direction of the new Harvard Psychological Laboratory to Münsterberg; and by 1895 it was described by one contemporary account as: the most unique, the richest, and the most complete in any country; and in witness of the fame and genius of its present director, and of the rapidly spreading interest in experimental psychology, particularly in America, there are already gathered here, under Professor Münsterberg’s administration, a larger number of students specially devoted to mental science than ever previously studied together in any one place.4

One of those students, notably, was Gertrude Stein, who studied experimental psychology with Münsterberg at Radcliffe College (at that time a coordinate institution of Harvard) from 1894 to 1895. Donald Gallup records Münsterberg as having written to Stein in 1895 to congratulate her on having been his ‘ideal student’: ‘I thank you above all for the model-work you have done in the laboratory and the other courses wherever I met you […] if in later years you look into printed discussions which I have in mind to publish about students in America, I hope you will then pardon me if you recognize some features of my ideal student picture as your own.’5 Stein, as Michael Hoffman and Steven Meyer have noted, was deeply influenced by her time working at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory under first Münsterberg, and then William James; after her undergraduate degree she became a research assistant in the Laboratory, publishing academic papers on ‘motor automatism’ and the human physiology of attention

3 4 5

See Hugo Münsterberg, ‘Studies from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, Part I’, Psychological Review 1 (1894), pp. 34–60. H. Nichols, ‘The Psychological Laboratory at Harvard’, McClure’s Magazine 1 (1895), pp. 399–409. Quoted in The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, ed. Donald Gallup, New York 1953; repr. 1979, p. 4.

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in Psychological Review in 1896 and 1898.6 One of the main research interests of the Laboratory during these years was in testing the experimental limits of human subjects’ attention, and particularly in their responses to word repetition and mental and physical fatigue when studying, reading, or writing. Stein’s own experiments in ‘motor automatism’ included testing the place of repetition in subjective memory, and fluctuations of the attention when subjects were asked to write the same letter repeatedly whilst reading a story aloud; or when a subject was asked to read aloud a dull story whilst listening to an interesting one. Though its methods were modelled firmly on the kind of research conducted by laboratories in the hard sciences, and its vocabularies were situated thoroughly within the biological discourses of physiology – ‘motor’ nerves and processes; the physiology of muscle fatigue or attentional processes; the mechanical vocabulary of mental ‘strain’ – the research conducted at the Laboratory often seemed to incorporate some subjective element of the aesthetic or literary: here, the presence of the dull versus the interesting story which captured – or not – the attention of Stein’s research subjects. The success of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory led to Münsterberg being offered a permanent chair at Harvard in 1897. In 1898 he was elected President of the American Psychological Association; in 1900 he became chair of the philosophy division at Harvard; ten years later, in 1908, he was elected President of the American Philosophical Association. During this period he also became Fellow and Vice President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in recognition of the sheer breadth and quantity of work he had published, and its impact on a wide variety of disciplines: this ranged from volumes of essays on Psychology and Life and on the American national character, to works on the position of psychology in the system of knowledge; on psychotherapy, science, and idealism; as well as major books in the philosophy and the underlying principles of experimental psychology. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that Münsterberg was the founder of American scientific psychology; and that, more than any 6

See Michael J. Hoffman, ‘Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory’, American Quarterly 17:1 (1965), pp. 127–32; and Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, Stanford, CA 2001.

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other individual before or since, he shaped the scope and future directions of experimental psychology throughout the twentieth century. As well as his shaping influence on psychology as an academic discipline, Münsterberg’s work of the 1910s and 1920s also had an extraordinarily wide popular reach and historical longevity in American culture, and within Western cultural history more widely. Across the range of his work he was consciously and explicitly multi- and interdisciplinary, founding subfields of experimental psychology such as forensic and crime psychology – in, for example, On the Witness Stand and The Psychology of Crime (both 1908), which evaluated the impact of unreliable human attention and memory recall in witnesses’ evidence, and in the trial by jury legal system. In 1907 he had attracted sensational newspaper publicity for having used a system of experimental lie-detector tests in the trial of Harry Orchard, the mass-murderer and government witness responsible for the assassination of a former Governor of Idaho: having concluded that Orchard was telling the truth on the stand, this use of measuring physiological responses inaugurated the idea and widespread use of the lie-detector in American courts. On this, as on other aspects of public life such as the role of women, Münsterberg frequently attracted critical or negative public attention. His belief that the increasingly equal status of women was a sign of the effeminization of America (and contrasted unfavourably with a more vigorously masculine Germanic culture), was a widely shared reactionary opinion of the time, with even President Roosevelt writing to him to agree.7 However, Münsterberg’s penchant for making unflattering pronouncements on the negative aspects of American national culture lent him a dubious popular notoriety, including being lampooned in newspaper cartoons and referred to as ‘Professor Hugo

7 Hale, Human Science, p. 63. Münsterberg’s opinions on this are elaborated at some length in the chapter on ‘Women’ in his American Traits from the German Point of View (1901); for a wider analysis of his attitudes to women, see Rena Sanderson, ‘Gender and Modernity in Transnational Perspective: Hugo Münsterberg and the American Woman’, Prospects 23 (1998), pp. 285–313.

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Monsterwork’.8 He also founded another subfield of psychology that made a lasting impact on wider American culture: educational psychology. Most notably, in Psychology and the Teacher (1919) and The Principles of Art Education (1904), he inaugurated the use of scholastic and vocational aptitude tests; anyone who has ever taken a SAT or an aptitude test for an American graduate school has Münsterberg to thank. In the following decade he branched out into aesthetics in The Eternal Values (1909); and, at the end of his career, early forms of film and media studies. His 1916 monograph The Photoplay: A Psychological Study has a claim to being the first study of the psychology of film, in which he argued that film is constructed through the ‘subjective play of attention’ with which the mind understands the world.9 As well as all of these areas with practical or aesthetic impact, in the arena of professional academic science and philosophy Münsterberg had been a founder of the interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods and an organizer and speaker at the International Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St Louis World’s Fair of 1904, which featured papers from internationally renowned American and European cultural and scientific figures. As well as Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce, the Congress also included contributions from thinkers as diverse as Max Weber, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Jackson Turner.10 T. S. Eliot, who grew up in St Louis, Missouri, had also attended the 1904 World’s Fair as a child. The event, which later, famously, became the setting for the musical and the 1944 Judy Garland film Meet Me in St. Louis, made a big impact on the popular as well as the academic imagination.11 Münsterberg 8 9 10

11

See Allan Langdale, ‘S(t)imulation of Mind: The Film Theory of Hugo Münsterberg’, in Langdale (ed.), Hugo Münsterberg on Film: ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological Study’ and Other Writings, New York 2002, pp. 1–41: p. 32, n.35. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, New York 1916, p. 91. Recounted in Hugo Münsterberg, ‘The International Congress of Arts and Science’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1:1 (1904), pp. 1–8. See also James Rowland Angell, ‘Psychology at the St. Louis Congress’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 2 (1905), pp. 533–46. See, for example, Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St Louis to ‘The Waste Land’, London 2015, p. 59.

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always explicitly sought to situate his work at conjunctions of disciplinary forces or interests, combining psychology with philosophy, physiology, aesthetics, and economics. The aims of the International Congress, as he described them, were to replace what he called ‘detached specialization’ and the ‘heaping up of disconnected, unshaped facts’, with ‘a new synthesis’ of interdisciplinary interaction and collaboration, which would ‘bring together the sciences, psychology and philosophy, to emphasize the philosophic nature of science and the true scientific value of philosophy’.12 In his major work of the 1910s, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913), Münsterberg developed this interdisciplinary impulse into a new practical science of what he termed ‘psychotechnics’: the study of the connections between work, efficiency, psychology, physiology, and business. This new science would aim to study and promote the conservation of mental energy and of human physical and mental aptitudes, reformulating a Taylorist model of industrial efficiency in the biological and mechanical terms newly provided by early twentieth-century physiology of the nervous system and behavioural science. In Psychology and Industrial Efficiency he argued that: [o]ur aim is to sketch the outlines of a new science which is to intermediate between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry. So far we have only scattered beginnings of the new doctrine, only tentative efforts and disconnected attempts which have started, sometimes in economic, and sometimes in psychological, quarters.13

Psychotechnics thus represented the technical application of applied psychology as it might intervene in social and cultural life, and particularly in ‘commerce and industry, of business and the market in the widest sense of the word’.14 Münsterberg envisaged psychotechnics as an applied science which would interweave existing fields of behavioural psychology, economics, business studies, sociology, and philosophy, potentially being 12 13 14

Münsterberg, ‘The International Congress’, pp. 1–2. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, London and New York 1913, pp. 3–4. Ibid. pp. 15–16.

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applicable to every place where the human subject interacts as a physical entity with ‘will and feeling, perception and thought, attention and emotion’, including ‘mental states of attention, memory, feeling, and so on’, which transect the realities of economic and cultural existence.15 The purpose of psychotechnics as a discipline would be: to ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in the interest of business. In other words, we ask how to find the best possible man, how to produce the best possible work, and how to secure the best possible effects.16

To this end, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency deals not only with ‘the best possible man’ (and how to guard against ‘[i]llusory ideas as to the prospect of a career’, and ‘wandering from calling to calling’, which is ‘more frequent in America than anywhere else’; in order to find ‘deeper satisfaction and more harmonious unfolding of the personality’ in life and work);17 but also with the ‘scientific management’ of particular workforces according to the methods of experimental psychology, with case studies in the electric railway service, the telephone service, and shipping; the differences between individual and group psychology, learning in the educational system; efficiency in motor movement in the workplace and the processes of attention, concentration, and fatigue in factory workers and students; the effects of advertisements; the effect of shop displays; and the psychology of buying and selling, amongst other aspects of commerce. One of the most revealing sections of the book is the following passage reflecting on the methods used to conduct his own experiments (worth quoting at length, since here Münsterberg describes in detail his experimental method):

15 16 17

Ibid. pp. 21, 28. Ibid. pp. 23–4. Ibid. pp. 34, 36, 37.

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Sarah Cain I proceeded in the following way. To make use of a large number of subjects accustomed to intelligent self-observation, I made the first series of experiments with the regular students in my psychology lecture course in Harvard University. Last winter I had more than four hundred young men students in psychology who all took part in that introductory series. The task which I put before them in a number of variations was this: I used lists of words of which half, or one more or less than half, belonged to one single conceptional group. There were names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or parts of the body, or wild animals, or so on. The remaining words of the list, on the other hand, were without inner connection and without similarity. The similar and the dissimilar words were mixed. The subjects listened to such as list of words and then had to decide without counting from the mere impression whether the similar words were more or equally or less numerous than the dissimilar words. […] I had coupled with these experimental tests a series of questions, and had asked every subject to express with fullest possible self-analysis his practical attitude to monotony in life. Every one had to give an account whether in the small habits of life he liked variety or uniform repetition. He was asked especially as to his preferences for or against uniformity in the daily meals, daily walks, and so on. Furthermore he had to report how far he is inclined to stick to one kind of work or to alternate his work, how far he welcomes the idea that vocational work may bring repetition, and so on. And finally I tried to bring the results of these self-observations into relation with the results of those experiments […] I found that just the ones who perceive the repetition least hate it most, and that those who have a strong perception of the uniform impressions and who overestimate their number are the ones who on the whole welcome repetition in life.18

This passage shows Münsterberg attempting to bring together discourses of bodily demands (‘daily meals, daily walks, and so on’) with a modern concept of ‘repetition’: the ‘monotony in life’, which was an anxious preoccupation of so many contemporary literary writers. In this experiment, Münsterberg’s elision of linguistic repetition with a love for quotidian routine belies his typical desire to collapse the representational realm into the movements and habits of the body: the physiological is understood as inextricably linked with, even an index to, conceptual and aesthetic appreciation of pattern, and strongly inflected by a tendency to subjective ‘self-observations’. One reason why this long passage from 1913 is particularly significant is that in 1912–13, according to Eliot’s own typewritten list of courses he

18

Ibid. pp. 199–202.

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attended while a graduate student at Harvard, Eliot had attended the full course in ‘Philosophy 206: Seminary in Psychology’ given by Professor Hugo Münsterberg.19 The seminar’s subject for the year was ‘Mind and Body’, and included attending Münsterberg’s introductory undergraduate lectures in psychology as part of the course. It might be reasonable, then, to speculate that Eliot himself was among the ‘four hundred young men students in psychology’ who were Münsterberg’s experimental subjects in the passage above. In taking both the ‘Seminary in Psychology’ and attending the compulsory lecture series, Eliot would surely have been, in any case, aware of the research interests which would become Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, since Münsterberg had a habit of testing out his current ideas on his students whilst he was writing a new volume. Certainly, Münsterberg’s preoccupations with the conjunctions between human attention, work, fatigue, and the efficiency of economic production seem to dovetail with Eliot’s own personal and literary preoccupations with waste, attention, monotony, energy, and the limits of the human subject in modernity. In his essay on the critic Gilbert Murray, written for the periodical Art & Letters and collected the same year in his first volume of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot suggests that ‘[a] number of sciences have sprung up in an almost tropical exuberance which undoubtedly excites our imagination, and the garden, not unnaturally, has come to resemble a jungle […] Wilhelm Wundt, who early fertilized the soil, would hardly recognize the resulting vegetation’.20 Within this tropical profusion of discourses, Eliot, too, was continually engaged, throughout the late teens and early twenties, in anxiety about the production of his work (academic, literary, and vocational); his own sense of vocation, and the relationship between stimulation, fatigue, and monotony – and, of course, in ‘how to produce the best possible work’.

19

Copies of Eliot’s own list of his graduate courses are reproduced in both the Hayward Bequest at King’s College, Cambridge, and in the Houghton Library at Harvard. 20 T. S. Eliot, ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, ed. Ronald Schuchard, London and Baltimore, MD 2014–present, II, pp. 195–201: p. 198.

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After the war, as he continually juggled his everyday work as a clerk at Lloyds Bank with critical writing and editing, Eliot began to fear that he would never again be able to produce poetic work of the same standard as Prufrock and Other Observations. Eliot’s parents had worried that he had ruined his academic career and missed his vocation, and Eliot himself confided in his brother, Henry, his fear that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ might be a ‘swan song’, and that he might never equal it.21 Writing to Henry two months later, he worried that he was wasting his literary talents, admitting that ‘I have not had time to pursue my literary connections, and overwork is telling on the quality of my production’.22 His letters from the late teens and twenties, after he left Harvard to work in London, betray a constant concern with the possibility of not being able to work; of not fulfilling his vocation; of not being able to conserve and best use his own mental and physical energy. His work at the bank was not as insignificant as we would understand today by the term ‘clerk’: it resembled a junior investment banking role, and Eliot found it stressful and anxiety-inducing, not least because he really wanted to use his mental and physical resources on intellectual work and the labour of writing, rather than quotidian commuting and the financial life of the City. He had had a long history of physical and nervous health difficulties, from having to wear a truss for a hernia as a child; to his later famous retreat to Margate and Lausanne, during the composition of The Waste Land, to be treated for neurasthenia by the Swiss nerve specialist Roger Vittoz.23 What is more marked following his experience of his courses in Harvard psychology and philosophy, however, is how his understanding of mental and physical strain became increasingly couched in Münsterberg’s language of the relationship between bodily attention and economic efficiency. Though some Eliot scholars have noted, largely in passing, the graduate courses he took at Harvard, few so much as mention Münsterberg. None have appreciated his significance as a cultural and intellectual figure in his Eliot to Henry Eliot, 6 September 1916, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. John Haffenden, 20 vols, London 2009–present, I, p. 165. 22 Eliot to Henry Eliot, 5 November 1916, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 173. 23 See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, passim. 21

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own right, nor have delved into his writings enough in order to realize that Eliot was amongst the cohort of students on which he would test out some of the experimental observations of his major psychological research.24 The very few critics who have noted Eliot’s interest in Münsterberg’s psychology courses have considered him as merely part of the general background of Harvard intellectual history of the teens and twenties. Manju Jain, for example, classes Münsterberg, somewhat erroneously, as a proponent of a philosophical idealism whose primary interest is within ‘the idealist consensus at Harvard’; and mentions him only glancingly throughout what is otherwise a reasonably comprehensive account of Eliot’s early intellectual interests.25 Instead, however, I suggest that Münsterberg’s influence on Eliot is more significant than has previously been assumed; and that while Eliot was undertaking his graduate work in philosophy at Harvard during the early teens, and beginning to draft the work that would become Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land, his writing and thinking about the mind, the body, work, and ‘monotony’ became charged with these new psychological vocabularies of measurement, energy and industrial efficiency, and of the physiology of the nervous system as a site of both mental and economic production and exhaustion. This is most explicit in some of Eliot’s letters which date from the period of working on The Waste Land, in which his neurasthenic worries about his physical and mental health are inflected by anxieties about work, energy, waste, and concentration: ‘[t]he great thing I am trying to learn is how to use all my energy without waste, to be calm when there is nothing to be gained by worry, and to concentrate 24 Scholars of Eliot’s early intellectual influences have largely overlooked the connection with early Harvard experimental psychology: M. A. R. Habib, for example, in The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy, Cambridge 1999, near-completely ignores the American context of Harvard’s indigenous philosopher-psychologists such as William James, Josiah Royce, and Münsterberg. Even Robert Crawford, in his recent and very full biography of Eliot’s life up until 1922, makes only a couple of very brief references to Münsterberg throughout his lengthy description of Eliot’s Harvard years: see Crawford, Young Eliot, p. 113, pp. 172–3. 25 Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years, Cambridge and New York 1992, pp. 69–71.

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without effort […] I realise that our family was never taught mental, any more than physical hygiene, and as a result we are a seedy lot.’26 And, again in relation to his anxieties about literary production: ‘I was aware that the principal trouble was that I have been losing power of concentration and attention, as well as becoming a prey to habitual worry and dread of the future: consequently, wasting far more energy than I used, and wearing myself out continually.’27 Here, Eliot’s letters inflect existing discourses of nervous illness or neurasthenia with physiological vocabularies of attention, production, and energy that specifically recall Münsterberg’s psychotechnics, with its stress on the optimum mental and physical reserves of the human subject and its key concerns with attention and concentration. Chiming with wider modernist literary anxieties about the intersections between the human subject and modernity – especially the demands of modernity that human subjects be unceasingly economically productive, efficient, or mechanistic – Münsterberg’s discourse of the physiology of monotony and repetition seems to haunt not only Eliot’s letters but also his poetry. The Waste Land’s morbid interest in the deadening effects of modern life is particularly evident in its representation of wasted energy and the monotony of working life. In the first section of the poem, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, an urban crowd commutes to the living death of work: Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.28

Eliot to Henry Eliot, 13 December 1921, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 641. Emphasis in the original. 27 Eliot to Sidney Waterlow, 19 December 1921, Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 617. 28 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in The Complete Poems and Plays, London 1969, pp. 59–80: p. 62 (lines 60–8). 26

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This passage, in which the commuters exemplify one kind of uniformity in their daily walk, presents an entirely joyless, anxious, even uncanny, image of what Münsterberg termed ‘the idea that vocational work may bring repetition’. It might, or might not, be significantly inflected by the knowledge that Eliot had worked as a bank clerk close by St Mary Woolnoth Church, between 9:15 and 5:30 precisely; and he took pains to annotate the monotonous ‘dead sound’ of the bell in his ‘Notes’ to the poem as ‘a phenomenon which I have often noticed’.29 In any case, the mechanistic ‘dead sound’ of the church bell is both suggestive of the starting-bell and clock-watching of the factory production line; and of the unification of the crowd into a composite form of human resource, united in its unwilling participation in a wider economic system. This anxiety about the human subject envisaged as part of a machine for economic production appears again in the third section of the poem, ‘The Fire Sermon’, where, as Tim Armstrong has suggested,30 the worker is imagined as a ‘human engine’ ready to be occupied by economic demands, and is reduced to an economy of body parts which seem to be emptied of subjective agency, merely awaiting their interpellation into a system of economic production: At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upwards from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I, Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins.31

29

Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, p. 77, n.68. Eliot’s poetic speaker’s first person interjections into the poem’s ‘Notes’ can be understood as autobiographically or impersonally as the reader wishes: the poem was first published without them in 1922, and the ‘Notes’ were later added when the poem was printed in book form. 30 See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural History, Cambridge 1998, p. 71. 31 Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, p. 68 (lines 214–23).

