Editor's Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline,
Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources
Author(s): Laurie Shannon, Vin Nardizzi, Ken Hiltner, Saree Makdisi, Michael Ziser, Imre
Szeman and Patricia Yaeger
Source: PMLA , March 2011, Vol. 126, No. 2 (March 2011), pp. 305-326
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41414106
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12 6.2 J
Editor's Column: Literature in the Ages of
Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline,
Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources
Contributors
Power! Incredible ,
barbaric power! A blast , a siren of light
311 Laurie Shannon
within him, rending, quaking, fusing his
313 VinNardizzi
brain and blood to a fountain of flame,
316 KenHiltner
vast rockets in a searing spray ! Power! (419)
318 Saree Makdisi
321 Michael Ziser
This fountain of overwriting in Henry Roth s Call It Sleep captures the
323 Imre Szeman
incommensurability between the frail human form and the power of
electricity. After connecting himself to the rail powering trains that
run through New York s Lower East Side slums, Roths ten-year-old
protagonist, David, veers between life and death. His electrocution is
self-inflicted and deliberate. Earlier in the novel David longs for the
source of this "searing spray," for the fantasied angel-coal that burned
the prophet Isaiah clean: "where could you get angel-coal? Mr. Iceman, give me a pail of angel-coal. Нее! Нее! In a cellar is coal. But
other kind, black coal, not angel coal. Only God had angel-coal. Where
is God s cellar I wonder. How light it must be there" (231). Although
David also associates cellar coal with a promising disobedience, with
sexual and religious transgression, Roth is more skeptical; he explores
modernity's coal-made economy as a dark power tarnishing America s
promise as di goldene medine (the golden land). In a country that offers
opportunity, but at the cost of language loss and hard labor, survival
demands a constant entanglement with dirty energy.
This Editor s Column peruses the relation between energy resources and literature. Instead of divvying up literary works into
hundred-year intervals (or elastic variants like the long eighteenth
or twentieth century) or categories harnessing the history of ideas
(Romanticism, Enlightenment), what happens if we sort texts accordBiographical notes about the contribu-
ing to the energy sources that made them possible? This would mean
tors appear on page 326.
aligning Roth s immigrant meditations on power with Henry Adams s
J © 2OII BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA J 3О5
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Зоб Editor's Column [ PM LA
. . the weather, how
they'll
get there- and
blue-blood musings on "the". dynamo
and
the
all
the
time
they'll
get
there
anyway,
you see.
virgin," or comparing David s coal obsessions
.
.
.
'Well
now,'"
he
mimicked,
atI
don't
knowwith those of Paul, the coal miner's son in
maybe we shouldn't
gas in that station. I
D. H. Lawrence s Sons and Lovers.
We get
might
read recently in National Petroffious Petrojuxtapose Charles Dickens's tallow-burning
leum News that this kind of gas has a great
characters with Shakespeare's, or connect the
deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone
dots between the fuels used for cooking and
once told me it even had semi-official highwarmth in The Odyssey and in Gabriel Garcia
frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I
Márquez's Cien años de soledad.
just don't feel like it anyway . . .' Man, you dig
I first became interested in literature's
all this." He was poking me furiously in the
relation to energy when, piqued by America's
ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best.
energy extravagance, I picked up Jack Kerouac's On the Road and wondered, how of-
(209; 3rd ellipsis in orig.)
ten do Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise stop Moriarty isn't worried about the price of oil
for gas? As they criss-cross the country, do(or its Saudi and Venezuelan sources- a probthey worry about how much fuel they're us- lem for American business in the 1950s) or his
ing or the price of oil? Or is this is a question own fuel dependency, but is Kerouac? Is there
for the twenty-first century, for a nation thatan energy unconscious at work in this text?
survived the Arab oil embargo and the BP oilParadise starts his trip in the midst of the unspill and may not survive global warming? By known and unsaid. He travels in the wrong
1950 America's appetite for oil surpassed itsdirection (northeast) and stalls, "crying and
use of coal. By the 1970s America was con-swearing and socking myself on the head," in
suming seventy percent of the world's oil with "an abandoned cute English-style filling sta-
little thought about sustainability. In an eration," where he curses and cries "for Chicago"
of unprecedented material abundance, why(12-13). Are the gas station's empty pumps a
should Paradise, Moriarty, or a host of otherpremonitory metaphor for resource anxiety,
car-mad heroes worry about gas? It seemedfor what Pierre Macherey calls "that absence
as naturally there, as American, as the applearound which a real complexity is knit" (101)?
pie and ice cream Paradise eats "all the wayOr is an empty gas station just an empty gas
across the country" (49). On the Road's char-station- the halted traveler's bad luck, the
acters rarely experience the material world writer's reality effect? In Macherey 's theory of
as an impediment. For Paradise even cottonabsences, "[w]hat is important in the work is
picking becomes a lark. After allowing Mexi-what it does not say. . . . What the work cannot
can American friends to finish his picking,say is important, because there the elaboration
Paradise feels "like a million dollars; I was ad- of the arguments is acted out in a sort of jourventuring in the crazy American night" (100). ney to silence" (87). But is this always true?
Even though Paradise avoids material
Certainly Kerouac's characters are gas-
worries, On the Road is fascinated with clean aholics. Oil dependency created their world;
raw materials and their transformation into
each city, suburb, truck stop, and bite of pie
dirty culture ("before me was the great rawdepends on Standard Oil, Shell, Mobilgas, or
bulge and bulk of my American continent;Phillips 66. What happens if we rechart literary
somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New periods and make energy sources a matter of
York was throwing up its cloud of dust andurgency to literary criticism? What happens if
we think systematically about how On the Road
brown steam" [79]). Energy anxiety keeps
popping up. Hitching a ride east, Moriartyand its sibling texts relate to energy sources
rants about bourgeois drivers obsessed with across time and space? Within the genre of the
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12 6.2 j Editor's Column 307
1950s road narrative, what
does
it Let
mean
that
our
reading.
me chart
some coordinates for
John Updikes Mrs. Maple an
gets
excited literary
whentheory.
a
energy-driven
First, resource
muscular gas station attendant
rocks
car
as
depletion
is not her
new; its
a repetitive
fact. Native
he washes its windows (56)?
What
about
ElizaAmericans living in woodland regions moved
beth Bishops "The Moose" entire
and its
antipastoral
villages
whenever nearby forest stocks
reminder that in the twentieth
century
sacred
were depleted. A Jewish
holiday is built around
sight must be carbon-based?
an oil shortage and its miraculous cessation.
by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline. (173)
Second, energy sources have varied wildly
over time and space and include almost any-
thing that burns: palm oil, cow dung, random
animal carcasses mounted on sticks. When
the biblical God declared, "Let there be light,"
was oil from fish stocks or olives the source
of illumination?
We need to contemplate literature s relation
Third, energy use is uneven. The age of
to the raucous, invisible, energy-producing
atcoal is not
close to being over, is perhaps barely
oms that generate world economies and
motor
begun
(fig. 1). Looking at the "ages" of energy
Fig. 1
Coal reserves at the end of 2009. This chart uses two scales. The upper axis (black bars) shows the amount of coal available for
extraction in each country. The bottom axis shows how much longer the reserves will last at the 2009 production rate ("Burning
Ambitions"; The Economist; Economist Newspaper, 27 Jan. 2011; Web; 28 Mar. 2011).
