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Overview
Wampole examines both the philosophical implications of this metaphor and its political evolution. From the root as home to the root as genealogical origin to the root as the past itself, rootedness has survived in part through its ability to subsume other compelling metaphors, such as the foundation, the source, and the seed. With a focus on this concept’s history in France and Germany, Wampole traces its influence in diverse areas such as the search for the mystical origins of words, land worship, and nationalist rhetoric, including the disturbing portrayal of the Jews as an unrooted, and thus unrighteous, people. Exploring the works of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Celan, and many more, Rootedness is a groundbreaking study of a figure of speech that has had wide-reaching—and at times dire—political and social consequences.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226317793 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/06/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 717 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Rootedness
The Ramifications of a Metaphor
By Christy Wampole
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31779-3
CHAPTER 1
Welcome to the Rhizosphere
The day after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States on October 29, 2012, the entire region was strewn with uprooted trees. A walk in a nature preserve near my town in New Jersey took me past fallen, decades-old trees and their jutting roots. When trees this massive fall, they take with them a thick circumference of land, leaving holes that fill quickly with water. The roots I saw were never deep; they were gnarled and weblike, proliferating horizontally in an erratic network. Roots generally reveal traces of themselves at the base of trees, but merely to signal the extent of their unseen-ness. We are able to scrutinize roots only when they are decontextualized, exposed by weather, age, disease, or human transplantation. Catching sight of a full root happens only in instances of violence, infirmity, or death. This could account in part for the metaphorical darkness of our associations with the root, compounded by the literal darkness of its subterranean dwelling space. Roots commune with the dead. Their composition is reliant on decomposition. Botanists have given the name rhizosphere to the area of soil around the roots of plants, their subterranean dwelling. We will enter the rhizosphere now together.
This first chapter provides a broad overview of the way the root has been imagined. There are a few basic patterns of its metaphorization: root as home, root as genealogical origin, root as miniature person, root as the past, and root as a severable connection to any phenomenon, particularly the environment. Carl Jung and Gaston Bachelard recognized its power as a subconscious image, but the root is clearly a figure for the subconscious itself. This metaphor's broad applicability to such a variety of circumstances reveals a meaningful pattern in the human psyche: Continuity is preferable to discontinuity. The root is an integrating metaphor, one that allows for connections to be made between past, present, and future, between remote geographic spaces, between neighbors, between the human and its ecosystem. To be rootless is to lack context. What becomes clear in the incessant reliance on the metaphor of rootedness is that the desire for temporal, spatial, epistemological, and ontological continuity is an elementary human need. In the following pages, the chronicle of a species at odds with itself unfolds. Figurative language is the outlet for a deep-seated apprehension about permanent estrangement from the context whence we came.
Some Thoughts on Metaphor
Philosophers have been called poets. And both philosophers and poets live by metaphors. But their motives for making metaphors are not the same.
STEPHEN C. PEPPER, "Philosophy and Metaphor"
By their metaphors ye shall know them!
GOTTFRIED BENN, Primal Vision
Geoffrey Gorer has argued that while Americans tend to use mechanical metaphors to describe "institutions and processes," Europeans rely constantly on arborescent ones. In all its reductive wildness, this sweeping assessment caught the eye of the philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) in his research for Paradigms for a Metaphorology (Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 1960). Gorer's claim was of interest to Blumenberg because of "the methodological import of the attempt to trace stylistic differences of a way of life back to a layer of elementary ideas that always shows itself most clearly where the 'supply of images' has been tapped." Even in stating the objectives of metaphorology, Blumenberg uses root language: "Metaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the nutrient solution of systematic crystallizations" (5). While many have focused on the second half of this formula and its emphasis on chemical processes, the full sentence and the larger context of the quote make it clear that Blumenberg conceives of the method of metaphorology as imitative of the root's siphoning of minerals from the soil. He proposes the notion of absolute metaphors, which "have a history in a more radical sense than concepts" (5). Blumenberg's translator Robert Savage pursues Blumenberg's insistence on the root theme in his afterword to the book, writing, "Metaphorology radicalizes conceptual history, in the literal sense that it directs its attention to the roots of concept formation." When Savage uses the word "literal" here, he is attempting to make a distinction between the dictionary definition of radical and its empty, contemporary meaning that leaves out its etymological connection to plant life. But "literal" here still does not refer to the literal embedded structure that feeds and stabilizes plant life. Nowhere is there a literal root in any of Blumenberg's thought, but the metaphor is so stealthy that many fail to recognize it as one. In his methodology for the study of absolute metaphors, he argues that, in many cases, metaphors are not simply rhetorical flourishes, replaceable by nonmetaphorical language, but that they allow thoughts to be expressed that are impossible to express in nonfigurative terms. These are absolute metaphors, of which his primary example is that of light as knowledge, a topos throughout the history of Western thought. The root is clearly an absolute metaphor, a fact emphasized all the more by Blumenberg's use of it in the very definition of the discipline of metaphorology.
The nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston argued that "half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrives are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity." I will show that a literalization of the metaphor of rootedness has had very real political consequences, particularly in France and Germany, the epicenters of root thinking in twentieth-century Europe. The evocation of rootedness most often signals the conservative desire for a return to the past, imagined as more stable than the present. It is also a deferral to ancestral wisdom. This root may serve as a metaphorical anchor to a geographic space, a figure for cultural transmission from one generation to the next, or even a symbol of the subconscious; its structure approximates a map of countless unexploited possibilities latent in each set of circumstances a person encounters.
To understand in part why the root is such an effective metaphor for origin, we may compare it to three other metaphors of beginning: foundation, source, and seed. The first, an architectural metaphor, portrays the beginning as a human-made structure upon which everything else is built. The ideal foundation is solid and lasting, since the house built on a shaky foundation is bound to crumble. This metaphor is often used in philosophy — for example, in the long history of debates between foundationalists and antifoundationalists — because language and ideas are easily metaphorized into architectural forms (building an idea, bridging two concepts, deconstruction, etc.). The source, an aquatic metaphor, has more spiritually inflected connotations and also refers to the truth-dispensing original text. The wellspring is the uncorrupted starting point, and although water is not itself alive, it contains and sustains life (as in the fountain of youth) and connotes purity (ablution). The seed, a compressed kernel of futurity, represents the beginning point of a vital thing; it is a figure of fertility. Compared in the New Testament to the Kingdom of Heaven, the mustard seed seems small but grows to great proportions. The root is a powerful metaphor because it groups in a single figure the primary features of the others: like the foundation, it embodies the stabilizing precondition for upward development; like the source, it is approximates water in its fluvial form and its function as a channel for fluids; and like the seed, it is a botanical figure for potential and growth. Combining the stability of architecture, the fluidity of water, and the vitality of plant life, the root is a kind of supermetaphor that subsumes the others. This flexibility manifests itself in fascinating places, for example, in its application to the seemingly oppositional categories of jus sanguinis (the right of blood) and jus solis (the right of soil). Since its founding as a republic, France moved from a conception of nationality based solely on bloodlines (jus sanguinis) to one that included birthplace (jus soli). In both cases, the fact of birth is the determining factor. The root metaphor accommodates both juridical statuses: its vascular function can be compared to the genealogical transmission of jus sanguinis, and its embeddedness in the soil works effectively to represent the relationship between people and their land, as expressed through jus soli. Thus the shift from one administrative definition of nationality to the other did not require the disposal of the root metaphor. As an absolute metaphor, the root allows for the efficient saying of what is otherwise extremely difficult or even impossible to communicate. This chapter attempts to show the contours of this metaphor, which, although broad, has its limits.
