II

Fertur Prometheus addere principi
limo coactus particulam undique
desectam et insani leonis
vim stomacho aposuisse nostro.

Prometheus, forced, they say, to add
To his prime clay some favorite part
From every kind, took lion mad
And lodged its gall in man's poor heart.

Horace, Odes I.XVI (Trans. John Conington, 1865)

I had wanted for many years to visit the American Museum of Natural History, initially because I had heard that it contained an enormous scultpture of a cachalot battling an architeuthis, and subsequently because of an essay on the Carl Akeley Hall of African Mammals by the biologist Donna Harraway, of which my friend Geoffrey Shullenberger had sent me a recording years before.  I had meant to bring the recording so that I could listen to the essay while viewing its subject, but I realized with some frustration and anxiety that I had forgotten it and would thus have to be content with my faulty memories of the essay and distorted impressions of the Hall, and the overheard conversations of children and tourists.    

I thought of something I had seen the day before, as Rachel I walked by the Grand Central Station.  She had noticed the head of a small bird lying in the gutter.  The rest of the animal was nowhere to be seen, and the head was remarkably intact without visible trauma or bloodstains, as though it had been surgically removed for some unfathomable purpose before being carelessly discarded by the sated celebrant of some clandestine rite.  I wished I could remember some of what I used to know about Roman augury, in order to determine the import of this apparition for my visit. 

I left the park and crossed the street, heading for the full size equestrian statue which projects from the facade like a ship's prow.  It depicts the son of one of the incorporators of the museum, astride a charger and flanked by an African and a Native American, both clad in what I suppose the sculptor imagined to be their antelapsarian traditional dress: a scant arrangement of rags, hides, and savage ornaments.  At the foot of the statue was an empty bottle of Leroux Blackberry Flavored Brandy.  The cap was lying close by, suggesting that it had been finished near where it lay, although whether the statue had been the inspiration and site of its consumption or merely a waystation on its previous owner's journey to some other place was not apparent.

The steps swarmed with tourists, schoolchildren, and New Yorkers, and I was buffeted about in my attempts to gain the entrance.  I found myself at last in the enormous atrium, where it took me several minutes to figure out how to purchase a ticket.  I looked around, and saw the great inscriptions I had heard about.  What I had not expected, because I had forgotten that Harraway mentions them, was the collection of murals flanking the northern and southern entrances to the Museum itself.  These are enormous, stretching all the way to the ceiling forty or fifty feet above, and depict Theodore Roosevelt's achievements with reference to an symbolic and ethnographic history of the human species.  The brightly colored figures, executed by an artist not untouched by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, practically burst off the walls in a profusion of activity, each whorl of energy centering around Roosevelt, who is typically wearing a white linen suit and often a pith helmet.  I learned later from a 1944 museum pamphlet authored by one William Andrew McKay, who turned out to be the artist, that the quotations from Roosevelt bolted to the wall in bronze letters are not actually continuous passages, but excerpts from letters, commencement speeches, and other writings which have been strung together according to their theme.  I was unable to deduce from what I saw whether this was done because suitable passages of continuous prose could not be found, or for some other reason.

I wanted to spend longer examining the murals, but the African Hall exerted an insuperable attraction on me and I was drawn towards its tenebrous doorway like a celestial body falling into a black hole.  

The Hall is very dark, as befits a place of worship in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.  It is lit only by the lights of the vast dioramas which radiate from its sides like the chapels of Westminster Cathedral, and a few dim orange bulbs which cast their ghostly light on the group of elephants which loom incomprehensibly large in the center of the room, frozen in the act of fleeing through the main entrance as though, like Lot's wife, they had cast a forbidden glance back at the artfully re-arranged slaughter of their fellow Sodomites.  I began my circuit of the main Hall in a counterclockwise direction, pausing in front of each diorama for as long as it took to obtain a view unobstructed by the hordes of lemures who thronged the space around me, chattering in a bewildering variety of languages.  The scenes are large and ambitious.  Each is carefully constructed to replicate the natural habitat of the animal depicted, and the specimens collected are supposed to comprise the fundamental reproductive unit of the species.  Donna Harraway writes that 

No visitor to a merely physical Africa could see these animals.  This is a spiritual vision made possible only by their death and literal re-presentation.  Only then could the essence of their life be present.

