The Wild and the Common: Apples in Modernity and Postmodernity

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!The Wild and the Common !

Eitan Freedenberg Object Lessons

Fall 2013 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Freedenberg - The Wild and the Common ��1

Introduction !This study of the apple, and the historical moment of its commodification, begins in New Eng-

land’s woods. Henry David Thoreau, in whose Walden and Cape Cod we encounter the geo-

graphical sublime, sought in his 1862 essay Wild Apples to define wildness as the common es-

sence of humankind and nature. The apple is traditionally given to history as the catalyst of hu-

man sin. But the fruit takes on an agency in Thoreau’s ode that refigures Rene Magritte’s 1964

painting The Son of Man as a horticultural mise-en-abyme: apple, the avatar of man’s undomestic

or migratory impulses; man, the breathing synonym of the apple’s intellect (fig. 1). Thoreau fa-

mously wrote in Walden, “if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is be-

cause he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured

or far away.” And in Wild Apples, published at the end of his life, he extends this line of thinking

to the russeted and misshapen apples that take root on the periphery of the “civilized” orchards.

A fruit is best which grows freest. Virtue in the “noblest of fruits” is proportional to its obscure

station in a distant field, its avoidance of cultivation, its reproduction contingent only upon the

vicissitudes of the wind and genetic mutation. Fruit as civil disobedient. Fruit that could, in its

homely sourness, resist the dogma of its own digestibility. “Here on this rugged and woody hill-

side,” he writes elegiacally of one upstart tree without a grove, in whose ruddy and strange

“orbs” he sees a version of his self, “has grown an apple-tree, not planted by man, no relic of a

former orchard, but a natural growth . . . the apple emulates man’s independence and

enterprise.” Neither a Creator nor Thoreau must grant the fruit agency; its agency is a priori. 1

! Henry David Thoreau, Wild Apples (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), 63.1


Recently, Jane Bennett has suggested that Thoreau consumed food as a tool to help him

“better sense the force of things,” and seldom is this truer than in Wild Apples. When Thoreau

complains that a wild apple taken indoors is sapped of the tang or smack it might have were it

“eaten in the wind,” he suggests an interrelation of taste and place in the act of sensual self-actu-

alization. But for Thoreau, as for us today, there is another genre of apple altogether: the cosseted

and commercial “grafts.” We know these from supermarket aisles. Their waxy skins invariably

shine in fluorescence. Bred “not so much for their spirited flavor as for their mildness,” these are

apples that reflect selective breeding strategies in the garden and standardization practices in the

broader field of industry. Thoreau binarizes the “seedlings” and the “cultivars”—the wild, in oth-

er words, and the common. Published three years after Origin of the Species but nearly a century

before the discovery of the double helix, Wild Apples bristles with allegories of survival and

symbiosis. In the most humorous passage of Thoreau’s account, the apples find in bands of graz-

ing cows a determined enemy. Pushing against the onslaught of the “bovine foes,” bushes of wild

apples eventually accommodate the grazers by pushing upwards, forming an “inverted pyramid”

that shelters and shades the now-harmless creatures. “What a lesson to man!” he exclaims. “Only

the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward

at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth.” 2

With Thoreau’s spirited pitting of “queer” fruit against the tyranny of normalization in

mind, I investigate in this paper the historical moment of pomological standardization. Tracing

the apple’s passage from elite dessert to fruit of the masses, I establish parallels between mid-

nineteenth century horticultural practices and that era’s broader trends in industrialization and

! Thoreau, Wild, 69.2


consumerism. I then explore how turn-of-the-century pomological literature—“fruit manuals”—

registered the transition from parochial, nursery-based commerce to a national and transnational

commerce abetted by new shipping and storage practices. In these manuals’ sensory descriptions

and photographic illustrations, I locate a powerful impulse to preserve vernacular “structures of

feeling” through modern and empirical means. This impulse, which birthed discourses of preser-

vation and connoisseurship that we now associate with “heritage practice,” aligned with the goals

—but not the methods—of the “antimodern” movement. C. Nadia Seremetakis and others have

suggested that the scarce variety of fruits a typical consumer has access to today, as compared to

those of the preindustrial era of agriculture, is accompanied by a decline of aura. And certainly,

encountering Spencer Ambrose Beach’s descriptions of the tastes of now-lost or esoteric apples

in The Apples of New York, the (post)modern reader might envision him or herself in the Platonic

cave. Against the imagined sensory experience of the lost breed, even the most pleasurable tart-

nesses of today’s popular Honeycrisp or Pink Lady cultivars may suddenly suggest what Fredric

Jameson called “depthlessness”: a simulative—but not stimulative—play of surfaces, a foreclo-

sure “of the capacity for certain perceptual experiences.” Such aches may be irresolvable. But I 3

assert, finally, that the very genetic logic of the apple guarantees meaningful historicity even to

the seemingly impoverished byproducts of commercial breeding. Since each apple seed, if not

grafted by a careful hand, produces a wholly different breed, each successive generation prompts

a true life-or-death choice: to end its lineage or ensure its cultural perpetuity, if only until next

season. Gainful breeding of even the most mundane, salable cultivars demands unceasingly ac-

tive transmission over time, facilitated by oral pedagogy, vernacular texts, and even local tradi-

