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 narrative, 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

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 understanding 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 landscape 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 natural 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 beginning 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 world from a bird’s eye view and to consider the connections between man and nature just as we consider the connections between prose and dialogue. This bird’s eye view often looks something like this: “The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head.” This scene transforms the physical landscape into a human body, a conversion that seems overwhelmingly anthropocentric until Hardy reverses it a few sentences later: “The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating their various cities and nationalities.”12 The actions of both physical bodies here, those of Europe and its peoples, are strikingly connected, the small human bodies crawling and writhing over Europe’s body as insects or parasites would over a decomposing corpse. This particular frame comes at the very beginning of the drama, in the midst of the discussion between the phantom intelligences, interrupting the Spirit of the Years as it describes the justific- ation for the drama about to unfold before us. These frames provide a space in which we can see Europe from on high and allow us to more easily draw connections between the actions taking place and the physical environment. Not all frames, though, are intended to set the scene. The dumb shows are equally important in creating connections between various humans and action, and often rely on animals to complete their metaphors. These dumb shows most often deal with the movements of troops and the preparations for battle, scenes that are logistically difficult (and perhaps boring) to narrate. Reducing them to a paragraph or so that details a variety of actions both relieves Hardy of the dialogic burden and allows him to simultaneously show a number of events occurring at once. In one dumb show, we learn that “On the downs in the rear of the camps fifteen thousand cavalry are maneuvering, their accoutrements flashing in the sun like a school of mackerel. The flotilla lies in and around the port, alive with moving figures.”13 The soldiers’ tools, machines, if you will, are related to a group of fish, while the soldiers themselves are reduced to nameless, faceless “moving figures.” In the dumb show of Part Two, Act Two, Scene One, Hardy shows us Napoleon’s soldiers “in a creeping progress across the frontier from the French to the Spanish side,” the crossing of the river Bidassoa, and “the wondering native carters [who] draw their sheep-skinned ox- teams aside, to let the regiments pass.”14 Hardy also gives us the passing of time in this particular dumb show, allowing us to watch battles as they play out over an un- specified period of time. Soldiers are often reduced to a “mass” or “masses” in these frames, a term that effortlessly points us towards the biomass aspect of the ecological pyramids we have been dealing with. Sometimes these masses are obscured, as when “The Prussians, surprised at discerning in the fog such masses of the enemy close at hand, recede towards the Ilm [sic].”15 Other times, they are simply a mass on the move: “each column is seen but as a train of dust, and the disappearance of each marching

12 The Dynasts, Fore Scene. I-I. 13 Ibid, I.II-iii. 14 Ibid, II.II-i. 15 Ibid, II.I-iv.

54 mass over the eastern horizon.”16 These masses erase the individual, asking us to think about a larger scale of organism than we typically deal with. If we allow soldiers, in this moment, to fill the base of our ecological pyramid, we need an immense amount of mass in order to power the smaller groups above (colonels, cavalry, and generals perhaps). Without this large foundational mass, the levels above would be rendered effectively useless, a trend that works nicely for both ecological and militaristic conceptions. We should also think about the word “creeping”within these frames, as they almost necessarily refer us back to the insects and small animals that we are concerned with here. “Creeping” asks us to think about the size reduction occurring at any particular moment, forcibly shrinking down the actor regardless of whether this shrinkage occurs literally in the text. While we normally don’t pay much attention to creatures that creep, Hardy’s use here zooms us in, like a lens, from the vision of Europe as a continent, to a nation, to these crawling individuals that exist on it. In terms of the ecological pyramid, these frames are similar in that they provide us just this bird’s eye view. The pyramid allows us to look at ecological systems from a different vantage point, to access the organisms, relationships, and environments in a different way, a way that allows a simultaneous understanding of organismal dependence and evolutionary time. The pyramids are always reduced, sim- plified versions of the increasingly complex natural systems they intend to represent. Hardy’s frames, in a similar way, attempt to compose a scene in which we can see all things happening at once. This stance, though, draws obvious attention to the fact that Hardy must leave some things unnarrated and others must be drastically reduced in order to achieve any kind of representation at all. This reduction doesn’t mean that Hardy (or the pyramids) are recklessly deviating from reality, but instead signifies that there are inherent problems with representation, regardless of whether you are attempting to reproduce the entire physical planet or a set of actions in one particular moment. While Hardy spends a great deal of time giving readers environmental perspective, he also spends an immense amount of time shrinking us down to the level of the tiny creatures he places throughout his narrative. One of the most vivid passages containing tiny animals comes in Part Three, Act Six, Scene Eight in a speech delivered by the Chorus of the Years. While it’s a long speech, it contains a vast number of creatures and is necessary to quote at length:

