The Meaning of (Fossilised) Life or “If an ammonite swims in the sea and nobody’s there to see it…” 

Amongst the myriad forms of life that line the walls and fill the Victorian cabinets of the Grant Museum of Zoology, there lie a number of specimens that are marked out not by the strangeness of their appearance (for the Grant is a veritable archive of strangeness, from preserved, etiolated lungfish to the infamously taxonomically confusing stuffed platypus) but by their sheer ancientness. Whereas the majority of specimens in the Grant are specimens or skeletons of animals and organisms that still exist, or that existed within recorded historical consciousness (this, this, and this), these enigmatic objects come from a time before anything resembling a human being stepped foot on the Earth. These specimens, as you may have guessed, are fossils.

 

The Grant has a number of fossilised specimens in its collection and a selection of models and casts of famous fossils, the originals of which are stored elsewhere. The stories of fossils, how they come to be preserved over millions of years of geological flux, as well as the unlikely and often serendipitous ways in which they are found by palaeontologists and amateurs alike, are fascinating. Perhaps the most historically significant example is that of Mary Anning, a working-class woman from Dorset who began her fossil-finding career selling fossilized curios to seaside tourists. Over time, her skill and tenacity as fossil finder grew and led to her to the discovery of the Plesiosaurus, the Ichthyosaurus, and a number of other highly significant ancient species. Her work was in turn influential on a number of more canonical figures in the history of science such as the influential geologist William Buckland and the fossil collector Thomas Hawkins. Conversely, the pre-eminent French zoologist of the late 18th and early 19th Century, Georges Cuvier, to the detriment of his legacy, branded her a fraud.

However, there is a different type of story I want to pursue today, and it is one that might seem wilfully obscure to those of us accustomed to considering the scientific and paleontological implications of fossil finds and palaeo-archaeology more generally.

I have asked in a previous post, incited by the literary, philosophical meanderings of Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a question that seems to me to drive right at the core of what the Grant Museum endeavoured to answer in the 19^th Century: What can the structure (the anatomy, if you will) of an organism tell us about the organism itself? Robert Grant himself, in a speech delivered to his colleagues at the University of London in 1833, put it simply: ‘Comparative anatomy is that branch of physical science which treats of the structures of animals’. Ishmael, connecting us once more to UCL’s collections, asks this of the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham that now sits in the South Cloisters of the university. Bentham, according to Ishmael, conveys in his very structure the character of the utilitarian thought that he pursued in his philosophical works. For Ishmael this is the one instance in which structure and essence are undifferentiated aspects of the whole. Generally, however, he admits that ‘nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan’s articulated bones’. Robert Grant may have disagreed with Ishmael on this point; but for Melville’s narrator, the question is not so much we can know the whale, but what the limits of this knowing are.

 

Moby-Dick, being as much about the interpretation of literature and the search for truth as it is about the search for an elusive white whale asks us to consider a related question: what can the structure of a text, of a book, tell us about the text or book itself? Are there limits to our knowledge of a book or a novel? Can we ever “know” a book fully, by closely studying its parts?

We can put these questions more succinctly: What can an inanimate part (structure or skeleton) tell us about the living whole (text or organism)? Melville, via Ishmael, is circumspect about our ability to gain an accurate representation of the whole, lamenting that ‘one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like’.

Thus it is that I come finally to the question I want to pursue, a question that has been prompted by the time I spend among inanimate parts and fossilised remains, as it has by my own forays into literature and its interpretation. What does a fossil mean? What can a fossil, a part of the entire, unimaginable span of organic history, tell us about the entirety of life and history? Can it have a meaning at all? Is it the case that, as with Melville’s leviathanic skeleton, the fossil (indeed all fossils) can only tell us a limited story about the history of life on earth? And if so, what does this tell us about “meaning” as such?

