Environmental Awareness and the Design of Literature [1 ed.] 9789004324831, 9789004324800

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Environmental Awareness and the Design of Literature

Studies in Environmental Humanities Managing Editor Mark Luccarelli (University of Oslo) Co-editor Steven Hartman (Mid Sweden University) Editorial Board Þorvarður Árnason (University of Iceland) Eva Friman (Uppsala University) Maunu Häyrynen (University of Turku) David E. Nye (University of Southern Denmark) Advisory Board Sigurd Bergmann (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) Lawrence Buell (Harvard University) Thomas Hallock (University of South Florida, St. Petersburg) Ursula Heise (University of California at Los Angeles) Amanda Lagerkvist (Stockholm University) Phillip Payne (Monash University) Aaron Sachs (Cornell University) Kate Soper (London Metropolitan University) Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir (University of Iceland) Cary Wolfe (Rice University) Donald Worster (University of Kansas)

VOLUME 3 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/seh

Environmental Awareness and the Design of Literature Edited by

François Specq

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustrations: Photography by François Specq. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Specq, Francois, 1965- editor. Title: Environmental awareness and the design of literature / edited by Francois Specq. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: seh - Studies in environmental humanities; 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016029175 (print) | lccn 2016041441 (ebook) | isbn 9789004324800 (hardback : acid-free paper) | isbn 9789004324831 (E-book) Subjects: lcsh: Literature--Philosophy. | Environment (Aesthetics) | Nature in literature. | Human ecology in literature. Classification: lcc PN48 .E58 2016 (print) | lcc PN48 (ebook) | ddc 809/.9336--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029175

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2211-5846 isbn 978-90-04-32480-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32483-1 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For Anne

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Contents

Notes on Contributors viii

1

The World Outside in (Literature) 1 François Specq

2

American Ecocriticism and the Ethics of Commitment 17 François Gavillon

3

Urban Ambivalences and Narrative Domains in Defoe’s Novels 39 Anne Dromart

4

Thoreau’s Environmental Humanism 52 François Specq

5

Environmental Awareness and Geography: Reading Reclus Ecocritically? 69 Bertrand Guest

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Ecological Awareness and the Democratic Consensus: John Muir’s Post-Mortem Radicalism 90 Jean-Daniel Collomb

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John C. Van Dyke, The Desert (1901): Under the Shadow of the Artificial Desert 105 Michel Granger

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Encountering the Sahara: Embodiment, Emotion, and Material Agency in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky 116 Alexa Weik von Mossner

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Dillard Dancing: An American Childhood 136 Nathalie Cochoy

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On Duff Wilson: Community, Agribusiness and Environmental Testimony 148 Alain Suberchicot

Index 161

Notes on Contributors Nathalie Cochoy a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Fontenay-Saint Cloud, is Professor of American Literature at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. She is the author of Ralph Ellison, La Musique de l’Invisible (1998), and of Passante à New York (2010). She directed L’Art de la ville/The Art of the City (Anglophonia/Caliban, 2009) and Instants de ville/City Instants (erea, 2010). She also wrote numerous articles on the representation of urban and natural spaces in American literature. She is the editor of Transatlantica for literature and the arts. She leads the “Poéthiques” research group at the University of ToulouseJean Jaurès. Jean-Daniel Collomb is an Associate Professor in American civilization at the Université Jean Moulin in Lyon, France. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on John Muir’s life and work. His first book, published in November 2013, is entitled John Muir, écologie et parcs nationaux and is the first book devoted to Muir’s life and work in French. His research activities focus on the history of the us environmental movement from the late 19th century to the contemporary era. He has published several articles on the prospects of radical environmentalism within the larger framework of modernity, including “John Muir and the Ambivalence of Technology” in the Journal of American Studies Turkey, “Christianity to Ecology: John Muir’s Walk through America” in Transtext(e)s-Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies, and an article in French dealing with the notion of anthropocentrism in the history of us environmentalism (“Rejeter l’anthropocentrisme : stratégies du refus dans l’histoire environnementale des États-Unis de John Muir à Earth First!” in Cycnos). He is currently preparing a new book dealing with the history of environmental radicalism in the United States. Anne Dromart (†) was an Associate Professor of English literature at Université Jean-Moulin (Lyon 3), and a researcher affiliated with the cnrs. A specialist in eighteenth century British Literature, she published extensively on Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. She is the author of Tristram Shandy (Paris: Atlande, 2007). François Gavillon holds a Ph.D. in English and Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature from the University of Paris iv-Sorbonne. He is Associate Professor of American

