Magnificent Decay

Melville and Ecology

Tom Nurmi

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813945033
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

What is Melville beyond the whale? Long celebrated for his stories of the sea, Melville was also fascinated by the interrelations between living species and planetary systems, a perspective informing his work in ways we now term "ecological." By reading Melville in the context of nineteenth-century science, Tom Nurmi contends that he may best be understood as a proto-ecologist who innovatively engages with the entanglement of human and nonhuman realms.

Melville lived during a period in which the process of scientific specialization was well underway, while the integration of science and art was concurrently being addressed by American writers. Steeped in the work of Lyell, Darwin, and other scientific pioneers, he composed stories and verse that made the complexity of geological, botanical, and zoological networks visible to a broad spectrum of readers, ironically in the most "unscientific" forms of fiction and poetry.

Set against the backdrop of Melville's literary, philosophical, and scientific influences, Magnificent Decay focuses on four of his most neglected works— Mardi (1849), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856), and John Marr (1888)—to demonstrate that, together, literature and science offer collective insights into the past, present, and future turbulence of the Anthropocene. Tracing the convergences of ecological and literary creativity, Melville's lesser-read texts explore the complex interplay between inanimate matter, life, and human society across multiple scales and, in so doing, illustrate the value of literary art for representing ecological relationships.

Chapter 1

Pearl

Mardi

Think you there is no sensation in being a rock?

—Mardi

When Melville visited the Boston Gallery of Fine Arts in May 1847, along with his sisters Augusta and Sophia, he was confronted by a series of rock-strewn landscapes hanging on the walls. Among them was Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire (1833–36), the celebrated five-panel allegory of civilization’s imprint on the Earth.1 Eight months later—after newlyweds Herman and Lizzie Shaw had settled into their New York City life—the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevadas forever altered the topography of northern California, generating a mining boom that triggered one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history.2 Also in January 1848, New York City society was enthralled by Scottish scientist John P. Nichol’s lectures on astronomy, which incorporated poetry into discussions of the Milky Way.3 The course of empire, gold fever, and the immensity of the stellar universe. Together, these three moments in Melville’s life and times provide a useful way to approach his least-read and first fully ecological novel, Mardi: and A Voyage Thither.

Rich with “sedimentary strata” and imagery of terrestrial “treasures”—gold, silver, diamonds, granite—Mardi shows Melville thinking on a planetary scale through the nineteenth-century sciences of geology, mineralogy, and astronomy.4 For Melville, the geologist and the novelist share a common fascination with the pressures of creation, especially the elegant patterns that follow from creative processes, nonhuman and human alike. From Mardi on, Melville experimented with different literary forms to articulate the implications of Earth sciences at a moment when, all of a sudden, the human no longer occupied the center of planetary history. But before his more famous meditations on whales and tortoises, Melville turned in Mardi to the Earth’s surfaces and interiors, to the compressed and propulsive worlds beneath our feet that remain mostly invisible and largely unthought. Mardi takes as its central problem the givenness of the Earth in relation to the human.5

In Mardi, Melville’s careful attention to geological materials—as well as the geothermal and weathering processes that shape them—marks his first attempt to make sense of the “inscrutable inhumanities” that exist in magnitudes far beyond our species’ capacity to represent them.6 From our twenty-first-century perspective, thinking inside the Anthropocene has meant taking seriously our debt to and responsibility for the nonhuman, from microbes to oil to rainforests. But we have not fully recognized the extent of our entanglement with inorganic spheres of existence, the often-obscured elements and minerals that support bone chemistry and power iPads. Ironically it might be the third and most abstruse work of a seafaring novelist that provides a vital but unfamiliar vision of our species through the scale-bending perspective of inanimate matter.

This chapter recovers Mardi as an essential text in Melville’s oeuvre. Mardi not only inaugurates Melville’s interest in eroding the barriers between literature and science; it also makes an initial case for Melville’s relevance to our own moment of environmental crisis. Melville wrote Mardi at a transformative time in world history, when mid-nineteenth-century developments in metallurgy and industrial mining led to the appearance of what Christopher Jones terms “mineral energy regimes.” These developments lowered technological barriers to expansion, thereby structuring modern economies of scale. Increased energy production and consumption generated new “landscapes of intensification,” and America became the proving ground for the economic potential and environmental limit of a modern, mineral democracy.7 In particular, anthracite coal, or “stone-coal,” dramatically reshaped mid-Atlantic landscapes via energy transportation networks that connected the country to the city, creating (uneven) geographic development and contributing to America’s first large-scale environmentally degraded areas.

As mined resources fueled industrial capitalism, by the late 1840s economic roadblocks appeared to vanish completely, and the nation’s mineral prospects took shape from Pennsylvania to California. Ores like copper and iron provided the matrix for the “blending of organic and mineral energy regimes” that would bring America into the age of empire.8 At the end of the century, solid coal could be railroaded for heat and fuel, liquid oil could be pipelined for refining and manufacturing, and flows of electricity could be channeled from dams to light the eastern seaboard. And the shift from harvesting wood to extracting oil was a conceptual leap as well as a technological one. Consciously or not, oil companies intervened in geologic timelines in ways that jumbled distinctions between prehistoric past and modern present. Even though consumers tend to repress the organic nature of fossil fuels like oil, the origins of its carbon energy are quintessentially ecological: sea-floor plankton and mineral matter become sedimented into kerogen petroleum, which is then trapped in shale formations that, hundreds of thousands of years later, yield petroleum-field riches and illuminate kitchens. Many of Melville’s breakfasts, for instance, were cooked on a box stove, a hotplate for burning million-year-old coal, with windows made from quarried New England mica.