Traditionally, fossils (versus the skeletons of living or recently extinct species) have acted as testaments to the vast span of organic history: subterranean monuments to the dead, which nevertheless provide us with the silent testimony of life anterior to the existence of humanity. In the case of Mary Anning, as well as the work of her detractor, Georges Cuvier, the ancient specimens they described, greatly troubled 18^th and 19^th century biblical accounts of creation which attributed thousands and not millions of years to the age of the earth. Beyond this, of course, a fossil tells us amazing stories about evolutionary and geological history. In the Grant, a large ammonite, a fossilised marine invertebrate similar to the contemporary nautilus genus, sits silently between the skulls of two elephants and model of an elephant’s heart. However, during the Mesozoic era, the ammonite was so abundant, that palaeontologists now can use it as an index fossil, a specimen so ubiquitous that an entire geological epoch can be characterised by its presence in the stratigraphic record. This tells us a tantalising story of a distant and unknowable watery past, an earth populated for thousands of years by invertebrate marine animals, a world that, unless we spend the majority of our time beneath the waves, is incomprehensible to us and was unimaginable without the material existence and fossilisation of the ammonite itself.

For some, fossils fill the blanks of our evolutionary past (the ammonite, it would seem, fills a particularly large one). If one is vigilant, one will see the intermittent appearance in the pages of newspapers and popular journals stories of “missing links”. Here, the discovery of ancient proto-human remains provides us with the supposed intermediary between our species, homo sapiens, and our primitive ancestors. Strictly speaking, there is no one missing link – evolutionary history is not linear or progressive in the way we might like to think, but fossils nevertheless are employed to supply us with a meaning that underwrites humanity’s existential legitimacy, a paleontological riposte to the larger metaphysical question: Why Are We Here? Unfortunately, fossils, even ones that seem to supply us with “missing links” to our evolutionary past do not answer this question satisfactorily. Henry Gee, an editor at Nature and the author of The Accidental Species writes witheringly of the temptation to interpret evolutionary history this way: ‘The term missing link, … speaks to an idea in which evolving organisms are following predestined tracks, like trains chugging along a route in an entirely predictable way. It implies that we can discern the pattern of evolution as something entirely in tune with our expectations, such that a newly found fossil fills a gap that we knew was there from the outset. Quite apart from the impossibility of knowing whether any particular fossil we might find is our ancestor or anyone else’s, this is a model of evolution that is at once entirely erroneous, and also rather sad’. What is ‘sad’, for Gee, is the seemingly unassailable arrogance of the human species’s tendency to understand all other evolutionary phenomena in relation to the question of its own existence. After all, we have been on this Earth for a comparatively minuscule period in comparison to the ammonite, and yet, we like to see ourselves as somehow more “evolved” or “superior”, despite the increasing climatic evidence that we are hastening the end of our tenure on this Earth due to the very arrogance that underwrites our anthropocentric view of the world.

This arrogance is perhaps no surprise. We are inescapably human, trapped within our own human minds, and unable to inhabit the minds of other species. It is no surprise then that we tend to view everything through an anthropocentric prism; we are imprisoned by it. The Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy gestured at the possibility of escaping our all-encompassing humanness in his early novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which the fossilised past irrupts into the otherwise serene life of an otherwise confident Victorian man. In a passage supposedly inspired by the mountaineering travails of his intellectual mentor (and father of Virginia Woolf) Leslie Stephen, Hardy describes the mental state of a rich gentleman, Henry Knight, an amateur geologist, as he hangs perilously from the edge of a cliff on the Jurassic Coast in Devon. As he dangles from the cliff face, he sees a trilobite embedded in the rock before him, and his eyes meet those of the ancient crustacean his mind is cast back into deep geological and evolutionary history:

‘Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines—alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development’.

Here an encounter with a fossil is the catalyst for a reverie concerning the unbearable morality of all that lives as well as the transience of humanity, its utter insignificance in the face of all that has gone before and all that will follow. And yet again, the fossil remains secondary to our own consideration, our own sense of humanness. In describing ‘an earlier band’ of monstrous animals, Hardy’s narrator does not fail to add ‘No man was there’.  Despite the fossilised animal’s complete indifference to the existence of humanity, we repeatedly project our own existence into the way we understand it. It is a foil against which we understand our own condition.