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3o8 Editor's Column [ PMLA
Figures
2 and
3 enumerate
facets of A
will never be a tidy endeavor,
since
fuel
sources
use between
1775 and 2009. Sh
interact. Describing Chinaenergy
s burgeoning
econ-
look
at each of these systems when w
omy, Clifford Krauss writes
that
ine the culture they helped to produc
China's thirst for energy is Fourth,
leading thinking
it to build
about literature t
not only coal-fired power
also especially the f
theplants,
lens of but
energy,
wind farms, at a record pace, and to invest
of economies, means getting seriou
modes of production as a force field
in energy sources around the world, like oil
fields in Sudan, hydroelectric power in Burma
ture.1 The stolen electricity at the be
and natural gas fields in south Texas. Beijing's
of Invisible Man , the marching fir
ability to lift hundreds of millions of people
Macbeth
, the smog
into the middle class over
the coming
yearsin Bleak House
nure
fires
in
Jorge
Luis Borges s Laby
will be largely based on its ability to produce
the gargantuan
windmills
more energy, and its foreign
policies can also
be expected to follow its energy interests
in Don
would join a new repertoire of analy
FlG. 2
Consumption of energy by source in the United States, 1775-2009. "As for the social, economic, and ecological consequences of evolving energy
sources, they are too deep and numerous to do more than give suggestive examples. One of the most significant is the shift between muscle and
machine power. Horses, mules, and other draft animals were invaluable prime movers well into the first half of the 20th century, and despite
increasing reliance on fossil fuels and the engines they powered, the number of draft animals in the United States continued to rise until about
1920. As late as 1870, draft animals accounted for more than half of the total horsepower of all prime movers. Their displacement by fossil-fuel
engines meant, eventually, the disappearance from city and farm alike of millions of animals, along with the vast stables that housed the citybased animals, the mountains of dung they left on city streets, and many of the English sparrows that fed on the grain therein" (US, Dept. of
Energy, Energy Information Administration; "United States Energy History"; Annual Energy Review 2009; US, Dept. of Energy, Energy Information
Administration, 19 Aug. 2010; Web; 8 Feb. 2011).
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12
6.2
gized
into
by
Editor's
class
or
this
ergy
invisibility
been
three
the
text
visibilities
may
constitute
might
change
our
reading
thatme,
the writer
who treatsits
fuel as elucidation
a cultural
for
with
or
social
come
mythic abundance not
available
to the
ena of
symbolic
act
or
individual
as
must
of
texts.
asserts his or that
her class position
in a system
suggests
if we
first
we
ologeme
Without
networks
code or reality for
effect makes
examining
a symbolic move,
Jameson
parole,
unconscious?
also
ergy worker
who lives in carnal
exhaustion.
also
recognize
it
as an
ide-
utterance
But perhaps energy that
sources alsoreconstitutes
enter texts as
fields
of
force
that
have
causalities
outside
(or form,"
class conflict, as well as an "ideology
of
a
dream
sign
catcher
systems
anticipations
systems
zons"
that
captures
skirmishing
in addition
to) class conflicts and
commodity
"which
themselves
traces
wars.are
The touch-a-switch-and-it
s-light magic
of
modes
of electricalof
power,production."
the anxiety engendered by
represent
for
rev
di
Jameson,
w
Theerasures.
Political Following
Unconscious
has
bible
extended
Fredric
upon
a
309
materialism,
I want
to suggest
inquiry
about energy's
visibil-
methodologies.
long
Column
the political
unconscious
resource
conflict
breaking
and
visibility.
Fifth,
ity
1
"progressively
atomic residue, the odor of coal pollution,
wider
the
or
These
hori-
examining
in
which
viscous the
animality ways
of whale oil, the
technology
the
text enacts imaginary
resolutions
of real soof chopping
wood: each resource instantiates
cial contradictions
(76).
Does
this
of
a changing phenomenology that couldmodel
re-
Fig. 3
Consumption of sperm and whale oils combined in the United States, 1860-1902 (US, Commission of Fish and Fisheries; Part 28:
Report of the Commissioner for the Year Ending June 30, 1902; Washington: GPO, 1904; 204; Google Books; Web; 8 Feb. 2011).
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310 Editor's Column | PMLA
create our ideas about the
pyaeger@umich.edu
literary texts
and imre@ualberta.ca
relation to its originating modes
by 1 September
of production
2011.
as
quasi-objects.
Finally, in thinking about energy we
must make room for the miniature (that
Patricia Yaeger
faint odor of moose mingling with the smell
of gasoline) but also contemplate scale and
the complex relations between literature
and trade. Giovanni Arrighi points out
Note
that the "reshuffling of goods in space and
1. In Jameson's The Political Unconscious the text
time can add as much use-value ('utility')
becomes "a field of force in which the dynamics of sign
to the goods so reshuffled as does extracting them from nature and changing their
form and substance, which is what we understand by production in a narrow sense."
He quotes Abe Galiani: "Transport ... is a
kind of manufacture . . . but so is storage"
if it makes goods "more useful to potential
buyers" (177). Mrs. Maple's gas station at-
systems of several distinct modes of production can be
registered and apprehended," and no system should become a master code or allegory for its age (98). But since
fuel sources hover in the backgrounds of texts, if they
speak at all, to pursue an energy unconscious means a
commitment to the repressed, the non-dit, and to the
text as a tissue of contradictions. What is the best meth-
odology for pursuing literature's relation to energy? The
answer may lie in systems theory instead of the political
unconscious, or in new species of literary Marxism.
tendant washes her windshield while stand-
ing on a concrete-covered basin of stored
gasoline that may have come from Venezu- Works Cited
ela, Saudi Arabia, or Oklahoma. Does this
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. London:
Verso, 1994. Print.
change the libidinal or economic values
in Updike's text? How do we think about Bishop, Elizabeth. "The
Moose." The Complete Poems,
1927-1979. New York: Farrar, 1990. 169-73. Print.
utility and poetry together? Whatever the
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious : Narrative as a
answer, thinking about energy is already
Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.
embedded in older and stranger histories
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1976. Print.
than our own, and to unearth these histories the following essays explore the roles
of tallow, wood, coal, oil, human labor, and
energy futures in a variety of texts. In ad-
Krauss, Clifford. "In Global Forecast, China Looms Large as
Energy User and Maker of Green Power." The New York
Times. New York Times, 9 Nov. 2010. Web. 6 Apr. 2011.
Machery, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans.
dition, Imre Szeman and I plan to edit a
Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1978. Print.
Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. 1934. New York: Picador, 2005.
book on literature, energy, and the ways in
Print.
which thinking about energy sources might Updike, John. "Twin Beds in Rome." The Maples Stories.
transform our notions of literary periods.
New York: Everyman's Pocket Classics-Knopf, 2009.
We hope you'll send essays and proposals to 53-64. Print.
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12 6.2 J Editor's Column 311
Greasy Citizens and Tallow-Catches
LAURIE SHANNON
Hamlet, performing his self-styled
10).madmans
Reeky tallow would be replaced by the
script, forces his auditors to remember
disoil later acommandeered
by the large-scale
whaling industry
emerging in Massachusetts;
turbing truth that is normally repressed:
"A
man may fish with the worm that
stumping
hath eat
in England
of
for the United States
whaling
trade
in 1785, John Adams vaunted
a king, and eat of the fish that hath
fed of
that
"the
of the spermaceti whale" as yielding
worm" (Ham. 4.3.27-28). The logic
offat
circula"the clearest
and most beautiful flame of any
tion in the line recalls the Pythagorean
docis known in nature" (308). Untrine of the transmigration of substance
souls, a that
view
til then,
though, tallow was a cheap, readily
often mocked in early modernity
as equivaavailable
staple,
lent to insanity.1 But Hamlet s line
traces
no the yield of small-scale, pre-
practices of animal slaughter that
flight by the soul from one bodymodern
to another.
were local and
integrated into daily life. Sheep
Instead, it joins a traditional Christian
per-
overwhelmingly
supplied tallow in a woolspective on worldly vanities (a fortune
s-wheel
economy. Contemporaneous literargument) to an insistence on theproducing
equivalently
ary worms
contexts, to
however, persistently defy the
gross materiality of all flesh, from
official
of tallow as something
kings and back again. The economy
of confinement
circulation here charts not the routes of individu-
derived from "all creatures else." The most in-
ated souls but rather the disindividuating teresting tallow yielders were people.
In Shakespeare's environs, the ideal deer
paths of recycled energy.2 "We fat all creatures
else to fat us," his speech declaims, "and we fat to kill was one "in grease" or "in prime or
ourselves for maggots" (22-23). In Hamlet's pride of grease" ("Grease, sb"). The well-fed
recycling vision, fat is fuel - yet fat is (also) us. state of the herd in As You Like It provokes
To manage the disturbance this view their designation as "fat and greasy citizens"
presents between denominators of political (2.1.55). Yet even as deer are measured by
or entitled personhood and the commercial their commodifiable fat, their free motion and
metrics of exchange, we designate as "tallow" rightful claim to Arden's woods earn them a
only the byproduct of nonhumans- of Ham- name that countervails their commodificalet's "all creatures else." Tallow consists of
tion: "citizens." Thus, early modern animals
resist wholesale reduction to usable matter.
