Arrows and Cycles, Human and Nature

I just finished browsing Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Deep Time—a marvelous book that put a lot of the thoughts that have been churning around my head lately into some sort of order, for which I owe it a debt of gratitude. In Gould’s account, Burnet, Hutton, and Lyell were driven (whether they knew it or not) by the problematic dichotomy between the notion of time as an “arrow,” or a series of unique and irreversible events that create a contingent history, and the notion of time as a “cycle,” which posits an immanent unity and inevitability such that contingency is evacuated. Gould’s project, here as in his essays on punctuated equilibrium, is to give the lie to uniformitarianism by pointing out that the uniformitarian method (under which natural laws are unchanging) has little to do with a uniformitarian account of history (under which catastrophism is dangerous nonsense): the laws, he claims, can be unchanging even if the effects suggest rupture, event, specificity.

So does he offer a synthesis of the two? Perhaps. More interesting, to my mind, is his underlying point that both of these models of time are, alternately, deeply comforting and deeply worrying. We want to believe that we can effect change; but we don’t want to believe that everything is chaos and contingency. We want to believe in order; but we don’t want to believe in determinism.

Gould’s work also speaks to an interest of mine that’s been ruminating for the past few months on the narration of non-linear time as a challenge to Western big-H History.

Latour posits that the arrow of time is a particularly modern (which, for Latour, always means Western) model of history. In We Have Never Been Modern, he asks us to consider how a model of time as a spiral would disrupt such a linear narrative by suggesting, not a singular line of progress, but a growing process within which nonlinear points could speak to each other (picture a line starting from the center of a spiral and moving out; that line is posited as a new kind of historical understanding in which temporally distant events are called into new relationships). This is strongly reminiscent of Benjamin’s image of the disruption of the linearmodel of history in which events slide after each other like beads on a rosary: Latour, like Benjamin, asks us to twist if not break that rosary, to let the beads form new and nonlinear connections in the process of writing history.

Latour is but the latest (and not even that) in a long line of ecological thinkers to distinguish between the Western line and the non-Western cycle or spiral (though the difference between those two models bears further thought).

It gets picked up by early environmental thinkers who unfavorably contrast the line of Western history (destructive, anthropocentric, falsely assured of its own teleology) with the cycles of natural history (restorative, maternal, healing). Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, two key contributors to the canon of American nature writing, go out of their way to stress the cyclicality of the environments they observe, and to lament the intrusion of Western linear history into those cycles.Both author’s major works (Sand County Almanac and Desert Solitaire) are organized by cyclical metrics of time: months and seasons, placed throughout in the deep-temporal context of the many Januaries and winters, Aprils and springs, that have passed before and will continue to pass. And both authors take pains to contrast this natural cyclicality with the disruptive linear history of humankind, with its capacity to derange beyond cyclical repair: hence Abbey’s (accurate enough) lamenting of the detrimental popularization of vast natural parks that requires their transformation into well-paved little microcosms of urban civilization, and Leopold’s famous episode of an extended history told through the rings of a tree (the image is literally circular, and Leopold goes out of his way to mention and then disregard the supposed climaxes of human history—for instance, the Civil War—in order to focus on the natural and environmental events and cataclysms of the day).

Much as I enjoy reading (and look forward to teaching!) these writers, and much as I understand the advocacy reasons for marking such a temporal division between human linear history and nonhuman cyclical history, I’m even more interested in those texts that pick up on this “natural” cyclical temporality and use it to disrupt the violent line of Western history. I’m thinking in particular of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, in which nonlinear temporality is deployed as a tool, if not a weapon. Reed’s novel makes use of two “natural”/nonhuman temporal models: the time of the virus, and the time of the seed. The virus does not follow the simple linear model of creation, growth, and destruction; instead, it remains present even when invisible and presumed vanquished. Its dormancy allows it to dip in and out of linear history, epitomized by the Wallflower Order, until the time is ripe for a successful infection; thus we hear over and over again that Jes Grew had a “flare-up” in the 1890s, but was put down before it came back in the 1920s (the “now” of the novel). This is developed even more in the image of the Human Seed, a trick that involves lying underground, dormant, until such time as it is expedient to resurface. Thus the closing of the novel:

People in the 60s said they couldn’t follow him. (In Santa Cruz the students walked out.) What’s your point? they asked in Seattle whose central point, the Space Needle, is invisible from time to time. What are you driving at? they would say in Detroit in the 1950s. In the 40s he haunted the stacks of a ghost library. In the 30s he sought to recover his losses like everybody else. In the 20s they knew. And the 20s were back again. Better. Arna Bontemps was correct in his new introduction to Black Thunder. Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around. (Locomobile rear moving toward neoned Manhattan skyline. Skyscrapers gleam like magic trees. Freeze frame.)

Those who fail to understand Papa LaBas mark their association with linear temporality in their protestations: they want to follow, they want a point, they want to drive at something. What Papa LaBas knows is that time is a pendulum, not a river; that time is a cycle, not an arrow. Time is what goes and comes around. This inhabitation of the cyclical—of the seed, the virus, the discarded natural object—and successful breaking open of the line of Western history speaks precisely to what that history occludes: not just, as per Abbey and Leopold, the time of the natural (though certainly that too), but also the experience of those populations excluded from history through the violent racism that so often rested on a designation of some humans as more animal than human, more natural than historical. Thus the dichotomy between natural cycles and human lines of time becomes a generative site of resistance by which the integrity of the latter can be critiqued, disrupted, perhaps (à la Benjamin) exploded.

On the Road (1957)

After a semester so full of reading and MLA preparations that this blog completely fell off the radar, I have quite a backlog! The next few weeks will be full of short thought-posts, mostly on the novels that I’ve been buried in since last I appeared here. So much for “time enough at last!”

I’ll start this deluge off with a few notes on Kerouac’s On the Road. Part of the challenge of reading for coverage is to find a way to connect your own interests to a text without forcing a reading on it. There are, then, a number of reasons for me to find On the Road valuable. Foremost is its attention to questions of space and place (key issues for environmentalism), and, not unrelatedly, its commitments to a certain mobility that destabilizes the localism that I find so overrepresented in discourses about American environmentalism, if not environmentalism itself (indeed, Ursula Heise cites Kerouac as one of many influences that perhaps perversely produced American localism by creating an uneasy sense of rootlessness!). What really helped me zero in on what I found so compelling and yet so frustrating about Kerouac’s classic tale of hipster ennui is the way that it rewrites Transcendentalism. It’s common knowledge that Ginsberg was writing to Whitman: what happens to our reading of Kerouac if we consider the possibility that Kerouac was writing to Emerson in much the same way?

I’m speaking here particularly to the Emersonian commitment to a certain relationship to nature that moves beyond empiricism into transcendental comprehension, to an orientation that allows one to see universal patterns just under the surface of the natural world. Kerouac’s brand of Transcendentalism takes on the 19th-century movement’s commitment to radical individuality and the resistance via mysticism to totalizing institutions. Yet the material from which he attempts to deduce the patterns of truth is not “nature,” defined as the absence of the human. It is rather the very human communities and landscapes through which Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty tumultuously careen. The novel highlights Paradise’s keen attention to apparently coincidental similarities in behavior across his various acquaintances (quotes TK when I have my dogeared copy and its copious margin notes in hand!), and his narrations of these similarities are energetic, even exuberant. They suggest that he believes himself to be honing in on some truth-infused pattern, some Emersonian point of access to the transcendent and infinite divine.