Returning to the original question, then, what can the fossil – the fragment – tell us about the whole? Not much it seems, as it is impossible to step outside our own anthropocentrism; we are unable to escape the perceptual prison of our own humanity. Thus what the fossil can tell us about the Earth, and the history of life upon that Earth is limited by our inability to be anything but human – and subjective. However, a French philosopher named Quentin Meillasoux would argue differently. For Meillasoux, the fossil is the most revealing artefact one could wish for. Not for what it tells us about the imagined ‘whole’ to which I have referred a number of times. But of what it can tell us about how we might go about knowing the nature of reality.

For Meillasoux, the pre-human fossil has a meaning that has the potential to recalibrate the nature of the philosophy of reality itself. Meillasoux’s philosophical endeavour is dedicated to solving the Gordian knot that he – and the pre-eminent French philosopher, Alan Badiou – believe was most successfully tied by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18^th Century. Kant’s philosophy, Badiou states, can be said to have ‘broken the history of thought in two’. Before Kant, Meillasoux tells us, is the period of pre-critical philosophy, and afterwards, the period of critical philosophy. What do these terms mean? [Warning: This is going to get a little technical, but I promise, we’ll get back to fossils!]

A pre-critical stance towards reality, Meillasoux states, is seen today as insupportably naïve, because it requires us to believe that, despite the frailties of human perception and its inescapably subjective character, we can gain access to the very thing in-itself, that is to say, the very thing we are observing, stripped of all subjective appearances and all perceptual distortion and ambiguity. A critical stance, the philosophical stance to which the majority of philosophers adhere today, states the opposite and this – we are told – is Kant’s doing. What did Kant tell us? Meillasoux calls Kant’s central critical thesis ‘correlationism’. Correlationism, he tells us, is ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from each other’. In other words, we can never access a thing, a being, without it being a function of thinking, or our perception. This has big implications, not only in philosophy, but in science too. ‘Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object ‘in itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject [us], but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that not would always-already be related to an object’. In short, Meillasoux is saying that, because of this critical stance we 1) can never know anything in itself without the taint of human subjectivity or 2) ever insist that anything exists outside of a person’s ability to perceive it. For many (perhaps those of a more relaxed disposition) this is not a problem; things exist and we don’t need philosophy to tell us otherwise. But for Meillasoux, and the more masochistic of philosophers, this is a big problem. He wants to know if we can know and, if so, how we can know. He is not satisfied with the stasis of contemporary philosophical thought because it tells us, like Ishmael, that anything we know is merely an approximation of the Real. And because of this he’s going to take on Kant, perhaps the single most important figure in Western philosophy of the last 500 years. And he’s going to do it with fossils.

The oldest fossil in the Grant Museum is the Ottoia Prolifica, or as has been called in a previous blog post, the ‘Ancient Penis Worm’, the reason for which will be clear for readers of Classics and Ancient Greek. This particular fossil is inconceivably old. It dates from over 500 millions years ago – a date that for Meillasoux is extremely important. It is so crucially important because it pre-dates the arrival of humankind (Homo habilis) by around 498 millions years. In other words, this unassuming looking fossil existed almost half a billion years before human consciousness was ever even able to cast its observational, subjective eye over the phenomena of the world. Yet, we have already established that the subject-object relation is constitutive of existence itself; without the subject, the object is invisible and thus effectively non-existent. The fossil, what Meillasoux will call, ‘The Arche-Fossil’ is the material evidence to repudiate the critical stance and to make us re-think correlationism: ‘”the arche-fossil” … [represents] not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar sense of the term ‘fossil’, but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality [think of the ammonites’ watery world!] or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life’.

 

The Ottoi Prolifica is a material instance of something – in itself – which existed before man could project its own identity and subjectivity upon all that exists outside itself, when all that existed were things in themselves and no human representations or approximations of these things. Meillasoux will go on to argue in a number of ways how philosophy can work towards understanding the thing in itself, to see the object and not the set of relations that constitute it for us as subjects. However, he admits that the ‘arche-fossil’ is not a solution to the problem of correlationism, but merely the material, factual evidence that correlationism is a problem. His solution to this will entail a number of manoeuvres that include arguing for a relinquishing of the orthodox notion of causality in favour of a purely contingent and chaotic world of events, as well as championing the ability of mathematics (this he gets from his mentor, Badiou) to access the primary qualities of things in themselves.

