The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 9781666915709, 9781666915716, 9781666915723, 166691570X

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The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

ECOCRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Katarina Leppänen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists. Recent Titles The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism, edited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters, edited by Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives, edited by Scott Slovic, Joyjit Ghosh, and Samit Kumar Maiti An Ibero-American Perspective on Narratives of Pandemics, edited by Zélia M. Bora, Animesh Roy, and Ricardo Ballesteros de la Fuente The Animal Other in Narratives of Conquest: Uncanny Encounters, by Stacy Hoult The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II, by Dilek Bulut Sarikaya Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic, 1837–1871, by Nicole C. Dittmer Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism, by Keita Hatooka

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth, by Bénédicte Meillon Indian Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Nicole Anae Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises, edited by Sune Borkfelt and Matthias Stephan

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism Edited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-66691-570-9 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-66691-571-6 (electronic) ISBN 978-1-66691-572-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson SECTION I: OTHER SPECIES



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Chapter 1: The Outer Animals: Non-Othered Nonhumans in McTeague 13 Karin M. Danielsson Chapter 2: Jack London and the Perils of Human Exceptionalism Paul Crumbley Chapter 3: The Social Contract and Human-Animal Equality in Dreiser’s‌‌‌‌ “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” Patti Luedecke



31

45

Chapter 4: Extinction, Genocide, and Atomic Anxiety: Storks in Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro 63 Lisa Tyler SECTION II: LAND AND SEA



77

Chapter 5: Environment, Emotion, and the Individual in “The Open Boat” 79 Rob Welch Chapter 6: Anthropomorphism Reconsidered: Nature Faking in Jack London’s “All Gold Canyon” Paul Baggett

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Contents

Chapter 7: “Love” of the Land as Agrilogistic Tragedy in O Pioneers!: Hazards while Embracing Nonhumans Ryan Hediger SECTION III: CITYSCAPES AND PSEUDONATURE

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Chapter 8: Wharton’s Architectural Imagination in The House of Mirth 133 Daniel Dufournaud Chapter 9: Pseudonature in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth Jency Wilson

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Chapter 10: Naturalism’s Nonhuman Streets: Food and Waste in Ann Petry’s Writing Cara Erdheim Kilgallen

163

SECTION IV: IMAGE, OBJECT, TEXT

179



Chapter 11: Between Word and Image: Western Landscape and Photographic Rhetoric in Stephen Crane’s Prose Writing Francesca Razzi

181

Chapter 12: “The Cruel Radiance of What Is”: The Reality of Things in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 195 Markku Lehtimäki SECTION V: LAST THINGS



Chapter 13: Trouble with Human-Nonhuman Distinctions in Dreiser, London, Hamilton, and Dick Kenneth K. Brandt

211 213

Chapter 14: Davids and Goliaths: Last Days Reconciliation between Humans and Nonhumans in Don DeLillo’s Zero K and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos 229 Ingemar Haag Chapter 15: Writing What Remains: Naturalism and the Nonhuman after Nature in Sheri S. Tepper’s Plague of Angels Trilogy Stephanie Studzinski Index

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About the Contributors



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Acknowledgments

An edited collection like this is a joint effort and a complex venture which would be impossible to imagine without the wholehearted engagement and hard work of all involved. We would therefore like to thank, first, all the contributors, who responded so enthusiastically to our call for proposals, and who then delivered original, thoughtful and interesting essays—all valuable contributions for which we are truly grateful. We would also like to thank the Lexington editorial staff who answered all our questions and provided encouragment and support when we needed it, and who helped us produce a beautiful book. Karin would also like to thank the research council of the School of Education, Culture and Communication at her university MDU, who generously awarded her some much needed time for research in 2022, as well as her husband Per and border collies Dis and Yin, for all their love and support over the years. Last but not least she would like to express her gratitude to Ken who, without hesitation, accepted her proposal that he co-edit this collection. Ken’s generosity with his deep knowledge of American literary naturalism has been invaluable, and conversations with him on Zoom invariably a joy. Ken would like to thank his wife, Angela, and his daughter, Faye, for all their patience and help. He especially thanks Karin for inviting him to co-edit this volume and for her unshakable focus, perseverance, and encouragement that brought everything together in the pages that follow with exquisite insight and grace. Finally, Ken also acknowledges the inspirational guidance of Rosie, the cat who saved the day, and the Outlaw Belle Starr, a singular Aussalier.

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Introduction Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson‌‌‌

At the end of the nineteenth century, American authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, influenced by new advances in science—notably the idea of evolution— created a new school of writing which scholars most often have grouped under the rubric of American literary naturalism. The first wave of “classic” American naturalism began in the 1890s and extended roughly through the mid-1920s. Representative first-wave works include Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). The early naturalists were concerned with showing how their characters are shaped by heredity and environment. They were engrossed by the social and natural forces at play in the world, which was then (as now) in the throes of unpredictable environmental calamities, rapidly shifting technological changes, increasing industrial regimentation, and the stresses of urbanization. Though they did not ignore the spiritual and the mystical, the naturalists concentrated on the empirical, the observable, and the measurable. As Emile Zola ([1880] 1893) explained in his foundational treatise on naturalism, “The Experimental Novel,” the primary focus of the naturalists is on physical reality. According to Zola, the naturalistic writer must eschew attributing any events or actions to supernatural or divine intersession and embrace the monistic perspective that the forces and substances of the bio-physical world constitute the totality of existence. Zola maintains: In short, we must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the 1

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idealists and replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment. (172)

While Zola’s assertion here, that “Determinism governs everything” considerably overplays the usual practices of American literary naturalists, this totalizing pronouncement has inveigled more than a few commentators, especially the earlier ones, into making similarly extreme generalizations. Lars Åhnebrink (1950), for instance, inaccurately concluded that “a naturalist believes that man is fundamentally an animal without free will” (vii). The American literary naturalists created characters and narratives that were much more nuanced and complex than such reductive declarations admit. Typically, first-wave American naturalists did not refute free will, but they were interested in documenting how the forces operating in the physical world would push, prod, and often overwhelm their characters. Thus, biological and cultural determinants play more substantial roles in controlling human actions in naturalist plots than in earlier writers, especially the Victorians and realists. It is perhaps not surprising that traditional scholarship on American literary naturalism has focused on how the text represents a human subject under pressure from hereditary and environmental forces. Early on, V. L. Parrington ([1930] 1998) described naturalism as “pessimistic realism, with a philosophy that set man in a mechanical world and conceives of him as victimized by that world” (212). More recently, Donald Pizer (1995) maintains that the “core of naturalistic preoccupations . . . appears to rest on the relationship between a restrictive social and intellectual environment, and the consequent impoverishment both of social opportunity and of the inner life” (13). In the same vein, Richard Lehan (1995) writes that literary naturalism “depends upon a biological model, relying heavily on theories of evolution and devolution, seeing man as a product of his immediate environment” (65). Many scholars have also attempted to define genre conventions and frame a canon of American naturalism. Charles C. Walcutt ([1956] 1998) observed that “naturalism involved a continuous search for form” (289), while June Howard (1985) notes, “One must for the sake of economy of expression speak of ‘naturalism,’ and thus I may sometimes seem to suggest that an evolving entity exists somewhere, but my intent is rather to evoke a sense of naturalism as a mediating concept that enables us to perceive significant similarities and differences among texts” (30). For Eric Carl Link, writing in 2004, a text labeled “naturalistic” “simply indicates that it explores thematically, elements of philosophical and scientific naturalism” (19). Registering, among other things, the stylistic diversity found among naturalistic texts, Keith Newlin (2011) offers his expedient Blob account:

Introduction

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It useful to conceive of the naturalist novel as primarily a novel of ideas, functioning like the Blob in the 1958 science fiction movie of the same title— absorbing everything it can to propel the idea—and this capacity for absorption explains not only the varied plots and philosophies contained in naturalism but also the prevalence of the narrative strategies of realism, documentation, sensation, sentiment, and romance. (5)1

While an extensive body of research on American literary naturalism thus has focused on genre conventions, the thematic engagement with evolution and determinism, and the plot of decline, this has obscured other and equally strong concerns in naturalist text, such as the nonhuman animals, landscapes, cityscapes, and other entities that constitute the environmental forces affecting the humans. These concerns become noticeable first when we turn our eyes from the human characters, and study what surrounds them. In other words, much of the previous research on American literary naturalism has taken a decidedly anthropocentric approach to naturalistic texts. Therefore, the purpose of this collection is to offer another perspective that considers those under-researched aspects of American literary naturalism that can be gathered under the term “nonhuman.” THE NONHUMAN For the purposes of this collection, the nonhuman in American literary naturalism can be defined as that which has been obscured but becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or perhaps, temporarily at least, moved off-center. What then appears is the naturalist’s representation of other animals, but also of other vital or inert species, things, entities, or processes. Although the naturalists wrote about human characters, all these surrounding entities and concerns were also part of their worldview. Frank Norris, for example, often argued for an all-encompassing literature, true to life, and for authors who were attentive enough to create it: In “The Need of a Literary Conscience” ([1903] 2015), he advocates for truth, which he says, can be found everywhere. It is, he claims, “an actual workaday thing, as concrete as the lamp-post on the corner, as practical as a cable-car, as real and homely and workaday and commonplace as a bootjack. . . . Or look from your window. A whole Literature goes marching by, clamouring for a leader and a master hand to guide it” (2319–2320). Indeed, this is not a concern only for literature: Timothy Morton (2007), drawing on Bruno Latour’s concept of the extended collective, claims, in similar words, that “[a]ll kinds of beings, from toxic waste to sea snails, are clamoring for our scientific, political and artistic attention” (17).

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Philosophy, as well as literary and cultural theory now enable us to look out from our windows and pay attention to these nonhuman entities who were always an integral part of naturalist literature but have so far either been neglected or considered as representations of allegorical or metaphorical humans or human functions. Thus several of the contributors to this collection engage with thinkers who prompt us to look at places, transformations, relationships, and creatures in their own right, and not only (though sometimes also) in as far as they relate to the human characters. COLLECTION OVERVIEW Section I, “Other Species,” provides wide-ranging portrayals of the nonhuman in American literary naturalism. In various ways, these essays show how the authors (Norris, London, Dreiser, and Hemingway) adapt their narrative focus to create intricate and sometimes symbiotic relationships across various landscapes and species—including dogs, a mule, birds, and ants. Together, these essays recover nonhuman animals from critical practices that typically relegate their presences to the interpretive margins or consign them to function as symbolic props. These essays work toward reseeing these important nonhuman participants as significant narrative elements on their own terms. Karin M. Danielsson’s opening essay provides a cogently informed study of the nonhuman centered on Frank Norris’s involved depiction of animals in his novel McTeague (1899). Danielsson details how Norris recurrently explores other species in his educated descriptions of individual nonhumans (two dogs and a mule to be exact) and reveals how their described species-specific action is often contrasted—rather than compared—to that of his human characters’ beastly activities. This perspectival shift away from anthropomorphic allegory and metaphor epitomizes the decisive nonhuman critical move beyond human-centered subjectivity. Danielson’s essay demonstrates how much of the work of nonhuman studies centers on a long overdue and ecologically sensitive “de-humanizing” of literary scholarship. Along similar lines, Paul Crumbley focuses on the need to reject human exceptionalism and embrace an ethic of interdependence between the human and nonhuman. Drawing on the ideas of Timothy Buell, Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and others, Crumbley reads Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire” (1908) as a species-based cautionary tale. He shows that the “man” in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” dies because of an arrogance born of ecological obtuseness. Crumbley also examines how London relates a rebalanced masculinity to an environmentally attentive version of manliness in his novel Burning Daylight (1910). This renewed version of masculinity eschews aggression and competitiveness for an identity that reflects a more enriched

Introduction

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(and less biologically destructive) connection between the male and female and the human and the nonhuman. Moving along into the world of insects, Patti Luedecke analyzes Theodore Dreiser’s ant story “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” (1901) through the lens of social contract theory, revealing how Dreiser’s depictions of appetite-driven animal behavior encourage more than just human socio-political arrangements. Applying the ideas of social contract theorists Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and integrating the more recent theoretical work of Michael Lundblad in the field of animal studies, Luedecke demonstrates that Dreiser and the contract theorists held complex ideas regarding the capacities for deliberation and choice in nonhuman animals, which complicate the disparities of the conventional man-beast binary. Next, shifting to the avian realm, Lisa Tyler examines Ernest Hemingway’s evocative references to storks in his posthumously published nonfiction novel Under Kilimanjaro (2005). Integrating an array of ideas from Ryan Hediger, Robert E. Gajdusek, and Martin Heidegger, Tyler convincingly argues that Hemingway’s references to the fluctuating stork and other bird populations, reveal his cultural fears and extinction anxieties for humanity in the aftermath of World War II, the holocaust, and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the ongoing atomic testing in the1950s. The chapters in Section II, “Land and Sea,” share a concentrated focus on seascape and landscape. Rob Welch’s “Environment, Emotion, and the Individual in ‘The Open Boat’” (1897) supplies a discerning ecological reading of Stephen Crane’s story. Applying affect theories from Weik von Mossner and Theresa Brennan, Welch re-prioritizes the critical focus and positions readers to more fully appreciate the nonhuman primacy of nature in the story. He shows how the story’s sense of perspectival exteriority (a recurring narrative technique in literary naturalism) is crucial to capturing the full dimensionality of the nonhuman in the story. For Crane, the most powerful determinant is the environment. And although Welch does not claim that the author had explicit ecological designs in the “Open Boat,” he does contend that Crane critiques the limiting influences on human perception that might occlude life-saving conceptions of environmental realities. Paul Baggett examines two forms of anthropomorphism in Jack London’s story “All Gold Canyon” (1906). The first is a “crude” form of anthropomorphism practiced by the miner Bill in the story. London associates Bill with a limited perception of the natural world and with unregulated capitalism and environmental destruction. But, London also invites, from the omniscient narrator’s perspective, an anti-anthropocentric viewpoint that disrupts the dichotomous human/ nonhuman duality exemplified by Bill, who only sees the canyon in terms of the gold it can yield. Untainted by an overriding desire for material gain, this

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larger perspective accentuates human-nonhuman interconnections that Bill’s human and profit-centric vision fails to apprehend. Next, Ryan Hediger considers Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1913) in terms of how the destructive, human-generated binary oppositions that erupt in the novel place human flourishing and nonhuman flourishing into needless conflict with each other. Utilizing the work of Melissa Ryan, Timothy Morton, Louise H. Westling, and others, the essay shows how the logic of agricultural business practices ravage the environment. However, as Hediger deftly clarifies, they also have devastating effects on the human relationships in the novel. Yet, the opposite is also hypothetically possible through thoughtful cultivation of anti-anthropocentric cultural practices that create the continuity necessary for human and the nonhuman to flourish in mutually beneficial ways. Since naturalist writers and their writing are quite as at home in the big cities, as in the wilderness, we specifically wanted to include essays on urban aspects of the nonhuman. In Section III, “Cityscapes and Pseudonature,” we collect three essays whose nonhuman focus is on the city of New York, and some of what it comprises: buildings, parks, streets, food, and waste. It includes two chapters on Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (1905), and one on Ann Petry’s The Street (1946). Daniel Dufournaud reads Wharton’s novel with Jacques Derrida’s and Cary Wolfe’s deconstructive works on architecture and posthumanism, respectively. Dufournaud’s reading begins with the idea that Wharton’s architectural metaphors, which are so noticeable—not only in the title of The House of Mirth—are suggestive of her notion that architecture and embodied action are inextricably linked. The chapter elaborates on this in a series of analyses of spatial situatedness, not only of Lily Bart, but finally also of Edith Wharton herself. In Jency Wilson’s reading of The House of Mirth, attention is focused on the kind of city spaces designed to emulate nature, or at least create a vague resemblance of it, in between streets and buildings. Wilson, who reads the novel with feminist materialist theorists Stacey Alaimo and Karen Barad, shows that this liminal pseudonature is conducive to a passionate behavior that other city spaces prohibit. Above all, though, her analysis emphasizes the illusion of pseudonature, and calls it a “consolation prize for the loss of the thing obscured by human progress—that unspoiled feminized body of land which was the object of a collective cultural fantasy of escape.” Ann Petry’s The Street, published forty-one years after The House of Mirth, offers a very different representation of New York, but a similar naturalist mode of determinism and decline. Cara Erdheim Kilgallen, seeing a need for further ecocritical readings of twentieth-century black women’s writing, offers a new materialist analysis of this novel, and one of Ann Petry’s short stories, “Mother Africa” (1971). Thus, our attention is brought to depictions

Introduction

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of food and cooking, the lack of food, and the waste and trash littering the streets of Harlem. Kilgallen points to the juxtaposition of excess and scarcity, familiar to the reader of classic naturalist texts, but also to the, perhaps surprising, restorative role that the natural force of weather, for instance, plays in Petry’s urban prose. In Section IV, “Image, Object, Text,” we move out of the city, onto the wide-open spaces of the American West, and the dusty cotton fields of the rural South. The chapters in this section have a photographic focus: first on the photographic style of Stephen Crane’s prose, and then on Agee’s and Evans’s book of photographs and text that in many ways became the defining representation of the American Depression. Francesca Razzi’s essay investigates Crane’s indebtedness to photography by analyzing the conflicting interactions between nonhuman landscape and human agency in two short stories and two pieces of journalistic writing. Razzi shows how Crane, in his subjective camera-style of writing, acknowledges but then profoundly revises the frontier myth of the West, particularly the significance of human agency within the natural environment. Markku Lehtimäki engages in a materialist reading of the James Agee and Walker Evans’s photodocumentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which he considers “a seminal object centered book in American naturalism and modernism.” Drawing on Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” and Jane Bennett’s Vital Matter, Lehtimäki aims to situate the human tenants in the material reality of nonhuman lives and inanimate objects and reveal the materiality and meaning of these objects as they appear in both photographs and writing. The essays in Section V, “Last Things,” focus primarily on post-first-wave works of American literary naturalism. Most texts considered here are identifiable as science fiction (SF). This genre dynamically extends many naturalistic subjects and themes, such as evolution, scientific rationalism, and a focus on the nonhuman, often in the form of extraterrestrial beings. Works in the tradition of naturalistic-oriented SF continue to become increasingly relevant as advances in AI, genetic engineering, and surveillance technologies, to name a few, persistently change and reshape education, work, and media, as well as nonhuman and human evolution. Kenneth K. Brandt’s essay investigates how first-wave naturalists (Dreiser and London) and later SF writers (Hamilton and Dick) portray the nonhuman vestige or entity within the human self. Incorporating the work Giorgio Agamben, Brandt first explores the inner nonhuman as described in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Jack London’s The Star Rover. The essay is concerned mainly with the social problems and indeterminacies that emerge when one attempts to define humans as uniquely distinct from nonhuman animals. Brandt discusses variations on this concept in Edmond Hamilton’s 1931 story “The Man Who Evolved” and Philip K. Dick’s 1953 story “Beyond Lies the Wub.” In the next chapter, “Davids and

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Goliaths: Last Days Reconciliation between Humans and Nonhumans in Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos”(1986), Ingemar Haag scrutinizes the apocalyptic trope in play in these novels with the help of philosophers Latour, Levinas, Haraway, and others. Haag points to how, even in DeLillo’s arguably hyper-anthropocentric cryo-preservation plot, and certainly in Vonnegut’s futuristic story of human evolution, nonhuman animals intrude and enable a coexistence, or being-with, as a possible solution. He concludes that, although these authors are seen as modern representatives of naturalism, this denotes a shift in position regarding our animal origins. For these authors, he claims, animality is treated as something that will hopefully become of us in the future. In the last chapter, Stephanie Studzinski centers on Sheri S. Tepper’s Plague of Angels trilogy. The Plague of Angels trilogy consists of A Plague of Angels (1993), The Water’s Rising (2010), and Fish Tails (2014). Tepper’s novels are among the most recent texts analyzed in this collection. They present a rare instance where the author’s thematic concerns coincide with many of the major ideas underlying nonhuman studies. Her novels specifically address environmental concerns, speciesism, and the necessity of stable human-nonhuman interrelationships. Studzinski explores how Tepper’s worldbuilding negates human exceptionalism and, instead, offers a new vision of how the future of human evolution will include an engineering program that allows humans and nonhumans to swap attributes—a process that will necessitate a more comprehensive recognition of our own “nonhumanness” and the “humanness” of nonhuman. We, the editors, chose to pursue this project because we recognized the need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and texts associated with American literary naturalism. Our aim in organizing this collection of theoretically innovative scholarly perspectives by an international team of scholars on the nonhuman was to meaningfully enhance the study of American literary naturalism and productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. Though the focus in naturalism studies has customarily concentrated on the human, we hope this volume will offer scholars examples of ways to reshape and enlarge critical perspectives beyond our humancentric inclinations. NOTES 1. A number of recent critics, who Christophe Den Tandt (2011) identifies as “postmodern” (404) have developed substantial and provocative challenges to pervious definitions of literary naturalism. In his essay “Refashioning American Literary Naturalism: Critical Trends at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” he summarizes:

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“The postmodernist characterization of naturalism contradicts the classical definitions in all respects. In June Howard’s, Walter Benn Michaels’s, Amy Kaplan’s, Rachel Bowlby’s, or Mark Seltzer’s essays, naturalism no longer demystifies the hardships of urban capitalism: it glorifies the culture of consumerism. Instead of charitably expanding the scope of literary representation in order to include depictions of urban poverty, it portrays subaltern populations as subhuman, ethnically alien outcasts” (405).

REFERENCES Åhnebrink, Lars. 1950. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction: A Study of the Works of Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris with Special Reference to Some European Influences, 1891–1903. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Den Tandt, Christophe. 2011. “Refashioning American Literary Naturalism: Critical Trends at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, edited by Keith Newlin, 404–423. New York: Oxford University Press. Howard, June. 1985. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Lehan, Richard. 1995. “The European Background.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, edited by Donald Pizer, 47–73. New York: Cambridge University Press. Link, Eric Carl. 2004. The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Newlin, Keith. 2011. “Introduction: The Naturalistic Imagination and the Aesthetics of Excess.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, edited by Keith Newlin, 3–17. New York: Oxford University Press. Norris, Frank. (1903) 2015. “The Need of a Literary Conscience.” Complete Works of Frank Norris (Illustrated), 2319–2320. United Kingdom: Delphi Classics. Parrington, V. L. (1930) 1998. “Naturalism in American Literature.” In Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, edited by Donald Pizer, 211–214. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Pizer, Donald. 1995. “Introduction: The Problem of Definition.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, edited by Donald Pizer, 1–18. New York: Cambridge University Press. Walcutt, Charles C. ([1956] 1998). “Some Criteria of Literary Naturalism.” In Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, edited by Donald Pizer, 288– 290. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Zola, Emile. (1880) 1893. “The Experimental Novel.” In The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Translated by Belle M. Sherman, 1–54. New York: Cassell Publishing Company.

SECTION I

Other Species

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Chapter 1

The Outer Animals Non-Othered Nonhumans in McTeague Karin M. Danielsson

INTRODUCTION Frank Norris (1879–1902) was one of the first Americans to write in the school of literary naturalism, and Norris’s second novel, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, has become one of American literary naturalism’s signature works. One reason for this is that McTeague features one of naturalism’s main motifs, the animal in the man, or, the inner beast, which has been widely discussed by scholars, although predominantly in an anthropocentric mode, focusing not so much on the inner animal as on its effects on the outer man. The prevalence of this motif has often been assigned to Norris’s interest in evolution, which resulted in texts that explore the prehuman, atavistic origins of human emotions and actions (see e.g., Bert Bender 1999, 73, and Donald Pizer (1965) 2018, 56). Pizer has also pointed out that Norris’s theory of evolution was not so much Darwinian as influenced by the evolutionary ethical dualism of Joseph Le Conte, Norris’s professor at Berkeley ([1961] 2018, 36–37). Nevertheless, although Norris thus was not a pure materialist but believed that man was body and soul, Pizer claims that he “held that . . . the body was the result of man’s evolution from animal life” (36). More recently, Pizer (2000) has added to the discussion of the inner brute motif, the argument that the motif also is Norris’s shrewd capitalization on “a folk-based fear of the presence of the animal in man” rooted in the conventional Western belief that what makes humans different from the animals is the capacity for rational thought and behavior (22). In this focus on the exceptionality of humans, and on the human body, however, the research neglects Norris’s obvious interest 13

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also in nonhuman behavior, which he, I claim, often represents as rather more rational and comprehensible than that of the humans. Another approach to the inner beast motif in naturalism is the view of the brute as the Other, as a manifestation of all that is irrational, unfamiliar, stigmatized, and lower class, an argument put forward by June Howard (1985). She claims that “the naturalists remind us of a world in which actions and meanings are constantly seen in terms of class . . . focused in American naturalism’s notion of the brute” (x), while also pointing to the necessity of taking into account “the perspective from which those characters are viewed, the observant and articulate naturalist in close conference with his reader” (x). Howard extends the perceived beastliness in naturalism to all working class or foreign characters, claiming that the text helps us identify them as such by its representation of their actions as vulgar or brutal and their speech as non-standard (105–106). Howard’s analysis is valuable for my essay in that it demonstrates not only the otherness of human characters, but the importance of the narrator’s and the reader’s perspective, both of which are significant in my reading of Norris’s nonhuman characters. While Pizer, Bender, and Howard all confine their discussions to the genre of naturalism and its main authors, Michael Lundblad (2013) in The Birth of a Jungle historicizes the discourse of animality in a range of American literature and culture from the turn of the century. He argues that the motif of the inner animal is part of a broader discourse of animality and the jungle that became prevalent in the United States during the progressive era, and that influenced a wide range of political and ethical ideas. In a chapter on Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair, Lundblad “explores the relationship between animality and the working class” (92) but shows also “how the nature of the beast could be constructed rather differently in more privileged characters” (92). Thus, in Lundblad’s reading of Norris novel The Octopus (1901) he discusses the rancher Annixter’s obsession with and near sexual assault on his servant and love interest, Hilma Tree—and his rivalry in this pursuit with Delaney—as an example of how Annixter tames his inner brute by adhering to Christian values and the comforts of marriage (101). Interestingly, Lundblad makes no mention of the buckskin mare who is the two men’s first object of rivalry. This is a horse whose nervous behavior shows interesting similarities with that of Hilma Tree, and who is present, and active, in many pivotal scenes in The Octopus, including the one when Annixter’s fumbling advances on Hilma are mistaken for a marriage proposal, and the scene with the fatal fight at the irrigation ditch (Danielsson 2008, 26). Lundblad’s omission of this quite prominent nonhuman character does not stand out in previous research on Norris, which has all but ignored the outer animals. Other than my discussion of the buckskin (2008), the only

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discussion of her, or other horses in Norris that I have been able to find, is a brief comment and footnote in an article by Robert Micklus (1981), contrasting Presley’s choice of bicycle or pony to Annixter’s and the other men’s horses (120–121). David McGlynn (2008) mentions another animal character—McTeague’s canary—although his argument is that the bird in its cage is a key metaphor for McTeague’s “urban imprisonment” (25), and not that it is significant as a nonhuman character. Metaphorical interpretations may be valid but must be seen as incomplete, according to John Simons (2002), since “the use of the animal experience as a metaphor for the human is [also] a major vehicle for the expression of the non-human” (59). In other words, the nonhuman is by necessity also there, but it may take a deliberately non-anthropocentric analysis to demonstrate it, and to note the significance of what the animal is doing. The anthropocentric focus which so far has dominated the Norris research, has therefore failed to notice that Norris, in several works, and certainly in McTeague, is concerned not only with the inner animal, manifestations of a prehuman past in current human behavior, but also with the behavior of actual nonhuman animal characters. These nonhumans are present in the text, they play important parts in the plot and they are, perhaps surprisingly, represented by Norris not as brutish Others, but as familiar, rational beings acting in their own interest. Before I turn to close readings of how these nonhuman characters’ behavior is represented, and how they function in the texts, I want to first, address the question of why Norris wrote about animals, and then relate my analysis to animal studies and narrative theory. One reason Norris included so many nonhuman animals in his writing is probably that he liked animals—dogs and horses in particular—and enjoyed writing about them. In McElrath’s and Crislers biography (2006), Norris’s interest in horses is apparent, especially in the section describing his time at the California School of Design when Norris was in his late teens. Norris’s fellow student there, Ernest Peixotto, is quoted as explaining how the two friends used to spend time at the Presidio military reservation, where, by the stables, they “used to sit by the hour, and sketch the heads and rumps, the knee joints and flexible fetlocks of the restless horses” (71). Judging from later remembrances of Norris, his love for horses was still strong when he came to Europe (73), and among the memories of Norris that were collected after his death, several mention Norris in connection with horses and dogs (Crisler and McElrath 2013, e.g., 82, 88, 96, 143). I argue that Norris’s descriptions of, for example, the averted dog fight or the frightened mule’s antics in McTeague, support these testimonies of Norris as a keen observer of animals and their behavior. Norris’s animal characters may also have been the result of his taking influence from popular animal stories by Rudyard Kipling and Richard Harding Davis, for example in Norris’s “The Coverfield Sweepstakes” from 1890

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(as mentioned by Crisler and McElrath 2006, 143–144) and in “The Most Noble Conquest of Man” from 1894 in which Norris includes perceptive and detailed descriptions of horse behavior (Danielsson 2008). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was also a growing interest in nature stories, particularly after Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known had been published in 1898. In Norris’s essay “The Nature Revival in American Literature,” Norris names Seton’s work as a model, and a refreshing contrast to the refined, city-based, literary novels of the preceding decades, which even when they were set in the country, Norris claimed, were too refined and literary. “The ‘literature’ in them suffocated the life, and the humans with their everlasting consciences . . . filled all the horizon, admitting the larks and the robins only as accessories; considering the foxes, the deer and the rabbits only as creatures to be killed” (Norris in Pizer 1964, loc 1207). According to Norris, Seton and others in contrast had “opened a door, opened a window, and mere literature has had to give place to life,” (loc 1207). No doubt Norris recognized a kindred spirit in Seton, and it seems likely that the reading public of this time who enjoyed Seton’s animal stories also noticed and enjoyed Norris’s fiction with animal characters. Timothy Baker (2019) characterizes literary animal studies as focusing “both on the relation between real and imagined animals and on the degree to which imagined animals are inherently textual productions” (8). A vital part of the present study of the representation of animal characters in McTeague is Baker’s first point, namely my recognition of Norris’s animals as having real life referents. They have been meticulously drawn from living dogs and mules and given characteristics in looks and above all behavior—mimetic dimensions—that together help create “the illusion of a plausible person” as James Phelan puts it (1989, 11), only in this case they are of course plausible dogs and mules. It is exactly the plausibility of these animals as members of their species that enable their function in the novel as contrasts to certain human characters, a part of my analysis to which I will return. Baker’s second point, about the degree to which the animals are textual constructs is of course also very relevant. The literary nonhuman animal is by necessity a very human construction, created as it is by human language. Nevertheless, Baker’s claim that “the appearance of nonhuman animals in fiction challenges the stability of linguistic representation” (10) is relevant and encouraging, especially since it points to the very dissimilar ways in which animal behavior can be textually constructed, and the difference this makes for how we read and understand them. Human readers might be programmed by evolution to read both real and fictional characters’ minds, attempt to understand their actions, and recognize their behavior as something we might do in the same situation; at least this is claimed by Lisa Zunshine (2006) and Porter H. Abbott (2008). Given that

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neither human authors nor human readers know what it is like to be of another species, anthropomorphism, the representation of nonhuman cognition and behavior in terms of the human, is often the way both real and fictional animal minds are constructed. Fictional animal narrators, such as Anna Sewell’s horse in Black Beauty ([1877] 1963) might be considered more anthropomorphized than animal focalizers, such as Jack London’s wolf-dog in White Fang (1906), but it is a difference of degree not of kind. Although anthropomorphism may induce, as Sewell hoped, “kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses” (Putman 1963, 2) or convey the idea that dogs and wolves are not automatons, but are “directed by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning” as London puts it in his essay “The Other Animals” (1910), it is not without challenges. Anthropomorphized animal characters risk appearing as overly familiar, or their living conditions as too straightforward, which may cause misinterpretation, mistreatment, or neglect, as Erica Fudge (2002), Sarah McFarland and Ryan Hediger (2009) have shown. On the other hand, non-anthropomorphized, really unreadable animal minds, appearing as truly Other, risk being reduced to symbols or metaphors of human predicaments (Marco Caracciolo 2020) and of losing their status as subjects and agents. Tom Tyler (2009), furthermore, argues that anthropomorphism is an anthropocentric idea that makes little sense without a fundamental belief in human uniqueness, “which restricts what we can think both about human being and about the being of other animals” (24). In what follows, I argue that Norris typically does not anthropomorphize his animal characters, but neither does he leave his reader without textual clues for how to interpret their behavior. The difference that the textual representation of animal behavior can make is the argument of Eileen Crist’s Images of Animals (1999) in which she investigates texts on animal behavior by Charles Darwin and later naturalists and behaviorists. Her study illustrates how representation can transform the reader’s perception of a nonhuman individual from that of a mindless object to that of a purposeful subject, whose “actions are experientially meaningful and actively authored” (40), for instance, by systematically representing “action as performed by, rather than happening to the animal” (40). This is the kind of representation Norris affords the animals in McTeague. In what follows I will demonstrate how Norris’s nonhuman characters are neither anthropomorphized nor plain unreadable but represented as actors with an identifiable, meaningful intent, and readable to anyone who, like Norris, is familiar with dogs and horses. While their behavior is sometimes experienced by some of the human focalizers as surprising or vexing, this is only ostensibly so, since those humans are already othered, and their difference from the implied reader and the “privileged spectator” emphasized in their brutish language and behavior (cf. Howard 1995, 118–119). In contrast,

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the actions that the nonhuman characters engage in are represented as choices made within the genetic and social constraints they have, and therefore interpreted as normal, familiar, by the implied reader. In this the behavior of the nonhuman resembles that of Norris’s middle-class characters, whose familiarity, Howard claims, needs no explanation, but can be taken for granted (89). One implication of this is that the nonhumans’ species-specific activities therefore can be contrasted—rather than compared—to those of Norris’s human characters, and this in a way that makes some humans appear considerably less civilized than the nonhumans; in fact, the contrast emphasizes the abnormal behavior of the human brutes. THE GREYHOUNDS, THE SETTER, AND THE COLLIE A dog in Norris’s fiction is very rarely just a dog, it is typically of a specific breed, and often a setter, collie, or greyhound. By the time McTeague ([1899] 1986) was written (sometime between 1895 and 1898), dog sports had long been popular in the United States, especially coursing with greyhounds, and field trials with setters and pointers. Field Dog Stud Book, the oldest pure bred dog registry in the United States, started registering field dogs (such as setters) in 1874 (American Field). Dog shows and dog trials in California were announced, and their results reported, in Breeder and Sportsman, a weekly paper published between 1882 and 1919 (Biodioversity Heritage Library). Breeder and Sportsman is also one of the publications that Mr. Grannis, McTeague’s neighbor, takes a pleasure in binding into books (287). It seems therefore very likely that Norris had come across the paper and not unthinkable that he had attended greyhound coursing, collie shows and setter trials, and was familiar with these breeds. It is exactly the familiarity with which these dogs are represented—and how their representation is contrasted with that of some human characters—that is so notable in McTeague. Although McTeague does not own a dog, only a stone pug that sits by his fireside (265), there are several dogs in his neighborhood. One of the first to appear is a black greyhound owned by the Sieppe family, a German-Swisse couple with four children, one of whom is Trina, soon to be Mrs. McTeague. The Sieppes—on their way to a picnic in a public park—are very notably foreign in habits and speech: “‘Owgooste!’ Mr Sieppe shouted to the little boy with the black greyhound, ‘you will der hound und basket number three carry. Der tervins,’ he added, calling to the two smallest boys, who were dressed exactly alike, ‘will releef one unudder mit der camp-stuhl und basket number four. Dat is comprehend, hay?’” (309) The loud foreignness of the owners contrasts strongly with their greyhound, kept on a rope in this scene: a quiet, English breed which does not

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need to be described to Norris’s implied reader, but whose familiar presence emphasizes the Sieppes’ otherness, especially when we learn how the Sieppes treat it at home: In the back yard was a contrivance for pumping water from the cistern that interested McTeague at once. It was a dog-wheel, a huge revolving box in which the unhappy black greyhound spent most of his waking hours. It was his kennel; he slept in it. From time to time during the day Mrs. Sieppe appeared on the back doorstep, crying shrilly, “Hoop, hoop!” She threw lumps of coal at him, waking him to his work. (317)

Keeping a greyhound—an elegant muscular animal bred for speed and open spaces—confined in a box is not only incongruous but inhuman. The fact that the black greyhound is treated inhumanely by his brutish foreign owners is further emphasized when McTeague notices another greyhound, owned by McTeague’s rival dentist, a middle-class person with a more refined clientele than McTeague, and, as we are told repeatedly in McTeague’s envious free-indirect voice, a “rider of bicycles and courser of greyhounds” (298, 367). This greyhound individual, although it is used for open field coursing, has pampered indoors quarters: “A little fire coughed and tittered on the hearth, a brindled greyhound sat on his haunches watching it intently” (498) as McTeague notices when he visits his rival’s surgery. The rival’s coursing of greyhounds, and his greyhound’s resting by the fire, are noted but unmarked and unexplained and serve as contrasts to the explicitly reported cruelty and foreignness of the Sieppes’ treatment of their greyhound. Two more dog characters, an Irish setter and a Scotch collie, play a similar role in a more extended scene. The scene is set up to contrast the dogs’ behavior with that of the human onlookers and with a similar scene with human characters, later in the same chapter. Trina, McTeague’s wife, is leaning out of the window, chatting to Miss Baker, and notices the setter Alexander (owned by McTeague’s friend Mark Schouler) turning into the street and going in the direction of another dog, the neighboring collie (415). Trina who, we should remember, is characterized as an extremely miserly woman of German-Swisse origins—as othered in her way as her oafish husband is in his—expects a dog fight and tells Miss Baker to watch out. The scene that follows—in its entirety about a book page long—shows the dogs’ meeting and their behavior in detail, and reveals Norris’s familiarity with dogs and dog behavior: Meanwhile, the collie and the setter had drawn near to each other; five feet apart they paused as if by mutual consent. The collie turned sidewise to the setter; the setter instantly wheeled himself flank on to the collie. Their tails rose and stiffened, they raised their lips over their long white fangs, the napes of their

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necks bristled, and they showed each other the vicious whites of their eyes, while they drew in their breaths with prolonged and rasping snarls. Each dog seemed to be the personification of fury and unsatisfied hate. They began to circle about each other with infinite slowness, walking stiffed-legged and upon the very points of their feet. Then they wheeled about and began to circle in the opposite direction. Twice they repeated this motion, their snarls growing louder. But still they did not come together, and the distance of five feet between them was maintained with an almost mathematical precision. It was magnificent, but it was not war. (415–416)

This can be compared to an early description of dog behavior, from Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1899): “the appearance of a dog approaching another dog with hostile intentions, namely, with erected ears, eyes intently directed forward, hair on the neck and back bristling, gait remarkably stiff, with the tail upright and rigid” (ch. 5). Darwin notes that this behavior is very familiar to us, and this is a likely reason why Norris included this scene; he knew what it meant and expected his reader to do so, too. Since then, the science of ethology has developed and made it possible to describe animal behavior from an evolutional point of view in more detail. An ethological reading of this scene thus notes that the setter and the collie display agonistic behavior, that is, behavior intended to “divide or defend resources” (in this case the territory of the street corner) in competition with conspecifics (Miklósi 2007, 171). Turning sideways, raising lips and tails, raising the hairs on their necks and walking stiff-legged are all behaviors included in a complex system of signals. This system has evolved since fighting “involves not only gains but also costs” (171) and evolution favors behavior that prolongs life and a chance to procreate. In this case, the behavior signals size, which is significant since if the contest became a fight, the bigger dog would probably win. Signaling thus means that a fight may not be necessary. In the situation described by Norris, the fight is indeed avoided when one dog shows submissive signals (Miklósi 172), which are immediately recognized and responded to in kind: Then the setter, pausing in his walk, turned his head slowly from his enemy. The collie sniffed the air and pretended an interest in an old shoe lying in the gutter. Gradually and with all the dignity of monarchs they moved away from each other. Alexander stalked back to the corner of the street. The collie paced toward the side gate whence he had issued, affecting to remember something of great importance. They disappeared. Once out of sight of one another they began to bark furiously. ([1899] 1986, 416)

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The last detail, the fact that agonistic behavior can be safely resumed when the risk of a physical encounter has passed, is also typical behavior for dogs, and can be explained by the fact that their “resource holding potential” increases when they are back in their own territory, which increases their motivation and chance of winning a dispute (Miklósi 171–172). The scene is intriguing for several reasons. First, there is some anthropomorphism here: the dogs “pretend an interest” and part with “the dignity of monarchs,” but there is no focalization on the part of the dogs; we see them from a distance. More importantly, they are represented as performing subjects, agents engaging in species-specific agonistic signal displays which they then choose to adjust when the situation demands it. Alexander turns his head, the collie sniffs the air; these are actions performed by subjects, not happening to them. Even the brief anthropomorphization “affecting to remember” has the effect of adding purpose to the action performed. These behaviors are described in detail but apparently need very little explanation in human terms. The dogs are not othered in this scene, rather the opposite, their behavior is meant to be familiar. Mario Ortez Robles (2016) claims that “dogs, cats, horses and songbirds tend to be portrayed in literature as familiar beings, whose strangeness . . . only compels us to examine our own ideological investments, . . . in an oblique and thereby simplified manner,” (147) in other words, that their familiarity removes their status of animal alterity. I disagree, however, because Norris’s representation of these dogs as recognizable does not diminish the fact that they are vividly described as dogs, and that, as I will show, their behavior differs from that of the human onlookers. I would suggest that the dogs’ methodical and controlled interaction in this scene provides a contrast to what follows immediately afterward, namely the vulgar and violent reactions of the human protagonists: “‘Well, I NEVER!’ exclaimed Trina in great disgust. ‘The way those two dogs have been carrying on you’d ‘a’ thought they would ‘a’ just torn each other to pieces when they had the chance, and here I’m wasting the whole morning’—she closed her window with a bang” ([1899] 1986, 416). Trina considers the morning wasted because she did not get to witness a fight, and Marcus Schouler, Alexander’s owner, flies into a rage when he hears about the dog’s behavior: “‘I’ll cut him in two—with the whip,’ he shouted. ‘I will, I will, I say I will, for a fact. He wouldn’t fight, hey? I’ll give um all the fight he wants, nasty, mangy cur. If he won’t fight he won’t eat. I’m going to get the butcher’s bull pup and I’ll put um both in a bag and shake um up. I will, for a fact, and I guess Alec will fight’” (417). This scene might be seen as an ironic comment on the often-argued point about language as an unnegotiable boundary between human and nonhuman, here in the words of Timothy Baker (2019): “Humanity is defined by the ability to create a linguistic category which

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subsumes other species differences, and to which the living beings placed in that category cannot respond” (9). By contrasting these biologically familiar dogs and their controlled behavior with Trina’s morbidity, Schouler’s cruelty and inhumanity, and both of their heated non-standard speech, Norris here subverts the idea of the nonhuman as Other. The dogs are rather models of civilized behavior which these humans, despite their access to language, are unable to match. This scene is followed, some pages later but in the same chapter, by a picnic outing with McTeague, Trina, Marcus Schouler, and his new girlfriend. The men engage in sports and McTeague shows off his strength in raising weights and lifting himself in the rings: “His great success quite turned his head; he strutted back and forth in front of the women, his chest thrown out, and his great mouth perpetually expanded in a triumphant grin” ([1899] 1986, 424). Although McTeague here is described more in terms of a gamecock than a dog, the ensuing wrestling match between McTeague and Schouler is an elaborate contrast to the dog’s meeting. Dogs and men both begin by circling around, but the men soon engage in physical wrestling, and Marcus Schouler is thrown on the ground. He refuses to accept defeat, however, and demands a rematch on the grounds that both his shoulders were not down, something which confuses and angers McTeague. In contrast to the dogs, the two men are not in agreement about the rules, and in the rematch, McTeague’s confusion and Schouler’s anger cause the wrestling to turn into a fight without any rules at all. Schouler, who finds himself cornered, does what the dogs did not; he bites McTeague’s ear and draws blood. This lets the monster lose: The brute that in McTeague lay so close to the surface leaped instantly to life, monstrous, not to be resisted. He sprang to his feet with a shrill and meaningless clamor, totally unlike the ordinary bass of his speaking tones. It was the hideous yelling of a hurt beast, the squealing of a wounded elephant. He framed no words; in the rush of high-pitched sound that issued from his wide-open mouth there was nothing articulate. It was something no longer human; it was rather an echo from the jungle. . . . His rage was a kind of obsession, an evil mania, the drunkenness of passion, the exalted and perverted fury of the Berserker, blind and deaf, a thing insensate. (428)

The defamiliarization of McTeague in this scene is interesting on several counts. First because it focuses on the sounds that issue from his mouth and resemble what Darwin notes in The Expressions of Emotions: “Rage leads to the violent exertion of all the muscles, including those of the voice; and some animals, when enraged, endeavour to strike terror into their enemies by its power and harshness, as the lion does by roaring, and the dog by growling” (1899, ch. 4). However, while Darwin expresses these reactions in active

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verbs, and with “the animals as authors of action,” as Crist has shown (50), Norris grants no such active agency to McTeague who on the contrary is “a thing insensate.” In contrast to the collie and the setter who actively “raised their lips over their long white fangs, . . . and . . . showed each other the vicious whites of their eyes, while they drew in their breaths” (415, my italics) this fury is something that happens to McTeague and that he cannot control. Moreover, the references to the jungle and the exotic elephant are examples of “the emergence of the jungle as discourse” around the turn of the century discussed by Lundblad (2013, 2) but also a pointed contrast to the domestic and quiet behavior of the non-othered Scotch collie and Irish setter. THE MULE Although McTeague is one of the most othered—most beastly—characters in the novel, he is also the one who is most friendly and empathetic to animals, especially in contrast to Schouler who is negligent at best and often cruel. McTeague is the one who notices the black greyhound’s distress, and he is the one who keeps a canary for company and decides to take it with him when he runs away after murdering Trina: “The canary would be days without food; it was likely it would starve, would die there, hour by hour, in its little gilt prison. McTeague resolved to take it with him. He took down the cage, touching it gently with his enormous hands, and tied a couple of sacks about it to shelter the little bird from the sharp night wind” ([1899] 1986, 526). Similarly, when he is himself half-dead of dehydration and heat exposure in Death Valley, McTeague takes some of his precious water and dampens the sacks around the cage (553). McTeague’s affinity with animals becomes especially apparent when he buys a mule, that is, a horse-donkey hybrid, in order to go prospecting in the Sierras and later in Death Valley. Mules were particularly associated with Death Valley around the time of the creation of McTeague, due to the famous “twenty mule teams” that pulled huge borax loaded wagons out of Death Valley between 1883 and 1889 (Twenty Mule Teams). They were appreciated by teamsters and overland travelers for their surefootedness and resourcefulness which allowed them to survive on journeys where horses succumbed to heat and starvation (Linda Sumption 2002, 288). Darwin remarked about the mule, “That a hybrid should possess more reason, memory, obstinacy, social affection, powers of muscular endurance, and length of life, than either of its parents, seems to indicate that art has here outdone nature” (1860, ch. XV). Norris’s choice of a mule for McTeague therefore seems well founded, historically correct and biologically sound; it is a species suitable for the desert, but similar enough to the horse to be familiar to the reader. To McTeague the

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mule certainly becomes more than a mount and a carrier, he is a valuable companion who helps find water by smelling for it ([1899] 1986, 544), feeds himself on whatever grows in the bleak landscape (542), provides some companionship, and perhaps also adds “elements of domesticity into the desert,” as Sumption claims about William Manly’s similarly bleak Death Valley narrative from 1894 (2002, 289). The mule is thus an important character in the last two chapters, and his interactions with McTeague and Marcus Schouler are crucial for the plot. Nevertheless the mule has been largely neglected in the McTeague scholarship. As Jane Tompkins (1992) remarked about the horses in Western movies, “they are right there in front of you, but no one seems to notice them in the sense of paying them any attention” (90). Very few critics pay attention to the mule at all. Apart from a few who mention his death—crushing the water canteen with his dead body—Karen F. Jacobson (1999) notes that he “acts crazed” (39). Suzy Bernstein Goldman (1972) calls him “a living symbol of the madness that affects all the characters” (98) whereas William J. Hug (1991) simply refers to him several times as “the crazed mule” (224–225) as if this was his natural state. This is not, however, the impression the reader gets who pays attention to how the mule is represented in the text. His behavior is described with a similar sensitivity to detail as that of the two dogs, and with a not insignificant amount of empathy. When at one point the mule begins to act strangely, McTeague presumes that he has eaten a toxic plant: The mule had begun to squeal and lash out with alternate hoofs, his eyes rolling, his ears flattened. He ran a few steps, halted, and squealed again. Then, suddenly wheeling at right angles, set off on a jog trot to the north, squealing and kicking from time to time. McTeague ran after him shouting and swearing, but for a long time the mule would not allow himself to be caught. He seemed more bewildered than frightened. . . . At length the mule stopped of his own accord and seemed to come to his senses again. McTeague came up and took the bridle rein, speaking to him and rubbing his nose. ([1899] 1986, 555)

We never learn the real cause of the mule’s behavior, but several of the details mentioned, for example the fearful facial expression, flattened ears, kicking and squealing, are associated with pain and discomfort in equines (Ashley, Waterman-Pearson, and Whay 2005, and Torcivia and McDonnell 2021) and could be caused by colic brought on by toxic weeds. However, very similar flight behaviors in prey animals can also result from less specific pain or fear. As Deborah Goodwin points out, a horse [and by correspondence a mule] has no other defense than flight, and “the requirement to detect and avoid potential predators fashioned [its] morphology, sensory

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system and behavior” (1999, 16). In other words, equines spook easily. In the scene quoted above, McTeague learns not to chase it, but to stay calm and wait for it to stop, and when it does, he treats it with compassion. This scene establishes the mule and McTeague as companion species (Haraway 2008) engaging in social reciprocity, “looking back . . . in an act of respect” (19), an image which will be a significant point of comparison and contrast to the final scene with the mule. Near the end of the novel, Marcus Schouler, who has pursued McTeague into the desert, catches up with him. If we do not remember his cruelty to animals from previous encounters, we are reminded of it when we learn that he has ridden his own horse to death and therefore is on foot, and what is more, out of water ([1899] 1986, 567). It is worth noting here, that after that first incident quoted above, the mule is back to his old self again; he is not crazy or in pain, and McTeague keeps his water supply, and his sack of gold, tied to his back. But as soon as Schouler appears, the mule is frightened: “Marcus grunted, and cast a glance at the mule, who was standing some distance away, snorting nervously, and from time to time flattening his long ears” (568) in other words, displaying clear signs of discomfort and fear. The reader thus knows what to expect when Schouler moves toward it to get to the water: The mule squealed, threw up his head, and galloped to a little distance, rolling his eyes and flattening his ears. Marcus swore wrathfully. “He acted that way once before,” explained McTeague, his hands still in the air. “He ate some loco-weed back in the hills before I started.” . . . Marcus ran after the mule, revolver in hand, shouting and cursing. But the mule would not be caught. He acted as if possessed, squealing, lashing out, and galloping in wide circles, his head high in the air. (568–569)

A comparison between Marcus Schouler’s chase, and the earlier one by McTeague, shows some notable differences. When McTeague is focalizing, the mule “seemed more bewildered than frightened” (555). In other words, McTeague sees the mule, and recognizes the then possibly intoxicated companion’s confusion and pain. When Schouler is the one who has spooked him, and is actively chasing the mule away, the mule appears to him possessed. Unlike Norris, McTeague, and the reader, Schouler fails to understand the purposeful flight behavior of the frightened mule. Always the dominant one of the two men, Schouler manages to get McTeague, too, engaged in a chase that lasts for hours, and in which the “distraught animal shied away and fled before them” (570), behaving as we would expect of a distressed flight animal. The mule thus acts like a mule, but the men behave without thinking, hardly human in their desperation. In the end Schouler shoots the mule, who

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“pitched forward upon his head, then, rolling sideways, fell upon the canteen, bursting it open and spilling its entire contents into the sand” (570). Without water, far into Death Valley, the men are doomed. The mule’s impact on the plot and on the characters cannot be denied. Without the mule McTeague would not have been able to go prospecting in the first place, not found water at a critical point, and not been able to carry the water, his sack of gold, or his canary (his other nonhuman companion) in its cage. The entire Death Valley episode would have been impossible to imagine without the mule, which its ubiquitous presence in the text (it is mentioned fifty-three times in two chapters) signals. Furthermore, the way it consistently shows species specific, normal, mule behavior also offers a contrast to the human characters’ series of inappropriate choices, resulting in the deaths of all present. The last one standing is in fact the canary, but caged as he is, his momentary survival only underlines the certainty of the ending. CONCLUSION In this essaý I have avoided the usual anthropocentric reading of the inner brute in McTeague, and instead noticed the outer animals, overlooked by previous research but always present, in plain view, in Norris’s text. In contrast to the inner brute, who is associated with stigmatized and uncontrolled behavior in othered human characters, outer animals in McTeague are remarkably unmarked by otherness. The dogs act as dogs, and their innate, signal-controlled behavior serves them well in that a fight, with possible costs to life or health, is prevented. In the contrasting scene with human participants, the outcome is not so felicitous; the men are represented as overcome with atavistic emotions, and unable to control their actions, which result in serious injury. The mule, moreover, is represented as not only perfectly suited for its task as mount and carrier in the harsh desert, but also as a companion to McTeague, bringing out his arguably only positive trait: his affinity with animals. In the end the mule is seen acting, not crazily at all, but purposefully in his own interest when he shies and tries to escape from McTeague and Schouler who again are acting as unthinking, unreasonable brutes. That the mule’s falling, dead body deprives the men of the last water supply is only the last straw; without a mule the journey out of Death Valley clearly would have been impossible anyway. The non-othered normalcy of these nonhuman characters certainly play a role in contrast with, and emphasizing the beastliness of, the humans. In addition, I hope to have shown that Norris, the skilled observer and enthusiast of dogs and horses, also made a point of including them in this narrative as agents whose actions influence the narrative. By taking a biocentric

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perspective, and paying attention to the outer animals, we add significantly to our understanding of McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. REFERENCES Abbott, Porter. 2008. “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader.” Style 42 (4): 446–466. American Field. https:​//​www​.americanfield​.com​/register (accessed December 30, 2022). Ashley, F. H., A.E. Waterman-Pearson, and H. R.Whay. 2005. “Behavioural Assessment of Pain in Horses and Donkeys: Application to Clinical Practice and Future Studies.” Equine Veterinary Journal 37 (6): 565–575. Baker, Timothy C. 2019. Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bender, Bert. 1999. “Frank Norris on the Evolution and Repression of the Sexual Instinct.” Nineteenth Century Literature 54 (1): 73–103. http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /2902998 Bernstein Goldman, Suzy. 1972. “McTeague: The Imagistic Network.” Western American Literature, 7 (2): 83–99. DOI: https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1353​/wal​.1972​.0014. Biodioversity Heritage Library. https:​//​www​.biodiversitylibrary​.org​/bibliography​ /58597 (accessed December 30, 2022). Caracciolo, Marco. 2020. “Strange Birds and Uncertain Futures in Anthropocene Fiction.” Green Letters 24 (2): 125–139. doi:10.1080/14688417.2020.1771608. Crisler, Jesse S., and Joseph R. McElrath Jr. 2013. Frank Norris Remembered. Alabama Press, ProQuest Ebook Central, http:​//​ebookcentral​.proquest​.com​/lib​/ malardalen​-ebooks​/detail​.action​?docID​=1207688. Crist, Eileen. 1999. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Danielsson, Karin Molander. 2008. “The Nature and Culture of Horses in ‘The Most Noble Conquest of Man,’ and The Octopus.” ALN: The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter 3 (1–2): 22–27. Darwin, Charles.1860. Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage Round the World of H.M.S. Beagle. https:​ //​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/3704​/3704​-h​/3704​-h​.htm. Darwin, Charles. 1899. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. https:​//​ www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/1227​/1227​-h​/1227​-h​.htm. Fudge, Erica. 2002. Animal. London: Reaktion Books. Goodwin, Deborah.1999. “The Importance of Ecology in Understanding the Behaviour of the Horse.” Equine Veterinary Journal 31 (28): 15–19. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Howard, June. 1985. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.

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Hug, William J. 1991. “McTeague as Metafiction?: Frank Norris’ Parodies of Bret Harte and the Dime Novel.” Western American Literature 26 (3): 219–228. DOI: https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1353​/wal​.1991​.0073. Jacobson, Karen F. 1999. “Who’s the Boss? McTeague, Naturalism, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 32: (2) (June) 27–41. https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/44029597. London, Jack. 1910. “The Other Animals.” In Revolution and Other Essays. https:​//​ www​.gutenberg​.org​/cache​/epub​/4953​/pg4953​-images​.html. London, Jack. (1906) 1991. White Fang. New York: Dover Thrift Edition. Lundblad, Michael. 2013. The Birth of a Jungle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McElrath, Joseph R. Jr., and Jesse S. Crisler. 2006. Frank Norris: A Life. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. McFarland, Sarah E., and Ryan Hediger. 2009. “Approaching the Agency of Other Animals: An Introduction.” In Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, edited by Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, 1–20. Leiden: BRILL. http:​//​ebookcentral​.proquest​.com​/lib​/malardalen​-ebooks​/detail​.action​ ?docID​=467653. McGlynn, David. 2008. “McTeague’s ‘Gilded Prison.’” Rocky Mountain Review 62 (1): 25–44. http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/20479488. 2010-04-04. Micklus, Robert. 1981. “Ambivalent Warriors in The Octopus.” Western American Literature, 16 (2): 115–124. Miklósi, Ádám. 2007. Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press. Norris, Frank. 1894. “Outward and Visible Signs II: The Most Noble Conquest of Man.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 23 (137): 502–506. http:​//​quod​ .lib​.umich​.edu​/m​/moajrnl​/ahj1472​.2​-23​.137​/510. Norris, Frank. (1899) 1986. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. In Novels and Essays, edited by Donald Pizer. Library of America. Norris, Frank. (1901) 1986. The Octopus: A Story of California. In Novels and Essays, edited by Donald Pizer. Library of America. Norris, Frank. (1903) 1964. “The Nature Revival in American Literature.” In Pizer, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Kindle Edition. Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression and the Intrepretation of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Pizer, Donald. (1961) 2018. “Evolutionary Ethical Dualism in Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and McTeague.” In Frank Norris and American Naturalism, 35–52. Anthem Press. Pizer, Donald. 1964. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Kindle Edition Pizer, Donald. (1965) 2018. “McTeague and American Naturalism.” In Frank Norris and American Naturalism, 54–60. Anthem Press. Pizer, Donald. 2000. “Frank Norris’s McTeague: Naturalism as Popular Myth.” ANQ, A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 13 (4): 21–26. DOI:10.1080/08957690009598121

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Pizer, Donald. 2011. “Evolution and American Fiction: Three Paradigmatic Novels.” American Literary Realism, 43 (3): 204–222. Putman, Frances H. 1963. “Introduction.” In Anna Sewell, Black Beauty. New York: Airmont Books. Robles, Mario Ortez. 2016. Literature and Animal Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Seton, Ernest Thompson.1898. Wild Animals I Have Known. https:​//​www​.gutenberg​ .org​/files​/3031​/3031​-h​/3031​-h​.htm. Sewell, Anna. (1877) 1963. Black Beauty. New York: Airmont Books. Simons, John. 2002. Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. London: Palgrave. Sumption, Linda. 2002. “The Domesticated Gold Rush in William Manly’s Death Valley in ’49.” Journal of the Southwest 44 (3): 277–301. Tompkins, Jane. 1992. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Torcivia, Catherine, and Sue McDonnell. 2021. “Equine Discomfort Ethogram.” Animals 11 (2) 580, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3390​/ani11020580. Twenty Mule Teams. Death Valley National Park. https:​//​www​.nps​.gov​/deva​/learn​/ historyculture​/twenty​-mule​-teams​.htm#. Tyler, Tom. 2009. “If Horses Had Hands . . . ” In Animal Encounters, edited by Manuela S. Rossini and Tom Typer, 13–26. Leiden, BRILL. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Chapter 2

Jack London and the Perils of Human Exceptionalism Paul Crumbley

Jack London’s famous 1908 short story “To Build a Fire” (1986) and his 1910 novel Burning Daylight (2012) can be read as complementary works that prefigure current ecocritical theories concerning humankind’s relationship to the nonhuman universe. Both works lend themselves to the sort of analysis Donna Haraway (2008) models in When Species Meet, where she describes a fusion of human and nonhuman species that becomes possible when humankind embraces the interdependence of earthly life. According to Haraway, a full appreciation of species interdependence becomes possible when we reject the notion of human exceptionalism and admit that the nonhuman has always shaped who and what we are; only then can we enter the process of interspecies future-creation that increases “the chance for getting on together with some grace” (15). Haraway’s (2008) approach is useful in illuminating London’s awareness of the danger posed by human exceptionalism. In “To Build a Fire” and Burning Daylight, London communicates this danger most clearly through male protagonists, who direct attention to the crippling effects of species isolation. Breaking out of isolation requires awakening to the presence of the nonhuman and leveling the ontological playing field by, in Haraway’s words, “looking back” at the nonhuman (42). Through his narrators, London makes clear to the reader that the nonhuman world is constantly gazing at characters who are not epistemologically equipped to respond. The London Haraway helps bring to light is a writer who seeks to open his readers’ eyes to the nonhuman universe in order to escape the epistemological entrapment that leads his protagonists to imperil their own health while contributing to the ecological damage we now associate with the Anthropocene. Though 31

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many London works lend themselves to analysis of the nonhuman—including The Valley of the Moon, “The White Silence,” The Scarlet Plague, “The Red One,” and “The Water Baby”—it is in “To Build a Fire” and Burning Daylight that London most directly explores the problems created by dedication to a strictly teleological vision of human achievement. London explores this dilemma by contrasting his narrators’ respect for the nonhuman world with the self-centered and destructive ambitions of his protagonists, thereby revealing how belief in species superiority limits the protagonists’ ability to engage with the nonhuman universe. The characters’ narrow perspective hampers their capacity to imagine an ecologically sustainable future, thereby revealing the presumption of species mastery to be the basis for epistemological error. Read as a philosophical investigation into the perils of human exceptionalism, “To Build a Fire” emerges as an ontological cautionary tale, in which the unnamed protagonist perishes because he lacks the imagination to see that acceptance of human-nonhuman interdependence is the key to survival. The protagonist in Burning Daylight starts out as equally isolated and more environmentally destructive, but, when his health and happiness are at their lowest ebb, he engages the nonhuman gaze, an experience that triggers his emergence from isolation, leads him to embrace the nonhuman, constrains his teleological impulses, and enables him to become a force for planetary health. From the very start of “To Build a Fire,” the narrator attributes the protagonist’s geographic and mental isolation to an epistemological failure of imagination. The first sentence introduces his topographic remoteness: “the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail” (London 1986, 176). We then learn the trail he chose “was faint” and “[a] foot of snow had fallen since the last sled had passed over” (178). His detachment is indicated when, upon departing from the Yukon trail and climbing a “steep bank,” he “paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch” (176). Rather than acknowledging his physical limitations, he avoids admitting shortness of breath and turns his attention to a device that has little relationship to his immediate geographic reality. Indeed, the narrator magnifies the man’s isolation by repeatedly describing the trail the man leaves as a “hair-line” (176). Upon his third repetition, the narrator explains what it is that the man does not comprehend: “But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man” (176–177). “The trouble with him,” the narrator declares, “was that he was without imagination” (177). Imagination is thus presented as fundamental to humanity’s appreciation of the altogether humbling “strangeness and weirdness” of human life pursued on a part of the planet characterized by “absence of the sun” and “tremendous cold.”



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As Donald Pizer (2010) has noted, the narrator’s “insight is inseparable from the meaning London intends to impart” (221). Viewed in the context of Haraway’s (2008) discussion of interspecies meetings, the narrator’s focus on a lack of imagination correlates directly with the man’s devotion to human exceptionalism. For Haraway, the absence of imagination effectively prevents the exercise of “curiosity” that she views as “one of the first obligations” without which meeting the nonhuman gaze is impossible (7). Curiosity is crucial to Haraway because she, like the narrator, understands that human existence depends on the nonhuman. The narrator’s very next move is to spell out the ontological justification for interdependence that escapes the protagonist’s notice. Due to his absence of imagination, the unnamed man “did not . . . meditate on his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, only able to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe” (London 1986, 177). As before, the narrator encourages humble recognition of species “frailty” that accompanies being “a creature of temperature” biologically dependent on the nonhuman biosphere. The narrator’s repetition of the word “frailty” implies that recognition of species dependence is a prerequisite for imaginative reflection on “man’s place in the universe.” It is significant that the narrator defines the man as both “a creature” and therefore the equal of other creatures, as well as a distinct species with its own “place in the universe.” Even at this early stage of the story, the narrator makes it clear that the unnamed man’s lack of imagination prevents him from appreciating his ontological place in the universe. This analysis is consistent with Michael Millner’s (2017) argument that “[t]hroughout London’s work, ‘imagination’ is a key concept and the ultimate productive faculty,” the absence of which accounts for the man’s “Alertness to things but not their significances” (118). What, then, is it that consumes the man’s thoughts? The narrator provides an answer by connecting the man’s absence of imagination to a species-specific teleology communicated through devotion to clock-time, economic ambition, and competitive masculinity. Evidence of the man’s reliance on clock-time was first established when he consulted his watch; now we learn that his objective is “the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already” (London 1986, 177). To get there he chose to “come the roundabout way to take a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring” (177). This tells us that he is, in Millner’s words, “a paradigmatic consumer” who views his surroundings as commodities to be exploited (118). The man’s concern with masculine status is established through the old-timer from Sulphur Creek, who advises “that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below” (184). This warning pricks the younger man’s pride. First he laughs at him (182) and later questions his manhood:

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“Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought” (184). He then concludes, “Any man who was a man could travel alone” (184–185). Such thinking lies behind the man’s inflated confidence that he can achieve his objective by maintaining an average speed of four miles per hour (179) between 9:00 in the morning (176) and 6:00 in the evening (177, 181) while traveling alone in the bitter Arctic winter (181). From this point on, London uses his narrator’s perceptions as a via negativa that presents what the unnamed man fails to see as the world the reader needs to take seriously. As James K. Bowen (1971) has observed, even by this early stage in the story the reader is aware of the man’s “rational limitations” (287). The first function of the narrator, then, is to encourage the reader to do what the protagonist does not do: view the nonhuman world with imagination. In Haraway’s (2008) words, this means “look[ing] back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have a courteous regard for, to esteem” the nonhuman (19). From Haraway’s point of view, the man’s lack of curiosity prevents the meeting of species she views as essential to fully entering the world by “becoming with” other species (19). Haraway puts it this way: “Species interdependence is the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect” (19). Partners in this game become what Haraway calls “companion species” who “do not precede their relating,” but rather combine to create new and unpredictable futures: “all that is,” Haraway writes, “is the fruit of becoming with” (17). That is why Haraway rules out teleology, concluding that there is “no assured happy or unhappy ending . . . only the chance for getting along with some grace” (15). As a naturalist writer, London is similarly attuned to the presence of the nonhuman and goes so far as to present the appeal of what Haraway terms “companion species” by means of the dog that accompanies the unnamed man. The “big native husky” (178) first appears after the man embarks on the trail that has received a foot of snow “since the last sled has passed over” and we learn the man “was glad he was without a sled, travelling light” (178). Here the narrator once again uses repetition, this time to magnify the intense cold that the dog registers but the man does not. He begins by factually and repeatedly observing that it is fifty below, but by the sixth mention he has noted that the man’s “spittle crackled in the air,” that “it was colder than fifty below—how much colder he did not know,” and that in the man’s mind “temperature did not matter” (177). Only now does the narrator reveal that the actual temperature “was seventy-five below zero,” a cold so severe that he spells it out in terms even the least experienced reader will understand: “Since the freezing-point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained” (178). At this point, the narrator directs attention to the dog, whose “apprehension . . . subdued it and made it slink along at the man’s heels, and that made it question . . . every unwonted



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movement of the man” (178). It is the dog’s response that captivates the narrator’s imagination: “The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling” (178). Then, in the very next sentence, the narrator overtly questions the man’s reason by stating that the dog’s “instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment” (178). London constructs the scene so that we see the dog looking back at the man and signaling a mutually beneficial course of action that the man fails to detect. Animal instinct is thereby paired with human imagination in that both contribute to humility provoked by awareness of species interdependence. This recognition contributes to the reader’s distrust of the man and increases attentiveness to the world the narrator describes. Pizer (2010) usefully points out that the “dog and the old-timer schematize the survival resources” at the man’s disposal (222), but accessing those resources requires an acceptance of species interdependence inconsistent with human exceptionalism. London’s narrator implies that while evolution diminished human instinct, it increased the need for imagination of the sort the reader exercises when identifying with the dog. “This man did not know cold,” the narrator tells us. “Perhaps all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge” (182). It is difficult to envision a clearer or more forceful incitement to accept the dog’s instinctive knowledge. In language that applies directly to the point of view encouraged by London’s narrator, Haraway (2008) describes the beneficial human-nonhuman sharing that does not take place: “When species meet, the question of how to inherit histories is pressing, and how to get on together is at stake” (35). London’s unnamed man cannot participate in such sharing because he expresses no curiosity in the dog. Just before the man builds his lunch fire, London brings the planet into the foreground of the story, further reducing the man’s significance and invoking a sense of solidarity that ought to unite man and dog—but doesn’t. The narrator makes the planet’s influence on the man explicit: “The bulge of the earth intervened between [the horizon] and Henderson Creek, where the man walked under a clear sky at noon and cast no shadow” (181). As Timothy Morton (2016) points out, “At Earth magnitude, anthropocentric distinctions don’t matter anymore. . . . Teleology has evaporated, hierarchies have collapsed” (32). This is the point at which the man’s dedication to ontological superiority ought to give way to the interdependence Haraway associates with companion species. Not surprisingly, the man in the story registers scant awareness of the planet or the dog. On the contrary, “He was pleased at the speed he had made” and reiterates his conviction that “he would certainly be with the boys by six” (181). The man’s devotion to a preordained schedule

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again displaces recognition of the peril the planet poses to him and his nonhuman companion. To further emphasize the man’s misplaced presumption of species superiority, London shifts point of view from the man’s activity on the planet to the planet’s position in outer space, vastly expanding the scale and further reducing the man’s significance while clarifying his reliance on a shared global ecology that ought to unite human and nonhuman. This happens when the man has kindled his lunch fire and the narrator observes, “For the moment the cold of space was outwitted” (182), metaphorically implying that the cold of space is implacable and hostile. London is equally deliberate in his anthropomorphizing of space when the narrator focuses on the dog’s disappointment at the man’s all-too-rapid departure from the fire. Speaking from the dog’s point of view, the narrator says, “It was time to lie snug in a hole in the snow and wait for a curtain of cloud to be drawn across the face of outer space whence this cold came” (182). The word “face” figuratively casts space as looking down on the planet, transforming man and dog into objects ontologically equalized by its threatening gaze. As a result, the man appears more vulnerable than he needs to be because he does not communicate with his companion species. Focusing on the dog’s unhappiness, the narrator states the obvious: “[T]here was no keen intimacy between the man and the dog” and, as a consequence, “the dog made no effort to communicate its apprehension to the man” (182–183). As readers, we see that the man has alienated a significant ally. Writing specifically of “London’s depiction of canine corporeality,” Christine Mahady (2012) suggests that London “encourages readers to try on the ethically significant perspective of a body that is intimately connected and attuned to its surroundings” (71). The narrator who has promoted this level of identification now explains how the man has rejected it: “[T]he only caresses [the dog] had received were the caresses of the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing throat-sounds that threatened the whip-lash” (182). From the vantage point of the reader who has recognized the dog’s justified respect for the cold, the man’s treatment is cruel and self-defeating. London’s final reference to the planet shows that failure to embrace the nonhuman has tragic consequences. Just after the man steps into the hidden spring and starts to build his second, doomed fire, the narrator delivers this fateful observation: “The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow” (184). London specifies the “unprotected tip” of the planet as a way of saying that the planet is not uniformly exposed to the cold of outer space and that each specific location requires a unique set of responses. This runs counter to the man’s reliance on anthropocentric clock-time and commodification of the environment. To underscore the man’s ontological oversight,



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the narrator concentrates on the degree to which man and dog are mutually threatened by the cold: “The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold” (184). Repeating the phrase “like the dog,” the narrator insists that dog and man are equals, but by this time it is too late for the man to obey his blood. In Haraway’s (2008) terms, he has missed the opportunity to embrace the dog as a companion species and thereby benefit from the dog’s instinctual knowledge. This rejection seals the man’s fate long before snow snuffs his second fire. The urgency with which London links survival to species interdependence can help us think of “To Build a Fire” as a story of the Anthropocene. Working with a standard definition of the Anthropocene as the current geologic era during which “[h]uman activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita” (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007, 614), then London’s story is about its causes. “To Build a Fire” does not describe the widespread environmental degradation usually associated with stories of the Anthropocene. Instead, London concentrates on epistemological error that is the origination point for detrimental environmental outcomes. The reader’s detection of the ontological error that gives rise to human exceptionalism and epistemological miscalculation makes the story a cautionary tale, and the story’s promotion of species interdependence makes it a call for the kind of interspecies becoming that Haraway associates with companion species. In Burning Daylight London’s protagonist also contributes to the environmental damage we associate with the Anthropocene, but the novel traces his slow recognition of the presumption implied by human exceptionalism, allowing him ultimately to escape the epistemological trap that dooms the man in “To Build a Fire.” The protagonist’s growth in environmental sensibility is tied to his discovery of a companion species, in the form of a California lily. Bert Bender (2011) affirms the environmental orientation of the novel when he argues that London “produced America’s first ecological novels early in the twentieth century” (108) as part of an “ecological project he began in Burning Daylight” (110). Commenting on the eponymous protagonist, Bender points out that his actual name, Elam Harnish, begins with “male” spelled backwards, setting him up as a representative of the “strong and combative male” that London seeks to “harness . . . in service to a greater ecological cause” (112). Reading Burning Daylight as a successor to “To Build a Fire” reinforces Bender’s view that the novel is about the ecological benefits of abandoning masculine isolation while at the same time presenting healthy masculinity as a product of the interspecies communication that Haraway associates with companion species.

