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Tiny Creatures, Trophic Pyramids and Hardy's <I>The Dynasts</I>

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Tiny Creatures, Trophic Pyramids and Hardy's <I>The Dynasts</I> STUDENT ESSAY COMPETITION TINY CREATURES, TROPHIC PYRAMIDS AND HARDY’S THE DYNASTS ELLE EVERHART Thomas Hardy has a tendency to focus on the small. Occasionally stopping narr- ative, he will pay detailed attention to the physical environment and the small, often unnoticed, creatures that populate it. This connection to the natural stretches across Hardy’s fiction and his poetry, including his epic verse drama The Dynasts, published in the early years of the twentieth century. Through the surrounding prose, dialogue, and the characters themselves, The Dynasts demonstrates Hardy’s assertion that the natural world is inseparable from the humans that exist within it. In this piece, I address these creatures and argue that we can read Hardy’s narratives through the ecological concept of the trophic pyramid, a hierarchy that attempts to structure energy flow through a particular ecological system. Reading Hardy’s narratives in this way allows us to envision the theoretical orientation of these creatures in relation to their human counterparts and further imagine their position in the overall structure of the narrative environment. Keywords: The Dynasts, Animal Studies, Ecology, Trophic Pyramids, Ecocriticism NSECTS AND OTHER small nonhuman animals rarely receive any critical attention. Creeping and crawling their way through any number of literary texts, I these tiny creatures remain untouched, unnoticed, and unloved. Their presence, though, reminds us of the physical earth we inhabit and the living beings we are related to, including the little animals that we (more often than not) tend to forget. Thomas Hardy’s work often pays close attention to such tiny creatures, pulling the focus away from the central human characters to examine the impact of these humans (and “the human” more generally) upon the lives of the animals that make their home in his narrative universe. Hardy moves beyond the human uses of nature and into a space in which people, animals, plants, and earth are not only inseparable, but also com- pletely reliant on one another. This movement begs for critics to begin to look at 51 Hardy’s narratives with a more scientifically ecological lens in an attempt to recreate and understand the universe that he was constructing. Recent projects, like Heidi C. M. Scott’s Chaos and Cosmos1 do just that with other nineteenth century writers: “literature,” Scott argues, “generates essential knowledge about nature complement- ary to our scientific views,” and “ecocriticism can do better than play the role of dupli- citous sibling to ecological science. Ecocriticism can theorize how the scientific un- derstanding of nature has literary origins.”2 This sentiment is beginning to echo throughout the literary humanities, as the forthcoming collection Humanities for the Environment3 seeks to demonstrate: this collection “showcases how humanists are working in ‘integrate knowledges’… that are moving beyond traditional … outcomes and towards solutions to the greatest social and environmental challenges of our time.”4 In this paper5 I blend the literary and the scientific through the ecological pyramid, a graphic representation of energy transfer in particular ecological systems that quantifies and highlights the structure of the depicted environments (see Appendix for an example). Tiny creatures and plants make up the base of the pyramid and constitute the largest parts of the ecological community. The pyramids move from these primary consumers (herbivores) to various levels of predators, sometimes reaching as many as five trophic6 levels in a given ecological system. This pyramid also quantifies biomass, a measurement based on the number of individual organisms in an ecological space and the mass of these individuals. All systems (both ecological and human, though I reject the division suggested here)7 are entirely dependent on these base creatures, the energy for the entire organization derived from these often forgotten citizens. Would an ecological pyramid help us better understand Hardy’s fictional landscape? An examination of Hardy’s The Dynasts suggests that it would. The Dynasts, an epic drama which stages the Napoleonic Wars as a chorus of metaphysical spirits discussing the events unfolding below them, was published in the first years of the 20th century long after Darwin’s entrance into the intellectual land- scape and just as ecology was beginning to gain scientific traction. The late nineteenth century saw a number of rapid changes in the study of ecology, from the introduction of the term “biosphere” and explorations into the relationship between animal and habitat, to the achievement of a deeper understanding of nutrient cycling. Hardy, already an ecologically and scientifically aware writer, was writing in a moment of vast intellectual change, predicated on Darwin’s assertions that humans have evolved 1 See Heidi C. M. Scott, Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania UP, 2014). 