Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature: Adalbert Stifter in the Context of Nineteenth- Century American Environmental Literature SEAN IRETON U NIVERSITY OF M IS SOURI In the historical context of ecocriticism, nineteenth-century nature devotees such as Adalbert Stifter, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir represent a crucial transition from Anglo-European romanticism to an empirically filtered realism. Their totalized views of nature display a curious blend of pantheistic rapture and scientific inquiry, or, in terms coined by Laura Dassow Walls, of «rational holism» and «empirical holism.» As Walls elaborates in Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995), rational holism posits the totality of nature as a divine or otherwise transcendent unity that can best be comprehended through reason or reflection. Walls points to Schelling, Coleridge, Emerson, and the early Thoreau - the young, idealistic author of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) - as prime representatives of this tradition. From the standpoint of empirical holism, on the other hand, the whole can only be understood by closely examining its constituent parts and their interconnections. Here there is no assumption of, and often no allowance for, a transcendent agency. According to Walls, empirical naturalists include Humboldt, Darwin, and the Thoreau of the later Journal. His 1854 classic Walden, she claims, neatly combines both attitudes and thus occupies a middle ground in this schematic. As a consequence of this increasingly empirical mindset during the course of the nineteenth century, nature begins to lose its idealized status and idyllic veneer such that its everyday reality and crude materiality have to be acknowledged - and represented. This shift in perceptions of nature has been voiced by a number of modern environmental writers including Gary Snyder, who asserts the importance of such natural (read: normal) truths as violence, pollution, and putrefaction. As Snyder argues in The Practice of the Wild and an essay entitled «Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder,» literary studies can no longer ignore or repress the so-called «dark side» of nature. «Life in the wild,» after all «is not just eating berries in the sunlight.» What about, he suggests, «the ball of crunched bones in a scat, the feathers in the snow, the tales of insatiable appetite»? Or, to consider a more provocative and demythologized image, one CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 149 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 149 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 150 Sean Ireton that alludes to the archetypal Eurydice: «the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots» (Practice of the Wild 118-19)? Another prominent North American author, Joyce Carol Oates, criticizes nature writers, especially the iconic Thoreau, for their «painfully limited set of responses» to the environment. In her essay «Against Nature» (1986), she conveys these responses in upper case so as to underscore their metaphysical loftiness: «REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS» (67). In his ecocritical - if not ecocriticism-critical - study, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (2003), Dana Phillips expands on Oates’s critique as follows: «Reverence, awe, piety, and mystical oneness are antiseptic responses to nature; one might even say that they are unnatural responses, in that they are incompatible with what we know about the earthy flavor, by which I mean to suggest not only the randiness, but the rawness and rankness as well, of most biological processes» (209). Phillips and Heather I. Sullivan have recently issued additional responses to our «painfully limited» sensibilities toward nature, coediting a special volume of the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (19.3 [2012]) that expands on the interpretive approach of «material ecocriticism» advanced by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. 1 As Phillips and Sullivan state in their introduction: «all kinds of matter must fall within the purview of the environmental, the ecological, and the ecocritical» (447). Such matter includes dirt, waste, bodies, and food. In their respective individually authored articles, Sullivan’s notion of «dirt theory» and Phillips’s new materialist reconsideration of Walden further guide my present effort to reflect on the status of dirty nature in Stifter. Using Muir and Thoreau as points of departure and as useful gauges of materially inflected nature writing (as remains to be seen, they both physically engage with their respective environments to an extreme degree), I will probe the extent to which Stifter confronts the «unclean» side of natural phenomena and processes. 2 My approach is admittedly rather literal if not literalist: grounded more in literary and biographical practice than in ecocritical theory, it seeks to unearth and fruitfully explore chthonic elements in select writings by all three authors. As such, it may seem to suffer from an «undertheorization» (Easterlin 3) that has long typified - some would say plagued - ecocritical discourse, but as Oppermann has painstakingly shown (see «Ecocriticism’s Theoretical Discontents»), the issue of theory in this relatively new field is complicated and moreover fraught with controversy; at the very least, it merits a more lengthy and nuanced deliberation as well as execution than can possibly be undertaken here. On the upside, however, the various texts that I scrutinize in a more immanent manner provide concrete examples of Sullivan’s «dirt theory» and what Iovino more explicitly categorizes CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 150 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 150 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 151 as «‹messy matter›» («Theorizing Material Ecocritism» 451). Stated in more direct terms, I intend to probe the extent to which Muir, Thoreau, and Stifter «give dirt its due» (Lioi 17). Yet even on this conceded level of methodological immanence, one might object to the dissimilarities in literary genre, namely that Muir and Thoreau wrote in a nonfictional mode whereas Stifter crafted fictional tales that oscillate between romantic sentimentality and realist mimesis. Strictly speaking, Stifter cannot be considered a nature writer in the North American mold since the tradition of environmental writing does not exist in German-speaking literature. This deficit may have something to do with fundamental cultural differences in perceptions of nature, for instance with the much-debated issue of American wilderness versus European landscape. Nevertheless, though not a Naturschreiber, Stifter is perhaps the most celebrated Naturbeschreiber in German letters. His descriptions of the natural environment - above all of his native Bohemian Forest and the nearby Upper Austrian Alps - are both copious and meticulous, and they often represent, or at least approximate, nonfictional narrative tracts within the broader fictional expanse of his tales. These many evocations of forest and mountain sceneries, of flora and fauna, of geological formations and meteorological conditions have earned him a reputation for concentrating on the «beautiful» and «harmonious» aspects of nature while glossing over its more telluric qualities of dirt, decay, and disorder. But this is a somewhat simplified view, for highly graphic and deeply sensitive depictions of nature’s materiality - and even brutality - can be found throughout his texts, mainly in the form of elemental storms involving rain, snow, ice, and hail. Geological erosion along with its attendant byproducts of dust, sand, and soil also pervade his oeuvre. Though he may not fully embrace the dirtiness - let alone the randiness, rawness, and rankness - of nature, he nonetheless possesses a fine-tuned sense of its disruptive climatic potential. Temporary disruption rather than long-term pollution ultimately carries the day. Those works of his that thematize such natural disturbances and their resultant effluences can furthermore serve as test cases for material ecocritical studies concerned with the mid-nineteenth century, which was after all a transitional period in Western conceptions of nature. One need only mention a single pivotal name and year: Darwin, 1859. Although Muir’s writings tend to exhibit a pronounced romantic and more specifically transcendentalist veneration of nature, they are at the same time firmly rooted in materiality - just as Muir himself was constantly immersed in the physical terrain of the North American wilderness. During a visit to Yosemite in 1871, Emerson in fact declined an invitation by Muir to join him on a backcountry camping trip in the High Sierra lest he, the elder nature phi- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 151 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 