Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 161 Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun Jens Klenner Bowdoin College Abstract: This essay centers on the idea that archival storage requires metamorphic processes to achieve scientific order and taxonomic stability and asks what happens when obdurate objects resist archiving� In a reading of texts by Adam Leyel, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, the essay investigates the curious case of the miner of Falun, who troubles epistemological boundaries and principles of taxonomy� It argues that the mine and the miner are archives of co-existent adversative narratives, offering a surplus of information about nature at times incomprehensible, ungraspable, and untranslatable. The miner’s instability as an archival object requires semantic stabilization through narrative, and the multiple stories surrounding the miner establish an ecological archive, emphasizing the archival potential of the literary imagination� Keywords: extraction, inorganic, metamorphosis, mining, mineral, narrative, organic, taxonomy Archives, museums, even Wunderkammern commonly bring to mind rooms and boxes stuffed with papers, artifacts, and objects. They are storehouses of items considered worthy of keeping and worthy of knowing, and they suggest an inherent sense of stability, reliability, and retrievability regardless of the principles that appear to motivate or order the collections. For a community, be it social, political or scientific, an archive is often the foundational physical presence of its communal cohesion, existence, and beliefs� In a recent study on archives, historian of science Lorraine Daston and her collaborators examined this commonly held believe of archival stability and suggested that a process of metamorphosis is inherent to the creation of any archive� With regards to the archive of the sciences, Daston writes: 162 Jens Klenner Scientific empiricism converts first nature into second nature. Under the carefully controlled conditions of the laboratory but also in the selective observation in the field […] [i]ndigestible first nature becomes intelligible second nature […]. But once second nature slips from science present to science past, collective empiricism requires a third nature: the repository of those findings of second nature selected to endure. These are the archives of the sciences. (“Introduction” 4) Daston identifies three metamorphic states or natures of an object’s archival existence: the object’s first nature is its appearance in the field, incomprehensible and illegible to the scientist. The change from first to second nature can be understood as a process of translation: an object takes on its second nature after the researcher identifies and integrates it into an encompassing scientific discourse and disciplinary framework which renders it legible. The change from second to third nature requires a method of selection and transcendence: not every object’s second nature is deemed worthy of receiving an archival afterlife beyond all time, worthy “of the transcendence of time, of past, presence, and future, merged in the archives” (12). Daston’s here admittedly severely simplified and truncated conception of the archive is intriguing� She contends that archival practices, while historically specific, are largely consistent across the disciplines, and ensures that who or what makes it into the archives—“the very palpable, fragile, expensive, and often recalcitrant stuff”—is never accidental but admittance is highly selective and jealously guarded, vesting great power in the scientist as archival and disciplinary gate keeper. Looking ahead, the archive, in Daston’s description, “is the physical expression of how science creates a usable past for future science” (“Epilogue” 329). Yet what happens to the “recalcitrant stuff” mentioned by Daston? What happens to an object deemed worthy of study and inclusion that resists the metamorphosis from first to second or second to third nature? An object that proves to be so stable in its first nature that it defies archival transformation, and hence defies classification and inclusion? Or conversely, an object whose stability rests in its very instability, eluding all attempts of classification? To put it differently, what if the multiple recorded attempts of transitioning from first to second and second to third nature constitute an archive in their own right — an archive of obstinate objects? In what follows, I will trace the curious case of a petrified miner, who was discovered deep inside in an iron ore mine in 1719, and whose body defied all attempts of classification. As the miner’s body moves through a variety of states — animate, inanimate, organic, inorganic, and something in between — it also moves as an object through a variety of texts. The body’s recalcitrance and the mercurial nature of the miner’s materiality pose problems for representa- Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 163 tion — textual and archival — as the body has the ability to synchronically exist in multiple states and textual registers at the same time, exceeding the scope of linear narratives, and demanding narrative and poetic devices that reflect this elusive dynamism. The many factual and fictional stories surrounding the curios case of the petrified miner are part of the ecocritical genre of “tales of extraction,” narratives about mines and mining, with Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg (1804), and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (1819) at their core. 1 These narratives originate in a period that Jason Groves recently coined “German petroromanticism,” a period “typified by genres centered on human-mineral romances and occurring in a larger cultural-historical context of intensive interest in forms of mining, particularly of precious stones, metals, and ores — but not coal and other fossil fuels” (18). Heather Sullivan has shown in great detail how “scientist-poets like Novalis and Goethe” and other writers of that time were “actively engag[ed] with scientific ideas […] about the Earth, its history, and the distinctions of organic and inorganic,” as well as with ideas about the composition of the human body itself, which were oftentimes at great odds with commonly held beliefs (Sullivan, “Bodies” 27). In her reading of narratives of extraction and contemporaneous scientific treaties, Sullivan identifies the period around 1800 as a period of widespread cultural anxiety over the inability to establish stable