Henry Knight, the unfortunate aristocrat that Hardy has hanging from the very Devonian cliffs in which Mary Anning discovered so many important fossils could hardly have imagined that his imagined journey into the past would dramatise exactly what Meillasoux tells us could never happen. Knight is a witness to an ancestral time in which no witness existed. And yet, we know, like Ishmael, who laments his inability to know the whale from its structure, that Knight’s understanding of the ancestral past is entirely imaginary. According to correlationist thought, all of the stories we tell about our past, our environment, our evolutionary history are imaginary, in so far as we are caught within our pitifully limited human frames of knowledge, to which the ‘absolute’ or the being of the world and the universe is inaccessible. However, there sits the fossil; the Plesiosaur, the Ichtyosaur, the ammonite, and the Ottoi Prolifica, all silently and humbly acting as physical monuments to the contradiction of strictly correlationist thinking and to the potential to step outside it even if only in a speculative manner, to see, as Ishmael puts it, ‘precisely what the whale really looks like’.

So the next time you step into the Grant Museum and cast your eyes over the fossils, do not just think about our evolutionary past, or about the incredible forms of life that existed in the distant past, about tentacles and exoskeletons, pterosaurs and sea monsters; think about whether what we can ever know anything about these things at all. Think about the way their existence, for us, is defined only by our ability to construct elaborate and ultimately imaginary stories about them (albeit with some pretty great science!). And finally, think about how a 500 million year old worm gave Immanuel Kant, the most influential philosopher since the Ancient Greeks, something to think about himself.

 

Reading list:

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. by Alan Manford, New Edition (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, (London ; New York: Continuum, 2009).

Henry Gee, Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. ([S.l.]: Univ Of Chicago Press, 2015).

For more information on Meillasoux and the ‘speculative realist’ movement in philosophy, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism is available for free here: http://re-press.org/books/the-speculative-turn-continental-materialism-and-realism/

 

By Kevin Guyan

In the first of two blog posts exploring Student Engagers’ experiences of using images when sharing research in museums, Kevin Guyan discusses the enthusiasm he has experienced and the two-way conversations created from photographs of homes in the 1940s and 1950s.

I was conscious of the importance of visual material in the sharing of my research since commencing the PhD process, with photographs possessing the power to transform dense moments of a presentation into something more accessible and engaging. However, a recent change in direction in my approach to engaging across UCL Museums has illustrated the power of the image even more than I had first imagined.

I am a PhD student in History and my research explores the ideas of experts planning the design of social housing in London in the decades following the Second World War.  I specifically question how planners understood men’s actions and behaviours within the home and attempted to reconfigure these performances through design and planning.  To summarise these ideas in a visual form I brought with me to the museum eight photographs: architects, planners and Royal attendees at the 1943 County of London Plan exhibit (below); images from the Live Architecture exhibition at the 1951 Festival of Britain; designs from the 1940s for how living spaces should be arranged and photographs of ‘model homes’ from the 1950s.

 

Upon display of the images, the heightened level of response from museum visitors surprised me.  Without the need for me to even look particularly inviting – visitors assembled at my table and questioned, ‘Well, what do we have here?’  This expression of interest enabled me to explain the Researchers in Museums project, give a brief outline of my research and explain why I am based in the museum for the afternoon.

The images offered a starting-point for conversation, with several of the visitors quick to draw links between the photographs and experiences from their own lives.  One visitor asked questions on racial differences in postwar domestic practices, citing a BBC documentary on the historical significance of the Front Room for black families in the latter half of the 20^th century.  Another visitor examined the current arrangement of their own home – questioning where Dad relaxes after a day at work, in which room children do their homework and the location of where meals are eaten.  Memories of previous homes also featured in our conversations, with one visitor proudly sharing the forward-looking mindset of her Father who would always assist with the household chores or assist the children with their homework in the living room.  People were thinking about their own homes, both past and present, in a new way, while also educating me on their experiences and opinions towards my research.

This deeper engagement is exactly what I was hoping to achieve with my afternoon and made clear the value of public engagement when it operates as a two-way discussion, in which both the museum visitor and myself left feeling better informed about the subject.  This approach to museum engaging also enabled me to avoid disturbing visitors keen to explore the collections on their own, with no wish to engage in conversation.  This approach therefore circumnavigated this problem, with my assortment of images acting as a magnet for those in the museum that wish to engage in a personal conversation and learn more from their visit.

