The Shock of the Earth

This chapter unearths Walter Benjamin’s dispersed remarks on a figure of shock, the Erschütterung, in order to mark a shift from theorizing sudden disturbances toward registering a deeper time of collapse. The resonant asphalt of Berlin’s Tiergarten, the porous rock of Naples, the uneven paving stones of Paris, the unregulated ground of Marseilles’s public squares, and the rocky paths of Ibiza’s hills become the locus of a shocking experience whose theorization offers an aesthetics of and for the mineral imaginary. Benjamin’s critical and literary elaborations of this form of shock, which evinces an astonishing sensitivity both to the unsettled earth underfoot and planetary irregularities, offer a way to figure the sense of disorientation shared by Tieck, Goethe, and Stifter as well as that of a contemporary epoch facing a breakdown of the Earth system.

Epilogue: Dilapidated

The conclusion reflects on the shifting relations between writing and stone as mediated by a common dilapidation. It reviews how aberrant stones and an unreliable Earth both trouble the novellas and novels considered in this book and perturb the ability of narrative to render a well-plotted world to the breaking point. To test the robustness of these claims the conclusion turns to the lapidary forms of the epigram and epigraph to explore how the shifting valence of stone and the lapidary might index planetary change. Walter Benjamin’s 1939 commentary on Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer epigrams, and in particular on a line written in chalk, offers a primer for commentary in the generalized state of war that is known as the Anthropocene, while also providing a vastly expanded set of coordinates for that commentary.

Many Stranded Stones

The third chapter examines how stones serve as witnesses to historical trauma in Adalbert Stifter’s realist novellas collected in Many-colored Stones, how attempts to downplay those histories and their shocking materialism only make stone even more menacing, and how the susceptibility of those stones and histories to erosion informs his stories’ susceptibility to revision. Rather than the novellas appropriating the obdurate quality of stone and then conveying this emblem of persistence onto the decidedly more fluid familial and societal institutions, those stories within stone convey a recapitulation of their own impermanence and formal incompleteness. Relatedly, the dispersed plotting and dissipated eventfulness of Stifter’s stories, particularly where they deal with the appearance of the stone, are read as a form of engagement with the problem of reading and perceiving at earth magnitude and moreover on a far more dynamic and vibrant planet than he or his contemporaries were willing to acknowledge.

Goethe’s Erratics

The second chapter explores a geological imaginary in the Age of Goethe that takes shape around the errant mobility of granite within a climatologically volatile planet rather than the vertical cliffs, stationary mountains, and imperturbable landforms that have traditionally occupied ecocritical attention. In carefully attending to Goethe’s longstanding engagement with the aesthetic and geological problem of so-called erratic blocks, this chapter recontextualizes the scenes and figures of mobility in his 1829 novel Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering within the errancy of the more-than-human world. The itinerant protagonists in this novel are geomorphic figures whose genealogy includes the granite erratics, and the novel’s environmental imagination is one oriented less toward fixed stratifications and more toward the plotting of an erratic mobility.

Introduction

The introduction of The Geological Unconcious briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. After charting a widespread inclination toward stone and a geologic self-understanding in German-language literature, it argues that the motifs of mobility, wandering, and errancy that figure prominently in romantic, realist, and modernist traditions have as their subtext a lithosphere increasingly agitated by both the expanding extraction of mineral resources and a rapidly expanding insight into the historically volatile climatic conditions of the planet. In response to the widespread argument that the medium of literature is inapt to convey these planetary perturbations now associated with the Anthropocene, this chapter attempts to salvage the humiliation of literature as a figure to think through its place within a larger geologic turn within cultural studies.

Of Other Petrofictions

The first chapter argues that the romantic imaginary not only develops out of literary images of mining but that it is materially from the mine. Taking Wackenroder’s letter describing his and Tieck’s 1793 descent into an iron ore mine as an initial document of German romanticism, this chapter resituates Tieck’s romantic novella Rune Mountain against the backdrop of their first-hand observations of mining industry and the contemporaneous geosciences. However, their romantic vision of mines involves minerals envisioning the romantics: though ostensibly a story about an eccentric human protagonist, Rune Mountain can also be read as a story about the eventfulness of this landform, which serves less as a passive backdrop and more as a captivating and eccentric antagonist. In this way Rune Mountain becomes less a story about the ramifications of the romantics’ overactive imagination and more about the ramifications of an excessively active planet.