! C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Breast of Aphrodite,” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing 3

Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (New York: Berg, 2005): 298.


tions. Thus those fruits that we may instinctively think of as being the least primogenital may, in

fact, be the most. Thinking with the apple, we can imagine a new model of heritage studies, in

which rare and mass-produced objects are treated as coeval. The romantic gravitas of the heir-

loom seed, and its potential to reanimate bygone sensualities notwithstanding, even the dullest

Red Delicious at the chain supermarket conveys a meaningful investiture in tradition.

!The Apple in Modernity

!“The project of modernity,” writes David Harvey, was to refine and more perfectly execute the

highest ideals of the Enlightenment: to harness new modes of scientific rationality to inure hu-

manity against “scarcity, want, and the arbitrariness of natural calamity.” As the Enlightenment 4

project matured in the mid to late nineteenth century, agriculture became an increasingly ratio-

nalized discipline. Chemistry and Linnean taxonomy were no longer exclusively the domain of

the university laboratory and the globetrotting botanist. Increased dissemination of growers man-

uals made such tools available to estate gardeners and amateur breeders alike. The pattern of sci-

entific rationality enacted in modernity apexed in the collusive technical regimes of Taylorism

and Fordism. The former system prescribed the compartmentalization of industrial activity and

the latter conjugated workplace efficiencies with the belief that mass production and mass con-

sumption were mutually dependent.

But decades before Frederick Taylor wrote Scientific Management and Henry Ford

opened his River Rouge plant, efforts to standardize, nationalize, and commoditize agricultural

output had already started both in Britain and the United States. As Eric Hobsbawm notes in The

! David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 12.4


Age of Capital, the rapid growth of cities and the completion of American and European

transcontinental railroads radically transformed agricultural trade, opened up new markets and

increased demand for nonnative goods. Yet these new markets and technologies, which at once

expanded economic geographies and compressed the logics of spatiality and duration—and

which appear to us today as intimations of globalization—were not without their social conse-

quences. Hobsbawm explains that the “convulsions which followed the transfer of agriculture to

a capitalist, or at least a large-scale commercialized pattern,” punctured once-powerful illusions

of parochial stability. The sentimental tug of familial property did not, in most cases, withstand

the influx of capitalistic, then corporate, and finally monopolistic exploitation of arable land. 5

Those farmers who were not dispossessed by such trends in “world-market agriculture,” or who

stayed afloat in spite of them, were subject to theretofore unexperienced market pressures. In

precapitalist agrarian economy, the greatest fear of the homestead farmer was a “bad harvest and

consequent famine.” But the growing need to satisfy the demands of far-flung buyers put former-

ly regionalist producers in uneasy competition with unknowable parties. This shift was accom-

panied by the risk of “overproduction” and catastrophic destabilization or even collapse in prices.

Predictably, non-capitalistic forms of agriculture—self-sufficient, barter-based, or otherwise non-

monetary—vanished almost completely by the mid nineteenth century. 6

Lewis Mumford notes that the dissolution of self-sustaining agrarianism and the rise of

industrial agriscience would not have been possible without dramatic innovations in (and popular

acceptance of) artificialized environments. By shifting the burden of floricultural labor from the

field to buildings such as the greenhouse, there arose “the prospect of turning part of agriculture

! Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 206.5

! Hobsbawm, Capital, 209.6


into an all-year occupation.” Since the paleolithic era, horticultural practices have frequently 7

been the venue of significant technological innovation. Mumford, writing in the midst of the

Dust Bowl, saw this interpellation of mechanical novelty and horticulture as part of a “neotech-

nic” phase, inaugurated by the 1832 invention of the water turbine and continuing into the

present day. The neotechnic is a consummation of all human scientific ambition. It is character-

ized by now-familiar modes and themes: inexorable speed, foreshortened cultural and spatial dis-

tances, and synchronization of organic and mechanical rhythms. Mumford viewed such changes

with a now-dubious optimism. “If agriculture, freed from the uncertainty of the weather and of

insect pests, will become more regular, the organic timing of life processes may modify the beat

of industrial organization.” But the very technologies for which Mumford advocates, as 8

Jonathan Crary has recently argued, enact industrial capitalism’s coup de grâce: the annexation

of all earthly time into the time of productive labor, the cataclysmic disruption of diurnal

rhythms, and, as can be more deeply felt, the annihilation of meaningful social bonds. 9

In the 1850s, however, such technologies were welcomed unsuspiciously by British aris-

tocrats, gourmands, and bon vivants. The pomological obsessions of midcentury Victorians were

both birthed and sustained by the Industrial Revolution. As the “small world” of eighteenth-cen-

tury Society suffered the rise of an indecorous merchant caste, an “upward spiral of social barter”

among old wealth—who, unlike the urban nouveau riche, held vested country estates—necessi-

tated more conspicuous indicators of wealth. Rare culinary treats served that purpose

delectably. The greenhouse soon became an indispensable technology. Building and maintain10 -

! Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 259.7

! ibid.8

! Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).9

! Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, The Book of Apples (London: Elbury Press, 1993), 84.10


ing the crystalline spectacle on an estate allowed owners to replicate foreign climates and, con-

sequently, those climates’ produce. This ongoing investment ensured that when the dessert tray

arrived at the dinner-party table, it was ornamented with fruits of enviable novelty. As Joan

Richards and Alison Morgan assert in The New Apple Book, diversities in color, scent, and tex-

ture were, at mid-century, valued above more pragmatic considerations such as crop yield and

long-distance transportability. Victorian apples “therefore acquired a range and subtlety which

did indeed bear comparison with wine.” But these competitive gastronomes’ cavalier attitudes 11

toward markers of salability put them at odds with an emergent cast of commercial growers.

Though novel and nonnative foods had been reliable signifiers of prosperity since at least

the the sixteenth century—the high era of the spice trade—the disruptive agronomic technologies

developed at the onset of modernity, particularly the greenhouse, anticipated the most significant

tendency of that epoch: “time-space compression.” Morgan and Richards note that fascination

with American apples like the Esopus Spitzenburg and the Washington Strawberry, and Italian

ones like the Mela Carla, spurred major innovations in domestic greenhouse technology. In the

words of nurseryman Thomas Rivers, the greenhouse allowed for the “climate of Toulouse or

Nice but without its biting winds.” The greenhouse’s functionality is dramatically captured in 12

Humphry Repton’s 1816 postcard, “Forcing Garden, In Winter,” (fig. 2) in which a frock-coated

and top-hatted gardener hunches over a snow rake while a luckier peer, holding a summer crop in

the titular “forcing garden,” tilts his head back in imperious glee.

To understand the significance of this development, we turn again to Harvey. In his dis-

cussion of the stream of technological innovations—“the telegraph . . . steam shipping . . . radio

! Ibid, 84.11

! Ibid., 87.12


communication and bicycle and automobile travel”—that defined the latter half of the nineteenth

and early years of the twentieth centuries, he notes that that era’s ambition toward instantaneity

“annihilated space through time.” In other words, industrial nations and their peoples circum-

vented the tyranny of distance by adopting time-saving technologies and routines. For those in

the vanguard of that movement, he adds,

the task was to re-launch the Enlightenment project of universal human emancipation in a global space bound together through mechanisms of communication and social intervention . . . New senses of relativism and perspectivism could be invented and applied to the production of space and the ordering of time. 13

!Instruments like the airplane and the radio were thus a stitch in time, in both senses of that hoary

idiom: a means to truncate laborious rituals; and a method of puncturing and lacing through, at

novel and improvised rhythms, the fixed Cartesian fabrics of time itself.

The greenhouse era wasn’t the first time the apple had been seen as a transportive object.

In the “postlapsarian” myth, Adam and Eve’s consumption of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge

forced mankind’s passage from inside (Eden) to out (our own world). In biblical exegesis, how-

ever, the apple plays an even more influential role. Like Thoreau after him, eleventh century

Spanish scholar and mystic Rashi conceived of the apple as existing independent of and prior to

God’s own agency. In his commentary on Genesis 3:5, he notes that the apple enfolded the uni-

verse’s innate moral binary. Not only did the apple instill in its eater the knowledge of good and

evil’s coexistence and seal mankind’s permanent mortality, but it also catalyzed Creation itself.

He writes, “מן העץ אכל וברא את העולם”—God ate from the tree and only then (having acquired

knowledge of good and evil) conspired to design the universe. To adapt the Satrean formula: 14

! Harvey, Postmodernity, 270.13

! Rashi, commentary on Genesis 3:5, www.chabad.org14


apple precedes existence precedes essence. Building upon Rashi’s exegesis, Kabbalists identify

the apple tree as a site of dimensional infolding. The Kabbalists’ tree harmonizes presence and

non-presence, utopia and dystopia, the object and its mirrored reflection. It is, as Foucault sug-

gested of the heterotopia, “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several

sites that are in themselves incompatible.” The fruit has long embodied, in other words, a sort 15

of proto–virtual-reality machine: a fantasy conduit between scenes, tempos, ethics, and sensuali-

ties once considered discrete or incommensurable.

