Grasping extinction: the natural history museum as haptic space in the work of Clarke, Robinson and Jamie

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines depictions of natural history museums in a selection of poems and essays drawn from Gillian Clarke’s Zoology (2017), Jane Robinson’s Journey to the Sleeping Whale (2018) and Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines (2012). These texts present the museum as a place in which we confront extinction through conflicting emotions: a space of care and protection, built on acts of violence. My analysis explores how physical prehension, real or imagined, contributes to mental prehension, and thus helps us to grasp the sixth mass extinction. I examine how metonymical relations connect museums to damaged environments, including zones, like the ocean, that are perceived as sacrifice zones in the making. I contrast Clarke’s sequence of poems ‘Behind Glass’, where ekphrasis connects the beauty of endangered specimens with protected landscapes, to Robinson’s ‘Memories of Flight at the Life Museum’ and Jamie’s ‘Voyager, Chief’ and ‘The Hvalsalen’, which emphasise the collection’s dependence on the depletion of lands and oceans. This leads me to outline two textual approaches to the natural history museum: the first reads the specimen as a synecdoche for endangered, yet protected environments, while the second connects the collection, metonymically and metaphorically, to anthropogenic extinction and sacrifice zones.