The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels, The lark’s eggs are scattered, their owners fled; And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals The snail draws in at the terrible tread, But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim; The worm asks what can be overheard, And wriggles deep from a scene so grim, And guesses him safe; for he does not know What a foul red flood will be soaking him! Beaten about by the heel and toe Are butterflies, sick of the day’s long rheum To die of a worse than the weather-foe

16 Ibid, I.III-iii.

Trodden and bruised to a miry tomb Are ears that have greened but will never be gold And flowers in the bud that will never bloom. (emphases mine)

We cover an array of taxonomical classes here, including mammals, annelids, birds, plants, and molluscs, and all are impacted in some way by the environmental dominance of the humans around them. The mole and hedgehog lose their homes, the snail is crushed in his shell, and the worm is soaked in a literal blood bath. By shifting the attention from the humans dying on the battlefield to the small, often insignificant creatures here, Hardy asks that we consider the impact of our actions on a more globally recognised scale. Without diminishing the human loss and suffering, Hardy widens the scope, forcing us to understand that there are broader implications to our violent existence, with consequences that often go unnoticed to our human eye. Animals are not always depicted in the midst of such violent scenes. Soldiers “hurry to and fro like ants in an ant-hill,” become “slug-like shape[s]” on the horizon, and move “in serpentine lines, like slowworms through grass.”17 We see molluscs in Part One, Act Three, as the Recording Angel describes the movement of militaries as the “movement as of molluscs on a leaf.”18 This moment is followed by “The silent insect-creep of the Austrian columns” in the prose immediately following the Recording Angel’s speech, reminiscent of the miniscule armies we have become accustomed to.19 Landmasses are also transformed into molluscs: the Isle of Slingers is “like a floating snail” and England’s “rock-rimmed situation walls her off/Like a slim selfish mollusk in its shell.”20 The transformation of land into animal highlights the connections between the earth and all groups of living species. By allowing land to becoming a living, breathing subject, Hardy asserts that connections run through both the living and the nonliving, and that the possession of life isn’t the base qualif- ication for the possession of worth. This transformation is also reminiscent of the energy transfer that occurs in the ecological pyramid, the physical earth and plants serving as the energy source for small herbivores. By changing land into animal, Hardy models both this transfer and the sense of loss, a size change reflected in the process of shrinking a massively large space (like the landmass of England) into a tiny creature, like a snail. Before closing my discussion of Hardy, I feel that it is necessary to pay some attention to the phantom intelligences that are guiding our journey. In the language of epic, these intelligences function as a kind of epic machinery, controlling and guiding the actions that are being represented. In the language of ecology, these intelligences become something a little different: they are ecological machinery. Ecological machinery can be any number of things, including processes (like evolution), laws (of thermodynamics, physics, etc.), or representations of systems (like ecological pyramids). Often asking big questions like, “Where are we? And why are we where we are?” the intelligences prompt thinking on the part of the reader that requires us to examine our position in the grand, universal scheme.21 While human characters often

17 Ibid, III.VII-i, III.VII-ii, III.VI-i. 18 Ibid, I.III-ii. 19 Ibid, I.III-ii. 20 Ibid, I.I-i, I.VI-v. 21 Ibid, III. I-ix

56 attribute the mechanistic movements of the earth to history, as Napoleon in “History makes use of me to weave her web,” this web actually belongs to the Immanent Will.22 The Immanent Will is the invisible force that seems to drive all the action and characters, including the phantom intelligences that seem to be in control of all. The Will is not a logical process and seems to have no rhyme or reason to its doings, as the Spirit Ironic most eloquently points out here:

It is only that Life’s queer mechanics chance to work out in this grotesque shape just now. The groping tentativeness of an Immanent Will (as grey old Years describes it) cannot be asked to learn logic at this time of day! The spectacle of Its instruments, set to riddle one another through, and then to drink together in peace and concord, is where the humour comes in and makes the play worth seeing!23

