Stephen A. Norwick
The relations between geology and literature go back at least to the beginnings of modern science in the Enlightenment. Abraham Gottlob Werner, author of the first mineralogy textbook, influenced Goethe and taught Novalis at the Freiberg Mining Academy. James Hutton of Edinburgh, the founder of modern geology, influenced Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. My teacher D.B. McIntyre used to recite from memory long passages from Lord of the Rings, in his Scots burr, around a campfire on star-filled, moonless nights in a dry camp in the low mountains of the Mojave Desert of southwestern Nevada. Perhaps it is my experience of oral poetry around the campfire that makes me think as well of the prehistoric origins of both science and literature.
European natural science arose in the frame of six major holistic metaphors of nature (see Norwick 2006). The ancient pagan peoples who spoke the Indo-European languages believed that the earth was created when the gods killed and dismembered the bodies of a race of monstrous giants and made the rocks and hills and valleys with their body parts. Traces of this idea remain in the personified nomenclature for hills, landslides, alluvial fans, and lava flows that have crowns, brows, feet, and toes; the whole earth has bowels. Hellenistic natural philosophers retained this image and developed the theory of the macrocosm, a giant, male, human body that is the observable universe. Empedocles of Agrigento incorporated the macrocosm in his unified theory of the four elements in the parts of natural philosophy that became astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, and medicine. This connection influenced literature for the next two millennia.
The Book of Nature trope is derived from the Sumerian book of fate, which became the book of life to the Hebrew peoples, and entered Christian and Muslim cultures. In the Middle Ages, the idea of the Book of Nature written by God suggested that nature has instructive and morally uplifting messages for people to read. The image of the Book of Nature was central to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biology and geology. Biologists dropped the trope when they adopted Darwinism, but popular nature writers, especially the most religious authors, continue to use the image. Geologists and molecular geneticists are the only scientists who still regularly use the Book of Nature trope (Norwick 2006, ch. 9).
The minor Olympian goddess Natura became a sort of archangel when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion. Over the next half millennium, she became Mother Nature and was conflated with the Muse of Science, Urania, and by many Christians with the Virgin Mary. Mother Nature was a major inspiration to many early geologists. Both Darwin and the anti-Darwinian religious nature writers also used Mother Nature: Darwin imagined that Mother Nature was selecting the strongest animals and plants to succeed by natural selection (Darwin 1903). Mother Nature is not used in modern scientific writing, but she is common in popular parlance, sometimes when describing nature’s beauties, such as flowers and landscapes, but mostly when describing geologic natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides, and tornadoes (Norwick 2006, ch. 1).
In modern times, Mother Nature has been conflated with Gaia, the ancient Greek soil goddess. According to James Lovelock, he was mainly influenced, like Hutton, by the analogy connecting macrocosm to the microcosm. The Gaia Hypothesis was not generated by the trope of Mother Nature, but as soon as Lovelock made the connection, he was inspired by it to continue his search for the overarching control mechanisms which moderate the earth’s climate and make continued life possible (Lovelock 2000: 255). So we see that earth science was created by European societies as a response to the interaction of experienced landscape and received mythology, mediated by language. In treating the next periods of cultural development we will continue to ask: how did the general language influence the science?
The Sumerians believed that their great gods were kindly and loved humanity, while the Hebrews used three myths to explain pain and suffering: the Fall in the Garden of Eden, the building of the tower of Babel, and the Noachian deluge. Moses repeated these stories. Starting with Rabbi Nathan in the Talmud (c.150 CE), the Fall of Adam and Eve was believed to have infected the whole earth and to have made mountains. Peter Abelard wrote that the earth God created was smooth as an egg but it became deformed into mountains and valleys with the Fall. During the Renaissance it was added that the drawdown of Noah’s floodwaters further eroded the valleys of the earth, and deposited the waste in the oceans. Both Martin Luther and John Milton depicted vast geological changes, due either to God’s wrath or to the battle between the blessed and the fallen angels. Voltaire, however, mocked the early geologists who agreed with Abelard that the early earth was smooth.