"animal fat (esp. that obtained from . . . about
Equivocations like this one, however, also
the kidneys of ruminating animals, now
work in reverse. Persistent recognition that
chiefly the sheep and ox), separated by melthuman matter is fat, oily, grease-laden, melting and clarifying from the membranes, etc.,
able, combustible, and consumable erodes
naturally mixed with it . . ." ("Tallow, sb").
tallow's separation of animal fat from human
While fat spoils when raw, once processed
flesh.
as tallow it becomes storable and portable,
a product used to seal boats, make soaps, The Comedy of Errors assesses Nell in taldress leather, bind foods (like haggis), and, low
of metrics: "she's the kitchen wench, and all
course, provide light through combustion.3
grease, and I know not what use to put her
Tallow candlelight ranked beneath that to
ofbut to make a lamp of her ... I warrant
wax, which was pricier; Cymbeline disparages
her rags and the tallow in them will burn a
winter" (3.2.93-99). Falstaff affords
"the smoky light / That's fed with stinking Poland
tallow," calling it "base and illustrous" (1.6.109repeated blurrings of personhood and oily
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312 Editor's Column [ PM LA
repress
about fuel: we are as
substance. Although lean nomenclatures
deer were
properly
as "allacreatures
"rascals," quibbles make combustible
Falstaff
"fatelse."
rascal" (i.e., a plump YorkshireThe
tea
literary
cake);
apotheosis
a "fatof the bodycandle
metaphor
comesfrom
in Charles Dickens's
kidneyed rascal" (indexing
the
place
House
Mr. Krook,
who combusts
which tallow was drawn); Bleak
and
anwith
"oily
rascal"
(Wiv. 2.2.5-6; 1H4 2.2.5,(appropriately
2.4.521).4
In
enough)
in aThe
mercantile setting among the
commodities of
Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff
isinscrutable
a beached
his collected
rag and bottle shop.
Soot falls "like black
whale whose oil might be
(2.1.6162); "a barrow of butcherfat,"
s offal"
(3.5.5);
and
and a "stagnant,
sickening
oil" leaves a
"dark greasy coating
the walls and ceil"the fattest" stag "i' the forest,"
whoonmight
"piss his tallow" (expend his
ing";
fat
Krook's
or death
energy)
by "Spontaneous
in
Com-
the exertions of "rut-time"
(5.5.12-15),
as in
the
bustion"
is "engendered
the corrupted
uncongealed metaphors undermine
humours of the vicious
his body
status
itself" (316-20).
as subject. As Wendy Wall
In Bleak
specifies,
House , this event
"[T]he
presents a "dreadplay deflates [Falstaff's] ful
bodily
mystery" pretensions
for a coroner (323). Combustiby making him into manageable
bility is no longer a domestic
familiar trope reflecting
goods" (116-17). Seeking Falstaff,
Prince
palpable knowledge
of the Hal
human body's
shouts, "Call in ribs, call combustible
in tallow,"
and
Falstores of energy. From the whale
oil that lubricated
the machines
of the Indusstaff enters to vivid insults
climaxing
with
"whoreson, obscene, greasy
trial tallow-catch."5
Revolution (retrieved by ships whose
A tallow-catch Falstaff is a container of
journeys recast notions of space and time) to
commodifiable fat. When called "a candle,particle physics and nanoengineering (which
the better part burned out," Falstaff con-recast space and time again), Western culture
firms himself a "wassail candle ... all tallow"
has transitioned to forms of energy whose
(2H4 1.2.155-58). Noting the contempt that origins are opaque to ordinary perception,
makes a lowly Ben Jonson character "an un- whose material workings are comprehended
savoury snuff" (i.e., "a tallow candle quickly only by specialists, and whose business operaburning itself out"), Gail Kern Paster exca- tions are shielded and securitized. One result
vates the humoral economies enabling the seems clear. Literally visceral knowledge of
conceit (222). The trope of the human body where energy comes from, or what energy is,
as a combustible candle also had prominent has been substantially extinguished.
elite precedents. John Foxe s Book of Martyrs
(1563) recorded the Protestant Hugh Latimer's proclamation from the stake: "We shall
this day light such a candle by God s grace in
England, as (I trust) shall never be put out"
(154). Elizabeth herself (decorously adjusting
the metaphor to wax but preserving the logic)
claims, "I have . . . been content to be a taper
of true virgin wax, to waste myself and spend
Notes
1. See the Pythagorean "sanity" test crazily administered to Malvolio in Twelfth Night (4.2.49-59).
2. For the related cycle from "dust to dust" in Hamlety
see De Grazia, ch. 2.
3. The Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers, char-
my life that I might give light and comfort to tered in 1462, ranks just below the wax chandlers' company
those that live under me" (347). Both of these in the livery system. The present-day tallow chandlers, ac-
self-expending candles are imagined to burn
for public benefit. The trope thus works both
ways, representing prodigal waste and public
self-sacrifice, just as it reveals what official
cording to their Web site, "have . . . built up close links with
energy company BP, on the basis of a shared interest in heat
and light" ( Worshipful Company ; emphasis mine).
4. For deer nomenclatures and full discussion of "ras-
cal Falstaff," see Berry, ch. 5.
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12 6.2 j Editor's Column 313
Elizabeth I. "Final Bevington's
Speech before Parliament." Collected
5. 1H4 2.4.110-11, 225-26, amending
"keech" to the First Folio's "catch." Numerous modern
Works. Ed. Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth
editions follow earlier amendments of "catch" to "keech," Rose. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. 346-51. Print.
or lump; "chest," "ketch," and "cask" are other alternaFoxe, John. Foxe's Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives. Ed.
tives but seem unnecessary (Clark and Wright 277).
John King. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
"Grease, sb." Def. lb. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd
ed. 1989. Print.
Works Cited
Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the
Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Adams, John. "To Secretary Jay." The Works of John Adams, Print.
Second President of the United States. Ed. Charles Fran-
cis Adams. Vol. 8. Boston: Little, 1853. 302-10. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shake-
Berry, Edward. Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and
speare. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Longman,
1997. Print.
Social Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.
"Tallow, sb." Def. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd
Clark, William George, and William Aldis Wright, eds.
ed. 1989. Print.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Vol. 4.
Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and
Cambridge: Macmillan, 1864. Print.
De Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cam- English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge:
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
The Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers. Worshipful
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and
Evans, 1853. Print.
Company of Tallow Chandlers, n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
Wooden Slavery
VIN NARDIZZI
timeProjected
of shortage in England. This resonance
"There's wood enough within."
hasProspero's
fallen off our cultural radar because, unfrom offstage, this response to
like Shakespeare
summoning launches The Tempest's
Cali- and his contemporaries,
most of
us emin the global North no longer live
ban into literary history (1.2.315).
Its
in the
"ageslave
of wood."2 Were we to substitute
phasis on adequacy indicates that
the
for "wood" in Calibans debut line, we
has completed his work, and its"oil"
disgruntled
tone stems from this sense of closure and
would more readily comprehend that the
line
evokes a necessary energy source and
suggests an insubordination later elaborated
in Caliban's plan to murder Prospero andthat the extraction and use of energy sources
burn his books. Such acts of defiance have
can cause environmental devastation. I sug-
made Caliban, as Jonathan Goldberg says, gest that thoughts about supply, source, and
"a byword for anticolonial riposte" (ix). Butprice may also have crossed the minds of The
Tempesťs earliest audience members when
sponse? In pursuing this question, which may Caliban offers this accounting of the islands
what of the wood mentioned in Caliban s re-
seem slight when weighed against the heft of energy security.
The age of wood is, I trust, an epochal
empire and resistance to it, we discover that
Caliban keys us into the indispensability of designation unfamiliar to literary scholars.
wood as the primary energy source under- In environmental history, it names a swath
pinning subsistence and manufacture in the of time that stretches from prehistory to the
preindustrial era.1 Moreover, the response en- second half of the eighteenth century, when
codes a fantasy of plenty articulated during a coal generally replaced charcoal (an energy
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314 Editor's Column [ PM LA
a model.