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The first half of Burning Daylight lays the groundwork for Daylight’s pivotal encounter with the California lily by describing the isolation that accompanies his quest for wealth in the Yukon. His life follows a narrow rags-to-riches teleological trajectory that retains the same grounding in human exceptionalism and capitalist aspiration that motivated the man in “To Build a Fire.” He rises from working-class prospector to upper-class capitalist whose success cuts him off from other people and contributes to his commodification of the nonhuman world. Unlike the man in “To Build a Fire,” Daylight does not wear a watch, venture into the Arctic alone, or face nature without imagination. His vulnerability stems from a “rigidly limited” imagination that leaves little room for the curiosity Haraway deems essential to contact with the nonhuman: “His mind was orderly, his imagination practical, and he never dreamed idly” (London 2012, 48). As in “To Build a Fire,” London’s narrator provides a running account of what London wants his reader to see but which escapes his protagonist’s notice. Nowhere is this clearer than at the end of Part One where Daylight looks out over the rising boom town of Dawson, oblivious to the “vast devastation” produced by the extractive industry he has helped create (82). The narrator describes the scene as hellish: “A blanket of smoke filled the valleys” and “fires flamed redly” wherever “new [mine] shafts were starting.” Yet Daylight sees only the opportunity “for another big killing”: “his quick imagination sketched Eldorado Creek from mouth to source, and from mountain top to mountain top, in the hands of one capable management” (82). Blind to ecological damage and the hardships his investments impose on others, Daylight drives up the value of his holdings and “sells at the right time” (83). He then departs amid great fanfare, hastening financial collapse so severe that within “five years town lots in Dawson could not be given away” (83). London engineers the scene so that Daylight sees himself as an unqualified success, while readers view him as an alienated instrument of the Anthropocene. Sources of Daylight’s environmental alienation are visible from the opening pages of the novel where the narrator pairs his personal ambition with resistance to female intimacy. Initially introduced as a “pioneer” who left his family in eastern Oregon when “a stripling of eighteen” (8), he quickly becomes Burning Daylight, a “man’s man” (9) and “an Arctic hero” (41) who famously refuses to waste time. As with the man in “To Build a Fire,” time is a measure of masculine achievement based on teleological aspirations grounded in human exceptionalism. Daylight’s fear that women will retard his quest for wealth and power is so great that he “rebelled in ways either murderous or panicky” whenever a woman “sought to pass the apronstring around him” (11, 12). As Tony Williams (2017) has noted, this reaction exposes “the feet of clay hidden deep within a character idolized by the local community” (346). An early instance of this is when Daylight rejects



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the Virgin—the most fully developed female character in the first part of the novel—in favor of the male gaming table. At the slightest pressure from the Virgin his response is extreme: “For that infinitesimal space of time he was to all purposes a frightened tiger filled with rage and terror at the apprehension of the trap” (12). The extremity of Daylight’s reaction comes across as proportionate to his concern with time and his fear that women will reduce the competitive drive that fuels his “big killing” in Dawson. To confirm that Daylight’s treatment of the Virgin is tied to disregard for the environment, London times Daylight’s triumph in Dawson to coincide with the Virgin’s suicide. Once Daylight realizes that the Virgin “killed herself because of him” (79), he is so “badly and avowedly frightened,” that he wrongly concludes, “Women were terrible creatures” whose presence must be even more stringently avoided (80). This conjunction of female suffering and ecological damage trades on what Annette Kolodny (1975) has described as “America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy,” the “experience of the land as essentially feminine” (4). Toril Moi (1999) more narrowly frames the masculine exploitation of nature as a fundamental feminist axiom: “[n]ature, objectivized and oppressed, is female” (349). Clarice Stasz (1978) further observes that Daylight’s given name, Elam, serves to illuminate “various turn-of-the-century attitudes toward masculinity” (59). Daylight is of course oblivious to the way his gynophobia correlates with his disregard for nature, but the narrator is not. When Daylight enters the civilized Southland, his increasing lust for power intensifies his masculine isolation and coarsens his personality. London’s narrator tells us that Daylight’s “present battles” were no longer “conducted with elemental nature” but “wholly with the males of his species” (111). This version of species isolation is consistent with the dictates of human exceptionalism that London here links to social expectation. Leonard Cassuto (2017) explains that London’s “fictional men try to measure up to what is expected of them, or what they expect of themselves,” leading to a “performativity of gender” in which they “always suffer in the effort” (553). In Daylight’s case, continued success breeds suffering through subtle changes that fall beneath his awareness precisely because he so triumphantly embodies the ideal American male. Steve Garlick (2017) encapsulates Daylight’s dilemma, writing that “the price for . . . domination is paid in alienation” (12). London’s narrator lends credence to this view: “Daylight’s coming to civilization,” he asserts, “had not improved him” (121). When we learn that “he had become cynical, bitter, and brutal” to the point where “nothing was left for him but to worship at the shrine of self” (121), we know Daylight has spiraled into unhealthy masculinity. Construction of healthy masculinity begins when Daylight encounters the California lily and succumbs to its nonhuman influence. London’s narrator

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signals Daylight’s break with routine when he describes how the first horse ride Daylight has taken in many years evokes memories of “his eastern Oregon boyhood” that surface at the very moment he feels most “jaded with all things business” and hears “the wooded knolls . . . calling to him” (122). Daylight’s acknowledgment of this call performs as an auditory instance of Haraway’s “looking back” (27) and marks the moment he ceases to be a more extreme version of the man in “To Build a Fire.” He not only hears but responds to nature’s call, “[feeling] with a shock the beauty of the world” (123). The narrator describes Daylight’s abandonment of prior teleological commitments as akin to “a poker-player rising from a night-long table and coming forth from the pent atmosphere to taste the freshness of the morn.” Turning away from “worship at the shrine of self” (121), he glimpses new life in nonhuman nature. Daylight’s emergence from self-imposed solitude and his alignment with the narrator is most fully communicated through his dramatic contact with the lily. Rising “[a]t least eight feet in height,” its slender stem “green and bare for two-thirds its length,” it bursts “into a shower of snow-white waxen bells,” resembling a silent roman candle (123). The narrator affirms that “Daylight had never seen anything like it” and now follows Daylight’s “gaze” as it “wandered from [the lily] to all that was about him.” Spontaneously moved by nature’s beauty, Daylight “took off his hat, with almost a vague religious feeling.” “Here,” the narrator reflects, “man felt the promptings of nobler things.” According to Millner (2017), London’s attention to feeling often reflects his belief that “affect connects us to something significant—our species being, our universal characteristics, our deepest history” (122). This analysis is consistent with Haraway’s account of what happens when we look back at the nonhuman. Stipulating that “species” is a capacious category that can include “landscapes, animals, plants, microorganisms, people and technologies” (41), Haraway (2008) argues that any of these can become companion species. “The point,” she insists, “is . . . to become wordly and to respond” (41). This is what happens when Daylight removes his hat and witnesses the nonhuman world looking back at him: a “squirrel crept out on a branch and watched him” (123) and a “crimson-crested woodpecker . . . ceased its knocking and cocked its head on one side to survey him” (124). Interspecies communion replaces epistemological isolation with the “joy” Haraway links to the experience of companion species that takes place “when the possibility of mutual response, without names, is taken seriously” (22). London tells us that Daylight “had never been so happy. His old woods’ training was aroused, and he was keenly interested in everything in the moss on the trees and branches; in the bunches of mistletoe hanging in the oaks; in the nest of the wood-rat; in the water-cress growing in the eddies of the little stream; in



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the butterflies drifting through rifted sunshine and shadow” (124). Daylight’s sense of rebirth through connection with the nonhuman prefigures Haraway’s “dance of encounters” that attend the meetings of “species of all kinds, living or not” (4). All that matters is the dance of encounters that gives rise to new and unpredictable futures. In strictly ecocritical terms, Daylight shifts at this moment from anthropocentric autonomy to ecocentric interdependence, described by Lawrence Buell (1995) as “relinquishment” of “individual autonomy itself, to forego the illusion of mental and even bodily apartness from one’s environment” (144). For John Felstiner (2009), such environmental participation is crucial to humanity’s survival: “Homo sapiens,” he writes, “has to refigure its place on earth, much as the Copernican revolution upset our geocentric universe” (5). We must ask, “Are we a part or apart?” (5). For the moment, Daylight is a part of and not apart from the nonhuman world. Significantly, as the narrator points out, Daylight’s awakening does not take place on a conscious level: “it was not a concept of his mind. He merely felt it without thinking about it at all” (123). Haraway similarly observes that in encounters like Daylight’s with the lily we “are, constitutively, companion species” who “train each other in acts of communication we barely understand” (16). The point is respect and response, not the formulation of new teleological objectives. Daylight’s altered attitude is most evident when he removes his hat and feels “the promptings of nobler things,” but, as Haraway (2008) insists, “more is required too. Figuring out what that might be is the work of situated companion species. It is the work of cosmopolitics” (42) that Haraway defines as “a practice for . . . entangling materially with as many of the messy players as possible” (106). What Haraway means by the “more” that is required is explored in Burning Daylight through the character of Dede. Described by Stasz (1978) as “a New Woman who lives in Berkeley, dates college men, and keeps a horse” (58), Dede contrasts sharply with the Virgin, whose possessiveness repelled Daylight. Instead, Dede is fiercely independent, grounded in the natural world, and comfortable displaying masculine behavior. Under her influence, Daylight unconsciously enters a process of de-gendering that contributes to his emergence from isolation by lifting him out of the self-worship associated with patriarchal authority. This phase of the book presents Daylight learning “to be worldly” in the manner Haraway (2008) grounds in “grappling with . . . the ordinary” (3). In his first serious conversation with Dede, his “masculine tolerance” crumbles: “Despite his superior point of view,” the narrator ironically observes, Daylight admits that “she knew a lot” and abruptly feels “like a barbarian face to face with the evidence of some tremendous culture” (115). At the same time, Daylight grows increasingly perplexed by how “manlike” and “natural” Dede is (149), leading him to conclude that “mere mastery would prove

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a bungle” (150). The narrator tells us that Daylight’s “ideas of women were prone to be old-fashioned” (149). He admires Dede’s “masculine” deportment yet patriarchally concludes, “She should be a man’s wife, taking it easy, with silks and satins and diamonds” (152). Daylight will discover that Dede could never be content as a pampered wife, but here his thoughts betray the hegemonic masculinity R. W. Connell (2005) summarizes as “gender practice which . . . guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (77). Daylight’s efforts to accommodate Dede’s unconventional femininity can be understood through Connell’s (2005) description of “gender vertigo” that accompanies efforts to “undo masculinity” and risk “a loss of personality structure that may be quite terrifying” (137). In Daylight’s case, negotiating the power imbalance implicit in his courtship of an employee proves notably vertiginous. The narrative concentrates on his efforts to find the right language with Dede: “I—I do honor and respect you, and . . . and all that,” he protests, but, as the narrator notes, “He was beginning to flounder . . . ” (155). Further evidence of vertigo appears in Daylight’s physical discomfort: “the beads of sweat on his forehead, his trembling hand, and his all too-evident general distress” (155). As Daylight and Dede develop into early environmentalists, Dede’s influence becomes more pronounced and Daylight becomes more compliant. Dede prays Daylight’s business will fail (192), calling it a “disease” that “claims all of you” (194). Daylight gives up drinking (211), relinquishes his business, and moves from the city to the country. Ultimately, Daylight’s accommodation of Dede’s demands leads to the “fusion of masculine and feminine principles” that Connell links to “degendering [sic]” (142). Dede’s role in uniting healthy masculinity with ecological sensitivity is the subject of the climactic closing scene of the novel that demonstrates how Daylight’s partnership with a woman closely associated with nature reflects his growing respect for the nonhuman world that began when he encountered the California lily. After recovering his health through clean living on their Glen Ellen ranch (229), and while the couple await their first child, Daylight spots a newly disclosed vein of gold. “Hello,” he says, “Look who’s here,” anthropomorphizing the fissure as if it possessed volition (234). Daylight flings “a quick glance around to see if any eye were gazing upon him,” his suspicion signaling reversion to competitive isolation. “[C]aught up in the old passion that had ruled most of his life” (234), and once again drawn to “drink—whiskey, cocktails, anything,” Daylight descends into destructive masculinity, only to be jolted back to reality by the sound of Dede’s voice. As Donna M. Campbell (2017) puts it, “Dede’s voice . . . rescues him” (570). At that moment he realizes “he had almost lost her” and temporarily succumbs to “panic fear” before “artfully” concealing the gold so effectively that “no sign remained of the out-jutting walls of the vein” (236). In the narrator’s



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words, Daylight has survived a “frightful crisis,” a crisis that he overcomes by foregoing human exceptionalism and the competitive masculine isolation exceptionalism engenders. London ends the book by reversing the scene that concluded book one; instead of abandoning the devastation he contributed to in Dawson and escaping his fatal influence on the Virgin, Daylight now views the gold as a companion species and responds through an act of shared future-creation that preserves the nonhuman and enhances his life with Dede. In Haraway’s (2008) terms, Daylight contributes to a positive cosmopolitics when he and the gold “make each other up” by means of a mutually constitutive “developmental infection called love” (16). All that Daylight has achieved since his first encounter with the California lily represents an awakening never experienced by the protagonist of “To Build a Fire.” In the first half of Burning Daylight London gives us an extreme version of the unnamed man who produces the environmental devastation implicit in the earlier character’s indifference to the nonhuman. In the second half, Daylight embraces the nonhuman and contributes to the positive future-creation Haraway associates with companion species. For readers who approach the novel in the context of the Anthropocene, London lays bare the ontological and epistemological flaws inherent in human exceptionalism and the dangers exceptionalism poses to our species and the planet. In both the short story and the novel, London shows how devotion to the teleology of competitive masculinity is ultimately suicidal, evoking a sense of urgency that our species has only now begun to confront. His solution is to accept the species interdependence Haraway views as essential to the kinds of species encounters that increase our “chance for getting on together with some grace.” REFERENCES Bender, Bert. 2011. “Darwin and Ecology in Novels by Jack London and Barbara Kingsolver.” Studies in American Naturalism 6 (Winter): 107–133. Bowen, James K. 1971. “Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’: Epistemology and the White Wilderness.” Western American Literature 5 (Winter): 287–289. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Campbell, Donna M. 2017. “Women’s Rights, Women’s Lives.” The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, edited by Jay Williams, 562–576. New York: Oxford University Press. Cassuto, Leonard. 2017. “Jack London, Suffering, and the Ideal of Masculine Toughness.” The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, edited by Jay Williams, 549–561. New York: Oxford University Press. Connell, R. W. 2005. Masculinities. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Felstiner, John. 2009. Can Poetry Save the Earth? New Haven: Yale University Press. Garlick, Steve. 2017. The Nature of Masculinity: Critical Theory, New Materialisms, and Technologies of Embodiment. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kolodny, Annette. 1975. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. London, Jack. (1908) 1986. To Build a Fire and Other Stories. New York: Bantam Classic. London, Jack. 2012. Burning Daylight. Memphis, TN: Bottom of the Hill Publishing. Mahady, Christine. 2012. “Teaching Old Readers New Tricks: London’s Interspecies Ethics.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45 (Spring): 71–93. Millner, Michael. 2017. “‘The Feels’: Jack London and the New Mass Cultural Public Sphere.” The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, edited by Jay Williams, 112–128. New York: Oxford University Press. Moi, Toril. 1999. What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Pizer, Donald. 2010. “Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’: How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction.” Philosophy and Literature 34 (April): 218–227. Stasz, Clarice. 1978. “Androgyny in the Novels of Jack London.” Jack London: Essays in Criticism, edited by Ray Wilson Ownbey, 54–65. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc. Steffan, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36 (December): 614–621. Williams, Tony. 2017. “Burning Daylight.” The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, edited by Jay Williams, 345–354. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 3

The Social Contract and Human-Animal Equality in Dreiser’s‌‌‌‌ “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” Patti Luedecke

INTRODUCTION In “Personality,” Theodore Dreiser (1920a) reflected that “the average cat reasons quite as well as the average plumber or grocer, if not better. Give a good pagan tomcat a man’s body and sensory capacity, and how long do you suppose he would remain a plumber” (111)? Similarly, the narrator of Sister Carrie ([1900] 1994) reflected on the capacities of animals to feel complex emotions like depression, or “rueful thoughts,” in response to the cold: “Not poets alone, nor artists, nor that superior order of mind which arrogates to itself all refinement, feel this, but dogs and all men. These feel as much as the poet, though they have not the same power of expression. The sparrow upon the wire, the cat in the doorway, the dray horse tugging his weary load, feel the long, keen breaths of winter” (90). Despite Dreiser’s admiration of animals and expansive opinion of animal thinking and emotional capacities, however, Dreiser’s work has been read as reducing animals to symbols for human appetite and aggression. For example, David Zimmerman (2006) argues that Dreiser understood financial panic as revealing “cutthroat competition among economic animals” and that for Dreiser “financial behavior, no matter how self-serving, corrupt, or predatory” “merely expresses individuals’ natural drive to satisfy their wants” (35). F. O. Matthiessen (1951) believed that The Financier’s (1912) closing reflections on the wiles of the black grouper fish, the Mycteroperca 45

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bonaci—which, the novel describes as “a living lie” because of its “brilliant” “power to deceive” (779, 778)—was Dreiser’s way of “dismissing any conception of the beneficent divine will as merely delusive. . . . Dreiser had thought in this elementary way of the correspondences between men and animals” (142). However, given the complexity of Dreiser’s assessment of animal thinking and feeling, it seems just as possible that it is the readings of Dreiser’s works, not merely the works themselves, that create “elementary correspondences” of animals with appetitive self-interest. Other scholars have noted the widespread popularity of reductive readings of animals in The Financier. As T. Austin Graham (2013) suggests of the grouper episode, “[t]he fish’s thematic relevance to Cowperwood is no doubt obvious to readers—the financier is not so much dishonest as interested in maximizing his advantage, as all biological entities are” (1241; my emphasis). Similarly, as Donald Pizer (1976) has pointed out, discussions of the novel’s vignette of a squid falling prey to the better-armoured lobster in a tank at a fish market “often imply that [the novel] is dominated by an imagery and symbolism of animal ferocity” (178; my emphasis). Jude Davies (2004) has noted that it “is an incident generally regarded as exemplifying the crudest and most reductive social Darwinism” (58; my emphasis). While Graham and Davies go on to point out much greater complexity in the metaphorical significance of these animals, they, like Pizer, show that the most common, knee-jerk interpretations of animals in Dreiser’s work tend to simplistically reduce animals to analogs for human beastliness. Dreiser’s other works have similarly been read as harnessing animals only for symbols of human appetite and aggression. In An American Tragedy ([1925] 2003), as Clyde prepares to murder his pregnant lover, Roberta, he is shaken by “the sharp metallic cry of a blue-jay” (559). Similar to Stephen Crane’s ([1897] 1984) likening the wake that a shark makes while pursuing a lifeboat to “a monstrous knife,” the metallic quality of Dreiser’s bird’s cry has come across to readers as curtailing the bird’s role to that of a mechanical menace (901). For example, Thomas P. Riggio (1978) has remarked that multiple bird calls in the climactic scene are “Dreiser evok[ing] the dark, lifeless underside of nature” (521). After Clyde kills Roberta, he again hears “[t]he cry of that devilish bird upon that dead limb” (Dreiser [1925] 2003, 565). Correlating animals with evil portents and human brutishness, Richard Lehan (1969) has argued that “Dreiser adds a gothic quality to the symbol, making the bird reflect a demonic element in both nature and in Clyde’s ‘darker’ self” (163). Like Jack London’s ([1904] 1982) starting his short story about the enmity between an abusive master and his dog, “Bâtard,” with the sentence, “Bâtard was a devil,” Dreiser’s demonic birds have most commonly—although, as I’ll show, not most holistically—been understood as



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metaphors for beastly human nature (387). In another example, Carrie yields to her appetites, or to “the drag of desire” (Dreiser [1900] 1994, 23), and, as another passage in the novel establishes, “follow[s] wither her craving led” because she is like “the tiger [on whom] no responsibility rests” (73–74). While the passage involves a more complex moral analysis that Pizer (1970) engages with, even he acknowledges that “the passage . . . is an apology for Carrie’s impending choice of an immoral life” (59). Such readings that equate animals in Dreiser’s work with hollow ciphers for human appetite in essence reduce the role of animals to little more than reflections of Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) ([1651] 1991) famous declaration: that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (89; my emphasis). For Hobbes, life is brutish when people “have no other law but their own appetites” (469), rendering them like “creatures [i.e., animals] who live by sense and appetite alone” ([1642] 1998, 71).1 Likewise, as Cara Elana Erdheim (2010) has noted of naturalism criticism generally, “[c]ritics of American literary naturalism have long been preoccupied with hunger, framed almost entirely by a discussion about the animalistic appetites of socially determined human beings” (para. 1). What’s more, the popular perception that Dreiser’s work identifies animals with human appetite seemingly reduces them to mere metaphors for humans: thinly veiled “men in furs” (Seltzer [1992] 2015, 167) rather than “‘real’ animals,” as Michael Lundblad (2013) calls nonhuman animals (4). However, criticism that constricts animals to symbols of human instincts and appetites significantly contradicts Dreiser’s beliefs about the thinking and feeling capacities of “‘real’ animals.” To confront this contradiction (and since animals have so commonly been read as operating as Hobbesian metaphors in Dreiser’s work), I use social contract theory to argue that Dreiser’s aggressive and appetite-driven animals can function, not as excuses for human bestiality or social Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest, but, quite the opposite, as inducements to form fairer social environments. I do so by first establishing how early social contract theorists used animals and animal metaphors to encourage social cohesion. Then I apply the polemical role of animals and animal metaphors in early social contract theory to Dreiser’s ant allegory, “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” (1901, 1918), to argue that appetitive animals in Dreiser’s works can appeal for stronger protections against the appetites of the powerful. Next, I argue that social contract theory’s beastly animal metaphors create the following unexpected implication for “‘real’ animals” (Lundblad 2013, 4): by acknowledging that humans, too, are as Hobbes ([1642] 1998) says, driven by “animal passions,” such metaphors erase appetitive drives, on the one hand, and reason, on the other, as the distinctions between animals and humans, thereby creating a model of human-animal equality (11). Such a model that equalizes humans and animals, I suggest, raises questions about

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the social contract capacities of “real” animals, questions that Dreiser’s animal allegory also poses. In other words, instead of just justifying human greed, appetitive animals in naturalist works like Dreiser’s, as in social contract theory, can urge higher opinions of, and better treatment of, both people and animals. ROLE OF ANIMALS IN SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY As in Dreiser’s work, animals in the social contract theory of Hobbes, John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) are most easily read as analogs for human bestiality. Exemplified by Hobbes’s ([1642] 1998) maxim that “man is a wolf to man” (3), social contract theory used predatory animals to symbolize people’s rampant animalistic appetites and aggression outside the social contract. Without the social contract, people existed in what social contract theorists variously called meer nature or the state of nature or war.2 For instance, Hobbes established that “the condition of men outside civil society (the condition one may call the state of nature) is no other than a war of all men against all men” (11–12). In this state, people are forced to resort “to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud, i.e., to the predatory nature of beasts” (4). As metaphors for human avarice and appetite in the state of nature, animals in social contract theory can be read as only functioning to bestialize humans. For example, Locke ([1689] 1988) relied on readers’ assumptions about the legitimacy of killing dangerous animals to analogize the justice of killing aggressors in a state of nature: “[O]ne may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason, that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, . . . and so may be treated as beasts of prey” (279). Locke also employed an animal simile when he argued that violent criminals, because they act as though they are in the state of nature, can be killed “as a lion or a tiger, one of those wild savage beasts, with whom men can have no society nor security” (274). As in naturalism, animals in social contract theory appear only to act as hollow ciphers for human rapacity. But social contract theorists denigrated animals with a purpose: by equating both human animality and actual animals with greed and aggression, social contract theorists used animals as a bugbear to instill a horror of the perils and uncertainties of the state of nature and so to encourage endorsements of the social contract. Rousseau, like Dreiser, owned pets; moreover, he “delighted in” animals (Wolloch 2008, 296) and even believed animals “sentient” (Rousseau ([1755] 1997, 128). Yet he nevertheless suggested that when a person “transition[s] from the state of nature to the civil state,” he



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“should ceaselessly bless the happy moment which wrested him from [the state of nature] forever, and out of a stupid and bounded animal made an intelligent being” ([1762] 1997, 53). Locke ([1663–1664] 1997) suggested that ruthless people merely “follow the herd in the manner of brute beasts, since they do not allow themselves the use of their reason, but give way to appetite” (127). Not only apex predators or lumbering beasts, but also insects helped Locke ([1660] 1997) to caution that life outside the social contract provides “no peace, no security, no enjoyments, enmity with all men and safe possession of nothing, and those stinging swarms of miseries that attend anarchy” (37). Animals in social contract theory act as a homily warning us against the dangers of the state of nature and threatening us with the possibility of our returning to such a state should we blindly follow the dictates of our appetites. This warning goes for those in power as well. For example, Rousseau ([1762] 1997) also used an animal metaphor to warn that tyranny and oppression break the social contract, a threat that sparsely populated countries are most prone to: “The least populous countries are thus the most suited to tyranny: wild beasts reign only in wildernesses” (104). As Tobias Menely (2010) has claimed, “the polity remains haunted by liminal figures such as brutal sovereigns and creaturely subjects” (570). By haunting the social contract, animals in social contract theory function to propel people, including rulers and those with power, to commit to the social contract and to at least a minimum level of social equality. For example, Locke ([1689] 1988) argued that because people have roughly equal capabilities, they, unlike animals, must be considered as essentially equal: “being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us [i.e., humans], that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours” (271; emphasis original). Locke leveraged a familiar human-animal hierarchy, not to keep animals in their place, but to generate a metaphor illustrating that only the social contract can guarantee that people will be treated better than animals and will behave better than animals too. Further, all three theorists used the metaphor of hunted animals to argue that those in power and the social contract must provide more justice than the state of nature because no one would give up their natural right to protect themselves unless they were better protected by the social contract in return. For example, Locke ([1663–1664] 1997) asked, “[W]hat would be the privileges of society, if men united in a commonwealth only to become a more ready prey for the power of others?” (87; my emphasis). By working as both whipping horses and metaphors for the threat of unbridled human self-interest, animals in social contract theory serve as arguments for social cohesion and justice.

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As such, animals have a more complicated role to play in social contract theory than scholars have commonly recognized. Although animal analogies in social contract theory do devolve humans to the level of appetite-driven beasts, the polemical function of them doing so is to induce gratitude for, and renewed commitments to, the social contract. Applying this more complex reading of animal analogies in social contract theory to literary naturalism uncovers the following possibility: animals in naturalist works, like Dreiser’s “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers,” which I’ll turn to now, do more than simply signify a resignation to our lowest common atavisms or the inevitability of competition and greed. Instead, they act as warnings against unchecked greed. In short, naturalism’s animals don’t just answer the call of the wild; they instead call for rules that curtail individual appetites and, consequently, support the common good. “MCEWEN”: SOCIAL DARWINISM VERSUS REFORM READINGS Robert McEwen sits under a tree on a hot August day. He finds an ant on his clothes and violently brushes it off, stomping on it for good measure. His attention now on the ground, his eyes follow the erratic movement of an ant until he becomes hypnotized. Coming aware of his surroundings again, McEwen finds himself transformed into an ant. A passing ant, Ermi, asks McEwen, in “a friendly and yet self-interested tone,” if there is anything to eat (Dreiser 1918, 55). Just having arrived in this world, McEwen says no, there isn’t. In response, Ermi discloses that there is a famine before he takes off in search of food (55). With talk of food, McEwen realizes how hungry he is and chases after Ermi to ask for his help. When he catches up to him, he sees that Ermi has found food in the meantime. McEwen asks Ermi, “Will you give me a little?” Ermi responds, “I will not,” “and a light came in his eye that was almost evil” (56). With Ermi’s “self-interested” tone and “almost evil” look, the story establishes that animals’ appetites pit them against each other, much as they do human and animal agents in the state of nature. Similarly, when McEwen comes across a dying ant who has found food, the ant offers it to him only because he can no longer benefit from it. The scene, despite involving sharing, appears to indicate that animals typically only aid each other when they have nothing to lose. When another ant swoops in to take the dying ant’s food for himself, McEwen quickly adapts to this ruthless animal environment: “McEwen was on the alert and savage into the bargain, on the instant. He, too, gripped his mandibles upon [the food]. ‘I was called by him to have this, before he died,’ he shouted ‘and I propose to have it. Let go’” (59). With images of ants warring over food, Dreiser’s



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narrator sets up a state of nature in which aggression appears to be necessary for animal survival. The story paints the ants as pitiless and rapacious, but the ants are also vehicles for attaching those characteristics to humans, just as social contract theory’s animal metaphors are. Before McEwen is offered food by the dying ant, he asks him if he knows where he can find anything to eat; the ant angrily responds: “Certainly not. If I had anything for myself, I would not be out here. Go and hunt for it like the rest of us” (57). Dreiser underscores that the ant operates as an allegory by having McEwen “gaz[e] after him in astonishment” because he recognizes the ant’s “indifference” to his suffering as being “at once surprising and yet familiar” (57). That McEwen finds the ant’s indifference “familiar” (i.e., like that which he experienced or observed as a human) overtly turns the animals’ competing appetites into an allegory for human self-interest. Additionally, when McEwen pleads that he has been hunting but has found nothing to eat, the ant retorts, “No worse off than any of us, are you? . . . Look at me. Do you suppose I am feasting” (57)? Like social contract theory, Dreiser levels humans and animals by depicting them as equally motivated by appetites and equally indifferent to the sufferings of others. But how can we best interpret the equalizing function of Dreiser’s animal allegory? What does it imply for both humans and animals? On the human side of the equation, it is ambiguous whether the allegory celebrates or censures this cold-shouldering that McEwen recognizes in the ants as familiarly human. On the one hand, the ant’s argument that McEwen should “go and hunt for it like the rest” may indicate that the allegory promotes social Darwinism and exemplifies its use of animal imagery to excuse capitalism’s injustices and to denounce social welfare. For example, William Graham Sumner (1883) argued that capitalism is an ancient biological function of animals, suggesting that its inequalities are natural because “[t]he first beginnings of capital are lost in the obscurity which covers all the germs of civilization. . . . Among the lower animals we find some inchoate forms of capital” (60). Further, by telling McEwen off for asking for food (think of deriding “hand-outs”), the ant symbolizes, and seemingly sympathizes with, social Darwinian economic discourse of the survival of the fittest individual. For instance, Herbert Spencer ([1884] 1892) argued against government efforts to regulate business or to alleviate poverty by archly asking, “Can [anyone] assert that outside the family, among adults, there should not be, as throughout the animal world, a proportioning of benefits to merits?” (361; my emphasis). As Richard Hofstadter ([1944] 2017) summarized, “it was natural for conservatives to see the economic contest in a competitive society as a reflection of the struggle in the animal world” (42). Similarly, an overly simplistic reading of

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Dreiser’s individualistic ants could be used to justify laissez-faire capitalism as unavoidable. On the other hand, Dreiser’s appetitive-ant allegory can be read as a criticism of social Darwinism’s reliance on animal rhetoric as a veil for greed—like late nineteenth-century Progressives who portrayed laissez-faire capitalism as predatory or selfishly indifferent to joblessness and poverty. For example, Lester Ward (1894) denounced Spencer’s theories because “[h]is idea of ‘worth’ never rises above the mere animal attribute of fitness to survive” (124). Similarly, Charles Sanders Peirce (1893) satirized conservative social Darwinism’s reliance on animal rhetoric at length: The vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold the opinion that the true cause of those exquisite and marvellous adaptations of nature for which, when I was a boy, men used to extol the divine wisdom is that creatures are so crowded together that those of them that happen to have the slightest advantage force those less pushing into situations unfavorable to multiplication or even kill them before they reach the age of reproduction. Among animals, the mere mechanical individualism is vastly re[i]nforced as a power . . . for good by the animal’s ruthless greed. As Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for existence; and he should have added for his motto: Every individual for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost! Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, expressed a different opinion. (182)

Although Peirce, perhaps unfairly, also catches Darwin himself in his crosshairs, his disdain is for social Darwinism’s pressing animals into service to justify individualism—what he, Pierce, facetiously called “the Gospel of Greed” (182). In addition to criticizing the logic of social Darwinism’s reliance on animal rhetoric, reformers responded by employing their own animal rhetoric. For example, Peirce himself bestializes individualists as greedy animals. For another example, labor leader Eugene V. Debs (1897) constructed an animal metaphor to lambaste “trusts, syndicates, corporations, [and] monopolies” when he said that he had hoped that “free silver would blunt the fangs of the money power” (quoted in Sanders 1999, 139; my emphasis). Populist and novelist Ignatius Donnelly ([1895] 1976) had one of his fictional characters quip that “if one were to ask [him] what animal the successful plutocrat most closely resembled as a class . . . [he] should say—the hog!” (98; emphasis in original). Read as akin to this reform rhetoric, Dreiser’s aggressive and acquisitive ants act as analogs for, and moralistic indictments of, unregulated capitalism and rhetoric that supports ruthless individualism. Each of these contrasting readings of “McEwen” is productive. One way to understand the contradiction between them is to suggest that the story’s analogical connection between human and animal appetites neither simply



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excuses laissez-faire social Darwinism, as conservatives did, nor moralizes against it, as reformers tended to do. Rather, Dreiser’s animal allegory, by comparing un- or under-regulated capitalism to ants fighting over food in a state of nature, appeals for a more-strongly regulated economic environment that better constrains appetites and so makes possible a morality that mitigates inequalities. In short, a social contract reading can synthesize both the social Darwinian acknowledgement that people are appetitive and the reformist desire that people rise above their appetites. For Hobbes ([1651] 1991), because the environment of the state of nature allows free rein to appetites, it restricts people’s moral capacities. He explained that “in the condition of men that have no other law but their own appetites, there can be no general rule of good, and evil actions” (469). Correspondingly, Dreiser initially describes the ants as appetitive, yes, but not morally responsible. They are simply “self-interested”; and while they are “[a]lmost evil” they are not actually so. The rapidity with which McEwen adapts to his environment by becoming “alert and savage . . . on the instant” likewise suggests that McEwen’s morality evaporates because of his insertion into a famine environment and his “ravenous craving for food” rather than because of a moral failing on his part (56). However, while moral relativism is an essential implication of the idea of the state of nature, social contract theory does not merely excuse appetite in the way that social Darwinism does. Instead, as we’ve seen above, it uses metaphors and images of appetitive animals to promote creating a social contract environment that curbs appetites. As Rousseau ([1762] 1997) put it, “one might add to the credit of the civil state moral freedom, which alone makes man truly the master of himself; for the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery” (54). For the social contract theorists, only when appetites are restrained in exchange for assurances of protection by the social contract can people truly become humans with the capacity for moral choices rather than “stupid and bounded” animals enslaved by their impulses, as Rousseau remarked (53; also quoted above). As symbols for unchecked appetites in the state of nature, animals in social contract theory prod people to commit to the social contract because it is the only environment in which morality can exist. Correspondingly, Dreiser’s story allegorizes laissez-faire economics as a state of warring animals to suggest that, just as animal and human appetites are unbridled in a state of nature, so too do unregulated economic environments fail to adequately keep appetites in check. Like Dreiser’s tale, other naturalist works use the image of appetitive but amoral beasts to encourage constructing environments that better rein in appetites, rather than to simply denounce appetites. For example, Shelgrim, the railroad kingpin in Frank Norris’s ([1901] 1986) The Octopus, responds

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to accusations of injustice by advising us to “[b]lame conditions, not men” (1037). Readers have often interpreted this epithet as evidence of Norris’s allegiance to, or at least acquiescence to, economic predation à la Spencer or Sumner—the farmer-strangling “octopus” of the corporation amorally following its predatory instincts (McElrath and Crisler 2006, 345, 399). But Norris is instead suggesting that we blame environments (i.e., “conditions”) with weak controls on appetites, rather than blame people (i.e., “men”) for having those appetites in the first place. Similarly, Hobbes ([1651] 1991) claimed that “The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them” (89). The idea that we should blame conditions is not, as many scholars have suggested, a deplorable shirking of responsibility under the pretext that economic conditions and people’s animalistic appetites are natural and immutable. Norris’s blaming social conditions is a call to change conditions: to erect legal and social guardrails that could restrain the kinds of appetites that were running amok in the social Darwinian and anti-regulatory environment of the Gilded Age. And Progressive-Era legal regulations—such as the Interstate Commerce Act (1887), the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), and the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)—did answer that call by curtailing the predatory appetites of the financially powerful. The animal metaphor depicting the railroad as an aggressive octopus, seen through the lens of social contract theory, does not simply excuse or indict human greed, it prescribes a stronger social contract environment to keep animalistic appetites in check. Similarly, Dreiser’s ant allegory can more holistically be understood as leveraging the threat of people’s appetites running wild as a means of promoting stronger economic regulation and fairer conditions. “MCEWEN” AND ANIMAL COOPERATION But analogies work in two directions. The question remains: what does Dreiser’s analogy between ants fighting over food and human greed suggest on the animal side of the equation? That is, what implications does it have for “‘real’ animals” (Lundblad 2013, 4), not just men in furs (or with antennae as the case maybe)? Again, social contract theory might be of help. It is true that Hobbes, for one, overtly denied the possibility of animals entering social contracts, either with humans or each other ([1651] 1991, 97; [1642] 1998, 71–72); however, he and the other social contract theorists unwittingly opened that very possibility by leveling humans and animals through animal metaphors for human appetites, like those we’ve seen above. In another example, Hobbes correlated human and animal drives by acknowledging that



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people “can have greed, fear, anger and all the other animal passions” (11). An unintended side effect of such animal metaphors for human impulses is that they generate a model of human-animal equality. Applying social contract theory’s equation of human and animal urges to “McEwen” reveals how animals in Dreiser’s work can do more than just drag humans down to the level of appetite-driven beasts; they can also raise questions about animal motivations and capacities and their proximity to those of humans. On top of the equalizing work of their beastly metaphors, social contract theorists also more overtly linked human and, what Lundblad (2013) calls, “‘real’ animal” appetites and instincts (4). For example, Locke ([1663–1664] 1997) established that “all men as well as other living creatures are driven by innate impulse to seek their own interests” (127). Likewise, Hobbes ([1651] 1991) acknowledged the similarities between “the faculties, and passions of men and beasts” (80). While Hobbes held that humans enter the social contract because their reason convinces them that its protections outweigh its restraints, he nonetheless asserted that people’s “animal passions” constantly threaten to overturn both their reason and the social contract because “the passions of men, are commonly more potent than their reason” (131). Similarly, Dreiser’s ([1900] 1994) narrator in Sister Carrie observes that “[m]en are still led by instincts before they are regulated by knowledge” (269). By blurring distinctions between animal and human decision making, both social contract theory and Dreiser’s work question whether there is much difference between animals and humans. In addition to inadvertently generating a model that levels humans and animals based on their shared appetites, Hobbes and Rousseau acknowledged the reasoning capacities common to animals and humans. For example, Hobbes ([1651] 1991) argued that “it is not prudence that distinguishes man from beast. There [are] beasts, that at a year old observe more, and pursue that which is for their good, more prudently, than a child can do at ten” (23). Nor, he said, does thinking or imagination separate humans from animals (21, 19). Rousseau ([1755] 1997) likewise insisted that “[e]very animal has ideas, since it has senses” (140). Hobbes, in fact, notes so many similarities between animals and humans that ultimately only animals’ lack of language bars them from qualifying for the social contract (97). In this section I’ll show that social contract theory’s human-animal equality and Dreiser’s animal analogy implicitly raise the same question regarding “real animals” (Lundblad 2013, 4): if appetite-driven humans manage to restrain their appetites in exchange for the security and morality of the social contract, is it possible for animals to do the same? Dreiser portrays animals who are driven by appetites and fears, but who nevertheless, like humans, make deliberate choices that override those instincts in favor of the social contract. In revising the Ainslee’s Magazine

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(1901) version of the story for publication in Free and Other Stories (1918), Dreiser added images of animal cooperation that loosen the initial story’s coupling of animals with appetite and self-interest. For example, when Ermi is beset by rival red ants, McEwen doesn’t abandon him to his fate but rather weighs whether he should rescue him: “At first [McEwen] thought to avoid it all, having a horror of death, but a moment later decided to come to his friend’s rescue” (Dreiser 1918, 63; my emphasis). Although the story was criticized for providing fantastical rather than scientific depictions of ants, Dreiser in fact took many of the details from Sir John Lubbock’s (Lord Avebury’s) Ants, Bees and Wasps (1881) (Moers 1969, 144). And while Dreiser’s depictions of the ants’ slave-owning and warring tendencies were accurate, so, too, were his depictions of their social organization and cooperation, including, as Ellen Moers has pointed out, “the discipline of their marching columns, the specialization of their fighters, their tenderness in caring for a wounded comrade, or even their devotion to the common good” (144). McEwen’s decision to rescue Ermi both exemplifies Hobbes’s particular concept of animal deliberation and realistically depicts an animal deciding to make the exchange that initiates a social contract. Among the capabilities that Hobbes ([1651] 1991) acknowledged animals share with humans is their capacity to choose between competing impulses. An “alternat[ing] succession of appetites, aversions, hopes and fears,” he wrote, “is no less in other living creatures than in man: and therefore beasts also deliberate” (44). As we’ve seen, Ermi has hardly been a friend to McEwen; he ruthlessly denied McEwen a share in the food he found. McEwen’s decision to supress his “horror of death” and rescue Ermi despite their enmity illustrates an animal as having a human-like ability to deliberate rather than simply be driven by appetites or, in this case, aversions. As Don B. Graham (1977) has observed, McEwen “merge[s] his individualism with the common good” (44). McEwen benefits from his decision to rescue Ermi by receiving Ermi’s help in return when he is under attack. With the narrator’s assertion that if it weren’t “for the generous aid of Ermi, [McEwen] would have been killed,” Dreiser’s (1918) revisions make it clear that these ant rescues are not simply the result of natural reflexes but of deliberate decisions like those Hobbes acknowledged animals can make (64; my emphasis). Further, Dreiser’s emphasis on the “generous” quality of Ermi’s decision highlights that animals, because of their deliberations, can make social rather than selfish choices. An idea that Dreiser reiterates in his essay “The American Financier” (1920b) when he asks whether “animals lack any of the emotional or charitable traits which we possess? Observe the wolf with its young; the cat; the dog; the lion. Are not all swayed by conditioning laws of subsistence and which they obey, but nothing more? True, they kill to eat, to



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preserve themselves. Has man ever done less—or more?” (88). Dreiser likens humans with animals not merely to bestialize humans, but also to show the social and “emotional” and “charitable” capacities of animals. As Jude Davies (2004) has pointed out, “McEwen” suggests “not that men are like ants (i.e. subject to ‘animalistic’ drives and conditions), but that ants are like men” (65). For example, when McEwen returns to the human world from the ant world, he takes away from his experience the idea that there are biological “worlds within worlds, all apparently full of necessity, contention, binding emotions and unities” (Dreiser 1918, 75). His reflections on his experience suggest that, just as humans are conditioned by appetites and aversions (i.e., “necessity” and “contention”), so, too, do animals have social faculties (i.e., “binding emotions and unities”). Deciding to exchange individual appetite for social commitment is the catalyst for the social contract as early social contract theorists envisioned it. Rousseau ([1762] 1997) argued that the social contract requires “substituting justice for instinct”—that a social contract is formed “when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulsion and right succeeds appetite” (53). Likewise, by asserting that McEwen “decided” to put himself in danger to save Ermi because of “a feeling of tribal relationship which was overwhelming coming over him” (Dreiser 1918, 63), Dreiser’s tale suggests that McEwen’s sense of duty and justice prevails over “physical impulsion” and “appetite.” While Ermi and McEwen go on as comrades to wage a bloody war against rival colonies to compete for resources during the famine, McEwen is no longer in a state of nature (as he experienced earlier in the story when he had to compete for food by himself) because he has “decided” to become part of an “allied family” (66). As Lilian Carswell (2014) has remarked of London’s tales, the “recognition that animals not only feel pain but also have the capacity for autonomy and choice” demonstrates London’s engagement with concepts of animal rights (319). London’s ([1903] 1982) narrator may have described Buck as “the dominant primordial beast who had made its kill and found it good” indicating that he is an instinct-driven brute (37). However, like Dreiser in his reflections on animal capacities, London ([1908] 1910) asserted that dogs are capable of “establish[ing] a relation between various things, and the act of establishing relations between things is an act of reason” (251). Similarly, by emphasizing the decision making and, even further, the social contract-making capacities of ants, “McEwen” bucks readings that pigeonhole animals in naturalism as simple ciphers for human individualism and rapaciousness; it suggests at least the possibility that animals, like humans, can weigh appetites against social duties and rights.

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CONCLUSION Given that social contract theorists did depict images of animals as appetite and instinct driven, they seem unlikely allies for animal rights advocacy. However, more scholars are now considering the possibility that social contract theory can be a productive tool in animal rights discussions. For example, Chris Tucker and Chris Macdonald (2004) call “premature” the “widespread acceptance that contractarianism cannot account for the moral status of animals” because they believe that such acceptance overlooks the fact that the social contract itself is a metaphor (477). Similarly, Shane D. Courtland (2011) has argued that “Hobbesian contractarianism could provide some real protection for animals” (24). Courtland suggests that protecting animals is in people’s self-interest because someone who harms animals is likely to be perceived as capable of harming people, and so protecting animals proves people’s pro-social attitudes. My aim here has been to show that while social contract theorists undoubtedly reduced animals to mindless beasts, they also expended a lot of ink admitting their similarity to humans. In addition to the examples given above, Hobbes ([1651] 1991) acknowledged that “beasts that have deliberation, must necessarily also have will” leaving readers wondering: if humans and animals are so similar, why can’t animals be part of the social contract and receive its protections (44)? Rousseau ([1755] 1997) even offered an incipient justification for animal rights, reflecting that “if I am obliged not to harm another being like myself, this is so less because it is a rational being than because it is a sentient being; a quality which, since it is common to beast and man, must at least give the beast the right not to be needlessly maltreated by the man” (128). Like Dreiser, the social contract theorists contradictorily didn’t just use animals as metaphors for human animality, they also humanized animals. This contradiction can provoke curiosity about animal faculties and, by extension, animal rights. Similarly, there may be no definitive way to resolve the contradiction between the beastly images of animals in Dreiser’s works and his high regard for animals. However, recognizing that Dreiser’s violent and self-interested animals function to promote limits that protect people from falling “prey” to the appetites of others indicates that Dreiser, like the social contract theorists, depicted beastly animals as a brutal rhetorical means to a fairer outcome for humans. Additionally, like the social contract theorists, Dreiser also implicitly created a model of human-animal equality that challenged assumptions about animals’ non-sociality and explicitly identified shared thinking abilities of animals and humans, leaving open the door for a discussion of animal rights. As Dreiser (1920a) lamented, “it is a common fallacy among the ignorant that no lower animal possesses more than the generic characteristics of its



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species—such-and-such powers, such-and-such limitations, such-and-such instincts,” concluding that “this of course is not true” (111). Although such a lament contradicts the images of appetite-driven animals in his works, it should prompt us to look more closely at what naturalism has to offer the discussion of animal rights. After all, the moral of “McEwen” is not that ants are ferocious animals, or at least not any more ferocious than humans, but that since ants, like humans, have “binding emotions and unities” one should not just go around stomping on them. NOTES 1. All quotations for Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Herbert Spencer have been modernized in terms of spelling and capitalization; punctuation, however, is original. 2. In De Cive ([1642] 1998), Hobbes often uses the term state of nature (e.g., 28) and sometimes uses it in conjunction with state of war (e.g., 31, 108). In Leviathan ([1651] 1991), Hobbes typically uses the phrases meer nature and condition of war (e.g., 111). Although Locke ([1689] 1988) distinguishes between the state of nature and the state of war, he, like Hobbes, uses both terms to describe the condition of people outside the social contract (280). Rousseau ([1762] 1997) makes a similar distinction and likewise uses state of nature to describe the non-social contract condition in which there is no property (66).

REFERENCES Carswell, Lilian. 2014. “‘The Power of Choice’: Darwinian Concepts of Animal Mind in Jack London’s Dog Stories.” In America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and US Literary Culture, edited by Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher, 302–32. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Courtland, Shane D. 2011. “Hobbesian Justification for Animal Rights.” Environmental Philosophy 8 (2): 23–46. Crane, Stephen. (1897) 1984. “The Open Boat.” In Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry, edited by Donald Pizer, 885–909. New York: Library of America. Davies, Jude. 2004. “The Struggle for Existence, the Struggle for Domination, and the Struggle for Justice: Animals and the Social in Theodore Dreiser’s ‘The Shining Slave Makers’ and The Financier.” In Animal Magic: Essays on Animals in the American Imagination, edited by Jopi Nyman and Carol Smith, 55–72. Joensuu, Finland: Faculty of Humanities, University of Joensuu. Donnelly, Ignatius. (1895) 1976. The American People’s Money. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press. Dreiser, Theodore. (1900) 1994. Sister Carrie. New York: Penguin. Dreiser, Theodore. 1912. The Financier. New York: Harper.

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Dreiser, Theodore. 1918. “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers.” In Free, and Other Stories, 54–75. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, Theodore. 1920a. “Personality.” In Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, 107–14. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, Theodore. 1920b. “The American Financier.” In Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life, 74–91. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, Theodore. (1925) 2003. An American Tragedy. New York: Library of America. Erdheim, Cara Elana. 2010. “The Greening of American Naturalism.” ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI3440633. https:​//​research​.library​.fordham​.edu​/dissertations​/AAI3440633. Graham, Don B. 1977. “Dreiser’s Ant Tragedy: The Revision of ‘The Shining Slave Makers.’” Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1): 41–48. Graham, T. Austin. 2013. “Fish, Crystal and Loop: Dreiser’s Histories in ‘The Trilogy of Desire.’” ELH 80 (4, Winter): 1237–66. Hobbes, Thomas. (1642) 1998. On the Citizen, edited by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. (1651) 1991. Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hofstadter, Richard. (1944) 2017. Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860– 1915. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lehan, Richard. 1969. Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Locke, John. (1660) 1997. “First Tract on Government.” In Locke: Political Essays, edited by Mark Goldie, 3–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, John. (1663–1664) 1997. “Essays on the Law of Nature.” In Locke: Political Essays, edited by Mark Goldie, 79–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, John. (1689) 1988. Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. London, Jack. (1903) 1982. The Call of the Wild. In Jack London: Novels and Stories, edited by Donald Pizer, 1–86. New York: Library of America. London, Jack. (1904) 1982. “Bâtard.” In Jack London: Novels and Stories, edited by Donald Pizer, 387–401. New York: Library of America. London, Jack. (1908) 1910. “The Other Animals.” In Revolution, and Other Essays, 235–66. New York: Macmillan. Lundblad, Michael. 2013. The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Matthiessen, F. O. 1951. Theodore Dreiser. New York: Sloan. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., and Jesse S. Crisler. 2006. Frank Norris: A Life. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Menely, Tobias. 2010. “Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (4): 567–82. Moers, Ellen. 1969. Two Dreisers. New York: Viking.



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Norris, Frank. (1901) 1986. The Octopus. In Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, edited by Donald Pizer, 573–1098. New York: Library of America. Peirce, Charles S. 1893. “Evolutionary Love.” The Monist 3 (2, January): 176–200. Pizer, Donald. 1970. “The Problem of Philosophy in the Novel.” The Bucknell Review 18 (1, Spring): 53–62. Pizer, Donald. 1976. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press. Riggio, Thomas P. 1978. “American Gothic: Poe and an American Tragedy.” American Literature 49 (4, January): 515–32. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. (1755) 1997. “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men.” In Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch, 111–88. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. (1762) 1997. “Of the Social Contract.” In The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch, 39–152. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press. Sanders, Elizabeth. 1999. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seltzer, Mark. (1992) 2015. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge. Spencer, Herbert. (1884) 1892. “The Sins of Legislators.” In Social Statics: Abridged and Revised—Together with the Man versus the State, 334–75. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Sumner, William Graham. 1883. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. New York: Harper and Brothers. Tucker, Chris, and Chris Macdonald. 2004. “Beastly Contractarianism?: A Contractarian Analysis of the Possibility of Animal Rights.” Essays in Philosophy 5 (2, June): 474–86. Ward, Lester F. 1894. “The Political Ethics of Herbert Spencer.” In The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 4 (January): 90–127. Wolloch, Nathaniel. 2008. “Rousseau and the Love of Animals.” Philosophy and Literature 32, (2, October): 293–302. Zimmerman, David A. 2006. Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Chapter 4

Extinction, Genocide, and Atomic Anxiety Storks in Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro Lisa Tyler

In her book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Ursula K. Heise writes, “[B]iodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value and what stories we tell, and only secondarily issues of science” (2016, 5). The stories we tell about extinction matter. In this essay, I want to examine a story of extinction (or ultimately, near extinction or non-extinction) that Ernest Hemingway tells in Under Kilimanjaro, the memoir of his 1953–1954 African safari that he worked on at home in Havana, Cuba, from 1954 to 1956. Throughout the narrative, Hemingway alludes in several scattered passages to the presence (or imagined absence) of white storks (Ciconia ciconia), European birds whose physical beauty he greatly admires.1 In virtually every one of the dozen passages in which he refers directly to storks, he alludes directly or indirectly to their potential death or extinction. Through these passages, Hemingway expresses anxiety not just about the survival of this particular species but also about the massive environmental damage caused by World War II. He repeatedly links his concern about potential stork extinction to human genocide, suggesting that he sees obvious parallels between human violence toward nonhuman animals and human violence toward other humans. By attributing the storks’ putative extinction to wartime bombing, he situates his extinction anxiety in relation to widespread cultural fears about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the highly publicized 63

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atomic testing of the early 1950s, and the world’s developing understanding of the insidious dangers of nuclear fallout. Through deliberate references to extinction and genocide, Hemingway articulates grave concerns about where modernity has led Western culture. The way in which Hemingway invokes the storks’ possible extinction only after describing thriving stork populations in both Spain and Africa recalls Sigmund Freud’s description of a child playing the “fort/da” game. In that game, a toddler who is anxious about his mother’s temporary departure reenacts it with his playthings, tossing a toy away and saying “fort” (meaning “away”) and then drawing it back to himself by pulling on a string attached to the toy and saying “da” (meaning “present” or “there”). Freud interpreted the child’s repetitive game of tossing the toy away and then retrieving it as the child’s way of mastering his anxiety about the trauma of his mother’s departure by controlling her movements through play (Freud 1961, 8–11). Similarly, Hemingway mentions the possibility that the European storks might have become extinct (“fort,” or “away”) only after he has already assured the reader that the storks are abundantly present in both Spain and Africa (“da,” or “there”). He begins by referring first to their abundance in Africa: “Then great flocks of European storks came to eat the worms and there would be acres of storks moving on a single stretch of plain grown high with the white flowers” (Hemingway 2005, 258). The phrase “acres of storks” assures the reader that the birds are as populous as ever. Only after that does he mention that they were harder to find in Spain, where Mary had spotted storks only twice, once in Castile. The innkeeper takes Mary upstairs so that she can photograph the birds, and Ernest lingers at the bar and chats with “the owner of the local transport and trucking company” (whose occupation emblematizes modernity): “[We] had read an article that told how the storks were disappearing from Europe and that some scientists laid it to the bombing of northern countries during the war. Then we talked about the different Castilian towns which had always had storks’ nests on the churches and from all I could learn from the trucking man these were as plentiful as ever” (Hemingway 2005, 263). Heise suggests that “the endangerment of a particular species comes to function as a synecdoche for the broader environmentalist idea of nature’s decline as well as for the stories that communities and societies tell about their own modernization” (2016, 32). In invoking the storks’ possible endangerment, then, Hemingway is expressing a personal anxiety and perhaps a Western cultural anxiety as well about the possibility that deliberate human action (in this case, specifically the bombing of northern Europe during World War II) might have caused irreparable damage to the environment through the inadvertent eradication of a culturally popular species.2

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Interestingly, Hemingway’s conversation with the trucking company owner in this passage is haunted by death: “Both he and the proprietor of the inn, a not dissolute but early drinker who had joined us at the historic bar, had friends in common that we were very careful about mentioning since they were dead under varying circumstances. It was better to speak of the bulls and the storks” (Hemingway 2005, 263). So to avoid referring to deceased friends (at least some of whom are presumably casualties of war), Ernest, the innkeeper, and the trucking company owner discuss bulls, who invariably die in the bullring, and storks, whose possible extinction is a matter of concern and whose impending death is implied by juxtaposition. Men who are unwilling to speak directly of the deaths of their fellow humans both express and deflect their anxiety over their losses by talking indirectly about the deaths of animals instead. Hemingway here implicitly acknowledges that he is both expressing and deflecting his own anxiety over where modernity has led Western culture by talking about the extinction of storks instead, in a way that is characteristic of his writings: “Partly because Hemingway had so much interest in and information about animals, he routinely used them to understand the meaning of injury or trauma, and more profoundly, the meaning of death” (Hediger 2016, 144). After they reach Africa, Hemingway and his wife witness a “great flock of storks feeding” and are somewhat reassured: “Miss Mary liked them and they meant much to her since we had both been worried about the article that said that storks were becoming extinct and now we found that they had merely had good sense enough to come to Africa as we had done ourselves, but they did not take away her sorrow and we went on toward camp” (Hemingway 2005, 266). Heise explains that sorrow like Mary’s can become an act of resistance: “mourning where society sees nothing worthy of grief can become an explicitly political act” (2016, 34). The fact that Mary’s mysterious (and never explained) depression persists suggests that the presence of the storks is not enough to stop her from worrying about the existential threat to the birds.3 The context of various stork references in the narrative proves that the threat of the extinction of a species was very much on Hemingway’s mind, too. For example, after reminiscing about trading grizzly claws and eagle tails with Cheyenne Indians, he refers to the increasing scarcity of the bears in the American West: “There had been no grizzly claws for many, many years” (Hemingway 2005, 262). He also refers repeatedly to the dangers that both automobiles and airplanes—icons of modern technology—pose to wildlife in general and storks in particular. For example, he recalls hitting a jackrabbit with his car and watching a gooney bird hit the windscreen of an airplane before noting, “we chased the storks off the airstrip and left them worming dartingly and diligently in an adjoining stretch of meadow” (Hemingway 2005, 393). Shortly afterward, he realizes that the airplane that is due to

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arrive poses a threat to the storks, too: “I made a mental note to come back and keep the strip clear before Willie and Miss Mary came in” (Hemingway 2005, 393). He successfully remembers his “mental note” to protect the birds later: “We drove back to camp by the airstrip and ran some new storks off it” (Hemingway 2005, 393). Even when the storks obstruct their passage, he relishes watching them: “We were already putting up storks at full speed at the approaches and seeing them after the running rush straighten their legs as though they were pulling up their undercarriages and commencing their reluctant flight” (Hemingway 2005, 396). Ernest’s affection for the birds is evident. Interestingly, storks were not the only species whose survival worried Hemingway. Mary Welsh Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife, recalls his concern for another declining bird species as they traveled in Spain before their 1953–1954 African safari: Ernest had been looking along the road all morning for a bird he particularly associated with Spain, the hoopoe bird with its long curved bill and big crest. “They’re rare,” he said. “But they weren’t extinct during the war here.” We stopped at a government-run restaurant, The Cid, to lunch in the garden, and counted eight different hoopoes flitting about, thrusting their cinnamon-colored heads into bright blossoms. (Mary Welsh Hemingway 1976, 332)

As Heise notes, “fears concerning the extinction of individual species in the contemporary age . . . are often tied up with anxieties over the consequences of modernization and colonization” (2016, 19). Mary’s account suggests that throughout this trip Hemingway was preoccupied with birds, war, and extinction. Through juxtaposition, Hemingway twice links human genocide to the increasing rarity of the storks—first, as already noted, he refers to the Cheyenne Indians of the American West.4 Hemingway also linked colonialism in Africa to both American treatment of Native peoples and the genocide of the Jewish people in the Holocaust: “[T]he white people always took the other people’s lands away from them and put them on a reservation where they could go to hell and be destroyed as though they were in a concentration camp” (Hemingway 2005, 209). In 1999, his son Patrick recalled that Papa had once made the same comparison to him: I remember being in Nairobi with him when we were crossing the street and somehow he got the impression that I had acquired some of the habits of the white colonialist in Africa, which was very well-defined by a white South African observing a little boy in an airport, when he said that the boy was “already the little white master of everything but himself.” And my dad caught

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a little bit of this from me, and after we crossed the street he turned to me and said, “Pat, it’s just like with the Indians at home.” (Seefeldt 1999, 11)

Hemingway’s choice to link the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis with the genocide of the American Indians at the hands of Euro-Americans would have seemed much more startling when he worked on the manuscript in the 1950s.5 Annette Kolodny (2017) notes that as recently as 1992, the New York Times required a great deal of persuasion to use the term “genocidal campaigns” to describe “General Andrew Jackson’s attempts to ‘exterminate’ the Creek Nations.” Hemingway’s second reference to genocide occurs when he describes the storks as “working on the caterpillars as though they were German storks and under orders” (Hemingway 2005, 266). As Robert E. Gajdusek observes of the birds in Islands in the Stream, another of Hemingway’s posthumously published books, “the birds are related to the inescapable voracious food cycle, identified with and related to the lives and deaths of men” (Gajdusek 2002, 374). Hemingway’s incongruously comic simile would have had particularly tragic overtones so soon after World War II, invoking the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust by Germans working under orders— and genocide is another form of (deliberate) mass extinction. Hemingway suggests that marginalized human animals are as vulnerable to extinction as nonhuman animals are. The comparison is one that has been made more explicitly by others since In his book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Charles Patterson argues, “The ethic of human domination which promotes and justifies the exploitation of animals legitimized the oppression of humans alleged to be in an animal condition” (Patterson 2002, 25). As Patterson goes on to document, the “industrialized killing” of the Chicago slaughterhouses led first to Henry Ford’s invention of the automobile assembly line and then to the application of assembly-line principles to the mass murder of Jews (2002, 72). As Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee writes in his 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, “Chicago showed us the way; it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies” (Coetzee 2003, 97). If that claim seems tenuous, it’s important to remember that in his autobiography, My Life and Work, Henry Ford himself explicitly credited the Midwestern slaughterhouses’ industrial system with inspiring the automobile assembly line: “The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that Chicago packers use in dressing beef” (Ford and Crowther 1992, 81).6 And no one doubts that the highly efficient automobile assembly line inspired the horrifyingly efficient killing of Jews by the Nazi regime.

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Hemingway had linked what happened in the Chicago slaughterhouses to the killing of humans by humans once before, much earlier in his career, in one of the best-known passages in his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms: I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory, and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. (Hemingway 1929, 184–85, emphasis added)

In an essay unpacking the significance of that passage, Kim Moreland reminds us that during Hemingway’s childhood, Chicago was “Hog Butcher for the World,” to quote Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem “Chicago” (Moreland 2008, 88).7 She further invokes Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, a candid exposé of the meatpacking industry, to give some sense of the horrors of the Chicago slaughterhouses of the early twentieth century: “the filthy conditions of the stockyards, the animals’ suffering during the messy and chaotic slaughter, the efficient and dangerous technology, the anonymity occasioned by the application of mass production processes, the dangers to employees occasioned by animals and machinery alike, the risk to the American public who consumed the tainted meat” (Moreland 2008, 88). The parallels here are inescapable: “The soldiers’ fate is worse than that of butchered food animals” (Hediger 2016, 146).8 If, as Moreland persuasively argues, in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway compared World War I to the Chicago slaughterhouses to emphasize the bloodiness and senselessness of the conflict’s carnage, in his mid-century writings he repeatedly links World War II to the mass extinction of a species. In typical Hemingway fashion, he makes these associations through jokes, which Craig Kleinman suggests Hemingway’s audiences might need “in order to confront the catastrophes of war” (1995, 64). In a September 1, 1945, letter to Mary Welsh, who would later become the fourth Mrs. Hemingway, Ernest writes that he misses the restaurants of Paris and discusses the lasting damage to France caused by World War II: “For a year, anyway, Europe will be fairly bad. But France is such a rich country that as soon as communications are re-established it will come back very fast. Normandy is dairy products and cider. Cider, of course, is 90 percent of all the alcohol that makes all the aperitifs. But we never drank them anyway. Just as long as the atomic bomb doesn’t wipe out the Juniper berry you’ll be o.k.” (Hemingway 1981, 597). Thus he mockingly envisions the atomic bomb wiping out a plant species.