The Fall of Nature trope led to the feeling that mountains were ruins. The British Romantic poet Shelley produced this memorable description of the Alps in his poem “Mont Blanc”:
How hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! – rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. Is this the scene
Where the old earth-quake-demon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? Or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
(ll. 69–75)
Not just in the popular language, then, but also in elite writings by cultural heroes such as Moses, Abelard, Luther, Milton, and Shelley, attitudes toward landscape were strongly influenced by prescientific theories of origin. Most of the early scientific theories of the earth involved giant catastrophic events such as floods and colliding planets. This general feeling of catastrophe influenced the development of the theory of “catastrophism” in early earth science.
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures believed that the earth was created a few thousand years ago, an attitude that made it impossible to develop hypotheses powerful enough to generate predictions about the location of minerals or fuels. Leonardo da Vinci was the first scientist to realize that the earth was millions of years old, but he only confided this in his journals, in the section that became the Leicester Manuscript. The latter arrived in England in 1717 and was read by several scientists, including Edmund Halley – Newton’s friend and supporter, but also a notorious atheist, who published Leonardo’s proof of the antiquity of the earth, the salt clock (without attribution).
During the Enlightenment, a very bold scientist and literary figure proposed an entirely different proof of the great age of the earth. The French natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, keeper of the King’s Botanical Garden, made major contributions to geology, astronomy, calculus, probability theory, and was the last serious person to write an encyclopedia by himself. It has 44 volumes. A member of the Academy of Science, he was also a member of the literary Académie française, where he was called “the phrase monger.” Buffon produced a series of physical simulations of the rate of cooling of a molten earth that showed that the earth was tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. Meanwhile, the most important Enlightenment mineralogist and earth scientist, Abraham Gottlob Werner, proposed the theory of “Neptunism,” stating that most rocks were laid down in a primeval ocean. While Werner himself was not a religious person, such people interpreted his theory to be compatible with the story of Noah’s deluge.
The main alternative general theory of the earth was developed by James Hutton under the influence of powerful literary tropes. We are warned not to mix metaphors, but Hutton did so to great advantage. First, he discovered that, as rocks weather into soil, they release all of the elements needed to fertilize plants except nitrogen. Hutton became a physician and used the macrocosm/microcosm trope in his medical dissertation. His soil and medical discoveries led him to imagine the earth as a great human body that could heal itself by a great flux of material. This flux was one of the main influences on Emerson’s vision of the unity of nature, while Hutton’s idea that health comes from decay influenced Emerson’s “Law of Compensation” (see Dant 1989).
Hutton also used the metaphor of the earth as a machine. McIntyre (1963) has shown how these metaphors allowed Hutton to discover the “rock cycle,” in which all forms of rock become altered to make the others, and that most of the important processes that create rocks are not “catastrophic” but slow, happening over hundreds of millions of years (“the Great Abyss of Time”). As he famously put it: “The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Ironically, Hutton was a deeply religious person, but he was attacked by most religious writers of his day. These attacks popularized geology, and kept it in the public consciousness for the half century between the death of Hutton (1797) and the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Unlike the “Neptunist” Werner, Hutton had extensive field experience. He proved that granite was intruded as a liquid, not laid down in the ocean. For this reason he was called the “Plutonist,” although this was only a small part of his “System of the Earth.”
Except in hydrology and atmospheric science, where it remained the motivating trope, most geologists of the Victorian period and early twentieth century dropped Hutton’s great flux metaphor. The flux trope only returned to mainstream geology in the 1950s with the development of biogeochemistry, process geomorphology, and modern soil science. The image of nature as a great flux has also been repopularized by the Gaia theories developed by James Lovelock (Norwick 2006, ch.10). Like most scientists of his day, Hutton also used the metaphors of nature as a great book and as a fabric woven by Nature or God. The fabric trope is still in common use in geologic nomenclature that imagines texture and fabric in rock, soils, and whole landscapes. Popular authors from the Renaissance on, and especially since the Romantic period, have written of the fabric of nature. For instance, Wordsworth often wrote that nature was a knot, or threads (often of silver or gold), or beads on a thread.