He cone-shaped
surveys an array of literatures
source plucked from the ashes
of
to
demonstrate
the transhistorical
force that
piles of lumber that had been charred)
in inforest has exerted
the imagination. My
dustrial iron making and the
fuelwood
inonhomes,
where it heated food and consumer alike.
sense, however, is that "wooden-age litera-
ture" tends to represent spectacular employSometimes dubbed the wooden age (Warde 6),
this ligneous era bursts the strictures of tra-ments of this energy source, from the funeral
ditional nomenclature for Anglo-American
pyres of ancient epic to public burnings of
literary periods, outstripping epochs ret-presumed heretics, and eschews its routine
uses in hearth and home. When these munrospectively parceled into temporal units
(the [long] eighteenth century) or labeled fordane practices come into view, special circumstances frame their inclusion. Robinson
cultural movements (the Renaissance ), monarchies (the age of Elizabeth), or position in
Crusoe remarks that he "found it absolutely
relation to other periods (the Middle Ages
necessary to provide a place to make fire in,
and early American). To better apprehend theand fewel to burn" (Defoe 80), but although
sweep of the age of wood, we could do worse
he is a meticulous recorder of everyday life, we
never see him search for either on the island.
than to reflect on the life span of two of the
Instead, he mentions these matters in connecplanet's most mature organisms: Methuse-
tion with other events: his illness (106, 108),
lah, a bristlecone pine in California, and Old
Tjikko, a Norway spruce in Sweden. Dendrohis firing of pottery and first baking of bread
chronological research has determined that
(132-34), and his discovery of a cave (182-83).
these trees are roughly 4,800 and 9,550 years
Are his energy sources, despite being "absoold, respectively ("Swedes"). They are colossal
lutely necessary" to survival, paradoxically
measuring sticks for approximating the age of
not significant enough for literary represen-
woods breathtaking temporal reach.
tation? Are they too prosaic to be described
The counterpart of the era's mind-in their own right? Undertaking a project for
boggling temporal coordinates is its geofuelwood and charcoal as sprawling as Hargraphic range. In a discussion of colonial
rison s might prove well-nigh impossible.
Brazil, Shawn William Miller observes that
Calibans debut line is no exception to
"prior to 1800 one had almost no place to this
go representational rule. Yet it does not exbut the forest to obtain a practical source haust
of the presence of wood in the play: Prosheat" (3). Case studies of wood dependency pero
in tells Miranda that they "cannot miss"
Caliban because he "does make our fire" and
other preindustrial locales- colonial America
"[f]etch in our wood" (1.2.312-13); Caliban
(Perlin), Easter Island (Diamond), England
(Nef), Germany (Warde), Japan (Totman), andthrows down a bundle of wood at the start
the Venetian Republic (Appuhn) - and comof one scene (2.2), and Ferdinand, the play s
parative accounts that start with the despoil-mock slave, hauls a log onstage in the next
ing of woodlands in the ancient and the early(3.1). This log is a synecdoche for the "[s]ome
modern worlds bear witness to Millers thesis
thousands" that he must "pile . . . up" (3.1.10).
(Richards; Williams). In so doing, both kindsWhy might this energy source have such stage
of environmental history have helped to color prominence? It may well be, as There Will Be
Blood (2008) and Avatar (2009) suggest, that
Given the temporal and geographic mag-energy sources- oil and "unobtanium," re-
in the map of a global forest that once was.
nitude of the wooden age and the diversespectively, in these films - rise to a level of
expertise that its study entails, how do wedetailed representation during times of enbring into focus the grain of literatures dating ergy insecurity. My larger project regards
from this era? Robert Pogue Harrison offersShakespeare s wooden Os- his playhouses -
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12 6.2 J Editor's Column 315
"Evergreen
Shakespeare's Theatre in
as uniquely self-reflexive progress,
spaces
for Fantasies:
meditatthe Age of Wood."
ing on wood: its expense, its indispensability,
its scarcity, and its centrality to dreaming. In
this framework, The Tempest proves an imag-
Works Cited
inative record of an unprecedented wood
Appuhn, Karl. A s
Forest
on the Sea: Environmental
Experscarcity gripping Shakespeare
England
and
tise in Renaissance
Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
a complex response to energy
insecurity.
UP, 2009. Print.
Prices for this staple good were acceleratAvatar. Dir. James Cameron. Twentieth Century Fox,
ing when The Tempest was
performed
2009. first
Film.
(Williams 170), and polemics
describing
an Ross. LonDefoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Angus
don: Penguin, 1985.
Print.
unremedied shortage predicted
ecopolitical
Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
collapse.3 In a pamphletDiamond,
contemporaneous
Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.
with the play, Arthur Standish articulates the
Goldberg, Jonathan. Tempest in the Caribbean. Minne-
potential fallout: "no wood no Kingdome" (2).
apolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.
How might audience members
affected
by
the of CivilizaHarrison, Robert
Pogue. Forests:
The Shadow
tion.
Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1993. Print.
scarcity have apprehended
the
abundance
of
Miller, Shawn William.
Fruitless could
Trees: Portuguese
wood on The Tempesťs island,
which
Con-
servation and Brazil's Colonial Timber. Stanford:
be put to various uses (from heating to shipStanford UP, 2000. Print.
building), and the fact that Prospero ships off
Nef, J. U. The Rise of the British Coal Industry. 2 vols.
to Europe without any of it?
The
Tempesťs
deLondon:
Archon,
1966. Print.
piction of "wooden slavery"
(3.1.62)
thus
Pearson,
Chris. "'The may
Age of Wood':
Fuel and Fighting in
French
Forests,
1940-1944." Environmental
History
have stoked colonialist desire
for
restocking
a
11 (2006): 775-803. Print.
depleted resource long before Caliban spoke
on behalf of anticolonial resistance. From
Perlin, John. A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and
Civilization. Woodstock: Countryman, 2005. Print.
our vantage, it also emblematizes a historical
Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environtendency to take essential energy sources for mental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley:
U of California P, 2003. Print.
granted and simultaneously to mobilize them
in the exercise of power, as Prospero does.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason
Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. 3rd Arden Ser. Lon-
don: Cengage Learning, 1999. 139-286. Print.
Standish, Arthur. The Commons Complaint. London,
1611. Print.
Notes
"Swedes Find 'World's Oldest Tree.'" BBC News. BBC
News, 17 Apr. 2008. Web. 12 Sept. 2010.
There Will Be Blood. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Ghou-
1. In this epoch, wood was also a primary building
material (Williams).
lardi, 2008. Film.
Totman, Conrad. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Prein2. Pearson shows that petroleum cars can be retrofitted to run on wood. Youngs argues that the age of wood dustrial Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Print.
Warde, Paul. Ecology, Economy and State Formation in
has not ended, and wood's ubiquity as a source of energy
in so-called Third World nations bears this proposition Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
out. The matter of "energy simultaneity" is outside the 2006. Print.
scope of this piece.
Williams, Michael. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory
3. 1 elaborate the likely causes of this shortage and the
to Global Crisis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.
Youngs, Robert L. "Every Age, the Age of Wood." Interproposed solutions to it, which included colonial plantations in Ireland and the New World, in my manuscript in disciplinary Science Reviews 7.3 (1982): 211-19. Print.
This content downloaded from
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3i6 Editor's Column í PMLA
Coal in the Age of Milton
KEN HILTNER
On a foggy morning in 1578, "greved
and noted in 1661, by midAs John Evelyn
anoyed" by the strong smell of
coal
smoke
century
a variety
of species of local plants in
in the air surrounding Buckingham
Palace,
London had
already become extinct because
Queen Elizabeth refused to travel
of coalinto
smokeLonand the resultant acid rain (7).
don (Lemon 612). The immediate
problem
Similarly,
by 1627 it was realized that acid
was easily resolved: invoking rain
an ordinance
was "tainting the pastures, and poisonregulating the large-scale burning
of fish
coal,
ing the very
in the Thames" (Bruce 270).
which had been on the books since
1307,
auLondon's signature
fog exacerbated the situthorities quickly arrested andation,
imprisoned
since it held sulfur dioxide close to the
a local Westminster brewer and
dyer.
Theand deadly cloud, which
ground in a damp
larger issue, however, would notaffected
go away.