The use of images has made me think further about how those working in museums could expand upon this approach.  How can researchers discuss their work in ways that go beyond talking?  I am aware of other Student Engagers that have used sounds to spark conversations – I feel encouraged to explore ways to bring the smells of early 20^th century housing into the museums, or evoke conversation through the tasting of certain foods and drinks.  History is a sensory journey into the past and there is a need for myself and others sharing their research with the public to look across the senses to make their research as accessible and engaging as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

By Kevin Guyan and Ruth Blackburn

This taster is from a larger presentation, Blockages in the system: health research in postwar Britain, which forms part of the Student Engagers’ Movement event taking place at UCL on Friday 23 May. What follows is a sample of the interdisciplinary work by PhD students Kevin Guyan, Department of History, and Ruth Blackburn, Department of Primary Care and Population Health, linking their interests in 20^th century British history and health sciences. Movement will also relate these ideas to objects from UCL Collections as well as giving attendees an audiovisual experience of travelling on a London Routemaster bus.

 

 

The links between good physical health and exercise have only relatively recently been established. In the postwar decades there was particular interest in investigating heart disease: an increasingly common ailment with causes that were poorly understood at the time.  Jerry Morris (1910-2009), Emeritus Professor of Public Health at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and commonly referred to as the father of exercise epidemiology, was the first to establish proof that the frequency and severity of heart disease was reduced among workers who did more active jobs.

He made this discovery in the late 1940s by conducting an innovative and efficient ‘experiment’ that studied the behaviour and indicators of physical health in several thousand London Transport employees; particularly focusing on health differences between bus drivers and conductors. The selection of the two study groups was critical for the success of the experiment. This is because the bus drivers and conductors were very similar groups of people in most respects (e.g. age, socio-economic status and diet) but differed in terms of the amount of physical activity that was undertaken whilst at work.

By studying differences in the rates of cardiovascular disease between these two groups the ‘bus men study’ showed that the additional physical activity that bus conductors undertook whilst at work was associated with a 50 per cent reduction in heart disease. This finding was the first real evidence to demonstrate that being more active brought substantial health benefits and highlighted the importance of exercise as a public health intervention.

It is now time to position Jerry Morris’s study within the wider context of postwar London, showing that his research on the health of London transport workers was a product of its time and is an interesting example of broader changes in how ‘experts’ were understanding and explaining human action and behaviour.

The decades following the Second World War experienced a widening of ‘expert knowledge’, particularly within fields linked to the physical and social health and well-being of citizens.  The esteem of qualities associated with experts also underwent a shift: moving from the predominance of highbrow cultures (for example, the humanities) to also include masters of science, skill and technology. This period was witness to the rise of the scientific and technical expert.

The belief that experts were striving for a ‘New Jerusalem’, a utopian ideal removed from the realities of postwar austerity, often distract discussions of British planning.  However, there was undoubtedly a political dimension to these projects, reflecting the politics of the Left, Fabianism and the Labour Party. It is not coincidental that Morris was a Socialist and championed the need for state intervention to improve the welfare of the population throughout his life’s research. In his work, the line between science and politics is often blurred – expressing the view that positivist forms of science work in tandem with socialist principles.  In this political vision of a New Britain, the rational and modern nation would require the successful management of health and disease.  Morris and his expert knowledge of epidemiology would therefore position him as a central figure in this imagined future.

This interest in the political led to what is arguably the most interesting development in his work: his definition of the individual. Morris did not focus on moral deviancy or communities positioned on the edge of society; nor, in his ‘bus men study’, was his primary focus the influences of class or social situation.  Instead, his chief research interests were individual actions and ways of living, removed from their social and economic contexts.