The Immanent Will, then, seems suspiciously similar to the kinds of biological processes that drive and influence all life on earth. The Immanent Will becomes the figure for evolution, ecological energy transfer, and so many other invisible laws governing life. So, as the Shade of the Earth asks in the drama’s opening line, “What of the Immanent Will and Its designs”?24 It seems that the Will has no designs. While this lack of direction might seem fundamentally frightening, it serves an extremely important ecological purpose. By removing a sense of design, Hardy opens a space in which nature is not working to achieve an “ultimate goal,” in which the moves nature makes are unplanned and random, in which successful living beings simply developed the right adaptation at the right time. Hardy truly provides us with a complete picture of ecological pyramids in epic form. Beginning with the overarching, world- or continent-sized view of the environment, Hardy gradually zooms in on each composite layer before asking us to think about the forces working on that pyramid from its exterior. We see sun, soil, water, and air moving through these spaces before we shift our focus to the animals and other nonhuman life. These animals are small (as I discussed above) but are also large, as Hardy spends quite a bit of time talking about the plight of the horses25 in the Napoleonic wars. In the end, Hardy creates a vision of humankind that is entirely bound up in the natural space in which it exists. By presenting animals, humans, plants, and earth alongside one another, Hardy inextricably correlates their existence and asks us to reconsider our position and relation to one another. By equalising all life, Hardy asserts that no one form is more important than another and that all actions taken by one species will, in some way, impact many others. This vision situates human action, thought, and life within a frame it had previously lacked, and lays an imaginative foundation for contemporary eco-critical theory. By bringing in real scientific knowledge and thinking about literary texts, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of how our literary environments are set up, how these fictional worlds parallel the worlds they are representing, and tell us what level of engagement the

22 Ibid, III.I-i 23 Ibid, II.IV-v. 24 Ibid, Fore Scene, I.I. 25 While I do not spend time focusing on the horses here, Hardy does pay an immense amount of attention to their treatment and use in battles. Horses are often seen dying alongside soldiers and are given a voice in the moment of death that mirrors that of the dying soldier.

57 author’s text has with the world outside the human. Hardy’s ecological vision is one that should inspire us all. What are the implications for thinking about fiction, especially Hardy’s fiction, in this ecological way? Hardy’s novels also tend to see the world from this ecological perspective, and an examination of Far From the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, Return of the Native, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles, just to name a few, could reveal an impulse to present fictional environments that engage with the world as Hardy did with The Dynasts. Viewing these texts in the context of the ecological pyramid creates questions about energy and mass that we might not otherwise have considered. We can draw connections between late nineteenth century attempts at understanding the laws of thermodynamics, laws that came into being in the 1840s-50s. Is it possible that these fictions in some way represent an anxiety about where the energy of the future might come from? We can also think about biomass. What is the human biomass, how has this shifted since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how might our ecological pyramid look? Are we, as Malthus suggested, on the brink of species collapse or are we somewhere else entirely? We must remember that in The Dynasts, unlike much of Hardy’s other work, the tiny creatures represented here are largely figures – they are metaphorical creatures introduced by our narrator to colour the scene. We are rarely given the opportunity to encounter a ‘real’ (though, of course, still fictional) animal within this text, though when we do, our encounters are intensely violent. Hardy’s discussion of the abuse of horses in the war and the passage from Part Three, Act Six, Scene Eight quoted above show just how dangerous the relationship between humans and animals is. By taking our figurative animals seriously, though, we are able, as I’ve shown, to glean more from this text, to get a better understanding of how Hardy envisioned himself and his fellow humans in relation to the natural environment. Transforming humans into animals as he does so frequently in this text breaks down the barrier between the human and natural worlds and forces them back together. The ecological pyramids we can create from these scenes, too, brings humans back into the food webs from which they are typically excluded. Hardy, thus, unites humans and nature in both the literary and scientific worlds, pushing a Darwinian narrative that would be all but lost to mainstream society as the narrative of human dominance and exceptionalism overran our discourse. Ultimately, Hardy is interested in moving beyond a space in which the human is more important than (or even separate from) the environment, a project that aligns him with the current posthumanism and ecocriticism movements in the humanities. Hardy’s trophic epic asserts that we are entirely, uncontrollably, and irreversibly caught in the web of being that encompasses all things in our universe, living or otherwise. It is as Bathsheba Everdene reminds us in Far From the Madding Crowd: “love, life, everything human seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.”26 Our universe might not always be infuriated, but Bathsheba’s remark still holds true: when we consider how truly massive our universe is, we begin to seem a lot more like those insignificant, creeping creatures we like to ignore.   

26 FFMC, Ch. 37.