The surface of things : the forgotten art of describing natural beings

Abstract

If words are now lacking to describe natural beings and places as closely as possible to their appearances and intermingling, it wasn't always so. In the time of Goethe and Humboldt, the dream of a " natural history " attentive to all creatures, without restriction or distinction, drew on the combined forces of science and literature to elevate " landscape painting " to the rank of crucial knowledge. The galaxy and the lichen, the child and the butterfly all lived peacefully side by side in the same story ; no single phenomenon had narrative ascendancy over the others. It wasn't that man mattered little, it was that everything mattered infinitely. This art of worldly detail - the ability to portray nature's " grand Tout " in its minutest existences and in each of its metamorphoses - was sustained by the dialogue between science and poetry, as well as by a monistic philosophy embodied, in turn, by Friedrich von Schiller and Lorenz Oken. In what way did this " philosophy of Nature " give Goethe and Humboldt the means to tell their stories, and is it possible today to rediscover, through literary work, the concern for the surfaces of the world that was theirs ? Conversation can thus be re-established between the art of telling of today's novelists and the ancient naturalist knowledge that it sometimes helps to bring back to the fore.