Romantic Priority Claims, or, Who Has Priority in Deep Time?

ABSTRACT

This essay seeks to extend the definition of the term priority claim, arguing that some kinds of priority claims operate across literature and science and may be made on behalf of past actors as well as oneself. My examples are drawn primarily from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of the place of early or ancestral humans in deep time, particularly those of Thomas Carlyle, John Lubbock, and Johann Gottfried Herder. In making this argument, I attend specifically to the role of race and gender in these accounts and to the rhetorical and affective intensity accruing around the identities of those imagined to inhabit deep time. Deep time, as a contentious and vaguely defined sphere of discovery prior to the establishment of radiometric dating, provides a field especially adapted to priority claims in this extended sense.

Notes

1 This essay is cited by Biagioli, “From Ciphers” 213, and by Strevens 57 among others. Biagioli’s two co-edited volumes, Scientific Authorship and Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property, provide a wide sampling of the issues associated with priority in science.

2 For a more detailed treatment of this issue, see my essay review of Davy’s Collected Letters, edited by Fulford and Ruston (Heringman, “Collected”).

3 I am indebted here to suggestions from Tilottama Rajan and Julia Carlson.

4 Translations from Herder are my own except as noted (for this passage, cf. Churchill 268).

5 Deep literary time, then, is ultimately a vehicle for the great cycle of human history that Carlyle envisions, in which Johnson can figure as the harbinger of the new heroic age later formally announced in On Heroes [and] Hero-Worship.

6 In the very different context of early-twentieth-century Munich, Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus uses the character Chaim Breisacher to portray an atavistic fascination with the deep human past as the precursor of Nazi ideology (376–77). In The Time Stream (1931) by John Taine [Eric Temple Bell], it is again an ancient master race rather than a race of “savages” that is located in an unexplored dimension of prehistory.

7 T. Churchill, in what is still the only complete translation available, offers the following more ornate version: “I, might he say, I, the black, am the original man” (260).

8 Heartfelt thanks to Andy McInnes for organizing this excellent conference, to my audience for useful questions and insights, and to David Collings and Tilottama Rajan for their divinatory readings of the draft.