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

In this slim and suggestive volume by Jason Groves, we find a pre-articulation of Anthropocene concerns and anxieties in 19^th-20^th century German letters, particularly in terms of what Groves calls its "mineral imaginary": its repository of geological tropes and images in which, as often as not, the ground beneath our feet is rendered strange and perhaps unwelcome. While not exactly a survey, The Geological Unconscious nevertheless focuses on three writers representing three distinct strata of German literary history: Goethe, Stifter, and Benjamin—in other words, Romanticism, (Biedermeier-style) Realism, and Modernism. Other figures, notably Ludwig Tieck and Bertolt Brecht, serve as additional touchstones, but for the most part Groves is content to fix upon the aforementioned trio, which the introduction and epilogue attempt to situate against the broader horizon of contemporary ecocriticism.

Though Groves is ultimately interested in how geology functions as figure, cryptonym, or Denkbilder (to anticipate Benjamin's usage), he begins in a decidedly literal vein. A surprising number of Romantic-era writers were educated at the Bergakademie at Freiberg, opened in 1765, or studied earth sciences at university. Mining, minerals, crystals, ores, and fossil fuels represented wholly conscious preoccupations (both scientific and aesthetic) for Novalis, Alexander von Humboldt, Brentano and others, but conscious preoccupations that quickly indexed "deeper" psychological ones. The contemplation of stone, of deep planetary history, is sublime and ecstatic (in the sense of 'standing outside oneself') but also correspondingly terrifying and diminishing: anthropocentrism stumbles over even the smallest pebbles. How much more perplexing then, are the large granite blocks scattered about Northern Europe—and Goethe's writings—called "foundlings" or "erratics": these not only confounded scientific explanation, but became markers or symbols of alienation.

These "erratics" became, according to Groves, a poetological problem and resource for Goethe. Granite, so often associated with durability and immobility, instead comes to signify the fundamentally frangible and volatile "life" of the planet. It moves, uncannily: either too slowly to register at any human scale or in immense (and equally unthinkable) cataclysms. In Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years in particular, Groves notes, it appears as "debris in transit" (58). Wilhelm and Felix's encounter with their old pal Jarno, who has taken to calling himself "Montan," evolves into a kind of symposium on geological and linguistic matters, a magical mystery tour that begins amongst the abandoned stone blocks of a dilapidated monastery and concludes on the granite peak of a nearby mountain. For Montan (and presumably for Goethe as well), stone represents absolute opacity, absolute muteness—something paradoxically ungrounded and erratic, shrugging off cultural enframement, so strange and radically withdrawn from human concepts as to be immune to language. It can thus only ever be an object signifying human resignation, relinquishment, or (per the novel's subtitle) "renunciation."

Rather than serving as prop in an otherwise human drama, stone becomes in Goethe that which resists assimilation into language, into narrative—a kind of agentive, recalcitrant presence. This notion in turn sets the stage for Groves' discussion of Adalbert Stifter in the following chapter. Focusing mainly on "Granite," a story in Stifter's 1853 collection, Many-Colored Stones, Groves offers a stark counter-reading of the Austrian writer's penchant for exhaustive landscape description. Stones which appear throughout the tale—and are otherwise chalked up to realism's endless aggregation of trivial details—increasingly seem "irradiated" in Groves' account, possessing an eerie liveliness and mobility. Groves here not only recasts Stifter's work in an extraordinary light, but Benjamin's as well. The final chapter of The Geological Unconscious hinges on a reworking of the latter's concept of "shock" in light of his criticisms of Stifter. For Benjamin, Stifter's minutely described landscapes, produced in the shadow of the Revolutions of 1848, register not so much a lack of shock as an inability to render or countenance shock in the first place. Groves' reading, however, offers an altogether different perspective in which stones and...