Jesse Oak Taylor’s “Tennyson’s Elegy for the Anthropocene: Genre,Form and Species Being.”

摘要

This article examines ways in which the identification of the anthropocene, which isconceived here as originating in the industrial revolution, served to instigate newdefinitions of both animal and human species. Taylor suggests that the critical point ofthis definition lies in the process of the loss of certain species, and the consequent senseof mourning which this entails. The early-Victorian advances in geology greatlyincreased the legibility of both creaturely and human history and served to dismantlethe boundaries between the animal kingdom and homo sapiens. The recognition ofwidespread species extinction which the new geology brought into focus, Taylorargues, was refracted in literary terms through the form of the poetic elegy. Such actsof memorialisation, it is suggested, are reliant on the ‘afterlife of the image’ in whichlife is defined in terms of the trace of the remains of other species, and the articleproposes that species may be defined in both biological and aesthetic categories. Taylorargues in Benjaminian terms that the concept of translation is crucial to interpretationsof the anthropocene, and he applies this insight to a brief reading of Tennyson’s InMemoriam as an elegy which allows the dead to speak. In some climactic sections theTennysonian text, it is stressed, specifically addresses geological issues and theevidence of extinction, and the poem is resonant with the implications of theidentification of successive ‘types’ in the fossil record. Taylor’s article seeks to movebeyond current readings of In Memoriam reflective of Victorian geology, stressinginstead the thematic centrality of the sense of the newly identified and definedanthropocene to Tennyson’s poem. In elaborating and extending his argument, Taylorspecifically explains the unintended valence of the text’s recording of the way in whichevolution will ‘let the ape and tiger die’ in relation to the current concern for endangeredanimal species: such disappearing species, he suggests somewhat paradoxically, are infact now reproduced or resurrected in aesthetic forms. In other words, Taylor maintainsin a telling conclusion, “Footprints, skeletons, and other fossilised remains reanimatethe species they represent as features of both the landscape and the human imagination”(232).