151 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 152 Sean Ireton losopher, catch cold in the chilly mountain air. This anecdote aptly sums up the difference between transcendentalist «indoor philosophy» (Our National Parks, VI, 145) and a more somatic orientation toward the environment, as practiced by the philosophizing outdoorsman Muir. 3 From his first published book The Mountains of California (1894) to his final collection entitled Steep Trails (1918), his texts are replete with firsthand portrayals of rock, ice, snow, water, plants, trees, and other matter. And he never ceases to «intra-act» (a term I borrow from material ecocritical discourse) with these natural phenomena, presenting in-depth accounts of his hiking, climbing, surveying, and botanizing activities in the wild. The material landscape thereby becomes a «site of narrativity,» as Iovino and Oppermann («Material Ecocriticism» 83; «Theorizing Material Ecocriticism» 451) describe the narrative potential of agentic matter in literary texts. From a more literal «dirt-theoretical» perspective, an episode from «A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit» (chapter four of Steep Trails) proves more illuminating. After climbing the 14,162 ft. Californian volcano in the spring of 1875, he and his partner are overtaken by a storm that unleashes a fury of snow, hail, thunder, and lightning just as they begin their descent. They are forced to seek some semblance of shelter in the fumaroles or so-called «Hot Springs» just below the summit, where they can «lie in this mud and steam and sludge, warm at least on one side» (VIII, 74). Hunkered there for hours until the tempest finally breaks, they find themselves in the precarious position of succumbing to the elements in three different ways: freezing to death, being scalded by the volcanic steam, and/ or inhaling the toxic vapors that issue from the cavity’s vents. Muir sums up this literally and figuratively messy predicament as follows: When the heat became unendurable, on some spot where the steam was escaping through the sludge, we tried to stop it with snow and mud, or shifted a little at a time by shoving with our heels; for to stand in blank exposure to the fearful wind in our frozen-and-broiled condition seemed certain death. The acrid incrustations sublimed from the escaping gases frequently gave way, opening new vents to scald us; and, fearing that if at any time the wind should fall, carbonic acid, which often formed a considerable portion of the gaseous exhalations of volcanoes, might collect in sufficient quantities to cause sleep and death. (VIII, 76) 4 In A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), a posthumously published book that recounts his journey «by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find» (I, 247) from the Indiana-Kentucky border to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867-68, Muir passes through a part of the country that is characterized by a wholly different topography than that of the West. 5 (His ultimate goal was to reach the Gulf Coast, then sail to South America and follow in the footsteps of Humboldt by exploring the Orinoco and Amazon River CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 152 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 152 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 153 basins.) For those used to his animated and at times rapturous descriptions of the pure air, clean granite, and firm sandy soil of the High Sierra, his narrated trek through the backwoods of the South makes for a gripping, and in some ways unsettling, reading experience. He himself often feels alienated from his surroundings - something that never occurs during the course of his travels in California. Here, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, water crossings pose a constant challenge, rattlesnakes and alligators haunt his imagination, and in the swamps of Florida he struggles just to find dry stretches of land upon which to walk and sleep. When, on one occasion, he gets lost in an everglade forest, the physical toil of «wading and wallowing» (I, 341) for miles through the marshy morass seems far more extreme than any of his mountaineering exploits in the West. As one scholar observes, «his own sense of bodily control and ease of physical movement were constrained by swamps and brambles» (Holmes 171). Throughout the text Muir not only invokes but also ruminates on the dust, soil, and mire that he encounters during his wanderings from Louisville to Cedar Keys. This narrative of dirt is framed by his first journal entry, in which he «[e]scaped from the dust and squalor of my garret bedroom to the glorious forest» (I, 248) and a concluding philosophical meditation on the intimate connection between Homo sapiens and «the dust of the earth» (I, 357). In patently romantic-pantheistic fashion, Muir even extends this analogy to the entire spectrum of creation. All matter, whether organic or inorganic, is composed of cosmic-divine dust. In this vein, he also speaks in defense of long-demonized creatures such as serpents and alligators, which are, after all, «part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth» (I, 324). On a more quotidian level, Muir remains preoccupied, more so than in his other writings, with the ground upon which he treads for some one thousand miles. Outside of Augusta, Georgia, he reflects on the fluctuating sand-clay composition of the soil (see I, 290-91), while in Savannah he searches the dunes, «sinking ankle-deep in the sand» (I, 304), for a safe place to bed down. Generally speaking, Muir revels in the dirtiness of nature; he readily sleeps outdoors, despite the mosquitos, beetles, and whatever «cold-blooded creature […]; whether a snake or simply a frog or toad» (I, 308) may visit him during the night. Muir’s main problem is not with dirty nature but with dirty civilization. Indeed, his narrative reads like a running commentary on the toxicity of human habitation. In Tennessee, for instance, Jamestown is dismissed as «rickety» and «dreary» (I, 262), Montgomery as «shabby» (I, 270), and Philadelphia as «a very filthy village in a beautiful situation» (I, 272), which is to say that only its natural environs are aesthetically pleasing. 6 The inhabitants of these towns, CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 153 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 153 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 154 Sean Ireton whether white or black, are also largely lacking in hygiene. As for Muir, it is telling that the small knapsack he carries during his five-month ramble contains nothing but books and toiletries, including a change of underwear, a bar of soap, a towel, a comb, and a brush. As the most recent Muir biographer, Donald Worster, comments: «Maintaining a high standard of cleanliness was important wherever he was heading» (A Passion for Nature 120). A crucial filth-fraught confrontation on the outskirts of Gainesville, Florida, is particularly revealing. His following reflection, which I cite at length, abounds with dirt, ranging from the individual-phenomenal to the universal-metaphysical: Came to a hut about noon, and, being weary and hungry, asked if I could have dinner. After serious consultation I was told to wait, that dinner would soon be ready. I saw only the man and his wife. If they had children they may have been hidden in the weeds on account of nakedness. Both were suffering from malarial fever, and were very dirty. But they did not appear to have any realizing sense of discomfort from either the one or the other of these misfortunes. The dirt which encircled the countenances of these people did not, like the common dirt of the North, stick on the skin in bold union like plaster or paint, but appeared to stand out a little on contact like a hazy, misty, half-aerial mud envelope, the most diseased and incurable dirt that I ever saw, evidently desperately chronic and hereditary. It seems impossible that children from such parents could ever be clean. Dirt and disease are dreadful enough when separate, but combined are inconceivably horrible. The neat cottage with a fragrant circumference of thyme and honeysuckle is almost unknown here. I have seen dirt on garments regularly stratified, the various strata no doubt indicating different periods of life. Some of them, perhaps, were annual layers, furnishing, like those of trees, a means of determining the age. Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty. (I, 332-33) A number of interesting points emerge from this extended excerpt, the most important of which is that Muir seems far more riveted by the external substance of dirt than by the individual human beings it encases. In fact, there is no clear indication of race anywhere in this passage, only of socioeconomic status. Muir, in effect, passes general anthropological judgment on those disenfranchised souls who are sullied by their own squalid existence rather than by the hostile forces of nature. This focus on unsanitary man reappears during Muir’s first sojourn in Yosemite only one year after the completion of his thousand-mile walk at the opposite end of the country. As related in My First Summer in the Sierra (published in 1911, but based on his journals from 1869), Muir is repelled by human uncleanliness, whether of Caucasians or Native Americans. Regardless of race, most people are a noxious presence in the sublime High Sierra that he is just beginning to discover for himself and that will eventually become «his totem place on earth» (Worster, A Passion for Nature 339). His CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 154 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 154 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 155 portrait of the white shepherd Billy, whose greasy overalls accumulate dust, dirt, and forest debris such as pine needles, moth wings, and even whole insects, is comically repulsive. As Muir mordantly notes, Billy is so covered in plant, animal, and mineral specimens that he embodies a kind of «microcosm» of nature. Or at least his trousers do: «These precious overalls are never taken off, and nobody knows how old they are, though one may guess by their thickness and concentric structure. Instead of wearing thin they wear thick, and in their stratification have no small geological significance» (II, 130). His observations regarding Indians, however, are devoid of mirth yet all the more rife with reproach. A native hunter’s visit to the sheep camp prompts the following generalization: «A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness […]. Two things they have that civilized toilers might well envy them - pure air and pure water. These go far to cover and cure the grossness of their lives» (II, 206). Later, on a hike across Mono Pass, Muir finds his mountain euphoria interrupted by a band of Indians who abruptly appear on the trail before him, begging for whiskey and tobacco. Taken aback by the contrast between their bedraggled looks and the pristine images of his alpine surroundings, he is most struck by the following detail (note the similarities in phrasing to the image of Billy above): «The dirt on some of the faces seemed almost old enough and thick enough to have a geological significance; some were strangely blurred and divided into sections by seams and wrinkles that looked like cleavage joints, and had a worn abraded look as if they had lain exposed to the weather for ages» (II, 219). While there are various reasons why the visages of American Indians, especially those like the Mono tribe that inhabit a high-desert region, might be caked in dirt (for example, as protection against sun and wind), Muir fails to recognize or otherwise relativize this phenomenon. He remains, rather, fixated on banal issues of sanitation and on lofty ideals of nature - both of which are intimately linked in his mind. For as he later remarks: «[M]ost Indians I have seen are not a whit more natural in their lives than we civilized whites. Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better. The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild is unclean» (II, 226). For Muir, in sum, there is no such thing as «dirty nature» - only dirty people. 7 In true transcendental fashion, Thoreau elevates the chthonic to a whole new conceptual level. Like his mentor Emerson, he deifies «Nature» (always writ large in both authors) as a higher province beyond the empirical reality perceived by our senses. That is, he strives for the spiritual - and perhaps «antiseptic» - experiences of reverence, awe, piety, and mystical oneness that Oates and Phillips decry. Yet transcendentalism for Thoreau, unlike for Emer- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 155 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 155 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 156 Sean Ireton son, works in two directions: the latter’s famous «mysterious ladder» (Emerson 281), by which one scales from the immanent to the transcendent, allows Thoreau to climb back down as well. Walden is full of tropes illustrating this dual realistic-idealistic relationship toward nature/ Nature. Images of upward and downward movement are particularly prevalent. Fishing, for instance, is a transcendental activity for Thoreau, since the flaxen line that he casts into the lake connects him to the natural phenomena of fish and, by extension, to a more transcendent attunement with greater Nature. «It seemed,» he writes, «as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fish as it were with one hook» (175). There are moments in Walden, and more often in the Journal, when Thoreau does not just delve into the depths of nature by engaging in such physical activities as fishing, plumbing the pond, and probing for underground water with a divining rod. He also gets, so to speak, «down to earth» by digging in the dirt, burrowing in the soil, even wallowing in the muck. As various scholars have noted, he had a «life-long fascination with wading in bog-holes» (West 128), would stand in «‹the muddy batter midleg deep,›» or «brush through dense blueberry swamps and through ‹extensive birch forests all covered with green lice›» (Worster, Nature’s Economy 79, partially citing from the Journal). As Thoreau also writes in his Journal, the naturalist must think like a muskrat (much as Aldo Leopold urges us to think like a mountain) in order to fathom nature fully: «‹You wander indefinitely in a beaded coat, wet to the skin of your legs, sit on moss-clad rocks and stumps, and hear the lisping of migrating sparrows flitting amid the shrub oaks, […] more at home for being abroad, more comfortable for being wet, sinking at each step deep into the thawing earth›» (qtd. in Worster, Nature’s Economy 78-79). And lest there be any doubt that this primal urge is mere empty talk or some kind of animalistic fantasy (he invokes, if not identifies with, this species often enough in the Journal and Worster goes so far as to dub him «a muskrat-naturalist» [Nature’s Economy 78]), the following episode deserves mention. In May of 1857, during the annual spring floods, Thoreau wades barefoot through one of the many pools of water that collect on the local fields. Suddenly, around his legs, there appear «a hundred toads […], copulating or preparing to.» As they swim and leap atop one another, their trill reverberating through the air and making the earth beneath his feet tremble, Thoreau declares that «I […] am thrilled to my very spine, it is so terrene a sound.» Indeed, he himself «vibrate[s] to it» feeling at one with all this teeming amphibious swamplife (Journal, vol. 9: 354-55; also qtd. in Worster, Nature’s Economy 80). Thoreau’s most sustained deliberation on dirt, more expressly on mud and clay, is found in the penultimate chapter of Walden. Simply entitled «Spring,» CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 156 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 156 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 157 this chapter deals more with the incipience of the season than with the later phase often celebrated in literature. 8 In other words, Thoreau dwells on the sloppy month of March as opposed to the more verdant stages of late April and May (at least according to the seasonal trend in New England). Over the course of some twenty pages (299-319), he describes the melting snow and resultant slush and sludge, expanding his observations beyond portrayals of nature to deeper meditations on language, metaphysics, and cosmic creation. The core of this section, however, concerns an embankment and its soil mutations during the meteorological variations of spring. This sandbank is not, in strict terms, natural but rather anthropogenic, the result of land removal for the construction of a railway that runs on the opposite side of Walden Pond from Thoreau’s cabin. Nevertheless, for Thoreau «this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature» (308). As such, it represents the inextricable «nature-culture» or «natureculture» amalgam that some ecocritics (for example Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway) have posited and formulaically proposed. Still covered by snow in early spring, the cut bank gradually sheds this winter layer to reveal its muddy slopes. Thoreau scrupulously notes the diverse configurations as well as colorations formed by the melting sand and clay, which refreeze at night and then manifest different patterns during the daytime thaw. These patterns resemble numerous other aspects of nature such as leaves, vines, lichens, coral, leopards’ paws, birds’ feet - even internal organs and other secretions like «brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds» (305). All such intricate and variegated designs carved into the loam function as a «hieroglyphic» that he strives to «decipher» (308) as