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In this evening scene, the mirror image of the morning commute of the city workers in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, the ‘typist’, an emblem of the efficiency of the modern business economy, is defined by her relationship to her work: the machine of the typewriter. The moment of departure from economic work into the routine of ‘home […] time’ is one in which, like a ‘taxi throbbing waiting’, the body waits to be occupied once more by some kind of psychic agency. The deadening effect of the modern economy of work is echoed in the unfinished and cancelled lines that form part of this section in the drafts of The Waste Land: population (London! your { pop / people is bound upon the wheel!) pavement jerky motions poor cheap Record the movements of these huddled toys tarnished 32

The ‘jerky motions’ of the people imagined as ‘toys’ follow on from the ‘throbbing’ of the taxi, and the absent-minded, mechanical actions of the inattentive typist, who later ‘smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone’ (lines 255–6). Their nervous energy continually exhausted and refilled, London’s ‘pavement toys’ occupy some kind of mechanistic universe in which the demands of work and production have emptied out their capacity for productive attention. The ‘throbbing’ of the imagined taxi in ‘The Fire Sermon’ is then transferred, in the following line, to the speaker Tiresias; the repetition of ‘throbbing’ overlays his suspension ‘between two lives’ with the mechanical idling of the car, and a consequent image of the car’s emptiness. Repetition, in fact, is a key feature of The Waste Land; and of Eliot’s writing more generally. In the short section above on London’s morning commuters, there are multiple repetitions: ‘so many’ repeated at the end of two following lines; ‘flowed’ repeated five lines apart, in relation to the crowd; and a near-repetition of ‘death’ and ‘dead’ six lines apart. Similarly, 32

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot, London 1971, p. 37.

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in the second extract above, not just the word ‘violet’ but the phrase ‘At the violet hour’ is repeated verbatim, and followed soon after by the variation ‘evening hour’; ‘throbbing’ is repeated in two adjacent lines; there is a near repetition (with variation) of ‘waits’ and ‘waiting’; and the word ‘home’ is sounded out three times within the lines ‘Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea / The typist home at teatime’. These subtle repetitions and variations of words and short phrases are typical of the poem: throughout, snatches of repeated dialogue and phrase echo within and between the poem’s sections, from the repetition of the Shakespearean ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ (lines 48, 125), which appears in both of the first and second sections of the poem, to the incantatory repetitions which close the final lines of the poem: ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (line 433). The repetition of key words that resound throughout – rock, dead, eyes, water, noise, city, nothing, spring, mountains, thunder, amongst others – often recurs, in slightly different contexts, in different parts of the text: for example, ‘violet light’ appears in the final section, ‘What The Thunder Said’, drawing the reader’s attention to the echo of the earlier ‘violet hour’, in a technique Eliot employs throughout the text. The repetitions sometimes break down into performative representations of sound, such as in the imitation of birdsong (‘Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug’: lines 203–4); noise (‘Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop’: line 358); or lines suggestive both of madness and of religious fervour (‘Burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out / O Lord Thou pluckest // burning’: lines 308–11). Monotone repetition here serves to reinforce the monotony of the tolling bells and the poem’s waiting, throbbing, unseeing inhabitants; it also lends the text itself a sonorous quality of fatigue and foreboding. Within short spaces of the text, repetitions such as these may catch and hold the reader’s attention; or, conversely, serve, like the incantations of ‘burning’, to disperse it, scattering the focus of the reader’s eye and mental concentration and disintegrating into apparently meaningless noise. This use of repetition and variation is similar to Stein’s experiments with the sound and visual patterning of repetition: ‘It is easy to change marguerites pointedly. Ever and even ever mainly. Every little Arthur. The dears with accusation of drawing up. Make it a repetition and find them. In sewn grammar’, she suggests, in her characteristically charming, and infuriatingly

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resistant, prose.33 Stein’s sound patterning, as in her famous line ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’, which first appears in the poem ‘Sacred Emily’ in 1913, makes a virtue of repetition: each time the same word or phrase is repeated, the interplay of repetition and variation both looks backwards and drives the text forwards at the same time.34 This movement both produces and tracks the processes of readerly attention, with the repeated words echoing within and between sentences. (Indeed, the relationship between individual words and the grammar of sentences is often the focus of Stein’s specific interest in such essays as ‘Sentences’, ‘Saving the Sentence’, ‘Sentences and Paragraphs’, ‘A Grammarian’, and ‘Arthur A Grammar’, all written between 1927 and 1931 and collected in How to Write.) ‘Grammar is resemblance’, Stein announces in one of her repetitive grammatical essays: Resemblance to charging charging up hill but if there is plenty of time they will coarsen. There is no need of a hill in a flat country a city is a flat country there is no need of a hill in a city a city is a habit a habit of hyacinths wild hyacinths and a city all wild hyacinths have the same color and cannot have the same odor. To be disappointed in whatever is said although a great deal of it pleases.35

Here, Stein’s flower references form a curious echo of Eliot’s own ‘O city, city’, and the repetitions of ‘hyacinths’ in The Waste Land, in which one voice replies to another: ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’ – Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed (lines 35–9)

In her work of the late 1890s in Münsterberg’s Harvard Laboratory, Stein, along with her fellow student Leon Solomons, had worked on a series of projects designed to measure the limits of her subjects’ conscious attention, 33 Gertrude Stein, ‘Arthur A Grammar’, in How To Write, Paris 1931, pp. 37–101: p. 48. 34 Gertrude Stein, ‘Sacred Emily’, in Writings 1903–32, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, New York 1998, pp. 387–96: p. 395. 35 Stein, ‘Arthur’, p. 59.

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including experiments on ‘The Place of Repetition in Memory’, ‘Fluctuation of Attention’, and ‘The Saturation of Colors’, some of which became part of her published papers on ‘Motor Automatism’.36 These experiments, in which subjects were asked to write down repeated words whilst listening to other texts, or the converse, anticipated Münsterberg’s experiment on his class of Harvard students: it turned out for Stein, too, that perceived repetition persisted in disrupting her subjects’ conscious attention to whatever else they were listening to or writing.37 Gradually, the repeated words her subjects heard began to insert themselves, often unconsciously, into the other stories or tasks they were writing, apparently signalling small breakdowns in conscious attentiveness. The use of repetition and variation in her own prose might be thought of as not only reflecting the connections between the Harvard laboratory’s experimental psychology of attention and concentration, but itself producing a psychic exploration of repetition and variation in reading and writing. For both Stein and Eliot, in the effects of repeated words, themes, and grammatical structures, repetition itself produces moments of focusing or slackening of the reader’s attention: what Münsterberg might have termed a psychotechnics of reading. Psychotechnics, literally translated, might be understood as a form of practical art of the self. This techne of attention and mental efficiency seems to haunt Eliot’s post-Harvard literary works. Even at the most literal level, the form of Münsterberg’s experiment on the Harvard psychology students, quoted at length above, seems to be reproduced in unnerving form within The Waste Land (and Eliot’s early poems more generally), in repeated words or phrases which re-occur, sometimes in subtly varied forms, throughout the texts, but with no clear links between the repetitions other than the simple fact of repetition itself. Münsterberg’s list of similar or dissimilar ‘names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or parts of the

36 See Gertrude Stein, ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism; a Study of Character in its Relation to Attention’, Psychological Review 5 (1898), pp. 295–306; John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World, Boston, MA 1959, p. 29; Hoffmann, pp. 127–8. 37 See Leon M. Solomons and Gertrude Stein, ‘Normal Motor Automatism’, Psychological Review 3 (1896), pp. 492–512.

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body, or wild animals, or so on’ dovetail unnervingly with The Waste Land’s specific, and startling, interest in all of those categories: lilacs, hyacinths; Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London; rats, dolphins, nightingales, gulls, bats, thrushes; feet, fingertips, teeth, knees, fingernails, eyes, backs, and ‘automatic hands’ – and elsewhere, throughout Eliot’s early poems, a similar profusion of flowers, animals, and bodily imagery. Eliot’s ‘Notes’ to the poem are also, of course, full of names of poets: Baudelaire, Ovid, Milton, Spenser, Marvell, Verlaine, Dante. Eliot’s poem, which so fascinatingly replicates the repeated words of Münsterberg’s psychological experiment, might also be thought of, then, as a form of poetic psychotechnics: its interest in repetition and monotony, both literal and metaphorical, might act as an exploration of cultural and literary anxieties about production, waste, work, and the human subject. Where Münsterberg’s experiment had concluded that ‘just the ones who perceive the repetition least hate it most, and that those who have a strong perception of the uniform impressions and who overestimate their number are the ones who on the whole welcome repetition in life’, The Waste Land offers a different reading of the place of the psyche in relation to the repetitive monotony of modernity. If Stein’s repetitions are often joyful, playful, or frustrating, Eliot’s serve as a reminder of the deadening effect of repetition in modernity, and underscore the poem’s sonorous interest in monotony in both tone and life. Seeing in Münsterberg’s work in experimental psychology a productive analogue to their own concerns, both Stein and Eliot produce their own experimental forms of understanding the relationship between psychological discourses and aesthetic practice.

Bibliography Angell, James Rowland, ‘Psychology at the St. Louis Congress’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 2 (1905), pp. 533–46. Armstrong, Tim, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural History, Cambridge 1998.

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Brinnin, John Malcolm, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World, Boston, MA 1959. Crawford, Robert, Young Eliot: From St Louis to ‘The Waste Land’, London 2015. Eliot, T. S., The Complete Poems and Plays, London 1969. ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, ed. Ronald Schuchard, London and Baltimore, MD 2014–present, II, pp. 195–201. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot, London 1971. Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, The, ed. Donald Gallup, New York 1953. Habib, M. A. R., The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy, Cambridge 1999. Hale, Matthew, Jr, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology, Philadelphia, PA 1980. Hoffman, Michael J., ‘Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory’, American Quarterly 17:1 (1965), pp. 127–32. Jain, Manju, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years, Cambridge and New York 1992. Keller, Phyllis, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War, Cambridge, MA 1979. Landy, Frank J., ‘Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?’, Journal of Applied Psychology 77:6 (1992), pp. 787–802. Langdale, Allan, ‘S(t)imulation of Mind: The Film Theory of Hugo Münsterberg’, in Langdale (ed.), Hugo Münsterberg on Film: ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological Study’ and Other Writings, New York 2002, pp. 1–41. Letters of T. S. Eliot, The, ed. John Haffenden, 20 vols, London 2009–present. Meyer, Steven, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, Stanford, CA 2001. Münsterberg, Hugo, ‘The International Congress of Arts and Science’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1:1 (1904), pp. 1–8. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, New York 1916. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, London and New York 1913. ‘Studies from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, Part I’, Psychological Review 1 (1894), pp. 34–60. Münsterberg, Margaret, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work, New York 1922. Nichols, H., ‘The Psychological Laboratory at Harvard’, McClure’s Magazine 1 (1895), pp. 399–409. Solomons, Leon M., and Gertrude Stein, ‘Normal Motor Automatism’, Psychological Review 3 (1896), pp. 492–512.

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Spillman, Jutta, and Lothar Spillmann, ‘The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993), pp. 322–38. Stein, Gertrude, ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism; a Study of Character in its Relation to Attention’, Psychological Review 5 (1898), pp. 295–306. How To Write, Paris 1931. Writings 1903–32, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, New York 1998. Stern, William, ‘Hugo Münsterberg: In Memoriam’, Journal of Applied Psychology 1 (1917), pp. 186–8.

David Wachter

14 Amoeba, Dragonfly, Gazelle: Animal Poetics Around 1908

abstract The present chapter analyses the representation of animals in early twentieth-century literary and scientific texts. Drawing on a constellation of works published around 1908 by Rainer Maria Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, and Karl Möbius, I am interested in the notion of animals as beautiful objects as well as perceiving subjects with genuine forms of agency. The argument begins with an overview of Karl Möbius’s approach to nature’s beauty in The Aesthetics of Animal Life and moves on, via Jakob von Uexküll’s Environment and Inner World of Animals, to selected works from Rilke’s New Poems. In these series of readings I wish to test the assumption that Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke, respectively, but to a different degree, negotiate a potential departure from anthropocentrism in an encounter with the non-human. Three comparable, yet distinctive types of ‘animal poetics’ thus become apparent.

‘Da oben wird das Bild von einer Welt / aus Blicken immerfort erneut und gilt’ (Up there, the image of a world composed of looking is forever renewed and remains valid)1 – such is the animal’s perspective on the human world at the beginning of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Der Hund (The Dog), written and published in 1907 as part of Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (New Poems, Part II).2 While the dog initially seems to be inferior to its master, it acquires remarkable agency in the course of the poem: ‘nicht ausgestoßen und nicht eingereiht’ (not cast out, and not assigned a place either), it establishes itself as a perceiving, feeling, and acting subject, negotiating its position in a 1 2

I am most grateful to David Midgley for his valuable assistance with the translation of quotations from Rilke. Rainer Maria Rilke, Der Hund, in Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, Werke vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 585.

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conflict-riddled interaction with the human world into which it finds itself awkwardly thrown. A few months after this poem was published, the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll wrote in his seminal study Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Environment and Inner World of Animals): ‘Each varying individual is adapted to its environment in a different but equally perfect way according to the way it is constructed, for the way it is constructed largely and actively determines the animal’s environment.’3 These juxtaposed quotations may already indicate to what extent the cultural perspective on non-human life underwent decisive changes at the beginning of the twentieth century.4 Animals in particular were no longer treated as a passive object of study; rather, their agency came to the fore in intersected fields of knowledge and artistic production. While Rilke’s poems on dogs, cats, or gazelles lyrically explore the life of animals as a site of non-human activity,5 Uexküll’s neo-Kantian biology considers such diverse species as the amoeba, sea urchin, or dragonfly as constructive producers of their own perceptive environment. At the same time, the aesthetics of animal life came to attract academic interest: Karl Möbius, the famous biologist of sea life, published his Ästhetik der Tierwelt (Aesthetics of Animal Life) in 1908.6 Drawing both on Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature, 1899–1904) with its metaphysics of animal beauty and on psychological aesthetics by Lipps and others, Möbius reflects on the reasons for forms and shapes to render certain animals beautiful (and others not). Focusing on the intersection between these approaches to animal life, this chapter examines a specific constellation of scientific and literary texts. 3

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‘Jedes variierende Individuum ist entsprechend seinem veränderten Bauplan anders, aber gleich vollkommen seiner Umwelt angepaßt. Denn der Bauplan schafft in weiten Grenzen selbsttätig die Umwelt des Tieres.’ Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, Berlin 1909, p. 5. These changes recently caught the attention of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose study Das Offene in turn has played a formative role for the advancement of literary and cultural animal studies. As Karl-Heinz Fingerhut emphasized in his early study, Rilke is probably the first German-language poet to deal with animals in a more than cursory, superficial way. See Karl-Heinz Fingerhut, Das Kreatürliche im Werk Rainer Maria Rilkes: Untersuchungen zur Figur des Tieres, Bonn 1970, pp. 106–14. Karl Möbius, Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt, Jena 1908.

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All published around the year 1908, they establish an experimental field in which issues of an animal poetics are discussed. The term ‘poetics’ seems appropriate to indicate a combination of three aspects that come up in the following argument. Derived from poiesis, the Greek word for production, it signals a growing interest in constructive aspects of perception among early twentieth-century biologists. In the present context, the question arises as to what extent Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke conceive of animal perception not as passive reaction, but as a complex procedure by which non-human agents actively shape their specific environments. In a second sense, the term ‘poetics’ encompasses a fascination for nature’s beauty that seems to inform both literary and scientific approaches to animal life around 1900. These approaches to perception and beauty are intertwined in Rilke’s lyrical writings. His texts on parrots or dogs poetically explore animal perception and interrogate the relationship between art and nature. In a third sense, ‘poetics’ indicates the relevance of narrative patterns, figures of thought, and rhetorical uses of language in various disciplinary contexts. While some approaches to a poetics of knowledge tend to destabilize the distinction between scientific and literary texts,7 the present argument outlines points of contact, but also divergent strategies in literary and scientific approaches to animal life. This relationship between knowledge and poetics is certainly not an entirely new topic in current scholarship.8 Particularly Uexküll’s and Rilke’s mutual influence has attracted scholarly interest, and their mutual acquaintance from 1905 onwards has repeatedly been addressed.9 However, what remains to be explored are the different 7

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This is particularly evident in the growing scholarship on a poetics of knowledge following Foucauldian discourse analysis as outlined in Joseph Vogl, ‘Für eine Poetologie des Wissens’, in Karl Richter and Walter Müller-Seidel (eds), Die Literatur und die Wissenschaften 1770–1930, Stuttgart 1997, pp. 107–27. For a sophisticated overview of different methodological approaches to the relationship between knowledge and poetics, see Nicolas Pethes, ‘Poetik / Wissen: Konzeptionen eines problematischen Transfers’, in Gabriele Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann (eds), Romantische Wissenspoetik: Die Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800, Würzburg 2004, pp. 341–72. See Erich Unglaub, Panther und Aschanti: Rilke-Gedichte in kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht, Frankfurt am Main 2005; Malte Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob

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ways in which science and literature textually organize their reflections on animal perception and its inherent beauty. My chapter begins with an overview of Karl Möbius’s approach to nature’s beauty in Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt (The Aesthetics of Animal Life) and moves on, via Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Environment and Inner World of Animals), to a close analysis of a selection of poems from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte (New Poems). It finishes with a brief reflection on the methodological shape of an animal poetics as it emerges in the course of the argument. My guiding assumption will be that Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke, respectively, but to a different degree, negotiate a potential departure from anthropocentrism in an encounter with the non-human.10

Nature’s beauty and the limits of aesthetic anthropocentrism: Karl Möbius The biologist Karl Möbius is generally considered a founding father of zoological aesthetics around 1900.11 Unlike his predecessor Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms of Nature, which is based on a metaphysical monism, his study

