Humboldt’s Dirty Nature CAROLINE SCHAUMANN E MORY U NIVERSITY For Alexander von Humboldt «dirty» nature seems like a contradiction of terms since Humboldt never separated clean from unclean matter. Whether soiled, filthy, dusty, or grimy, Humboldt approached any environment with unceasing curiosity and open-mindedness rather than predetermined values or bias. Wholly dissimilar from geographers and other natural historians of the day, Humboldt focused on the dynamic and changing elements in a particular landscape. More than in any particular location, he was interested in geologic processes, plant communities, and human societies. In this way, any place, as his famous altitude diagrams show, was connected to a host of factors including temperature, composition of the air, refraction, and plant distribution, among others. Though Humboldt demanded attention to local conditions, he was ultimately more interested in geographic or ecological comparative scales revealing what he repeatedly called the «physiognomy of nature.» If Anne Marie Claire Godlewska concludes «Humboldtian location was a concept far more complex and rich than location in the traditional geographic sense» (244), this concept was far too complex to be described as either dirty or clean. His pioneering work in ecology laid the unterstanding of the interconnectedness and interaction between landscapes, plants, animals, and humans, a belief that does not privilege human agency over natural processes and remains largely independent of established aesthetic categories. His audiences, however, at the time and up until the present, have often been more discriminating, concentrating on Humboldt’s exalted depictions of grand spectacles and heroic feats rather than his matter-of-fact descriptions of mundane, annoying, or exasperating interactions with his environment, which equally fill the pages of his copious texts. In this essay, I focus on the latter in order to lay bare what I believe to be a false division of celebrated and revolting nature. By examining more closely Humboldt’s material entanglement in his surroundings that can also be called «dirty nature,» I hope to illuminate the tensions between a visual consumption and representation of nature that characterizes nineteenth-century Western cultural approaches and Humboldt’s reciprocal interaction with his environment that rises above a mere description of nature. In an early, more radical and unusual example, Karl Rosenkranz used Humboldt’s writings to illustrate what he, among the first philosophers, CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 133 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 133 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 134 Caroline Schaumann delineated as the «ugly.» Distinct from the already established aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, in his Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853) Rosenkranz defined the ugly and the experience of disgust as a systematic category of its own, distinguishing among «Naturhäßliches,» «Geisthäßliches,» and «Kunsthäßliches» by providing examples from nature, art, and everyday life. While Rosenkranz operates within a nineteenth-century framework that seeks to solidify established categories of the sublime and the beautiful while outlining a strategy to overcome the ugly through humor, he nevertheless devotes his explicit attention to hitherto neglected categories, foreshadowing the modernist project of depicting an increasingly unsightly world (Marx, Adorno). As indicated in the title of his essay, Rosenkranz defends the ugly as part of aesthetics, claiming «allein das Häßliche ist vom Begriff des Schönen untrennbar» (5), even as he continues to privilege the beautiful as the absolute measure of aesthetics. With respect to nature, Rosenkranz regards flora and most fauna as generally beautiful but concedes that both embody the potential for ugliness since living beings are subject to aging, deformation, and disease. Going further, Rosenkranz keenly locates disgust in decaying and decomposing matter, «Der Schein des Lebens im an sich Todten ist das unendlich Widrige im Ekelhaften» (313), using as example the illustration «Air Volcano of Turbaco» from Alexander von Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères: Das Ekelhafte als ein Produkt der Natur, Schweiß, Schleim, Koth, Geschwüre, u. dgl., ist ein Todtes, was der Organismus von sich ausscheidet und damit der Verwesung übergibt. Auch die unorganische Natur kann relativ ekelhaft werden, aber nur relativ, nämlich in Analogie oder in Verbindung mit der organischen. An sich selbst aber lässt sich der Begriff der Verwesung auf sie nicht anwenden, und aus diesem Grunde kann man Steine, Metalle, Erden, Salze, Wasser, Wolken, Gase, Farben durchaus nicht ekelhaft nennen. Nur relativ, in Beziehung auf unsere Geruchs- und Geschmacksorgane, kann man sie so nennen. Ein Schlammvulcan, das gerade Gegentheil des majestätischen Schauspiels eines feuerspeienden Berges, wird für uns widrig, weil das Ausströmen trüber Effluvien analogisch uns an das Wasser erinnert und hier statt seiner eine flüssige, undurchsichtige, etwa noch mit todten, verwesenden Fischen untermischte Erdauflösung, eine gleichsam verwesende Erde sich darbietet. Man sehe die Darstellung eines solchen Schlammausbruches in A. v. Humboldts Vues des Cordillères. (Rosenkranz 