By moving the focus of one’s likelihood to encounter disease away from social class or community and instead considering the activities that individuals perform, although throughout his life’s work Morris was deeply interested in how socioeconomic factors affect the activities people perform, the ‘bus men study’ differed from the approach of scientists before him.  Importantly, the fluid nature of modern life was also acknowledged and the need to view subjects as ‘changing people’ operating in changing social environments. As experts grew more willing to challenge the influences of social class and instead consider the complex effects of social and biological relations, ‘ways of living’ emerged as a primary factor in the study of health and disease.  The offshoot of this finding was groundbreaking: a call for the reform of everyday lifestyles. With this conclusion, Morris’s ‘bus men study’ should not only be viewed as a key text in epidemiology but also as part of a wider shift in 20^th century Britain over the role of scientific expertise and definitions of the individual.

By Ruth Blackburn

The aptly named brain coral is a dome-shaped member of the family Faviidae which has distinct sinuous valleys (that’s the wibbly ridgey bits that look like the surface of a brain).

So why the dome shape?  This is largely driven by the position of the coral within the reef: brain coral is found in shallow parts of reef at a depth of about 1-15 metres. At this depth there is substantial wave action, which corals with a compact spheroid shape are much more resilient to than those with thin antler-like projections.

The sinuous valleys on the surface of the brain coral can also be explained.  These mark the areas in which polyps – soft bodied marine creatures – are most densely found.  Polyps are able to secrete calcium carbonate (just like the scale that builds up in your kettle) to form a hard and protective exoskeleton that it can live in: this exoskeleton is what you actually see when you visit the Grant Museum.

By Kevin Guyan

Questions directed towards Engagers come in all forms, one of the most common questions I have been asked while working in the Art Museum is also one of the most of interest to me:

Where did UCL acquire its Art Collection?

Excited by the romantic vision of illicit meetings between UCL staff and art collectors, foreign trips and auction houses, I made my own investigations into the history of the collection.

Perhaps reassuringly, the history behind the 10,000 plus objects in the UCL collection is more mundane than I had first expected.  The collection has developed through two main sources: links between UCL and the Slade School of Fine Art and the receipt of art work bequeathed to the museum.

A collection of material produced by prize-winning students studying at the Slade would, in its own right, offer a collection of great importance, with notable students including Stanley Spencer, Paula Rego and Augustus John.  This collection policy continues to the present day, with the museum recently acquiring A Printers’ Symphony,  a sound recording accompanied by a concertina of printed images and marks from these processes, bound together like a musical score and Marianna Simnett’s video Dog, which won the William Coldstream Memorial prize in 2013.

What about the collection’s Durers and Rembrandts – they surely were not linked to a school of art that they predate by over two centuries?  The second source explains the acquisition of the collection’s older material.

Above all, the collection is a teaching resource and it is the hope of benefactors that by donating their work to the collection it will be of benefit and enjoyment to the students and staff at UCL as well as being shared with the general public more broadly.

This made me think about how the museum goes about collecting work in the present day.  Space is an obvious limitation and the time of UCL staff is finite, there must therefore be limitations on what the museum can and cannot accept, raising questions over who holds the power of this decision?

The Art Museum is the only collection at UCL that continues to grow, as the other UCL collections do not acquire new objects.  Any acquisition of new works is first approved by a committee and is subject to a strict acquisition policy.  It can be the case that UCL chooses to turn down works if it is felt that they would be unable to conserve or store them properly.

The question of how UCL Art Museum acquired its collection made me rethink the processes behind why the collection takes it current shape.  A more in-depth account of the collection’s acquisition history and charting the chronological spread of the material would be fascinating – a ready subject, perhaps, for a future blog post?

 By Niall Sreenan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In its oceanic bibliographic depth and its densely allusive prose, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is as much a work of academic research as it is a study of obsession. Indeed, its genius is to make the reader enact the academic obsession of the pursuit of truth in its narration of the story of Captain Ahab and his own obsessive, yet doomed, quest for the elusive white whale, Moby-Dick.

Allusion and bibliographic prosthesis, in much academic prose, can attenuate the richness of academic work, as our consciousness flits wearily from footnote to endnote and back to prose, yet much of the joy of reading Moby Dick is in immersing ourselves in the rich set of references with which Melville explicitly and implicitly peppers the novel.

