by providing strange attractors at the crossroads. Small historical events like when and where the steam engine was invented (1712, England) have the power to revolutionize global society along a new set of parameters in only three centuries. Urban settlement, industrial work time, fossil fuel consumption, new class dynamics, population booms, mass transportation, the modern economic imperative of expansion, and most of the ecological disturbances we face today are downstream of this historical happenstance. One small trickle of technology found favorable conditions and nudged into motion this major ontological shift from the long established environments of human evolution to this strange state of global industrialism.
With any progressive history, there is a danger of retrospective bias awarding destiny to a “chosen” or “superior” culture. Such is the bent of most heroic histories of imperial Britain, and of some of the more shameful interpretations of evolutionary theory. But this false telos involves inadequate factoring of the chancy initial conditions, what John Keats saw as the vanguard of circumstance into which a seed of future events happens to be sown. A less celebratory narrative of chaotic dynamics emerges from the epidemiology of measles and cholera in London, another offspring of industrial and colonial dominion.
In these literary readings of ecological chaos, there is no intention to claim that they achieve formal mathematical chaos, discovered in the 1960s. The vogue of chaos theory as a new way to read patterns in many disciplines—from the fine arts, to literature, to law—has caused some grumpiness among mathematicians who would like to sequester chaos theory within their discipline. More loosely interpreted, chaos as a metaphor allows for a third vision of emergent structure that was invisible in the classic dichotomy between order and disorder. It shows the limits of human control over natural systems. Michael Crichton’s character Ian Malcolm, a mathematician, repeatedly brings chaos theory into his perceptions of dinosaur behavior, island ecology, and the inevitable failure of Jurassic Park’s security. In the 1990s, Katherine Hayles demonstrated how the trope of chaos can be applied to twentieth-century narrative theory. Hayles is careful to maintain that balance makes an idea like chaos particularly useful: chaos does not obviate order; it merely reorients our understanding of how order occurs in the natural world by signaling the prevalence of slight variations. She invokes images of environmental problems brought into focus by the trope of chaos: “Industrial pollutants are released into the atmosphere; along with carbon dioxide, also a by-product of technology, they create the greenhouse effect; the resulting climate changes wreak havoc with the global ecosystem. Cascading effects from initially small causes could, and have, been observed at any time. But whereas in earlier epochs they tended to be seen as anomalous or unusual, now they are recognized as paradigmatic of complex be-havior” (15).
This metaphor of chaos can also be used to show how writers began refiguring nature during the industrial shifts of the nineteenth century. There are intriguing moments when writers anticipate ecological concepts that have since been formalized under mathematical chaos theory, such as population dynamics and meteorology, but in general the chaos trope indicates an author’s vision of the natural world that falls poignantly in an alternative state between perfect order and utter randomness. Recall Richard Jefferies celebrating his break from the limits of the mechanical microcosmic worldview to embrace the more radical possibilities of dynamic chaos.
This metaphor of chaos reconciles the paradigms of nature, balance versus disorder, thereby providing a conceptual frame for the work of adventurous nineteenth-century writers who diverged from long-standing cultural assumptions about the economy of nature, static created species, and landscapes impervious to human activity. A few exceptional Enlightenment theories of a dynamic natural world aided in nineteenth-century literary visions of chaos. Geologists like Georges Cuvier advocated catastrophism over gradualism; volcanologists, including Humphry Davy and James Smithson, argued that the atmospheric impact of eruptions mimicked industrial emissions; and natural historians like Alexander von Humboldt began to formally ob-serve the impact of climate and altitude on ecological interrelations.
The narrative chaos at play in this book refers to the ecology of disturbance: how fiction envisioned disturbed nature emerging downstream in time. The British nineteenth century is particularly rich with second natures, those landscapes that became scattered and smothered by the cultural productions of industrialism. Wrecked environments still have ecologies, and literary ecocriticism is actively involved in theorizing how these second natures have become the focal environments of concern in the twenty-first century. For example, protest lyrics like Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars” highlight the pathos of landscapes sacrificed to economic advance, when the trees that had been planted by human hand to give river shade are “All felled, felled, are all felled / [. . .] Not spared, not one / [. . .] On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank / [. . .] After-comers cannot guess the beauty been” (lines 3, 5, 8, 19). The Darwinian entangled bank is exposed and degraded into a muddy riverside slide by the elimination of the keystone trees. In this poem, ecological complexity is hacked down into a simpler utilitarian economic order that gives easy access to river transportation. Chaos is in the moment of the disorderly deed—the felling of the Binsey poplars—as well as in the implied narrative of its long-term consequences: increased storm runoff, erosion of the banks and nearby soils, decreased habitat for spawning fishes and nurseries, accelerated river flow, and, most apparently to Hopkins, the loss of the beauty of the “sweet especial rural scene” and its emotional gravity (line 24). That chaotic moment of the felling will determine the character of the landscape and the mentality of its human inhabitants for generations to come.
There is a microcosm effect, too: this minor act of landscape disturbance models the larger process at work, changing the English countryside into a more economically productive environment. The hedgerows, for example, were actively decimated throughout the country following World War II to accommodate the needs of modern agriculture. (An enormous combine machine cannot operate in the same small space as a plowman and his horses.) A student of ecology could use Hopkins’s before-and-after as a microcosm study of the effects of riparian deforestation. The minor anecdotal poem becomes a vision of the future beyond the lyrical moment in 1879, a narrative of a new landscape downstream from disturbance. Note that it need not be Nature, wilderness, at the starting point of degradation. Even second natures, like the row of poplars planted by humans long before Hopkins’s time, develop into fixtures in the landscape—ecologically and emotionally.
The present project seeks to recover two highly formalized scientific tropes from their twenty-first-century denotations and restore them to their original homes in interdisciplinary philosophy. Therefore, my use of the terms chaos and microcosm throughout the analysis gestures to the evolution of a set of connotations associated with these concepts over the course of the nineteenth century. From mythological chaos, the epitome of vile incoherence, arose the intriguing paradox of higher levels of order; one of these structures is biological life itself. Analogously, the concept of an isolated, coherent ecological microcosm that could model larger dynamics arose from the ancient philosophical construct of human bodies as little words resembling the larger cosmos. The poems and other texts selected for this study each demonstrate a specific way in which a returning trope can serve to organize the thoughts of a culture struggling with new phenomena. Literary tropes are returning motifs that not only aid in the communication of ideas but have also frequently been identified as constitutive of experience (Ortony 253). Conceptually crucial tropes of the imagination inform the development of inchoate sciences lacking foundations in theory, such as the ecology of the nineteenth century.
I stop short of claiming that a direct causal relationship exists between the evolution of these literary tropes in the nineteenth century and their subsequent adoption into scientific epistemology. However, I maintain that British culture, in order to develop a discourse around the natural world newly altered by industry, had first to create theoretical scenarios and frames of reference using the literary imaginary. These chaotic narratives and microcosmic models became tools shared by an intellectual culture reacting to the environment as it changed under industrialism. The science of ecology is only the most recent method we have developed to examine nature, and it has inherited methods from many benefactors.
