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Tortoises, Mosses, Birds, Trees: The Rhizome, as seen form the Rock

Herman Melville’s sketches of the Galapagos Island, known as The Encantadas, while satirizing Darwin’s droll classification of the island’s inhabitants, also serve to subvert colonialist practices that use rationality as justification of the unfair domination of more “primitive” worlds. These two criticisms are, of course, linked. Darwin’s taxonomical approach to classification of the island’s inhabitants is itself a constricting form of domination that the Western world utilizes to conquer and dominate these islands, supplanting its natural, nonhuman beauty with the ugly and restrictive language of humanity. Rather than conforming to this paradigm, Melville’s parody subverts such a hierarchical power structure that justifies humanity’s Machiavellian appropriation of the environment, in favor of a way of thinking that values all organisms as individuals, each with traits that mingle and play with classically imposed structures of identification. This mingling puts these organisms on a horizontal (or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, rhizomatic) playing field, which promotes a more just treatment of these organisms and of the environment that humanity is, at most, an equal part of. The elimination of hierarchical, “vertical” boundaries between organisms of different classification is used by Melville to promote a worldview that is reflected in many contemporary philosophical discourses. This paradigm is known by many names, and while each incarnation has its variations, they all can find a root (or several!) in Melville’s record of the Galapagos. The theory, paradigm, worldview (whatever it should be called) used for the purposes of this essay is the aforementioned “rhizome” of Deleuze and Guattari, from their daunting A Thousand Plateaus. Disregard for the value of every organism’s individuality, and appropriation of the environment for the needs of humanity that we see in Charles Darwin’s account of the same islands, could be deemed an historical contribution to what is known today as the Anthropocene: the current geological age of the planet in which humanity has become the most dominate force over the environment.

Before delving into meticulous textual analysis of The Encantadas, I believe it important to supply the standard that Darwin sets for Melville in his The Voyage of the Beagle, so that Melville’s subversion will become absolutely clear. While Melville’s interpretation of the organisms and the islands themselves takes on a certain whimsical tone (examples of which will be supplied later on), Darwin adheres to staunch, rigid calculation of the environment, and speaks of the unique organisms in terms of their relation to mankind and the already-standing classifications that have been imposed on the organisms of the island. He describes the craters of the island as “[giving] to the country an artificial appearance, which vividly reminded me of those parts of Staffordshire, where the great iron-foundries are most numerous” (Darwin 2), and, using colonialist rhetoric, as opposed to Melville’s all-encompassing geographic detail, describes the archipelago as “a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists” (Darwin 4). Melville, in his attempt to describe the location of the islands, names points of geographic reference in all lateral directions, not just to the north-east (Melville 32). The difference in the way both explorers discuss the tortoises of the island is perhaps the most worthy of note. While these tortoises have a hauntingly profound effect on the narrator of The Encantadas, Darwin describes them with a sterile, emotionless tone: “the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent” (Darwin 3), and later:

I was always amused when overtaking one of these great monsters, as it was quietly pacing along… The flesh of this animal is largely employed, both fresh and salted; and abeautifully clear oil is prepared from the fat. When a tortoise is caught, the man makes a slit in the skin near its tail, so as to see inside its body, whether the fat under the dorsal plate is thick. Darwin 8

Darwin goes on to classify the birds of the islands by what he believes their origins are, mostly deriving from American species. When comparing a bird from the archipelago to a bird from elsewhere in the world, he will often call them “analogous” (Darwin 6). By comparing these birds in such a way, Darwin denies them their uniqueness and individuality; he taxonomically categorizes the birds, and all species of the islands, into neat, suffocating boxes. He does this figuratively and literally; there is a large and detailed chart included in the text that catalogues the different species in a variety of ways (Darwin 14 - 15). While this may not appear malevolent, and actually quite a convenient means of classification, these methods serve as an example of human domination over an environment that is everything but human.

