Our Romantic Hero is the Limpet
Climate Change changes historical modeling
"A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. ... I am an adherent of ... the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. ... [T]he hero doesn't look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, a potato." — Ursula K. LeGuin
J.M.W. Turner, "War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet"
I remember the first academic conference I ever attended as a Romanticist. It was on Romantic Historicism, hosted in Aberystwyth, Wales, in summer 2004, and began its plenary welcome with a rich consideration of the J.M.W Turner painting, “War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet” (1842). The figure of Napoleon that we considered that day was a revenant: diminished, outmaneuvered by the sheer number of reactionary forces and the tide of events, and haunted by a historical reason that itself — on peril of dissertation and job for anyone starting out in their career — was not to be understood as self-possessed. The hero (as, for example, Napoleon stood always in essayist William Hazlitt’s eyes) had passed through the anti-hero stage (as in Lord Byron’s contempt for defeated Napoleon, “abject— yet alive!”) onto the phase where names as tropes are harder to find.
Still, Napoleon and melancholy humanism centered the frame. Today, in welcoming those tired travelers to an imagined future in-person event, and new scholars into the field of Romantic Studies, many of us I think would focus much longer and more concertedly on the limpet, which (despite its biological habitus more or less in groups) is singled out in the painting just as ponderously (if by many scales less large) than the sad toy-like Napoleon. The limpet shares a better lesson on precarity and endurance.
For more of that lesson, look into The Edge of the Sea (1955), where Rachel Carson considers limpets as among the most successful examples of life in the “surf zone.” This is the realm of an environmentally quotidian in-between that both floods and may nearly dry out, every single day. As such, the limpet and its pre-historic zone is both an analog and a throwback with regard to the increasingly freak events of anthropocentric climate change. It is to the rock limpet, rather than to Napoleon or Prometheus, that we should look to search myths for what it takes to endure in the contemporary world, and for futures ahead. Yet the limpet’s lesson is equally at home in pre-history, or post-history. The very depth of its resources for an analogical thinking that could impart lessons of resiliency on a human scale is, in itself, muting and disquieting.
After his initial capture, Napoleon rather heroically broke out of his imprisonment on the Mediterranean Island of Elba, only to lead the 100 Days Campaign which famously ended in the carnage of Waterloo. He finally died, as Derek Jarman reports (under “Green Fingers” in his remarkable color book, Chroma) as a result of arsenic poisoning from rotted wallpaper in his rooms on the Island of St Helena, out in the remote midst of the South Atlantic: an outpost of the invincible British Navy, then; today a tiny nation seeking 100% renewables by April, 2022.