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.