14
revolutionary land management of pioneering agronomists such as Arthur Young or the La Rochefoucauld brothers implies a human mastery of the natural environment which has surmounted forever the
cyclical fatality of feast-and-famine found in Catholic teachings and
familiar to the peasant mindset. More explicitly, the anti-clericalism of
the Encyclopédie’s articles and plates on geological phenomena only
refute the centrality of humankind in the Biblical chronology the better to install a free-thinking humanity at the heart of a new vision of
man’s relationship to the Earth, a vision which is variously deist, theist or atheist-materialist in tenor depending on the convictions of the
author or draughtsman. What the early nineteenth-century utopians,
such as the Saint-Simonians and Leroux, take from this tradition is a
sense of organicity and oneness with the Earth which they subsequently reimbue with their own deeply anti-Christian mysticism or religiosity.
If the figures drawn from earth sciences by French social utopianism already represent a large rhetorical remove from Enlightenment
empiricism, this abstraction and extension of geological ideas is taken
further by novelists such as Balzac and Sand who specifically structure psychological and historical narratives on the model of archaeological excavation. Whether in theory or practice, an engagement with
archaeology literally informs narratives of national historical rupture
that traumatize the fictional subject (Balzac) or tales of local historical
continuity that reassure their protagonists (Sand). Later in the century,
it is rather the Enlightenment use of the earth sciences as a rationalist
tool for the secular education of the young that inspires a generation of
writers sharing a fascination for subterranean spaces and figures in
their work. In late nineteenth-century France, the young mind – now
conceived as a sort of “prehistory” of the adult psyche – is not an already formed structure to be unearthed and analysed dispassionately;
instead, it is a secretive world in motion, an active, moulding, shaping,
dynamic underground of thoughts, emotions and actions. Fittingly in
the age of Darwin, it is a world of fantastical and recapitulative evolutions. Yet, as the stories of Verne, Malot, Ballantyne or MacDonald
show us, a profound ambivalence haunts these later geological discourses: subterranean culture can just as easily deform and disfigure
as it can form and mould aright.
It is the sheer inscrutability of underground (or underwater) processes that makes them ideal spaces for both physical and metaphysical
revolutionary land management of pioneering agronomists such as Arthur Young or the La Rochefoucauld brothers implies a human mastery of the natural environment which has surmounted forever the
cyclical fatality of feast-and-famine found in Catholic teachings and
familiar to the peasant mindset. More explicitly, the anti-clericalism of
the Encyclopédie’s articles and plates on geological phenomena only
refute the centrality of humankind in the Biblical chronology the better to install a free-thinking humanity at the heart of a new vision of
man’s relationship to the Earth, a vision which is variously deist, theist or atheist-materialist in tenor depending on the convictions of the
author or draughtsman. What the early nineteenth-century utopians,
such as the Saint-Simonians and Leroux, take from this tradition is a
sense of organicity and oneness with the Earth which they subsequently reimbue with their own deeply anti-Christian mysticism or religiosity.
If the figures drawn from earth sciences by French social utopianism already represent a large rhetorical remove from Enlightenment
empiricism, this abstraction and extension of geological ideas is taken
further by novelists such as Balzac and Sand who specifically structure psychological and historical narratives on the model of archaeological excavation. Whether in theory or practice, an engagement with
archaeology literally informs narratives of national historical rupture
that traumatize the fictional subject (Balzac) or tales of local historical
continuity that reassure their protagonists (Sand). Later in the century,
it is rather the Enlightenment use of the earth sciences as a rationalist
tool for the secular education of the young that inspires a generation of
writers sharing a fascination for subterranean spaces and figures in
their work. In late nineteenth-century France, the young mind – now
conceived as a sort of “prehistory” of the adult psyche – is not an already formed structure to be unearthed and analysed dispassionately;
instead, it is a secretive world in motion, an active, moulding, shaping,
dynamic underground of thoughts, emotions and actions. Fittingly in
the age of Darwin, it is a world of fantastical and recapitulative evolutions. Yet, as the stories of Verne, Malot, Ballantyne or MacDonald
show us, a profound ambivalence haunts these later geological discourses: subterranean culture can just as easily deform and disfigure
as it can form and mould aright.
It is the sheer inscrutability of underground (or underwater) processes that makes them ideal spaces for both physical and metaphysical