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In 1944, he writes to his sons, then at Canterbury School in Connecticut, to criticize the American troops throwing bombs into the streams and heedlessly killing the trout (Mandler 2010, 114). In 1951, he writes Lillian Ross of the New Yorker about his nearly finished manuscript of The Old Man and the Sea: “By the time I get it all right and as good as I can do they will probably be dropping atomic bombs around like goat shit. But we can make a trip to some comparatively unbombed area and you can read it in Mss. if they have stopped publishing books” (Ross 1999, 73). Although he is again obviously joking, there is a serious undercurrent here in which he implies that human culture in general and literature in particular might not survive a nuclear war. Hideo Yanagisawa notes that Richard Cantwell, the protagonist of Hemingway’s 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees, also jokes about the atomic bomb: “Cantwell’s garrulous atomic jokes paradoxically express his chagrin at the advent of nuclear weapons” (Yanagisawa 2017, 30). Hemingway deploys these jokes as a defense mechanism that enables him to criticize Western nuclear armament and its potential to render human beings extinct.9 Comedy enables Hemingway to “resist Western notions of progress and negotiate the present toward a more livable future” (Kleinman, 1995, 70). Hemingway’s cluster of allusions in Under Kilimanjaro to the plight of animals killed by humans, the genocide of the Jews and earlier of the Native Americans, and the terrifying dangers of nuclear weaponry parallel a hugely controversial statement by twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger:10 “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs” (1994, 27). The false moral equivalency Heidegger tries to establish here is admittedly disturbing, but the passage nevertheless offers a critique of modernity that is relevant to Hemingway’s work. Mahon O’Brien explains that the essay from which this sentence was taken, “The Question Concerning Technology,” is “a discussion of the philosophical roots of a mindset that can look on entire peoples as resources or objects to be used and disposed of as ‘industrial waste’” (O’Brien 2015, 21), and Michael E. Zimmerman offers a very similar reading of Heidegger’s remark: “Extermination camps and hydrogen bombs, from Heidegger’s viewpoint, were both symptoms of humanity’s conception of itself and everything else as resources to be produced and consumed, created and destroyed, at will” (Zimmerman 1990, 43). O’Brien offers a useful gloss on the philosopher’s troubling passage: “Heidegger is suggesting that the manner in which agriculture, military conflict and genocide have been understood in the twentieth century [has] been very heavily influenced by a technological type of understanding” (O’Brien 2015, 19). In other words,

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Heidegger is arguing that framing various situations in technological terms has led to the moral bankruptcy of modernity. Judging by Under Kilimanjaro, Hemingway seems to have reached a very similar conclusion.11 It’s important to remember the historical context in which Hemingway was working. He wrote and revised the manuscript published posthumously as Under Kilimanjaro “from late October 1954 to the spring of 1956,” basing it on his second safari in 1953–1954 (Lewis and Fleming 2005, vii). Anyone reading the newspaper during those years would have been well aware of the further development of nuclear weapons. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the United Kingdom tested its first atomic bomb in October 1952 (“1950 to 1959,” 2019). In the South Pacific in November 1952, the United States tested its first ever thermonuclear device, “which was roughly 1,000 times larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima seven years earlier” (“1950 to 1959,” 2019). Testing continued throughout 1953, and in June of that year, the United States executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for having passed America’s nuclear secrets to the USSR. The Soviet Union tested its first thermonuclear device in August 1953 (“1950 to 1959,” 2019). “Between 1951 and 1963, the United States conducted approximately a hundred above-ground tests” in the Nevada desert (Winkler 1993, 91). In October 1953, President Eisenhower stated America’s willingness to avail itself of its nuclear weapons “in the event of hostilities” (Winkler 1993, 81). Not surprisingly, in that same year, “the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand” of the doomsday clock “to two minutes before midnight” to express their grave concern about the risk of nuclear war (Winkler 1993, 76). The rapid development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction terrified the American people: “Public concern about the effects of radiation mounted in the post-World War II years in response to the American nuclear testing program” (Winkler 1993, 90). The public’s hunger for more information probably explains the popularity of David Bradley’s New York Times bestseller, No Place to Hide, which chronicled his experiences as a physician monitoring the fallout of the tests in the South Pacific. Excerpted in Atlantic Monthly and condensed by the Reader’s Digest, it became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and sold a quarter of a million copies by the end of 1949 (Boyer 1985, 91). U.S. schools in major metropolitan centers initiated atomic air-raid drills in 1950 (Winkler 1993, 114–15). In December 1950, Life magazine ran an article titled “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War” (Boyer 1985, 326); the following year, Life reported on backyard shelters in California (Winkler 1993, 121). There was widespread interest in what citizens could do to protect themselves and their families: “Survival, a seven-part television series shown on NBC in 1951, reached an estimated twelve million people”

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(Boyer 1985, 114). It became utterly rational for informed Americans to worry about what nuclear fallout would mean for the survival of the human species: “Fallout focused atomic fears more than any other issue in the early postwar period. . . . Still worried about a calamitous nuclear holocaust, which grew more likely as weapons improved, they now had to worry about a less violent form of extinction as well” (Winkler 1993, 108). Little wonder, then, that even as early as in Islands in the Stream, “composed primarily between 1945 and 1949” (Trogdon 2013, 146), Hemingway evinces a preoccupation with apocalyptic imagery, as Moreland notes (2014, 225), including references to “the Second Coming” (Hemingway 1972, 10), the sinking of the Titanic (Hemingway 1972, 18), “the End of the World” (Hemingway 1972, 19), the return of “the ice age” (Hemingway 1972, 417–18), hurricanes, water spouts, and “Custer’s Last Stand” (Hemingway 1972, 429), as well as the extinction of the passenger pigeon (Hemingway 1972, 417–18). The reference to the passenger pigeon’s extermination recalls a telling anecdote related by Hemingway’s sister Marcelline in her memoir At the Hemingways. She wrote that many years earlier, their father was horrified by the reminiscences of their mother’s brother, Uncle Tylee, about hunting the birds indiscriminately: “ ‘And to think they are extinct now,’ Daddy said. ‘It’s wicked!’” (Sanford 1999, 11). Very early in life, Hemingway learned from his father to regard driving a species to extinction as a grave moral failure. Given the historical context in which Hemingway was writing, it would have been virtually impossible for his contemporaries to read his references to possible extinction caused by wartime bombings without thinking of their own species’ potential impending extinction by nuclear weaponry. Birds often function in Hemingway’s work as “harbingers and prophets” (Gajdusek 2002, 380),12 which might prompt readers to wonder what the possibility of the storks’ extinction heralds for humans: “Hemingway understood our kinship with animals as rendering him and them equally killable” (Hediger 2016, 155). The fact that the stork has long functioned as an emblem of human fertility underscores this reading of Hemingway’s text: The bird’s endangerment parallels humans’ endangerment. It is instructive to remember the ending of one of Hemingway’s earliest short stories, “Indian Camp”—itself a story about racial genocide.13 Young Nick Adams witnesses his father performing a makeshift Caesarean section on a Native American woman. Nick then watches as his father, Dr. Adams, discovers that the patient’s husband has slit his throat in the bunk above. Understandably shaken by the Indian’s suicide, Nick later tells himself that he will never die. If we accept the premise that Nick is a semi-autobiographical figure (a truism in Hemingway studies), then Hemingway reveals, in Under Kilimanjaro, that he has changed very little by his mid-fifties. He imagines the white stork vanished from Spain and then quickly reassures himself

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that—like Nick Adams—the storks will never die. The astute reader recognizes both of these hollow reassurances for what they are. NOTES 1. The white stork is not endangered in the twenty-first century. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources classifies Ciconia ciconia as “least concern” and describes the population as “increasing” (Birdlife International 2016). 2. Writing of birds as “collateral damage in human wars,” John R. Nelson explains the dangers in his article “Birds and War”: Understandably, little has been written about the harm done to birds by war. One might claim philosophically that it’s speciesist to value human suffering over bird suffering, but few people would seriously argue that we should worry more about avian war casualties when people by the hundreds of thousands are being killed, maimed, raped, orphaned, tortured, humiliated, or left to live with grief or guilt. It’s also rarely feasible to gather reliable information about the status of birds in a war zone. It’s not as if combatants will cease fire so that ornithologists can go forth to census the birds or survey the condition of their remaining habitat. . . . In whatever numbers, birds have certainly been killed in war by the same weapons that kill people: bombs, land mines, poison gas, even stray bullets. They been harmed more extensively, if less directly, through destruction of habitats by bombs or fires, deforestation of stopover oases on migration paths, loss of food supply through toxic defoliants like Agent Orange, deliberate spilling of oil, and disruption of breeding. (Nelson 2015, 452–53)

3. Hemingway does link Mary’s sorrow to the deaths of birds: “I felt bad about Miss Mary’s sorrow, but I could not tell her what the eagles meant to me, nor why I had killed these three, the last one by smacking his head against a tree down in the timber, nor what their skins had bought at the reservation” (Hemingway 2005, 260). 4. For a discussion of the ways in which Native Americans were vilified as “subhuman” and “dangerously close to animals” as a prelude to their genocide, see Patterson (2002, 32 and 25). Patterson, like Hemingway, invokes the genocide of the Native Americans as a parallel to both the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust and the treatment of nonhuman animals by humans: “Given the way Europeans treated animals, their designation of Native Americans as ‘wild beasts’ was a deadly presentiment of what lay ahead.” He argues that “our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other” (Patterson 2002, 32, 109). As Heise puts it, “the same underlying logic informs racism and speciesism” (Heise 2016, 165). 5. For an overview of Hemingway’s attitudes toward Native Americans, see Amy Strong (2013). 6. Ryan Hediger makes this point as well (2013, 218).

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7. Slaughterhouses figure prominently in several of Hemingway’s books, including Death in the Afternoon (1932, 24–25) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940, 254–55), and invariably function as sites of horror. See A. E. Hotchner’s account in his book Papa Hemingway of a conversation with Ernest about the slaughterhouses in Madrid (1967, 148–49). 8. It is probably not entirely coincidental that In einem anderen Land, the German translation of A Farewell to Arms, was among the books burned by the Nazis in 1933 (“Ernest Hemingway,” undated). 9. Hemingway complained about the tendency to see his jokes as irrelevant distractions: “The bastards don’t want you to joke because it disturbs their categories” (Hemingway, 1981, 385). As he later implied in a letter, he considers humor worthwhile and valuable and takes his jokes very seriously: “You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn’t kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple” (Hemingway, 1981, 767). 10. Heidegger’s comment, known as the “agriculture remark,” was first made in a lecture given at the Bremen Club in 1949 and was later published. As Mahon O’Brien explains, “The comment has provoked extreme outrage. The common denominator running through the responses is that Heidegger’s remark is shockingly inadequate and insensitive, that he grossly diminishes the horror of the Holocaust and the gas chambers by comparing them to agricultural practices” (O’Brien 2015, 21). Heidegger’s membership in the National Socialist (Nazi) party and the antisemitism evident in his recently revealed private writings have only exacerbated the controversy. At least one noted Jewish writer, however, has espoused a philosophy that similarly recognizes moral parallels between genocide and human treatment of animals. The Nobel Prize–winning American novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer writes in his novel The Penitent, “[W]hen it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi” (1983, 39). 11. See John Killinger’s book Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (1960) for a discussion of Hemingway’s affinities with existentialist philosophy. 12. For example, a songbird heralds the end of not one but two relationships in “A Canary for One,” a bird’s flight signals the sexual union of Nick Adams and Prudie in “Fathers and Sons” and of Robert Jordan and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the death of the ducks in Across the River and into the Trees foreshadows the death of Richard Cantwell. Hemingway laments his own neglect of the birds of Africa and simultaneously directs his (and by extension, our) attention to them: “Now here in Africa there were beautiful birds around the camp all of the time. They were in the trees and in the thorn bushes and walking about on the ground and I only half saw them as moving bits of color while Mary knew and loved them all. I could not think how I had become so stupid and calloused about the birds and I was very ashamed” (Hemingway 2005, 225). He advises himself, “This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into” (Hemingway 2005, 225).

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When an earlier version of this essay was presented at Hemingway: Between Key West and Cuba, a conference hosted by Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, in July 2017, Valerie Hemingway commented that when she served as his secretary in the 1950s, Hemingway was extraordinarily attentive to the natural world and enjoyed drawing others’ attention to specific details in their shared environment. 13. Strong points out that “At the turn of the century, most Americans quite reasonably assumed that Indian cultures would eventually become extinct” (Strong, 2013, 323). Hemingway, who was born in 1899, would have grown up with that understanding. See Strong (1996 and 2008) for discussions of Native Americans and their significance in Hemingway’s fiction.

REFERENCES “1950 to 1959: The Two Superpowers.” 2019. Atomic Timeline. Atomic Heritage Foundation, https:​//​www​.atomicheritage​.org​/history​/timeline. BirdLife International. 2016. “Ciconia ciconia.” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T22697691A86248677. International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, http:​//​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.2305​/IUCN​.UK​.2016​-3​.RLTS. T22697691A8624 8677.en. Boyer, Paul. 1985. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon. Coetzee, J. M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking. “Ernest Hemingway.” Undated. Holocaust Encyclopedia. The United States Holocaust Museum. https:​//​www​.ushmm​.org​/wlc​/en​/article​.php​?ModuleId​=10006085. Ford, Henry, and Samuel Crowther. 1992. My Life and Work. New York: Doubleday. Google Books, https:​//​books​.google​.com​/books​?id​=4K82efXzn10C​&printsec​ =frontcover​&source= gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Freud, Sigmund. 1981. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, edited by James Strachey. Rev. ed. New York: Liveright. Gajdusek, Robert E. 2002. “Hemingway’s Late-Life Relationship with Birds.” In Hemingway in His Own Country, 368–82. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Hediger, Ryan. 2013. “Animals.” In Ernest Hemingway in Context, edited by Debra A. Moddelmog and Suzanne del Gizzo, 217–26. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hediger, Ryan. 2016. “Shot . . . crippled and gotten away: Animals and War Trauma in Hemingway.” In Teaching Hemingway and War, edited by Alex Vernon, 143–56. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Heise, Ursula K. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hemingway, Ernest. 1929. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribners.

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Hemingway, Ernest. 1932. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribners. Hemingway, Ernest. 1940. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Macmillan. Hemingway, Ernest. 1972. Islands in the Stream. New York: Bantam. Hemingway, Ernest. 1981. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by Carlos Baker. New York: Scribners. Hemingway, Ernest. 2005. Under Kilimanjaro, edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Hemingway, Mary Welsh. 1976. How It Was. New York: Knopf. Hotchner, A. E. 1967. Papa Hemingway. New York: Bantam. Killinger, John. 1960. Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press. Kleinman, Craig. 1995. “Dirty Tricks and ‘Wordy’ Jokes: The Politics of Recollection in A Farewell to Arms.” Hemingway Review 15, no. 1 (Fall): 54–71. Kolodny, Annette. 2017. “Schooling the Nation’s Newspaper of Record: The New York Times and Indian Genocide.” Society of Early Americanists, Tulsa. CORE Repository, MLA Commons, March 5, 2017, https:​//​hcommons​.org​/deposits​/item​ / hc:11513. Lewis, Robert W., and Robert E. Fleming. 2005. “Introduction.” In Under Kilimanjaro, vii–xv. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Mandler, Lou. 2010. “The Hemingways at Canterbury.” Hemingway Review 29, no. 2 (Spring): 105–22. Moreland, Kim. 2014. “Death by Drowning: Trauma Theory and Islands in the Stream.” In Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works, edited by Larry Grimes and Bickford Sylvester, 213–28. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2014. Moreland, Kim. 2008. “A Farewell to Arms, World War I, and ‘the Stockyards at Chicago.’” In Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, edited by Lisa Tyler, 85–97. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Nelson, John R. 2015. “Birds and War.” Massachusetts Review, 56, no. 3 (Fall): 447–60. MasterFILE Premier. Accession number 109990004. O’Brien, Mahon. 2015. Heidegger, History, and the Holocaust. New York: Bloomsbury. Patterson, Charles. 2002. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. New York: Lantern. Ross, Lillian. 1999. “Hemingway Told Me Things.” New Yorker, May 24: 70–73. Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway. 1999. At the Hemingways: With Fifty Years of Correspondence between Ernest and Marcelline Hemingway. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press. Seefeldt, Michael. 1999. “An Evening with Patrick Hemingway.” Hemingway Review 19, no. 1 (Fall): 8–16. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. 1983. The Penitent. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Strong, Amy Lovell. 1996. “Screaming through Silence: The Violence of Race in ‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife’ and ‘Indian Camp.’” Hemingway Review 16, no. 1 (Fall): 18–32. Strong, Amy L. 2008. Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Strong, Amy. 2013. “Race and Ethnicity: American Indians.” In Ernest Hemingway in Context, edited by Debra A. Moddelmog and Suzanne del Gizzo, 322–31. New York: Cambridge University Press. Trogdon, Robert. 2013. “Posthumous Publications.” In Ernest Hemingway in Context, edited by Debra A. Moddelmog and Suzanne del Gizzo, 141–50. New York: Cambridge University Press. Winkler, Allan M. 1993. Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom. New York: Oxford University Press. Yanagisawa, Hideo. 2017. “Hemingway’s Requiem for Battlefields: ‘Atomic Jokes’ after Hiroshima/Nagasaki in Across the River and into the Trees.” Hemingway Review 37, no. 1 (Fall): 18–35. Zimmerman, Michael E. 1990. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

SECTION II

Land and Sea

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Chapter 5

Environment, Emotion, and the Individual in “The Open Boat” Rob Welch

Despite ecocritism having become a mainstream tool for critical theory over three decades ago, its application to American literary naturalism has only recently begun to develop. In part, this is likely because of general assumptions made about naturalism and its relationship with science and the world. Naturalism developed with a conscious focus on early concepts of evolution, and it regularly conceived environment as one of many possible determinants, elements of cause, which are acknowledged as having an effect on humans; in that view, environment remains in a subordinate position, only mattering in so far as it impacts people. This is precisely the anthropocentric view that ecocriticism developed to answer, but perhaps because naturalist views seem so definite on this unidirectional relationship, ecocritical scholars have been slow to isolate and examine this movement as offering more. However, recent publications have begun exploring the ways American naturalism does have more to say on the topic of nature than has previously been assumed. Interestingly, most ecocritical articles relating to naturalism feature the works of Stephen Crane to represent the movement. Likely, this is because his works remain very topical, still being regularly taught in literature classrooms at all levels. However, the phenomenon might also suggest that Crane has a special affinity with modern ecocritical perspectives. “The Open Boat” is the narrative which provides the best and most direct entry to the topic, and I have chosen to explore the ecocritical in Crane’s naturalism through reading this story. The referents within “The Open Boat” are as pared down and straightforward as possible, really allowing for a very direct interpretation which sheds light on the author’s position on the relationship of the human to the environment, as well as demonstrating how 79

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this fits within a wider but still comprehensible framework for understanding the workings of naturalism. “The Open Boat” is based on the true story of Crane’s survival after the sinking of the ship Commodore, a cargo vessel carrying arms and men to the civil war in Cuba, on January 2, 1897. However, rather than historicizing this experience, or depending on the drama of the dire situation, or romanticizing the actions of the people involved, Crane instead turns this narrative into one that emphasizes nothing so much as commentary on the position of the human in relation to the environment. On one hand, four humans ride in a small boat. On the other, the waters of the Atlantic swell and fall according to tide and wind, the waves standing as the effective, unavoidable environment. The meeting of human and nonhuman in this setting sets the stage for the characters to model the potential for a new awareness. The tragedy of “The Open Boat” is how Crane’s characters fail to realize this potential, mired by the comfortable constraints of cultural referents, and, in the end, glorying in them. While “The Open Boat” is a stark example illustrating the relationship of human to environment, it has eluded explication by ecocritical scholars until now. However, a brief review of other works examined through this lens shows the facility of Crane’s art to the view, and it provides foundation for understanding his methods in that short story. One significant theme binds these assessments of the author’s work: Crane habitually de-emphasizes or questions the significance of the human in his narratives. In 2011, Iris Ralph published “Stephen Crane and the Green Place of Paint,” one of the first applications of ecocriticism to naturalism. She anchors her ideas in a connection well explored since the 1960s, the concept that Crane is trying to do in writing what nineteenth-century Impressionists did with paint, a concept explored definitively in the criticism of James Nagel (1980). Crane’s unique descriptive language has been the subject of comment since its first publication, and Joseph Conrad (1926) famously eulogized Crane by calling him “the most single-minded of the verbal impressionists” (130). Ralph (2011) takes this in a new direction, suggesting that the underlying relationship between the Impressionist painters and nature is an integral part of what Crane transfers into his medium. In particular, she notes how Impressionist painters de-emphasize the human and craft images that resist narrative, instead depicting a moment’s point-of-view with a certain light and a certain angle. The trick for Crane is to create something that reads as narrative but retains effects similar to viewing Impressionist paintings. Ralph suggests that we can see this at work when Crane downplays the significance of the human in his fiction. Ralph concludes that Crane is doing more than expressing ideas of determinism as the be-all-and-end-all of his naturalist purpose. She writes, “Crane’s writings . . . go further, questioning normative anthropocentric distinctions between humans and nonhumans and subjects and subject-less

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objects” (2011, 217). Wendy Ryden (2017) further developed the idea of Crane gesturing beyond the human in “Lawn and Order: An Ecocritique of Progress in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster.’” In “The Monster,” the character of Henry Johnson is disfigured in a fire in the laboratory of Dr. Trescott, and Johnson becomes regarded as something other than human for those who interact with him. Ryden counterposes the invalid Johnson with Dr. Trescott’s lawn, which is featured as the focus of the doctor’s attentive labor at the story’s start. Both Johnson and the lawn may be classified as objects, natural in origin, but turned to a new end by human machinations. Ryden notes that Johnson, the object who is no longer a person, devaluates Trescott’s status, whereas the manicured lawn accentuates the physician’s position within a wealthy middle-class. While this certainly acts as social commentary, Ralph’s central point is that Crane achieves this commentary by giving center stage in the story to an element which is problematic specifically because it is other than human. That Johnson’s humanity is already a matter of question in the story, prior to his disfiguring, because the character is an African American who is only understood in terms of stereotype only adds deeper levels of provocation to the reader to reconsider the category of “human” as malleable in developing this narrative. Crane’s commentary on the human and environment is particularly clear in his earliest novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), and Robert M. Myer’s (2015) exploration of it stresses a second major point about Crane’s work, seen through the ecocritical lens. That is the weight of existing criticism that stresses cultural referents as the accepted means of interpretation. The novel’s representation of immigrant-rich and tenement-filled New York of the turn of the century is particularly provocative, exploring humans as they exist in their self-made environment, the city. Myers’s article, “Crane’s City,” advances the idea of the role Crane means for the urban environment to be taken as a full-fledged character within the narrative. However, much of Myers’s efforts are spent justifying an ecocritical perspective to the novel; Myers argument gives a real feel to the weight of predominant criticism identifying class and culture as the core referents necessary for interpreting Crane’s novel, exemplified in the opinions of naturalist expert, Donald Pizer. Myer’s view should be taken to heart by other scholars seeking to advance ecocritical perspectives for naturalist fiction. Even previous studies which have purportedly focused on Crane’s use of the urban environment like Christophe Den Tandt’s (1998) The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism undercut the significance of environment, per se, by shifting the meaning of its representation toward aesthetic and philosophical understandings. As such, they still refrain from directly considering the possibilities of the environment as environment. Myers’s (2015) struggle against more traditional cultural criticism is ironic in

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light of my contention that Crane’s purpose in “The Open Boat” is to question how those cultural referents limit his characters. Across his fiction, Crane consistently acknowledges environment as a key element, but the human rarely compares favorably. This result largely develops from the disdain that Crane displays for Romantic traditions that color the understanding of the human and its relationship to the environment. The vast vistas of Texas are backdrop to “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), helping set both tone and expectations for the direction of the narrative with a sense of the sublime. A paralyzing blizzard on the great plains is the operative device bringing disparate characters together in “The Blue Hotel” (1898), pairing two images of daunting space and irresistible power. Importantly, however, Crane refrains from overtly embracing the sense of the sublime, instead, merely suggesting the drama that he knows the reader will infer from the existing cultural connections to this concept. In fact, he uses those connections to downplay the drama of his own narratives. The smallness and remoteness of the town of Yellow Sky stresses the insignificance of the human conflict which turns, appropriately, to comedic resolution. Similarly, the strength of the punishing weather in Romper, Nebraska, sends characters to huddle in shelter, contrasting the interior and the exterior, sharply. Here, as happens in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the buildings created as human spaces show poorly against their natural settings, their poverty and artificiality speaking to the quality of those who occupy them. Crane plays on Romantic precepts to evoke emotional responses that confuse and contradict those precepts. Through emotion, Crane’s work resonates within ecocriticism. The foundational principle for ecocritical studies is that the representation of the environment within fiction matters on a personal level. As Alexa Weik von Mossner (2020) points out in her recent overview of developmental directions within the field, despite growing concern for global issues, a constant thread remains the awareness of the “deep feelings” that are associated with local and specific experience (130). In “Environmental Narrative, Embodiment, and Emotion,” Weik von Mossner (2016) walks through this process, explaining in detail how the writer’s depictions translate for the reader into a version of lived experience which replicates characters’ interactions with their environment. Most significant to this is the way that emotions within the text develop corresponding emotion within the reader. Weik von Mossner (2016) notes: “Emotions . . . are understood as the basic mechanism that connects us to our environment, shapes our knowledge, and motivates our actions” (536). This may work in several ways, though the most simple is for characters within the narrative to react to environment with positive or negative emotion, prompting the reader to follow suit. Another affective technique is for the author to develop anthropomorphic metaphor in regard to the environment

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to, essentially, transform it into a relatable character on its own, particularly one that feels, offering the opportunity for direct empathy. In her reading of Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake (2007), Weik von Mossner (2019) points to how in that novel strip-mining is characterized as having wounded the mountain, suggesting continued pain, and she concludes, “The narrative thereby enables readers to understand not just cognitively but also viscerally and emotionally” (560). In “The Open Boat,” Crane incorporates both of these techniques directly into its narrative, deeply developing the reader’s emotional experience of the depicted ordeal of the human characters by demonstrating their relationship with their environment. The foremost technique Crane employs in “The Open Boat” is personification to bring the environment of the ocean to life in a multitude of ways. Crane is famous for his unusual metaphors, but in this, he begins in a very straightforward manner, the narrator proposing nearly from the beginning that the sea has a purposeful consciousness behind it. When one wave passes by, the rower in the boat realizes that “there is another behind it just as important and as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats” (2017, 1049). So, the environment is immediately identified as the enemy in this situation, the opposition that seeks to destroy the human. The waves are described in ominous terms that emphasize their power and their antipathy: they pass with “terrible grace,” and they are silent “save for the snarling of the crests” (1049). A similar counter-positioning occurs to all that is associated with the ocean. At one early interlude, the team of men in the boat intersect with a flock of gulls. Crane inserts one of his odd but effective descriptions, claiming the gulls are made of “Canton flannel,” so that a sense of color and texture is added to the image, mirroring the rough weave of the cheap fabric (1050). It soon becomes clear that the birds, however, are at peace with the waves, and this causes the men to pair them as conspirators against them. The birds become “uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny” (1050). All of this interaction sets up the reader to see this situation as human versus the environment, and the obvious message is to sympathize with the humans who have so little power, so small a chance. The description propels the reader to comprehend the situation using traditional, Romantic understandings of the human overmatched by the sublime power of nature. Yet, as Crane suggests the men thinking in terms of a conspiracy of individual waves and plotting gulls, he also calls into question these same Romantic understandings of the awesome power of nature, making them into something petty, something more recognizable as human, and this is key to where the author takes his message about man and the environment. The birds, after all, never harm the castaways. While the waves certainly have the potential to do so, the antipathy exemplified through snarling is undercut by characterizing their effort as an anxious one, far from the surety that any sublime

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power might expect. Crane writes of the ocean to both illustrate and provoke emotive responses, but these are all singular to a particular viewpoint that he wants to develop. The focus on emotion suggests how Crane’s message can be enhanced by cross-referencing ecocritical ideas on feelings against affect theory. While critical of some methods within the wider field of affect studies, Weik von Mossner (2016) regularly ties the impact of emotion to the effectiveness of ecocritical perspectives. She notes, “It is through the mechanism of empathy . . . that readers map the sensations, emotions, and movements of that fictional body onto their own, thus understanding, and literally feeling, its interaction with the environment” (539–40). Affect theory tries to assess the paths of such feeling, and it features a strong focus on the embodiment of the human, a concern for the barriers for what is interior and what is exterior, exploring how we inhabit our world. It might seem counterintuitive, but highlighting embodiment encourages us to define what is us by taking stock of what is not us and developing ideas about the relationships in this binary. In affect theory, emotion is the means of this discovery. The idea is that concentrating on our individual identity or consciousness as distinct from everything else actually reveals the connections to what lies beyond us. Alphoso Lingis (2007) writes, “The story we tell ourselves of our lives gives narrative locations of impassioned experiences to the landscape, the city or hamlet, the productive or unproductive industry, the politically administered region about us” (56). Sara Ahmed (2004) explains the phenomenon simply, stating, “Emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects” (8). This means that, as we understand ourselves as occupying a physical being and understand ourselves as the consciousness occupying our reality, when we experience emotion through interaction with the world, real or imagined, we are drawn to recognize our relationship to that which is exterior to us as being essentially intertwined with our being. The exterior, particularly the environment, becomes the proverbial first cause for delineating that which is us. Theresa Brennan (2004), in The Transmission of Affect, further, suggests that a significant portion of the confusion or willful misunderstanding of the relationship of humans to one another and to their world rests in cultural customs (including foundations of psychology) for understanding identity construction through individuality. These perspectives are very significant for understanding Crane’s purpose in writing “The Open Boat,” since much of his text critiques ideas of individuality and how the individual relates to environment. The first thing to recognize in thinking about “The Open Boat” is how the narrative, itself, exists as an individual entity that resists expectations. Just as Crane sets up Romantic motifs that resonate with accepted ideas of the sublime, he just as quickly reflects on those motifs and causes the reader to

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question them. This is his method through the entire narrative, and before delving deeper into how this leads to a tragic moment of failed revelation for human consciousness, it is important to recognize how “The Open Boat” resists the pull of various tropes for the action it presents of men struggling in the aftermath of a tragedy. As with embodied things, we can learn a great deal about what Crane has created by considering what he has specifically excluded from this narrative. While the story was widely known to represent the true experience of Crane after the sinking of the Commodore on January 2, 1897, he refrains from presenting this as a first-person account, instead speaking in the third person of “the correspondent,” the character representing him. The drama of the ship sinking is already in the past when the story begins, and so, the events that occur during the narrative are, simply: the men in the small boat wait out the weather for the space of a day, hoping that someone will rescue them, and then they make a landing on the beach at New Smyrna, Florida, when they think they have a chance of doing so. No one leads the group in the sense of inspiring and holding them steady. No one acts as Iago, sowing dissent in the boat. Everyone just does their part, and most of them make it. Crane’s narrative choice is in stark contrast to the way that the contemporary press represented the same events when the Commodore went down, and understanding this as a purposeful choice for “The Open Boat” makes the reader question why he so strongly resists elements that most would claim as the tools of storytelling. Newspaper coverage of the incident highlights the relative nature of the truth about the accident in a way that compliments Crane’s own investments in relativism, but they also stress how news writers capitalized on expectations for developing a certain amount of drama for conveying the incident. After the sinking, details shift from day to day and newspaper to newspaper, despite the fact that each was working with the same local news dispatches emanating from northern Florida. The print news of the day, often invested in sensationalism as a method to maintain sales, was not shy about portraying drama, but the direction of that drama varies widely, depending on editorial perspective and potential tastes of the readers. Several news accounts choose to view the sinking in racist terms. The second report published by The New York Herald on January 3, 1897, emphasizes that loss of life was exacerbated by the Cubans on board panicking and refusing to listen to the recommendations of the captain, a detail not substantiated in any account (“Commodore Sunk”). A follow-up article from The Baltimore Sun illustrated how an unidentified “colored man” nearly swamped the boat containing Crane, the captain, and his two companions, suggesting that this character was responsible for these white men being unable to save more people (“Commodore’s Survivors” 1897). While the United States was still more than a year away from entering into formal war with Spain, the press

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was also anxious to touch on the tensions that were leading to that conflict. Despite the Commodore having run aground, presumably damaging its hull, on the day before setting out to sea, accusations of sabotage and spycraft inform the narrative of the journalistic version of the sinking. Note that these speculative ideas about what happened and how it happened represented the “truth” of the moment about the Commodore to many readers. It is also significant to think about how these stories demonstrate what we can take as common ideas contemporary to Crane for how others might develop a story around the sinking of this ship. The distance between the expectations of the news-reading audience and what Crane produces in fiction is interesting, but, after all, “The Open Boat” is a work of art and should probably remain distinct from news accounts. However, Crane established the distinctions between his view and what might be expected even before composing the fictional account. Just three days after returning to dry land, Crane wrote an eyewitness account of the sinking for newspapers. It was printed, first, in the New York Press on January 7, 1897, and it was subsequently reprinted in papers across the country through the next week. This account really acts as a kind of prequel to “The Open Boat,” as the primary action begins withs how the Commodore set sail, and the recounting leaves off as the survivors pull away from the site of the sinking in their small boat. He closes the last two paragraphs of this account by teasing, “The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be instructive for the young, but none is to be told here now” (Crane 1897). In many ways, Crane’s recounting of the sinking reads characteristically as his own, presenting phrasing that is full of vivid, original imagery, and replete with humorous understatement. Even here, though, the author resists any impulse to craft a tale with heroes and villains. Crane remarks on the competency and professionalism of the crew, especially Captain Edward Murphy, assuring his audience that the captain and the oiler, William Higgins, behaved in a way that credited their “manliness.” The New York Press article does include the element of the African American stoker who nearly swamps their boat, but this is told in a simple way, clearly implying a sympathy for the lives lost as the primary takeaway. For comparison, the account Mark Twain famously wrote of the burning of the ship Hornet in 1866 paints a picture of a heroic captain shepherding his crew through hardship despite the incompetence of a junior officer who is credited with causing the ship disaster and then mishandling supplies and the men he was meant to lead. Crane utterly resists framing the event in this way, and the contents are interesting, but it is equally interesting because of how the author refuses to dramatize it. If the newspaper account of the sinking of the Commodore is the preface for Crane’s fictional account of what came next, then it is a very mundane preface, and that is a primary clue that really emphasizes how Crane has

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already conceived the narrative of the incident as something very different as he turns to crafting the “instructive” explanation of what happened after the sinking of the Commodore. Likely, hearing directly from a survivor carried enough interest to boost the reception of his newspaper release on the sinking, even if it did not quite fit with the expected pattern of playing up the action or assigning blame. However, when “The Open Boat” carried on Crane’s narrative in fiction, the literary reception demonstrates that, here, too, Crane actively avoided satisfying the expectations of contemporary critics, leaving them unsure how to characterize what exactly he was doing. Contemporary reviews of the story frequently mention that it cannot be defined as a story at all, and the level of tolerance for this perceived lack varies from reviewer to reviewer. London’s Westminster Gazette remarked of Crane, “He seems studiously to avoid the plot or incident which other writers seek for the short story,” and the reviewer longs for the day when Crane is fully in control of his narrative powers, to make his writing more purposeful and artful in a conventional way (Montiero 2009, 169). At the Outlook, another British magazine, the critic expresses nearly the same idea about “The Open Boat” and the stories published along with it. The reviewer writes, “They are incidents rather than stories, and are selected, not for their dramatic interest, which the author apparently wishes to exclude, but as a vehicle for the telling touches in which he paints aspects of nature, or analyses human emotions” (Montiero 2009, 173). From beginning to end, Crane sought to do something decidedly different in presenting the story of the sinking of the Commodore. My suggestion is that the criticism leveled at Crane about avoiding conventional narrative derives from what the critics perceive as inconsistencies in narrative method; however, these deviations from expectations actually represent the author’s object to present a more comprehensive drama, one that does not depend on traditional expectations. In short, Crane wants to offer drama that does not depend on showing humans reaching new heights. Instead, it is a narrative about being in two senses. The first sense stresses physical embodiment, the biological beings in the boat who are on the edge of survival. The second sense explores human consciousness and how it relates and fails to relate to the reality of physical being. The key in connecting these emphases is the link between human and the environment. A particular metaphor for Crane is the thin skin which keeps the human distinct from the environment, and this takes the shape of ego in the identity of his characters and their dependence on the human ability to alter its environment. The actual drama in “The Open Boat” rests on just how tenuous these distinctions can be. Crane demonstrates this in the baldest way possible, presenting the four characters in a ten-foot boat on a churning ocean. At the very start of the story, one character is described as “staring with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean” (Crane 2017, 1048). This thin

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measure is all which keeps them distinct from the ocean environment, and it is the sole means of preserving their lives, their individuality. Immediacy pervades the entire narrative, and this works to draw the reader in emotionally, and it reinforces the realism of the situation. The reader perceives the wearying sameness of the labor, the eternal motion of the water, and how they interact. As Weik von Mosser (2019) suggests, two things are necessary for readers to experience a mimetic relationship with narrative, “a vivid account of sensory outcomes” and “the evocation of the material conditions that give rise to those outcomes” (564). Crane develops this effect impressively. On one level, largely the physical one, the author shows the survivors becoming extensions of their environment, existing to react to it, their individuality subsiding, and this leads the reader to similarly participate. Crane shows this in the way the cook’s gaze is absorbed in the gunwale, but each character responds similarly, robotically performing the function required to conclude each moment. Crane writes, “After successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it” (Crane 2017, 1049). So, the oiler steers, the correspondent rows, and the captain navigates, while the cook bails, all in a seemingly endless cycle, each living for this moment with the sole reward being another moment beyond, and the one that follows. In this way, the motions of the sea both instigate the actions of the humans and parallel their experience of being, as they move in accord. Only when night closes on the survivors and the correspondent finds himself the only one waking does introspection restore a more independent sense of self, and a fresh distinction comes into play, one that is out of keeping with the observations noted by Ralph (2011), Ryden (2017), and Myers (2015). Each of those critics noted how strongly Crane consistently seeks to devalue the human. Of a sudden, at this point in “The Open Boat,” Crane begins to emphasize the human, and this unexpected turn should alert readers that the author must be making a particular point with this deviation from form. As he rows, ensuring the boat moves with the water and does not challenge the power of the waves, his actions continue automatically, as before, but his mind wanders. On the first day, as they drew close to the shore and thought they might try a dangerous landing, the narrator summarizes the “rage” submerged inside the desperate men, and it is in the form of questioning fate, asking why they were not just killed immediately if that was to be the outcome (Crane 2017, 1054). Now, in the darkness, the same thought returns to the correspondent. He begins, “If I am going to be drowned . . . [,]” and he concludes that he has to consider the likelihood “an abominable injustice” (1059). He acknowledges that through the history of civilization, people who have sailed have been drowned, but this cannot remove the personal sting from his potential loss. This turns his thought to the unequal relationship between the individual and nature taken at large. The correspondent is not

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remarking on the fact that the ocean is just too big for a man to contend with. Instead, he is put out because the emotive connection is all on one side. He wishes that nature actually was as conceived in classical antiquity; being at the mercy of the environment, he desires to at least have the satisfaction of railing at the entity responsible, of throwing “bricks at the temple,” but he is left only with his impotent anger, stewing in the knowledge that “there are no bricks and no temples” (1059). This simple message relates to the reality of his position, in a boat away from the sheltering structures of humanity, but it also recognizes the falseness of the concept behind the temple itself, how it is a creation whose significance derives from the human mind. This train of thought dead-ends in solipsism, the correspondent acknowledging that his own consciousness, the thing which enables his participation in the world is also the source of his troubling conflict with nature, imposing his emotive projections on his environment and making it something that it, patently, is not. This is the critical moment for Crane’s character. His body continues its automatic motions, his physical connection with his environment, the reality of his situation. This evidence, however, is set aside as the correspondent struggles to define the chain of cause and effect for his consciousness and its relationship with the natural world. The character has the potential to consider how culture and tradition have dictated his understanding. This is the moment when he has the opportunity to see clearly how things actually fit together, if only he can keep reasoning in this direction and not fall back into the habits of received knowledge. This is the moment when the real tragedy of “The Open Boat” occurs, as the correspondent wavers on the precipice of critiquing the structures of power that prioritize humanity as the center and focus of everything. Crane’s correspondent envisions the satisfaction of offering supplication, of potentially receiving succor from a higher power, but given the fact that he has already acknowledged that his consciousness is not met by anything similar in the natural world, this prayer takes an extremely odd form, saying, “Yes, but I love myself” (2017, 1059). The conclusion is that he has no one to pray to but himself, and he already knows the limits of his own power within this situation. Having uttered the prayer, Crane inserts one of his typical metaphors, writing, “A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels she [nature] says to him” in response (1059). Note the qualifier, “he feels,” in this remark, emphasizing the falseness of the contention made by the character. Rather than addressing this as false, though, Crane’s character seems to accept this supposed interaction at face value. With little ado, the reasoning and realization of the previous moment slips away and the correspondent lapses back into the fantasy of a personified nature, the default understanding derived through tradition. The views of antiquity, the views of

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the many who have come before, the views accepted by common metaphor supersede both the physical evidence provided by his body and the rational potential of his mind. Interestingly, Crane’s narrator does not reserve this moment of reflection exclusively for the writer in the depiction, further highlighting the author’s critique on individuality. With a single comment, this cycle of realization and rejection of realization is generalized as having occurred in each of the shipwrecked men, despite their varied backgrounds, captain, cook, engineer, and author. This understated repetition might imply a “truth” represented in the text, though the ultimate result of this “truth” illustrates the illusions humans create that distance them from the reality of the material world around them. Then, as quickly as Crane makes this simple case for how enculturation has shaped them into similar consciousnesses, he segues into an exact example for how this occurs as the correspondent’s mind wanders toward literature. Unbidden, as the correspondent ponders, a cultural tangent occurs to him. Crane writes, “To chime the notes of his emotion, a verse mysteriously entered the correspondent’s head” (2017, 1059). This new tack in the narrative is another touch of realism and a furthering of the point the author is seeking to make about the distance between humans and the world they inhabit. In “Environmental Narrative, Embodiment, and Emotion,” Weik von Mossner (2016) explains the power of literature as performance. She writes how fiction “will cue readers to simulate . . . [a] sense or feeling in their minds, using their own real-world experiences as models and their own bodies as sounding boards for the simulation” (538). Crane presents his character modeling this very action for his own readers, creating a meta-level of reference. As the correspondent’s mind wanders, a scrap from his past intrudes. In this instance, the correspondent suddenly recalls a piece of poetry. Crane alludes to the romantic poem “Bingen on the Rhine” by Caroline E. S. Norton (2012), which dates from his own boyhood in 1883, and the narrator’s tone leaves little doubt that his character regards this fresh recollection with some consternation. The correspondent’s past association with the verse is a tiresome one, a time when “myriads of his school-fellows” recited the lines describing a soldier dying on foreign soil and thinking of his home. He distinctly remembers that “he had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow” (Crane 2017, 1060). At this moment, years later, however, his sympathies awakened by his own situation, the poetry seems suddenly relevant. In this instance when the correspondent’s life may be at its close, he understands these tired lines as something “stern, mournful, and fine” (1060). He spends the remainder of his night’s watch building on the scene, illustrating the moment of the soldier’s death, dwelling on it, “dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier” and reaching a “slow and

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perfectly impersonal comprehension” (1060). As is typical with Crane, after a long build, he undercuts the significance of this new moment of comprehension. What the character realizes is that he feels sorry for the soldier, and this is far from a shattering revelation. However, this last realization is more than just a realistic reference to the associative ability of the mind. With his earlier consideration about the personification of nature as context, the correspondent has, in fact, circled back to emphasize the point already made, that the one thing he knows is that he loves himself, and, it is, of course, his own dying that he feels sorry for. By turning his attention to literature in the form of a fragment of poetry, he turns instinctively to the cult humanity maintains for itself and its centrality in significance, truly amplifying that moment of prayer professing self-love. Crane’s criticism of this action by his character is made clear both by his habit of ironizing any serious contention, but also by his selection of the poem and his treatment of it. Norton’s poem is, practically speaking, only known to us today through the fragment Crane preserves in “The Open Boat.” References from within just a few years of the publication of the short story demonstrate that Norton’s poem was still regularly used in declamation exercises for students at that time. A lesson plan suggestion from the October 1901 issue for The Journal of Education clarifies the value of “Bingen on the Rhine” as a resource. It begins, “While this lesson is not an example of high-class poetry, it is still, because of its simple and touching story, a very general favorite” (“Bingen on the Rhine,” 266). This view works to demonstrate Crane’s purpose in highlighting Norton’s poem, here, the intrusion of popular sentiment about tragic death as a substitute preferred by the correspondent. Rather than considering his own equally tragic but far more imminent and real death, the correspondent invests in a fictional parallel, preferring that “touching” representation as a subject. This, in turn, is an extrapolation of how Crane’s characters distance themselves from the reality of their environment. The author suggests the faultiness of this reasoning by the subtle faultiness of the correspondent’s memory, something which may not be immediately obvious to modern readers. To generations contemporary to Crane, those who shared his experience of “myriads” of schoolchildren reciting these lines for oratory practice, it might well have been obvious that, despite it being drummed into him, the correspondent actually misquotes Norton’s first stanza. The correspondent elides six lines from Norton into four, eliminating description of the reaction of the comrade to the dying soldier. The original reads, “But a comrade stood beside him, while his life-blood ebbed away, and bent with pitying glances, to hear what he might say. The dying soldier faltered” (Norton 2012). This means that the character’s desire to share a common, literary artifact becomes, instead, his making the artifact into a personal performance, something that reflects his identity,

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the self that he professes to love. This takes the reader back to that moment of prayer, especially for those who are aware of the course of Norton’s poem. It closes with the moonlight glowing on the site of the battlefield where the soldier of the legion has died, and this directly recalls the response of Crane’s “high cold star.” The value of the thought exercise and the conclusions reached by the correspondent are further undercut by the shift in the story toward its concluding action. With the ponderings of the night complete and a new day shedding the light of irony on them, the men in “The Open Boat” turn to the business of making it to shore, and most of them return to the safety of the land and resume visions of the world where the human remains the supreme and sole concern. The criticism of humans as anthropocentric is a theme that regularly recurs in Crane’s work. The lines of his most famous poem speak to this succinctly and directly: A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” (Crane 1899, 56)

The substance of these words establishes how the reader should interpret the correspondent’s revery. Similarly, Crane’s criticism of received cultural tradition, pilloried cruelly in “The Open Boat” by the extended allusion to Norton’s pastiche of tragic loss can also be summarized in the brief lines of another of his poems: Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the elivening milk for babes; But no meat for men is in thee. Then – But, alas, we are all babes. (Crane 1896, 48)

Iconoclasm of this sort is typical of the naturalists who, ultimately, broke ground for the advent of modernism and new perspectives on humanity and its place in the world. In fact, Crane dedicated one of his books of poetry to his friend Hamlin Garland (1894), whose critical collection, Crumbling Idols speaks at length against valuing the wisdom of the past (particularly in treasured literature) over the reason and passion of the present. My argument through this paper has been that in writing “The Open Boat,” Crane sought the same ends that Garland advocated, but he also wanted to demonstrate examples for what he thought should be valued. So, Crane

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derides the way that his characters project themselves into their understanding of the environment, and he criticizes the part that culture plays in promoting such projections. Yet, he quietly holds them up as models as they quietly do as they must and fall into the rhythm of their environment, moving and living in accord with the motion of the water. Crane makes no overt declaration of ecocritical awareness, but he does make a decided case for critical awareness that includes the potential for ecocritical views, and since “The Open Boat” so essentially incorporates the intersection of human and nature into its purposes, the narrative should be a focus for study within the field. As a writer in the naturalist movement, Crane chooses to explore elements which limit, drive, and determine the human, and the greatest of these is the environment in which we live. However, within his fiction, these determinants are not simply posited with the focus remaining on how the human, like a rat in a maze, reacts to stimuli, driven to a predictable end. Crane recognizes that the determinants are comprehensible, enabling humanity to self-modify and self-create. In this perspective, comprehension does depend on reason, but it also depends on affective interaction, emotive response filtered through lenses of cultural and personal experience. Crane uses this extension of “knowing” to deeply critique how the same powers that allow for comprehension enable the creation of false narratives that validate human vanity by reinforcing myths of superiority, inferiority, and the possibility of dominion, these often being passed down through generations without any strong evaluation. “The Open Boat” works at many levels, as an unconventional adventure story, as a true-life representation of the shock and fatigue of survivors, and as a thoughtful reflection on how Romantic ideals about nature continue to shade our views on the part we play in this world. Crane’s closing words in the narrative bring this home. As they recover, the survivors are still close enough to hear the sound of the ocean, and “they felt that they could then be interpreters” of the voice it speaks with (Crane 2017, 1064). The men now feel themselves initiates at the temple, ignoring the fact that the temples are frauds, masking the real world. The characters indicate that they have returned to comfortable, cultural precepts for understanding the environment, and that they will only contribute to the preservation of the perspectives that feed their egos. REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. “Bingen on the Rhine.” 1901. The Journal of Education 54 (16): 266–67. Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. “The Commodore Sunk Off Florida.” 1897. New York Herald (January 3).

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“The Commodore’s Survivors.” 1897. Baltimore Sun (January 5). Conrad, Joseph. 1926. A Personal Record. New York: Doubleday Page. Crane, Stephen. 1896. “Tradition, Thou Art for Suckling Children.” In The Black Riders, 48. Boston: Copeland and Day. Crane, Stephen. 1897. “Stephen Crane’s Own Story.” New York Press (January 6). Crane, Stephen. 1899. “A Man Said to the Universe.” In War Is Kind, 56. New York: Frederick Stokes. Crane, Stephen. 2017. “The Open Boat.” In Norton Anthology of American Literature, 9th ed., edited by Robert Levine, 1048–64. New York: Norton. Lingis, Alphonso. 2007. The First Person Singular. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Monteiro, George, editor. 2009. Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press. Myers, Robert M. 2015. “Crane’s City: An Ecocritical Reading of Maggie.” American Literary Realism 47 (3): 189–202. Norton, Caroline E. S. 2012. “Bingen on the Rhine.” In Collected Classic Poems: Lamb to Poe. Toledo, OH: Great Neck Publishing. Ralph, Iris. 2011. “Stephen Crane and the Green Place of Paint.” Concentric 37 (1): 201–30. Ryden, Wendy. 2017. “Lawn and Order: An Ecocritique of Progress in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster.’” Explicator 75 (2): 121–24. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2016. “Environmental Narrative, Embodiment, and Emotion.” In Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, 534–50. Berlin: De Gruyter. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2019. “Why We Care about (Non)fictional Places: Empathy, Character, and Narrative Environment.” Poetics Today 40 (3): 559–77. doi: 10.1215/03335372-7558150. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2020. “Affect, Emotion, and Ecocriticism.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11 (2): 128–36. doi:10.37536/ECOZONA.2020.11.2.3510.

Chapter 6

Anthropomorphism Reconsidered Nature Faking in Jack London’s “All Gold Canyon” Paul Baggett

An early scene from “All Gold Canyon,” the fourth of six vignettes that make up Joel and Ethan Coen’s (2018) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier, features a nameless gold prospector played by Tom Waits, confronted by an owl who has caught him stealing eggs from her nest. “Damn it!” the prospector grumbles as he begrudgingly returns the eggs to the nest, or rather, before relinquishing all but one. In this momentary face-off between species, despite the owl’s legendary status as wise counselor (according to Aesop) and bad omen (according to many Indigenous traditions), the prospector decides the owl will hardly notice an egg missing from her clutch. Slipping a single egg back into his satchel, the prospector remarks, “Maybe just one. How high can a bird count, anyway?” (57:10–58:20). The question is an inside joke between the filmmakers and their viewers who have just seen in the preceding vignette a “self-taught” counting chicken, referred to variously as “Gallus Mathematicus,” “The Calculatin’ Capon,” and “The Peckin’ Pythagorean.” While the Coens infuse such instances with their trademark wry humor, the question of nonhuman animals’ capacities for thinking and feeling, and their abilities to convey such states of mind, has attracted serious inquiry in United States’ cultural history for generations, riddling scientists, mobilizing animal-rights activists, and inspiring artists. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States are especially significant in this regard, when many worried about industrialization’s threat to the nation’s treasured wilderness, and when Darwin’s cultural influence led some to consider the lives of their nonhuman ancestors. Among the 95

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nation’s most prominent literary responses to these concerns came from those associated with American literary naturalism. This includes, of course, Jack London, who most famously captured the thoughts and feelings of the canine species. Best known for The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), London gained international fame by lending sentience and psychological depth to our most cherished nonhumans. Between the appearance of these early “dog novels,” as they are sometimes called, London published the original “All Gold Canyon” (1905).1 Like the Coen brothers’ adaptation, London’s original story thematizes the destruction and violence that follow humans’ invasion of the wilderness. And while the owl scene featured in the Coen brothers’ version does not, unfortunately, appear in the original tale, London’s gold miner, named Bill in the story, proves himself an equally disruptive presence within the titular canyon’s fragile ecosystem. The narrator emphasizes how Bill’s noisy entry into the tranquil canyon causes insects and animals to scatter and the peaceful “spirit of the place” to vanish (1905, 118). This initial disruption quickly escalates when Bill declares the canyon “a pocket-hunter’s . . . paradise” and launches into a feverish rush for gold (118). Bill turns his search into a cat and mouse game, repeatedly threatening his golden “prey” with lines such as, “I’m gwine to get yer!” (120). And sure enough, after carving up the hillside with his pick and shovel, Bill does indeed unearth a rich golden vein six feet beneath the soil and quartzite he excavates. Upon this discovery, Bill assumes naming rights of the canyon, proclaiming to anyone who might hear (as far as he knows, he’s the only human present in the canyon): “An’ right here an’ now I name this yere canyon ‘All Gold Canyon,’ b’ gosh!” (124). Finally, Bill’s pursuit culminates in violence, when another man, named only “the stranger,” enters the canyon and attempts to rob Bill of his discovery; however, Bill manages to wrest control of the stranger’s gun and kills him. In its graphic portrayal of the damage that humans willfully inflict upon the environment and each other, London’s “All Gold Canyon” reads as a historical allegory of the exploitation and violence resulting from that dominant force of the Gilded Age: human greed. But it’s easy to overlook another point we might draw from this story; it also tells us something about the nature of nature-writing itself. While “All Gold Canyon” is told primarily from the limited, third-person perspective of Bill, another, omniscient, narrator opens and closes the narrative. Before Bill enters the canyon, or the story for that matter, the narrator devotes a full eight paragraphs to detailing the movements and interconnected activities of a series of nonhuman factors—biotic and abiotic—within its ecosystem, activities that no human characters are there to witness. The narrator thus provides readers with a private tour, explaining in a sequence of lyrical descriptions how the “green heart of the canyon” pulses with life: bees and butterflies

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dance among the wildflowers, manzanitas release springtime odors while their leaves twist toward the sun, and the bark of madrone trees perform their seasonal process of changing from green to red. Even the canyon walls appear to swerve and lean, providing shade to moss-covered rocks beneath them, while a lone, antlered deer cools itself in a stream that, we are told, “drip[s], “ripple[s],” and occasionally “gurgles” as it makes its way through the canyon’s valley (117–18). As if responding to that famous question posed by eighteenth-century empiricists about whether the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound in the absence of human ears, London’s narrator suggests that, at least through the filter of the author’s imagination, this “world apart” stirs with sentient life. “All Gold Canyon” is thus a tale of two canyons, one from the mind’s eye of a gold prospector, and a second from the perspective of the omniscient narrator who begins and concludes the story. While the former names the canyon after the literal gold he finds, the later draws attention to the human potential for imagining all the canyon’s gold, that is, for taking note of the many other, uncommodified riches contained within its walls. In the following essay, I examine more closely how in its presentation of these two possibilities of responding to the nonhuman factors within the canyon, the story also provides us with two distinct forms of anthropomorphism, forms that I believe are worth considering for philosophical, historical, and ethical reasons. The most conspicuous example of one form occurs when Bill anthropomorphizes the gold deposit he seeks. Not only does he assign a name to the gold pocket, shouting out to “Mr. Pocket” throughout the story, but Bill also attributes a human intentionality and purpose to the gold, imagining that the precious metal is actively evading Bill’s efforts to locate “him.” Bill practices what ecocritic Greg Garrard (2012) designates as a “crude” form of anthropomorphism, one that carries a “pejorative” meaning, typically involving “the sentimental projection” of human traits onto nonhuman entities (154). Of course, it is easy to view Bill’s projection as an innocent game, merely a playful gimmick to break up the monotony of his digging and panning. Certainly, Bill doesn’t actually believe the gold he seeks is capable of the agency and intelligence he assigns to it. And yet, I would like to apply this category of crude anthropomorphism to consider its more serious implications. We can read Bill’s crude anthropomorphism as an extension of his limited, anthropocentric vision of the nonhuman world. Such a version of anthropomorphism forecloses the possibility of his seeing the other riches of his surroundings and of situating himself in a more ecologically sound relationship to them. Bill’s crude anthropomorphism allows him to zero in on “Mr. Pocket’s” exact location, and ultimately, to carry out a sort of “slow violence,” a term coined by environmental theorist Rob Nixon (2011) to describe the environmental harm “that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of

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delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (2). While not as spectacular as the scene of Bill’s killing of another human being, the violence resulting from Bill’s mining enterprise is nonetheless a remarkable instance of ecological destruction within the long history of slow violence that London came to understand as among the costs, human and nonhuman, of unfettered capitalism. But London’s story also includes in its opening eight paragraphs what I would argue constitutes a second, more constructive form of anthropomorphism. Building on studies that encourage anthropomorphism’s reconsideration, I read these passages as a kind of thought experiment, as an exercise in what pioneering eco critic Lawrence Buell (1995) calls the “environmental imagination,” and what science historians Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (2005) describe as “thinking with animals,” whereby London’s narrator registers the significant presences of a range of nonhuman factors within the canyon. In their interdisciplinary collection, Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, Daston and Mitman remind us that humans have routinely “recruit[ed] animals to symbolize, dramatize, and illuminate aspects of their own experience and fantasies,” to teach us more about ourselves, about how to be better humans (2). While they acknowledge that anthropomorphism’s crude forms warrant our concern, Daston and Mitman also explain that we have as much to learn from asking how and why we anthropomorphize as from inquiring about the ethical question of whether or not we should do so. Both Garrard and cultural studies scholar Tom Tyler (2009) call this more constructive form “critical anthropomorphism,” a concept used to distinguish it from its crude counterpart (Garrard 157; Tyler 19). As Tyler explains, ethologist Gordon Burghardt was the first to introduce this second form. Burghardt contends that anthropomorphizing can prove, “both useful and healthy for the purpose of speculative enquiry just so long as we remember that we are not seeking to verify postulated characteristics or attributes, but using this strategy as an exploratory, investigative tool” (Tyler 19). While crude anthropomorphism impedes the investigation and analysis of the nonhuman, critical anthropomorphism opens up possibilities for new revelations and further inquiry. Tyler expands upon this point, emphasizing another related observation among anthropomorphism’s defenders, that “any discussion of animals will inevitably involve anthropomorphism,” that “we could not abandon it even if we wanted to” (18). In other words, any human account of the nonhuman world is by definition anthropomorphic, or, to use a closely related term, anthropocentric. That is, though nature writers may attempt to de-center themselves, anything they write is “inevitably” the product of a human subject’s interpretation. In reviewing these defenses, Tyler also reminds us of a more fundamental and problematic assumption that both critics and advocates of

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anthropomorphism may be guilty of: the assumption that we know what it means to be human. Drawing from Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche, Tyler astutely observes, “To be able to claim that a characterization or representation of some being assigns to it a quality or state that is actually distinctively human, one would need to know just what it is about human beings, in themselves, that makes them the kind of being they are” (20). In this antianthropocentric, deconstruction of the human/nonhuman binary, Tyler challenges us to question the very notion that we are “first and foremost,” that is, primarily, human (24). But respecting Tyler’s contention that anthropomorphism is itself a humanist construct does not require that we abandon the term altogether. By analyzing anthropomorphism in its crude and critical forms in “All Gold Canyon,” I suggest an anti-anthropocentric reading that demonstrates how the story not only destabilizes the human/nonhuman binary (highlighting, for instance, how Bill and the man who attempts to rob him behave just as “beastly” as any other predator of the canyon), but also gestures toward an acknowledgement of and appreciation for the canyon’s diversity and heterogeneity. Ultimately, the story invites readers to imagine existing human–nonhuman continuities, ones that Bill fails to see. A necessary first step to analyzing “All Gold Canyon” according to these philosophical, anti-anthropocentric terms is to situate the story historically. As it turns out, when London composed his tale, a lively debate was circulating that centered on much of the popular nature writing at the time, works that critics claimed were excessively sentimental, unscientific, and potentially misleading. In essence, the authors of these stories were guilty of the crude anthropomorphism described by Garrard and Tyler. With the publication of White Fang, London had unwittingly entered into this debate, not as an exception, but as yet another contributor to the reckless forms of anthropomorphism that critics thought might corrupt the minds of young readers. The literary debate came to be known as “the nature fakers controversy,” and it was none other than President Theodore Roosevelt (Clark 1907) who took London to task, labeling the nation’s most famous writer of “the wild” a “nature faker.” LONDON AMONG THE NATURE FAKERS With the publications of The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), London enjoyed the reputation of a seasoned adventurer of the “outback.” He also considered himself an informed student of the subjects he chose to write about, keeping up with the latest research in the natural and social sciences, and writing fiction that was consistent with the scientific authorities

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of his day. He was thus surprised when Roosevelt, perhaps the nation’s most prominent advocate for the preservation of the nation’s flora and fauna, placed London’s work alongside the fantastical animal tales of authors less interested in achieving the scientific realism that London sought. In the first of his two rebukes published within months of each other, Roosevelt shared in an interview with Edward B. Clarke (1907) that he took issue with a fight scene in London’s White Fang between the novel’s main character, a wolfdog, and a bulldog. Roosevelt insisted that the bulldog could not come through such a fight without suffering more serious injuries than London’s narrator describes. Roosevelt, himself an avid hunter and conservationist, asserts, “I can’t believe that Mr. London knows much about the wolves, and I am certain he knows nothing about their fighting, or as a realist he would not tell this tale” (771). The specificity of Roosevelt’s displeasure may strike us now as absurd: the president certainly had more urgent matters to attend to than fussing over a dog-fighting scene in a piece of popular fiction. But Roosevelt thought such sensational scenes were part of a more concerning cultural trend that he had been privately following since the nature fakers controversy began four years earlier. Indeed, the debate started in March 1903, when London had not yet achieved literary celebrity. Just a few months before London’s meteoric rise to fame with the serialization of The Call of the Wild, John Burroughs (1903), among the leading nature essayists of the era, sparked the nature-faker debate in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly with his essay, “Real and Sham Natural History.” What irritated Burroughs was not simply the humanizing of animals and insects, but more specifically, a growing list of authors who blatantly disregarded the conventional boundaries dividing fact from fiction. Burroughs specifically targets Earnest Thompson Seton who helped pioneer this new genre of wild-animal fiction with his publication of Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). About this work and others, Burroughs complains, “I am bound to say that the line between fact and fiction is repeatedly crossed, and that a deliberate attempt is made to induce the reader to cross, too” (1903, 300).2 President Roosevelt (1907), in a second public indictment of nature faking, would register a similar complaint, explaining that such fictional liberties “would be . . . far less objectionable if the writers in question were content to appear in their proper garb, as is the case with the men who write fantastic fiction about wild animals for the Sunday issues of various daily newspapers” (428). Roosevelt’s relegation of such sensational animal fiction to the Sunday papers is indicative of a concern that he and Burroughs shared over the threat that American consumerism and its various forms of escapist entertainment posed to scientific authority. Both were worried about the potential impact of these stories on a public that, at the time, was more interested in dime novels,

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circus shows, and other forms of mass-cultural entertainment than in works of more artistic or educational merit. Burroughs’s target in “Real and Sham Natural History” has a wider scope, one that includes a rapidly expanding culture of consumption born out of an urban population lacking easy access to the woods and making do with different forms of imitation. Why travel to the Catskills when the city-dweller could more easily stroll through Central Park, pay a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, or purchase a seat at a Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus spectacle? It is within this context that Burroughs complains about the “sham” writers of natural history. We see this in the opening lines of his essay: “I suppose that it is the real demand of an article that leads to its counterfeit, otherwise the counterfeit would stand a poor show” (298). The “real demand” in this case was for “real” nature books, and Burroughs takes it upon himself to expose the frauds bent on capitalizing on the appeal of this expanding genre.3 And in fact, London shared such concerns about the cultural impact of American consumerism, including the prevalence of nature faking in popular fiction. Having ignored the president’s public rebuke for months, London ([1908] 1912) eventually responded to the accusations made against him in an essay tellingly titled “The Other Animals.” He begins by pointing out the irony of the criticisms being leveled against him, explaining that he had consciously written both The Call of the Wild and White Fang as correctives to the anthropomorphic fakery found in other animal tales. He was writing his dog novels, he says, as a “protest against the ‘humanizing’ of animals, of which it seemed to me several ‘animal writers’ had been profoundly guilty” (238). Like the other literary naturalists of his generation, London endeavored to apply scientific methods of disinterested observation, and depicted characters, human and nonhuman, as governed by the forces of heredity and environment to challenge the Romantic ideals of free will and transcendence, unsettling the strain of sentimentality within mainstream American culture. In “The Other Animals,” he insists that he had “hewed [his stories] to the mark set by scientific research” (238). London, thus, initially engages Roosevelt and Burroughs on their own terms, insisting on his expertise as a careful and meticulous observer of animal behavior. But London’s “The Other Animals” takes an interesting, anti-anthropocentric turn when he reproves Roosevelt and Burroughs for adhering to problematic terms used to differentiate humans from nonhumans, namely the terms rational and instinctual. London criticizes them both for insisting that animals lack the capacity to reason: “They assert that all animals below man are automatons and perform actions only of two sorts—mechanical and reflex— and that in such actions no reasoning enters at all. They believe that man is the only animal capable of reasoning and that ever does reason” (240). While London does not go so far as to question the persistent scientific belief in a

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hierarchical, “Great Chain of Being,” referring here to “all animals below man,” he nonetheless challenges the simplicity of distinguishing intellectual humans from instinctual nonhumans with a string of observations that run counter to this view. If we are to apply Roosevelt and Burroughs’s logic, London argues, then the fact that humans routinely perform “a multitude of instinctive acts . . . thereby prove[s] that man is an unreasoning animal” (245). As for the intellect of animals, London references his dog, Rollo, who had at least a “pinch of brain stuff,” sufficient to learn that, among other things, he “musn’t chase the cat, kill chickens, nor bite little girls’ dresses” (250). While Roosevelt and Burroughs prided themselves for championing modern science, London pokes fun at them for a perspective that he argues is grossly outdated, going against the very laws of evolution: “This is a view that makes the twentieth-century scientist smile. It is not modern at all. It is distinctly medieval” (240). London’s criticisms should strike us as significant for a couple reasons. For one, he emphasizes how the facts of evolution, which famously blurred the distinctions between humans and nonhumans, at the very least complicate any efforts to accuse London of anthropomorphism. London’s defense corresponds with Tyler’s suggestion, that we should question the very notion that we are “first and foremost human” (2009, 24). To divide humans from nonhumans according to intellectual and instinctual traits is to ignore the human–nonhuman continuum advanced by evolutionary theory. In short, Roosevelt and Burroughs are guilty of human exceptionalism, or as London puts it, “President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in advancing such a view, are homocentric in the same fashion that the scholastics of earlier and darker centuries are homocentric” ([1908] 1912, 240). But London’s argument takes an additional, linguistic, turn, from science to semiotics, when he accuses Burroughs of not recognizing the provisional nature of signs. “Burroughs’s homocentric theory,” London surmises, “has been developed out of his homocentric ego, and by the misuse of language he strives to make the facts of life jibe with the theory” (259). London contends that we should never conceive of the words and definitions we assign to life as “hard and fast, absolute and eternal.” He singles out Burroughs for having forgotten an essential conundrum facing not only evolutionary scientists, but all those interested in translating observation into representation: that “the universe is in flux,” and therefore, “definitions are arbitrary and ephemeral.” “Definitions cannot be made to rule life,” London reminds his readers. “Life must rule definitions or else the definitions perish” (260–61). In “The Other Animals,” London’s couching of the nature-faker controversy in such linguistic terms shifts the terms of the debate from observation to representation, from the presumptions of the scientist to the possibilities

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of the fiction writer. While London states plainly his own disapproval of the cruder forms of anthropomorphism, he also accuses Roosevelt and Burroughs of an egotism that ultimately ruled out those more critical forms of faking capable of opening humans up to the “other animals.” In the conclusion of his essay, he returns to his anti-anthropocentric theme, warning Burroughs: “You must not deny your relatives, the other animals. Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself. By them you stand or fall” (266). While we do not find explicit explanations of these different forms of anthropomorphism in “The Other Animals,” we do have “All Gold Canyon,” a story that, as I have already indicated, dramatizes anthropomorphism’s varied practices. As such, the story conveys as much about the nature of nature writing as about the human destruction of the nonhuman world, about the fictions that shape our understanding of nature, and, at the same time, attempt to tell another story, one whose faking might, paradoxically, bring us closer to the truth, helping us to see ourselves as deeply entangled within the same biosphere of other species. SEEING THE RICHES OF “ALL GOLD CANYON” On May 28, 1905, London took a break from his first day of composing “All Gold Canyon” to write a letter to his fellow socialist friend and the Oakland Library’s reference librarian, Frederick Bamford, recommending the ameliorative effects of escaping the hustle of the city to the peacefulness of more bucolic surroundings.4 London had been staying some sixty miles north of Oakland, at Wake Robin Lodge in Glenn Ellen, home to Ninette Eames, editor of Overland Monthly and aunt of London’s soon-to-be second wife, Charmian Kittredge. Having learned that Bamford had been convalescing in Burke’s Sanitarium in nearby Santa Rosa, London (1988) recommends the less costly therapy of, “get[ing] your country” whenever possible. It’s too bad that you can only get your country in the expensive doses of the Sanitarium. Of course, the baths and treatments are all right, but after all, they are not the main thing. The main thing is the country life, and the fact that you are out of the high pressure of city life. . . . A tent, ten miles from a railroad station or a mail box, an axe to chop your own wood with, a bucket to carry your own water with, a couple of pots and a frying-pan to cover your own food in, and all the rest of the time for simply loafing, without meeting people who ask you to outline the life of Caesar, would be the one very thing for you. . . . The thing is, to cease being intellectual altogether. To take delight in little