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von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 553–92; Ralph Köhnen, ‘Wahrnehmung wahrnehmen: Die Poetik der Neuen Gedichte zwischen Biologie und Phänomenologie: von Uexküll, Husserl und Rilke’, in Erich Unglaub (ed.), Rilkes Paris 1920 · 1925: Neue Gedichte (Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 30), Göttingen 2010, pp. 196–211. This consideration became heavily contested during the course of the twentieth century, stimulating responses by authors such as Heidegger and Agamben. See Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt am Main 1983; Giorgio Agamben, Das Offene: Der Mensch und das Tier, trans. Davide Giuriato, Frankfurt am Main 2003. On the general importance of Möbius for modern biology, see Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany, Chicago,

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The Aesthetics of Animal Life claims to rely on empirical research. Drawing on various species of animals, Möbius seeks to re-introduce nature’s beauty into aesthetics. He accordingly distances himself from nineteenth-century philosophers from Hegel to Vischer who had come to focus on the beauty of artworks, anthropocentrically excluding nature from the field of aesthetics. Möbius’s argument is rooted in psychological aesthetics, mainly Lipps’s theory of ‘Einfühlung’ (empathy), combined with a scholarly expertise gained in many years of zoological work. The influence of Lipps, who had published his seminal study Psychologie der Kunst und des Schönen (Psychology of Art and the Beautiful) just two years before The Aesthetics of Animal Life appeared, becomes most apparent in Möbius’s assumption that beauty is less a feature of the object than a psychological state of the perceiving subject. While Haeckel had considered the art forms of nature as structural components of the object itself,12 Möbius explicitly states: An animal is considered beautiful if the sheer sight of its shape, colour and movement captivates and pleases the beholder’s attention. Without this influence exerted by its qualities on the beholder’s emotional state, the animal is not yet beautiful. Only by pleasing do these qualities assume a beautiful character. One zoologist may be enthralled by the sight of a jellyfish swimming in clear seawater. Another observer, having been covered with slime and burned as if by nettles by jellyfish while bathing, may despise them as ugly beings.13

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IL 2009, especially Chapter 4: ‘From Practice to Theory: Karl Möbius and the Lebensgemeinschaft’, pp. 125–60; for Möbius’s position within an aesthetics of natural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Christoph Kockerbeck, Die Schönheit des Lebendigen: Ästhetische Naturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert, Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar 1997. On the basic differences between Haeckel’s objectivism and Möbius’s subjectivism, see Kockerbeck, Die Schönheit des Lebendigen, pp. 135–8. ‘Ein Tier gilt für schön, wenn der bloße Anblick seiner Gestalt und Farbe und seiner Bewegungen die Aufmerksamkeit eines Anschauenden fesselt und ihn erfreut. Ohne diese Einwirkung seiner Eigenschaften auf den Gemütszustand eines Wahrnehmenden ist das Tier noch nicht schön. Erst dadurch, daß sie gefallen, erhalten diese Eigenschaften ihren Schönheitswert. Einen Zoologen entzückt der Anblick einer im klaren Meerwasser schwimmenden Qualle. Ein Anderer, den Quallen beim Baden mit Schleim überzogen und wie Nesseln gebrannt haben, verabscheut sie als häßliche Tiere.’ Möbius, Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt, p. 2.

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Particularly the observation that a certain species can appear beautiful to one observer while repelling another serves as an argument for refuting Haeckel’s aesthetic objectivism. However, Möbius equally rejects an unrestricted individualism that would negate any aesthetic rule on account of beauty’s irreducible singularity. Rather, he considers beauty as a combination of subjective and objective components: ‘All aesthetic judgements are based on objective and subjective principles.’14 The process of empathy, by which a human subject comes to feel the aesthetic qualities of a perceived object, is stimulated by certain traits that materialize in the shapes and colours of beautiful animals. The outline of those shapes and colours can be provided by biological observation. The very same process depends on intersubjective rules of beauty that are common to educated men. These rules can be identified by psychological research. Möbius’s Aesthetics of Animal Life accordingly seeks to identify universal characteristics in animals, which stimulate notions of beauty because they share objective forms perceived as beautiful by educated observers. The study begins with a general outline of common rules of beauty and proceeds to an overview of different classes of animals. The rules of beauty identified in this process are rather traditional, the most important being unity, regularity, and particularity, together with a clear preference for form (e.g. shape) over material (e.g. colour). According to Möbius, we appear to perceive regular forms as beautiful because they appeal to a sense of harmony for which we collectively long. While Möbius himself claims to discover these regularities via empirical research, their traditional orientation casts doubt on the limits of his methodological innovation, but also on the extent of his departure from aesthetic anthropocentrism. Although he is eager to distance himself from philosophical aesthetics, his own categories testify to a tacit continuity with early nineteenth-century idealism. Due to this hidden tradition, anthropocentric features remain paradigmatic, especially in Möbius’s continuous effort to distinguish beautiful from ugly animals and in moral prejudices haunting his text. While antelopes, for example, are considered beautiful 14 ‘Alle ästhetischen Urteile haben besondere objektive und subjektive Grundlagen.’ Ibid. p. 3.

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due to their ‘regularly curved and curled horns directing the gaze towards the head with its large and friendly eyes’,15 the hippopotamus’s disadvantageous shape is strongly emphasized: ‘The neck is short and as thick as the trunk, the head large and heavy, the ears small, the stupidly goggling eyes protrude from each side of the face.’16 Judgements of this kind reveal that Möbius’s aesthetics remains closely tied to a human ideal. His anthropocentric orientation is explicitly reflected: ‘Among all animals, mammals are aesthetically most comprehensible to us, because they are physically and emotionally closer to us than any other species.’17 While Möbius seems to raise awareness of the aesthetic wonders of animal life, he exclusively focuses on the psyche of human observers, whose sovereign gaze is thus required for nature’s beauty to emerge. In The Aesthetics of Animal Life, animals nowhere enter the scene as perceiving – let alone aesthetically sensitive – subjects.18

Poetics of non-human perception: Jakob von Uexküll Compared to Möbius’s Aesthetics of Animal Life, Uexküll’s Environment and Inner World of Animals establishes a fundamentally different kind of animal poetics. Uexküll seeks to understand the sensory apparatus of animals in relation to their environment. Hence it is an aesthetics in the Greek sense of aiesthesis, meaning perception. What follows from this

15 16 17 18

‘gesetzmäßig gebogene und geringelte Hörner, die den Blick auf den Kopf und große freundliche Augen hinlenken’. Ibid. p. 91. ‘Der Hals ist kurz, ebenso dick wie der Rumpf, der Kopf groß und schwer, die Ohren klein, die Augen treten dummglotzend aus der Gesichtshälfte hervor.’ Ibid. p. 93. ‘Unter allen Tieren sind uns die Säugetiere ästhetisch am besten verständlich, weil sie uns leiblich und seelisch näher stehen als alle anderen Tierklassen.’ Ibid. p. 89. The case could potentially be different for Möbius’s article ‘Können die Tiere Schönheit wahrnehmen und empfinden?’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 22 June 1906, 301–9.

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perspective is a much more radical displacement of anthropocentrism than Möbius’s sensualist, yet secretly idealistic emphasis on harmonious forms and their appeal to the human beholder. Uexküll’s theory could even be considered theriocentric (in the sense of being centred on animals) in so far as it emphasizes the constructive agency exercised by animals, which perceive their surroundings and act within them. This move towards an understanding of animals as perceptual agents depends on a neo-Kantian epistemology.19 Uexküll strongly relies on Kant’s understanding of perception and cognition as a transcendental activity by which subjects, rather than approaching an independent sphere of objective things, constitute the world in which they live. This procedure, understood by Kant as specifically human, is generalized by Uexküll to the entirety of animal life. In order for the perception of diverse species to be understood, our human perspective on the world needs to be methodically excluded from scientific research: ‘Our anthropocentric perspective must progressively retreat into the background and the animal’s view must be allowed to become the decisive factor.’20 The idealist biologist accordingly rejects popular Darwinism, particularly in the guise of Haeckel, whose supposedly materialist monism he acidly despises as pernicious to cultural life.21 As the title of Uexküll’s study suggests, the terms Umwelt and Innenwelt are crucial to his understanding of the interaction between an animal and its surroundings. While the alternative term Umgebung means human environment (or surroundings), Umwelt designates the specific world seen through the eyes of each species. Uniting a Kantian epistemology 19

This philosophical orientation is convincingly addressed in Aldona Pobojewska, ‘New Biology – Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre’, Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 323–39. 20 ‘Unsere anthropozentrische Betrachtungsweise muß immer mehr zurücktreten und der Standpunkt des Tieres der allein ausschlaggebende werden.’ Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, p. 6. 21 This rejection remains somewhat latent in Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. It moves to the centre of the argument, however, in Uexküll’s cultural criticism formulated around the same time. See Jakob von Uexküll, ‘Die Umrisse der kommenden Weltanschauung’, Die neue Rundschau 18:1 (1907), pp. 641–61, where he fervently rejects the ‘zersetzende Einfluß des Haeckelismus auf das geistige Leben der Massen’ (corrosive influence of Haeckelianism on the spiritual life of the masses, p. 646).

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with a physiological approach to sensory perception, Uexküll ascribes to each species a specific manner of construction which organizes the world according to that animal’s physiological set-up. Each animal thus forms a specific Umwelt according to its needs. Uexküll considers this interaction between the animal and its world as a physiological Funktionskreis (functional circle) between Merkwelt (perceptive environment), Innenwelt and Wirkwelt (the environment with which the animal interacts).22 The animal selects particular impulses from its surroundings. Having entered the Innenwelt through sensory receptors, these impulses are transformed into stimuli and transmitted either directly between nerves and muscles (as in simple organisms) or via a central nervous system (as in more complex organisms). The muscular activity, that is to say the animal’s behaviour in reaction to incoming stimuli, is transmitted via the effectors towards the external world, which thus becomes the animal’s specific Wirkwelt. In his later work Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men),23 Uexküll illustrates this functional understanding of perception with the famous example of the tick’s simple yet fascinating life.24 Having reached a twig on a tree by use of a vague sense of light, the tick is able to wait for years until its two selective features can come into play: its sense for butyric acid enables it to perceive the approach of a mammal, and having dropped on its victim’s skin, its sense for body temperature allows it to drink blood, whereupon it deposits its eggs and dies quickly. As simple as it may appear, the tick’s sensory apparatus is seen by Uexküll as a selective mechanism in its own right. In Environment and Inner World of Animals, Uexküll focuses on invertebrates such as the amoeba and sea urchin, as well as the dragonfly, and scrutinizes their physiological set-up. With constructive activities present

22 For a concise outline of this functional circle see Thure von Uexküll, ‘Die Umweltforschung als subjekt- und objektumgreifende Naturforschung’, in Jakob von Uexküll and Georg Kriszat, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Bedeutungslehre, Frankfurt am Main 1970, pp. XXIII–XLVIII, especially p. XXXVf. 23 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil, Minneapolis, MN 2010. 24 See Uexküll and Kriszat, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen.

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everywhere, Uexküll distinguishes between complex animals with a central nervous system and primitive animals without one. Drawing again on Kant, who had developed the notion of a Schema in order to indicate an intermediary faculty between concepts given a priori and the empirical world, Uexküll interprets the central nervous system as a Gegenwelt (counterworld) mirroring the spatial structures of the animal’s environment and allowing it to distinguish between different types of object. In particular the faculty of vision – with the stages of moto-, icono- and chronoreception – enables more complex animals to construct precise objects out of undifferentiated impulses. While Uexküll generally departs from anthropocentrism, he frequently describes physiological processes as mechanisms. Together with metaphors such as ‘Getriebe’25 (gearing), the term ‘functional circle’ suggests that Uexküll’s transcendental view on the organization of life as an ‘übermaschinelle Tätigkeit’ (more than mechanical activity) strangely contrasts with his analysis of predetermined procedures of the senses.26 His notion of a functional circle correspondingly oscillates between mechanistic formulations such as ‘all animals are machines answering to effects from the outer world’,27 and a strong emphasis on animals as autonomously selecting subjects, such as the claim that ‘the way the receptors are constructed alone determines which effects from the outer world an animal should interact with’.28 This tension between active and passive may be due to Uexküll’s physiological methodology based on empirical observation. Even when he uses the term ‘Innenwelt’, he nowhere suggests a psychological understanding of animals as emotional subjects. Neither does he extend his approach in the direction of a theory of beauty, be it an interest in the aesthetic sensitivity of animals or an account of the impression they make on a human beholder. His theory of Umwelt seems to develop an animal poetics only in so far as it emphasizes the poietic, the constructive aspect inherent in each species’ 25 Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, p. 54. 26 Ibid. p. 26. 27 ‘[A]lle Tiere sind Antwortmaschinen auf Wirkungen der Außenwelt’. Ibid. p. 55. 28 ‘daß die Bauart der Rezeptoren eines jeden Tiers souverän darüber entscheidet, mit welchen Wirkungen der Außenwelt das Tier Beziehungen eingehen soll’. Ibid. p. 55.

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physiological set-up. Möbius’s view on nature’s beautiful forms appears to be absent at least in the general outline of Uexküll’s study. A closer look at selected chapters is necessary in order to find out whether some outlines of an aesthetics of animals in this different sense could possibly be found in his work. I will therefore compare his observations on the simplest species (amoeba terricola) and the most complex species (dragonfly) with regard to a potential receptivity for nature’s aesthetic beauty and to animals as psychological subjects, with some brief remarks on Uexküll’s use of rhetorical features in individual observations. Uexküll’s emphasis on close observation becomes apparent at the beginning of his chapter on the amoeba terricola, a constantly metamorphosing protozoan consisting only of endo- and ectoplasm: ‘A small animal dwells in its humid moss and on musty ground, hardly visible to the human eye, yet a giant in its small world. […] With its shape and movements, it resembles a polluted droplet slowly running down the edge of a plate.’29 This passage illustrates the author’s recourse to vivid description, achieved by the use of comparisons with the human world. It is, however, governed by a metaphorical struggle between a declared respect for this ‘giant in its small world’ and an unintended presence of anthropocentric judgements recurring throughout the chapter. What is nevertheless dominant is Uexküll’s eagerness to describe even the least complex animal as a perceptive subject, for example when speaking of ‘the ability of the amoebae to discern between stimuli from their environment’.30 This tendency, observable for instance when Uexküll describes the amoeba’s movements, is strongly enhanced by an endeavour to employ images of beautiful life. As can be seen in the chapter’s final observation, these images apparently strengthen the overall perspective on the primitive protozoan as an autonomous being: ‘If we now look back at amoeba terricola, we receive the impression of a most

29

30

‘Es lebt in seinem feuchten Moose und auf moderigem Grund ein winziges Tierlein, kaum sichtbar dem Auge des Menschen, aber dennoch ein Riese in seiner kleinen Welt. […] Es gleicht in seiner Form und seinen Bewegungen einem verunreinigten Tropfen, der langsam den Rand eines Tellers hinabrollt.’ Ibid. p. 32. ‘Fähigkeit der Amöben, die Reizwirkungen der Umwelt zu unterscheiden’. Ibid. p. 38.

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charming work of art. Within a foreign world it seems to have created its own world, where it quietly hangs, like a door from secure hinges.’31 In the chapter on amoeba terricola it thus seems that Uexküll, while not specifically interested in animal beauty, uses aesthetic images strategically in order to render his view on the animal’s genuine activity more persuasive. Comparable strategies re-appear in his final chapter on the dragonfly, a complex organism endowed with a counterworld based on a central nervous system. This chapter counterbalances mechanical physiology with metaphors of autonomous agency, and it combines an acute physiological description with repeated analogies to art. The dragonfly appears here as an artist whose painting creates a landscape of its own.32 As I shall mention only briefly here, this strategy employs metaphors for a more vivid depiction of animals as autonomous agents, but it also entails an increasing use of political images: ‘Thus its existence by no means resembles a servitude forced upon it by the so-called struggle for life, but rather the life of a free individual in its own house.’33

Animal gazes in lyrical form: Rainer Maria Rilke Moving on to Rilke’s animal poems, we face the question of how his lyrical work fits into the constellation of issues mapped out in the preceding argument. To what extent do his poems on gazelles, cats, flamingos, or the famous panther explore animal agency? Are they devoted to physiological perception, the beauty of natural life, or a combination of both perspectives?

31 32 33

‘Betrachten wir jetzt rückblickend Amoeba terricola, so gewinnen wir den Eindruck eines allerliebsten Kunstwerks, das in einer fremden Welt sich seine eigene Welt geschaffen, in der sie sich ruhig, wie in sicheren Angeln schwebend, hält.’ Ibid. p. 39. See ibid. p. 243. ‘So gleicht ihr Dasein durchaus nicht einer Knechtschaft, welche ihr der sogenannte Kampf ums Dasein aufzwingt, sondern vielmehr dem freien Wohnen im eigenen Haus.’ Ibid. p. 247.

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From a biographical point of view, Rilke’s general interest in natural sciences is beyond doubt.34 As early as 1903, when the first poems that were to be collected as New Poems in 1907 were written, he contemplated studying life sciences. In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, the poet confessed his longing for a personal guide who might introduce him to an as yet unfamiliar field of knowledge: ‘Denn: sich an jemanden Wissenden von Fall zu Fall direct und fragend wenden dürfen, wäre unendlich viel für mich, unendlich lebendiger Zufluß und große Ermuthigung’ (For the chance to approach a knowledgeable person directly with my questions from time to time would be infinitely important for me, an infinitely lively influx and great encouragement).35 Following an encounter in 1905 with Countess Luise von Schwerin, Uexküll’s mother-in-law, Rilke regarded Uexküll as a potential ‘Rater und Helfer’ (counsellor and supporter) and initiated a correspondence in letters as well as a visit to Schloß Friedelhausen, where they discussed Kant.36 Throughout his life, Rilke remained interested in the scientist’s work and studied his publications, mainly the popular books Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung (Elements of a Biological Weltanschauung, 1913) and Biologische Briefe an eine Dame (Biological Letters to a Lady, 1920), where Uexküll presents his theory of Umwelt in a simplified format and continues his idealist attacks against Darwinism. Uexküll, in turn, commented on Rilke’s poetry, occasionally criticized the New Poems, but enthusiastically praised the panther poem for its accuracy of biological observation.37 The two writers fundamentally share an emphasis 34 For Rilke’s biographical contact to Uexküll, see Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’, pp. 555–60. 35 Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt 1975, p. 168 (letter of 13 May 1904). 36 Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1904–7, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber, Leipzig 1939, p. 71 (letter of 4 May 1905, to Countess Schwerin). 37 ‘[…] daß Sie ein hervorragendes Talent für Biologie und für die vergleichende Psychologie besitzen, haben Sie in Ihrem Gedicht ‘Der Panther’ bewiesen. Die Beobachtung, die Sie dort entwickeln, ist meisterhaft’ ([…] in your poem The Panther you have demonstrated your extraordinary talent for biology and comparative psychology. The observation developed there is masterful). See Gudrun von Uexküll, Jakob von Uexküll: Seine Welt und seine Umwelt: Eine Biographie, Hamburg 1964,

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on observation (‘Betrachtung des Lebendigen’ – observation of life)38 summed up by Gudrun von Uexküll in her biography of her husband: ‘The gift of observation and pictorial vision united Rilke and Jakob.’39 With a closer look at a few of the New Poems, we shall now consider how this attitude of precise observation informs Rilke’s poetic account of animals. In a series of brief readings from Die Gazelle (The Gazelle) Der Panther (The Panther) and Die Fensterrose (The Rose Window), I shall examine the assumption that Rilke’s poems remain sensitive to natural beauty (The Gazelle), while at the same time exploring animal agency, particularly with regard to non-human perception (The Panther, The Rose Window). Can these poems be read as a departure from anthropocentrism? How are they related either to Möbius’s aesthetics or to Uexküll’s physiology? Die Gazelle Gazella Dorcas Verzauberte: wie kann der Einklang zweier erwählter Worte je den Reim erreichen, der in dir kommt und geht, wie auf ein Zeichen. Aus deiner Stirne steigen Laub und Leier, und alles Deine geht schon im Vergleich durch Liebeslieder, deren Worte, weich, wie Rosenblätter, dem, der nicht mehr liest, sich auf die Augen legen, die er schließt:

pp. 126–32: p. 132. This observation is shared by the zoologist Hans Mislin, a disciple of Uexküll, in ‘Rilkes Partnerschaft mit der Natur’, Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 3 (1974), pp. 39–48. 38 Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, p. 1. 39 ‘Rilke und Jakob verband die Gabe der Beobachtung und des bildhaften Sehens.’ G. von Uexküll, Jakob von Uexküll, p. 129. The issue of a new kind of poetic visuality in the New Poems has been emphasized repeatedly in Rilke scholarship. For an introduction to this issue, see Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, ‘Neue Gedichte und der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil: Kommentar’, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, pp. 898–1005: pp. 906–8.