In short, literary and popular images of the earth and prescientific feelings about minerals, rocks, soils, and landscapes have entered common speech as figurative resources. For example, an overwhelming victory is said to be “winning by a landslide.” When a person chooses to abide by local social norms they are said to be “going with the grain,” the vehicle of which refers to both woodworking and stone masonry. A massive search of a large body of digital data is called “data mining.” A very reliable person is said to be “a rock.” Anything that is flowing in large volume, such as people or information or even cash, can be called “a flood.” A large thing is “a mountain,” such as a “mountain of a man.” A restaurant critic called the very slow service in a café “glacial.”
We can see a pervasive interplay between geological, linguistic, and literary forms. Whereas the general language strongly influenced a great geological innovator such as Hutton to break through the dominant theories of his day, many writers also believed that different landscapes and climates produced different personality types, that the minerals, rocks, soils, and landscapes, without the mediation of scientific theories, inspired the genius of some authors. For example, the limestone valleys of central England weather into low, smooth, gently undulating plains that inspired the flower-filled, sweet, rural poetry of England such as poems by William Cowper. In the same way, the open lowlands of Scotland inspired James Thomson. In the twentieth century, the poet W.H. Auden included numerous geological references in his poetry. Raised on the limestone of Yorkshire, he associated the dissolution and smoothing of this rock with the changes that happen to memories. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” is partly about the environmental determinism by which landscapes developed over granite, clay, gravel, or limestone produced different types of plants, animals, and people.
The more varied rock types that make the rugged coast of Ayrshire, Scotland, produced high hills from which most streams flow rapidly into low, coastal plains. These streams became a major part of the poetry of Robert Burns, in which the streams are often symbols for the feelings of the poet or his characters (Geikie 1898: 25). Burns was a major influence on John Muir, who was both a geologist and a fine writer, who wrote that the structural weaknesses in the Sierra Nevada rocks “predestined” the paths of the glaciers, leaving “Nature’s poems carved on tablets of stone” (Muir 1898: 48). Thus the Scottish landforms inspired the poet who inspired the scientist who interpreted a completely different landscape, the Sierra Nevada of California.
As we have already noted, minerals, rocks, soils, and landscapes became common subjects of Romantic authors and influenced literature in many ways. Throughout the nineteenth century, science’sinfluence on popular language grew stronger. Though dead by the Romantic period, Hutton was responsible for the creation of a new holistic trope of nature, the image of the self-modulating earth, often referred to as “the globe” or “the planet.” This image spread slowly through the English-speaking world during the Romantic period, and until the late 1960s when NASA photographs of the Earth from space or from the surface of the moon popularized both visual and verbal images of planetary totality (Norwick 2006, ch. 8). Hutton’s most important popularizer was another Scotsman, Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology was the most-read geology textbook of his century. Calling this concept “uniformitarianism,” Lyell emphasized Hutton’s theory that major changes in the earth are usually due to ordinary processes like weathering and erosion over very long periods of time. Many important literary figures read Lyell’s Principles. Tennyson owned a copy and incorporated Hutton’s “deep abyss of time” and rock cycle into his poetry: “The moanings of the homeless sea, / The sound of streams that swift or slow / Draw down Aeonian hills, and sow / The dust of continents to be” (Tennyson 1849: sec. 35; Gliserman 1975: 444).
Some geological concepts have accompanied major intellectual controversies in Europe. The notion that nature or society is improving, or degenerating, or static, can sometimes have a powerful influence over public feelings toward the Earth. Although they had a generally positive attitude toward nature (Fairclough 1928), the ancient Greeks believed that the Earth was degrading. During the Enlightenment, the increasing knowledge of paleontology showed that life had changed markedly over geologic time. The rock record seemed to show dynamic but not directional changes, and this indeterminate status confused many authors, including Sir Charles Lyell, who passed this confusion on to Emerson and Thoreau (Rossi 1994), William Cullen Bryant (Ringe 1955), Victor Hugo (Welsh 1978), and many other nineteenth-century authors who wanted to find progress in nature but who only saw undirected change.
