Editing Audubon

Here's link to the online essay on Audubon's editors I mentioned in class

Specimens and Type Specimens

Steve asked about how Audubon picked his specimens (i.e. the animals to represent). Many of the species he captured and drew had been described before (hence his reliance on Wilson) and, he believed, inadequately. His desire was to be as true to his observations as possible--so he would pick individuals that helped him emphasize what he wanted to demonstrate. Sometimes he wanted to represent birds in a certain phase of their plumage; sometimes (as in a few of the images from Labrador), he wanted to represent both summer and winter plumage. Often he included young birds, because this also demonstrated his range as a collector, describer, and artist. "Type Specimen" refers to the actual specimen from which a species was first described. Audubon added several new species--including Lincoln's sparrow, but since he didn't collect and preserve skins, his descriptions (measurements etc.) work as "types." Often with was to Audunbon's disadvantage-see the controversy surrounding his "new" discovery of a Washington Sea Eagle.

In the 1826 Journal, Audubon shows an increased awareness of his text as a text and of himself as an author, referring to himself at one point as “a Naturalist; nay Let me fully Write an author!” Compared to Mississippi River Journal, the 1826 Journal features a greater density of parallelism, allusions, apostrophe, and alliteration. In the 1826 Journal, Audubon (or Audubon’s speaker) appears more conscious of how he says things, but also in what he chooses to say or not to say. Audubon creates content through evasions—he says by not-saying—and this complex method of rendering reality draws attention to the problems of representation and preservation that Audubon faces as an author, artist, and naturalist.

Part of Audubon’s project as a naturalist is to preserve and represent nature to others. Audubon reveals the extent to which he values representation when he says of Sir Walter Scott, “Where art thou? Wilt thou not come to my Country? Wrestle with Mankind and Stop their Increasing ravages on Nature & describe her Now for the Sake of Future Ages” (186). To Audubon, representation of nature is both a way to preserve nature for future generations and also a potential method for affecting societal change. Yet representing nature entangles “art” with nature; that is, it is impossible for Audubon to replicate the birds he sees in nature, so he must make artistic decisions in how to represent them. This creates a difficulty for Audubon, because to him nature is distinct from art, and distinctly valuable. Audubon emphasizes this point when he criticizes a priest, who is “a Closet Priest I Mean by One who had not studied Nature herself Beautifull Nature devoid of Art” (170). The version of nature that Audubon creates through his drawings and writing is never devoid of art.

Audubon takes this deficiency—the inability to perfectly replicate nature—and makes it an asset; he uses deletion and evasions to create content. In his drawings, he kills bird to depict them as life-like; he draws birds contorted in unnatural positions to capture the feeling and emotion the birds invoke; he places eagles above the clouds to give the viewer a sense of the awe one might feel seeing the bird in nature. A similar method comes through in the 1826 Journal, the most obvious example being Audubon’s addresses to Lucy, in which he frequently breaks off in the middle of intense moments of imagination. The first example occurs as Audubon closes his “At Sea” entry:

“I recollect Just now that when I first I knew thee, Dearest Friend: Frequently I was asked if this Passion of mine would be of Lasting Duration—help, I am now Entering on a Sacred Subject = husband, Shut thy Book, pray =” (164).

Another example occurs toward the end of his July 31^st entry:

“I thought of Such an Evening Walking Gently arm in arm together towards the Watters of the Bayou Sara to Watch thee Bathe thy gentle form in its current. I thought of the Happiness I have enjoyed, whilt gazing on the Happy Couple before me. I thought!—ah my Dearest Friend Mr Hodgson…” (169).

And a final example occurs at the end of his November 1^st entry: “I Dreamed of the Beech Woods, of a House there! Of a female there; Of a—” (184). Through these deletions, Audubon evokes feelings of passion and an almost religious devotion that are too intense—or too risqué—to be contained by the text. The deletions serve better than a more direct description because they emphasize that Audubon’s passion is beyond description.

Another type of deletion or deferral occurs when Audubon frequently claims he is not able to describe something, even though he will go on to describe it. In his July 31^st entry, Audubon states, “I am sorry I cannot paint portraits—I would represent to thee, the Meekness of his Blue Eyes—his sweetness of Language—his comely movements, but My Dear Lucy, thou knowest that in all my attempts I never yet reachd the original” (168). The denial is one sense absurd, both because Audubon literally can create portraits and because Audubon’s very denial contains a “portrait” of the person in question. Still, Audubon fears he “never yet reachd the original”—in other words, he cannot create a replication. But Audubon’s denial becomes part of the rendering, because it causes the reader to imagine something intangible beyond the “Blue Eyes” and “sweetness of Language” that Audubon names.

