Idiorrhythmic Temporalities: Jewett and the Shell Heap

The second part of the panel takes up Chow's and Pease's concrete considerations of the strangeness of marine life forms to consider, more generally, how nineteenth-century literature employs the liquidity of the ocean to... [ view full abstract ]

The second part of the panel takes up Chow's and Pease's concrete considerations of the strangeness of marine life forms to consider, more generally, how nineteenth-century literature employs the liquidity of the ocean to rethink that which appears firm and structured. To that effect, the last two presentations examine the period's marine ontologies as the productive fund of alternative approaches to memory, identity, and freedom. As Vesna Kuiken argues in "Jewett and the Shell Heap," oceanic historicity dismisses the notion of time as a chronological or progressive unfolding, and allows instead for varied forms of temporality: simultaneous, chaotic, spatial. Alternative chronotopics emerge in Jewett's employment of the Whaleback shell heap—a large man-made deposit of oyster and clam shells in Maine, created by many generations of Native American peoples—as the habitat of one of her most memorable regionalist characters. The Whaleback's peculiar biochemical properties, which allow it to preserve virtually intact the matter lodged within it (including vestiges of natural, prehistoric, and Native American life accumulated over a millennium), render the heap a unique archival mechanism—an idiosyncratic assemblage of seemingly incongruous temporalities and forms of life whose simultaneous coexistence disrupts evolutionary distinction, ontological priority, and historical linearity.