However, many writers used the fossil record to support their contention that nature was improving. In addition, the Huttonian notion that continents and mountains are continuing to rise in our day accorded with positive Romantic feelings that God was still at work in nature, and promoted mountains in particular. Byron left England for more adventurous mountainous terrain: “England! thy beauties are tame and domestic, / To one who has rov’d on the mountains afar: / Oh! for the crags that are wild and majestic, / The steep, frowning glories of dark Loch na Garr” (Byron 1898: “Lachin Y Garr”). At the same time, geological influences were often less powerful than other ideas. For example, William Wordsworth was well read in earth science but mildly anti-intellectual and opposed to “mechanic laws.” His love of mountains was more likely a nostalgia for the low mountains of the English Lake District where he was born, as well as the high mountains of Switzerland that he visited. Wordsworth himself believed that the high places of the Earth corresponded to high moral character and so climbing mountains could literally elevate a person’s character as well as their body (Geikie 1898: 55). Similarly, Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Crater reflects Lyell’s description of the formation and destruction of a volcanic island. The rise and fall of a utopian colony parallels the history of the volcanic island on which they are living (Scudder 1947).
Scientific practices strongly influenced the development of new popular literary forms. During the nineteenth century, the realistic and naturalistic novel, and especially the detective story, became popular because they enacted fictive scenes and behaviors that paralleled the scientific interests of the age. Most novels are like science in that they have realistic physical and social settings and a causal narrative. Edgar Allen Poe’s pioneering detective, C. Auguste Dupin, behaved scientifically in the way he observed ordinary things in extremely fine detail and in his careful deductive logic. Like most scientists, Dupin loved puzzles, was deeply rationalistic, and strongly against magic and superstition.
However, detective literature owes more to field sciences like geology than to the laboratory sciences of chemistry and physics. The field sciences are usually actualistic, that is, they see their own patterns in the natural world without reference to the laboratory sciences’ fundamental particles and forces. For example, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was strikingly actualistic. As with geologists, he could not usually solve his cases by using the first principles of physics, chemistry, or mathematics. Instead, for instance, like the geologists who looked at sand deposits in rivers, beaches, lakes, and deltas and then inferred the origins of different sandstones, Holmes smoked and then closely observed the butts and ash from all of the cigars available in Western Europe, and then used this knowledge to catch criminals who left cigar ash at crime scenes (Conan Doyle 1887, ch. IV).
In the twentieth century, literary criticism began to use geological tropes to describe its own operations. For example, if there are several early versions of a famous text, scholars can write a history of the choices that the author made to create the book, for example, Thoreau’s Walden. Sometimes it is known that an earlier version has been lost. For example, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility started as an epistolary novel that she read aloud to her siblings. The original has never been found, so scholars have looked for “fossils” in “deposits” of earlier traces of the epistolary version in the present text. Such an analysis is called a “geologic study” (Lock 1979). Similarly, the deep study of a text has been called “geologic” by critics. Levine likened another critic’s “shallow” understanding of Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness as “lateral and surface topography – a map perhaps,” as opposed to “geology” that is “deep” (Levine 1988: 25).
The practice of science changed society in ways that are reflected in literature. The sciences of the earth, sea, and sky developed rapidly throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and this had many practical impacts on European cultures and European colonies around the world. Scientific mineral exploration was able to discover vast deposits of metals and ores of industrial minerals that had been overlooked by prospectors who were not aided by theory. Oil exploration would have been impossible without Hutton’s insights into the age of the earth and the interpretation of earth materials. Geological engineering made possible giant hydroelectric dams. At the beginning of the twentieth century, these activities generated imaginative literature in which heroic geologists and engineers created vast works, making the new industrial European world, such as the boys’ stories Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel, Tom Swift and His Great Oil Gusher, The Young Engineers in Nevada – or, Seeking Fortune on the Turn of a Pick, The Young Engineers in Mexico – or Fighting the Mine Swindlers, and the romantic novel Soldiers of Fortune, by Richard Harding Davis (Tichi 1987: 117–34, 187).