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um dich zu sehen, hingetragen, als wäre mit Sprüngen jeder Lauf geladen und schösse nur nicht ab, solang der Hals das Haupt ins Horchen hält: wie wenn beim Baden im Wald die Badende sich unterbricht: den Waldsee im gewendeten Gesicht.40 (Enchanted one: how can the harmony of two selected words ever match the rhyme that comes and goes in you, as at a given sign. From your brow leaves and lyre rise, and everything about you passes through the similes of love songs, the words of which settle, soft as rose petals, on the eyes of someone no longer reading, and he shuts them – in order to see you, carried along as if each leg were loaded with leaps but not discharged as long as your neck holds your head in a listening position, like a woman bathing in a forest pool who stops, the pool reflected in her turned face.)

Referring to the gazelle’s scientific classification, the subheading explicitly connects this sonnet to zoological knowledge. It addresses a beautiful animal, whose aesthetic appeal is evoked by an articulate use of sound effects such as the repetitive assonance ‘ei’ and various alliterations such as ‘Stirne steigen’ or ‘Laub und Leier’ in line 4. The first two quatrains reflect on the relationship between art and the gazelle’s natural beauty, negotiating unity and difference in a complex way. For while the gazelle is characterized in line 2 by ‘rhyme’, an unspecific sound figure which metonymically evokes the animal’s poetic nature a priori, human art depends on constructing poetic beauty a posteriori, in an ‘Einklang zweier / erwählter Worte’ (harmony of two selected words). The consonance thus achieved is caught in the tension between ‘ein’ and ‘zwei’, and characterized by an intrinsic break at the verse’s end, which is somewhat insecurely bridged by enjambment. While poetry’s potential to encompass the animal’s beauty is interrogated in the phrase ‘wie kann […] erreichen’ (how can […] ever match), which questions the

40 Rilke, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, pp. 469–70. There is a published translation of Rilke’s poems discussed here: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, London 1987, p. 27 (The Gazelle) and p. 25 (The Panther). But unless otherwise stated, all translations here are my own.

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power of words via the topos of the unsayable,41 the gazelle rests in encircled perfection, separated from the rest of the poem by a colon. This perfection is enhanced by the hymnic apostrophe, which hypostatizes the ‘enchanted’ animal and thus accentuates the difference by which it remains separated from the beholder. The animal’s natural beauty, however, remains volatile insofar as it is characterized by an equivocal movement: ‘kommt und geht’ (comes and goes) in line 3 could either be read as the gentle gazelle’s paces or as the appearance and immediate disappearance of beauty. It is also a beauty informed by love songs, which recall the religious pretext of The Book of Solomon as well as profane artworks, and a beauty informed by myth: ‘Laub und Leier’ (leaves and lyre) evoke Apollo, the powerful Greek God and patron of art.42 Interestingly, it is precisely the cessation of reading and the closing of eyes that enables a vision of the gazelle’s beautiful movement between the second quatrain and the first tercet.43 This more than visual beauty rests on a light, almost flying movement which recalls Karl Möbius’s fascination with the gazelle,44 combined with a dynamic energy at the threshold between stillness and action.45 The lovely gazelle could thus be considered an aesthetic epiphany, a movement at a threshold between appearance and disappearance.

41 42 43 44

45

See Luke Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems, New York 2015, p. 243. This double context is highlighted by Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist, p. 245. With this emphasis on inner vision rather than empirical observation, Rilke again endows the scientific context with a religious dimension, which recalls the function of silence, of reduced sensual perception in mysticism. In his article ‘Über die Grundlagen der aesthetischen Beurtheilung der Säugethiere’ (1900), Möbius describes the gazelle as ‘zierlich und anmuthig. Die schlanken Beine bewegen den Körper leicht und schnell. Der Hals wird aufgerichtet getragen, als wäre er ganz lastlos’ (petite and charming: The slender legs move the body swiftly. The neck is carried upright as if burdenless). Quoted from Kockerbeck, Die Schönheit des Lebendigen, p. 126. See Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist, p. 246.

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The final tercet gives the sonnet’s movement a new turn. Virtually an ideal realization of Rilke’s poetics of Verwandlung (transformation),46 this surprising turn takes up the issue of borders that appears to be contested throughout Rilke’s poem.47 Here the border between inside and outside is destabilized; the motif of interruption implies an inward turn by which the gazelle perceives its surroundings as part of its interior world. It would certainly be possible to read this as an early instance of what Rilke later came to call, in a famous phrase more often cited than read in its context, a ‘Weltinnenraum’ (inner world space).48 However, in the present context it can be related to Uexküll’s functional circle. If this biological concept entails a notion of balanced interconnection between an animal’s external Umwelt and its internal Innenwelt, which the animal does not perceive as separate from each other, the poet seems to experiment with this conjunction.49 This perspective on the poem’s ending sheds new light on its beginning as well. The ‘Einklang’ (harmony) may then connote Uexküll’s assumption that animals are adapted into their Umwelt, and ‘in dir’ (in you) connotes an Innenwelt that is influenced by signs, that is, by impulses that are interpreted as stimuli by the animals’ specific senses. 46 For this poetic figure, see Judith Ryan, Umschlag und Verwandlung: Poetische Struktur und Dichtungstheorie in R. M. Rilkes Lyrik der mittleren Periode (1907–14), Munich 1972; and Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Neue Gedichte/Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil’, in Manfred Engel (ed.), Rilke-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, Darmstadt 2004, pp. 297–318. 47 It once again connotes the sphere of myths, here embodied in the allusion to the Greek goddess Artemis bathing in a secret pond. 48 The term, often cited as a keyword in Rilke’s late poetology, is part of the poem Es winkt zur Frühlung fast aus allen Dingen (1914): ‘Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum: / Weltinnenraum’ (One space extends through all creatures: inner world space). See Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1910 bis 1926, Werke, vol. 2, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 113. 49 Until his very late writings, Rilke remained fascinated by the idea that a clear distinction between inside and outside, which is at the centre of man’s predicament, is absent in the animals’ perception of the world. The famous Eigth Duino Elegy most influentially testifies to this fascination. See Erich Unglaub, ‘Zu Rilkes Konzepten von Welt und Umwelt’, in Andrea Hübener (ed.), Rilkes Welt: Festschrift für August Stahl zum 75. Geburtstag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 65–75: p. 68.

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However, this assimilation to a scientific context should not ignore fundamental differences between Uexküll and Rilke as they become apparent in the present context. The poem should not simply be read as a lyrical equivalent of Uexküll’s theory, written two years in advance of Environment and Inner World of Animals. Rather, The Gazelle differs from its scientific context precisely by developing a similar, yet autonomous imagery. The result is a striking change of perspective. For while Rilke’s poem certainly relies on observing the animal’s movements, it departs from the premises of naturalistic description by focusing its attention on a quasi-mystical transgression of spatial borders between inside and outside world in the poem’s final verse. Rilke’s poem The Gazelle thus artfully evokes the beauty of the animal as it transcends the limits of human art. While his praise of the gazelle’s delicate movements apparently conforms to Möbius’s aesthetics of nature, Rilke’s poem strikingly surpasses an anthropocentric aesthetics by exploring a conjunction between the animal and its environment. In the movement of a ‘gewendete[s] Gesicht’ (turned face) at the very end, metaphors that bring Uexküll’s Umwelt theory to mind are poetically transformed, evoking an encounter with the nonhuman that exceeds Uexküll’s physiological constructivism. It would certainly be productive to extend this approach to other lyrical descriptions of beautiful animals such as Der Schwan (The Swan) or Die Flamingos (The Flamingos). Rather than following these links, however, I want to consider the aesthetics of animal perception in The Panther, for it is Rilke’s most famous poem from the New Poems, written as early as 1902, that provides us with the most detailed description of an animal’s perception to be found in this collection.50 Der Panther Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe So müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe Und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

50 It is therefore not surprise to note that Der Panther has repeatedly been read in the light of Uexküll. See Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’, pp. 561–3; and most recently Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist, pp. 236–42.

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Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, Der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht, Ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, In der betäubt ein großer Wille steht. Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille Sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein Geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille Und hört im Herzen auf zu sein. (His vision has grown so weary from the passing of the bars before him that it no longer fastens on anything. It seems to him that there must be a thousand bars and no world beyond them. The soft progress of strong and supple strides, turning in the tightest of circles, is like a dance of energy around a centre in which a powerful will stands numbed. Only occasionally does the curtain before his pupil silently lift. Then an image enters, passes through the tense stillness of his limbs, and reaches his heart, where it ceases to exist.)

Beginning with the panther’s gaze, a visual activity which features prominently in Rilke’s animal poems,51 this text adopts the encaged predator’s perspective.52 The panther’s situation is portrayed in remarkable distinction to the life of the gazelle. Whereas the previous poem entirely obliterated the animal’s imprisonment in a zoological garden, thus presenting it as if in a natural environment, both the subtitle and the reference to the cage’s bars now indicate that the panther finds himself dislocated from his natural abode. He may feature as a perceiving subject registering external impressions and reacting to them, but he is entirely at odds with an artificial ambience, which allows him no orientation.53 Confined to the zoo, his senses are no longer confronted with external impressions appropriate

51 52 53

For a comparative approach to lyrical scenarios of animal vision in Rilke, see Laermann, ‘Oder daß ein Tier, / ein stummes, aufschaut, ruhig durch uns durch’. See Unglaub, Panther und Aschanti, p. 81. This disorientation is visible even in the minutest details, such as the linguistic ambiguity of ‘Vorübergehn’ (passing) in the first line: while the word would normally be taken to refer to the panther’s paces, it is grammatically constructed here as if the bars themselves were moving. Due to its confinement in the Jardin des Plantes, which severs it from its natural environment, the panther takes up an ambivalent

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for his physiological set-up. Interpreted from an Uexküllian perspective, a natural balance between the animal and its environment, perfectly established in the gazelle’s harmony, is disturbed in The Panther. The predator’s tired gaze only perceives meaningless bars in endless repetition, lyrically evoked by the insisting ‘ä’ assonance, which leaves the panther with virtually no Umwelt at all. This displaced interaction seems to occasion the animal’s closed-off isolation, its erratic movements around a paralysed, as it were anaesthetic centre (‘betäubt’ – literally: numbed). While occasional contacts with his surroundings occur (‘manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille / sich lautlos auf ’ – occasionally the curtain before his pupil silently lifts), the stimuli thus provided remain alien, do not leave permanent marks on the organism and cause no reactions (‘hört im Herzen auf zu sein’ – in his heart it ceases to exist).54 Hence Rilke’s famous poem seems to provide us with accurate observations reminiscent of Uexküll’s zoology. It has accordingly been praised for its naturalism by scientists and literary scholars alike.55 However, its poetic approach differs from Uexküll’s scientific explanations by more than the obvious fact that, as a lyrical text, it relies on a more complex form and imagery.56 Throughout the poem, Rilke’s physiological accuracy is enriched by a vision of sovereignty that contrasts sharply with the panther’s displacement. This becomes most apparent in the second stanza. The encaged animal’s movements are here represented in an ambiguous image governed by contrasting forces. While ‘der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht’ (literally: turning in the tightest of circles) could easily denote nervous confusion, this very image of erratic paces around a numbed centre is framed by two lines which entirely change its character. The phrase ‘Der weiche Gang

position between active subject and passive object, which eventually influences the lyrical representation of his movements. 54 For this Uexküllian interpretation of The Panther, see also Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’, p. 567. 55 See Mislin, ‘Rilkes Partnerschaft mit der Natur’, p. 48; Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’, p. 562. 56 A remarkable example worthy of closer attention is the metaphor of ‘Vorhang’ (curtain) used in the third stanza, which gives the setting a theatrical character.

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geschmeidig starker Schritte’ (the soft progress of strong and supple strides) implies the unbroken force and energy of a powerful animal, and the ‘Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte’ (dance of energy around a centre) interprets this aesthetic grace as a light movement which, despite the animal’s numbness, remains unerringly rooted in a stable centre. The ‘großer Wille’ (powerful will) finally renders the panther a sovereign figure, yet this remains ambiguous as the ‘wie’ (like) of Rilke’s comparison makes it doubtful whether the animal actually is or deceptively only seems to be a sovereign. Thus from the perspective inherent in the second stanza, the predator’s displacement enhances, rather than destroys the aesthetic effect occasioned by its natural greatness. In addition to this image of quiet strength, the physiological perception is also enriched by a slight but all the more striking image of the panther as a feeling subject, gained by means of a physiognomic conclusion. While its gaze in the poem’s first line evokes the topos of eyes as doors to the soul, the final line’s emphasis on the predator’s heart endows it with an individual psyche. The interior space thus opened decisively differs from Uexküll’s Innenwelt. While the zoologist conceives the animal’s interior space as a physiological mechanism, the poet combines empirical observations with a tentative and reserved sensibility towards an inner realm of feeling. In its undetermined vagueness, however, this insight testifies to the poem’s resistance towards an anthropomorphic description of inner life, a portrayal of the panther’s feelings as if he were a human being in jail. This resistance is poetically necessary because it leaves the animal with an opacity and strangeness that accounts for its non-human subjectivity.57 This subjective moment inherent in the animal’s gaze is explored in a number of poems from the New Poems. While the human perspective is absent from The Panther, some of these poems imagine an encounter between animal and human where hierarchies of perception and action are more or less challenged. In The Dog,58 the domesticated pet reveals an irreducible otherness (‘anders, wie er ist’ – different as he is) and begins to 57

See Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’, p. 567; Laermann equally emphasizes the ‘grundlegende Fremdheit’ and ‘sprachlose Andersartigkeit’ of Rilke’s animals. See Laermann, ‘Oder daß ein Tier, / ein stummes, aufschaut, ruhig durch uns durch’, p. 125. 58 Rilke, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, p. 585.

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develop a perspective of its own. However, this gaze toward the human is kept at bay in a visual regime: an entire ‘Welt / aus Blicken’ (world composed of looking) subordinates the dog to a continuous struggle between subservience and self-assertion. While the dog’s owner remains a full master, the human superiority is more radically questioned in Schwarze Katze (Black Cat).59 Here, the interaction with the sleeping cat is awkwardly compared to raving madness that disperses when encountering the animal’s fur (‘an diesem schwarzen Felle / wird dein stärkstes Schauen aufgelöst’ – on this black fur your most searching look is dispelled). The decisive transformation, however, occurs when the cat awakens. Looking back, it arrests the human gaze, freezes it in its own eyes, leaves it ‘eingeschlossen / wie ein ausgestorbenes Insekt’ (encased like an extinct insect), and thus facilitates a psychic loss of self even more disconcerting than the previously evoked dissolution. While the destabilization of boundaries between the human and the non-human leads to a destruction of the self in Black Cat, it acquires a religious sense in The Rose Window, the final poem to be considered here.60 Despite its title, which refers to an architectural ornament in Gothic cathedrals, the poem is essentially about visual encounters between humans and cats. Addressing an unspecific human ‘you’, the poem evokes an equally unspecific animal interior (‘da drin’ – in there), accompanied by a ‘träge[s] Treten ihrer Tatzen’ (lazy pacing of their paws), a lulling and vaguely confusing movement (‘die dich fast verwirrt’ – that almost confuses you). In the course of the poem, the human observer is forcefully grasped (‘ergriffen’) by the animal’s gaze. In the subsequent dynamics of power, this observer loses himself in oblivion and is put down to an archaic life force. Thus far, the poem appears to parallel Black Cat in its description of the human’s traumatic effacement in the encounter with the non-human. However, after a linguistic rupture visualized by an orthographic break ‘– :’, the poem performs its final Umschlag in a turn toward the rose window invoked by its title. The forceful self-loss through the eyes of the cats is surprisingly equated with a primeval religious experience: ‘So griffen einstmals aus 59 Ibid. p. 545. 60 Ibid. pp. 465–6.

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dem Dunkelsein / der Kathedralen große Fensterrosen / ein Herz und rissen es in Gott hinein’61 (thus, in past ages, from the dark / the great rose windows of cathedrals seized / a heart and swept it headlong into God).62 In this astonishing constellation, psychic loss is inseparably confounded with religious transcendence. The crossing of human borders toward a nonhuman space therefore remains ambiguous, caught in a double tendency of reduction and enhancement.

Conclusion At the beginning of the twentieth century, animals began to inhabit the intersection between natural sciences and literature as subjects of perception and as agents in an aesthetics of nature. In the constellation formed by Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke around 1908, they serve as figures allowing an animal poetics to negotiate the limits of anthropocentrism. Rilke in particular is deeply fascinated by the otherness of animals and acutely interested in the ambiguity between their haunting proximity and their irreducible distance to the human world. The dog’s, panther’s, or cat’s gazes serve as media of an awkward contact between human and animal spheres, but equally as instances of a non-human subjectivity recorded in its full opacity. Due to this contact, the borders between the human and the non-human are destabilized in the New Poems. A longing for an unknown openness thereby emerges, which oscillates between promising religious experience (The Rose Window) and dangerous loss of self in madness (Black Cat). What remains to be briefly addressed are the methodological consequences that follow from these observations for an understanding of the relations between literature and biology around 1900, if not for a poetics of knowledge in general. Evidently, the relationship between literature and 61 See Unglaub, Panther und Aschanti, pp. 91–2. 62 The English translation here is taken from The Rilke of Ruth Speirs, ed. John Pilling and Peter Robinson, Reading 2015, p. 19.

