worm work- introduction

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Janelle A. Schwartz

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VermiCulture

Introduction

- . This was the headline runonline by DiscoveryNews on September 2, 2010, preceding a subtitlethat read, For the rst time, a structure comparable to our cerebralcortex has been found in an invertebratea humble marine ragworm.1

By placing a complex vertebrate in direct relation to a simple inver-tebrate, title and subtitle alike threaten a continued dismantling ofthe great distance heretofore separating high from low organisms onthe chain of being. The suggested proximity of human and wormprovokes in turn a largely pejorative reaction from writer and readeralike. As if the inserted adjective humble and the descriptive prexrag were not enough to promote a sense of belittlement toward aworm conceivably six hundred million years our ancestor (and yet

still our contemporary) and now understood to share brain structuresthat anticipate our own, the discussion thread appended to the mainarticle offered up colorful reader responses that range from contemptto ridicule to indifference:

If you prefer to believe your brain is related to a worm, then so

be it. Others have a higher regard for human life.

Are you saying that we are worm-brain creatures?

That headline is guaranteed to be cited by some religious

nut as proof that evolution is a lie. I can hear it now: How does explain a brain in a

Scientisticals done wrote it themselves in that there scientistical


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xiv INTRODUCTION

magazine Discovery. Here look at it yourselves: Human-like brain

found in a worm. My case is restful-like. God done created it

all, periods!

And to think they are just worms . . .

And the worm turns . . .2

Human supremacy appears here to be as carefully guarded (if not as

justly organized) as the pecking order of a henhouse. Through nothingmore than the rhetoric that frames the summary of and reaction toa scientic study, this article displays an almost unconscious, seem-ingly inherited repulsion away from the worm. The worm emerges asa creature just shy of a menacing presence; it challenges the supremeposition of the human and so deserves our derision and scorn. Inshort, the worm is reviled not simply for what it is but for what itsuggests about the nature of man.

Worm Work

We wear our hubris well. Or is it that our hubris wears us? This isnot a glib question. As the preceding vignette quickly shows, we, as

humans, have adopted for centuries the essentially misguided (misap-propriated?) idea that weare somehow better, more valuable, than them.This instance of redressing ourselvesbecause, to be clear, worms arenot the intended audiencefor even thinking (much less proving)that in such a low creature we might nd progenitive reections ofus is an affront often accompanied by rhetorical acrobatics meant tofortify the lines of separation, however specious.

This is nothing new. One can read of the discomfort provoked bythe presence of worms on or near the bodies of humans in the worksof Homer and Aristotle just as readily as in the writings of naturalistsand scientists from the inception of the microscope through to today.3Iam also not claiming that this discomfort, or what I understand to be akind of misaligned allegiance, is unique to the analogy of man : worm.This hubris resonates, for example, in discourses surrounding more


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INTRODUCTION xv

complex organisms, such as dolphins and primates,4and is perhaps themost visible in the ethnic, gender, and racial divisions that plague our

own species. Nevertheless, I am especially fascinated by the entangledrelationship of man and worm, particularly regarding the specicthreshold of scale these forms exhibit together. I see in it a way torethink our approaches to organic matter in both our classicatoryand narrative practices. And by looking at how man organizes andrepresents his encounters with the worm, we will see how necessaryit is to recalibrate the denitions and aesthetic valuations we assign

not only to this lowly being but to ourselves.5To attempt this thought experiment from the time of Homer to

today, however attractive, is out of the question for this book. It issimply too broad and too tightly packed of a terrain to cover responsiblyhere. Instead, this book focuses on a specic historicocultural momentwhen worm studies enjoyed a particular emphasis and exponentialgrowthwhen such studies, as I will show, elicited a root vocabularyfor contemporary considerations of the categorically slippery, whichcontinue to hold traction today. Discourses on or about the wormoffer a surprising and fertile demonstration of what I propose was adeveloping aesthetic imaginary from the mid-eighteenth to nineteenthcenturies, rooted not in the abstractions of beauty or sublimity but inthe very material processes of decay and generation. From the time of

Erasmus Darwin to that of Charles Darwin, worms were recognizedas much for their literal ability to break down and cast up organicstructures as for their gurative utility in the disruption of man-madesystems like the classication of organisms and conventional aesthetic

judgments. Worms were a taxonomic terror. Their appearance in bothnatural history treatises and works of poetry and prose often presagedsome form of collapse, be it literal or gurative, and hence the need

to rebuild meaning. But they also signaled great order in nature aswell as a way to express and even preserve such order.