Audubon’s various deletions and deferrals—his methods of not-saying—reveal a deeply artistic sensibility that would perhaps not be tolerated in naturalists or scientists today. Even Audubon’s metaphors and similes are ways of saying by not-saying that frequently reveal the shifting and uncertain relationships between signifier and signified. When “one of the most Scientific Men” inspects Audubon, Audubon says he looked “at me as I Look at the Eye of a Bird as it looses its brilliancy & I fear to Lose its caracter” (181). In this simile, Audubon is both watcher and watched, representer and represented, the inverted roles pivoting on the brilliant eye of the bird that is also Audubon’s brilliant eye. Audubon fears to “lose its caracter” because as a scientist he is always attentive to faithful representation, but as an artist Audubon also understands how the most faithful representation can be a figurative one.

Resource to help with Audubon readings

Hey guys--thought I would just let you know that through the library homepage, if you search "Birds of North America," you can access a really great site that lets you find out more about some of the species Audubon describes in his journals. I enjoyed being able to hear the songs of the different birds (especially since Audubon describes the lark's song in his 1826 journal and I know nothing about bird songs).

Here is the link from the IU library site (you may have to be logged in to access it):

http://bna.birds.cornell.edu.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/bna

Steph

The Bird-Man Cometh!

I’m interested in the way that Audubon’s character sketches are influenced by the language and methodology of ornithology but, for the sake of brevity, I’ve restricted myself here to Audubon’s descriptions of himself. The passages that initially suggested this inquiry are in the early pages of the 1826 Journal. Observing the petrels on July 4^th, Audubon writes, “how much I envied their power of Flight to enable me to be here, there, and all over the Globe comparatively Speaking in a Moment” (160). And in the next entry, considering his impending foray into England: “The Bird seazed when sitting on her Nest could not be more terrified” (164). Audubon is always writing about birds, of course, but these specific comparisons seem to be triggered by his particular situation: confined to the ship—“this floating Prison” (162)—for an extended period, sustained by a limited diet, suffering under the horrific weight of “dreary, Iddle time” (163). Audubon is not in his natural habitat. Comparing him to a caged bird seems inevitable: we picture him sighing over the petrels, which can come and go as they please. Indeed, Audubon’s pronoun confusion, as I read it, substituting “enable me” for “enable them” (the birds) indicates that he is literally imagining himself as a petrel. In actuality, he is reduced to comparing the petrels’ relative speeds (no shooting and sketching while at sea) and “Philosophiz[ing] on a goose quill” (163), despite his best efforts to avoid it.

Later, while displaying his paintings to a group of young women, Audubon waxes sentimental over his own natural habitat: “ ’ha, that’s Beautifull’. again and again repeated made me wish to be in the Forests of America to be able myself to say at meeting a New Specimen = ah! How beautifull!!” (167). The extra exclamation point in the second exclamation perhaps hints at Audubon’s superior sensibilities, affirming that, when it comes to appreciating birds, he is the natural. The passage also reminds the reader that Britain is no more Audubon’s natural habitat than the ship is. (This is evident in his social and professional interactions. Audubon’s trip to the theater on 174 is an amusing example of this, though he recovers his equanimity by reminding himself that he is “an Honest plain Man and ranked as high as any other in the eye of God” (174). Very American indeed.) The anxiety of the voyage persists throughout his visit. The sensibility of the second quote I mentioned above—the nesting bird—paves the way for Audubon’s performances with the well-to-do. The “nest” imagery is particularly a propos as Audubon wonders whether his heretofore obscure artistic endeavors will be rewarded—I imagine a doting Audubon-bird protectively sheltering his precious portfolio, ruffling his feathers out to keep it warm and dry…

But, to follow the descriptive thread: when dining with the Rathbones, Audubon takes out his portfolio and finds himself “panting like the wing^d pheasant he dreads the well taught Friend of Man, that may perhaps prove him too weak, to proceed in full sight of his learned Eye—” (166). Here, Audubon is again feeling that he has been transformed, somehow, into an animal (a bird) while, if I’m understanding the pronouns correctly, Rathbone retains his humanity, relying on the “Friend of Man” (a hunting dog, representing Rathbone’s educated sensibilities, his “best Taste and strong Judgment”?) to flush Audubon out of hiding, overturn his nest, etc. The Rathbones approve of his drawings, but the next Audubon / bird comparison, when Audubon is meeting with engravers, is actually more jarring: “he accompanied me Instantly to one of the most Scientific Men, who after looking at me as I Look at the Eye of a Bird as it looses its brilliancy & I fear to Lose its character” (181). Here, Audubon imagines himself as a dead bird under the hunter’s scrutinizing eye. Given the emphasis on dead vs. live eyes in Audubon’s illustrations, and his emphasis on achieving life-like representations in “My Style of Drawing Birds,” it may be particularly significant that Audubon is making this comparison: will he lose his authentic life-like character when the critic’s gaze transforms him into a specimen? And, I wonder, do Audubon’s critics see him as an artist, a naturalist, an author, or more as a curiosity of the American variety? (I’m thinking here of the notes in the Chronology: “Wearing a wolfskin coat and sporting long, curly hair, he is widely feted as the incarnation of the ‘American Woodsman’” (865).) There are numerous passages in which Audubon admires his hosts’ excellent manners (though he deplores the British postal system), but to what extent is it all an act, whether for his British critics, for his wife (for whose eyes the journal is ostensibly intended), or for himself? I’m not sure, but I can’t help thinking back to Audubon’s awkward night at the theatre, which he survives by insisting to himself (something along the lines of) “I’m a Man! I’m a Man!”

