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notes-on-the-fourth-dimension

Notes on the Fourth Dimension By Jon Crabb October 28, 2015 Hyperspace, ghosts, and colourful cubes — Jon Crabb on the work of Charles Howard Hinton and the cultural history of higher dimensions. * Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal. . . — H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb (1917) * La Belle Époque, a beautiful term for a Beautiful Age, as Light and Understanding replace Fear and Superstition, and Science and Art join hands in unholy matrimony and set out to discover the world anew. Trains become underground worms burrowing through the city, displacing medieval graves in the name of modernity; the Aéro-Club de France sends men into the heavens, amazing the public; Muybridge proves horses fly too and wins a bet; Edison floods the world with light; biologists discover germs and defy Death; botanists grow tropical plants in Parisian glass-houses and affront Nature with hot-house orchids; the phonograph and the cinema fold Time and Space for the masses. And for some reason bicycles become rather popular. The world was getting smaller every day and the discoveries were getting bigger every week. How very diverting it all was. . . * In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death. — H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship (1920) * During the period we now call the fin de siècle, worlds collided. Ideas were being killed off as much as being born. And in a sort of Hegelian logic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the most interesting ones arose as the offspring of wildly different parents. In particular, the last gasp of Victorian spirituality infused cutting-edge science with a certain sense of old-school mysticism. Theosophy was all the rage; Huysmans dragged Satan into modern Paris; and eccentric poets and scholars met in the British Museum Reading Room under the aegis of the Golden Dawn for a cup of tea and a spot of demonology. As a result of all this, certain commonly-accepted scientific terms we use today came out of quite weird and wonderful ideas being developed at the turn of the century. Such is the case with space, which fascinated mathematicians, philosophers, and artists with its unfathomable possibilities. Outside of sheltered mathematical circles, the trend began rather innocuously in 1884, when Edwin A. Abbott published the satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions under the pseudonym A. Square. In the fine tradition of English satire, he creates an alternative world as a sort of nonsense arena to lampoon the social structures of Victorian England. In this two-dimensional world, different classes are made up of different polygons, and the laws concerning sides and angles that maintain that hierarchy are pushed to absurd proportions. Initially, the work was only moderately popular, but it introduced thought experiments on how to visualise higher dimensions to the general public. It also paved the ground for a much more esoteric thinker who would have much more far-reaching effects with his own mystical brand of higher mathematics. In April 1904, C. H. Hinton published The Fourth Dimension, a popular maths book based on concepts he had been developing since 1880 that sought to establish an additional spatial dimension to the three we know and love. This was not understood to be time as we’re so used to thinking of the fourth dimension nowadays; that idea came a bit later. Hinton was talking about an actual spatial dimension, a new geometry, physically existing, and even possible to see and experience; something that linked us all together and would result in a “New Era of Thought”. (Interestingly, that very same month in a hotel room in Cairo, Aleister Crowley talked to Egyptian Gods and proclaimed a “New Aeon” for mankind. For those of us who amuse ourselves by charting the subcultural backstreets of history, it seems as though a strange synchronicity briefly connected a mystic mathematician and a mathematical mystic — which is quite pleasing.) Hinton begins his book by briefly relating the history of higher dimensions and non-Euclidean maths up to that point. Surprisingly, for a history of mathematicians, it’s actually quite entertaining. Here is one tale he tells of János Bolyai, a Hungarian mathematician who contributed important early work on non-Euclidean geometry before joining the army: It is related of him that he was challenged by thirteen officers of his garrison, a thing not unlikely to happen considering how differently he thought from everyone else. He fought them all in succession — making it his only condition that he should be allowed to play on his violin for an interval between meeting each opponent. He disarmed or wounded all his antagonists. It can be easily imagined that a temperament such as his was not one congenial to his military superiors. He was retired in 1833. Mathematicians have definitely lost their flair. The notion of duelling with violinist mathematicians may seem absurd, but there was a growing unease about the apparently arbitrary nature of “reality” in light of new scientific discoveries. The discoverers appeared renegades. As the nineteenth century progressed, the world was robbed of more and more divine power and started looking worryingly like a ship adrift without its captain. Science at the frontiers threatened certain strongly-held assumptions about the universe. The puzzle of non-Euclidian geometry was even enough of a contemporary issue to appear in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov when Ivan discusses the ineffability of God: But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. . . I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world?— Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamzov (1880), Part II, Book V, Chapter 3. Well Ivan, to quote Hinton, “it is indeed strange, the manner in which we must begin to think about the higher world”. Hinton’s solution was a series of coloured cubes that, when mentally assembled in sequence, could be used to visualise a hypercube in the fourth dimension of hyperspace. He provides illustrations and gives instructions on how to make these cubes and uses the word “tesseract” to describe the four-dimensional object. The term “tesseract”, still used today, might be Hinton’s most obvious legacy, but the genesis of the word is slightly cloudy. He first used it in an 1888 book called A New Era of Thought and initially used the spelling tessaract. In Greek, “τεσσάρα”, meaning “four”, transliterates to “tessara” more accurately than “tessera”, and -act likely comes from “ακτίνες” meaning “rays”; so Hinton’s use suggests the four rays from each vertex exhibited in a hypercube and neatly encodes the idea “four” into his four-dimensional polytope. However, in Latin, “tessera” can also mean “cube”, which is a plausible starting point for the new word. As is sometimes the case, there seems to be some confusion over the Greek or Latin etymology, and we’ve ended up with a bastardization. To confuse matters further, by 1904 Hinton was mostly using “tesseract” — I say mostly because the copies of his books I’ve seen aren’t entirely consistent with the spelling, in all likelihood due to a mere oversight in the proof-reading. Regardless, the later spelling won acceptance while the early version died with its first appearance. Hinton also promises that when the visualisation is achieved, his cubes can unlock hidden potential. “When the faculty is acquired — or rather when it is brought into consciousness for it exists in everyone in imperfect form — a new horizon opens. The mind acquires a development of power”. It is clear from Hinton’s writing that he saw the fourth dimension as both physically and psychically real, and that it could explain such phenomena as ghosts, ESP, and synchronicities. In an indication of the spatial and mystical significance he afforded it, Hinton suggested that the soul was “a four-dimensional organism, which expresses its higher physical being in the symmetry of the body, and gives the aims and motives of human existence”. Letters submitted to mathematical journals of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly disturbing or dangerously addictive. It was rumoured that some particularly ardent adherents of the cubes had even gone mad. * He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.— H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1928) * Hinton’s ideas gradually pervaded the cultural milieu over the next thirty years or so — prominently filtering down to the Cubists and Duchamp. The arts were affected by two distinct interpretations of higher dimensionality: on the one hand, the idea as a spatial, geometric concept is readily apparent in early Cubism’s attempts to visualise all sides of an object at once, while on the other hand, it becomes a kind of all-encompassing mystical codeword used to justify avant-garde experimentation. “This painting doesn’t make sense? Ah, well, it does in the fourth dimension. . .” It becomes part of a language for artists exploring new ideas and new spaces. Guillaume Apollinaire was amongst the first to write about the fourth dimension in the arts with his essay Les peintres cubistes in 1913, which veers from one interpretation to another over the course of two paragraphs and stands as one of the best early statements on the phenomenon: Until now, the three dimensions of Euclid’s geometry were sufficient to the restiveness felt by great artists yearning for the infinite. The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term: the fourth dimension. [. . .] Wishing to attain the proportions of the ideal, to be no longer limited to the human, the young painters offer us works which are more cerebral than sensual. They discard more and more the old art of optical illusion and local proportion, in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms. This is why contemporary art, even if it does not directly stem from specific religious beliefs, none the less possesses some of the characteristics of great, that is to say religious art. Whilst most suited to the visual arts, the fourth dimension also made inroads into literature, with Apollinaire and his calligrammes arguably a manifestation. Gertrude Stein with her strikingly visual, mentally disorienting poetry was also accused of writing under its influence, something she refuted in an interview with the Atlantic Monthly in 1935: “Somebody has said that I myself am striving for a fourth dimension in literature. I am striving for nothing of the sort and I am not striving at all but only gradually growing and becoming steadily more aware of the way things can be felt and known in words.” If nothing else, the refutation at least indicates the idea’s long-lasting presence in artistic circles. Some critics have since tried to back-date higher dimensions in literature to Lewis Carroll and Through the Looking-Glass, although he was, by all accounts, a fairly conservative mathematician who once wrote an article critical of current academic interest in the subject entitled “Euclid and his Modern Rivals” (1873). As a side note, Hinton once invented a game of three-dimensional chess and opined that none of his students could understand it, so perhaps Carroll would have appreciated that. If anything, the connection between Carroll and hyperspace was the other way round, and the symbolic language employed by Carroll — mirrors, changing proportions, nonsense, topsy-turvy inversions and so on — was picked up by later artists and writers to help prop up their own conceptions of the fourth dimension, which, as we can see, were starting to become a bit of a free for all. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, coined the rather wonderful phrase “Mirrorical return” in a note about the fourth dimension and the Large Glass. In the same period that Hinton’s ideas of the fourth dimension were gaining currency among the intellectuals of Europe our “secret sense, our sixth sense” was identified by neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington in 1906. Proprioception, as he called it, is our ability to locate where a body part is when our eyes are closed — in other words, our ability to perceive ourselves in space. And yet the sixth sense means something completely different to us nowadays, associated with another fin-de-siècle obsession: mediumship, the ability to perceive things in the same space but in different dimensions. It is worth noting that in those days, scientists — real, respected, working scientists — apparently looked towards spiritualist mediums for experimental evidence. At the same time, Hinton’s cubes were used in séances as a method of glimpsing the fourth dimension (and hopefully a departed soul or two). Hinton himself published one of his very first articles on the fourth dimension with the sensational subtitle “Ghosts Explained”. In defence of the era’s more eccentric ideas, though, so much was explained or invented in so very few years, that it must have seemed only a matter of time before life’s greatest mysteries were finally solved. In any case, the craze over a mystical fourth dimension began to fade while the sensible sixth sense of proprioception just never really caught on. * But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?– H.P. Lovecraft, “The Street” (1919) * By the late 1920s, Einsteinian Space-Time had more or less replaced the spatial fourth dimension in the minds of the public. It was a cold yet elegant concept that ruthlessly killed off the more romantic idea of strange dimensions and impossible directions. What had once been the playground of spiritualists and artists was all too convincingly explained. As hard science continued to rise in the early decades of the twentieth century, the fin-de-siècle’s more outré ideas continued to decline. Only the Surrealists continued to make reference to it, as an act of rebellion and vindication of the absurd. The idea of a real higher dimension linking us together as One sounded all a bit too dreamy, a bit too old-fashioned for a new century that was picking up speed, especially when such vague and multifarious explanations were trumped by the special theory of relativity. Hinton was as much hyperspace philosopher as scientist and hoped humanity would create a more peaceful and selfless society if only we recognised the unifying implications of the fourth dimension. Instead, the idea was banished to the realms of New Age con-artists, reappearing these days updated and repackaged as the fifth dimension. Its shadow side, however, proved hopelessly alluring to fantasy writers who have seen beyond the veil, and bring back visions of horror from an eldritch land outside of time and space that will haunt our nightmares with its terrible geometry, where tentacles and abominations truly horrible sleep beneath the Pacific Ocean waiting to bring darkness to our world. . . But still we muddle on through. * What do we know. . . of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos. — H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond (1920) * The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 28, 2015

Jon Crabb

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:29.615430

picturing-don-quixote

Picturing Don Quixote By Rachel Schmidt April 6, 2016 This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, author of one of the best-loved and most frequently illustrated books in the history of literature — Don Quixote. Rachel Schmidt explores how the varying approaches to illustrating the tale have reflected and impacted its reading through the centuries. Four hundred years ago, on April 23, 1616, Miguel de Cervantes died. In the prologue to his posthumously published The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, he poked fun at his upcoming death and the little literary fame he achieved in his lifetime. As the aging author rode a nag on the road to Toledo, a student catching up to him from behind hailed him with these words, “Yes, yes, this is the complete cripple, the completely famous and comic writer, and lastly, the delight of the muses!” Cervantes could not accept this faint praise, and replied, “That is an error into which many of my uninformed admirers have fallen. I, sir, am Cervantes, but not the delight of the muses or any of the other foolish things that you have mentioned.” Cervantes finished the prologue by taking leave of his readers: “for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happy in the life to come!”1 The literary fame Cervantes gained in his lifetime was for writing Don Quixote de la Mancha. The book tells the story of Alonso Quijano, a country gentleman whose limited estate has been eaten away by the costs to both his purse and mental stability caused by his non-stop consumption of chivalric romance. Proclaiming himself the knight errant Don Quixote de la Mancha in an age when knights no longer exist, he sets off, accompanied by the peasant Sancho Panza, to right imaginary wrongs, only to meet with beatings by those who consider him at best a madman, if not a fool. After being taken home in a cage by his neighbors at the end of Part One, Don Quixote hits the road again in Part Two, this time to encounter readers of his previous misadventures, including a duke and duchess who turn the would-be knight errant and squire into court entertainment. Published in 1605, Part One gained sufficient popularity to inspire translation into English by Thomas Shelton, probably by 1612, and into French by Cesar Oudin by 1614, as well as a spurious continuation from 1614 by the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. Already having begun Part Two (published in 1615), Cervantes reacted against Avellaneda’s sequel by changing his characters’ route and taking angry swipes at the impostor. Nonetheless, the generic identity and even the intent behind his beloved work had bothered the author from the beginning. In Part One’s prologue, an unnamed friend advises Cervantes, who struggles with writer’s block, that his goal be “demolishing the ill-founded apparatus of these chivalric books, despised by many and praised by so many more, and if you accomplish this, you will have accomplished much.” What is more, reading Don Quixote was to “move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it.”2 Whatever Cervantes’ initial idea, in the course of the last four hundred years, Don Quixote has embarked on a journey in the world imagination that has taken the literary character far beyond its original conception. The book illustrations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote would play a decisive role in this — not only transforming the image of Don Quixote and his loyal servant Sancho Panza but also giving life to the image of Cervantes himself. * Seventeenth-century images emphasized the title character’s pompous folly as well as the often rough-and-tumble action of many episodes. The windmill scene, in which Don Quixote mistakes for giants the technology that grinds the grain produced in the semi-arid Manchegan landscape, became immediately iconic. The first representation of the scene appears in a Frankfurt edition of 1648, in which the windmill sail stabs Don Quixote. The frontispiece to the 1687 London Hodgkin edition also captures important motifs of early visual interpretation. The presence of the windmill identifies this otherwise English countryside as the setting for Don Quixote’s adventures, as it already did in the title page to the 1620 London Blount edition (see the second image featured above). In the foreground Don Quixote proudly wears the basin that he has claimed from a bewildered barber as Mambrino’s helmet, while Sancho, dominated by a beer belly, wears a dunce’s cap. Aldonza Lorenzo, the peasant Don Quixote names as his sweetheart when Sancho pushes for information about the imaginary Dulcinea, feeds pigs in the background. The iconographic tradition has already diverged from the novel in significant ways. In the text Sancho is described as having long shanks, but illustrators show him with the abundant belly that his name implies (Panza meaning “belly” in Spanish). The comic opposition of the short, fat peasant to the tall, lean would-be knight errant — a juxtaposition never developed by Cervantes — emerges early in book illustrations. Here the fictitious nature of the beautiful, virginal Dulcinea stressed by Cervantes remains unchanged, as the illustrator depicts Cervantes’ joke concerning a husky peasant woman who had the best hand for salting pork in all the neighboring countryside. In the eighteenth century major changes came to the interpretation of Don Quixote, accompanied by a reappraisal of Cervantes. The advent of deluxe editions containing biographies of the author as well as abundant engravings, including illustrations of the episodes with allegorical frontispieces and maps, transformed the funny book into a monumental tome fit to take its place beside classics such as Homer, Dante and Horace on the learned reader’s bookshelf. The 1738 London Tonson edition, published in Spanish and patronized by Lord Carteret, constitutes a monumental project. It boasts Gregorio Mayans y Siscar’s biography of Cervantes as well as two portraits of Cervantes, one presenting him as a sensitive man of letters and another as the allegorical hero Hercules Musagetes. The first, designed by William Kent and engraved by George Vertue, emphasizes the writer’s dignity, hiding the hand maimed at the Battle of Lepanto and framing him in drapery and books in a Gothic architectural setting. Cervantes clearly controls his characters, Don Quixote and Sancho, astride their mounts in a vaulted niche behind him. The allegorical portrait of Cervantes as a muscular Hercules, designed by John Vanderbank and engraved by Gerard van der Gucht, stands in sharp contrast. The author turns his back on the viewer and the pleading Muses, takes a club and a mask from a beckoning satyr, and strides toward Mount Parnassus to rid it of the monsters of knight errantry that occupy it. The meaning of the illustrations must have seemed somewhat slippery and unstable, for a certain Dr John Oldfield found it necessary to write accompanying explanations. The mask, which sports a heavy brow and craggy nose very similar to that of Don Quixote in the edition’s episodic illustrations, is “the proper implement for accomplishing [Cervantes’] end, viz. those of raillery and satire.”3 Whereas earlier commentators insisted on Cervantes’ parody of the popular literature of knight errantry, Oldfield and Mayans now attribute to the author satiric intent, clothing him in neoclassical attire. For Mayans, the literature of knight errantry is nothing less than barbaric, perpetuating the rule of brute power that followed the fall of Rome. Cervantes’ satirical attack on chivalric romance becomes, then, a defence of reason and, even, civilization. In visual terms, elevating the novel to another genre translates to illustrating episodes that show Don Quixote not only as a fool, but also as a man of learning. In this sense, alternative narratives emerge in the illustrations. For example, Cervantes pokes fun at Don Quixote as his character discourses — before puzzled, illiterate goatherds — on the lost Golden Age when trees gave freely of their fruit and maidens rode untouched across the wilderness as virginal as the mothers who gave them birth. Not only does the would-be knight errant mangle the classical topic, but he does so for an audience who has no idea what he is talking about. When Vanderbank encapsulates this episode in its climactic moment according to the norms of history painting, a very different vision emerges. The goatherds listen raptly, as a youth presents his muscular back to the spectator but turns his head in respectful attention toward the distinguished Don Quixote. This setting of the central character, using the surrounding crowd to pull in the viewer’s eye, is seen in works such as Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda. Indeed, the only person who ignores Cervantes’ madman is Sancho, who guzzles his wine bottom right. The visual neoclassical vocabulary fails to capture Cervantes’ irony, nor is it deemed fitting within the larger project of canonizing the novel Don Quixote to revert to depicting scenes of physical humor or of Don Quixote’s madness. In fact, this edition does not depict the infamous windmill scene at all. Although the 1780 Madrid Ibarra edition, patronized by the Real Academia de la Lengua, complements the 1738 London Tonson edition in its canonizing impulse, certain components demonstrate how the language of neoclassicism, both visual and critical, can give way to a sentimental reading of the novel in which Don Quixote emerges as a hero. In his analysis of the novel, Vicente de los Ríos notes glimpses of wisdom within the character of Don Quixote, and observes that when not dealing with issues of knight errantry, the madman always behaves as an educated gentleman. Among the several illustrators whose drawings were engraved for this monumental edition, José del Castillo ventured into a heroic vocabulary. In an illustration of Don Quixote’s beating by mare herders engraved by Pedro Pascual Moles, Castillo grants the fallen character dignity and strength, as he offsets the brutish beating by the two peasants with his outstretched shield. His profile is strong, middle-aged, and handsome; his gaze valiant. Even the compositional curve formed by his attackers and the tree behind them is anchored by the firm Don Quixote at their feet. All this, of course, illustrates a violent encounter occasioned by an event perhaps more comic than dignified: the randy nag Rocinante’s unwelcome sexual advances upon the mares. With the advent of mass-produced editions containing vignettes and full-page illustrations in the nineteenth century, comic and sentimental images often coexisted in the same volume. In the 1818 London Cadell edition Robert Smirke designed two quite different illustrations, both referring to Don Quixote’s penance in the Sierra Morena, in which the would-be knight errant took off his pants and performed acrobatic feats as proof of his devotion to Dulcinea. One is a full-page illustration, engraved by Francis Engleheart, showing Don Quixote seated half-naked atop a mountain peak, which has been interpreted as evidence of a “Romantic” reading of the novel. The other illustration, an accompanying vignette, clearly participates in the older, comic tradition as it shows Don Quixote upside-down with bare legs akimbo and Sancho Panza in the background, aghast at his master’s shamelessness. The production of vignettes along with full-page illustrations (already seen in deluxe editions) allows for a multiplicity of visual interpretations of Don Quixote side by side in the same edition. In his illustrations for the 1863 Paris Hachette edition, Gustave Doré took advantage of the diversity of the iconographic traditions to create a visually exuberant and even contradictory vision of Cervantes’ novel. The French illustrator carried the sentimental tradition to its extreme, seeing not only Don Quixote as the hero he believed himself to be but also seeing the world from his perspective. Granted new technical capacity to explore dark tones through wood engraving, Doré reveled in depicting night scenes, wringing from them their lugubrious ambient qualities. In the illustration engraved by Longacre after Doré’s drawing of a fictitious procession of “Merlin”, rigged by a duke and duchess to manipulate Don Quixote and Sancho, the artist capitalizes on white on black delineation to highlight the spectral quality the midnight scene would have had for the two frightened protagonists. This vision of the episode allows readers to experience the knight errant and squire’s fear, and then to feel the disappointment and eventual loathing for the cynical aristocracy as the truth is revealed. This inversion of perspectives is another turn in the visual narrative. Nonetheless, Doré did not renounce the comic. Returning to the windmill scene, Doré foregrounds Don Quixote’s defeat as the tattered sail sweeps Rocinante into the air, exposing the horse’s underbelly and carrying the thwarted madman along a great arc that literally brings down to earth the vision of a battle between a hero and giants. In the case of eighteenth-century deluxe editions, the move by publishers and literary biographers to canonize Cervantes and his novel was coupled with the illustrators’ neoclassical visual vocabulary that tended toward sentimentalizing Don Quixote. As editorial projects, these editions were monumental in scale and succeeded in envisioning Cervantes as a “classical” author, yet the illustrations depict an intentionally one-sided perspective on the novel’s complexity, sacrificing its humor and irony. Nineteenth-century editions, cheaply produced and including vignettes, reintroduced the comic episodes side by side with the sentimental. Even more influential was making visible the perspective of Don Quixote himself, in all its excessive attractiveness, as seen in Doré’s vision. So it is that the character Don Quixote slipped away from the straitjacket in which he had been held when considered a mere tool for attacking chivalric romances, and became a hero of the popular imagination. Cervantes had already glimpsed how slippery the claims to his wonderful nutcase would be, when in the prologue to Part One he quipped, “But though I seem to be the father, I am the stepfather of Don Quixote.”4 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 6, 2016