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things, the bugs and crawling things, the birds, the leaves, etc., etc. (484–85; emphasis added)

London, himself, had reasons that may have prompted his own country retreat. In addition to the stresses of juggling his many professional responsibilities as a rising literary celebrity, he was in the final months of a messy separation from Elizabeth “Bess” Maddern, who had sued him for divorce the previous year, and he had just lost his second bid in Oakland’s mayoral elections, having run on the Socialist ticket. But he was also developing what London scholars have identified as an ecological consciousness during this period, one that is subtly present in his earlier work, but more pronounced in “All Gold Canyon,” and in later novels, Burning Daylight (1910) and The Valley of the Moon (1914).5 Shortly after he wrote this letter to Bamford, London purchased 129 acres of overworked agricultural land on the eastern slope of the Sonoma Mountain, the first of seven plots that he and Charmian would restore to become Beauty Ranch, the culmination of their shared, agrarian dream. The previous year, while working as a Russo-Japanese War correspondent, he learned the Asian farming practice of terracing to avoid erosion, and he studied methods of crop rotation, tillage, and organic fertilization still used by contemporary organic farmers. He also subscribed to multiple agricultural newspapers and magazines, and he consulted with government officials and experts at the University of California to learn more about best land-use practices. In an oft-cited letter to MacMillan editor George Brett nearly a decade later, when his and Charmian’s Beauty Ranch was well underway, London (1988) expressed his wish “to leave the land better for my having been” (1377–78), demonstrating a sense of eco-stewardship that would guide his management of his farming enterprise to the end of his life. While scholars have already commented on London’s emerging ecological consciousness during this period, I would like to examine a more specific development that connects this ecological sensitivity to an evolving sense of purpose behind his aesthetic practice, and more specifically, to the anthropomorphic experimentation we find in “All Gold Canyon.” We see glimpses of this new ecological sensibility in his letter to Bamford, when he describes the need to “take delight in the little things, the bugs and crawling things, the birds, the leaves.” In “All Gold Canyon,” he offers a more extended version of this attentive observation, rendering the various sights, sounds, smells, and even the taste and touch of the nonhuman world. We read in its opening eight paragraphs a series of the narrator’s attentive observations, including that of a buck, who himself appears to “take delight in the little things,” or at least demonstrates an acute awareness of the movements around him as he stands knee-deep in the still waters of a stream pool. In fact, it’s unclear as to whether the point of focalization is that of the deer, the omniscient narrator,

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or a combination of both; nonetheless, we read how the deer is surrounded by grasses and flowers, bees and butterflies, shrubs and trees, all sheltered by canyon walls beneath gentle sun rays. More than a mere catalog of different species, these passages seem to invite readers to join the narrator in the aesthetic experience that an encounter with the wilderness brings to those who pay attention, who “take delight in the little things.” In addition to the visual imagery of “young velvet” grasses blanketing the slopes of the canyon, “spangled with . . . patches of color, orange and purple and golden,” the narrator highlights aromatic features, including the smell of a madrone tree that “breathed its fragrance into the air . . . the sweetness of perfume that is of the springtime,” and audial details, from the “low and sleepy hum of mountain bees” to the “faint and occasional gurgles” of the canyon’s stream. All these elements, the narrator explains, appear to be ecologically and aesthetically unified, “w[oven] together in the making of this delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place” (117–18). In addition to presenting a sensual way of “seeing” to readers (which also involves smelling, listening, touching, and tasting), these opening passages also signal ontological questions regarding the veil of perception dividing the human subject from the nonhuman world, a borderline that appears in the story as a literal “green screen.” Readers share the narrator’s view, but the canyon is otherwise closed off from other eyes. “There was no view,” explains the narrator. “The walls leaned together abruptly and the canyon . . . [was] hidden by a green screen of vines and creepers and boughs of trees” (117). In other words, despite there being “no view,” the narrator sees all, registering a remarkable agency and interdependency among the different factors within this ecosystem hidden from human eyes. But it is precisely these multiple instances of anthropomorphic and sometimes zoomorphic “faking” that make these passages effective in capturing the liveliness of this hidden biosphere. For example, the narrator likens the mountain bees that danced among the flowers to “feasting Sybarites that jostled one another good-naturedly at the board, nor found time for rough discourtesy” (117). We read how the river stream speaks in “a drowsy whisper” (118) and even how the canyon walls seem to have “swerved” and “leaned” over time to ward off intruders (117). Meanwhile, the cottonwoods “sent their scurvy fluffs fluttering down the quiet air”; the manzanita leaves, “wise with experience,” were beginning “their vertical twist against the coming aridity of summer”; and the mariposa lillies stand “poised . . . like so many flights of jewelled moths.” The narrator likens a madrone tree to a “woods harlequin,” who is “permitting itself to be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red,” and “breathed its fragrance into the air in great clusters of waxen bells” (117). While the Coen brothers’ cinematic adaptation of these opening scenes relies heavily on the twenty-first century “nature

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faking” tools of CGI technology, London exploits a variety of pre-cinematic devices, the tools of poetry.6 From metaphor and simile to alliteration and an allusion to “feasting Sybarites,” the narrator provides a description that is as poetically enchanting as ecologically desirable, painting a picture of a dynamic, diversely populated, well-balanced environment, abounding in “smooth-pulsing life,” and “undisturbed by rumors of far wars” (118). Undisturbed, that is, until our boisterous gold prospector Bill, who after many years of living apart from fellow humans in the wilderness has developed the noisy “habit of soliloquy,” arrives on the scene, first singing, then talking to himself (119). The narrator tells how the buck quietly escapes the canyon meadow upon hearing Bill’s “sing-song” voice and the “harsh clash” of Bill’s “steel-shod soles” (118). Bill eventually wreaks havoc on the thick, green coverage of boughs and brush while leading his two horses, weighed down with pics, shovels, and various mining and camping gear, into the canyon, “burst[ing] through the screen,” leaving behind a trail of “broken vines and torn creepers” (120). But while Bill cuts through the literal screen of greenery hiding the canyon from human discovery, another veil remains, one that limits and skews Bill’s perception. It’s worth noting that Bill, at least initially, displays the potential to perceive the canyon’s beauty in much the same way as the omniscient narrator. Ironically, the folksy gospel tune that he sings as he enters the canyon urges its listeners to momentarily suspend their labors to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation, to “Tu’n around an’ tu’n yo’ face / Untoe them sweet hills of grace,” and to, “Look about an’ look aroun,’ / Fling yo’ sin-pack on d’groun” (118). One wonders if this seasoned outdoorsman might have learned to heed the advice contained in this melody. In fact, the narrator highlights a range of Bill’s sensory responses illustrating his ability to find the same “delight in the little things” that London experiences during his retreats to Wake Robin Lodge. We read, for instance, how Bill’s “nostrils dilated and quivered with delight” in response to the canyon’s fragrances, to which he responds, “Talk about your attar o’ roses an’ cologne factories!” Then, after bending over and drinking “long and deep” from a canyon stream, he announces, “Tastes good to me” (118–19). But more often than not, Bill aborts such momentary pleasures to pursue the hidden gold deposit. After surveying the canyon from the hillside, running “his eyes over the details to verify the general impression,” he exclaims, “Smoke of life an’ snakes of purgatory! Will you look at that! Wood an’ water an’ grass an’ a side-hill. A pocket-hunter’s delight an’ a cayuse’s paradise!” (118). A more singular purpose guides Bill’s thoughts and actions as he translates the “general impression” he gets from his survey of the canyon into human capital: wood, water, grass, and gold. And the narrator especially

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emphasizes how Bill depends largely on the conditioning of his ocular sense, on his particular way of seeing. His “startingly blue” eyes, we are told, “contained much of the calm self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and experience of the world” (118). We then read how Bill “studied the hill formation long and carefully,” surveying the canyon with a “practised [sic] eye” as he looks for clues, and how he examines the contents of his gold pan with “a keen scrutiny” (119). Bill sees with exceptional clarity, but with a clarity that simultaneously blinds him from other ways of seeing. Of course, Bill’s particular way of seeing, his eyes “contain[ing]” the “calm self-reliance and strength of purpose,” is a familiar one, an epistemological orientation that aligns with rugged, frontier individualism and its associated myths of the West. Bill embodies much of what Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1920) notorious “frontier thesis” posits as the defining traits of American selfhood, exhibiting characteristics of one born out of that “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (3). But Bill seems more a caricature than a fully developed character, a parody of Turner’s frontiersman. He is at once anti-social, relishing his solitude within the hidden canyon, yet remarkably sociable, not only talking to himself (having developed the “habit of soliloquy”), but engaging in an imaginary, and amusingly civil, conversation with the gold deposit that he affectionately names, “Mr. Pocket.” At the end of each day’s work, after readying himself for a night’s sleep under the stars, Bill calls out congenially to the hillside, “Good night, Mr. Pocket!” (121, 122). And even when the relationship changes to that of a hunter to his prey, Bill maintains the same air of civility, politely imploring the gold he imagines is hiding from him: “Come down out o’ that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an’ agreeable, an’ come down!” (121). Bill introduces another level of “crudeness” to his anthropomorphism: not only does he project human traits onto the gold deposit, but he projects a narrative that follows the specious logic of Western conquest, constructing a relationship between the human and nonhuman world under the pretense of his own civility and, thus, his entitlement to all the canyon’s gold. Like the protagonists of other frontier tales, Bill considers himself as an honest, straight shooter, who follows the unwritten codes of the West. In addition to civility, Bill also exercises reason and restraint in the face of temptation to validate his human exceptionalism. He repeatedly admonishes himself for allowing the allure of the gold to distract him from his own body’s need for rest and nourishment. When he nearly skips his breakfast to get an early start on his search for “Mr. Pocket,” he reminds himself: “Keep yer shirt on, Bill; keep yer shirt on. . . . What’s the good of rushin’? No use in getting’ all het up an’ sweaty. Mr. Pocket’ll wait for you” (121). Later, upon feeling his lower back’s “protesting muscles” after a long day’s work, he stands up and exclaims, “Now what d’ye think of that, by damn? I clean

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forgot my dinner again! If I don’t watch out, I’ll sure be degeneratin’ into a two-meal-a-day crank. Pockets is the damnedest things I ever see for makin’ a man absent-minded” (121–22). Bill thus avoids “degeneratin’” by keeping his head, remaining calm and collected despite his growing sense that he is closing in on the gold. But we find the most protracted example of Bill’s efforts to establish human superiority and dominance in the remarkable mental feats he performs to successfully locate the gold deposit. London incorporates into his story a relatively sophisticated technique of gold tracing used by miners of the period to track deposits. As Bill clearly demonstrates, far from a haphazard “rush” for the gold, tracing is a slow and strategic affair. The narrator records Bill’s elaborate method in meticulous detail, describing how he digs multiple “test holes” in a series of lines running parallel to the stream, each one shorter than the previous as they graduate up the hill. The ascending lines, the narrator explains, result in an “inverted ‘V’” formation, the “converging sides of this ‘V’ mark[ing] the boundaries of the gold-bearing dirt,” and the “apex of the ‘V,” marking the location of the gold pocket (121). Indeed, part of the drama of the story surrounds the arduous process involved in the many “test-pans” Bill conducts. The narrator explains how after placing each soil sample into his pan, he adds water from the stream, swirls the pan’s contents to separate heavier particles from the lighter ones, continues this sluicing process to reduce the remaining particles to a fine black sand, and finally scrutinizes the sand to identify any gold flecks resting at the bottom of his pan. And Bill’s hunt does not end with gathering these small pieces from his test-pans; rather, Bill counts the gold flecks each time, noting the increase or decrease in the number of flecks between samples, and assigns to memory the number of gold flecks found in each sample and the corresponding location from which the sample was taken. The narrator refers to these recording exercises as Bill’s “memory tabulations” (119–20), emphasizing the careful reasoning involved in his work. Indeed, the attention paid to the mental labor involved in this process nearly outnumber descriptions of Bill’s physical movements, and the success of his technique in locating Mr. Pocket seems only to confirm Bill’s exceptionalism. Through exercises in mathematical calculation and logical deduction, he believes he has “outwitted” Mr. Pocket, and by extension, nature itself. But Bill’s “Eureka!” moment upon locating and digging up the large gold deposit is short-lived. Ironically, it is not a creature of the nonhuman world that eventually retaliates and, thus, exposes the lie of Bill’s human exceptionalism; it is a “fellow” human. When the stranger suddenly arrives at the edge of a hole Bill has dug at the “apex of the ‘V,’” with Bill squatting below, gripping “lumps an’ chunks” of gold he has just unearthed (124), Bill suddenly realizes his short-sighted ambition: “His eyes searched the ground in

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front of him for a weapon, but they saw only the uprooted gold, worthless to him now in his extremity. . . . He was in a trap” (124). It is precisely when the stranger arrives that Bill’s intellect gives way to instinct. In an ironic twist on the scene at the beginning of the story, when the buck senses Bill’s entry into the canyon before seeing him, the narrator describes how Bill somehow senses another human’s presence without seeing him. Similar to the deer, Bill registers the stranger’s proximity through a “mysterious force,” described simply as “a premonition”: Suddenly there came to him a premonition of danger. It seemed a shadow had fallen upon him. But there was no shadow. . . . He did not spring up nor look around. He did not move. He was considering the nature of the premonition he had received, trying to locate the source of the mysterious force that had warned him, striving to sense the imperative presence of the unseen thing that threatened him. There is an aura of things hostile, made manifest by messengers too refined for the senses to know; and this aura he felt, but knew not how he felt it. (124)

Like the nonhuman animal that senses the approach of a predator, Bill feels before he knows that his life is in danger. But unlike the deer who had managed to escape to safety before Bill’s invasion of the canyon, Bill finds himself trapped at the six-foot hole, a hole that through careful and calculated reasoning has led him to Mr. Pocket, but also a hole that he has unwittingly dug for either his own or the stranger’s burial. Finally, as if to mark the end of Bill’s already foundering human exceptionalism, the crack of the stranger’s pistol is followed by the collapse of Bill’s body, which the narrator tellingly compares to a “crumpled” and “withered” leaf: He sprang up in the air, but halfway to his feet collapsed. His body crumpled in like a leaf withered in sudden heat, and he came down, his chest across his pan of gold, his face in the dirt and rock, his legs tangled and twisted because of the restricted space at the bottom of the hole. His legs twitched convulsively several times. His body was shaken as with a mighty ague. There was a slow expansion of the lungs, accompanied by a deep sigh. Then the air was slowly, very slowly, exhaled, and his body as slowly flattened itself down into inertness. (125)

The comparison is especially apt when we recall the flourishing plant-life described at the beginning. Indeed, Century Magazine seems to have thought the scene so central to warrant an illustration, the only one to appear with their publication of the story. While the opening passages consist of multiple exercises in anthropomorphism to capture the vitality of the canyon valley, we now have the reverse,

Figure 6.1.  “His Body Crumpled in Like a Leaf.” Source: Picture by Jay Hambidge. In “All Gold Canyon” by Jack London. The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 1905, vol. 71: 127. Scan courtesy of Hilton M. Briggs Library, South Dakota State University.

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a sort of vegetal, biomorphic image that places Bill’s “tangled, twisted,” “twitch[ing],” “shaken,” and eventually “inert” body among nature’s other elements, all susceptible to forces beyond their control. While Bill survives the gunshot and manages to kill the stranger, any lessons concerning anthropocentricity are soon forgotten. Following the gruesome scene in which Bill is first shot in the back by the stranger before Bill kills him, Bill cries out while attempting to staunch the blood flowing from his gun wound, “Measly skunk! . . . a-campin’ on my trail an’ letting me do the work, an’ then shootin’ me in the back!” (125). The scene is remarkable not only because it includes an instance of zoomorphic expression, the stranger lambasted as a “measly skunk,” but also because it dramatizes the unsettling of Bill’s faith in human civility. As if he is unable to grasp the stranger’s treachery, Bill repeats “he shot me in the back!” five additional times before the story ends. Unwilling to accept the fact of his own species’ potential for savagery, Bill relegates the stranger to a different species altogether. Before departing from the canyon, Bill cries once again: “The measly skunk!,” his parting shot at a man who has transgressed the anthropocentric codes of the West by succumbing to the laws of nature. CONCLUSION In the story’s final paragraph, Bill having retreated from the canyon, his horse weighed down with nuggets of priceless metal, the omniscient narrator returns to the story to describe how the canyon returns to the peace it possessed before Bill came: Through the silence crept back the spirit of the place. The stream once more drowsed and whispered; the hum of the mountain bees rose sleepily. Down through the perfume-weighted air fluttered the snowy fluffs of cottonwoods. The butterflies drifted in and out among the trees, and over all blazed the quiet sunshine. (126)

As Jingbi Shi (2008) observes, the narrator shows the potential for the valley “to regenerate and recover from the ravages of humanity’s invasion” (91). But “All Gold Canyon” hardly ends on a hopeful note. The final sentence reads, “Only remained the hoof-marks in the meadow and the torn hillside to mark the boisterous trail of the life that had broken the peace of the place and passed on” (126). Bill’s mark remains, in other words, and when exiting the canyon, he shows no signs that the threat to his life has had any transformative effects. But as I have tried to demonstrate, we can learn much by approaching some of the complicated questions London wrestles with when he was about

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to embark on his own farming and ranching enterprise on Sonoma Mountain, questions that persist among nature writers today. By including multiple instances of anthropomorphism in both its crude and critical forms, London encourages us to pay attention, to “take delight in the little things,” and to recognize the tentative and often problematic meanings we attach to humans and nonhumans alike. As we struggle to create more sustainable futures, I suspect the nature fakers of the twenty-first century will continue to distract us from recognizing the shared interests of humans and nonhumans. But the nature fakers might also provide sources for moral clarity, inspiring empathy and more biocentric perspectives, and promoting ways of seeing, feeling, and indeed thinking that can lead us to identify and respect our common futures within the fragile ecosystems of our planet. NOTES 1. In its first publication, the story appears as “All Gold Cañon,” the Spanish eñe used instead of the English yn. For this chapter, I use the standard English spelling, which is consistent with the title used in later publications. 2. Some of the most egregious examples of crossing the dividing line between fiction and nonfiction occur in Seton’s (1898) story, “The Springfield Fox,” whereby a clever mother fox evades the pursuit of hounds, first by riding atop a sheep long enough to break her scent trail, and later, by luring the dogs across a narrow railroad trestle where a fast-approaching train arrives in the nick of time, sending the hounds to their demise (115–38). 3. Biographer Edward J. Renehan (1992) provides informative details from the life and career of John Burroughs often left out of short-hand summaries of the nature fakers controversy. For example, while Burroughs criticized the “sham history” of sensationalist fiction for its scientific inaccuracies, he identified less as a science writer than as “an artist interpreting nature” (97). More precisely, Burroughs conceived of himself in terms more closely aligned with the American transcendentalism of an earlier generation than with the empiricism of modern science or its literary counterparts, nineteenth-century realism and naturalism. Not only was he an admirer (and imitator) of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Renehan, 53), but he was a friend of Walt Whitman, and Whitman’s first biographer. Taking into account these aesthetic sensibilities, we might read Burroughs’s complaints against the nature-fakers as not only about scientific inaccuracy, but also about artless execution. Also worth noting is that it was Roosevelt, not Burroughs, who grouped London in with the nature fakers. When Burroughs learned that Roosevelt accused London of nature faking in the June 1907 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, Burroughs was so surprised that he sent London a letter of apology (Renehan, 236). Renehan surmises that Roosevelt had ulterior motives for undermining London’s talents, that Roosevelt “had long disliked London’s [socialist] politics. Now he decided that he disliked the writer’s natural history almost as much” (237). As for Burroughs, the difference

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between London and those he deemed “nature fakers,” might be best captured in a journal entry that Burroughs wrote on October 24, 1907: “To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is quite another” (quoted in Renehan, 229). Such a distinction certainly resonates with the crude and critical forms of anthropomorphism I will later analyze in “All Gold Canyon.” 4. For dates of composition of London’s works, see Williams (1991). 5. Earle Labor (1976) offers one of the earliest extended discussions of this emerging consciousness, what he calls London’s “agrarian vision.” More recently, scholars have used London’s preoccupations with nonhuman species to refine key concepts in deep ecology (Shi 2008), animality studies (Lundblad 2009), interspecies ethics (Mahady 2012), and modern ethology and behavioral psychology (Danielsson 2013). 6. In Randi Altman’s (2019) interview of the visual effects artists Alexander Lemke and Michael Huber for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, we learn that a sum total of 704 shots required digitization, including the shot of the deer. Wanting to model their shot of the deer after the antlered deer that appears in the opening scene in the classic Western Shane, they had to resort to a digital solution. The film included so many visual effects that Joel Coen joking refers to it as their “Marvel movie.” While acknowledging the abundance of nature-faking technology in the film, Lemke reports that the owl in the movie is, in fact, “real.”

REFERENCES Altman, Randi. 2019. “VFX Supervision: The Coens’ Western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” postPerspective (January 2). https:​//​postperspective​.com​/vfx​-supervision​ -the​-coens​-western​-the​-ballad​-of​-buster​-scruggs​/. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Burroughs, John. 1903. “Real and Sham Natural History.” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XCI. 298–309. New York: Houghton, Mifflin. https:​//​books​.google​.com​/books​?id​ =hZAGAQAAIAAJ​&pg​=PA298​#v​=onepage​&q​&f​=false. Clark, Edward B. 1907. “Roosevelt and the Nature Fakirs.” Everybody’s Magazine 16, no. 6 (June): 770–74. https:​//​books​.google​.com​/books​?id​=​-GYXAQAAIAAJ​ &pg​=PA770​#v​=onepage​&q​&f​=false. Coen, Ethan, and Joel Coen, directors. 2018. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier. Annapurna Pictures and Mike Zoss Productions. 2 hr., 33 min. https:​//​www​.netflix​.com​/search​?q​=ballad​&jbv​=80200267. Danielsson, Karin Molander. 2013. “White Fang as Ethological and Evolutionistic Bildungsroman.” Litteratur och Språk (vol. 9): 74–84. https:​//​www​.researchgate​ .net​/publication​/330901009​_Jack​_London’s​_White​_Fang​_as​_Ethological​_and​ _Evolutionistic​_Bildungsroman. Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. Second Edition. New York: Routledge. Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman, editors. 2005. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. Columbia University Press.

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Labor, Earle. 1976. “From ‘All Gold Canyon’ to The Acorn-Planter”: Jack London’s Agrarian Vision.” Western American Literature 11, no. 2 (Summer): 83–101. London, Jack. (1905). “All Gold Cañon.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: Vol. 71 (November): 117–27. https:​//​books​.googleusercontent​.com​/books​/content​ ?req​=AKW5Qad6QGIjTEMc51gu5r3NBaSVIRqcdxySVrM6bB6vZjR8Cjc5GD pR4pTbcLo​-A7nL​_49HW92O6​_HPlNjC3QVxXuZLQTCqwBHiebAMLI​-KVL wdArUJ1i45NvoVZT3F4jSuNVazPDZGZvmC1KvMuGVw3n6NOsEW7otg7W 1y90Llk84szTv7TIPu9df139z0PRz4rd6UAwmUCan4ZVYHEtU2cEdwS5sSItX​ -bWqzWN0wQ93s​_bRn2Zob9hnRl3QvuigWcVQ8​_exQ. London, Jack. (1908) 1912. “The Other Animals.” In “Revolution” and Other Essays, 235–66. New York: MacMillan. London, Jack. 1988. The Letters of Jack London: Volume 1, 1896–1905, edited by Earle labor, Robert C. Leitz, III, and I. Milo Shepard. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lundblad, Michael. 2009. “From Animal to Animality Studies.” PMLA 124 (March): 496–502. Mahady, Christine. 2012. “Teaching Old Readers New Tricks: Jack London’s Interspecies Ethics.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45 (Spring): 71–93. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Renehan, Edward J. 1992. John Burroughs: An American Naturalist. Post Mills, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Roosevelt, Theodore. 1907. “Nature Fakers.” Everybody’s Magazine 17 (September): 427–30. https:​//​books​.google​.com​/books​?id​=XmcXAQAAIAAJ​&pg​=PA427​#v​ =onepage​&q​&f​=false. Seton, Ernest Thompson. 1898. Wild Animals I Have Known. New York: Random House. Shi, Jingbi. 2008. “The Development of Jack London’s Ecological Thought in ‘All Gold Canyon,’ Burning Daylight, and The Valley of the Moon.” The Trumpeter 24: 87–115. https:​//​trumpeter​.athabascau​.ca​/index​.php​/trumpet​/article​/view​/1030​ /1407. Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1920. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In The Frontier in American History, 1–38. New York: Henry Holt. Tyler, Tom. 2009. “If Horses Had Hands . . . ,” In Animal Encounters, 13–26. Boston: Brill. Williams, James. 1991. “The Composition of Jack London’s Writings.” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910. 23 (Winter): 64–86.

Chapter 7

“Love” of the Land as Agrilogistic Tragedy in O Pioneers! Hazards while Embracing Nonhumans Ryan Hediger

Willa Cather’s writing is widely recognized for its environmental concerns. Far from being univocal, moreover, her novels express a range of perspectives on nonhumans, from the sheerly instrumentalizing to the mystically celebratory, suiting her work for categorization as naturalist, romantic, or perhaps as something else. Critics such as Louise H. Westling (1996) and Patrick K. Dooley (2003), for example, explore this range compellingly. Westling exposes a gendered logic at work in representations of landscape in several Cather novels, a gendering that reproduces ecologically damaging, domineering ethics and behaviors. Dooley—anchoring one of his arguments to the ethics of Aldo Leopold, a key figure of twentieth-century environmentalism—investigates the biocentric thinking in Cather’s work alongside the homocentric, or human-centered, considering the deficiencies of both. In such analyses, the values or principles underlying representations and narratives are at issue. What do representations do? Can they provide unblemished accounts of nonhumans? Can they mediate between humans and nonhumans without falling into anthropocentric frames? A common interpretive move on such questions condemns any taint of anthropomorphism or human construction in texts. Such analysis often encourages a less ideological and less mediated access to nonhumans. Indeed, the rise of new materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and other related forms of inquiry might seem to promise more direct access to nonhuman entities themselves. However, embracing ostensibly objective frames—a common element of literary naturalism for one thing—risks 115

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producing yet another ideology masquerading as truth. Instead, I emphasize here that even while learning from new materialist discourses, we cannot escape construction in our understandings of nonhumans. All human interpretations of nonhumans, all narrativization and imaging, inevitably includes human biases and framings. The question is to what end and to what effects. The effects can be surprising. In this essay, for example, I show how ostensible love of nonhumans, specifically Alexandra’s love of the land in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), masks the powerful and harmful norms of ecological transformation that drive her actions. At key moments, the novel purports to provide direct access to the land itself and its desires, even taking up geological frames to do so. Yet, perhaps surprisingly in light of much environmental discourse, it is precisely the way that this novel seems to acknowledge nonhuman agency that is at the root of the problem. Alexandra’s account of the Great Plains supposes the success of agriculture happens on its own, which precisely mystifies or obscures the all-too-historical, all-too-“unnatural” realities that led to the settler-colonial treatment of the Plains. Indeed, I read Alexandra’s proclamations as particularly lucid examples of what Timothy Morton (2106b) calls “agrilogistics.” He defines agrilogistics as a “twelve-thousand-year machination, . . . a specific logistics of agriculture that arose in the Fertile Crescent and that is still plowing ahead. Logistics, because it is a technical, planned, and perfectly logical approach to built space. Logistics because it proceeds without stepping back and rethinking the logic. A viral logistics, eventually requiring steam engines and industry to feed its proliferation” (42). This term and Morton’s account of it function, like Cather’s novel, in an equivocal way. On the one hand, Morton insists that agricultural regimes are “planned,” not natural or universal. They have a history, and it can be changed. On the other hand, he notes how agrilogistics is a very old “machination” that is “viral,” that does not stop and rethink, emphasizing how much power long-standing cultural norms and forms have over their practitioners. Practitioners often reproduce such norms almost automatically, mechanically. It takes effort to see dominant cultural norms at a remove, to stand outside them and think critically about them. And it takes even more effort to change them. As Morton writes (2016b), “agrilogistics is a dumb show so familiar that it’s almost invisible: the silent functioning of metaphysics. One goal of Dark Ecology is to make agrilogistic space speak and so to imagine how we can make programs that speak differently, that would form the substructure of a logic of future coexistence” (46). Morton’s terms here are constructivist: we must “imagine how to make programs that speak differently.” We must intervene in powerful cultural forms that function silently, that seem to escape politics altogether. Indeed, the very sense of inevitable tragedy that looms behind contemporary environmental

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concerns, Morton argues (2016b), is itself a product of agrilogistic norms and procedures (6, 119). Another way to put this is that Morton provides a wide historical frame in which to reinterpret events often understood as natural (and tragic). In that sense, his approach is perhaps anti-naturalist, which may be surprising since he is also one of the more prominent practitioners of object-oriented ontology, which credits nonhumans with power and agency. Morton thus models the kind of approach taken in this essay, in which nonhuman power and human constructions both matter. In fact, when we pursue such an approach rigorously, we have to conclude that even Morton’s sweeping term “agrilogistics” is too generalizing, that the rise of agriculture is more nuanced, complex, and open to various outcomes than Morton allows, as described especially well by David Graeber and David Wengrow in their landmark book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021).1 Furthermore, when we rehistoricize even huge formations like agriculture, we come to terms with the fact that humans are involved in every construction of environment. This is true not only at historical levels in familiar ways, such as the constructedness of national parks, suburban spaces, or agricultural fields, but in more radical, fundamental, existential ways: the perceiver or senser of anything is always involved in constructing what is sensed. The task is to make that case about construction without again turning nonhuman entities into what Morton (2016a) calls “Easy Think Substance,” mere Play-Doh that we can shape willy-nilly. Instead of imagining the possibility of a pure or depoliticized approach to nonhumans, then, I argue that our readings and our ethics need to come to terms with the inevitable situatedness of interpretation, even if interpretations are often very widely framed and difficult to discern as situated. Interpretation is particular, not universal; interested, not disinterested. Applying this idea to O Pioneers! helps to identify the somewhat hidden ambivalence at the heart of the novel’s seemingly fulsome embrace of the changes to the land. In other words, I advocate for and demonstrate an example of a constructivist reading of O Pioneers! that takes nonhumans seriously without assuming that an unmediated access to nonhumans is possible. This reading has implications for our characterizations of literary history too, rendering movements like literary naturalism as necessarily partial, as highlighting certain elements of reality at the expense of others. Despite the ambition of a kind of objectivity in literary naturalism, we must recognize how even forms of objectivity require framings and thereby introduce distortions. Willa Cather’s position as a naturalist writer is unstable. Some of her works have been read as naturalist, such as The Song of the Lark (1915), but that novel’s fulsome treatment of its subjects, consistent in many ways with Émile Zola’s notion of naturalism, is often contrasted with Cather’s approach in shorter and more widely praised novels like My Antonia (1918)

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and O Pioneers! (1913) (e.g., Ahearn 2002, 143–44). The latter novel moves quickly through time and does not always provide robust details about its characters. Indeed, its mood may even be characterized in some ways as “romantic” in a sense often opposed to naturalistic. On the other hand, there are clear ways in which O Pioneers! seems to perform a kind of scientific experiment on its characters that aligns it with strands of naturalism. The core plot, Alexandra being put in charge of the pioneering family farm in Nebraska by her dying father, instead of her brothers Lou and Oscar, seems to function as a kind of test of character, one that her brothers fail at least twice. First, they “fail” in the sense of not living up to conventional norms of patrilineage and patriarchy in not being selected by their father to care for the family property. And they fail again later when they advocate abandoning the land at the very moment when Alexandra decides to double-down on it, to buy up the plots of neighbors who are themselves abandoning it (43–47). According to the logic of the novel, it is the combination of Alexandra’s sober, rational, even scientific judgement, plus her abiding affection for the land, that leads to the eventual great success of her farm. We might call her approach lovingly “objective.” Thus, Alexandra’s lifelong friend Carl, upon returning after years away, characterizes the settled, agriculturally developed land as one of “milk and honey,” quite different in his view from the “wild old beast” it had been when first settled by European-Americans (80), emphasizing a taming plot that Melissa Ryan (2003) characterizes as one of enclosure. When Carl asks Alexandra to explain the success of her farm and that of the others on the Divide, Alexandra’s answer sounds notes of environmental determinism: “We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still” (79). Such moments, praising the nonhuman land and crediting it with a remarkable form of agency, might seem to accord well with what Richard Grusin (2015) calls “the nonhuman turn” and what other scholars like N. Katherine Hayles (1999) and Cary Wolfe (2010) had earlier called “posthumanism.” It can be tempting to praise Alexandra’s approach as anti-anthropocentric. But the naturalistic account of the land driving events by its own will leaves a tremendous number of concerns out of view, making the subsequent events seem inevitable when they were at all times disputed and selected. In short, Alexandra’s statement is a clear example of agrilogistics, in which a specific regime of relationships to the land emerges as dominant from among many other possible ones. It is true that the richness of the soil, the climate regimes, and other nonhuman realities are essential to agricultural success, but it is

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also true that such landscapes can support other systems of life, often more “naturally,” with less human intervention. Such alternatives are abundantly clear when we recall other cultural modes of inhabiting the Great Plains, modes made invisible in O Pioneers! Crucially, as Westling (1996) puts it in her study The Great Breast of the New World, “Cather erases the original inhabitants of the Plains whom the white man had evicted not long before the time of the novel” (66–67). One of the more dramatic moments of that evasion has resonances with the contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene, organized around framing a new geological epoch following the Holocene. At the close of “The Wild Land” section of the novel, which details the early period of subduing the wild prairie into agricultural form, Cather describes Alexandra’s passion for the land: “For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning” (44). As Westling notes, “incredibly,” this passage “denies any previous human appreciation of the land, ignoring the Indian people[s] who lived there so long and with such deep feeling for the place that they sickened and died when removed to Oklahoma by the edicts of the white man’s government” (67). In other words, Cather’s elision of Indian peoples from the novel hides the political process that dramatically changed the inhabitancy of the Plains. Ironically, however, Cather’s reference to geological ages, meant to praise White settlers’ love of the land as unique in the massive scale of planetary time, can be read today precisely to contradict her celebratory intensions. Today, this “love” expressed as agriculture connotes forced reproduction, as plant life is subjected to capitalist regimes of production facilitated by human labor, and many wild plants and animals are eliminated. Moreover, such production is driven by ever-more-sophisticated and expensive machinery, as revealed with special clarity near the novel’s end. In the harvesting season, Emil visits his friend Amédée and is impressed at first by his vigorous, machine-aided labor in the fields: “Emil felt a new thrill of admiration for his friend, and with it the old pang of envy at the way in which Amédée could do with his might what his hand found to do, and feel that, whatever it was, it was the most important thing in the world” (163). The appearance is one of harmony between human, machine, and landscape, with distinct credit to human power. Upon closer inspection, however, Emil learns otherwise from Amédée: “Ouch! I got an awful pain in me, Emil. Something’s the matter with my insides, for sure.” When Emil insists Amédée rest and recover, leaving the harvesting to others, Amédée answers, “How can I? I got no time to be sick. Three thousand dollars’ worth of new machinery to manage” (163). Despite his commitment, Amédée cannot work through the day and dies at 3 a.m. of appendicitis, an ailment that perhaps could have been remedied if addressed

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earlier. As Cather writes, the medical intervention “should have been done three days ago” (165). Amédée has wagered his very person against the exigencies of machine-entangled, capitalist agricultural production, and he has lost. He is another example of the kinds of choices that occur in an agricultural domain that Cather so often presents as inevitable and natural. Amédée did not have to die. As Cather does actually imply, he could have attended to his bodily signals even within his social and economic framework (perhaps risking his very expensive machinery). More generally, in the kind of possibility mostly occluded by Cather’s novel, the culture could be organized around less sacrificial logics of production that would do more to accommodate for human frailties—and for other forms of life too. Amédée’s pain inside and his demise evoke the dangers lurking in the larger set of historical events connected to widespread modernization, mechanization, and urbanization that would lead directly to climate change and the other realities understood in geological terms as the Anthropocene. The material practices derived from Alexandra’s love are thus historical ones that dramatically expose how history depends on—and significantly alters—nonhumans. As remarked above, Cather presents alternative perspectives on nonhumans in the novel, notably in the person of Ivar, whose rejection of settler farming practices and whose mystical embrace of birds, horses, and natural spaces runs contrary to agrilogistical productivism. Indeed, early in the novel we learn, “When Ivar lost his land through mismanagement a dozen years ago, Alexandra took him in, and he has been a member of her household ever since. He is too old to work in the fields, but he hitches and unhitches the work-teams and looks after the health of the stock” (59). There is a doubleness to this account. On one hand, “management” of land is treated as an objective reality, something done either correctly or incorrectly, when it could better be understood as a question of differing values leading to differing forms of so-called management. This rhetoric of “mismanagement,” then, reiterates an unselfconscious agrilogistics, Cather’s depoliticized logic of a certain kind of progress. On the other hand, the novel shows that Alexandra has affection for Ivar and merits his judgment on a range of issues, especially when it comes to animals. We could say that his unconventional values regarding nonhumans become folded into and instrumentalized by Alexandra’s more conventional agricultural production. At the narrative level, Ivar’s sensitivity to nonhumans not only earns him a role on Alexandra’s exemplary farm, it also contributes directly to the plot at various moments. For instance, after Emil and Marie have been murdered by Frank near the novel’s end, Ivar is the first to recognize a grave problem because he is sensitive to Emil’s horse, who has been returned in poor condition. Ivar thinks, “Something is wrong with that boy. Some misfortune has

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come upon us. He would never have used her so, in his right senses. It is not his way to abuse his mare” (181). The novel thus confirms that careful attention to nonhumans is important, instructive, useful; it also confirms that abuse of nonhumans signals larger concerns. But Ivar is so marginalized in his milieu as to be at risk himself, recalling the scenario of Amédée, who is in a sense subjugated to his machinery.2 Ivar’s unconventional beliefs and behaviors earn him the threat of being institutionalized, of being contained, sent “to the asylum” (62). He learns of this hazard from gossip, but Alexandra’s brothers Oscar and Lou also directly advocate institutionalizing Ivar, explaining to Alexandra that the “superintendent of the asylum” sees Ivar as “one of the most dangerous kind” (68). Alexandra rejects these entreaties, successfully defending Ivar, but the novel implies that her defense has power because of her conventional economic flourishing. If her farm were not so productive, she would be unable to shelter and protect Ivar from being seized. The powerful politics involved in philosophies of nonhumans appear at a deeper, less visible level too, as Ivar’s very function in the novel can be allied with the silencing and disappearing of Indian peoples. As Westling argues about Ivar, “She [Cather] replaces the Pawnee, Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho with a European immigrant literally dug into the American earth to establish his legitimacy and supplant Indian ways of living on the land” (66–67). Precisely because he is a benign and caring character, Ivar functions in invisibly political ways. He is thus corollary to the logic of Alexandra’s words quoted above, about the spontaneous success of the farm, ostensibly because the land suddenly woke up: “we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still” (79). These final two words, “sitting still,” are exposed as dramatically equivocal: though they accurately reflect her decision to stay put when her brothers Lou and Oscar wanted to sell out and move, those words completely mystify the violent history of Indian displacement that scholars like Jeffrey Ostler (2019) have characterized as genocidal.3 “Sitting still” is what Alexandra could claim to do because so much previous, vigorous activity, both military and political, made space for settler agriculture. Ironically, then, “sitting still” accurately names the novel’s passivity, its seeming inaction regarding Indigenous land politics. Conversely, the agricultural regime itself that makes the land valuable is anything but passive. In sum, then, this claim to be “sitting still” reveals how ethnocentric and agrilogistical norms can come to seem natural and thus apolitical—still, invisible. Stillness in these cases is a form of human power, not passivity. Instead of passive, then, Alexandra and the agricultural regime she represents must be understood as dramatically active, as agrilogistical in ways the novel often fails to register. In her compelling treatment of the novel, “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!,” Melissa Ryan (2003), citing Westling as well, shows how the

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ostensibly praise-worthy story of the pioneers hesitates around questions of activity and passivity. It “is a story of spatial reconfiguration,” one full of “radical ambivalence,” “a deep anxiety about the taming of the wilderness— about the very process of civilization” (276). Ryan demonstrates ways that this process of enclosure involves the application of norms not just to land, but to human characters as well, including especially older characters like Mrs. Lee and Ivar. Ryan exposes how the explicit threat from Lou and Oscar to institutionalize Ivar because of his eccentricity, his radically alternative values regarding nonhumans and much else, masks how Ivar is already constrained: “Lou and Oscar’s talk of the Hastings institution merely mystifies the fact that Ivar is already within the confines of the asylum” (283). By this Ryan means specifically that, late in the novel, Ivar is contained by the prevailing norms, required to stay at Alexandra’s house as protection from institutionalization. This living arrangement is one kind of confinement: Alexandra’s “household, presented as an asylum (sanctuary), is ultimately the asylum (the juridical space, in Foucault’s terms, of disciplinary confinement)” (283). Ivar is confined in body because of the need to confine his behaviors. Ryan deepens the significance of this Foucaultian point by citing Leo Marx’s observation that “asylum was a key concept in the original pastoral propaganda of the new world,” a place to escape “from the complexity, anxiety, and oppression of European society” (283–84). In those older notions of asylum, Ryan explains, the (American) natural is opposed to the (European) cultural, with the natural being the favored term signaling refuge. It is ironic, then, Ryan emphasizes, that Ivar and Mrs. Lee must be contained because they are too natural, insufficiently cultural in the settler colonial, modernizing modes (284). Such cases indicate again how “the novel is divided against itself,” full of longing for the past and the natural even as it documents the transformation of the wild prairie into settled space, the taming of the “wild beast” into the “checkerboard prairie” of enclosed land that persists to this day (285). Westling (1996) adopts Renato Rosaldo’s term for such scenarios: “imperialist nostalgia,” “a widespread tactic used by colonial powers to cover up their domination and ‘transform the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander’” (5).4 The dramatic, often invisible power of ideological systems like imperialism and agrilogistics condition our reading of the seemingly radical declarations about land at the novel’s close. Overlooking her family’s original homestead site while talking with Carl at the close of the day, Alexandra seems to question notions of property itself, thinking perhaps she may well leave the land to the children of Lou and Oscar when she passes away. Doing so would solve one of the novel’s fundamental tensions—Lou and Oscar’s constant maneuvering to assure their inheritance of Alexandra’s portion of the land, going so far as to insult Alexandra and women more

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generally (110–15). Seeming to surrender these tensions in this novel’s final scene, Alexandra widens the novel’s scope: “The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it for a little while” (209). Ironically, however, this gesture would in fact return the land to the patrilineage of Alexandra’s family, restoring Euro-American, masculinist property rights under the guise of dismissing them. Furthermore, this moment obscures again the fact that “loving” the land in this formulation is tantamount to radically transforming it, in a way that the future would demonstrate to be deeply damaging. For instance, when the long-term pattern of droughts common on the Great Plains returned in the 1930s, two decades after the publication of O Pioneers!, agricultural regimes would be exposed as seriously harmful, having removed (with plowing and livestock overgrazing) much of the native prairie grasses that helped to hold the soils in place and thereby exposing the region to the massive dust storms that displaced many of the human settler inhabitants.5 Such displacements ironically echo the earlier displacements of Indigenous inhabitants, whose forced movement can hardly be called innocent or apolitical. Signs of such ambivalence are present in the novel’s human plot too, which is seriously ambiguous about its hopes. For example, Alexandra repeatedly insists that all her hard work on the land is only worthwhile because it frees Emil from having to do the same work (e.g., 83–84, 142). Of course, despite the novel’s effort to present Emil as exemplary, it ends with Emil being murdered because of his love for Marie, a love she tragically shares but cannot fully embrace because of Catholic strictures against divorce. So, even at the personal level, the level of plot and family, this novel is a clear tragedy, often driven by love. As Carl puts it in that tragic frame near the end of the novel, Emil and Marie die because “[t]hey were both the best you had here” (207). The best must die young. Is it not sensible to conclude, contrary to the novel’s final pages, that the whole enterprise of breaking the Great Plains sod with “love” is a failure? Clearly, the agricultural regime of production that Alexandra helps to inaugurate, epitomized by her at the novel’s end as “love,” has led to deep personal loss and would not have been possible without the military and political campaign of Indian removal and subsequent enclosure. If it is a love, it is one enabled by racist violence in the past and an ecological catastrophe waiting in the future. Instead of a natural event driven by the land itself, then, the rise of Great Plains agriculture proves political and historical. Thus, two characterizations are at stake in a single act of movement nomenclature. If

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we read O Pioneers! as literary naturalism, we might be tempted to underscore the sense of geographical determinism (and even Manifest Destiny) in Alexandra’s characterization. On the other hand, if we press the novel into a more romantic frame, it may be easier to recognize the ways that Alexandra’s and Cather’s crediting of the land is mystification rather than explanation. A reverse point applies as well, however: reading O Pioneers! in the frame of naturalism can also help to expose the ways that other naturalist texts undertake similar forms of historical obfuscation (for example, Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, 1904).6 In other words, I suggest caution about crediting nonhuman agency too much in questions of settler colonial agricultural regimes like those described in Cather. Specific forms of human agency are very important to this narrative and this history. While I heartily accept “challenges [to] some of the key assumptions of social constructivism,” as Grusin (2015) describes the nonhuman turn (xi), one key to my argument here is exposing hazards on the reverse side of such scenarios, the risk of collapsing back into something like the naturalization of agrilogistics that we see so clearly in Alexandra’s words and in other Cather novels. This hazard reiterates the value of constructivist frames—ones that fully recognize nonhuman agency too. That kind of approach is visible in Cary Wolfe’s work. In his book Ecological Poetics; Or, Wallace Steven’s Birds (2020), Wolfe offers a clear and important counter to the risks of certain forms of thinking about nonhumans. He urges that we recognize our relationships to nonhumans as non-totalizing: “as we know from contemporary theoretical biology, no organism has a representational relationship to its environment, in the sense of a neutral, transparent access whose veracity and usefulness is calibrated to the degree of this neutrality and transparency. To get on in the world, organisms must exclude (largely unconsciously) most of what is ‘out there’ to make a structured and functional world possible” (viii). As Wolfe explains, this core insight means that all organisms construct their realities in the sense of identifying salient elements that bear directly on their needs and ignoring the rest. We need to ignore the rest in order to function effectively. This form of constructivism, importantly, is not the same as the more extreme form that, in Grusin’s words (2015), “strips the world of any ontological or agential status” (xi). Putting these two frameworks—nonhuman and constructivist—into dialog this way clarifies the problem: we need a constructivism that recognizes nonhuman agency and that can also account for specifically human forms of construction, ones that therefore include politics and historicity. Why politics and historicity? Because they are fundamentally involved in human constructions of life and self.7 Of Alexandra and Cather, then, we can emphasize how she/ they do make space for nonhuman agency, but they ignore how that agency

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is radically, even apocalyptically, directed into a very specific set of norms and protocols.8 Those protocols are not just agrilogistical, then; they are also an inherent mix of apocalypse and progress. These two terms travel together in the concrete history of the United States, in which the rise of one vision of progress, so well epitomized by Cather’s prairie novels, is facilitated by genocide and apocalypse. I emphasize the need to think of progress this way, as fundamentally connected to apocalypse, rather than the more common exceptionalizing historical thinking. That more common approach—at least in its more honest and accurate forms—will recognize apocalypse as part of capitalist development in the United States and beyond, but only as a kind of unfortunate side effect. That does not go far enough. Progress, as it is conventionally understood— and to be sure, I think the word needs to be called into question: “progress,” so-called progress—progress has been produced by way of tragedy, by way of destruction. In a sense, this isn’t surprising. Our houses are built of killed trees. The agricultural system that fuels my typing and cognizing now was made by genocidal Indian removal and vigorous (often enslaved) work regimes that damaged humans as well as ecologies. Our computers rely on very harmful regimes of mineral extraction. And so on. We know all this. And much recent scholarship shows the fundamental interconnection between “progress” and apocalypse, including work like Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), which shows how geology and extractive capitalism rely fundamentally on turning Black and Brown bodies into resources to mine, ontologically and historically. Or consider Edward E. Baptist’s histories of slavery, such as The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), which exposes how fundamentally interconnected slavery is with the rise of American modernization and growth.9 Insisting that progress and apocalypse travel together undermines positions of innocence (and objectivity). Where, at what point in time, would we find innocence? How would objectivity be performed? We know that even bacteria, long before mammals came into existence, radically changed the environment. Most dramatically, some two billion years ago in the Oxygenation Catastrophe, bacteria became so successful that they “made their own environment poisonous long, long before humans did the same,” as Morton puts it (2018, 141). Organisms change their environments, sometimes quite dramatically. Noting this fact, however, Morton emphasizes, is “not the same thing as saying humans should destroy their environment because they’re successful or that destruction is inevitable” (141). Indeed, recognizing constructedness means recognizing the distinctive behaviors of each form of life, including the human ability to weigh competing courses of action. Undermining positions of innocence also exposes another hazard, the charge of hypocrisy, the cynical move that is all too common in resistance

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to environmental policy that would point out, for example, that Al Gore uses airplanes in his climate advocacy, polluting even as he criticizes pollution. Here again I underscore that absolute innocence has never been a realistic goal. Criticizing the carbon-intensive economy generally happens from within that economy, much as criticisms of slavery during abolition debates happened in cultures that profited from the evil institution, even in the North, as much historiography has shown (e.g., Berlin 1998, 228–55). The implausibility of innocence has additional implications in this case as well, raising questions pertaining to arguments like Westling’s (1996) and Ryan’s (2003). Ryan frames her argument around enclosing the wilderness, an understandable move since that “wilderness” approach to understanding the land pre-contact has historical resonance. But of course this wilderness frame has been vigorously challenged. William Cronon’s influential “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1996) and the raft of other scholarship showing how Native peoples have shaped ecologies for millennia, using fires and other methods, undermine notions of Turtle Island/North America being “wilderness” pre-settler (Mann 2005; Westling 1996, 34). What was seen by settler Europeans as wilderness, then, was inhabited and shaped territory. The risk with wilderness frames is both forgetting that history and reproducing the mythic ideal of innocence, one which makes actual cultural changes regarding environment more difficult.10 For some, surrendering notions of innocent wilderness will itself seem tragic. Indeed, such a surrender might seem to excuse the ugliness of so much settler colonial history. Without some better point to reference in the past, how can we hope to improve the present? What recourse do we have outside the tragic realities of history? Does that perhaps naturalize and universalize tragedy? Does it become an excuse or an explanation for why tragedies are ongoing? It can. So here too I think we need an interjection of historicity and politics, as Westling argues. Tragedy is common but not inevitable. There have been better philosophies and behaviors regarding nonhumans in the past that we can emulate, even if they were never pure or innocent. That’s one way to summarize the powerful, long-history analysis presented by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything (2021). Drawing conclusions from their robust, new account of world history, they insist on the value of three basic freedoms: “(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones” (503). These are freedoms to decide for ourselves about our lives, and they accent historically situated agency rather than inevitability. In the terms of this essay, they emphasize constructedness of the realities we inhabit. Such work resonates with arguments like the one made by Katherine Behar (2016) when she critically engages object-oriented ontology and

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related philosophical inquiries. Recognizing the value of taking nonhuman entities and objects seriously, Behar also “prioritizes feminist intersectionality, which ontological framings, hinging on totality and exclusivity, would seem to overwrite” (4). In other words, Behar emphasizes a need for praxis, for politics and recognition of relationships, rather than absolutist arguments. Westling’s argument, in her early ecocritical book The Green Breast of the New World (1996), is sage on these concerns. She underscores near the opening, for instance, the need for a “much more historicized, self-critical effort” in assessing frames for understanding the land (6). Her focus there is on how the land has been gendered, but the point has wider application. Similarly, in her conclusion, Westling complicates the dynamics of power relationships that are sometimes made to seem simple, as when for example Black literatures (or Native American literatures) are read in the context of a historically white supremacist literary canon. Though there is a legitimate concern that such intellectual practices function to domesticate Black traditions, it can also be the case, Westling insists, borrowing from Toni Morrison, that such practices “are destabilizing and changing that system.” In a key move, Westling takes one step further, arguing, “that is how all culture works—by mingling and synthesizing and shifting. The question is where value and power come to rest” (152). This final point recognizes the openness and hybridity of all cultures, which are always in uneven dialog with other cultures and with nonhumans. Westling’s point also resonates with the argument I make here about the need to acknowledge our constructions, to recognize that our understandings of—and embodied encounters with—nonhumans are historical, political, constructed. Yes, to be sure, nonhumans participate in the dialog with humans; nonhumans have power and agency. But that power, that participation, is not always equal. Human power in many such dialogs is great and still growing. In the case of Cather’s O Pioneers!, much of that power is exerted out of view, quietly making possible the kind of narrative presented in the novel. Without the violent history of Indigenous dislocation, without the dangerous norms of extractive agricultural production that would lead to the Dust Bowl, Alexandra’s—and Cather’s—“love” of the land would be impossible. In O Pioneers!, crediting the nonhuman with exaggerated power is not just inaccurate; it is dangerous because it naturalizes realities that are actually political, subject to dispute. In this way, Cather’s novel evokes a larger concern with a tendency in naturalism to present narratives as inevitable, as “natural.” So, rather than hastily naturalize, our challenge is, as Westling writes, to focus on “where value and power come to rest,” to engage in politics and interpretation, rather than seeking some primordial innocence (152). Such political undertakings, focused on value and power, are of course at the heart of traditional humanities scholarship, with its emphasis on human

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agency, historical change, interpretive patterns, and so on. In other words, an emphasis on constructedness also functions as an apology for humanistic inquiries. It’s just that, when we more fully acknowledge the importance of nonhumans, we end up taking much more account of their impact on—and impactedness from—human constructions. We have to be responsible, then, not only for our understandings, but for how our understandings account for and affect nonhumans too. This is perhaps what makes a posthumanist rather than a humanist interpretive practice. And in the spirit of the anti-hierarchical strains of the posthuman/nonhuman turn, it becomes more clear that these kinds of “high-culture,” “scholarly” interpretive practices do not differ radically from what human organisms do in other domains as we try to stay alive. We interpret and decide. We engage with the messy, material, political world as if our lives depend upon it. Because they do. NOTES 1 In their monumental investigation of such questions, David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) argue that being stuck in a cultural and political arrangement (like agrilogistics) is actually not typical across our species’ history (115), and that farming—though clearly important—is not the direct, inevitable, or only source of repressive, state-like forms of social organization (127–28). 2 For a parallel case, see Morton’s account (2016b) of humans “appear[ing] as machine-like components” of agricultural production in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, treating roughly the same period as O Pioneers! (3–5). 3. In his book Surviving Genocide, Jeffrey Ostler (2019) rigorously defends this characterization, genocide, engaging the scholarly controversy that swirled around whether that category is apt for naming the events of Indigenous displacement in North America. Ostler’s history shows time and again that the process of removal inflicted “demographic catastrophes” as a “direct result of a policy that was continued by government officials who knew what was happening” (387). It was a deliberate, self-conscious process as visible in written records, recorded statements, Indigenous histories, and more. Ostler recognizes that “genocide was not present all the time,” and that the history of U.S. and Indian encounters included a variety of actors with different approaches and the like, but genocide recurs as a clear and consistent element (386). 4. Westling quotes Rosaldo at the end of the passage quoted here. 5. The most severe areas of the Dust Bowl were south of Nebraska, in the region where Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas meet. Additionally, the causes are understood to relate to economic conditions of the period and to the growing mechanization of farming (McLeman, et al., 2014). 6. On London, see Ryan Hediger (2016), especially 6–11.

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7. Rosi Braidotti (2017) similarly argues that “the posthuman is not postpolitical but rather recasts political agency in the direction of relational ontology” (40). That is very much in keeping with what I advocate here. 8. It is worthwhile to understand Cather and her heroine Alexandra as both singular and plural at once, since each makes the other, Cather making Alexandra, but Alexandra also making Cather by helping Cather to develop her writerly identity here in her early novel. This is an identity-queering “they,” mixing our identities with artifacts we make and use. 9. For a fuller treatment of this set of questions, see Ryan Hediger (2023). 10. Although I am quibbling with Ryan’s baseline references to wilderness, her article is unusually attentive to the complexities of historicization. Also, for a sophisticated rehabilitation of wilderness frames, see Kyle Keeler (2021).

REFERENCES Ahearn, Amy. 2001. “Full-Blooded Writing and Journalistic Fictions: Naturalism, the Female Artist and Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark.” American Literary Realism 33, no. 2 (Winter): 143–56. Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Behar, Katherine. 2016. “An Introduction to OOF.” In Object-Oriented Feminism, edited by Katherine Behar, 1–36. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berlin, Ira. 1998. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Belknap. Braidotti, Rosi. 2017. “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism.” Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin, 21–48. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cather, Willa. (1989)1913. O Pioneers! Reprint. New York: Penguin. Cather, Willa. 1915. The Song of the Lark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cather, Willa. 1918. My Antonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, 69–90. New York: W. W. Norton. Dooley, Patrick K. 2003. “Biocentric, Homocentric, and Theocentric Environmentalism in O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.” In Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather’s Ecological Imagination, edited by Susan J. Rosowski, 64–76. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Grusin, Richard. 2015. Introduction. The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, vii–xxix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Hediger, Ryan. 2016. “Becoming with Animals: Sympoiesis and the Ecology of Meaning in London and Hemingway.” Studies in American Naturalism 11, no. 1 (Summer): 5–22. Hediger, Ryan. 2023. “Unfree Labor: Slavery and the Anthropocene in the Americas.” In Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene, edited by Ryan Hediger, 71–94. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Keeler, Kyle. 2021. “‘Will of the Land’: The Political Action of the Wilderness Ecology.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 28, no. 3: 986–1001. London, Jack. 1904. The Sea-Wolf. Novels and Stories, 479–771. Reprint. New York: Library of America, 1982. Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Vintage. McLeman, Robert A., Juliette Dupre, Lea Berrang Ford, James Ford, Konrad Gajewski, and Gregory Marchildon. 2014. “What We Learned from the Dust Bowl: Lessons in Science, Policy, and Adaptation.” Population and Environment 35, no. 4: 417–40. Morton, Timothy. 2016a. “All Objects Are Deviant: Feminism and Ecological Intimacy.” In Object-Oriented Feminism, edited by Katherine Behar, 65–81. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, Timothy. 2016b. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2018. Being Ecological. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ostler, Jeffrey. 2019. Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ryan, Melissa. 2003. “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in O Pioneers!” American Literature 75, no. 2 (June): 275–303. Westling, Louise H. 1996. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2020. Ecological Poetics; Or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

SECTION III

Cityscapes and Pseudonature

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Chapter 8

Wharton’s Architectural Imagination in The House of Mirth Daniel Dufournaud

In the penultimate chapter of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart laments the rootless course of her life; impoverished and ostracized, she can draw strength from neither “the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories” nor “the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties” (Wharton 2005, 359). That Wharton resorts to an architectural metaphor to describe Lily’s condition is particularly resonant; the novel’s naturalist aesthetic imbues a number of nonhuman entities with power to shape its characters’ fates—entities such as social happenstance, cultural mores, gender inequities, poverty, and the unforeseeable fluctuations of the stock market.1 As if to leave no doubt in her readers’ minds about the bleakness of this condition, no sooner does Wharton associate Lily with a lack of architectural grounding than she has her heroine link a penniless family sustained by love to the image of “a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss” (359). Wharton brings Lily’s decline into relief through a sequence of metaphors that, in juxtaposing the human order with a natural form of shelter exceeding human affairs, dramatizes both the fantasy of life uncontaminated by culture and the impossibility of realizing this fantasy. Her metaphors suggest something paradoxical about her conception of human subjectivity: that human life is distinctive not because of its ontological difference from the nonhuman but because it is inextricably tied to, and takes meaningful shape from, the nonhuman, namely, the architectural structures that are often treated as mere backdrops for human action. 133

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In keeping with this collection’s theme of the nonhuman in naturalist literature, this essay attends to Wharton’s aesthetically consequential fascination with architecture. The title of this essay riffs on Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, a classic of midcentury criticism in which the author cites naturalist fiction’s putative moral obviousness and commitment to reflecting reality as evidence of the genre’s minor aesthetic and moral value.2 Much of Trilling’s analysis relies on his notion of “moral realism,” a shorthand for the nuanced investigation of human affairs, especially the desire for power and control motivating conduct couched in the language of moral righteousness and indignation (1950, 219–222). This dimension of the aesthetically successful novel relies on rich portrayals of individual psychology, taking for granted the stability and coherence of the human subject. For Trilling, there are few novelists better at capturing moral realism than Wharton’s friend Henry James, who stands in illuminating contrast to Wharton. In one of his prefaces, James adduces an architectural metaphor to explain how the novelist captures life: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; everyone of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will” (1962, 46). James’s vision of the sheltered but perceptive novelist prefigures the individualist bent of Trilling’s moral realism.3 Yet Wharton was less enthusiastic about James’s fiction than Trilling. James’s dense representations of manners left her cold as a reader, prompting her to write that his preoccupation with “the architecture of the novel” led to works that “are magnificent projects for future masterpieces rather than living creations” (1997, 84). In light of her own preoccupations with architecture, the question raised by this criticism is whether moral realism, with its humanist underpinnings, provides an adequate rubric for appraising a novel’s depth of human understanding. Close examination of The House of Mirth suggests that Wharton did not locate the grounds of such understanding in the drama associated with the human intellect at odds with its environment but in the drama associated with the dynamic interplay between embodied existence and nonhuman entities. This essay interrogates Wharton’s treatment of architecture in The House of Mirth and identifies a posthumanist line of thinking that troubles the distinction between individuals and their surroundings. For Wharton, architecture is an aporetic force destabilizing such binaries as human and nonhuman, culture and nature, agency, and determinism; accordingly, her aforementioned architectural metaphors—and, by extension, her treatment throughout The House of Mirth of architecture, architectural space, and the architectural walls dividing interior from exterior spaces—enact the deconstruction and unmaking of the autonomous individual central to liberal-humanist thought. Architecture’s

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capacity to blur boundaries within the novel inspires this essay’s turn to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive work on architecture and to Cary Wolfe’s deconstructive understanding of posthumanism that emphasizes the human’s simultaneous division from and contamination by nonhuman entities. Read together, these deconstructionist projects suggest the interpenetration of architecture and posthumanism, and it is this critically overlooked association that Wharton’s novel showcases. Encountering in The House of Mirth a great deal about architecture and how it relates to human activity is by no means surprising. The title’s biblical reference enjoins readers to focus on architecture, both literal and figural, and Wharton’s first published book, The Decoration of Houses (1895), is a treatise on interior decoration, which, according to Wharton and coauthor Ogden Codman, Jr., “is only interior architecture” (1978, 10) (a baggy definition of architecture leveraged throughout this essay). Wharton mobilized the design principles articulated in Decoration when planning, building, and decorating the Mount, her famed home in Lenox, Massachusetts where she wrote House. Set against this biographical backdrop, the novel’s architectural preoccupations, particularly Lily’s “longing for shelter” and for “the shelter of a mother’s love” (Wharton 2005, 133, 127), demand close scrutiny. While Lily’s decline over the course of the novel, as well as her unrealized romance with Lawrence Selden, may bear out his observation that she “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her” (41), the novel does not simply deploy the naturalist plot of decline but stages a complicated relationship between fate and opportunity, one that enacts a posthumanist interplay between architecture and everyday life. To be sure, critics have not let Wharton’s abiding interest in architecture go unremarked. Judith Fryer, reading the novel through Wharton’s admiration for architecture, argues that the narrative’s trajectory of social and moral decline finds correlative expression in progressively disordered spaces (1986, 83; see also Watts 2007). Sarah Luria associates Wharton’s writing process with her ideas about spatial arrangement. If meticulously planned spaces enforce social conventions, then spaces designed for writing, Luria claims, enable the free play of the imagination, and it is in these spaces that Wharton could test the limits of propriety through literary experiment (Luria 1997, 301–303). And yet, while both Fryer and Luria underscore the significance of architecture to Wharton’s work, in neither of these accounts does the proverbial wall between humans and the spaces they inhabit become porous. The human, remaining stable and coherent, maintains its rootedness at the center of critical attention, and it does not, therefore, find itself decentered by architectural phenomena. According to Derrida, no sophisticated analysis of the human can overlook the outsized role that architecture plays in embodied existence. Factoring this

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relationship into one’s view of human subjectivity moves beyond the limits of humanist thought and highlights how everyday life is fundamentally relational. “We appear to ourselves only through an experience of space which is already marked by architecture. What happens through architecture both constructs and instructs this us” at the same time that architecture constitutes “a writing of space, a mode of spacing which makes a place for the event” (Derrida 1997, 306). In shuttling between the nominative “we” and the accusative “us,” between the transitive verb “construct” and the open-ended potentialities of the event, Derrida claims that architecture both imposes limits on human subjectivity and makes space for unique, and wholly unforeseen, forms of existence. This formulation liberates architecture and human life from a dichotomous framework and places them in a mutually constitutive and contextually contingent relationship. Derrida allows us to locate architecture within a posthumanist framework. As Wolfe explains, posthumanism “isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes . . . fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (2009, xv). Wolfe’s notion of posthumanism does not reject the ineluctable predicament of embodiment but abandons such humanist linchpins as reason, consciousness, and the disembodied intellect, instead insisting on the human’s implication with the nonhuman; in this light, human life comes into view “with greater specificity” (xxv).4 The need to expand on the posthumanist dimension of Wharton’s architectural imagination finds confirmation in Georg Lukács’s assertion that “great realists” were “humanists” invested in using literature to expose how capitalist society had corrupted humanity without extinguishing the individual’s capacity for anti-capitalist aspiration (1989, 9). Lukács’s great realists come into relief as such through comparison to Émile Zola, who first codified the tenets of naturalist fiction (see Zola 1964, 6–54). The “inorganic nature” of naturalist fiction, argues Lukács, bespeaks the alienation of the writer, who “no longer participates in the great struggles of his time, but is reduced to a mere spectator and chronicler of public life” (94, 89). The realist impulse to inscribe a strenuous objection to the ways of the world in the heroic individual cannot countenance a view of humanity’s unavoidable entanglement with nonhuman others. Yet a different picture of realism emerges in Wharton’s writing. What she most values in the fiction extolled by Lukács are moments of “inorganic nature.” She praises two of Lukács’s favorites, Balzac and Stendhal, for “viewing each character first of all as a product of particular material and social conditions” and for recognizing that “each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things” (1997, 9, 10). In praising the relational aspects of Balzac’s and Stendhal’s fiction, Wharton evinces a posthumanist mode of thinking in which the individual

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cannot be unproblematically separated from the nonhuman entities that enable as much as limit human agency and aspiration. Arguably, Wharton’s satirical view of patrician culture is fundamentally posthumanist—a view, Ruth Bernard Yeazell points out (2001), resembling that of Thorstein Veblen, who in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) prefigures many of the insights about high society found in The House of Mirth. Just as, in the early stages of Wharton’s novel, Lily satisfies herself with “the subtle elegance of the setting she had pictured for herself . . . in which every tint and line should combine to enhance her beauty and give distinction to her leisure” (Wharton 2005, 146), so Veblen avers that the leisure class treats “property” as “the most easily recognized evidence of a reputable degree of success” (1953, 37). The mediating force of culture and class—the opportunities they afford as well as the limits they impose—invites a critical examination of the human’s ineluctable connection to the nonhuman. This essay, then, does not foist a posthumanist reading upon The House of Mirth but rather contends that the novel exhibits a posthumanist line of thinking avant la lettre. Leveraging posthumanism as a mere critical lens would amount to a mode of inquiry that Derrida associates with structuralism; that is, the imposition of an alien methodology would make literature resemble “the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, . . . haunted by meaning and culture” (Derrida 1978, 5). Strikingly, given this essay’s focus, Derrida links the structuralist “notion of an Idea or ‘interior design’ as simply anterior to a work which would supposedly be the expression of it” to an idealist mode of thought that “flowered during the Renaissance” (12; emphasis mine). Structuralist hermeneutics establishes a stratified binary between stable forms and fluid content without acknowledging their interpenetration. Derrida traces this mode of interpretation to Renaissance humanism and its implicit hierarchy that values humans over nonhumans. Even though it is to the European Renaissance that Wharton and Codman, Jr. link their principles of good design (Wharton and Codman, Jr. 1978, 13), Wharton appears to share Derrida’s mistrust of binary oppositions, her view of the human resting less on idealist or rationalist qualities of subjectivity than on environmental contingency. Ironically, her close friend Geoffrey Scott— whose death she laments in the final pages of her autobiography (Wharton 1998, 374–378)—captures this subtle but important matter of emphasis in The Architecture of Humanism (1914). Writing about Renaissance architecture leads Scott to contend that the “foundation of architecture” is “the anthropomorphic way which humanises the world and interprets it by analogy with our own bodies and our own wills” (1999, 163, 162–163). When beholding great architecture, Scott writes, we “[transcribe] ourselves into terms of architecture” no less than we “transcribe architecture into terms of ourselves” (159). Scott’s use of “transcribe” suggests a porous distinction

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between architecture and human subjectivity, a distinction that fails to strike a classically humanist note and instead resonates with Derrida’s assertion that in “architecture there is an imitation of the ‘Riß’ [German word for rupture], of the engraving, the action of ripping. This has to be associated with writing” (1997, 304). Architecture, conspiring with cultural understandings of the appropriate use of space, makes room for human activity at the same time that the vagaries of such activity threaten to overrun the limits established by architecture. This confusion of control and contingency is analogous to the way in which meaning slides across the page, from signifier to signifier, crossing boundaries in the very act of establishing them. A brief detour through Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction (1924) will pour the foundation for a posthumanist investigation of The House of Mirth. In this short treatise on craft, Wharton articulates a series of precepts for fiction writing that turn on a productive tension between authorial immersion and distance. She repeatedly expresses these ideas through architectural metaphors, such that the heuristic role architecture is meant to play becomes trapped in aporetic confusion. She claims that the novelist must possess two countervailing capacities: first, “the power of getting far enough away from his story to view it as a whole and relate it to its setting” (Wharton 1997, 58); and second, an ability to “[think] of his human beings first, and of their predicament only as the outcome of what they are” (101). If this rule of holding two opposing approaches in equipoise indicts authors who give either character or situational detail short shrift, closer examination of Wharton’s metaphorics of architecture makes this principle seem all but impossible to practice without deviations from the blueprint. At one point she avers that the short-story writer’s “first care” in selecting a center of consciousness for a narrative is to choose this character as “one would choose a building-site, or decide upon the orientation of one’s house, and when this is done, to live inside the mind chosen, trying to feel, see and react exactly as the latter would, no more, no less, and, above all, no otherwise” (36). She then distinguishes the short story from the novel by calling the former “the temporary shelter of a flitting fancy” and the latter “the four-square and deeply-founded monument” (56). Broadly speaking, it appears that the beginning of the writing process is for Wharton not unlike the beginning of a new architectural project—the resulting economy of signifiers being, therefore, not unlike the interplay of privacy and publicness, inside and outside, openness and closure that marks any structure in which individuals come and go. A single character is to the story of a novel what a single room is to the layout of a house. This principle echoes Wharton and Codman, Jr’s prescription that “good proportion” ought to govern the decoration of houses (1978, 13). And yet, according to the path laid out by Wharton’s metaphors, difficulties arise for the novelist when a focus on character must give way to a focus on the structure of the novel as

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a whole. Or is it the case that the desire to write a novel means that the plan of a “deeply-founded monument” precedes and thus governs the novelist’s attention to character? If the novelist must “think of his human beings first,” this order of composition runs into trouble when read against the image of the short-story writer both selecting character as though choosing “a building-site” and writing with insufficient situational detail for a novelistic monument. No teleological order emerges here but a mode of invaginated composition in which the writing of character clears ground for, as much as it is animated by, the writing of the novel. For Wharton, then, character in the novel is unthinkable without the plan for a novelistic monument and the novelistic monument is unthinkable without the presence of lively character. The impossibility of grounding a firm distinction between architecture and character arises at the outset of The House of Mirth. A chance meeting in the vast space of Grand Central Station reacquaints Selden and Lily. From Selden’s point of view, the unbroken sightlines in Grand Central as well as the “dull tints of the crowd” set Lily’s “vivid head” and “purity of tint” into relief, but no sooner do they begin talking than Lily’s beauty loses its natural quality in his eyes and becomes associated with a “carefully-elaborated plan” (Wharton 2005, 37, 38, 39). That this plan constitutes the foundation for the “setting” Lily will envision herself inhabiting is not immediately apparent, but as they begin to walk the streets of New York, the constellation of space, desire, and social reputation becomes clear. They arrive at Selden’s building, the Benedick, which was built “in obedience to the American craving for novelty,” and a curious mixture of sexual attraction and heat exhaustion—she coquettishly tells Selden how “cool” his apartment looks—compels Lily to make the impolitic decision of accepting his invitation to come inside (40). When leaving, Lily declines Selden’s offer to walk her to the train station and instead pauses on the “threshold” of his apartment to bid him adieu, as if wary of the possibility that someone will see them leaving the Benedick together (47). Yet she runs into the seemingly forgettable char-woman who, much later on, will offer Lily the means to overturn her misery in the form of secret letters sent from Bertha Dorset to Selden (141). Although spatiality is the sole consideration behind one of Wharton and Ogden, Jr.’s primary design principles—that “the uses of a room . . . are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a small world by itself” (1978, 22)—the opening scene of The House of Mirth stages the impossibility of isolating interior space from the outside world. To be sure, the scene highlights Lily’s bond with Selden as well as the double standards associated with gender, but equally significant is its emphasis on human activity’s consequential association with architecture and the space it delimits. Key is the passage in which Lily pauses on the threshold of Selden’s apartment and exposes herself to the char-woman’s sightlines and interpretive embellishments. The

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scene demonstrates how architectural space factors into the speculation that contributes to a person’s reputation. We learn in the opening paragraphs that Lily “always roused speculation” (Wharton 2005, 37), but it is only because Lily leaves Selden’s apartment alone that the char-woman thinks they are having an affair and subsequently seizes the opportunity to turn letters found in a wastebasket into a source of income. Just as each woman’s relation to architectural space frames the interpretation of her conduct by the other, so the meaning ascribed to Lily’s actions clears ground for the char-woman’s intrepid attempt to improve her own lot. The scene suggests not only the imbrication of architecture and character but also how this overlap plays a decisive role in shaping future action. Later in the opening chapter, Wharton leverages the power of thresholds again to strengthen the link between architecture and human behavior. After leaving the building, Lily immediately encounters Simon Rosedale, a nouveau-riche Jew who “glanced up interrogatively at the porch of the Benedick” (Wharton 2005, 48). Quickly submerged in anti-Semitic stereotype, Rosedale displays his “race’s accuracy in appraising values” (50), wearing clothes that “[fit] him like upholstery” (48). Lily is surprised to learn, after lying to him about her reason for being at the Benedick, that he owns the building, a revelation that forces Lily to privately admit that she has “blundered” (49). Even though at this point in the novel Rosedale stands “outside the walled gate of the social world that he wishes to enter” (Pizer 2008, 55), his ownership of the Benedick indicates that he possesses the financial means of entry, an entry that he could secure on social grounds by marrying Lily. The Benedick, then, is many things at once: a solid structure, a place of secrecy and revelation in which people are partitioned according to social class, a profit-making opportunity, a symbol of outsiders encroaching upon New York’s patrician society, and a narrative matrix from which a series of events ensues. This opening scene is a microcosm of Wharton’s insistence throughout The House of Mirth that architecture and embodied action are inextricably linked. Several key moments show that the characters’ entanglements with architecture have consequential effects. At the Trenors’ country estate, Lily intrudes upon Selden and Bertha sharing a private conversation in the library, which “was in fact never used for reading, though it had a certain popularity as a smoking-room or a quiet retreat for flirtation” (Wharton 2005, 94). In a world where mere rumor often becomes the source of social ruination, rooms affording privacy are precious commodities. Lily’s intrusion, making Bertha go “pale with temper,” inspires an antagonistic attitude in a woman who knows how to deflect attention from herself by weaponizing gossip against others (90). Later, as Lily shares her own private moment with Selden in the Brys’ greenhouse, their near romantic satisfaction seems attributable to the

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ambiance created by the “magic place,” as they come to “[accept] the unreality of the scene as part of their own dream-like sensations” (174). Wharton has already made clear that Lily “had no real intimacy with nature” but “could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations” (99). Back in New York, however, Selden forms an uncharitable opinion of Lily after seeing her leave Gus Trenor’s home and hurtle into a cab. Selden and his companion have just discussed the Trenors’ “obscure and uninhabited” house. Witnessing Lily leave the house unsettles Selden’s interpretive certainty vis-à-vis his social world. Although he predictably falls back on a misogynistic presupposition about female conduct in order to restore his confidence, the structure of the Trenor house frames his interpretation of the scene (198). What has transpired between Trenor and Lily, though, is attempted rape. In the novel, architecture is not limited to being a backdrop for human activity or to being what Linda S. Watts calls an “explanatory [metaphor] for the progress of Lily’s moral and social career” (2007, 190). It plays an outsized role in limiting and inspiring forms of embodied action, and it contributes to the interpretation of human conduct and the concomitant formation of socially incendiary gossip. Lily’s keen awareness of architecture’s association with human life accounts for her onstage success in the tableau vivant performances at the Brys’ new country estate, which is itself likened to a stage. The house’s “whole mise-en-scène” forces one “to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard” (Wharton 2005, 168). The association of the Brys’ estate with dramatic artifice suggests the flimsiness of the social conventions governing the behavior of the denizens of Lily’s patrician society. For Lily, the open artificiality of this architectural space is no more than a heightened version of the ubiquitous social stages upon which she routinely performs. Ironically, the Bry house provides an opportunity for genuine self-expression. She outshines the other tableau vivant performers in her depiction of Joshua Reynolds’s painting “Mrs. Lloyd,” which she does not imitate so much as assimilate to “the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart” (171). Selden, locking his eyes on Lily as Mrs. Lloyd, “seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of her trivialities of her little world” (171). Lily’s performance seizes him and obviates his flawed powers of interpretation, for she realizes later that the impression made by her performance was “obviously called forth by herself, and not the picture she impersonated” (173). Indeed, Selden’s reading of the performance aligns with both the narratorial description of Lily’s tableau vivant as “simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart” and his cousin Gerty Farish’s assertion that the performance “makes her look like the real Lily” (171).