Audubon and Education

In “Myself,” we see the young Audubon as a reluctant student. His father wants him to go to school because “talents and knowledge, added to sound mental training, assisted by honest industry, can never fail, nor be taken from any one once the possessor of such valuable means” (769). Audubon acquiesces, but only to a point: he spends the time he ought to be in school gathering his first collection of “curiosities” gleaned from nature (769). I think it’s scarcely shocking that Audubon prefers learning from nature than from human teachers—but I do think it’s worth noting that this too is an imperfect means of education in Ornithological Biography. I want to trace, in this text in particular but also in some of the others we’ve read, the ways in which Audubon departs from his father’s view of education as an invaluable asset, the ways in which he distrusts the power of both the transmission of learning from expert to novice and learning from experience as methods for attaining a meaningful education. To do so, I want to address each of the categories of learning delineated here: talents, knowledge, and sound mental training (which I take to include training in behaviors and attitudes).

It seems odd to question Audubon’s belief in human educability because his life project is, it seems, an educational one. Ostensibly, Audubon’s goal in cataloging and artistically rendering America’s birds is not only to learn about birds himself but also to share his knowledge with a broader audience. But in Ornithological Biography, his ability to do both of these things is called continually into question. As frequently as Audubon affirms that he has observed these birds himself and drawn his conclusions from empirical evidence he draws attention to the limits of his knowledge and the limits of human beings for acquiring the knowledge he seeks. He “can only observe” that he’s seen one old eagle and has to rely on the suppositions of others (244). He hasn’t been able to ascertain the precise duration of incubation (245). He must cite the statements of others without being able to “vouch for the truth of such statements” (244). The movements of the hummingbird “preclude the possibility of following them” even “with a good glass” (250). If “anxious” is the buzzword of Mississippi River Journal, “suppose” is the buzzword of Ornithological Biography. Just as he repeatedly points out the limits of his knowledge and his ability to pursue it further, he obsessively corrects others. Doing so, he doesn’t just assert his supremacy—he calls into question the knowledge others have generated and can’t quite keep this same question away from the knowledge he himself has generated. Coupled with his doubts about his (and others’) ability to know birds are his doubts of his ability to convey what he knows and his readers’ abilities to learn what he has to teach. While I think it would be easy to write off his doubts on this count as rhetorical devices, I think their insistence is worth taking seriously. His desire to be believed and understood impacts his ability to give the facts as he knows them (268). I think we can understand his consistent anthropomorphism, his repeated similes and analogies, as tactics born of an honest concern as to whether his readers, having not seen what he has seen, will be able to understand what he believes he does. (I’m wondering if the desire to render the birds lifesize is in a part a product of this same anxiety about the possibilities of knowledge transmission.) I take seriously his repeated “Would I could represent to you” as representing doubt in the ability of his text to convey information. Sometimes, this desire to be understood and believed leads him to overstatement (“it never having been observed in the Middle States within the memory of any person now living there,” 270); at other moments, we see him try to reassure himself of the truth of what he has to tell (262).

Audubon is similarly anxious about his ability to achieve his affective goals, the goals I link to his father’s idea of “sound mental training.” Here again he falls back on a rhetoric of inability—“I cannot describe to you the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions,” for example (263). In addition to beauty, he cannot impart “the pleasure which I have felt whilst watching” (249). Surely, we can read this as a rhetorical device, Audubon claiming that words fail him, but it seems to me that too much is at stake in this failure for this to be solely coy. In the 1826 journal, he imagines himself asking Walter Scott to come to America now because her beauties are already being tainted and diminished. If we take concern for the environment as one rationale for Ornithological Biography, then his ability to convey and impart his feelings has a real and dear price: if he is unable to make others feel as he does, then he is unable to make them act as he does, with concern for the environment. His assertion in his discussion of the hummingbird that “you could not fail to be impressed with the deepest pangs which parental affection feels on the unexpected death of a cherished child” hangs precariously on that “could not fail,” which in its dispelling of doubt raises it (250). He trusts that “so kindly” we all have “been blessed with that intuitive and noble feeling—admiration!” (248). What he doesn’t trust, however, is his ability to activate this feeling in his readers.