Rachel Schmidt

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:30.443122

who-says-michelangelo-was-right-conflicting-visions-of-the-past-in-early-modern-prints

Who Says Michelangelo Was Right? Conflicting Visions of the Past in Early Modern Prints By Monique Webber February 10, 2016 When the lost classical sculpture Laocoön and His Sons — lauded as representing the very highest ideal of art — was dug up in 1506 with limbs missing, the authorities in Rome set about restoring it to how they imagined it once to look. Monique Webber explores how it was in reproductive prints that this vision was contested, offering a challenge to the mainstream interpretation of Antiquity. Rome, 1506. A Vatican envoy races across the Renaissance city to the home of Giuliano da Sangallo, Pope Julius II’s architect. Something wonderful has been found on the Esquiline Hill. Soon after Sangallo, his son Francesco, and his close friend Michelangelo – who was at the Sangallo home as usual – are lowered into the ground to another world. The Roman Emperor Titus’ palace, believed to have been built over the infamous Golden House of Nero for which Rome (supposedly) burnt, had been found beneath the vineyard of Felice de’ Freddi. Peeking out from the now-underground palace was the Laocoön and His Sons. This monumental sculpture of the Trojan priest and his children, killed by Poseidon’s sea serpents for prophesying the city’s destruction by the Trojan Horse, had been lost to sight since the fall of the Roman Empire. But this had not prevented its fame from burning as brightly in the early modern period as it had in the ancient city. One of the works praised in Pliny the Elder’s first-century treatise Natural History, the Laocoön was amongst the revered lost treasures of Rome. And now it had been returned to the city and its artists. There was only one problem – the Laocoön was broken. But the Vatican could see to that. At a time when a farmer could be tilling a vineyard and reveal an imperial palace, the lines between the ancient and the modern city were not definitively drawn in Rome. The same could be said of its art. Rome attracted thousands of artists, as eager to scour Pliny’s Natural History and the city’s antiquity galleries for inspiration as they were to learn the latest techniques from the leading court artists. And so when a work such as the Laocoön was found to be missing arms and sections of snake, and with one son detached, it was only natural that one of the pope’s favoured artists should complete it. After all, the pope was the guardian of the city, and his artists were the inheritors of the Roman tradition. In the same way that an apprentice would show the depth of his understanding by finishing the background of the master’s painting, so Rome’s modern artists would express respect for their ancient predecessors by restoring their work “maniera all’antico” (“in the ancient style”), as Giorgio Vasari was later to praise the Laocoön restoration in his Lives of the Artists. And perhaps with just a little of their own individuality, so that the much-desired affinity with antiquity could also add to their own status. But the question in 1506 was, who amongst Rome’s artists would be entrusted with the commission? Pope Julius II had amassed a court of the most celebrated artists of the day. Having promptly purchased the Laocoön from de’ Freddi and placed it in the Belvedere courtyard, the Pope had his pick of masters to complete the sculpture. The work remained fragmentary until 1510, when the elderly architect Donato Bramante challenged the leading masters to come up with the best solution for the damaged Laocoön. Raphael, a distant relative of Bramante, was elected as the judge. In a few short years, the young artist from Urbino had established himself as the enfant terrible of Rome’s art scene. Having goaded the formerly pre-eminent Michelangelo by winning papal favour and sneaking into his as-yet unfinished Sistine Chapel, Raphael further insulted his Florentine rival in the Laocoön competition. Ignoring Michelangelo’s argument that Laocoön’s right arm was turned back in anguish, Raphael instead declared Jacopo Sansovino the winner. His version, in which the priest’s arm extends upwards to create a dramatic diagonal composition, was implemented in a series of restorations in 1520-1540. This Renaissance-revised Laocoön enjoyed an impeccable heritage of papal patronage and leading artists’ deliberation. It was the standard vision of the sculpture until the twentieth century when, in an historical twist of fate, an antique backward-bent arm was discovered in a Roman workshop in 1906. Affirmation in 1942 that the fragment belonged to the Laocoön, and the subsequent decision to reaffix it to the sculpture, posthumously vindicated Michelangelo’s argument long after even he had come to agree with Sansovino’s composition. This popularity of Sansovino’s version did not signify, however, that everyone else approved. At the same time as the Laocoön was unearthed and became the talk of Rome, the engraver Hans Brosamer was born in the German city of Fulda. Brosamer never travelled to Rome, so he could not participate in the ongoing debate about the Laocoön’s restoration or even see the work for himself. This did not prevent him from forwarding his own interpretation of the sculpture that flooded Europe’s visual culture through reproductive prints and miniatures. In response, in 1538 Brosamer created the tiny engraving Laocoön Troia. In the centre stands Laocoön, his face upturned in anguish as in the Vatican sculpture, while sea serpents bind his limbs and those of his sons. In case the viewer remained in any doubt that Brosamer intended to depict the recently discovered sculpture, behind this scene of agony can be seen imagined Roman buildings. Their embellishments include a Pegasus capital very similar to those from the Augustan Temple of Mars Ultor, and famously illustrated in Sebastiano Serlio’s architectural treatise Tutte l’Opere d’Architettura, et Prospetiva (All the Works of Architecture, and of Perspective). Brosamer is closely aligning his sculpturally modelled Laocoön with that being debated over in Rome. Yet Brosamer’s image has not followed the restoration dictated by the Italian architects. Some elements, such as the smaller serpents in slightly different positions, could be regarded as minor differences of interpretation from one print to the next. However, Brosamer has taken this further, and dramatically revised the composition. Freed from the practicalities of the actual stone, Brosamer rearranged and elaborated the fragments. The resulting image expresses his own understanding of how a statue of the Trojan priest should look. The son on the right, whose missing arm had been restored to be raised in fear, now holds his father instead. The other son has been detached from the composition and turned ninety degrees to struggle with the serpents on the ground. The altar against which Laocoön leans has also been detached, and forms the composition’s background. And, in direct engagement with the arguments over the sculpture in Rome, Brosamer has bent Laocoön’s arm back just as Michelangelo had first intended. In opposing the sculptor’s revised approval of Sansovino’s restoration, Brosamer challenged the “official” image of the Laocoön and its adjacent culture of superstar artists and faithful mass-market reproduction. Reproducing a work visible in Rome, Brosamer’s engraving can be aligned with the European tradition of what were known in their Italian centre of production as vedute (“views”). Although some artistic licence was allowed, these were primarily intended to show the city as it was seen by visitors. Hieronymus Cock’s 1550 etchings of the Forum of Augustus and Nerva demonstrate how closely vedute could be modelled on the visual reality. Even though he did not know what they were, Cock was eager to show the ruins as they stood in the city. In terms of sculpture, Nicholas Beatrizet’s engraving of the River God Tiber replicates almost exactly the form of the work as it was seen opposite the Laocoön in the Belvedere Courtyard (now in the Musée du Louvre). Brosamer’s composition is clearly based on such an image of the Laocoön. Yet he has used this not as a model, but as an inspiration for his own vision. With Brosamer having boldly revised the “official” Laocoön, other artists followed suit. In a design eventually printed by Nicolò Boldrini, Titian reimagined the Trojan priest and his sons as apes in a Venetian landscape. Although praised by the seventeenth century biographer Carlo Ridolfi as “un gentil pensiero. . .” (“a delicate concept. . .”), the image’s attitude towards the Laocoön is unmistakeably satiric. Notably, Titian’s parody – which has been variously interpreted as opposing either the sculpture, its adulation, or its replica by Bartolomeo Bandinelli – does not respect the Sansovino restoration. Like Brosamer, Titian has opposed Raphael’s decision and bent back the priest’s arm. The Laocoön may have been completed and installed at Rome, where Titian likely saw it in 1545-1546. But in Venice, The Laocoön Group as Monkeys targeted an audience open to an alternative vision. Centuries after Brosamer and Titian’s images, William Blake similarly utilised print media to forward his own opinion of the iconic sculpture. In his 1826 Laocoön the carefully rendered work is newly identified as a group comprising of Jehovah, Satan, and Adam from Solomon’s Temple. This modern Laocoön exceeds Brosamer and Titian’s revisions, and for the first time significantly reorients the sculpture’s meaning away from the predominant Greco-Roman tradition. Yet in this audacious reimagining of the Laocoön intellectual institution, the sculpture’s Renaissance form is not altered. Blake has maintained the composition as Sansovino created it, and as he would have known it. To a certain extent, the form of the sculpture has become immaterial. As a simultaneously exalted and questionable masterpiece, subject to both rapturous praise and reappraisal, the Laocoön is for Blake a platform for exploring new concepts. Surrounded by snatches of his theories on culture and society, Blake’s image revives debate over the sculpture’s significance in its contemporary context. Livia Stoenescu has suggested that Brosamer’s Troia “foster[s] a climate of insubordination. . .” to the dominance of the Laocoön as a singular representation of the past, and in so doing casts its restorers as “slavish imitators. . .” of this singular model (Stoenescu, 2015, p. 185). To this can be added a challenge to the Roman artists’ authority to determine what the past looked like. Ignoring the assumed restrictions on his artistic freedom as a maker of vedute, in his version of the Laocoön, Brosamer was amongst the first to assert the validity of his interpretation of antiquity. Laocoön Troia reveals how open visual culture was to interpretation in early modern Europe, even in the period at which its revival was at its highest. When regarded alongside Titian and Blake’s versions, the extent to which artists across Europe engaged in these debates is evident. Antiquity – and its reinterpretation – may have been superficially cloaked in academic learning and deliberation. In reality, it was a lively and fluid debate. If Brosamer had a hand in the actual Laocoön restoration, we would certainly see a very different sculpture in the Belvedere Courtyard today. And with his print Brosamer has ensured that, in some way, we do. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 10, 2016