I find it appropriate now to begin my analysis of The Encantadas with the tortoises, as both Darwin and Melville describe them as “antediluvian” (Darwin 2, Melville 26), or, before (Noah’s) flood. The Encantadas is divided into ten sketches, and the introductory sketch concludes with a chilling account of the narrator’s life after spending some time on the archipelago, and having returned home to America; he finds that “far from the influences of towns, and proportionally nigh to the mysterious ones of nature”, he is overcome by visions of “my other and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles” (Melville 24). Melville at once distinguishes between towns (cities, industry) and nature, as opposed to Darwin’s aforementioned comparison between the two, while simultaneously expressing that his time spent within the archipelago has had a significant and profound impact on his psyche. Indeed, he goes on to say that, while at a party of some sort, in a mansion described as “old-fashioned-*+-”, he

“seem[s] to see, slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with ‘Memento*****’ burning in live letters upon his back” (Melville 24 - 25). This hallucination of the narrator’s casts the remaining nine sketches in an ominous light. It implies that the “enchanted islands” have left their mark on the narrator, imploring him to “remember” the tortoises he has seen, and perhaps the ones he has killed. At the same time, this passage suggests the opposite of what Darwin’s text sought to accomplish; rather than make his mark on the islands, the narrator of The Encantadas is impressed upon by the nonhuman environment of the archipelago. This ultimately is a suggestion made by Melville that humanity does not dominate this chain of islands, as Darwin’s desensitized account of the islands might suggest, and that it is rather quite the opposite; it is Melville’s narrator that is dominated by the island and its inhabitants.

We are far from finished with our reptilian friends, as I believe Melville’s devoted analysis of these creatures contains some of the most significant metaphors in the text. In fact, the entire second sketch is devoted to the further mystification (and thus, denial of them as a part of the scientific realm) of these creatures, as well as providing an image of these tortoises that transcends the many realms of classification imposed upon organisms (both plant and animal life) by scientific jargon. He devotes a great amount of prose to detailing the shells of the tortoises: “Even the tortoise, dark and melancholy as it is upon the back, still possesses a bright side… if you but put them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides… because you have done this, you should not swear that the tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the bright… but be honest, and don’t deny the black” (Melville 25). This passage supposes that the tortoises are able to be two things at once (a notion that will be expanded upon momentarily), both delightful to human interpretation (the bright side), while also possessing darkness (perhaps, what is unknown) and aspects of the melancholic. That Melville’s narrator implores the reader to not “deny the black”, seems subtle enough, but is a very provocative, loaded metaphor. The real suggestion here is to not flail before the unknown; that is, to not only value the aspect of something natural that might be pleasing to the eye, or seen as of a certain use, but to celebrate and admire all the unique aspects of an organism that coalesce to form our interpretation of it.

This metaphor is extended as Melville’s narrator continues his grand account of these tortoises’ shells:

Behold these really wondrous tortoises - none of your schoolboy mud-turtles… shaggy, too, here and there, with dark green moss, and slimy with the spray of the sea… scars strangely widened, swollen, half obliterate, and yet distorted like those sometimes found in the bark of very hoary trees, I seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying the bird-tracks and ciphers upon the exhumed slates trod by incredible creatures whose very ghosts are now defunct. Melville 26 - 27

From this loaded passage, with all of its flowery poetics, we can extrapolate many ideas. Firstly, there is a critique, or perhaps a parody, of the world of academia, a world that is naturally associated with taxonomies and strict classification: “schoolboy mud-turtles”, while seemingly a nod at the impressive, mature nature of these specific tortoises, may also be referencing the inclination of academics to classify a creature, to reduce it to its title alone. The most significant part of the passage, however, is the description of the tortoise’s shell: this singular creature is, at once, layered with moss, compared to the bark of a tree, impressed upon by the feet of birds, and imbued with the spray of the sea. This is not just a tortoise, this is a living compilation of many aspects of the environment it inhabits; it is a hybrid. Branka Arsić, in her Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, details historically the modes of classification utilized by various scientists.

