Giving Things Their Proper Names: Carl Linnaeus and W. H. Auden
2007; Wiley; Volume: 21; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1096/fj.07-0501ufm
ISSN1530-6860
Autores Tópico(s)Botanical Studies and Applications
ResumoThe FASEB JournalVolume 21, Issue 7 p. 1285-1289 EditorialFree Access Giving Things Their Proper Names: Carl Linnaeus and W. H. Auden Correction(s) for this article Errata Volume 21Issue 10The FASEB Journal pages: 2633-2633 First Published online: August 1, 2007 Gerald Weissman, Gerald Weissman Editor-in-ChiefSearch for more papers by this author Gerald Weissman, Gerald Weissman Editor-in-ChiefSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 May 2007 https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.07-0501ufm Images: Left: Carl Linnaeus. Engraving by August Ehrensvärd (1740). Image courtesy of Linnaeus 2007. Right: W. H. Auden with Erika Mann (1935). Image courtesy of A. D. Bangham.© AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL nomina si pereunt, perit et cognitio rerum [Without names, our knowledge of things would perish] (1)Carl Linnaeus Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable (2).W. H. Auden This year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of Carl (Carolus) Linnaeus (1707–1778) whose binomial system has made it unlikely that the names of living things will perish. We also celebrate the 100th anniversary of Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973) who gave his time the proper name: The Age of Anxiety (3). An avatar of the 18th century Enlightenment, Linnaeus set the stage for Darwin by recognizing similarities between man and ape: he named our species Homo sapiens. In an age when the word was unspoken, Linnaeus recognized that even plants had sex. He put Sweden on the map of natural science and changed forever the way we label living things. An avatar of the Enlightened Left in the 20th century, Auden brought English poetry into the modern world: he set planes and trains and automobiles to verse. At a time when "In the nightmare of the dark /All the dogs of Europe bark," while Yeats was chasing the Celtic occult, and T. S. Eliot worried over "Murder in the Cathedral," Auden addressed Murder in Madrid. And after Guernica and the Hitler war, he retained high hope for a new world of reason, paying our profession a compliment we barely deserve: The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and the statesmen, but the scientists. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes (4). LINNAEUS, KING OF FLOWERS The images of Linnaeus and Auden show them in the process of forging the temper of their time. Both were prodigies: Linnaeus proclaimed not immodestly "Before the age of 23, I had thought out everything (5)." He may have been right. By 1740, "Carolus Linnaeus, Med. Doc." had become the founder and first president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and was also practicing medicine in Stockholm. After seven years of medical study and botanical research in Lund and Uppsala, Linnaeus earned his M.D. from the University of Harderwijk, a Dutch diploma mill that exists no longer. In the same year he gained international attention for his Systema Natura (1735). Linnaeus' first effort at botanical nomenclature at age 22 had been "Praeludia spon-saliorum plantarum" [A Prelude to the Wedding of Plants], based in good part on his 2300 mile collecting trip through Lapland to the Arctic Ocean. The Systema Natura went further into the maze of gender. He divided plants into classes by the number of "male genitals," the stamens, and then into orders by their pistils, the female "genitals." The supporting structure, the calyx, became the "nuptial bed." His sexual taxonomy may have gone a tad overboard, with some structures compared to labia minora and majora, and an entire class of flowers named Clitoria (6–10). Whatever the sexual overtones, Linnaean botany was not only proved correct but heuristic, based as it was on specimens collected worldwide. In Sweden, Linnaeus had gathered plants from Lapland to the Baltic; in Leiden he consulted Boerhaave and gained access to Clifford's collections of the Dutch East India Company; in Amsterdam he drew Seba's marine flora; at Oxford he scoured Sherard's global Botanical Garden; in Paris, he picked through the Jardin des Plantes with Jussieu. His botanical skills earned him a corresponding membership in the French Academy. A year after Ehrensvard engraved his portrait, Linnaeus was appointed Professor of Medicine in Uppsala (1741), and for the next three decades he and his students worked out the problem of assigning finite names to the infinite objects of nature. Key to the enterprise was a system of names. In Philosophia Botanica (1750) Linnaeus announced binomial taxonomy, "A plant is completely named, if it is provided with a generic name and a specific one," adding that the characteristics of a species are dictated by its genus (6). Additions and corrections to the Linnaean Systema Natura followed apace: the first edition of 1735 was only 12 pages long, but by the twelfth edition