Monique Webber

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:30.914152

on-oscar-wilde-and-plagiarism

On Oscar Wilde and Plagiarism By Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell January 13, 2016 Celebrated for his innovative wit, Oscar Wilde and the notion of originality are common bedfellows. The pairing, however, is not without its complications. Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore the claims of plagiarism that dogged Wilde's career, particularly as regards his relationship with that other great figure of late-19th-century Decadence, the American painter James McNeill Whistler. “[W]hen I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.” – Oscar Wilde1 Charges of Oscar Wilde’s plagiarism are certainly not new; they have their origins in his contemporaries’ sharp criticism of his first published volume, Poems (1881). Even if they did not claim that any of his poetry had been stolen verbatim from the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites whose work he adored, commentators grasped that much of his work was highly derivative. The Saturday Review was fairly typical of the critical reception: “The book is not without traces of cleverness, but it is marred everywhere by imitation, insincerity, and bad taste.”2 At the same time, the Oxford Union famously rejected on similar grounds the very copy of Poems that its secretary had solicited from Wilde; at the Oxford Union, the undergraduate Oliver Elton — later to become a renowned literary historian — asserted that Wilde’s poems were “not by their putative father at all, but by a number of better-known and more deservedly reputed authors.”3 Modern scholars have on occasion rebutted Elton’s claim, suggesting that disdain for Wilde’s developing poetic voice or even downright jealousy motivated the outcry.4 Nevertheless, the stigma attached to the reception of Poems has stuck firmly to that work and to many others in Wilde’s oeuvre. In the late twentieth century, his presumed unoriginality appeared to one scholar as a symptom of his constitutional indolence: “[O]ne feels that Wilde was more than usually immature in his slavish regurgitation of diverse and unassimilated poetic tags; one is impatient with his lazy refusal to replace the shorthand of quotation by a carefully thought-out phrasing of his own; and one is shocked at the effrontery of a would-be literary imposter.”5 Many observers dismissed the idea that Wilde’s youthful identification with his Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite poetic idols was so strong that his devotion to them — and not a desire to steal from them — resulted in his apparent copying of their writings. And in a connected point, while charges of affectation were frequently applied to Wilde’s aesthetic mannerisms, it seems that few took seriously the idea that the lassitude or nonchalance he embodied was itself affected; his languor was (like the “Double First” degree he earned at Oxford even as he insisted to friends that he would be lucky to escape with a third) the product of intense — if skillfully concealed — effort. From the early 1880s onward Wilde found it hard to escape the entrenched belief that he happily filched other people’s ideas. By far the most controversial conflict in Wilde’s career arose from criticisms that the socially competitive painter James McNeill Whistler made about Wilde’s unacknowledged appropriation of his bon mots. The rivalry between the older American artist and the younger Irish author, who moved in similar fashionable circles, developed through a spirited if eventually bitter exchange in the periodical press. On February 20, 1885, Whistler delivered his notorious “Ten O’ Clock Lecture”, whose title indicates the attention-grabbing late-evening slot he chose to deliver his thoughts on art. In particular, Whistler attacked the modern critic: “the unattached writer” who “has become the middleman in the matter of Art”.6 Such an arbiter of taste, in Whistler’s view, could not see the “painter’s poetry” in the artwork, since the critic treated it as he would “a novel — a history — or an anecdote.”7 Wilde retorted by objecting to Whistler’s belief that only the artist can comprehend aesthetic beauty. “An artist”, Wilde commented, “is not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle.”8 In other words, Wilde claimed that cultural traditions created the conditions in which the finest types of art could flourish. Moreover, he asserted that in these modern times, “an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau dans l’horrible.”9 Challenged, Whistler responded briskly in the World, stating that Wilde had implied that it was left to modern poets to find “‘l’horrible’ dans ‘le beau’”.10 In turn, Wilde sparred back that Whistler had scarcely understood his critique: “Be warned this time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible. To be great is to be misunderstood.”11 With intentional archness, in this last line Wilde drove home his point by quoting — though not explicitly acknowledging — Emerson’s famous essay, “Self-Reliance” (1840)12, thus further appropriating another person’s wisdom to speak eloquently on his behalf. Toward the end of 1886, Whistler’s temper flared up once more when he detected Wilde’s flagrant appropriation of some of his phrases. “What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables, and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces.”13 “Oscar,” Whistler’s barbs continued, “has the courage of the opinions . . . of others!”14 Matters did not rest there. Years later, the American painter again grew vociferous when he read Herbert Vivian’s reminiscences, which appeared in the London Sun in the autumn of 1889. Vivian recalled a lecture that Wilde delivered almost seven years before, for which Whistler had “in good fellowship crammed him”. In the lecture, Wilde wryly addressed Whistler as “Butterfly” (Whistler commonly signed his artwork with a stylized butterfly) but failed to give the elder artist credit for his assistance.15 Vivian also noted that in “The Decay of Lying”, published in the Nineteenth Century in January 1889, Wilde had incorporated, without acknowledging Whistler as the source, the artist’s claim that he had “the courage of the opinions . . . of others”.16 Wilde’s alleged offense occurs early in the essay, when his main speaker in this critical dialogue argues that the modern novelist has lost the ability to lie and simply “presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction”: He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.17 In Whistler’s eyes, the irony could not have been more blatant. From Whistler’s perspective, Wilde could hardly argue for artistic originality in the novel when his criticism of such repetitive and predictable fiction relied on words that he had stolen from his erstwhile master: Whistler himself. Whistler went so far as to call Wilde the criminal “arch-imposter”, the “detected plagiarist”, and the “all-pervading plagiarist” — one who would have violated in America the “Law of ’84”.18 Yet, to Wilde, Whistler’s “shrill shrieks of plagiarism” were the pitiful sign of “silly vanity or incompetent mediocrity”.19 No matter how petty Whistler’s gripes may appear, they illuminate the difficulties involved in casting Wilde in the role of a deceitful plagiarist. Whistler described his holding forth at dinner as a type of “cramming”, positioning himself as the workaday instructor of the younger man, raising pressing questions about the connection between pedagogy and plagiarism: Can the teacher accuse his student of this crime because the pupil has parroted the content of the instruction? Is not one’s goal, when preparing intensively for an examination, the ability to duplicate with as much fidelity as possible the information studied? Looked at critically, Whistler’s self-important accusation against Wilde may well appear as an excuse to generate a decidedly public feud, one that Whistler exploited to keep himself in the public eye. Nonetheless, Whistler’s insults helped sustain the broad allegation that Wilde’s was not an original mind. Much later, Frank Harris — who developed a close relationship with Wilde as editor and friend — reiterated the belief that Whistler had done more to shape Wilde’s wit than any other figure: “Of all the personal influences which went into the moulding of Oscar Wilde’s talent, that of Whistler was by far the most important; Whistler taught him the value of wit and the power a consciousness of genius and a knowledge of men lend to the artist.” In Harris’ view, Wilde enjoyed great success as a writer because of his “great ability” as well as “inordinate vanity” — qualities, it would seem, that no charge of plagiarism could stifle.20 This success did not inoculate Wilde from claims that his work was unoriginal. In early 1892, when his earliest Society comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, won many plaudits at the St James’s Theatre, Wilde’s apparent borrowings again incensed critics. The fairly liberal-minded A. B. Walkley, for example, claimed that the “staleness of the incidents” came “from half a dozen French plays”, and he observed that Wilde’s female protagonist was “a guileless young bride” who resembled “M. Dumas’s Françillon”.21 Meanwhile, as far as Walkley could tell, another of Wilde’s characters, Mrs. Erlynne, appeared to have stepped out from a further play by Dumas fils, L’Étrangère (1876). Elsewhere, one commentator found the drama to be a “not too ingenious blend of the Eden of Mr. Edgar Saltus, with the Idler of Mr. Haddon Chambers,” together with that other well-known drama of adultery, Françillon (1887), once more put in for good measure.22 Not everyone agreed these were capital offenses. As Frederick Wedmore perceived it, such borrowings were standard fare in the theatre, a comment supported by the sheer number of texts cited as sources for Wilde’s play. In his view, even if the fan — Wilde’s major stage prop — had a clear antecedent in Haddon’s Idler (1890), it had “hardly . . . occurred to the least intelligent to suggest plagiarism”.23 How, then, to make sense of these borrowings? Over the years, the amassing scholarly research on Wilde’s later works showed that many passages echo writings that were essential to his intellectual growth. These inquiries disclosed that parts of “The Critic as Artist”, for example, repeat ideas in Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance.24 The same might be said of many sections of the dialogue where Lord Henry Wotton speaks in The Picture of Dorian Gray.25 Yet Wilde scarcely concealed the influence that Pater’s Renaissance had exerted on him since his “undergraduate days at Oxford”, as he freely stated in his review of Pater’s Appreciations (1889): Mr. Pater’s essays became to me “the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.” They are still this to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.26 As Wilde suggested, to be impassioned about another writer’s work created for him the possibility of understanding his source of inspiration critically. In any case, Wilde’s frequent evocations of Paterian phrases hardly resembled theft.27 Consider the many echoes of Pater’s Renaissance that are detectable in Wilde’s sole novel. It would be difficult to claim that Lord Henry’s advocacy of the “New Hedonism”, for example, evinced the author’s intent to steal surreptitiously from what was a fully recognizable source. The advice Lord Henry gives to Dorian Gray about the need to pursue pleasure, which sounds similar to sentences in Pater’s “Conclusion” to his 1873 study, has terrible consequences — ones that are entirely contrary to Pater’s insistence on the “desire for beauty” as the “fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness”.28 Areas more vulnerable to allegations of plagiarism would be the extensive sections that paraphrase entries from South Kensington Museum catalogues, a French book on embroidery and lace, and information gleaned from John Addington Symonds’ five-volume Renaissance in Italy (1875–1886).29 These exhaustive lists — which detail the artifacts, instruments, and vestments that capture Dorian Gray’s attention — also evoke the kinds of objets d’art that recur in J.-K. Huysmans’ anti-realist novel about an aesthetic collector, À rebours (1884), a well-known work of fiction that counted among several French sources that at least one indignant contemporary reader believed Wilde had plundered.30 Still, these various allegations of Wilde’s fearless thieving of other writers’ ideas, phrases, and situations stand in contradistinction to his carefully elaborated ideas on literary borrowing, criminality, and creative expression. In his reviews from the 1880s, Wilde addressed uninspired borrowing as a demonstration not of an author’s artistic integrity or work ethic, but as an indication of poor taste. That is to say, both the writers from whom an author chooses to poach and the finesse with which he commits the act create the proper grounds for assessing this type of theft. His commentary in the popular Pall Mall Gazette on two works of poetry reveals this distinction: the one volume ostensibly written by “Two Tramps”, and the other by H. C. Irwin. Here Wilde considered the permissibility of poetic borrowing. By using language pulled directly from his “Chatterton” notebook (another text that has generated charges of plagiarism), he took the “two tramps” to task for conflating the “defensible pilfering from hen roosts” with the “indefensible pilfering from poets”.31 “[W]e feel”, Wilde wrote, “that as bad as poultry-snatching is, plagiarism is worse. ‘Facilis descensus Averno!’ From highway robbery and crimes of violence one sinks gradually to literary petty larceny.”32 Earlier in his review, Wilde had excused the authors, even praised them, for trying to “annex the domain of the painter” through their aesthetic choices in paper color and binding, but here he suggested that plagiarism was a transgression far worse than that.33 One reason was that, although the appropriation of colors from the painters led to beauty in the finished product, the plagiarized lines simply resulted in terrible poetry: the difference between the five-petaled tulip and the three-petaled tulip. This contrast was heightened through Wilde’s positive assessment of Irwin’s collection, which, as he put it, “gains her colour effect from the poet not from the publisher.”34 In Irwin’s poems, Wilde certainly witnessed traces of Matthew Arnold’s works, but he nonetheless praised Irwin for “studying a fine poet without stealing from him, a very difficult thing to do, and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them.”35 In other words, even when learning lessons from a master it was the case that the epigone might transform evident echoes of his idol into innovative art. Such is the meaning that underscores the epigraph to this essay; to transmute and to improve source material, in Wilde’s view, was a perfectly legitimate approach to literary creativity. One of Wilde’s last, and most fascinating, direct engagements with plagiarism occurred in a series of letters published in the Pall Mall Gazette under the heading, “The Ethics of Journalism”.36 The episode began on August 5, 1894, with the publication of a poem, “The Shamrock”, in the London-based Weekly Sun, which the paper erroneously attributed to Wilde. Soon thereafter, the poem was reprinted in the New York Sun, where an alert reader recognized the poem as one that “Helena Calahan” had previously published, and he demanded an explanation from Wilde in a letter to the London paper. The Weekly Sun’s editor, T. P. O’Connor (whose paper Wilde clearly disliked), pressed Wilde for a response, which came in a letter the following month to the Pall Mall Gazette.37 Wilde noted the ridiculousness of the situation. He faced an accusation of plagiarism from an editor who had published a poem under his name without having verified the authorship of the work, much less having asked for his — the (ostensible) author’s — permission to publish it. Wilde referred to “The Shamrock” derisively as “some doggerel verses”, which raised the serious question of authorial and editorial taste in addition to the “ethics of modern journalism”.38 A letter of rebuttal from the Weekly Sun’s assistant editor quickly appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. By prefacing his comments first with the acknowledgement that the editors “regret exceedingly the suggestion of plagiarism”, the editor explained the circumstance of the attribution: the poem had arrived in the mail with a letter ascribing it to Wilde, and so the Weekly Sun published it under Wilde’s name. Perhaps because of the impeachability of this explanation, the editor then pivoted to debates about taste, alternately defending the poem’s “melodic charm” and “pure and exalted patriotism” and suggesting that the editors’ willingness to attribute the poem to Wilde was an act of generosity: So conspicuous, indeed, was its elevation of tone that we were reluctant to believe it could have been the product of a mind like Mr. Oscar Wilde’s, and were driven to take refuge in the charitable belief that it belonged to the period of a forgotten and generous youth.39 A final missive from Wilde closed the conversation. He critiqued the Weekly Sun for sloppy editorial practices and blurring the boundaries between ethics and taste. If, he maintained, the paper actually believed the “fifth-rate verses” to be his, its staff would have asked his permission to publish.40 “[N]o respectable editor”, wrote Wilde (himself a former periodical editor), “would dream of printing and publishing a man’s work without first obtaining his consent.”41 We take from this episode a snapshot of Wilde’s position in the press. Since Wilde had long been a target for charges of plagiarism, the unscrupulous Weekly Sun suspended editorial integrity in order to catalyze once more a dated public conversation about his artistic inferiority. Moreover, the assistant editor’s letter intimated that the author’s Irish background should be considered the source of this embarrassment. It is remarkable, even amid all of this sniping, that in the Weekly Sun’s letter to Pall Mall Gazette, in which the assistant editor admitted his fault and apologized for accusing Wilde of plagiarism, a postscript serves as an unabashed advertisement for his own newspaper: “We are giving a number of letters bearing upon ‘The Shamrock’ in our next issue, together with the text of the poem and a letter from its actual author.”42 Such a self-serving apology, clearly enough, sharpens the belief that certain areas of the late Victorian press had little to lose when intervening in polemics about literary plagiarism. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 13, 2016

Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:31.481907

the-anthropometric-detective-and-his-racial-clues

The Anthropometric Detective and His Racial Clues By Ava Kofman February 24, 2016 Ava Kofman explores how the spectre of race, in particular Francis Galton's disturbing theory of eugenics, haunts the early history of fingerprint technology. A complex pattern is capable of suggesting various readings, as the figuring on a wall-paper may suggest a variety of forms and faces to those who have such fancies.— Francis Galton, Finger Prints, 1892 By the time Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” in The Strand Magazine in 1903, the reputation of the fingerprint as a powerful and “self-evident” forensic technology — one that could be used in a court of law to prove a suspect’s guilt — was on the rise. In 1902, a fingerprint was accepted in an English court as evidence for a burglar’s presence at the scene of the crime. By 1904, Scotland Yard was processing as many as three hundred fingerprint cards every week. Precisely because the fingerprint’s authoritative status was taken for granted, Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes sought to undermine it. In “Norwood Builder”, Holmes discovers that the fingerprint in question does not belong to the suspect, but is, instead, a forged print used to frame him. Although Holmes published on fingerprints in the anthropological journals of his fictional universe, the most prolific author of actual texts on fingerprinting found Holmes’ methods in Conan Doyle’s latest tale suspect. Not long after the story appeared, the gentleman scientist Francis Galton wrote to Conan Doyle asking how the wax mould of a seal could have left a legible bloody fingerprint on the wall, given that it is not “possible to get good impressions from a hard engraved material upon a hard uneven surface”. Taking the fiction’s depiction of forensic science in good faith, Galton asked Conan Doyle for further details of his experiments with fingerprints. It is unclear whether Conan Doyle responded and unlikely that he ever conducted experiments. While this curious bit of correspondence ended before it really began, Galton’s own career in the emerging science of fingerprinting was often compared to the fictional detective’s, although his work had quite different implications for the potentials of fingerprinting technology. To anthropologists and evolutionary theorists like Galton, the fingerprint was more than a criminal trace. At the heart of Galton’s exhaustive research program into fingerprints was always the “great expectation” that they might serve as tiny fossil records, providing evidence of the genealogy, personality, criminality, and perhaps even destiny of individuals and groups. In 1888, a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette paid a visit to Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory in London, where instruments developed by Galton measured the physical and mental characteristics — from keenness of hearing to breathing power — of over 10,000 people. The resulting article, titled “A Morning With the Anthropometric Detectives”, described Galton’s laboratory as a world of “order and precision, and tests of the nicest accuracy”. “Dumb though they are,” Galton told the reporter, “what splendid detectives our instruments might prove”. “Splendid detectives!” the reporter exclaimed, “I am not, I hope, in a department of the Criminal Investigation Department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel hitherto unhung.” The comparison to detection in the article’s title is no accident: the scientific development of medical and anthropometric instruments like Galton’s coincided with the rise of the detective novel, a genre which, in the words of the literary scholar Ronald Thomas, was “preoccupied with the professional monitoring and identification of bodies”. Fears of mistaken identity and unconscious slips were crystallized in the literature of detection but emerged from a broad range of hermeneutic practices across the era, at a time in which those in power considered the borders of empire and boundaries of racial identity to be insecure. These links between Galton’s work with fingerprints and detective fiction continued in the reviews of his most important contribution on the subject, his 1892 monograph Finger Prints. Many noted its immediate parallels to other books of clues. “A capital title for a detective story, Fingerprints” wrote the National Observer. A writer for the British Medical Journal, likely not having encountered Conan Doyle’s multiple stories on fingerprints, remarked that he would be “astonished if Mr Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, does not work something up by Mr Francis Galton’s unique book on thumbmarks”. The Humanitarian went as far as to suggest that the technology “opens up a new avenue for the Braddons and Gaboriaus, and other ‘detective novelists,’ to track and run to earth the most mysterious crimes. A field of investigation is here opened which will rival in fascination the celebrated ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’” These reviewers were right. But perhaps, in retrospect, not in the way they had intended. In the late nineteenth century, knowledge based on the interpretation of “clues unnoticed by others” became increasingly influential across a wide spectrum of professions — from doctors to physiognomists, from connoisseurs to naturalists. In his classic text, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, the historian Carlo Ginzburg traces the rise of this semiotic model in the human sciences, as best exemplified by his titular trio of diagnostic sleuths, to the emergence of “an increasingly clear tendency for state power to impose a close-meshed net of control on society [. . .which] involved attributing identity through characteristics which were trivial and beyond conscious control.” by Karl Pearson — Source. It is unsurprising then that Galton, who described his own early training in forensic medicine as having “a sort of Sherlock Holmes fascination”, referred to the fingerprint as having a “very pronounced, symptomatic character.” The anthropometric detective, like his fictional ally Holmes, coupled his forensic expertise with his conjectural knowledge to read and interpret unruly documents and bodies. But unlike Holmes, Galton was guided less by the hopes of catching criminals and more by the expectation that fingerprints could reveal inherited traits. Despite Galton’s best efforts, when surveying his research from the past decade in Finger Prints, he concluded that fingerprints did not contain such evidence. He definitively declared that “no peculiar pattern . . . characterizes persons of any of the above races.” And yet, despite his admission that “hard fact had made hope no longer justifiable”, a closer look at Galton’s writings reveals that racial typologies were never far from his thoughts. The conflicted speculation, conjecture, and hesitation in Galton’s racial rhetoric in Finger Prints can be understood as a deliberate strategy, one which allowed him to perpetuate a strong racial and imperial research program even when his scientific data undermined it. This combination of speculation and data would be necessary for his eventual development of eugenics, a political program of selective breeding to improve, in his view the human race. * Throughout Finger Prints, Galton continued to alternate, sometimes in the space of a single sentence, between claiming that fingerprints were and were not marked by racial difference. His remarks illustrate the tensions of disciplines like anthropology and comparative anatomy in this period, which attempted to simultaneously identify both deviant individuals and visible traces of generalisable criminal types from body parts. In the second to last chapter, Galton definitively detailed his findings on “Race and Classes”. After examining the impressions of various races and classes, he determined that they “may all be spoken of as identical in the character of their finger prints”. To demonstrate the lack of difference across racial groups, he even included a table displaying the similar frequency of arch patterns in the right fore-finger of each group. But even in his disavowals of racial difference in fingerprint patterns, Galton still searched for traces through which to decipher the devious and degenerate clues of suspect identities. Galton noted: Their patterns are not, so far as I can find, different from those of others, they are not simpler. . . Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or from the way in which they were printed, or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. The width of the ridges seems more uniform, their intervals more regular, and their courses more parallel than with us. In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes that I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement. Despite the data, Galton’s initial “great expectations” still inflected his analysis. His ideas about both the lack of evolutionary complexity of “degenerate” forms and the homogeneity he perceived between members of extra-European races underpinned his analysis from the outset. It is telling that a hand that both individuates and that conveys information about extra-European racial groups was, to Galton, a hand marked by “greater simplicity”. That it did not matter to Galton whether the “greater simplicity” he sensed in non-white hands lay in the faulty method of printing or in the hands themselves reveals that he saw these hands as posing a threat to his own empirical efforts. This failure, in fact, redoubles Galton’s recourse to his own analytical powers. He closes the chapter by stating that his conclusions do not apply to investigating the shape of the hand, which might yet offer racial insights. These scenes of detection in Galton’s writings allowed the Imperial fantasy, that extra-European others might be identified and controlled, to masquerade as a reality. * The year following the publication of Finger Prints, Galton followed up with a supplemental text, Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints (1893), which outlined his method for illuminating indistinct impressions. Its publication was occasioned by Galton’s receipt of a round of prints from men in India, whose impressions had been taken once in 1878 and again in 1892. This provided a rare opportunity to demonstrate the persistence of impressions. Galton also saw it as an opportunity to demarcate the superiority of British science and his own. Galton begins the text without even analyzing or exhibiting the prints. Instead, he takes a curious detour to focus on their context: “The documents are characteristically Oriental; they are on a common kind of apparently native-made paper, worm-eaten with many holes, and abundantly subscribed with attestations, names, ages, and dates, partly written in English and partly in native characters.” Having already published on the lack of racial signification in fingerprints, Galton attempted to secure racial characteristics through other means. Holmes, of course, could realize Conan Doyle’s fantasy of a textual body unconsciously inscribing its traces in a way that Galton, bound by the disappointing readings of his empirical data, never could. And yet, the meaningless script of the fingerprint did not stop Galton from anxiously detecting “characteristic” and unconscious traces of race on its periphery. When he thanks the imperial bureaucracy for putting him “into the possession of such interesting materials”, he conflates these foreign bodies of these men with the texts themselves. Galton contrasts these “Oriental” methods of fingerprinting to his own in order to demonstrate the superiority of European science. He notes his dissatisfaction with the Indian method of printing and quality of the paper, which he assumes uses Indian dye or watercolor. The Indian materials, he complains, were “too coarse” when compared to those in his English laboratory. Whereas Indian methods for printing are “moist”, “blackened all over”, “coarse”, and blurry, those in Galton’s lab are “regular”, “rapid”, “clear”, “uniform”, “very thin”, and “uniformly of a high-level order of goodness”. His invocation of morality — not only subtly with contrasts of light/dark imagery, but explicitly with the reference to “goodness” — explicitly justified the superiority of British empiricism and so implicitly hinted at the necessity of his empire’s “civilizing” rule. Galton then further locates the blurred and indistinct qualities of the fingerprints in what he perceives to be generic characteristics of the Indian race. He attributes the indistinctness of the impressions to hard manual labor and to “the disintegration of skin, owing to the advanced ages of the persons in 1892 [. . .] which I presume corresponds to greater ages among ourselves, since Indian children are more precocious than ours.” The logic of racial contamination underpinned this apparent reflexivity: fingerprints were originally introduced for Europeans to distinguish between the otherwise indistinguishable mass of extra-European peoples, who themselves produced “indecipherable” fingerprints. In this way, Galton’s prints exemplify the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the “repeated hesitancy afflicting the colonialist discourse when it contemplates its discriminated subjects; the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeakable rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots.” This “art of decipherment”, as Galton called it, reified the racial categories from which it emerged. Patterns, like foreign peoples, were likely to deceive. Therefore, they needed expert scrutiny to decipher them. For instance, Galton wrote in Scientific American that when looking at an enlarged reproduction of fingerprints “one might be deceived and take such a production for a specimen of graphic ornamentation of barbarous origin”. The act of deciphering any fingerprint, even in a completely deracinated context, was linked to the act of disciplining, segregating, and classifying racialized bodies. The criminal and Indian body — both understood as sites of interpretation, enforcement, and diagnosis — became objects of scientific expertise. In this respect, the pedagogical component of Galton’s text — his cautious and painstaking explanations of how to see “the facts and their interpretation” — aimed to give readers the power not just to classify their own fingerprints but to mark foreign bodies as such. Galton drew upon the logic of detection to present readers with the fantasy that seemingly dangerous bodies could, under the right gaze, be controlled. And yet, it was precisely the success of fingerprint identification in the “colonial laboratory” of India abroad that aided the technique’s return to the center of empire in 1901, thus turning English citizens, too, into colonial subjects that needed to be tracked, surveilled, and deciphered. * How the fingerprint familiar to us today ended up emptied of meaning is part of the larger shift in locating criminality on the criminal’s body to locating it in the criminal record. As biologists increasingly looked to genes for the secrets of heredity, law enforcement took over the scientific domain of interpreting, standardizing, and administering fingerprint technology. The fingerprint’s dominance as an archival sign made it increasingly necessary to separate its identificatory functions from dubious diagnostic research like Galton’s. At stake in wiping away these anthropological traces was the legal reputation of an increasingly powerful and “self evident” forensic technology. “It is not to the finger-print expert’s advantage”, the head of Chicago’s fingerprint school cautioned in 1925, “to be associated, in the minds of the public, with fortune tellers and palm-readers. The science of fingerprint identification is a real science and should not be dragged to the level of the pseudo sciences.” Galton, for his part, never tired of searching for ways to identify characteristics that could be selectively bred for eugenic improvement. His obsession with quantifying racial difference led him to devise “analytical portraiture”, invent geometric notation for facial profiles, measure the noses of exceptional English leaders, and calculate the efficiency of people with differing hair colors. Galton even attempted to track physiognomic changes in Englishmen by studying their portraits in the National Gallery. Revisiting the early history of the fingerprint reminds us that ostensibly color-blind identification techniques often contain the biases and cultural assumptions of their makers. In this light, Galton’s search to reify racial difference in the body bears a striking resemblance to the contemporary search for the “crime gene” and other personality markers in DNA. That his hunt may have been pseudo-scientific did not make the fears and assumptions that guided his research any less influential, or dangerous. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 24, 2016

