Twin-brothers Charlie, left, and Donald Kaufman (both played by Nicolas Cage) in Adaptation.
Towards the end of his epic history of the concept of “milieu”, Leo Spitzer briefly goes over the origin of the closely-related English word, “environment” – which was coined, it turns out, by Thomas Carlyle in an article on Goethe, published in Miscellanies (1827).
And “what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines in question are themselves a translation of Goethe (Dichtung und Wahrheit, book XIII): following upon a passage in which Goethe had emphasized the gloominess of contemporary ‘Poetical Literature’ in England, comes a new paragraph”:
In such an element, with such an environment of circumstances, with studies and tastes of this sort (In einem solchen Element, bei solcher Umgebung, bei Liebhabereien und Studien dieser Art); harassed by unsatisfied desires . . . ; with the sole prospect of dragging on a languid, spiritless, mere civic, life [it is easy to understand that young Germans of the Werther type should be tempted to commit suicide] (quoted in Spitzer 205)
The lines Carlyle omits from the translated passage, lines which maintain precisely that unique sense of an affective surroundings, give an altogether different impression of the ‘quality’ “environment” purports to represent:
“But the Element and Umgebung of Goethe are only to be understood by reference to his lines which Carlyle omitted: a passage in which Goethe states that Ossian had found a perfect ‘Locale’ for English melancholy: the heath, a ‘Caledonian night’ lit by the moon, when dead heroes and maidens once fair came back to ghostly life. Thus Goethe, thinking of the Ossianic landscape, was speaking of an ‘element’ of nature, while Umgebung represented a mid-term between natural and spiritual surroundings (this is shown clearly by the words that follow, Liebhabereien and Studien, which are definitely concerned with the spiritual).” (Spitzer 204–205)
What Carlyle’s use of the word “environment” serves to occlude, then, is the very concept of a poetic-theatrical “Locale”, in this case the Ossian, melancholic heath. Indeed, for Spitzer, Carlyle’s “bombastic and overstuffed phrase environment of circumstances” –- which would repeat throughout Carlyle’s work, he points out, always with a “rather circumscribed nature” (205) –- specifically works to trade in affective for deterministic models of ‘influence’.
In place of a poetic landscape or scene, and the pseudo-spiritual affects that ‘pervade’ it, Carlyle opts for the more biological-sociological image of definite, fixed ‘circumstances’. Though both words “suggest a ‘quality’ inherent to the surroundings [...] with milieu the quality is more personal and more intangible than with environment — and less deterministic: environment is the term of a sociologist who thinks in terms of fixed factors, milieu the more spontaneous expression of a human being who feels, rather than analyzes.” (Spitzer 206)
Goethe’s Umgebung indeed appears to lack a proper English correlate. Even milieu, which didn’t make an appearance in English until 1877, fails to capture the spiritual, affective connotation of Goethe’s Locale. English characterizations of the relation between self and surroundings are in this respect simply too exact. Indeed, reacting against the prevalence of a deterministic element in words like environment William James used the word tone instead — but even here the totality or completeness of a ’scene’ or ’situation’, as implied by Umgebung, is effectively lost.
Chris Cooper, who plays orchid thief John Laroche, will go to any lengths to find rare species of the flower.
One solution to this problem can be found, I think, in Deleuze’s use of the term milieu in his two works on Cinema.
In terms comparable to Goethe’s “Locale”, Deleuze discusses ’stock’ filmic backgrounds or settings — which are perhaps the modern-day counterpart of the literary ’scene’. Where for Goethe Ossian had “found a perfect Locale for” an English emotion or complex, for Deleuze, the cinematic set or background suggests an equally “originary world” lodged midway between symbolic and literal orders.
“Take a house, a country, or a region. These are real milieux of geographical and social actualisation. But it looks as if, in whole or in part, they communicate from within with originary worlds. The originary world may be marked by the artificiality of the set (a comic opera kingdom, a studio forest, or marsh) as much as by the authenticity of a preserved zone (a genuine desert, a virgin forest). It is recognisable by its formless character.” (Deleuze 123)
The “formless character” of the milieu is at once a function of its open generality, with all the associations that come with it, and its nonetheless coherent, enclosed identity. So while the milieu can be a more or less static background, “it is also the set which unites everything, not in an organisation, but making all the parts converge in an immense rubbish-dump or swamp” (Deleuze 124). Like Ossian’s melancholic heath, the studio forest or artificial marsh “actualizes” a mood as much as a setting essential to the plot — which is to say, it endows the scene with a pervasive, intangible aura as much as it serves as literal site for definite narrative events.
Take the famous last scene of Adaptation. for instance. On the one hand, the swamp is a recognizable stock cinematic setting, the cliche of cliches (making it all the more fitting for a sell-out screenwriter to meet his end in), but on the other hand it is the natural terminus of a storyline devoted to orchids. In this last scene, in fact, the historic cinematic overdetermination of the swamp setting even seems to reach a logical conclusion, or point of exhaustion: which is to say, though its status as artificial device does fold back on itself in a last bout of self-consciously forced exertion (–the swamp that kills the writer seems to have been written by him), it also manages to sincerely retain that melancholic note essential to the figuration of the orchid as otherworldly and intangible, alluring but dangerous. In spite of, or perhaps in collaboration with, Kaufman’s irony, some mystical, cinematic force in the end withholds the orchid from total corruption or capture, as if it were much more than a flower but also (because we are, after all, only in a swamp in the Everglades) much less than the power for which it is persistently mistaken.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. [Link]
Spitzer, Leo. “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics (Part 2).” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, No. 2 (December 1942): 169–218. [Link]
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