part of his greater project to comprehend the inner workings of nature. In his own words: This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring [upper case]. It precedes the green and flowery spring [lower case], as mythology precedes regular poetry. (308) This display of what one might call Nature’s «underbelly» (my term, not Thoreau’s) leads him to conclude that «[t]here is nothing inorganic» (308), not even our own human existence, for «What is man but a mass of thawing clay? » (307). This rhetorical question is not just another timeworn literary allusion to the creation of Adam as a composite of «man» and «earth.» As evidenced by his reflections that ascend from the excremental to the transcendental, or what Lawrence Buell labels his «pantheistic excrescences» (249), CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 157 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 157 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 158 Sean Ireton Thoreau graphically emphasizes that we humans are part and parcel of telluric nature. To defer again to Buell: «Walden breathes life into the biblical formula of humankind’s earthy origins» (170). One is further reminded of an episode in Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk in which he stumbles upon an African-American couple gathered around a fire in the pinewoods of central Florida, whereupon a humanlike form - which turns out to be their son - unexpectedly rises «from the earth naked as to the earth he came.» As the deeply religious Muir then draws the inevitable connection: «Had he emerged from the black muck of a marsh, we might easily have believed that the Lord had manufactured him like Adam direct from the earth» (I, 330-31). But whereas Muir’s remark remains a passing reference, Thoreau develops a far more sophisticated associative complex. He bolsters his creationist message with systematic analogies between human anatomical features, the manifold structures found in nature (whether in soil, water, or vegetation), and the linguistic utterances (e.g., lobe, globe, lap, lip, flap, lapse, leaf) that articulate the coincident correlations between these two variants of creation. Thus the finger is a congealed drop, the hand a spreading palm leaf (word play on «palm»), the ear a patch of lichen, the nose a stalactite, etc. - all lobular-globular protrusions whose basic forms are etymologically rooted in the consonant cluster LB or the related LV/ LF. Though one could pursue these musings in further detail, 9 Thoreau’s point is clear enough: all organic life issues from the same primordial ooze. Moreover, his metaphysics of mud suggests that even advanced human faculties and endeavors originate from this «excrementitious» source: «Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe [by which he means ‹glob› of earthen matter] continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit» (Walden 306-07). Herein lies the essence of transcendentalism as the transformation from lower to higher tiers of experience and existence. As noted above, however, Thoreau’s brand of transcendentalism is not characterized by a one-way vector pointing upward but rather by a constant oscillation between romantic-idealistic spheres of Nature worship and the realistic ground of dirt, mud, and clay - in a word, humus - from which humans and other life forms arise and to which they inevitably return. 10 Given the pantheistic gusto - and at times reckless abandon - with which Muir and Thoreau expose themselves to the full brunt of nature, often by corporeal immersion in its mucky materiality, Stifter’s narrative engagement with the environment seems to pale by comparison. A sense of order, indeed orderliness, runs through his texts, which in a dirt-theoretical context means that they lack the grittiness found, at least to some degree, in North American environmental writing. As mentioned earlier, this may be due to divergent CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 158 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 158 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 159 cultural conceptions of nature; that is, to the long-standing debate concerning American wilderness versus European landscape. In Germany, nature tends to be conceived in terms of a vernacular landscape, a notion that encompasses the natural history of a region along with the ethnic past of its denizens, including their dialect, their customs, even the architecture of their homes. In the United States, on the other hand, the operative concept is «wilderness preservation.» Over the course of American history, wilderness has come to acquire a number of variable meanings and resonances, but it generally denotes a natural space that humans do not inhabit, appropriate, or exploit. (It is of course a cruel historical irony that Native Americans remain excluded from this idealized human-free realm.) Such areas tend to be located in remote and «sublime» terrains, as these are the last remnants of an ecologically intact environment and constitute precisely the type of scenery that the American wilderness ethic and aesthetic have promoted over the past couple centuries, in large measure through the nature advocacy of John Muir. As Muir and others have pointed out, America lacks many of the cultural splendors found in Europe (ancient ruins, medieval cathedrals, baroque palaces, etc.), but it possesses all the more physical wonders: Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, old-growth forests, unique wildlife - to name but a few. One could, in sum, say that the American wilderness ideal separates nature from culture while the German vernacular landscape combines these two spheres into the inclusive natural and human idyll known as Heimat. An argument from this angle, however, carries only so much weight, for a number of factors - only a couple of which I mention here - speak against it. First of all, the environs of Walden Pond during Thoreau’s lifetime had been heavily logged and «were at an historic low point of forest coverage» (Sattelmeyer 241). In fact, thanks to its status as a state protected reserve, the woods of Walden are far more intact today than when Thoreau carried out his famed back-to-nature experiment in living. Furthermore, most of Muir’s thousand-mile walk led him through an anthropogenically altered terrain, mainly along dusty roads through farmed fields and logged woodlands. His sole contact with old-growth forests occurred while crossing the Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. Even in the boggy backcountry of Florida he mainly trekked along a man-made railroad bank, which was the only reliable corridor of dry land that traversed the peninsula. These North American geographies are thus no more «wild» than Stifter’s nativenarrative terrain of the Bohemian Forest, which also underwent its most severe period of deforestation during the mid-nineteenth century (see Brande 62-63). Of course nature is a relative rather than absolute concept and, in the end, perhaps nothing more than a human construct. As Gary Snyder for in- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 159 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 159 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 160 Sean Ireton stance insists, «nature» and environment» are «bland terms,» while «ecology» and «wild» at least connote dynamic processes («Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder» 8/ 30). And as he reminds us elsewhere, our notions of «nature,» «wild,» and «wilderness» are by no means isomorphic (see Practice of the Wild 3-26). Still, the nagging question remains: How far does Stifter go in depicting not just the raw materiality but also what one might call the biotic fecality of nature? A concrete example might help shed some preliminary light on this question. One of Stifter’s most famous descriptions of nature, namely his narrative survey of the Bohemian Forest on the opening pages of Der Hochwald (Journalfassung 1842; Studienfassung 1844), is as detailed as it is comprehensive. It is, moreover, crafted in a prose that seems as dense and animate as the forest itself. As the perspective gradually shifts from a bird’s eye view of the entire region - the Dreiländereck where Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia converge - to a more localized focus within the wooded interior, the narration briefly lingers on the ground, indeed soil. Dichte Waldbestände der eintönigen Fichte und Föhre führen stundenlang vorerst aus dem Moldauthale empor, dann folgt, dem Seebache sacht entgegensteigend, offenes Land; - aber es ist eine wilde Lagerung zerrissener Gründe, aus nichts bestehend, als tief schwarzer Erde, dem dunklen Todtenbette tausendjähriger Vegetation, worauf viele einzelne Granitkugeln liegen, wie bleiche Schädel von ihrer Unterlage sich abhebend, da sie vom Regen bloßgelegt, gewaschen und rund gerieben sind. - Ferner liegt noch da und dort das