Describing Death: Natural History's Static Time

In “Describing Death: Natural History’s Static Time,” Sylvan Goldberg turns to the 1839 Narrative of a Journey by John Kirk Townsend, the first trained naturalist to make the overland trek to the Pacific, to discuss... [ view full abstract ]

In “Describing Death: Natural History’s Static Time,” Sylvan Goldberg turns to the 1839 Narrative of a Journey by John Kirk Townsend, the first trained naturalist to make the overland trek to the Pacific, to discuss natural history’s desire to forestall the nonhuman death it engendered. While the recent descriptive turn has highlighted description’s ability to deemphasize the agency of humans, Townsend and other nineteenth-century naturalists help to reveal the way in which description asserted a literary agency that further privileged the human vis a vis the nonhuman by insisting on literature’s ability to slow time down to a near standstill. In scenes of hunting, Townsend deploys description’s static temporality as a formal strategy for deferring the deaths his method of specimen collection produced, interrupting his narration of killing animals with the seemingly timeless prose of natural description. Natural history’s descriptions—invested in the death of nonhumans and in human agency—thus challenge the descriptive turn’s claims to a more modest account of human agency.