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science cannot reasonably be conceived as a unidirectional transfer. Neither does literature simply adopt issues that were previously discussed in the empirical sciences alone, nor does it always prefigure emerging ideas still excluded from the restricted field of official knowledge. Rather, science and literature coexist as different approaches to common problems, for example, as in the present context, the negotiation of anthropocentrism in biological discourses on animals. By juxtaposing Rilke to Möbius and Uexküll, I hope to have shown that there are good reasons to understand literature as a medium of alternative spaces for the possibility of knowledge.63 One could tentatively call this literature’s potential for explorations into as yet unknown or unfamiliar areas, articulating possible experiences that for methodological reasons have to escape a scientific perspective. Accentuating such a difference between literature and science, however, does not imply a preference for either of the two fields of knowledge. Rather, it requires us to acknowledge a plurality of accesses to common issues which, necessarily, have to go hand in hand with a plurality of analytical methods. In the present case, argumentative reconstructions thus have to be combined with a philological approach to literary texts, which takes their figurative use of language seriously.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, Das Offene: Der Mensch und das Tier, trans. Davide Giuriato, Frankfurt am Main 2003. Engel, Manfred, and Ulrich Fülleborn, ‘Neue Gedichte und der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil: Kommentar’, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, pp. 898–1005. Fingerhut, Karl-Heinz, Das Kreatürliche im Werk Rainer Maria Rilkes: Untersuchungen zur Figur des Tieres, Bonn 1970.

63

See Pethes, ‘Poetik / Wissen’, p. 359.

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Fischer, Luke, The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems, New York 2015. Heidegger, Martin, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt am Main 1983. Herwig, Malte, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 553–92. Kockerbeck, Christoph, Die Schönheit des Lebendigen: Ästhetische Naturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert, Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar 1997. Köhnen, Ralph, ‘Wahrnehmung wahrnehmen: Die Poetik der Neuen Gedichte zwischen Biologie und Phänomenologie: von Uexküll, Husserl und Rilke’, in Erich Unglaub (ed.), Rilkes Paris 1920 · 1925: Neue Gedichte (Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 30), Göttingen 2010, pp. 196–211. Laermann, Klaus, ‘“Oder daß ein Tier, / ein stummes, aufschaut, ruhig durch uns durch.” Überlegungen zum Blick der Tiere in einigen Gedichten Rilkes’, in Hans Richard Brittnacher, Stephan Porombka, and Fabian Störmer (eds), Poetik der Krise: Rilkes Rettung der Dinge in den ‘Weltinnenraum’, Würzburg 2000, pp. 124–39. Mislin, Hans, ‘Rilkes Partnerschaft mit der Natur’, Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 3 (1974), pp. 39–48. Mitchell, Stephen (ed. and trans.), The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, London 1987. Möbius, Karl, Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt, Jena 1908. Müller, Wolfgang G., ‘Neue Gedichte/Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil’, in Manfred Engel (ed.), Rilke-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, Darmstadt 2004, pp. 297–318. Nyhart, Lynn K., Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany, Chicago, IL 2009. Pethes, Nicolas, ‘Poetik / Wissen: Konzeptionen eines problematischen Transfers’, in Gabriele Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann (eds), Romantische Wissenspoetik: Die Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800, Würzburg 2004, pp. 341–72. Pobojewska, Aldona, ‘New Biology – Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre’, Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 323–39. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996. Gedichte 1910 bis 1926, Werke, vol. 2, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996. Ryan, Judith, Umschlag und Verwandlung: Poetische Struktur und Dichtungstheorie in R. M. Rilkes Lyrik der mittleren Periode (1907–14), Munich 1972.

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Uexküll, Gudrun von, Jakob von Uexküll: Seine Welt und seine Umwelt: Eine Biographie, Hamburg 1964. Uexküll, Jakob von, ‘Die Umrisse der kommenden Weltanschauung’, Die neue Rundschau 18:1 (1907), pp. 641–61. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, Berlin 1909. and Georg Kriszat, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Bedeutungslehre [1933], Frankfurt am Main 1970. Uexküll, Thure von, ‘Die Umweltforschung als subjekt- und objektumgreifende Naturforschung’, in Jakob von Uexküll and Georg Kriszat, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Bedeutungslehre, Frankfurt am Main 1970, pp. XXIII–XLVIII. Unglaub, Erich, Panther und Aschanti: Rilke-Gedichte in kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht, Frankfurt am Main 2005. ‘Zu Rilkes Konzepten von Welt und Umwelt’, in Andrea Hübener (ed.), Rilkes Welt: Festschrift für August Stahl zum 75. Geburtstag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 65–75.

Robert Craig

15 The City as Creature: Reconfiguring the Creaturely Self in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)

abstract Alfred Döblin’s epic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is widely considered to be one of the twentieth century’s greatest city narratives. This pseudo-religious story of a disturbed ex-con’s epiphany and redemption has been hailed in recent years as a proto-postmodern tribute to Weimar Berlin. But my chapter aims to show that we can only do full justice to Döblin’s masterpiece by reading it against the backdrop of his biologically inflected aesthetics and anthropology. The first part examines the inexorable collapse of Franz Biberkopf ’s attempts to restore some kind of sovereign control over his life in the city: both his body and his environment. But in the face of his repeated defeats, I then turn to read the traces of ‘creaturely life’ within the text. These relate to uncanny points of crossover and hybridity between man and animal, which may, in turn, shine unexpected new light on the very ‘nature’ of human identity at the heart of the modern city.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is a true landmark of German modernism, a subversive masterpiece about which it might seem difficult to say anything new. Comparisons with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), perhaps the most obvious ‘hook’ for English-speaking readers, have also provided the basis for a subtler appreciation of this unique achievement of epic writing,1 and the texture 1

See, for example, Werner Stauffacher, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’, in Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, ed. Stauffacher, pp. 837–75: pp. 840–2. I shall use the following set of in-text abbreviations for Döblin’s works: BA (Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf, ed. Werner Stauffacher, Zurich 1996); IN (Das Ich über der Natur, Berlin 1927); KS I (Kleine Schriften I, ed. Anthony W. Riley, Olten 1985); SÄPL (Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt,

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of the work continues to fascinate readers as an outstanding example of a city noisily narrating itself. In its denial of a protagonist-centred perspective and its polyphonic embrace of Berlin’s sights, sounds, and discourses, it is a uniquely successful confluence of ‘the political, the avant-garde, and the urban’: a monument to the febrile social and political climate of the Berlin of the late Weimar Republic.2 However, this epic novel is preoccupied not simply with the steam rams, tramlines, and product lines of the Alex (as the Alexanderplatz is colloquially known). In a retrospective essay of 1932, Döblin claimed that the second part of the title, ‘Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf ’ (The Story of Franz Biberkopf ), was appended to the book’s main title at the insistence of his publisher (SLW 312); and irrespective of its verifiability, the anecdote has been taken to suggest the sense of two books folded into one. It is the narrated and the narrating city, but also the story of a former Berlin cement and transport worker released from a stint in prison for manslaughter. Biberkopf ’s story sees him move from selling neckties to hawking Nazi papers, through an involvement with a gang of petty criminals, to losing his arm after being pushed from a getaway car, and finally becoming a pimp, only to have his new girlfriend, Mieze, murdered by his sinister fellow-criminal Reinhold. What follows is a nervous and existential breakdown; his admittance to the insane asylum out at Berlin-Buch; and the life-changing revelation – dispensed by an ironized figuration of the Grim Reaper – that he has been engaged in a hubristic and self-destructive process of self-preservation (BA 430). I wish to show that the intertwining of these two aspects (Biberkopf ’s story and that of Berlin) calls for a fresh interpretation: one which refuses either to reduce it to the epiphanic tale of a violent everyman, or to read it in essence as an epistemological and

2

Olten 1989); SLW (Schriften zu Leben und Werk, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt, Olten 1986); UD (Unser Dasein, ed. Walter Muschg, Olten 1964). There is a published translation of Döblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, trans. Eugene Jolas, New York 1983; but unless otherwise stated, all translations here are my own. Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film, Cambridge, MA 2015, p. 156.

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aesthetic playground of urban texts and discourses.3 My suggestion is that a ‘creaturely’ reading might best do justice to this intertwining, and by briefly revisiting the novel’s background, I shall demonstrate its deep significance for our topic. From 1919 onwards, Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) had run a clinic as a public service doctor in working-class Lichtenberg. His portrayal of Biberkopf, a manifestly traumatized Front veteran, unquestionably drew upon his professional treatment of the psychological and social effects of industrialized warfare – compounded by the sensory onslaught of urban modernity – among his working-class patients.4 But alongside his day job and his literary writing, Döblin sustained an interest in the interface between medicine, biology, and philosophy. David Midgley has highlighted his commitment, from his studies of philosophy as a medical student in Berlin and Freiburg onwards, to retaining ‘the unifying power of metaphysical thought in compensation for the disintegrative effects of empirical [natural scientific] inquiry’;5 and this attunement is evident from a diverse trickle of treatises which ranged from polemical attacks on the biological

3

4

5

See, most notably, Otto Keller, Döblins Montageroman als Epos der Moderne, Munich 1980, pp. 155–6; cf., for example, Eva Horn, ‘Literary Research: Narration and the Epistemology of the Human Sciences in Alfred Döblin’, Modern Language Notes 118 (2003), pp. 719–39. See Veronika Fuechtner, ‘“Arzt und Dichter”: Döblin’s Medical, Psychiatric, and Psychoanalytic Work’, in Roland Dollinger et al. (eds), A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, Rochester, NY 2004, pp. 111–40: pp. 118, 123. A brief conversation between Biberkopf and the polisher Georg Dreske in Book II, concerning his recent involvement with the Nazis, suggests that he served at Arras (BA 84). David Midgley, ‘Metaphysical Speculation and the Fascination of the Real: On the Connections between Döblin’s Philosophical Writings and his Fiction before Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield (eds), Alfred Döblin: Paradigms of Modernism, Berlin 2009, pp. 7–27: p. 13. In a retrospective essay of 1938, Döblin tellingly admitted that what had interested him as a medical student between 1900 and 1905 had not been bones, joints, or intestines, but rather what holds the world together ‘im Innersten’ (in its innermost being, SLW, 239–40). This admission should be set within the broader context of a search for a sense of metaphysical ‘wholeness’ in German intellectual culture around 1900, at the turn of a century that had witnessed the growing prestige of the natural sciences in the wake of (avowedly

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underpinnings of Nietzsche’s epistemology and ethics (1902 and 1903, KS I, 13–54), to essayistic works of nature philosophy and anthropology (Das Ich über der Natur – The I above Nature, 1927; and Unser Dasein – Our Existence, 1933). Berlin Alexanderplatz’s relevance to ‘biological discourses’ lies in the ways in which it both grew out of this intellectual hinterland and richly fed back into it. In his own overview of the novel in 1932, Döblin revealed how profoundly its framework was shaped by an interaction between form and formlessness, and creation and dissolution, more generally characteristic of the early twentieth-century movement of Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy) of such post-Nietzschean thinkers as Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Georg Simmel (1858–1918).6 The beleaguered Biberkopf ’s urban environment is, Döblin suggests, marked by a vitalistic dynamic of ‘Aufbau und Zerfall zugleich’ (building up and disintegrating), through which figurations of ordering and forming are predicated on energies of destruction and disintegration (SLW 216). As I shall discuss in the first section of my chapter, this damaged war veteran proves repeatedly – and violently – unable to subsume his experiences to a socially acceptable role in the city. But in amidst the rubble of his failures and the anodyne nature of his urban re-integration, I then turn to the idea of creatureliness. Eric Santner’s concept of the ‘creature’ in literary modernism captures man’s hybrid existence at the ambiguous ‘jointure of nature and culture, the inscription of biological life into historical forms of life’.7 In Unser Dasein, a sprawling work that Döblin was putting together at the same time as he was writing Berlin Alexanderplatz, he argues that the idiosyncrasy of ‘being human’ lies in the fact that we are at once ‘Stück der Natur und ihr Gegenstück’ (part of nature and its counterpart) (UD 49, 291). As an organism, I am a structured organization symbiotic with the natural world through a constant process of nourishment and metabolic

6 7

anti-metaphysical) movements of positivism. See Wolfgang Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Berlin 1996, pp. 47, 52–3. See Ursula Elm, Literatur als Lebensanschauung: Zum ideengeschichtlichen Hintergrund von Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bielefeld 1991, pp. 10–23. Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, Chicago, IL 2011, p. 13.

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process, but I am also a cognizing and experiencing subject, forever split over-against it (95, 29). In straddling this creaturely divide, the work of art is a figurative imprint of the human self as both a subject straining towards an elusive sense of autonomy, and a body as a physiological fact: just another disposable and destructible part of organic, environmental, and social webs (UD 241–2). Ernst Haeckel had brought a ‘spiritualized and progressivist interpretation’ to bear on Darwin’s theories of natural selection in such influential works as his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The Natural History of Creation, 1868);8 and this monistic reworking fed into the recognizably Romantic idea of a deep affinity between the laws that form inorganic matter into organic beings, and those employed to create art.9 From within a clearly related discursive field, Döblin argued in an essay of 1928 that works of art are dynamically akin to works of nature. Human beings are both ‘geschaffene und schaffende Natur’ (created and creating nature), a hybridity which is reflected in Döblin’s own articulation of his literary works as never entirely ‘his’ product, but rather as organically ‘aus […] einer Keimzelle in mir entstanden wie der junge Sproß aus dem “Auge” der Pflanze’ (emerging from a gamete in me like the young sprout from the growth-point of a plant) (SLW 107). It is this mediation between human creativity on the one hand, and man’s natural ‘createdness’ on the other, which highlights the anthropological truth-value of the work of art; and this particular quotation evokes the uncanny figurative proximity of botanical and human reproduction that Linda Leskau discusses elsewhere in this volume in relation to Döblin’s early works. But by the time of Unser Dasein, Döblin suggests that our perennial incompleteness is offset by the paradox that we nonetheless embody ‘ein[en] Anlauf zur Ganzheit’, an ‘approach to completeness’, or the intimation of fulfilled selfhood (UD 73).

8 9

Nicholas Saul, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture 1890–1913’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, vol. III, London 2014, pp. 46–77: p. 48. See ibid. p. 51; see here also the so-called ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ (art forms of nature), which Haeckel discusses in his Kunstformen der Natur: Supplement-Heft; Allgemeine Erläuterung und systematische Übersicht, Leipzig 1904, p. 22.

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The work accordingly figures, in strikingly Kantian terms, as a ‘Ganzes ohne zwecklichen Bezug der Welt gegenüber’ (a whole without any particular purpose in the world) (UD 249): an expression of our peculiar existence between being both part and counterpart. In sum, art is humanly meaningful, and it draws its forms and energies from the organic processes of disintegration, decay, but also regeneration, to which its creators are subject. But if these are the theoretical underpinnings of artistic production, what is their relevance to a novel set in the working-class neighbourhoods of 1928 Berlin? Can his city masterpiece really be described as ‘creaturely’? And if so, what does that mean for the creature at its very heart, Franz Biberkopf ?

Delusions of sovereignty What is clear from the outset is that the onslaught of the modern metropolis had dealt a body blow to the unitary subject, as well as to any stable sense of linear narrative. As Georg Simmel had argued in his seminal sociological essay ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903), the urban self must reckon with an unprecedented intensification of nervous stimulation, resulting from the ‘swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’.10 Simmel’s idea speaks to the barrage of sensory information pervading modern city life, but when mixed in with the ongoing traumas of Döblin’s protagonist, the theory’s human implications are thrown into messy literary relief. The urban narrative opens with a sharp sense of depersonalization, but it also reflects a traumatic decentredness within the embodied subject:

10 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, trans. H. H. Gerth, in Richard Sennett (ed.), Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969, pp. 47–60: p. 48. Emphasis in the original.

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Lebhafte Straßen tauchten auf, die Seestraße, Leute stiegen ein und aus. In ihm schrie es entsetzt: Achtung, Achtung, es geht los. Seine Nasenspitze vereiste, über seine Backe schwirrte es. ‘Zwölf Uhr Mittagszeitung’, ‘B. Z.’, ‘Die neuste Illustrirte’ [sic], ‘Die Funkstunde neu.’ ‘Noch jemand zugestiegen?’ Die Schupos haben jetzt blaue Uniformen. Er stieg unbeachtet aus dem Wagen, war unter Menschen. Was war denn? Nichts. Haltung, ausgehungertes Schwein, reiß dich zusammen, kriegst meine Faust zu riechen. Gewimmel, welch Gewimmel. Wie sich das bewegte. (BA 15) (Busy streets appeared, Seestraße, people got on and off. Something inside him screamed, terrified: look out, look out, it’s kicking off. The tip of his nose froze, a twanging and buzzing across his cheek. ‘Zwölf Uhr Mittagszeitung!’, ‘B. Z.!’, ‘Berliner Illustrierte!’, ‘Funkstunde!’. ‘Any more fares please?’ The coppers wear blue now. He got off the tram, unnoticed, and was back among people. What now what now? Head up you scrawny little shit, get it together mate, I’ll thump you. Swarms, all these swarms. Look at them move.)

We are constantly distracted and disoriented by the narrative’s jerky sidesteps into snippets of thought, speech, and discourse. An hallucination of sliding roofs in turn puts paid to any sense of centred agency in an image of mental disorder and imbalance which recurs throughout the text (BA 17); and even as Franz manages superficially to stabilize himself and walk through Berlin without the attendant hallucinations at the start of Book IV, the chaos of his first entrance into the city is never far from the surface. ‘Zu schwanken können sie anfangen, zu schaukeln, zu schütteln. Rutschen können die Dächer, wie Sand schräg herunter, wie ein Hut vom Kopf ’ (those roofs can start swaying, swinging, shaking, sliding like sand they are, just like that, gone, like a hat from a head) (131, my emphases). This sibilant image of roofs sliding from houses, and hats from heads, with its slippage through swaying, swinging, and shaking, welds the protagonist’s psyche into his cityscape, turning a symbol of sliding self-control into its very symptom. Beleaguered metropolitan man – no longer even master in his own house, as Sigmund Freud had described the modern ego’s predicament in 191711 – is unable to absorb and master the sensory shocks of the city, and 11

Sigmund Freud, ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, London 1955, pp. 137–44: p. 143.

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to retain a sense of masculine sovereignty.12 The panic at a loss of personal control is only narrowly averted in the reminder that the roofs are nailed on, an illusion of psychical security which shades over into a fleeting yearning for the lost contours of wartime manhood (‘[f ]est steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein’ – firm and true stands the Watch, the Watch on the Rhine!, 131). The narrative, then, restlessly shifts into different psychical and discursive spaces – and these militaristic invocations repeatedly hint at the traumatic collective memory of warfare, not to mention the (now) historically freighted hints at what might be to come.13 Against this overlap between the urban and the psychical, Berlin Alexanderplatz’s queasily sliding roofs embody and enact a textual tendency towards instability; and they enter into an allegorical association with other fusions of psyche and city, most prominently the Alexanderplatz’s resident steam ram, which hammers away at the ‘heads’ of steel piles, thus providing a markedly physical symbol of the city’s psychical barrage (165). I shall return to the steam ram’s uncanny embodiment of psychical instability right at the end of the chapter. What is important here, though, is that in mediating the violence of the city and its protagonist through a play of motifs and discourses, Berlin Alexanderplatz exposes the precariousness of the very idea of a sovereign subject.