313-14) (Fig. 1) While Rosenkranz neatly separates disgusting from delightful nature and organic from inorganic matter, Humboldt, of course, draws no such distinctions. His illustration «Air Volcano of Turbaco» does not stand out from the other illustrations of mountains, rivers, and cultural artifacts in Vues des Cordillères as a particularly revolting example. In fact, it now crowns the cover of the most recent English translation of the volume, Views of the Cordilleras CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 134 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 134 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 135 and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012. Even if the small cones with their steaming fumaroles do not strike the viewer as a sublime scene, the otherworldly formations, along with the large-leafed ferns and palm trees, the thick forest in the background, and the naked Indian accompanying one of the fully clothed explorers all contribute to the exotic and mysterious appeal of the depicted scene. Humboldt’s accompanying essay supports this interpretation: Humboldt situates the volcanitos amidst a «majestic forest» and trees «of colossal size,» (Views of the Cordilleras 281) and his description of the cones remains free of aesthetic judgment: At the heart of a vast plain bordered by Bromelia Karatas rise eighteen to twenty small cones with a height of only seven to eight meters. These cones are of blackishgray clay, and at their tips is a water-filled aperture. As one comes closer to these small craters, one hears an intermittent sound, dull yet quite loud, which occurs 15 to 18 seconds before a large quantity of air is released. […] I counted about five explosions over two minutes. This phenomenon is often accompanied by a mud- Fig. 1: Volcans d’air de Turbaco, colored aquatint engraving by Pierre Antoine Marchais and Michel Bouquet, after a sketch by Louis de Rieux. In: Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique. Paris: Chez F. Schoell, 1810-13; © Bereichsbibliothek Biologie im Botanischen Museum der Freien Universität Berlin. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 135 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 135 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 136 Caroline Schaumann dy ejection. […] Through analyses conducted with the help of nitrous gas and of phosphorous, I found that the air released does not contain even half a percent of oxygen. It is a nitrogen gas that is purer than what we generally prepare in our laboratories. (284) If Humboldt depicts and describes the volcanitos with precision and, by admiring the purity of its gases, some undeniable fascination, Rosenkranz portrays what he calls the «mud volcano» in direct opposition to «fire-spitting volcanoes,» interpreting its ejections as filthy decaying matter, and even adding some dead fish supplied by his vivid imagination. Thus, Rosenkranz upholds a systematic yet false division between dead and living substances, mud and fire, grime and water, in short, the ugly and the beautiful. In this decidedly gendered reading, «dirty nature» emerges as the formless, the fluid, and the sick, barely concealing his fear of «Erdauflösung.» His anxiety about «Verwesung der Erde» not only misses the point that the earth is decaying matter but also indicates his failure to understand the fundamentals of biology as dynamic processes altogether. Nevertheless, Rosenkranz’s treatise offers a provocative approach to Humboldt’s works, dismantling what has been constructed as heights of sublimity into piles of mud, worms, and decay. In this way, Rosenkranz’s thoughts serve as a point of departure in that this essay is not concerned with what usually occupies the Humboldt scholar, be it his daring river journeys, famed mountain ascents, or salient cross-cultural encounters. Instead, I focus on the grittier details that all too easily evade scholarship, from the intimate witnessing of predation on prey to the barrage of insects he battles in the tropical wetlands and the physical afflictions that befall him at altitude. In contrast to overarching assertions and allegations, these details reveal Humboldt’s daily immersion in his surroundings, as well as the non-dualistic beliefs emanating from it. In the aforementioned pictorial atlas Vues des Cordillères (1810-13) containing the bone of contention for Rosenkranz, Humboldt included images and essays of both natural scenes and human artifacts intended «to represent a few of the grand scenes which nature presents in the lofty chain of the Andes, and at the same time to throw some light on the ancient civilization of the Americas.» 1 It is remarkable that Humboldt does not separate nature from its inhabitants but seeks to convey both scientific detail and artistic impression. As a naturalist who viewed his science as art and his art as science, Humboldt provides information about his journey from multiple points of view, elaborating on his understanding of nature as spatial, dynamic, and fluid. Thus, the awe-inspiring illustrations of the «lofty chain of the Andes» and the mud volcano complement each other, yet as Rosenkranz’s uneasiness indicates, contribute to the multiplicity and contingent tangibility of Humboldt’s œuvre. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 136 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 136 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 137 Further discrepancies arise in the written accounts of his travels when Humboldt celebrates the views of mountains, the force of rivers, the mystique of the indigenous in the highest sublime terms on the one hand, but on the other bemoans the obstacles and inconveniences of his river journeys and mountain ascents, the unfamiliar food, the ferociousness of mosquitoes and ants, the inhospitability of the terrain, and the perceived timidity and laziness of the Indians. These incongruities are even more pronounced if one considers Humboldt’s travel diaries, written in German and French (and not translated into English to this day), which Humboldt initially withheld from publication and only toward the end of his life made accessible to other natural scientists at the Berlin Observatory. In these texts, sublime adulation and detached observation, whining, whimpering, and wittiness, remain in an unresolved contrast yet add to the overall richness, unpredictability, and unevenness of Humboldt’s work. Right from his arrival in Cumaná, Venezuela, Humboldt was utterly taken with what he perceived as a bountiful, grand, and mysterious New World. In his much anticipated published report of the first part of his American journey, Relation historique, translated as Die Forschungsreise in den Tropen Amerikas, he recalled his first impressions of the American continent: «Der Glanz des Tages, die Kraft der Farben und Gewächse, die Form der Pflanzen, das bunte Gefieder der Vögel, alles verkündete den großen Charakter der Natur in den Äquinoktialgegenden» (Die Forschungsreise 1: 170). As Nancy Stepan has suggested, Humboldt’s texts were highly influential in coding the tropics as a place of superabundance, vegetative excess, and magnitude, creating effective and lasting tropes of representation not only of the tropics but also of temperate Europe: «Tropical nature was, in this sense, part of the formation of Europe’s identity as a place of temperateness, control, hard work and thriftiness as opposed to the humidity, heat, extravagance and superfluity of the Torrid Zone» (36). Indeed, Humboldt’s vision of the tropics did not emerge with his arrival in the New World but was born in his imagination much earlier, when the adolescent yearned of faraway riches that would enable an escape from his restrictive upbringing in Prussia: «Ich hatte seit meiner ersten Jugend den glühenden Wunsch nach einer Reise in entfernte und von den Europäern wenig besuchte Länder» (Die Forschungsreise 1: 20). «Tropical nature» thus became an assemblage of qualities that his own time and place seemed to lack, first and foremost sublime, fertile, and essentially uncontrollable nature, a primeval terrain in distinct contrast to Western civilization, as Marie Louise Pratt (and also Susanne Zantop) has claimed. «Alexander von Humboldt reinvented South America first and foremost as nature. Not the accessible, collectible, recognizable, categorizable nature of the Linneans, CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 137 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 137 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 138 Caroline Schaumann however, but a dramatic, extraordinary nature, a spectacle capable of overwhelming human knowledge and understanding» (118). While Pratt, Zantop, and Stepan have precisely delineated Humboldt’s conception of tropical nature to offer a forceful postcolonial critique of Humboldt’s voyage and its overall impact, the peculiar contradictions and complexities of Humboldt’s understanding of and confrontation with nature remain to be explored. It may be true that Humboldt operates within a well-established framework that pits Western culture against so-called wild nature, and moreover (dis) regards native populations as part of the latter. At the same time, Humboldt’s peculiar, material, and unprejudiced engagement with his environment seems to transcend such a framework. Like any other European explorer of his time, Humboldt approached the New World with a firm belief in Western superiority, heralding European achievements in the arts and sciences as universally relevant and impervious. He also benefited from and furthered colonialist power structures, both voluntary and involuntary. At the same time, however, Humboldt fully immersed himself in his new environment, had sharp words about colonialism and slavery, and committed himself to be formed and changed by his surroundings. Therefore Humboldt’s uneven and at times contradictory œuvre cannot be easily lumped into simplified theoretical constructs such as the dichotomy of nature and culture or Europe and the New World. In order to situate Humboldt as a part of his material surroundings and further delineate his particular engagement with it, it is helpful to consult recent works on material ecocriticism that offer a deeper look into the forceful and reciprocal interactions that characterize our relationship with what we call nature. Rejecting binary models of humans and nature, material ecocriticism focuses on the interplay of humans and their environment. Serenella Iovino reminds us that «humans share this horizon with countless other actors, whose agency - regardless of being endowed with degrees of intentionality - forms the fabric of events