Ava Kofman

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:32.155779

bad-air-pollution-sin-and-science-fiction-in-william-delisle-hay-s-the-doom-of-the-great-city-1880

Bad Air Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880) By Brett Beasely September 30, 2015 Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory — Brett Beasley explores a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse. Scarcely can I portray in words the dire and dismal scenes that met my vision here. . . . For here, where on the previous night had throbbed hot and high the flood-tide of London’s evening gaiety, was now presented to my poor fevered sight, the worst, the most awful features of the whole terrific calamity. I had entered into the very heart and home of horror itself. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. That is, at least, according to William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella, The Doom of the Great City. It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls “the greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed” at what was, for Hay’s first readers, the distant future date of 1942. The novella received only mild acclaim among its late Victorian readers, and today it is almost forgotten. But, surprisingly enough, it has become possible to read our social and environmental problems foretold in Hay’s strange little story. In our age of global warming, acid rain, and atmospheric pollution, we may become the first readers to take Hay seriously. When Hay imagines a city whose wealth and “false social system” lulls it into complacency, we can recognize ourselves in his words. And as for those air problems that loomed dangerously around them, Londoners “looked upon them in the light of a regular institution, not caring to investigate their cause with a view to some means of mitigating them”. At moments like these, we get the feeling that Hay’s obscure 135-year-old story is eerily prophetic. But before we canonize Hay as an environmentalist and his story as An Inconvenient Truth in Victorian garb, we have to look at the story’s other features. Readers of The Doom of the Great City unfailingly notice that the story does not fit easily with other science fiction narratives, but seems to belong also to another class of tales, which Brian Stableford has called “ringing accounts of richly deserved punishment”. This is because Hay’s narrator seems to slide back and forth between material and moral explanations for pollution. While he talks of how “In those latter days there had been past years of terribly bad weather, destroying harvests”, he adds in the same paragraph, “prostitution flourished rampantly, while Chastity laid down her head and died! Evil! — one seemed to see it everywhere!” In fact, the narrator goes so far as to cast himself as a prophet. Like a latterday Jeremiah he reviles London as “foul and rotten to the very core, and steeped in sin of every imaginable variety”. In a twenty-page diatribe he catalogues vices such as prodigality, corruption, avarice, and aestheticism — not to mention feminine vanity, for which he reserves special scorn. He denounces tradesmen, aristocrats, theater-goers, and the young as well as the old. For him, London is like Atlantis or Babylon standing blithely unaware of the divine wrath about to strike it. All of this raises an important question: can pollution be material (i.e. made of soot, ashes, smoke, chemicals, etc.) and moral as well? The same question could also be stated as a problem of genre. What exactly are we reading when we read The Doom of the Great City? Is it a forward-looking sci-fi tale about a dystopian future that may yet arrive? Or is it a fantasy of divine retribution that belongs with the ancient past? In order to answer that question, we need a working definition of science fiction. For that definition we could look to Rod Serling’s statement that science fiction is “the improbable made possible”. Hay certainly draws from available scientific ideas to make his improbable story into a reasonable possibility. Hay’s contemporary F. A. R. Russell consistently noted higher instances of death from asthma and respiratory complaints during intense fogs, and he published widely in an effort to raise public concern about them. But Hay’s literary precursors (like the public in general) tended to see the fog as a mere nuisance. They could even at times show some fanciful tenderness toward it as toward an ugly pet that won’t go away. For example, William Guppy in Dickens’ 1853 novel Bleak House describes the fog in familiar terms as “The London Particular”. But Hay makes that seemingly friendly pet bite — and, increasingly, the data was on his side. In addition to the evidence of news and anecdotes, Hay needed a plausible cause of death, not just for the infirm, but for an entire metropolitan population. That is where the “bronchial spasm” comes in. Hay, a published scientist (specifically a mycologist) is scrupulous on this point. On the chance journey into the country that saves his life, Hay’s protagonist discusses the fog with a friend who also happens to be a leading medical authority, one Wilton Forrester. Forrester gives “the benefit of his scientific acquirements,” (emphasis mine) by laying out what he considers to be the only possible scenario in which a fog can prove fatal. He explains that in a case he previously observed that the bronchi and tubes ramifying from them were clogged with black, grimy mucus, and death had evidently resulted from a sudden spasm, which would produce suffocation, as the lungs would not have the power in their clogged condition of making a sufficiently forcible expiatory effort to get rid of the accumulated filth that was the instrument of death. Hay goes so far as to include footnotes referencing actual medical authorities on this point. Rather than seeming far-fetched, Hay’s first readers could hardly have doubted that, past a certain threshold of pollution, a fog would certainly prove fatal to those who inhaled it. Read closely and in its context, the science in Hay’s novella is not just persuasive, it is also politic. Writing in 1880, Hay was working at a time in which science and the emerging discipline of public health were in a state of flux. Long-held views about the causes and consequences of disease were being eroded by new findings, especially the emerging germ theory of disease. Thus, in attempting to write a fictional work that used science to “make the improbable possible”, a writer like Hay would have to navigate a changing terrain of what counted as possibility. In his emphasis on filth in both its moral and material forms, Hay was borrowing the vocabulary and social ethic of what have been called the “anti-contagionists”. The anti-contagionists tended to hold the belief that diseases spread by miasma, or “bad air”. The bad air could come from any number of places: from corpses or other rotting organic materials, from the bodies and homes of the poor, from cesspools and stagnant or dirty water, and even, in the view of one important miasmatist, from the groundwater lying beneath a city. Most miasmatists equated bad air with bad smell. Thus, miasmatist works like Edwin Chadwick’s Report of the Sanitary Conditions of the Working Classes can be read not just for their contribution to the emerging discipline of epidemiology, but also as veritable anthologies of stories about stench. Chadwick correlates “miasmatic exhalations”, “putrid” and “obnoxious effluvia”, “pestiferous vapours and fogs”, “vitiated” and “foul air”, “noisome vapours”, “injurious gas”, and “foul ordure” with outbreaks of diseases like cholera and typhus. For him, the only solution was to institute broad sanitary reforms to remove the causes of these bad airs. At their best, the miasmatists practiced social medicine that included a focus on diet, education, and forms of social uplift. At their worst, they were racist and classist bureaucrats. But whatever their scientific and ideological deficiencies, miasmatists were amazingly successful at marshalling the resources and political will (often with the important tool of disgust at their disposal) to create a compelling vision of the sanitary city. If, as Chadwick put it, “all smell is disease”, then only a city-wide solution could possibly stop it. ※※Indexed under…Odourof London (and disease) But by the time Hay was penning his tale in 1880, the whole miasmatist position was losing its power to provoke the kind of disgust necessary for political action. Analyzing the “Great Stink” of Paris, which also occurred in 1880, David S. Barnes shows that “scientific progress as represented by the nascent germ theory of disease, may actually have blocked rather than accelerated remedial mobilization”. The germ theory suggested that diseases were not spread by the air at all, whether good or bad, smelly or pure. Thus the stink could not produce what Barnes calls a “sensory crisis”, whereas a similar Great Stink in London in 1858 led to comprehensive sanitary reforms. Hay’s lurid tale of destruction is technically scientific while also being a bricolage of available science. From the miasma theory, he takes his focus on the air and his social ethic. But he jettisons the mechanism of miasma itself. I quote again from Dr Wilton Forrester, this time reading from a newspaper: “We must suppose that a gush of foul sewer-gas, or some similar poisoning of the thick and heavy air, produced the fatal effect”. This popular belief in miasmas he finds laughable. In fact, Hay gives us an indication that Forrester, as a cutting-edge medical professional, accepts the germ theory. But he has Forrester mention it only in passing on the way to what is a clear espousal of a non-germ cause of death: No; I see only one way in which the fog is likely to act as a life-destroying agent — apart, that is, from its action in carrying poisonous germs and spreading epidemics, which illustrates its slower action — but as a rapid and immediate extinguisher of vitality the cause must be bronchial spasm. Germs here represent a “slower action”, a secondary and, in this case, minimal threat. Hay allows this concession to the germ theory while retaining urgency for something like the older filth theory, although it is now presented as mere mechanical suffocation rather than disease. In order to understand Hay’s work in its totality, then, we have to see it not just as a representation of a particular view of science, but as a changing view of danger and how danger relates to a social system. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas showed in her groundbreaking work Purity and Danger, pollution behavior always has to do with the maintenance of a social system. She writes, “Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity”. Thus, for Douglas, rituals either in modern secular cultures or in primitive ones, reinforce duties, relationships, and morality. Douglas’ theories help us explain the climax of Hay’s tale, which is a single spectacle that he calls “the most horrible, the most gruesome, the most ghostly and unutterably terrific of all”. He sees all the gradations of London society illuminated by gas lamps in a theater but fixed in a kind of collective rigor mortis. He writes: I had a full and instant view of the whole interior. The gas still burnt, and threw a light upon the scene more brilliant than perhaps it had been on the previous night; and the people—no, not the people, the DEAD!—there under the glaring light they sat, they lay, they hung over the benches, the galleries, the boxes, in one tremendous picture of catastrophe! And again, later: Yes, there they lay, the old, the young, the rich, the poor; of all ranks, and stations, and qualities, all huddled in one cold and hideous death; while open eyes, piteous faces, distorted limbs, and strange, unnatural attitudes told the tremendous tale of that sudden midnight agony. Douglas writes that, failing their normal supportive functions, filth rituals can also enact a shattering and renewal of social systems. Every duty is taken out of place and disordered to the point of creating a productive “formlessness”. Only in this “final stage of total disintegration” can formlessness become a symbol not just of decay but of “beginning and of growth”. Or as Mircea Eliade put it in discussing tales of water cataclysms: In water everything is “dissolved,” every “form” is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a “sign,” not an event. Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth . . . Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores — even if only for a moment — the integrity of the dawn of things. So, in the end, if Hay’s novella speaks to us today, it is not because Hay writes a rigorous science fiction tale using a form of science we recognize as our own. It is rather because his confusion — or what we see as confusion — helps us understand our own predicament better. Even in our most rigorously scientific environmental efforts, we still feel the need for moral parables. One thinks of the decidedly unscientific analogy of the boiled frog amidst the otherwise rigorous claims in An Inconvenient Truth. And certainly there are strains of dystopian imaginings and apocalyptic visions in some environmentalist writings — why shouldn’t there be? As Hay knew, in order to combat the ills of society we need to appeal to both science and morality — and if that doesn’t work, a little horror can’t hurt. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 30, 2015