12

13

Original German title: ‘Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse’ (1917). The emphasis is in the original. Simmel’s strikingly biological figuration of the modern subject’s consciousness as an ‘organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, p. 48) influenced Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘shock’: in Benjamin’s analysis of 1939, ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ (On Some Motifs in Baudelaire), the consciousness must parry modern life’s sensory bombardment in the manner of a physical defence mechanism, thus reducing its after-effects on the psyche. See Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, London 1999, pp. 152–90: pp. 159–62. On the traces of Simmel’s essay in Benjamin’s study, see Kathrin Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, New York 2012, pp. 96–7. In a number of medical essays published in the early 1920s, Döblin the clinician had acknowledge the traumatic psychical aftereffects of trench warfare throughout Berlin society. See Fuechtner, ‘Arzt und Dichter’, pp. 118, 123.

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Franz’s repeated yearning for a settled ‘da sein’, a reintegrated ‘being there’ in the city, certainly seems a reasonable enough demand; and when he re-emerges in Berlin after his ‘violent cure’ at the hands of Death in the asylum at Buch, the celebratory ‘[j]etzt ist Biberkopf wieder da’ (now Biberkopf ’s back), with its suggestion of both physical and mental return, finds its urban complement in the statement that the Alex, too, is still ‘there’ (BA 447, 448). But the flip-side of this persistent refrain of ‘da sein’ is that his book-length search for self-presence and narrative control is characterized by a repeated desire to violently eliminate what is alien and incommensurable, what always escapes control. In this vein, Franz’s compulsive physical and sexual violence has rightly been criticized as one of the novel’s most problematic aspects – even if it is ironized time and again through such references to mock-military motifs as the chapter title of the rape of Minna, the sister of his violently murdered former girlfriend Ida: ‘Sieg auf der ganzen Linie! Franz Biberkopf kauft ein Kalbsfilet’ (Victory all down the line! Franz Biberkopf buys a veal cutlet!) (37).14 Crucially, though, messy remainders of the body and the bodily persistently force their way to the surface of the text. Franz’s rediscovery of his virility in the sexual assault is accompanied by the comically overblown collapse of the laws of nature, gravitational and centrifugal forces being cancelled out as Minna simply ‘zerfließt wie Wasser’ (melts away like water) (BA 39–40) in the moment of orgasm. This is echoed in the description of how her sister’s decaying corpse ‘zerfließt in Jauche’ (melts into slurry) (BA 102) after her manslaughter. Prima facie this is a gratuitously corporeal depiction that bears an uncanny resemblance to Döblin’s descriptions of the continua between organic and inorganic forms in his nature philosophy (e.g. IN

14

Maria Tatar has justifiably taken strong exception to Döblin’s apparently cavalier portrayals of violent misogyny (Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton, NJ 1995, pp. 145, 151–2). However, as Roger Kingerlee has perspicuously remarked, there is an unmistakable irony to the text’s disturbing switches between Franz as violent perpetrator, and Franz as a victim of a figuratively female ‘Other’ of formlessness, chaos and – in the recurrent figure of the Whore of Babylon – mythic violence (BA 116, 342). See his Psychological Models of Masculinity in Döblin, Musil, and Jahnn: Männliches, Allzumännliches, Lewiston, NY 2001, pp. 78–80.

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105); but precisely through its gross materiality, it doubles as the jarring, negative memory of the human being just beneath. Motifs of sovereignty, then, are subject to persistent subversion. Even the incipient logic of fascism in late Weimar political discourse, with its false Edenic promises of law and order (BA 82), is linked to his desire to achieve some kind of control over an irremediably chaotic external world (‘Ordnung. Denn Ordnung muß im Paradiese sein, das sieht ja wohl jeder ein’ – Law and order, law must reign in paradise, which everyone must recognize, 82). Tellingly, this putative paradise, this elusive mastery over body and city, finds a dialectical opposite in Franz’s desire to return to the mute cycles of nature and becoming nothing at all. As he stews selfindulgently over one of his personal misfortunes, ‘[es] [m]uß alles sauber werden, muß alles weg. […] Von Erde bist du gekommen, zu Erde sollst du wieder werden’ (everything must be made clean, washed away. […] From earth thou camest, to earth thou returnest) (BA 119). In short, we have moved from the idyll of Eden to a melancholy recognition of man’s transience in Genesis 3.19. This shifting field of inversions constitutes a distinctly shaky foundation for Franz’s trumpeted re-socialization as an autonomous Berliner at the book’s close. Franz has seen the light, accepted his role in Mieze’s death, and can now properly read the city. ‘Und auch sonst ist viel los am Alex, aber Hauptsache: er ist da’ (there’s always something going down on the Alex, but the main thing is, he’s now back again) (BA 449). In his new incarnation as a factory doorman, the rechristened Franz Karl Biberkopf takes down numbers and keeps a watchful eye on who comes in and out, freed of those destructive urges to control an environment which he now accepts he can never fully control (454). However, in his famous review of Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1930, Walter Benjamin had his doubts about this strangely sanitized social resolution in the manner of the bourgeois Bildungsroman;15 and so, I suggest, should we. Franz certainly seems to embody the sense of watchful intellectual detachment that Simmel in his essay of 1903 considered integral to personal freedom 15

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 236.

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at the heart of the modern city. Things are not quite as they seem, though, as the preservation of metropolitan individuality depends on a barely suppressed interpersonal antagonism, a defensiveness that threatens to break out into violence at a moment of closer contact.16 Psychical stability is underwritten by the threat of physical violence, social control by a barely internalized bodily force. Indeed, a distinctly militaristic entreaty to stay awake, keep your eyes open and look out (BA 454), tips over into a reprise of one of the text’s cacophonous marching songs (455). The roll of drums recalls the rhythmic figurations of ‘[n]atural history and urban technology’ that Andrew Webber cogently identifies throughout the novel,17 not least as the deathly reverberations of ‘krumm […] fällt um […] stumm, widebum, widebum’ directly echo the interminable rumbling of the Alex’s steam ram (455). It is in this onomatopoeic overlap between the linguistic and the material – between the psychical and the physical, and the city and the emergent forces of nature – that we can identify the urban subject’s vulnerability. This precariousness is the mark of what I want to call the ‘urban creature’, and through an exploration of the text’s myriad facets of creatureliness, I suggest that we might view Franz’s final metropolitan rebirth in a radically different light.

Of men and other creatures As a description of the human being caught in the overlapping spaces of self, city, and nature, the urban creature anticipates Santner’s articulations of creaturely life. One of his focal points is the vulnerable, embodied yet Dollenmayer reads in Berlin Alexanderplatz a ‘textbook example’ of this type of freedom (‘Narration and the City’, in David E. Wellbery (ed.), A New History of German Literature, Cambridge, MA 2004, pp. 764–9: p. 767). See also Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, pp. 48–9, 53–4. 17 Andrew J. Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography, Cambridge 2008, p. 215. 16

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decentred reality of being human in modernity: as he puts it, creatureliness emerges from our ontological exposure to our underlying contingency, and to the ‘ultimate lack of foundation’ for our social configurations.18 Being human means being non-conterminous with that biological being and painfully aware of the sub-linguistic ‘abyss’ in our organic existence,19 a gap which sparks meaning and language, but which we only ever fragmentarily and provisionally paper over with language and meaning. Santner invokes Rilke as the modernist poet most explicitly committed to the representation of human subjects as always somehow set over against a supposedly ‘objective’ natural world.20 In the eighth of his Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies, written between 1912 and 1922), he laments that we are always fatefully ‘gegenüber […] / und nichts als das und immer gegenüber’ (opposite […] / and nothing but that, forever opposite) (DE VIII).21 Our hybrid existence as nature’s ‘Stück’ (part) and its utterly inseparable ‘Gegenstück’ (counterpart) (UD 49) situates us in an embedded-yet-detached dialectic with our world. We hear by contrast that ‘[m]it allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene’ (with all its eyes, the natural world sees / the Open) (DE VIII), as Rilke strives to poetize the animals’ dwelling in what Santner, tracing out a ‘biological metaphysics’ after Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, calls the ‘unimaginable enjoyment of self-being in otherness’.22 In Chapter 14 David Wachter probed a fascinating constellation between Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke, revealing the proximity and distance of aesthetic and more strictly ‘scientific’ approaches to descriptions of the physiological forms and behaviour of animals in the early twentieth century. Uexküll’s description of the Umwelten of animals in his work of

See Eric Santner, The Royal Remains, p. 5; cf. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago, IL 2006, pp. 22–4. 19 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London 1991, p. 201. 20 Santner, On Creaturely Life, pp. 1–2. 21 Translations of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien are my own. 22 Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols, Frankfurt am Main 1955, vol. I, pp. 714–15; Santner, On Creaturely Life, p. 2; cf. p. 6. 18

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1909, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Environment and Inner World of Animals) found resonance not only with Rilke, but also with the pathbreaking philosopher Martin Heidegger. In a lecture cycle of 1930, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), Heidegger praised Uexküll’s insistence on the organism’s semiotic inextricability from its Umwelt, but also stressed the qualitative difference between the animal’s relatively impoverished perceptual existence on the one hand, and the openness of human Dasein to what he terms ‘Welt’ (world) on the other.23 In short, a biological discourse was intersecting with a philosophical one. Uexküll was configuring his own biology, in distinction from the positivist and materialist underpinnings of chemistry and physics around the turn of the nineteenth century, as an aesthetically and subjectively oriented science with an intuitive connection to its studied world.24 In a different but related direction, German-speaking intellectual and literary cultures of the century’s first three decades were marked – in the wake of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud – by a growing need to do anthropological justice to the underlying ‘instinctual’ and ‘animal’ nature of humanness.25 Human beings are riveted to their animal condition, and that rivetedness deeply informs the sense of hybridity central to Unser Dasein; but it also finds striking symbolic expression in Biberkopf ’s own proximity See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (winter semester 1929/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington, IN 1995, pp. 263–4. In an elision of Heidegger’s qualitative distinction, Uexküll would claim in his work of 1934, Steifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten (A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men), that all animal Umwelten constitute their own ‘subjektive Wirklichkeiten’ (subjective realities): see Uexküll and Georg Kriszat, Streifzüge, Berlin 1934, p. 91. 24 See Malte Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134:1 (2001), pp. 553–92: pp. 570–1. 25 See Wolfgang Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014, pp. ix–x. As Riedel shows, this sense of man’s deeprootedness in his natural environment fed into the growth of the German movement of ‘philosophical anthropology’ in the 1920s. Under its pioneers, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, it represented a philosophical approach to the unique hybridity of embodied human identity (see Nach der Achsendrehung, pp. x, 149). 23

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to animality. After hearing the picaresque tale of the conman Stefan Zannowich, as told by the marginalized Jews, Nachum and Eliser, whom he encounters after leaving Tegel prison at the start of the novel, he laments that he is little more than ‘verfluchtes Mistvieh’ (a bloody animal), to be driven out of his corner of the shed for disposal by the ‘Schweinekerl mit dem Hundewagen’ (filthy swine with the dog wagon), despite not even being completely dead (BA 30): in short, an abject creature released back into society, but excluded from meaningful civic participation.26 In further development of the paradox, the intercalation of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, complete with a preposterously jubilant Yahweh, is followed by the narrator’s rueful comment that man (Franz) has his eyes, that ‘in dem steckt viel drin und alles durcheinander’ (there’s lots of stuff in him, and it’s all topsy-turvy), and that he is burdened with a dreadful brain: an altogether sorry state of affairs in contrast to the humble sow, who is happy to consist of flesh and fat (286). And as Franz later lies in a state of deep unconsciousness in the asylum at Buch, he laments that it is better to cower under the earth than to live in a human body. In contrast to that unreachable but idealized state of otherness – akin to Rilke’s ‘Open’ – Franz emerges, in the hallucinated goading by the field mice around the asylum, as ‘das widrigste Geschöpf ’ (the most repugnant creature), painfully conscious of being set apart from nature and yet desperate to re-join nature’s cycles (428–9). This desire to sink back into organic cycles painfully recalls Rilke’s lament that we are never quite in tune like the migratory birds, even though ‘[b]lühn und verdorrn ist uns zugleich bewußt’ (we are conscious of blooming and withering at one and the same time) (DE IV).27 These senses of an in-between space suggest that Franz is irreducible both to sovereign agency over his environs on the one hand, and to the cycles of nature on the other. It is through the topos of the slaughterhouse itself, with its premonitions of sacrifice and regeneration, that this sense of contingency and violence might nonetheless lay an unexpected ground for a new set of perspectives on humanness in the fabric of the city. The chapter title ‘Denn es geht dem Menschen wie dem Vieh; wie dies stirbt, so stirbt er 26 See Santner, On Creaturely Life, p. 22. 27 Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, p. 697.

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auch’ (for the same fate awaits both man and cattle; as one dies, so dies the other) (136), is a reworking of Ecclesiastes 3.19, and reflects the individual’s subjection to the same biological facticity of death as the abattoir’s pigs and steers. The narrative duly underlines the slaughterhouse’s administrative embeddedness in the city, recording the turnover of livestock, presenting us with the tastefully appointed butcher’s shop on the other side, and reassuring the swine that it’s nothing personal. The image of condemned swine clambering over one another in fright now seems a chilling omen,28 and myriad anthropomorphisms again call to mind Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’: that blurring of the internal threshold between the polis and the ‘state of nature’, physis, and between the sacrifice-worthy and abjectly unworthy, in the figure of ‘homo sacer’.29 After being assured of the legitimacy of the abattoir workers’ duties as food providers, we are treated to graphic accounts of the slaughter, firstly of swine, and secondly of a steer. What strikes us throughout this extended, bloody set-piece is the narrator’s carnivalesque relish: the ‘jubilant’ gushing of the steer’s blood is described in terms of a ritual celebration, and it immediately segues into an hallucination of revellers spilling out of their party, as life drains from the corpse (142). There are echoes of the jarring discursive play in Franz’s earlier rape of Minna – with its suggestion of self-annulling laws of physics – in the description of the pig’s moving through physiology and theology to the final jurisdiction of physics (BA 140; cf. 39). We encounter a profound porousness between man and animal in near-anthropomorphisms of jerking legs and limbs, the comic suggestion that the pigs are enjoying a Turkish bath in preparation for slaughter, and the reproduction of noises associated elsewhere in the text with Franz himself. For example, the disjointed ‘das 28 On the hint of the death camps here, see Dollenmayer, ‘Narration and the City’, p. 768. 29 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA 1998, pp.  90, 107–10. As Agamben argues, the Hobbesian state of nature is ‘not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City but a principle internal to the City’ (p. 105). This sense of a crossover is central to Santner’s sense of ‘creaturely life’ (see The Royal Remains, pp. 56–7). See also Webber, who invokes, but does not develop at length, the concepts of ‘the creature’ and ‘bare life’ in his discussion in Berlin in the Twentieth Century, pp. 205–6.

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Leben röchelt sich nun aus’ (life leaves with a death rattle) falls among other instances of the visceral but ironically medical death rattle, which jostle alongside sounds that characteristically blur the divide between animal and man, nature and city (138; cf. 142, 178). In modernist affinity with Mikhail Bakhtin’s Renaissance conception of the carnival, thought as a figurative site of endlessly ‘degrading and simultaneously regenerating functions’, or rather of disintegrating and redeveloping meanings,30 the messiness of the abattoir continually feeds into myriad resonances with myths of slaughter, death, and renewal throughout the narrative fabric. Indeed, echoes of animal killing can be heard time and again as the novel progresses. Mieze’s brutal murder at the hands of Reinhold at the close of Book VII is intercut with flashbacks to the knives and the arteries of the abattoir (139–40) as well as being overshadowed by the burlesque figure of the ‘Schnitter Tod’ (Grim Reaper) (352, cf. 185). And the image of the swinging ‘Beil’ (hatchet), crashing down on the heads of slaughterhouse swine and Franz alike, sees the site of food production, right at the seam between man and his ‘natural’ others, resonating with the site of his ritual sacrifice at the hands of the axe-wielding Death in the asylum at Berlin-Buch (139, 431).31 Ritchie Robertson has justly argued that as Gretchen redeems Faust, ‘so the pure-hearted prostitute Mieze seems to redeem Biberkopf by her violent death’;32 but when read in the shadow of the abattoir, the novel’s troubling sacrificial economy – through which he is supposedly redeemed and then re-socialized – is far more prone to slippage and irony than this reading might suggest.33 Franz’s recognition of the need to accept responsibility for Mieze’s violent death through his 30 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Krystyna Pomorska, Bloomington, IN 1984, p. 23. 31 Cf. the figure of ‘homo sacer’. In its original (classical Roman) significance, as Agamben expounds it, ‘homo sacer’ was excluded from the sacrificial economy of the polis, his life and death thus divested of all potential sacrificial and symbolic weight. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 71–3. 32 Ritchie Robertson, ‘From Naturalism to National Socialism (1890–1945)’, in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of German Literature, Cambridge 1997, pp. 327–92: p. 363. 33 Cf. also Tatar, Lustmord, pp. 141, 145.

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own hubristic bluff and bluster, is of a piece with the collapse of sense of sovereignty in the face of his own mortality and the radical uncontrollability of his environment. However, what is interesting is that this new openness to otherness, embodied in the refrain of ‘herankommen lassen’ (letting things come) (435–6), is itself carnivalized and subverted by being made bluntly explicit. Death casts himself as a bizarre hybrid of messianism, baroque figuration, and low-cultural Volkslied, complete with a bemusing Berlin accent and such self-ironizing claims as the parody of John 14.6 in ‘[i]ch bin das Leben und die wahrste Kraft’ (I am life and the truest power) (431). And when Franz finally emerges from the asylum after much hacking, chopping, screaming, and clinical disagreement over whether he needs a physiological or psychotherapeutic cure,34 metaphoric catharsis gives way to a strikingly humdrum reincorporation into Berlin society. He is now Franz Karl Biberkopf, after his maternal grandfather, but he has the same papers and the same appearance (442, 447). Against that shifting backdrop, I suggest that instead of being the tale of a violent ex-con’s moral epiphany, the novel acts out an aesthetic through which symbolic meanings are repeatedly subverted, chopped up like so much organic matter, and reassembled in new forms. We read that beyond the tiny pieces into which it is being carnivalized, Franz’s unconscious body is certainly not dead, but rather ‘[es] lebt alles weiter’ (everything lives on) (432); and this vitalistic economy of renewal elicits an amusing biological parallel in the image of Franz’s broken soul containing many plant germs and drifting, in a dream state, out of the asylum on a daily basis to scatter more over the wintery ground (429). These organic metaphors become, I argue, a symbolic correlate to a figuratively vitalistic aesthetic that redeems fragmentation through fragmentation. What I mean by this is that the novel’s symbols of violence, sacrifice, and degeneration continually shade into their opposites of regeneration: concrescences or constellations of very different notes or themes that set in motion a dynamic of interaction and interpenetration. 34

BA 424–8. On the parody of Freudian voguishness in the reference to the ‘Protokoll vom letzten Kongreß in Baden-Baden’ (the minutes of the [third] Congress for Psychotherapy in Baden-Baden, BA 426), see Stauffaucher, in BA 549.