weiße Gerippe eines gestürzten Baumes und angeschwemmte Klötze. Der Seebach führt braunes Eisenwasser, aber so klar, daß im Sonnenscheine der weiße Grundsand glitzert, wie lauter röthlich heraufflimmernde Goldkörner. Keine Spur von Menschenhand, jungfräuliches Schweigen. (1,4: 212-13) 11 This passage is characterized by a fusion, perhaps more a confusion, of realism and romanticism. On the one hand, Stifter strives to represent, through an objective and semiscientific lens, a scene from nature that is true to life. On the other, he employs poetic tropes and anthropomorphic symbolism, which, from a literary-strategic standpoint, foreshadow the tragic events that transpire later in the tale: the deaths of Ronald and Herr von Wittinghausen, the destruction of the latter’s castle, the decline of his family, etc. Nevertheless, despite such a pronounced Todessymbolik («Todtenbett[-],» «Schädel,» «Gerippe»), Stifter neglects to capitalize on organic metaphors of decay, which would not only have made for a more empirico-realistic reproduction of the forest biota but would also have helped underscore the death imagery that plays an important role on the fictional level of the text. And both strategies would furthermore conform to Gary Snyder’s appeal for a more CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 160 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 160 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 161 sincere confrontation with literary decomposition and putrefaction. Stifter in general, and Der Hochwald in particular, eschew such images but alternatively embrace scenes and metaphors of sowing, planting, and harvesting. Der Hochwald ends with precisely such a symbolic episode, as one of its few surviving characters, the veteran woodsman Gregor (Stifter’s Old World version of James Fenimore Cooper’s frontiersman Natty Bumppo), performs an act of forest renewal: Westlich liegen und schweigen die unermeßlichen Wälder, lieblich wild wie ehedem. Gregor hatte das Waldhaus angezündet, und Waldsamen auf die Stelle gestreut; die Ahornen, die Buchen, die Fichten und andere, die auf der Waldwiese standen, hatten zahlreiche Nachkommenschaft und überwuchsen die ganze Stelle, so daß wieder die tiefe jungfräuliche Wildnis entstand, wie sonst, und wie sie noch heute ist. (1,4: 318) The upshot of Stifter’s concluding message is that forests may degenerate through the adverse effects of civilization; left to themselves, however (or here even abetted by ecologically sensitive stewards like Gregor), they flourish yet oddly never seem to decay. Had he only taken a cue from his contemporary Thoreau: «Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils» (Journal, vol. 3: 353; also qtd. in Snyder, «Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder» 9/ 31). Although deep organic processes such as decomposition are noticeably absent from Stifter’s oeuvre, natural elements and particles permeate his texts and further take on an essential thematic or symbolic function. A by no means exhaustive list includes: dust (Der Hagestolz), sand (Abdias), slush (Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters), rain (Kalkstein), hail (Katzensilber), snow (Bergkristall and Aus dem bairischen Walde), and ice (Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters). Most of these come in the form of sudden, violent storms. Moreover, other material realities such as drought (Das Heidedorf) and flooding (Kalkstein) figure prominently. While all of these natural occurrences bring about a period of chaos and pollution, they do not result in lasting environmental damage. Ultimately, they remain more disruptive than destructive - passing phenomena that fail to upset the ecological, historical, and ethical order of things. In fact, the more powerful the storm or disturbance, the more intense and profuse is nature’s post-calamitous regeneration. This tripartite schematic of order - disruption - reinstated order runs throughout his work and is reminiscent of conceptual and narrative patterns found in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (With respect to the specific question of nature, Hölderlin and Schelling come to mind, as they both tend to think in terms of a prelapsarian state of man-nature harmony; our modern alienation from the natural world; and the future recovery of this primordial bond.) CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 161 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 161 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 162 Sean Ireton Stifter himself not only incorporates this basic model into his fictional tales; he also once attempted to ground it in theory. His well-known and oft-invoked preface to Bunte Steine (1853), in which he makes a formal case for his regulative principle of das sanfte Gesetz, is an artistic manifesto that can also serve as a theoretical blueprint for interpreting his texts, above all those featured in this collection of «many-colored stones»: Granit, Kalkstein, Turmalin, Bergkristall, Katzensilber, and Bergmilch. Yet many of his earlier stories - including some that he originally published in journals and later revised for Bunte Steine - also revolve around a disruptive natural event and the gradual, «gentle» restoration of order. This restoration is also a Restauration in the political sense of the term; that is, a corrective of the tension and at times turmoil that reigned in the German lands during the nineteenth century, especially in the wake of the 1848 revolts. The violence of these upheavals unnerved Stifter and prompted him to reinforce his «restauratives Ethos» (Prutti 51) in almost all subsequent writings, often by devising thinly veiled analogies between human existence and the natural world. A comparison of Die Pechbrenner (1849) and Granit (1853) offers perfect testimony of this practice, in this case an auto-corrective one, as Stifter amended the pessimism of the original story in the reconceived version for Bunte Steine, creating a fairy-tale-like happy end in the internal plotline of the plague. 12 Throughout this middle period of his writing career, Stifter, it would seem, imposes a normative narrative order on the pure ontological givenness of nature. (Within the stories themselves, he often shows how humans can «improve» the functionality of nature through such practices as resoiling, crop husbandry, and selective logging.) As Christian Begemann formulates this problem: «Eruptive Naturvorgänge können zwar nicht in ihrer Existenz, wohl aber in ihrer Bedeutung geleugnet werden. Sie sind nur punktuell und transitorisch, sie finden statt, aber danach geht alles seinen üblichen sanften und stetigen Gang weiter, der das ist, was an der Natur als ‹wesentlich› gelten soll» (311). In the following, I will examine two texts that narrate eruptive and pollutive events: Granit and Katzensilber. Granit may not depict dirty or messy nature per se, but as the first story of Bunte Steine it prototypically exemplifies Stifter’s operative model of order - disruption - restored order, here in the more explicit mode of childhood purity - pollution - purgation. 13 The central disastrous event is not the kind of Naturereignis found in his other tales (droughts, floods, and storms of all varieties) or enumerated in the preface of Bunte Steine (thunderstorms, lightning, gales, volcanoes, and earthquakes). It is, rather, the plague, which can be considered to have its origins in nature - specifically in fleas carried by rodents - even if it chiefly affects humans. Fichte, for instance, includes diseases CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 162 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 162 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 163 (Krankheiten) and epidemics (Seuchen) in his list of natural threats to humanity, a list that otherwise bears a striking resemblance to Stifter’s own: floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes (see Fichte 267). In the text of Granit itself, all that is said about the provenance of the infection is the following: «Man weiß nicht, wie sie gekommen ist: haben sie die Menschen gebracht, ist sie in der milden Frühlingsluft gekommen, oder haben sie Winde und Regenwolken daher getragen: genug sie ist gekommen [...]» (2,2: 37). If pestilence, whether transmitted by the forces of nature or the incursions of man, remains the central cataclysm of the story, a seemingly innocuous human-provoked incident is its catalyst. The young narrator of this semiautobiographical tale relates how he becomes the victim of a prank committed by the local Wagenschmierfuhrmann Andreas, who daubed the youth’s bare feet with pitch, the material of his trade. When the nameless narrator enters his parents’ house and «den schönen Boden […] besudel[t]» (2,2: 31), he is punished by his mother, who whips his feet and thereby produces an even greater mess as the wagon grease splatters all over the hallway. Rhetoric