In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 1 Introduction This place affords legions of monstrous Plants, enough to confound all the methods of Botany ever hitherto thought upon. —James Wallace, “Part of a Journal” confounding plants Writing in 1700 about Darien, the site of an early and soon abandoned Scottish colony in Panama, the botanist James Wallace insisted on a confusion that narratives of imperial conquest and taxonomic mastery rarely specify, except as a prompt to greater efforts to create a taxonomic home and name for those plants that seem unwilling to recognize their place in a modern episteme in which mastery, not errancy, is the desired goal. I argue in this book that Wallace’s official report to the Royal Society on the strange species he encountered in the New World belongs to an extended counternarrative that within a century made romantic era thinking about plants and nature anything but a settled project. For romantic writers and botanists, as for Wallace, strange plants invited an attraction to material and figurative differences that pushed against epistemic mastery. It is an irony dictated by the physical form of a book that I must characterize the role of plant matter in romantic botany and its figurations without recourse to that matter. Imagine live plants and dried specimens crossing the globe, some sent in or with letters and across seas, sinking with ships that sink, arriving at destinations that have preserved them since, as best as local climates allow (and some certainly do not). Imagine now their current arrangement in cabinets of natural history museums, not as assorted curios that were arranged, more or less and at times whimsically, in earlier cabinets of natural history but as specimens associated with orders, genera, and species, along with whatever else might illustrate their traits: magazine clippings or early illustrations as engravings or drawings and notes about their taxonomic location and whatever disputes have arisen about the integrity of 2 c l a n d e s t i n e m a r r i a g e that location. Much has been preserved, and much lost, all of it matter, including plant matter. Such arrangements are not innocent of a plan; nor are they instances of an innocent , unscientific seeing, for plants as things cannot be dislodged from the circuits through which they have passed. Bill Brown’s hope that material presence might precede or survive cultural objectification as something more or “other” misses what the romantic history of plants insisted on.1 It is precisely the embeddedness of plants as matter and thing in romantic concepts, particularly as those concepts roll round and back to take in new particulars, that stages one of modernity’s most sustained arguments over whether things or their conceptual frameworks constitute a reliable index of what we know. Letters between botanists linger over plants, their habits, and locations. In the romantic era, plants did circulate, they were commodities and were treated as objects, yet they were also treated as particulars, their “curiosity” the delight of those who looked at them or at the illustrations that so many looked at in magazines and books. Against the pull of reification, for profit or pleasure, plants invited notice of their physicality and taxonomic pleasure in their particularity and difference. Here, I surmise, is an instance of a materiality kept in mind not by an unschooled mind but by minds trained to see particularly, even without the better microscopes that came into production in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Because even older microscopes allowed the same plant to appear very large or very small, looking at plants with or without magnification invited attention to things that could be so manipulated or, more precisely, things that could present a variation in structure and detail depending on whether they were or were not seen through a microscope. Brown quotes Theodor Adorno’s critique of a man (arguably Hegel made near-sighted by the demands of Spirit) who “looks upon thingness as a radical evil . . . he tends to be hostile to otherness, to the alien thing that has lent its name to alienation, and not in vain.”2 The romantic era attraction to botanical difference and Hegel’s wariness of that difference together acknowledged nature, and in particular plant nature, as an unsettled domain for matter and figure. For despite efforts to bring such plants home by folding them into a systematic and giving them names to insist on their taxonomic location, romantic writing about botany was repeatedly drawn...

Share