The Geological Unconscious

German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

Jason Groves

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780823288090
  9780823288106
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823288113
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown.

Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named.

These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

1

Of Other Petrofictions

Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism

Literature emerges not only in response to philosophical crises, as Jean-Luc Nancy argues in The Literary Absolute, but also to planetary crises. The genre of petrofiction, which was first elaborated in 1992 by Amitav Ghosh to refer to Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and other fiction explicitly confronting the oil encounter between the Americas and the Middle East, is one such example.¹ The extraction, processing, and consumption of petroleum and the tangible effects of those processes on sites of production and transmission and ultimately even on the Earth system has helped usher in the recent recasting of literary and cultural production within the periodizing framework of a petromodernity. However, as petroculture comes to pervade environments and the environmental imagination alike—Heather Sullivan writes that “we might today describe almost all literature from industrialized countries as well as countries with extractive economies as ‘petro-texts’”—it becomes easier to lose sight of its cultural and historical specificity.² In restricting the range of this term to the encounter with oil, theorists of petrofiction constrain both the meaning of the Greek root petros (a free-standing stone) and the broader geological imagination. If one takes into account the wide range of petric encounters in modern fiction, those with both free-standing petros and massive petras (rock formations such as cliffs, deposits, and bedrock), multiple petrofictions begin to emerge. Petroleum may pervade many contemporary cultures across the planet, yet the significant cultural impacts of other deposits, molten or crystallized, solidifying or liquefying, exposed or subsurface, carboniferous or not, have also been the subject of fictionalized encounters. As the damaging effects of centuries of intensive hydrocarbon mining escalate and as societies become ever more oil-bound, it also becomes increasingly urgent to recognize and elaborate relations to the geologic mediated by objects other than fossil fuels.

Redefining the Petro-text

Among the multiple petromodernities in play—with petro- no longer understood exclusively with reference to petroleum—this chapter examines a rich seam in what could be called German petromanticism, a lithic-literary subperiod that emerged at the saddle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The period is typified by genres centered on human-mineral romances and occurring in a larger cultural-historical context of intensive interest in forms of mining, particularly of precious stones, metals, and ores—but not coal and other fossil fuels. During the first decade of the nineteenth-century, production of coal in the German lands was, in Theodor Ziolkowski’s estimation, “almost too trivial to be recorded” at 0.3 million tons. Compared to England’s eleven million tons, and the relative inaccessibility of Germany’s fossil fuel deposits throughout much of the nineteenth century, means that the social context and material content of this literature differs from that of their British contemporaries and of contemporary fiction.³ That there is no endemic oil culture to speak of during this period, and that fossil fuels played a relatively little role in cultural production, does not mean there is no petrofiction to speak of. The mine has been identified as a primary institution of German romanticism, since from the medieval ages through the mid-nineteenth-century German mines served as the primary European source of precious metals for Europe, and by the late eighteenth-century there is a massive influx of fiction dealing with those mines. Just as Jussi Parikka in Anthrobscene (2014) and A Geology of Media (2015) proposes to consider “the depths of mines as essential places for the emergence of technical media culture,” so too do those depths act as an essential place for the emergence of romantic literary culture.⁴ The overlap between the cultural and the geological in German romanticism is so pronounced that a letter detailing an excursion in 1793 by Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder to “The Gift of God” (Die Gabe Gottes) and other iron ore mines in Upper Franconia is widely regarded as marking the beginning of the romantic movement in Germany.⁵ And so, if the geologic is the “defining strata of contemporary subjectivity,” as Kathryn Yusoff writes, then the mining narratives of German romanticism could be regarded as a defining stratum.⁶

