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Ecosublime
Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld
By Lee Rozelle The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2006 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9058-7
CHAPTER 1
Oceanic Terrain
The Journal of Julius Rodman and A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
Edgar Allan Poe's virtually unexplored The Journal of Julius Rodman claims to detail the exploits of a trapping crew that crossed the Rocky Mountains in 1792, one year before Alexander Mackenzie's trek and twelve before the Lewis and Clark expedition. Serialized in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine from January to June of 1840, Poe's hoax journal purports in its first chapter to embody
a relation of the first successful attempt to cross the gigantic barriers of that immense chain of mountains which stretches from the Polar Sea in the north, to the Isthmus of Darien in the south, forming a craggy and snow-capped rampart throughout its whole course, but, what is of still greater importance, gives the particulars of a tour, beyond these mountains, through an immense extent of territory, which, at this day, is looked upon as totally untravelled and unknown, and which, in every map of the country to which we can obtain access, is marked as an "unexplored region." (521)
Drawing heavily from the History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814) and Washington Irving's Astoria (1836), Poe patches together an uncharted territory suitable for easy installments, with well-placed crags and savages and bears imposed at every turn.
But after lukewarm reception and problems with the staff at Burton's, Poe abandons Rodman and his crew in "the far distant Yukon ... on the [Missouri] river in Montana, with no inkling given us of the means whereby he was to fulfill his promise to cross the Rockies" (653). Rodman never reaches the passage that typified in the nineteenth-century imagination what the craggy surface of Mars might represent to the millennial American; the Rocky Mountains were for Poe's readership a metonym and repository for that which remained untamed in the expanse between the Mississippi River and America's Manifest Destiny. To blaze a trail through the Rockies, to impose linear inscriptions upon biospheres with axes or pens, was to take part in processes of beautification and debasement of a seemingly endless wild. Pioneers, speculators, and writers of the nineteenth century represented the Rocky Mountains in conflicting ways, and Poe's Journal of Julius Rodman (1840) and Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) track and survey these oppositional approaches. Rodman's editor and Bird's narrator discuss their surroundings in terms of the landscape gardening conventions of the day, and both use the language of aestheticism and the period's well-worn romantic conventions to describe the terrain. Rodman's journal represents nature as either landscape garden or as woods/forest, rendering the natural environment merely beautiful or horrific. Bird, on the other hand, describes a demystified yet revered Rocky Mountains that defies depictions of natural environment as garden or resource, enabling its narrator to reach the ecosublime. Both Poe and Bird are able to represent ecological comprehension through depictions of uncertainty in the face of change, but Poe fails to depict the apprehension of human characters immersed within a tentative ecological whole.
Joan Dayan suggests that perhaps "all of Poe's work is finally about radical dehumanization: one can dematerialize — idealize — by turning humans into animals or by turning them into angels" (183). Poe's texts reconfigure nonhuman ladies and slaves by either adding spirit or removing mind. Dayan adds that "both processes, etherialization and brutalization (turning into angel or brute), involve displacement of the human element. We are dealing with a process of sublimation, either up or down. ... What remains unmentioned, and unencoded, is the manhood at the center of these operations. It is the powerfully absent construction that Poe intentionally probes" (183–84). Unlike angel and brute, Poe's "universal man" (184) exists because he can reason. Because reason falls short for creatures of heart and slavery's mindless hands, maltreatment comes as a means to improve or cultivate. In nineteenth-century expansion literature, this rationale also justifies the mismanagement of untouched wilderness. Propaganda portraying quaint prairie settlements with bountiful resources, vicious Native Americans, or monstrous bears idealizes and degrades the indigenous to perpetuate the multi(ne)farious agendas of divine right. For The Journal of Julius Rodman, this process of displacement situates nature as either convertible model (the landscape garden) or debased monstrosity (the forest). Poe's narrator thus desires nature either as feminized ideal or savage slave.