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While critics have come to different conclusions about this scene, they tend to agree that the scene dramatizes the permeability of boundaries.5 Yet if this scene suggests that Lily can express herself unguardedly only through heightened artifice, this paradox is due to the social sanction that protects the content of the tableau vivants from opprobrium. The audience’s collective agreement that they are witnessing a performance makes this particular stage a site of true expression for the consummate actress Lily. The bareness of the set as well as Lily’s scant attire contribute to a moment of temporal disorientation in which “she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace” (Wharton 2005, 171). Lily brings the subject of the painting into the present tense at the same time that she steps out of time altogether and strikes “a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part” (171). But even though the temporal confusion of Lily’s performance bespeaks a fleeting escape from patrician society’s prison-house of conventions, the spatial elements of the scene—the stage, proscenium, and seating arrangement—leave an indelible mark on Lily’s moment of personal triumph, for they remind readers that she cannot express herself genuinely without the theater’s architectural trappings. In contrast, Lily’s aunt, Mrs. Peniston, lives in a house that could never constitute the site of unprescribed behavior, because it embodies its owner’s rigid morality. Mrs. Peniston’s “connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New York revealed itself in the glacial neatness of [her] drawing-room” (Wharton 2005, 72). So embedded in tradition is Mrs. Peniston that her mind “resembled one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was happening in the street” (72). These architectural correlatives augur Mrs. Peniston’s decision to write Lily out of her will when slanderous gossip reaches her from Monte Carlo. To the extent that the novel resembles an architectural monument, Wharton conveys the irreparable break between niece and aunt through successive building blocks of prose. After Bertha spreads a rumor about Lily having an affair with her husband, one chapter ends with Lily leaving Monte Carlo, and the next begins with the “blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room . . . drawn down against the oppressive June sun” (259), as if to imply that Lily will find no shelter in her aunt’s fiefdom that is obsessively closed off from the outside world and from anything that might unsettle old New York’s Manichean understanding of human conduct. Indeed, in this chapter Lily learns of her disinheritance, and this unforeseeable development is framed as Lily having “Mrs. Peniston’s door closed on her” (270). Lily’s disinheritance leaves her indigent and sets the stage for her return to the Benedick and for one final encounter with Selden. The altered circumstances of Lily’s life find expression in her altered relation to Selden’s

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apartment. She no longer “glances about the room, with its worn furniture and shabby walls” but discerns in the softly lit room “a sweeter touch of intimacy” (Wharton 2005, 46, 344). Her bleak circumstances force her to decide between marrying Rosedale and publicizing Bertha’s letters, on the one hand, and refusing to tarnish Bertha’s reputation, on the other. Her decision to destroy the letters in Selden’s apartment brings the novel full circle, so to speak. Derrida writes of the “spatialization of time” (1997, 303) and Wolfe of the “decomposition [of the architectural medium] by the problem of time” (2009, 207) to emphasize the contingencies of culture and environment over the assumed stability and coherence of architectural space over time. In linking the plot of her novel, the sequence of events spaced out over time, to the architectural plot of the Benedick, Wharton shares this emphasis. She associates Selden’s apartment with both a beginning and an ending, with a narrative that moves forward in time while ultimately completing a loop. Accordingly, the element of regret in Lily’s behavior suggests at once her submission to the deterministic power of environment and an awareness that her life could have unfolded differently. The stage of this final encounter urges readers to reconsider Lily’s life in the conditional mood. As Lily says to Selden moments before burning the letters, “I must say goodbye to . . . the Lily Bart you knew. . . . When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think she has stayed with you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room” (Wharton 2005, 348–349). Recalling the tableau vivant scene, this passage stresses the human’s architectural entanglements by linking Lily’s social identity to Selden’s apartment. This emphasis contradicts humanism’s impulse to posit reason as the means to environmental transcendence. As Wolfe explains, what distinguishes a posthumanist perspective is its view that the world “is both what one does in embodied enaction and what the self-reference of that enaction excludes” (2009, xxiv). Accordingly, embodied action is not coextensive with the social identity created by the powerful nexus of culture and architecture, which fixes the human within space and discourse. Lily’s disarticulation of self from social identity prefigures her death and thus the end of the novel two chapters later, but the act of self-splitting drives a wedge between embodiment (the Lily Bart who enunciates “I”) and identity (“the Lily Bart you knew”), bringing to light a difference between the two. Lily’s decision to leave her social identity behind implies that the symbolic and spatial enclosures in which daily life unfolds and acquires meaning are not ontological limits. The force of cultural repression keeps these enclosures from becoming thresholds that open onto alternative forms of embodied existence. That is, Wharton suggests that architectural structures are no less connected to stigmatized modes of existence than to prescribed forms of life.

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Of course, what immediately troubles the foregoing analysis is how close it comes to suggesting that death constitutes Lily’s only path to freedom. In the final chapter, Selden’s belated realization that “all the conditions of life had conspired to keep [him and Lily] apart” (Wharton 2005, 369) does little to soften the novel’s sweeping attention to gender and class inequality. By way of conclusion, then, we might shift our attention to a moment in Wharton’s autobiography in which she associates her childhood love of reading, and thus the early stages of her growth as a writer, with architectural space: I have wandered far from my father’s library. Though it had the leading share in my growth I have let myself be drawn from it by one scene after another of my parents’ life in New York or on their travels. But the library calls me back, and I pause on its threshold, averting my eyes from the monstrous oak mantel supported on the heads of vizored knights, and looking past them at the rows of handsome bindings and familiar names. (Wharton 1998, 64)

This passage calls to mind the temporal confusion of the tableau vivant scene. Wharton’s fleeting shift to the present tense causes the time of recollection to collapse into the recollected event. The event of readerly discovery has left its indelible mark on the aged Wharton, who in turn figures the act of standing at the threshold of the library as a moment in which passivity (“the library calls me back”) and agency (“I pause”), architecture and the human, become entangled. This moment of self-transformation through intellectual curiosity provides a foil for Lily’s predicament at the end of The House of Mirth. Shelterless, Lily is forced to either jettison her identity or repair her reputation through antagonistic means and a passionless marriage. Whereas Lily’s self-splitting ends with her exiting Selden’s apartment, Wharton crosses the threshold in the opposite direction, bringing the outside in—a bookish girl fascinated by the “rows of handsome bindings” in the androcentric space of the library. Wharton attributes the inordinate amount of time she spent in the library to there being “in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude” (70). Within Wharton’s childhood home, her father’s library was an inner sanctum that fostered the growth of her own secret retreat within herself. Although architectural space never becomes the kind of threshold that allows Lily Bart to avoid her fate, the opposite holds true for her creator. The private domain of Wharton’s mind owes a debt to the architectural space beyond it—the necessary space of free intellectual pursuit that Wharton needed to become a writer.

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NOTES 1. For helpful overviews of naturalism as a genre with more or less identifiable parameters, see Campbell (2011) and Pizer (1995). 2. Trilling’s main object of criticism is Theodore Dreiser, whose “vulgar materialism” resonates with midcentury critics who value literature’s capacity to reflect “material reality,” which is “hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant” (1950, 20, 13). Elsewhere, Trilling expands his criticism of Dreiser to include naturalist fiction tout court, which he associates with a “low view of possibility” (66). Trilling’s disdain for such fiction assumes ironic dimensions within the context of the present essay, for his partner, Diana Trilling, published a favorable reappraisal of The House of Mirth in 1947, contending that Wharton’s patrician commitment to “cultivating her private garden behind a high wall of reticence and social fastidiousness” did not prevent her from capturing “moral truth” (1962, 113). 3. To be sure, Trilling’s hermeneutical framework is not the only one that can be brought to bear on James’s “house of fiction” metaphor, which lends itself to a variety of interpretations. For recent work that sees in James’s metaphor the foundation for a radical mode of formalist inquiry, one that examines how literature urges us to revalue social and political forms, see Kornbluh (2019, 1–56). And for work that sees in the metaphor the basis for an ethics of interpretive humility, see Dufournaud (2022). 4. While Rosi Braidotti distinguishes her formulation of posthumanism from that of Wolfe, citing the “limitations of [his] linguistic frame of reference,” the adoption of a deconstructive approach inspired by Derrida does not limit one’s focus to language and the written word (see Derrida 2005, 39; Odello 2017). In fact, Braidotti’s Deleuzian notion of posthumanism, treating the subject as “constituted in and by multiplicity,” as “internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable” (2013, 30, 49), shares more with Wolfe’s conception than it lets on. This essay draws on Wolfe’s work for guidance because its Derridean influence resonates with Derrida’s thoughts about architecture. 5. “Lily’s effectiveness on stage,” writes Barbara Hochman, “depends upon the blurring of boundaries between art and life, fiction and reality, being oneself and being another” (1995, 222). Gary Totten and Thomas Loebel each take up this focus on boundaries and turn it to different ends. For Totten, the agency displayed by Lily in the scene, contending with the grand sweep of Wharton’s vision of patrician society, pushes against the boundaries of naturalist representation (Totten 2000, 73). And for Loebel, Lily’s self-expression through self-alienation in the figure of Mrs. Lloyd shows that her genuine selfhood exceeds the bounds of her socially intelligible identity as Lily Bart (Loebel 2001, 116).

REFERENCES Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Campbell, Donna. 2011. “The Rise of Naturalism.” In The Cambridge History of The American Novel, edited by Leonard Cassuto et al., 499–514. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. “Jacques Derrida.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neal Leach, 300–328. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dufournaud, Daniel. 2022. “‘Queer as Fiction’: Seeing and Being Seen in Henry James’s The Ambassadors.” Studies in the Novel 54 (1): 80–99. Fryer, Judith. 1986. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Hochman, Barbara. 1995. “The Awakening and The House of Mirth: Plotting Experience and Experiencing Plot.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism:Howells to London, edited Donald Pizer, 211–235. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Henry. 1962. The Art of the Novel. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Kornbluh, Anna. 2019. The Order of Forms: Realism, Socialism, and Social Space. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Loebel, Thomas. 2001. “Beyond Her Self.” In The House of Mirth Revisited, edited by Deborah Esch, 107–132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1989. Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others. Translated by Edith Bone. London: The Merlin Press. Luria, Sarah. 1997. “The Architecture of Manners: Henry James, Edith Wharton, and the Mount.” American Quarterly 49 (2): 296–327 Odello, Laura. 2017. “The Greatest Possible Mastery, the Greatest Possible Self-Presence of Life”: Derrida and the Deconstruction of Sovereignty.” Translated by D. J. S. Cross. CR: The New Centennial Review 17 (1): 141–162. Pizer, Donald. 2008. American Naturalism and the Jews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Pizer, Donald. 1995. “Introduction: The Problem of Definition.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, edited Donald Pizer, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Geoffrey. 1999. The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste. New York: Norton. Totten, Gary. 2000. “The Art and Architecture of the Self: Designing the ‘I’-Witness in Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth.’” College Literature 27 (3): 71–87. Trilling, Diana. 1962. “The House of Mirth Revisited.” The American Scholar (1): 113–128. Trilling, Lionel. 1950. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking Press. Veblen, Thorstein. 1953. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Studies of Institutions. New York: Mentor.

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Watts, Linda S. 2007. “The Bachelor Girl and the Body Politic: The Built Environment, Self-Possession, and the Never-Married Woman in The House of Mirth.” In Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture, edited by Gary Totten, 189–208. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Wharton, Edith. 1998. A Backward Glance: An Autobiography. New York: Touchstone. Wharton, Edith. 2005. The House of Mirth. Edited by Janet Beer and Elizabeth Nolan. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Wharton, Edith. 1997. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Touchstone. Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman, Jr. 1978. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Norton. Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. 2001. “The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart.” In The House of Mirth Revisited, edited by Deborah Esch, 15–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zola, Émile. 1964. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Translated by Belle M. Sherman. New York: Haskell House.

Chapter 9

Pseudonature in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth Jency Wilson

As the nineteenth century came to a close, American literary naturalism emerged to reveal a concentration of cultural anxieties about shifting social and economic practices, the imperative toward industrialized modernity, and waning enthusiasm for the American wilderness which had so gripped the American consciousness for much of the century. Scholarship most frequently plumbs the depths of American literary naturalism through a fixation on the individual experience as determined by environmental, societal, and hereditary factors, but a less human element that consistently rears its head, so to speak, throughout canonical works of the movement is the representation of parks, gardens, and other seemingly “natural” spaces which are in fact manmade constructions.1 This category of space—one for which I will here attempt to coin the term “pseudonature”—includes any space which the undiscerning eye may call “nature,” but is not “nature” as we tend to conceive it at all. Rather, these spaces exist in some liminal form between the nature they emulate and the society whose bleak industrialization they seek to negate, and in doing so, also present a unique set of anxieties about the tension between these two poles, rife with critical implications. Edith Wharton is no exception to this trend in naturalism, and in her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, the primary characters, Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, encounter pseudonature as a realm within which the two find themselves engaged in spiritual, passionate, or otherwise intimately human interactions which the constructed world does not seem to allow. In examining both pseudonatural space as well as the affect it generates in Wharton’s characters, implications for both human and nonhuman entities readily emerge, with pseudonature functioning as a repository of cultural anxieties about changing landscapes, 149

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both wild and urban, and the changing cultural roles of the individuals who navigate them. Practically speaking, my term “pseudonature” refers to any space of constructed organic aesthetic that appears against a backdrop of cultivated, manmade society. This includes urban parks, gardens, or spaces of natural aesthetic otherwise enclosed by manmade construction, and not just those represented in American literary naturalism. A critical unpacking of the notion of pseudonature itself is useful in order to explore the cultural ramifications to which Wharton’s examples ultimately gesture, as well as for a close look at how other forms of “nature” are implicated in the text. First and foremost, pseudonature must be contextualized in the discourse of both the parks movement and in more contemporary understandings of ecocritical thought. A push toward urban parks and greenspaces as sites of rejuvenation in the latter part of the century relied heavily on culture-shaping romantic ideals about what “nature” is and humans’ relation to it. It can be generally agreed upon that romanticism, and mid-nineteenth century American Transcendentalism, embraced the great mysteries of the individual’s internal state as well as the unknowns of the universe, and frequently turned to chaotic, unknowable wilderness as emblem of all that remained uncharted in the realm of earthly, and human, experience. As Roderick Nash (1967) puts it in Wilderness and the American Mind, “In general it implies an enthusiasm for the strange, remote, solitary, and mysterious” (47). American transcendentalism, and its Romantic worldview, generated a reversal in attitude toward wilderness in the larger culture and consciousness, deviating from an older mode of Puritan hostility toward the uncivilized. While nature and wilderness maintained the perception of being mysterious, unknowable, and spiritually complex, instead of conceiving of the wilderness as a hostile foe to the project of civilization, the onset of romantic thought brought with it a shift toward an admiration for these vast, unknowable qualities of nature, projections of the same vast, unknowable qualities of man’s internal life with which romantic thought was frequently preoccupied (Nash 1967, 47). The aforementioned attitude toward wilderness is, of course, a cultural projection, one which Timothy Morton (2007) labels as capital-N “Nature,” a separate entity from the material reality of the earth.2 “The ‘thing’ we call nature,” Morton writes, “becomes, in the Romantic period and afterward, a way of healing what modern society has damaged” (22). Morton’s critique identifies the problematic essentialism of the classic Nature/Culture binary as a foundational problem within this discourse. Jason W. Moore (2015) suggests that the preservation of this false dichotomy allows the privileging of humanity over all other matter, creating built-in justification for capitalism and industry, which siphons the vitality of all that is deemed Nature, a category with which Moore notes women have historically been associated.

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Moore explains, “Capitalism—or if one prefers, modernity or industrial civilization—emerged out of Nature. It drew wealth from Nature. It disrupted, degraded, or defiled Nature” (5). Though notions of the Nature v. Culture binary prevailed at the time of Edith Wharton’s writing, our contemporary understanding of the fluidity between what is deemed “nature” and what is not allows for a reading of pseudonature as occupying an illuminating liminal space on this spectrum. The positioning of pseudonature as the “natural” opposition to Wharton’s New York in this novel also raises the question of gendered associations within the Nature/Culture dichotomy. Feminist geographer Leslie Kern (2020) argues in Feminist City that “urban environments are structured to support patriarchal family forms, gender-segregated labour markets, and traditional gender roles” (9). She quotes fellow geographer Jane Darke in even starker terms: “‘Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete’” (qtd. in 13). Oversimplified, the structures of urban environments can be read as masculine, and historically in ecocriticism, the natural land which they dominate is oft-read as the feminine counterpart. This raises the question of what cultural values may be, as Darke suggests, writ large in the very infrastructure of the American city. Reading the land as feminized is not a new concept in ecocritical thought, of course. Annette Kolodny’s classic work of ecocriticism, The Lay of the Land, cemented this concept in critical discussion. Kolodny (1975) suggests that the initial movement of European settlers to that mythologized “New World” “was experienced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating metaphor: the regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape” (6). This dynamic closely parallels the affect of pseudonature to be unpacked, in which characters are retreating from more “adult” constraints into the freedoms of an imagined alternative life. Kolodny describes one effect of the “New World” dynamic projected upon land as “the tantalizing proximity to a happiness that had heretofore been the repressed promise of a better future, a call to act out what was at once a psychological and political revolt against a culture based on toil, domination, and self-denial” (7). Without the “New World” as unpainted canvas upon which to project this fantasy, as society takes its toll on the land itself, the problem then becomes how to pacify the fantasy in daily life. Kolodny suggests that part of the response to this problem comes in the glorifying of Nature in art, concretizing the mythologized “New World” into artificial manifestations in order to placate the impulse toward this fantasy (7). In the absence of the ability to live out the frontier adventure fantasy, individuals within the modern world turn to artificial means of reproducing the affect of that fantasy, a dynamic which is quite obviously reflected in the creation of pseudonature. In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama (1995) writes that “landscapes are

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culture before they are nature—constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock” (61). Marilyn McEntyre (2008) notes, regarding such spaces in Wharton, “It is a natural or non-urban world that has, itself, been made an object for aesthetic and material consumption: ‘landscape’ or ‘scenery’ to be viewed or possessed by the owners of large country houses” (89). Pseudonature, then, can best be understood as a human product, a work of art preserving the associations of the feminized landscape, one symbolically linked to the female body itself, for cultural consumption. There’s no better example of the overlap of commodification, pseudonature, and the female body in Wharton’s novel than the memorable tableaux vivant scene, in which Lily is convinced “to exhibit” herself in a recreation of famous artwork via the use of elaborate costumery and the organic beauty of the young women in question (Wharton 1905, 138). The tableaux vivant as phenomenon is described in terms not unlike the affect of pseudonature, its function depending upon the “adjustment of mental vision” in order to obtain “glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination,” as Lily performs as a piece of stylized “living” art (140). Crucially, Lily recreates the late eighteenth century painting Mrs. Lloyd by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which features a delicate female figure posed against natural foliage in a wooded scene. This dynamic is also evocative of the mental restoration and emotional rejuvenation which are associated with experiences of pseudonature in the novel, and this scene offers further understanding of Lily’s deep connection with such spaces, and their affects, through her utter compatibility with such an artificial endeavor at recreating beauty. Here Karen Barad’s (2003) concept of “thingification” proves illuminating. Barad’s posthumanist critique of what she calls “thingification” rejects the academic impulse toward classifying matter as passive (801), defining the term as “the turning of relations into ‘things,’ ‘entities,’ ‘relata’” in a way that “infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it” (812). Stacy Alaimo (2008) further defines Barad’s “thingification” as “the reduction of lively, emergent, intra-acting phenomena into passive, distinct resources for use and human control” (249). Intra-activity, as Barad and Alaimo employ it, disrupts an anthropocentric understanding of agency as a human attribute in which discrete categories of “things” act upon one another, and instead posits that human and nonhuman material are in constant relational flux, with agency occurring within relations rather than as an act performed by one entity upon another (248). In the tableaux vivant scene, the female body is conflated with and subsumed within pseudonature in a way that commodifies both, yielding a “thingification” of the natural beauty of both Lily and the “nature” represented in which both are reduced to passive matter—an artifact. In this scene, Lily and pseudonature have been morphed into one artificial creation,

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manmade but steeped in natural imagery, which is meant to be consumed by the upper echelons of urban society as a sight for sore eyes. Though Mark Seltzer’s “body-machine complex” refers primarily to male forms and their industrial counterparts, it’s a useful parallel to identify something that I might call a ‘body-commodity complex’ that appears in relation to the feminine body in Wharton’s novel. Seltzer presents the “body-machine complex” as a fundamental trope in American literary naturalism, in which the economic anxieties surrounding modernization and industrialization are made manifest in symbolic and thematic connection with the physical human form (Seltzer 1990, 4). Reading men as the destructive embodiment of masculine capitalist and cultural forces, Seltzer’s reading leaves room not only for women’s bodies to take on the anxieties about nature, in the vein of Kolodny, but also the symbolic position of natural resources being exploited at the hands of the mechanized male form. The body-commodity complex, as I pose it, is a manifestation of the cultural anxiety felt about and within feminine forms—an anxiety that the canonically feminized body of land might be compartmentalized and commodified into the likes of pseudonature, cordoned off so as to become a site of consumption. In this reading, Lily’s body and pseudonature are symbolically linked as sites of this anxiety, and the fate of Lily, who encounters an untimely death after experiencing financial and societal ruin, may be read as the epitome of American anxiety about the fate of “nature” in the face of modernity. The romantic projections comprising capital-N Nature provide the philosophical context into which pseudonature enters. The restorative powers of Nature were increasingly coveted as societal shifts toward industrialism and commodity culture eclipsed a more Thoreauvian worldview. Urban parks were an even earlier response to the increasing industrial dominance of the nineteenth century than national parks, and a more conscious answer to the anxieties of living in such industrialized urban centers. In 1844, American poet William Cullen Bryant penned “A New Public Park” in The New York Evening Post, calling for public officials to “give our vast population an extensive pleasure ground for shade and recreation in these sultry afternoons, which we might reach without going out of town.” This call to action would mark one of the first moves toward Frederick Law Olmsted’s creation of Central Park, a pseudonatural space envisioned by the so-called father of landscape architecture that is cemented in the foundation of the American cultural imagination (Nash 1967, 389). Bryant’s call for a “pleasure ground” offering respite from the New York heat foreshadows a sense of parks as necessary supplements to urbanized living, a sense that would inform much of Olmsted’s opinions on park creation and cultivation. Olmsted (1866) mused

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on the role of urban parks in a document meant to justify imminent plans for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park: There is such a pleasure, common, constant, and universal to all town parks, and . . . it results from the feeling of relief experienced by those entering them, on escaping the cramped, confined, and controlling circumstances of the streets of the town; in other words, a sense of enlarged freedom is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park. (5)

Here Olmsted suggests that parks serve as a salve to modernized living needed by every individual who inhabits those places which are “cramped, confined, and controlling.” Andrew Menard (2010) points out, crucially, that it is not an actual enlargement of freedom experienced by park-goers, but the sense of it (524). The park as concept, then, should then be read as an illusion of alternatives to urban surroundings, a temporary stay against the chaos that awaits in the city upon the individual’s reentry to “the streets of the town.” The thematic significance of these types of spaces in The House of Mirth has been suggested in Marilyn McEntyre’s and J. Susannah Shmurak’s readings, respectively, of natural imagery and settings in the novel in relation to romantic and transcendental ideals associated with Nature, particularly at the time of Wharton’s writing. McEntyre (2008) suggests that the goal of The House of Mirth is to highlight and reinforce the imperative toward some romantic ideal of the restorative powers of nature by illustrating Selden and Lily’s failure to achieve that restoration in navigating modern society (99). However, this argument does not fully account for the limitations of the constructedness of the “natural” settings in necessitating a reentry into society because of both pseudonature’s philosophical assumptions and its spatial limitations. J. Susannah Shmurak (2010) laments the failure of parks to uphold the democratic ideals of self-improvement under which they were allegedly forged: “Though residents of  . . . cities soon learned that parks could not alleviate the pressures of urbanization on physical and civic health, urban planners continued to include parks in their efforts to reform ailing cities” (138). Shmurak appears to argue that the utter futility of romantic ideals found in pseudonature to effect significant change indicate not the failure of the individual to capitalize on the freedom offered, as suggested by McEntyre, but the failure of the urban structure at large to generate acceptable standards of living despite the efforts at cultivating pseudonatural space. Though both of these interpretations offer useful fodder for an ecocritical, or infrastructural, critique, neither effectively considers that the presence and purpose of the spaces evaluated may be more insidious altogether—that pseudonature itself functions, whether consciously or unconsciously, as an institutional tool,

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reifying urban structures, and strictures, by offering only a simulation of the freedom which these scholars suggest to be realizable. The “sense of enlarged freedom” which Olmsted identifies as the central function of the park is the phenomenon with which a reading of the pseudonature of The House of Mirth is largely concerned, and an affective ecocritical framework is invaluable in unpacking this dynamic in Wharton’s novel, as the images of nature evoked are explicitly linked to the emotional state of the characters who encounter the spaces. In other words, the environments which these characters encounter generate a certain “affect” as a response. In Affective Ecocriticism, Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (2019) describe how the blending of ecocriticism and affect theory “disrupts both discrete notions of embodied selfhood and static notions of environment, encouraging us to trace the trajectories of transcorporeal encounters that are intricate and dynamic” (8). The primary conceit of affective ecocriticism is that place has the ability to shape our emotional and internal responses in accordance with the external material reality of the space (2). In Material Feminisms, Stacy Alaimo offers a definition of transcorporeality that can be applied in tandem with this affective ecocritical reading. Alaimo (2008) advocates a turn toward the material in feminist studies based on an understanding of transcorporeality as “a time-space where human corporeality . . . is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’” (238). Transcorporeality here refers to the constant relational flux between material bodies, human included. Alaimo discusses the relationship between human body and its environment in terms of agency: “There is obviously a sense in which all embodied beings experience corporeal agencies, be they positive, negative, or neutral. Acknowledging that one’s body has its own forces, which are interlinked and continually intra-acting with wider material as well as social, economic, psychological, and cultural forces, can not only be useful but may also be ethical” (250). Alaimo also references Carolyn Merchant’s writings on “the agency of nature,” in which nature is conceived of as historical agent—“an actor which may very well challenge the discursive constructions through which it is understood,” meaning that it disrupts traditional dualistic understandings of nature/culture as passive/active (245). The goal of Merchant’s acknowledgement of nonhuman agency is not to project sentience onto nonhuman matter, but instead to promote an awareness of the potential affect and effect of that nonhuman agency on humans, and vice versa. In short, the internal is affected by the external, and I argue that the affect generated by pseudonature in Wharton’s novel is an affect of freedom—an illusory sense of possibility beyond those “controlling circumstances” of modern life. The stage for this internal-external relationship is set with Lily and Selden’s first big emotional tête-à-tête at the country grounds of Bellomont, a slightly wilder space than some of the more manicured pseudonature in the novel.

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The scene serves as a prime example of the fluidity of the transcorporeal relationship represented by Lily’s experiences with her surroundings. Lily remarks that the natural vista resonates with her internal experiences: “The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches” (Wharton 1905, 66). The expansive quality matches the expanses of the human heart, depths which she and Selden abruptly commence plumbing, entertaining the possibilities that their mutual affection, now revealed, might open up. No matter their entertainment of possible futures, both understand that there are financial and social forces which prevent them from engaging in a public romantic union. The tension between possibility and practicality wage a quiet war in Lily in this scene, as Wharton writes, “There were in [Lily] at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other grasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears” (67). This interaction between Lily’s internal state and her external surroundings in arguably the most “natural” space in the novel sets the tone for later iterations of this phenomenon—cementing a relationship between emotional freedom and extra-urban space that continues to play out in the text. Grounding the exploration of the built environment in The House of Mirth in affective ecocriticism allows us to analyze the material environment’s affect on the body, as well as how human bodies have shaped that very environment. In the case of pseudonature, this offers a theoretical foothold for the phenomenon seen within the novel—that paradoxical emotional response of freedom from society’s pressures that characters feel while interacting with a space constructed as part of the very material fabric of that society. The particular encounters with pseudonature in Wharton’s novel evoke romantic and transcendental associations with Nature as an expression of the affect associated with these spaces, engaging with that tradition of conceiving of the wilderness as a restorative antidote to the toxicity of urban living. And the relationship forged between Lily Bart and these pseudonatural spaces raises questions of their effect and affect on Lily, as representative not only of humanity but specifically of the female experience. The opening scene prepares the reader, however subtly, for a consistent negotiation between the spiritual refreshment of feminized natural beauty and the otherwise chaotic, ugly, and sometimes despair-inducing constructed backdrop of modernizing New York. In the opening lines of The House of Mirth, Lawrence Selden is positioned firmly in the throes of the urban cityscape of New York when he encounters an enlivening vision: “Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart” (Wharton 1905, 3). His position in the train station places him in modernized industrial surroundings, steeped in the urban culture coming to dominate turn of the century New

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York City, and being offered a regenerative moment of reprieve from the onslaught of society in the vision of a small, mysticized pocket of femininity among the chaos: the vision of Lily. Here Selden is said to be “returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country,” and this detail sets up a subtle opposition from the outset between the productivity of urban settings and the regenerative power of that which exists beyond it (3). Selden also notes the artificiality which goes on to be attributed to Lily throughout the novel: “He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make. . . . He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though the fine glaze of beauty had been applied to vulgar clay” (5). The opening scene generates a number of thematic threads that help us understand both Lily herself and the pseudonature with which she is linked: that Lily is a source of spiritual rejuvenation against the backdrop of modern society, that the modern society in question is cold and unattractive, and that Lily, no matter how organic the raw materials of her beauty and character, is a construction of her surroundings. In this case the source of Selden’s ‘refreshment’ from such capitalist constraints is Lily herself, whose presence he experiences in much the same vein that Lily experiences pseudonature later in the novel—suggesting a unity between Lily as feminine figure and the artificial beauty of pseudonature. Following Lily’s display as part of the memorable tableaux vivant performance, Lily and Selden find themselves once more seeking reprieve from societal pressures by removing themselves from the societal setting of the event into a pseudonatural environment. The pair enter into a contemplative state within the hidden garden space, explicitly moving away from the society and its rituals within the larger structure: She hardly noticed where Selden was leading her, till they passed through a glass doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly in the fragrant hush of a garden. . . . Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among lilies. The magic place was deserted. . . . Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. (Wharton 1905,144–45)

Inside this pseudonatural space, the pair are free to express the full extent of their romantic feelings. Selden tells Lily, with an air of futility, “‘The only way I can help you is by loving you,” which effectively illustrates both the release of emotional instincts that they experience in pseudonature and the ultimate dominance of the larger social and cultural structure beyond it, which denies them any lasting action in favor of their own happiness (Wharton 1905, 145). The scene marks an important clarification regarding

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the emotional freedom that nature allows the pair; where Bellomont was a place where Lily could imagine futures, inside this manufactured facsimile of wilderness, the freedom of expression extends only as far as the interaction that takes place within its hidden space, with no significant change to the outside world possible. It is instead merely an affect of freedom which is generated by the pseudonatural space that they experience here, as the futility of the exchange reveals that the constructions of society—physical and ideological—wait in the wings to burst their pseudonatural bubble. A parallel incident occurs later in the novel during the episode in Monte Carlo, when Bertha Dorset banishes Lily from the yacht under fabricated accusations of having an affair with her husband, George, in a fit of scandal-induced cruelty. Selden accompanies Lily out of the arena of her social shame and into the safety of a secluded garden that offers them some semblance of removal from the social mores inside. The two move from a constricting social encounter dictated by social hierarchy, capital both actual and societal, and the sort of high class frivolity with which much of Lily’s New York existence is occupied. The two remove themselves, once more, from the urban structure to experience the freedom, however fleeting, to express themselves candidly within the pseudonatural space: Outside, the sky was gusty and overcast, and as Lily and Selden moved toward the deserted gardens below the restaurant, spurts of warm rain blew fitfully against their faces. The fiction of the cab had been tacitly abandoned; they walked on in silence, her hand on his arm, till the deeper shade of the gardens received them, and pausing beside a bench, he said: “Sit down a moment.” She dropped to the seat without answering, but the electric lamp at the bend of the path shed a gleam on the struggling misery of her face. (Wharton 1905, 188)

The scene that follows is one marked by honesty about both Lily’s innocence and her social damnation, one based on the genuine mutual affection that the pair have for each other, but it is the description of the transgression between urban and “natural” that hammers home this duality experienced by these characters in pseudonature. This passage marks an abandonment of “fiction” in tandem with the abandonment of the societal setting, suggesting the emotional freedom felt within pseudonatural space in this novel. And yet, it also offers an interesting opposition of Lily and Selden’s characters with the inclusion of what we might call a ‘machine in the garden in the machine’ moment. Leo Marx (1964) popularized this notion of “the machine in the garden” in ecocriticism as the phenomenon of industrial technology symbolically, and sometimes actually, intruding upon restorative Nature. The “electric lamp” that illuminates Lily’s face, not Selden’s, quite literally sheds light on Lily’s misery via mechanical intrusion

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upon the garden setting, a setting which is still a reversal of the machine in the garden phenomenon by necessarily being an anomaly of natural beauty among a civilized larger setting. This episode solidifies both that Lily’s emotional freedom, in particular the freedom to connect romantically based on love and attraction rather than financial and social stability, is related to her proximity to the “natural” and that her freedom does not translate beyond its boundaries and back into the “real world.” As Lily’s descent into derelict tragedy begins, pseudonature fades from the novel’s pages. Lily’s ability to restore herself from contact with Nature is totally eclipsed by the social forces which have pigeonholed her into her bleak boardinghouse existence. The prospect of her happiness being consistently quelled at the hands of society has effectively siphoned her vitality to a point beyond any means of “natural” restoration. In the final scene, when Selden rushes to Lily’s side only to find her mysteriously dead, he observes from the street an anomaly in the bleak urban surroundings which have now come to dictate Lily’s existence: “He noticed too that there was a pot of pansies on one of the window sills, and at once concluded that the window must be hers: it was inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty in the dingy scene” (Wharton 1905, 342). Lily’s beauty, much like this feeble interjection of natural beauty into its dull surroundings, has been rendered quite as perfunctory as the pansy. The natural entity’s restorative powers are limited by the comparative vastness of the constructed world around it, a constant reminder of the constructed quality of these pseudonatural spaces; the pansy is potted, the urban garden is bordered by urban structure, and Lily is categorically constrained by the same civilization which offers here these small pockets of simulated freedom in the form of pseudonatural space. Lily’s plot of decline is marked not only by the failure of pseudonature’s illusory freedom to yield happiness, but also by the attendant financial decline that accompanies her increasingly dire social circumstances. There’s a clear correlation between Lily’s potential value to her suitors, her actual financial circumstances, and the rigidity of her circumstances as her options become increasingly limited. This decrease in value as alternative futures fail to pan out is experienced as ailing physical health and eventual death, the site of Lily’s body—linked with pseudonature—becoming a concretization of the anxiety of cultural possibility being increasingly closed off. The presence of a “body-commodity complex” in Wharton’s novel highlights the cultural assumption of the passivity of matter which Barad and Alaimo reject in favor of a transcorporeal understanding of the embodied human experience. Thingification occurs in Lily’s body as an object distanced from the self, linked exclusively to commodity and economy rather than the individual person’s will—a passive resource for the consumption of the larger systems in play. This reveals an impulse toward the preservation of female bodies,

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the preservation of beauty, through an insistence on eliminating a sense of agency, instead relying on a passive understanding of the female form—a natural resource which, with careful cultivation, can be arranged into something which fuels culture. This orientation toward the body as a resource instead of an integral part of the self mirrors the problematic orientation to the Nature/Culture binary, which fuels the conspicuous consumption associated with American capitalism that siphons nature of its power and resources in service of the perpetuation of culture. The implication of reading the body as a commodity is that it also becomes disposable—something to be used and replaced, not necessarily cultivated at the hands of tender stewards. Norman O. Brown (1959) in Life Against Death asks his reader, “What then is a city?” and his answer is the source of Lily’s plight in a nutshell: “A city reflects the new masculine aggressive psychology of revolt against the female principles of dependence and nature” (281–82). The city as a very concept, in Brown’s estimation, results in a categorical rejection of femininity in its emphasis on economic forces abstracted from physical needs for survival and utter lack of consideration for the “dependence” inherent in a community which privileges the well-being of its constituent parts, both human and non, via a conscious interdependence and custodial sensibility. This interdependence, unfortunately, does not evaporate simply because it is not given its due diligence. The interconnectedness of human and nonhuman parts in a community is still there—it is simply arranged, in urban environments, in a way that benefits the systems over the individual, the human over the nonhuman, and the masculine over the feminine. Moore (2015) writes that “capitalist relations move through, not upon, space—which is to say through, not upon, nature as a whole” (83). The capitalist system which dictates such an exploitative dynamic as the one which we see in effect in Wharton’s New York is not extra-natural, but a system by which natural matter, humans included, is organized in service of a force which is perceived as larger than life, and one which ultimately takes life from the unprivileged masses who suffer at the hands of that system. The capitalist drive at the core of this emerging consumer culture in naturalism, and its corresponding cultural moment, does not exist separate from the human forms who dwell within it; it exists because of the vitality of those individuals, feeding off of it with the reckless consumptive gusto of a gasguzzling SUV. In this scheme, the female form is fuel for the culture. The space of pseudonature, as nonhuman body, takes on these associations as well, as extension of the phenomenon of commodified femininity—a reproduction of the restorative qualities which are associated with land and understood in terms of femininity. The female body in the novel is presented as a passive “thingified” entity from which these manmade systems siphon the vitality

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for sustenance, just as Lily’s romantic vitality was siphoned within spaces of pseudonature for the aims of men unwilling or unable to conceive of the destructive consequences of their actions. This connection between the female body and the spaces of pseudonature reveals the inextricability of the cultural systems from those spaces and solidifies our understanding of pseudonature as a product of its cultural environment. At the moment of the emergence of American literary naturalism, America was experiencing a grim realization that the promised possibility of untouched virgin land no longer existed, as the spaces of America were increasingly incorporated into the fold of civilization. The anxiety of the sense of being locked into place within a system which oppresses leads one to dream of escape, and pseudonature can be read as a product intended to meet that very need. Under this system, pseudonature is produced as a consolation prize for the loss of the thing obscured by human progress—that unspoiled feminized body of land which was the object of a collective cultural fantasy of escape. The anxiety felt at the loss of this fantasy is projected onto the female body and to the body of pseudonature—both presented as products which are to be consumed in order to scratch the itch that remains of this desire for freedom from oppressive societal systems. Reading these bodies together—both of women and of pseudonature—is a reading of the “body-commodity complex” as a projection of the same central cultural anxiety onto both forms: the anxiety of certainty. It is an anxiety of the false sense of loss of cultural possibility perpetuated by naturalism’s insistence on reading the forces of culture, the product of human choice, as inevitable, inscrutable, and immutable. In Wharton’s novel, both products offer illusory, but not actual, escape from the dread of existence in an oppressive world that seems inescapable while sustaining actual, not illusory, damage to the material from which those projections are cultivated. NOTES 1. “Natural” included here in scare quotes is to note that the discourse on terming material spaces as “nature” or “natural” as opposed to cultural is, of course, complex and to be unpacked later in the essay as is relevant to the topic. For now, it indicates simply what the common understanding of “nature” or “natural” spaces would entail in the discourse of the times. 2. Going forward I will be using the capital-N “Nature” to signify the set of romantic associations with which humanity has historically treated the wilderness, rather than as a reference to material reality.

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REFERENCES Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–31. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1086​/345321. Becker, George. 1963. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bladow, Kyle, and Jennifer Ladino. 2018. Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, and Environment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Brown, Norman O. 1959. Life Against Death. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Bryant, William Cullen. 1844. “A New Public Park.” The New York Evening Post, July 3, 1844. Newspapers.com, https:​//​newscomwc​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /32119902​/​?terms​=a​%2Bnew​%2Bpark​&pqsid​=Drvp2CNT58vsX7OXq5BEPg​ %3A204000​%3A1502195828. Kern, Leslie. 2020. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Manmade World. London: Verso. Kolodny, Annette. 1975. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press. McEntyre, Marilyn. 2008. “The House of Mirth: Isn’t There a Quieter Place?” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15 (1): 83–99. https:​//​www​ .jstor​.org​/stable​/44086672. Menard, Andrew. 2010. “The Enlarged Freedom of Frederick Law Olmsted.” The New England Quarterly 83 (3): 508–538. http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/20752715. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nash, Roderick. 1967. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press. Olmsted, Frederick L., and Calvert Vaux. 1866. Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying out a Park in Brooklyn, New York, Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds. I. Van Anden’s Print. Rosenthal, Bernard. 1980. City of Nature: Journeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: A.A. Knopf. Seltzer, Mark. 1992. Bodies and Machines. London: Routledge. Shmurak, J. Susannah. 2010. “The City’s ‘War with Nature’: Urban Parks in The House of Mirth and Sister Carrie.” Nineteenth Century Studies 24: 123–40. http:​//​ www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/45197024. Wharton, Edith. 1905. The House of Mirth. In Edith Wharton: Novels, edited by R. W. B. Lewis, 1985, 1–348. Library of America.

Chapter 10

Naturalism’s Nonhuman Streets Food and Waste in Ann Petry’s Writing Cara Erdheim Kilgallen

Ann Petry’s vivid portrayal of Harlem, New York, with all of its complexities in the wake of World War II, speaks powerfully and profoundly to today’s readers. After all, American cities currently continue to grapple with unclean environments, racial injustice, economic inequities, and healthcare disparities in a post-pandemic world. Indeed, there is a power and vitality of nonhuman entities—specifically food, drink, and waste—in Petry’s fiction and nonfiction, which enliven and enrich the larger corpus of American literary naturalism. Three years after the publication of her bestselling and award-winning novel, The Street (1946), Petry became the author of a brief but colorful essay on Harlem, the setting for much of her fiction and a place where she resided for several years. The first black woman to write a book whose sales exceeded one million copies, Petry was consulted by Holiday Magazine to compose some words about Harlem that would accompany a vivid photographic essay.1 Presumably, the magazine’s editors intended for the piece to attract travelers to New York City during the years following World War II, so Petry’s depiction of Harlem is in part favorable; however, it also speaks truthfully to the reality of racial, economic, and environmental inequities that plague this urban environment. To prove that “Harlem is as varied and as full of ambivalences as Manhattan itself” (1949, 772), Petry’s piece juxtaposes the “thick juicy steak” and “sizzling hot lamb chops” that the city’s wealthy indulge in some of Uptown’s finest eating establishments with the “dingy vermin-ridden rooms” and “filthy laboratories” (768, 770) of Harlem’s overcrowded tenements. 163

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One theme central to American literary naturalism is the coexistence of abundance and scarcity when it comes to food, filth, water, waste, and other nonhuman as well as nonliving elements. These naturalist readings, however, tend to focus on the writings of canonized white male authors within the tradition such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. Indeed, ironic images of urban excess characterize naturalist narratives like London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), which juxtaposes naturalist gluttony and starvation among England’s underclass, and Norris’s The Octopus (1901) where indulgent feasting occurs among the wealthy and the poor suffer and starve on San Francisco streets. Only recently have scholars begun directing sustained critical attention to female writers of color within the naturalist tradition. One potentially promising avenue is through ecocriticism, which explores nonhuman and nonliving environments.2 This paper engages in a green reading of African American naturalism by examining the powerful presence of food, filth, water, waste, material, and metal in Petry’s prose. In her groundbreaking work, Vibrant Matter (2010), Jane Bennett makes an original contribution to ecocriticism and related fields by focusing on the vitality of things within themselves. To envision inanimate objects as agents that drive human decisions and influence social behaviors— policies—allows us to reframe our understanding of American naturalism, a literature about environment and appetite. To demonstrate that “edible material” can be active in the world beyond the human, Bennett emphasizes the power of its nonhuman agents; food functions as a key “player” because “it enters into what we have become” (51). I argue that through eating in The Street and consumption in “Mother Africa” (1971), one of Petry’s later works of fiction, nonhuman and nonliving forces become interconnected with human and living ones; through this dynamic interplay, the experiences of black women and men in these naturalist narratives gain vitality. Although neither in a sentimental nor a transcendentalist sense, the natural world begins in this literature to heal black and brown communities that have been beaten down by systemic human oppressions such as sexism, racism, violence, and poverty. Interestingly, in The Street, a novel about urban life, natural forces like earth, air, and wind at times provide relief and respite. Toward the middle of The Street, Petry’s protagonist Lutie Johnson seeks solace in an upstate New York River while on a countryside retreat from the city. Lutie finds comfort in this body of water, which, by enduring “forever— silent, strong, knowing where it [is] going,” infuses her life with renewed meaning and purpose (159–160). Also, while Petry’s tragic heroine spends much of the story picking her way through trash, the novel concludes with a scene of snow cleansing the grime and garbage that pervade and pollute New York City streets. Waste and garbage are frequent features in naturalist

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narratives, but discarded materials in black-authored novels like The Street require a more nuanced analysis. In her study of the book’s bestselling success through a comparative look at national and international editions, Tayari Jones finds that “trashy book covers [can] perhaps explain the incredible sales record” (Introduction 2020, 21–22). This paper is focused on the materiality of garbage, but I do wonder what it means to paint black women in a salacious light, and might this unclean imagery contribute to the widespread financial success of Petry’s piece? Also interesting to note is that the novel’s tragic heroine earns her living cleaning clothes and removing dirt from white homes (22–25). Lutie and her son, Bub, must live among the garbage and grime while the single black mother works tirelessly to create cleanliness and comfort for privileged white families. Naturalist narratives often involve individuals struggling futilely against an indifferent universe; this novel is no exception as it opens with Lutie fiercely fighting the wind currents (1–2). The Street’s introductory scenes display nonhuman elements in full force, energizing everything in their path. Nature certainly is anything but calm in the book’s opening pages: “[The wind] did everything it could to discourage the people walking along the street. It found all the dirt and dust and grime on the sidewalk and lifted it up so that the dirt got in their noses, making it difficult to breathe; the dust got in their eyes and blinded them; and the grit stung their skins” (3–4). Following pages of description that capture the wind’s viscous and “violent assault” (2) on vulnerable New Yorkers, Petry’s narrator narrows in on her protagonist, made to feel “naked and bald” (5) by the wind’s brutal blows. Although nature threatens in the beginning, as the winds blow garbage into human faces, the narrative concludes with a restorative image of gentle snowfall covering the city streets (436). This is not to say that the story ends joyfully on a human level; in the novel’s final scenes, Lutie boards a train to Chicago after killing Boots Smith, a singer at Junto’s Bar, who has sexually exploited and assaulted her. Although Petry’s protagonist flees the scene and leaves behind her son, there is an indication that the streets have been cleansed by snow (436). Still, The Street and “Mother Africa” illustrate how black individuals struggle to subsist on scraps in a world of pervasive pollution, unclean urban spaces, and substandard health conditions. Unlike some naturalist narratives of decline, however, not all is fatalistic in Petry’s prose or in the larger corpus of African American naturalism. While characters on the street endure alcoholism, addiction, prostitution, and environmental racism,3 there is potential for renewal and regeneration in both Petry’s novel and her later short story. Petry’s prose humanizes naturalism, a literature characterized both by deterministic plot sequences and characters lacking in agency. In order to understand her contribution to and enrichment of the movement, it

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would be helpful to examine the literary tradition itself in terms of its origins and relation to realism. NEW NATURALISMS American literary naturalism, which begins in the 1890s, has existed for a long time under the shadow of Realism.4 The movement was first theorized by Norris who imported the European ideas of French naturalist Emile Zola to American shores. As scholars work to broaden the borders and boundaries of literary naturalism, they would do well to consider Petry’s often overlooked place within the tradition, which her work complicates through its exploration of blackness, female identity, and the environment. Any investigation into nonhuman nature and race can be potentially problematic, of course, but Bennett’s argument about Vibrant Matter can bring ecological justice to African American literary naturalism. What would it mean to read Petry’s prose as “humanitarian” in nature? Clare Eby is one who rejects the common naturalist notion that Petry’s plots are fatalistic and views The Street as a “humanitarian narrative” rather than a work of pure protest fiction (2008). Rather than present this post-war author in a marginalized light, or as an African American female foil to Richard Wright, I also consult the work of Nellie Y. McKay who claims that while Petry “borrowed heavily from elements in the naturalistic tradition,” she carved out her own aesthetic apart from that of Wright.5 McKay goes on to say that, rather than “[imitate] Wright’s fiction, Petry’s novel[s] [expand] Wright’s boundaries as well as those of previous black fiction” (1953, xiii). Scholarship on Petry tends to place her work within the naturalist tradition, but her aesthetic is characterized by elements of realism and modernism6 as well. Comparisons to Wright are common; however, as Keith Clark notes in his influential study of her fiction, Petry’s prose is radical in its own right. Strong female characters, in both her novels and short stories, have had profound influences on the postmodern writings of Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and other women writers in the late twentieth-century. Considering the critique of Naylor’s weak male characters in The Women of Brewster Place (1982), which prompted her to write The Men of Brewster Place (1998), Petry’s multi-faceted men show that she was very much ahead of her time.7 To appreciate fully Petry’s prose, it is necessary to challenge some of our common conceptions of the naturalist narrative as we have come to understand it. Imagine a brutish young man, likely white and physically fit, struggling to survive against hostile and indifferent forces in a vast universe. Add plenty of violence, sexual aggression, and excessive appetite; this is the naturalist

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narrative to which so many of us have become accustomed. Indeed, according to Donna Campbell, this literature is characterized by the casual acceptance of violence and alcoholism as an ordinary part of life” (2011, 501). It is certainly the case that these stories are often set in either “urban slums” or “savage wilderness,” and that they expose the indifference of human beings to their fellow creatures” or vice versa (499). Naturalist novels tend to involve vulnerable human beings with insatiable appetites; just think of Norris’s monstrous McTeague, the novel’s titular protagonist (1899), the beastlike brute of Vandover (1914), and London’s Wolf Larsen (The Sea-Wolf, 1904) to name a few. Yet naturalism is not monolithic; it is multifaceted and has evolved—as has our understanding of this movement—to encompass stories about women and communities of color. In order to generate more multi-faceted readings of this literature, it is helpful to understand the thematic evolution American naturalism. Crane’s fiction focused on “urban poverty, violence, and parody”; Norris’s novels shifted to “heredity and capitalism”; Dreiser’s works considered “social Darwinism and determinism”; and London’s prose dwelled in themes of “racial atavism and nativism” (Campbell 2011, 500). Following Sinclair’s muckraking fiction and narratives of reform, which some see as a second wave of literary naturalism, African American authors like Wright and Petry protested racial oppression of blacks victimized by the embedded structures of a dominant white world, claims Campbell (503). Naturalist narratives tend to involve characters with limited free will (504). Yet, individuals in Petry’s prose do not always lack agency, even though their choices and freedoms have substantial limitations. Humanizing characters involves granting them agency and doing so requires readers to consider the natural and nonhuman environments that intersect with and enrich the lives of those residing in cities. Steeped in social Darwinism8 and influenced by evolutionary discourse of the day, literary naturalism has only relatively recently produced ecocritical readings. It is surprising that naturalist scholarship has taken so long to investigate the nonhuman agents of a literature focused on “heredity, environment, and chance” (Campbell 2011, 499). Green readings became more focused on ecological and environmental justice during the 2000s, when scholars like Jennifer Fleissner (2004) located the tragedy of naturalism for women and writers of color within the failed survival of “‘nature’ itself (6–7). Why have so few critical conversations about food, water, waste, and other materials taken place among scholars of naturalism? Finally, however, this pattern is beginning to change.9 Just as ecocriticism opens up new pathways for innovative inquiries into African American naturalism, so too does the field of cultural food studies. Petry’s passages are filled with food imagery, and hunger is a perennial theme

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throughout her fiction. In Black Hunger: Food and Politics of U. S. Identity, Doris Witt traces foodways through Black womanhood and vice versa (1999, 5). Witt looks at African American females as producers and consumers of food (8). The culinary arts were depicted by writers like Morrison, Naylor, and Walker as a creative practice shared between women-mothers and daughters, lesbian lovers, and more (10–11). Through his study of soul food—which became a term in the 1960s, but has its roots deeply imbedded in slavery—Adrian Miller looks to this cuisine as a way for American blacks to assert their humanity (2013, 9). Created from the remnants of white scraps, “soul food is an expression of the central core of black culture” (1997, 274); it has become for African American women a form of significant self-creation. FOOD FRAGMENTS Lutie Johnson’s limited access to clean and healthy food in The Street complicates her ability to connect with the culinary history and culture of her ancestors; however, she makes every effort to take pleasure and pride in food preparation. A single black mother struggling to survive, Lutie battles to sustain her life and the wellness of her young son, Bub. Petry’s third person narrator10 reminds readers that “[Lutie] tried to make all the meals good, appetizing ones and that meant spending most of her time hunting bargains in the market and preparing dishes that required long, careful cooking” (1946, 170– 171). At this point in the story, Lutie consults her father, Pop, who advises her to take some foster children into her apartment for income; she agrees, and, despite the perennial battle to get young mouths fed, begins to discover the pleasures of food production: “It was during that period that she learned about soups and stews and baked beans and cassaroles” (170–171). Petry’s protagonist becomes what Witt would call a prideful producer (1999, 8). Despite efforts to provide sustenance for her son, Lutie still struggles mightily as a mother to feed him healthy produce, limited by the filthy food and eating conditions surrounding her. Unable to access adequate meals at school (Petry, 1946, 59), Bub depends upon his mother to provide. While on a desperate quest for dinner one evening, Lutie notices the utter lack of available and affordable cuisine; between “ham locks, lamb culls, [and] bright-red beef,” she has heard that Harlem’s butchers have colored the meat with “embalming fluid” and thus removed from it any nutritional value (61). Reluctant to believe that such polluted produce would be for sale, Petry’s protagonist becomes a careful consumer by closing scrutinizing “the contents of the case with care” (61).

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Scenes like this one may remind readers of The Jungle (1905), Sinclair’s turn-of-the-century muckraking novel that inspired then President Roosevelt’s Food and Drug Administration.11 The nonhuman world is pivotal to Sinclair’s exposure of contaminated conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking district; this crucial work of protest fiction shines a light on the unjust living and working world of Lithuanian immigrants. At the same time that Sinclair’s Progressive era novel spurred on increased regulations, The Jungle’s detailed depiction of Chicago’s unsanitary meatpacking plant also contributed to a rise in vegetarianism and fasting (Bloodworth 1979), which readers see socially elite white eaters engage in toward the beginning of The Street. Petry’s protagonist spends the novel’s early pages cleaning and cooking for the Chandlers, a white family who lives in the bucolic town of Old Saybrook, far from the Bridgeport houses “blackened with soot and smoke from the factories” (Petry 1946, 35). Overwhelmed by the abundant greenery and gardens surrounding this home on the Connecticut River (38), Lutie observes with frustration as Mrs. Chandler’s friends eat either “like horses” or not at all due to their privileged fear of becoming fat (40). Despite her precise preparation of the most expensive delicacies, Lutie looks on as the white women barely touch and taste their meal (40). Mr. Chandler, by contrast, drowns himself in drink (48). What Mrs. Chandler does not eat, consume, or wear (her excess clothing in particular), she hands over to Lutie (50), and thus reinforces the nefarious notion that blacks must collect scraps from the white world. Black communities created their own cuisine from the white man’s scraps; soul food is one way to reconsider naturalist hunger at the same time that it deepens our understanding of how black characters experience eating throughout the novel. On rare occasions, Lutie works tirelessly to take pride in the food that she prepares for her family to consume, but her circumstances and environment rarely allow her to do so. Carlo Petrini’s philosophy of Slow Food, designed to counteract the highly mechanized and impersonal nature of the fast-food industry, considers the ecological process through which human meals make it from farm to table. Slow food focuses less on the edible material itself, and more upon the process by which animals and plants make their way into meals. This movement considers the labor that lies behind food production, as well as the profound personal stories that influence the culture of each cuisine. Conversations about choice and free will have surrounded naturalist novels for quite some time, but these discussions often focus on human beings. What would it mean to apply Bennett’s idea that nonhuman entities have agency to Petry’s prose? How do food and other materials drive the decisions of characters on New York City’s crowded streets? Toward the middle of the novel, while taking a stroll through Harlem with Booth after he tempts her with a position performing at Junto’s Bar, Petry’s protagonist seems transfixed by

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the food that she encounters in store windows. Lutie notices the “pigs’ feet, hog maw, neck bones, chitterlings, ox tail, [and] tripe—all the parts that didn’t cost much because they didn’t have much solid meat on them” (Petry 1946, 153). The “withered oranges and sweet potatoes, wilted kale and okra,” and “bruised rotten fruit” are all that Lutie can afford, and they are all that is available in her area of the city (153). So many naturalist narratives are about the availability of resources, both living and nonliving; Petry’s prose certainly is no exception to this point. Readers familiar with naturalist struggles, particularly those in African American fiction, may recall the opening scene to Wright’s Native Son (1940) when Bigger Thomas chases the rat around his Chicago tenement. In The Street, human beings do not battle animals in the same way but rather observe their presence within the city’s toxic spaces. For example, fearing that the white butcher will contaminate her meat, Lutie wonders whether the “yellow cat” wandering aimlessly around the streets will make its way to the “meat-grinder to emerge as hamburger” (Petry 1946, 62). There is a touch of irony here, as well as when Petry’s third-person close narrator compares Lutie’s bags of groceries to Ben Franklin’s “loaf of bread” (63). Lutie is inspired by Franklin to achieve the American Dream of a white man, but the novel’s readers realize the vast discrepancy in circumstances. Petry’s protagonist is not unaware of the hurdles she faces, however, and this awareness keeps her perpetually hungry for a better life. In many of Dreiser’s novels, such as Sister Carrie (1900), women have insatiable appetites, which leave them longing for more; the novel concludes with Caroline Meeber endlessly rocking. Lutie does not have hunger for more material items, as does Carrie, but she desires stability and clean food. When she mentions to Boots that she cannot fathom how her neighbors continue “living and reproducing in spite of the bad food” (Petry 1946, 153), he replies with a straightforward unfeeling response: “They don’t have to eat it’” (154). Debates about access to food often come down to human choice, as with this scene, and Lutie responds that individuals within her community have very few options in terms of their dietary decisions: “What are they going to do—stop eating?” (154). Yet communities of color continue to endure, and as Petry’s narrator says, “the people went on living in spite of the bad food” (153). RUBBISH AND REFUSE This paper’s focus thus far has been on food scraps, hunger, and African American culinary patterns; however, the nonhuman world in Petry’s prose is characterized also by material waste, which contributes to poor and unhealthy air quality. Influential scholars of naturalism have examined junk

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in the context of consumer capitalism (production, consumption, and the like).12 More recent readings of naturalist narratives have emphasized the physical components of waste itself and explored its environmental effects on characters, plots, narration, and other storytelling elements.13 Similarly, in Petry’s prose, the filthy meats draw readers’ attention to unclean environmental factors such as toxic waste sites that both limit and drive significant human decisions. As we investigate the nonhuman in naturalism, specifically African American writings by women, we would do well to consider how garbage, grime, and other environmental forces become “vibrant matter” (to borrow Bennett’s phrase) in Petry’s fiction and nonfiction. Soul food is about crafting creative cuisine from scraps; although Petry’s characters do not regularly whip up new recipes, they do succeed at making new materials and meanings from waste and other discarded items. Indeed, the agency and ability of young black women like Lutie bring vitality to nonhuman and even nonliving objects. The Street is filled with garbage and grime, but an analysis of junk in Petry’s shorter fiction sheds new light on nonhuman naturalism. During the Progressive era, which coincides historically with the beginnings of literary naturalism, there was a real aversion to waste, as social policies sought to eliminate excess from the environment and economy. Furthermore, an era of physical culture led many to engage in fasting fads that eliminated toxins from the body.14 In his study of “Material and Social Waste in Frank Norris’s McTeague,” J. Michael Duvall looks to domestic spaces in early naturalist novels as sites of “disposability.” The turn-of-the-century home becomes for protagonists like McTeague, who cleans teeth, and Vandover, who clears clutter from lived in spaces, the “agent of an ever-swelling heap of urban garbage” (2009, 133). Waste functions, in turn-of-the-century American literature and culture, as “material conditions and habits” that reflect an early twentieth-century existence and an increasingly “modern subjectivity” (133). Duvall’s interest in junk as “social phenomenon” as well as “material condition” sheds light on my reading of Petry’s prose, which is naturalistic while also containing elements of late Modernism.15 Feelings of fragmentation, in a post–World War II America on the brink of the Civil Rights movement, influence many of the themes and motifs in her work. Waste and junk are particularly pivotal, I would argue, to her later fiction; this section of the paper therefore focuses on her collection titled Miss Muriel and Other Stories. In “Mother Africa,” a short story that appears in the middle of this collection, the nonhuman world takes on a life of its own. At the start of the story, we meet Emmanuel (Man) Turner, a collector of junk, waking up in his Harlem home to “a small patch of April sunlight [filtering] through [his] dirt-encrusted windows” (1971, 126). This opening scene illustrates the healing effects of nature, signals the coming of spring (127), and foreshadows a

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sort of rebirth that Man experiences through his collection process. Having suffered the loss of his wife, Mary Lou, and infant during childbirth (154), Man finds comfort in the stuff that he acquires. As the sole “black man in the area” who sells discarded materials, he has discovered a niche for himself and created a lucrative business (127). The things that he obtains not only provide him solace in the face of loss, but they also show his ingenuity. This process of taking the scraps and repurposing them for profit resembles the culinary creation of soul food. The coexistence of abundant and scarce resources in naturalist narratives figures prominently into this story. Man does not possess much in terms of expensive valuables, but he makes the most of the plentiful items that he collects on Harlem’s city streets. In less than a block he picked up a number of salable items: six shapeless felt hats; ten sweaters—most of them in good condition, one not so good; a huge pile of dusty curtains (he would run them through his washing machine)—an old one someone gave him in exchange for a dryer he’d pick up free from a moving man; some mismatched rubbers; a pair of hardly worn-at-all galoshes; several usable lamps; an old lantern; a dozen pretty good plates; and a child’s highchair in fair condition. (129)

It might help unpack this passage to think of the above as an “assemblage”—to borrow Bennett’s language again—of items that have agency to effect change. The discarded “dusty curtains,” which Man plans to wash and resell, along with the “usable lamps” and “old lantern,” constitute what Bennett would describe as an “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements (2010, 23). Although it does not lead to systemic change in the story, these waste products take on a power of their own by reminding readers and Mannie— the narrator vacillates between his perspective and a more omniscient point of view—how “white-skinned people still fed [like ferocious sharks] on the dark-skinned people of the world” (131). The thing that holds the most power in this story is a metal statue, in the shape of a nude woman, which Petry’s protagonist initially refuses to collect. When his old war buddy, Joe tries to part with the female-shaped statue that his wealthy white client, Mrs. Treadaway, wishes to discard, Man reluctantly accepts the item and then regrets his decision: “He should have known better than to say yes. It just went to prove how a white woman would trick a black man every time—even one she’d never seen” (134). Tempted to “dump this dark, naked, metal woman in the Harlem River,” Man resolves to destroy the statue if nobody purchases it by selling the metal parts (136). He does hold onto the object, though, and despite the fierce objections of neighbors who are offended by the naked statue, Man begins to discover “something of the

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beauty of the metal woman” (150). When the moonlight brightens the statue to make her seem like a “breathing black woman,” Man feels enlivened by the object’s power and names it/her “Mother Africa” (150). For a brief moment, he feels connected to his heritage. This connection to the statue does not last, however, and the metal woman becomes a force against which Petry’s protagonist struggles. Eager to “confront” the material object, which Man realizes has transformed him, he recognizes her status as a statue but “resent[s]” her nonetheless “as though she had been a live woman” (158). The object has changed Man physically by causing him to shave his beard (158, 161) and emotionally by decreasing his passion for junk collection. Interestingly, once he stops humanizing the item by the story’s end, Man resolves to sell the statue (162). To recognize the “life of metal,” declares Bennett, is to question our human association of this material with “passivity” and “dead thingness” (55). What would it mean to bestow upon Petry’s “Mother Africa” statue a “creative materiality”? (56). In the story, this statue gains a “material vitality” in part because of its sexuality, something that Bennett considers when she explores what “draws human bodies to apparently dead things—to objects stones, bits of matter” (61). Perhaps the greatest irony of this story is that “Mother Africa” turns out to be the statue of a white woman whom Man immediately becomes eager to sell for nothing by the story’s end. After transforming his appearance and realizing that the metal woman has changed him (158), Man makes the gruesome discovery. He lay still, too shocked to move. It had never occurred to him that this alive-looking statue was a white woman. There wasn’t any question about it—tell by the hair, the straight sharp nose, the thin-lipped mouth. He’d been so busy looking at her breasts and her thighs, he hadn’t paid any attention to her face. Besides, bronze darkened with age and just on the basis of the darkness of the metal, he had thought this was a statue of a shapely black woman. Mother Africa. (161)

Man has humanized and sexualized the metal figure; in so doing, he romanticizes the nonliving object as a black woman who becomes the subject and object of his fantasy. The irony, then, comes from the realization by Man (an ironic name in itself) that this statue represents a white woman whose wornout state makes the metal figure’s “bronze [become] darkened with age.” “Mother Africa” may be a critique of consumer capitalism, as well as a statement on the failed American Dream particularly when it comes to race and consumption. According to Gladys J. Washington, characters like Man lead lives that are “trash heaps of disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration” (1986, 21). Washington and others16 also investigate the natural

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world’s complex role in Petry’s short stories, which she wrote later in her life and career. RESTORATIVE NATURE Connections between the human and nonhuman, as well interactions between the living and nonliving entities, enrich and enliven Petry’s protagonists. Whether through Lutie’s protective mothering and careful consumption of produce or Emmanuel (Man) Turner’s pride in his junk collection, characters in Petry’s prose gain agency and always maintain their humanity. Urban deterministic readings of black-authored naturalist texts show their limitations, so ecocritical attempts to recover an African American wilderness seem relevant here. Cassandra Y. Johnson and J. M. Bowker participate in an ongoing ecocritical wilderness debate, and both defend the wild as a physical and mental space for blacks to reexamine their enslaved history on American soil, recount their cultural narratives of black identity, and re-root themselves in their African heritage. This “historical relationship of African Americans to wildlands” provides a counter to the “white, middle-American view” of the Western wilderness construct (2008, 323–27). As literary environmental critics turn their attention away from a masculine concept of Nature with a capital N, which has for so long privileged whites and excluded blacks, we realize how white America has constructed the natural world as a privileged social, cultural, ethnic, and racial category. The black experience of nature has long garnered interest among readers, but these readings have tended toward a sort of romantic racialism; that is, a reductive notion that African Americans have a harmonic but simplistic relationship with the land as it exists apart from human culture. Houston A. Baker cautions against such a reading when he insists that none of Wright’s African American characters exist in a “state of black, prelapsarian innocence and plentitude” (1993, 201). The same applies to Petry’s female figures, perhaps even more so. If we are to delve deeply into the nonhuman elements of naturalism and black women’s writing, then a consideration of the “natural beauty of the landscape” (Washington 1986, 17) in her stories is essential. Miss Muriel and Other Stories illustrates both the toxic waste of urban life and the bucolic pleasures of country living (16). Tales like “The New Mirror” capture a nostalgic but “bittersweet” experience of the African American encounter with country living (18, 20). “In Darkness and Confusion,” by contrast, a story of protests and police brutality, depicts a city, nation, and world that are broken and in shambles. Washington notes that short stories about urban and rural spaces showcase the author as an astute observer of place (29), much like The Street’s Lutie Johnson who at times seems hypersensitive to her surroundings.