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Biblical allegory is repeatedly reworked through natural history, evincing new perspectives in its new constellations. The uncanny vignette of singing trees (345), which prefaces Mieze’s murder at Reinhold’s hands, recalls Jeremiah 17’s image of a God-fearing man as a tree planted in living waters, at the fateful moment of Franz’s commitment to the Pums criminal gang in Book V. What unfurls here is a portmanteau of myth and biological process which plays on markedly different senses of ‘verlassen’ (relying or abandoning) in its almost organic shift from Franz’s ‘auf mir kannste dich verlassen’ and ‘auf mir ist Verlaß’ (you can count on me) (178, 206), to a condemnation of the ‘Verlassenen in der Steppe’ (the man out there on his own) who relies on his own fleshly strength (198, 212). And even this condemnation is twisted through figurations of decay and renewal in waters that are addressed as living in a different sense (‘Pflanzen verwesen in euch, Fische, Schnecken regen sich’ – plants decay in you, fish and snails stir, 198).35 This meeting of metonymy and metaphor is a near-perfect instantiation of what Unser Dasein identifies as the artwork’s tendency to draw its forms and energies from the evolutionary traces of plant, animal and mineral matter embedded in it. A ‘Neigung zum Zerfall’ (tendency to disintegrate) is the shadow side of the artwork’s inherently subversive, but irrevocably meaningful, drive to regenerate and recreate (UD 242). In short, we see refracted throughout the text’s fabric a creaturely proximity to destruction and disintegration, but also – as its figurative obverse – an openness to outgrowths and new possibilities. As Döblin argues in Unser Dasein, the embodied human should be conceived not as a monad, but rather as the focal point of a reciprocal relationality between subject and nature: a two-way movement of softening, opening, and penetrating elicits new meanings, even new forms of living, through a fabric of porousness and changeability (UD 187, 168–71). With these resonances in mind, I want to close by moving from Döblin’s myriad miniature natural histories to the Alexanderplatz itself and its urban environs.

35

See Keller, Döblins Montageroman, pp. 160–2.

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Carnivals and cityscapes By homing in on two final set-pieces from the cityscape of Berlin itself, I suggest that this sense of reinvested meaning speaks to a creaturely anthropology that unfurls not simply within the protagonist’s journey towards epiphany, but also on the level of the street itself. Despite his reservations about the novel’s end, Benjamin admired the way in which the narrative’s dissipation among bible verses, snippets from hit songs, and statistics – in short, its ‘montage’-like quality – fed into new, ‘epic’ possibilities.36 And it is in this light that the two halves of the novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Franz Biberkopf, disclose their symbiotic relationship. By 1928, the Alex had become synonymous with urban reconstruction, and Döblin’s montage sequences bring to presence a cityscape that is in the midst of constant regeneration.37 The laying of the new U-Bahn line, which would be opened in December 1930, finds its way into the narrative at the start of the urban panoramas of Books IV and V (BA 123, 165). The mentions seem properly coincidental, and simply another example of Döblin’s desire to give a vivid account of a real contemporary time and space. And yet what strikes us is the way in which this street-level description of the city somehow moves marginally beyond itself, and shades over into something of symbolic significance. The riffing invocation of security and protection companies near the start of the fourth book, for example, playfully invokes the panoptical quality of the novel’s own textual strategies (106). In a dynamic of seemingly free association, the narrative shifts from the ‘Wach- und Schutzdienst für Groß-Berlin und außerhalb’ (Watch and Safeguard Service for Greater Berlin), through the tellingly named ‘Wachbereitschaft Deutschland’ (Germania Protective Agency), to a nonsensical play on ‘Wachsmann als Erzieher’ and ‘Flachsmann als Erzieher’, before ending up rather ridiculously in the contiguous and entirely random ‘Wäscherei Adler’ (Adler’s Laundrette) with its speciality in ‘feine 36 Benjamin, GS, vol. III, p. 232. 37 See Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture, Berkeley, CA 2006, pp. 3–8.

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Herren- und Damenwäsche’ (fine gents’ and ladies’ underwear) (124, my emphases). In an extensive discussion of Joyce in The Modes of Modern Writing, David Lodge pointed to a high-modernist proclivity for scattering words from seemingly incommensurable realms of signification through the fabric of a mundane, metonymic narrative reality.38 Döblin’s use of textual montage is particularly interesting in this connection because of the way in which the contingent details of the city’s furniture and infrastructure interplay with the narrative’s central thrust. Against repeated rumbles of the notorious post-war Dolchstoßlegende (123),39 the verbiage brings echoes of the motifs of ‘Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘wach sein’ into dialogue with the hardware of the city (cf. BA 131, 454, my emphases), before ironizing both in a moment of textual play. Biberkopf ’s story is hybridized into Berlin’s spatiality and temporality, and his persistent desire for a self-controlled and militaristic watchfulness repeatedly carnivalized. As if in delight at the sheer plasticity of its own language, the narrative acts out its own proximity to contingency and nonsense. Yet at the same time it points beyond itself as a mimesis of a mode of urban life that is open to unmasterable difference and otherness in the city’s frenetic here and now, as Döblin expressly describes modernity in Unser Dasein (UD 213). The cityscape’s figurative proximity to disintegration becomes a seedbed for new perspectives and reinvestments. Once again, at the heart of the breaking down, we discover an inexhaustible drive to build back up, as the carnivalization of meanings feeds into transient reconfigurations, and fragmentation lays the ground for endless re-creations. Appropriately enough, this brings us back to the Alex’s steam ram, whose pounding has echoed throughout our discussions. Book V’s negotiations with building work open with an onomatopoeic

38 39

See David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, London 1977, pp. 134–5. The text makes a number of direct references to the persistent ‘stab in the back myth’, which blamed Germany’s defeat in World War I on an eclectic group of internal enemies, from seditious ‘red’ workers to Jewish financiers (cf. BA 84–5; cf. Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic, trans. P. S. Falda and R. J. Park, London 2004, p. 140).

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description of how the steam ram ‘wuchtet’ (slams away) at the Alex (165). Midgley has highlighted the narrative significance of this scene, setting this biological portrayal of collective animal activity – ‘[w]ie die Bienen sind sie über den Boden her’ (people swarm over the ground like bees) – in contrast to Biberkopf ’s own bluster at his ability to rise above the city, to be a masculine conqueror of all.40 The narrator tells us to shed no tears over the condemned Hahn department store, as it is simply part of a natural cycle of rejuvenation, to be cannibalized into something new, just as the former statue of the Berolina might be recast into medals. As Döblin had argued with an unmistakably Darwinian flourish in an essay on technological modernity in 1924, cities were themselves natural histories, the products of our species’ evolutionary tendency towards collaborative forms of existence (SÄPL 177–8). The modern city is a collective creature. But the personification of the piles for the U-Bahn exceeds even these natural cycles, motioning to a creaturely meaning that is always marginally in excess of the biological reality of ‘being human’. There is a miniature process of subjective association on the part of passers-by who have time outside of the circulation of texts to linger and watch the steam ram hammering piles into the ground. In their witnessing of the piles’ battered ‘heads’, we glimpse a playful allegory of the modern epic novel itself. And in the observation of how slickly it all passes off, there is an ironic suggestion of the readers’ shared aesthetic experience in following Biberkopf ’s trials and tribulations, not to mention an oblique nod to the ethical ideal of a shared public space and a collective encounter with the artwork: Rumm rumm haut die Dampframme auf dem Alexanderplatz. Viele Menschen haben Zeit und gucken sich an, wie die Ramme haut. Ein Mann oben zieht immer eine Kette, dann pafft es oben, und ratz hat die Stange eins auf den Kopf. Da stehen die Männer und Frauen und besonders die Jungens und freuen sich, wie das geschmiert geht: ratz kriegt die Stange eins auf den Kopf. Nachher ist sie klein wie eine Fingerspitze, dann kriegt sie aber noch immer eins, da kann sie machen,

40 David Midgley, ‘“Wie die Bienen sind sie über den Boden her.” Zu den biologischen Bezügen der Massendarstellungen in Döblins Romanen’, in Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (ed.), Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium, Berlin 2011: Massen und Medien bei Alfred Döblin, Bern 2014, pp. 51–65: p. 64.

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Robert Craig was sie will. Zuletzt ist sie weg, Donnerwetter, die haben sie fein eingepökelt, man zieht befriedigt ab. (165) (Boom boom, the steam pounds away on the Alex. Many people have time spare, and have a gander at the steam ram pounding away. Up top there’s a man pulling at a chain, then a puff of steam, and bang! The pole gets it right on the noggin. There are men and women standing around and lots of youngsters as well and they love how slick it all is: bang! the pole gets it right on the noggin. It gets smaller, smaller, as small as a fingertip, then it gets it again, there, they can do like with that one. Holy cow, they’ve given that a good old whack.)

In my introduction to this chapter, I suggested that art for Döblin elicits the strangely persistent promise of human purposiveness in the face of the brute fact that, as finite physiological entities, we are nothing but the contingent outgrowths of ever-repeating organic cycles (UD 241–2). As the mirror image of its human creators, the work of art, or the epic novel, mimics organic processes, complete with their secretions, outgrowths, and intricate interconnections. But it also hints at an inimitably human meaningfulness that sits ever so slightly askew of those processes – in short, it speaks to our shared creatureliness. Although this might seem an odd passage with which to end, we see crystallized in these shared moments on the Alex a filmic portrayal of this completeness in the midst of corporeal and psychical violence, as the pile is satisfyingly driven into the ground like a disappearing fingertip. This is a return to the earth and, in the repeated pounding to the head, a cathartic glimpse of Biberkopf ’s ravaged body and mind. But as one of Berlin’s contingent carnival pleasures, it is also a moment that refracts a fleeting promise of human ‘Vollendung’ (completeness) into the novel’s many random and nondescript Berlin vignettes (BA 126–7; cf. UD 237–8). And out on the Alex, that’s more than enough to let these nameless fellow Berliners move off and go about their intersecting business, satisfied, with the sense that at least something has been finished, something is done. Holy cow, they’ve given that a good old whack. Berlin Alexanderplatz’s enduring achievement is certainly not to redeem its troubled – and troubling – protagonist in a culminating economy of re-socialization, to the drumbeat of the marching masses. Instead, the novel brings to expression countless, fleeting promises of creaturely

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meaning and interconnection beyond its protagonist, leaving Franz’s future as one of the little guys unnervingly open as the novel’s myriad voices and noises finally fade to silence (BA 454–5). Döblin’s novel moves at a complex intersection between recent configurations of biology and philosophical anthropology, and the creaturely motifs of literary modernism. That interface opens up spaces for reflection on the subject’s uncanny, even terrifying, proximity to its underlying ‘naturalness’; but our messy proximity highlights the irreducibility to biological explanation that marks out the modern human being as human. Through its creative portrayals of that in-between space, Berlin Alexanderplatz suggests that this vulnerability, this existence at the precarious suture of biology and society, might even provoke an ethical rethinking of metropolitan humanness itself. Franz is by no means the only creature in town.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford, CA 1998. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington, IN 1984. Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1972. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, London 1999, pp. 152–90. Döblin, Alfred, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf, ed. Werner Stauffacher, Zurich 1996. Das Ich über der Natur, Berlin 1927. Kleine Schriften I, ed. Anthony W. Riley, Olten 1985. Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt, Olten 1989. Unser Dasein, ed. Walter Muschg, Olten 1964. Zwei Seelen in einer Brust: Schriften zu Leben und Werk, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt, Olten 1986. Dollenmayer, David, ‘Narration and the City’, in David E. Wellbery (ed.), A New History of German Literature, Cambridge, MA 2004, pp. 764–9.

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Elm, Ursula, Literatur als Lebensanschauung: Zum ideengeschichtlichen Hintergrund von Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bielefeld 1991. Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, London 1955. Fuechtner, Veronika, ‘“Arzt und Dichter”: Döblin’s Medical, Psychiatric, and Psychoanalytic Work’, in Roland Dollinger et al. (eds), A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, Rochester, NY 2004. Haeckel, Ernst, Kunstformen der Natur: Supplement-Heft; Allgemeine Erläuterung und systematische Übersicht, Leipzig 1904. Heidegger, Martin, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (winter semester 1929/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington, IN 1995. Herwig, Malte, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134:1 (2001), pp. 553–92. Horn, Eva, ‘Literary Research: Narration and the Epistemology of the Human Sciences in Alfred Döblin’, Modern Language Notes 118 (2003), pp. 719–39. Huyssen, Andreas, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film, Cambridge, MA 2015. Jelavich, Peter, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture, Berkeley, CA 2006. Keller, Otto, Döblins Montageroman als Epos der Moderne, Munich 1980. Kingerlee, Roger, Psychological Models of Masculinity in Döblin, Musil, and Jahnn: Männliches, Allzumännliches, Lewiston, NY 2001. Kolb, Eberhard, The Weimar Republic, trans. P. S. Falda and R. J. Park, London 2004. Komar, Kathleen, ‘Technique and Structure in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz’, The German Quarterly 54:3 (1981), pp. 318–34. Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, London 1977. Midgley, David, ‘Metaphysical Speculation and the Fascination of the Real: On the Connections between Döblin’s Philosophical Writings and his Fiction before Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield (eds), Alfred Döblin: Paradigms of Modernism, Berlin 2009, pp. 7–27. ‘“Wie die Bienen sind sie über den Boden her.” Zu den biologischen Bezügen der Massendarstellungen in Döblins Romanen’, in Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (ed.), Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium, Berlin 2011: Massen und Medien bei Alfred Döblin, Bern 2014, pp. 51–65. Riedel, Wolfgang, ‘Homo Natura’: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Berlin 1996. Nach der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014.

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Rilke, Rainer Maria, Sämtliche Werke, ed. the Rilke-Archiv, vol. I, Frankfurt am Main 1955. Robertson, Ritchie, ‘From Naturalism to National Socialism (1890–1945)’, in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of German Literature, Cambridge 1997, pp. 327–92. Santner, Eric, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago, IL 2006. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, Chicago, IL 2011. Saul, Nicholas, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture 1890–1913’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, vol. III, London 2014, pp. 46–77. Simmel, Georg, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, trans. H. H. Gerth, in Richard Sennett (ed.), Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969, pp. 47–60. Stauffacher, Werner, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’, in Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, ed. Stauffacher, pp. 837–75. Tatar, Maria, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton, NJ 1995. Uexküll, Jakob von, and Georg Kriszat, Steifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten, Berlin 1934. Webber, Andrew J., Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography, Cambridge 2008. Yacavone, Kathrin, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, New York 2012. Žižek, Slavoj, For They Know Not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London 1991.

Notes on Contributors

HEIKE BAUER is Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on literature and the history of sexuality, including two monographs, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia, PA 2017) and English Literary Sexology (Basingstoke 2009); a three-volume anthology of texts, Women and Cross-Dressing 1800–1930 (London 2006); and two edited collections, Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years (coedited with Matt Cook, Basingstoke 2012) and Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World (Philadelphia 2015). She also works on contemporary queer, lesbian, and feminist writing and graphic memoirs. She has edited special journal issues on ‘Transnational Lesbian Culture’ (with Churnjeet Mahn), Journal of Lesbian Studies 18:3 (2014), and ‘Contemporary Comics by Jewish Women’ (with Andrea Greenbaum and Sarah Lightman), Studies in Comics 6:2 (2015). ELENA BORELLI holds a PhD in Italian Literature from Rutgers University, USA, and specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature, with a focus on Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the theme of desire in the Italian fin de siècle. Her book, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Ethics of Desire: Between Action and Contemplation, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2017. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Italian at the City University of New York, and currently she is working in Italy as a translator and a teacher at a private institution. SARAH CAIN is College Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She is currently completing a doctoral thesis on American modernist poetry and early twentieth-century philosophies of language, including works by T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. She teaches English and American literature

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post-1830, critical theory and aesthetics, and has research interests in global modernism, the modern history of the book and intellectual history, and in twentieth-century histories of illness and psychoanalysis and their impact on literary writing. ROBERT CRAIG is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in the Department of British Culture at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis examined the dialectic of nature and self in the work of the modernist author Alfred Döblin (2016), and reflects a broader interest in the intersections of science, philosophy, and aesthetics in literary modernism. His main publications include ‘“Ist die Schwarze Köchin da? Jajaja …”: Mimesis and Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel’ (Monatshefte 2016) and ‘Dilthey, Gadamer, and Facebook: Towards a New Hermeneutics of the Social Network’ (Modern Language Review 2015); and he has co-authored a paper on intercultural corporate communications (Miami, FL 2012). WILLIAM J. DODD is Professor Emeritus of Modern German Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has published extensively on Franz Kafka, German language and discourse in the twentieth century, and the literature of inner exile in the National Socialist period. His publications in this area include Jedes Wort wandelt die Welt: Dolf Sternbergers politische Sprachkritik (Göttingen 2007) and ‘Der Mensch hat das Wort’: Der Sprachdiskurs in der Frankfurter Zeitung 1933–43 (editor, Berlin 2013). He is currently working on two monographs: a study of critical language commentaries on National Socialism, and a contextual study of Sternberger’s Panorama and its reception by Walter Benjamin. MICHAEL EGGERS is Akademischer Rat at the Institute for German Language and Literature of the University of Cologne, Germany. His main research interests are the history and theory of comparative literature; the history of knowledge and literature; the human voice in literature and cultural theory; and contemporary drama. His recent publications include the volumes Vergleichendes Erkennen: Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie

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des Vergleichs und zur Genealogie der Komparatistik (Heidelberg 2016) and Von Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschieden: Vergleich, Analogie und Klassifikation in Wissenschaft und Literatur (18./19. Jahrhundert) (editor, Heidelberg 2011); and the book chapters ‘Herzblut: H. H. Jahnns “Pastor Ephraim Magnus”, und die Theaterstücke Sarah Kanes in der Tradition szenischer Gewaltdarstellung’ (Munich 2015), and ‘Weltliteratur und Warenkunde: Zum ökonomischen und naturhistorischen Wissenstransfer bei Johann Beckmann und Goethe’ (Göttingen 2015). LINDA LESKAU is a doctoral candidate in the Department of German Languages and Literatures at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her dissertation investigates the role of the sexual-scientific discourse in Alfred Döblin’s early works, with a special focus on sadism and masochism. Her research interests include literature from the eighteenth century to the present day, literary and cultural theory, gender, and queer studies, as well as media studies and the theory and practice of contemporary theatre. She has published book chapters in all these areas, including ‘Superpunk: Zur Subversion der Normalität’ (Duisburg 2014); ‘Sadismus/Masochismus in Alfred Döblins Der schwarze Vorhang: Eine Analyse der reziproken Wissenswanderungen zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft’ (Berlin and Boston, MA 2015); ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume als literarische AbFallgeschichte gelesen’ (Würzburg 2015); and ‘Perspektiven der Medienwissenschaft – Gender’ (Bielefeld 2017, forthcoming). INA LINGE is Associate Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. She holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis focused on the performance of queer livability in German sexological and psychoanalytic life writings, c.1900–33 (2016). She has published essays on modernist and fin-de-siècle literature and culture and the interdependence of sexology and autobiography, for example, ‘Gender and Agency between Sexualwissenschaft and Autobiography: The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren’ (German Life and Letters, 2015); and ‘Hospitable Reading: An Approach to Life Writings of Gender and Sexual “Deviants”’ (Berlin 2015).