2 Scott, 5, 6. 3 The Humanities for the Environment book isn’t yet out, so I refer to the Routledge promotional page in the paper. “Humanities for the Environment.” Routledge. Routledge Web. 10 Aug. 2016. 4 Ibid. 5 I would like to thank Professor Herbert Tucker at the University of Virginia for his valuable assistance in preparing this piece and my audience at MMLA 2015 for their thoughtful insights regarding an earlier draft of this work. 6 Trophic levels are representative of an organism’s position in the food chain of a particular ecosystem: primary producers (like grass and flowers) occupy the first level, herbivores occupy the second level, and predators occupy levels three through five, depending on the complexity of the ecosystem represented. 7 In the spirit of Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought and Ecology without Nature (Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP. 2010), I ask that we consider that human systems are not as separate from Nature as we might want to believe. 52 alongside animals, that we are part of the natural system we are now attempting to learn more about. It has been argued, though, that Hardy’s narratives cannot be responsible for a “renewed attention to landscape and the world of nature in modern English literature.”8 This credit usually lies with the Romantics, and while I don’t disagree that the Romantics were important figures in this regard, the work that Hardy is creating and his particular approach to nature is revolutionary. Hardy’s intellectual project differs from that of the Romantics in that his human characters are not at all separate from the natural spaces that he creates: the humans are embedded in a web of relationships with the physical environment and other nonhuman subjects, an embeddedness that foreshadows Timothy Morton’s concept of the “mesh.” When we think about this relationship in terms of the ecological pyramid, Hardy’s attention to tiny creatures becomes more significant. Hardy pays a lot of attention to small, unnoticed animals throughout The Dynasts, his epic drama, continually drawing our eyes away from the human to the nat- ural space and nonhuman creatures that exist around us, highlighting the grand, chao- tic system in which we live. Focusing on The Dynasts might seem like a strange begin- ning for such an argument. Why, for example, wouldn’t I focus on one of Hardy’s many ecology-friendly novels? I’m tempted to answer that The Dynasts has received little critical attention, much like our tiny creatures in consideration here, thus making them natural (if you’ll pardon the phrase) partners; but, I have more concrete reasons for this selection. First, in The Dynasts, Hardy creates a piece that is “altogether origin- al”– it “belongs with the major epics,” Herbert Tucker argues, “precisely because it transforms the tradition it receives.”9 More, its status as epic makes The Dynasts an in- triguing text to explore in light of the ecological pyramids I’m interested in. Epics tell a sponsoring culture its own story, from a vantage whose privilege transpires through the successful articulation of a collective idea that links origins to destinies by way of heroic values in imagined action.10 Epics attempt to narrate the story of a culture, space, or generation, partici- pating in a cycle that simultaneously “receive[s] an order … describe[s] an order, and … issue[s] an order.”11 These orders are meant to re-tell and reinforce certain facts or norms about a given human society, but we can also fit them into our ecological puzzle. Ecological pyramids, like epics, provide a snapshot of a particular community at a specific moment in time, tracking relationships and movements between levels and attempting to understand their significance – they are, in effect, telling a story. These pyramids ask us to think about our dependence on those within our ecological level and those that are not, to understand that we are forever tied to them in ways that are dangerous to alter. Much of Hardy’s attention to the environment comes through the framing prose set before and between scenes. Often consisting of a paragraph or more, these frames swallow the drama’s dialogue and force us to attend to them. Used to set up scenes, describe a dumb show, or simply littered about as asides, Hardy’s prose invites 8 John Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (London: Macmillan Press, 1977), 3. 9 Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790-1910 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 584, 585. 10 Tucker, 13. 11 Tucker, 14. 53 us to look at the
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