and causal chains» (451). In a similar vein, Manuel de Landa puts it, «rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself» (21). What is heralded as sublime or decried as filth has thus the same agentic capacity that sets into motion complex natural as well as cultural processes, for which Humboldt’s depictions serve as an apt example. Attacking what Heather I. Sullivan calls the dichotomy of «pure and clean nature and dirty human sphere» (515), material ecocriticism has focused first and foremost on dirt and debris, pollution and toxins, nonhuman organisms and animate matter. Humboldt’s texts, with their nondiscriminatory attitude toward unfamiliar CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 138 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 138 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 139 cultures, organisms, and environments, offer much fodder for such interpretations. If his pioneering work in ecology and his belief in the interconnectedness of landscapes, plants, animals, and humans proves highly agentic, these processes to Humboldt are most visible in the New World: Kaum wird man beim Überblick an dieser ausgedehnten Landschaft bedauern, dass keine Bilder vergangener Zeiten die Einsamkeit der Neuen Welt verschönern. Überall, wo in der heißen Zone eine gewächsreiche, mit Bergen besetzte Landschaft ihre ursprüngliche Gestalt beibehielt, erscheint der Mensch nicht mehr als Mittelpunkt der Schöpfung. Weit entfernt, die Elemente zu beherrschen, geht sein Bestreben nur dahin, sich ihrer Gewalt zu entziehen. Was die Wilden seit Jahrhunderten auf der Erdoberfläche veränderten, verschwindet neben den Umwälzungen, die durch unterirdisches Feuer, Überschwemmungen großer Flüsse und heftige Stürme bewirkt wurden. Der Kampf der Elemente unter sich ist es, der das Schauspiel der Natur im Neuen Kontinent auszeichnet. (Die Forschungsreise 1: 430-31) Questioning the basic assumptions of the creation myth and (human) history, Humboldt concedes that humans play only a minor part in the history of the earth yet remain utterly dependent on its natural powers. At the same time, he acknowledges native populations and their profound influence on the environment. This interaction of natural and cultural processes restructures the hierarchy of mind over material and matter. Humboldt’s ruminations, rather, correspond to Karen Barad’s framework of «agential realism,» which «provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism» (26). What Barad, in her book, investigates on the micro level of quantum physics, Humboldt insinuates on a macro level, namely the rethinking of notions of causality, agency, power, and identity. In fact, the very document that Humboldt handed to the Prime Minister of Spain, Mariano de Urquijo, which outlined the goals of his expedition in the hopes of attaining a royal permit to visit the Spanish colonies, alludes to such a diverse mix of agents: Von dem heißen Wunsch beseelt, eine andere Weltgegend zu sehen, und zwar unter Beziehung auf die allgemeine Naturkunde, nicht nur die Arten und ihre Charakteristika zu studieren (ein Studium, dem man sich bis heute zu ausschließlich gewidmet hat), sondern den Einfluss der Atmosphäre und der chemischen Zusammensetzung auf die Lebewesen, den Bau des Erdballs, die Übereinstimmung der Schichten in den voneinander entferntesten Ländern, endlich die großen Harmonien in der Natur, äußerte ich den Wunsch, den Dienst des Königs für einige Jahre zu verlassen und einen Teil meines kleinen Vermögens dem Fortschritt der Wissenschaften zu opfern. («Mein Lebenslauf 1769-1799,» 27-28) CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 139 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 139 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 140 Caroline Schaumann For all its progressive and radical thinking, however, Humboldt’s works remain transfixed in a Eurocentrism that precisely idealizes a New World as solitary, expansive, and pristine. The previous quote from the Relation historique provides plenty of evidence for such an interpretation: Humboldt not only logs the customary register of the sublime (i.e., the fierce power of fire, water, and storms) but also, in the deeply established visual tradition of Western culture, watches what he calls a «Schauspiel» with «Überblick,» describing the scene as a «Bild.» In addition to his recognition of a dynamic, agentic, and interactive nature, Humboldt thus remains a detached scientist who, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, unceasingly observes, measures, and records his experiences. This is also the Humboldt who emerges in Daniel Kehlmann’s bestselling novel Die Vermessung der Welt (2005), a scientist the author characterizes as an «uniformierten, unverwüstlichen, ständig begeisterten und an jeder Kopflaus, jedem Stein und jedem Erdloch interessierten Preußen [im] Dschungel» (37). And indeed many examples from Humboldt’s works support such an interpretation, from letters when Humboldt examines the head lice of Creole women under the microscope in Cumaná, «Jeder will den Mond und die Sonne sehen, vor allem aber Läuse unter dem Mikroskop» (Briefe aus Amerika 65), to the essay «Jagd und Kampf der electrischen Aale mit Pferden» (1807) detailing an incident when he ordered Indians to drive wild horses into a stream filled with electric eels, and