of 1768 it had grown to 2300 pages and encompassed some 15,000 species. Nor was medicine given short shrift: Linnaeus first classified fevers (and hinted at contagion) in "Exanthemata viva" (1757). Later, he extended his system to all of human disease in the Genera Morborum (1763). But botanical science and its application re-mained his first love. Dubbed the "King of Flowers" in Sweden (5), Linnaeus made certain that if the treatment of a disease was herbal, the name of the herb was binomial. LINNAEUS AND THE DARWINS Linnaeus and binomial botany spread rapidly across Europe. In England, his first translator was Erasmus Darwin, F.R.S., Charles Darwin's grandfather. A beacon of the English Enlightenment, Erasmus Darwin was a prodigious physician, naturalist, and anti-slavery advocate. He was also a man of mirth and spirit who appreciated Linnaeus"9 erotic description of plants. Linnaeus had compared flowers with nine stamens and one pistil to "nine men in the same bride's chamber, with one woman (10)." Following suit, Erasmus used Linnaeus's polygamous imagery for his own purposes in The Botanic Garden (1791): Sweet blooms GENISTA in the myrtle shade And ten fond brothers wood the haughty maid Two knights before the fragrant altar bend Adored MELISSA… (11) Charles Darwin was familiar with Linnaeus not only from his grandfather's couplets, but also from his own botanical studies. Half a century after The Botanic Garden, Charles Darwin paid homage to the King of Flowers in On the Origin of Species (1859): Expressions such as the famous one by Linnaeus…that the characters do not make the genus but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that some deeper bond is included in our classification than mere resemblance. I believe that this is the case and that community of descent is the bond (12). Community of human descent followed directly from Linnaean nomenclature. Linnaeus decreed that man is an Animal (kingdom), a Mammal (class), a Primate (order), and it follows, therefore, that Homo sapiens (genus and species) is subtended by the order of Primates. A bond, deeper than mere resemblance, would dictate that Homo sapiens shares Darwinian "community of descent" with apes. Recent scholarship has shown that the decision to classify man with apes was taken jointly by Linnaeus and a fellow Uppsalian naturalist, Peter Artedi, when both worked in Amsterdam in 1735. Ironically, Artedi (now known as the King of Ichthyology) was drowned in an Amsterdam canal in the early hours of September 28th, 1735, after an evening's bout of drinking with his patron, Albertus Seba. Linnaeus published Artedi's works, manuscripts, and biography, fulfilling a pact that if one should die, then "the other would regard it as a sacred duty to give to the world what observations might be left…(9)" Erasmus Darwin picked up on the Artedi/Linnaeus notion of human origins in his "Zoonomia" and "The Temple of Nature" only to be mocked by Coleridge for suggesting that man had "descended from some lucky species of Ape or Baboon (13)." It seems fitting, therefore, that Dr. Darwin's grandson put evolution into play once and for all. The Darwin-Wallace paper (1858) that first proposed the theory of evolution through natural selection was first read in London before members of the Linnean Society (14). PROPER NAMES: AUDEN AND MANN The photograph of W. H. Auden shows the poet with Erika Mann (1905–1969) on the 15th of June 1935, shortly after their marriage in the registry office of Ledbury, a rural town by the Malvern hills. It was the office nearest the Downs School, a prep school where Auden was teaching his last term. The snapshot was taken by Alec Bangham (better known for liposomes) and documents a change of proper name, as does an entry in the Ledbury register: Marriage registry facsimile. Courtesy of A. D. Bangham.® The photo and registry not only illustrate Auden's belief that proper names are poetry in the raw, they are also a document of the terrible thirties when the night was full of wrong: Earthquakes and executions: soon he would be dead,And still all over Europe stood the horrible nursesItching to boil their children. Only his versesPerhaps could stop them…(15) Each of the names on the register reminds us of nights full of wrong, of political earthquakes, and executions. We read that Erika Julia Hedwig Grundgens, formerly Mann, (occupation not stated) was married to Wystan Hugh Auden (School Master) on June 15th, 1935. The registry also lists the occupation of their fathers: George Augustus Auden (Medical Practitioner) and Thomas Mann (Professional Writer), proper names indeed! Auden's father, a pioneer of public health, was an amateur of Norse myth and had named his son Wystan accordingly. The bride's father, author of The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks, had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. Marriage to Auden, a British subject, conferred a new nationality and proper name on Erika Mann, a stateless refugee from Hitler's Germany. She had arrived at the Malvern Hotel just a day before the wedding from Switzerland, where