It is often said that the chapters dedicated to the habits, behaviour, anatomy, and folklore of the leviathanic cetaceans that the Nantucketers of the Pequod seek to butcher for their livelihoods are the most boring of Moby-Dick’s chapters. They do not, it is argued, propel the narrative forwards nor do they proffer much insight into the complex psychological processes of the monomaniacal Ahab. Indeed, in much the same way as the densely allusive prose, they act as bulwarks to the general flow of the narrative, cutting it up, and disallowing our abilities as readers to devour the story, as it were.

As a student of literature, whose research explores the complex nexus of cultural linkages between science and literature, both in history and today, I find these passages to be the most fascinating, as they exemplify the very subject of my research, the intersection, or interface, between scientific writing and literary writing. Moreover, unless one is well read in historic whale biology, these sections require one to seek help at the back of one’s well-annotated scholarly edition, or  to fire up Google and hope for the best.

However, there is something of the museum to Moby Dick too…

Each of Melville’s bibliographic allusions, from archaic naturalist studies, taxonomic tomes, and subjective accounts, biblical stories and ancient Greek myth, acts as a monument to a past science, an archaeology of the sperm whale mythos, constructed from scientific and non-scientific texts. Thus, I was not surprised to find that Moby Dick proffered some intriguing connections with UCL’s own museum collections, particularly the Grant Museum, which is itself a monument to a past science.

One such chapter, dedicated to a taxonomic explication of the entire family of cetaceans as understood by the narrator Ishmael, draws a direct parallel between the size and character of certain whales and the materiality and format of books, once again enacting a collision or analogy between the whale and the text:

First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large.

Melville begins with the largest specimen, and the subject of his metaphysical hunt:

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER I. (SPERM WHALE).—This whale, among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained.

Yet before embarking on his review of whale taxonomy and etymology, through the index of cetaceans and their now curiously outdated appellations, ‘the grampus’, ‘the blackfish’, ‘the thrasher’, and their correlatives in publishing formats, ‘the folio’, the ‘octavo’, the duodecimo’, Melville draws attention to a contested aspect of the systematic study of whales, referring to what he calls ‘fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien’. These fish, the ‘fish style Lamatins and the Dugongs’, for Melville are not a member of the whale species, and we know now that they are in fact members of the order Sirenia, derived from the ancient Greek mythology of sirens, which also is said to refer to the circumstances of their discovery, their being mistaken by sailors for mermaids. The order Cetecea, in which whales belong, literally means ‘large sea animal’ though itself has an ancient Greek mythological origin:  Perseus, a demigod and the killer of Medusa, defeats the sea monster Cetus, and Melville himself refers to Perseus, as ‘the first whale man’.

But Ishmael sees nothing alluring about the supposedly siren like Dugongs and Manatees. Rather, he has disdain for them, writing that ‘these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.’

Examining at the skeletal specimen in the Grant Museum, it is not difficult to perceive how a contradictory folkloric narrative was constructed about the Dugong. Its tail is certainly mermaid-like, flowing elegantly, its gently curved spine ending in its compact flipper. Yet, its face is distinctly porcine, its nose ending abruptly, like a snout, and hunched upon its sleek body as if stuck there by an impatient sculptor.

Yet, what can we tell about a whale, or a ‘pig fish’ from its skeleton? Or indeed, what can we tell about a book from its structure? Melville writes:

 But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape.

Melville seems circumspect about our ability to tell much about an animal from its skeleton alone, a notion that might give one pause as they browse through the collection of skeletons and fossils in the Grant Museum of Zoology. Yet, for Melville, there is one exception to this rule, and this too can be found in University College London:

 …though Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal characteristics…

Bentham, it seems, clothed as he is and looking ‘burly-browed’ emanates the very essence of his philosophy, the content of his texts and his utilitarian thought being ‘correctly conveyed’ by his skeleton alone. And once again, Melville asks us to make the link between the ‘fleshy covering’ of the whale and the organism and books, texts, and philosophies.

Indeed reading Moby-Dick, without attending to the thicket of references, allusions, quotations, and citations, is much like reading only the skeleton of the book. The plot is but the skeleton, or the structure, and the flesh, which gives meaning to the bare bones of the story, is what leads us down the avenues of discovery and research and reminds the reader of the sheer joy of education for education’s sake, and the importance and privilege of spending one’s days as PhD student, reading, thinking, writing, and seeking out the White Whale.