Just as mines are instrumental in the formation of media cultures, so too are they crucibles for new geological epochs. Dust collected from ice cores in the vicinity of the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru evidences “a widespread anthropogenic signal” produced by colonial mining and metallurgy in Peru and Bolivia, particularly in the fifteenth century following the rapid expansion of silver mining in Potosí after 1450.⁷ The discovery of a globally legible anthropogenic signal leads the authors of that study to make two significant revisions to the prevailing narrative of the novel geological epoch informally known as the Anthropocene. Instead of linking this new epoch to the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at the start of the Industrial Revolution, they introduce the possibility of a preindustrial Anthropocene, and moreover one whose material signature consists in elevated heavy metal concentrations in the context of colonial extraction. Although the mines and caverns explored by Tieck and Wackenroder differ from those whose processing left a global trace in ice cores (in fact, the growth of Potosí may be linked to the exhaustion of silver mines in Saxony and Bohemia⁸), German romanticism is implicated in the Anthropocene in other ways. In his letter detailing his descent in 1793 into an iron ore mine, Wackenroder’s description of a “new machine” to run “pumps for removing water” from the mine implicates it in what until recently was the prevailing account of the Anthropocene.⁹ According to this account, posited by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene started “in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”¹⁰ Crutzen selects this date to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784, arguably the single-most important technical development behind the growing concentrations of these gases, and it is quite likely that Wackenroder encounters its predecessor, the Newcomen Engine, in the mine in 1793. This would have been just three years after Goethe was first introduced to a Newcomen steam engine, in the late summer and early autumn of 1790 during a trip to Upper Silesia, where, as Myles Jackson notes, they had been operating for several years (fig.1).¹¹ Goethe would go on to introduce the Newcomen engine to the mine in Ilmenau that he was overseeing at the time. This is a machine that figures even more centrally in another account of the Anthropocene, namely Gaia theorist James Lovelock’s A Rough Ride to the Future. In reference to the Newcomen Engine and “the pressing need of mine owners with flooded mines,” Lovelock argues that this need “set the start of the Anthropocene with the steam engine [i.e., the Newcomen Engine] in 1712.”¹² And so it is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that what Wackenroder and Tieck and many other romantics inadvertently witness in the mine, besides the deafening noise of these engines, is the emergence of a new geological epoch. When the eponymous protagonist of Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) descends into the Earth to meet with a miner and describes, in the very year that Tieck writes Rune Mountain, how “tremendous births are making a stir in the depths of the Earth, distended by the inner fire of the dark womb to gigantic and immense shapes,” he is also marking the monstrous natality of humanity’s geologic agency.¹³ If romantic narratives of descent into the mine allegorize a descent into human history, literary tradition, and sexuality, they might do the same for the ascent of the Anthropocene.

Figure 1. Sketch by Goethe of a Newcomen steam engine, ca. 1790–1791. Reproduced in Otfried Wagenbreth, Goethe und der Ilmenauer Bergbau. Acta humaniora, 1983, figure 15.

It is not so surprising, then, that some of the more prominent theorists of the Anthropocene return at crucial moments in their writing to German romanticism and its legacy, even when any link between these two periods tends to be left unexplored. At the center of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet geographer Nigel Clark turns to the post-Enlightenment legacy of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things Jane Bennett uses Kafka’s tales, inheritors of the romantic Kunstmärchen, or artistic fairy tale, to introduce vital materialism; in A Geology of Media Jussi Parikka turns to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen to articulate an alternative deep time of the media; and most recently Thomas Ford’s “Romanthropocene” evokes Friedrich Schlegel’s philosophy of romantic poetry for its conception of the world as artwork.¹⁴