Not only is it a particularly powerful subconscious image; I argue that it is a figure for the subconscious itself. The subliminal mind is often depicted as a subterranean network that follows a bifurcating logic rarely touched by the light of day. The root's hidden and abject form resembles the unsayable aspects of the psyche. This living botanical thing reaches for what it needs, formulating its desires by yearning for them. It is an embodied motivation. The plant's radical desire for what has decayed in the soil stands as a figure for memory, the reaching into dark recesses for what used to be alive. The root represents a matricial impression, an irrecuperable home where one's character and body were still in their embryonic phases. If people think of themselves as rooted beings, it is due to an umbilical memory of an attachment to the earth, a memory that has been severed in more ways than one. Something specific about the root encourages its metaphorization as both the tenor and the vehicle, to use I. A. Richards's distinction. For example, when roots are anchors that help the tree remain steady, they are the tenor; when people say that they are rooted in their homeland, the root is the vehicle. The smoothness of our metaphorization of this botanical form makes us often forget that it is a figure of speech; we imagine ourselves to be as rooted as the oak tree outside the window. Because of its metaphorical flexibility, the root is a favored figure of poets, who use it often in lyrical works about exile, homesickness, filiation, and the symbiosis between humans and the earth. It is alive but cannot protest our metaphorization of it. Its ugliness and subterranean dwelling make it a suitable candidate for metaphoric appropriations related to the abject, the taboo, the illicit, the underground, and, indeed, evil itself. Furthermore, with its vascular design, the root resembles the veins, nerves, and neurons in human and animal bodies and the rivers and tributaries that saturate the land. As I'll show, the application of this metaphor goes far beyond the morphological correspondence between the root and things of a similar form.
Generation Radix
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an obsessive, often scientifically driven search for origins or the most elementary forms of life and culture. As just a small sampling, take Darwin's Origin of the Species, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Jung's work on archetypes, Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art, Russell's History of Western Philosophy, Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Lévi-Strauss's structural explorations of the origins of myths, Stephen Pepper's research into the root metaphors or ground metaphors on which all worldviews are predicated, Foucault's analyses of foundational power structures, and Derrida's extensive work on the origin of writing. In the 1920s, a Belgian priest and physicist named Monseigneur Georges Lemaître developed what has become known as the Big Bang Theory, which he dubbed "la théorie de l'atome primitif" (the theory of the primeval atom). In short, the twentieth century was very much about a search for collective roots. In the twenty-first century, with the explosion of genealogical research made possible by large ancestral archives, such as the Family Search website hosted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and by genetic testing services provided by biotech companies like 23andMe, which allow for the tracing of one's ancestry using DNA samples, it is clear that the root quest mirrors the general inward and narcissistic turn of contemporary Western civilization. The earlier question "How did we get here? Where did we come from?" has shifted, perhaps temporarily, toward a different question: "How did I get here? Where did I come from?" This search allows for the creation of a community of invisibles with whom you never have to interact.
Why do people feel such a strong connection with their ancestors? Why such pride or shame in forebears with whom you share genes and perhaps a language or a set of traditions but whom you'll never meet? Why do adopted children sometimes feel the need to find their biologic parents? This is one of the great mysteries of our species. Humans feel reassured by ancestral continuity. When they study their ancestors, they imagine themselves to contain some kind of residual essence of the dead. If a person comes from a long line of warriors, he might believe he embodies a warrior spirit. The shameful ancestor has caused many people to change their surnames to symbolically cut ties with the disgraceful progenitor. The family tree, the schematic depiction of blood relations, has both practical and mythological functions. Its scientific iteration, the genogram, allows for the study of hereditary patterns useful in the prognostics of disease, the analysis of family dynamics, and other biologic or psychological patterns from generation to generation. But the family tree also exists as a mythologized branching of the dead into the living. Brigitte Boudon has traced the family-tree imagery from early popular legends of the tree imagined as a father or a mother through the biblical tree of Jesse and finally to its contemporary format. When the family lineage is corrupted through scandal, the death or murder of a meaningful relative, or the erasure of genealogical traces through slavery or genocide, the mourning over this corruption is frequently expressed in terms of root loss. This is clear, for example, in Paul Celan's poem "Radix, Matrix," which is analyzed in chapter 2. By giving the genealogical structure an arborescent form, the family can be imagined as an integrated whole, like a constellation that takes shape only when the human eye projects a particular configuration on a cluster of stars. The tree gives a narrative structure to blood relations, crafting a story out of arbitrary coital encounters. A certain causality is often projected onto the tree, for example in Emile Zola's gargantuan tales of inherited vices. So the family tree can offer shade and protection, but it can also be the gallows from which you hang yourself. From the etymologically connected words genesis, genocide, genealogy, genital, genius, generation, gentle, genre, gender, gentry, genuine, gentile, gentrify, generous, gene, and genus, the working lexicon of root-bound thinking begins to coalesce.
