Desiring Plants: Vegetal Libido And Human Morality In German ...

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Download Free PDFDesiring Plants: Vegetal Libido and Human Morality in German Literary ModernismJoela M JacobsSee full PDFdownloadDownload PDF

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As an artistic sensibility dedicated to the ephemeral and elusive flux of modernity, modernism can be conceived as a contradictory spirit that enacts an auto-defeating and therefore auto-sustaining rapid cycle of attempt and failure, purpose and obsolescence. In this essay I argue that the unachievable, self-perpetuating aspiration that modernism contains is refigured as despondent, late modern ‘vegetating life’ in the works of two limit-modernists, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Both writers repeatedly offer comparable expressions of endlessness – through purgatorial narrative conditions encapsulated by the continuous recontextualization of deictic language – that resonate with the belatedness and recommencement of modernism. Although deictic language is not especially frequent in Kafka or Beckett, it acquires great significance in their evocations of ‘vegetation’, an underexplored state identified by critics such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno that encompasses a series of related binaries: activity and stasis, desire and passivity, life and death. Through portrayals of interminable vegetative states, Kafka anticipates and Beckett epitomises a virtually exhausted late modernist life, undergoing the throes of modernism’s drive for novelty and immediacy while subject to the pervasive negativity and failure that replaces the possibility of achievement. If modernism’s intrinsic tardiness fuels its invention of ever-new forms, the lateness in late modernism manifests as futility, burden and nostalgia. The vegetating life evident narratively and linguistically in Kafka’s ‘The Hunter Gracchus’ (1931) and Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1950-51), for example, demonstrates the purgatorial condition of modernism habitually starting anew and converts it into late modernism’s protracted ending.

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Sometime around 1800, towards the end of his period of programmatic neo-classicism, Goethe took time out from his official duties at the Weimar Court, and from his own scientific research, to compose a perfect Petrarchan sonnet addressed to the relationship between “art” and “nature.” While seemingly in flight from one another, we are told in the opening stanza, the apparent divergence of the entities thus named actually effects their unforeseen reunion: “Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen,/Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden.” Reassured by this realisation of the newfound unity of nature and art, the speaker declares that his antipathy (Widerwille) (whether to the one or the other or, perhaps, to their apparently antipathetical trajectories) has also disappeared, and he now finds himself seemingly drawn equally to both. This bold beginning begs a series of tricky questions that are only partially and indirectly answered in the following stanzas (on which, more anon). “Nature,” as Raymond Williams remarks in Keywords, is “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language,” and, judging by the lengthy entry in Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, the same can certainly be said for Natur in German. One wonders, then, what conception and dimension of said “nature” is in play here? “Art” is a somewhat less multivalent term, but it was significantly more-so in Goethe’s day. While we tend to associate this word primarily with the sphere of aesthetic production, as in the creation of works of art, around 1800, Kunst, like art in English, could also refer to activities that would today be classified in terms of “craft.” Such crafty “arts” could also include the experimental techniques deployed by those who had adopted Sir Francis Bacon’s novum organon in order to induce “nature” to surrender “her” closely guarded secrets. What kind of “art” is this, then, that is seemingly so at odds with which “nature”? Why are they in flight from one another? And on what basis, and in what manner, might their apparent re-unification be understood to have been effected? In this article, I propose to explore these questions from an ecocritical and ecophilosophical perspective. In particular, I wish to reconsider German romantic-era understandings of the interrelationship of art and nature in relation to the burgeoning new field of multi- and inter-disciplinary study that became known in the 1980s as “biosemiotics,” entailing the examination of those multifarious and multifaceted communicative processes (semiosis) that are intrinsic to the existence and interactions of all living organisms (bios).

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