boundaries between the organic and inorganic: Thus, geologists and mineralogists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century perceived a very urgent need to try to define precisely the classifications for the organic and the inorganic. […] It was becoming clear not only that the mineral earth itself is in flux, but also that the very distinction between the realms of inorganic and organic remain enigmatic and that they might actually blend. (33—34) These unstable boundaries described by Sullivan are not only conceptual and epistemological but also physical as mankind increasingly penetrates the lithosphere separating above and below. In this period, Groves argues, “Romantic imaginaries are underpinned by material acts of extraction,” and “literary texts might be likened to an incidental mining product rather than the recovered ores” (22). Building on Groves, I would like to argue that the “incidental mining product” in the case of the miner of Falun is not just the vast textual archive surrounding the miner, yet also the petrified miner himself. The stories about the miner of Falun share the main characteristics common to other extraction narratives — a young man’s journey from the lowlands to the mountains; a seductive, irresistible, arcane, and mysterious natural force above and below ground — with one significant exception: what is ultimately extracted from the mine is not mineral but man. Emphasizing this distinction is not intended to 164 Jens Klenner recenter mankind; quite to the contrary: “although inherently anthropocentric, such narratives unleash ecologies-in-motion that subtly challenge that perspective” (Cohen 10). The opacity of the miner’s body frustrates scientific efforts and defies taxonomic order. Its cryptic nature becomes the creative catalyst for literary endeavors, a creativity that “can be interpreted as a form of narrative transmitted through the interchanges of organic and inorganic matter, the continuity of human and nonhuman forces, and the interplay of bodily natures, all forming active composites” (Oppermann 21). In July and September of 1720, two Copenhagen newspapers, the Nye Tidender om lærde Sager and the Extrait des Nouvelles, reported a curious mining incident: in December of the previous year, deep inside an iron ore mine in Falun, Sweden, miners had discovered what, once brought to light, appeared to be a sculpture� 2 At a depth of three hundred cubits inside the rock, between two unconnected mining shafts, workers found the body of a young man while cutting a crosshead linking the levels. The body was discovered in a previously undeveloped area of the mine, submerged in a water-filled cavern. Upon bringing it to the surface, his livery revealed the youth to have been a miner� He had sustained injuries to both legs, his right arm, and the back of his head� A liquid had soaked his corpse, and his flesh and skin were horn-like in texture (Leyel 252). Injuries aside, the miner’s body, his face, and even his clothes were uncompromised� In fact, while underground, he was a pliant corpse, but upon being brought above ground, he immediately became hard and mineral-like� At first, nobody could identify the remains; no one was currently posted missing and the chronicles of the mine were thought to be complete. After some investigation, Magnus Johannssen stepped forward and testified before the mining council that he believed he recognized the deceased as Mathias Israelsson, also known as “Fet Mats”—“Big Mathias.” Johannssen remembered that a miner had indeed gone missing in the fall of 1670, after descending into the mine alone, and was assumed to have succumbed in a rockslide. Mayor Erik Michelsen and the ropemaker Erik Petersen corroborated Johannssen’s statement. It was concluded that in 1670, Israelsson had gone into the mine by himself, perished in an underground explosion, and was buried. Further analysis showed that for fifty years, the dead man lay in a lake of blue vitriol known as cuperic sulfate, his body saturated by the crystalline solution, which preserved him� 3 The official identification should have solved the mystery of the young man and earned him an entry in the annals of the mine, but one further witness came to the scene: an old woman who claimed to have finally found her long-lost love. She had been engaged to Mathias over fifty years ago, when the young man was sixteen, and now demanded that the body be returned to her, although not for the final romantic reunion of star-crossed lovers in death� What ensued was an argu- Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 165 ment over the corpse that ended with the former fiancée selling it for medical research; and to be displayed in the Falun mining museum, first in a barrel, then in a glass vitrine� 4 Over the years, the body of the miner began to decay after all and became rather unsightly� 5 What remained of Mathias Israelsson was finally laid to rest on 21 December 1749, nearly eighty years after his disappearance and thirty years after his reappearance. Naturally, the young man was the subject of multiple scientific inquiries and visits, most prominently the study by the mining assessor Adam Leyel� Leyel, who scrutinized the corpse and its story shortly after its appearance, gives the most detailed and ‘scientific’ account of the occurrence, written “in the style of the erudite” (252). “Narratio accurata de cadavere humano in fodina cuprimontana ante duos annos reperto,” published in the first volume of Acta litteraria Sveciae publicita of 1722, is Leyel’s extensive report of his examination. 6 After a thorough investigation — he washed the body, studied it, and gathered reports from the inhabitants of Falun — Leyel determines, “it is clear that this is in no way a petrified cadaver, or one changed into stone, but one that was only hardened by a supply of bubbling vitriolum” (254). Leyel, however, concluded his report with a striking remark: What is there that more strongly refutes the nature and character of vitriolum than the force of that kind of petrification? Indeed, since vitriolum never changes anything to rock, but bursts through everything with the true animated motion of the slightest vapor, binds everything together, and protects it from decay and decomposition. (254) To what “force of that kind of petrification,” capable of unhinging the inevitable process of breakdown and of establishing a moment of suspension between strength and suppleness, might Leyel refer? And why would it “strongly refute” the character of vitriols, a lapidescent substance, capable, as the definition of lapidescent has it, “of tending to petrify,” “of turning Bodies into a stony Nature”? 