Finally, then, on to skills, or what Audubon’s father calls “talents.” While these two aren’t automatically collapsible, I think that in Audubon’s writings they become so. We remarked last class on Audubon’s distaste for teaching. It seems to me that this isn’t just the product of his believing the job beneath his station, but also of the fact that his students never really seem to get any better. His giving of lessons becomes a non-event in the Mississippi River Journal because they never seem to really lead anywhere. Even when he gets to teach his social superiors in the 1826 journal, none of them do particularly good work—they work with enthusiasm, but not skill (191). Either Audubon is a terrible teacher or his students are incapable of learning what he has to teach. Lindsey and Deanna both read “My Style of Drawing Birds” as an attempt at self-fashioning rather than a pedagogical text; this perception fits well with my reading here. Audubon finds himself astonished by people’s inability to learn: he mocks, for example, those presumably learned naturalists who “express [their] astonishment that half-a-crown was asked by the person who had perhaps followed the birds when alive over miles of such swamps” (271). Dr. Brewster, who edits his writing, can’t seem to understand it: he “had Improved the Style and destroyed the Matter” (191). Audubon rejects the idea that others have been skilled enough to come up with methods of capturing birds better than his; he tries another’s idea for catching hummingbirds but “abandoned the scheme,” feeling “confident that it can never have been used with material advantage” (253). One final example of Audubon’s frustration with the ability of others to learn: the Carolina Parrot. (Yes, it’s a leap from birds to people—but is it for Audubon?) Audubon is frustrated that Carolina Parrots are “incapable of articulating words, however much care and attention may be bestowed upon their education” (236). This belief that skills are in fact talents because they are unlearnable ties all the Audubon we’ve read so far together: the journals and “Myself” are of a piece with Ornithological Biography in that all present the skills, knowledge, and affect of a single individual that cannot be fully transmitted to others. His style of drawing birds remains his alone as does, not despite his authoring of Ornithological Biography but rather because of his inability to do so to his satisfaction, his style of knowing birds. His writings on his childhood propensities and talents become the necessary precursors for understanding the innate and unteachable talents that motivate his scientific writing and art. He can attempt to share what he knows, knowing that to some extent he will fail; he can “teach” others while maintaining his own supremacy because of the limits of human educability. But if his texts reveal abiding concerns about the limits of human educability and knowledge transmission, then what gives his work value? If human educability is limited, then Audubon can frame his products as unique, unsurpassable, and unrepeatable, which gives them a value not based on their universal intelligibility but rather based the uniqueness of his knowledge, affect, and skills, which simply cannot be taught or even fully appreciated—rather like, it seems, the birds themselves.

The Mad Artist

When I first read “My Style of Drawing Birds,” I was struck by what I would call the text’s feeling of “literary-ness”—its almost Poe-like fascination with the grotesque and the Gothic, and its curious, often frenetic, narrative voice. The more Audubon that I read—with his constant appeal to the trope of imploring the “kind reader”—the more that I also notice Audubon’s self-consciousness and self-fashioning not only as an artist or an ornithologist, but as a storyteller.

At the same time as he explains to us his philosophy of drawing, “My Style of Drawing Birds” can also be taken as definitive of Audubon’s style of writing. Here he constructs himself as a highly stylized character, a figure who resembles, in some of his behaviors, one that we know well in pop culture nowadays as well as in nineteenth-century and earlier fictions—the mad scientist. Bear with me here, because this comparison may sound a bit strange at first, especially since I’m about to introduce Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into it, and even pronouncing the names Audubon and Frankenstein in succession intuitively sounds like the set-up for a joke. Hopefully, though—my kind readers—by the end of this post you will be convinced, if nothing else, that there are some meaningful alignments in both formal and thematic content in these two first-person accounts. To this end, I’ll juxtapose some Frankenstein quotations from the excerpt in our anthology alongside passages from “My Style” so that you can decide for yourself. I’d also like to suggest that these points of intersection (and of deviation) matter, that they contain insights into a larger cultural consciousness of the time pertaining to several pressing issues—including questions of representation and originality (which harken as far back as Plato), man’s relationship to—or estrangement from—nature, as well as the relation of art to science when both are concerned with acts of “creation,” and ideas about the proper proportion of aesthetic liberty to realism.

I’m sure that Audubon never read Shelley’s work, though he would have been in his mid-thirties, I gather, when it was written; he was probably far too busy gleaning the secrets of nature himself and trying to bring his own dead subjects to life through drawing. (Why else so much obsession with the lifesize image? It's as if he were hoping that one day the birds might get up and sail away on paper wings.) And when Victor calls his laboratory of butchered body parts a “workshop of filthy creation” (147), well, these words speak just as well for Audubon’s room of bird marionettes (and sometimes even human cadavers for paid portaiture) that he moves about on wires trying to force them to most closely resemble life; this, too, is "filthy creation," far messier than taxidermy.