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Literature at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale in western France, and head of the English Program at Quimper. He teaches American literature, American civilization, and American environmental history. He is the author of a book on Paul Auster’s novels (Paul Auster, Gravité et légèreté de l’écriture, published by Rennes University Press in 2000). His research has focused for some years on American environmental literature. He has published articles on Edward Abbey and Rick Bass, ecocriticism and ecopoetics. He is the editor of a collection of essays entitled L’invention de la nature (The Invention of Nature, published by the University of Brest in 2009). Forthcoming is a volume of essays he has co-edited with Dr. Ufuk Özdag, entitled Environmental Crisis and Human Costs. Michel Granger is Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of Lyon. He is the author of Henry D. Thoreau. Narcisse à Walden (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991), Henry David Thoreau. Paradoxes d’excentrique (Paris: Belin, 1999). He has edited collections of essays on Thoreau, including “Cahier de l’Herne” Henry D. Thoreau (Paris: L’Herne, 1994), Henry D. Thoreau. Désobéir (Paris: 10/18, 1997). He has introduced and edited new translations of Thoreau’s works: Essais (trad. Nicole Mallet; Marseille: Le Mot et le Reste, 2007), Walden (trad. Brice Matthieussent; Le Mot et le Reste, 2010) and a selection of extracts from his Journal (trad. Brice Matthieussent; Le Mot et le Reste, 2014). Bertrand Guest is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the Université d’Angers and a researcher affiliated with ceriec. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Université Montaigne in Bordeaux, he wrote his PhD on the question of cosmological writings and revolutionary politics in the 19th century. He is a member of the Essais journal and works on the connections between sciences, literature and politics in French, German and English-speaking literatures. He took part in the organization of the workshop “L’anarchie par les lettres” (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 2011) and wrote several articles on politics, romanticism, ecology and anarchy. Alexa Weik von Mossner is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria and an affiliate at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Her ecocritical scholarship has been published in journals such as Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental Communication, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. She is

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the author of Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (U of Texas P, 2014), the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film (Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014), and the co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (with Sylvia Mayer, Winter 2014). Her forthcoming book explores the theoretical intersections of embodied cognition, affective narratology and ecocriticism (Affective Ecologies, Ohio State up, 2017). François Specq is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (Université de Lyon) and a researcher affiliated with the cnrs (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ihrim). He has published critical studies and translations of works by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, and Mary Austin, and essays on American aesthetics of the colonial period and the nineteenth century (visual culture, painting, music). He is coeditor of Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon (University of Georgia Press, 2013), and of Pedestrian Mobility in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts: From the 18th Century to the Present (New York: Palgrave, 2016). Alain Suberchicot is Professor Emeritus of American studies at the University of Lyon-Jean Moulin (Lyon 3). He has published extensively on environmental questions and ecology issues in the United States. His most recent book is Littérature et Environnement; pour une écocritique comparée (Paris, Champion, 2012), a book of comparative study looking into American, French and Chinese cultures.

chapter 1

The World Outside in (Literature) François Specq Critical studies of the relations between literature and environment have b­ ecome well-established over the past two or three decades, adopting a number of interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon literary history and theory as well as environmental history and philosophy, history of science, psychology, and anthropology, and ranging across a field that now extends beyond “nature writing” and landscape aesthetics to encompass a much wider variety of texts and documents.1 The essays gathered in this volume are meant to contribute to these ongoing debates, without attempting at exhaustivity or consensus, not to mention synthesis. Nor do they purport to settle the question of what is meant by the notions of “nature” or “environment.” By “environmental awareness,” these essays do not simply mean concern for a disappearing natural world, nor such prescriptive behavior as has sometimes been ascribed to environmental advocacy—in which a writer arguably provides “ecological lessons” and suggests an appropriate way to interact with “the natural world,” on the basis of a “truth” regarding the land, landscape or ecosystem, and a felt necessity to extend human empathy to nonhuman life.2 The phrase instead refers here to the various ways literary texts can ­question modes of viewing and inhabiting the world which appear innocuous yet ­hamper genuine insight or the possibility of more sustainable living. The ­following essays respond to Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s call for critical modes and practices  that  “foster self-understanding, strengthen and enrich our imaginative powers, and give a distinctive kind of intellectual pleasure” (2005, ­Author’s abstract). As Scott Slovic and Dan Philippon have emphasized, “­savoring” and ­“saving,” “pleasure” and “sustainability” are inseparable (Slovic 2008, esp. Chap. 1, “­Savoring, Saving, and the Practice of Ecocritical Responsibility”; Philippon 2012). 1 The scholarship on literature and environment is so vast that it is impossible to give even a brief overview. Key works mapping the field and giving a sense of its scope include—by chronological order of publication, and without any claim to comprehensiveness—Slovic 1992, Buell 1995, Glotfelty & Fromm 1996, Armbruster & Wallace 2001, Ingram et al. 2007, Outka 2008, Heise 2008, Garrard 2011 and 2014. 2 Dana Phillips (2003) has criticized what he perceives as “naïve” assumptions about nature, ecology and nature writing.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324831_002