I take this to mean that the spiritual function of the work, which is to locate the subject of early twentieth century American capitalist society with respect to Nature, and therefore Culture, requires the same kind of work as does a Passion Play.

The art of taxidermy began to be developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but did not reach its zenith until the Edwardian period.  In 1881, Rachel Poloquin informs us, the Director of the Natural History Museum in London wrote

I cannot refrain from saying a word upon the sadly-neglected art of taxidermy, which continues to fill the cases of most of our museums with wretched and repulsive caricatures of mammals and birds, out of all natural proportions, shrunken here and bloated there, and in attitudes absolutely impossible for the creatures to have assumed while alive.

The craft of museum taxidermy, an art of re-animation as opposed to the mere preservation of hunting trophies, was perfected in the first half of the twentieth century by Americans like William Temple Hornaday and Carl Akeley.  Both learned the rudiments of their craft as apprentices in Henry Augustus Ward's Natural Science Establishment, (Hornaday somewhat before Akeley,) and both went on to illustrious careers in metropolitan institutions honoring the natural sciences: Akeley, successively, at the British Museum, the Field Museum, and finally the American Museum of Natural History; and Hornaday at the United States National Museum (later called the Smithsonian Institution) and the New York Zoological Gardens (or, as it was called then and now in a locution said to have driven Hornaday to paroxysms of livid rage, the Bronx Zoo).  

Both were champions of the nascent movement to perserve areas of wilderness.  Harraway argues definitively that this impulse represents the search for a panacea to the rising tides of degeneration and miscegenation with which the intelligensia of the Gilded Age were obssessed.  One of Hornaday's first jobs for the American National Museum was to inventory its collection of American buffalo.  (This is a point of historical irony because his mentor in taxidermy and naturalism, Henry Augustus Ward, was the first person to be killed by an automobile in Buffalo, New York.  Ward died, as Esveldt says of David Zilberman, with his boots on; his mangled corpse was recovered from the road still clutching a copy of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.)  In any case, Hornaday's review of the Museum's collection of specimens, which he deemed inadequate, led him to a train of inquiry through which he realized the astonishing efficacy of  the genocide his contemporaries had been waging mounted, on foot, and from moving trains against the vast herds of ice-age quadrupeds which once roamed the Great Plains, at the same time as a similar campaign was being directed against Manhattan's urban pigs (and, for that matter, their lumpenproletariat masters).

Realizing that the extinction of the American bison was imminent, he journeyed to the Musselshell river in Montana, where the last remaining wild herds grazed, to collect the most perfect animals he could find among the righteous remnant for the benefit of what seemed doomed to be a bisonless posterity.  The Musselshell is now almost entirely "dewatered," as the bizarre euphemisms of environmental catastrophe have it, and the buffalo are gone, as well as the fish, beavers, and other creatures which teemed in its stream and the riparian ecosystem it supported.  Hornaday's bison were frozen in time, and displayed for years at the Smithsonian before being lost for several decades, only to be re-discovered and returned home, after a fashion, to the Museum of the Northern Great Plains in Montana.

It was Carl Akeley, however, who brought taxidermy to its zenith in the first decades of the twentieth century, as Harraway describes in her exquisite biographical sketch.  His first experience with the re-animation of very large creatures came in 1885.  During his apprenticeship at Ward's Natural Science Establishment, P.T. Barnum's prize elephant Jumbo was struck and killed by a locomotive in southern Canada.  In what may be the only documented taxidermic emergency, Akeley was dispatched from Ward's to preserve Jumbo's residue in a way which Barnum would find profitably exhibitable.  The result of his labors, undertaken with the help of every butcher the nearest town could muster, does not survive, and it is unlikely that the artist was satisfied with it; he expressed aesthetic disgust for the specimens which were prepared at Ward's, even with all the necessary materials close to hand, dismissing them as "upholstered."  After moving on from Ward's, Akeley invented new techniques of preservation and armature which allowed the construction of unprecedentedly lifelike mounts, which in general he refused to patent, considering them the common property anybody with sufficient skill to use them.  