In 1850s England, again, the apple’s tree and taste served as a passage between Old

World and New, between well-known climes and distant ones replicated in the humid virtuality

of the hothouse. This achievement, achieved simply by layering and reinforcing glass panels, and

in some cases importing soils, complemented the modern revolution of the senses. Several gen-

erations before the Cubists annihilated “the homogenous space of linear perspective” and 16

filmmaker Dziga Vertov proclaimed that the motion picture camera enabled “the possibility of

seeing life processes in any temporal order or at any speed,” the Victorians identified the apple’s

tastes and textures as the sensory and even affective proxy of an elsewhere. The apple was a

means to erase distance and vanquish natural time that doubled as a means of conspicuous con-

sumption. 17

This sensibility resulted in a hierarchized system of distinctively-titled varieties: the

Summer Golden Pippin (fig. 3), in its own season, being superior to the Ribston Pippin (fig. 4),

but never exceeding the pleasures of Cox’s Orange Pippin (fig. 5). We may consider this an in-

! Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias." Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 4815

! Harvey, Postmodernity, 266.16

! Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).17


cipient mode of brand literacy. Baudrillard, in his System of Objects, writes about the origins of

the brand as a means of self-actualization within a particular “status group.” He notes: “It is as if,

through the demarcation of the social, and not by a dialectic, an imposed order was created, and

through this order, for each group, a sort of objective future (materialized in objects): in short, a

grid in which relations become rather impoverished.” Those “impoverished” relations may be 18

seen in the aforementioned Pippins, through which Victorians erected a complex set of social

codes wholly disproportionate to the fruits’ narrow varietal differences. Marx would surely have

seen in this botanical moment a pattern of fetishism. The commodity-form—and the economic

facts it registered, such as ownership of certain technologies or employment of a fruiterer—as-

sumed a value unrelated to materiality or utility, and superimposed object relations onto social

relations. But it is through Baudrillard’s closer reading of signs and names within the market 19

context that we may see how brand logic is simply extensive of popular modes of Enlightenment

rationality: Darwin’s selective genealogy and Descartes’s mathematical objectivity, but above all

Linnean taxonomy, with its promise of a homogenous and legible sphere of knowledge. Social

investment in foreign and novel apple breeds in the nineteenth century certainly exemplified

commodity fetishism (and the extravaluation of technics over human labor). But in a more sig-

nificant way it marked a passage from the exercise of rationality for its own sake to the exercise

of rationality as a means of participating in a market.

! Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Objects,” in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford 18

University Press, 1988), 16. ! We might also consider Dutch “tulipomania,” the locus classicus of the speculative investment bubble, 19

as evidence that even before the advent of modern capitalism, horticulture replaced social relations with commodity relations, and served as the focus of irrational market behavior.


Unsurprisingly, given the relentless pace at which capitalism disrupted and reorganized

social and material relations in the nineteenth century, the fetishistic sustainment of varietal di-

versity gave way to a system of standardization designed for maximum profitability. In Britain, a

horticultural nationalism developed in response to the growing veneration of American breeds.

By the latter half of the century domestic greenhouses had largely been rendered financially in-

solvent by the mass-marketization of that technology. Aided by national campaigns promoting

local agriculture, public desire reoriented toward British exemplars. The complex mouthfeel and

gleaming coloration of America’s ambrosial Northern Spy lost purchase amid growing economic

competition between the two Atlantic nations. Consumers turned irrevocably against now-dread-

ed “Yankie” fruit. Much of Britain’s native fruit stock was less durable and comestible than 20

long-loved imports. This necessitated a rethinking of how, exactly, to satisfy growing demand for

fresh produce while ensuring allegiance to regional breeds. As the rank of societies, publications,

and institutes promoting the apple swelled in the twilight of the long nineteenth century, two

broader trends ran parallel, as they are wont to do: the nationalization of a marketable cadre of

sturdy cultivars at the expense of “old and regional specialties,” and the emergence of an anti-

modernism fixated on the preservation, in textual potentiality or in botanical actuality, of margin-

alized cultivars.

In 1883, the National Apple Congress, held in Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society, met

to discuss the ballooning quantity of native and nonnative apple varieties. Their aim was to “re-

solve the confusion of identities and select a good range of apples for growers to concentrate

on.” Markers of longterm salability that had long been scoffed at by the dinner-party elite, for 21

! Morgan and Richards, Book, 89.20

! Morgan and Richards, Book, 93.21


whom apples needed transport only from the garden to the table, rose in significance as “fruit

campaigners” sought to introduce all of England to the supreme market varieties. At one meeting

of the Apple Congress, 1545 apples were studied, tasted, and narrowed to a top sixty. These nons

plus ultra varieties, write Morgan and Richards, “were early, brightly-colored eating apples,

which would have a free run in the market until imports arrived; and culinary apples, which none

of the competitors grew.” The logic behind this careful, public consolidation of consumer op22 -

tions is well stated by Igor Kopytoff, who notes that processes of homogenization must strike a

balance between over- and underdetermination. “Cultural collectivities,” he writes, “must navi-

gate somewhere between the polar extremes by classifying things into categories that are simul-

taneously neither too many nor too embracing.” 23

Standardization dimmed the fruit’s role as a means for the elite to virtualize distant climes

and magnified its role as a means for non–merchant classes to virtualize haute cuisines (of yes-

teryear). But it also ensured that those varieties precluded from market calculuses acquired new

meanings as esoteric or sentimentally “absent” artifacts. Venerations of novelty begat venerations

of marginality. Conspicuous consumption begat connoisseurship. The Apple Congress reminds

us that the significances of polysemic objects—especially the apple, which has held many func-

tions since it was first grown in bronze-age Kazakh forests—may be recast not only through

spontaneous or elusive social mutations but also by bureaucratic dogma.