She criticizes John James Audubon for his Cartesian appropriation of an organism’s life for the means of scientific analysis (such as we have seen in Darwin’s account of the islands), and promotes the methods of Thomas Nuttall, whose theorization of the classification of life she summarizes here:

We carp at the anomalous - at the unclassifiable - only so long as the taxonomical fiction of fixed and separated identities, which standardizes beings, is understood to mirror their truth. But everything changes once we assume that, far from being rigorously separated, beings are rather changeable sites traversed by life’s mobility; they become processural, moving toward other beings so that “all the arrogance of solitary individuals,” as Nuttall puts it, is eluded. Arsić 147

Melville’s composite tortoise-bird-moss-tree hybrid is indeed a “changeable site traversed by life’s mobility”; its current form is at once the product of itself, avian-life, plant-life, and, indeed, human-life. Darwin, on the other hand, would be a supporter of the “taxonomical fiction of fixed and separated identities”; his tortoises are analyzed in such a way that they are only tortoises, and tortoises only in such a way that is useful to humanity: they make excellent soup, they are to be sliced near the tail, their fat produces beautiful oil, etc. This hybrid is also exemplary of Guattari’s and Deleuze’s “rhizome”, which we will now turn to.

We must bid a fond farewell to our supernatural and beloved tortoises, and set our sights on The Rock Rodondo and its various sea-fowl. I have thus far made brief references to the contrast between the vertical and the horizontal, a notion that will be expanded upon herein. The Rock Rodondo of Melville’s account is a large, tiered tower that serves as a “noble point of observation” (Melville 28) over the Galapagos archipelago. What is particularly interesting to thenarrator of The Encantadas is the structure of the tower, and the numerous sea-birds that find respite from their sea-flight upon the various tiers of the tower:

The tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven summit. These uniform layers, which compose the mass, form its most peculiar feature. For at their lines of junction they project flatly into encircling shelves, from top to bottom, rising one above another in graduated series. And so the eaves of any old barn or abbey are alive with swallows, so were all these rocky ledges with unnumbered sea-fowl… Not only were the eaves rustling with them, but they flew densely overhead, spreading themselves into a winged and continually shifting canopy. Melville 29

The tower is vertical, protruding straight out of the ocean, and tiered in structure. This vertical structure is contrasted by both the chain of islands, which could all be said to be part of the same horizontal stratum, and the “continually shifting canopy” of birds in flight that exists in another stratum, above the tower. This lengthy description of the inhabitants of the tower will allow me to complete this lengthy metaphor:

Let us first glance low down to the lowermost shelf of all… What outlandish beings are these? Erect as men, but hardly as symmetrical… Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen, their bills short; their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their side are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin… Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in none… As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude… thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial array. Melville 29 - 30

First, we must note a reminiscence of my previous point, made with the support of Arsić; the various facets of the penguin’s body makes it impossible to classify with the terms given to us by scientific taxonomies. They are also described as “erect as men”, which places humanity within such a realm that its body is comparable to an avian body. The latter part of this passage describes hierarchies of power among the birds, each level “dominating” the level beneath it. This allows me to come to my ultimate claim about The Rock Rodondo: the contrast between both horizontal structures (the archipelago itself, beneath the tower, and the canopy of birds above the tower) and the vertical structure of the tower itself, which is inhabited by creatures who find themselves displaced by dominating taxonomies, serves to subvert the very structure given to the tower by the narrator (its tiers, its thrones, its princedoms). Both horizontal strata, and the suggested amorphousness of the birds that inhabit the vertical structure, find themselves reflected in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. I must ask here for the reader’s forgiveness of my incessant use of block quotes; I find it more useful (especially for such a difficult text as this one) to lay all my cards (flat!) on the table, and then to unpack their various meaning and applications to the primary text. I do not believe Guattari or Deleuze would argue against this structure of analysis, as they themselves “have been criticized for overquoting literary authors” (Deleuze & Guattari 4):

The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree… Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one… A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes… Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes… The rhizome itself assumes diverse forms, from ramified surface extensions in all directions to concretion in bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other… any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines… These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. Deleuze & Guattari 5 - 9