of contamination dominates this segment of the narrative. Though the grandfather cleanses the boy’s feet - one of several biblical allusions (cf. John 13: 5-15) that fortify the themes of sin and absolution as well as the motif of defilement - and the maids scrub the stains from the floor, the lasting impression here at the beginning of the story is one of dirtiness. As the grandfather recaps the events: «Nun sage mir doch auch einmal, wie es denn geschehen ist, daß du mit so vieler Wagenschmiere zusammen geraten bist, daß nicht nur deine ganzen Höschen voll Pech sind, daß deine Füsse voll waren, daß ein Pechfleck in dem Vorhause ist, mit Pech besudelte Ruthen herum liegen, sondern daß auch im ganzen Hause, wo man nur immer hin kömmt, Flecken von Wagenschmiere anzutreffen sind.» (2,2: 30) In order to rectify all this «Unordnung» (2,2: 31), the grandfather takes the narrator on a long trek through the region (once again, the Bohemian Forest), instructing him in both its human and natural history. As often in Stifter, whom one is tempted to call «ordnungssüchtig[-]» (Prutti 58), nature is presented as an organized realm where everything has a name and place. In the course of their walk through forest and field, all the native trees, woodlands, mountains, and farmsteads are identified, whether in terms of their species (Tannen, Fichten, Erlen, Ahorne, Buchen, etc.) or their anthropomorphic designations (die Machtbuche, die Drillingsföhre, der Sesselwald, der Philippgeorgsberg, die Pranghöfe, etc.). 14 The grandfather further gives an account of the plague that decimated the area several generations ago. As it soon becomes apparent, this subnarrative symbolically parallels the main action. The alliterative Pech and Pest, with their common associative color of black (cf. «the black death»), are both toxic agencies that upset the established order, CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 163 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 163 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 164 Sean Ireton albeit on vastly different levels. Furthermore, as the history lesson unfolds, it is revealed that the cart grease purveyor from the beginning of the text is a descendent of the handful of pitchmakers who survived the epidemic. Stifter thus not only ties the two narrative strands together through the correlation of black contagions but further creates an historical as well as storytelling arc of closure through this final familial disclosure. 15 Indeed, as Martin and Erika Swales have observed, the story as a whole comes full circle as grandfather and grandson return home from their lengthy Rundgang (147). A further correspondence between the two storylines concerns the healing role of nature. The pedagogical hike through the Bohemian countryside is also a curative one: it serves to distance the besmirched youth from the scene of his transgression and metaphorically purge him of his sins. Analogously, the boy and girl - simply referred to as «der Knabe» and «das Mädchen» - who outlive the plague as chronicled by the grandfather are only able to do so because they find sanctuary in the mountain forests that lie beyond the pale of human settlement. The boy in fact nurses and nourishes the girl back to health not only in the midst of, but also by means of, nature. He constructs a bed of leaves, grass, and branches, covers her with medicinal herbs, and feeds her berries and hazelnuts. Upon her recovery they are able to find their way back down to what is left of civilization thanks to his familiarity with the diverse botanic zones. In a continuation of the fairy-tale mode, now that «die Gesundheit wieder in unsern Gegenden [war]» (2,2: 57), they later marry and establish a family from which Andreas, the prankster who set the entire narrative into motion, stems. In the end, the nearly all-day «ramble» of the main plotline - both the physical ramble that grandson and grandfather take together and the latter’s rambling, or at least perambulatory, discourse - functions as a form of purification. After they arrive back home and the wearied narrator lies in bed, the mother blesses her half-sleeping child, who «erkannte, daß alles verziehen sei, und schlief nun plötzlich mit Versöhnungsfreuden, ich kann sagen, beseligt ein» (2,2: 60). This religious symbolism of forgiveness is further accentuated on the next day, when «alles [war] rein frisch und klar» (2,2: 60) and the youth attends mass, thereby becoming absolved of his literally dirty deed. The story thus ends with «die Restauration einer gestörten Ordnung» (Ketelsen 318). In sum, much like in Muir, nature in Stifter’s Granit is not just predicatively clean and pure; it is transitively cleansing and purifying. In accordance with pastoral literary tradition, nature remains immune from infection, impervious to toxicity, and furthermore provides a cure to the ills afflicting civilization. It is worth exploring one more text by Stifter in order to uncover more potential, and perhaps more productive, dirt. In Katzensilber, the key cataclys- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 164 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 164 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 165 mic event is a fierce hailstorm that causes only minor human injury yet major environmental destruction. Unlike in Granit, where grime is restricted to the household and remains conspicuously absent from nature (except in its metaphorical association with the plague), it exhibits a distinct material presence in Katzensilber, as the storm spoils the landscape. As to be expected in a tale by Stifter, especially one belonging to the corpus of Bunte Steine, nature undergoes a period of disarray before returning to its original wholesome condition. In the opening descriptive exposition of Katzensilber’s setting, which appears to be a subalpine locale somewhere between the Bohemian Forest and the Austrian Alps, Stifter paints a tableau that blends the natural and cultural landscape. This arcadian backdrop seems remarkably tidy and well-ordered, even by Stifterian standards. The rugged natural features of the terrain have been modified and mollified by the hand of man. The «stattlich[e] Hof» (2,2: 243), in which the main characters - an extended family of three generations - dwell, contains gardens and orchards beyond which lie expansive forests. The nearby mountainside is accessible by a footpath equipped with railings and a few benches so that «man da sitzen, und die Dinge mit Ruhe betrachten kann» (2,2: 244). This well-kept sandy path leads deeper into the mountainous interior, where a mixed topography of woods, meadows, and rocky outcroppings harbors an abundance of plant and animal life as well as minerals such as the titular muscovite or common mica (Muskovit or Katzensilber). Over the course of several pages (see 2,2: 246-58) Stifter catalogues these multitudinous natural phenomena and further describes how the three children practically frolic in the midst of such bounty. In its naive simplicity, this segment of the narrative walks a fine line between hyperrealism and quasi-kitsch, between a kind of textbook ecological survey and a children’s storybook idyll. Yet the folksy or fairy-tale discourse only informs Stifter’s deconstructive plan of a «gradual ‹Entromantisierung› of Nature» (Mason 128). 16 The hailstorm that strikes out of nowhere puts an abrupt end to this idealized scene, transforming what might be called a verklärte Idylle into a schmutzige Urlandschaft. Indeed, this latter quality is suggested twice, once in connection with «dem Schmuze der Erde» (2,2: 268) and once as an adjective describing the pollution of a mountain brook. Note, in the following excerpt, the transition from a romantic fairy-tale idiom to a more sober realistic prose: Als sie zu dem Bächlein gekommen waren, war kein Bächlein da, in welchem die grauen Fischlein schwimmen, und um welches die Wasserjungfern flattern, sondern es war ein großes schmuziges [my emphasis] Wasser, auf welchem Hölzer und viele viele grüne Blätter und Gräser schwammen, die von dem Hagel zerschlagen worden waren. (2,2: 267) CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 165 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 165 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 166 Sean Ireton Whereas Stifter previously indexed nature’s phenomenality in a deft and delicate - for modern tastes even dainty - style, he now delivers a laconic and paratactic enumeration of the damage, so to speak, après le déluge: «Das Laub wurde herab geschlagen, die Zweige wurden herab geschlagen, die Äste wurden abgebrochen, der Rasen wurde gefurcht, als wären eiserne Eggenzähne über ihn gegangen» (2,2: 264). The following lines are even more stripped down of grammar and syntax, their staccato cadence intimating a sense of aggression: «Es schlug auf das Laub, es schlug gegen das Holz, es schlug gegen die Erde […]» (2,2: 264). As