!!!!! Morgan and Richards, Book, 118.22

! Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cul23 -tural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 70.


Fruit Manuals: Modernist Antimodernism !While British gardeners and bureaucrats worked to neutralize the American horticultural threat

through a series of nationalistic standards, American pomologists labored in orchards and offices

to record their nation’s venerable apple history. Fruit manuals had existed before market de-

mands began to shape apple cultivation practices, the ur-texts being John Lindley’s 1841 Po-

mologia Britannica and Dr. Robert Hogg’s 1860 Fruit Manual. But this hybrid literary genre—in

equal measures encyclopedic and prosaic, qualitative and quantitative, scientific and cultural—

rose to prominence only as apple diversity was forced into decline by commoditization efforts.

The reader of such volumes, mutely window-shopping tastes and glosses in the catalog’s aisles,

may feel not unlike the famous flâneur, that prowling specter of Benjamin’s dramatis personae

whose cosmopolitan nomadism the philosopher construed as “botanizing on the asphalt.” I ar24 -

gue that authors of such fruit manuals appropriated the strategies of “neotechnic” modernity—

the scientific method and “the new permanent record” of photography, rather than the high Arts

& Crafts aesthetic —to advance a distinctly “antimodern” agenda. They sought to recuperate 25

regional difference vis-à-vis an increasingly nationalized culture, transmit oral histories and folk-

lores, and promote alternatives to broad-market capitalism. But these texts by and large do not

engage in discourses now regarded as “nostalgic.” As Svetlana Boym has written, nostalgia is a

response to industrialization and secularization that is driven by the anxiety that a return to out-

moded objects and symbols will exaggerate incongruities in the historical record. The nostal26 -

gic’s aim is to seamlessly reconcile past and present, such that the act of reconciliation appears

! Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 24

1997), 36.! Mumford, Technics, 242.25

! Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2008).26


natural, coherent, even necessary. That nostalgic practices are often so conspicuous seems proof

of nostalgia’s impracticality. But it is precisely by avoiding the era’s modish craft aesthetic alto-

gether that these fruit manuals render their artifacts, narratives, and persons more durably rele-

vant. Paradoxically, they advance historical awareness by approaching history only peripherally.

As the foundation for an understanding of “antimodernism,” I employ the thoughtful

work of T.J. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of

American Culture 1880-1920. Lears agrees with Harvey and Mumford that modernity is the ide-

ological aftereffect of the Enlightenment project. But he sees it manifested less in philosophy and

science than in culture. Modernity, he argues, is simply a secular faith in material progress. The

primary benefactor in his equation is the bourgeoisie. The process of rationalization, accompa-

nied by “efforts to impose moral meaning on a rapidly changing social world,” ensured their

hegemonic position. Galvanized by a “corporate drive for efficiency,” the culturally and demo-

graphically ascendant merchant class appropriated, modified, and finally universalized, the shib-

boleths of the dwindling gentry. 27

The Apple Congress, which categorized and democratized the salon’s favored dessert,

was just one example of this pattern. As the twentieth century loomed in the middle distance,

scriptural faith ceded ground to spiritual “weightlessness” and the profusion of therapeutic pseu-

dosciences. Antimodernism emerged as a response to this trend. Though it did include a regres-

sive religious element, the movement was more specifically an intraclass revolt, enacted primari-

ly within the bourgeoisie, against snake-oils, streamlines, and other transient dogmas. These

dogmas, argued antimodernists like Arts and Crafts impresario William Morris, did little more

! T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 27

1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 9.


than alienate individuals from a truer ethical nature. Against popular delusions of abundance and

speculative cure-alls, antimodernists “accepted the insoluble conflict at the heart of their human

condition” and “preserved an enduring witness against the flatulent pieties of our progressive

creed.” 28

Let us examine an apple guide from the turn of the twentieth century to see how the shifts

and revolts I have discussed—from superabundance to standardization, from modernism to anti-

modernism—reverberated in the horticultural discipline.

The manual which most ably captures the spirit of the genre is Spencer Ambrose Beach’s

1905, two-volume Apples of New York, perhaps the most complete and widely known apple di-

rectory of the twentieth century. Beach was not an estate’s retained fruiterer nor a private nurs-

eryman, but rather a researcher and archivist for the New York State Agricultural Experiment

Station in Ithaca and nearby Geneva, New York. The volumes provide a clinical historiography

of the apple’s transition from nursery to commercial orchard, offering in a rare moment of practi-

cal economism that the “horticultural interests of the state” are perhaps best served by the capaci-

ties of those orchards: “On the whole the industry of growing apples rests now on a more stable

and satisfactory basis than at any previous period in its history.” In the directory, Beach is fore-

most an empiricist, not to mention a completist, and his descriptions and cross-section plates of a

few breeds of wild apples are as detailed and skillfully presented as for those commercial vari-

eties which remain popular to this day. Beach’s volumes were among the first American horticul-

tural guides to make use of laboratorial photography (fig. 6), rather than lithographed plates.