7 In these lines, Leyel attributes to vitriolic salts a great deal of dynamic energy: they are said to be “scantentis”—bubbling or effervescent, from the Latin scantere� And the process of saturation is not a slow infusion but an “animated motion of […] vapor[s]” “bursting through everything” (254). Judging by his comments, Leyel appears unsatisfied with the outcome of his examinations and his discontent evokes an air of resistance in his text, as the hardened body continues to push against his analysis. Leyel offers neither answer nor alternative, but in his treatise, we encounter the difficulties in translating or transcribing the external reality of the body into legible text. Leyel’s language seems to exceed the norms of the scientific genre in which he writes. As he attempts to describe the energies of vitriol, which “bursts through everything with the true animated motion of the slightest vapor,” his language becomes 166 Jens Klenner increasingly poetic (254). We are alerted here to the power that physical transformations seem to exert on language at the junction of the ontological problem of material transformation across taxonomic boundaries on the one hand, and the creative act and poietic principle on the other, yoking poetic transgression to the problem of material transformation� Said otherwise, Leyel has, in the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a “stoney encounter” that requires “narrative enfleshing” to allow for a meaningful temporal trajectory without ever fully bridging the disjunction between the “recondite object” and its “interpretive vocabulary” (91—92). Just as words on the page conjure up the illusion of the real, they can also make it disappear, cause it to vanish behind the opacity of words. The materiality of the miner’s body turned to stone seems to resist full inclusion into the abstract poetics of the text� Time and again, this body disrupts the structure of the text� Its peculiar hardness, its radical materiality, is the immediate antagonist to the textual sign designated to replace it: “Neither dead matter nor pliant utensil, bluntly impedimental as well as collaborative force, stone brings story into being, a partner with language (just as inhuman), a material metaphor” (Cohen 4). For the textual sign to come to the fore, the body must withdraw, or better, step down and let itself be transformed. Because of the noticeable hesitation in Leyel’s account, one could even suggest that Leyel wants to preserve the miner — archive him — but to do so in a state of animation that would redefine Daston’s notion of an archival second nature. 8 Instead of becoming an archival object within the order of things, the body undergoes a strange metamorphosis in matter and a change in the state of aggregation that seems to question its stable objecthood and renders difficult a clear taxonomy. By identifying an inorganic principle — the bursting energies of vitriols — that is animate but not alive, Leyel discloses the tension inherent in metamorphosis. These tensions arise when changes have to take place across different epistemic, taxonomic, and ontic states, or more simply, from organic to inorganic, from soft to hard, and, as the body’s journey through its textual archive shows, from fact to fiction. Ultimately, Leyel’s inability to establish steady epistemological borders foreshadows a “disquieting question” inherent to eighteenthand nineteenth-century handbooks of natural history: “whether the borders are stable and eternal, and what to do with bodies that seems appropriate for several categories” (Sullivan, “Bodies” 35). It should come as no surprise then that Fet Mats finds his way into the lecture halls, where, among others, the well-known naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert made him the topic of his popular and widely read lectures at the Universities of Dresden and Erlangen. Published collectively in 1808 as Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, the title of the compendium refers to Schubert’s counter-Enlightenment approach: He considers the interplay of bright and dark, of light and shade, and displays a fascination for that Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 167 darkness which remained obscure� In a series of lectures on dreams, the harmony of man with nature, planetary orbits, animalistic magnetism, and clairvoyance, Schubert also takes up the case of the miner from Falun. In lecture eight, “Die organische Welt,” Schubert discusses the petrified miner as an example of an undecayed corpse—“[…] Beyspiele von lange unverwesten Leichnamen, welche an der Luft sehr schnell zerstört wurden […]”—and presents a two-part analysis of the episode (217). Part one consists of the factual details, part two of more emotional observations, rendered in an amplified, imaginative fashion. Schubert’s account, however, is not as clear-cut as I have just presented it, since the two parts of his lecture envelope one another� A closer look at an excerpt from Schubert’s lectures illustrates the intertwining of images and ideas: Auf gleiche Weise zerfiel auch jener merkwürdige Leichnam, von welchem Hülpher, Cronstedt und die schwedischen gelehrten Tagebücher erzählen, in eine Art von Asche, nachdem man ihn, dem Anscheine nach in festen Stein verwandelt, unter einem Glasschrank vergeblich vor dem Zutritt der Luft gesichert hat. Man fand diesen ehemaligen Bergmann, in der schwedischen Eisengrube zu Falun, als zwischen zween Schachten ein Durchschlag versucht wurde. Der Leichnam, ganz mit Eisenvitriol durchdrungen, war Anfangs weich, wurde aber, so bald man ihn an die Luft gebracht, so hart als Stein. (215—16) Schubert’s elaboration of the incident obviously unfolds in the context of an empirical inquiry. The miner is part of a discussion of Schubert’s hypothesis that human bodies decay much faster than those of animals, which he, in reference to an established scientific apparatus, illustrates through this example. Yet Schubert also asks why there are no findings of petrified humans: Funfzig Jahre hatte derselbe in einer Tiefe von 300 Ellen, in jenem Vitriolwasser gelegen, und niemand hätte die noch unveränderten Gesichtszüge des verunglückten Jünglings erkannt, niemand die Zeit, seit welcher er in dem Schacht gelegen, gewußt, da die Bergchronicken so wie Volkssagen bey der Menge der Unglücksfälle in Ungewißheit waren, hätte nicht das Andenken der ehemals geliebten Züge eine alte