rett Beasel

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:32.650272

visions-of-algae-in-eighteenth-century-botany

Visions of Algae in Eighteenth-Century Botany By Ryan Feigenbaum September 7, 2016 Although not normally considered the most glamorous of Mother Nature's offerings, algae has found itself at the heart of many a key moment in the last few hundred years of botanical science. Ryan Feigenbaum traces the surprising history of one particular species — Conferva fontinalis — from the vials of Joseph Priestley's laboratory to its possible role as inspiration for Shelley's Frankenstein. Algae are rarely thought of as remarkable plants, when and if they’re thought of at all.1 Attitudes seemingly haven’t changed all that much since the eighteenth century; people were as blasé about algae then as they are now. Given such an unremarkable status, it is surprising to find that a single species of algae managed to catalyze major eighteenth-century discoveries concerning photosynthesis and embryogenesis, especially in light of the fact that the naturalists responsible for these discoveries only stumbled upon this alga while looking for something else entirely. The species in question — a fine, light to dark green, filamentous aquatic plant, about a half inch in length, that clumps together by the thousands into decumbent, interwoven mats that look like wet felt — was often (but not always) identified at the time as Conferva fontinalis. (It’s now identified as Vaucheria fontinalis, a species of yellow-green algae.) By following it through the scientific literature of the eighteenth century, we find quite the complicated little being, a species that came to be recognized by the century’s end as beautiful, curious and, without a doubt, an alga worth the trouble of getting to know. Neither Sought Nor Seen The Italian botanist Pier Antonio Micheli (1679–1737), famous for being the first to collect and sow the spores of various fungi, was also the first to describe and illustrate the C. fontinalis systematically in his Nova plantarum genera (1729), though he called it Byssus palustris, subobscura, filamentis non ramosis, brevibus. That old chestnut. Whereas Micheli affirmed the existence of seeds in the alga, his contemporary, Johann Jacob Dillenius (1687–1747) denied their existence. Dillenius thought that in lieu of bearing seeds, these plants grew by aggregation, in the manner of minerals. This prominent German-born English botanist also scientifically described and illustrated the C. fontinalis (though under a different name) in his Historia muscorum (1741), a work completed entirely without the use of a microscope. These naturalists’ vexed hypotheses portend years of confusion about algal reproduction, which also indicates just how much phycology (the study of algae) was still in its infancy. Nevertheless, their works would remain the standard reference until the turn of the nineteenth century. They retained this standing partly because of Carl Linnaeus, the century’s most famous botanist. He adopted the research of Micheli and Dillenius as the conclusive word in algae, conducting little if any research himself. In fact, when Linnaeus described the alga in his Species plantarum (1753), a book that stands at the beginning of modern botanical taxonomy, he used Dillenius’s own herbarium specimen as the type species. What Linnaeus did change, however, was the alga’s name and taxonomic position. He replaced the previous naturalists’ long polynomials with his own binomial nomenclature: “Conferva fontinalis” was born. By basing his taxonomic system on the number or position of flowers’ reproductive organs, Linnaeus effectively discouraged algal research because the reproductive organs of these plants were thought to be either imperceptibly small or altogether missing. Hence, algae were of little concern to Linnaeus and his disciples. Moreover, because C. fontinalis and many other species of algae were so small, they required tedious observations with high quality microscopes using well-developed protocols. The trouble was these microscopes weren’t yet widely available and protocols weren’t yet established. Accordingly, this alga remained in muddy waters. Not Sought But Seen Given the longstanding neglect of algae and the poverty of established methods for its research, it would be surprising to find C. fontinalis at the center of a major scientific discovery, let alone two. And yet, it was. Its appearances in these discoveries make more sense once it’s realized that they were completely fortuitous. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), responsible for the first discovery in question, said as much: “In looking for one thing I have generally found another, and sometimes a thing of much more value than that which I was in quest of. But none of these unexpected discoveries appear to me to have been so extraordinary as that which I am about to relate”, that is, the remarkable property of what he called “green matter” (1790, 282–3). Priestley, a veritable polymath who published on subjects ranging from theology, philosophy, natural science, politics, and more, began to experiment on gases in the 1770s. One of the first and most significant of his consequent discoveries was the identification of dephlogisticated air or, as it would soon be called, oxygen2, and that certain processes like respiration depleted the air of oxygen, whereas others, like introducing a plant into the test vial, restored it. This last finding led him to a crucial realization: plants produce oxygen. While testing this latter hypothesis, he observed that many of his vials became covered with a mysterious green matter. Initially concluding it to be neither animal nor vegetable, “but a thing sui generis”, Priestley soon became convinced otherwise by his more botanically skilled friends who declared it to be indisputably a plant (most likely C. fontinalis). Forced to leave vials of this green matter unattended for three months while he traveled, Priestley observed upon his return that specimens kept in poor sunlight did not survive, whereas those in the opposite condition flourished. Further experimentation showed that sunlight was necessary not only for the survival of green matter, as would be expected of a plant, but also, significantly, for its production of oxygen. In short, experiments on an alga likely to be C. fontinalis were among the first to reveal the necessary role of sunlight in a plant’s production of oxygen. Priestley’s inadvertent discovery of green matter thus began to illuminate the concept of photosynthesis, one of the most fundamental and important processes in nature. While Priestley conducted his experiments on green matter in the late 1770s, one of the most celebrated naturalists in Germany, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), was occupied with his own. He published his results in an article entitled “On an Extraordinarily Simple Manner of Reproduction” (1781), which described what its title promised: the propagation of an alga, namely, C. fontinalis. As with Priestley, the alga itself wasn’t Blumenbach’s focus. He only came across it while looking to support his own theory of generation, which he called the Bildungstrieb or formative drive. The theory is complex, but the long and short of it is that this formative drive is responsible for bringing living beings into existence, keeping them alive, and, ultimately, producing more kangaroos, oak trees, algae, and every other living thing. Yet, how was an alga, something that Blumenbach described as looking like “wet mouse fur”, supposed to support this new theory of life? By being simple. For Blumenbach, everything about this alga was simple. It was simply collected. One only needed to check the nearest pipe, spring, ditch, pond, etc. It was simply formed. It consisted of a single straight filament with an identical internal and external structure that was simply examined under the microscope. Lastly, its manner of propagation, as the essay’s title indicates, was simple. Over the course of a mere forty-eight hours, the tip of the filament would swell up into a nub that detached from the alga’s body, fixing itself to a favorable location. The nub would then begin pushing out a filament of its own until it had grown into an entirely new C. fontinalis. This simplicity afforded any naturalist the opportunity to examine the alga inside and out, literally, and to observe the entire course of its generation. If this opportunity were taken, Blumenbach thought, then the naturalist would have no choice but to reject previous opinions and accept his theory of the formative drive. While Blumenbach’s algal experiments, in addition to his other studies, swayed many natural researchers in eighteenth-century debates over embryogenesis and inspired new research, they weren’t quite the coup for which he hoped. This disappointment stemmed, in part, from the fact that C. fontinalis just wasn’t as simple as he thought. According to modern phycology, this genus of algae reproduces sexually and asexually, and in a variety of ways to boot. Even in Blumenbach’s time, shortly after the publication of his article, the eminent botanist James Edward Smith, founder and first president of the Linnean Society of London, recognized the genus Conferva to be so understudied and misunderstood that he called it the “opprobrium of botany”. Sought But Not Seen Although the C. fontinalis happened to prove illuminating for Priestley and Blumenbach, its lingering obscurity further confounded two other longstanding controversies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. A. P. de Candolle (1778–1841) aimed to resolve the first of these with his “Report on the Confervae” (1802), in which he reviewed foregoing scientific literature in order to determine whether species of Conferva were plants, animals, or some intermediary thing between them. This third possibility referred to Priestley’s sui generis hypothesis, which, as we saw above, he abandoned, instead judging the alga to be a true plant. Several other naturalists, however, claimed species of Conferva had animal natures. For instance, the French scientist, Justin Girod-Chantran (1750–1841), believed that C. fontinalis was an animal or at least of animal origin. (In his defense, the alga does discharge motile spores that look like swimming microscopic animals). Candolle responded to Girod-Chantran’s arguments as well as those of other naturalists, arguing that the evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of Conferva being a plant, a conclusion that stuck for more than a century. (In a final twist, to happen much later, this alga is now considered neither plant nor animal, but falls into another kingdom altogether.) The second controversy concerned how this plant comes into existence. Some scientists thought it was the product of spontaneous generation; that is, it came from inorganic matter and not from egg or seed. As strange as this idea might sound today, it persisted well into the nineteenth century. An example of the evidence given in support of it, which is as unpleasantly familiar today as it would’ve been in the eighteenth century, is the experience of finding weevils in flour. Supporters of this theory explained the pests’ presence by saying that they were produced spontaneously out of the flour itself and not from any parent. They then extended the same logic to other living things whose propagation was not clearly understood, including algae. This controversy returns us to Priestley, who went to great lengths to demonstrate that his green matter wasn’t spontaneously generated, a theory he abhorred. Jan Ingenhousz (1730–1799), another scientist important in the elucidation of photosynthesis, asserted the contrary: “The water itself, or some substance in the water, is, as I think, changed into this vegetation” (1779, 90–1). To whomever might have balked at such a thought, that water could be transformed into a plant, Ingenhousz asked if he would have the same disbelief in the case where a ruminant transformed grass into fat. Neither Priestley nor Ingenhousz were alone in their positions, each finding vociferous adherents and opponents. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), grandfather of Charles, was one such adherent. Despite being a dear friend to Joseph Priestley, Darwin partly sided with Ingenhousz in the debate concerning the generation of C. fontinalis. In describing his own theory of spontaneous generation as part of the “Additional Notes” to his poem, The Temple of Nature (1803), Darwin wrote, “There is one vegetable body, which appears to be produced by a spontaneous vital process, and is believed to be propagated and enlarged in so short a time by solitary generation as to become visible to the naked eye; I mean the green matter first attended to by Dr Priestley, and called by him conferva fontinalis” (4). Darwin’s remarks on the spontaneous vitality of the C. fontinalis have their own surprising legacy. Mary Shelley (1797–1851) attributed the premise of her novel Frankenstein to Darwin, who supposed it “as not of impossible occurrence” (1818). Yet, the reader learns nothing more of what Shelley has in mind, at least not until prodded by “The Publishers of the Standard Novels” to answer how “such a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea” (1831). In her response, which occurred in the book’s third edition, Shelley recounted listening to a conversation between her husband and Lord Byron; at one point, one of them had inquired into the principle of life and asked whether it could ever be discovered and expressed. Shelley continued, “They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of has having been done by him,) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion”. It was but a short distance for Shelley to consider the possibility that various once-living body parts could be reassembled into an amalgamous creature, then given life anew. But what Shelley meant by “vermicelli” — a kind of pasta that consequently bears no direct reference to anything in Darwin’s corpus — is unclear. Nonetheless, scholars agree that if Shelley is referring to something specific in Darwin, it likely stems from the note in The Temple of Nature on spontaneous generation. One possibility is the vorticella, an aquatic animal that shows no signs of life when dry, but begins swimming about and searching for food when placed in water. While this example bears a resemblance to Shelley’s recollection, scholars have identified another possible source: Darwin’s discussion of C. fontinalis. Samuel H. Vasbinder has provided an intriguing argument on behalf of this possibility (1981). He points out that Darwin mentions a “glass case” with respect to Priestley’s alga; it isn’t there in the vorticella passage. Vasbinder also argues for a “strong rhythmic and phonemic similarity between ‘conferva fontinalis’ and ‘vermicelli,’” connecting, for instance, “ferva” with “vermi” (117). Unfortunately, the evidence is indeterminate and neither side’s arguments are ultimately decisive, or, in other words, it happily remains quite possible that the initial spark that brought the monster of Dr Victor Frankenstein to life was none other than the C. fontinalis. Given its already long list of exploits, should we really expect anything less of this alga? Sought And Seen There were a handful of scientists around the turn of the nineteenth century who certainly wouldn’t have underestimated it, like the German botanist, Albrecht Wilhelm Roth (1757–1834). After admitting that this part of the vegetable world was quite unfamiliar to him, he resolved to become acquainted with algae; however, he quickly realized the lack of resources available to the beginner in this area of study. This shortfall, he lamented, frustrated and discouraged research on these plants. He thus set out to redress the situation in his Remarks on the Study of Cryptogamous Water Plants (1797). How could the botanist, he asked, be expected to study algae effectively when there were no guidelines, methods, or best practices yet in place? He enumerated the difficulties waiting to beset the researcher in the investigation of a water plant like C. fontinalis. How should it be gathered from its body of water without damaging it? Should it be studied while wet or while dry? How should it be preserved? How should its structures be communicated when extant terminology focused on flowering plants? How should it be mounted for microscopic examination? How should the researcher build a collection of other algae for the sake of comparison? How should the “wet felt”, constituted by thousands of slender filaments, be drawn? Roth answered each of these questions in turn, not hesitating to underscore how difficult it was for him to investigate this phenomenon without predecessors: “The lack of a teacher or guide, after which I could properly organize my work, was quite palpable to me. I believe, however, to have fortunately overcome the most significant difficulties and held it as my responsibility to make budding plant lovers familiar with the same” (8). Roth’s hard work did not escape the notice of another botanist, Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778–1855), even if Dillwyn ended up disagreeing with almost all of Roth’s algal taxonomy. Dillwyn himself contributed to the study of Conferva through his aptly named British confervae, which comprises a series of fascicles published from 1802 until 1809. In this work, we find a scientist with an unmistakable reverence for Conferva. He enthused that there was no genus more interesting than it, that its study relieved the mind from the hustle and bustle of active life, that the genus was a constant source of amusement, and that it, in the end, like all of natural history, produced satisfaction in the mind and led the naturalist to “admire and adore” the works of God. Finally, as if that weren’t enough, Dillwyn also hailed the genus Conferva as the “most beautiful and curious” of the algae. While the eighteenth-century largely discounted most nonflowering plants like algae, C. fontinalis was one that got itself noticed, for better and for worse. As it helped to clarify the phenomena of photosynthesis and embryogenesis, it also confused the kingdoms of nature and perpetuated belief in spontaneous generation. Nevertheless, at the turn of the nineteenth century, at least for a few intrepid researchers, this complicated, extraordinary little being inspired a new attitude toward algae, a reverence warranted just as much now as it was then. This new attitude persisted into the nineteenth century with the efforts of Carl Agardh (1785–1859) and William Harvey (1811–1866) who established the foundations of modern phycology. Previous dismissals and confusions gave way to the recognition of algae’s economic potential and its vital role in ecosystems. This recognition is captured particularly well by one of the first American phycologists, John Hooper (1802–1869). In his “Introduction to Algology”, a little known pamphlet self-published in Brooklyn in 1850, he delivered an impassioned defense of algae and its study, echoing many of the sentiments first voiced by Roth and Dillwyn. Hooper reinterpreted earlier confusions regarding the reproduction of Conferva as evidence of the “chain of creation” that revealed the harmony and unity of nature. He reminded his readers that algae offered habitats and food for countless creatures and produced the oxygen essential for animal life. For the most recalcitrant of readers, Hooper called on a language with universal currency. “Let us speak in dollars and cents”, he said, pointing out that important industrial materials like kelp (i.e., soda ash) and iodine were both extracted from algae, and that seaboard farmers used algae as a fertilizer known as “vraic”. Hooper intended these remarks as encouragement for his readers to take another look at algae (or, in some cases, a first look) in order to see it not as “the green, slimy substance on the stagnant pond” or as “corruption emanating from feculent water”, but rather as “a beautiful Alga, pleasing to the eye, and, by its act of vegetating, freeing that stagnant pool of its impurities, which might have otherwise spread around pestilence and death” (11). His encouragement is one still worth hearing today, to look again not only at the algae living all around us, but also at the illustrious species like C. fontinalis that constitute its history.3 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 7, 2016

Ryan Feigenbaum

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:33.013372

richard-spruce-and-the-trials-of-victorian-bryology

Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology By Elaine Ayers October 14, 2015 Obsessed with the smallest and seemingly least exciting of plants — mosses and liverworts — the 19th-century botanist Richard Spruce never achieved the fame of his more popularist contemporaries. Elaine Ayers explores the work of this unsung hero of Victorian plant science and how his complexities echoed the very subject of his study. Lying prostrate in his bed in Yorkshire in 1869 just five years after returning from an expedition through South America, Richard Spruce — one of Victorian England’s top botanists, collectors, and explorers — found himself contemplating his gradual transformation into the object of his fervent study: moss. “One day last week a dentist relieved me of four teeth”, Spruce joked to a friend, “and I now belong to the genus Gymnostomum; but by the time you come over I hope to have developed a complete double peristome”. As his health declined dramatically in the following years, Spruce retreated into his beloved collections, spending what little energy he had left by working for just a few minutes at a time on classifying microscopic specimens into meticulous arrangements of sporophytes and peristomes. From 1849 to 1864, the botanist trekked along the Amazon and its tributaries, ending up in the Andes of Peru and Ecuador on a successful collecting mission for Kew Gardens and the English East India Company. Today, Spruce is mostly remembered for this final leg of his expedition — under the orders of the famous Sir Clements Markham, he studied, cultivated, and eventually smuggled out young cinchona trees to plant in India as potential treatment for malaria. This swashbuckling story of botanical espionage, though, obscures what Spruce spent most of his life obsessed with: those most minute and mundane specimens of the plant world — bryophytes, or mosses and liverworts. Although bryophytes actually thrive in cooler environments (like England), Spruce’s livelong mysterious bodily afflictions prevented him from living comfortably in these same conditions. Years of inexplicably coughing up blood and suffering from debilitating headaches forced the botanist to conduct his work in warmer, more tropical climes. This, then, is the story of how one of Britain’s most promising, skilled explorers struggled to find a place in Victorian science, unable to shake his love for the underdogs of the plant world. Born in Yorkshire in 1817, the tall, thin, and handsome Richard Spruce had always been drawn to nature’s most unassuming plants. After building unparalleled botanical collection and classification skills in England’s countryside and then in the Pyrenees, Spruce joined his good friends Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates in Brazil at the age of thirty-two, backed and brokered by prominent botanists at Kew Gardens. Reflecting on his Amazonian collections, Spruce described his unusual, and perhaps debilitating, draw to hepatics (liverworts), in particular. “I like to look on plants as sentient beings,” he wrote, which live and enjoy their lives — which beautify the earth during life, and after death may adorn my herbarium. . . It is true that the Hepaticae have hardly as yet yielded any substance to man capable of stupefying him, or of forcing his stomach to empty its contents, nor are they good for food; but if man cannot torture them to his uses or abuse, they are infinitely useful where God has placed them, as I hope to live to show; and they are, at the least, useful to, and beautiful in, themselves — surely the primary motive for every individual existence. Indeed, despite his later reputation as a smuggler of cinchona, Spruce had little personal interest in utilitarian plants. Nor was the botanist particularly interested in the tropical species that we usually associate with floral beauty — orchids, palms, birds of paradise, and the like, that made other naturalists famous. Dismissing the picturesque image of the Amazon filled with “gay flowers, butterflies, and birds”, Spruce argued that popular naturalists (like Wallace and Bates) would “utterly mislead” readers, “if they were thereby led to suppose that even a tithe of those beautiful objects were ever to be seen all together, or in the space of a single day”. The beauty of the Amazon, to Spruce, lay in the humble, Godly mosses and hepatics that hearkened back to his botanical ramblings back in Europe, providing respite from the rainforest’s apparently underwhelming — albeit dangerous — daily existence. In a passage scrawled in his journal, and later reprinted in nearly all of his obituaries because it seemed so inherently characteristic, Spruce revealed his innermost botanical leanings. After years of trekking through thick forests, dealing with overturned canoes and lost collections, outwitting a mutinous attack by his native porters, and, as always, dealing with unceasing illnesses, infections, and his usual bloody cough, the botanist “found reason to thank heaven which had enabled me to forget for the moment all my troubles in the contemplation of a simple moss”. Mosses and hepatics, in the nineteenth century as now, were — perhaps unsurprisingly — relatively unpopular plants. Lacking roots, flowers, and seeds, bryophytes require tedious, trained microscopic observation in order to study their intricate characteristics. Examining them in the field involves crawling around on hand and knee, dissecting complicated colonies growing on rocks and stumps with a hand lens and tiny forceps. While preserving bryophytes is relatively easy — usually only a single cell thick, they can be dried and pressed even in the dampest and most inhospitable environments — bryological collections seem divorced from any verdant aesthetics usually associated with flora. Piled up herbarium sheets appear uniformly brown and amorphous, their hidden natural beauty only revealed under more careful, time-consuming microscopic study. The sets of mosses and hepatics that Spruce collected in South America (which, when sold to subscribers back in Europe, supplied most of his meager income while travelling) only appealed to serious plant scientists with bryological interests. Rather than providing any insight into the Amazon’s vast biological diversity or potential imperial economic holdings, Spruce’s bryological collections spoke to very specific, disciplinarily bounded discussions about plant reproduction and speciation. Bryophytes mattered to mid-nineteenth century botanists primarily because of their role as primeval beings, plants that predated almost all other vegetative life amidst a growing scientific fever for evolutionary studies. Spruce’s most popular, oft-quoted journal entry described his realization of the “idea of a primeval forest” upon reaching Brazil, a rich depiction of “enormous trees” that were “decked with fantastic parasites, and hung over with lianas, which varied in thickness from slender threads to python-like masses . . . now round, now flattened, now knotted, and now twisted with the regularity of a cable”. Writing to the director of Kew, William Jackson Hooker, from Ambato in 1858, Spruce appealed to this sense of evolutionary interest while sending back a beautifully complete set of moss specimens. Although he had suffered a period of particularly bad health while travelling through a damp and cold region, the botanist came across a scene rich in bryophytes, delighting him to no end. After listing all of the mosses and hepatics that could be found growing in “shady rivulets”, Spruce wrote that “I had never seen anything which so astonished me”. Taken by the botanical riches, he went on that “I could almost fancy myself in some primeval forest of Calamites, and if some giant Saurian had appeared, crushing its way among the succulent stems, my surprise could hardly have been increased”. The mosses and hepatics that he collected in this “primeval” area brought him a large sum of money, one of the most valuable collections of his fifteen-year expedition. Beyond their small role in Victorian botany in an evolutionary sense, bryophytes had a way of working themselves into art and literature as signifiers of privacy and secrecy. Pushing against its scientific reputation as downright boring, moss in particular served to create some botanical, aesthetic sense of a setting that allowed for illicit sexual encounters and for primal yearnings. The reasons for this strange dual identity of bryophytes as both mundane and as primal are relatively clear: realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. One need only look to the climax of Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent historical novel, The Signature of All Things — a long-coming sexual awakening that takes place in a hidden moss-covered grotto in Tahiti — as evidence for the strength and longevity of this Victorian plot device. Although tropes of sexual encounters occurring in gardens and forests far predated the nineteenth century, both realistically and literarily, these hidden moss grottoes conjured up an image of something semi-religious, some secret refuge from the trials of urban — and overwhelming imperial tropical — life. Despite eschewing the topic of sex altogether in his Amazonian journals and letters, Spruce wrote excitedly about coming upon one of these hidden grottoes in 1855, just off of the Rio Taruma. After climbing for hours on end to reach a picturesque waterfall, Spruce snuck behind the fall into a space that he remembered as an overwhelming high point of his expedition. Finding naturally produced steps embedded in the cliff, it was: thus easy to walk under the cataract without being wetted, though the rocks drip here and there and are everywhere thickly clad with ferns and Hepaticae, but especially with Selaginellae, of which I gathered four species not found in adjacent forests. The water falls into a deep trough, from which spray dashed out and is borne downward by the rush of the cataract. The water winds away among mossy blocks and then is lost beneath them for a considerable distance . . . The whole aspect of this mossy cirque, with its broad riband of falling water, embosomed in dense luxuriant forest, in which was visible no palm, was something of an admixture of tropical scenery with that of temperate climes. Spruce’s reaction to this mossy grotto was nothing short of sublime. Never one to exaggerate the beauty of the tropics, the botanist (whose health was on a brief upswing in 1855) had a private, almost religious reaction to this bryological setting. This day in the “mossy cirque” was one that Spruce seemed unable to forget even after returning to England’s more “temperate climes”. Back in Yorkshire after his fifteen years in South America, Spruce’s health continued to decline. Although he dedicated most of his time to compiling and writing his bryological masterpiece, Hepaticae of the Amazon and Andes of Peru and Ecuador (published in 1885), a more than five hundred page list of all the region’s liverworts and their characteristics, the botanist suffered increasing attacks of intense bodily pains and even routine paralytic seizures. The saddest irony, perhaps, is that Spruce’s illness rendered it incredibly difficult to work with the bryological specimens that he had spent his life accumulating. Writing to a colleague in 1889, Spruce lamented that unbearable headaches prevented him from using the microscope for more than a few minutes at a time. His collections of thousands of mosses and hepatics remained unclassifiable except in brief spells of good health, and Spruce was forced to rely heavily on other bryologists to examine the peristomes and sporophytes necessary for serious study. Although Spruce lived to be seventy-six — a remarkably old age for such a diseased and decrepit man in the 1800s — he never wrote the travel narrative of his time in the Amazon that could have secured his fame and fortune. At the time of his death, the botanist had accumulated a massive bryological herbarium, thousands of pages of specimen lists that tracked floral biogeographical distribution, travel journals that described his daily habits in the Amazon and Andes, and countless letters to Europe’s and America’s foremost scientists. His early notes were, and are, considered nearly flawless examples of botanical record keeping. Spruce’s handwriting was impeccable; precise locations, dates, and environmental conditions marked every specimen he collected. His descriptions of mosses and liverworts continue to be some of the most specific and accurate ever recorded. Botanists, even now, regard Richard Spruce as a true “botanist’s botanist”. Hepaticae of the Amazon and Andes remains a usable and useful guide to South American liverworts, and Spruce’s herbarium sheets are some of the most carefully arranged and beautiful specimens of mosses ever created. So why, then, is the naturalist missing from most histories of Victorian science? The answer, it seems, lies in Spruce’s unceasing love for the meticulous and the mundane. Although these qualities made him a respectable, credible source to his colleagues in the mid-nineteenth century — Spruce, for example, was never accused of exaggerating the geographical range of his expedition, unlike most explorers — everyone seemed to recognize that his work just wasn’t interesting to the general public. His good friend Alfred Russel Wallace certainly tried to popularize Spruce’s work, compiling his journals and letters into the two massive Notes of a Botanist volumes, published by Macmillan in 1908. Indeed, although Wallace believed that the volumes would “take their place among the most interesting and instructive books of travel of the nineteenth century”, he was careful to print the longer, more detailed botanical passages (mostly bryological in nature) “in smaller type, so that they may be readily skipped by those who are chiefly interested in the actual narrative of Spruce’s travels”. Rather, in introducing the volumes to readers, Wallace emphasized the smallest sections of Spruce’s work — his quick and conventional references to the Amazon’s more sensational stories, ranging from naked warrior women to gold and vampire bats. Spruce’s long, detailed, and almost obsessive passages about mosses and hepatics shrank into the shadows. Richard Spruce, along with his favorite bryological specimens, occupied tenuous, almost dual identities in Victorian science. Both the botanist and his bryological colleagues struggled with how “popular” their work could aspire to be. Although he generally fits into the category of masculine, sensationalist Victorian explorer (along with Wallace and Bates), Spruce was far from the strong, resilient model of conqueror of nature; for most of his life, the naturalist was too sick to work, and spent his favorite days in the Amazon sitting quietly on the ground, examining the miniscule plants that reminded him of home. These miniscule plants, too, fit uneasily into broader botanical categories. While they represented something clandestine, sexual, and primeval in literature, bryophytes were considered relatively uninteresting and even unimportant in a rapidly expanding British botanical empire. Although he never fully transformed into a species of moss, Richard Spruce’s uncommon affinity with the plants relegated his work to the depths of the botanically obscure, wildly useful to other bryologists, but unread and uninteresting to the broader public. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 14, 2015

