Waste in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric

ABSTRACT

Lingering with waste might seem antithetical for an issue all about newness, but although waste demonstrates persistence, it also indicates change: a body wasting away, an environment becoming a wasteland, a person wasting opportunities or good will. In this essay I argue that the nineteenth-century lyric helps us to think about the accumulation of unusable products, dead ends, waste, as central to intimacy. Percy Shelley’s “The Sensitive-Plant” operates as my case study, a lyric fundamentally troubled by the disposability of the human in contrast to the garden’s continual disturbing survival, and a poem obsessed with the erotic potential of rot and decomposition.

Notes

1 Sophie Gee makes the persuasive argument for waste as a central fixation in Milton’s poem:

For Milton, waste is a potentially confusing and negotiable category because it is a form of abundance. Milton was, after all, writing about the grandest kind of abundance there is: divine creation. Like abjection, luxurious excess is at once alluring and alarming, threatening to decline into putrefaction but also a source of life, energy, and renewal. Degraded leftovers in Paradise Lost are as cosmically significant as their much more glorious counterparts because in Milton’s republican imagining of the cosmos, waste and abundance are equally necessary as markers of a theologically and philosophically coherent universe. (42)

Both Shelley and Hval are perhaps responding to the anxious debate over the role of waste and excess in Paradise Lost in their depiction of Eden’s excessive liveliness turning to rot.

2 See specifically Rowan Boyson glossing of John Wilkinson’s reading of “Ozymandias” (112–13).

3 Mitchell takes “cryptogamia” from Linnaean taxonomy, where it refers to plants that hide their reproductive organs, and repurposes “the Greek roots of this term (crypto = hidden + gamia = generation) to mark and amplify the Romantic fascination with the strange life of plants” (632). I extend Mitchell’s interest in the ambivalent relationship between human and plant to argue that “The Sensitive-Plant” formally enacts moments of incomprehension and recoil activated by encounters with inaccessible modes of being. While Mitchell examines the mutual atmospheres produced by different forms of life, my focus is on the affordances of waste as both a type of noncathartic intimacy and a means of continued survival incompatible with the human.

4 Morton encourages us to attend to the “zombielike nature of interconnected life forms” which reveal that “Nature looks natural because it keeps going, and going, and going, like the undead, and because we keep on looking away, framing it, sizing it up” (279). Recognizing the sense of uncanny, excessive, and persistent life against all odds is a key feature of queer ecology for Morton and one that characterizes the fate of the garden in the third part of Shelley’s poem.

5 Paradise Rot notably also depicts an environment without clear boundaries: Jo and Carral’s flat has no separating walls, meaning a sound as small as the other breathing in their sleep can be heard from the opposite end of the building as if it is occurring up close. Their intense attentiveness to each other’s basic signs of life becomes amplified the more things go to rot within their home.

6 I have in mind specifically Alaimo’s following statement:

Even as the practices of sustainability foster the recognition that nearly everything one does has environmental effects, the epistemological stance of sustainability, as it is linked to systems management and technological fixes, presents a rather comforting, conventional sense that the problem is out there, distinct from one’s self. (561)