treue Liebe bewahrt. (216) The first half of this passage begins in an objective, factual style, yet in part two, Schubert’s text takes on a kind of plasticity when he touches upon the identity of the miner conserved in vitriolic water� In the course of the lecture, the features of the miner change from “jugendlich” and “unverändert” to “geliebt.” Formally speaking, the scientific report gives way to an emotionally charged narrative. Schubert juxtaposes the imagery of youth, “noch jugendlicher Bräutigam,” with old age, “altes Mütterchen,” “Verwelken und Veralten des Leibes,” depicting the progression from life to death� 168 Jens Klenner Denn als um dem kaum hervorgezogenen Leichnam, das Volk, die unbekannten jugendlichen Gesichtszüge betrachtend steht, da kömmt an Krücken und mit grauem Haar ein altes Mütterchen, mit Thränen über den geliebten Toden, der ihr verlobter Bräutigam gewesen, hinsinkend, die Stunde segnend, da ihr noch an den Pforten des Grabes ein solches Wiedersehen gegönnt war, und das Volk sah mit Verwunderung die Wiedervereinigung dieses seltnen Paares, davon das Eine, im Tode und in tiefer Gruft das jugendliche Aussehen, das Andere, bey dem Verwelken und Veralten des Leibes die jugendliche Liebe, treu und unverändert erhalten hatte, und wie bey der 50jährigen Silberhochzeit der noch jugendliche Bräutigam starr und kalt, die alte und graue Braut voll warmer Liebe gefunden wurden. (216) The report ends with an almost lyrically composed, nested opposition. On the one side is the youth, yet “starr und kalt,” on the other the old bride filled with youthful, warm love� In a chiasmic combination, the lady and her young love possess complimentary characteristics that bedizen one young and one old lover. However, each has the qualities normally assigned to the other. Taking a closer look at Schubert’s language — the bodies described as wilting like plants, yet stiff und cold like inorganic minerals — we see several bold propositions. One concerns the transition from organic to inorganic matter, the other transitions in space and time. Time appears to have passed at different speeds in the two locations separated by the lithosphere. Above ground, time affects the external features of the physical body in its customary fashion, yet an internal, emotional time appears to stand still, stalled at the height of the couple’s youthful love. The inverse is true for the subterranean body: while its surface displays eternally young features, the core has grown cold and stiff. Schubert conjoins two moments in time that would never coincide in a linear chronology. He also emphasizes the asynchrony of the miner’s body, now in juxtaposition with that of his fiancée. Both represent an aberration from the presumed course of nature and an interruption of the chronology of an aging human body. Schubert observes the miner’s state of youthful suspension, citing vitriol again as the instrument of preservation or deferral� But in a poetic digression from the factual accounts, Schubert begins his own narrative treatment, his “narrative enfleshing” of the event with its end, the body’s discovery and its disintegration, emphasizing the text’s archival dynamic of tracing it back to its origins. This imaginative inscription is necessary because the archival object rejects its functional stability and becomes ephemeral� While the facts of Schubert’s account in many ways correspond to Leyel’s, there is something peculiar about its opening: in the very first sentence of his text, Schubert dissolves the petrification and turns the miner to ashes. Schubert emphasizes a pulverulent condition, though the sources are divided with regard to the way, form, and exact state to which the corpse from Falun dis- Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 169 integrated during its years on display in the service of science. The descriptions by scientists and curious visitors range from praise for the body’s miraculously pristine condition to observations of its black color and morbid stench� Dissolution into ashes may be an expected outcome, but Schubert foregrounds this particular condition before going on to depict the reunion of the lovers in the text’s second part� He uses poetic license to accelerate the process of a slow and unsightly decay, thus revealing his own romantic interest in the subject matter. His interest in the love story prevents him from adhering to the factual accounts —though he does invoke them in his opening — and he glosses over the barter of the body and its decay in order to integrate the body into a different explanatory system. Around 1800, the factual accounts surrounding the miner slowly gave way to fictional accounts, and Schubert was instrumental to the story’s dissemination. His fictionally amended love story of the reunited fiancées was republished in 1808 in the literary magazine Phöbus, and in the following year 1809 in Jason with no other title than “Dichter-Aufgabe”—a task for poets — admonishing authors to take up this story and bring Schubert’s already very imaginative narrative frame to further heights� 9 The petrified body subsequently inspired many aesthetic forms� Since Jason’s call, no less than thirty German-speaking artists and authors have retold the story of the miner in poems, novellas, librettos, and plays, among them most famously Johann Peter Hebel, Achim von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Richard Wagner, and Georg Trakl. 10 What sets apart E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1819 “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” from the many other adaptations is that it most extensively inquires into the life of the miner before his death. Hoffmann allows us to speculate on the origins of the enigmatic body and the story of his life, as he tells the tale of a young sailor, renamed Elis Fröbom, who becomes a miner and perishes in the mines. What further distinguishes Hoffman’s “Bergwerke” from other literary examples of extraction narratives is that it contains a realistic account of an open pit mine. In his description of the pit, Hoffmann not only vividly describes the destruction and exploitation with all is coloric and olfactoric concomitants in their various shades of black and brown to sulfuric yellow, but he also makes mention of the exact dimensions and construction of the pit: Bekanntlich ist die große Tagesöffnung der Erzgrube zu Falun zwölfhundert Fuß lang, sechshundert Fuß breit und einhundert und achtzig Fuß tief. Die schwarzbraunen Seitenwände gehen Anfangs größten Teil senkrecht