Elaine Ayers

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:33.501408

divine-comedy-lucian-versus-the-gods

Divine Comedy Lucian Versus The Gods By Nicholas Jeeves March 23, 2016 With the twenty-six short comic dialogues that made up Dialogues of the Gods, the 2nd-century writer Lucian of Samosata took the popular images of the Greek gods and redrew them as greedy, sex-obsessed, power-mad despots. Nicholas Jeeves, editor of a new edition for PDR Press, explores the story behind the work and its reception in the English-speaking world. Lucian of Samosata, who lived from ca. AD 125 to ca. AD 200, was an Assyrian writer and satirist who today is perhaps best remembered for his Vera Historia, or A True Story — a fantastical tale which not only has the distinction of being one of the first science fiction stories ever written, but also is a contender for one of the first novels. A True Story is a stylish and brilliantly conceived work of the imagination, and readers may still delight in its descriptions of lunar life forms and interplanetary warfare, its islands of cheese and rivers of wine, and its modernistic use of celebrity cameos. But by the time of its writing, Lucian was already several years into a period of literary adventurism that had brought him considerable fame — and infamy — as one of the sharpest, funniest, and most original comic writers of the age. With the quartet of works consisting of Dialogues of the Courtesans, Dialogues of the Dead, Dialogues of the Gods, and Dialogues of the Sea-Gods, Lucian would not only scandalise some of the most influential and celebrated figures of the empire, but in what is perhaps the best known of these, Dialogues of the Gods, he would also furnish the permanent decline of belief in the gods themselves. In Dialogues of the Gods Lucian conjures a series of short comic scenes in which we find the Greek gods domesticated. Here is Zeus, bluff and irritable, squabbling with Hera over his latest infidelity; there is Aphrodite, reprimanding Eros for making an old lady fall madly in love with a teenager. In Apollo & Dionysus, the adolescent god of wine frets about the over-endowed Priapus’ “growing” interest in him; in Pan & Hermes, Hermes tries to duck the issue of his paternity — “how should I come by a son with horns, and with such a shaggy beard and cloven feet, and a tail at his rump?” — until, that is, Pan tells him about the harem of nymphs he keeps in Arcadia. “Indeed. . . well — son — come hither and embrace me!” With these twenty-six peeks behind the curtain of the great Hesiodic myths, Lucian draws up a sensational image of Heaven and the legends of its tenants, variously recasting them as impotent, venal, needy, irresponsible, opportunistic, sex-obsessed, and power-mad — hardly immaculate, but just like those made in their image, permanently insecure and just as prone to lowering thoughts and deeds. These “closet dramas” would deliver a stinging blow to Greek polytheism. While philosophy was now the religion of state for Athenians, the ancient beliefs, so obviously rural in origin, were undergoing a minor resurgence in popularity. For Lucian this was intolerable. As one of the most gifted and popular satirists of his time, at the peak of his powers, and having just survived an attempt on his life by a gang of religious zealots, the gods of his forebears were ripe for his attentions. * Born in Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates in Assyria, Lucian lived for the early part of his life under the Roman emperor Hadrian, and then as an adult under Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus. Because there are no contemporaneous accounts of his life, not much more is known about him other than what little can be gleaned from his collected writings. We know that he spent the early part of his adulthood educating himself as he wandered in and around Ionia, Italy, and Gaul, all the while developing his skills and reputation as a rhetorician. At this he would become successful and quite wealthy, speaking in court on behalf of paying clients, writing speeches for high-standing citizens, and publicly demonstrating his ingenuity with improvised riffs in response to suggestions called out by audiences. He wrote extensively throughout this period — generally arch, philosophical works, composed in stylish Attic Greek, and drawing on his formidable skills as a rhetorician. Yet in his early forties he seems to have suffered what we would now call a midlife crisis — or at least, a crisis of conscience. As Henry Fowler puts it in his introduction to The Works of Lucian of Samosata, “Rhetoric had been left to the legal persons whose object is not truth but victory.” This idea would certainly become one of the underlying themes of Lucian’s writings, and he learned to despise the self-righteous. But whatever triggered the crisis, he felt sufficiently moved to abandon the respectable life of the rhetorician and relocate permanently to Athens, where he would devote himself completely to the writing and performing of comic satires. The journey to Athens would prove both eventful and portentous. Along the way, accompanied by his elderly parents, Lucian encountered the fraudulent priest Alexander of Abonoteichus, leader of the newly emerging cult of the snake god Glycon. Alexander claimed that a snake in his possession was the reincarnation of the god Asclepius, and that only he, Alexander, could channel and interpret its divine prophecies. Lucian was simultaneously disgusted by the influence wielded by Alexander and by the credulity of his followers, whom he described in Alexander the Oracle-Monger as having “neither brains nor individuality. . . with only their outward shape to distinguish them from sheep.” Having identified the manifestation of the snake god as nothing more than a cleverly manipulated puppet, Lucian was determined to expose the puppet master. The attempt nearly cost him his life. When his turn came to ask Alexander for a prophecy, Lucian’s question was as rash as it was amusing: “When will Alexander’s imposture be detected?” Alexander responded with a characteristically cryptic answer, and then had Lucian followed. Discovering that Lucian was about to make a sea crossing, Alexander paid the captain of the vessel to have Lucian and his family slain and thrown overboard. Only the captain’s last-minute desire to meet his impending retirement with a clean conscience prevented the murder. Lucian would never forget the experience, and it is to be supposed that it galvanised him, honing his innate sensitivity to duplicity. With the satires that followed he began to dismantle the pillars of hypocrisy wherever he saw them. With Dialogues of the Courtesans, he sketched a merciless portrait of the hetaerae — the high-status prostitutes of Athens — and their puffed-up clients. He built on these with Dialogues of the Dead, in which he ridiculed the vain expectations of a host of recently departed celebrities arriving in the afterlife, including the eminent philosophers Diogenes and Polystratus, the warrior Hannibal, and Kings Philip and Alexander of Macedon. Having dealt with the rich, the famous, and the mighty, he turned his gaze upwards, to the very peaks of Mount Olympus. With Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Sea-Gods, he would visit his wits on Heaven, and taunt the gods themselves. * While Lucian is treasured by classicists, today his extensive talents seem hardly to rank at all in the wider public consciousness. In contrast with his venerable forebears, he has slipped into relative obscurity. It was not always like that. From the middle Renaissance into the late 1800s, Lucian was among the most widely read of the “Greeks” in Europe, largely thanks to the efforts of the great Dutch theologian Erasmus and his English friend Thomas More. Sharing an appreciation for Lucian’s amusing scepticism and the elegance of his prose style, together they produced, in the early 1500s, the first major translation of his works into Latin. The project, which took several years to complete, would become a publishing sensation, going through more than thirty editions in Erasmus’ and More’s lifetimes alone. Not everyone was pleased to see it. Thanks to the international appeal of the Erasmus-More translations, by 1590 Lucian’s entire canon had been placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Vatican’s catalogue of texts considered to be too salacious for public consumption. Yet despite such prejudices, Lucian’s popularity continued to grow rapidly — not least of all in England, where his dialogues found their way on to school curricula. Thomas Linacre, Thomas More’s old teacher, believed that “Your toil will become light and amusing and your progress sure, if you will only read a little Lucian every day.” And so it proved, as Lucian was endorsed by a new generation of schoolmasters, each in agreement that his sharp wit, broad humour, and matchless style provided the perfect means by which a young lad might be encouraged to attend to his Latin. A number of English translations soon followed. First was Francis Hickes’ Certaine Select Dialogues of Lucian of 1634, updated and republished in 1664 to include Jasper Mayne’s Part of Lucian made English from the Originall. Ferrand Spence’s more extensive Lucian’s Works of 1684 was the first to make use of vernacular English, a decision which infuriated the esteemed poet and translator John Dryden. In his essay “The Life of Lucian”, which would preface the subsequent four-volume Works of Lucian of 1711, Dryden remarked of Lucian that “No Man is so great a Master of Irony, as our Author” — but of Spence, thought it “not worth my while to rake into the filth of so scandalous a Version. . . he makes [Lucian] speak in the Stile and Language of a Jack-Pudding, not a Master of Eloquence. . . for the fine Raillery, and Attique Salt of Lucian, we find the gross Expressions of Billings-Gate, or More-Fields and Bartholomew Fair.” For the next sixty years or so, “Dryden’s Lucian”, as it became known, would serve as the standard. Yet as Lucian became ever more popular, and as the demand for new editions grew, so the translations kept coming — and with them a series of alternating editorial visions. John Carr’s Dialogues of Lucian of 1773 succeeded in being vivid, earthy, and companionable, directed as it was towards the general reader rather than the classical scholar. Thomas Francklin’s Works of Lucian of 1780 took a more academic approach, a rebuke to Carr that resulted in a more respectable, but considerably less fun, translation. William Tooke’s Lucian of Samosata of 1820 might be thought of as a “Goldilocks” edition — pitched just right, with Tooke allowing Lucian’s schoolboy humour, his sly philosophy, and his elegant prose to shine through just as he found it in the Greek, untroubled by any notions of incongruity. Yet as the eighteenth century drew to a close, Lucian slowly began to fall out of favour. Victorian attitudes towards propriety prevailed, and schoolboys had their Lucian substituted with Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. The story might have ended there, had relief not come from the unlikeliest of places — a small tomato plantation on the island of Guernsey. * By 1903, at the age of forty-two, Henry Fowler found himself at a low ebb. Behind him lay an undistinguished academic career at Balliol College, Oxford; this was followed by ungratifying and only moderately successful employment as a schoolmaster, and then occasional freelance work as an essayist for Punch and The Spectator. His brother Frank, twelve years his junior, had found himself similarly disappointed: he had graduated with a third-class degree from Cambridge, and was now making plans to farm tomatoes in the Channel Islands. Despite their relative lack of academic achievement, the two brothers were altogether devoted to the Greek and Roman classics, and shared a great passion for, and facility with, language. Throughout Henry’s time as a schoolmaster, teaching both Latin and Greek first at Fettes in Edinburgh, and then at Sedburgh in Yorkshire, he would visit Frank during the holidays at his rooms in Cambridge. There they would talk enthusiastically about their plans to one day write together. Having decided to accompany Frank to Guernsey, Henry began to think seriously about the writing project. In between their labours among the tomato plants, they hatched a plan — a lively new translation of the complete works of Lucian. There were a number of good reasons for choosing Lucian. First, the most recent translation, a concise edition compiled by the Cambridge scholar Howard Williams in 1888, was not only out of print but considered to be unsatisfactory by the Fowlers. Second, they felt that the great satirist had been neglected for too many years, having slowly fallen out of fashion, and that a mass-market revival was due. Third, Henry had learned that Oxford University had recently begun publishing a series of translations of Greek and Roman classics under the Clarendon Press imprint, and felt that a complete Lucian would make an ideal addition to the catalogue. But there was also another, more carefully concealed reason: Henry saw some interesting parallels between his own lack of religious faith and Lucian’s questioning of the religious authorities of his day. Henry had little time for religion and the “airs of intellectual superiority” he felt it engendered. As Jenny McMorris quotes in her excellent biography of Henry, The Warden of English (Oxford University Press, 2001), “Thirty years ago I thought religious belief true; twenty years ago doubtful; ten years ago false; and now it is (for me, of course) merely absurd.” It is doubtful that Henry shared any of this with his publishers when he pitched the idea of a new edition. He was canny enough to sense that it would not only prove an unhelpful confidence, but that there were enough good reasons to persuade Oxford to fund the book’s publication anyway without invoking dangerous personal ones. The commission to translate Lucian agreed upon, Henry and Frank divided the Lucian workload between them. The pieces which Henry translated are marked in the books with an “H”; Frank’s with an “F”. Those translations they found more challenging, and on which they thus found it necessary to collaborate, were marked “H. F.”  By this method they were, by the close of 1904, able to present to Oxford their complete works of Lucian. Well — not the complete works. During their initial proposal to Oxford, Henry had noted that several of the dialogues might need to be expunged so as not to offend the decency of their readership (who were not, after all, only scholars or students, but also more general readers). Not wishing to pre-empt which pieces would be acceptable to Oxford and which not, the Fowlers willingly handed over the job of censor to the university Vice-Chancellor William Walter Merry. On this occasion at least Merry was quite liberal with his blue pencil. In Dialogues of the Gods alone he excised seven of the twenty-six. These seven expurgated dialogues deserve some particular attention, for they are among the most interesting of the set — though this is quite possibly because of their lewdness (which is rather a lowering thought in itself, but there we have it). Of these, Zeus & Ganymede and Hera & Zeus would have been the most obviously problematic for Merry. In the first of these, Lucian sets the familiar mythological scene in which Zeus takes on the appearance of an eagle so that he may swoop down on the comely shepherd-boy Ganymede and carry him up to heaven forever. “Kiss me, you fine little fellow!” says Zeus on their arrival. “You are now an inmate of Heaven. Instead of milk and cheese you will eat ambrosia and drink nectar.” Ganymede is understandably distraught. “But where am I to sleep at night?” he asks innocently — to which Zeus replies, “Little numbskull, I brought you away that you may sleep with me!” In Hera & Zeus, Zeus tries to justify the presence of his new erômenos to his furious wife. She is having none of it. “Zeus! I hope never to proceed so far in condescension as to let my lips be contaminated by a Phrygian shepherd-boy—and such an effeminate stripling too!” To which Zeus replies, “Mind your language, madam — this effeminate stripling, this Phrygian shepherd-boy, this delicate youth. . . Ah, goodness, I had best say no more, lest I overheat myself!” Four of the remaining five dialogues on the blacklist are not nearly so contentious, though one can still see why Merry might have been nervous about allowing their inclusion. Hermes & Helios is a bit of racy tittle-tattle in which Zeus sends orders to Helios, the sun god, to stay in for a few days so that he can spend an unnaturally long night copulating with Alcmene. Merry would only have seen fit to censor it due to its bawdiness, a highlight of which is when Helios chunters about how, in his day, “such things did not use to happen. . . Whereas now, for the sake of one graceless woman. . . poor mankind must live miserably in darkness all the while, and — thanks to the amorous temperament of the king of the gods! — there they must sit waiting in that long obscurity, till this great athlete you speak of is finished!” Apollo & Hermes is similarly risqué. Here Hermes relates to his companion the story of how Hephaestus has managed, at last, to catch his wife Aphrodite in bed with Ares, the god of war. Trapping them in a magical net like a pair of eels, he calls all the gods to witness the adultery for themselves. Despite this highly embarrassing situation Hermes confides that, even so, “I could not help thinking that Ares, when I beheld him so entangled with the fairest of all the goddesses, was in a very enviable situation.” In Pan & Hermes, Pan claims Hermes as his father. Again it is easy to see why Merry drew a line through this. Not only is Pan boastful of his many sexual conquests, but there is an uncomfortable moment in which we try to figure out quite how goat-like Hermes was when he made love to Penelope — a touch of bestiality that did not go unnoticed. Apollo & Dionysus begins with Dionysus raising the seemingly harmless subject of Aphrodite’s variously natured children. However, it soon emerges that this is merely a preamble to an embarrassing tale in which he confesses to having been cornered by Priapus and his giant penis. He is clearly worried about this encounter and what it means but, like a schoolboy wanting to ask a friendly uncle about girls, tries to approach the subject from another angle so as to make his enquiry seem rather more casual, and therefore less excruciating. Regarding Merry’s blue pencil, this one rather speaks for itself. As to why the seventh, Poseidon & Hermes, was excised is a bit of a mystery. The dialogue deals with the birth of Dionysus from Zeus’ leg. There is nothing in it that is particularly shocking even to delicate sensibilities, and the story of how Dionysus was born would already have been known to anyone with even a casual familiarity with the Greek myths. Perhaps it was the idea that a man might give birth on behalf of a woman that bothered Merry; perhaps it was the passing references to adultery and hermaphroditism — though one imagines that these could easily have been removed without damaging the text too severely. Whatever his reasons, it seems we will never know exactly what he saw in it that so exercised him. ※※Indexed under…Birthof Dionysus (from Zeus' leg) In 1905, the four-volume set The Works of Lucian of Samosata was published to great critical acclaim, and remained in print until 1939. The Fowlers capitalised on their successful partnership the following year with their first bestseller, a book of English usage and grammar they called The King’s English. Frank died in 1918 aged forty-seven from tuberculosis; Henry died in 1933 aged seventy-five, and would be remembered by The Times as “a lexicographical genius” thanks to his work on the first Concise Oxford English Dictionary. As for Lucian himself, the details surrounding his death remain something of a mystery. The story that he was torn to pieces by dogs is a well-known myth propagated in the tenth century by the compiler of the encyclopedic Suda, a Christian who was unimpressed with Lucian’s perceived mockery of the faith. Lucian was largely, but not entirely, innocent of the accusation: his Death of Peregrinus had made characteristic fun of the newly emerging religion, and it remains one of the few first-hand accounts of its earliest expressions. He saw out his days in Egypt, having been pastured by the emperor Commodus into an easy and well-paid legal post. We know that he performed his dialogues there, and that he suffered badly from gout, an affliction about which — naturally — he wrote a play, featuring the goddess Gout herself. As Henry Fowler writes in his introduction to The Works of Lucian of Samosata, “whether the goddess was appeased by it, or carried him off, we cannot tell.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 23, 2016