she was living in exile with her father. In Germany, she had been a film actress (Maed-chen in Uniform), an international motorcar rally driver (Ford Motor Co.), and the MC of a satirical anti-Nazi, gay/lesbian cabaret, the Pfeffermühle (a la Joel Grey in the musical Cabaret). Mann and her cabaret were forced to flee Germany in consequence both of her politics and sexual orientation. In April of 1935, she proposed a pro forma marriage to Christopher Isherwood in Amsterdam as a means of gaining British citizenship. Isherwood was author of Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was later based, and bits of Erika Mann's career float through those Berlin stories. Isher-wood declined Mann's request, pleading prior domestic arrangements. He nonetheless put Mann in touch with Auden, his school-chum, co-author (The Dog Beneath the Skin; et al.) and sometime lover. Auden cabled back a one word response to Erika's appeal: DELIGHTED (16)! Arrangements were made for a registry office marriage near the Downs School at the end of summer term. The photo and registry entries confirm the event. Directly after the wedding lunch at a local pub, Auden went back to teach classes and on the next day Erika Mann returned to Switzerland with a British passport. She telegraphed Auden almost immediately: MEINE LIEBE, DEINE LIEBE, ALLE MENSCHEN SIND GLEICH [my love, your love, all men are equal] (17). It's a banner worth raising against homophobes today. Term over, Auden left the Down School forever and embarked on a soon to be well-documented voyage to and around Iceland with Louis MacNeice (18). That trip to the mythic North of his father's dreams confirmed Auden's notion that, somewhere in this world, on some island, Alle Menschen Sind Gleich: Fortunate IslandWhere all men are equalBut not vulgar—not yet (19). The marriage of W. H. Auden, arguably the best poet in English of the twentieth century, to Erika Mann daughter of Thomas Mann, clearly the best German novelist of the century, is the stuff of history, raw. But a darker tone is struck by another name on the register, Gustav Grundgens, Erika Mann's first husband. Grundgens, an actor and director, was a willing player in the Nazi game of rank and honor. Greatly favored by both Gobbels and Goring, he became celebrated for his portrayal of Faust, or Mephisto, a role he repeated with plaudits to Nazi-packed houses in Munich and Berlin. He rose to direct Berlin's official Staatstheater during the war and produced popular fare for the Nazi state: one imagines a chorus of brown-shirts yodeling "The Hills are alive with the sound of Hitler…" Always the survivor, Grundgens emerged from the fall of the Reich in a Faustian transformation, a rehabilitated, honored German hero of "Kunst (20)." Erika took another path. She became a journalist, wrote several books with brother Klaus exposing prewar fascism, reported on the Spanish Civil War, and then wrote courtroom dispatches from the Nuremberg trials, while Grundgens was vamping the Munich stage, others had been busy in the Munich suburb of Dachau. Professors Pfannensteil of Marburg, Jarisch of Innsbruck, and Linger of Munich froze scores of inmates to death and reported detailed autopsies to "proper" scientific congresses. In Dachau also, Professor Beigl-bock of Berlin forced Poles and Jews to drink gallons of seawater: descriptions of the victims' hallucinations and heart failures were neatly recorded in what passed for scientific manuscripts. At the Natzweiler camp, Professor Dr. Eugen Haagen—formerly of the Rockefeller Institute—worked to transmit viral hepatitis from prisoner to prisoner and managed successfully to kill several hundreds with experimental typhus (21). Pfannensteil, Jarisch, Linger, Beiglbock and Haagen— the proper names recorded by the Nuremberg tribunals are raw poetry, indeed: fleurs du mal. AUDEN AND THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE The Mann-Auden marriage was a noble gesture on behalf of an exile in an era when: Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in his bookThe enlightenment driven away (22). Auden and his fellow anti-Fascists of the thirties were convinced that the journals of science contained clues to the equality of man. Auden believed that the laws of physics govern servant and master alike, and that it was the job of the poet to instruct both in the language of their common history, "Without science, we should have no notion of equality: without art no notion of liberty (4)." Auden himself was persuaded that science, like poetry, is a "gratuitous, not a utile, act, something one does not because one must, but because it is fun." Oliver Sacks who was a friend explained that "He had the analytic brilliance and vigour of a physical scientist; he had an intuitive penetrating, almost clairvoyant sense of what was going on in people, physically and spiritually, what was amiss and what was aright (23)." His oldest friends, Isherwood and Cyril Connolly, have called him a schoolboy scientist at heart; Stephen Spender acclaimed him as the diagnostician of our fears. Auden was ashamed by the extent