the Swales have pointed out, this passage illustrates the basic tension between two conflicting aesthetics as condensed in the pronoun es: the «Romantic personification principle» of nature embodied by «das braune Mädchen» and the impersonal pronoun behind which lurks the inscrutable agency of natural laws (see Swales/ Swales 188). As the pair of critics further notes, this fundamental duality turns the text into «a conceptual, and hence stylistic, battlefield: pitted against the poeticizing aim there is a powerful realistic strand» (187-88). Though this claim may be overstated, it cannot be denied that the post-storm scenery has been converted into a veritable battlefield. The widespread devastation is evoked by repeated references to the «schwarze Erde» (2,2: 265, 266, 267) that lies battered and denuded of vegetation. Even the surrounding rocks, though of course not damaged by the falling hail, appear «schwarz» (2,2: 267) in the ensuing rain, and the overall mixture of dark earth and collected rainwater turns the soil into a «Brei» (2,2: 253). Hailstones still litter the blackened and gouged ground, everything is «zermalt,» «zerschmettert,» «zerstampft[-],» and «getötet» (2,2: 266). Overall, the picturesque wonderland that prevailed in the first part of the narrative now resembles an apocalyptic landscape. Back at home everything also lies in shambles and «[d]as erste, was der Vater am Morgen vornehmen ließ, war, daß er das Innere der Glashäuser reinigen ließ» (2,2: 278). Both natural and man-made «Abfälle» (2,2: 278) - leftover hailstones, plants, branches as well as pottery shards and other household debris - are carted off for disposal. This sanitation of the domestic domain goes hand in hand with the restoration taking place in the broader realm of nature. The local stream, murky from all the «Schlamm» (2,2: 279) along its banks and befouled by masses of dead fish, gradually clears, though the thrashed countryside remains barren until the following spring. As in Thoreau’s take on this transitional season, telluric anarchy is but a prelude to life, and Stifter’s own chaotic Urscape soon undergoes a springtime rebirth. By the time summer arrives, the leaves on the trees are grander and deeper in color than ever before, while hazelnuts abound on the few intact branches that now bear the physical and moral regenerative load - Stifter refers to their «Pflicht» (2,2: 289) - of their counterparts elimi- CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 166 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 166 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 167 nated by the storm. There is, in sum, «nichts mehr von dem Unglüke des Hagels zu erbliken» (2,2: 295), and the Stifterian laws of nature have returned to ethical normalcy. While the various moments of dirty, or at least disruptive, nature found in Stifter inform a broader aesthetic-ideological program, they also have their own realistic-mimetic valence; that is, their own validity as artistic attempts to capture the intrinsic «reality» of nature. This reality may lack the kind of material fundament that modern readers have come to expect from environmental literature or other texts that purport to represent, or presume to reproduce, the natural world. Even Muir and Thoreau, who remain far more immersed in dirt, mud, and related matter than does Stifter, display strong attachments to romantic pantheism and espouse a scientifically enlightened physicotheological view of transcendent Nature as a divine and perfect order. Muir in fact continues to do so as late as the turn of the century. Of course in the end, all three authors cannot but offer their own historically limited set of responses to the brute and ineffable materiality that we, for lack of a better term, call «nature.» This is particularly true in the case of Stifter, who wavers between a romantic fascination with nature’s darker, destructive powers and an aesthetic-ethical urge to transfigure these forces and keep them in check. In the end, this latter corrective impulse almost always prevails. Muir and Thoreau, on the other hand, present remarkably gritty responses given their respective eras. Their intense intra-actions with the material landscape anticipate the exploits if not antics of contemporary wilderness enthusiasts and radicals like Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock, and Dave Foreman. As such, they embody Snyder’s deeper existential ideal of nature writing and ecocritical research, as expressed in the following remark: «Our work as writers and scholars is not just ‹about› the environment, not just ‹speaking for› nature, but manifesting in ourselves […] the integrity of the wild» («Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder» 10/ 32). Notes 1 For some representative material ecocritical reflections by Iovino and Oppermann, see Works Cited. 2 Though I have previously explored ecocritical connections between Stifter and Thoreau (see Ireton), virtually all of the observations presented here are new. I merely reiterate some of my earlier points on pp. 149 and 155-56 of this article. 3 Though most of Muir’s books were published in the early part of the twentieth century, some of them posthumously (he died in 1914), they are almost exclusively based on his travels during the latter half of the nineteenth. Moreover, many of these books derive CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 167 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 167 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 168 Sean Ireton from his early journals while their individual chapters are often reworked versions of articles that he published in periodicals before 1900. He can thus be considered more a nineteenth-century author than a twentieth, even if, in terms of his biography, he straddles both eras. On a further philological note, I cite throughout from the ten-volume The Writings of John Muir, Sierra edition, according to work title, volume, and page number. 4 For an alternative account of this adventure, see his essay «Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta,» which was originally published in Harper’s Monthly in September 1877. 5 Throughout my discussion of A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, I cite from the published version rather than from Muir’s diaries, which have received a fair amount of scholarly scrutiny over the last several years. 6 A later remark by Muir concerning the city streets of San Francisco is worth considering in this context of dirty civilization: «The streets here are barren & beeless & ineffably mud[d]y & mean looking. How people can keep hold of the conceptions of New Jerusalem & immortality of souls with so much mud & gutter, is to me admirably strange. A eucalyptus bush on every other corner, standing tied to a painted stick, & a geranium sprout in a pot on every tenth window sill may help heavenward a little, but how little amid so muckle downdragging mud.» This excerpt from a letter dated 28 January 1879 is cited in Worster, A Passion for Nature 222. 7 The question of race, more specifically of racial bias on the part of Muir, is a complicated one and lies beyond my focus. Generally speaking, during his thousand-mile walk he remains sympathetic toward blacks and reserves harsher judgment for whites (especially the privileged upper class) in the immediate postbellum South. In further fairness to Muir, it should be noted that his views regarding Native Americans evolved over the course of his life and travels, from his early negative attitudes toward the Winnebago or Ho-Chunk nation in his home state of Wisconsin to his more positive interactions with the various populations in Alaska, particularly the Tlingit people. For an informative survey of this issue, see Fleck. For a discussion of Muir’s «Victorian» attitudes toward American Indians (in the context of Darwin’s own critical views), see Cohen 185-90. 8 The scholarly literature on this key chapter of Walden is vast and I have no intentions or pretensions of doing it justice but merely seek to bring out some fruitful dirt-theoretical connections to Muir and Stifter. For an overview of secondary studies dealing with the chapter, especially with the symbolic function of the sandbank, see the annotated bibliographical essay in Boudreau 117-34. 9 For a more thorough discussion of Thoreau’s attempt to ground his sandbank observations in linguistic natural correspondence theory, see West and Boudreau 105-14. While Boudreau offers an instructive close reading of the section, West explores some potential influences on Thoreau’s ideas, especially Walter Whiter’s Etymologicon Magnum or Universal Etymological Dictionary from 1800. In this work Whiter traces numerous words back to radicals denoting «earth» and its vast varieties of «dirt.» For example, some four hundred pages of the lexicon cover the radical BC from which are derived Bog, Peat, Puddle, Pit, and Bottom. Moreover, as West summarizes, the «final one hundred and forty pages are, in effect, an extended mediation on ‹the M ATTER of MUD›» (125); that is, they feature entries such as MC (e.g., M UCK ) and MD (e.g., M UD ). One can only imagine the pleasure with which Thoreau might have plundered this source material. 