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In a 1988 interview with the author conducted by Mark K. Wilson, Ann Petry expressed her discomfort with material items while voicing an admiration for Henry David Thoreau’s simplicity in Walden (74). At the same time, she acknowledged that the vibrant energy of urban living inspired not only her journalism but also her writing of fiction. As an African American author who looked back to Frederick Douglass (80), while preparing a path for later women writers, Petry humanized black experiences within literary naturalism. This paper has considered naturalist hunger through the materiality of food and the vitality of waste. More green readings of naturalism are necessary, as well as further considerations of eco-justice in twentieth-century black women’s writing. One place to begin would be with Petry’s nonfiction and journalism, both of which influenced her aesthetic but have received far less attention from critics and scholars. Ultimately, from Harlem’s city streets to nature’s restorative powers, Ann Petry’s nonhuman world enriches and enlivens American literary naturalism. NOTES 1. Ann Petry was in high demand as an author and though she often retreated from the public eye in her hometown of Old Saybrook, Connecticutt, she wrote this contribution essay for Holiday, a post-war travel magazine. See Ann Petry (1949). 2. Over the past decade or so, green readings of naturalism have become more common. For an excellent overview of naturalist criticism and new opportunities to extend its borders as well as boundaries, see Donna Campbell (2011). 3. See Gerald Torres (1992). 4. Naturalism was viewed by early scholars as aesthetically inferior to realism and romanticism. To understand how George Lukacs and Lionel Trilling attacked naturalism, while critics like June Howard and Donald Pizer sought to defend and humanize the movement, see the following: Jennifer Fleissner (1996). 5. For a comprehensive look at the popular and academic reception of Petry’s prose, see The Critical Response to Ann Petry (2005). 6. See Heather J. Hicks (2002). Hicks argues that the bestselling novel critiques surveillance and spectatorship while also resisting realist narration that engages in the looking and spectatorship itself. As with the fiction of Henry James, characters in Petry’s prose has the power to read and interpret their surroundings but not necessarily to change their circumstances. 7. Clark notes that Petry’s portrayal of men is far more favorable and well developed than are the depiction of female figures in writings by her contemporary male black authors Wright and Ralph Ellison (2013). 8. The evolutionary discourse that informs American literature naturalism is crucial to our understanding and unpacking of the movement. To benefit from a thoughtful and thorough overview, see Richard Hofstadter (1992).

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9. A Google Scholar search for “American literary naturalism and ecocriticism” yields some recent and relevant results, separate from the many green readings on Transcendentalism. On the nonhuman in literary naturalism, see Robert M. Myers (2015). 10. As with many naturalist novels, Petry’s narrator is third person; however, the point of view vacillates a bit. 11. Sinclair’s naturalist novel, which began as a piece of proletariat prose, had tremendous effects on public and political policy. See Jason Pickavance (2003). 12. See Walter Benn Michaels (1987). This classic work of naturalist criticism constitutes cultural materialism and Marxist literary theory. 13. One relatively recent example is Michael J. Duvall (2009). 14. Upton Sinclair contributed to Physical Culture Magazine, which helped to popularize the “fasting cure.” For more context, see Michael J. Duvall (2002). 15. See Tabish Khair, “Modernism and Modernity: The Patented Fragments” (2001). 16. Collections of critical essays on Petry’s short fiction affirm the richness of her short stories, which have not received the same critical attention of her novels. See the following: Hazel Arnett Ervin, Hilary Holladay, and Hilary W. Holladay (2004).

REFERENCES Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1993. “On Knowing Our Place.” Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present.” Eds. K. A. Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 200–225. New York: Amistad. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Benn Michaels, Walter. 1987. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bloodworth, William. 1979. “From The Jungle to The Fasting Cure. Upton Sinclair on American Food.” Journal of American Culture 2 (3): 444–453. Campbell, Donna. 2011. “American Literary Naturalism: Critical Perspectives.” Literature Compass 8 (8): 499–513. Dreiser, Theodore. 1991. Sister Carrie. 2nd ed. Ed. Donald Pizer. London: W. W. Norton & Co. Duvall, Michael J. 2002. “Processes of Elimination: Progressive-Era Hygienic Ideology, Waste, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.” American Studies 43 (3): 29–56. Duvall, Michael J. 2009. “One Man’s Junk: Material and Social Waste in Frank Norris’s McTeague.” Studies in American Naturalism 4 (2): 132–151. Eby, Clare Virginia. 2008. “Beyond Protest: The Street as Humanitarian Narrative.” MELUS 33 (1): 33–53. Ervin, Hazel Arnett, and Hilary W. Holladay, eds. 2004. Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays. No. 209. Greenwood Publishing Group.

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Fleissner, Jennifer. 1996. “The Work of Womanhood in American Naturalism, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8 (1): 57–93. Fleissner, Jennifer. 2004. Women, Compulsion, Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hicks, Heather J. 2002. “Rethinking Realism in Ann Petry’s The Street.” MELUS 27: 489–505. Hofstadter, Richard. 1992. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. Hsuan L. Hsu. 2016. “Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice.” American Literature 88 (4): 787–814. Hughes, Marvalene H. 1997. Soul, Black Women, and Food. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Cassandra J., and J. M. Bowker. 2008. “African American Wildlife Memories.” In The Wilderness Debate Rages On. Eds. Michael P. Nelson and J. Baird Callicott, 325–343. Jones, Tayari. 2020. “Introduction.” In The Street by Ann Petry, 10–31. New York: Houghton Mifflin. London, Jack. 1963. The People of the Abyss. Oxford: Archer. London, Jack. 1964. The Sea Wolf. New York: Penguin. Martin, Ronald E. 1981. American Literature and the Universe of Force. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1981. McKay, Nellie Y. 1953. “Introduction.” In The Narrows: A Novel by Ann Petry, 9–13. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Miller, Adrian. 2013. Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2013. Myers, Robert M. 2015. “Crane’s City: An Ecocritical Reading of Maggie.” American Literary Realism 47 (3): 189–202. Naylor, Gloria. 1983. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Penguin Books. Naylor, Gloria. 1998. The Men of Brewster Place. New York: Hyperion. Norris, Frank. 1914. Vandover and the Brute. New York: Doubleday. Norris, Frank. (1899) 1997. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. New York: W. W. Norton. Norris, Frank. (1901) 2005. The Octopus: A Story of California. New York: Barnes & Noble Books. Petrini, Carlo. 2005. Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair. Trans. Clara Furlan and Jonathan Hunt. Italy and New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris. Petry, Ann 1908. “Ann Petry.” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series 6. Petry, Ann. 1949. “Harlem.” Holiday Magazine, Story of the Week, Library of America. Storyoftheweek.org. Petry, Ann. 1974. “The Street. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Petry, Ann. 2017. “In Darkness and Confusion.” 252–295. In Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Petry, Ann. 2017. “The Migraine Workers.” In Miss Muriel and Other Stories, 112– 125. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017.

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Petry, Ann. 2017. “Mother Africa.” In Miss Muriel and Other Stories, 126–162. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Petry, Ann. 2017. “The New Mirror.” In Miss Muriel and Other Stories, 58–88. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Pickavance, Jason. 2003. “Gastronomic Realism: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the Fight for Pure Food, and the Magic of Mastification.” Food and Foodways 11 (2–3): 87–112. Sinclair, Upton. 1981. The Jungle. “Introduction.” Morris Dickstein. Larchmont, New York: Bantam. The Critical Response to Ann Petry. 2005. Ed. Hazill Arnett Ervin. Westport, CT: Praeger. Tabish, Khair. 2001. “Modernism and Modernity: The Patented Fragments.” Third Text 15 (5): 3–13. Torres, Gerrald. 1992. “Introduction: Understanding Environmental Racism.” University of Colorado Law Review 63: 839. Washington, Gladys J. 1986. “A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry’s Short Fiction.” CLA Journal 30 (1): 14–29. Witt, Doris. 2004. Black Hunger: Soul Food and America. University of Minnesota Press. Wright, Richard. 1998. Native Son. “Introduction.” Arnold Rampersad. New York: Perennial.

SECTION IV

Image, Object, Text

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Chapter 11

Between Word and Image Western Landscape and Photographic Rhetoric in Stephen Crane’s Prose Writing Francesca Razzi

In his discussion on the dialectic relation between realism and naturalism, published in 1896, Frank Norris argues that the latter is far from being, as it is commonly believed, “a theory of fiction wherein things are represented . . . with the truthfulness of a camera” (1996, 85, emphasis added). Norris’s words are well expressive of the subjective value of naturalist fiction, an aesthetic feature shared by late-nineteenth-century visual culture: rather than a mere, objective reproduction of reality, Norris seems to call for a kind of selective outlook which stems from a personal recreation of the viewer—an “illusory objectivity,” “a distortion of reality” capable of shaping ideas and even defining society (Freund 1980, 4–5). In so doing, Norris addresses a process of “modernization of vision” (Crary 1992) that typifies both literature and photography as artistic forms, often characterized by a mutual convergence in depicting the world and the social transformations of the modern age, which occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century (Armstrong 1999, 75–85). With reference to American print culture, this amalgam of verbal and visual dimensions has a successful application in the presentation of space and landscape. The cultural construction of the American landscape takes place through a kind of hybrid narrativity, where textual and pictorial languages integrate and complete one another (Johnston 2016, 10–11). Thanks to the wide circulation of illustrated books and magazines, this visual revolution marks the development of late-nineteenth-century popular press (Kaestle and Radway 2009, 12–13), making the case of Stephen Crane’s prose writing 181

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particularly relevant to the discussion of the nonhuman in American naturalism. The present essay, therefore, aims at a deeper understanding of Crane’s style and its indebtedness to photography, through the discussion of the conflicting interactions between nonhuman landscape and human agency emerging from Crane’s Western writings—the short stories “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel,” and the journalistic reports “Galveston, Texas, in 1895” and “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life.” As previous criticism on Crane’s style has pointed out, connections between Crane’s fiction and the visual arts can be found in his use of a pictorial language, which incorporates impressionist techniques. These methods revolve around the use of color and chiaroscuro, and also engage with the modulation of narrative points of view in order to reproduce the sense of space and reality (Rogers 1969; Nagel 1978, 1980). In addition, along with writers such as his contemporary Theodore Dreiser (and John Steinbeck, later in the 1930s), Crane ranks among the naturalist authors whose fiction can be stylistically associated with the visual language pertaining to photography. More recently, scholarship has underlined the crucial influence of photographic storytelling and documentary photography on Crane’s literary practice and rhetoric. For example, a functional analogy connects Jacob Riis’s photojournalistic study of New York slums, How the Other Half Lives (1890), with Crane’s work Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), in that they both narrate the conditions of the urban lower classes (Pizer 2011, 469–71). Indeed, both Riis and Crane create an “ethnography of the slum” building upon the power of visual and textual narratives that are devoid any conventional moralism or sentimentalism (Gandal 1997, 27–60), thus documenting an “anaesthetic experience” of incommunicability and dehumanization in and through urban settings (Esteve 1995). Yet, Crane’s use of this kind of photographic language stretches beyond the representation of the human side of the late-nineteenthcentury American scene, and it proves particularly meaningful if considered in relation to the nonhuman aspects behind the sociocultural construction of space—of 1890s Western landscape, more precisely, at a time when the very idea of the frontier is being assigned ideological implications forging the modern mythology of the West (Smith 1950, 250–60; Slotkin 1998, 29–62). In turn, the nineteenth-century myth of the West has been significantly shaped by landscape photography. As early as the 1860s, a good number of photographers (among them, Carleton E. Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, John K. Hillers, and Solomon Butcher) contributed substantially to the foundation of this modern myth, since they witnessed the experience of the American frontier both in its geographic and ethnographic dimensions (Cartosio 2018, 159–67). Most importantly, Western American photography evokes an idea of landscape intended as cultural construction, as a space connoted by individual perceptions. In this sense, Solomon Butcher’s work epitomizes the

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relation between individuals and environment taking place on the Western “stage.” In their depiction of the homesteaders in the Nebraskan prairie of Custer County, Butcher’s well-known photographs crucially deal with the dichotomy between human agency and nonhuman environment. Employing a strong visual rhetoric typical of landscape imagery, Butcher establishes a close connection between the West—perceived as a physical and cultural space—and its human inhabitants’ response; in other words, in Butcher’s work the entire process of human construction of space (which is ideological and literal, at the same time) defines both landscape meaning and settler identity (Sailor 2014, 83–85). On this cultural background, the visual qualities of Crane’s style will be discussed by focusing on Crane’s prose writing, seen as the result of a subjective viewpoint according to which the author recreates the American Western landscape in naturalist literature. Crane deals with the American West by staging a human/nonhuman dichotomy—that is, an opposition between human agency and nonhuman environment. Hence, the textual analysis will be centered on Crane’s detailed descriptions pertaining to both urban and natural environment, and their relation to human characters and lives. While adopting stylistic strategies expressive of the interrelation between verbal aesthetic and visual rhetoric, Crane opens the way to the construction of the modern literary field. From a sociocultural perspective, while reframing the classic Western tropes into a naturalist pattern, Crane narrows the distance between fiction and journalism, merging the boundaries between high-brow and low-brow forms of cultural production. In fact, Crane’s canonical short stories “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel” were both first published in illustrated popular magazines in 1898—in McClure’s and Collier’s Weekly, respectively. In both tales, Crane’s fictional treatment of the West stems from the author’s previous experience as a correspondent through Nebraska and Texas for the New York–based Bacheller newspaper syndicate, in a trip which took place in early 1895. During his travels, Crane became aware of the fact that the traditional idea of the “Wild” West, popularized by dime novels as the peculiar stage of frontier heroes, outlaws, and gunslingers, constituted a mere romanticized, stereotyped image construed on an Eastern bias (Sorrentino 2014, 152–58). In criticizing this perspective, Crane deeply revises the Western tropes, and reframes them into a literary pattern questioning the role and significance of human agency within the natural environment. Crane’s revision, then, derives from the author’s subjectivity in dealing with the Western myth—a subjectivity operating also at the level of literary technique shared by the two 1898 short stories and the journalistic reports titled “Galveston, Texas” and “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life.” In fact, in a landmark biography of Crane, Robert W. Stallman comments on the stylistic features of

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Crane’s Western tales and articles underlining “his gift for rendering sense impressions much as a camera imprints images of reality” (1968, 131), thus setting a critical analogy between the author’s use of verbal language and its visual quality. Hence, Crane’s tales and journalistic reports can be read as specimens of a photographic rhetoric sustaining their textual structures, in spite of the different literary genres to which, at first sight, they belong. The depiction of what Crane himself calls “the picturesque Western landscape” (1996, 686) (in his 1894 story titled “An Excursion Ticket”) is carried out in the four texts through interconnected references to the urban architectures in Texas, and to the Nebraskan natural environment. In this sense, Crane’s prose writings cannot be conceptualized apart from the aesthetic function and social role of landscape photography in latenineteenth-century American culture. According to Robert Adams (1983), nineteenth-century landscape photography depicts the West as a complex environment, technically made up of silence, visual stillness pertaining to both subject and composition, and the shaping and revealing role of light. As the close reading in the following section will show, the same features can be found throughout Crane’s texts. From a sociocultural standpoint, photography in its own right represents an example of “middle-brow” artistic form, halfway between the realms of non-specialized, popular taste, and established cultural practices and rules (Bourdieu 1990, 95–98). Although paradoxically relying upon a high degree of technical and aesthetic competence mastered by the individual who produces it, photography as a middle-brow art is directed at a socially heterogeneous public: it is fully inscribed within the economic system of large-scale production, whose aim of a profitable investment is made possible by reaching and involving the widest possible audience (Bourdieu 1993, 125–31). Crane’s artistry testifies to his own status of middle-brow author in the late-nineteenth-century American print culture. He performs a complex verbal translation of the iconographic codes proper to landscape photography, and this process reverberates through his four literary pieces, since they point to the mass readership guaranteed by a nationwide print circulation, while rhetorically and stylistically blending fictional and journalistic features. Therefore, Crane’s Western writings stand for a stratified textual discourse which paves the way for the historical configuration of modern American literature at the turn of the century.

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PORTRAYING THE WEST: CRANE AND THE TEXTUAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE MODERN LITERARY LANDSCAPE “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” stands for an introductory example of Crane’s literary reconstruction of the West as a “countermyth” (Zanger 1991), which is also carried out by virtue of a photographic rhetoric. Set in Texas, the tale features vivid depictions of the Western nonhuman environment, which is filtered through the narrator’s “Eastern” perspective. The opening description geographically frames the gradual recession of the Western wilderness toward the civilized East, implying basically an idea of movement as follows: The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward. Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mesquite and cactus, little groups of frame houses, woods of light and tender trees, all were sweeping into the east, sweeping over the horizon, a precipice. (Crane 1996, 787)

Instead of immobility, both the Western subject (the plains) and the distribution of the specific elements of composition (grass, plants and trees, and small houses) suggest mobility, since they are depicted through the Eastern viewpoint of the train speeding across the open space of the frontier. In this representation of movement, the apparition of Yellow Sky is displaced into the very corner of the composition, as soon as “To the left, miles down a long purple slope, was a little ribbon of mist where moved the keening Rio Grande. The train was approaching it at an angle, and the apex was Yellow Sky” (Crane 1996, 789). Quite similarly, the streets of Yellow Sky are described through a picturesque Western iconography, whose conventions still convey the classic naturalist opposition to the extent of the marginalization of the human presence, severed from rather than integrated into its environment, as the following passage shows: Across the sandy street were some vivid green grass-plots, so wonderful in appearance amid the sands that burned near them in a blazing sun that they caused a doubt in the mind. They exactly resembled the grass mats used to represent lawns on the stage. At the cooler end of the railway station a man without a coat sat in a tilted chair and smoked his pipe. The fresh-cut bank of the Rio Grande circled near the town, and there could be seen beyond it a great plum-colored plain of mesquite. (Crane 1996, 791)

However, at a closer glance, the Western iconography in the two passages seems to undergo a double and simultaneous shift—a thematic one, from

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untamed wilderness (“Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mesquite and cactus”) to recreated artificiality (“They exactly resembled the grass mats used to represent lawns on the stage”); and a visual one, from movement (“all were sweeping”) to stillness (“a man . . . sat in a tilted chair”). As the narrator’s eye comes to Yellow Sky, in fact, the image connected to mobility gradually yields to the absence of motion, portrayed through the profile of the old man sitting quietly at the station, and the sunburnt sands and grass, almost made unnatural due to the blinding light. The overall composition is perfectly framed as in a photograph, encircled by the lines traced by the watercourse of the Rio Grande. Crane uses the same visual strategy not only in the fictional recreation of a frontier town, but also in his journalism, while reporting the features of the Texan city of Galveston as follows: Galveston is often original, full of distinctive characters. But it is not like a town in the moon. There are, of course, a thousand details of street color and life which are thoroughly typical of any American city. The square brick business blocks, the mazes of telegraph wires, the trolly-cars clamouring up and down the streets, the passing crowd, the slight fringe of reflective and reposeful men on the curb, all disappoint the traveller. . . . The cities differ as peas—in complexion, in size, in temperature—but the fundamental part, the composition, remains. (Crane 1996, 707)

Here, the passage from movement to visual stillness helps further debunk the artificiality of the classic iconography of the West, overtly exposing its stereotyped cultural construction: Galveston does not actually differ from any other American commercial city of the time, enlivened by its crowd. Using the same perspective that marks “The Bride,” the Eastern viewer is soon (and quite ironically) surprised by the ordinariness of a city that subverts any expectation related to Western life, downgrading the mythic view of the far-off, wild frontier to the level of any other late-nineteenth-century American city. Most interestingly, the occurrence in this passage of the technical term “composition” connotes the commonplace spirit of Galveston, delineating a standard urban landscape made up of huge buildings, communication facilities, and crowded streets, that can be actually observed anywhere in the United States. This hallmark does not simply identify the Southwestern city of Galveston: another example can be found in Crane’s report from Arkansas, since the main street in Hot Springs is labeled as “purely cosmopolitan. It undoubtedly typifies the United States better than does any existing thoroughfare, for it resembles the North and the South, the East and the West” (1996, 701). Indeed, the author’s Eastern perception of the West sets a key opposition between the ordinary reality and the realm of fancy and imagination, as the opening lines of Crane’s report on Galveston show:

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It is the fortune of travellers to take note of differences and publish them to their friends. It is the differences that are supposed to be valuable. The travellers seek them bravely, and cudgel their wits to find means to unearth them. But in this search they are confronted continually by the resemblances and the intrusion of commonplace and most obvious similarity into a field that is being ploughed in the romantic fashion. (Crane 1996, 706)

In this undercutting of the Western imagery the close interaction of human and nonhuman factors within the landscape is crucial, because the human presence is an integral part of, rather than opposed to, the urban environment as occurs at the docks in Galveston, portrayed in the following passage: A train approaches the Island of Galveston by means of a long steel bridge across a bay, which glitters like burnished metal in the winter-time sunlight. The vast number of white two-storied frame houses in the outskirts remind one of New England. . . . Later, in the commercial part of the town, appear the conventional business houses and the trolly-cars. Far up the cross-streets is the faint upheaval of the surf of the breeze-blown Gulf, and in the other direction the cotton streamers are arrayed with a fresco upon their black sides of dusky chuckling stevedores handling the huge bales amid a continual and foreign conversation, in which all the subtle and incomprehensible gossip of their social relations goes from mouth to mouth, the bales leaving little tufts of cotton all over their clothing. (Crane 1996, 709)

The commercial vocation of Galveston, where human and nonhuman dimensions converge, is underlined by the photographic use of light, stressed by a kind of visual imagery linked to the glaring effects of brightness (“a long steel bridge . . . which glitters like burnished metal”). A further connotation of the visual properties of the urban landscape of Galveston emerges from the subsequent description, which verbally reports the architectural peculiarities of the Texan city through detailed images anchored in a clear photographic language: Galveston has a rather extraordinary number of very wealthy people. Along the finely-paved drives their residences can be seen, modern for the most part and poor in architecture. Occasionally, however, one comes upon a typical Southern mansion, its galleries giving it a solemn shade and its whole air one of fine and enduring dignity. The palms standing in the grounds of these houses seem to pause at this time of the year, and patiently abide the coming of the hot breath of summer. They still remain of a steadfast green and their color is a wine. Underfoot the grass is of a yellow hue, here and there patched with a faint impending verdancy. The famous snow-storm here this winter played havoc with the color of the vegetation, and one can now observe the gradual recovery

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of the trees, the shrubbery, the grass. In this vivid sunlight their vitality becomes enormous. (Crane 1996, 709–10)

In describing each element pertaining to the Southwestern architecture of Galveston, Crane closely translates into words the visual rhetoric typical of nineteenth-century photography set out by Adams. Indeed, the visual stillness marks the architectural elements in the foreground of the composition, whose shapes are further highlighted by the use of chiaroscuro—reinforced, in turn, by verbs and adjectives conveying the sense of absence of any movement (among them, “standing,” “seem to pause,” “remain,” “steadfast”); the brightness accentuates the yellowish and greenish hues of the vegetation, contrasting the darkest zones given by the galleries. This photographic language connected to the use of light and shade which dominates the urban landscape, can be found in the Western natural environment too. In the depiction of the prairies in “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life” the visual imagery related to the use of chiaroscuro strengthens the antithesis between human actions and nonhuman forces, while reversing the two categories of silence and stillness. In the first instance, in “Nebraska’s” the photographic categories of silence and stillness are switched into sound and motion as follows: In the rage of the wind, the trees struggled, gasped through each curled and scorched leaf, then, at last, ceased to exist, and there remained only the bowed and bare skeletons of trees. The corn shivering as from fever, bent and swayed abjectly for a time, then one by one the yellow and tinder-like stalks, twisted and pulled by the rage of the hot breath, died in the fields and the vast and sometimes beautiful green prairies were brown and naked. In a few weeks this prosperous and garden-like country was brought to a condition of despair, but still this furnace-wind swept along the dead land, whirling great clouds of dust, straws, blades of grass. A farmer, gazing from a window was confronted by a swirling tempest of dust that intervened between his vision and his scorched fields. The soil of the roads turned to powder in this tempest, and men traveling against the winds found all the difficulties of some hideous and unnatural snow storm. At nightfall the winds always vanished and the sky which had glistened like a steel shield became of a soft blue, as the purple shadows of a merciful night advanced from the west. (Crane 1996, 689)

As Crane thoroughly describes the Western prairies during the raging summer heat, the predominant use of verbs suggesting sound and movement (such as “struggled,” “gasped,” “shivering,” “bent,” “swayed,” “twisted,” “pulled,” “whirling”) underscores the hardships faced by the inhabitants in their desperate conflict with so harsh a natural environment. Nevertheless, the use of light and shade still is a recurring visual feature through the whole passage: both sharpness and brightness dominate the summer landscape during the

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day—in a climax whose apex is signaled by the simile in the closing lines (“the sky which had glistened like a steel shield”)—and then slowly recede into darkness at dusk (“the purple shadows . . . advanced from the west”). The same juxtaposition between sound and motion, and light and shade features in Crane’s description of the winter landscape, as the following example shows: Over the wide white expanses of prairie, the icy winds from the north shriek, whirling high sheets of snow and enveloping the house in white clouds of it. The tempest forces fine stinging flakes between the rattling sashes of the window that fronts the storm. The air has remained gloomy the entire day. From other windows can be seen the snowflakes fleeing into the south, traversing as level a line as bullets, speeding like the wind. (Crane 1996, 694)

Again, the main imagery revolves around the sounds and the movements, in this case produced by the blizzard (as suggested by the verbs “shriek,” “whirling,” “enveloping,” “stinging,” “rattling,” “fleeing,” “traversing,” “speeding”); lights and shades complement each other in this visual composition, since the whiteness of the prairie is contrasted by the use of low lights (“The air has remained gloomy”). Providing a specimen of what can be considered as an effective intersemiotic counterpart of Butcher’s Western photography, the overall description is centered on the notion of violence governing nature against which people struggle, “engaged in a bitter and deadly fight for existence” (Crane 1996, 688), whether under the scorching sun or through a fierce snowstorm. As in Galveston, however, the stereotype of the frontier life seems to merge into a standard national character: the human efforts in confronting the nonhuman environment redress the traditional, clear-cut opposition between wilderness and civilization, as Crane acknowledges the fact that “upon these people there came the weight of the strange and unspeakable punishment of nature. They are a fearless folk, completely American. Their absolute types are now sitting about New England dinner tables” (1996, 690). A similar treatment and ideological connotation of the Nebraskan landscape can be found in “The Blue Hotel.” In both texts Crane’s personal outlook remarkably reframes the Western conventions linked to the idea of violence, which progressively shifts from the local, mythic, and romanticized space of the frontier into a larger, general, and shared human experience. If closely compared to “Nebraska’s,” “The Blue Hotel” shows an even more complicated reconstruction of the Western landscape and its inner tensions, whose iconography is further connoted in terms of symbolism. As widely discussed by previous criticism, Crane’s style features of course an impressionist, figurative use of color, which is often expressive of the subject’s relation to the surrounding world (see Nagel 1980), and that is epitomized in “The Blue Hotel.” Here, the reiterated description of the environment based on colors

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is connected to the naturalist notion of violence inherent in human nature, an idea underscored in the three pivotal moments of the narrative—the opening portrayal of the Palace Hotel, the tempest circumscribing the scene of the fight between Johnnie and the Swede, and the storm outside the saloon in Fort Romper, respectively: The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush. It stood alone on the prairie, and when the snow was falling the town two hundred yards away was not visible. (Crane 1996, 799) The men lowered their heads and plunged into the tempest as into a sea. No snow was falling, but great whirls and clouds of flakes, swept up from the ground by the frantic winds, were streaming southward with the speed of bullets. The covered land was blue with the sheen of an unearthly satin, and there was no other hue save where at the low black railway station—which seemed incredibly distant—one light gleamed like a tiny jewel. (Crane 1996, 815) We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. . . . However, the Swede found a saloon. In front of it an indomitable red light was burning, and the snow-flakes were made blood-color as they flew through the circumscribed territory of the lamp’s shining. (Crane 1996, 822)

In the first and second passages the color blue—associated to the Palace Hotel and the snow-covered ground—is allegorically used not only to evoke the feral quality pertaining to the enclosed territories of human agency (the hotel shows “a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron,” “screaming and howling”), but also to underline a sinister sense of delusion enshrouding the whole natural landscape (“The covered land was blue with the sheen of an unearthly satin”). Similarly, in the third passage the red light shining outside the saloon makes the snowflakes look like dreadful drops of blood (“an indomitable red light was burning, and the snow-flakes were made blood-color”). In addition to rhetorical techniques indebted to literary impressionism, in these landscape descriptions photographic strategies can be detected as well and reinforce the human/nonhuman dichotomy. First, through the association of colors with sounds, the use of synesthesia rearranges the imagery of silence into its opposite as occurs, most notably, in the portrayal of the Palace Hotel whose color is “screaming and howling.” And yet, standing “alone on the prairie,” the blue hotel is located at the center of a desolate winter landscape, thus giving a sense of stillness to the visual composition. Similarly, in the open, wide space

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surrounding the hotel, the railway station can be seen only in background, where the shaping use of light underlines its collocation within the overall composition (“at the low black railway station . . . one light gleamed like a tiny jewel”). Lights are a pivotal element also in the description of the front of the saloon in Fort Romper, as in the chiaroscuro of “the circumscribed territory of the lamp’s shining” the visual effect of the blood-red color of the snowflakes reverberates even more ominously. At the same time, the spatial descriptions of the hotel, the winter landscape, and the saloon also identify the three narrative stages of the Western (mis)adventure of the Swede. From a narrative perspective, the depiction of the stereotypes connected to the mythic space of the frontier represents the background upon which the Swede misreads his own experience of the West, which he still perceives as a violent place. The Swede’s sense of uneasiness (“he said that some of these Western communities were very dangerous” [Crane 1996, 801]) gradually grows as he feels frightened and threatened by the other characters who are in the hotel (“there have been a good many men killed in this room. . . . I suppose I am going to be killed before I can leave this house!” [Crane 1996, 802 and 804]); the Swede’s behavior seems unreasonable, maybe because, as the Easterner contends, “this man has been reading dime-novels, and he thinks he’s right out in the middle of it—the shootin’ and stabbin’ and all” (Crane 1996, 809). Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the fact that the merging of narrative construction and photographic rhetoric in “The Blue Hotel” is strengthened by the occurrence and use of photography as a textual object per se, as Scully shows the Swede the portrait of his lost daughter. Here the visual dimension is integrated into the narrative pattern of the tale: in his attempt at persuading the Swede in staying at his hotel, Scully uses the charming power of the image, reinforcing then the verbal enticements through which he tries to reach his own profit. In this scene, the deterministic pattern related to the idea of “paying” that underlies the tale (Wolter 1979) is centered on the textual use of photography, which help develop the tension between the two men, simultaneously rearranging and neutralizing into a naturalist scheme the stereotype of a lawless, unknown, and dangerous West: “Come on! I want you to come and see a picter—just across the hall—in my room.” The Swede must have concluded that his hour was come. His jaw dropped and his teeth showed like a dead man’s. He ultimately followed Scully across the corridor, but he had the step of one hung in chains. Scully flashed the light high on the wall of his own chamber. There was revealed a ridiculous photograph of a little girl. She was leaning against a balustrade of gorgeous decoration, and the formidable bang to her hair was prominent. The figure was as graceful as an upright sled-stake, and, withal, it was of

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the hue of lead. “There,” said Scully tenderly. “That’s the picter of my little girl that died. Her name was Carrie. She had the purtiest hair you ever saw! I was that fond of her, she—” Turning then he saw that the Swede was not contemplating the picture at all, but, instead, was keeping keen watch on the gloom in the rear. (Crane 1996, 807)

Here, the occurrence of photography as a textual object in the form of the “photograph of a little girl” may stand as a wider metaphor for the potentialities of the pictorial use of language. Even though shifting from the details of the Western landscape to the portrait of the girl, the textual use of photography is altogether expressive of its aesthetic and rhetorical devices incorporated by Crane in the artistic creation of his tale. In this regard, this last example further highlights the vital role of photography in Crane’s prose writing in critically dealing with the symbolic construction of both literary and environmental landscapes—and mainly through the interconnection between human and nonhuman factors, as pointed out so far. The nonhuman Western landscape stands as the object, portrayed through the hybrid devices of verbal and visual strategies tightly connected to the artist’s subjective viewpoint. Exploiting the popular cultural value of the Western iconography and transforming it by means of a deep revision of the frontier tropes, Crane’s writings perfectly fit into the sociohistorical process of expansion of national print culture in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. What is more, Crane’s intersemiotic treatment of the nonhuman West is a substantial point in both his biography and place in the historical development of American literary naturalism. When hired by Irving Bacheller for his Western travels in January 1895, Crane almost achieved the acknowledged status of literary celebrity, thanks to the success of the first, syndicated publication of The Red Badge of Courage promoted by Bacheller himself only a month earlier in December 1894. Secondly, Crane’s experience as “crossover writer” unceasingly switching to and from fiction and reportage, is emblematic of the “postbellum apprenticeship” in journalism fostering the literary careers of a relevant number of writers between the late-nineteenth and the early-twentieth century (Canada 2013, 9–13), and especially of those belonging to the naturalist tradition, ranging from Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, to Willa Cather, and up to Ernest Hemingway—to name only a few of them. Repeatedly crossing the textual borders of literature and journalism, and of the related social forms of high and popular culture that defines the American literary marketplace at the turn of the century, Crane places himself within the “ambiguous fact-fiction discourse of 1890s journalism” (Robertson 1997, 7). In so doing, Crane contributes to a dramatic transition toward modernity in the literary landscape, too. As mythic frontier heroes and outlaws become Texan businessmen and Nebraskan farmers, the main

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characters typical of the Western literary tradition turn into national protagonists of the new American society; their experiences make up the core of naturalist stories, in which the themes connected to the human issues of free will and determinism hide behind the photographic rhetoric of a visual depiction of nonhuman environments, both urban and natural. In conclusion, the elaborate photographic portrait of the West emerging from Crane’s work helps place nonhuman studies at a crucial critical crossroads. As the case of Crane’s short fiction and journalism has shown, a nonhuman-oriented critical reading can significantly enrich the more traditional views on naturalist writers, since it opens new aesthetic perspectives on their artistry. REFERENCES Adams, Robert. 1983. “Introduction.” In The American Space: Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography, edited by Daniel Wolf. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Armstrong, Nancy. 1999. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited and introduced by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Canada, Mark. 2013. “A Brief History of Literature and Journalism in the United States.” In Literature and Journalism: Inspirations, Intersections, and Inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert, edited by Mark Canada, 1–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cartosio, Bruno. 2018. Verso Ovest. Storia e mitologia del Far West. Milan: Feltrinelli. Crane, Stephen. 1996. Prose and Poetry, edited by J. C. Levenson. New York: Library of America. Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Esteve, Mary. 1995. “A ‘Gorgeous Neutrality’: Stephen Crane’s Documentary Anaesthetics.” ELH 62 (3): 663–89. Freund, Gisèle. 1980. Photography and Society. Boston: David R. Godine. Gandal, Keith. 1997. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York: Oxford University Press. Johnston, Matthew N. 2016. Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Kaestle, Carl F., and Janice A. Radway. 2009. “A Framework for the History of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940.” In Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, edited

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by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, 7–21. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Nagel, James. 1978. “Stephen Crane and the Narrative Methods of Impressionism.” Studies in the Novel 10 (1): 76–85. Nagel, James. 1980. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Norris, Frank. (1896) 1996. “Zola as a Romantic Writer.” In The Apprenticeship Writings of Frank Norris 1896–1898, edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Douglas K. Burgess, 85–87, vol. 1. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society. Pizer, Donald. 2011. “Naturalism and the Visual Arts.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, edited by Keith Newlin, 463–82. New York: Oxford University Press. Robertson, Michael. 1997. Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Rogers, Rodney O. 1969. “Stephen Crane and Impressionism.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (3): 292–304. Sailor, Rachel Mc Lean. 2014. Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Slotkin, Richard. 1998. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Smith, Henry Nash. 1950. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sorrentino, Paul. 2014. Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stallman, Robert W. 1968. Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York: G. Braziller. Wolter, Jürgen. 1979. “Drinking, Gambling, Fighting, Paying: Structure and Determinism in ‘The Blue Hotel.’” American Literary Realism 1870–1910 12 (2): 295–98. Zanger, Jules. 1991. “Stephen Crane’s ‘Bride’ as Countermyth of the West.” Great Plains Quarterly 11: 157–65.

Chapter 12

“The Cruel Radiance of What Is” The Reality of Things in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Markku Lehtimäki

In the contemporary digital culture that makes us fear that we have lost touch with the materiality of things (see Gumbrecht 2006, 306), it may be interesting to revisit the ideas of thingness in the era of American naturalism and classic photo-documentary practice. The aim of this chapter is to read material, nonhuman things and inanimate objects in the context of American literature, shifting the focus from anthropomorphic naturalism to materialistic naturalism. Richard M. Gale defines that in the American pragmatic philosophy (especially that of John Dewey), “anthropomorphic or humanistic naturalisms . . . depict nature as made to order for us human beings because it answers back to our deepest feelings and aspirations,” whereas “reductive materialistic naturalisms . . . strip nature of all the qualities that give it human meaning and purpose” (2010, 55). The main issue of the chapter is the reality of things themselves and those marginal details of the everyday, such as daily work and inanimate objects, which sometimes only photographs can capture. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941 = FM), a classic of the photo-documentary books produced during the Great Depression, depicts writer James Agee’s and photographer Walker Evans’s journey to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to record the lives of three white sharecropper families who were living in desperate conditions. It has conventionally been described as either “naturalist” or “modernist,” but these concepts, naturalism and modernism, are themselves questioned in Agee’s text. 195

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James Agee defines the aims, purposes, and media of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at the beginning of the narrative text: “The nominal subject is North American cotton tenantry as examined in the daily living of three representative white tenant families. . . . The immediate instruments are two: the motionless camera, and the printed word” (FM, 10). Here, the authors (both Agee and Evans) present themselves as documentarists whose working ethics must be considered and negotiated by the readers. What is more, the “nominal” subject of the book—the life of tenant families—both shapes and is shaped by the “actual” subject, that is, the flesh-and-blood reality of the real people behind or beyond the text. We may note that Agee changed the names of the three families he depicted, not in order to make fiction, but to grant them their dignity and individuality (he indeed speaks of the “dignity of actuality” FM, 221). From this perspective, of course, the title of the book is quite telling, as it “praises” these people (not only men) who are not “famous” but forgotten. Conventionally, the book has been read as an “effort in human actuality” (FM, 11), following Agee’s guidance. As Jeffrey J. Folks argues, Agee responded instinctively with empathy toward the frail and vulnerable—the poor, the homeless, the sick, all of whom elicited his compassion (2007, 74). We may also note that the book’s title alludes to the lines from Ecclesiasticus. As Gavin Jones suggests, this subtext sets Agee’s work “within a familiar Christian dialectic that contrasts wise and powerful men with the silent but blessed poor” (2008, 192). These traditional readings of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men emphasize the book’s focus on the suffering of the poor and Agee’s way of seeing something holy and beautiful in that suffering; generally, these readings foreground the book’s human aspect. My own reading in this chapter also aims to situate those human lives and minds in the material reality of nonhuman lives and inanimate objects that constitute the tenant farmers’ world in the 1930s Alabama. WORDS AND IMAGES: READING THE MATERIAL CULTURE A materialist reading of literature is an approach taken in this chapter, while my analysis also argues that Agee and Evans’s documentary book is one of the seminal “object centred” texts in American naturalism and modernism. In his “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown explores the ways in which the late twentieth century witnessed the emergence of material culture studies and the vitality of material history as well as the accounts of objects in everyday life and the return of the “real” in contemporary art. According to Brown, in material literary and cultural studies the focus of analysis was turned “on the pencil, the zipper, the toilet, the banana, the chair, the potato, the bowler hat” (2001,

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2). However, as Brown clarifies, we only begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us, when, for example, the drill breaks or the window gets filthy—or, in my reading, when the tenant farmer’s shoes show their weariness after endless work on cotton fields. It is here that the human and social dimension of inanimate things comes to the foreground; the questions asked concern not so much whether things are (and what they are) but, rather, what they mean and what they perform to us human beings (7). Speaking of “vibrant matter” and the “vitality of things,” Jane Bennett means the capacity of things to block the will and designs of human beings as well as to act as agents or forces with tendencies of their own (2010, viii). She therefore emphasizes “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things” and adds a political dimension to her reading of inanimate objects and nonhuman actors by suggesting “the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption” (ix).1 In this context, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men might be seen as an interesting elegy for the material things that constitute the lives of the poor in the age of capitalist consumption; indeed, the book celebrates the meaning of shoes, clothes, tools, and food that are an integral part of the daily work and everyday lives of the tenant farmers depicted in the narrative. In what follows, I will especially focus on Agee’s prose and Evans’s photography concerning a tenant farmer’s working shoes, their materiality and meaning in the world depicted in the book. In his book A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003) Bill Brown develops his theory presented in the article “Thing Theory,” now especially attached to the readings of American realism, regionalism, naturalism, and early modernism (including authors such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James). Aiming at constructing a “materialist phenomenology of everyday life,” Brown’s book-length study concerns itself with various works of fiction that “dramatize the role of objects in American life, and how such texts dramatize the role of humans in the life of American objects” (2003, 3, 14). Referring briefly to the related aesthetics of photographer Walker Evans and poet William Carlos Williams, Brown notices Williams’s broken verse “the broken / pieces of a green / bottle” and speaks of “framing,” which enables Evans or Williams to “produce art out of quotidian waste” (213; see also Orvell 1989, 292). What interests me in this chapter are those marginal details of the everyday, which writers such as James Agee or William Carlos Williams also tried to “reach” in their prose and poetry—or, indeed, Walker Evans in his photos. While a photograph is also perceived as resembling that which it depicts, it may be noted that a photograph is not only iconic but also indexical (to employ C. S. Peirce’s semiotic terminology). The notion of indexicality is the founding element of photographic representation: indexicality links the image to its

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object through physical causality or connection. As Geoffrey Batchen notes, “as an index, the photograph is never itself but always, by its very nature, a tracing of something else” (1997, 9). Therefore, since the photographic image is an index of the effect of light on photographic emulsion, all unedited (or “analogical”) photographic and filmic images are, by their nature, indexical. Thus, we need to acknowledge that what distinguishes the photo-image from other forms of representation is its material link to reality, just as we have to pay attention to the tension between the culturally fabricated nature of the photograph and its fundamental indexicality, its status as “a trace of the real” (Hughes and Noble 2003, 4). In other words, “the photograph is a physical trace of (the light reflecting off) that which existed before the camera in the real world” (Horstkotte and Pedri 2008, 12–13). Photographs, in short, differ from other images on the basis of their photochemical process, mechanical production, and indexical connection to reality. Studies of photographic art aim at foregrounding photographic specificity while relating that specificity to the concerns of a particular cultural and historical climate. Donald Pizer speaks about the interrelations of American naturalism and photography in their commitment to the depiction of hardship, poverty, and other forms of deprivation (2020, 35). While Jacob Riis’s photo-journalistic book How the Other Half Lives (1890) marks the starting point of American photographic naturalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I would argue, represents its culmination point. In 1936, the U.S. government launched a large-scale documentary project called the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which worked hard to make the Depression easier to handle and understand through photographic images. It is important to note that the classic phase of American photographic art was born in this context and that these years saw a lot of collaboration between prose writers, poets, and photographers in their joint project to try to depict the events and faces of the Depression era.2 The element of documentary representation of the social world—through fiction, poetry, film, photography and so on—is one significant element of American modernism (see Rabinowitz 2005, 264–66), but as the high modernist writers sometimes aimed at objective distance and formal aesthetics, they were, more or less, detached from the actual social concerns of their times. It is this kind of “hermetic” modernism—as well as sensational “naturalism”—which Let Us Now Praise Famous Men criticizes through Agee’s polemic discourse. As the reader opens Agee and Evans’s book (a considerable material object in its own right), what she or he finds first is fifty pages of photographs without any text. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble suggest that photographic images make their appeal to the viewer not simply on an intellectual level, since they can work against the culturally consecrated primacy of intellect over emotion, or of mind over body; thus, “as we engage with the realm of

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the photographic we are given access to alternative ways of knowing” (2003, 6). As W. J. T. Mitchell shrewdly argues, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men works against text-image “exchanges” typical of photo narratives, as the book resists the straightforward collaboration of prose and photos. Evans’s photographs are bereft of textual and literary elements, and thus they “force us back onto the formal and material features of the images in themselves” (1994, 239). Therefore, the very materiality, as well as indexicality, of the photograph makes it work differently from the written text; it requires the reader to respect the thing in itself. However, according to John Tagg, there is an ontological distance between the hard material presence of real things and the observing yet subjective photographic eye. In its demand for realism, photo-documentary art is always limited; it never reaches “the unforgettable forgotten that does not lend itself to signification” (2009, xxxiv). In Tagg’s phrasing, the “overwhelming thing” presents continuous challenges to verbal and visual representation (178). We should, however, also recognize photography’s remarkable ability to put the viewer in perceptual contact with the world, “an ability which can be claimed even by a fuzzy and badly exposed snapshot depicting few details and offering little information” (Walton 2008, 49). While it is obvious that a photographer can choose to add or remove objects in the front of the camera, photography always also records random details in the natural environment: The photograph works to alter our perception of the world by drawing attention to a marginal detail, one that would go unnoticed if it were not for the fact that it was photographed and thus framed. . . . Through the everydayness of photographic aesthetics, the familiar (and oftentimes overlooked) aspects of the real world are more readily perceived and thus gain in importance. (Horstkotte and Pedri 2008, 14–15)

Evans’s photographs are visibly separate from Agee’s prose in the book’s structure, and they are also devoid of all textual features that conventionally accompany this kind of photo-essay: there are no captions, legends, dates, names, locations or any other subtexts or textual guides which would help us to “read” these photographs (cf. Mitchell 1994, 290). One of the questions the reader/viewer of the book must face is the ways in which prose and photos are communicating with each other. What is obvious is that inside the covers of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men we have two different artists working in different ways and with different media but with the same subject matter. Agee sometimes wants to shock the reader, give his readers new perceptions through defamiliarization of objects, while Evans’s more simple and austere sensibility leads him to attempt to construct new visions from ordinary or conventional lines of sight.

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As T. V. Reed notes in his analysis of Evans’s working habits and his ethics of photography, Evans usually refused to move any of the objects he was photographing; instead, he wanted to take pictures of those objects, people, animals, and things, in their natural contexts of everyday living; and for the most part he avoided unnatural angles, preferring to shoot from normal height and straightforward angles (1992, 48). There is simple poetry in Evans’s silent, unmoving images; the style of Agee’s text is sometimes similar, sometimes more subjective, angry, and polemic. As John Tagg has argued, instead of a certain manipulative rhetoric of some other Depression era photographs, which aimed at constructing an explicit meaning through spectacle, irony, and symbolization (Tagg’s primary example is the aestheticizing art of Margaret Bourke-White), Evans’s poetic images are more obscure and more difficult to fix into a definite time, place, and event. Thus, in Evans’s photographs, “the relationships of image to image are not those of thesis and antithesis, but of rhyme, repetition, discrepancy, and reversal,” “the process of reading is not curtailed in advance,” and “no spatial setting is given, no wider explanatory frame, no supporting ground” (2003, 27–28). In Tagg’s view, it is precisely the problem of meaning that is visible in Evans’s photographic art. HUMAN AND NONHUMAN REALITIES IN LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN In the cultural scheme of the Great Depression and photo-documentary art, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men still appears a radically idiosyncratic work. The book aspires, in James Agee’s own words, to a “non-artistic” view of its real subjects in an “effort to suspend or destroy imagination,” so that without its mediation there may open “before consciousness and within it, a universe luminous, spacious, inculpably rich and wonderful in each detail” (FM, 25). Famously, he speaks of his “effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is” (FM, 24). Actually, Agee does not want his text to be thought of as a work of art; this is because regarding it as “art” will, in Agee’s view, diminish the weight and power of the actual existence of its subject and thus tame the force of reality in the text (FM, 11). Agee protests against the flatness of realist representation, but also against modernist art, which “is hermetically sealed away from identification with everyday ‘reality’” (FM, 217). Discussing the textual means of representation and the handicaps of naturalism and documentary, Agee writes in his characteristically complicated prose style: I doubt that the straight “naturalist” very well understands what music and poetry are about. . . . So that, if you share the naturalist’s regard for the “real”

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but have this regard for it on a plane which in your mind brings it level in value with music and poetry, which in turn you value as highly as anything on earth, it is important that your representation of “reality” does not sag into, or become one with, naturalism; and in so far as it does, you have sinned, that is, you have fallen short even of the relative truth you have perceived and intended. (FM, 215)

As we may note, Agee regards the representation of reality a highly ethical act, one that must take as its main goal at least a relative truth, and one that does not sink to the lower depths of “naturalist” documentation. Here, it seems, Agee understands “naturalism” as a mode of sensational and sentimental melodrama and rhetoric (see, e.g., Newlin 2011, 5–6). In this sense, he is critical of the emotional plotting of events and characterization of people, as if the vast amount of verbal and visual documentation of the Depression era, done in the framework of the Farm Security Administration, seemed to have obscured reality rather than clarified it. The book shows some serious doubt about any textual artifact’s ability to achieve immediacy in its representation, and it makes this constantly by drawing attention to conventions of textual, both verbal and visual, production. In the preface of the book Agee writes as follows: “We are trying to deal with our subject not as journalists, sociologists, politicians, entertainers, humanitarians, priests, or artists, but seriously” (FM, 10). In Agee’s view, then, each of these discursive positions remains trapped in one narrow set of conventions, reducing the complex inter-play of language and the world to some single frame of category (see Reed 1992, 34–35). According to T. V. Reed, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men represents “novel journalism that calls its own representational practices into question,” and the book’s “questioning of representational capacities within each of the two media the prose and the photos is intensified by comparative cross-mediation” (35, 39). Written mainly against the conventions of the genre inside which it is produced—the thirties documentaries of rural life and their claim to give the reader a real picture of that life—Agee and Evans’s book aims at shaking the readers’ preconceptions by problematizing the relationship between a verbal/visual text and the harsh realities of the actual world. Agee’s style of self-negating his own writing, as well as his way of stressing the materiality of the book, is illuminated by his comment on the early pages of the narrative: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pictures of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement” (FM, 26). Here, material objects partake in the construction of the book. The juxtaposition of the prose and the photos, with their equal inability to reach the real, therefore enhances the critical

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self-reflexivity of the book.3 Agee insists both on the reality of the referent and on the inevitable failure of any representation to capture the real. Thus, he believes that “the language of ‘reality’ . . . should have and impart the deftness, keenness, immediacy, speed and subtleness of the ‘reality’ it tries to reproduce” (FM, 208). He also writes that “the cleansing and rectification of language, the breakdown of the identification of word and object, is very important, and very possibly more important things will come of it than have ever come of the lingual desire of the cow for the horse” (FM, 209). Agee further stresses that “words cannot embody; they can only describe” (FM, 210). Nevertheless, Agee’s prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is filled with realist observation and visual allusions as if he were trying to capture the photographic sharpness with his verbal imagery. Thus, Agee’s text contains several allusions to various other media, including poetry, painting, photography, film, theatre, and music. While Agee’s textual self-reflexivity is probably the most visible aspect of his prose, his narrative does contain more descriptive passages as well, as in his photographically realist observations of material objects that constitute the reality of the tenant farmers’ world: I helped get camera ready and we stood away and I watched what would be trapped, possessed, fertilized, in the leisures and shyness which are a phase of all love for any object: searching out and registering in myself all its planes, stresses of relationship, along diagonals withdrawn and approached, and vertical to the slightly off-centered door, and broadside, and at several distances, and near, examining merely the ways of the wood, and the nails, the three new boards of different lengths that were let in above the left of the door, the staring small white porcelain knob, the solesmoothed stairlifts, the wrung stance of thick steeple, the hewn wood stoblike spike at sky, the old hasp and new padlock, the randomshuttered windowglass whose panes were like the surfaces of springs. (FM, 49–50)

Here, Agee’s almost painful attempt to grasp the material essence of things in his language results in imaginatively blended words (“solesmoothed stairlifts,” “randomshuttered windowglass”), which also simulate the simultaneousness of photographs. Indeed, some of the objects depicted in Agee’s prose are also recognizable in Evans’s photographs.4 Agee’s focus on everyday details—such as clothing to which he devotes dozens of pages—contributes to his notion that everything is meaningful. Describing the main character George Gudger’s Sunday dress, Agee notices that “the hat is only timidly dented into shape” and that “the crease is still sharp in the trousers” (FM, 257). As Victor Kramer suggests, “details about the mutations of cloth of common work clothes provide insight when what is ordinarily considered unimportant is observed carefully” (1991, 41). The

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actuality of George Gudger, whose real name was Floyd Burroughs, is something that baffles Agee, disturbing his aesthetic vision: “George’s red body, already a little squat with the burden of thirty years, knotted like oakwood, in its clean white cotton summer union suit that it sleeps in” (FM, 51). Here, Agee refers to George’s body as “it,” a material entity that resembles oakwood. Agee’s spiritual closeness to George as well as his physical, almost sexual, interest in him is juxtaposed with the voices of the upper class, like those of landowners: “George Gudger? Where’d you dig him up? I haven’t been back out that road in twenty-five years” (FM, 71). Through these other voices, George is represented and dismissed as a piece of muddy earth, as something that should not be touched. Soon after these discourses, Agee borrows the lines from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (FM, 73). Agee solidly places George and other human figures in the reality of the earth, which appears to resist a formalist conception of art and fiction: The dead oak and pine, the ground, the dew, the air, the whole realm of what our bodies lay in and our minds in silence wandered, walked in, swam in, watched upon, was delicately fragrant as a paradise, and, like all that is best, was loose, light, casual, totally actual. There was, by our minds, our memories, our thoughts and feelings, some combination, some generalizing, some art, and science; but none of the close-kneed priggishness of science, and none of the formalism and straining and lily-gilding of art. (FM, 199)

In other words, no amount of formalism can capture the reality of an oak, whether a real tree or George’s worn-out body. Accordingly, Agee’s attempt at describing the life of tenant families, the land they work, and the earth they belong to, is constantly interrupted by the difficulty of actuality. While Let Us Now Praise Famous Men focuses on human life and work, surrounded by houses and shelters, tools and furniture, and other material objects that are an integral part of the tenant farmers’ world, that world is also peopled (so to speak) with nonhuman animals, as Agee presents in his catalogue: In fact each of the families owns and is drawn-round with animals, for work, for food, or by more vague functions: a mule as one kind of centre and leverage, a cow as another, a hog as still another, a dog in different meanings of his own, the tolerated tramp’s and robber’s life of the cat, the three generations of chickens, the peripheral or parasitic or almost unmagnetized spheres of rats, vermin, insects, and serpents, all in turn sprung round with tended and with random vegetation, and finally, those with lounge in the fields, and the many birds, and those who are hunted; and in any proper account it would be necessary to

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give such a full record of all these in themselves and in their mutual and human meanings and relationships as is impossible here. (FM, 195)

It is possible to see that Agee’s prose pays more attention to the presence and individuality of nonhuman animals as compared to Evans’s photos, which (among fifty printed images) only capture a dog and two mules. Agee’s phrasing, according to which “the human animals . . . live in an immediate and most elaborate texture of other forms of existence” (FM, 195), sounds surprisingly contemporary in our age of posthumanist concerns. Stacy Alaimo, for example, writes about “trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2010, 2). Or, as Susan McHugh argues, we should be able to read non-human animals against the grain of anthropocentric structures of human thought and feeling (2011, 9). Animal stories—or, as I would have it, even stories with animals as marginalized figures as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—may open the reader’s consciousness to new, alternative modes of knowing beyond humanist epistemologies (19). Nevertheless, in Agee’s prose nonhuman animals are an integral part of the reality of the world that the text tries to depict—they are real things just as human beings, buildings, and tools are—whereas they are conspicuously almost absent in Evans’s photos. In this sense, the writer and the photographer are working with different modes of knowing with their different media. THINGS AND TRUTHS OF THE EARTH Even though words and images work differently, it may still be argued that in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, both prose and photos must face equal problems of reality representation. In the production of the book, it appears that both Agee and Evans wanted to challenge their own devices and media by pushing them to certain limits; thus, Evans is experimenting with photographic techniques (lenses, frames, lights, angles, etc.) while Agee painfully—sometimes painfully also for the reader—includes in his prose all the motives and devices of his writing. The result is a book, which is “a meditation on the limits of what, among the things we see and recognize, we can directly record or indirectly evoke with images and words” (Minter 1996, 201). As mentioned, sometimes Agee makes clear that he is trying to write “photographically,” as if the written word could not reach the complex reality well enough. The “cruel radiance of what is” is the very thing that Agee tries to capture in his prose, even as he knows that perhaps only photography can lighten up that reality.

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In this context of reality representation, let us take a closer look at a single photo by Evans, printed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. First, we may think that there is an allusion to Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting of peasant shoes (1886) in a picture of a tenant farmer’s shoes taken exactly fifty years later. We may also recall that van Gogh’s painting stimulated Martin Heidegger to write his famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), written, as we can see, about at the very moment Evans was taking the picture. In his poetic essay, Heidegger explains the essence of art in terms of the concepts of being and truth and writes about art’s ability to set up an active struggle between what he calls earth and world (1971, 39–50).5 The possibility of its earth aspects is due to the fact that the reader of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is able to connect the photograph of the shoes with the very particular body and existence of a farmer, namely George Gudger, a man whose specific human weight can be felt in these working shoes. In one of the rare instances where Agee’s text and Evans’s specific photograph actually communicate, Agee writes of these shoes as if they were a Cubist artwork (and obscure like Charles Bovary’s hat), and still firmly rooted into the hard work on cotton fields: They are one of the most ordinary types of working shoe: the blucher design, and soft in the prow, lacking the seam across the root of the big toe: covering the ankles: looped straps at the heels: blunt, broad, and rounded at the toe: broad-heeled: made up of the most simple roundnesses and squarings and flats, of dark brown raw thick leathers nailed, and sewn coarsely to one another in courses and patterns of doubled and tripled seams, and such throughout that like many other small objects they have great massiveness and repose and are, as the houses and overalls are, and the feet and legs of the women, who go barefooted so much, fine pieces of architecture. . . . The shoes are worn for work. (FM, 241–42)

The literary text also aims to make ordinary, everyday objects significant and perceptible through the aesthetic process of defamiliarization.6 Agee’s poetic rendering of the working shoes potentially reminds the reader of Heidegger’s vision of the shoes depicted in van Gogh’s painting. Heidegger writes that in those shoes “there vibrates the silent call of the earth, it quiet and ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field” and that “this equipment the shoes belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman” (1971, 44). Of course, Evans’s probably intentional allusion to van Gogh’s famous painting may also remind us that our vision is being directed aesthetically by the photographer, his choice of framing, angle, and perspective. As T. V. Reed notes, the contrast between Heidegger’s and Evans’s “readings” of van Gogh’s painting is illuminating,

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since where Heidegger mystifies the land and romanticizes peasantry, Evans’s approach to the painting has the effect of making it appear more concrete and rooted in a specific life (1992, 47–48). That is, in Evans’s pictures, just as in Agee’s prose, we are made to feel the hard realities and the resistant earth of the Depression era Alabama, even though neither words nor images never really capture that real earth. The indexical nature of “analogical” photography has a relation to what Agee calls “unimagined existence” (FM, 10), a notion representing his belief that there is an extratextual world, nonhuman nature, and a resistant earth. As M. Jimmie Killingsworth notes in the context of American naturalism and environmentalism, “while Nature with a capital N is certainly a product of human thinking, an ideological construct, the earth continues to be one thing that resists” (2004, 8–9). Killingsworth further argues that “ecopoetics has an interest in preserving the concept of nonhuman being, that which exists outside language and culture and which hints at something larger and more lasting than the products of human hubris” (9). In a phenomenological sense, in the photograph there remains a kind of natural “being-there” of objects.7 The photograph is thus connected to the physicality of the past; it is not simply a reconstruction of that past. As Roland Barthes puts it, “In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past” (1981, 76). Our feeling that real objects (people, animals, trees, buildings, etc.) are actually distant from us make us mourn for them, and in this sense, a photograph can never replace the real thing (see Silverman 2003, 340; Walton 2008, 14–21). Indeed, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is full of mourning and melancholy, as well as longing for lost things, while it is also a brave attempt to document and retain the world of the tenant farmers, with their faces, work fields, houses, animals, clothes, tools, and other things—all those things that are still shining when we read the text and look at the photos. As Caroline Blinder suggests, by cinematically animating the objects in the world he documents, Agee is able to connect “the sacred with the vernacular, the divine with the mundane” (2010, 147). In Agee’s view, human beings are beautiful because they exist; and also nonhuman animals, inanimate things, and material objects are illuminated by light. Agee thus believes that the beauty he sees in the natural world is not a human projection or abstraction but inheres in the world he perceives and experiences (see Jones 2008, 128). Agee writes about “the profoundest and plainest ‘beauties,’ those of the order of the stars and of solitude in darkened and empty land” (FM, 280). In a sense, then, what we need to do is to show humble generosity toward the world and its mysteries and remain open to the possibility that even the most “common” and mundane things have intrinsic value and importance.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have suggested a new kind of reading of James Agee and Walker Evans’s classic photo-documentary book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the context of materiality and object culture. As I have argued, in his description of the daily existence and environment of three poor tenant families in the Depression era America, James Agee protests against the flatness of realist representation, but also against modernist art, which, in his words, is hermetically sealed away from identification with everyday reality. In other words, it may be suggested that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men celebrates the aesthetics of the everyday (e.g., Saito 2007, 2–8). Agee speaks of his effort to perceive “the cruel radiance of what is” by focusing on human bodies, nonhuman animals, the surrounding environment, agricultural tools, plants, buildings, and weather. The text is filled with descriptive catalogues or inventories of material things, and Agee’s focus on everyday details (clothes, work tools, houses, and their interiors) contributes to his notion that everything is meaningful. Agee’s prose, which tries to capture all incidental things that usually get unnoticed in our everyday living among them, is accompanied by Walker Evans’s photos of the material world. These include a famous photograph of a tenant farmer’s shoes, which can be read as an allusion to Vincent van Gogh’s painting of a peasant’s shoes, also discussed by Martin Heidegger in his essay on the “earth” and “world” aspects of things. My analysis of Agee’s prose and Evans’s photography has especially focused on these shoes as material objects and how their existence and meaning can be captured verbally and/or visually. It has also been suggested in this chapter that there is an interesting interrelationship between American naturalist fiction and photographic journalism in their mutual commitment to the representation of the poor and the vulnerable. However, in his polemical prose James Agee understands “naturalism” as a literary mode that easily veers toward sensationalism and sentimentality, which is arguably a limited conception of naturalism. Agee’s version of nonhuman naturalism nevertheless downplays human-centered melodramatic plots and, instead, celebrates the reality of things and the existence of material objects and nonhuman lives as an integral part of the tenant farmers’ world in the era of the Great Depression. NOTES 1. While Bennett bases her theoretical approach on French poststructuralism, she maintains that her attentiveness to things and their affects stems from her reading of

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American writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Barry Lopez, and Barbara Kingsolver (2010, xiv). 2. In addition to the collaboration between Agee and Evans, the following works are worth mentioning: Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937); Archibald McLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), a collection of poems including the work of various photographers; Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus (1939), and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941). We may also note the influence of the FSA photographs on the narrative style of what may be the most famous of the Depression era novels, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). 3. David Minter gives the following description of the book’s generic modes: “It employs a wide range of discourses—ethnographic, sociological, phenomenological, theological, historical, autobiographical, poetic, novelistic—and utilizes an astonishing range of styles—realist, naturalist, impressionist, expressionist, surrealist, cubist, and visionary” (1996, 200). T. V. Reed, for his part, labels this almost unclassifiable work as “cubist sociology” and “postmodernist realism” (1992, 35). 4. Brian McHale has paid attention to descriptive catalogues or inventories in postmodernist long poems, as in the work of John Ashbery, but he adds that this poetic practice goes back to the American naturalist and modernist tradition; indeed, he suggests that “the reality of rural poverty acquires ‘thickness’ through James Agee’s inventorying of a sharecropper’s possessions in his and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (2004, 143). 5. Fredric Jameson somewhat clarifies this by saying that Heidegger’s theory is “organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality of the body and the nature and the meaning endowment of history and of the social.” Jameson adds that “Heidegger’s account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewed materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materiality— the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that other materiality of oil paint” (2005, 7–8). Jameson also refers to Walker Evans’s photograph of the tenant shoes in his own analysis of van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes. 6. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht discusses “those cases in which aesthetic experience is an unexpected interruption in the flow of the everyday,” and he refers to those familiar, everyday moments “when an object that has long been familiar, all of a sudden and without any obvious reason, looks or feels strange” (2006, 308). 7. Still, photography poses problematics of its own. According to Heidegger’s criticism of “framing” and “picturing” the world, modern times and visual culture have replaced the attitude of wonder, which lets things be as they are, with that of curiosity, which is based on the desire to know how things can be used for human purposes (see, e.g., Jay 1993, 270–75).