I think it might be a conceptually rich thought experiment to consider the practice of drawing from the dead, as Audubon does, as a form of artistic “re-animation”—perhaps one to rival prevalent scientific theories about spontaneous generation and attempts to literally “draw life” out of dead matter. Also, it's worth looking at the similar mental states that both of these acts of creation are depicted as fostering, how both Shelley and Audubon dip into this common pool of romantic language about the experience of individuals supposedly on the verge of discovery and revelation, whether scientific or artistic or both (which also hinges on the spiritual and thus the applicability of the word "revelation").

So now for that direct juxtaposition of the two passages:

Principles of Life and Nature:

Victor: “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?” (144)

Audubon: “My Manner of Drawing Birds formed on Natural principles” (762)

Audubon: “…to study Nature was to ramble through her domains, Late and early and at every hour, that any where there I might if capable obtain a serviceable Lesson…” (762)

Victor: “...with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places” (147)

Model of ‘Total Immersion’ in order to obtain exclusive knowledge

Audubon: “…by fastening the threads securely I had something like life before me, yet Much was wanting—when I saw the living bird I felt the blood rise to my temples and almost in despair spent about a Month without Drawing, but in deep thought and daily in the company of the feathered inhabitants of Dear Mill Grove” (760)

Victor: Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses…I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain (145)

The Big Moment of Realization / Revelation:

Victor: “…from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple…” (145)

Audubon: “A thought struck my Mind like a flash of light, that nothing after all could ever answer my Anthusiastic desires to represent nature, than to attempt to Copy her in her own Way, alive and moving!”

Individual So Consumed by Work, No Time for own Basic “Consumption”

Victor: “My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated, with confinement” (147)

Audubon: “Think not reader that my want of a breakfast was at all in my Way, no indeed—I sat to, outlined the bird, aided by compasses and My eyes coloured it and finished it without ever a thought having crossed My Mind as regarded the alleviation of Hunger” (761)

Others May Think Me Mad (but it’s not true)

Victor: “a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit” (147)

Audubon: “there seemed to hover around me almost a mania” (792)

Audubon: “the wife of my Tenant I really believe thought that I was mad” (761)

Victor: “Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman” (145)

(Note, in the first set of quotes, the hesitation of both speakers when they insist on using the qualifier “almost”—almost a mania, almost frantic—and the passiveness of the words “seemed to”; both narrative voices here are excited to point to the romanticized resemblance that their mental state bears to madness, but are keen to point out that it stops at appearances).

So what do we extract from all this? Well, to start with, that looking at this rhetoric side by side, it eventually became difficult (at least for me) to distinguish Shelley’s language of fiction, told from the voice of Victor Frankenstein, from Audubon’s own “real” discussion of himself and his artistic principles. And that often the narrative voice in both felt so similar that often what one could have said the other also could have said (if you allow yourself to forget the fact that Audubon is talking about birds) so close were both in the dominating “frenzy” or “mania” that they assumed. With only a tweak in the particular subjects they refer to—dead birds or human cadavers, isolated woods or isolated cemeteries—their tone could be interchangeable.

Not to say that there aren’t ideological differences. There are many possible jumping-off points for major disagreement in the nuances of what it means, for instance, to “pursue nature to her hiding places” (Victor) versus to “ramble through [nature’s] domains” (Audubon) For instance, although the attitude of the rambler/pursuer is one of similar passion, the rambler sets himself up as one who can learn from Nature at her own designated pace, while the pursuer sets himself up as one who will force Nature to be his teacher as he sees fit. And yet it’s also somewhat deceptive rhetoric, too, that Audubon calls himself a mere “rambler,” implying that he never imposes on Nature, but lets her take the lead and “teach” him, considering that he is such an avid hunter and in his lifetime killed countless thousands of birds. Killing them first, then letting them “teach” him.

But back to this business of representation. The words to “imitate nature” are crucially important to Audubon in his work (to imitate nature as well as possible, to draw a bird as close to life as possible) and also to the mad scientist creator. The closer he gets to life or the resemblance of life (Audubon ecstatically moving aside his King Fisher’s eyelid and Victor seeing the “dull yellow eye” of his creation open for the first time) the higher the creator’s excitement, or nervous energy, mounts. In a sense, Frankenstein’s monster is alive, but in another, he is nothing more than a representation of life. He had to be created, not just born, and the idea of what he was supposed to look like preceded and dictated even this second “birth.” As a (very poor) representation of a living human, he is a composite of assorted artistic materials, a pasty collage of different bodies, doomed to walk amongst those who are the true “Originals” of that thing he can only shabbily represent.