Such scrambled senses of time, energy, material, and environment bear not just on Melville’s meals or his literary philosophies but on embryonic nineteenth-century scientific disciplines like biochemistry and modern medicine, where new, post-vitalist categories of organic life reorganized definitions of what counted as an “environment” at all. In chemistry, for example, German scientist Friedrich Wöhler’s laboratory in Göttingen drew American students throughout the 1850s, riveted by Wohler’s 1828 synthesis of urea from ammonium carbonate. Wohler demonstrated that organic matter could be created from inorganic compounds, erasing hard distinctions between “natural” and “artificial” and paving the way for modern pharmacology. Another German, Felix Hoppe-Seyler, opened the field of physiological chemistry by pioneering syntheses of alkaloids and antipyretics (fever-lowering compounds). And by the early twentieth century, the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen in the air would revolutionize agricultural fertilization and increase global crop yields to allow for the massive human population growth in the past hundred years. These materialist sciences, which undergirded fields as diverse as oil production, medicine, and agriculture, disclosed the elemental-mineral ties between apparently unrelated histories, defying familiar organizing principles like scientific field or “natural” conditions.

Moreover, colonial and early national studies of what would come to be known as disease ecology had previously showed that the internal environments of the body were always already penetrated by external ones. Shaped by ancient climate and humoral theories of the body’s susceptibility to outside influence, many eighteenth-century physicians—like William Falconer in his Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781)—believed human traits, such as character and even race, were essentially environmental. Greta LaFleur has noted that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of the porous body were, in this sense, “deeply ecological.”9 At the same time, scientists like Lamarck argued that human societies were making unalterable modifications to local and global environments. As early as 1803, Lamarck had pondered these mutual networks of influence, posing a question about hydrogeology that stood for environmental arrangements more broadly. “What,” Lamarck asked, “are the general effects of living organisms on the mineral substances which form the earth’s crust and external surfaces?”10 And, we could add, vice versa?

Reading Mardi today, one hundred and seventy years after it was published, it is remarkable how Melville offers the contours of a Lamarckian-inspired, geo-environmental history with which we are still coming to grips, one that understands all objects as “increasing assemblage[s] of ancient times and dispersed spaces,” as Bruno Latour phrased it.11 In the mid-twentieth century, Charles Olson contended that narrative fiction had the uncanny ability to trace these assemblages across orders of magnitude, dilating Ahab’s famous doubloon into an entire planet. “This round gold,” Ahab murmurs, “is but the image of the rounder globe.”12 For Olson, part of Melville’s enduring appeal is his “unique ability to reveal the very large (such a thing as his whale, or himself on whiteness, or Ahab’s monomania) by the small.”13 In other words, the freedom of literary form opens thought to hidden topologies, networks of scale that highlight the continuities between a mollusk’s shell and the coil of a galaxy. This is why minerals—the most foundational building blocks of “earthy matter” visible to the human eye—warrant closer inspection in nineteenth-century literary history. These geological clusters and formations offer material clues into the problems of magnitude, time, and modernity with which writers were grappling in Melville’s lifetime. To account for the nature of the mineral was to account for the nature of the galaxy. Babbalanja, our guide through Mardi’s stony landscapes, agrees: “Other worlds differ not much from this, but in degree. Doubtless, a pebble is a fair specimen of the universe.”14

Eternal Granite

Branded a strange, “shapeless rhapsody” by one reviewer, Mardi begins as an anonymous sailor’s adventure-turned-quest for a mysterious woman named Yillah as he travels through the fictitious but Pacific-inspired isles of Mardi.15 But once the narrator assumes the name Taji (the sun god of Mardi) and is joined by five companions—Babbalanja, Media (the king), Mohi (the historian), Yoomy (the poet), and Vee-Vee (the fool)—the novel transforms into something else entirely. From the gold mine to the Milky Way, the bulk of Mardi explores the planetary imprint of the human species at different vantage points in space and time. “Mardi is not wholly ours,” Babbalanja explains. “We are the least populous part of creation . . . a census of the herring would find us far in the minority. . . . We inhabit but a crust.” “We are,” he concludes, “but a step in a scale.”16 So Taji and his crew spend time considering the human as a thing among and “in things.”17 They inspect fossils, discuss volcanic eruptions, debate the origin of the Earth, analyze the structure of human bones, argue theories of mineral chemistry, and even examine a butterfly locked in amber. Like Ishmael, self-professed geologist and fossil reader of “antechronical creatures,” Babbalanja finds in scientific paradigms the vocabulary to speculate on Mardi’s past, referencing a litany of scientists including Linnaeus, Cuvier, Hutton, Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin.18

By the tim...