Sereno Edwards Todd’s 1871 The Apple Culturist, for example, accompanies its sowing and har-

! Lears, Antimodernism, 58.28


vesting advice with stony lithographs of Yellow Bellflower apples and pen-and-ink sketches of

oak roots (fig. 7). The 290 sketches in John Aston Warder’s 1867 American Pomology do hardly

more than allude to the complex knowledges and practices of successful horticulture (fig. 8).

Beach, on the other hand, fully embraces the “age of technological reproducibility,” with maga-

zine-quality images serving as the best proxy yet for the presence of the Real Thing. Colored

pencil accents upon the monochrome images imbue each cross-section with a subjective, almost

emotive beauty, just one year before Auguste and Louis Lumière patented the Autochrome and

prompted hand-coloration’s march to obsolescence.

The directory is a source of great intrigue, principally because many of the apples which

it presents as relatively widespread are scarcely if at all seen today. The Jacobs Sweet, for exam-

ple, appears in a number of early twentieth century apple directories, including William Ragan’s

1905 Nomenclature of the Apple, Andrew Edward Stene’s 1910 Some Suggestions for Rhode Is-

land Apple Growers, and Ulysses Hedrick’s 1922 Cyclopedia of Hardy Fruits. But fruitless

searches in contemporary directories show that no such apple is grown today. First grafted in

1860 by Medford, Massachusetts orchardist Charles Sumner Jacobs, the Sweet was a “large

showy” fruit born of a “vigorous” tree. It was an aggressive apple, a reliably annual bearer in the

orchard that blossomed at a very young age—“pubescent,” as Beach notes. As to its uses, this

was no elite dessert fruit but was, rather, one of the “best sweet apples” of its region and season

for baking. Not one for wanderlust, the Jacobs Sweet kept mainly to its Medford climes; “it has

been but sparingly disseminated in New York state,” Beach laments.

What became of this “best” apple—that superlative certainly being subjective, yet sup-

ported by an abundance of documented anecdotes and culinary experimentations? Clues to its


disappearance lurk between the lines of Beach’s description. “The fruit is very tender and liable

to crack and spot . . . it is an unreliable keeper . . . it is recommended for the home orchard but

not for general commercial planting.” We may infer with some certitude that the Jacobs Sweet 29

was marginalized into extinction sometime in the twentieth century due to cyclical market de-

mands or commercial disinterest. An explanation we should return to, illustrated before in refer-

ence to the era of dessert-tray brinksmanship, is that superlatives are hardly the first and often the

last concerns of the market. In the West, as Kopytoff points out, salability is the quintessence of

the modern commodity system.

While Beach easily telegraphs the Jacobs Sweet’s outward appearance—“tough, waxen,

glossy . . . dots obscure, whitish or russet,” which, closing your eyes now, you might freely imag-

ine—his taste descriptions demonstrate language’s poverty vis-a-vis that more elusive sense.

“Slightly aromatic, very sweet, good” is the deficient lexical trace of the Jacob’s Sweet that we

are left with today, a reminder of why taste is so frequently allocated to the domain of eros and

magic. But what more can our descriptions of taste be than the facile concatenation of analo-

gies? A wine that tastes of honey, coffee, or vanilla; a bread that tastes of butter or cinnamon; a

new cut of meat that inexorably “tastes like chicken.” The poet William Carlos Williams’s plums

were nothing less, and nothing more, than “delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold.” Tastes confound

because they present themselves not all at once, but rather in a series of dense informatic waves.

First a cameo that cannot be disaggregated from aroma, then a barbed or silky whisper lurking

amid texture’s shadows, a waltz of entrenchments and retreats, and a pathetic—or curative—fin-

ish. Taste exerts a mercurial agency. Sight has its stare and touch its lingering pressure, but taste

! Spencer Ambrose Beach, The Apples of New York (Ithaca, NY: J. B. Lyon and Company, 1903), 169.29


slaloms between brightnesses and intensities, and expires seemingly at its own leisure. For Aris-

totle, who chronicled the senses in Parva Naturalia, taste takes on a moral dimension. Its dis-

crimination of sensory qualities and signals is impervious to trickery. It is “by taste,” he notes,

“that one distinguishes the pleasant from the unpleasant, so as to flee from the latter and pursue

the former.” And for the late eighteenth century gourmand Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 30

these complex qualities of taste—“fugitive nuances”—rendered it the sense par excellence.