But here there is another question: is the bigger issue that Victor “overstepped” nature in attempting to do the same thing that Nature does, or is the real issue that Victor is just an awful artist? That if he could have just imitated Nature better, paid enough attention to the total harmony of his composition, he could have circumvented the ensuing tragedy? Then, on the other hand, let’s think about Audubon: he wants to be known for his scientific eye and his first-hand knowledge of birds in nature. He doesn’t consider himself an artist in the “art museum” sense, as we discussed in class last time, but eventually becomes an artist in the art museum sense after his death. At the same time as he is devoted to realism and being "true" to nature--which Victor is not--Audubon is undeniably concerned with the aesthetic pleasure of the viewer (he considers not only a creation, but those who look at it); this is exactly what Victor neglected to account for in his own work (and, oh, the consequences). It makes sense that Shelley, as a writer, would warn scientists of the danger of forgetting about humans' existence as aesthetic beings.

Artistic mimesis, versus the “simulation of life” that drew audiences to watch scientists (also performers) like Galvani perform electric experiments that made the limbs of corpses jerk, is not one that is generally condemned, at least in the same way, for being transgressive. Art is criticized for being societally or ethically or morally transgressive; it can be insensitive or in poor taste, but less often do you hear the more epic statement that it is “against nature.” If there’s an overarching message in this post—and I’m still just musing very abstractly—maybe it’s that art is capable of going one step further than even the most speculative science in permanently “re-animating” its subjects, offering that elusive fountain of youth or a “second life” to the dead. Perhaps the mad scientist's mistake is unwittingly attempting to use the body as his canvas, when it is the task of the mad artist to translate the body onto a canvas (or the written page).

In the Belly of the Bird: A Reading of Audubon's Mississippi River Journal

As I was reading John James Audubon’s Mississippi River Journal I found myself thinking of the entries thusly: less as descriptions of what had taken place in his life on a certain day and more as descriptions of the contents of his stomach had he been killed and dissected on that day. I apologize for being grotesque in my metaphor. That said, I believe that any reading of the Journal provides the reader with more than a catalogue of names, dates, and places. This document grants the peruser a keen sense of the spiritual sustenance that sustained its author. That sustenance? Birds, of course.

Can man live on bird alone? Audubon seems to have come close. As he writes in one of his journal’s most memorable apostrophe’s: “but My Birds My Beloved Birds of America feel all my time and nearly all my thoughts” (137). Here I purposely refuse him the editorial “sic.” For he is quite right, the birds don’t merely fill his days, they “feel” them—grant them meaning, affect. A number of other passages make a similar point even if they do so in a less direct manner. Consider, for example, the details he chooses to emphasize when discussing the night of December 10, 1820. As he informs his reader, he spent the night cushioned by “10lb of Wild Turkey Feathers” only to awake to the “Mirth” of “the Cardinals, the Towe Buntings, the Meadow Larks and Many Species of Sparrows, chearing the approach of a Benevolent sun shining day” (46). He spends his night comforted by a bird and his dawn cheered by them. One hardly hesitates to speculate on the subject of his dreams.

Of course birds manage to do more than merely cheer him up. On at least three occasions they provide him with a forecast, serving “as the herald of Weather in its Movements” (35, see also 60, 132). Birds bring him the news, bring it to him in lines of type shifting across the sky. And if they are his reading material, they are also what he writes about and even what he writes with as he suggests when he mentions the killing of five crows “for their quills” (48). Considering the closeness of these links between bird and word, it is only right that Audubon often employs birds and their behavior in his metaphors. Note, for example, his description of standing over a deathbed, an occasion when “time flys very slow indeed, so much so that it lookedt as if it Stood Still like the Hawk that Poises in the Air over is prey” (115). Can anyone be surprised that birds should provide him with his moments of greatest eloquence? Even better, of course, are the moments when he envisions himself as a bird, as when he leaves the room of a soon-to-be-nude model feeling “like a Bird that makes his escape from a strong Cage” (887). Similarly memorable is his description of how different he feels after receiving a new haircut and a new set of clothes, changes that alter him “fully as much as a handsome Bird is when robbed of all its featherings” (130).

Audubon is a bird and when we read these entries it is his stomach that we sift. If, however, such a reading seems to imply that I am taking revenge for the birds that he massacred, I would like to insist that I do not begrudge him his manner of research. Cutting these birds open provided him with important information about their gender and their diet, information that allowed him to make his drawings more scientifically accurate and useful. You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and you can’t make an ornithological study without cracking a few ribs. What’s more, there was simply no way for a man of Audubon’s times and inclinations to resist opening up the birds. As an artist, Audubon was naturally interested in seeing all that he could see. I would like to propose, however, that he was also inclined to open these birds as a participant in what I am beginning to think of as the visual bias of 19^th century science. Luigi Galvani wanted to draw electricity “out of the nerves, and almost to place it under our eyes” (Otis 146). Scientists, both legitimate and otherwise, produced spectacles that not only explained scientific breakthroughs, but burned them onto an audience’s retinas. Audubon watched birds, drew their surfaces, and bore into them with the beady, implacable eyes of his age.