This book traces how worms helped shape, and were shaped by,Romantic culturehow these lower organisms became an instrumen-tal paradox for the Romantics viable representations of the naturalworld. I argue that the worm, as an archetypal gure of such pro-cesses, recasts the evolution of a literary order alongside questions of


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xvi INTRODUCTION

taxonomy in the period between 1740 and 1820 (and extended brieyto the 1880s)making Romanticism a rich humus of natural histori-

cal investigation and literary creation.VermiCultureadmits, as the medial capitalization in the title tothis Introduction insists, a direct relationship between human studiesof the worm and this organisms ability to cultivate such study. AsI will illustrate throughout this project, both natural historical andRomantic writings share an oftentimes disregarded slippage betweenan articulation of the material world as inscribed by the gurative

and the metaphorical as it is informed by matter itself. This curiousyet routine looping exposes two registers of denition that I believecoalesce most readily at worm citings throughout the period: theorganic and the aesthetic. It opens up an area of inquiry for thinkingaesthetically, on one hand, and in narrative terms, on the other, aboutorganic processes in natural history. These processes in turn affectRomantic literature in a way distinct from the aesthetic categories ofthe beautiful and the sublime.

This departure from the more conventional pairing of naturalaesthetics involves looking at the worm as something vile,somethingthat is dened not by any aesthetic qualities it lacks but by a positiveunderstanding of its very substantiveness or materiality. From theLatin vilemor vilis,meaning of low value or price, cheap, common,

mean, base, the adjective vilelends itself to confronting as well asimagining a wholly integrated yet nonetheless disparaged object. Itinjects a productive and parallel sense of the abject into the actualizedlower organisms on which I center this project, allowing for wormsto undergird the materiality of a vile nature just as they underminethe values of a culture attempting to assimilate them at the sametime it rejects them. In this way can the worm then be realized as

that which under-writesa Romantic conception of the human andits artistic productions.

At issue in this project are three methodological concerns: toforeground the difficulties and complexities of taxonomic inquiryin eighteenth-century natural history; to reveal the self-consciousaestheticization that develops from the empirical research of naturalhistory to its imagistic and imaginary reconstructions in Romanticism;


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INTRODUCTION xvii

and to identify the role of aesthetic sensibility in making naturalhistory a subject of discourse. Much as Thomas Kuhn, in The Struc-

ture of Scientic Revolutions,describes scientic revolution as thatwhich disturbs or reshapes scientic consensus, the worm dismantleseighteenth-century efforts to classify it just as it activates and enlivenstaxonomic debates about the natural world and the promise of clas-sicatory structures. Such taxonomic irregularity encourages in turncategory construction and textual creation at the same time that itunsettles yet continues to induce human agency.

Throughout this project, I offer readings that build on a decon-structive approach with which to realize the gural implications col-lecting around the worm in Romantic literature. I look for patternsof diplopia, or seeing double, that suggest organic wholeness, suchas decay and (re)generation, decomposition and (re)composition, inan effort to indicate a more complex structuring of experience. Myapproach positions decay or division as positive processes compoundedby generation or renewal, thereby making an understanding of or-ganicism contingent on the simultaneity intrinsic to diplopic vision.