Taste’s incommunicability, its sabotage of our most ardent attempts at diagnosis, is essential to

our special alliance with it. It is precisely by modeling irrationality and unpredictability in a nat-

ural world we labor tirelessly to categorize and simplify, he argues, that taste helps us “repair the

continual losses brought about by life.” 31

Beach’s attempt to narrate taste on the printed page, however maladroit, is very much in

line with the antimodernists’ faith that man was the measure of all things. The fin-de-siecle’s

secular cults of therapeutic quick-fixes and scientific management, however narcissistic or ego-

driven, presupposed the existence of an external, objective order that could be assimilated into

the body (or body politic). Antimodernists embraced an opposite discourse, though as Lears

notes, their efforts were diffuse and often contradictory. But in general, against what they saw as

“morbid self-consciousness” brought on by widespread cultural obsession with nervousness and

therapy, antimodernists sought to recover “the primal, irrational forces in the human psyche,

forces which had been obscured by the evasive banality of modern culture.” The diverse char32 -

acters of the movement viewed so-called “authentic” experiences as the only true palliative of

! Aristotle, On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath., trans. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 30

University Press, 1936), 109.! Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, “On Taste,” in Taste Culture, 16.31

! Lears, Grace, 57.32


modern helplessness. Beach’s writings on taste are necessarily feeble, drawing on a narrow vo-

cabulary of acidity, bitterness, brightness, and the occasional hapless superlative. But they are

nothing if not embracive of the irrational and subjective. Such descriptions appear to revel in

their own paucity, reading rather like staccato poems, tumbling around the details: “acute, aro-

matic, sprightly, becoming nearly sweet,” for the Kittageskee apple of Cherokee origin, “fine-

grained, breaking, distinct,” for Dr. J. Stayman’s 1875 Winesap. Beach celebrates the indeter33 -

minacy of the “lowest” sense, sketching in fractured innuendos an idea that must be completed in

the reader’s imagination.

Throughout the volume, Beach marries scientific description to folktale, regional anec-

dotes, and historical narrative—clothing vernacular material in rationalized objectivity as a

means of preserving continuity with the past. The Jacobs Sweet receives a few brief notes on in

its origins in Massachusetts, but a variety which remains popular to this day receives the most

effusive historiography: the Northern Spy (fig. 9). This is, in Beach’s estimation, an apple with

all the necessary qualities to be a regional emblem. In the growers’ notes, he praises it:

The fruit is large and attractive, being of a bright red color, overspread with a del-icate bloom. . . . It generally does well on the hills and well-drained slopes in the more elevated regions from Chautauqua lake eastward to the Catskills, along the Champlain valley and in the uplands east of the Hudson as far south as the Fishkill mountains. 34

!Here he merely begins to allude at the narrative he is to provide in the historical notes, but one

can already see how New York and its topologic details are part of a vivid psychical map Beach

wishes to draw of the state’s interior. Notably, this is a map of regions, not anchored by the

names of familiar cities. There is of course a botanical and commercial truth to his claims: the

! Beach, Apples, 210.33

! Beach, Apples, 231.34


Northern Spy, indeed, does not grow well south of the Fishkill mountains. But like Thoreau be-

fore him, and against the vulgar agriscience of the British gentry, Beach sees place as being inex-

tricable from the identity and sensualities of each fruit.

Can one smell the damp earth in this textual map? Might one begin to imagine political

and cultural connectivities threaded through the venues of Northern Spy country? Even if not, we

are still left with a compelling idea of what environmentalist Tony Hiss has called a “working

landscape.” In The Experience of Place, a revolutionary urban planning text from 1990, Hiss ex-

plains that the working landscape is forged from the natural one. He cites French biologist Rene

Dubos: such a landscape gives rise to “an environmental diversity that provides nourishment for

the senses and for the psyche” and “an increased awareness of the interdependence between hu-

man beings and their total environment.” It is exactly such a landscape that Beach illustrates in 35

the historical notes. From its humble origins as a (wild) seedling around 1800 in East Bloom-

field, NY, Beach traces its primogeniture through a series of sites and growers: from Herman

Chapin, who purchased seeds from Salisbury, CT to ambitious Western New York orchardist

Roswell Humphrey; from the death of the original tree to the quiet second-generation triumphs

of Humphrey’s orchard; from untraveled Finger Lakes specialty to the belle of the American

Pomological Society’s 1852 ball. It is such a narrative, and others too numerous to recount 36

here, that provides us with a sense of the commercial variety’s deeply embedded lineage. Perhaps

Beach does not aspire quite to the affective immediacy of “heritage”—his is a rather removed

and rote style. He does, however, demonstrate that rationalist encyclopedism and vernacular

! Rene Dubos, quoted in Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Vintage, 1991), 117.35

! That organization “not only listed it as a new variety of promise but also as a variety worthy of general 36

cultivation.” quoted in Beach, Apples, 232.


knowledges are commensurable, and even mutually constitutive, when viewed through the lenses

of taste, place, and social history.

!Biodiversity and Heritage: The Apple in Postmodernity

!Having spent much of this project casting the apple as a pivotal character in the era of “high

modernity,” I wish to end it with the apple in postmodernity. A single question guides this open-

ended conclusion. What might the apple’s central genetic logic—its “promiscuous” drive toward

wildness—suggest about its position within the matrix of “heritage”?

