In the twenty-first century, we are witnessing a radical refiguration of the nature of human embodiment. As scientists reveal the sheer scope and diversity of microbial life associated with the human body—our microbiome—it is increasingly clear that human and microbial lives are deeply entangled. To understand our own humanity therefore means to acknowledge the extent to which we are colonized and influenced by our microbial contingent.

The recent flourishing of human-microbial ecology has been increasingly assessed by scholars in the humanities and social sciences: anthropologists have shown how microbiome science shapes cultural practices, while philosophers have inquired into its implications for biological individuality. Yet while these approaches detail the influence of the microbiome, they rarely address the cultural heritage of the microbiome concept and the shaping influence of language and narrative. This panel shows, in contrast, how historical representations of microbial life tangibly inform scientific discourse in the present.

“Being Human in a Microbial World” defines literature, in particular, as an active influence on scientific discovery. This premise follows from abundant scholarship in literature and science, which asserts that literature does not merely reflect scientific concepts but in fact also shapes the metaphors, language, and trajectory of science itself. Such scholarship was inaugurated in Laura Otis’ Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (1999), and has turned specifically to biomedical and microbiological themes in the past two years with Sari Altschuler’s The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (2018) and Tita Chico’s The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (2018). This panel expands the conversation to consider the entanglement of human and microbial bodies as figured in literature and science. Its three papers show how the literary imagination has structured what is thinkable, and therefore knowable, in contemporary microbiology.

In keeping with the MLA Presidential Theme, this panel focuses in particular on “being human” at two key moments of transformation: the Victorian era and the present. As the discipline of microbiology took shape in the late-nineteenth century, literary authors began to ask how our imagination of subvisible life takes shape through an understanding of our own humanity. The tropes and themes of this era have resounded across the subsequent development of the field, resurfacing anew, as this panel shows, in contemporary discussions of the microbiome.

The panel features three papers, each limited to 15-20 minutes, that leave ample time for 15-20 minutes of discussion.

The session will begin with Laura Forsberg’s paper “Monster Soup and Fairyland Dreams: Scale Effects of the Victorian Microscope,” which explores how the nineteenth-century microscope revealed enchanting and horrifying visions of life that eroded the idea of human exceptionalism. Drawing on periodicals, cartoons, illustrations like Charles Heath’s satirical Monster Soup, commonly called Thames Water (c. 1828), and short fiction like Fitz James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858), Fosberg shows how microbes were imagined as reflecting and exaggerating human characteristics. She suggests that the relative beauty that O’Brien’s narrator observes on the microscopic scale—and that makes him grow disgusted by the bodies of human dancers on the human scale—illuminates a broader point that the intricacy of microbial parts renders human parts comparatively ungainly and oversized. At the same time that microbes pointed to the limits of human aesthetics, Forsberg argues, they also emphasized the place of humans in a scalar continuum of life, with smaller forms of life passing through the human system in their own life cycle. She demonstrates that when microbes were magnified, Victorian microscopists detected key resemblances between them and humans. Forsberg concludes that the microscope suggested to Victorian observers that the notion of human exceptionalism was a scale effect that was challenged and eroded by the magnifying and equalizing lens of the microscope.

While Forsberg examines the imaginative response to a newly visible world that is teeming with microorganisms, Melissa Wills explores the scientific and imaginative stakes of life without them in her paper “La vie impossible: Dying without Germs in HG Wells and the Microbiome Era.” She argues that contemporary microbiome discourse, in insisting that modern human bodies are suffering without their accustomed microbes, invokes a long history of conceptualizing the necessity of microbes through their imagined, catastrophic loss. Wills begins by discussing the development of germfree animals in the 1890s: research specimens created to test the impact of microorganisms on the body, and kept alive and sterile through extensive technological intervention. In a rereading of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1897), she shows how germfree animals are transposed into a human register as Wells casts the invading Martians as victims of their own achievement of a germfree world. Wells’ dramatization of the risks of germfree life thus forms an essential precedent for the microbiome era’s persistent claim that modern life catastrophically depletes the microbes we need in order to thrive. Wills concludes with an overview of the germfree animal as it is imaginatively recruited into the scientific discourse of the present, coming to symbolize the risks of attempting to live without germs.

Finally, David Rambo returns to our microbiome moment to explore both literary and scientific representations of microbial ecosystems in his paper “Microbial Representations in Literary-Scientific Hybrid Texts.” It tracks the representational strategies deployed in two literary-scientific hybrid texts--Ed Yong’s popular account of microbiome science, I Contain Multitudes (2016), and Bruce Sterling’s novel Schismatrix (1985)-- to make sense of the granular agency and interdependency in the human’s microbial existence. Rambo examines Yong’s translation of microbiome science into metaphors and Sterling’s reliance on vocabulary borrowed from Ilya Prigogine’s science of complexity to flesh out the basal necessity of bacteria in a variety of ecosystems. Taken together, Rambo argues, Yong’s and Sterling’s hybrid styles re-imagine the human in the microbial model of invisible, multi-species processes. He concludes that, counter-intuitively, the human individual is consolidated on account of its multiple microbiomes, while the idea of an environment disintegrates into the constant negotiation of organisms.