With this in mind, it is important to articulate here what I meanby my use of the term worman articulation that will be developedin detail both in the following discussion and throughout this book.Many of the references to follow will traipse across several of the worms

varied or variable forms: from earthworm, maggot, and caterpillarto two-winged insects like the ubiquitous y or buttery to insectsin general. Clearly the label worm involves much more than whattoday many of us encounter in our garden (the composting worm,or red wriggler), skewered on our shing hooks (the bait worm,or night crawler), or even poking out of a tasty Pippin apple (thecodling moth, or apple worm). A quick glance at the Oxford English

Dictionarys entries for wormlikewise registers their manifold nature.From wormto wormy, there are more than thirty entries, which in-clude nouns, verbs, adverbs, past participles, adjectives, and so on. Itsgurative uses vie in equal variety with its literal appearances. Worm,for example, can be understood as the archaic wyrm,for serpent,snake, dragon (in the way Milton refers to Satan, or temptation,as a false Worm in Paradise Lost6), or as the broader denition of


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any animal that creeps and crawls; a reptile; an insect, or as ap-plied (like vermin) to four-footed animals considered as noxious or

objectionable, or in its most common form of a slender, creeping,naked, limbless animal, usually brown or reddish, with a soft bodydivided into a series of segments; an earthworm. It is even usedtoday as a computing term for any self-duplicating program whichcan operate without becoming incorporated into another program.The terminology employed throughout this book is used to discussa multitude of specically vermiform invertebrate animals,discovered

and/or classied in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,whose shapes resemble (more or less) the shape of a common tubularworm and whose activities display most, if not all, of the wormlikecharacteristics listed previously. As we will see, it is tting that suchinvertebrate animals inspired their technological namesakes becauseactual worms are as prolic and replicable as their computer coun-terparts, yet also just as often unincorporable into system building.

The largely unbounded and discomforting worm is of furtherinterest to me given that still today, the scientic study of worms fallsunder that branch of zoology founded in the late eighteenth centuryand dedicated to the study of insects: entomology. Its name coinedfrom the Greek entomon(insect), entomology identies the studyof insects according to what Aristotle had referred to as entomos,or

having a notch or cut (at the waist). This denition was meant toreect the visibly segmented division of insect bodies, more overt inthose insects with wings than in those without. The general cona-tion and seeming transposability of wormand insectare thereforeendemic to the communication of naturalist and scientic studiesof such organismsand I will often likewise use the terms inter-changeably. Nonetheless, such conation has seemingly allowed for

an omission of the vermicular from any serious critical inquiry intothe insect metaphor in literature. For example, neither HollingsworthsPoetics of the Hivenor Browns Insect Poeticsmakes any mention ofactual worms, with the exception of the latter, in which the lore ofthe mescal worm in a bottle of tequila is taken up briey along-side novelty candies like the gummy worm (both within the contextof entomophagy).7


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INTRODUCTION xix

Although ubiquitous, vermicular invertebrates present an immedi-ate discomfort to the observer, often invoking in her that unconscious

distancing illustrated at the beginning of this Introduction, so thatthere is always already something offensive, muddled, or dirty, as wellas unknown or elided, when talking about worms. Entomologicalstudy is therefore approached in this book in accordance with theway insects and worms often dismantled the very boundaries theireighteenth-century observers set out to reify and how these organismsexposed the crucial paradox of construction and deconstruction that

formulated mans approach to both understanding and representingthe natural world.

To extend what Giorgio Agamben proposed in The Openas theconcept of Homo sapiensthat is, neither a clearly dened speciesnor a substance but rather an anthropogenic, optical machine con-structed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, seeshis own image always already deformed in the features of an ape8Ichoose to look beyond what man viewed as his anthropomorphousequivalent (an ape). I look at what resembled him the least: theworm. Because man historically recognizes himself in the non-manin order to be human,9it is not surprising to nd that man looks as

well to the radically distinct vermiforms in an effort to see continuitywhere he would see only disruption and division. The causative value

of worms in European Romantic thought therefore reveals the nonhu-man to be that which restricts the human to, just as it emancipatesthe human from, the animal that it is.10