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Each of the following essays thus explores the potential of language and the literary experience to expand modes of awareness of the physical world— or, to use more “Romantic” wording, to sharpen our senses and broaden our ­understanding. They all examine texts that, despite their formal and r­ hetorical differences, explicitly or implicitly critique the ossification of our conceptions of the relation between human beings and the physical world. Literary criticism, in this perspective, is decidedly an anthropology, in the sense that it ­interrogates—however obliquely—what it means to be human, and sheds light on the way texts contribute to shaping our lives. We have tried to avoid being prescriptive in our critical approaches to the issue, so as to remain open to its manifold aesthetic, philosophical, historical and political aspects. But, beyond their diversity, all these essays demonstrate how attention to the “representation” of the physical environment can help question preconceptions and standard views—i.e., those informed by our daily concerns and interests, be they practical or economic, for instance—through a healthy combination of earthiness and skepticism. What most d­eeply brings these essays together, and what more broadly defines environmental ­awareness, is that the physical world is not taken for granted—­ignored or overlooked—but always ahead of us, a constant horizon as much as a grounding for our life. Literature can help us resist two distinct yet convergent trends: the simple, mindless exploitation of nature and its packaging in bright and ­cheerful colors that make it blandly attractive. Far from the clichéd conceptions that would reduce depictions of n ­ ature in literature as creating “not […] a living but […] an enamelled world,” as ­Raymond Williams has claimed about the pastoral tradition since the Renaissance (1973: 18), thus evading social conditions as well as real attention to the physicality of nature, the works examined here do take the physical world seriously, without, however, yielding to any simplistic “mimetic” or “realistic” conception of the written text. This volume is nevertheless based on the ­assumption that some texts do address our relation to the physical world in ways that are more than perfunctory or obfuscatory—even so-called “nature writing” rarely produces an idealized world that obscures the “truth” about nature. Critical attention, particularly in Europe, has long downplayed the role of the physical environment to favor human characters, and our approach shares the ecocritical “­militancy” to the extent that it considers the physical world as a genuine focus of literature—reading both comparatively forgotten and well-known texts in ways that are sensitive to the physical environment. In particular, it ­considers the ways human individuals are in part defined by how they interact with their environment and its tangled topography. This needs not be restricted to “country” or “wilderness” but also includes urban ­environments. As they probe the interactions of individual human beings

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with “nature,” these essays testify to the various ways nature has always been enmeshed in complex discursive, ideological, and material systems: although they are not meant to be historical essays, there has been a sense that it is necessary to preserve the variety of ­attitudes, responses, and debates in relation to their historical ­moments. Accordingly, the essays have been assembled in a chronological order. This is certainly not to say that all writers of the past were proto-environmentalists—but their literary constructions did in some ways engage environmental issues. As Anne Dromart shows in her essay, even before nature writing as a genre or mode emerged in the Romantic period, some writers offered r­epresentations of their physical environment in ways that were both engaging and ­challenging—conducive as they were to not only aesthetic pleasure but to a powerful examination of the individual’s (evolving) milieu as a ­shaping force of her or his identity, against the background of a ­rising “modernity.”3 And, crucially, far from articulating unchanging, imperial, or irenic ­visions of the natural world, these authors and texts often reflect situations of ­vulnerability or humbleness in the ways human beings engage with their environment. This volume’s red thread—one that in this respect echoes ­postmodern concerns—is a sense of “frailty,” in its attention to forms of environmental awareness that, even as far back as the eighteenth century, did not point to the triumphant attitude of an omnipotent subject’s surveying and capturing the world, but were rather intent on swerving away from a form of sentimental ­realism, making room for a sense of unease—­acknowledging mankind as never fully in its place, and sometimes completely out of place, in its physical environment. What these texts and essays tell us about is not primarily a g­ entle story of humans feeling at home in the world (balance, ­oneness, a­bandon, ­appealing depictions of a wild paradise), as critics of “­nature writing” and ecocriticism are sometimes prone to describe it. This volume rather means to consider the various ways in which literary texts make us reflect about our situatedness in our physical environment—what with a sense of closeness or separation, displacement or unbalance, or even violence, as Weik’s essay ­suggests.4 “Outer and inner landscapes are never entirely synchronous or continuous,” Buell writes (2001: 26), pointing to the ways in which human cultures both shape and are shaped by the physical world. Neither, as a consequence, do the ­critical analyses offered here focus on what has been 3 The recovery of early forms of “environmental literature” has been a comparatively marginal but essential trend in recent ecocritical work. See especially Branch 2004, Sweet 2010, Ziser 2013. 4 Buell also points out that the physical environment can be both a “destabilizing force” and a “creative force” (2001: 17).