Early in his career, he invented the "habitat group," a style of museum presentation which became (and remains) hegemonic.  In habitat groups, all the members of the animal's family unit are gathered together and depicted in the course of their supposed natural relations to one another against a background scrupulously constructed to replicate the environment in which they were collected.    It is determined by what Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison called, in their history of objectivity, "trained judgment."  The observer is given to understand that while the tableaux which stands before them may not correspond to any set of circumstances which, were they to go to the African savannah and regard the reality on the ground, they would observe, it has been composed by a scholar-artist whose deep knowledge of the objects depicted ensures that what is represented is the Type; Goethe's Urplanz, plural and vertebrate.  The habitat group, as developed by Akeley, is a form of iconography in the Orthodox sense of the word; the image is consubstantial with the innermost reality of what is depicted.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, before taxidermy had really begun to grow into a high art, another means of using death to represent life was being developed in the public hospitals of Paris.  Beginning in the last years of the eighteenth century, French physicians had begun to dissect their deceased patients on a previously unimagined scale.  This represented a sharp disjuncture from previous anatomical traditions, like that depicted in Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, which records the annual dissection of a recently hanged man to demonstrate normal anatomy.  The pictured dignitaries stare across the body at an open book, doubtless Vesalius De Humani Corporis Fabrica, as though their primary concern is to verify the coherence of the canonical text with the exposed muscles of the convict's left arm.  By contrast, the clinicians of the Paris school opened bodies to find the pathological: the tubercle, the inflammed meninges, the fibrotic and adherent pericardium; they were connoisseurs of the lesion.

The French and Industrial Revolutions had shifted thousands of people from the countryside into the filthy, pestilential, and overcrowded cities, where they died from accidents and infections, particularly tuberculosis, in much greater numbers than they reproduced.  The conditions a the Hotel Dieu in 1788 are described, in a contemporary work, as follows:

The general policy of the Hotel Dieu…is to put as many beds as possible into one room and to put four, five, or six people into one bed.  We have seen the dead mixed with the living there.  We have seen rooms so narrow that the air stagnates and is not renewed and that light enters only feebly and charged with vapors.  (...) We have seen a room for convalescents on the third floor, which could only be reached via the smallpox ward.  The operation ward where they trephine, cut the stone, and amputate limbs contains those who are being operated upon, those who will be operated upon, and those who have already been operated upon.  The operations are performed in the center of the room.  The one who will be operated upon tomorrow sees his futuer sufferings.  The one who has passed through this ordeal is shaken by these cries of anguish.  He undergoes these emotions in the midst of inflammation and purulence….A thousand particular and accidental causes are added every day to the general and constant causes of air corruption, and force us to conclude that the Hotel Dieu is the most unhealthy and most uncomfortable of all hospitals, and of nine patients, two die.

Such conditions produced an enormous volume of raw material for pathological anatomists.  Marie FranÇois Xavier Bichat, one of the great anatomists of the period, is said to have performed six hundred autopsies in a single winter (which, given the primitive techniques of preservation then available, was the season to do them in).  Through the work of such indefatigable ghouls, death was transformed from the macabre opposite of life into a mirror in which its truth could be read.  The historian of medicine Michel Foucault writes that

When the doctor observes, with all his senses open, another eye is directed upon the fundamental visibility of things, and, through the transparent datum of life with which the particular senses are forced to work, he addresses himself fairly and squarely to the bright solidity of death.

It was in the lesions of the sick woman's dead body, not the (presumably) normal structures of the highwayman hanged an hour before, that Bichat, Laennec, and others sought deeper truths of the peculiar form of motion known as life. 