Thejust living things. Late in
more than
reason was simple: as Edmundthe
Howes
noted
1620s, Charles I realized that "the corrodin 1615, because there was a "great scarcity of
ing quality of the Coale Smoake, especially
wood throughout the whole kingdom, and
in moist weather," was eating away the sur-
not only the City of London, but in all havenfaces of even stone buildings, including, as he
towns" (Howes and Stow 33), coal use was
noted, Saint Paul's Cathedral (Dugdale 134).
skyrocketing throughout England. While we
London's air pollution problem appears
might imagine that air pollution from fossil
in Renaissance literature as well. Although
fuels would not become a major urban probthe first work to take urban air pollution as
lem until the era of Blake or Dickens, it pre-
its principal subject, Evelyn's Fumifugium ,
ceded them by at least two centuries. In fact,
did not appear until 1661, a great many ear-
the first chimney sweeper s song was penned
lier (as well as contemporary) texts refer to
not by Blake but by William Strode, in 1635.
the issue, if often indirectly. London's coalBy the time Milton was writing Paradise
smoke problem is alluded to in such canoniLost , the problem was massive and deadly.
cal works as The Faerie Queene and Paradise
While collecting data for London's Bills of
Lost , as well as in enormously popular poems
Mortality in 1665, John Graunt noticed a
of the time, like John Denham's Coopers Hill
spike in London s death rate when
compared
(Hiltner, What , ch. 5). Moreover, a range of
writers
in the by
period, including Margaret
connected to respiratory illness caused
Cavendishpeople
and Kenelm Digby, considered
coal smoke. As he succinctly noted,
the of
health
risks of coal smoke, while the mas"cannot at all endure the smoak
London,
sivebut
mining
industry
not only for its unpleasantness,
for
the that procured all this
coal
appears
in
the
writings of John Leland,
suffocations it causes" (394). Because Lon-
with that of the countryside, which he quickly
John Taylor
("the water poet"), Celia Fiennes,
doners almost exclusively burned
a noxious,
Milton, and many others. Even the choice of
sulfurous form of coal known at the time as
"sea coal" and the population of the city was the word brimstone (which referred to sulfur
growing at an astonishing rate (perhaps as and coal) for the 1611 Authorized King James
much as tenfold from 1500 to 1700), Graunt translation of Hebrew and Greek words sigrealized that respiratory illness caused by
naling, respectively, "Jehovah's breath" and
coal smoke was quickly becoming one of "divine incense" may have been because it
London's leading causes of death. And the was thought that the most effective way to
danger was not limited to human beings.
imagine hell was to allude to London's hellish
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12
6.2
air
Editor's
Column
317
pollution.
In
countries
true that
air pollution
in nineteenth-century
cities like Manchester
(and Dickens'sis
fictiextensively,
hell
used
sulfurous
wher
rarely
air
pollution.
tious "Coketown")
was largely industrial in
Dante
example,
contains
no
such
refe
origin, industry is not the
only possible
source
When
Milton
writes
hell
of air pollution.
The citizens of earlyabout
modern
Lost
lem
the
hell
,
he
in
a
on
in
air
operation
that
the
thing
that they had been doing for centuries
before the Renaissance but now
did almost
mountain
that
"[s]hon
a
scurff"
and
s
First,
mining
griesly
the
invokes
London
London caused it themselves
by burning coal
variety
for cooking and of
residentialways.
heating, some-
(a
sulphurous
exclusively (since wood was largely unavail- deposi
able) and
at a feverisha
rate. smokestack
Because London s
top,"
like
rowling
smoke"
(1.674,
damp winters
were associated with a range
of
air
of
Milton
Beelzebub
6
hell
with
a
sulfurous
illnesses and
a warm fire was believed
to be
s
hell
so them
bad
among the best is
ways of fending
off, the
first
cheap appeal oflearns
coal proved irresistible.of
As I
that
w
earth
there
might
"purge
off
t
have argued, this presented
Londoners with
that
earth as
"soft
delicious
ai
dilemma.
Knowing the health
risks of the
those
who
"breathe
her
balm,
smoke but believing coal fires their
best deof
these
corrosive
fires"
(2.40
fense against winter sicknesses, Londoners
Beelzebub
s kept
speculation,
when
a life grip on a practice that was killing
eling
rives in Milton s Eden he behaves like some-
one from a "populous City" who has ventured
them (Hiltner, "Renaissance Literature").
Renaissance London's air pollution may
to the countryside to freely "breathe / among also escape our attention because English
the pleasant Villages and Farmes" (4.445-48). writers were sometimes reluctant to confront
In setting up the description in this way, Mil- the issue directly, for fear of maligning their
ton nicely draws a parallel between hell and a
capital city, which, some of them argued,
"populous City," like London, whose air is so was quickly becoming the rival of Paris and
polluted that its citizens desire to leave it to Rome, neither of which had comparably polbreathe pure country air. The desire to leave luted air. Some went so far as to outlandishly
the smell and dangers of coal smoke to enjoy
misrepresent the facts (even if they deceived
the fresh air of the countryside was not limited
no one who had ever visited London, even
to Milton s Satan and Queen Elizabeth; rather,
today), as did Thomas Gainsford in 1618: "in-
as John Stow made clear in 1598, it was felt stead of foggy mists and clouds . . . you have
by thousand of Londoners, who, on holidays in London a sun-shining and serene element
and at other opportunities, would leave their
homes to "recreate and refresh their dulled
for the most part" (qtd. in Manley 44).
As ecocritics and historians are increas-
spirits in the sweete and wholesome ayre" of ingly making clear, a range of truly modern
the rural surrounds (127).
environmental issues, such as large-scale ur-
Since so many Renaissance writers, including Milton, mentioned the issue, it is
ban air pollution from the burning of fossil
fuels, first emerged in the early modern pe-
riod. With these problems came a number
ten unaware of early modern London s coal- of questions that remain with us today. With
useful to ask why literary critics today are of-
smoke problem. I suspect this is partly because
we tend to associate such environmental prob-
respect to coal and to fossil fuels in general,
the most important of these may be as rel-
lems with technological modernity and the
evant now as it was then: how do we reduce
so-called Industrial Revolution. While it is
our dependency on something that endangers
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3i8
Editor's
plants,
Column
animals,
and
lieve essential to life?
í
PMLA
Writings
of Sir William Petty. Ed.
Charles Henry
Hull.
ourselves
but
that
Vol. 2. Cambridge, 1899. 314-435. Print.
Hiltner, Ken. "Renaissance Literature and Our Contem-
we
be
porary Attitude toward Global Warming." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 16.3
(2009): 429-41. Print.
Works Cited
the Environment. Ithaca: Corne
Bruce, John, ed. Calendar of State Papers , Domestic Series , of
the Reign of Charles L, 1627-1628. London, 1858. Print.
Denham, John. Expans d Hieroglyphicks : A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill. Berkeley: U
of California P, 1969. Print.
Dugdale, William. The History of St. Paul's Cathedral in
London. . . . London, 1658. Print.
Evelyn, John. Fumifugium; or, The Inconvenience of the Aer
and Smoak of London Dissipated. Together with Some
Remedies Humbly Proposed. London, 1661. Print.
Graunt, John. Natural and Political Observations upon
the Bills of Mortality. 5th ed. 1676. The Economic
Howes, Edmund, and John Stow.
ali Chronicle of England. Londo
Lemon, Robert, ed. Calendar of
Series, of the Reigns of Edwar
1547-1580. London, 1856. Print
Manley, Lawrence, ed. London in
An Anthology. London: Croom
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. T
R. Flannagan. Boston: Houghton
Stow, John. The Annales; or, G
gland. Vol. 1. London, 1598. Pr
Strode, William. "Chimney- S
330-31.