nieder; dann verflachen sie sich aber gegen die mittlere Tiefe durch ungeheuern Schutt und Trümmerhalden. In diesen und an den Seitenwänden blickt hin und wieder die Zimmerung alter Schächte hervor, die aus starken, dicht auf einander gelegten und an den Enden in einander gefugten Stämmen nach Art des gewöhnlich Blockhäuser-Baues aufgeführt sind. (220) 170 Jens Klenner This data corresponds almost verbatim to the mines of Falun as described in the fifth volume of geologist and mineralogist Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann’s travelogue Reise durch Skandinavien in den Jahren 1806 und 1807; Hoffmann in fact includes a footnoted reference to Hausmann. Hoffmann’s prosaic rendering of the mine is interesting insofar as the mine of Falun was, according to Hausmann’s report, a highly productive and technologically advanced enterprise of impressive dimensions. This can be gleaned not only from the travelogue, but also from a detailed map and cross section of the mine in Hausmann’s appendix. In comparison to the gigantic subterranean sprawl of the mine, the visible part above ground seems miniscule. The sketch shows an older section of the mine that was apparently belabored in open-cast style, while the younger section is a vast network of horizontal, subterranean tunnels accessible by vertical shafts. The buildings above ground are dwarfed in comparison to the dimensions of the mine. Hoffmann presumably read Hausmann’s sketch as an allegorical emblem of what is visible and what remains invisible� This proportional asymmetry is relevant not only to the infrastructure of the mine, but also to the relation of what is rationally explicable and what must remain irrationally vague and unknowable in nature and in the mind (Hausmann 434, Tab. IV). Hoffmann published “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” as a story in the four-volume collection of his Serapions-Brüder cycle, a project in narrative experimentation, published between 1819 and 1821. Taking its cue from Hebel (“[…] ein sehr bekanntes und schon bearbeitetes Thema”), Schubert’s Nachtseiten, as well as Hausmann’s Reise durch Skandinavien, Hoffmann’s tale draws upon a rich textual genealogy of sources, which documents the period’s fascination with the curious find. 11 The story appropriates and transforms elements of different epistemological and generic orders in light of the taxonomic mutability of the miner’s body. The body, and stories surrounding it, complicate notions of stable form and ask whether stability may be paradoxically strongest at the very point of form’s dissolution. As a heterogeneous collection, the Serapions-Brüder confronts us with an experiment in storytelling. The experiment is conducted by a brotherhood of six friends —Theodor, Ottmar, Cyprian, Vinzenz, Sylvester, and Lothar — who meet weekly to read and discuss stories. The stories and their subsequent debates reflect on modes and parameters of fictionalization and provide a testing ground for poetic principles. They also explore differing readers’ expectations on how to transform preexisting stories — be they folklore, journalistic pieces, fairy tales, or historic events — into literary narratives. And, after Cyprian took the friends to Danzig with “Der Artushof,” it is Theodor’s turn to recount the story of the miner: Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 171 Es wird spät, und das Herz würde es mir abdrücken, wenn ich euch nicht noch heute eine Erzählung vorlesen sollte die ich gestern endigte. Mir gab der Geist ein, ein sehr bekanntes und schon bearbeitetes Thema von einem Bergmann zu Falun auszuführen des Breiteren, und ihr sollt entscheiden, ob ich wohl getan der Hingebung zu folgen oder nicht. (Hoffmann 208) Before Hoffmann, Achim von Arnim’s ballad Des ersten Bergmanns ewige Jugend appeared in 1808; three years later Johann Peter Hebel published his “Unverhofftes Wiedersehen” as a calendar story for Der rheinländische Hausfreund� Before Hoffmann, too, of course, came the accounts by Schubert, Leyel, and the newspaper articles. But unlike those who came before him, Hoffmann gives the miner a backstory. He introduces Elis Fröbom, a sailor, who was destined to be a mariner from childhood. At a moment of total loss — Elis’ parents died — Elis meets Torbern, an old miner who is in fact undead. A traveler from a different time, an asynchronous entity able to traverse ontological and categorical boundaries, Torbern is convinced that Elis is at an age when his life is just about to begin instead of end and points him toward a new way of life� He encourages Elis to forsake his life at sea, certain that Elis was never suited to be a sailor� Instead, Elis should follow the calling nature had destined for him: “Aber zum Seemann habt Ihr Eure Lebtage gar nicht im mindesten getaugt. […] Folgt meinem Rat, Elis Fröbom! Geht nach Falun, werdet ein Bergmann” (214). Torbern advises Elis to undergo a transformation: to move from sea to land� 12 From the beginning of the tale, it is apparent that Elis’ path from sailor to miner is anything but accidental: Hoffmann places Elis at a juncture, and Elis chooses the life of the pitman. What follows is the story of Fröbom’s passage from sea to land, yet although Elis does relocate, his transition remains incomplete and cannot change his predicted fate� In fact, as we will see, Elis remains caught in an eternally transitory state, in an intermediary realm between what he was before and what he could be, a recalcitrant body defying organized transition between natures. Between Schubert and Hoffmann, the miner’s body disintegrates once at the beginning of an account and once at the end, reanimated several times in between. Like Schubert, Hoffmann also has the miner transform into ashes or dust as he is brought to the surface and reunited with his lover (239). And there is yet another echo of Schubert in Hoffmann’s ending. In itself, this is not very surprising, given Hoffmann’s explicit reference to Schubert in his Serapion’s cycle as well as the widespread reception and inspirational history of the Nachtseiten lectures. But Hoffmann, instead of focusing on the facts of the story, picks up Schubert’s fictionalization, amplifies it, and enacts a process of strong, literary metamorphoses. Hoffmann recounts the reunion of the former lovers in dramatic detail: 172 Jens Klenner Da geschah es, daß die Bergleute, als sie zwischen zwei Schachten einen Durchschlag versuchten, in einer Tiefe von dreihundert Ellen im Vitriolwasser den Leichnam eines jungen Bergmanns fanden, der versteinert