subordinate to him nor homogeneous with him. By the fragmentation of the space over which Classical knowledge extended in its continuity, by the folding over of each separated domain upon its own development, the man who appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century is “dehistoricized.” (367–69)
In effect, the increasingly sophisticated life sciences were proposing a new and indeterminate paradigm of deep time in which human history was only one of myriad narratives. The human story was recent, heroic only from an egocentric point of view, and had neither clear origins nor a telos. The human story meandered, like all other life histories, through a pathless wood deprived of the landmarks that heroic history and religion had provided. Foucault’s perspective is postmodern and retrospective, and his reading pays little attention to how Darwin crafted a conscious narrative of purpose, articulation, and improvement to characterize evolution. Still, the kind of vertigo expressed by Matthew Arnold, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born,” captures the more shadowy zeitgeist of Darwin’s time, which Foucault identifies through his theory of the “dehistoricized” culture of the nineteenth century (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” lines 85–86).
The main thesis of these two opening chapters is that chaos in literature predates the scientific study of chaos in ecology. Eighteenth-century geologists, including Cuvier, Buffon, Lamarck, and (a little later) Lyell, had discovered both deep time and cataclysm in fossil evidence, but their discoveries were slow to be adopted into theories of the ongoing state of nature. From an ecological standpoint, these four literary works are precocious because they appraise catastrophic events in natural history and weave them into the fabric of futurity. It would overstress the interdisciplinary project to claim that these works demonstrate formal mathematical chaos. However, the very pattern of sudden ecological punctuation is a timely contribution of a literary imagination, as is the ecology of disturbance. These works are precursors to contemporary chaos ecology because they all insist that natural and anthropogenic disturbance must figure in our understanding of modern nature.
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
Between 1768 and 1787, Gilbert White brought to the Enlightenment the first in-depth, in situ study of an ecosystem. The text has never been out of print since it was first published in 1789. White’s Illustrated Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne reports on several aspects of Selborne’s environment: its geology, botany, zoology, and climate. Notably for a man of the cloth, the Reverend Gilbert White never invokes God or any higher power in his attempts to explain mysterious forces of nature. He keeps his letters literal, detailed, and secularly speculative. White’s narrative momentum is maintained through the progression of time, since the three dimensions of space remain fixed in his home parish. The single location distinguishes White’s epistemological strategy from that of his contemporary Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled extensively to understand geographical relations in ecology. Observations while traveling gave Humboldt the theoretical grounds for biogeography, as he de-tailed the importance of elevation in the distribution of plant types in the Andes range. In contrast, Gilbert White’s work is an early microcosm study because of his decades-long dedication to a circumscribed microenvironment. In a time when natural historians were engaged in a mania of exotic collection to fill cabinets of curiosities, White’s enduring absorption in his home parish shows an impressive degree of concentration on the biodiversity in his immediate purview. The wanderlust of the colonial scientist did not influence White’s own methods, though he kept up a considerable correspondence with traveling collectors and scientific societies in London (Worster 6).
White’s original use of phenology, the study of naturally recurring cycles such as the seasons, provisionally advanced knowledge according to Enlightenment expectations of stability. A devotion to ornithology predisposed him to detailing species migration according to predictable annual patterns. In spite of its phenological design, the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne deconstructs the Enlightenment sensibility of coherent, patterned nature. By the end of White’s chronicle, the author views extraordinary events of ecological disturbance as essential to Selborne’s natural state. Critics have nearly always distilled White’s text down to precisely the inverse of chaos by celebrating its stable Enlightenment essence. The prevailing consensus on White’s work is that his letters from Selborne articulate an Edenic vision of man living in contemplative symbiosis with his natural surroundings. This balanced, preindustrial microcosm frame of reference massages the reader’s shoulders with visions of simpler times to which we may retreat, if only psychologically (Allen 50–51). Another perspective credits White with appreciating changes in nature, but only within the comfortable boundaries of a taxonomic challenge, citing “his fascination and delight in an ever-living yet ever-changing, ever-elusive, ever-miscellaneous nature” (Bellanca 77).
There is more than fascination and delight in Gilbert White’s letters: readers also receive a ration of confusion, awe, and horror. Although the first two-thirds of White’s chronicle are passably at peace with the world and imply the utopia of a stable and dynamic cosmos, to pin the whole work within this frame of balance deprives White of the credit he deserves for contemplating chaotic disturbance, the less comfortable mode of ecological thought. Before the end of his quarter-century of correspondence, White has grown into a more radical speculator on the complex dynamics around him. If Selborne were really a chronicle recording eternal peace, it would be functionally obsolete; a twenty-first-century visitor to the parish would recognize very little from White’s account. Selborne is a classic text for modern times not because it reinforces a set of established conventions about the balance of Mother Nature, but because White successfully divests the balance paradigm in favor of a more modern view of nature based on discord and contingency. The microcosm of Selborne, White discovers, was vulnerable to violent change and rapid degradation partially by virtue of its diminutive scope. These theories of chaotic endangerment have not been developed in the critical literature on White’s work.
By 1770, two years into his study, White is detailing the elaboration of precise methods of observation, and has coined for himself the title of “monographer” writing on a single scientific subject: “Men that undertake only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer” (125).1 White is wary of being overwhelmed by too much natural information and losing the clarity of an expert’s vision in a specific sphere of knowledge. The Enlightenment filled shelves with surface-level, encyclopedic studies. Selborne has borders, and ample natural provisions within them, to keep his scientific interests sated. Another way to think about this kind of circumscribed environment is through the concept of the “ecosphere”—the regional environment that was the entire sphere of existence for most people before the Industrial Revolution. Preindustrial life centered on the ecosphere and the values of bioregionalism that ecological philosophers now cite as a necessary corrective to the “biosphere” mentality of globalization. Individuals in developed nations with a biosphere mentality expect goods to come from anywhere on the planet: they expect materials to be extracted in one location, parts forged in a second, components assembled in a third, and finished products sold and consumed in a fourth, without regard to the distance between places. The ecosphere or bioregional ethic, seen now in retrospect as the prevailing way of life before industrialism, advocates that consumers and goods should originate in the same ecological region (Buell 143).
Over the course of four letters, White comes to realize the strong potential of this serendipitous method of monography. It began with simple regional records designed to enable detailed migratory reports. But White’s instincts push his cataloguing science toward innovation: “For many months I carried a list in my pocket of the birds that were to be remarked, and, as I rode or walked about my business, I noted each day the continuance or omission of each bird’s song; so that I am as sure of the certainty of my facts as a man can be of any transaction whatsoever” (117). The key concept here is White’s notice of omission in migratory patterns. Not merely the presence of an identifiable species but also its absence become formalized