A Culture of Worms

Similar in aim to the collection Romanticism and the Sciences,my

project is concerned with Romantic modes of understanding Na-ture, both as they gured in the various natural sciences and as they

were manifested in the literature of the period.11Specically, I pro-pose an aesthetics of worm workas yet unacknowledged in Romanticscholarship to elucidate the relationship between eighteenth-centurynatural history and what we classifynot without exceptionasRomantic literature.12


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xx INTRODUCTION

Navigating what Barbara Stafford identies as the attempts bynaturalists and Romantics alike to make the invisible world visible,

to express the inexpressible, and to image the unimaginable,13

thisproject realizes the necessity of aesthetic sensibility to bring matter tomind. It labors to do for a teeming portion of invertebrate zoology

what Noah Heringman has done for geology and Theresa Kelley isdoing for botany14so that VermiCulture theorizes an intersectionbetween the materiality of natures motile minutiae and their aes-thetic reformulations. It registers yet another instance of what Kelley

describes as Romanticisms preoccupation with representation andrepresentabilitywith the problem of relating parts to wholes oreven nding wholes for those parts.15Even more, it recognizes forRomanticisms experiment in representation what Timothy Mortonattributes to fractal geometry: its all parts, all the way up and all theway down, until there is no whole separate from the parts.16Assuch, this project extends efforts to recuperate Romanticism throughits natural historical and conceptual contexts, like those found in thework of Ashton Nichols,17by concentrating on a particularly slip-pery, loathsome, and thus often overlooked group of organisms. Justas Heringman mines the intrusively inanimate objects of the naturalworld (romantic rocks), I dissect the agonizingly animate.

As the only extant study devoted specically to the gure of the

worm in late-eighteenth-century literature, Clara McLeans Lewiss TheMonkand the Matter of Reading18marks off a signicant boundaryin the scholarship to which my project responds. McLeans investi-gation into worm imagery deals in the economies of sex in gothicction such as pornography, gender theory, and Freudian aesthetics;she focuses her discussion on gurations of the phallic worm andtheir corruptive, penetrative, digestive, (re)generative, discursive, and

narrative implications for reading literature. Although my projectthinks through similar metaphoric capacities, it does not revisit theintricacies of the worms iconographic connection to the serpent andthe phallus, nor does it reproduce a full inventory of biblical consid-erations of the worm. In fact, I have consciously omitted the myriadinstantiations of serpents and dragons from my discussion as well asthe serpentine and the reptilian. Serpents et al. do warrant a similarly


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INTRODUCTION xxi

close study to the one I offer here, but the distinctly mystical con-notations connected to such creatures would steer my project away

from its foundation in empiricism and organic matter. Furthermore,serpents and reptiles are vertebrates and thus more complex organisms(higher on the chain of being) than those on which my study focuses.By contrast, I concentrate on a comparative rendering of natureslower organisms to the magnitude of mans natural visionand itsresultant textual creations. This book emphasizes a pattern of culturalproduction by tracing an investigation of the worm through natural

historical study and by transferring these ndings into a theoreticalframework for understanding the Romantic sensibility as it confrontsand assimilates such a strangely animate nature.

I show how eighteenth-century natural history studies of theworm provided late-eighteenth-century and Romantic writers witha vocabulary for recognizing the instabilities of classication andfor constructing an aesthetic imaginary that could take up thoseinstabilities as its central logic. I do for largely eighteenth-centuryinvestigations into the lower animals what Gillian Beer, David Per-kins, and Harriet Ritvo have demonstrated as the late-eighteenth andnineteenth centuries preoccupation with animals higher up on thechain of being.19In particular, I examine what Ritvo relates as mansefforts to impose order on nature, even when faced with its apparent

outliers.20

Furthermore, I present the worm as a collection point forwhat I understand to be patterns of diplopic vision emerging dur-ing this period, which in turn recasts Romantic conceptions of theorganic and the processual through the development of the largelyhidden aesthetic sensibility of the vile.