Empire and Human Energy
SAREE MAKDISI
Four
Zoas. Blake's vision of bodies chained
First Trades & Commerce ships &
armed
vessels he builded laborious
together and marshaled for the productive
To swim the deep & on the Land children are purposes determined and dictated by a dessold to trades
Of dire necessity still labouring day & night
till all
Their life extinct they took the spectre form
in dark despair
And slaves in myriads in ship loads burden
the hoarse sounding deep:
Rattling with clanking chains, the Universal
Empire groans . . . (360-61)
potic power - a vision of a world system literally powered by human energy, while tied,
perhaps, to other forms of energy as well - is
of enduring interest to us. For one thing, it
emerged at a moment of profound transition
in England and around the world, a moment
that set the stage for our own era, a moment
in which the imperial investment in human
energy was changing qualitatively and quantitatively,
William Blakes 1797 vision of empire
as a as more and more peoples around
the world were being violently yoked together
global system of brutalization and exploitaserve
tion reminds us that global empire,tofor
all the same system of production and
its interest and investment in other forms
of
exchange
and as - more palpable to Blake nature, cultures, and lifeworlds of Enenergy - water, wind, steam, oil - has the
always
were being altered beyond recognition
depended most on human energy: thegland
human
bysubjua shift in how human energy was tapped.
power mobilized in warfare, conquest,
More immediately, however, we ought to
gation, and, above all, the form of economic
recognize
the transformations captured by
production so powerfully captured in
The
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12 6.2 1 Editor's Column 319
Blake not only because
they
set
the
stage
known
as the big six
Romantic
poets,
but that for
formulation
was never, for all kinds
of reathe fully integrated,
inescapably
globalized
world that we inherited from the 1790s but
sons, very productive. We could just as easily
also because the transformations and dis-
read Blake in a seventeenth- century context,
locations of human energy initiated in his
in the company of antinomians and Ranters,
time have continued unabated into our own,
or in a twentieth-century one, in the company
of futurists, vorticists, and anarchists. Literin ways that affect even the readers of this
journal. After all, the closest antecedents arily,
of
he is in many senses closer to T. S. Eliot
or
Wilfred
Owen than to Charlotte Smith or
today s academics and would-be academics
are arguably the English weavers of Blakes
John Keats; visually, he has far more in common with Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch
time, whose training and skill meant nothing in an age of steam-powered machinesthan with Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua
yoked to de-skilled mechanics. The recently
Reynolds (the president of the Royal Academy,
whom he so ferociously despised); aurally, he
announced closure of several humanities de-
partments at the University at Albany, State
is close, on the one hand, to Beethoven (an al-
University of New York; the elimination of most exact contemporary) and, on the other
hand, to John Coltrane and Omette Coleman,
the philosophy department at the University
of Middlesex; and the looming downsizing who ought, at face value, to have nothing to
do with him; philosophically, he is far closer
English university system are only the most to Benedict de Spinoza than to his contemporecent reminders that those contemplating raries Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; and
joining the ranks of the world's last arti- politically he is the ally of Gerrard Winstansans (specialized, more or less free to deter- ley rather than of Tom Paine. There is no real
of the humanities and social sciences in the
mine their own hours and rhythms of work, way, given the traditional schema of literary
working in self-motivated or shifting cycles
periods, to think through these kinds of rerather than according to an abstract insti- lations, even at the level of the literary, never
tutional schedule) must contend with the mind the visual and the aural.
continuing unraveling of a whole culture of
The great theme running through Blake's
academic teaching and research and its re- work is his engagement with the ontological
placement by a system of educational mass capacity of empire, its drive to organize time
production dependent on exploited tempo- and space and to situate human bodies in rerary and migrant laborers whose individual lation to them in order to most productively
skills and research interests are of little im-
tap into and devour human energy- and,
portance to managers and administrators of course, he engages with the resistance to
(sixty-eight percent of university teaching
that power, the refusal of those forms of or-
in the United States is now carried out by
ganization, temporality, subjectivity, and, in-
transitory, non-tenure-track faculty mem- deed, history. Blake's interest in what I have
bers ["Background Facts"]).
elsewhere called "impossible history" has
Perhaps his radically destabilizing interest in the ontological formation and deforma-
precisely to do with his refusal to accede to
the demands of the normative history deter-
tion of bodies, power, and human energy in mined by, and tied to, the ontological disposirelation to power is what makes it so difficult
to locate Blake in the traditional schema of
tions determined by power, and by the power
of global empire above all: the normative hisliterary periods, to which we have become too tory that structures and defines our underaccustomed. It wasn't until the 1950s that he
standing of the past by framing it in terms
was drafted into the company that became of the conceptual and ideological categories
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320 Editor's Column [ PM LA
appropriate only to a particular
mode of
that have fashionably
comeexisto define and contence - the one we are confronted
tain, instead of
with
being defined
today.
and contained
The struggle between powerful
by, literary studies),
ontological
we ought, perhaps, to
dispositions of human energy
start paying and
closer attention
the conto what Giovanni
tinual resistance to them has been carried
Arrighi identified as the long twentieth cen-
tury-that is, the age of capital not merely as
on from the fifteenth century to our time,
a world system but as a system that made the
though it intensified during the great trans-
world recognizable as a world by globalizing
formations that took place during Blakes lifeit, largely in the pursuit of more and more effitime. We need an alternative way of thinking
through the history of the possible and cient
the modes of devouring human energy, irreof the price paid by humanity. And in
impossible, a different way of accessing spective
the
that long, overarching period we will find and
past, and a different way of understanding
connect together acts of resistance, works at
our own temporality and historicity as well.
If I have focused on Blake in this conodds with their times, and writers and artists
text, then, it is not because of my interest who
in refused to go along with the triumphant
him on his own terms but rather for what his
march of universal empire.
Here, then, is a way to reconceptualize
refusal of historical and periodizing norms
teaches us about history and periodization literary history, in terms of the shifts and disthemselves. His work pushes us to consider locations of, and moments of resistance to, the
the processes of imperial investment in hu- extraction of human energy by global empire
man energy - rather than other modes of en-
in the long twentieth century: a century that
ergy, from whale oil to nuclear power - and has outlasted its time and carried on into ours.
how those processes and their accompanying
forms of ontology and power (and, always,
the resistance to them) define and structure
history and periodization, including literary Works Cited
history and periodization.
Blakes example suggests the need to re-
think the categories of literary (and other
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money,
Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso,
1994. Print.
forms of) periodization in a way that can clar- "Background Facts on Contingent Faculty." American
Association of University Professors. Amer. Assn. of U
ify and bring to the surface the mystified imperial investment in human energy during the
overarching transformation running from the
fifteenth century to the twenty-first. For all
Professors, n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2011.
Blake, William. The Four Zoas. The Complete Poetry and
Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New
York: Doubleday, 1988. 300-407. Print.
that we have heard of the long eighteenth cen-
Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History
tury and the long nineteenth (formulations
of the 1790s. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.
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12 6.2 J Editor's Column 321
Oil Spills
MICHAEL ZISER
Although coal and oil are chemically
similar
ing economic
drivers. As a huge technological
and equally significant in the modernization
leap, ubiquitous commodity, basis for new
of the West, their geologic and historical
par- and power, and pervasive informs of wealth
ticularities have produced radicallyfrastructural
differentcontext for cultural production,
meanings in culture and the arts. The
oil is mining
aesthetically and ideologically excessive.
of coal, which must be brought by brute
force modern oil texts, like John J.
The earliest
from seams buried far below the
ground,
McLaurin's
Sketches in Crude-Oil (1896), a
epitomizes the zero degree of labor
that
so omnium-gatherum history
somewhat manic
fascinated many nineteenth-century
intelof American oil exploration in the nineteenth
lectuals and underscores the ultimate
depencentury,
foreground the adventure of exploradence of even an advanced industrial
society
tion in a return to the mineral imperialism
on the input of human energy. Little
wonder
associated
with earlier forms of resource co-
that many of the most profound depictions
lonialism. The of
film and television industries
physical labor (Émile Zola's Germinal
[1884],
in particular
have emphasized this dimenBaldomero Lilo s Sub terra [1904]) and of the
sion, regularly translating complex narrapoliticization of labor (Upton Sinclair's King
tives about the dawn of the oil age into more
Coal and The Coal War [1917, 1976], George
conventional frontier dramas of primitive
Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier [1937], Daaccumulation. George Stevens's film adaptavid Peace's GB84 [2004]) emerged from the
tion (1956) of Edna Ferber's Giant (1952), for
pit. Oil, by contrast, is a liquid that in the
instance, preserves much of Ferber's deeply
classic scenario flows to the surface almost of
researched detail concerning the transition
its own accord, gushing out in all directions
from a sun-based economy (cattle) to a fossil-
and proposing an entirely different relation
fuel one, but it also structures itself around
among labor, consumption, and the body.
the oil strike as a symbolic masculine pos-
Once struck, oil returns so much more energy
sessive climax in a way that belies Ferber's
than is required to produce it that it becomes
primary interest in complex side effects and
an effectively costless substitute for human
aftereffects. Likewise, Paul Thomas Anderand animal labor. A "free gift of Nature to
son's brilliant film There Will Be Blood (2007)
capital" far exceeding what Marx (and other
fixates on the ferocious exertion of the will
nineteenth-century economists) thought it
required toto
"bring in a well," an emphasis
possible for a "raw material" to contribute
largely
absent from its source, Upton Sinclair's
economic production, it would seem
to justify
Oil! (745).
