Ken Cooper
SUNY Geneseo
Ken Cooper is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo, where he teaches courses on contemporary American literature and ecocriticism. His current research on 1970s popular culture and ecology has appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies and Technology and Culture. He is co-coordinator for OpenValley.org, a digital humanities project featuring undergraduate archival research on bioregional issues. This spring, he will be co-teaching an experimental course on 21st-century nature writing for COPLAC Digital.
Ken Cooper SUNY Geneseo “Herman Melville, Anachronic Man” The late 1980s often are cited as ushering in the cultural Anthropocene, a slow-motion recognition impelled by climatologist James Hansen’s stark Congressional... [ view full abstract ]
Ken Cooper
SUNY Geneseo
“Herman Melville, Anachronic Man”
The late 1980s often are cited as ushering in the cultural Anthropocene, a slow-motion recognition impelled by climatologist James Hansen’s stark Congressional testimony, a subsequent Washington Post editorial by then-Senator Al Gore, and by publication of Bill McKibben’s landmark book The End of Nature (1989). This paper proposes that we travel back a century earlier—specifically, via Herman Melville’s late work “John Marr” (1888)—to ask when and how anthropogenic poetics first begin to inflect our conceptions of the global. My title ascribes to Melville an epithet borrowed from H.G Well’s short story of that same year, “The Chronic Argonauts,” whose themes anticipate desolate visions of futurity in his better-known novel The Time Machine (1895). Temporality is a sine qua non in the study of climate change, write Catherine Brace and Hilary Goeghegan, and so necessarily we confront first a problem with time “and how it is constructed and theorized. The second, linked problem, is the future, and how it can be imagined.”
As with Wells’ Jason in his story, who pilots “the ship that sails through time,” Melville actuates a traditional metaphor of oceans as at once timeswept and, in their vast depths, “eternal.” The temporal ecology of “John Marr” likewise shares with Wells and other C19 artists a tone influenced by geologic deep time and the Romantic aesthetics of desolation. Melville is most striking, however, in a series of traumatic displacements: of poetic mode and tone (between his poem and its rarely anthologized narrative prequel); of temporal frames (from Gilded Age to antebellum to remembered seafaring); and especially of his figuration of the American prairie as a “reminder of ocean”—albeit one haunted by the specter of a buried wife and child, and by Native American dispossession symbolized by the Trail of Tears. The effect, I will argue, is to render the history, ecological effects, and inevitability of Manifest Destiny as a precursor to climate-change politics.