Stephen Mainville states that "Poe's frontier is the frontier of the unconscious, the unknown, the limit of consciousness, a frontier that is experienced rather than located," adding that "Poe's unexplored frontiers are not to be found on any map, in any external geography; they are interior frontiers" (347). Mainville's use of "to be" verbs highlights accepted Western notions of mind-body, nature-culture, and inside-outside. His title separates meaning and "dumb nature" (354), or the "void." This approach sheds light on the unexhumed corpus that Poe scholarship has been slow to forget: the text can provide a key to the internal mechanisms of the mind, and like a visitation from the ghosts of critics past Wimsatt and Beardsley, it provides keys to the mind of "Poe." Such bodies of criticism must be laid to rest in order to further a critique of that which lies outside: historical forces, cultural markers, and ecological processes. Ecocriticism must make as its object of inquiry the void itself. In The Journal of Julius Rodman the void speaks the voice of the absent woman, the debased slave, and the forest. As Mainville notes, Rodman does "step outside of language," but he does not engage a fantastic supernature; his interactions with the "pretext of humanity" can be seen as either beautiful or horrible connections to biome. Rodman's journey marks a dilemma in nineteenth-century American culture, one that involved the use of romantic rhetoric to etherialize natural space while killing it. Lofty tones that accompanied the language of western expansion thinly mask the impulse to murder and devour the beloved.
The narrator of chapter 1 of Poe's Journal explains that Rodman "was possessed with a burning love of Nature; and worshipped her, perhaps, more in her dreary and savage aspects, than in her manifestations of placidity and joy" as he "stalked through that immense and often terrible wilderness with an evident rapture at his heart" (524). Rodman stalks his beloved as did Lewis and Clark; both texts seek to inscribe their names upon objects of desire. These inscriptions — trapping, mapmaking, trailblazing, and note taking — victimize the natural environment in expansive acts. The animal remains, cartographic and physical openings of biospheres, naming of rivers, and denuded timber and mineral deposits found in cavernous mines mark the possessive actions of an erratic lover (stalker) upon a molested ecology. Poe's dramatizations of possession thus link The Journal of Julius Rodman to the social realities of clear-cutting, strip mining, and species decline in nineteenth-century America.
Poe was also familiar with the techniques of the English Landscape School, which flourished between 1712 and 1790, his interest possibly stimulated by his own childhood experiences abroad. In his landscape sketches, particularly "The Domain of Arnheim," the text struggles with synthetic scenes and the defects of natural space. Ellison explains: "In the most enchanting of natural landscapes there will always be found a defect or an excess — many excesses and defects. Why the component parts may defy, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of these parts will always be susceptible of improvement" (182). Before his conferences with Ellison, the narrator thought that "the primitive intention of nature would have so arranged the earth's surface as to have fulfilled at all points man's sense of the perfection of the beautiful, the sublime, or the picturesque." But because of natural disturbances "of form and color-grouping," it "was Ellison who suggested that they were prognostic of death" (184). Like the poet, the landscape artist must make order, sequence, and harmony out of raw material. A poorly constructed thought or poem is thus likened to the seemingly disarranged forest. Poe's artist, hovering between man and God, must reconfigure feelings, events, and natural environments to find the ethereal within the base. Otherwise, Ellison indicates, the world lacks completion. In "The Domain of Arnheim," Ellison and the narrator get a glimpse into a perfect balance between the natural and the cultural, where the "thought of nature still remained, but her character seemed to have undergone modification: there was a weird symmetry, a thrilling uniformity." In this place there was not "a dead branch — not a withered leaf — not a stray pebble — not a patch of the brown earth was anywhere visible" (191). Ellison finds beauty in the symmetrical and the uniform; perfection comes when he reaches a place that looks similar enough to ecological space to have aesthetic appeal but is not rustic enough to disturb or threaten. The narrator notes with pleasure that this place lacks dead branches, withered leaves, disorganized pebbles, and dirt. Arnheim's domain appears sanitized, devoid of the forest's degenerative processes and more like the lobby of a comfortable inn. For Rodman and Ellison, aesthetics and nature merge as convolutions of literary anxiety in the face of a complex wall of green. More importantly, these projections kill any chances for either one of them to experience the ecosublime.
Although Poe himself may well have deemed the sublime an incomplete descriptor of aesthetic experience, Burkean renderings of the sublime and beautiful permeate The Journal of Julius Rodman. Poe's reproachful critical posture toward Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful has been detailed, but Rodman's descriptions of sights beautiful or awful often parallel those of Burke and, indirectly, Kant. Within the "vegetable creation," Burke argues, "we find nothing so beautiful as flowers" (86), citing smoothness, unimposing size, delicacy, and "colours clear and bright" (107) as determining factors of beauty. Most of Rodman's early descriptions of terrain lack the harshness, grandeur, cragginess, and obscurity associated with the Burkean sublime, but his polished surfaces signify an attempt to beautify the wild as a means of displacement. Rodman and his crew attempt to inscribe the codes of domesticated, contained space onto the frontier but find the results incomplete. Rodman's first attempts to contain river eddies, prairies, and forests suggest a desire to wish away discomfort and confusion in the chaotic wild. He explains that the prairies "exceeded in beauty any thing told in the tales of the Arabian Nights" and that on "the edges of the creeks there was a wild mass of flowers which looked more like Art than Nature, so profusely and fantastically were their vivid colors blended together" (542). Even river flora takes on the attributes of an "English flower-garden" (542).
