More Than Human

I read this book in a strangely apt setting. I was in a place that meant a lot to me, a family cottage on Lake Michigan that had just been sold to the highest bidder (long story, can't get into it—too much emotional baggage). I was visiting for a last time, on the winter holiday. We were there to do some of the final cleaning before the property would change hands. While there, I took my children down to the lakeshore several times to look for rocks and other treasures. We skipped flat stones, dragged heavy driftwood, and scavenged heart-shaped rocks for their grandmother. The ultimate find on that particular beach is a Petoskey stone: this is a fossilized coral from 250 million years ago. Its hexagonal pattern is enchanting to spot in the shallows and exhilarating to polish and display on a shelf or table. I have some that I've been toting around for decades, hauling them from northern Michigan to Wyoming, Arizona, back up to Montana, across to California, to New Orleans, then to St. Louis, where I live presently. I probably lost some along the way. Up in Michigan in December as I read Coral Lives, we would bring some newly found Petoskey stones back with us, carrying forward this odd sort of geologic movement of ancient coral. Old coral lives. Coral lives on.The ambiguity in the title of Michele Currie Navakas's book under review says it all: Coral Lives. Lives and lives—a plural noun and/or a stative verb, the ontological aporia capturing a tension that runs through the book. Are we dealing with life, nonlife—or something in-between? This book emerges from the humanities, but it might as well be “dehumanities,” with a dialectal difference, if taken seriously. For coral leads attentive readers not just to allegorical lenses through which we might better understand human life within layered geological timelines; it telescopes far beyond life itself, zoē or bios (bare existence, or cultural life), far past the lives of our own sad species. To think coral rigorously is to resort to dehumanities. We are a mere blip on the geological timeline, and it is this timeline that coral makes manifest.Still: Our timelines mean something to us. Here I was reading about how coral traveled and what it communicated 150 years ago—all its aesthetic paradoxes, political vexations, and classificational enigmas—while letting go of a place in the present that showed deep ties to an era on this planet eons ago, via another form of coral. Of note: the Michigan peninsula where I was while reading this book was supposedly situated closer to the equator a few hundred million years ago, where these coral colonies bloomed. I was geographically disoriented while reading, tied as I was to this region I call home, to our fraught American history founded on a slave trade, as well as to an ecosystem that bared the visible, graspable traces of a time so long ago (at least by my pathetic, mortal standards).Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America is a sophisticated, subtle, persistent collection of coral citations across mostly nineteenth-century American literary, cultural, and art historical texts. One virtue of Navakas's study is the careful assemblage of artistic representations, lyrical instances, and philosophical contradictions of coral across an archive. Every so often I would stumble upon a phrase or clause that could have been the book's title: “If coral could speak” (32) . . . “countless nonhuman laboring bodies” (46) . . . “hovering between life and death” (47) . . . “coral's defiant and transformative powers” (52) . . . “polyps passively secrete” (57) . . . “fathomless forms of life” (79) . . . “what we of the present are failing to perceive” (83) . . . “knowing coral” (84) . . . “a challenge to teleological growth” (93) . . . “the point is to build something new” (106) . . . “the unexpected, unpredictable, and tiny movements of small bodies” (109) . . . “ever gradually becoming” (113) . . . “unpredictably and without design” (144). These almost aphoristic snippets reflect the promise and hope of coral for Navakas. Coral is a revolutionary entity that embodies and evinces lessons for life beyond human progress as we've known it so far: more collective, less teleological, inherently mutually beneficial and reinforcing. Or in Navakas's own words, “Reefs model the lesson that any truly collective present or future ‘rising’ depends on assuming relations to the past that are at once more implicated and historically accurate” (118). Here the desire for a “lesson” remains a teleological wish-image of sorts, shimmering beneath the surface of Navakas's prose. But, as far as wishes go—this isn't a bad one to float.Coral Lives is organized by a structure that I quite like and generally wish more academic books would experiment with: chapters with brief interchapters nestled between, providing transitions or islands wherein the reader can pause and connect the dots. This also conveniently mimics the form of the subject in question: Navakas is playing with fractal patterns of thought and inquiry as well as examining them in material historical archives. Coral then redoubles as a metaphor throughout the book, in almost a Nietzschean way, serving Navakas's specific critical readings as well as mobilizing a reliable poetic strategy. The way coral works, careful buildup makes as much sense as a sudden turn. I wonder how much of this was conscious, and how much of this was the logic of coral insinuating itself into Navakas's style as the book came together. Either way, it is an elegant construction.I completely take Navakas's point in the book's coda that environmental humanities need to be (more) attentive