watched the horses’ demise before collecting the exhausted eels for research purposes. Ich hätte gewünscht, dass ein geschickter Mahler den Augenblick hätte auffassen können, als die Scene am belebtesten war. Die Gruppen der Indianer, welche den Sumpf umringten, die Pferde mit zu Berge stehender Mähne, Schrecken und Schmerz im Auge, welche dem Ungewitter, das sie überfällt, entfliehen wollen; die gelblichen und schlüpfrigen Aale, welche großen Wasserschlangen ähnlich an der Oberfläche schwimmen, und ihre Feinde verfolgen: alles das gab ein höchst mahlerisches Ganzes. […] In weniger als fünf Minuten waren zwei Pferde ertrunken. Die Aale, deren mehrere über 5 Fuß Länge hatten, schlüpften den Pferden und Mauleseln unter den Bauch, und gaben dann Entladungen ihres ganzen electrischen Organs. Diese Schläge treffen zugleich das Herz, die Eingeweide und besonders das Nervengeflecht des Magens. (69) While Rosenkranz would confidently have assessed this scene as ugly nature and even contemporary readers - especially those sensitive to animal welfare - may not be able to withhold their disgust, Humboldt remains undeniably fascinated by the cruel and frightening spectacle. Kehlmann could surely have captured the unintended irony of a spellbound Humboldt pointing to the «mahlerische» quality of this incident, even calling, in yet another nod to Western ocular tradition, for a «Mahler» to capture it while remaining wholly CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 140 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 140 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 141 oblivious to the not-so-fine distinction between the picturesque and the repulsive of that same tradition. What is more, however, is the fact that Humboldt is not witnessing a natural phenomenon but carefully arranged the crass experiment or massacre and continues to observe it from a safe distance. This curious mix of a prearranged uncanny spectacle and European consumption, animal agency, and Indian bystanders, highlights some of the contradictions and conflicts in Humboldt’s œuvre. While aesthetic philosophy, postcolonial criticism, and fictional invention have all delivered examples of Humboldt encountering ugly, uncontrollable, or cruel nature, suggesting that Humboldt is going much beyond the scope of an Old World perceived as controlled, orderly, and clean, I would like to draw attention to the gritty, material, and corporeal details in his texts that tend to get lost when viewing Humboldt in either sublime adulation or enlightened calculation. Expanding on the concepts of material ecocriticism and Sullivan’s notion of «dirt theory,» I propose a slightly different «dirty nature» in Humboldt. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (2013), «dirt» has two main connotations, which are 1) excrement (filthy substances, worthless matter, or a contemptible person) and 2) earth. Humboldt’s native German does not possess these two divergent meanings of «dirt,» using instead entirely different words, and even in English there have recently been efforts to reclaim the word «dirt», freeing «soil» from the misleading negative implications of «dirt.» The documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2005) traces the history of the eccentric Midwestern farmer John Petersen, while Dirt! The Movie (2009), a film that «will make you want to get dirty» «tells the story of the glorious and unappreciated material beneath our feet.» 2 In a most liberal definition that leans on Sullivan’s ground work, I take «dirt» to encompass our immediate, material surroundings with which we engage, from the soil that nourishes our food to the dust (and toxins) we breathe, from the bacteria that sustain and deplete human life to the millions of insects that inhabit and share our life. Dirty nature, in this case, comprises less of a particular location but more generally one’s environment and thus accompanies both scientific practice and aesthetic awareness. Rather than delving deeper into aesthetic categories or gruesome skirmishes, I devote the remainder of this essay to Humboldt’s material exploits when he is truly engaged in his surroundings. Aside from grand vistas and sordid anecdotes, Humboldt delineates many more daily and mundane encounters with nature that have not received ample scholarly attention. In this vein, his works are replete with ants, spiders, and mosquitoes, with smoke and dust, with fever and nausea. For instance, on his travels along the rivers Orinoco, Casiquiare, and Rio Negro, Humboldt becomes obsessed with mosquitoes. He not only mentions them daily in his diary entries but goes CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 141 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 141 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 142 Caroline Schaumann on to distinguish different species and even compares the strength of their bites at different river locations. Even in the temporal distance of the Relation historique that Humboldt completed a decade after his journey, mosquitoes recurrently disrupt the flow of his aesthetic marvel or scientific measurement, though Humboldt also describes their impact more sarcastically: «Es war ein prachtvoller Anblick, dessen ruhiger Genuß jedoch eine von Insekten befreite Atmosphäre erfordert hätte» (Die Forschungsreise 3: 60). But Humboldt’s preoccupation