System and Nemesis: Christopher Smart, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Clare and the legacy of Linnaeus

The taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) wrote a field guide to world naturalia called the Systema naturae (The System of Nature), which comprehensively instituted the scientific use of binomial nomenclature. He also composed for his son's edification a confidential manual of God's retaliations on sinners, entitled Nemesis divina (Divine Vengeance). Like the Systema naturae, the bleak and surprisingly circumstantial evidence collected in Nemesis divina demonstrates Linnaeus's fierce categorical compulsion.;These two Linnaean works--the famous public instrument and the private record of God's symmetrical retributions--suggest that every System invokes, or is invoked by, a Nemesis. The reciprocities and exchanges of these factors differently inflect Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Les reveries du promeneur solitaire, and various of the prose and poetry of John Clare. Christopher Smart (1722-1771) wrote "Jubilate Agno" in Mr. Potter's madhouse; but the parallelisms between his procedures in this poem (in which he desegregates the domains of System and Nemesis) and the Gedankengang of Linnaeus demonstrate the proximity of Smart's putative insanity to the scientific orthodoxy of his day.;Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote Linnaeus that the scientist's botanical manual was superior to every treatise on ethics. In Les reveries du promeneur solitaire, Rousseau uses the veridicality of the Linnaean System to counter the Nemesis constituted by his real and imagined persecutors; the repeatable capacity to make identifications among naturalia secured Rousseau's own identity--and the identity between the empirical findings preserved in his herbarium and the conclusions he drew on his promenades, safeguarded in Les reveries.;For John Clare (1793-1864), the binomially "peasant poet," Linnaeus's System itself appeared in the guise of Nemesis, "a darkness visible." Clare perceived in the indecipherable Linnaeus the virtually inextricable knot etymologically comprised of class, classification, and the classics. As Rousseau conscripted Linnaean veridicality to substantiate his self-vindication, so Clare's class enemies used the cosmopolitan taxonomies of Linnaeus partly to extenuate the expropriation of rural land and rural culture.;The interplay of System and Nemesis both illuminates the work of the writers under scrutiny and models a method of interrogating the motivations of those who zealously propound or adhere to theories and authorities.