This is a refreshing departure from Transcendental definitions of nature that generate problematic idealizations of Romantic wilderness and a total lack of attention to human interaction with (and membership within) the “natural” world, a binary that a great deal of work (particularly that by Timothy Morton, though William Cronon’s critique of “wilderness” deserves more attention than it has been given) has recently sought to break down. Yet this is less a critical reimagining of the subject-object binary, and the culture-nature binary it enables, than a flattening such that everybody Sal and Dean encounter—particularly women and people of color—become objects, available for evidence in the same way that nature was for Emerson. I am left with two abiding questions: how to narrativize the deconstruction of these binaries in a less problematic and more dialectical way, and (which follows from the precious question) how to conceive of a Transcendental or Beat/proto-Transcendental collectivity, rather than a small group of individuals seeking to extract meaning from the objectified human masses. My sense is that a preliminary answer to both questions can be found in a consideration of Whitman and Ginsberg—and perhaps, à la Wai Chee Dimock, in the complex and transtemporal relationship between their two oeuvres.

John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946/1985)

John Hersey’s Hiroshima originally appeared in (in fact, constituted the whole of) the August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker; it was published as a book later that year, and the edition I have includes a fifth chapter, “Aftermath,” written forty years after the dropping of the bombs in 1945. It tracks the experience of six survivors (or, more properly, hibakusha—literally, explosion-affected people): Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a young clerk; Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a physician who owned a private hospital; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with three children; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a surgeon in the Red Cross Hospital; and Reverand Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church.

I was struck by the way that Hersey was providing an audience relatively ignorant about the delayed and long-term effects of radiation exposure with a narrative account of fallout—by the way that his piece connects the precipitating event (the dropping of uranium bomb “Little Boy” on August 6, 1945) with the delayed and extended effects of this experience, with the narrative connection between surviving an atomic bomb and discovering the postponed medical damage over the course of the next few days, months, and (with the addition of the fifth chapter) decades. Hiroshima constructs the concept of the “risk factor.” What interests me is that Hersey subtly equates the medical with the cultural in terms of fallout, presenting delayed mental and emotional damage alongside delayed physical harm. Take, for instance, the way that he closed Chapter 4 (which was, for readers from 1946-1984, the end of the entire piece):

It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface, their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. (90)

He concludes this paragraph with a quotation from an essay written by Hatsuyo Nakamura’s son Toshio about the bomb. The effect is chilling: having focused on the embedding of radiation damage and unknown medical dangers that may surface in the future, Hersey wraps up by creating a new category of fallout, one that is psychological and social rather than medical or physical. The structure he has built of delayed damage is repurposed to account for a new kind of danger.
This is made even more complicated in the final chapter, where Hersey describes the long-term ailments of the hibakusha:

…most of them seemed to suffer … from the mysterious that real malaise that came to be known as one kind of lasting A-bomb sickness: a nagging weakness and weariness, dizziness now and then, digestive troubles, all aggravated by a feeling of oppression, a sense of doom, for it was said that unspeakable diseases might at any time plant nasty flowers in the bodies of their victims, and even in those of their descendants. (93)

There is much to comment on here—I’m particularly fascinated by the notion of diseases as “nasty flowers” whose seeds have been sown by nuclear exposure, a botanical nightmare that calls back to the menacing explosion of flora in the “Panic Grass and Feverfew” chapter—but what I would like to focus on is how the final symptom Hersey discusses is precisely the kind of emotional fallout that I have been arguing he constructs: the emotional fallout of the knowledge that you are subject to mysterious symptoms that you may be unable to predict, to resolve, to receive compensation for, to protect your progeny from, or even to conclusively link to radiation exposure. I feel there’s a connection between this alarming account of the two kinds of fallout and Hersey’s description later in the same chapter of Toshinki Sasaki’s reflections: she had

an opinion that was unconventional for a hikabusha: that too much attention was paid to the power of the A-bomb, and not enough to the evil of war. Her rather bitter opinion was that it was the more lightly affected hikabusha and power-hungry politicians who focused on the A-bomb, and that not enough thought was given to the fact that warfare had indiscriminately made victims of Japanese who had suffered atomic and incendiary bombings, Chinese citizens who had been attacked by the Japanese, reluctant young Japanese and American soldiers who were drafted to be killed or maimed, and, yes, Japanese prostitutes and their mixed-blood babies. She had firsthand knowledge of the cruelty of the atomic bomb, but she felt that more notice should be given to the causes than to the instruments of total war. (122)