schien, als sie ihn zu Tage förderten. […] Es war anzusehen als läge der Jüngling in tiefem Schlaf, so frisch, so wohl erhalten waren die Züge seines Antlitzes, so ohne alle Spur der Verwesung seine zierlichen Bergmannskleider, ja selbst die Blumen an der Brust. […] Man stand im Begriff den Leichnam weiter fortzubringen, nach Falun, als aus der Ferne ein steinaltes eisgraues Mütterchen auf Krücken hinankeuchte. […] Und damit kauerte sie neben dem Leichnam nieder und faßte die erstarrten Hände und drückte sie an ihre im Alter erkaltete Brust, in der noch, wie heiliges Naphtafeuer unter der Eisdecke, ein Herz voll heißer Liebe schlug. (238—39) Hoffmann adopts some of Schubert’s language verbatim to present the basic elements of the story. The description of the mine and the discovery of the miner is lifted from Schubert, as is the old woman on her crutches, and the fact that nobody recognized the young man. Hoffmann continues by describing the body’s pristine state and renders the miner in a dainty portrait as he limns his handsome face, his delicate clothes, and the still fresh boutonniere� Well rested and invigorated, we can imagine the young man might awaken at any moment from his slumber, in good health and ready to return to work in the mines� Ulla, the fiancée is rendered as his exact inverse — an old, crippled woman. Ulla herself is transformed from organic to inorganic matter: old as stone and grey as ice, her hybrid state complements that of Elis. Neither the young miner, nor the fiancée, now an aged woman, remain stable beings. The identity of the miner takes shape through the narration of someone who herself had to first abdicate her own identity. It is curious that Hoffmann, in the very moment of identification and formation has the miner crumble to ashes� 13 His lack of physical stability as an archival object seems to require semantic stabilization through the “enfleshing” of romantic narrative, or rather, as I would argue, the recalcitrant object has to crumble and give way to such a projection� In both Schubert and Hoffmann, the corporeality of the miner’s body achieves its significance only once the body itself is beyond recognition and has fallen to ashes. The material body of the miner and the materiality of the text cannot coexist in time, because the obstinacy of the object to neatly transform into its second nature challenges the epistemic order of the archive� Trapped in rock, between two passageways, unmarked by time, and changing his form in his movement from dark to light, from the depth of the mine to the surface, Fet Mats was always of more than one form, category, and order� He was perpetually in a liminal state. Hoffman’s text offers a description of Mats in his early years that is intelligible, if marked by transition and instability. But upon discovery, Fet Mats Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 173 presented the people of Falun with more than the problem of an unidentified corpse on their hands� He was a semiotic problem, a cipher that no one could decode� Although the body moves from darkness to light and therefore from geology to geography, it remains illegible� 14 Despite the body’s emergence, its movement into the realm of the geo-graphein, the miner remains inscrutable� The miner as cipher is precisely at the semantic margins of the known and the unknown� In both Leyel and Schubert, the curious body is indecipherable to science. Hoffmann writes such a detailed prehistory of the miner in order to emphasize the power of literary imagination vis-à-vis scientific observation. Where Leyel’s taxonomic efforts were frustrated and Schubert expanded a scientific account through poetic license, Hoffmann frees the case from the shackles of the factual. For the illegible physical body to become a legible textual sign, the physical body must disappear through metamorphosis into text� It is this second disappearance of the body that paradoxically emphasizes the figural corporeality of the miner and demands his reformation and reanimation. The transforming material body suggests an alternative archival trajectory and questions traditional epistemic orders, foregrounding fiction as the poetic site where the complex connection of natura naturata and natura naturans becomes evident� In their entirety, the many stories surrounding the miner of Falun establish what Hubert Zapf calls a “cultural ecology,” an approach that connects the “question of creativity with an ecocritical framework” (55). Within this cultural ecology, Zapf emphasizes the critical role of literature as an “ecological force”: “literature is a medium that represents the exclusions of the cultural system and symbolically reintegrates the nonintegrated into language and discourse” (66). Physically and metaphorically, the body of the miner becomes a point of intersection for multiple processes of metamorphosis: it undergoes material transformations from animate to inanimate and from organic to inorganic, troubling principles of taxonomy in disconcerting ways. The body also moves as object and protagonist through textual and poetic states, from factual to fictional accounts, from newspaper articles to scientific analysis, from the historiographic to the literary, registering and “reintegrating” the multiple attempts of the body’s archival transformation. Hoffmann focuses on the body of the miner as a source of asynchrony and poetic impulse: its emergence from a grave in the mountain’s depths causes a rupture in the close-knit fabric and order of contemporary knowledge production. The body resurfaces as an unruly relic from a different time, it unsettles social order by resisting taxonomic and scientific explanations. The body of the miner engenders new narratives that allow Hoffmann to explore the archival potential of the literary imagination and to search for a literary form dynamic enough to capture the elusive miner, weaving historical, scientific, and other cultural documents into his text. At the 174 Jens Klenner same time, the body itself becomes a site through which a literary genealogy can be established, revised, or even demolished. This type of hybridity results in a process that destabilized the boundaries between organic and inorganic, between fact and fiction, between object and archive. Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” offers a poetics of a suspended archival transformation, in which narrative self-consciously imposes a semantic order without ever fully obliterating the obstinacy of the recalcitrant object. Hoffmann’s text works to move back and forth between forms and topics of study, often asking the reader to inhabit the space between multiple possibilities and conditions and leaving the reader suspended in epistemic doubt� “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” outlines the connection between considerations of poetic transformation — from object, historic source and material, to literary narrative — and material transformation — from organic to inorganic, between different aggregate states of fluid, firm, and crystalline, from inanimate object to living being and back. The different orders depicted in the story comprise a taxonomy, a Romantic order of knowledge that Hoffmann interrogates. “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” invokes this controversy by fictionalizing a factual, historical incident that at its own time already destabilized taxonomic categories and binaries. Hoffmann transforms historic material into literary narration. Events leave their traces in documents, changing from one aggregate state into another; textual sources transform from fact to fiction, from scientific description to historiography and literary narrative. Material objects are sometimes obdurate, resisting change and at other times uncontrollably dynamic, moving from one state into another. Hoffmann’s story, like Daston’s description of the archival process, thus envisions a temporality of metamorphosis; it deals with the transition from one space, from one realm of order, to another. But it also questions the plausibility of such transitions, suggesting that such transitions are not always complete, logical, or legible, and that the archival does not easily lend itself to processes of verifiable knowledge production. In particular, incomplete transformations in Hoffmann’s text leave objects and readers suspended between temporal markers. Poised in between origins and endings, the matter undergoing change often inhabits a strange, nearly timeless state. Tracking the transformations of the miner’s body and the text in which the story is told exposes the relationship between physical matter and literary form. Ultimately, the body that emerges from the mines proves both resistant to change and generative of it; so too is literary form, which Hoffmann molds in order to narrate the dual, and sometimes in-between state of his source material� Hoffmann, at the time of his writing already at the end of a long textual genealogy, problematizes the body’s representation by addressing the process of fictionalization and the contingencies of narrative production and, consequently, Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 175 by asking for the appropriate form or medium to archive the miner’s body. Yet Hoffmann indicates that he expects the miner to resurface in future accounts and that his body has not come to rest� Narrated in the simple past, that tempus which emphasizes the imperfect, the unfinished, or not yet complete, and which links the present to the past in service of the future, Hoffmann’s story emphasizes what Daston recognized as the archival transitions between first, second, and third nature. In a final move, Hoffmann removes his own story from time and projects it into a future yet to come� In the story, the sole calendric date mentioned is 1687, the year of the terrible rockslide in the mine of Falun in which Torbern perished� According to lore, Torbern lived “more than one hundred years” ago, which places the narrative and the year of Elis’ vanishing in the mines around the year 1790 at the earliest� If Elis himself remained buried in the mine for half a century, the star-crossed lovers will not have been reunited until 1840, twenty-one years after the publication of Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” in 1819. 15 Notes 1 I am borrowing “tales of extraction” from Sullivan 2011. For recent ecocritical scholarship on Romantic mines, see Groves, Rigby, and Sullivan. 2 Nye Tidender om lærde Sager (29), 20 July 1720; “Extrait des Nouvelles” du Mois de Septembre 1720, 206—08-; cited in Friedmann 9—11. 3 Copper and not iron vitriols must have preserved the miner in question. Vitriols are crystalline salt compounds of sulfur and metals like iron or copper. They form dense, hair-like fibrous aggregates with varying degrees of hydration, ranging from hard crystals to complete dissolution. For a detailed analysis of the scientific findings, cf. Küchler Williams. 4 The Extrait des Nouvelles reports the following on the barter over the body: “[…] mais une chose aussi singulière, quoy que moins savante, est la dispute qu’il y a eue pur ce corps, l’école de Medicine le demandoit pour faire des observations, les ouvriers le pretendoient come un bien qui leur aoartenoit, on ne savoit à qui l’ajuger, lors qu’une fille ou feme [sic], à qui le deffunt, elle reclamé ce corps, sur le quel elle a soutenu ques a promesse de Mariage luy avoit donné des droits, que la mort mesme ne povoit par detruie, le corps lui a eté adjugé, et ayant offert de le remettre à ceux qui lui en donneroient le plus, la faculté de Medicine lui en a donnè [sic] cinq cents écus” (206—08). Regarding the storage and exposition of the cadaver, see Wiman 149. 5 On July 2, 1737, Réginald Outhier makes the following entry in his travel log: “Le Mardi, nous fumes voir un Home que l’om difoit être pétrifié; il avoit été étouffé sous des cartiers de Rocher, qui s’étoient écroules dans 176 Jens Klenner le fond de la Mine. Au bout de 40 ou 50 ans, en fouillant on trouva son corps; ils étoit fi peu défiguré, qu’une Femme le reconnut; il y avoit seize ans qu’on le conservoit dans un fauteuil de fer par curiosité. Nous ne vîmes qu’un corps tout noir, fort desseché et fort éfiguré, qui exhaloit une odeur cadavereuse” (282). 6 A note on translation: Wherever possible, I refer to English translations of works cited. On occasion, I have modified the translations to better reflect the original text� Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own� 7 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, s.v. “lapidescent”; Oxford English Dictionary, 1 st ed�, s�v� “lapidescent�” 8 In a more general introduction of vitriolic acids, Leyel does indeed claim that human bodies, “nevertheless by their own brackishness, and their attractive force, so conspicuously condense and harden, that they leave their natural softness for the hardness of stone” (251). 