Academic studies of scientificinfluences on literary figures often involve personal connections. While there is a serious academic disagreement over whether William Blake had much direct exposure to geology or was just responding to popular ideas (Heringman 2004: 95), Thomas Hardy claimed to have read the famous textbook by Sir Charles Lyell. However, he did not have a copy in his library, and it has been shown that Hardy owned and closely paraphrased a much more common and popular book, The Wonders of Geology (1848) by Gideon Algernon Mantell (Ingram 1980: 60, 61). Henry Adams must have had more geologists for friends than any other literary figure in European or American letters. He knew Sir Charles Lyell well. Clarence King, first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, was a close friend, and Adams knew many other geologists from traveling as a journalist with a geological party surveying the length of the 40th parallel. However, the influence of geology on Adams was not positive. In his famous autobiography (1918) he recorded his disappointment: he had expected science to tell him some great truths, but it seemed very undecided.
In the middle of the twentieth century, the earth sciences were revolutionized by the idea that the continents are floating around on the surface of the earth. Although this idea has altered almost every form of geology, it has not influenced literature, unless one includes the five rather journalistic but Pulitzer Prize-winning books by John McPhee, which are based on interviews during long field trips with geologists: Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising From the Plains (1986), Assembling California (1993), and Crossing the Craton (2000).
The clearest of all cases of the influence of earth science on literature occurs when the author practices both the science and the art. Important writers who were practicing geologists include Novalis, Goethe, and John Muir. Novalis, the founder of German Romanticism, was manager of several salt mines. He had studied at the Mining Academy of Freiberg with the great Neptunian, Abraham Gottlob Werner. Novalis took as one of his poetic tasks to harmonize science and poetry so as to rejuvenate the relationship of humans to nature. Neptunism was a static, historic view that believed that the main processes of earth formation had been caused by ancient catastrophes. However, Novalis did not agree with his teacher; rather, he agreed with James Hutton, the Plutonist, uniformitarian, and “founder of modern geology,” that the earth was still being formed slowly by everyday processes. Novalis’s sense of the otherness of the inorganic earth came from geology and contributed to the Romantic conception of the sublime (see Heringman 2004).
Goethe was a skilled practicing mineralogist. The very common mineral and pigment Goethite, FeO(OH), is named for him. A Neptunist and catastrophist, Goethe was opposed to Plutonism. He believed that God made granite, as in “Über den Granit” (1784). In Faust, the Devil advocated Plutonism (of course), the school that believed that granite began as flaming liquid rock, although he knew that the theory was based on a vast hallucination. For his part, Muir left books full of marginalia, as well as his University of Wisconsin transcripts that show he studied glaciology with Ezra Carr, who in turn had studied with the great glaciologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. Muir was the first to realize that glaciers carved Yosemite Valley. Then he discovered active glaciers in the Sierra Nevada, and finally he filled his popular books with rich figurative language about the Ice Age.
In contemporary literature, Sarah Andrews is a geologist who also writes murder mysteries, starring Em Hansen, forensic geologist. Intended to introduce the general public to geology and geologists, each of her novels takes up a different application of geology: soil pollution, paleontology, petroleum engineering, mineral deposits, seismic safety, etc. Geologist, historian, and poet Susan Cummins Miller is the author of four geological Frankie McFarlane mysteries. Linda Jacobs is a petroleum geologist who has written a series of steamy as well as geological, historical, and award-winning adventure stories set in the region of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
We have seen that Indo-European languages motivated the development of earth science that created the present industrial world. We can also see that rocks, soils, and landscape without theoretical mediation have inspired many popular tropes in modern English. We have seen that the earth sciences were an important part of the Romantic project to give value to nature, and that science, particularly actualistic earth science, inspired the popularity of the prose novel and short story, especially detective fiction. Perhaps surprisingly, we can see that some of the most powerful ideas in geology – the rock cycle, uniformitarianism, continental drift, and “The Great Abyss of Time”–have had little influence on popular culture or high literature since the Romantic period, but the macrocosm/microcosm analogy has been revived as modern Gaia science.
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