Any examination of romantic legacies in the Anthropocene, however, would do well to cast a glance at Ludwig Tieck’s Rune Mountain, a tale of petrophilia gone awry. Particularly because romantic narratives of “enthrallment with earthly excavation” rarely “evoke the ensuing dirt and damage done by mining,” as Heather Sullivan observes, Tieck’s poetics of mining in Rune Mountain, a story of derangement and a damaged life, is all the more compelling.¹⁵ As readers increasingly revisit romantic narratives of mining, extraction, and descent—such as Kate Rigby, who in a recent reading of Heinrich von Ofterdingen proposes “to exhume an ecological ethos that might provide a locus of resistance to today’s political economy of extraction”¹⁶—it is arguably still important to seek out stories of complicity whose ecological ethos is dark in Timothy Morton’s sense of “admitting our coexistence with toxic substances we have created and exploited.”¹⁷ Elsewhere Rigby characterizes Rune Mountain as a “dark rejoinder” to the utopian romanticism of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and indeed the ecology of the former is nothing if not dark: underground, nocturnal, and despairing, though also vibrant.¹⁸ However, as John Lyon points out in a recent reading of Hymns to the Night and Heinrich von Ofterdingen that draws on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, Novalis dwells on the nocturnal and the subterranean precisely for their darkness and their corresponding lack of stable footing, lack of spatial orientation, and lack of temporal definition.¹⁹ If such experiences prove to be fundamental for the establishment of a sense of orientation (or reorientation), then any locus of resistance to the extractivism that the mining engineer Novalis himself helped develop could be sought in moments of disorientation. The darkness and dis-orientation of Rune Mountain might be productive for an ecological ethos after all. To start with, the alluring crypticness of the nonhuman world in Rune Mountain, particularly where it resists the ecologically destructive anthropocentrism and anthroponarcissism inherent in prominent accounts of the Anthropocene (e.g., “the geology of mankind”), could point the way toward their revision; second, the geosocialities that emerge in the course of the narrative (e.g., “the company of feral stones”²⁰) could indicate the “path of more-than-human communicative co-becoming” that Rigby suggest as a form of future coexistence to be gleaned from romantic narratives.²¹

Metal Imaginaries

Theodore Ziolkowski’s “The Mine: Image of the Soul,” from German Romanticism and its Institutions, remains the most thorough and insightful treatment of romantic mining narratives. As Ziolkowski shows, from the image of the human-mineral hybrids that haunt texts ranging from Tieck’s Rune Mountain (1802) to E. T. A. Hoffman’s Mines of Falun (1818) and all the other narratives of over-imaginative young men being lured away from the flatlands to the mountains, the mine functions as a source of images for romantic visions. My impulse to reexamine the mineral imaginary of German romanticism, however, ultimately stems from a two-fold dissatisfaction with Ziolkowski’s dictum that “the mine in German Romanticism is a mine of the soul, not a technological site.”²² When reviewing Ziolkowski’s sources it seems abundantly apparent today that a full account of the image of the mine in German romanticism entails exploring not only the way that the mineral realm has been imagined in literature but also how the romantic imaginary is materially from the mine, as the Medieval Latin minerale (“something mined”) indicates. In this case it might be more site-specific to speak of a metal imaginary, recalling along with Valerie Allen that metal derives from the Greek metallon, “mine” or “quarry,” which indicates the relationship between metal and the act of mining.²³ Furthermore, to treat the mine as a “mine of the soul” risks overly anthropomorphizing a space whose interest for romantic tales, in Rune Mountain as much as any, lies in its recalcitrance to domestic concerns.

That the mine from Tieck to Novalis to Hoffman is extensively figured in literature as an image of the human condition does not exclude it from also serving as a technological site for literature. Indeed, Jussi Parikka’s proposal to consider mines as sites of the emergence of technical media culture can be productively extended to encompass literary media, a prospect which Parikka proposes but does not consider at length.²⁴ Although the iron ore mines of Upper Franconia cannot be said to enable nineteenth-century German literature to the extent that copper and tantalum mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo materially enable contemporary digital media culture, this may be a difference of degree rather than kind. Romantic imaginaries are underpinned by material acts of extraction and they are generated in what Lewis Mumford calls the “manufactured environment” of the mine.²⁵ Although literary texts might be likened to an incidental mining byproduct rather than the recovered ores, this admission does not disregard the crystallization of German romanticism, in part, out of an early phase of modern mining technology. It emerges out of encounters that take place within those depths and is facilitated by acts of excavation and extraction within those depths, and in this way, it is also materially of those depths. Insofar as the soul is figured as possessing depth—an image greatly elaborated by the romantics—it has as its substrate the various technological achievements necessary for subsurface ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Of Other Petrofictions: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism
• 2. Goethe’s Erratics: Wandering in Deep Time
• 3. Many Stranded Stones: Stifter’s Spectral Landscapes
• 4. The Shock of the Earth: Benjamin’s Unarticulated Ground
• Epilogue: Dilapidated
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index