The rst chapter, Transitional Tropes: The Nature of Life in Eu-ropean Romantic Thought, acts principally to ground the analyses

in this book on the objects of natural history, their representativestudies and gurative effects. It rehearses eighteenth-century naturalhistory studies of the worm as they manifest at once the exhilarationand the anxiety of discovery, particularly as such discoveries producethe inescapable man : worm analogy. By demonstrating the frequencyand deliberation with which the worm (in its multitudinous forms)

was being examined, I am able to discuss this organism as an agent


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xxii INTRODUCTION

of change integral to and transformative of both matter and mind.Because this segment of natural history sees the introduction of mod-

ern taxonomic methodologies, I also present here a brief history oftaxonomy through the lens of the lower organisms to illustrate clas-sication as a tenuous, if not impracticable, practice. Furthermore,I look at a few literary examples that either immediately predate orcoincide with those I will take up later in greater detail to illustrate the

worms metonymic capacity to identify what I have come to recognizeas VermiCulture: a culture of thought that secures the substantiveness

of the vermicular (developed through the work of both natural phi-losophers and natural historians) within a vile aesthetican aestheticthat gained its fullest expression in writings of the Romantic era.

Chapter 2, Unchanging but in Form: The Aesthetic Epistmof Erasmus Darwin, presents an extended reading of Darwins nallong poem, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society(1803). Aremarkable work constructed of verse and note, The Temple of Naturediscloses Darwins vision of organic wholeness in the natural world asan essentially vermicular activity. As I demonstrate, this poem revealshow empirical pursuit gives way to an aesthetic consciousness relianton gures of twoness to represent a material oneness. Drawing outthese gures, which include the linked processes of decay and genera-tion, the relation of man to worm, and the use of empirical narrative

inside a mythic frame, my discussion of Darwins poem registers hisattempt to model totality through a simultaneity of extended forms.Moreover, this poem realizes the entangled act of poetic composi-tion as one that relies on decompositional processes. With what Iwill dene as diplopic,or double-visioned, paradox, the nature ofnature is disclosed rather than disguised by literary enterprise. I thusbegin my close readings here because The Temple of Natureis itself

an exemplary composition dependent on the doubleness I track insubsequent chapters.

Chapter 3, Not without Some Repugnancy, and a Fluctuat-ing Mind: Trembleys Polyp and the Practice of Eighteenth-Cen-tury Taxonomy, returns to natural history writing to illustrate akind of lyricism and aesthetic revaluation built into the articulationof empirical study. In doing so, this chapter focuses on a singularvermiform creature, the freshwater hydra or polyp. Discovered in 1740


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INTRODUCTION xxiii

by Abraham Trembley, this organism displayed (and helped to dene)an astonishing variety of wormy behaviors, including the capacity to

regenerate from cuttings as if it were a plant. Consequently, previousstudies of Trembleys investigations into the polyp emphasize thisnaturalists relative obscurity in the history of science against the polypitself being a celebrated discovery, one that affect[ed] the orientationof zoological science21in the eighteenth century and helped makethe practice of taxonomy into a vital problematic. Although I explorethe polyp as the taxonomic anomaly that unsettled previously set

ideas on the distinction between plant and animal and the genera-tive or multiplicative behaviors of animate life, I also concentrate onthe language used by Trembley and his contemporaries to confrontthis so-called anomaly. My discussion here submits that Trembleysaccount of his investigations into the structure and behavior of thiscreature urges a way of aestheticizing the vermicular that fruitfullycombines the more classic repulsion with an inventive appeal to mu-tability, indeterminacy, and the irrepressibility of the organic, and it isthis pattern that gains more prominence in the work of later writerssuch as that already discussed by Erasmus Darwin as well as that by

William Blake, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Charles Darwin, workthat I explore later in this study.