with the mosquito does not end here. In 1822, he published an essay «Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Mosquitos,» in which he collected knowledge about the pesky insects and describes his self-experiments: Denn wenn ich dem Culex cyanopterus ruhig die Rückseite meiner Hand hinhielt, so war der Schmerz sehr heftig und verringerte sich in dem Maaße, als das Insekt fortfuhr zu saugen. Auch stellte ich den Versuch an, daß ich mich mit einer Nadel in die Hand stach, und die Wunde mit zerquetschten Mustikos einrieb, dennoch blieb ich von aller Geschwulst befreit. (150) Different from the previous scientific detachment in the case of the eels, here Humboldt fully and literally interacts with his dirty environment by willingly exchanging bodily fluids with the insect. This type of scientific practice has been described by Stacy Alaimo as «trans-corporeality» that reveals new and unpredictable interchanges and interconnections across bodies (2), and by Andrew Pickering as a «mangle» in which the boundaries of human and nonhuman agency are intertwined as the scientist becomes both an active researcher and object or part of the experiment altogether (21-22). Iovino takes the claim a bit further: Against the fracture of representationalism, this new onto-epistemological debate brings matter into the body of discursive practices, and vice versa, thus showing the corporeal dimension, the «being embodied» of discursive practices, including scientific knowledge. If knowledge is an embodied practice, the knower and the known are mutually transformed in the process of knowing, and new levels of reality emerge. (455) While this, perhaps, sounds a tad too optimistic, it nevertheless accurately characterizes Humboldt’s engagement with his environment, including the many scientific experiments he conducted on himself. In the remainder of this essay I would like to return to mountains in order to probe further the reciprocal relationship that dirty nature elicits. In contrast to his forays along rivers and through forests, Humboldt’s mountain ascents have been depicted as advances into a purer, clean, and elevated world. Indeed, Humboldt himself initially approached and conceptualized the new environment in such a mindset. In his diary of June 19, 1799, the day before he set foot on the island of Tenerife, the explorer’s first stopover, Humboldt re- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 142 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 142 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 143 corded his sight of Pico de Teide, the highest mountain of the Canary Islands once thought to be the highest mountain in the world, in distinctly sublime terms: Der Morgen war feucht und trübe. Die Sonnenscheibe war für uns noch nicht sichtbar, als plötzlich das dicke Gewölk, welches westlich über der Stadt nach der Lagune hin an dem Gebirge hin[g], zerriß. Durch diese Öffnung erschien der Himmel in lieblicher Bläue und mitten in dieser Bläue, als gehörte er nicht der Erde zu, als wäre die Aussicht in eine fremde Welt eröffnet, der Pic von Teide in seiner ganzen Majestät. […] So freundlich und schön aber auch dieser Anblick ist, […], so giebt ihm das, was unsere Einbildungskraft hinzufügt, etwas ernstes und schreckliches. Die Insel scheint so klein gegen den Koloß, dem sie zur Basis dient. […] Der Wind tobte in den Wolken, die den hohen Kegel einschlossen, sie drängten sich näher zusammen, und der Vorhang war ebenso schnell geschlossen, als er sich unerwartet für uns eröffnet. (Reise durch Venezuela 81) Both imposing and elusive, the mountain presents itself framed by a curtain of clouds opening and closing, granting onlookers only temporary sights into the spectacles of nature. Once again entrenched in visuality, Humboldt describes his glimpse into a «fremde Welt» from a distance, like a painting. His description, characteristically, bears the classic markers of the sublime, where grandness, suddenness, and formidableness all converge to overwhelm the senses, instigating an intense inner experience. But as soon as Humboldt engages with his environment, he leaves behind the realm of sight along with its established aesthetic register. Instead, the physical challenges of the climbing experience divert his mind away from an aesthetic, visual experience and upset a completely harmonious interpretation. Humboldt first mentioned the ascent of Teide in a letter to his brother, dated June 20 to 25, 1799: «Den 23. Juni, Abends. Gestern Nacht kam ich vom Pik zurück. Welch ein Anblick! Welch ein Genuß! Wir waren bis tief im Krater; vielleicht weiter als irgend ein Naturforscher» (Briefe 36). Visibly overwhelmed and speechless by the climb, Humboldt resorts to repeated exclamation marks to characterize the intensity of his experience. This brief description in the letter establishes a number of themes that will return in the description of his other mountain climbs: superlative exclamations denoting amazement and speechlessness, the sight of or view from the mountain, and the pride in having advanced further, farther, deeper, or higher than anyone before. At the same time, Humboldt refers to the results of his measurements «Ich habe hier sehr wichtige mineralogische Beobachtungen gemacht» (36), and emphasizes the physical dimension of his experience. Der Sturm fing an heftig um den Gipfel zu