(1927). Sinclair's
novel is relatively uninalmost any degree of fetishization
At
terested
in the founding oilman; it focuses inpresent, oil dominates a fossil-fuel
economy
stead
on
the son, who represents the second,
that releases the energy equivalent of a quar-
inheriting generation of oil wealth. Sinclair
ter sun to the earth every day, commanding
cannily
saw that the greatest significance of oil
huge portions of the economic and
political
lay not often
in the way it reiterated a classic pioneer
domain in the process. Oil fortunes,
story but in the unexampled consequences of
disconnected from the socializing constraints
that characterized older forms of labor-based
the effortless wealth it brought: the changwealth, likewise contribute to a new, looser ing landscapes created by the automobile and
set of possibilities governing the relation be-
its necessary infrastructure; the tilt in sex-
tween the arts and literature and the subtend-
ual mores that the car allowed, especially to
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322 Editor's Column j PMLA
young women; the erosion
notedof
the ways
the
in traditional
which contemporary "world
labor movement in a world
literature"
ruled
- particularly
by a
Nigerian
newwriting logic of resource production
and in
consumpfollows closely
the wake of petroleum
tion; and the connection development,
between
oil-based
to the
point that the organizamechanical reproduction
tions
and
granting
contemporary
the international prizes that
forms of mass media (especially
are often a critical
print,
rung of radio,
the ladder for new
writers from former
colonies are funded
and film). This last association,
established
inand
staffed by oil
companies, which the
have, accordthe novel through plot points
involving
Hollywood film industry
ing and
to Wenzel,
radio
a stake in
evangeseeing these corners
of the world
represented
as less cosmopolitan
lism, is the most significant
thing
Anderson
preserves from Sinclair: in
the
andthe
more movie,
benighted than
thelink
biographies of
is made through reflexivemany
allusions
to the
of the writers
would hissuggest. Hence
tory of silent film and tothe
the
filmic
notice
given, formedium
example, to the osten-
itself. The mechanical reproduction
of of
mass
tatiously "rotten" English
Amos Tutuola s
The Palm-Wine
Drinkard and to the "animist
culture, which so exercised
key mid-century
realism" of the
London-bred Ben Okri.
cultural theorists like Walter
Benjamin
and
Theodor Adorno, is exposed
at moments
During
the same period like
that the prothese as something that duction
is rooted
not
merely
of oil was
taking
on a foreign and
in a vague "rise of the machine"
more
primitive cast, its but,
consumption
in the United
fundamentally, in the development
of
modStates was becoming
theasite
of an alternately
ern oil economy that drove
the
industrial
and accelerecstatic
and
apocalyptic jouissance
culture industries alike.
ated in the postwar period by huge national
Oil is not, of course, a merely American investments in the interstate highway system
phenomenon; many more nations than can and by the accompanying white flight to car-
be covered here have their own traditions of
dependent suburbs. The golden age of the
oil narrative, often involving their colonial road movie began with Peter Fonda's grim
holdings and their postcolonial spheres of in-
tale of gasoline-powered liberty, Easy Rider
fluence. Of texts that emerge from within the (1969). Copycat films, like Vanishing Point
major oil-producing powers, the most influen- (1971) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), kept the
tial by far is Abdelrahman Munif s five-book, fetishistic treatment of the combustion en-
Arabic-language epic Cities of Salt ( Cities of gine while eliding much of the social critique,
Salt , The Trench , Variations on Night and Day , paving the way for the purely recreational
The Uprooted , and The Desert of Darkness). and comedic road movies of the 1980s. In The
Written by a former oil engineer whose Saudi
Cannonball Run (1981), rebellion is directed
citizenship was revoked because he criticized only against the fifty-five-miles-per-hour
the alliance struck between Ibn Saud and
speed limit imposed as an austerity measure
foreign governments and corporations,after
Mu- the oil shocks of the 1970s, and Jean
nif s quintet details, from the perspective
Baudrillard
of
s America (1986) might, if one
credits oils role in producing the postmodthe Arab nonelites caught up in it, the rapid
conversion of nomadic Bedouin culture into a
ernist emphasis on the detachment of signifisubaltern modernity with the discovery of thecation from its material foundations, be best
Ghawar oil field and the construction of the
Ras Turana shipping port in the early 1950s.
historicized as a byproduct of the oil glut of
the mid-1980s, when prices fell precipitously
Oil production has seeped into literary from their late-1970s highs. The apotheosis
of this trend is Mad Max II : The Road Warhistory in an even more direct (if somewhat
less obvious) fashion. Jennifer Wenzel has rior (1981), in which postapocalyptic bandits
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12 6.2 J Editor's Column 323
dressed in S-M leathers both husband and
its problematic surpluses - economic, po-
squander diminishing supplies of gasoline. litical, environmental, sexual, aesthetic, and
Since the 1970s, the excessiveness of oileven religious - and to consider the human
has been associated not solely with wealth buteffects of its eventual passing.
also with pollution and, most recently, cli-
mate change. As Gerry Canavan has begun
to document, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979,
together with the rising profile of the modern
Note
environmental movement, helped inaugurate
I would like to thank the participants in my spring 2010
a new strain of dystopic futurism attested in
graduate seminar on petrocultures, Will Elliott, Kelley
novels like Peter Brunner's The Sheep Look
Gove, Angie Lewandowski, Josef Nguyen, and George
Thomas. They were the discoverers, producers, and refinUp (1973) and J. G. Ballard's The High-Rise
ers of many of the ideas outlined above.
(1975). Later novels, as well as recent documentaries and feature films, have taken up
this pessimistic vision of oil-induced apoca-
Works Cited
lypse under the specter of climate change and
high-tech imperial warfare (Werner Herzog sCanavan, Gerry. "The Sky's the Limit: The 1970s vs. the Fu-
Lektionen der Finsternis [1992], Cormac Mc-
Carthys The Road [2006], and Reza Negares-
ture." Climate Change Culture I. Amer. Studies Assn.
Annual Meeting. San Antonio. 20 Nov. 2010. Address.
Marx, Karl. Capital Vol. 3. New York: Intl., 1967. Print.
tani s Cyclonopedia [2008], to name but a fewWenzel, Jennifer. "Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Politi-
of the best). All of these ask us to acknowl-
cal Ecology of Nigerian Literature." Postcolonial Stud-
edge the connection between the oil age and ies 9.4 (2006): 449-64. Print.
Literature and Energy Futures
IMRE SZEMAN
importance of modes and forms of production for thinking about culture and literature.
Energy enables; different forms of en-
ergy
enable differently. And energy (or its
This special Editor s Column asks what
might
lack) also produces limits. The physicist Jahappen if we frame cultural and intellectual
cob Lund Fisker notes that the growth and
periods and the literatures they encompass
development
of human populations over the
not in terms of movements (e.g.,
modernpast
centuries "is often attributed to such
ism), nations ( British modernism),
ortwo
centhings. as
turies (eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth
. .)state initiatives, governmental systems
and economic policies, but the real and
but in relation to dominant forms of
energy.
underlying
cause has been a massive increase
A crude, perhaps too literal form of
materi-
in energy
alism, but a suggestive one nevertheless,
andconsumption. . . . Discovering and
extracting
not just in the aha ! manner of all thought
ex- fossil fuels requires little effort
when
resources are abundant, before their
periments. A periodization organized
around
depletion.