Home Is Where the Root Is
The Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, in his keynote address at the Twentieth- and Twenty-first-century French and Francophone Studies Conference in Long Beach, California, in 2012, told how he had wondered why in Europe and the United States, the umbilical cord is discarded after a baby is born. In the Congo, it is kept and buried in the soil of home, which remains a permanent place of return. With this symbolic attachment of the child to her homeland, a transfer from the mother's body to the body of Mother Earth, initiation into life begins with a tethering. Africa, the imagined cradle of humanity, is by no means the only place where roots and home are synonymous. Despite the absence of such a ritual in Europe and the United States, the language of rootedness to one's home is omnipresent and seems a nearly universal trope across cultures.
I would like to begin with a very typical illustration of the language used to express one's rootedness to home, a first example of what I'll call radical portraiture, a biographical or autobiographical depiction of a person that relies heavily on tropes of rootedness to the land. This excerpt from Guy de Maupassant's Le horla influenced Maurice Barrès's roman à thèse Les déracinés (1897), a vindication of regional embeddedness. The protagonist of Maupassant's novella declares in the first paragraph: "I love the country here, and I love living here because this is where I have my roots, those profound and delicate roots that attach a man to the land where his ancestors were born and died, and that attach him to what one should think and what one should eat; to customs as well as foods; to local idioms and peasant intonations; to the smells of the earth, of the villages, of the air itself." A rich rereading of Le horla is possible through a focus on this rhizocentric incipit, which could occasion an entirely different analysis of the Brazilian demon that arrives on the ship to disturb the protagonist's rootedness. This passage is a prime example of radical portraiture, whose typical elements — in biographical or autobiographical form, as fiction or nonfiction — include the blurring of the line between country as polity and country as landscape; a lexicon of attachment; an appeal to ancestral heritage; an insistence on specificity; sensorial enumerations; intimations of both the physical and the psychological associations with the homeland; and a hinting at an ineffable something that distinguishes this place from all others, a difference that language cannot accommodate. These characteristics are amplified in narratives in which the home is missing. Homesickness — known in French as le mal du pays and in German as Heimweh — is the greatest occasion for a reverence toward roots. Because the root is a figure of vital will and yearning — as it pushes through the soil, reaching for what it needs — the longing for home makes sense as a root image. Consider this poem by Robert Morgan called "Homesickness," in which the eyes of potatoes begin to reach, as a form of remembering:
Potatoes left in darkness keep
their eyes closed tightly, but
potatoes touched by hint of light
will sprout translucent shoots from eyes
that stretch and feel around and crawl
toward the illuminating source,
as though remembering a home
and luminous spark of vitality
in distant world and distant time,
across genetic memory
and evolution's tangled tree,
to germ of the original bloom
across the gulf of history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rootedness by Christy Wampole. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1 Welcome to the Rhizosphere
Some Thoughts on Metaphor
Generation Radix
Home Is Where the Root Is
Jung and Bachelard Go Deep: The Root as Subconscious Image
Radical Evil: Of Mandrakes and Wurzelmännchen
2 Radical Poetry
Ponge and the Plant’s Immobility
Into Thin Air: Celan’s “Radix, Matrix”
Guillevic’s Radical Trying
The Awkward Human: Levertov and Ecological Alienation
3 Roots and Transcendence
Verticality and the Root
Claudel’s Rooted Crucifix
Valéry and the Vegetal Brain
Inversion and Conversion
Monsieur Teste, Botanical Thinker
Tournier and the Upending of Western Culture
4 Saving Europe from Itself: Weil’s Enracinement and Heidegger’s Bodenständigkeit
Talk of Roots in the Air: La querelle du peuplier
Weil’s Fear of Abstraction
Heidegger the Terroiriste
5 Sartre, Phenomenology, and the Root
The Nausea-Inducing Root of Being
Sartre’s Autobiographical Tree
Phenomenology’s Search for Ground
6 Etymology and Essence: The Primeval Power of Word Roots
The Etymological Obsession
German Ideological Etymology
Paulhan’s Etymological Skepticism
Derrida’s Deracination of Language
Blanchot and the Etymon’s Danger
7 From Rhizome to Vegetal Democracy
The Cryptic Rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari
The Postmodern Plantation
Neo-Paganism and Plant Democracy
Bibliography
Index