The “world-tree” here, would, then, be the Rock Rodondo; vertical, structured, fixing an order (the tiers, the “senatorial array”). The tower has its own means of classification and hierarchy, a structure that is subverted by the inhabitants of the tower themselves, as well as the aforementioned lateral strata, above and below. Animals can be rhizomes, as we see in the rats, the penguins, and our very old friends, the tortoises. They are not fixed into the classification imposed upon them by cold science; they have not Nuttall’s “‘arrogance of solitary individuals’” (Arsić 147). Rather, their features extend laterally throughout the animal kingdom, amongst themselves (rats, birds, fish), and into the realm of plant-life (the moss and the tree of the tortoise’s shell). Darwin, in his crude calculations, would seek to plot points, fix order and impose the dualisms and dichotomies among the natural order of things, which is not order itself, but chaos, and transcendence. The “extensions in all directions” of the rhizome might remind the reader of Melville’s and Darwin’s respective geographic explanation of the archipelago, which I have already mentioned. While Darwin describes the chain of islands as merely a “satellite attached to America” (Darwin 4), Melville extends in all directions to find points of reference:

Look edgeways… permit me to point out the direction… of certain interesting objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this tower’s base, we behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole. We stand now ten miles from the Equator. Yonder, to the east… lies the continent, this Rock being just about on the parallel of Quito… We are at one of the three uninhabited clusters, which… sentinel, at long intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America. In a peculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American character of country. Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not one partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas. Melville 4

Darwin’s “satellite” is an example of his colonial rhetoric, implying that the archipelago belongs to America, in some way. Melville suggests just the opposite, that the islands belong not to South America, nor to the other archipelagos throughout the Pacific Ocean, and certainly not to America (where, when he returns, the narrator is haunted by visions of the island), but are of a character unique to themselves. That he extends in all lateral direction, on a flat map that we might imagine while reading, is reflective of the rhizome, where “there are no points or positions”. There is no locus of power or reference in a rhizome, but rather every point, or perhaps no point can be called the center. Thus, Melville subverts the colonial rhetoric of Darwin, both in his refusal to properly classify the animal- and plant-life of the islands, but also in his refusal to claim the islands in the name of any one country.

To conclude this essay, I will make a brief detour away from such abstract, and yet apt, philosophy into the field of eco-criticism. I mentioned in my introduction the current temporal classification of our atmosphere and environment, known as the Anthropocene. I argue that what Darwin promotes in his classification, and what Melville subverts in his prose, are precursors; foreboding, ominous images that foreshadow a world in which our appropriation of the environment becomes a perverse domination. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in his essay “Posthuman Environs”, summarizes this idea in a way that is applicable to both accounts of the Galapagos:

We have crafted the word ‘Anthropocene’ to name this lithic record of our domination over time and matter, to demarcate an era immutably altered through our bustle. But the term also conveys the human love of making things with rocks and words. We imbue stone and language with meaning, both thereby becoming signifiers in the grandiloquent stories we tell about ourselves. Cohen 25

This “human love of making things with rocks and words” is reflective of Darwin’s taxonomies. It could be said that Darwin, through his incessant naming, reference and cataloguing, wished to become a signifier in the story that he is really telling about himself, about mankind’s domination over such natural beauty as is found in the Galapagos. Melville, conversely, wishes to celebrate this beauty, to make it mysterious and to give it a character all its own. His classifications are anomalous and sometimes quite silly, but his mission is profound. Melville, while promoting the uniqueness of all forms of life, and decrying mankind’s influence upon such “satellites” as the Galapagos Islands, subverts colonial and imperialist attitudes shared by his contemporaries towards a world that could exist without being impressed upon by the calculating, greedy nature that belongs to mankind, alone.

works cited:

Arsić, Branka. Bird relics: grief and vitalism in Thoreau. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2016. Print.

Darwin, Charles, and Charles William Eliot. The voyage of the Beagle. Whitefish, MT:Kessinger Pub., 2005. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 1987. Print.

Melville, Herman. The encantadas and other stories. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Print.

Oppermann, Serpil, Serenella Iovino, and Jeffrey J. Cohen. Environmental humanities: voices from the anthropocene. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. Print.

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