Nicholas Jeeves

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:34.039028

unlimiting-the-bounds-the-panorama-and-the-balloon-view

“Unlimiting the Bounds” the Panorama and the Balloon View By Lily Ford August 3, 2016 The second essay in a two-part series in which Lily Ford explores how balloon flight transformed our ideas of landscape. Here she looks at the phenomenon of the panorama, and how its attempts at creating the immersive view were inextricably linked to the new visual experience opened up by the advent of ballooning. Until the late eighteenth century, the predominant mode of landscape representation was the bird’s-eye view. This type of image offered the onlooker a high viewpoint outside the subject depicted within the frame of representation, whether a city, a coastline, or a pastoral scene. The aim to show as much as possible outweighed the concern for true perspective and straight sight lines. Robert Harbison captured the dynamic of the bird’s-eye view when he commented, of Wenceslaus Hollar’s 1648 “Long View” of London, “This is not exactly London as anyone experiences it, but London laid out neatly in the mind’s eye, where one can enumerate its features and remind oneself of many separate things at once”.1 The panorama — patented by the Scottish portraitist Robert Barker in 1787 — was a new method of displaying a landscape image. Barker’s proposal was to exhibit a painted landscape in a 360-degree view on a circular canvas strip surrounding the viewer. This was not really a new kind of image: the manipulation of perspective, with multiple viewpoints made to appear visually consistent, was already a constituent feature of bird’s-eye views. Barker’s innovation was rather in the viewer’s interface with the image. The panorama was an apparatus that would isolate and control what it was possible to see. His specifications included lighting from above, an isolated central viewing platform exactly halfway up the height of the canvas, restrictions on the viewer getting too close to the picture, entrance from below, and ventilation without windows. The edges of the image were covered by a canopy that, at the top, also hid the source of light. Barker wasn’t taking the picture out of the frame, he was making the frame big enough to include the spectator as well. To audiences anticipating a conventional bird’s-eye view, it must have been strangely thrilling to walk through a tunnel and up onto a viewing platform and find themselves entirely surrounded by an illuminated scene. Initial responses to Barker’s inaugural panorama in 1792, a view of Edinburgh from Calton Hill, compared it to recent feats of illusion and visual trickery, such as Philippe de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon.2 But Barker was emphatic in his wording when defending the show against these comparisons: There is no deception of glasses, or any other whatever; the view only being a fair sketch, displaying at once a circle of a very extraordinary extent, the same as if on the spot; forming perhaps, one of the most picturesque views in Europe. The idea is entirely new, and the effect produced by fair perspective, a proper point of view, and unlimiting the bounds of the Art of Painting.3 Barker’s insistence on the “fair” (twice), “proper” and artistic character of his panorama painting was a counterweight to the startling sense of hyperreality that must have been experienced by visitors. Barker and subsequent proprietors (after his patent lapsed in 1802) emphasised the verisimilitude of the scenes they presented, whether of cities or of battles, and invited verification from figures who had visited the places or witnessed the events (Altick 188; Wilcox 37). Panoramas began not only to serve as a means of satisfying curiosity about the wider world when travel was difficult or impossible, but also to represent current affairs — The Battle of the Nile, the Coronation of George IV — in a time before illustrated newspapers had made up-to-date imagery cheap and accessible (Altick 181-2, 176). Modifications of the viewer-scene relationship established by the panorama were also essayed. The moving panorama — a long painting revealed horizontally or vertically on rollers — became popular in the 1820s. Here the audience stayed in their seats and the image moved. Theatregoers in 1824 at the Theatre Royal watched Grimaldi the clown “ascend” in a balloon against a scrolling vertical panorama backdrop designed by Thomas Grieve (Hyde 1988:131). A different kind of movement was achieved by the “diorama”, invented in 1823, which worked by moving audiences between two different “sets” showing scenes from nature in changing time and seasons, the transitions effected by lighting (Altick 1978:165). With the viewer at the centre of the view, the frame was dissolved. No longer was the experience of landscape representation mediated by the baroque perspectival constructions of traditional city views. The visitor was invited to encounter the landscape directly. Of course, this was still an image, but every effort was made to support the illusion that the visitor had been transported to the very point from which the image had been captured. Barker claimed the view was “the same as if on the spot”. Sometimes this “spot” was actually physically recreated in the panorama’s rotunda to form the viewing platform, as is the case in the 1829 Colosseum Panorama of London from St Paul’s Cathedral. The structure of the model of the cathedral tower is evident in a contemporary engraving by Rudolph Ackermann. But many of those entering the rotunda to admire the view found themselves disoriented, and it was not unusual for a first-time visitor to a panorama to be sick.4 The disruption of the conventional relationship between viewer and canvas — the removal of the frame, the legends, the hierarchy that reminded the viewer where they stood — could induce a powerful sense of dizziness and nausea. Visitors encountered the limits of their own bodies by being immersed and yet unable to see everything at once.5 The use of a conventional linear perspective both projected and demanded an observer situated at an exterior, elevated point; it was a way of making sense of the large space and depth of a city view. The viewer of the picture needed to occupy this ideal viewpoint and imagine themselves into the landscape while they read the image. From the late eighteenth century, the panorama modulated this scopic regime by immersing the viewer within the image while maintaining a certain separation and elevation of viewpoint. The impossibility of seeing the whole canvas at once, and the emphasis on verisimilitude in what was evidently an illusion, generated a new awareness of the limits of vision. The panorama inaugurated a mode of vision that was more subjective and self-reflexive, in which the beholder described not so much what there was in the image, but what they saw there and what it looked like to them. It was a peculiarly appropriate mindset with which to experience the newly elevated view enabled by the hot air balloon, which made its first manned ascent in France in 1783. The fact that the balloon and the panorama were invented within five years of one another, and the similarity of the 360-degree views they offered, is remarkable. In his The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, Stephan Oettermann argued that the new visual experience gained in the balloon led to the development of a format for recreating the immersive view.6 He qualifies this claim with the suggestion that the panorama responded indirectly to more sophisticated demands on vision and representation, by no means all to do with the balloon.7 It is not, I think, a simple case of cause and effect, with the balloon coming first, nor did both devices emerge from the same set of circumstances; for example, the balloon’s uptake depended on the availability of hydrogen that had only just been successfully combined.8 But the panorama undoubtedly schooled its visitors in a mode of viewing that was compatible with ballooning. And though the balloon was five years older than the panorama, far fewer people directly experienced balloon travel than the tens of thousands who visited a panorama. Before 1836, a total of 313 people had ascended in a balloon in England by one contemporary compiler’s reckoning; in contrast, as an example, the Colosseum’s Panorama of London received more than that number in a single day during its 1829 season.9 In the first fifty years of these two technologies, the idea of the “panoramic” view was far more widely disseminated than the idea of the balloon view. The impact of the panorama can be traced in balloonists’ accounts. Those trying to describe their airborne experiences found the panorama and its related devices to be a useful point of comparison. Before its appearance in 1792, authors of balloon accounts struggled for analogies to describe their experience. “I can find no simile to convey an idea of it”, wrote Vincent Lunardi of his elevated view of London.10 Thomas Baldwin was never lost for words, but flitted through analogies — fairyland, Lilliput, a table-top model of Paris, an “elegant Turkey-Carpet” — the only one bearing repetition being that of a “coloured Map”.11 Another 1780s balloon narrator also referred to “a coloured map or carpet” — the apparent flatness of the landscape was a new and unimagined feature of the aerial view.12 Both Lunardi and Baldwin related their views at one point to bird’s-eye views, mentioning “oblique” and “common” prospects or perspectives.13 But they insisted on the newness and difference of the view, and, in deference to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), professed a sublime-inflected inarticulacy at the vastness and beauty of the vista. By contrast, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of the panorama, balloonists did not need to look far for an appropriate analogy. “We found ourselves. . . the motionless spectators of a vast panorama” wrote Dr. Forster of his first ascent.14 Henry Mayhew, the journalist and social reformer who wrote about his first balloon experience for the Illustrated London News in 1852, drew heavily on this new vocabulary: And here began that peculiar panoramic effect which is the distinguishing feature of a view from a balloon, and which arises from the utter absence of all sense of motion in the machine itself. The earth appeared literally to consist of a long series of scenes, which were being continually drawn along under you, as if it were a diorama beheld flat upon the ground, and gave one almost the notion that the world was an endless landscape stretched on rollers, which some invisible sprites were revolving for your especial enjoyment.15 The first sentence suggests that by the middle of the century balloon views were often described as “panoramic”. His references to a diorama and a moving panorama show these contemporary entertainment technologies providing a shorthand for the expansive scope and numerous points of interest available in a balloon view. They also presage the comparison between the aeroplane view and the cinema in the twentieth century. Both the balloon and the panorama educated observers in techniques of engaging with the image that anticipated cinematographic techniques such as tracking, where the camera moves through space, and panning, where the camera swivels on a stationary point.16 Mayhew flew in Henry Green’s balloon, the Royal Nassau, on its five hundredth ascent.17 A professional balloonist with a mind for business, Green had constructed a giant balloon which could be inflated with coal gas (much cheaper than hydrogen) and begun a residency at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1836. His long-distance balloon journey in the same year, an unprecedented eighteen-hour drift across Europe with two passengers (one of whom, Thomas Monck Mason, wrote a lengthy and fascinating account of the trip), brought welcome attention to the venture. The ascents constituted a spectacle in themselves, drawing the attention of passers-by within the Gardens as well as providing the passengers with an exciting new experience — Mayhew noted “a multitude of upturned faces” as he ascended.18 As Richard Holmes notes, the cultural associations of the balloon changed in the 1830s, from the pioneering and dangerous image of its first fifty years to a more accessible “recreational” object.19 With a “passenger” balloon regularly ascending at Vauxhall, it became easier for the general public to experience flight. For a moderate fee, anybody could go up in the Royal Nassau and see the capital city from the air. Balloons joined panoramas on the London entertainment circuit; both types of view offered up the metropolis — the whole at once — to the gaze of the casual spectator. In 1839, it was even possible to go to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens to experience, in a moving panorama, a simulacrum of the very balloon ascent made from the same site.20 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the balloon experience had been well and truly disseminated. A map of London produced for visitors to the Great Exhibition was (inaccurately) named a “balloon view” to give it more appeal. The professional balloonist Henry Coxwell recalled that he was able to prepare for his first ascent, in 1844, simply by reading widely. This, then, was my first real ascent; but such was the amount of thought I had bestowed on the subject in previous imaginary flights, built upon the descriptive accounts of others, that I seemed to be travelling an element which I had already explored, [. . .]. In most respects I found the country beneath, including the busy humming metropolis, the River Thames, shipping, and distant landscape, pretty much as I expected, and had been tutored to see in the mind’s eye.21 An important shift had occurred in the experience of landscape. The panorama and the balloon disrupted the previously rigid interface between spectators and their surroundings by dissolving the frame of representations and bringing possibilities of height and movement to the viewing subject. Thomas Baldwin’s ballooning pictures were a rare attempt to reflect these possibilities, but were too strange and too new to make much impact. Some fifty years on from Baldwin’s pioneering ascent in 1785, many more people had experienced being at the centre of the view, in a static panorama, and a great deal more had been written to convey the visual rewards of aerial mobility. “[T]he aeronaut quits the earth to assume a station in the zenith of his own horizon”, wrote Thomas Monck Mason after the Nassau flight, where “all the most striking productions of art, the most interesting varieties of nature, town and country, sea and land, mountains and plains, mixed up together in the one scene, appear before him as if suddenly called into existence by the magic virtues of some great enchanter’s wand.”22 He brings to mind both a panorama and a diorama in his invocation of artifice. The new bounds of reality, visible from this suspended vantage point, were best articulated using the vocabulary of virtual reality. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 3, 2016