to which the children of art and science enlisted in the service of injustice and moral squalor. Commissioned as a Major at the close of the Second World War, he visited Dachau and Natzweiler where the methods of science were mocked on behalf of The grand apocalyptic dreamIn which the persecutors screamAs on the evil Aryan livesDescends the night of the long knives (22) Examples of scientific disgrace were paralleled in the realm of the arts not only by the Grundgrens of the stage, but also the complicities of Heidegger, the Wagnerians of Bayreuth and Oberammergau, and the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Auden was persuaded that our best chance lay in establishing limits to the collaboration between intellect and tyranny. He spelled out his hopes in his "Ode to Terminus," the Roman God of Limits: In this world our colossal immodestyhas plundered and poisoned it is possibleYou still might save us, who by now havelearned this: that scientists, to be lucky,must remind us to take all they say as atall story… (24) There's another strain here: a restatement of "Without science, no equality." Auden is speaking to us from the experience of a generation which had relied on experimental science and its diversities as a shield against the biological hierarchies of fascism. How could the brightest of Europe have been deluded into surrendering equality for the grand apocalyptic dreams of one ideology or another? In "Ode to Terminus" (24) he appealed to us to give things their proper names: … This, whatever micro-biology may think, is the world wereally live in and that saves our sanity,who know all too well how the most eruditemind behaves in the dark without asurround it is called on to interpret,how, discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor,it sinks into a driveling monologue,too literal to see a joke ordistinguish a penis from a pencil. One is sure that Linnaeus would have appreciated Auden's taxonomy: the last two objects are members, literally, of two different kingdoms. The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions ofFASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to [email protected]. REFERENCES 1Linnaeus, C. (1747) Wastgota-Resa In: Unnatural Kinds: remarks on Linnaeus's classification of mental disorders. T. Moore (1996) http://www.hku.hk/philodep/dept/tm/papers/linnaeus/three2.htm. Accessed March 2006 2Auden, W. H. (1970) A Certain World: A Commonplace Book. Viking Press, New York, p. 223. 3Auden, W. H. (1947) The Age of Anxiety. Random House, New York 4Auden, W. H. (1962) The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. Random House, New York, p. 81 5Britton, C. (2007) King of Flowers. http://www.linnaeus300.com/carl-linnaeus. Accessed March 2007 6Linnaeus, C. Philosophia Botanica. (Stephen Freer, trans., 2005) Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 219 7Wilson, E. O. (2005) The Linnaean Enterprise: Past, Present, and Future. Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 149, 344– 349 8Petrusson, L. (2004) Carl Linnaeus: Botanical History. Swedish Museum of Natural History. http://www2.nrm.se/fbo/hist/linnaeus/linnaeus.html.en. Accessed March 2007 9Broberg, G. (1983) Homo sapiens: Linnaeus's Classification of Man. In: Linnaeus: The Man and His Work. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 157– 194 10Uglow, J. (2002) The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York 11Porter, R. The Enlightenment. Penguin, New York, p. 273 12Darwin, C. (1909 edition) On the Origin ofSpecies. Collier, New York, Chapt. 14, p. 9 13Coleridge, S. T. Select Poetry and Prose. (1972, Stephen Potter, ed.) London, Nonesuch Press, pp 469– 470 14Darwin, C. and Wallace, A. "On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection" Proc. Linnean Society, London. http://www.linnean.org/index.php?id=53. Accessed March 2007 15Auden, W. H. (1945) Voltaire at Ferney. In: TheCollected Poetryof W. H. Auden. Random House, New York, p. 6 16Carpenter, H. (1981) W. H. Auden: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, p. 176– 177 17Pettis, R. M. (2005) Mann, Erika (1905-1969). glbtq: An Ency-colpedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture http://www.glbtq.com/arts/mann_e.html. Accessed March 2007 18Auden, W. H. and MacNeice, L. (1937) Letters From Iceland. Random House, New York 19Auden, W. H. (1966) Iceland Revisited. In: About the House. Faber and Faber, London, p. 59 20Michalzik, P. (1999) GustafGrundgens: Der Schauspieler und die Macht [The Actor and the Powerful]. Koch, Berlin 21Weissmann, G. (1985) Auden and the Liposome. In: The Woods Hole Cantata, Essays on Science and Society. Dodd, Mead and Co., New York, p. 79– 84 22Auden, W. H. (1945) September 1, 1939. In: The Collected Poetry ofW. H. Auden. Random House, New York, p. 57 23Sacks, O. (1975) Dear Mr A …. In: W. H. Auden:. A Tribute ( Stephen Spender, ed.) Macmillan, New York, p. 191 24Auden, W. H. (July 11, 1968) Ode to Terminus. New York Review of Books, p. 6 Volume21, Issue7May 2007Pages 1285-1289 ReferencesRelatedInformation
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