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DAVID MIDGLEY is Professor Emeritus of German Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. His major publications include Arnold Zweig: Zu Werk und Wandlung 1927–48 (Frankfurt 1980); Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–33 (Oxford 2000); and ‘“Schöpferische Entwicklung”: Zur Bergsonrezeption in der deutschsprachigen Welt um 1910’ (Scientia poetica, 2012). He has published many essays on German modernist writers and is currently focusing particularly on the works of Alfred Döblin. PAULINE MORET-JANKUS is a lecturer (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. She holds a PhD in French Studies from Durham University and a Master’s in French Literature from ParisSorbonne. Her current research project focuses on the concepts of biological race in French literature, and her first monograph is entitled Race et imaginaire biologique chez Proust (Paris 2016). STAFFAN müller-WILLE is Associate Professor in the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and Co-director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter and he also holds an Honorary Chair at the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies of the University of Lübeck. His research is interdisciplinary and international and covers the history of the life sciences from the early modern period to the early twentieth century, with a focus on the history of natural history, anthropology, and genetics. Among more recent publications is a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity (Chicago 2012), and a co-edited collection, Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, MA 2016). AISHA NAZEER is a PhD researcher at the University of St Andrews. Building upon an interest in the intersectional relationship between nineteenth-century Gothic literature and late Victorian medical and anthropological discourses on race, gender, and sexuality, her current research examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary depictions of

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natural science explore the gender hierarchy contrived by the masculine, scientific gaze. She is particularly interested in the feminization of the specimen in scientific discourses, and how literary characterizations of the naturalist and his specimen reflect changing societal attitudes towards gender relations. ANAHITA ROUYAN is a PhD candidate at the International Centre for the History of Universities and Science at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her main research interests include public discourses of experimental life sciences and evolution in the United States, media and literary representations of science, the history of science popularization, and ecocriticism. Her work has been published in the journals Utopian Studies, Partial Answers, and Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon. CYD STURGESS is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. She is currently finishing her thesis ‘Different to the Others: Discourses of Queer Female Identity and Desire in Berlin and Amsterdam (1918–40)’ and has published on queer Dutch literature and history, queer femininities, and female masculinity. She has also published several articles for DIVA magazine on lesbian history in Europe and has worked on several short film projects about LGBT+ issues. DAVID WACHTER is an independent researcher based in Berlin and affiliated with the German Department at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. He is currently working on a postdoctoral project about angels in literary modernism. Research interests include figures of the sacred, aesthetics of the sublime, and literary ethnography. His main publications include Konstruktionen im Übergang: Krise und Utopie bei Musil, Kracauer und Benn (Freiburg 2013); ‘Fenster, Orgel, Partitur: Cäcilies Dinge bei Kleist und Mallarmé’ (Kleist-Jahrbuch 2015); and ‘“Spruch, Tanz und Gesang”: Kafkas EthnoGraphie der Musik’ (Würzburg 2015). MICHAEL WAINWRIGHT lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on literature and science. Darwin and Faulkner’s Novels: Evolution and Southern Fiction (New York 2008), his

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first monograph, was a Choice Review of Books Outstanding Academic Title for 2009. His latest monograph, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is Game Theory and Postwar American Literature (Basingstoke 2016). GODELA WEISS-SUSSEX is Reader in Modern German Literature at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) of the University of London. She is also Fellow in German at King’s College, Cambridge. Her main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the following areas: women’s writing, the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile, biology and literature, the city in literature, and the visual arts. Recent publications include Jüdin und Moderne: Literarisierungen der Lebenswelt deutschjüdischer Autorinnen in Berlin, 1900–18 (Berlin 2016); Tales of Commerce and Imagination: Department Stores and Modernity in Film and Literature (co-edited with Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Frankfurt am Main 2015); and Protest and Reform in German Literature and Visual Culture, 1871–1918 (co-edited with Charlotte Woodford, Munich 2015). CHARLOTTE WOODFORD is Fellow in German at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Her recent publications include Women, Emancipation and the German Novel: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context 1871–1910 (Oxford 2014), and Protest and Reform in German Literature and Visual Culture, 1871–1918 (co-edited with Godela Weiss-Sussex, Munich 2015).

Index

abjection  16, 261, 274, 276–7, 285–7 Achebe, Chinua  320 aesthetics  9, 10–11, 18, 25–6, 117–18, 152, 165, 214, 229, 350–1, 353, 355–6, 358, 368, 372, 374–7, 381–2, 385–6, 388–91, 409, 413, 417 Agamben, Giorgio Homo Sacer  411, 412 Open, The  345, 346 Andreas-Salomé, Lou  18, 21–2, 189–207, 383 animal agency  4–5 animality  15, 17, 19, 24, 26, 39, 40–1, 50–1, 53, 60, 75–6, 153, 155, 165, 263, 272, 346, 407–14, 417–19 anthropocentrism  72–5, 80, 378, 393–4 anthropomorphism  5, 150–1, 221, 226, 265 anti-Semitism  20, 87, 90, 94–5, 102, 127 Arnold, Matthew  5, 7 Baartman, Saartjie (the ‘Hottentot Venus’) 279 Bakhtin, Mikhail  412 Bauer, Heike  14, 256 Beer, Gillian Darwin’s Plots  8–10, 33 Bellingham, O’Bryen  301 Benjamin, Walter  136–7, 144, 406, 415 Bergson, Henri Creative Evolution 341 biogenetic law  6, 35, 49, 92, 101, 103, 326 biopower  22, 211–13 Blainville, Henri de  279 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich  270–1

Bölsche, Wilhelm  21, 112–13, 117–18, 141 Love-Life in Nature 194–5 botany  171, 174, 181–4, 211, 215, 226–8, 232 Bourget, Paul  18, 20, 35, 52, 87, 97–108 Brera, Valeriano Luigi  292 Buffon, Georges  270–1 Cassirer, Ernst  344 Césaire, Aimé  261 classification  16–17, 23, 96, 163–4, 173–4, 178–81, 213, 261, 269–76, 285–8 Cobbold, Thomas Spencer  24, 291, 296–7, 299, 300, 302 colonialism  15, 17, 24, 74, 261, 275, 295, 318–19, 320, 321, 323, 325, 336 Comte, Auguste  6, 341 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 319–21 contagion  10, 23, 274, 286, 305 D’Annunzio, Gabriele  19, 42–3, 52–7, 59–60 Darwin, Charles  1, 2, 8–10, 15, 33–4, 36, 39–60, 63, 65–6, 71, 78, 90, 92, 94–6, 98, 103, 112–15, 121, 135–57, 161, 183, 279, 295 Descent of Man, The  44–5, 142–3, 150–1, 153–7, 263 On the Origin of Species  1, 33, 43, 44, 123, 145, 148, 263 Darwin, Erasmus  292–3, 302–3 Darwinism  3–5, 36, 43–5, 94–5, 139, 141, 378, 383

430 Index Dawkins, Richard Extended Phenotype, The 309 Selfish Gene, The 298 degeneration  15–16, 23–4, 45–6, 66, 73–4, 77–82, 120–1, 213, 238, 242, 249, 262, 269–70, 281, 285–6, 298–300 Dennett, Daniel Darwin’s Dangerous Idea 1–2 desire  13, 15, 19, 21, 22–3, 34, 39–60, 162–5, 189, 191–8, 202–3, 207, 217–18, 221, 224–5, 232, 235–56, 280–1, 330, 321, 327, 335 discourse(s)  8, 11–12, 15–16, 19–20, 23–5, 36, 60, 74, 77, 80–3, 100, 108, 120–1, 123, 136, 138–9, 149, 151, 156–8, 161, 164–5, 184, 190, 197, 200, 203–4, 206–7, 212, 215, 232, 236, 238–9, 243, 246, 249, 252, 255–6, 263, 265, 270, 273–4, 276, 279, 281–2, 285, 287–8, 293, 295–9, 303, 346, 349–50, 353, 358, 362, 398–9, 409 Döblin, Alfred  22, 215–19, 221, 228–9, 232–3, 399–400 Berlin Alexanderplatz 25–6, 397–419 Douglas, Mary Purity and Danger  293–4, 297, 306 Dunglison, Robley  301–2

76–83, 90, 92–3, 95–6, 100, 102–3, 113–15, 117, 120–2, 126–9, 139–40, 145–9, 152, 154, 161–2, 165, 183–4, 190, 194, 196–7, 206, 264, 278, 280–1, 284, 326–7, 341, 414, 417 Ewers, Hanns Heinz  22, 221–8, 230–3 experimental psychology  4, 24–5, 342, 346, 349–54, 357–9, 366–7, 368

Eliot, George  265 Eliot, T. S.  25, 350–1, 358–61 Waste Land, The  361–5, 367–8 Ellis, Havelock  115, 240, 253, 255 eroticism  53, 175, 178, 189–98, 202–4, 207, 335 eugenics  20, 114–15, 121, 125, 127, 129, 200, 204 evolution  2–3, 6, 9–10, 15, 19–20, 21–2, 33–6, 39–60, 63, 65–6, 71–4,

Gaier, Ulrich  8 Geddes, Patrick  276, 278 gender  16, 22, 161–2, 165, 192, 196, 206, 219, 221, 229–31, 236–8, 240–1, 245, 247, 252–5, 276–8, 281–5, 287 genetics  3, 21, 34, 76, 161, 201–3, 263 Gestalt psychology  342–3 Gilman, Sander Difference and Pathology 262

fascism  92, 97, 137, 262, 406 fatherhood  55–6, 126, 129, 282–3 Fechner, Gustav Theodor  342 feminism  35, 112, 115, 130, 162, 196, 261, 281 Flower, William  273 Fogazzaro, Antonio  19, 42, 46–8, 59–60 Forel, Auguste  23, 113, 117, 240, 242 Foucault, Michel  9, 11–12, 22, 164, 211–12, 239 Freud, Sigmund  4, 13, 40–1, 163, 191, 261, 262, 263, 303, 403 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 342 Ego and the Id, The 342 Interpretation of Dreams, The 334–5 Schreber Case, The 13 ‘Unconscious, The’  262 futurism  35, 41, 58–60, 63–6, 71–82

431

Index Gobineau, Arthur de  17, 128, 272–3, 279, 284–5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  122, 123 Gothic novel  16–17, 23, 270, 276, 278, 282, 286–8 Gould, Stephen Jay  271 Habermas, Jürgen  7, 136 Haeckel, Ernst  5, 18, 20, 33, 35, 87, 90–7, 101–8, 114, 122, 194, 326, 341, 376, 378, 401 Art Forms of Nature  372, 374–5 Natural History of Creation, The  3, 96 Riddle of the Universe, The 3 Haggard, H. Rider She  23, 270, 274–5, 277, 280, 281–8 Hartmann, Eduard von  4, 15, 40–1 Hedwig, Johannes  21, 179–81 Heidegger, Martin  344–5, 409 heredity  2, 10, 18, 21–2, 33–4, 41, 45, 56, 96, 101–2, 104, 107, 114, 129, 161, 200–1, 202, 213, 242, 263, 278–9, 285 heterosexuality  163, 251, 252, 255, 269 Hirschfeld, Magnus  23, 240–1, 253, 255 Hitler, Adolf  157, 273 Hofmeister, Wilhelm  21, 181–4 homosexuality  162, 235–6, 277 Huxley, Thomas Henry  5, 7, 44, 65, 68–70, 79–80 Ibsen, Henrik  265 Enemy of the People, An 266 imperialism  140, 144, 147, 157, 161–2, 282, 324–5 inheritance see heredity inversion see homosexuality James, William  342–3, 351–2 Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm  319

Jewish stereotype(s)  126–7, 129 Jewishness  116, 125, 128, 130, 203–5 Johannsen, Wilhelm  34 Kafka, Franz ‘Investigations of a Dog’  344 Key, Ellen  193 Koch, Robert  265 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von  280 Psychopathia Sexualis  13, 162–4, 213–15, 218–19, 224, 231, 232–3 Kristeva, Julia  16 Powers of Horror  261, 274, 276, 285–7 Küchenmeister, Friedrich  295 Lacan, Jacques  304 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste  73 Lamarckism 2 Lankester, Edwin Ray  78–9, 298–9 Lebensphilosophie  42, 341, 400 Levine, George  33 Lewes, George Henry  265 Linnaeus, Carl  21, 179–81, 270–1, 285–6 Lipps, Theodor  375 Lombroso, Cesare  44–5, 307 Marryat, Florence  288 Blood of the Vampire, The  23, 270, 274, 277–9, 281–2, 285–7 materialism  2, 90, 103, 141, 196, 341, 378, 409 Meisel-Hess, Grete  18, 20, 35–6, 111–30 Mendel, Gregor  2–3, 161 mesmerism  308, 312 miscegenation  17, 23, 270, 274, 275, 284–7 Mittelstraß, Jürgen  8 Möbius, Karl  25, 372, 381, 386, 388 Aesthetics of Animal Life, The 374–7

432 Index monism  3, 18, 20, 35–6, 90, 92, 105, 107, 111–16, 122–4, 129, 195–6, 203, 374, 378, 401 motherhood  100–1, 115, 119–20, 124–5, 130, 190–3, 196–8, 242 Müller, Robert  322–4 Macht 323 Tropen  24, 317–18, 321, 325–37 Münsterberg, Hugo  25, 343–4, 350–5, 359, 361–2, 367–8 Psychology and Industrial Efficiency 356–8 National Socialism  18, 33, 136–8, 147, 149, 150, 157 natural selection  1–4, 10, 15, 18, 21, 34, 36, 44, 65, 80, 138, 140–1, 143–6, 148, 151–2, 155, 157, 401 natural theology  9 Nazism see National Socialism Nietzsche, Friedrich  4, 190–1, 263, 265, 323, 331, 400 Beyond Good and Evil  264, 332 On the Genealogy of Morality 264, 332–4 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 331 Will to Power, The  39–40 Nordau, Max Degeneration  45–6, 77 parasitology  10, 24, 265, 291–300, 306–13 Pascoli, Giovanni  19, 42, 48–51, 57, 59–60 pathology  16, 22–3, 118, 164, 198, 211, 213–14, 215, 218, 228, 233, 269–70, 273, 27–77, 286 Popper, Karl  33 positivism  44–5, 105 projection(s) 262 psychoanalysis  13–14, 18, 24, 39, 48, 163–4, 190–1, 196, 207, 249–50, 334–5, 342

psychology  40, 46, 87, 89, 92, 94, 99, 102, 124, 165, 328, 333–4, 376 psychotechnics  5, 343, 350, 356–7, 362, 367 race  16–18, 23, 87, 90, 94–6, 101–2, 104, 107–8, 138, 140, 151, 156, 162, 204–6, 263, 270–9, 281–5, 287 racial stereotype(s)  261–2, 280, 323, 329–30 regeneration  307, 402, 410, 413–15 Renan, Ernest  261 reproduction  13, 14–15, 21, 115–17, 120–1, 130, 161–3, 165, 169, 179–81, 184, 190, 193, 195, 200, 213 Reuling, Josine  22–3, 237–8, 246–56 Rhind, William  293 Rilke, Rainer Maria  25, 193, 199, 382–3, 393–4, 408 Black Cat 392 Dog, The  371–2, 391–2 Gazelle, The 384–8 Panther, The  388–91 Rose Window, The 392–3 Rudolphi, Karl Asmund  292, 302 Ruskin, John  265, 291, 297–8 Said, Edward Orientalism  273, 282 Santner, Eric  400 On Creaturely Life  346, 407–8 Schaffner, Anna Katharina  13–14 Schopenhauer, Arthur  4, 15, 39–40, 42, 54, 55, 326 science popularization  34, 67–71 Serres, Michel  293, 313 sexology  13–14, 22–3, 162–4, 165, 190, 213–16, 230, 232–3, 236–46, 249, 255–6 sexual selection  33, 263 Shaffer, Elinor  8

433

Index Shapin, Steven  1 Showalter, Elaine Sexual Anarchy 282 Siebold, Karl Theodor Ernst von  295 Simmel, Georg ‘Metropolis and Mental Life, The’ 402 Snow, Charles Percy  5, 7–8 Two Cultures, The 5 social Darwinism  18, 44, 90, 114, 139 Soury, Jules  20, 35, 87–100, 102–8 Spencer, Herbert  6, 44, 99, 105, 106, 341 Stein, Gertrude  25, 350–3, 365–8 Sternberger, Dolf  20–1, 36, 135–57 Stifter, Adalbert  21, 169–85 Stöcker, Helene  115, 193 Stoker, Bram  23–24, 291, 300–6, 309–11 Dracula 307–8 Famous Impostors 310 Jewel of Seven Stars, The 309–10 Lair of the White Worm, The  24, 303, 310–13 ‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’  306–7 Primrose Path, The 305

Snake’s Pass, The 306 Under the Sunset 305 Taylor, Frederick Winslow  343, 356 Thomson, John Arthur  278 Uexküll, Jakob von  4, 25, 343–5, 383, 387–8, 409 Environment and Inner World of Animals  372, 377–82, 388, 391 Unconscious, the  4, 34, 36, 39–42, 60, 163, 192, 195–6, 198, 207, 262 vitalism  206–7, 341, 400, 413 vivisection  17, 155, 203 Vogt, Karl  17, 272, 281, 284 Weickart, Richard  33 Weininger, Otto Sex and Character  35, 112 Wells, H. G.  15 Time Machine, The  19–20, 35, 63–83 Wundt, Wilhelm  342–3, 351, 359 Zwierlein, Anne-Julia  6, 265

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY EDITORIAL BOARD: RODRIGO CACHO, SARAH COLVIN, KENNETH LOISELLE AND HEATHER WEBB This series promotes critical inquiry into the relationship between the literary imagination and its cultural, intellectual or political contexts. The series encourages the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through literature, visual culture and the performing arts. Contributions of a comparative or interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome. Individual volumes might, for example, be concerned with any of the following: •

The mediation of cultural and historical memory,

•

The material conditions of particular cultural manifestations,

•

The construction of cultural and political meaning,

•

Intellectual culture and the impact of scientific thought,

•

The methodology of cultural inquiry,

• Intermediality, •

Intercultural relations and practices.

Acceptance is subject to advice from our editorial board, and all proposals and manuscripts undergo a rigorous peer review assessment prior to publication. The usual language of publication is English, but proposals in the other languages shown below will also be considered.

For French studies, contact Kenneth Loiselle



For German studies, contact Sarah Colvin



For Hispanic studies, contact Rodrigo Cacho



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Vol. 1 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the C­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the C­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the C­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, ­Cambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4 Anthony Fothergill: Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad’s Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5 Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6 Renata Tyszczuk: In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Vol. 7 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Vol. 8 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 Alexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 Carlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 Monique Rinere: Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicissimus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 Anna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds): Playing False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 Vol. 21 Guy Tourlamain: Völkisch Writers and National Socialism. A Study of RightWing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960. 394pp., 2014. ISBN 978-3-03911-958-5 Vol. 22 Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds): Alternative Worlds. Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900. 343pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0

Vol. 23 Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel (eds): Invisibility Studies. Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture. 388pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0985-1 Vol. 24 Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds): Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. 349pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2 Vol. 25 Marjorie Gehrhardt: The Men with Broken Faces. Gueules Cassées of the First World War. 309pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1869-3 Vol. 26 David Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds): Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space. Borders, Networks, Escape Lines. 302pp., 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-2205-8 Vol. 27 Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds): Biological Discourses. The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900. 448pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-78-9