Hersey’s focus on the cultural/social comes full circle here: just as the cultural symptoms of fallout are emphasized, so too are the cultural causes of fallout of primary interest to Sasaki (even if, as he points out, this opinion is in the minority). I’ll wrap up by pointing to possible connections between this emphasis and Hersey’s statement, via Nakamura’s experience, that “The bombing almost seemed a natural disaster” (93). A natural disaster cannot be blamed or avoided; all we can do is respond. I’m not sure what to make of the politics that this suggests. Is this a comforting way of distancing American readers from national guilt? Is this an effort to dissociate atomic energy from weaponry in the service of emphasizing possible peacetime uses? Is this an incisive assessment of global infrastructure and a call for global peace? Mary McCarthy’s critique would suggest the first reading: that Hersey was domesticating the bomb and placating an American readership by presenting the bombing as a banal occasion for a natural disaster narrative; Paul Boyer, on the other hand, finds this critique overstated, particularly in the context of other contemporaneous accounts (making Hersey’s text a new kind of narrative in a culture already saturated with broad statistics and American accountability). I not only see both sides, but also see the interaction of the viewpoints: in other words, it is precisely Hersey’s sensitive and novel account of delayed effects that sets up his slippage into the language of natural disaster. Is this, as Hersey’s critics claimed, necessarily an effect of naturalism? I don’t think so. But it is his attention to delayed damage that simultaneously sets up a new temporal paradigm whose importance cannot be overstated and allows the event itself to fade into the background.

H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine

One of my gut-level instincts about why I’m so fascinated by SF is that it is uniquely interested in the intersection of/construction of a distinction between the social and natural sciences. By the social sciences I mean politics, history (broadly construed), and anthropology, among others; by the natural sciences I mean, in particular, geology, biology, and environmental science. This is absolutely a disciplinary argument and as such can be picked apart to no end; indeed, one of my next few posts is going to be working through Latour’s argument for the dissolving of the separate spheres of “politics” and “ecology” in the realm of “political ecology.” But even if this distinction is constructed and artificial, it is quite compelling and has taken on a narrative life of its own, and the SF genealogy that I want to trace is based precisely in this narrative.

Take, for instance, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which is where I (strategically, as I’ll explain) often start my personal history of SF. Wells was explicit about his choice to use time travel  through deep time (journeying forward beyond the lifespan of the human species as we know it) as a mode of narrativizing evolution: evolution, he explained, functioned so slowly that jumps in time were necessary to show any alarming (and thus narratively effective) change.

But we can also read his novel as an exploration of what happens when the social/political/historical becomes biological—when class (firmly within the realm of the social science) becomes inscribed in the body, when socioeconomic divisions cause speciation such that humankind splits into two distinct species. It is precisely the genre of science fiction, with its freedom to deploy disjunctive deep temporality, that makes the wall between social and natural science permeable.

This notion of permeability, of course, opens up a very interesting if well-trodden line of critique along the lines of eugenics and scientized racism. Remember that this was rife in the nineteenth century; for context, Darwin’s Descent of Man can be seen as quite progressive for its time on account of Darwin’s argument for monogenism—polygenism being the position that human races were actually different species and came from different origins. Race was generally believed to be biological at this point, rather than socially and culturally constructed, and I’d venture to say that contemporary discourse isn’t quite as far removed from the Victorian’s brand of biologized racism as we’d like to think. In other words, positing a transparent causal claim between the biological and social sciences’ explanatory modes was fairly common during the Victorian and Edwardian periods (see also: Social Darwinism). Still, science fiction seems like one of the places in which this relationship was interrogated and complicated, not just propagated. (Another is naturalism, examples of which I’ll definitely be discussing this year; stay tuned!)

A few thoughts going forward: how does collapsing the distinction between human and natural history differ when the “natural history” in question is geological/environmental rather than biological/genetic? Is there a way to rethink the social sciences’ explanatory dominance that is less politically reprehensible than biologized/essentialized racism and more nuanced than non-agential materialism?