9 Schubert, close friends with Schelling and Kleist, was widely read by many writers around 1800� Of greater importance, however, is the forefather of modern geology Abraham Gottlob Werner, who was in personal contact with numerous authors, most notably Novalis, his student at the Bergakademie in Freiberg. Cf. Haberkorn. Theodore Ziolkowski showed that there was hardly a writer of that period not interested in the science of mining (18—63). 10 The most recent German-language adaptation is most likely Franz Fühmann’s unfinished “Bergwerk Projekt.” For a collection of Falun adaptations see Eicher� 11 Theodor, the narrator of the story, mentions that versions of the tale of Falun exist by other authors. When discussing the story, Ottmar explicitely mentions Schubert’s Nachtseiten, and Hoffmann refers to Hausmann in a footnote (Hoffmann 208, 220, 240). For Hausmann’s travels to Falun see also Hartmann 94—97. 12 For a detailed discussion of Elis’ transition from sea to land, see Bachmann 145—68. 13 Heather Sullivan interprets the return to dust of Elis’ body as symbolic of the impossibility to erase the pollution and dust of extractive mining: “Goethe and Hoffmann write mining as the site where the concrete (environmental) results of digging are overwritten by the desire for gold, jewels, and modern economic power. Yet the dirt finally reappears in both cases: as putrid swamp and body crumbling to dust” (“Dirty” 122). 14 The reluctance of the object — the organic-inorganic body of the miner — to assume its proper place within the taxonomic and epistemological order of a scientific archive is not dissimilar to Heather Sullivan’s definition of dirt Suspended in the Archives —The Three Natures of the Miner of Falun 177 and pollution in her analysis of extraction narratives� Sullivan describes the “matter of dirt itself as both material and discursive. […] Dirt disturbs order; hence dirt is that which is, however one determines it, ‘out of place.’ […] Similarly, […] the term pollution denotes a cultural norm describing something out of place” (“Dirty” 113—14). 15 Hoffman 229, 230, 239. Cf. Schnyder (42), whose math, though different from mine, arrives at similar conclusions� Works Cited Bachmann, Vera� Stille Wasser - tiefe Texte? Zur Ästhetik der Oberfläche in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts� Bielefeld: transcript, 2013� Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Daston, Lorraine. “Introduction: Third Nature.” Science in the Archives: Past, Presents, Futures. Ed. Lorraine Daston. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017. 1—14. —. “Epilogue: The Time of the Archive.” Science in the Archives: Past, Presents, Futures� Ed. Lorraine Daston. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017. 329—32. Eicher, Thomas, ed. Das Bergwerk von Falun: Varianten eines literarischen Stoffes. Münster: Lit Verlag, 1996� Friedmann, Georg. Die Bearbeitung der Geschichte von dem Bergmann von Fahlun. Diss. Königliche Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 1887. Berlin: Druckerei der Berliner Börsenzeitung, 1887. Fühmann, Franz. Im Berg. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Ed. Ingrid Prignitz. Rostock: Hinstorff, 1991. Groves, Jason. The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. New York: Fordham UP, 2020. Haberkorn, Michaela. Naturhistoriker und Zeitenseher. Geologie und Poesie um 1800. Der Kreis um Abraham Gottlob Werner (Goethe, A.v. Humboldt, Novalis, Steffens, G.H. Schubert). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004. Hartmann, Regina. “Technischer Fortschritt als menschheitlicher Progress? Reiseberichte über das Bergwerk von Falun zwischen Aufklärungshoffnung und Aufklärungsskepsis.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 122 (2003): 184—99. Hausmann, Johann Friedrich Ludwig. Reise durch Skandinavien in den Jahren 1806 und 1807. Vol. 5. Göttingen: Johann Friedrich Römer, 1818. Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Die Bergwerke zu Falun.” Die Serapions-Brüder. Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Ed. Wulf Segebrecht. Vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001. 208—41. Küchler Williams, Christiane. “Was konserviert den Bergmann zu Falun - Kupfer- oder Eisenvitriol? Eine chemische Fußnote zu den Variationen des ‘Bergwerks zu Falun’.” Athenäum 10 (2000): 191—97. 178 Jens Klenner Leyel, Adam� “Narratio accurata de cadavere humano in fodina cuprimontana ante duos annos reperto�” Acta litteraria Sveciae publicita 1 (1722): 250—54. Oppermann, Serpil. “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency.” Material Ecocriticism� Ed� Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014. 21—36. Outhier, Réginald. Journal d’un voyage au nord, en 1736 & 1737. Amsterdam: H.G. Löhner, 1776. Rigby, Kate. “‘Mines aren’t really like that’: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited�” German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene� Ed� Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 111—28. —. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004. Schaumann, Caroline, and Heather I. Sullivan. “Introduction: Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the Anthropocene.” Colloquia Germanica 44.2 (2011): 105—09. Schnyder, Peter. “Die Wiederkehr des Anderen: Ein Gang durch die Zeichenbergwerke zu Falun.” Figur, Figura, Figuration: E.T.A. Hoffmann. Ed. Daniel Müller Niebla et al. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. 31—43. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft� Dresden: Arnoldsche Buchhandlung, 1808� —. “Dichter-Aufgabe.” Jason� Eine Zeitschrift. Herausgegeben vom Verfasser des goldenen Kalbes 1 (1809): 394—96. —. “Fragmente aus einer Vorlesung.” Phöbus 4/ 5 (1808): 67—68. Sullivan, Heather I� “Dirty Nature: Ecocriticism and Tales of Extraction — Mining and Solar Power — in Goethe, Hoffmann, Verne, and Eschbach.” Colloquia Germanica 44�2 (2011): 111—31. —. “Organic and Inorganic Bodies in the Age of Goethe: An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Rune Mountain’ and the Earth Sciences.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 10.2 (2003): 21—46. —. “Ruins and the Construction of Time: Geological and Literary Perspectives in the Age of Goethe.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001): 1—30. Wiman, C. “Über neue und einige alte Leichenwachsfunde.” Bulletin of The Geogical Institution of The University of Upsala 28 (1941): 141—55. Zapf, Hubert. “Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity�” Material Ecocriticism� Ed� Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann� Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014. 51—66. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.