Ruins and the Construction of Time: Geological and Literary Perspectives in the Age of Goethe

Ruins and the Construction of Time: Geological and Literary Perspectives in the Age of Goethe HEATHER I. SULLIVAN In his 1778 text, An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth, John Whitehurst writes of the "terraqueous globe" that having been "burst into millions of fragments . . . must certainly be thrown into strange heaps of ruins . . . ."' Whitehurst is not alone in extending the eighteenth-century fascination with ideas of ruins into early geology. In the rapidly proliferating texts analyzing the history of the earth during the Age of Goethe, when geology was just gaining a foothold as a field in its own right,2 scientists like Whitehurst, Johann G. Wallerius, and Johann R. Forster describe the entire surface of the earth as a conglomeration of ruins of previous worlds. This vision of devastation is the basis for two queries I address here: whether the narrative describing how these ruins are created is a linear development of progress or a vision of ongoing cycles (as Stephen J. Gould calls it, "time's arrow or time's cycle");3 and what the authors believe lies beyond the ruins, below the surface of the earth. Both of these questions are integral parts of theories describing the earth's history and structure, and the driving forces behind them. The first question regarding the construction of narratives and their relationship to time is the basis for fierce scientific and theological controversy in early geology.4 The answer to the second question concerning the realm beyond the ruins is, on the other hand, something many thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nine- 2 / SULLIVAN teenth century agree upon. Whether they emphasize field observations or readings of Genesis, whether they construct time as arrow or cycle, these writers use metaphors of the feminine world below the ruins as the foundation for their narratives. They imagine a sexualized and "feminine" space, one that is "soft and moist," below the surface of the earth. There, natural structures are formed, pushed upwards and destroyed in ongoing processes of fluid creation. The construction of time in these texts thus occurs on a stage dominated by "heaps of ruins" above and lurking feminine forces below. In this essay, I examine the construction of time in both scientific and literary narratives written during the Age of Goethe. That is the era when scientists begin to realize that the earth has a very long history—a defining moment for the entrance into scientific modernity.5 This early anticipation of a greatly expanded temporal vista, what we now term "deep time," is a part of the more general revolution in understanding concepts of time and history taking place during and after the Enlightenment. While the full implications of this revolution only become widely recognized in the midnineteenth century, early indicators of its significance begin to appear already in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Z. Smith writes: In the mid-nineteenth century, European thought underwent a revolution with respect to time comparable to the revolution with respect to space that resulted from the Age of Exploration (or better, the Age of Reconnaissance ) in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Both revolutions produced a series of cognitive shocks to European thought and sensibility . The history of the prior, spatial revolution—above all the encounter with "other" cultures—and its effects on the human sciences has been insistently told. The history of the temporal revolution has yet to be fatly written.6 This is my goal here: to contribute to the early history of the "temporal revolution" through an investigation of geological and literary depictions of ruins in the Age of Goethe.7 In order to do that, I focus on how narratives of the earth and its ruins in this era depict time, how the term ruins ("Ruinen" or "Trümmer") in this context differs from the more traditional understanding of architectural ruins, and how these narratives relate to two German novellas from the same era, Ludwig Tieck's The Rune Mountain (1802) and Joseph von Eichendorff's The Marble Statue (1819). These novellas both have a central image of a ruined palace inside of which there lives an alluring and yet ancient woman whose character is...