brausen; wir mußten uns fest an den Kranz des Kraters anklammern. Donnerähnlich tobte die Luft in den Klüften, und CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 143 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 143 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 144 Caroline Schaumann eine Wolkenhülle schied uns von der belebten Welt. Wir klommen den Kegel hinab, einsam über den Dünsten wie ein Schif auf dem Meere. (36) These material encounters - wind, cold, and thunder, and the resulting physical fatigue, anxiety, and loneliness - form an increasingly important subtext in Humboldt’s accounts of volcanic ascents. Admittedly, neither ascent nor descent turn out to be enjoyable experiences. The climb is arduous, and the party endures a cold night bivouacked on the rocks, without tents or blankets. In the Relation historique, even the indefatigable Humboldt repeats the words «wir litten» (Die Forschungsreise 1: 88, 89) to characterize the difficulties caused by the exertion, cold, wind, and smoke. On the summit, when the clouds lift, they are able to discern sporadically the ocean, coast, and inhabited villages of Tenerife, but they wait «vergebens» (101) for a rewarding view of the entire archipelago. On the descent, they find themselves unwillingly rolling down the loose ash slope. These unexpected difficulties disrupt scientific measurement and aesthetic awe. In Humboldt’s representations of his ascent of Silla de Caracas just six months later on January 1 and 2, 1800, this multifaceted, shifting, and often inconsistent discourse becomes even more evident. In the pictorial atlas Views of the Cordilleras, Humboldt included a picturesque drawing, «View of the Silla de Caracas,» of an explorer sitting in a meadow below a towering, heavily vegetated, steep mountain, while the extremely brief elaboration (five sentences) leaves out more than it reveals: «This granitic mountain, which is very difficult to scale because its slope is covered in a thick turf, has an absolute height of over thirteen hundred fifty toises» (Views of the Cordilleras 368). Once again, however, in stark contrast to the sublime sight, Humboldt’s lengthy and detailed diary entry of the mountain’s ascent is overshadowed by physical difficulties and displeasure. At 8,622 ft., Silla de Caracas was a lower summit but nevertheless foreshadowed the challenges and inconveniences of high-altitude mountaineering in the tropics for the first time, and Humboldt’s description bursts with negative superlatives and petty accusations: «Seit 11 Jahren habe ich durch ganz Europa Berge erklimmt - aber nie habe ich so gelitten, bloß der schlechten Zurüstungen wegen und der falschen Nachricht von [der] Entfernung des Gipfels, des Harrens wegen auf andere» (Reise durch Venezuela 181). Already in the morning, Humboldt feels «Unmuth über [die] verlorene, schlaflose Nacht» (177); he rejects the food as «Schweinefraß» (178), and grumbles about fearful porters, thirst, and sore feet. There is no grand depiction of the summit experience, only a short note about the elusive view and a sentence about the practical (and imperialist) value of his ascent: «Meine Höhenmessung kann für [den] Mexikan[ischen] Meerbusen dienen, daß Schiffe danach durch Höhenwinkel ihre Entfernung CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 144 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 144 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 145 von der Küste bestimmen, denn [die] Silla [ist] wegen [der] Sattelform weit im Meer erkennbar» (180). Humboldt’s joy seems limited to the successful measurement and prospect of leaving the summit, the latter of which turns into an equally painful and toilsome descent, completed, in part, barefoot: «Freudig über die Beobachtungen und den Zweck erreicht zu haben, faßten wir Muth, noch denselben Abend herabzusteigen. […] Wir stiegen herab mehr auf Hintern und Händen als auf Füßen» (180-81). In the description of the ascent, there is no overarching, crafted narrative arc, but fragmentary impressions prevail, often interrupted by physical suffering: «Mit Besinnung und Energie übersteht man alles. Aber die Füße schmerzten sehr und seit 1.5 Uhr bis 10 Uhr waren wir ohne einen Tropfen Wasser oder Weins» (181). The Relation historique, however, offers a thoroughly reworked narrative of the climb. The description is extensive (some twenty-five pages), focusing on measurements by thermometer, barometer, electrometer, and cyanometer (to measure the color intensity of the sky), declinometer and hygrometer, 3 and highlighting sights and views. Even though Humboldt includes some of his difficulties, such as the uncooperative guides and companions, missing provisions, and the particular steepness of the climb, his physical suffering has been entirely omitted from the text, and the narrative emphasizes instead pleasant scenery («Es gibt nichts Malerischeres,» [Die Forschungsreise 1: 419]), an exceptional view from the summit («Eine sehr ausgedehnte Fernsicht beschäftigte unseren Blick» [428]), and skilled climbing («Gefährlich ist dieser Teil des Wegs keineswegs, wenn man nur vorsichtig die Festigkeit der Felsblöcke prüft, auf die man den Fuß setzt» [428]). The description of the summit alone comprises some six pages, with Humboldt being «vergnügt über den glücklichen Erfolg unserer Reise» (434), and concludes in