Audubon's "Myself": Anecdotes and Constituent Events

In his short memoir, “Myself,” Audubon assures the reader twice that there are “hundreds of anecdotes” he could share (772, 793). Indeed, he shares a good many anecdotes in this story, but he quickly brushes past most of those hundred (or saves them for another story). This got me thinking about what counts as a mere anecdote and what counts as a constituent event* in Audubon’s life story. Because of my interest in narrative theory, I’m interested in what events get told (and emphasized) and what events get left untold or only briefly mentioned—and why?

Audubon’s first audience in “Myself” is purportedly made up of his two sons, Victor and John, and at first the story does seem like it’s constructed in such a way as to inform these boys about their father’s life—while hopefully exciting and instructing them along the way. The story belongs in the genre of family legend/“how I met your mother” tales. The narrator opens with the constituent events you would expect in a brief family history: a description of each of the narrator’s parents, and an overview of his childhood education. While he makes mention of birds a few times in this first half of his story, these mentions seem to simply to highlight the narrator’s ongoing enjoyment of nature without seeming like central events. What does seem like a central event is the moment when the narrator meets his future wife, the boys’ mother. The style of narration builds suspense: Mr. Bakewell is out, Audubon is shown into a parlor where “only one young lady” sits working by the fire (775). She rises, greets him; they have an awkward conversation; he realizes she’s more beautiful than any of the other girls he’s ever seen; she endeavors to amuse him. And then, the ultimate revelation: “Oh! may god bless her! It was she, my dear sons, who afterward became my beloved wife, and your mother” (775). Here, at least, this seems to be a narrative centered on a young man’s coming of age, a story that will ultimately lead to his sons’ emergence in the world.

But that’s not the story he ends up telling, or at least not the only one. As the narrator progresses through his adult life, sharing tales of travel, encounters with pirates and other scoundrels, and initial attempts to forge a career in industry, he seems to lose interest in the story he originally set out to tell, and family events become passing anecdotes. He brushes over the birth of Victor in one sentence, and he actually forgets to mention his second son’s birth, stopping himself in the middle of a paragraph to say “I have omitted to say that my second son, John Woodhouse, was born under Dr. Rankin’s roof on November 30, 1812” (788). After a brief mention of this son’s early sickness and eventual childhood health, the narrator returns to the action, as if to say, “Where was I?”

In other words, events that seem like they would be constituent events in a story written for the narrator’s sons are turned into passing anecdotes. Towards the end, he admits: “In glancing over these pages, I see that in my hurried and broken manner of laying before you this very imperfect (but perfectly correct) account of my early life I have omitted to tell you that, before the birth of your sister Rosa, a daughter was born at Henderson, who was called, of course, Lucy. Alas! the poor, dear little one was unkindly born, she was always ill and suffering” (793). This passage strikes me as extremely regretful, not only of the daughter’s death but of his neglect of mentioning it until now. Of course his sons would want to hear this chapter in their family history. Audubon’s language, sentimental and nostalgic, seems almost to represent his attempt to make up for his oversight: “your kind and unwearied mother nurse[d] her with all imaginable care, but notwithstanding this loving devotion she died, in the arms which had held her so long, and so tenderly” (793).

But already this family history has gotten away from itself; it has become at least in part a story of the narrator’s struggle with poverty and a story of, despite that poverty, pursuing his real passion. Birds were “the objects of my greatest delight” (785), Audubon writes. I’m not suggesting we judge Audubon for this shift in focus, or blame him for forgetting to mention the births and deaths of his children. It just seems to me that the story he set out to write has changed. He writes most movingly not when he writes about his wife or his children but, I think, when he writes about his passion for birds, especially in the culminating passage where suggests that the woods have become the one setting—and their feathered inhabitants the one kind of company—in which he feels most inclined to worship.

Beth

*H. Porter Abbot’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative defines “constituent events” as those events “central to the forward movement of the story” (188). This is in contrast to “supplementary events”: those events that are not “necessary” to the story—“they seem to be extra” (189). I’ve been talking about anecdotes in a way that considers them as supplementary events. (I’m sure I’ll need to be more precise in my definitions if I write about this further!)

Books about Contagion etc.

Hey all, here's those books and an article title related to what we talked about yesterday.
While I was searching for sources I also found a lot of articles about the architecture/colors of the rooms in the Masque of the Red Death, if that's more up your alley. Just do a general search for Poe and Masque (or Mask, as it sometimes is written), and you're sure to find some stuff.

Book for general public:
Alcabes, Philip. DREAD: How Fear And Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Plaque to Avian Flu.