The apple’s biological moxie is alluded to prosaically by Thoreau, but I wish to reempha-

size this point as it relates to the fruit’s historicity. In The Botany of Desire, a history of plants

organized around the theme of nonhuman agency, journalist Michael Pollan notes that every

apple carries with it an appetite for individuation. This wanton impulse, he notes, has contributed

to both the apple’s ubiquity and its polysemy. His biological-historical argument is lovely:

Every seed contains genetic instructions for a completely new and different apple, one that, if planted, would bear only the most glancing resemblance to its parents. If not for grafting, every apple in the world would be its own distinct variety, and it would be impossible to keep a good one going beyond the life span of that par-ticular tree. . . . More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. 37

!Consider the implication of this genetic logic from the perspective of the cultivar, with special

regard to its futurity. The survival of a popular breed requires, like a family heirloom, active

transmission at each generational turn. The ubiquitous Macintosh Red, for example, is a 1796

! Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (New York: Random House, 2002), 46.37


seedling, granted a stay of execution at every successive graft. The perpetuity of a variety is thus

contingent upon a tacit compact between generations of agriculturalists, an uninterrupted and

active impulse to rebreed, develop routines, best practices—even regional traditions—and trans-

mit them through both oral and textual mediums.

Some recent heritage polemics, such as Nadia C. Seremetakis’s “The Breast of

Aphrodite,” advance a conoisseurial approach to food studies that is at odds with botanical fact.

Seremetakis identifies this as the central conflict of postmodern taste experiences: the more a

cultivar is “engineered” to please multiple palates, the less likely it is to actually please anyone.

Writing of the long-lost peaches of her rural childhood, she notes that modern commercial vari-

eties have no capacity to surprise, delight, or awaken Proustian memory. “In the presences of all

those [new] ‘peaches,’” she writes, “the absent peach became narrative.” In her view, mass-38

market fruits’ averageness, their eagerness to comprise many sensual reference points, excludes

them fully from the formulas of heritage. It is true that unlike a discontinued car model or outré

furniture style, the lost apple and all its semiotic or sensorial attributes—taste, scent, weight,

ripening pattern—cannot be experienced again, even in volumes like Beach’s, which attempt a

textual surrogacy for the irreproducible. But despite the elusive authenticity that the Tobias Black

—“practically unknown outside of the Lake Champlain district . . . plump, tufted, sprightly

subacid, 1888” —may promise, it is hardly more deserving of our cathexis than the old reli39 -

ables, their hardy forms embodying the preservationist ideal.

And one can still amble through the brushy, distant rows of the orchard and find a fruit of

unknown origin. Neither seedling nor cultivar, bearing no price: a gift, to oneself, in secret.

! Seremetakis, “Aphrodite,” 298.38

! Beach, Apples, 34139


Illustrations

!!Figure 1. Rene Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm. !!!!!!!


Figure 2. Humphry Repton, “Forcing Garden, In Winter,” 1816, postcard, Royal Horticultural Society.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Figure 3. Alexander Bivort, Summer Golden Pippin, 1855, lithograph and hand colored on paper, 345 x 260 mm.!!!!!!!!!!!


!Figure 4. Wilhelm Lauche, Ribston Pepping (Pippin), 1882, from Wilhelm Lauche, Deutsche Pomologie (Singhofen, Germany: Paul Parey, 1882). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


!!Figure 5. Cox’s Orange Pippin, origin and date unknown. !!!!!!!!!!


!Figure 6. Spencer Ambrose Beach, Ribston, 1903, hand-colored photographic plate, from Spencer Am-brose Beach, The Apples of New York (Ithaca, NY: J. B. Lyon and Company, 1903). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Figure 7. Sereno Edwards Todd, Yellow Bellflower, 1871, lithograph, from Sereno Edwards Todd, The Apple Culturist (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871).!!!!!!!!!!!


!

!Figure 8. John Aston Warder, Manner of Cutting and Pegging Down a Layer, 1867, lithograph, from John Aston Warder, American Pomology (Middletown, CT: Orange Judd and Company, 1867). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Figure 9. Spencer Ambrose Beach, Northern Spy, 1903, hand-colored photographic plate, from Spencer Ambrose Beach, The Apples of New York (Ithaca, NY: J. B. Lyon and Company, 1903).!!!!!!!!


Bibliography !Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. !Aristotle, On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath. Translated by W.S. Hett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. !Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Ed. by Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988. !Beach, Spencer Ambrose. The Apples of New York. Ithaca, NY: J. B. Lyon and Company, 1903. !Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. !Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2008. !Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013. !Foucault, Michel. ”Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias." Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité (1984). !Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. !Hiss, Tony. The Experience of Place. New York: Vintage, 1991. !Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital 1848-1875. New York: Vintage, 1996. !Korsmeyer, Carolyn, ed. The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. New York: Berg, 2005. !Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. !Morgan, Joan and Alison Richards. The Book of Apples. London: Elbury Press, 1993. !Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. !Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire. New York: Random House, 2002. !Thoreau, Henry David. Wild Apples. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863. !Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Documents

The Wild and the Common: Apples in Modernity and Postmodernity