At this stage, Rodman delights in finding aesthetic form in flowering plant arrangements. He notices that one prairie "bore a wonderful resemblance to an artificial flower garden, but was infinitely more beautiful — looking rather like some of those scenes of enchantment which we read of in old books" (543). The crew becomes gleeful, even ecstatic, by that which reminds them of familiar landscapes. Their tentative sense of empowerment comes from constructing synthetic pattern, or beauty. Rodman describes the "romantic enterprise" (565) that prompts him to make his trek. He explains:
[As I] looked up the stream (which here stretched away to the westward, until the waters apparently met the sky in the great distance) and reflected on the immensity of territory through which those waters had probably passed, a territory as yet altogether unknown to white people, and perhaps abounding in the magnificent works of God, I felt an excitement of soul such as I had never before experienced. ... At that moment I seemed possessed of an energy more than human; and my animal spirits rose to so high a degree that I could with difficulty content myself in the narrow limits of the boat. I longed to be with the Greelys on the bank, that I might give full vent to the feelings which inspired me, by leaping and running in the prairie. (536–37)
Rodman's joyous rhetoric at the beginning of his journey echoes literary depictions of romantic sublimity. His reflections on the seeming infinitude of the river, the immensity of the territory, the divine presence in nature, and his own inspiration transform him briefly into a Wordsworthian vessel.
But as the journey continues, Rodman finds himself incapable of negotiating the terrain on those terms. As he physically and psychologically adapts to his changing surroundings, his descriptions of the terrain also change. Notations of utility replace bookish visions of beauty; he takes on the role of capitalist, inscribing value upon the wild on the basis of exchange. In one passage almost directly purloined from Lewis and Clark, he writes that "the low grounds began to spread out here more than usual, and were well supplied with timber ... the country extended in one immense plain without wood of any kind. The soil was remarkably rich," adding, "the game was more abundant than we had ever yet seen it" (566). Rodman now refers to the forest as timber, appraising the countryside for that which can be processed. Richness in soil indicates the potential for monoculture, and the abundance of "game" indicates the strategy and pleasure derived from animal entrapment and execution. At this point Rodman affirms that his exploring adventure is also a business trip. Wealth will be gained from animal skins by processing them into monetary abstractions. He explains: "The skins which were considered as the leading objects of the expedition were to be obtained, principally, by hunting and trapping," adding, "The furs usually collected by previous adventurers upon our contemplated route, included beaver, otter, marten, lynx, mink, musquash, bear, fox, kitt-fox, wolverine, raccoon, fisher, wolf, buffalo, deer, and elk; but we proposed to confine ourselves to the more costly kinds" (536). Rodman arranges animals hierarchically by dollar value, interrupting ecological webs by a process of proprietary stratification. The actual headshots, evisceration, skinning, stretching, and tanning of animals sound oddly like the trading of jewelry or gold bullion. The "leading objects" are "obtained" and "collected" as the group confines itself to "the more costly kinds" of commodity.
But after some hard traveling, Rodman's representations of his surroundings again shift, becoming more topsy-turvy. His confusion as to how to apprehend the terrain causes him to impose nonhuman characteristics onto human entities (theriomorphism) and to impose human characteristics onto nonhuman entities (anthropomorphism). Jhan Hochman describes these displacement behaviors as a means to create distance between human culture and the fifth world of "plants, animals, and elements" (17). But Rodman's minute advancement toward an intellectual and emotional link to biome actually comes with his anthropomorphic attempts to observe and describe the animals that he kills. He observes beaver behavior, going so far as to describe characteristics such as fixed action patterns, display behavior, and cooperation. This section of text that blatantly swipes from Washington Irving's The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) adds human-like characteristics to animals that function with machine-like efficiency.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ecosublime by Lee Rozelle. Copyright © 2006 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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