The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves (review)

How has the mineral world informed the literary imagination? Jason Groves's new book addresses this question through an analysis of literary texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language authors. His project is "driven by an inquiry into the literary forms of geological intimacy … in and around German romanticism" (12); one might also call it a reading of wandering rocks in literature, as Groves highlights the motions and instabilities of stones in various literary texts. His chapters are organized around interpretations of selections from Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, and Benjamin, with an introduction and epilogue that situate his study within contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene and pose questions of literature and reading in relation to stones. Groves begins his study by situating it in contemporary environmentalist discussions. He modifies the claim that the earth is no longer the stable and secure home it once was by suggesting that a feeling of the earth's volatility is nothing new, and that this volatility can be tracked through an analysis of literature. As his title suggests, he employs psychoanalytic terminology as a point of departure for his inquiry and conceptualizes his study as "an attempt to discern a latent Anthropocene in nineteenth-century German-language fiction" (3). For this task, he employs the term "erratics," an important concept in his theoretical idiom that refers to the myriad movements, slippages, and miniaturizations of the earth, all of which disrupt the conventional view of the earth as stable, solid, and ontologically grounding. These displacements and disruptions constitute the principal point of inquiry for the study; the book's theoretical ambitions, however, lie in outlining a "New Modality of Theory" (15), a modality not rooted in the anthropocentric subjectivity of psychoanalysis. Rather, Groves looks to generate a type of ecocriticism that reads with an attunement to the inorganic. The inorganic is conceptualized not simply as a counterpart of life and human subjectivity, but something vastly more immense, our relation to it being radically asymmetrical. Confronting that vastness, along with the "deep time" of the earth, presents another blow to our sense of self-importance that Groves situates in line with Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud: he thus reads literature from this position of "humiliation."

Groves's reading of Tieck's Der Runenberg (1804), the focus of his first chapter, is illustrative of this theoretical shift. Contrary to readings of German Romanticism that would understand the ascents and descents on Rune mountain as explorations of the interior space of the self, Groves proposes a less anthropocentric reading. He emphasizes instead the numerous ways in which the earth makes itself heard in the text—as in the uprooting of the mandrake—and reads the tale's mineral imagery as a revelation of the "inhuman." The tablet of jewels that Christian receives in an important narrative moment is interpreted as exercising its own gaze. The mine, Groves finds, is not merely a metaphor for the self, but conditions subjectivity, the technology of mining having already been present in the recesses of selfhood. Articulating this shift in perspective, Groves states, "The romantic vision of the mines involves minerals envisioning the romantics" (32).

The work of Walter Benjamin figures prominently in the second half of Groves's study, particularly Benjamin's notion of shock, "Erschütterung," a term whose rich significations Groves patiently unpacks. Groves's chapter on Adalbert Stifter frames its argument as a critical response to Benjamin's claim that Stifter never registered shock in his work. Groves, instead, reads shock in Stifter's landscapes and their vibrant debris (Schutt), as well as in the narrative incongruities that Stifter's revisions produced. In his direct engagement with Benjamin, Groves emphasizes the destabilizing stone underfoot during Benjamin's various perambulations and cites as a most vivid illustration of shock a powerful short piece by Benjamin: "Downhill." Groves cites in entirety this piece that juxtaposes an image of Proust suddenly struck by grief from his grandmother...