to historical approaches, to better deal with the very history that has brought our species on this planet to its current state of near collapse. However (and this is my own professional drift toward public scholarship speaking), I did find myself wondering what a more accessible book on coral might look like. What could a book do to translate the important lessons of this book—in short, the figure of coral as a motivating metaphor for a more socially just world—to broader audiences? How could contemporary stories of coral mobilize ecological awareness, on a larger scale? It's one thing for literature scholars to be illuminated by the polyvalence of coral, but even then, are they really going to adjust their ways of life toward more socially just ends? Are the progressive, perhaps utopian lessons translatable to general readers?Ends and lessons: these are the positive specters that haunt Navakas's book. A strictly biological understanding of coral shows its existence to be decidedly nonteleological: coral growth is indeterminate and adaptive, until conditions make life impossible. And yet Navakas wants to hold on to visions of coral that “could ultimately produce a more equitable society,” and reveal modes of being together that might “ultimately ‘transform the character of a nation’” (110; emphasis added). Navakas seems invested in coral because it consistently points toward an alternative path: it can help us “imagine a ‘we’ that is fully founded in relations, past, present, and future” (123; emphasis added). The problem is that the finality of a better society, the more-just system at last achieved, is not compatible with the ecological matrix in question. There is no “ultimate” destination or fullness to be arrived at in an evolutionary, processual schema. As much as we might admire the way coral behaves, accretes, and presents—it can't be misconstrued as a teleological exemplar or role model.Navakas knows that “nonteleological growth” (145) is a well-understood feature of coral, and even utilizes this scientific knowledge as a way to deftly tease out coral's slippery meanings throughout Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Coral in the story unsettles what and how the characters can know things (especially by seeing), so much that the appearances of coral cumulatively if “fleetingly imply that white epistemic humility must be the foundation of more just relations across racial boundaries.” And thus, as Navakas puts it, “the coral in Uncle Tom's Cabin also gives us one way out of a system of knowledge according to which race is a fixed and biological fact” (140). Again, this is an admirable interpretation. It's encouraging to think that a natural object, indeed another animal, can teach us how to be better as a species. And bringing this to the foreground using environmental humanities methods—reading literature alongside the history of science—makes it all the more impressive.Nevertheless, as much as I avidly concur with the analyses that comprise Coral Lives, if we really take Navakas's concern seriously—that the book amounts to “an argument for the indispensability of a historically oriented environmental humanities” (151)—then what lets us pause at the ninteenth century? Or the eighteenth, seventeenth, or any other? In fact, coral sends us way back in history—often to a time before humans roamed the Earth. Even where it still lives (if barely), coral beckons to other spaces and timescales that make our species-being look rather embarrassing. They might be “little builders,” in the words of multiple writers that Navakas quotes, but they are so, so much greater than us in terms of their lifespans and fabrications on this planet. If there is a humanities-type lesson to be derived from coral, it might be a profound one of ontological humility—but this is hardly a saleable liberal arts skill or STEM proficiency.Navakas suggests in the closing lines of the book that “one of the most enduring values of coral for humans may be that it tends to slow us down. . . . It stops us so that we wonder and think” (151). As Navakas shows, this wonderment and thinking can spin off in many directions—from the Christian evangelical to the Marxian materialist. It's never certain how artists and audiences are going to spin the allure of coral. In some ways this is its potential and its weakness, as a figure.When we returned home from our sad December trip, I was cleaning up my nine-year-old daughter Camille's room one day and I noticed an unfamiliar item on her windowsill. It was a perfectly polished, smooth-sided Petoskey stone, a palm-sized specimen that I hadn't seen before. I realized in an instant where she'd probably gotten it. I asked her where it came from, and she confirmed what I had suspected: she had taken it from the old family cabin before we left. It was a token, a totem, a souvenir, a family heirloom, a 250-million-year-old creature captured in stone. The proliferation of meanings spun out wildly in my head as I held the rock, having just finished reading Coral Lives.Navakas's book is a strong contribution to the environmental humanities, all the more so because it doesn't lean too heavily on existing projects or well-trod theories of the Anthropocene. Coral Lives is extremely well referenced and confidently put together; it is an example of material studies that harnesses disciplinary prowess to illuminate the more-than-human, and the more-than-object. This is why I think Navakas has perhaps inadvertently introduced readers to a novel hermeneutic realm: dehumanities, in all its humiliation—as well as its positive potential for a better, if always admittedly provisional, way of life.