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REFERENCES Agee, James, and Walker Evans. (1941) 2001. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. London: Violette Editions. (= FM) Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Barthes, Roland. (1980) 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Batchen, Geoffrey. 1997. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Blinder, Caroline. 2010. “Animating the Gudgers: On the Problems of a Cinematic Aesthetic in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” In New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, edited by Caroline Blinder, 145–64. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. Brown, Bill. 2003. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Folks, Jeffrey J. 2007. “Agee’s Angelic Ethics.” In Agee Agonistes: Essays on the Life, Legend, and Works of James Agee, edited by Michael A. Lofaro, 73–84. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. Gale, Richard M. 2010. “The Naturalism of John Dewey.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, edited by Molly Cochran, 55–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2006. “Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif.” New Literary History 37 (2): 299–318. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper. Horstkotte, Silke, and Nancy Pedri. 2008. “Introduction: Photographic Interventions.” Poetics Today 29 (1): 1–29. Hughes, Alex, and Andrea Noble. 2003. “Introduction.” Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, edited by Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble, 1–16. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Durham: Duke University Press. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Jones, Gavin. 2008. American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U. S. Literature, 1840–1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. 2004. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Kramer, Victor A. 1991. Agee and Actuality: Artistic Vision in his Work. Troy: The Whitston Publishing Company.

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McHale, Brian. 2004. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. McHugh, Susan. 2011. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Minter, David. 1996. A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newlin, Keith. 2011. “Introduction: The Naturalistic Imagination and the Aesthetics of Excess.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, edited by Keith Newlin, 3–18. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Orvell, Miles. 1989. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pizer, Donald. 2020. American Literary Naturalism: Late Essays. London: Anthem Press. Rabinowitz, Paula. 2005. “Social Representations within American Modernism.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian, 261–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reed, T. V. 1992. Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Saito, Yuriko. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 2003. “All Things Shining.” In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, 323–42. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tagg, John. 2003. “Melancholy Realism: Walker Evans’s Resistance to Meaning.” Narrative 11 (1): 3–77. Tagg, John. 2009. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Walton, Kendall L. 2008. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism.” In Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, edited by Scott Walden, 14–49. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Chapter 13

Trouble with Human-Nonhuman Distinctions in Dreiser, London, Hamilton, and Dick Kenneth K. Brandt

“Discussions of literary naturalism,” June Howard (2011) observes, “always seem to involve other genres” (92). In such discussions, realism, romance, and regionalism are naturalism’s usual cohorts. But, because of the hidebound tendency to periodize American literary naturalism, science fiction (SF) has until recently been a much more distant affiliate with the naturalistic tradition. SF and naturalism, of course, can be different in many ways. Yet, they share a concerted focus on a causal materialistic universe, a strong emphasis on scientific-empirical perspectives, and a substantial interest in evolution and the deterministic influences of various physical and socioenvironmental pressures. One might think of SF as a cybernetic augmentation that expands the range of the naturalistic tradition and extends its depictions of Darwinism into fields such as astrophysics and space travel, often projecting its characters into distant and future worlds. Rachel Nichols (2013) argues that “literary naturalism and science fiction share the same goal: to create new literary forms that would incorporate contemporary scientific ideas and methods” (7). Eric Carl Link (2013) also contends that “[a]s different as literary naturalism and science fiction may seem on the surface,” given the depth of their thematic connections, “one hesitates to see them as different modes or genres at all—their surface differences aside, they trace nearly two centuries’ worth of artistic attempts to come to terms with the implications of scientific developments on our understanding of human nature” (3). More particularly, works in the naturalist tradition also frequently involve depictions of conflicting inner nonhuman selves, their vestiges, and even the extraterrestrial. 213

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This chapter is concerned with the various ways naturalistically oriented SF texts conceive of the nonhuman within, cojoined, or occupying the human self and how, through such configurations, these works hypothesize various notions of difference (and sameness) between the human and the nonhuman—whether beast, extraterrestrial, or the (d)evolved posthuman. Drawing on the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben, I briefly review early instances of indeterminacy in the depiction of the human and nonhuman in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Jack London’s The Star Rover (1915). I then go on to explore variations on this idea in two later SF works: Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” ([1931] 1977) and Philip K. Dick’s “Beyond Lies the Wub” ([1953] 2013). In the writings of first-wave American naturalists, the nonhuman animal other is often described as something encoded in our ancestral heredity, lacing the inner organic sludge of modern human biology with a raft of base, brutish, and crude impulses. At the same time, these urges teem with potent vigor and primordial unity. Under the right combination of socioenvironmental stresses, such primitive drives can surge atavistically in violent acts oriented toward self-preservation, social dominance, or reproductive fitness. As Richard Lehan (2005) puts it, “animality is a latent state in human beings that is aroused at moments of physical crisis and emotional stress” (128). SF writers, of course, often dramatize the interactions between humans and various nonhuman life forms, including extraterrestrials or mutant beings. Like the early naturalists, they draw on scientific discourse in depicting these relationships to explore concepts such as evolution, genetic variation, consciousness, host-parasite relationships, ethics, oppression, and trauma. Sometimes SF writers describe inner “aliens” as disruptively regressive or primitive, but they often also develop and extend the classic naturalistic trope of atavism— the inner brute—into depictions of the posthuman other and inner alien. They usually imagine these inner others through the familiar paradigm of Darwinian evolution, and, as one might expect, the outcomes are imaginative, weird, and thought-provoking. Their stories often portray how invasive alien or posthuman entities might provoke readers, for better or worse, to consider alternative ways of conceiving of ourselves as well as our relationships with other humans, nonhumans, and the environment. These encounters present psychological reckonings and engage human problems dealing with identity, morality, political power relations, and ontological meaning. After Darwin’s alignment of human and nonhuman animal life forms on the same biological continuum, the urge to define the human against the animal and to distinguish animal desires and drives from human ones has been troubled by a nebulous indeterminacy. Kari Weil (2018) remarks that the “human, like the animal it distinguishes itself from, is drawn from a space of fundamental ‘indistinction’” (119). Giorgio Agamben (2004) argues in The

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Open: Man and Animal, that humans employ an “anthropological machine” in a muddled attempt to distinguish and separate themselves as uniquely different from, and superior to, other species. This process of differentiation, according to Weil, “works inversely by animalizing others in order to exclude nonhuman animals from the properly human as well as certain races, ethnicities, and sexes, thus leaving them vulnerable and forsaken” (119).1 The exclusionary “anthropological machine” exposes an absence crucial to the definition of the human because we can neither coherently incorporate nor entirely exclude the nonhuman animal from the human self. “The anthropological machine of humanism,” Agamben writes, “is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and terrestrial nature, between animal and human—and, thus, his being always less and more than himself” (29). Thus, the human is “[c]aught in this state of betweenness” (Weil 119). The entangled field of human-animal “betweenness” is one of American literary naturalism’s more familiar tropes. At the beginning of chapter 8 in Sister Carrie ([1900] 1987), for example, Theodore Dreiser’s narrator supplies some detailed commentary on the simultaneity of being both “beast” and “man”—but also somehow neither, as he describes humanity is caught in a “middle stage” (70). As is often the case in the writings of first-wave naturalists, the narrator’s descriptions of nonhuman cognition are stereotypic and reductive. In the selection below, the nonhuman animals are merely motivated by instinct and are solely driven by “the forces of life” (70).2 This passage offers a detailed reflection on the evolutionary origins and structures of Carrie Meeber’s (and, by extension, humanity’s) ceaselessly fluctuating thoughts and longings. In the previous chapter, Carrie has just abandoned her lodgings in the dingy home of her sister and her husband—a chaste and orthodox arrangement—to live in a plusher apartment paid for by her paramour, Charles Drouet, a showy salesman, making her, in effect, a kept woman. The situation prompts the narrator to remark, Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life—he is born into their keeping and without thought, he is protected. We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance. He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against them. As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces. In this intermediate stage he wavers—neither drawn in

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harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will. (70)

In many ways, being in this “scarcely beast”–“scarcely human” “middle stage,” or “intermediate stage” anticipates Agamben’s view of man being held “suspended between a celestial and terrestrial nature, between animal and human.” Naturalists like Dreiser acknowledge the inner physio-psychological commingling of the animal and the human, which disrupts any coherent or stable status for humans as separate from the nonhuman animal. Furthermore, one might regard Carrie’s decision to accept Drouet’s offer not so much as a concession to her instinctual desires but as a rational calculation that weighs and considers the possible moral condemnations of becoming intimately involved with Drouet against the gains and benefits, she can acquire through the continuation of that relationship. Her decision to accept Drouet’s offer may be as much a logical choice as it is an instinctual one. Christophe Den Tandt (2005) also claims that “Dreiser misleads his readers when he states that Carrie, as she ponders her surrender to Drouet, is a ‘wisp in the wind’ wavering between ‘desire and understanding.’” The passage aligns the novel with a Christian reading of Darwinian evolution and thereby covers up the fact that Carrie is eventually empowered by her assent to ‘the forces of life’” (102–103). Such ambiguity (or authorial distortion) only adds to the indeterminacy that emerges here and persists throughout the novel. Like Dreiser and other first-wave naturalists, Jack London also openly incorporates evolutionary ideas into his fiction. In his novel The Star Rover (1915), for instance, he uses Ernst Haeckel’s biogenic law, an evolutionary theory of development often referred to as recapitulation theory, to depict atavistic vestiges of past selves—proto-human and animal—within the modern, civilized self.3 These other, more primitive inner selves are remnants of past evolutionary stages. The book’s narrator is Darrel Standing, a former agronomics professor, now imprisoned for murdering a fellow professor. While serving his life sentence, Standing assaults a prison guard and is sentenced to death by hanging. Falsely accused by the warden of planning a prison break, Standing endures long periods in solitary confinement and is often constrained for prolonged periods in a straitjacket. To assuage his torturous captivity, Standing uses self-hypnosis to induce out-of-body flights of astral travel to revisit his past lives, which include a prehistoric cave dweller, a Roman legion soldier present at Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, a French Renaissance aristocrat, a sailor shipwrecked on a lonely Pacific island, and a nineteenth-century American pioneer boy who is killed in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The novel, regularly classified as a work of SF, features mystical and fantastic elements, but London also endeavors to orient the narrative toward the empirical and the scientifically plausible. For instance, to

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credibly portray the narrator’s feats of astral travel, Standing echoes fundamental tenets of Haeckel’s biogenic law, which postulates that embryological stages of an organism’s development parallel the past evolutionary stages. In an attempt to offer a more precise scientific explanation for his unique ability to reinhabit his former lives, Standing maintains, Truly do we carry in us, each human of us alive on the planet today, the incorruptible history of life from life’s beginning. This history is written in our tissues and our bones, in our functions and our organs, in our brain cells and in our spirits, and in all sorts of physical and psychic atavistic urgencies and compulsions. Once we were fish-like, you and I, my reader, and crawled up out of the sea to pioneer in the great, dry-land adventure in the thick of which we are now. The marks of the sea are still on us, as the marks of the serpent are still on us, ere the serpent became serpent and we became we, when pre-serpent and pre-we were one. Once we flew in the air, and once we dwelt arboreally and were afraid of the dark. The vestiges remain, graven on you and me, and graven on our seed to come after us to the end of our time on earth. (London 1915, 296–297)

Our biological heritage, then, is a “history written in our tissues and our bones” and “graven on our seed,” which, for Standing, is confirmation that we contain within our very physiology the residues of a multitude of nonhuman animal others, even back to when “pre-serpent and pre-we were one.” That nonhuman other is “in” and “on” our bodies, and we may conclude that the “pre-we” and our present selves are welded together. Michael Newton (2017) asserts that in The Star Rover “[London’s] is a ‘recapitulatory’ imagination. Here selves are doubled with past selves. London pictures contemporary identity in this way to expose the crack in modernity, to show that it is not modern at all, or only insofar as it is also primitive, a reprise” (240). Moreover, The Star Rover is one of London’s texts, Newton adds, that is “rooted in ‘fact’ (as London understood it), in the body, and the body’s alarming propensity to be both our own and also a vestige, a re-embodiment of past selves, other bodies, other lives. . . . [As Standing proclaims in the novel,] ‘I am all of my past, as every protagonist of the Mendelian law must agree’” (241). In London’s post-Darwinian world of The Star Rover, the human is dislodged from any coherent definition of a unified, autonomous, or divinely created self. It becomes, instead, a collage of manifold selves and a mélange of diverse species. Furthermore, in the minds of many first-wave naturalists, our genetic heritage compels deplorable and asocial brutish behaviors, such as predation, lust, viciousness, avarice, and subjugation, to name a few. For London and other naturalists, conventional conceptions of the human as distinct from and superior to the nonhuman animal are challenged by the recapitulation theory of the biogenic law. These bio-traces and “marks” of past stages and species

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of evolutionary flux contained within us are major destabilizing forces that produce a state of human betweenness and indeterminacy for the naturalists. For most writers drawing on naturalistic perspectives, our embedded nonhuman animal heritage renders human identity inextricable from its underlying animality. As Weil (2018) points out, “to deconstruct identity is also to show how it always bears the trace of what it is not or will at some point become” (118). Like their first-wave naturalist peers, Dreiser and London mainly looked back into the evolutionary past to understand the origins of social conflicts and aberrant human behaviors. Later, SF writers (beginning in earnest circa the late 1920s and early 1930s in America) were more inclined to depict evolutionary futures and imagine other worlds to shed light on contemporary cultural issues and the conundrums of human motivation and psychology. Several of these stories explore conflicts and themes that were also key issues in the works of first-wave naturalists: the tensions between selfishness and solidarity, injustices involving hierarchical oppression, and the crucial need for empathy and compassion in our interactions with the both human and the nonhuman. Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” ([1931] 1977) is a foundational SF story from the genre’s early pulp years that centers on evolution and the nonhuman other. First published in the April 1931 edition of Wonder Stories magazine, “The Man Who Evolved” focuses on the experimental research of scientist Dr. John Pollard, who has constructed a chamber that accelerates the evolutionary process. One is exposed to a concentrated bombardment of cosmic rays inside this chamber, which speeds up the mutation rate and renders 15 minutes inside equivalent to 50 million years of evolutionary time. The story makes for a compelling thought experiment and the tale’s emphasis on evolutionary unpredictability provides a thematic link to literary naturalism. The elaborate apparatus of the chamber’s working mechanisms and the cosmic ray mutation concept are pure pulp-era whimsy. Still, the story’s profuse technical language creates an atmosphere of scientism that imbues Pollard’s endeavors with an atmosphere of plausibility.4 The tale describes Pollard’s six successive 15-minute exposures to mutation-inducing cosmic ray bombardment inside the chamber. Throughout, he is assisted by two old college chums, the story’s narrator, Arthur Wright, and Hugh Dutton. Pollard’s goal is nothing less than to discover the evolutionary destiny of humankind. Most of the story details Pollard’s physical and intellectual evolutionary changes over those six 15-minute/50 million rounds in the chamber. Emerging from the chamber after his first 15-minute/50 million session, Pollard has mutated into a superhero-like being—“a radiant, physically perfect figure” (23). Now deeply muscled and several inches taller, his features hold “the stamp of immense intellectual power” (22). Next, at the 100-million-year mark, his body has atrophied, “grown thin and shrivelled” (23), and

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his head has become enlarged, with a “great bulging forehead dominating the face” (24). At this point, Pollard begins to exhibit a disturbingly arrogant, condescending mentality. He no longer considers himself a measly human and tells Wright and Dutton they seem to him as “as two brutish, hairy cavemen would” appear to them. Though Dutton protests that Pollard is “changing out of human semblance,” Pollard curtly rebuts: “The only emotions you awaken in me is a contempt for your crudity” (24). He bullies them to move ahead and activate the chamber for another round of cosmic rays. Reaching the 150-million-year point, Pollard emerges as a large (three-foot wide) head “supported on tiny legs” with arms “dwindled to mere hands that projected just below the head” (25). After telling his two friends that they now seem to him as “low . . . as the worms that crawl,” Pollard declares, “with the colossal brain I have I will master without a struggle this man swarming planet and make it a huge laboratory in which to pursue the experiments that please me” (25). Dutton protests that Pollard’s mission should be to “benefit humanity not to rule it!” (25). But Pollard, reveling in his posthuman eminence, fires back, “Do you men dream of benefitting the animals you rule over! I would no sooner think of working for the benefit of you humans” (26). To demonstrate his vast intellectual superiority, Pollard promptly mixes several compounds in the lab and creates pure gold. He then declares, “And you think it terrible that I should rule your race! I will not rule them, I will own them and this planet as you might own a farm and animals!” (26). As Pollard alters in these second and third stages, he first primitivizes his old human friends into “cavemen” and then animalizes them into worms and livestock. A clear pattern emerges in these accruing mutations: Pollard’s mental capacities and powers enlarge, and his exclusionary mentality becomes more inflamed. Pollard’s metamorphosis only escalates the doggedness of his hierarchical bigotry and his might-makes-right morality; both fuel an amplified version of Agamben’s anthropological machine. From Pollard’s newly evolved view, Wright and Dutton are now a subaltern species fit to be disregarded and demeaned. Through his depictions of Pollard’s changing biology in this part of the story, Hamilton showcases a negative posthumanism that highlights the continuation of Agamben’s definitional indeterminacy. Pollard does not progress beyond a need for Agamben’s anthropological machine. If anything, the stridency of Pollard’s supremacy suggests his exclusionary propensity expands as he mutates. His escalating intellect degenerates morally as it grows more proficient, becoming increasingly bent on domination and oppression. This trend parallels Agamben’s observation that “[i]n our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics” (80). Overall, these stages of the story unleash a regressive Hobbesian posthumanism.

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Through his now-immense psychic power, Pollard forces Wright and Dutton to activate the chamber for another 15 minutes to reach the 200-million-year point, after which he emerges as a large gray, skinless head, a “walking, seeing brain” (27) supported by two leg-like tentacles. He is now also able to communicate telepathically. In this state, he longs to soar beyond earth and humanity to previously unimagined vistas of “power and knowledge” (28). Believing that he is approaching the last possible mutation, Pollard enters the chamber for fifteen more minutes and appears afterward as a great, fourfoot wide, all-brain corpus that moves and feeds by drawing on pure energy. Pollard, now an immensely self-absorbed intellect, expresses to Wright and Dutton his complete detachment from emotions and human others: “the brain alone gives man dominance. . . . I am pure intelligence now and as such, though I can no more feel the emotions of love or friendship, neither can I feel those of ambition or pride” (28, 29). All that remains for Pollard is “intellection curiosity” (29). He thinks another round in the chamber to reach the 300-million-year mark will be “the end of man’s evolutionary path, the last and highest form in which he can develop!” (29). And after this final session in the chamber, Wright and Dutton find that Pollard has become “a mass of simple protoplasm” (30). This finale adds a particularly naturalistic, uberatavistic twist to the story. Hamilton theatrically reminds his readers that evolution is arbitrary and unpredictable and pursues a non-teleological course. The story reaches back (and forward) toward the pre-brute protoplasmic origins of humanity, which harbors the potential futures of the nonhuman, human, and posthuman. In the first five evolutionary stages Hamilton plays largely on a popular conception of evolution as a progressive (and dangerously empowering) process. Pollard’s ethical regression, though, is evident by the second and third stages. The last mutation into protoplasm is pregnant with vitality but morally neutral—neither empathetic nor arrogant. (This placid puddle of protoplasm comes as a welcome relief from the colossal tyrant that evolution seemed busily building throughout most of the story.) Unfortunately, what matters most in Hamilton’s cautionary tale of humanity’s future is supremacy, status, and power—along with the capacity to rise above other life forms and oppress them—until the drastic final mutation into protoplasm. Evolutionary flux, instability, chance, and variability contribute to a larger sense of indeterminacy. As Richard Lehan (2011) explains, “Darwin did not argue that [evolutionary] changes were in the form of progress; evolution did not make a species better, only different” (39). But what kind of differences emerge in “The Man Who Evolved”? The later mutated intellectually superior versions of Pollard are also brutes—intelligent brutes, but boorish, overbearing, unfeeling brutes nonetheless. And Pollard’s advanced but callous intelligence makes him all that much more of a threat to all he deems beneath him. Hamilton positions the reader to consider how evolutionary

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change can be simultaneously morally degenerative while bolstering the brain’s cognitive capacities. Lehan (2005) also posits that “[t]he theory of evolution presumes that we are conflicted—a rational self competes with an irrational self, a remnant of human evolution” (191). But Hamilton’s story does not present such a clear division. The rational is inextricable from the brute, and, indeed, as Pollard asserts, “the brain alone gives man dominance.” In the story, intellect and the drive to dominate increase in tandem. In this regard, Kelly Oliver (2007) makes an illuminating point in her analysis of Agamben’s central concept of human indistinction: “The truly human is an empty ideal produced through the continual disavowal of the failure of homo sapiens to escape their animality” (8). In the story, intellect and animality are fused rather than opposed against one another. Despite his engorged brilliance, Pollard cannot even recognize his own brutishness. In Hamilton’s depiction of Pollard’s evolution, the irrational and the bestial are not limited to the body and atavistic regression but are enmeshed in the brain and in the very rational concepts it spawns, which only become more amplified with Pollard’s rational-intellectual growth. This process only engenders a cerebral detachment from compassion, kindness, or empathy and intensifies Agambenian indeterminacy. Philip K. Dick’s “Beyond Lies the Wub” ([1953] 2013) is also an SF story that deals with the problematic coexistence of empathy and reason within the unstable category of the human. Appearing in the July 1953 issue of Planet Stories, “Beyond Lies the Wub” was Dick’s first published story. The “wub” in this story is a creature found on Mars by Captain Franco’s crew and loaded aboard their spaceship for the return voyage to Earth. (The wub, along with an assortment of other seized Martian nonhumanoid animals, will provide necessary food sources during their extended trip earthward.) The wub appears to be a podgy, all-around swinish beast to the humans. Captain Franco exclaims that the wub must weigh four hundred pounds and that it is “a pig! A huge dirty pig!” (2). The wub’s plenteous, sweaty flesh, though, looks as if it might be tasty. Shortly after departing Mars, the earthlings are amazed to find that the wub is self-aware, intelligent, speaks English, and has a pleasant, engaging personality. In addition, the wub possesses a cultured sensibility, is clairvoyant, and has the power to immobilize humans temporarily. Nonetheless, Captain Franco rigorously maintains the distinction between the human and the nonhuman and insists on viewing the wub solely as a food source. The imperious captain’s unrelenting reductive view of the wub as mere livestock reflects Dick’s portrayal of Franco’s mindset as shaped by the values of the mid-twentieth-century military-industrial-imperial complex. Tellingly, writing about this story, Dick ([1981] 1995) later disclosed that “[Captain Franco] is deliberately based on General Franco of Spain, which is my concession in the story to political considerations” (106–107). A product of cultural

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determinism, he is a compendium of the darker aspects and tendencies of 1950s American culture and right-wing extremism—hierarchical, autocratic, and exceptionalist. For Dick, Franco is the type of person likely to rise to power during the cold war. He is also a walking embodiment of Agamben’s modern “anthropological machine.” Pleading its case (the wub is never assigned a gender) during a private conference with Franco, the wub explains that its “race” is “very old and ponderous” and does not depend on “physical defenses. . . . Too heavy to run, too soft to fight, too good-natured to hunt for game” (4). The wub tells Franco that to survive, its species has evolved mind-reading powers while subsisting on plants and vegetables. As the wub explains, its race is “[t]olerant, eclectic, catholic. We live and let live. That’s how we’ve gotten along” (5). The wub implores Franco, “How can any lasting contact be established between your people and mine if you resort to such barbaric attitudes? Eat me? Rather you should discuss questions with me, philosophy, the arts” (5). When the captain proves unreceptive to such petitions, the wub freezes him in mid-sentence and goes off to discuss Odysseus, myth, individuation, and the journey of the soul with some of the more receptive crew members. Soon, a recovered Franco storms in and interrupts this amiable confab. Again, the wub pleads, “Have I done anything to you? I am against the idea of hurting. All I have done is try to protect myself. Can you expect me to rush eagerly to my death? I am a sensible being like yourselves. I was curious to see your ship, learn about you.” After commenting on the ingenuity, and technical wonder of the ship’s atomic power, the wub declares to the captain, “Apparently, your scientific hierarchy is not equipped to solve moral, ethical [problems]” (7). Here, Dick presents the familiar theme shared by naturalism and SF: The stagnation of ethical progress amid modernity’s barrage of technological advances. Just before he shoots and kills it, the obstinate Franco coldly declares to the wub, “I can look you in the eye. . . . Back on the farm we had hogs, dirty razor-back hogs. I can do it” (8). Franco’s prerogative here ordains what he assumes is his normative human dominion over the animal, a distinction he perceives as natural and just. Likewise, “In Agamben’s terminology,” as Oliver (2007) remarks, “man suspends his animality in a zone of exception” (79); “and by effacing his own animality, he retains his privileged position in the dichotomy of man-animal. By closing himself to the closed environment of the animal, he opens himself to the world of the properly human” (7). Summarily, the wub is executed, cooked, and served for dinner. In the story’s final scene, Franco and his now glum crew are finishing their dinner of wub meat, which is quite delicious. Franco’s closing lines of dialog, however, distinctly indicate that the wub’s consciousness now occupies the captain’s body; that is, Franco’s inner being has been eradicated and replaced by the inner self/being of the wub—thus, the wub lives on. In this finishing

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twist, the wub, now animating the body of Franco, suavely resumes its earlier conversion with the crew concerning Odysseus and myth. On one level, the story reads as a cold war fable. Dick offers his social commentary through his depiction of Franco’s blinkered mindset. The captain is not hip; he is a militant ideological square. Accordingly, Captain Franco’s thinking is chauvinistic, xenophobic, and authoritarian. In contrast, the wub is the tale’s countercultural rebel—the slovenly Beat or proto-hippie—a progressive envoy of free inquiry and open dialog. The wub’s values and consciousness convey the emancipatory potential of the liberal arts. In this scenario, the brute (cold war militancy) exists inside the human (Franco), and the amiable behavioral traits exist inside a hoggish wub. These polarities clash and, strikingly, the wub’s evolved capacities of transmigration and his inclusive ethical values prove, in a discernibly naturalistic-Darwinian manner, pro-adaptive. In the end, the wub’s progressive values depose Franco’s despotic social Darwinism. Dick states in his “‘Headnote’ for ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’” ([1981] 1995), The idea I wanted to get down on paper, had to do with the definition of “human.” The dramatic way I trapped the idea was to present ourselves, the literal humans, and then an alien life form that exhibits the deeper traits that I associate with humanity: not a biped with an enlarged cortex—a forked radish that thinks, to paraphrase the old saying—but an organism that is human in terms of its soul. (106)

Dick goes on to claim that in this story “empathy . . . becomes an actual weapon for survival. Empathy is defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s place. The wub does this even better than we ordinarily suppose could be done: Its spiritual capacity is its literal salvation. The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now” (106). Dick also notes that Franco “looks on other creatures in terms of sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for this total failure of empathy. So I show empathy possessing a survival value; in terms of interspecies competition, empathy gives you the edge” (107). Dick’s concept of the human in this story cannot be adequately captured through the behavior or actions of humans themselves; instead, to portray, however fleetingly, the “deeper traits” that supposedly define the positive attributes of the human, Dick ushers in an extraterrestrial being that can mimic the character of a loquacious and hyperliterate human intellectual. But, solid ground is challenging to find in a Dickean universe.5 Looking closely at the story, we don’t know exactly what the wub is. The wub appears to be a being that can read minds and migrate from organism to organism, a kind of intergalactic shapeshifter. Consequently, one can hardly approach the

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wub as a trustworthy reporter about itself or its species. Its self-description may simply be a parasitic ploy designed to secure another, more mobile host, Captain Franco. Perhaps the porcine incarnation the wub emerges from is a wub larval stage, or maybe the wub body was just another organism in a long line of host organisms. In such cases, its capacities remain pro-adaptive but reduce its show of empathy to calculated and self-interested performances of a chameleon-like parasite who blends in by virtue signaling its supposed authenticity by, among other things, opining on Jung and the Odyssey. Performative empath, imposter, freeloader, intergalactic hippie? The identity of the wub seems even more variable and shifty than the indeterminacy of the human is for Agamben. Dick’s comments on “Beyond Lie the Wub” do not fully encompass how ambiguously the story depicts the “deeper traits” of humanity—empathy, self-reflection, and “a live and let live attitude.” Yet, even if only a nimble mimic, the wub is better at being human than humans are. In Dick’s fiction, it often seems humans can never fully be human. We are, finally, so inept at being human because the human is never fully present within the human. Agamben’s lacuna of the human becomes notably germane here. The story is an early instance of what will become one of Dick’s central themes—the replication, manufacture, or simulacrum of the human. Strangely, the reproduction of the “truly human” (Dick [1981] 1995) through the wub’s embodiment of human values may also be precisely what humanity needs to survive and possibly achieve more equitable prosperity (106). Perhaps the true, the authentic, the real, and the very salvation of humanity itself, could reside in the alien, the artificial, the impersonator, but the story’s indeterminacy, concentrated in the caesura of the human, unsettles any definitive redemptive resolution. The fittingly enigmatic title of the story indicates that the wub lies “beyond,” but we can’t be sure what the wub is or what the beyond, occupied by the wub, will be like. Only uncertainty remains. NOTES 1. As Kelly Oliver (2007) furthers explains, “Agamben argues that the dichotomy between man and animal is a division within the category of the human itself. In both the earlier and the modern versions, humanity is divided into more and less human types, which in turn becomes justification for slavery and genocide. The question, then, for Agamben is not one of human rights, but rather how the category of the ‘human’ is produced and maintained against the category of the animal, which functions as both constitutive outside and inside such that some ‘people’ are rendered non- or sub-human. In other words, how do we come to treat some people like animals? Extending the scope of Agamben’s interrogation, we might also ask, how do

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we come to treat animals like animals? Or, in other words, how does animality justify enslavement and cruelty?” (2). 2. To explore related, more recent developments in the field of animal cognition, see Jaak Panksepp’s (2004) Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Panksepp professes that his study “accepts the premise that most animals—certainly all mammals—are ‘active agents’ in their environments and that they have at least rudimentary representations of subjectivity and a sense of self. With such assumptions, we can create a more realistic and richer science by recognizing the number of basic processes we share with our kindred animals” (6). 3. M. Elizabeth Barnes (2014) writes of Haeckel’s theory, “The biogenic law is a theory of development and evolution proposed by Ernst Haeckel in Germany in the 1860s. It is one of several recapitulation theories, which posit that the stages of development for an animal embryo are the same as other animals’ adult stages or forms. Commonly stated as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the biogenetic law theorizes that the stages an animal embryo undergoes during development are a chronological replay of that species’ past evolutionary forms. . . . Haeckel’s biogenetic law was further discredited by the results of experimental embryologists in the early twentieth century. Researchers abandoned Haeckel’s theory when they couldn’t confirm his observations” (Ernst Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law [1866]). 4. The editors of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010) comment that “The Man Who Evolved” is a “classic ‘super science’ story. . . . As with much sf of the period, the science is at times dubious: evolution, for example, is not a teleological process and does not operate at the level of the individual. . . . Exposure to concentrated high-energy particles, as depicted in the story would almost certainly lead to painful death rather than an epochal transmutation” (79). Hamilton’s focus on mutation ignores how changing environmental conditions “select” certain traits rather than others. Lawrence I. Berkove (2012) succinctly clarifies a relevant point in regard to natural selection: “Because the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ implies—but does not explain—the notion of ‘fittest,’ it can be readily understood that this teleological idea is at odds with the core Darwinian contention that evolutionary changes occur randomly, by chance, and not by plan. As Darwin explained his theory, environment and circumstance, which are continuously variable and unpredictable, drive evolutionary responses, and therefore the notion of fitness is always in flux; what is ‘fit’ at one time and in one place may be unfit in other times or places. Furthermore, random accidents may benefit or, alternatively, extinguish some species for reasons that have nothing to do with their inherent potential” (Berkove 9–10). 5. Eric Carl Link (2010) observes, “As Dick made evident throughout his career, the universe is a chaotic place and defies neat categorization, particularly when one factors in human subjectivity” (116). Link also notes, “Dick asked throughout his career if one can ever know—know in terms Descartes might appreciate, with absolute certainty—the absolute. Behind the thin fabric of human civilization saturated with power politics, technology, and media, above both broken and successful human relationships, beyond the epistemological problems caused by human subjectivity, what is there? Is it knowable” (140–141).

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REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Berkove, Lawrence I. 2012. “On Jack London: Darwinism and the Evolution of Jack London.” In Critical Insights: Jack London, 3–24, edited by Lawrence I Berkove. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press. Barnes, M. Elizabeth. 2014. “Ernst Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law (1866).” The Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Accessed on April 15, 2023. https:​//​embryo​.asu​.edu​/pages​/ ernst​-haeckels​-biogenetic​-law​-1866. Den Tandt, Christophe. 2005. “American Literary Naturalism.” In A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914, 96–118, edited by Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson. Oxford: Blackwell. Dick, Philip K. (1953) 2013. “Beyond Lies the Wub.” In Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, 1–8. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Dick, Philip K. (1981) 1995. “‘Headnote’ for ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’ (1981).” In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin, 106–107. New York: Vintage. Dreiser, Theodore. (1900) 1987. Sister Carrie. In Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men, edited by Richard Lehan, 1–455. New York: Library of America. Evans, Arthur B., Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk, eds. 2010. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Hanover, MD: Wesleyan University Press. Hamilton, Edmond. (1931) 1977. “The Man Who Evolved.” In The Best of Edmond Hamilton, edited by Leigh Brackett, 15–31. New York: Ballantine. Howard, June. 2011. “The Response to Power in American Literary: Visions and Revisions that Transformed a Literary Mode.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, edited by Keith Newlin, 37–51. New York: Oxford University Press. Lehan, Richard. 2005. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Lehan, Richard. 2011. “The Response to Power in American Literary: Visions and Revisions that Transformed a Literary Mode.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, edited by Keith Newlin, 37–51. New York: Oxford University Press. Link, Eric Carl. 2010. Understanding Philip K. Dick. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press. Link, Eric Carl. 2013. “Introduction: Naturalism and Science Fiction.” Studies in American Naturalism 8 (1): 1–5. London, Jack, 1915. The Star Rover. New York: Macmillan. Nichols, Rachel L. 2013. “Missing Links: Genre, Evolution, and Jack London’s Before Adam.” Studies in American Naturalism 8 (1): 7–20. Oliver, Kelly. 2007. “Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.” PhaenEx: Journal for Existential and Phenomenological Theory, (2) 2 (2007): 1–23. DOI:10.22329/p.v2i2.236.

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Panksepp, Jaak. 2004. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press. Weil, Kari. 2018. “Difference.” In Critical Terms for Animal Studies, edited by Lori Gruen, 112–124. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 14

Davids and Goliaths Last Days Reconciliation between Humans and Nonhumans in Don DeLillo’s Zero K and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos Ingemar Haag

To seal oneself off, to distance oneself, to decontextualize. Moving into the crypt to make oneself impervious to external threats. Is that possible? Or at all desirable? Of course, it depends on who you ask and what is at stake. If you ask a prepper about the measures he or she has taken, by creating secret bolt-holes, piling up supplies of water and food, making oneself independent of the outside world, his or her all-embracing concern is survival at all costs, a drive to protect oneself from threatening circumstances, due to local or global elements—because you never know when all hell will break loose— and we have all learned a little bit about a prepper’s way of living during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, this is not an essay about preppers. However, it recalls the preppers’ survivalist enterprise, but not their preference for solitariness. It is actually the other way around. In a reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos from 1986 and Don DeLillo’s Zero K from 2016, I aim at stressing a sense of togetherness, or coexistence, as a necessary and inevitable dimension of life—and of survival—even though survival does not necessarily mean the survival of human beings as we know them. Primarily, DeLillo and Vonnegut allow for a reconciliation between human and nonhuman entities, a conception of coexistence that has been advanced by thinkers like Donna Haraway (2008, 2016) and Timothy Morton (2013), but it has also been a 229

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recurring element in naturalistic discourses, a movement that Vonnegut as well as DeLillo partly joins. Naturalism’s strong articulation of the intimacy between humans and nonhumans (whether it is considered to be physical or metaphorical) is however a predominantly Darwinian heritage that challenges the humanity of humans, and not an intimacy that is prescribed in order to radically alter our relationship toward the nonhuman sphere in general, as in a posthuman context. The coexistence implies the intrusion of otherness, of nonhuman existences, into the human biosphere in Vonnegut’s and DeLillo’s novels, an otherness that opens to Emmanuel Levinas’s and partly Jean Baudrillard’s ideas, which mediate a consent to the radically other and to a radical objectivity, and subsequently to an ethical magnitude (Levinas 2012; Baudrillard 1994). In Vonnegut, this intrusion is quite obvious; in DeLillo it is more subtle, partly because his novel on the surface is more anthropocentrically colored. In different ways, DeLillo and Vonnegut make room for numerous organic life forms, animal life as well as microbiological life, in sum the seemingly insignificant “Davids,” whose existence in the long run always surpasses that of the human being. The “insignificance” and “invisibility” of animal life and microbiological life also point in another direction, namely that life—and in these novels especially the Goliathical human life—conceals a dark, hidden, dimension, calling to mind a naturalistic discourse marked by Darwinian elements, not least by the notion of human animality as a consequence of evolutionary progression. In relation to American naturalism and its early representatives, these dimensions are explored by scholars like Donald Pizer, who pays attention to the conception of the mutability of species as a significant development of intellectual life at the end of the nineteenth-century (1966, 67), Paul Civello, who argues that “[h]uman carnality, humanity’s biological affinity with the brute, was one of the most frightful aspects of Darwinism” in the late nineteenth-century (1994, 30), and, more recently, Bert Bender’s (2004) and Michael Lundblad’s (2013) broad investigations of the beastlike and brutish nature in the representation of the human being in American naturalism. Philosophically, the notion that there is an unknown dimension of every single object (not necessarily a brutish, animal element) was once launched by Edmund Husserl, and is an idea that constitutes an important aspect of Morton’s approach toward physical reality (2013). The attention paid to the “Davids” is shared by both DeLillo and Vonnegut; they are inexorable elements in those delimited biospheres that are dominated by human beings and that open on to something beyond this world. Of course, they are neither “beyond” nor delimited—the worlds of DeLillo and Vonnegut are, as I argue, characterized by an openness and by an immanence, as Bruno Latour defines immanence with reference to a Medieval context (2017).

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A prepper’s concern might just include him- or herself—perhaps there is nothing noble about the mission, but to save one’s own skin. If you are Ross Lockhart and his wife Artis in DeLillo’s novel Zero K, where people are cryopreserved in order to be returned to life in the future, perhaps there is something more at stake in their withdrawal from the world. At least, this is Ross’s position, when he envisions the creation of a radically improved human being and holds the conviction that the coming race will surpass the powers of the existing humans. The project is presented more or less as a philanthropic enterprise. Or, is that just a euphemism? Perhaps their reasons are, as for most preppers, pure individual concerns: the unconditional belief in the single individual, and at bottom the fear of the end, the void, the solitary death, my unnegotiable death. In Zero K this conceivable fear is accompanied by a dream of eternal life, an idea that partly interferes with the profitable and corporate elements that permeate the novel. These ideas hit you right at the beginning, in the opening, italicized line: “Everybody wants to own the end of the world” (3). No matter what deep existential issues the cryopreservation might awaken, the corporate and profitable aspects remain a constant backdrop to questions concerning life, death, and resurrection. The capitalization on the apocalypse is actually working in favor of the deep resonance that is mediated through the apocalypse in its etymological root, that is, the revelation and the birth of a new world. Investing in and capitalizing on “the end” implies—if all goes well (for the investor)—a profit in the future; there is, so to say, a profit beyond the end, a profit that is created out of this end. It sounds like the ultimate capitalistic dream. Either way, whether your point of departure is existential or capitalist, the cryopreservation enterprise, like the prepper’s survivalist project, is oriented toward a beyond, and it is this beyond that partly interests me here, a beyond that withstands the intimacy with the object, with the sensual qualities of a body or a thing, with a hyperobject that intrudes upon us. This “beyond” overrides the societal and physical circumstances that surround us, and points in the direction of a distant future, a more benevolent future, as Ross Lockhart puts it in Zero K: “when there are ways to counteract the circumstances that led to the end” (8). Those words imply that the body as well as the mind can be restored and recovered from the diseases it suffers from, by means of a superior medical technology. Yes, this process involves anticipation, the workings of a clever mind, but it is also a sort of indifference in relation to the existing world, an unwillingness to deal with the physical world. You do not have to be an eccentric prepper or a visionary life extender to bid farewell to the world. Indeed, we have become masters at sticking our head into the sand, or better, staring up into and putting faith in a metaphysical space—again and again, without seeing the meteorite rushing through

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space toward us. It has become an everyday business, dating from almost a thousand years ago, if we are to believe Bruno Latour. When Latour responds to the fact that modern man seems to be indifferent to phenomena like global warming, his answer brings us deep into Medieval theology. Latour’s answer is simply that we no longer are true materialists and that we, with fatal consequences, have brought transcendence into the world of immanence (191). According to Latour, this is a process that can be traced back to the twelth-century theologian Joachim of Fiore and his followers, who reinterpreted the apocalyptic moment in terms of certainty. Latour declares that “the continuing expectation of the return of the Son—of which ‘you know neither the day nor the hour’ (Matt. 25:13)—becomes the certainty that the Kingdom of the Spirit will be realized here below” (198; my italics). In other words, what seems to be an affirmation of immanence is actually the contrary. At the moment when the Heavenly City is situated in an earthly context, we are paradoxically no longer in contact with the very materiality of the earth: the capricious play of materiality that once affected the human existence is substituted by certainty—the material world is made invisible. Thus, we, as moderns, have transcended the material conditions. We are staying out of trouble, becoming untouchable, or as Latour subversively puts it, “It is thus completely useless to speak to them [the moderns] in apocalyptic terms announcing to them the end of their world! They will reply condescendingly that they have already crossed over to the other side, that they are already no longer of this world, that nothing more can happen to them, that they are resolutely, definitively, completely, and forever modernized!” (195–196). We can rest our case—we are saved, and the apocalypse has already taken place. Thus, we are insusceptible to global warming. Indeed, there is no global warming! Or: technology will handle it in the end or before the end! Still, the apocalyptic trope has continued to be massively exploited, although its expressions have shifted from religious contexts to secular scenes, embracing the postwar threats of nuclear war, the manufacturing and use of pesticides, global warming, and so on. The human being is now in possession of weapons of self-destruction and is in that respect equal to God. If Latour is correct, however, contemporary representations of the apocalypse are ineffective and purposeless, contrary to the idea that Frank Kermode once promoted, that “the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world” (1967, 28). By means of Latour, we might reject Kermode’s thesis and conclude that the apocalypse cannot be instrumental in the understanding of the present—transcendence has taken care of that. The positive evaluation of the apocalypse that underlies Kermode’s understanding has been disparaged by other contemporary critics, partly for other reasons than Latour’s. Greg Garrard (2011) lists a series of

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negative dimensions related to the apocalyptic trope: the tendency to “polarize responses,” which might ultimately elicit “confrontation and even violence”; an inclination toward a performative structure, through which “the rhetoric of catastrophe tends to ‘produce’ the crisis it describes”; a tendency to advance “a delusive search for culprits and causes that may be reductively conceived by conflating very varied environmental problems within the concept of a singular, imminent ‘environmental crisis’” (114–115). More recently Haraway and Morton have launched criticism partly equaling Latour’s and Garrard’s. Morton repeats Garrard’s worries about the polarizing character of the apocalypse when he declares that predictions of the catastrophe are attempts “to shock and dismay,” which in turn “inspires even more defiance on the opposite side of the ‘debate’”(2013, 100). However, the most aggravating problem as regards the apocalyptic images is the postponement of the doom “into some hypothetical future”: “these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space” (103–104)—and that “very real” object is, according to Morton, the “hyperobject,” an object that challenges the human time scale, stretching far back in time and far into the future. Still, apocalyptic narratives can sharpen our senses as regards the dangers of a hypothetical future and reawaken our sensitivity toward the physical world. This is to a large extent true with reference to hyperobjects; they will not offer us an opportunity to escape into apocalyptic fantasies. They are, as Morton puts it, “viscous,” they stick to us (1). Thus, there is no way to stay out of trouble, but rather only one way to handle ecological crisis, as Donna Haraway declares, staying with the trouble, which at bottom means “to be truly present” (2016, 1), or to be a “true” materialist, at the expense of transcendence, in Latour’s words (191). Indeed, DeLillo and Vonnegut both contribute to the sense of a “beyond.” Vonnegut’s temporal frame—stretching one million years into the future— and DeLillo’s cryopreservation project—suggesting a desire to escape present conditions—are expressions that point to a “beyond.” Ross Lockhart and his wife seem to have no intentions to stay with the trouble in Zero K. It is not just bodily diseases that have drawn people to “the Convergence,” as this isolated high-technological underground compound in the desolated deserts of central Asia is called, where financially well-equipped individuals arrive in order to be cryopreserved. Jeffrey, the protagonist, visits the compound that his father, Ross, has invested large sums of money in and where his stepmother now is about to be cryopreserved. Besides the belief in a future resurrection, the compound mediates a deterring image of the present. On screens, spread out on the walls of the corridors in the compound, there are images of blazing fires, droughts, starvation, floods, riots, events that indicate social instability and not least a serious environmental collapse. Thus, there is every reason for mobilizing survivalist strategies. Ross, however, has, as we

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have noted, more sublime plans than pure survival, which he enthusiastically mediates to his son, Jeffrey, when he envisions “[a]nother way to think and live” (34). This delimited compound that in the future could form an independent state, as Ross puts it, resembles a weird biospherical experiment, located in a well-chosen site, far removed from civilization. “This is what we want, this separation,” is Ross’ reply to his son’s question “why so isolated?” (30; my italics). Isolation implies exclusion, whether this enclosing strategy is voluntary (as in the Convergence compound) or involuntary—as in another apocalyptic novel in which a limited biosphere constitutes the setting for a transformation of the human race: Vonnegut’s novel Galápagos from 1985. To what extent do the cryopreserved individuals at the Convergence in DeLillo’s novel, and Vonnegut’s isolated group of individuals, haphazardly brought together on a fictive island in the Galápagos archipelago, constitute delimited biospheres, enclosed perimeters that are sealed off and self-sustainable? To what extent can they constitute a “beyond,” and can such an alienating operation be motivated from an ethical point of view? They cannot, of course; they demonstrate the very opposite of such an enclosure. There are no such biospheres that remain self-sustainable and protected; there are always leakages, and this is an important message that both novels deliver. The very idea of isolation is an illusion, and isolation implicitly suggests exclusion, which brings about unethical consequences, and external influences, which makes isolation delusionary. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard approaches the issues of isolation, exclusion, and ethics in relation to biospheres, notably artificial biospheres, and the end of history, in L’illusion de la fin from 1992. Baudrillard was never a radical environmentalist but in this book his arguments touch upon ecological matters, especially in the analysis of the project Biosphere 2, the artificial self-sustaining ecosystem erected in 1991 in Arizona, originally launched in order to prepare for space travels to Mars. Baudrillard’s approach is purely philosophical, but it has something significant to say about our relation to the “beyond,” the “future,” the physical world that surrounds us, and indirectly about DeLillo’s Zero K and Vonnegut’s Galápagos. Baudrillard’s critical attitude toward the project Biosphere 2 is revealed when he declares that those who created this artificial biosphere “have forgotten . . . that what binds living beings together is something other than the homeostatic equilibrium of a system: it is the cycle of metamorphoses,” which is a response to the fact that the experiment excluded certain species from participation and that the oxygen level dropped so much that one had to inject oxygen from the outside—all measures in order to sustain equilibrium (1994, 82). Baudrillard rejects the idea of the homeostasis of the artificial biosphere in favor of the necessity of change. What Biosphere 2 was trying

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to achieve was a “pure” environment, devoid of “germs, viruses, bacteria and scorpions,” which were “significantly eliminated” (81). There is first and foremost a moral conclusion to be drawn from this: “We ought not to entertain the illusion that we might separate the two, that we might cultivate good and happiness in a pure state and expel evil and sorrow as wastes. That is the terroristic dream of the transparency of good, which very quickly ends in its opposite” (82). Baudrillard concludes by claiming, “We must not reconcile ourselves with nature,” which should not be interpreted as indifference but rather as the acknowledgement of the otherness of nature (82). But it also signals a relativity, or rather an openness, concerning the moral evaluation of phenomena. Living entities cannot be judged according to pure moral categories, since Man is also, as Baudrillard claims, “a scorpion”: “It is the inseparability of good and evil which constitutes our true equilibrium, our true balance.” (82) This illusion, that we might expel evil from the human sphere, is equally shared by the makers of the Convergence in DeLillo’s novel. The project is legitimized by the morally good, by the prospects of an amelioration of the human being. There is of course a kind of evolutionary lapsus here, since the advancement of the human race presupposes that those who will accomplish these improvements in the future, that is, technicians, doctors, supervisors, and others connected to the project, all those who operate within the normal standards of temporality, have been at once capable of developing a supreme medical technology and, not least, have succeeded in transferring the idea of goodness through generations. It is obvious in DeLillo’s novel that those responsible for the Convergence, not least Jeffrey’s father Ross, are convinced that there will be a sufficient technology in place in the future in order to resurrect the cryopreserved human beings; but what about goodness? The ethical goals are firmly stated in the present, but will they stand the test of time? And is goodness at all possible without the presence of evil? Change, as well as the ejection of evil, is here incidentally, although not explicitly stated, the major threat to the project, as it was in Biosphere 2. Baudrillard’s expression “transparency of good,” and in particular the determination “transparency,” is central. By means of this concept, Baudrillard suggests the unfortunate, and impossible, discharge of otherness, and the unhappy obliteration of the “object” in a subject-object-dichotomy. Baudrillard argues that “nature is today becoming an interactive subject. It is ceasing to be an object . . . the ultimate danger is that . . . there is no other; there are only subjects. . . . All our problems today as civilized beings originate here: not in an excess of alienation, but a disappearance of alienation in favor of a maximum transparency between subjects” (80–81; my italics). For Baudrillard, the real problem is the prioritization of the subject, in much the same way as it is in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics. Levinas’s response to

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the prioritization of the subject is the introduction of an Other that cannot be assimilated by the subject. A face-to-face encounter radically questions the sovereignty and primacy of the subject, as he claims in Totalité et Infini: “calling into question of the same [which is Levinas’s expression for an ‘I’ that merges with itself] is brought about by the other” (2012, 43).1 Alienation, otherness, and withdrawal are inevitable dimensions of our experience of the world—the problem is that we have difficulties accepting it. This is an important argument for Morton as well, with reference to Husserl’s quite plain discovery that “[n]o matter how many times you turned around a coin, you never saw the other side as the other side. The coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible” (Morton 2013, 11). If Baudrillard is right, we tend to perceive the world in terms of “transparency,” which will admit of no “alien” elements. What will happen to the alien, “insignificant” existential forms in our world, those that are, as Baudrillard puts it, “significantly eliminated,” like “germs, viruses, bacteria and scorpions,” because they threaten our existence, or at least the success of the project Biosphere 2? What Baudrillard indicates is that if we extract the object, the other, we have removed the basis of an ethics. Contrary to these strategies of exclusion and elimination, the novels of De Lillo and Vonnegut confirm the presence and impact of microbiological life forms and other nonhuman entities—in short, they are inclusive and, additionally, they reinforce the interaction between humans and nonhumans. The care for marginalized forms, as well as nonhuman entities on a grander scale, is a powerful message in DeLillo’s and Vonnegut’s novels. On first sight, however, the subject of DeLillo’s novel is exceedingly anthropocentric: it is all about the advancement and survival of the human race. But the process of cryopreservation itself is a kind of inverted Frankensteinian experiment, as the organs (not least the center of “rationality,” the brain) are removed from the body, turning the human body into a thing-like existence, thereby suggesting an anti-anthropocentrism that radically challenges the sovereignty of the human being. The short interlude in DeLillo’s novel, titled “Artis Martineau,” is an ironic attempt to counteract this decentering of the human being. In this interlude we encounter the fragmented thoughts of Artis, now cryopreserved. Her brain, separated from the body, is trying to “rationalize” her present existential state. The whole interlude works as an embodiment of the rational human being, the Cartesian cogito, but devoid of the ergo sum; we have a “self” compelled to confide in faith and feelings: “I think I am someone. There is someone here and I feel it in me or with me.” (157) In this brain-monologue DeLillo demonstrates the consequences of a detachment and decontextualization of the human mind from its body as well as from its “world.” The rational cogito seems unable to operate reliably

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without a body; instead, faith and feelings are the sole pathways to existence, but an existence that is all but certain. In a sense, the Convergence appears to be the ultimate solution to our problems, at least as long as our brains are removed from our bodies and remain in a cryopreserved state. The attribute of the “human species” has been, since Descartes at least, cognition. What could have been the ideal resurrection, the celebration of pure rational thinking and the liberation from corporeal dimensions, is now transformed into radical doubts concerning existence itself. Obviously, the outcome of this brain-dialogue is not what the creators of the Convergence had in mind, but it is certainly DeLillo’s way to mediate the consequences (and failures) involved in engineering life and death, and the absolute necessity of res extensa, of bodies. In Vonnegut’s Galápagos the development of humanity follows a different trajectory. Evolution takes care of the flawed human race with its over-sized brains that appear as imperfections in the master plan of evolution. While the world suffers from a devastating financial crisis and the human beings somewhat later are infected by a virus that renders mankind sterile and thus extinct, as is hinted at in the text, a group of people sets out toward the Galápagos Islands on a nature cruise. On board the ship are ten people, naïvely unaware of the fatal destiny of mankind, among them the pregnant Hisako Hiruguchi, who later gives birth to a baby whose entire body is covered with fur, as a result of her mother’s exposure to radiation during the nuclear attack on Hiroshima 1945. This is a decisive moment, since mankind evolves due to this event and other odd circumstances. Slowly the human race adapts to the marine environment and has after a million years been transformed into beings that resemble furry sea lions. By now, the human brain’s cognitive abilities are completely attuned to fishing. If the blend of human and nonhuman in Zero K exists temporarily (when Artis’s vision is altered into a beastlike vision for a short period of time after an operation) and on an intellectual level (in a cognitive wrestling with an uncertain future), the combination is even more clearly and decisively articulated in Vonnegut’s novel, primarily because it affects the whole human race. What is even more conspicuous is the fact that evolution is not subjected to self-regulated laws: the transformation is caused by human intervention, by the invention of the atomic bomb and its effects on the DNA-sequence. Hiruguchi’s furry baby is the result of this disturbance of the sequence, which also testifies to the fact that even on a cellular level human beings—like all organisms—are unpredictable and vulnerable to external affects. The homeostatic equilibrium of an entity is easily disturbed. Metamorphosis, rather than homeostasis, is the standard procedure.

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In both DeLillo and Vonnegut systems are infected. On a general level, we experience a human intervention, a homo ex machina, involuntary (Vonnegut) as well as voluntary (DeLillo). In Vonnegut the human intrusion by means of the atomic bomb results in an explicit evolutionary divergence, and in DeLillo the intervention (in terms of the cryopreservation) engenders fantasies that suggest the proximity of human and animal life. Thus, the evolutionary system, as well as the system that prioritizes human supremacy, are deeply affected by these intrusions. At bottom, what both DeLillo and Vonnegut criticize is the image of man as the Apollonian man (the theoretical man, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense), the human being with an enormous brain (Vonnegut), or the future human being equipped with superior cognitive abilities (DeLillo). The human interventions might be considered as elements of evil, and in a paradoxical way, which reflects Baudrillard’s thesis, they are necessary ingredients in order to create a true equilibrium, a balance between good and evil. In Vonnegut, the incarnation of the good is the pregnant Hiruguchi, the innocent victim of radiation via her mother; in DeLillo, it is Artis, a woman condemned to death, a voluntary victim of technological manipulation. The interventions will in the end point in the direction of a reconciliation between humans and nonhumans. DeLillo’s Zero K does not offer any grand invitation to more-than-human life forms, as Vonnegut actually does, but rather cherishes the wrestling with Kantian categories like time and space. There are however suggestions that the “anthropological machine” in Giorgio Agamben’s sense—a machine that operates by dividing life into humans and not-humans—is entering a malfunctional state, which paves the way for a reconciliation between human life forms and animal entities (2004). Despite the anthropocentric strategies in the Convergence and the measures taken to improve the human race in the future, like the philologists creating an advanced new language, “[a] language that will enable us to express things we can’t express now, see things we can’t see now, see ourselves and others in ways that unite us, broaden every possibility” (DeLillo, 33), despite all this (that very well could turn out to be an ethical improvement), the characters are drawn toward the earth. As when Artis, in a conversation with her stepson Jeffrey, recalls an old memory that deals with the experience of watching a drop of water sliding down the inside of the curtain in the shower, waiting for the drop to transform, “to lengthen, to ooze”: “But it’s too clear and transparent to be a thing that oozes. I stand there getting smacked in the head while I tell myself there is no oozing. Ooze is mud or slime, it’s primitive life at the ocean bottom and it’s made chiefly of microscopic sea creatures.” (18) The transparent drop is at once an expression of an entity open on all sides, with no mysteries concealed, but also under way to transform (although this does not happen), in order to join the muddy, microbiological soup.

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The drop of water describes a trajectory downward, from the transparent clearness to a subaltern world at the bottom of the earth, which at least imaginatively drags Artis down to primitive life, as if exposed to an inverted evolutionary process. The site of the Convergence itself, with most of its facilities located underground, indicates a submergence through layers of time. The protagonist himself is affected by the temporal effects of evolution, suggested by the surrounding landscape and its “Precambrian rocks,” as if he is stuck within an evolutionary time scale (20). These passages remind us of the notion that primitive life is all around us, and also inside of us, affecting us deeply. But most often, in this novel, as well as Vonnegut’s, animal life is depicted as something ahead of us, as we shall see. As the moment of cryopreservation is approaching, Artis begins to contemplate her future and improved existence by connecting it to recollections of past experiences, among other things an eye operation she had some years ago, when her vision was temporarily and radically transformed right after the operation before it was restored to a normal state. Her vision was sharpened and animal-like, as she puts it: “Is this the world that only animals are capable of seeing? The world that belongs to hawks, to tigers in the wild” (46). This transfiguration is also what Artis imagines when she in some indefinite future will be returned from the cryopreservation, an entry into a world radically transformed by a renewed perception, as she puts it in a dialogue with Jeffrey, “I have every belief that I will reawaken to a new perception of the world.” / “The world as it really is.” / . . . “I will be reborn into a deeper and truer reality. Lines of brilliant light, every material thing in its fullness, a holy object” (47). Thus, human vision is unsatisfactory, almost contrary to the overall argument in the novel that prioritizes traditional human abilities, like cognition. Once again, this “promise of a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience” is identified with a perception that has the quality of something more than human: “Who will I be at the reawakening? Will my soul have left my body and migrated to another body somewhere? What’s the word I’m looking for? Or will I wake up thinking I’m a fruit bat in the Philippines? Hungry for insects” (48). Jeffrey fills in on the missing word: metempsychosis—a concept that is yet another evidence of the intimacy between human beings and animals that DeLillo brings to light in the midst of all the anthropocentric claims that result from the Convergence enterprise. Even though the evidences of a reconciliation between human and nonhumans are relatively few in DeLillo’s Zero K they occur at a critical moment—when death takes hold of us and when the world seems to fall apart. And when it does, the exclusive position of the human subject is all but incontestable. Metempsychosis opens on to a philosophical past that once defined the relation between man and animal in a more conciliatory mood. Gilbert Simondon notes that in pre-Socratic thinking, there are no essential differences in nature

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between the human soul, the animal soul, and the vegetal soul. This idea implies a fundamental equalization of the power imbalance between humans and nonhumans that has distinguished Western philosophy. Metempsychosis is simply an expression of “the identity of souls and their community in nature,” as Simondon declares (2011, 33). His conclusion is that “[w]hat comes out of the teachings of Antiquity is that what occurs in man and what occurs in animals is comparable. Comparable. Not identical but comparable” (58). The difference is rather a matter of “quantity” (quantities of intelligence, quantities of reason). Of course, my aim is not to let Artis’s imaginative ideas appear as reflections of a pre-Socratic mind, but rather to show that the equalization between existential forms is a lesson to be drawn from the past, before Socrates’s dualism corrupted the human mind (according to Simondon) and before Christian theology adopted the Greek conception of the immortal soul but with one conclusive addition: the individuality, the personality of the soul (Simondon 34). This latter modification is decisive, since it stakes out a position that to a great extent has become a fundamental element in Western philosophy: the significance of the individual, a strategy which does not solely work in favor of self-interest but in part also tends to rule out the community with nonhuman life forms. In Vonnegut, there are no ideas of sudden reawakenings from any cryopreservation, but rather the slow progression during a million years toward a revived perception (and cognition) which is exclusively adapted to catching fish. But Vonnegut is also, like DeLillo, aware of the fact that such a progression depends on processes invisible to the human eye. As Morton repeats on several occasions, “hyperobjects” are all around us, we are inside them, and, still, they are uncannily ungraspable. Over and over again, Morton asserts the significance of physical contact, that “[h]yperobjects force us to acknowledge the immanence of thinking to the physical” (2). Global warming is such an object, as is evolution, and perhaps the kingdoms of microbiological entities. Their temporal existence is not eternal but definitely challenging for the human time scale. Vonnegut keeps returning to the invisible creatures that inhabit, and actually dominate, the world—bacteria, virus, DNA, and other micro-organisms: “Truth be told, the planet’s most victorious organisms have always been microscopic. In all the encounters between Davids and Goliaths, was there ever a time when a Goliath won?” (1986, 168). The Goliaths are falling one by one in Vonnegut’s novel, but the Davids are doing all right as the novel progresses. The ongoing global financial crisis, which lurks behind the main story about the men and women about to embark on a nature cruise to the Galápagos Islands, elicits a series of acts of war. Peru declares war on Ecuador, and Peruvian airplanes attack various targets, one of which should have been the Bahía de Darwin, the cruising ship that finally

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sets out for the Galápagos Islands (but is mistaken for a troop-carrying vessel). However, the missile hits another ship, the San Mateo, anchored far from the port of Guayaquil, in the uninhabited marsh lands. The attack is however a failure, killing only fourteen crewmen and a lot of rats: “Mainly, though, it was an ineffectual assault on the very bottom of the food chain, the billions upon billions of micro-organisms who, along with their own excrement and the corpses of their ancestors, comprised the muck of the marsh. The explosion didn’t bother them much, since they weren’t all that sensitive to sudden starts and stops” (195). The Davids are unharmed, and would continue to exert their influence and thus interact with us, whether we are aware of it or not, but we can always observe the effects; the effects are in our face—and in this novel it is very much so on a literal level since the face of the human being is remolded. Of course, Vonnegut’s biological sensitivity is not restricted to the microscopic level. The setting of the novel, the Galápagos Islands, will alert us exactly to the consequences of evolution on a grander scale, on the Goliath level, embodied by the specific fauna of the islands, like the detailed descriptions of blue-footed boobies and their courtship dance, where the male birds attract the females by inflating a red balloon at the base of the throat, or the particular species of finches, living exclusively on the fictional island of Santa Rosalia, a species that has the odd habit of sucking blood, a characteristic that will inform one of the survivors, Mary Hepburn, on board the Bahía de Darwin about their exact location, since the little bird sucks the blood on her knuckles, thereby telling her where she has landed: “This bird just told me so” (123). What DeLillo’s and Vonnegut’s novels suggest is a growing sense of a reconciliation between human and nonhuman forms as we advance toward an end, being enmeshed in an intense limit-experience through which the human “I” itself is at stake, much like the illustrations from a thirteenth century Hebrew Bible that Agamben dwells on in L’aperto: L’uomo e l’animale. The illustrations depict eschatological visions, but what strikes Agamben is that the righteous, awaiting Salvation, are portrayed with animal heads. Why? Agamben speculates that the artist “intended to suggest that on the last day, the relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature” (2004, 3). Something similar occurs in DeLillo’s and Vonnegut’s novels. A new community, what Morton and Haraway calls coexistence or being-with, is visualized. Haraway is more explicit about what this coexistence, “companion species” or “becoming with,” implicate. Her definition opposes a “posthuman” or “posthumanist” stance, since what she gives priority to is “relationality,” “not getting beyond one troubled category for a worse one” (17). At bottom, her coexistential appeal reveals an ethical demand, an “act of respect,”

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an implication “[t]o hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem” (19). When Mary Hepburn sets her feet on Santa Rosalia and is greeted by the bloodsucking finch, it is a scene that unfolds the close interaction between humans and nonhumans. This intimate relation between animals and humans is a significant feature not only in the works of DeLillo and Vonnegut but in the American naturalism that they are modern representatives of. The interplay between the species was obviously far more observable during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, as Ryan Hediger points out in a reading of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, but the ejection of the nonhumans is a figment of the imagination: “It is only the forces of modernization, specialization, urbanization and the like that have made it possible to live under the illusion of human species independence” (2016, 6). No matter how anthropocentric the hyper-technological project of the Convergence appears to be, the animals intrude as potential co-creators in the future, and that might be a decisive difference between modern naturalists and earlier naturalists—that the latter group has a stronger focus on the hereditary dimension and evolution has determined our fate, which was one major trend in early American naturalism, according to Bert Bender (2005, 380). Vonnegut’s finch delivers an informative answer, but it is an answer that is evidence of a previous engagement; the message delivered requires an addressee with interpretative skills and an interest in and knowledge of physical reality. Mary Hepburn has, as a teacher of biology, the appropriate background—she is something of a “naturalist.” Thus, it is not a coincidence that Vonnegut’s initial dedication in Galápagos is addressed to Hillis L Howie, an “amateur naturalist,” who “had us sleep out-of-doors every night / and bury our dung, / and he taught us how to ride horses, / and he told us the names of many plants and animals, / and what they needed to do / in order to stay alive / and reproduce themselves” (1986, dedication). An intimacy with the earth might mean just that—to bury our dung, to have an insight into the processes of reproduction—since they are synergetic processes. This intimacy is of course on a general level an essential ingredient in naturalistic discourses, apart from the large-scale changes in society, as is pointed out by Katrin Horn and Katharina Motyl, who propose that in order “to arrive at a fuller assessment of literary naturalism and realism . . . it is equally necessary to pay close attention to their negotiation of the small, intimate concerns of life” (2021, vii). This intimacy, this general trust in and emphasis on the sensual dimensions of existence, are as much part of a naturalist discourse as is the deep time developments in Darwin’s theory of evolution. The lesson to be drawn from DeLillo’s as well as Vonnegut’s apocalyptical narratives is that there is always a dark side of all visible phenomena. Behind the renewed and superior vision of the human being there are perhaps the eyes

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of a hawk or a tiger; behind the smooth skin of human beings there is always a furry coat—behind everything visible lurks evolution and the kingdoms of viruses and bacteria. Still, one may question the choice of vocabulary here: Is “behind” the appropriate word? Does the spatial preposition “behind” reflect the relationship between humans and nonhumans in DeLillo and Vonnegut? Of course, to a certain extent it does, but this spatial interpretation neglects the temporality that is implicated in “behind” in terms of the evolutionary progression. “Behind” measured as a “temporal” quality is also something “before,” a previous state in the evolution, in a Darwinian sense. When Paul Civello claims that “[h]uman carnality, humanity’s biological affinity with the brute, was one of the most frightful aspects of Darwinism” (30), it is not just a question of human character and the fear of moral inferiority but also a question of temporality, that is, the fear of retrogression, of being thrown back into an animal state. And this is possibly one thing that might separate modern representatives of naturalism from the earlier ones, namely that modern writers treat animality as something that lies in front of you, like in Vonnegut’s playful novel, in which the gradually developed animality is the solution, what will hopefully become of us, in the future. In a similar way, Artis’s reflections on the proximity of human and nonhumans are partly oriented toward the future. Of course, for Morton and Haraway, this time to come must not be regarded as something distant, it is rather something right in front of us, something outside, an otherness, an alien, a nonhuman entity that we interact with. In order to acknowledge this alienated dimension, we must hold on to the “object,” as Baudrillard claims, and stay with the trouble, as Haraway says, even though this object seemingly radiates evil and puts us in jeopardy, and even though it means that we have to accept the act of burying “our dung.” NOTE 1. Of course, Levinas’s ethics seems inappropriate in relation to nonhuman existences, as Jacques Derrida notes in L’animal que donc je suis when he refers to Levinas’s tentative answer to John Llewelyn’s question “Does the animal have a face?” (Derrida 2008, 107–108). Still, Levinas’s initial openness to an outside, to an “Other,” which makes the issue of subjectivity secondary, is still a prerequisite for an ethical approach that is grounded in the recognition of otherness.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. L’aperto: L’uomo e l’animale. Torino: Bollati Boringheri. Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Baudrillard, Jean. 1992. L’illusion de la fin ou La grève des événements. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. The Illusion of the End. Translated by Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bender, Bert. 2004. Evolution and the “Sex Problem”: American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism. Kent: Kent State University Press. Bender, Bert. 2005. “Darwin, Science, and Narrative.” In A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914. Edited by Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Civello, Paul. 1994. American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth-Century Transformations. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. DeLillo, Don. 2016. Zero K. London: Picador. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by David Willis. New York: Fordham University Press. Garrard, Greg. 2011. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hediger, Ryan. 2016. “Becoming with Animals.” Studies in American Naturalism 11, no. 1 (Summer): 5–22. Horn, Katrin; Motyl, Katharina. 2021. “Intimate Knowledge in American Naturalism and Realism.” Studies in American Naturalism 16, no. 1 (Summer): vii–xxiii. Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2015. Face à Gaïa. Huit conferences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Levinas, Emmanuel. 2012. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press. Lundblad, Michael. 2013. The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pizer, Donald. 1966. Realism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Vonnegut, Kurt. 1986. Galápagos. London: Grafton Books.