Lily Ford

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:34.420805

worlds-without-end

Worlds Without End By Philip Ball December 9, 2015 At the end of the 19th century, inspired by radical advances in technology, physicists asserted the reality of invisible worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also spiritual questions around the soul and immortality. Philip Ball explores this fascinating history, and how in this turn to the unseen in the face of mystery there exists a parallel to quantum physics today. William Barrett was puzzled by flames. As the young assistant of the eminent John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in London in the 1860s, he noticed that flames seemed to be sensitive to high-pitched sounds. They would become flattened and crescent-shaped, as Barrett put it, like a “sensitive, nervous person uneasily starting and twitching at every little noise”. He was convinced that this “unseen connection” was mediated by some immaterial intangible influence — it was, he admitted, an effect “more appropriate for a conjuror’s stage than a scientific lecture table”. Certain people, Barrett decided, were analogues of the sensitive flame, exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses”. He considered these persons able to receive messages from supernormal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and the spiritual — a phenomenon that might account for telepathy. This sounds like a strange and surprising conclusion for a scientist to reach. But in the late nineteenth century, with invisible phenomena such as electromagnetic fields becoming central to physics, unexpected new discoveries of “emanations” such as X-rays and radioactivity causing much head-scratching, and radio proving that invisible telecommunication was possible, it wasn’t easy to distinguish the plausible from the fantastical. Some researchers forecast a new union of science and religion: a kind of theoretical proof of beliefs such as the immortality of the soul. Others began to suspect that ours was not the only universe — that others might stretch away unseen in other dimensions or on “spiritual” planes. The ether, a tenuous and all-pervasive medium that all physicists considered to be the carrier of light waves, was regarded as a potential bridge between these worlds. It is commonly asserted today that physics at the fin de siècle was believed by scientists to be on the point of completion. But that could not be further from the truth. On the contrary, at that moment almost anything seemed possible. Psychic Forces Barrett was no marginal figure: he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1899, and knighted in 1912. In 1881, while Professor of Physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, he published his findings on thought transference in the journal Nature. The ensuing controversy motivated him to convene a group of like-minded individuals who would conduct “psychical research” as a systematic science. After Barrett met with Edmund Dawson Rogers, vice president of the Central Association of Spiritualists, in 1882, the two men formed the Society for Psychical Research. The society’s first president, Henry Sidgwick, was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge and doubtful about the claims of spiritualism. Other presidents have included William James, Lord Rayleigh, and the later British prime minister Arthur Balfour; and its members have included J. J. Thomson, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, and the former prime minister William Gladstone. The society still exists today, and its output is an odd mixture of scholarly historical studies of the field of the paranormal and reports and theories that are strange, vague, speculative, and most definitely on the scientific fringe. Barrett suspected that some psychical phenomena might be explained as the interventions of invisible, immaterial beings — not souls or ghosts, but natural, living creatures. In On the Threshold of the Unseen (1917) he wrote that “it is not a very incredible thing to suppose that in the luminiferous ether (or in some other unseen material medium) life of some kind exists”. He imagined such beings to be “human-like, but not really human, intelligences — good or bad daimonia they may be, elementals as some have called them”. But where, then, did they dwell? One answer was proposed by the Irish physicist Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe, who, like Barrett, taught in Dublin until moving in 1910 to the University of Birmingham in England. Fournier d’Albe was interested in electromagnetic phenomena and conducted experiments in radio and nascent television technology. He merged these interests with a belief in invisible beings and worlds with which we stood on the verge of making contact. In Two New Worlds (1907), Fournier d’Albe argued that the recent discoveries in radioactivity and atomic structure implied the existence of an unseen spiritual universe continuous with ours. The material universe must now properly be regarded as an infinite series of worlds within worlds, which Fournier d’Albe considered to differ “only in the size of their elementary constituent particles.” He discussed two of them: the “infra-world” of atoms and electrons, and the “supra-world” of cosmic proportions. Both are, like our own world, teeming with purpose and life. Fournier d’Albe expanded on these views in New Light on Immortality (1908), where he tried to come to terms with what the notion of a human soul could mean in the atomic age. To pronounce on immortality, he said, who now was better placed than the physicist, who understood the most about energy and matter? He supposed that what we call the soul might be a real substance, albeit more tenuous than vapour, composed of particles called “psychomeres” that possess a kind of intelligence and ability to act together via telepathic contact. Fournier d’Albe claimed to deduce something of the nature of psychomeres, although in truth it was sheer guesswork. To estimate the number of psychomeres in a single human soul, he plucked a figure of ten trillion out of thin air. From this he calculated the mass of a soul as about fifty milligrams, and asserted that, were the soul-matter of a person to be condensed into a body just six inches high, it would have the same density as air and would float freely in it. Such a concentration of psychomeres might border on visibility: it could resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. “And thus it comes about that all the fairies, pixies, sylphs, and gnomes fly before the flaring light of science”, Fournier d’Albe proclaimed triumphantly. “They are not so much sent away as explained away”. If, once this soul has left the mortal body, its “earth memories. . . should be awakened, and become dominant”, then it might gather again into its remembered earth-form: “first, a fine mist, then a cloud, a tall pillar of filmy vapour, from which a complete form, moulded and clothed to suit the character assumed, would then emerge, to walk the earth as before for a little while”. In other words, it would be what we have traditionally called a ghost. There was not a shred of real scientific evidence in support of these wild speculations. But wasn’t Fournier d’Albe in the end doing no more than what science has always done: to reduce complex, puzzling phenomena to a minimal set of propositions that could rationalize them? Besides, the invisible world that Fournier d’Albe was invoking could offer consolation for the increasingly barren picture of the world that modern science seemed to insist on. From natural history, he wrote, theology has been ruthlessly evicted. The visible world being henceforth closed to it, it has taken refuge in the invisible world, where it feels free to make what declarations it likes. And that invisible world continues to be the ‘home’ towards which the weary heart turns from a world that has become indeed clean and bright and sanitary, but utterly hopeless and empty, if not unjust and cruel. Theological Thermodynamics The idea that there might be an entire immaterial yet populous realm of existence was emboldened by the new discoveries of the late nineteenth century, particularly the mysterious X-rays first described in 1895 (and invoked by H. G. Wells in The Invisible Man two years later). Although these speculations might seem now to be an extraordinarily elaborate way to “explain” questionable events reported at séances and attested to by mystics like the theosophists, we should remember that the Christian faith already supposed such things. If some nineteenth-century scientists, such as Tyndall and Thomas Henry Huxley, started to question them, most people considered them unexceptional. As a scientific understanding of the world advanced, some scientists still felt a need to reserve a space for God, the soul, and the afterlife. No telescope or microscope was going to locate these things; they would have to be invisible. Perhaps the most notable and thorough effort to provide a scientifically plausible account of invisible spirit worlds within a Christian context was made by the distinguished Scottish physicists Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait in their book The Unseen Universe (1875). Although Stewart became president of the Society for Psychical Research during the 1880s, both men were sceptics of spiritualism, seeing in it nothing more than evidence of human suggestibility. Tait attacked spiritualists at the British Association meeting of 1871, bracketing them alongside “Circle-squarers, Perpetual-motionists [and] Believers that the earth is flat”. Yet he and Stewart were eager to understand how the “invisible order of things” that the Bible seemed to demand — the existence of immortal souls — might be consistent with the laws of physics. They aimed to refute Tyndall’s attack on religion in his address to the British Association in Belfast in 1874, in which he asserted that religion should not be permitted to “intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command”. On the contrary, Stewart and Tait insisted, science and religion were fully compatible. Yet their version of Christianity, on the evidence of The Unseen Universe, was starkly materialistic: they fit within a long tradition of both advocates and opponents of religion who insist on making it a set of beliefs about the physical world that may either be rationalized or disproved. “We are forced to believe that there is something beyond that which is visible”, they wrote: “an invisible order of things, which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away”. This unseen realm need not be remote, but is present right alongside us — within reach, if only there were anything to touch. Its fabric might lie at the extreme of the gradual dematerialization of substance we already see in the physical world, where solid, liquid, and vapour were deemed to be followed by the “semi-material” existences of electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and gravity. Life itself, Stewart and Tait argued, is a “peculiarity of structure which is handed over. . . from the invisible to the visible”. This transfer relies on interaction between the two realms: something enabled by the rainbow bridge of nineteenth-century physics, the ether. This ether-mediated communication is vital to the authors’ theory of the immortality of the human soul. We each possess a spiritual body in this invisible world, they said, which becomes energized by our actions and impulses in the tangible world. “Certain molecular motions and displacement in the brain” are in part “communicated to the spiritual or invisible body, and are there stored up” as a kind of latent memory. This accumulated energy makes the spiritual body “free to exercise its functions” even after bodily death. By living, we store up immortality. There was, however, a problem. In 1850 the German physicist Rudolf Clausius formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics: the conservation of energy and the irreversibility of heat flow from hot to cold. A year later William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) pointed out that such a flow of heat inevitably dissipates energy, which flows into random motions of molecules and can never be recovered. This process, he said, must eventually create a universe of uniform temperature, from which no useful work can be extracted, and in which nothing really happens. But how can this “heat death” of the universe be consistent with immortal souls? Here Stewart and Tait fell back on an idea proposed by their mutual friend, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who worried about the implications of the inexorable second law of thermodynamics for human free will. Maxwell’s solution was first articulated in a letter to Tait in 1867. What if, he said, there exist invisibly small beings — later dubbed “demons” by Thomson — that could cheat the second law by identifying “hot” atoms and separating them from “cold” in a random mixture, creating a reservoir of heat that could be tapped to do work? Such beings, Stewart and Tait now proclaimed, might “restore energy in the present universe without spending work”. It isn’t clear that Maxwell ever intended his demons to be more than hypothetical. But for Stewart and Tait they were essential agents of eternal life. The unseen universe could account for almost any article of faith. “The scientific difficulty with regard to miracles will, we think, entirely disappear, if our view of the invisible universe be accepted”, Stewart and Tait claimed. “Christ, if He came to us from the invisible world, could hardly (with reverence be it spoken) have done so without some peculiar sort of communication being established between the two worlds”. This, then, is where invisible forces and rays pointed for some scientists in the late nineteenth century: towards what we might regard as a thermodynamic theory of God, Christ, the afterlife, miracles, and an eternal Hell. Perhaps concerned about how far they had gone, Stewart and Tait published their book anonymously. The Hidden Reality Physics has never looked back from this dematerialization of the world that began a century and a half ago. The speculations of Barrett, Fournier d’Albe, Stewart and Tait, and others (such as the prominent English scientists William Crookes and Oliver Lodge) were proposals that our visible world is not the only reality. That is just what physicists still assert today with their notions of the multiverse, 11-dimensional string theory, extra dimensions (“brane worlds”), and quantum-mechanical “many worlds” where parallel versions of ourselves go about their business. Contemporary metaphors such as a “hidden reality” (see physicist Brian Greene’s popular book The Hidden Reality [2011]) recommend themselves precisely because they have a history. Can there be any doubt that spiritualists would have delighted in “dark matter” and “dark energy”, these unseen particles and forces that supposedly dwarf the meagre quantities of visible matter in the universe and propel it on a trajectory that opposes gravity? When, in describing such concepts, cosmologists speak of “unraveling the mysteries of the invisible universe”, they are unwittingly invoking a long legacy. History teaches us that attempts to patch over gaps in understanding by inventing invisible phenomena are both useful (they prevent science from stalling in the face of mysteries) and usually wrong. The echoes between contemporary fundamental physics and cosmology and the late-nineteenth-century visions of unseen worlds — extra dimensions, invisible intelligences, matter as knots of pure energy, atomized constituents of immeasurably small extent — should alert us to the territory we are entering, in which traditional tropes are informing the pictures we create. They are a reminder that science is constantly resurrecting old dreams in new guises. It seems inevitable that some of the current ideas about the “hidden universe” will one day appear as quaint and archaic as Fournier d’Albe’s soul-particles or Stewart and Tait’s thermodynamic immortal soul. If our descendants are fair-minded, they won’t laugh at that, but will recognize the well from which such ideas were drawn. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 9, 2015

Philip Ball

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:34.994483

the-calcutta-pococurante-society-public-and-private-in-indias-age-of-reform

The Calcutta Pococurante Society Public and Private in India’s Age of Reform By Joshua Ehrlich August 17, 2016 Joshua Ehrlich on an obscure text found on the shelves of a Bengali library and the light it sheds on the idea of the "public" in 19th-century Calcutta. Lurking on the shelves of the Uttarpara Jayakrishna Public Library, in the Indian state of West Bengal, is a most unusual text. Prefixed to the Calcutta Quarterly Magazine for 1833, this sixty-page supplement bears the insignia pictured above and the title “Calcutta Pococurante Society”. It begins with some scraps of verse and a manifesto to “investigate and discuss the following subjects”: Firstly.—Three courses and a des[s]ert. Secondly.—An additional course.Thirdly.—Cant, Humbug, and Absurdity in all their branches whether Tory, Whig, Radical, Ultra, or Liberal, Medical, or Literary, Martial, or Civil, National, or individual . . . (p. 3). The proceedings which follow are a mixture of light humor, literary chatter, and armchair philosophy, all dripping with booze. “My dear compatriots and I,” one member sets the scene, “are scribbling in Calcutta, the ruling caste, and tippling our Hock and Champaigne round this table” (p. 22). Another notes “how much the art of preparing the necessaries of life has advanced in Calcutta”, referring specifically to “the modus operandi of cooling wines” (p. 33). Elsewhere a full page is taken up by a wine list. Evidently, this is “a club where the mind can throw off its coat, and put its legs upon a chair if they are tired” (p. 7). The members’ wandering dinner chat, peppered with lines of poetry and elements of the occult, is not the kind of thing modern readers are used to seeing in print. Nor is it obvious why past readers should have wanted to. Early nineteenth-century Calcutta (now Kolkata) has long held particular fascination for historians. In older tellings, this was the setting of a “Bengal Renaissance”, which saw ambitious attempts to synthesize eastern and western philosophical traditions, and gave an early (if abortive) impulse to Indian nationalism. Recent studies have situated Calcutta’s intellectual and political ferment in the larger context of a British-imperial or global age of reform. Bengal’s capital was the second city of Britain’s empire and a major commercial hub, home to a cosmopolitan population of some half a million. By the 1820s, Calcutta boasted meeting halls, a flourishing press, and numerous voluntary associations — not to mention collegiate institutions predating London University by up to a quarter-century. For many contemporaries, these were signs of an emergent “public” analogous to that which had come to shape social and political life in Britain. Views of Calcutta and its Environs (1848) — Source. Views of Calcutta and its Environs (1848) — Source. Yet the situation of Calcutta’s “public” differed markedly from that of its metropolitan counterpart. Its very claim to the title was denied by the government, on the theory that acknowledgment would lay the ground for revolution. As “public opinion” acquired ever-greater status in Britain, it remained highly contested in British India. Assemblies and the press were tightly regulated for much of the period, and newspaper editors who ran afoul of the authorities faced sanction or embarkation. Even at its most inclusive, meanwhile, Calcutta’s would-be public retained sharp divisions. Indian and European reformers came together around certain political questions, notably freedom of the press, but it was not at all clear that they shared the same long-term interests. The European population comprised mainly officials in the East India Company’s civil or military service, few of whom had any intention of settling permanently in India. While some immersed themselves in local culture and society, a greater number clung determinedly to the comforts of home. And while calls for responsible government resonated from the 1810s–30s, it was uncertain how far the city’s European population would pursue them if it meant relinquishing cherished privileges and emoluments. To this color divide might be added others running along lines of caste, class, and religion. It was thus a matter for debate among contemporaries — and has remained so among historians — whether a “public” on the British model existed in Calcutta, and, if so, how far it penetrated indigenous society. Could “public” institutions take root on Indian soil? A point of entry to such questions can be found in the aforementioned proceedings of the fictional “Calcutta Pococurante Society”. According to its rules, the Society is dedicated to “Cant, Humbug and Absurdity” in their “public” branches; “private Cant and private Humbug” are avowedly off limits (p. 3). Yet notions of public and private, openness and closedness, are played with and blurred throughout the text. “Public Dinner”, one member declares, is a misnomer: at such events, “A wise man dines before hand, and goes to make speeches or gain ‘his private end’ out of the public” (p. 30). The Society’s constitution marks another exercise in parsing such distinctions. “The number of members”, one rule states, will “be strictly limited to such as apply for admission, or are asked to join the Society or who are neither asked to join [n]or apply for admission” (p. 4). While the group would thus by comic implication seem open to all, another rule provides “that a Secret Committee be appointed . . . to eat, drink and think for the rest” (p. 4). As one member puts it, “Perhaps the public would like to eat drink and think for itself — but this would never do. . . We must be particular as to whom we admit into our circle or it will not long be worth entering” (p. 7). Such exclusivity is reinforced by the cultlike forms and observances of the Society, notably its alligator insignia, whose “mysterious meaning” is reserved for the Committee members: Zegri De Rohan, Glengyle, Wilfred, Lincoln, Berkeley, and Candide (p. 4). Annotations in the Uttarpara Library’s copy of the text dispel some of the mist surrounding this upper echelon. On page four, next to the printed handles of the Secret Committee members, someone has scrawled the names of prominent figures in Calcutta’s European community. “Wilfred”, for instance, is identified as David Lester Richardson, a writer and editor of publications including the Calcutta Quarterly. Also identified are the lawyer Theodore Dickens, the merchant William Cobb Hurry, and the administrator Henry Meredith Parker. Assuming the identifications are accurate, these were “public” eminences, whose depiction as soused aesthetes lends the “Pococurante” text the character of an extended joke. To be in on the joke, however, would have required a fairly intimate knowledge of the real-life personalities involved. That a work with so apparently narrow an audience could have found its way into print thus suggests something of the clubby parochialism of Calcutta’s would-be public. In a sober moment, Hurry’s character describes the British in India as “a limited society, where every body almost is personally known to every body else” (p. 54). Elsewhere, Parker’s stand-in opts to recite a piece formerly intended for the press, “as this circle is sufficiently extensive in its ramifications to supersede all necessity of publication” (p. 34). If Calcutta reformers had long envisioned the press as a conduit to the wider world, the proliferation of the medium seems instead to have fixed the attention of the city’s European elite upon itself. With few “matters of engrossing general or public interest to occupy men’s minds”, they gossiped about acquaintances or reminisced about home (p. 54). It is striking, meanwhile, how little the text is concerned with India or Indians. Most coeval groups, like the Calcutta School Society or Agricultural and Horticultural Society, included Bengali elites, and even English-language journals featured “native” contributors. The “Prefatory Remarks” which follow in the Calcutta Quarterly note “the rapid advance in knowledge, made by the Natives of India within these few years past”, and avow as one of the publication’s objects “to ameliorate the condition of the subject millions of this country”.1 Yet there is scant discussion among the pococuranti of these “subject millions”. The aloofness of the British transplants, their dislocation from their surroundings, seems part of the satire. (“Pococurante”, taken from a major character of Voltaire and a minor work of Thomas Moore, means “little-caring”.) At the Society’s dinner, even local ingredients are rendered in French on the menu. The members discuss almost exclusively western politics, philosophy, and literature. On the rare occasions when the east enters the scene, it does so obliquely and fancifully, for instance in the decoration of the Society’s meeting-place: “a Turkish tent of white silk . . . Ottomans of pale Blue and Gold . . . a profusion of Purple Velvet drapery” (p. 5). The everyday experience of life in India is relegated to outside the tent-flaps. It is ironic that a document with so little to say to Indian readers should have been preserved in one of the first libraries freely open to them. The Uttarpara Library, just upriver from Calcutta, was founded by the wealthy reformer Jayakrishna Mukherjee in 1859. In its early days, this “remarkable institution” featured a reading room with thousands of works in Bengali and Sanskrit as well as English; upper rooms for meetings, lectures, and other town hall functions; and “‘a garden of choice fruits and flowers . . . for the resort and recreation of the community’”.2 Conceived with the aim of widely diffusing knowledge, the library circulated volumes in the surrounding area and offered a gold medal to anyone who could pass an advanced reading examination. It embodied a far broader, more sanguine view of the Indian public than that found in the annals of the Pococurante Society. Historians have typically seen the early 1830s as the heyday, not to say the last gasp, of Calcutta’s early reform “public”. Yet works like the one explored here remind us just how small this “public”, for all of its aspirations, was. The Indian public imagined later in the century, built on popular, nationalist foundations, was a far cry indeed from one which could be summed up as a handful of alienated British transplants. An inkling of the fragility and decadence of that early-modern formation runs throughout the “Pococurante” text. And in the final pages a series of disasters befalls the Society. First, several members are seized by the poisonous effects of mushrooms consumed at dinner. Then Parker’s character observes, “Do mine eyes deceive me or does that Chandelier above our heads, and half a ton in weight, sway to and fro in the intrenchant and the slumbering air, as if’t were moved by some mighty but invisible hand?” (p. 58). Richardson’s character has just enough time to compose a sonnet “pro bono publico” before a final earthquake brings everything crashing down (p. 60). The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 17, 2016

Joshua Ehrlich

essay

2024-05-01T21:50:35.521895