Academic book:
Christensen, Allan Conrad. Nineteenth-century narratives of contagion : 'our feverish contact'

Article on Poe:
Fisher, Benjamin F. That 'Daughter of Old Time': Science in the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

Audubon

I don’t quite know what to make of Audubon’s title “My Style of Drawing Birds.” The title appears seemingly straightforward; simply put, there does not seem to be not much to it. Yet, there is something very possessive, loaded, and personal about the title. The audience must know that this is MY/Audubon’s (and no one else’s) Style of Drawing Birds. Audubon repeatedly makes the point that his style is distinct from other artists’ styles of depicting birds.

There is the sense that Audubon has spent such a large portion of his life studying and getting to know these creatures that for someone to recreate his style of drawing without really immersing oneself in nature is not the purpose of art.

Audubon explains “the gradual knowledge of the form and the habits of the birds of our country impressed me with the idea that each part of the family must possess a single degree of affinity distinguishable at sight from any one of them” (762). Audubon can draw birds and landscapes because he understands them, has learned about each species’ unique characteristics, and he knows how they function in nature. He “rambles” through nature every opportunity he was given . To create in any other way (as some artists are doing it seems) is cheating or plagiarizing. One could make the argument that naturalists are the best artists (just as Shelley states, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world). Viewing nature though a more scientific lens is what makes his art what it is.

We are even left with Audubon, who takes an immense amount of pride in his work and is frustrated by those who wish to copy his style of drawing without giving him the credit (and rightfully so), as not having enough agency. For instance, he explains that “I have made some hope that wherever you see them, their similitude to my originals will prove to you at once they are Nought but piracies of My Style of Drawing Birds” (764). The language Audubon employs here is extremely scientific. The similitude will prove the others are fakes and “truth” will be revealed. This statement also encourages the public to engage with and view art.

I really enjoyed reading this piece on how Audubon created his art. He demonstrates how difficult the process was [insert the Dodo comment here], and how he is thankful that his father encouraged him. As we know when we read “Myself” his father seems to take on another persona entirely. The father urges his son to be more academically minded and study mathematics; he partially discourages him from spending his days hunting and hanging out with his friends, which brings up the problems/questions of representation.

The process took an immense amount of tweaking, meticulousness, a lot of wire, close examination of the (dead) specimens, etc. In order to make the birds more real, to copy nature as its moves, he first must have complete control over them in their deadened state. Yet, for Audubon, these dead specimen were still infused with life as “even the eye of the king fisher was as if full of life before me whenever I pressed its lids aside with a finger” (761). Most birds are nearly always in motion (unless maybe the heron), so there is a movement his artwork tries to capture (From looking more closely at the drawings online, you can almost anticipate what the birds are going to do next).

Ironically, it was by luck that Audubon discovered how much the application of chalk could improve his drawing of certain birds as he tried to cover up the water drop that accidently fell onto a portrait of his friend’s face (763). In fact, he doesn’t have complete agency over his work; rather it was by chance he made this discovery. This idea of agency seems to resonate with our earlier discussion of Semmelweis.

In regards to Myself, the structure is fragmented and episodic. At times, Audubon inserts the most seemingly insignificant details into the piece, but they must be in his “autobiography” for his sons to understand him better. The writing appears less scientific as his audience has shifted. (The question of audience also seems like an important one. At first, the autobiography appears to be addressed only to Audubon’s “dear sons” but then later he seems aware that this piece of writing will be read by an audience when he states that “let the reader, whoever he my be, think as he like . . . “ (778). What are we supposed to make, if anything, of this change in address?

The transitions were rather abrupt (like my transition from discussing “My Style of Drawings” and then moving onto” Myself.”) I liked on the fourth page when Audubon has come to the conclusion that he has revealed enough information about his father and “Now, I must return to myself.”

Although dialogue does not appear in the letter to his sons, his writing style and tone changes with every new episode in his life. When Audubon describes himself as a child, it’s as if he is writing from the perspective of a child. His mother seems to be influential when she “hides [her son’s] faults, boasted to every one of [his] useful merits, and . . .said frequently in [his] presence that [he] was the most handsomest boy in France” (768). Not surprisingly, shortly after Audubon goes on to list of all of the things he excels in or those things which he possessed a” considerable” talent for. He is certainly not modest here, but as he ages that fond opinion he asserts with such confidence begins to dissipate.

When he loses all of his possessions from debt, (and can finally become an artist) there is such a real quality about Audubon almost as if he is becoming as realist as the birds he spends so much time drawing. Thinking about Audubon’s writing as visual art, it has an aesthetic appeal to it; I would argue there is a aesthetic timelessness to his work. Does his actual artwork function the same way? Is this scientific artwork “beautiful?” Of course, the answer is yes, but how? Where does it rank and/or how does relate to other art of the time period?

The stages of Audubon’s life somehow need to be viewed and envisioned from afar. But it seems more interesting to me to think of Audubon (the autobiographer) as art? Audubon emphasizes that art is a process, and it would have been interesting to actually see the expression on Audubon’s face as he was writing each detail of his life (along the lines of Velazquez’ Las Meninas).