To demonstrate how the polyp, in particular, and vermiform crea-

tures, in general, acted as a gural site for literary reimaginings of lifeand the place of humans within it, I close chapter 3 with a brief butsuggestive examination of Diderots La Rve de dAlembert(1769/1830).Retaining its naturalhistorical characteristics, the polyp is recast in thistext from Trembleys actual discovery into what can be read as specula-tive ction: the placing of human polyps on Saturn. Both the polypand insects at large become archetypal gures of taxonomic challenge

in a text arranged according to overlapping dialogues between fourhistorical persons: French mathematician Jean le Rond dAlembert,French philosopher and cofounder of the EncyclopdieDenis Diderot,French salon owner Jeanne Julie lonore de lEspinasse, and Frenchphysician Thophile de Bordeu. Their conversations reveal mutabilityto be the property with which to think through the limitations andpotentialities of living matter.

Although William Blake should not be thought of as being at the


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xxiv INTRODUCTION

front line of natural historical research per se, I do propose in chapter 4,Art Thou but a Worm? Blake and the Question Concerning Tax-

onomy, that several of his illuminated manuscripts traverse biblicalreferences, symbolic valuations, and even materialist manifestationsof the worm to arrive squarely in an enunciation of this organismsproblematic yet productive existence in the natural worldas un-derstood through both text and image. Analyzing the worm as anaesthetic gure made to represent the material consequences of existingin nature, this chapter demonstrates how and why the presentation

of worms in Blakes poetry gives way to a positive aesthetic of decay.The worm sutures the phases of decay and generation in such a wayas to call attention to perpetual process as a dening, even if vile,characteristic of life. Simultaneously seductive and horrifying, help-less and shrewd, the worm irrevocably demonstrates the slippage oftrue forms so that its putrid gure is transformed into a constructiveagent of cultural representation.

Chapter 5, A Diet of Worms; or, Frankensteinand the Matter ofa Vile Romanticism, offers a new naturalhistorical reading of therelationship between Victor Frankenstein and his creature in MaryShelleys Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus(1818). This read-ing, I argue, supplies a much-needed perspective on Shelleys work,which has been heretofore obscured by a scholarly interest in the

novels thematic implementation of electrochemistry. It foregroundsa material explanation for the creatures existence and its suggestiveimplications for the creation of narrative. Like those in Blakes poetry,worms in Frankensteinappear in part in their capacity to decomposedead matter and so continue to represent the cycle of decay andgeneration intrinsic to imagining nature as an organic whole. In Shel-leys novel, however, worms also expose the potential for creating or

actualizingas opposed to merely discoveringanomaly in nature.In this chapter, I show how Victor ultimately severs gurations ofthe worm from their naturalhistorical precedent, suspending processto transpose vermicular trappings into an exaggerated artice of thevile: the creature. I trace how Frankensteinonce again reimaginesthe relationship between the organic and the aesthetic, as outlinedin previous chapters, in an effort to present materiality as that whichisthe aesthetic imaginary itself.


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INTRODUCTION xxv

The Conclusion, Wherefore All This Wormy Circumstance?,offers a provocatively brief examination of Keatss Isabella; or, the Pot

of Basil(1818/1820) and Charles Darwins The Formation of VegetableMould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits(1881). My discussion of Keatss poem illustrates how Romantic poetryand prose transform the irresolvable matter of natural history into apowerful and factitious representation of the natural world. This, inturn, allows me to transgress the boundary of my own periodizationand discuss how such transformative work can be seen to culminate in

the writings of a later age. I suppose that by the time Darwin produceshis earthworm treatise, a culture of worms has been denitively cast.Worms therefore inject (revolutionary) movement into Romantictexts without suffering from categorical limitations; they take on theguise of a constant symbol of change.

Whereas the lower organisms disturbed epistemological concernsof eighteenth-century natural history, the vermiforms ability to crossand elide boundaries provides an extended metaphor of mutabilityon which to build Romantic literary discourse. Each of the readingspresented in this book establishes the terms for understanding howthe worm was deployed as a gure to complicate, disrupt, and rei-magine ideas of totality. This issue of totality is thus altered from anempirical notion into an aesthetic imaginary by a Romantic interest

in organicism, which itself invites a more self-conscious formulationthan early taxonomies and aesthetics had imagined.


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