Chapter 15

Writing What Remains Naturalism and the Nonhuman after Nature in Sheri S. Tepper’s Plague of Angels Trilogy Stephanie Studzinski

INTRODUCTION While naturalism dates to the late nineteenth century, what remains consistent is its resilience and slipperiness—its lack of core adherents, proponents, finite period, or historical constraints. Within literary criticism, realism and romanticism have been used to counter-define naturalism; however, these arguments are often imbued with a moralism which seeks to differentiate good from bad literature as is the case with many definitions which endeavor to distinguish science fiction (SF) from fantasy and romance. In this chapter, naturalism is considered not solely as a technique or movement, but as an authorial sensibility and philosophical position which shares key features with philosophically oriented SF. In particular, the SF of American author Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) reveals the ways in which SF can utilize a naturalist sensibility and themes to explore the human condition within the context of the Anthropocene and the nonhuman turn. While Tepper’s SF incorporates a mélange of genres including fantasy and camp, this does not exclude her work from naturalism nor her ecoapocalyptic futures from the realm of scientific probability. Tepper’s SF shares a fundamental focus with naturalism which is not surprising given that as Eric Carl Link (2013) asserts, SF and naturalism are “closely connected at a deeper, intellectual level,” and both “ask the same basic question: what can science tell us about the human condition and the relationship between humans and 245

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their environment?” (3). Tepper (1998) explores this question and similarly describes the purpose of contemporary SF as “to try to solve problems” (4). However, solving problems is deceptively simplistic given that her SF addresses the human condition, global concerns like climate change, and future interstellar conflicts (4). More specifically, Tepper’s SF is what Paul Civello (1994) terms “postmodern naturalism” due to its engagement with contemporary developments (2). The ecoapocalypses which predominate Tepper’s SF are extrapolations based on her personal observations and scientists’ predictions (Tepper 2008). However, Tepper’s SF extrapolates beyond the contemporary to consider futurity and is doubly postmodern in its suspicion, critique, and supplanting of grand narratives. Despite this postmodern outlook and emphasis on the future, by considering correlations between how nineteenth century naturalists such as Émile Zola and Frank Norris conceive of naturalism and how Tepper envisions her own writing, it becomes clear that their writing shares a philosophical foundation. In this way, Tepper’s SF encapsulates both the origins and futurity of naturalism by sharing in the philosophical project of early naturalists and simultaneous postmodernizing naturalist themes to accommodate contemporary and future societal concerns. In Tepper’s SF, naturalist themes like determinism, the brute within, heredity versus environment, and survival become expansive and shift their focus from individual or class concerns to species-wide, global, and even, interstellar concerns to confirm her hypothesis that the grand narratives of human progress, mastery, and hyperseparation are endangering the future of humanity. While Tepper’s SF oeuvre manifests a naturalist ethos and thematic unity, for concision, Tepper’s Plague of Angels trilogy, which consists of A Plague of Angels (1993), The Waters Rising (2010), and Fish Tails (2014), will be examined in regard to how this trilogy evidences Tepperian postmodern naturalism: Determinism manifests on a global scale wherein nascent societies struggle in the aftermath of cyclic ecoapocalypses on dying planets. The brute within is similarly reframed wherein the grand narratives of human progress, mastery, and hyperseparation become philosophical vestiges of a primitive past yet to be overcome. The heredity vs. environment paradigm is similarly refocused wherein the aforementioned grand narratives symbolize a kind of cultural heredity which opposes the holistic narratives of nonhumans who symbolize an active, intelligent, and embodied environment. Survival is similarly rescaled to consider humanity en masse. A closer analysis of how Tepper utilizes these themes will be examined chronologically within the trilogy.1 Overall, the trilogy concludes that humanity needs to become more critically self-reflective and reconsider what it means to be human in order to

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become philosophically, if not physically, entangled with the nonhuman and thereby, create a future for humanity Tepper further distills and simplifies this conclusion in a parable appended to Fish Tails which is all the more poignant given that this is the last novel published before her death in 2016. In the parable, Tepper identifies kindness as a simple step toward rewriting the grand narratives her novels problematize. Intriguingly, this message of kindness goes unheeded within the parable and the world of Fish Tails, leading readers to question why a concept so seemingly simple and beneficial is considered too difficult or undesirable to practice. According to the trilogy, humanity’s unreflective adherence to tradition, naïve propensity for myths in lieu of empirical evidence, and predeliction for short-term solutions and quiescence are significant barriers to the potentially transformative power of kindness as a modus vivendi. Tepper’s trilogy, as a literary experiment, proves that these need to be overcome in order for humanity to have a future. TEPPERIAN POSTMODERN NATURALISM: HYPOTHESES OF SURVIVAL Tepper’s SF is an example of postmodern naturalism in which her philosophical literary experiments determine why, how, and if humanity will survive and evolve physically and philosophically. Unsurprisingly, Tepper (1991) prefers SF as a genre because “it throws new light on the human condition” (69). While Tepper’s writing is focused on the future and is postmodern in style, its philosophical underpinnings have much in common with Zola’s conception of European naturalism. When Zola (1893) explicates his vision of an experimental scientific literature, he notes that “[t]he experimental problem reduces itself to this: To forsee and direct phenomena” (24).2 Tepper (1998) similarly describes her own writing process wherein she examines the same social issues in each novel, but uses “a certain point of view” or specific “angle” in each book to consider how the outcomes vary in accordance with changes in variables (5). Each of Tepper’s SF novels models various social and environmental conditions to examine how societies and their futures are affected as variables change in order to foresee and prevent deadly outcomes. Anikó Sohár (2017) also acknowledges Tepper’s consistency, noting that she “tend[s] to write about the same questions again and again, using different viewpoints, scrutinizing all aspects from diverse angles” (125). The questions Tepper’s SF routinely considers are as follows: What kind of future is humanity most likely to create? What does this reveal about the human condition? How can humanity create a better future for all? And, what prevents humanity from doing so?

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Tepper’s most well-known work, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), reverse engineers a post-ecoapocalyptic society which creates harmony and social stability—at a cost. Stavia, a young woman who narrates the novel, recognizes the imperfections in her culture, which is likened to Hades, but also recognizes that prior civilizations were even more dangerous and less equitable—especially to women. In the novel, a global ecoapocalypse was caused by an extreme androcentric culture which Women’s Country, the new civilization, intentionally resurrects in the form of a warrior cult in order to contain its dangerous ideals. Women’s Country is founded in opposition to warrior culture and holds opposing values, namely equality, education, productivity, and nonviolence. Tepper challenges readers to consider the grand narratives which create this future, what kinds of alternate narratives might prevent it, and what might be worth sacrificing to create a more equitable future for all. As a literary experiment, this novel concludes that when tribalism, violence against women and the environment, and an embrace of emotion over reason dominate, catastrophic outcomes ensue. Tepper’s SF oeuvre further develops and nuances this conclusion as will be examined in the Plague of Angels trilogy. While Zola aspired to scientific objectivity, Tepper embraces a many-faceted subjectivity which uses diverse nonhuman storytelling and juxtaposed narratives which refute the possibility of a universal or unbiased scientific subject position. Accordingly, Tepper’s writing amalgamates seemingly incongruous elements, including an “exuberant imagination” coupled with “scientific rigor” (Kelso 1997, 1). Imagination is essential because as Joan Gordon (2008) explains, “[s]cience Fiction allows us to imagine that we see through the eyes of the other—the other sex, the other gender, the other social group, the other species, the other kind of sentience” (192). Tepper uses imagination to bring an abundance of diverse intelligent alien, animal, and vegetal others to life; for example, in Fish Tails, Balytaniwassinot, aka Fixit, is an extraterrestrial galactic officer who is primarily vegetal, the second of five genders, and prefers the pronouns “he/it/they” (676). Through her imaginative SF, Tepper consistently challenges the boundary between the human and nonhuman, making it apt to read her work in the context of the nonhuman turn because both assert that humans and nonhumans are essentially indistinguishable (Grusin 2015, x). For Tepper, nonhumans are significant because humanity’s future is determined by how nonhumans are valued and storied which in turn reveals the human condition. Tepper (2002) further elaborates on the significance of nonhumans explaining that as a result of destroying biodiversity, humanity will have “less chance to communicate with unlike beings.” According to Tepper (2002), communication with nonhumans is essential because of their “new

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perspective” which invariably challenges predominant human perspectives. While the content grouped under the nonhuman can be traced to nine distinct theoretical developments, one of the uniting qualities is the nonhuman stance “against human exceptionalism” (Grusin 2015, x). Accordingly, Tepper’s SF also demonstrates the need to animalize humans by recognizing the ways in which humanity is entangled with and enriched by nonhumans. In A Plague of Angels, Talk Elk, a human, describes this saying, “Man must recognize his animal heritage before he can humanize himself” (347). Tepper’s texts consistently challenge and deconstruct the boundary between human and nonhuman, exploring the humanness of nonhumans and the inhumanity of humans who routinely dehumanize and harm others. In Tepperian worlds, being human means possessing intelligence, empathy, and the ability to communicate. For example, in Tepper’s Six Moon Dance (1998), Haraldson, an interplanetary leader, asserts that humanity is “defined in terms of intelligence, civility, and the pursuit of justice rather than by species or form” (31). The result is that “[c]ertain Earthian creatures other than mankind were immediately rendered human . . . gaining the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions thereby, and some extremist individuals and groups who had previously paraded themselves as human were disabused of this notion” (31). While Six Moon Dance contains the only formal declaration of the humanity of nonhumans, most of Tepper’s SF explores this informally by examining how individual protagonists grapple with the humanness of nonhumans and the inhumanity of unethical humans. To reify this concept, Tepper’s texts include many scenarios where humanity is declared no longer human and nonhumans who possess not only sentience and language, but higher ethical standards become human, meaning fully valued lifeforms.3 These judgments are significant because as Gordon (2008) notes, drawing on Derrida’s work on animots, “once the line between human and animal is blurred, it becomes difficult to shrug off one’s ethical responsibility to the one who looks back” (193). Whereas Gordon focuses on gaze, Tepper’s nonhumans not only look back but speak out, mock, and violently oppose humanity in reaction to how humanity fails to recognize these nonhumans simply because it is so unimaginable and contrary to their beliefs. However, in Tepper’s SF, human exclusionary beliefs are revealed to be myths which humanity tells itself in order to reinforce its own sense of mastery. Once identified as myths, humanity is no longer the sole narrator nor exclusive possessor of intelligence, language, ethics, or the ability to empathize and communicate. Similarly, early naturalist novels tend to narrate the lives of unlikely protagonists and tell stories which challenge predominant social norms. Seminal novels within American literary naturalism, like Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Norris’s McTeague (1899), and Theodore

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Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), focus on the lives of one or more individuals who represent entire classes of underprivileged and underrepresented people. However, as with the Anthropocene, the scale of Tepper’s postmodern naturalism expands to a glocal level, which examines the fate of all life by exploring cultural narratives through representative individuals.4 In Norris’s “The Novel with a Purpose” (1890), he posits that a novel “proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man” and reveals deeper truths (249). Both Norris and Tepper attempt to clarify or prove aspects of the human condition by examining grand narratives and revealing hidden truths. Both also refer to all of humanity as man. However, Tepper uses man or mankind as pastiche, implicitly critiquing its inappropriateness by recontextualizing and juxtaposing it with capable women and intelligent, communicative nonhumans. Tepper also uses man figuratively as a manifestation of the brute within as a historical legacy and tool of oppression. Man is also a literal critique because the context for its usage is typically a condemnation of the errors of humanity en masse, which Tepper asserts largely belong to men, for example, the male figures who have served disproportionally historically (and presently) as global legislators, leaders, and narrators. Tepper consistently disrupts readers’ assumptions regarding who or what is human by condensing all Homo sapiens into the term humanity, referring to species of aliens as races (e.g., The Margarets), and categorizing nonhumans as peoples (e.g., The Family Tree [1997]), wherein readers are intentionally misled into believing that the nonhuman narrators are human. While in the aforementioned quote, Norris references race impulses, conjuring meanings offensive to contemporary readers, he also captures the scale and melioristic thrust of Tepper’s writing. Like many naturalists, Tepper’s purpose is to reveal unpalatable truths and create social change. In this regard, Tepper (1998) envisions herself similarly to Norris—as a writer on an “intellectual quest” searching for “relative truths” (38). Norris (1890) further describes the “novel with a purpose” as “a preaching novel” but one which does so artfully—not by becoming a “pamphleteer” or “polemicist” (266). Ironically, Tepper is both. She wrote educational pamphlets and her SF is known for its didacticism: protagonists often moralize and some novels possess extended passages (even pages) devoted to explicating Tepper’s social and political agendas.5 Tepper (2008) acknowledges this, saying that she is “accused of being a writer who preaches. Actually, I’m a preacher who writes!” While many find this unnecessarily disruptive, for Tepper it is essential because she believes that humanity will self-destruct, and it is through her novels that she intends to foster societal change.

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Accordingly, Tepper’s SF consistently examines dire, global events and is overall, markedly deterministic: ecoapocalypses frequently occur as premises, anecdotal histories, contemporaneous events, or a combination thereof. This is not unusual since naturalism itself has long been associated with pessimism or “pessimistic determinism” (Pizer 2020, 8). In fact, George Becker (1963) characterizes the basic naturalist plot as a “man caught in a net from which there can be no escape and degenerating under those circumstances” (35). While Tepper’s postmodern naturalism shares this pessimistic determinism, it is expanded to a global scale wherein the Earth, as a protagonist, is caught in the net of anthropogenic ecoapocalypses and degenerates. Throughout Tepper’s SF, barren planets are revealed to be Earths made unidentifiable through toxic, radioactive landscapes, mass death, the collapse of civilizations, and/or the rise of genetically altered nonhumans designed to replace extinct lifeforms.6 The dominance and recurrence of ecoapocalypses implies that for contemporary readers, these events are already radically transforming the world. When asked why she consistently creates these dire futures, Tepper (2008) explains that it is because “[w]e’re living in it. . . . Did you think it was still in the future. . . . How do I hold myself there? I read the daily paper. How do I recover? I don’t.” Yet, as prevalent as these themes are, Tepper writes to prevent these futures in the hope that they may not be fully realized. Accordingly, Tepper’s protagonists do not degenerate as characters in early naturalism tend to do. Instead, Tepperian protagonists grow increasingly resilient and ecologically entangled—an example she hopes humanity will follow—as the central protagonists do in the Plague of Angels trilogy. This trilogy is Tepper’s (2001) last warning that humanity, which she satirizes as “homo so-called sapiens,” may soon cease to exist (9). The Plague of Angels trilogy completes Tepper’s True Game duodecology, which spans Tepper’s career. This trilogy will be examined as a literary experiment with a social purpose which postmodernizes naturalist themes to prove an ecoontological claim regarding teleology: to survive, humans must evolve. The trilogy reexamines the anthropocentric presumptions Herbert Spenser’s survival of the fittest has come to manifest by using naturalist themes to question the degree of humanity’s own humanness. To do so, Tepper creates nonhumans who demonstrate intelligence, the ability to communicate, ethics, and the ability and desire to cohabitate with unlike others. In the trilogy, humanity’s propensity for tribalism, violence, uncritical belief, preference for cultural myths and emotional decisions, blind adherence to tradition, and intellectual laziness perpetuate deadly grand narratives even as these narratives destroy the Earth and cause mass death.

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THE PLAGUE OF ANGELS TRILOGY: NARRATIVIZING THE NONHUMAN WITHIN POSTMODERN NATURALISM The True Game duodecology consists of four sets of trilogies which follow a diverse cast of human and nonhuman protagonists who attempt to save humanity by changing it philosophically via engagement with the nonhuman.7 The twelve texts of the True Game operate as bookends for Tepper’s writing career by incorporating her first published novel King’s Blood Four (1983) and the final Plague of Angels trilogy, which includes A Plague of Angels, The Waters Rising, and Fish Tails. Within the duodecology, the first three trilogies make up the True Game ennealogy and each trilogy focuses on a single protagonist: Peter, Mavin, and Jinian. The ennealogy trilogies overlap chronologically, allowing human and nonhuman characters to provide their own perspective as events are narrated multiple times by multiple narrators. The Plague of Angels trilogy similarly juxtaposes multiple human and nonhuman perspectives, but it does so continuously (e.g., in The Waters Rising and Fish Tails the nonhuman ul xaolat, a machine with artificial intelligence, frequently interrupts the narrative, selectively interprets and reports information, and mocks, manipulates, and murders humans). Superficially, there are more differences than similarities between the ennealogy and the final trilogy. The ennealogy follows different characters on a different planet, is written and organized differently, and shares minimal crossover elements. For example, ennealogy protagonists Jinian, Silkhands, and Bartelby only appear in Fish Tails and do so peripherally and anecdotally via metaphysical dreamlike manifestations and historical archives.8 Despite their considerable differences, the duodecology as a whole explores questions central to the human condition via naturalist themes. The most significant connection between the ennealogy and the trilogy is that their respective planetary spirits agree to mutually aid each other. The ennealogy takes place on a planet where Lom, a planetary spirit, resides whereas the trilogy takes place on a dying Earth. In Fish Tails, it is explained that the Earth spirit uses a wormhole to ask Lom for help because humanity was “destroying the planet. Lom didn’t have the wherewithal to provide help, so it reached out to another world—a huge ocean planet,” which began inundating the Earth with water (487). The Earth is subsequently flooded to destroy what nonhumans refer to as the human plague which has decimated planetary biodiversity, thereby weakening the planet spirit. From Lom and the Earth spirits’ nonhuman perspectives, humanity is a plague because biodiversity is essential for the planetary spirit to survive and fulfill their own

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purpose: to make discoveries about the universe through interactions with nonhumans and unlike others.9 Tepper’s trilogy demonstrates how naturalist themes and even early naturalist philosophy are not only still relevant but provide meaningful ways to engage with contemporary concerns. Tepper’s trilogy also demonstrates that naturalist texts can meaningfully incorporate elements of fantasy, such as articulate and ethically superior nonhumans. Within the Plague of Angels trilogy, an expansive determinism manifests throughout as cyclic ecoapocalypses which will not cease until the cultural narratives which cause them change. The brute within is similarly reframed on a species level to examine humanity’s problematic grand narratives of human progress, mastery, and hyperseparation, which characters are continuously challenged to recognize and overcome along with the human foibles which perpetuate them. To recognize the brute within is to problematize hierarchal ontological stances which have traditionally, exclusively valued a small subset of human and nonhuman life. This hierarchy is further analyzed within the heredity versus environment paradigm as Tepper examines grand narratives as kind of cultural heredity which is challenged by an active and intelligent environment embodied by nonhumans. The trilogy also demonstrates how ordinary human foibles inadvertently support dangerous grand narratives of human progress, mastery, and hyperseparation which Tepper portrays as not only outdated, but deadly. A Plague of Angels A Plague of Angels centers on Abasio, a reformed gangster, Blue, a speaking horse, and Olly, an archetypal Orphan and partial nonhuman, who attempt to save all remaining life on a post-ecoapocalyptic Earth from Ellel, an archetypal “Wicked Witch” who plans to use remnants of technology to become a ruthless global dictator (13). They succeed, as Tepper’s protagonists always do, and the novel concludes with a revelation which challenges the grand narratives of human mastery, progress, and hyperseparation: the global population has been decimated not because humanity colonized other planets, but because most people died in an anthropogenic ecoapocalypse. Sylvia Kelso (1997) describes this revelation as Tepper further “debunking an SF staple” to continue her “indictment of anthropocentric Western thinking” by revealing that “the supposed galactic diaspora never happened” (26). Humanity’s self-destruction exposes the brute within which Olly mocks as humanity’s “endless,” “heroic myths” which “make man the hero, for man always has to be the hero” (557). Tepper’s novel not only challenges but rewrites these narratives as a kind of dangerous cultural heredity revealed through engagement with nonhumans. Accordingly, Olly, who is half-human and half-nonhuman, is the hero who sacrifices herself to save all life on Earth.

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The eponymous plague of angels is three extraterrestrial nonhumans who attempt to reform humanity through suffering. These angels name themselves after humanity’s worst failures: Hunagor (Hunger), Werra (War), and Seoca (Sickness). Their names allude to the Four Biblical Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, and they are similarly harbingers of a final judgement. However, this judgement will be pronounced by nonhumans. In an ecoapocalyptic vision, Abasio sees the “Earth itself endangered by man. Man himself a plague, to be attacked like a plague, to be killed by whatever means the thrones [angels] could find” (540). Part of the reason humanity is a plague is because of the belief that humans are “the only intelligent beings” and their “reality is the only one” (464). Tepper mocks this grand narrative through the creation of nonhuman angels who are neither wholly anthropomorphic nor benevolent. The character Arakny, a librarian and historian, remarks that “if you consider what an angel really might be, you get a different idea. A creature dreadfully powerful and awesomely old, for example. A creature not necessarily at all manlike. A terrible creature, perhaps” (549). These angels attempt to reform humanity by forcing humanity to examine the brute within by exacerbating preventable human suffering and death. However, humanity baffles Hunagor, Werra, and Seoca by ignoring even the extreme suffering of humans and nonhumans alike. When Hunagor asks why humanity has failed to learn from the famines, Abasio critiques cultural narratives which reinforce the importance of progeny as essential “proofs of virility” and as a “way of controlling women” by limiting their access to education. Abasio also blames the financial incentive as capitalists profit from wars and the inability of elected leaders to make unpopular decisions, which further exacerbates suffering. Due to these factors, Abasio concludes that “men will not solve a problem unless they can find an ‘acceptable’ solution, and there are no acceptable solutions for some problems” (555).10 Through this dialogue, Tepper implicitly challenges readers to consider why famines exist in the reader’s world. Meanwhile, Tepper’s angels are making deadly choices, which further exacerbate preexisting problems. The difference being that the angels’ attempt to provoke humanity into solving its own problems. For Tepper, it is the act of recognizing the brute within and overcoming it, which is a precondition for humanity’s survival. However, humanity in the novel chooses instead a kind of blind optimism, believing that it is unnecessary to act. Ironically, given that humanity systematically devalues nonhumans, humanity believes a more advanced nonhuman power (god, technology, or both) will eventually provide readymade solutions to human problems. The second angel, Hunagor, asks Abasio why humanity who claims to be “sapiens,” chooses “such easy belief to the hard choices intelligence requires” (556). For Tepper, critical thinking means continual change on

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both individual and cultural levels, leaving no room for unexamined belief or tradition. However, these hard choices concern complex issues like what are basic human rights and who can access them? Abasio reflects on humanity’s uncritical assumptions and blames a propensity for blind optimism, explaining that “man believes what man wants to believe, and he always wants to believe the next time will be different” (556). Abasio further reflects that cultural narratives which are installed in young children are to blame, saying that the “end is in the beginning. If children are taught to ignore their minds and merely believe, grown men will never do otherwise” (556). Belief is used here as a catchall for any kind of thinking which is diametrically opposed to critical thinking. The assertion that adults cannot change is disheartening especially considering Tepper’s readers are typically adults. This might be another element meant to shock readers into reconsidering their own brute within and the influence of cultural heredity. The third angel, Werra, asks why humanity failed to learn from the exacerbated wars and pestilence, and “why it was necessary, finally, for the plague of man to be controlled by the plague of angels, in order to save the earth” (556). Subsequent novels in this trilogy reinforce and develop this idea that from a nonhuman perspective, humanity is a plague. Abasio again answers that humanity chooses easy belief and blind optimism, for example, believing “war was merely local or temporary or justifiable” (556). Abasio notes that “every faction found some part of the solution unacceptable” (556). Again, it is because no elected leader would risk losing support that no action was taken. Accordingly, the result was that humanity “would not stop destroying the earth until he was forced to do so, for he was reared in the belief he was more important than the earth itself, and the end is in the beginning” (556). The end is in the beginning reinforces Abasio’s earlier statement and acts as a metaphor for the ways in which humanity as a species remains mired in primitive beliefs as is evidenced by cycles of ecoapocalypses. A blind adherence to the past and its legacies of exclusion (heredity) and injustice and an unwillingness to recognize the dangers of anthropocentric exceptionalism (a brute within) prevent humanity from constructively reacting and preventing these deadly outcomes. The novel suggests that humanity requires more critical knowledge of its grand narratives, history, and itself as a species—something nonhumans provide. In this novel, there is an intertextual folktale wherein the Changing Woman attempts to aid humanity by allowing humans and nonhumans to communicate. The folktale asserts that when the world originally began “men and animals had talked the same language, so Changing Woman said she would make them speak the same language again” so that they can better coexist (36). Coyote, a speaking coyote, reflects on this saying that while all coyotes can speak not all can “talk human” (292). Coyote draws attention to

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the cultural narrative which asserts that human speech is the only meaningful speech. Upon discovering speaking animals, Arakny speculates that “they’ve been created to talk to men. So men will stop killing them” (428). By speaking, these animals challenge humanity to reconsider hyperseparation because as Coyote explains, even though “intelligence is a continuum . . . most men have traditionally believed themselves to be the only intelligent living things” (293–94). While Tepper’s nonhumans disrupt and rewrite this grand narrative, these narratives are so deeply ingrained that characters believe them instead of their own senses. When Arakny first speaks with Coyote, she questions how Coyote can speak with “that tongue, that shape of jaw” since his “mouth isn’t made for speaking” (382). In return, Coyote insults her, asserting that while her mouth was not made for singing and any “bird can do it better, but some of you learn to do it nonetheless. So I learned to talk, with difficulty. Have the courtesy not to tell me what I can and cannot do!” (382). This humorous exchange highlights not only nonhuman intelligence and communication, but how deeply ingrained exclusionary ideals encapsulated by the brute within can be. Tepper’s nonhumans further demonstrate how tenuous the concept of a completely hyperseparate humanity is and how quickly it deteriorates if nonhumans possess intelligence or language. Coyote reflects that when it is suggested that animals possess intelligence, these people are “accused of anthropomorphizing animals. . . . Man has been reluctant to animalize humans, too, even though he’ll never get society to work until he does!” (294). Animalizing humans is an essential part of Tepperian philosophy: any nonhuman can become human while any human can become nonhuman if the requirements are not solely taxonomic. Coyote asserts that he and other nonhumans speak to “explain things to men” and “convince them of our intelligence, our brotherhood” (427). Abasio similarly concludes that “it would be harder to kill off a whole species if you were accustomed to having conversations with it. Easier if you depersonalize it first” (428). This is also a pun on depersonalize because nonhumans are often referred to by Tepper as persons, that is, human. Olly reflects that humanity’s anthropocentric and exclusionist beliefs are a kind of protection against “having to learn to communicate with others, who think differently than we do” (461). However, for Tepper communication with nonhumans is key because of their different perspectives. The novel concludes that humanity needs to be more critically aware of and reflective about grand narratives and their consequences. By exacerbating suffering, the angels inadvertently reveal how deeply entrenched humanity is in dangerous narratives.

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The Waters Rising Whereas A Plague of Angels reads as a standalone novel, The Waters Rising and Fish Tails could be a single text. The Waters Rising takes place shortly after A Plague of Angels and follows Abasio, Blue, and Xulai, a partially nonhuman woman, on their journey to preserve what life remains on an Earth so scarred by humanity that the moon now appears green and “dead in its rotting light” and ocean levels are rising catastrophically (153). In terms of who will survive on this increasingly aquatic Earth, humans self-select: “Only those who could change would parent the new race; only the sea would test who could change. . . . They had to be willing to accept the change of shape in order to prove to the people of the sea that they were worth saving” (455). Xulai and Abasio make it clear that humans would need to materially manifest their philosophical change by changing their physical form “even into something some people considered repulsive, in order to convince the Sea People they were worth saving!” (456). The Sea People are aquatic nonhumans and most are reluctant to accept humanity because humanity has a legacy of destroying habitats and biodiversity. This novel is even more deterministic in that characters ominously allude to the reader’s world as the “Before Time,” as in just prior to an ecoapocalypse (23). After the Before Time, the Earth was decimated by “the ravenous appetites of too many humans; its ecosystems had been destroyed, its oceans were all but dead, its atmosphere dilapidated so that its sun bathed the surface with deadly radiation” (386). The situation was so dire that “the sea dwellers and even some land dwellers welcomed the Big Kill,” another global mass mortality event (386). The Big Kill resulted in the mass extinction of nearly all life and was preceded by the “Big Fat epidemic” and then “the mass starvation, the barking asthma, the lethal skin diseases, then the rich retreating to enclosed redoubts with filtered air, filtered water” (386). In response, the poor who were excluded use their physical mass to sabotage the refuges of the rich: The “air intakes were blocked with bodies. Solar power did no good when millions laid themselves down on the grids” (386). Again, as Abasio asserts, the end is in the beginning: The fact that a majority are excluded dooms the wealthy who only tried to save themselves. This dark vision of social justice brings to light the probability that only the extremely affluent, who consume the most, may survive a global ecoapocalypse largely of their own creation. This example also reinforces the idea that the devaluation of human and nonhuman others will be the downfall of humanity. After the Big Kill, the remaining human survivors enter a new dark age, losing the “ability to read, write, or build” and living as nocturnal cave dwellers (386). This new dark age is subsequently referred to as the “Time When No One Moved Around” (386). In this iteration, the future of humanity

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is to devolve, which counters narratives of human progress and the belief that technology or a deity will solve humanity’s problems. This future devolution is juxtaposed with the knowledge that previously humanity “did marvels” but “none of these marvels profited the human race” because humanity had failed to evolve philosophically, only technologically (386). This is further evidenced by the way the brute within is materialized as deadly cyborgs who literally and figuratively execute deadly grand narratives. The primary antagonist of the novel is Alicia, one of a handful of cyborgs designed to eliminate undesirable life. These cyborgs are programmed to value what each programmer values (e.g., a single religion, culture, or political party). This idiosyncratic and narrow programming reveals the predominant tribalist tendencies which center on gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, religious values, and so on. Abasio decries tribalism saying that these people were intentionally destroying others in order to “make room for their own kind” (386). Accordingly, the programming became increasingly narrow and arbitrary as time progresses and eventually the cyborgs were programmed to kill any lifeform (human or nonhuman) who thought anything other than specific preapproved thoughts. The resulting Big Kill illustrates the deadly potential of exclusionary grand narratives and reinforces that humanity needs to be more critically aware of how it defines and values itself. Through the Big Kill, the novel demonstrates the disastrous consequences that occur if there is only one way of living, thinking, or being. The protagonists’ journey throughout the land convincing others to choose to merge with the nonhuman and embrace a future with unlike others. Fish Tails Fish Tails centers on Abasio, Blue, and Xulai as they continue their journey and attempt to convince any remaining humans to evolve by accepting a new human condition symbolized by gaining a fish tail. As the Earth is increasingly inundated with water, they become anxious “to get on with the job of the human race,” which is convincing humans to merge with the nonhuman philosophically and physically and thereby become more human by becoming more ecologically entangled and aware (100). In the novel, humans can choose to become partially nonhuman and thus Homocephalo-sapiens or Homo Aquaticus. Or, if humans choose to embrace the brute within, they can choose to remain the same and perish. This is hyperbolically represented in a cult known as the Lorpists who believe in the material wholeness and perfection of the human body. Lorpists will murder any human or nonhuman whose body is deemed less than physically perfect in order to prevent their physical inadequacy from offending god.

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Tepper’s texts probe cultural narratives with ecoapocalyptic outcomes (e.g., climate change denial and religious dogma, which promote unchecked population growth regardless of the environment’s ability to support the population). Fish Tails reinforces the determinism of the previous novels by further developing their shared ecoapocalyptic history. The reader’s world is described as a “pre-Big Kill society,” that is, one just prior to mass death (78). It is further clarified that the Big Kill was catalyzed by grand narratives of human mastery and exceptionalism, which perpetuated inaction. Before the Big Kill, people knew “they were overpopulating the world; killing the oceans; using up prehistoric aquifers . . . adding billions of humans that the world couldn’t feed, [and] they disbelieved the world was getting hotter, less friendly to life” and chose not to act (370). As in A Plague of Angels, even as famines became commonplace, “certain religious groups still disbelieved it. . . . While millions of children were starving . . . some religions were still insisting that it was sinful to prevent excess births” because they “simply denied reality. They were completely myth-driven” (371). In Tepper’s ontology, religion is one of many grand narratives competing to determine the future of humanity, making story both the problem and the solution. Tepper identifies dangerous cultural narratives as myths, drawing attention to them as mutable constructs rather than absolute truths. These myths are a kind of brute within because they fail to imagine a world where humanity is not hyperseparate but dependent on and entangled with nonhumans. In a chapter campily titled “What are Stinkers Made of?,” Tepper further counters and mocks grand narratives of human mastery and hyperseparation by making it clear that from a nonhuman perspective, humans are not only ecologically entangled, but prey. In a discussion over what food source could support a large population of Stinkers, a predatory nonhuman species named for its repellant scent, Bear, a speaking bear, interjects, “Scuse me, Mother Lady. Guess you don’t think like a meat eater’d think, but you forgot about the most meat there is. People meat” (447). People meat is meant to shock readers—especially as it is confirmed to be true by a multitude of dismembered and partially eaten adult, children, and infant human corpses. Wide Mountain Mother, an indigenous leader, realizes that they had failed to consider “humans as game. Now we must” (450). Now, we must consider humans as food, meaning part of an interconnected and interdependent web of life. However, nonhumans may not want to acknowledge their relationship to humanity; for example, Bear feels that referring to humanity as a brother is “too close,” but he and Coyote agree on conceptually being “distant cousins” with humanity (427). Through their discussion, Tepper again reframes and challenges dangerous grand narratives of mastery and hyperseparation. Tepper decries uncritical belief through Needly, a young girl, who explains that “every human is like a horseback rider: he either rides a fact-horse or

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he rides a myth-horse. AND, to people who ride myth-horses, fact-horses don’t exist. Fact-horses are just stories made up by the other side” (257). Myth-driven thinking is another manifestation of the brute within and refers to the preference given to emotionally charged, exclusionary stories that deny the rights of others in favor of a minority. Tepper reframes this dichotomy in multiple complex ways by describing the riders of fact-horses as “[b]aodriven,” meaning they primarily value bao, a play on the Tao of Taoism (554). Bao is defined as a “threadness” or awareness of the connectivity of all life which should inform all decision making (51). Fact-horse riders also utilize “if-then” thinking, a kind of critical thinking which emphasizes the importance of determining outcomes before acting (49). In contrast, the riders of myth-horses are impulsive, myth-driven MOBWOW(s): “monkey-brain willy-wagger[s] with an oh-oh in the middle” or “[m]onkey-brain wombwallowers” who value themselves, their progeny, and their kind, but undermine these values through their inability to consider the consequences of their actions (49). Tepper’s nonhumans challenge the riders of myth-horses by disrupting their presumptions via engagement with the nonhuman. Ecoapocalypses further not only highlight the dangers of MOBWOW thinking but provide tabula rasa scenarios where the loss of cultural knowledge forces humanity to develop new ways of understanding, valuing, relating to, and storying humans and nonhumans. As with The Waters Rising, Fish Tails concludes that humanity needs to be more critically aware of the values that define humanity and determine its future. As a whole, the trilogy outlines the deadly outcomes created by the devaluation and destruction of nonhumans. Fish Tails explicitly challenges readers to contemplate how the “Intelligent Creatures Rights Organization” might regard humanity (558). In the novel, humanity is “destined for termination” because “the Galactic Congress had long ago voted eradication of this same race on the grounds that it was a plague race because it had left its home planet and infected another planet” (558). While the Galactic Congress determines that humanity is a plague and thus unacceptably dangerous, Fixit aids humanity sub rosa so that humanity may survive long enough to evolve. Similar to the plague of angels, this is another example of a nonhuman interceding to allow humanity the possibility to change but without providing solutions. While unrealistic, Tepper again alludes to the important role nonhumans play in determining humanity’s future. Unfortunately, in the reader’s world, there is increasingly less biodiversity, which means less exposure to nonhumans. While during a global pandemic there may be some appeal to a decrease in the potential for zoonotic diseases, nonhumans by definition have an invaluable and irreplaceable potential to inspire and provoke humanity to discover new ways of living and being.

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Through Tepper’s SF, she hopes to not only diagnose societal problems but amend them by persuading readers to prevent such outcomes. “The Story of the Kindly Teacher” is a short parable appended to Fish Tails which summarizes and simplifies what Tepper’s literary experiments conclude: “Be kind” to all life (703). The parable follows the story of a teacher who teaches a simple message of kindness to all. However, this message becomes disastrously misconstrued even by the teacher’s own followers, resulting in holy wars. Ironically, followers of this kindly teacher appear in Fish Tails and are referred to as Kindlies who are summarily ignored by all—even the protagonists. Sadly, as with the teacher in the parable, Tepper died without knowing whether kindness can really transform the world. Readers are left to contemplate whether something so seemingly simple could potentially transform, or rather, create a new future for humanity. CONCLUSION While naturalism’s fluidity is hardly exceptional among literary movements, it is a particular strength when considering the futurity and utility of the genre to adapt to changing times. In the Anthropocene, SF is increasingly concerned with naturalistic themes, especially as it becomes clear that the world cannot continue on its current trajectory. Because of naturalism’s adaptability, it remains a useful way to characterize texts, and sheds new light on Tepper’s SF, revealing it to be an extrapolative, socially oriented, literary experiment with a purpose. Part of the premise of SF, the nonhuman, and the Anthropocene, is the need to transcend national, cultural, species-level, and even temporal perspectives toward an ever-expanding, nonhuman, global, epochal, or even, interstellar perspective. Tepper’s postmodern naturalism does so by expanding the focus of naturalistic themes and making them more expansive. By considering Tepper within naturalism, her SF becomes clearer as a narrowly focused literary experiment centered on the human condition. Tepper’s writing also reveals new avenues into the ways in which naturalism shifts by assimilating unlikely genres like fantasy and camp. Tepper utilizes nonhumans throughout her novels as the embodiment of an active environment and challenges humanity to recognize the brute within and the influence of dangerous beliefs about humanity and the ways in which codified traditions can reify these. Tepper’s nonhumans critically assess humanity, mirroring the ways in which humanity has historically assessed and dismissed other lifeforms as food, commodities, or simply, irrelevant and therefore, able to be destroyed with impunity. Nonhumans further challenge the belief that humanity cannot solve the problems created by humanity, that only humans

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are intelligent and can meaningfully communicate, that humans are hyperseparate, and that the human anatomy and physiology are the standard against which all else is measured. In Tepper’s texts, humanity must recognize that nonhumans have value in and of themselves and purposes of their own. For Tepper, it is humanity’s awareness and relationship (or lack thereof) with nonhumans that will determine humanity’s next (d)evolution. Tepper’s SF as postmodern naturalism seeks to supplant traditional grand narratives of human mastery, progress, and hyperseparation with one of an entangled humanity indiscernible from the nonhuman in order to create a better future for humanity and all life. While Tepper writes to discover what cultural narratives inhibit and facilitate humanity overcoming the brute within and a heredity of dangerous cultural narratives, her novels serve to consistently confirm her own cultural critiques. Tepper criticizes any cultural narratives which favor emotion over reason, tribalism over multiculturalism, myth over fact, and an adherence to tradition for its own sake. Tepper’s novels advocate for critical awareness and reflection wherein every individual should continually reassess both individual and cultural narratives. Tepper’s solution to simply be kind is an interesting last word in terms of her oeuvre and life and leaves readers to contemplate what a future based on kindness would look like. Considering Abasio’s assertion that the end is in the beginning, how then do we view human history in terms of kindness? While it is uncertain, some anthropologists speculate that it was primitive humanity’s ability to work cooperatively which allowed it to progress rapidly. Perhaps, as in in Tepper’s trilogy, it will be humanity’s cooperation with nonhuman life which will yield the next evolutionary leap. Overall, Tepper’s trilogy, like many naturalist novels, uses naturalist themes to provoke readers into reconsidering their own assumptions about the human condition in order to discover hidden social truths and try to improve the world, or in this case, at the very least, make it kinder. NOTES 1 The examples given are by no means exhaustive but serve to represent the ways in which these themes manifest. 2. Zola quotes Claude Bernard’s influential Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). 3. These judgments occur informally and formally in many texts, most notably in Six Moon Dance and in both The Margarets (2007) and Fish Tails, where intergalactic courts legally declare humanity a plague species which is unfit to coexist with nonhumans and eligible for preemptive destruction.

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4. The glocal outlook makes it difficult to ascribe a nationality to this iteration of naturalism. However, Tepper is an American author and her novels explicitly and implicitly focus on American culture. This may be due to the disproportionate influence American culture exerts globally or that American culture best encapsulates these problematic grand narratives. Regardless, Tepper’s SF argues against nationalism (or any tribalism) in lieu of interspecies and interstellar perspectives which emphasise connectivity. 5. Tepper (1991) describes writing “speeches, pamphlets, [and] educational stuff” during her twenty-four years at then Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood (4). While these pamphlets (e.g., “The Great Orgasm Robbery” [1977] and “So You Don’t Want to Be a Sex Object” [1978]) are primarily educational, as their titles imply; they also demonstrate her signature writing style, feminism, and pragmatism. 6. Earths destroyed by anthropogenic practices are a central motif in Tepper’s SF, including The Gate to Women’s Country, Beauty (1991), The Companions (2003), and The Margarets. Similarly, many texts operate on the premise that humanity has destroyed the Earth and therefore, must colonize other planets, including the True Game ennealogy, After Long Silence (1987), Shadow’s End (1994), and Singer from the Sea (1999). 7. Tepper briefly summarizes the duodecology in the “Author’s Note” appended to Fish Tails; however, Tepper’s complex, winding plots follow multiple protagonists as they quest through complex and unique alien worlds, making them impossible to meaningfully summarize (Tepper 2002; Attebery 1996, 54). 8. Other crossover elements are equally peripheral but include Dervishes, the Daylight Tower, and Gamesmen. 9. Tepper’s philosophy regarding this is discernible in most of her SF novels and made explicit in both the Arbai trilogy and the Plague of Angels trilogy. 10. I have retained the original italics which Tepper frequently utilizes to highlight didactic segments within her SF.

REFERENCES Attebery, Brian. 1996. “Gender, Fantasy and the Authority of Tradition.” Journal of the Fantastic in Arts 7 (1): 51–60. Becker, George Joseph. 1963. “Introduction: Modern Realism as a Literary Movement.” In Documents of Modern Literary Realism, edited by George Joseph Becker, 3–38. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Civello, Paul. 1994. “Introduction.” In American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth-Century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo, 1–5. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gordon, Joan. 2008. “Gazing across the Abyss: The Amborg Gaze in Sheri S. Tepper’s Six Moon Dance.” Science Fiction Studies 35 (2): 189–206. Grusin, Richard. 2015. “Introduction.” In The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, vii–xxx. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Kelso, Sylvia. 1997. “A Glance from Nowhere: Sherri [sic] S. Tepper’s Fantasy and SF.” New Lambton: Nimrod Publications. Link, Eric Carl. 2013. “Introduction: Naturalism and Science Fiction.” Studies in American Naturalism 8 (1): 1–5. Norris, Frank. 1899. “The Novel with a Purpose.” In The Complete Works of Frank Norris, 265–69. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1899–1903. The Library of Congress. https:// lccn.loc.gov/45028570. Pizer, Donald. 2020. “American Naturalism: A Primer.” In American Literary Naturalism: Late Essays, 3–16. London: Anthem Press. Sohár, Anikó. 2017. “Parody of Academic Life in SF.” In Displacing the Anxieties of Our World: Spaces of the Imagination, edited by Ildikó Limpár, 122–44. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher. Tepper, Sheri S. 1994. A Plague of Angels. New York: Bantam Books. Tepper, Sheri S. 1998. “SFC Interview: Sherri [sic] S. Tepper.” Interview by Lyda Morehouse. Science Fiction Chronicle 20 (3): 8, 38. Tepper, Sheri S. 2001. “An Interview with Sheri S. Tepper.” Interview by Zach Watkins and Leslie A. Donovan. Mythprint 47 (48): 3–4, 8–9. Tepper, Sheri S. 2002. “Science Fiction Writer Sheri S. Tepper.” Interview by Margot Adler. Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Last modified April 24, 2002. https:​//​freshairarchive​.org​/segments​/science​-fiction​-writer​-sheri​-s​-tepper. Tepper, Sheri S. 2008. “Of Preachers and Storytellers: An Interview with Sheri S. Tepper.” Interview by Neal Szpatura. Strange Horizons. Last modified July 21, 2008. http:​//​strangehorizons​.com​/non​-fiction​/articles​/of​-preachers​-and​-storytellers​ -an​-interview​-with​-sheri​-s​-tepper​/. Tepper, Sheri S. 2010. The Water’s Rising. London, Gollancz. Tepper, Sheri S. 2014. Fish Tails. London, Gollancz. Zola, Émile. 1893. “The Experimental Novel.” In The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Translated by Belle M. Sherman. 1–54. New York: Cassell Publishing. The Open Library.

Index

Abbott, Porter H., 16 Adams, Robert, 184, 188 Agamben, Giorgio, 214–215, 219, 221, 222, 224, 225n, 238, 241 The Open: Man and Animal, 214–215 Agee, James 6, 195–207, 208n4 Agee, James and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 7, 195–207 agriculture, 69, 73n10, 116–17, 118, 121, 123, agrilogistics, 116, 118 Ahmed, Sara, 84 Åhnebrink, Lars, 2 Alaimo, Stacy, 6, 152, 155, 159, 204; Material Feminisms, 155 ants, 50–54, 56–57, 59 architecture, 133–145, 184, 187–88 apocalypse/apocalyptic, 125, 231–34, 242 Ashbery, John 208n4 Ashley, F.H. et al, 24 Attebery, Brian, 263 Bacheller (syndicate), 183 Bacheller, Irving, 192 bacteria, 125, 235–36, 240, 243 Baggett, Paul, 5–6

Baker, Houston A., 174 Baker, Timothy, 16, 21 Baptist, Edward E., 125 Barad, Karen 6, 152, 159 Barnes, M. Elizabeth, 225n3 Barthes, Roland, 206 Batchen, Geoffrey, 198 Baudrillard, Jean, 230, 234, 236, 238, 243 Becker, George Joseph, 251 bees, 96, 105 Behar, Katherine, 126–27 Bender, Bert, 13, 37, 230, 242 Bennett, Jane, 7, 164, 169, 171, 197, 207–208n1 Berkove, Lawrence I., 22n5 Berlin, Ira, 126 Bernard, Claude: Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale, 262 Bernstein Goldman, Suzy, 24 birds, 15, 104, 190, 241. See also: canary, chicken, gooney bird, owl, storks. Bladow, Kyle and Jennifer Ladino: Affective Ecocriticism, 155 Blinder, Caroline, 206 Bourke-White, Margaret 200, 208n Bowen, James K., 34 265

266

Bowlby, Rachel, 9 Bowker, J. M., 174 Boyer, Paul, 70, 71 Bradley, David: No Place to Hide, 70 Brandt, Kenneth, K., 7 Brennan, Teresa, 5, 84 Breeder and Sportsman, 18 Brown, Bill 196–97 Brown, Norman O.: Life Against Death, 160 Bryant, William Cullen, 153 buckskin mare, 14 Buell, Lawrence, 4, 98; The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, 41 bulldog, 100 Butcher, Solomon, 182–83, 189 butterflies, 96 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 70 Braidotti, Rosi, 145 Burroughs, John, 100–03 Caldwell, Erskine 208n You Have Seen Their Faces, 208n2 California lily, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43 Campbell, Donna M., 42, 145, 167 canary, 15, 23, 26, 73n12 canyon 96–99, 105–07, 109, 111 Caracciolo, Marco, 17 Carswell, Lilian, 57 Cassuto, Leonard, 39 cat, 45, 56, 102, 170, 203, Cather, Willa, 6, 115–128; 192; My Antonia, 117; O Pioneers! 6, 116–129; The Song of the Lark, 117 Christ, Jesus, 215 Civello, Paul, 230, 243, 246 chicken, 95, 102 Clark, Edward B., 99–100 Clark, Keith, 166

Index

Codman, Ogden, Jr.: 135 Coen, Ethan and Joel, 95–96, 105–06 Coetzee, J. M.: Elizabeth Costello, 67 coexistence, 229, 230, 242 collie, 18, 19, 20–21, 23 companion (species), 24–26, 34–38, 40–41, 43 Connell, R. W.: Masculinities, 42 constructivism, 124 cottonwoods, 105 Courtland, Shane D, 58 Crane, Stephen, 1, 5, 7, 46, 79–93, 164, 167, 181–86, 188–89, 192–93, 249; “The Blue Hotel,” 82, 182– 83, 189, 191; “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” 82, 182–83, 185–86; “An Excursion Ticket,” 184; “Galveston, Texas, in 1895,” 182–83; Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, 1, 182, 249; “A Man Said to the Universe,” 92; “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life,” 182–83, 188–89; “The Open Boat,” 5, 46, 79–93; The Red Badge of Courage, 192; “Tradition, Thou Art for Suckling Children,” 92 Crisler, Jesse S., 15, 54 Crist, Eileen: Images of Animals, 17, 23 Cronon, William, 126 Crowther, Samuel, 67 Crumbley, Paul, 4 Crutzen, Paul J., 37 Danielsson, Karin M., 4, 113n5 Darwin, Charles, 214, 216, 217, 220, 225; The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 20, 22–23;

Index

Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage Round the World of H.M.S Beagle, 23 Daston, Lorraine and Greg Mitman, 98 Davies, Jude, 46, 57 deer, 16, 97, 104–05, 109, 113n6 DeLillo, Don, 8, 229–243; Zero K, 8, 229–243 Den Tandt, Christophe, 8, 9, 216 Derrida, Jacques, 135, 136, 137, 138, 143, 145, 243, 249 Dewey, John, 195 Dick, Philip K., 7, 213, 225n5; “Beyond Lies the Wub, 7, 214, 221–224; “Headnote for ‘Beyond Lies the Wub,’” 223–224 DNA, 237, 240 dogs, 15, 17, 18, 20–22, 26–27, 96, 102. See also bulldog, collie, greyhound, husky, setter, wolfdog Donnelly, Ignatius, 52 Dooley, Patrick K., 115 Dreiser, Theodore, 1, 5, 7, 45–48, 50–58, 164, 213, 215–216, 218, 250; An American Tragedy, 1 Sister Carrie, 7, 45, 47, 55, 170, 182, 192, 213, 250; “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers,” 4, 5, 47, 50, 52, 55, 57, 59 Dufournaud, Daniel, 6 Dust Bowl, The, 127 Duvall, J. Michael, 171 Eby, Clare, 166 environment, 183−85, 187−89, 193 Erdheim, Cara Elana, 47; Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, 67 ethics, 230, 234, 235, 236, 242

267

Evans, Walker 7, 195–202, 204–07, 208n evil, 235, 238, 243 Felstiner, John: Can Poetry Save the Earth? 41 Fleissner, Jennifer, 167 Fleming, Robert E., 70 flowers, 105. See also: California lily, mariposa lilies, wildflowers Folks, Jeffrey J. 196 food, 163, 168, 169, 170 Ford, Henry: My Life and Work, 67 Franco, Francisco, 221 Freud, Sigmund, 64 Fryer, Judith, 135 Fudge, Erica, 17 Gajdusek, Robert E., 5, 67, 71 Galápagos, 229–243 Gale, Richard M. 195 gardens 149, 150, 157, 158, 159 Garlick, Steve: The Nature of Masculinity: Critical Theory, New Materialisms, and Technologies of Embodiment, 39 Garrard, Greg, 97–99, 232–233 gold, 42, 43, 95–97, 106–08 goodness/good, 235, 238 Goodwin, Deborah, 24 gooney bird, 65 Gordon, Joan, 248, 249 Graeber, David and David Wengrow, 117, 126 Graham, Don B, 56 Graham, T. Austin, 46 grasses, 105 greenspaces, 150 Great Plains, The, 116, 119, 123 greyhound, 18, 19, 23 grizzly bears, 65

268

Grusin, Richard, 118, 124, 248–49 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 208n6 Haag, Ingemar, 8 Haeckel, Ernst, 216–218, 225n3 Hamilton, Edmond, 7, 213, 218–221, 225n4 “The Man Who Evolved,” 7, 213, 218–221 Hayles, N. Katherine, 118 Haraway, Donna J., 4, 8, 229, 233, 241 f, 243; When Species Meet, 25, 31, 33–35, 37–38, 40–41, 43 Hediger, Ryan, 5, 6, 17, 65, 68, 71, 72n6, 242 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 69, 70, 73n10, 205–07, 208n7 Heise, Ursula, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72n4; Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, 63 Hekman, Susan: Material Feminisms, 155 Hemingway, Ernest, 4, 63–76, 192; Across the River and into the Trees, 69, 73n12; “Birds and War,” 72n2; “A Canary for One,” 73n12; “Chicago,” 68; Death in the Afternoon 73n7; A Farewell to Arms, 68, 73n8; “Fathers and Sons,” 73n12; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 73n7, 73n12; “Indian Camp,” 71; Islands in the Stream, 67, 71; The Old Man and the Sea, 69; Under Kilimanjaro, 5, 63, 69, 70, 71 Hemingway, Marcelline, 71 Hemingway, Mary Welsh, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72n3 Hemingway, Patrick, 66–67 Hemingway, Valerie, 74n12

Index

Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 47–48, 53–56, 58–59, 219 Hochman, Barbara, 145 Hofstadter, Richard, 51 hoopoe birds, 66 Horn, Katrin, 242 horses, 15, 17, 23–27, 120–121. See also buckskin mare Hotchner, A.E.: Papa Hemingway 73n7 husky 34–37 Howard, June, 2, 9, 14, 17, 18, 213 Hug, William J., 24 Hyperobject, 231, 233, 240 insects, 49, 96, 203, 239. See also: ants, bees, butterflies jackrabbits, 65 Jacobson, Karen F., 24 James, Henry: 134, 145, 197 Jameson, Fredric 208n5 Jewett, Sarah Orne 197 Johnson, Cassandra Y., 174 Jones, Gavin 196 Jones, Tayari, 165 Jung, Carl, 223 Kaplan, Amy, 9 Kelso, Sylvia, 248, 253 Kermode, Frank, 232 Kern, Leslie: Feminist City, 151 Kilgallen, Cara Erdheim, 6–7 Killinger, John: Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism, 73n11 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie 206 Kingsolver, Barbara 208n Kleinman, Craig, 68, 69 Kolodny, Annette, 67, 151, 153; The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History

Index

in American Life and Letters, 39, 151 Kornbluh, Anna, 145 Kramer, Victor, 202 Labor, Earle, 113n5 landscape, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156, 181−84, 186−92 Latour, Bruno, 3, 8, 230, 232, 233 leaves, 104, 109–10 Lehan, Richard, 2, 46, 214, 220, 221 Lehtimäki, Markku, 7 Leopold, Aldo, 115 Levinas, Emmanuel 8, 230, 235 f, 243 Lewis, Robert W., 70 Lingis, Alphonso, 84 Link, Eric Carl, 2, 213, 225n5, 245 Locke, John, 4, 48–49, 55, 59 Loebel, Thomas: 145 London, Jack, 1, 4–6, 7, 46, 57, 96–104, 106, 110–112, 112n3, 124, 164, 167, 192, 213, 214, 216–218 220, 221; “All Gold Canyon,” 5–6, 95–99, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112n1; Burning Daylight, 4–5, 31, 32, 37–43, 104; The Call of the Wild, 1, 96, 99–100; “The Other Animals” 101, 102, 103; The People of the Abyss, 164; “The Red One,” 32; The Scarlet Plague, 32; The Sea-Wolf, 124, 167; The Star Rover, 7, 213, 216–218; The Valley of the Moon, 32, 104; “The Water Baby,” 32; “The White Silence,” 32; “To Build a Fire,” 4, 31–38, 40, 43; White Fang, 17, 31–43, 96, 99–100 Lopez, Barry 208n

269

Luedecke, Patti, 5 Lundblad, Michael, 5, 14, 23, 47, 54–55, 113n5, 230 Lukács, Georg, 136 Luria, Sarah, 135 Macdonald, Chris, 58 madrone, 97, 105 Mahady, Christine, 36, 113n5 Mandler, Lou, 69 Mann, Charles, 126 manzanitas, 97, 105 mariposa lilies, 105 Marx, Leo, 158 Matthiessen, F. O., 45 McElrath, Joseph R. Jr., 15, 54 McEntyre, Marilyn, 152, 154 McFarland, Sarah E., 17 McGlynn, David, 15 McHale, Brian 208n4 McHugh, Susan 204 McKay, Nellie Y., 166 McLeish, Archibald: Land of the Free, 208n McNeill, John R., 31 Menard, Andrew, 154 Menely, Tobias. 49 Merchant, Carolyn, 155 metal, 172, 173 Michaels, Walter Benn, 9 Micklus, Robert, 15 Miklósi, Ádám, 20, 21 microbiological life, 230, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243 Miller, Adrian, 168 Millner, Michael, 33, 40 Minter, David 208n3 Mitchell, W. J. T. 199 Moers, Ellen, 56 Moi, Toril, What Is a Woman? And Other Essays, 39 Monteiro, George, 86–87 Moore, Jason, W. 150, 151, 160 Moreland, Kim, 68, 71

270

Index

Morrison, Toni, 166 Morton, Timothy, 3, 4, 6, 35, 116–117, 125, 150, 229, 230, 233, 236, 240, 241, 243; Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, 35 Motyl, Katharina, 242 mule, 15, 23–26 Myers, Robert, 81–82 Nagasaki, Japan, 63 Nash, Roderick 153; Wilderness and the American Mind, 150 Native Americans, 67, 69, 72n4, 72n5, 74n13 Naylor, Gloria, 166; The Men of Brewster Place, 166 The Women of Brewster Place, 167 Nelson, John R., 72n2 Nevada, 70 Newlin, Keith, 2–3 New York Times, 67 New Yorker, 69 Newton, Michael, 217 Nichols, Rachel, 213 Nixon, Rob, 97–98 Normandy, France, 68 Norris, Frank, 1, 3, 4, 13–29, 53–54, 164, 181, 197, 246, 249, 250; McTeague: A Story of San Francisco,1, 4, 13–29, 167, 249; “The Most Noble Conquest of Man,” 16; “The Nature Revival in American Literature,” 16; “The Need of a Literary Conscience,” 3 “The Novel with a Purpose,” 250; The Octopus, 14, 53–54, 164; Vandover and the Brute, 167 Norton, Caroline E. S., 90–92

O’Brien, Mahon, 69, 73n10 Odyssey (Homer), 224 Ogden Codman, Jr., 136 ocean, 80, 83–84, 87–89 Odello, Laura, 145 Oliver, Kelly, 221, 222, 224–225n1 Olmsted, Frederick Law 153, 154, 155 Ostler, Jeffrey, 121 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 182 owl, 95 Panksepp, Jaak: Affective Neuroscience: The Foundation of Human and Animal Emotions, 225n2 Parrington, V. L., 2 parks, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155 Patterson, Charles, 67, 72n4 Peirce, Charles S., 52, 197 Petrini, Carlo, 168, 169 Petry, Ann, 6–7, 163–175; “Harlem,” 163; Miss Muriel and Other Stories, 171, 174; “Mother Africa,” 6–7, 164, 171, 172, 173; “The New Mirror,” 174; The Street, 6, 163–165, 168, 169–171 Phelan, James, 16 Pizer, Donald, 2, 13, 14, 16, 33, 35, 140, 145, 198, 230, 251 Planet Stories, 221 posthumanism, 133–145 prairie, 183, 188−90 pseudonature, 149–161 Ralph, Iris, 80–81 Razzi, Francesca, 7 Reader’s Digest, 70 Reed, T. V., 200–01, 205, 208n Renehan, Edward J., 112–13n3 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 152 Mrs. Lloyd (painting) 141, 145n5

Index

271

Riggio, Thomas, 46 Riis, Jacob, 198: How the Other Half Lives, 182 Robles, Mario Ortez, 21 Roosevelt, Theodore, 99–103, 112n3 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 70 Ross, Lillian, 69 Rosskam, Edwin: Twelve Million Black Voices, 208n2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 5, 48–49, 53, 55 57–59 Ryan, Melissa, 118, 121–22 Ryden, Wendy, 81

Spain, 64, 66, 71 Spencer, Herbert, 51–52, 54, 59, 251 Soviet Union, 70 Stasz, Clarice, 39, 41 Stephanie Studzinski, 8 Steffan, Will, 37 Steinbeck, John, 182, 208n2; The Grapes of Wrath, 208n storks, 63–74 Strong, Amy, 72n5, 74n13 stream, 97, 105 Sumner, William Graham, 51, 54 Sumption, Linda, 23 Survival (television program), 70

Sandburg, Carl, 68 Sanders, Elizabeth, 52 Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway: At the Hemingways, 71 Schama, Simon: Landscape and Memory 151 Scott, Geoffrey: The Architecture of Humanism, 137 Seefeldt, Michael, 67 Seltzer, Mark, 9, 47, 153 Seton, Ernest Thompson: Wild Animals I Have Known, 16, 100, 112n2 setter, 18, 19–21, 23 settler, 116, 120–126, 183 Sewell, Anna: Black Beauty, 17 Shi, Jingbi, 111 Sinclair, Upton, 1; The Jungle, 1, 68 Shmurak, J. Susannah, 154 shoes, 197, 205, 207, 208n5 shrubs, 105 Simondon, Gilbert, 239 Simons, John, 15 Singer, Isaac Bashevis: The Penitent 73n10 skunk, 111 Sohár, Anikó, 247

Tagg, John 199–200 tableaux vivant 152, 157 Taylor, Paul S. 208n2 Tepper, Sheri S., 8, 245–264; After Long Silence, 263; The Arbai (trilogy), 252, 263; The Companions, 263; The Family Tree, 250, 259, 260; Fish Tails, 8, 246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 257, 258–61, 262, 263; The Gate to Women’s County, 248, 263; “The Great Orgasm Robbery,” 263; King’s Blood Four, 252; The Margarets, 250, 262, 263; A Plague of Angels, 8, 246, 249, 252, 253–56, 257, 259; The Plague of Angels (trilogy), 8, 245–264; Shadow’s End, 263; Singer from the Sea, 263; Six Moon Dance, 249, 262; “So You Don’t Want to Be a Sex Object,” 263; The Waters Rising, 8, 246, 252, 257–58, 260; The True Game (duodecology), 251, 252, 263 Thoreau, Henry David, 153, 208n1;

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Walden, 175 things 195–97, 199–200, 202–04, 206– 07, 207–08n Titanic (ship), 71 Tompkins, Jane, 24 Torcivia, Catherine and Sue MacDonnel, 24 Totten, Gary, 145 trees, 105. See also cottonwoods, madrone, manzanitas Trilling, Diana, 145 Trilling, Lionel, 145; The Liberal Imagination, 134 Trogdon, Robert, 71 Tucker, Chris, 58 Turner, Frederick Jackson 107 Twain, Mark, 197 Tyler, Lisa, 5 Tyler, Tom, 17, 98–99, 102 United Kingdom, 70 United States, 70 van Gogh, Vincent 205, 207, 208n5 Veblen, Thorsten, 137 Vonnegut, Kurt, 8, 229–230, 233– 234, 236–243 Walcutt, Charles C., 2 Walker, Alice, 166 Ward, Lester F., 52 Washington, Gladys J., 173 waste, 165 water, 164, 169, 172 Watkins, Carleton E., 182 Watts, Linda: 135, 141 Weik von Mossner, Alexa, 5, 82–3, 84, 90 Weil, Kari, 214–215, 218 Welch, Rob, 5 Welsh, Mary, 64, 65, 68

Index

Wengrow, David, 117, 126; The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, 225n4 Westling, Louise H., 115, 119, 121, 122, 127 Wharton, Edith 1, 133–145, 149–161; (with Ogden Codman, Jr) The Decoration of Houses, 135; The House of Mirth, 1, 6, 133– 145; 149, 154, 155, 156 The Writing of Fiction, 138–39 Whitman, Walt, 208n wilderness, 126, 149, 150, 156, 158, 161, 185−86, 189 wildflowers, 97 Williams, Jay, 113n4 Williams, Tony, 38–39 Williams, William Carlos 197 Wilson, Jency, 6 Wilson, Mark K., 175 wind, 165 Winkler, Allan M., 70, 71 Witt, Doris, 168 wolfdog, 100 Wolfe, Cary, 118, 124, 135, 136, 143, 145 Wolloch, Nathaniel, 48 Wonder Stories, 218 World War I, 68 World War II, 63, 64, 67, 68 Wright, Richard, 208n; Native Son, 170 wub, 221–224 Yanagisawa, Hideo, 69 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 137 Yusoff, Kathryn, 125 Zimmerman, David A., 45 Zimmerman, Michael E., 69 Zola, Émile, 1, 136, 166, 246–48; “The Experimental Novel,” 1–2

About the Contributors

Paul Baggett is an associate professor of English at South Dakota State University. His research includes studies in American literary naturalism, Native American literature, African American literature, and Western American literature, with particular interests in the intersections of literature, human rights, and environmental justice. He has published essays on Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Mary Seacole, and South Dakota literary history. Kenneth K. Brandt is professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He is the author of Jack London: Writers and Their Work (2018), and in 2021 he published a biography of Jack London titled Jack London: Critical Lives. He is the executive coordinator of the Jack London Society. Paul Crumbley is an emeritus professor of English at Utah State University whose current scholarship centers on Emily Dickinson, May Swenson, and Jack London. His book publications include Dickinson’s Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities (2014), with Eleanor Heginbotham; Winds of Will: Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty of Democratic Thought (2010); Body My House: The Work and Life of May Swenson (2006), with Patricia Gantt; Environmental Writing and Education: The Search for a Common Language (2004), with Melody Graulich; and Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson (1997). Karin Molander Danielsson is an associate professor of English at Mälardalen University, Sweden. She specializes in American literary naturalism and animal studies, and has published articles on works by Frank Norris, Jack London, and Eric Linklater. Her most recent publication is a book chapter: “Ecology, Capability and Companion Species: Conflicting Ethics in Nevada Barr’s Blood Lure” in Animals in Detective Fiction, edited by John Miller and Ruth Hawthorne (2022). 273

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About the Contributors

Daniel Dufournaud is an assistant professor at Trent University in Canada. He is currently at work on his first monograph, and he has essays published or forthcoming in such journals as Poetics Today, College Literature, Philip Roth Studies, and Journal of Modern Literature. Ingemar Haag is professor of comparative literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. In 2021 he published the book Vanishing Selves: Negotiating Selfhood in Self-Representational Works by Goethe, Sand, and Nietzsche, and he is one of the editors of Perspectives on Ecocriticism: Local Beginnings, Global Echoes from 2019. Ryan Hediger is professor of English at Kent State University. He specializes in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and U.S. literature and is the author of Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, editor of two essay collections on animals, and editor of Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene, published in 2023. Cara Erdheim Kilgallen is an associate professor of English in the Department of Languages and Literature at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Her scholarship and research focus on American literary naturalism in relation to a number of underexplored themes such as disability, the environment, food, humor, and sport. She has published on Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Anzia Yezierska, and Richard Wright. Markku Lehtimäki, PhD, is professor of comparative literature at the University of Turku, Finland. His areas of expertise are narrative theory, ecocriticism, visual culture, and American literature. His research projects include “Natural Narratology, Cognitive Poetics, and Ecocriticism” and “The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water.” His is editor or coeditor of several books, most recently Visual Representations of the Arctic: Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature, and Politics (2021) and Cold Waters: Tangible and Symbolic Seascapes of the North (2022). Patti Luedecke, PhD, teaches writing at the University of Toronto, where she has also taught American literature. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Studies in American Naturalism, the Edith Wharton Review, The James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal, and in the collection Haunting Realities. Francesca Razzi, PhD, is a research fellow in American literature at “G. D’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). Her research areas include

About the Contributors

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nineteenth-century American literature, also in comparative perspective, and the transmedia reconfigurations of the West in literature and visual culture. Stephanie Studzinski, PhD, is an independent researcher and educator in contemporary speculative fiction as it relates to ecology, the nonhuman, ecofeminism, and surrealism. Dr. Studzinski’s research focuses on the entanglement of literary and cultural narratives, in particular, authors who utilize the former to alter the latter. Lisa Tyler is a professor of English at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio, in the United States. She has published four books, three of them on Ernest Hemingway, and more than fifty essays in academic journals and edited collections. She serves on the board of the Hemingway Society and edits the society’s blog. Rob Welch is a scholar of late nineteenth-century literature and writes on topics that highlight the transition into Modernism. He has previously published on the works of Stephen Crane, George du Maurier, and Ambrose Bierce, among others. Rob happily teaches at Pennsylvania’s St. Vincent College. Jency Wilson, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Languages and Literature Department of Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where she also serves as director of the writing center. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, ecocriticism, and cinema studies.