In the latter years of the nineteenth century, however, as the art of museum taxidermy was being perfected by restless students of Henry Ward like Akeley and Hornaday, this means of seeing was in desuetude.   The center of medical thought had moved from Paris to Berlin, and consequently from the bedside to the laboratory.  Men like Bichat and Laennec had transformed the dead human body into the ultimate repository of all knowledge about life.  With bare hands, they had opened the sacrosanct enclosure of man and made its internal spaces tell the truth about its visible and living permutations.  They both refused to use microscopes, despite the fact that perfectly satisfactory instruments existed (it had been over 100 years since Leuuwenhoek had seen his own spermatozoa wriggling through a tiny globe of polished glass) because, as Bichat said, "when we look into darkness, everyone sees his own way."  He meant, I think, that nothing which cannot be seen in the light of day by an assembled body of like-minded citizens can reasonably be said to exist.  The apotheosis of the cadaver in the post-revolutionary French public hospitals was a cult of egalitarian empiricism, and when medicine turned definitively to the microscope and the test tube, this means of seeing man faded away.

I stood in front of the last diorama on the first floor of the Akeley African hall, regarding an enormous gorilla standing erect in front of me.  Akeley called this animal "The Giant of Karasimbi," and it is one of his masterpieces.  The Giant was killed in the Kivu mountains, in the area where Akeley himself was to die of an undiagnosed febrile illness six years later.  The environs of his final resting place are depicted in the diorama's magnificent background painting  No autopsy was conducted, as there was no surgeon on the safari, and he was buried by his wife and the men he called his "boys" in the sturdiest tomb local resources could afford; nonetheless, we learn from Diane Fossey, despite an eight-foot stockade and a five inch thick slab of concrete his bones were despoiled and borne away in 1979 by Zairoise poachers.  The substance of their interest in his remains is not recorded, although it is tempting to imagine that he was stuffed and sold to a wealthy collector.  

I looked into the glass eyes of the Giant, and I thought of Bichat.  This, I thought, is his legacy; not the recognition of tissues as a basica anatomical unit, nor the consequent delineation of the pericardium, epicardium, and myocardium and the cerebral meninges, nor the nosologic distinctions those discoveries allowed.  Bichat made the dead body into a lens through which the physiology of humans could be read; this inspired reorientation was not lost on Akeley, who made innumerable animal corpses into screens on which the sociology imagined by humans belonging to his moment's elite could be projected.  The robber barons of the 1920s read themselves not in the monochrome of human pathologic anatomy, but in the full palate of God's creation, whose members the students of Ward's Natural Science Establishment learned to kill and flay and artfully re-arrange to tell us the most basic stories about ourselves.  Akeley's dioramas are the exquisite metastases of Bichat's heroic winter in the dissecting room.

Upstairs I found the appendices.  The habitat groups in the main Hall, as Harraway so lucidly described, tell stories of racial purity, domestic economy, and the Darwinian order of society which reflect the values and preoccupations of New York's white elite in the early twentieth century.  The mezzanine contains less obvious narratives told by animals which cannot accede to the majesty of the lion or the fortitude of the eland.  A group of warthogs confront a pair of ostriches.  Both parties look awkward, as though they understand neither how they got into this situation nor how they might extricate themselves from it with what little dignity God has granted them intact.  The warthogs, I was informed by the illuminated sign next to the diorama, suffer much from starvation, a poingant aside which may have been intended to explain their designs on the ostrich nest.  Their situation in Eden was not compared to that of their well-fed cousins who, when the diorama was built, had been absent from the streets and the Park outside for only a few decades after a tenancy of nearly four centuries, although the implication of the entire Hall for the inhabitants of places like Seneca Village was clear.

In front of a diorama containing innumerable dead vultures dismembering a mangled zebra, I was surrounded by a group of alarmingly tall French teenagers.  They appeared to share my confusion as to the significance of the allegory confronting us.  "Non, non," said one, "Non, j'aime pas les oiseaux."