Catching up on The New Yorker, I came across an essay by the always-fascinating Kathryn Schulz, about the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus.
Linnaeus was apparently a prodigy of nature:
As word of Linnaeus’s gifts spread, he began acquiring friends in high places, including one who offered him a position delivering lectures at the university’s botanic gardens. That appointment earned Linnaeus some ire—it was normally reserved for academic elder statesmen, and he was still technically an undergraduate—but it further established his reputation as a rising star, and the talks he gave at the gardens routinely drew hundreds of people.
How did he manage this, you ask? What was the secret of his audience appeal?
The answer is: sex sells. Linnaeus had uncovered the sexual lives of plants, which reproduce by “releasing pollen to fertilize the ovules contained in pistils.”
Useful as these ideas were, they scandalized some of Linnaeus’s contemporaries, not least because the plant kingdom, like the animal kingdom, proved to be sexually unruly. Linnaeus spoke tenderly of flower petals serving as a “bridal bed,” but close examination of the reproductive methods of plants revealed relations that looked less like heterosexual monogamy than like homosexuality, polygamy, miscegenation, and incest. “Who would have thought that bluebells, lilies, and onions could be up to such immorality?” one critic mocked.
Schulz did not much like the book she is reviewing, and she may be right to criticize its prose and structure, but she ends up throwing shade at Linnaeus himself. “It is true that he was an exceptional botanist with remarkable powers of observation and incredible stamina,” she writes, but:
[It] is also true that he was mostly a kind of biological Marie Kondo, endlessly sorting and systematizing, and that his scholarship was ultimately more bureaucratic than profound.
Not fair, I think, on two related grounds. The first is that it underestimates the transformation that our lifeworld undergoes when we give logical names to plants and animals. What was a feral discord of syllables—nature—can now be read, in Latin, just as God intended.
The second sin here is hypocrisy. Schulz gets a kick from taxonomy as much as anyone, if not more—and she knows that its trivia can be deep. Witness her 2017 New Yorker essay on fantastic beasts, which begins by asking us to rank the plausibility of supernatural beings, from angels to zombies, in a nerdy spreadsheet—a party game that elicits “surprising … concord [and] impassioned disagreement”—but ends with the construction of the world “out of bits and pieces of reality plus the magic wand of the mind.”
Kieran,
have you read John Fowles's gem of a book, The Tree?
Page 30 onward.
Is this desire for naming, control and management at the heart of the ecological crisis? As if we could see everything from the outside. James C. Scott, in Two Cheers for Anarchism, has a very interesting discussion on the clearing up of the 'messiness' of nature (forests, in this case). Seeing like a capitalist/state?
Nature and 'landscape' as a grid of straight lines...a map that can be scaled and replicated (Anna Tsing)...a 'Roman wilderness' -as The Doors might say.