sublime awe with the descent at night: «Das Geräusch der Wasserfälle gab dieser Nachtszene einen erhabenen und wilden Charakter» (435). As this shifting and contradictory discourse exemplifies, the more immediately Humboldt becomes involved in his environment up close, the less he relies on predetermined, Old-World notions of visual consumption and aesthetics. During every subsequent major ascent, Humboldt’s descriptions of his climbs in the Andes record fatigue, shortness of breath, bleeding, thirst, and coldness; and filth, failure, fantasy, along with an awareness of his physical limitations permeate his texts. Nauseated by the sulfur stench, knee-deep in volcanic ash, and sliding along steep ice, Humboldt is overcome by fear, and subject to fantastical visions and thoughts. Karen Barad has suggested the term «intra-action» to «signif[y] the mutual constitution of entangled agencies» (33). Her concept deliberately rewrites the traditional concept of two separate entities that via the laws of causality CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 145 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 145 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 146 Caroline Schaumann become associated through interaction, posing instead that nature and culture are already mutually entangled and that agency emerges through this intra-action. When in the field, surrounded by dirty nature, Humboldt seems to acknowledge and even yield to such agency, documenting his bodily enmeshment or immersion. From a distance, especially in light of revising the material for publication, however, he returns to depicting his experiences in established models of a visual experience or detached scientist, while remaining frustrated with the incompatibility between material confrontation and human representation. Humboldt’s never-ceasing quest for new modes of representation and his experimentation with text, landscape painting, maps, graphs, diagrams, and even photography prove that the established categories of representation are not sufficient to adequately illustrate his experience. Notes 1 Personal Narrative xvii. Since this part is not included in Beck’s German translation, Die Forschungsreise in den Tropen Amerikas, which I used for all other quotes from the Relation historique, I refer here to the English translation. 2 Promotional website, http: / / www.thedirtmovie.org/ , accessed July 2013. 3 Lubrich has provided illustrations of the various measuring instruments in «Vom Guckkasten zum Erlebnisraum: Alexander von Humboldt und die Medien des Reisens» 51. Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 2010. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. de Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Dirt! The Movie. Dir. Bill Bienenson and Gene Rosow. Common Ground Media, 2009. <http: / / www.thedirtmovie.org/ >. Godlewska, Anne Marie Claire. Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Humboldt, Alexander von. Briefe aus Amerika 1799-1804. Ed. Ulrike Moheit. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993. -. «Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Mosquitos.» Notizen aus dem Gebiete der Natur- und Heilkunde 3.7 (1822): 97-103. Quoted in: Alexander von Humboldt. Das große Lesebuch. Ed. Oliver Lubrich. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2009. 139-50. -. Die Forschungsreise in den Tropen Amerikas. 3 vols. Ed. Hanno Beck. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 146 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 146 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Humboldt’s Dirty Nature 147 -. «Jagd und Kampf der electrischen Aale mit Pferden.» Annalen der Physik 25.1 (1807): 34-42. Quoted in: Alexander von Humboldt. Das große Lesebuch. Ed. Oliver Lubrich. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2009. 66-72. -.«Mein Lebenslauf 1769-1799.» Aus meinem Leben. Autobiographische Bekenntnisse. Ed. Kurt-R. Biermann. Munich: Beck, 1989. 24-30. -. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804. Trans. Thomasina Ross. Vol. 1. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852. -. Reise durch Venezuela. Auswahl aus den amerikanischen Reisetagebüchern. Ed. Margot Faak. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000. -. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Critical Edition. Ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette. Trans. J. Ryan Poynter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. «Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 448-75. Kehlmann, Daniel. Diese sehr ernsten Scherze. Poetik Vorlesungen. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. Lubrich, Oliver. «Vom Guckkasten zum Erlebnisraum: Alexander von Humboldt und die Medien des Reisens.» figurationen 2 (2007): 47-66. Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rosenkranz, Karl. Aesthetik des Häßlichen. Königsberg: Bornträger, 1853. Stepan, Nancy Leys. Picturing Tropical Nature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Sullivan, Heather I. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 515-31. The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Dir. Taggart Siegel. CAVU Pictures, 2005. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 147 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 147 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47