It is this cheap Surplus energy' that
energy draws much needed attention
to one
classical industrial, urban and
of the key conditions of possibilityhas
ofenabled
human
economic
development" (74). If we now think
social activity: a raw input - energy
- whose
aboutalways
energy more than ever, it is because we
significance and value are almost
have started
to worry about the implications
passed over, even by those who insist
on the
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324 Editor's Column [ PM LA
examples
of its limits or impending prominent
lack, even while
we of the small g
novels, that
which
seems not to be gro
continue to indulge in the fiction
energy
surplus, an unrepeatable historical
despite event,
the almost
will
daily appeara
define daily life on into the
the future,
news and
without
its presence everyw
major change or crisis. Thelives
fiction
(as plastics,
of surplus
fertilizers, fuel f
in which we subsist shapes waste
not only
washed
the belief
up on beaches, etc.).1
that there will always be plenty
energy
The of
dearth
of to
oil in contempora
go around but also the complementary
idea
is not a structuring
absence tha
that easy access to energy plays
a sec- - an absence
whole(at
ofbest)
literature
ondary role in history by
comparison
with
present
through
negation (stan
human intellect and the adventure
of progof the literary-critical
trade w
ress; it is not just energyhere).
that constitutes
It seems to a
me that there
limit but also our present
understanding
of
and
blunter explanation:
instead
its social role and significance.
ing the fiction of surplus - as we
We expect literature to
nameor
the
govhoped
expected
- literature pa
erning ideologies of an era,
whether
by as
anit just
as surely
every other soc
nouncing them in its narrative
and formal era. Ever mo
in the contemporary
contradictions and antinomies
ormore
by attemptever
signification, ever mo
ing to puncture them (however
afterincompletely)
social meaning: what litera
through formal innovation,
subject
matter,
with
the Enlightenment
and capita
and so on. It is startling, then,
to realize
that
implicit
longing
for the plus beyo
The
fact
that
literature
in
the
our fiction of energy surplus appears to be era
soof oil has
completely shielded from view
as
tooilbe
hardly
little to do
with
doesn't
negate the value of
named in our literary fictions
at all.OnA
energy periodization.
the pericontrary, one of
the
most
valuable
functions
of
this schematic
odization organized around energy assembles
literatures in new configurations:
in our presentmodernism,
moment - or, indeed, perhaps
for instance, either becomes
a
evenainsmall
the wholesubset
history of of
literature
- is to
long period of oil literature
(iftowe
bring
light imagine
a foundational this
gap to which we
period as being kicked off by
the "discovery"
have hitherto
given little thought.of
This gap is
oil in the United States in the
1859)
orepistemic
anticipates
apparent
inability or unwilland participates in the birth
oftothe
ingness
name hegemony
our energy ontologies, one
of oil (the decision by Winston
Churchill,
consequence
of which is thefirst
yawning space
lord of the admiralty, at the
outset
ofaction,
World
between
belief and
knowledge and
War I that the British naval
should
be
agency: fleet
we know where
we stand
with respect
powered by oil from the Middle
of it. The
to energy, East
but we instead
do nothing about
coal from Wales). Such a periodization
to
perverse outcome of fails
the drama
of individual
capture, however, the almost
complete
absence
and collective
maturity
in which we have
of oil as subject matter (direct
placed ouror
hopeallegorical)
since Kant is a perpetual
in the literature written during
the
era when
present shaped
by inaction
and bad faith.
This is where
ourselves
it is dominant. The exceptions
are we
sofind
few
as at the
to be notable, as Amitav Ghosh
points
out in
present. What
about literature
and energy fu-
his landmark essay "Petrofiction."
Upton
Sin-in literature's retures? If our primary
interest
clair's Oil! (1927), Abdelrahman
Munif
s
Cities
lation to energy lies in periodization, it makes
of Salt quintet (1984-89),little
Patrick
Chamoisense to cast
about for what might come
seau s Texaco (1992), and after
Reza
the Negarestani's
present phase of oil literature. Afscience fiction codex Cyclonopedia
(2008)
are
ter all, how can one
ever determine
things to
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12 6.2 J Editor's Column 325
or theto
hologram
or because
it has been rencome, especially with respect
literary
style
dered secondary
to the difficult
or form? Yet while predicting
movements
to task of staying
come or even national literatures to come
alive. Contemplating energy futures prompts
us to reflect on what we desperately need in
might seem meaningless, prediction becomes
our literary present: narratives that shake us
oddly productive when one names literary
out of our faith in surplus (there will always
periods in relation to energy. We can't help
be more; things will always be better), not by
imagining that what come after oil are newly
dominant forms of sustainable energy (wave,indulging in the pleasures of end times or fanwind, and solar power or more extensive usestasies of overcoming energy limits but by tracing the brutal consequences of a future of slow
of nuclear energy) or a fantastic new type we
decline, of less energy for most and no energy
have, as yet, envisioned only in science fiction
(the unobtanium of James Cameron's Avatar).for some - a future that might well have less
In these futures, energy is clean, no longer aliterature and so fewer resources for manag-
threat to the environment, and available in
ing the consequences of our current fictions.
indefinite or even limitless quantities. Even
more important, the switch to it miraculously
does not threaten our way of life: we can con-
tinue to be who we are now. The possibility
Note
that, say, a solar literature might take the
1. Peter Hitchcock's "Slick: Geocultures of Oil in Fic-
place of oil literature would resolve the pres-
tion" is a provocative and compelling analysis of petrofic-
ent gap between knowledge and action. In this
tion
in film and literature.
hope, the promise of the future underwrites
and legitimizes the bad faith of the present.
What makes speculating about energy futures
Works Cited
productive is that it highlights all the more
Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Sam Worthington,
powerfully the political fantasies in which literature currently indulges.
Sigourney Weaver, and Stephen Lang. Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. Film.
What if after energy surplus comes defi-Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis
cit? How might literature respond to a future and Val Vinokurov. New York: Vintage, 1998. Print.
Fisker, Jacob Lund. "The Laws of Energy." The Final Enof less rather than more? We can only specu-
late, for even in the genre that deals with the
ergy Crisis. Ed. Andrew McKillop, with Sheila Newman. London: Pluto, 2005. 74-86. Print.
future- science fiction- there are strikingly
Ghosh,
Amitav. "Petrofiction." New Republic 2 Mar. 1992:
few examples of cultures of less. In much of29-34.
Print.
Hitchcock, Peter.
science fiction (e.g., the space opera), energy
is abundant, often because new sources were 12 Nov. 2009. TS.
Munif,
discovered outside the earth, as was Camer-
on's fantastical fuel. Lack of energy is found
"Slick: Geocultures of Oil in Fiction."
Abdelrahman. Cities of Salt. New York: Vintage,
1989. Print.
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anony-
typically only in postapocalyptic scenarios - mous Materials. Melbourne: Re.Press, 2008. Print.
cautionary tales about where our fiction of
Sinclair, Upton. Oil! 1927. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.
surplus might lead. In both contexts, literature has disappeared, whether into the screen
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326 Editor's Column J PM LA
Contributors
Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 200
pleting a monograph called "Evergreen Fan
KEN HILTNER, associate professor of speare's
English at
the University
Theatre
in the Age of Wood."
of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Milton and Ecol-
LAURIE SHANNON, associate professor of En
ogy (Cambridge UP, 2003) and What Else Is Pastoral ? Renais-
western University, is the author of Sovereign A
sance Literature and the Environment (Cornell UP, 2011), as well
Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (U of Chic
as the editor of Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in MilThe Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Sh
ton's England (Duquesne UP, 2008) and a coeditor of Environcales (U of Chicago P, forthcoming 2012). Both p
mental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2011).
historical forms of thought about broadly const
His dozen published essays on ecocriticism include "Early
tions in order to excavate the diverse terms and
Modern Ecology," in A Companion to English Renaissance Litwhich stakeholdership has been - or might yet
erature and Culture (Blackwell, 2010), and "Nature," forthcomIMRE SZEMAN is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies
ing in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
and professor of English and film studies at the University of
SAREE MAKDISI is professor of English
and
litAlberta. His
most comparative
recent book is After Globalization,
cowritten
erature at the University of California,
Los
Angeles.
theon a book on the
with Eric
Cazdyn
(Wiley, 2011).He
He is is
working
author of Romantic Imperialism : Universal
Empire
and
the
cultural politics of oil.
Culture of Modernity (Cambridge UP, 1998), William Blake and
MICHAEL ZISER is an associate professor of English at the Unithe Impossible History of the 1790s (U of Chicago P, 2003), and
versity of California, Davis, where he codirects the EnvironPalestine Inside Out : An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2008)
ments and Societies working group. His current long-range
and the editor of Nineteenth-Century Literature.
research project traces the historical shift from biomass to
VIN NARDIZZI is assistant professorfossil
of fuels
English
at the
Univeras it is reflected
in British,
American, and postcolonial literatures.
sity of British Columbia. He is a coeditor
of Queer Renaissance
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