10 My brief discussion of Thoreau not only expands on Dana Phillips’s new materialist scrutiny of «food and farming» in Walden, but would also seem to refute it. Though CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 168 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 168 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 169 Phillips speaks of «Thoreau’s reluctance to broach the topics of the excremental and the excretory - of shit and piss» (536), he is mainly referring to the chapter «Higher Laws» and is furthermore strategically setting up his argument within parameters already laid out by David Gessner in Sick of Nature (2004) and Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature (2007). As I have demonstrated above, the chapter «Spring» teems with excrement - or is, so to speak, full of shit. However, as Phillips rightly points out, brute nature is inevitably overcome in the transcendentalist-Calvinist-Romantic mindset of Thoreau. In this sense, he (Thoreau, not Phillips! ) is perhaps figuratively full of shit: dirt will soon enough be elevated to a higher plane anyway, so why make such a big deal about its materiality in the first place? 11 All citations from Stifter are from Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe and are parenthetically indicated according to volume and page number. 12 See for instance the article by Lachinger, the partial title of which, «Von der Gewalt zur Sanftheit,» concisely sums up this shift from the sway of brute nature to the triumph of regulative order. 13 For a rich discussion of Granit along with its earlier Journal version Die Pechbrenner, see Prutti. This article also provides an overview of previous scholarship on the two texts and hence serves as an excellent orientation for those interested in their diverse thematic and structural aspects, only some of which I touch on here. 14 As Koschorke argues, this presentation of the natural topography resembles a «buchstabiertes Panorama» more than a mimetic landscape description or a subjective-romantic conceptualization of nature. Thus, paradoxically, the child narrator remains removed from the very formative experience that the grandfather is trying to impress upon him: «An die Stelle der erlebten Perspektive tritt die Simulation eines kartographischen Blicks» (5). 15 The structure and motif complex of the story are far more sophisticated than I am able to present here within the restricted thematic parameters of my analysis. For a more instructive discussion, see Bender. 16 For a recent study that expands on Mason and explores aspects of folklore, history, and national identity within the tale, see Howards. This article further offers a useful assessment of the extant scholarship on Katzensilber. Works Cited Begemann, Christian. Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. Bender, Wolfgang F. «Adalbert Stifters Erzählung Granit: Strukturen und Symbole.» In Search of the Poetic Real: Essays in Honor of Clifford Albrecht Bernd on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. John F. Fetzer, et al. Stuttgart: Heinz Akademischer Verlag, 1989. 33-44. Boudreau, Gordon V. The Roots of Walden and the Tree of Life. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1990. Brande, Arthur. «Stifters Hochwald am Plöckenstein: Eine vegetationskundliche und waldgeschichtliche Analyse.» Waldbilder: Beiträge zum interdisziplinären Kolloquium «Da ist Wald und Wald und Wald (Adalbert Stifter), Göttingen, 19. und 20. März 1999. Ed. Walter Hettche and Hubert Merkel. Munich: iudicum, 2000. 47-67. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 169 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 169 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 170 Sean Ireton Cohen Michael, P. The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984. Easterlin, Nancy. «‹Loving Ourselves Best of All›: Ecocriticism and the Adapted Mind.» Mosaic 37.3 (2004): 1-18. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. «Circles.» The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 1950. 279-91. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Die Bestimmung des Menschen. Fichtes Werke. Ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Vol. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. 165-319. Fleck, Richard F. «John Muir’s Evolving Attitudes toward Native American Cultures.» American Indian Quarterly 4.1 (1978): 19-31. Holmes, Steven J. The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999. Howards, Alyssa Lonner. «Telling a Realist Folktale: Folklore and Cultural Preservation in Adalbert Stifter’s ‹Katzensilber›.» Modern Austrian Literature 43.4 (2010): 1-21. Iovino, Serenella. «Material Ecocriticsm: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.» Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3 (2012): 75-91. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. «Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 448-75. Ireton, Sean. «Walden in the Bohemian Forest: Adalbert Stifter’s Transcendental Ecocentrism in Der Hochwald.» Modern Austrian Literature 43.3 (2010): 1-18. Ketelsen, Uwe-K. «Geschichtliches Bewußtsein als literarische Struktur: Zu Stifters Erzählung aus der Revolutionszeit Granit.» Euphorion 64 (1970): 306-25. Koschorke, Albrecht. «Das buchstabierte Panorama: Zu einer Passage in Stifters Granit.» Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 38 (1989): 3-11. Lachinger, Johann. «Adalbert Stifter - Die Pechbrenner und Granit - Von der Gewalt zur Sanftheit.» Jahrbuch des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 7/ 8 (2000/ 2001): 53-60. Lioi, Anthony. «Of Swamp Dragons: Mud, Megalopolis, and a Future for Ecocriticism.» Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Ed. Annie Merrill Ingram, Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon and Adam W. Sweeting. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007. 17-38. Mason, Eve. «Stifter’s ‹Katzensilber› and the Fairy Tale Mode.» The Modern Language Review 77 (1982): 114-29. Muir, John. The Writings of John Muir. Sierra edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916-24. -. «Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta.» Nature Writings. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Library of America, 1997. 634-48. Oates, Joyce Carol. «Against Nature.» (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 66-76. Oppermann, Serpil. «Ecocriticism’s Theoretical Discontents.» Mosaic 44.2 (2011): 153-69. Phillips, Dana. «‹Slimy Beastly Life›: Thoreau on Food and Farming.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 532-47. -. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 170 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 170 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47 Between Dirty and Disruptive Nature 171 Phillips, Dana, and Heather I. Sullivan. «Material Ecocriticism: Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, and Other Matter.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 445-47. Prutti, Brigitte. «Zwischen Ansteckung und Auslöschung: Zur Seuchenerzählung bei Stifter - Die Pechbrenner versus Granit.» Oxford German Studies 37.1 (2008): 49-73. Sattelmeyer, Robert. «Depopulation, Deforestation, and the Actual Walden Pond.» Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing. Ed. Richard J. Schneider. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000. 235-43. Snyder, Gary. «Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11.1 (2004): 1-13. Reprinted in: Back on the Fire: Essays. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. 21-35. -. The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1990. Stifter, Adalbert. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Alfred Doppler, Wolfgang Frühwald and Hartmut Laufhütte. 10 vols. to date. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978- . Sullivan, Heather I. «Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.» Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 515-31. Swales, Martin and Erika. Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1984. Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. -. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth- Century Natural Science. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. West, Michael. «Walden’s Dirty Language: Thoreau and Walter Whiter’s Geocentric Etymological Theories.» Harvard Library Bulletin 22.2 (1974): 117-28. Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2 nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1994. -. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 171 CG_44_2_s105-232End.indd 171 14.02.14 06: 47 14.02.14 06: 47