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a staple of environmental criticism in its early years, i.e. the fascination for the spectacularly blanked-out natural spaces often referred to as “wilderness.” Accordingly, ­fictional as well as non-fictional, urban as well as rural, literary as well as discursive, are equally represented here. These texts do not provide comforting visions of a world outside the precinct of man, but in many cases articulate different, alternative modes of interaction. This volume is thus animated by the idea that landscapes are neither mere idyllic scenery, nor simply cover-up for relations of power, but that, as Terry ­Eagleton writes, “the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to dominant ideological forms, and is in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon” (1990: 3). In other words, our stance insists that literature cannot be reduced to notions of complicity with existing powers, no more than to aesthetically transcendent artefacts, but should be seen as both embedded and destabilizing force. The physical world is not a place of idyllic retreat from corrupt society, but the very setting where culture and nature confront one another, constantly ­complicating and reconfiguring their definitions, in ways that are eminently constructive—of selves, communities, and environments. As Lawrence Buell has argued (see especially 1995 and 2001), the “environmental imagination” can help us to d­ evelop a more complex and thoughtful sense of how we relate to the land and to particular places. This volume pursues this avenue, with the aim of proposing a number of analyses of the diverse ways in which literature helps us escape the rigid frames of commonly assumed worldviews and modes of seeing. The texts and works analyzed here all testify to the different ways literature is located at the intersection of geographical, social, and personal space, and frames the human perception of environment as intellectual adventures and forays that draw upon a number of historical, aesthetic, philosophical and phenomenological positions. The very phrase “environmental awareness” a­ rticulates the tension between exteriority (the physical world) and interiority (perception and the perceiving subject). It is this tension, this friction, this p ­ henomenological dimension, that gives literature its substance, its weight. The quality of a work may be seen in its capacity not only to reflect or to mediate, but to resist its environment, and to affect and transform our sense of reality: all the essays in this volume eventually point to such an anthropology.

…

In the opening essay, “American Ecocriticism and the Ethics of Commitment,” François Gavillon delineates the more openly militant side of the relationship

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between literature and environment, as he shows the ­centrality of ethical concerns to what Lawrence Buell (1999) termed “the ecocritical ­insurgency.” Ecocritical work for the past two decades has clearly distanced itself from the formalism that prevailed until the early 1980s to instead espouse commitment, not to a single cause, but to a set of preoccupations that have deeply reconceived our understanding both of literature and of criticism. Reviewing the directions taken by various branches of ecocriticism, including bioregionalism, ecodeconstruction, animal rights, environmental justice, and ecofeminism, Gavillon suggests that, although these are very different approaches, they all share a sense of what it means to do criticism in a situation of environmental pressure that has now been widely acknowledged as a key c­ omponent of the allpervasive relationality characterizing life on earth. ­Gavillon makes it clear that what is at stake is how the enhancement of environmental awareness permitted by literature and criticism can—and does, the practitioners of ecocriticism believe—have a transformative effect, as it improves our r­elations with the physical world we inhabit, and, consequently, with our fellow human beings. Although this may sound more anthropocentric a claim than some ecocritics would accept, Gavillon crucially suggests that addressing anthropocentrism from within—as our inescapable condition—may well be the only way we can hope to keep it in check. Referring to “environment” rather than “nature,” as suggested in the opening lines of this introduction, is a way of a­ cknowledging that situation, and of more tightly identifying the scope of what human beings can reasonably hope to do without ceasing to be human beings. This, to some extent, concurs with Timothy Morton’s E­ cology Without Nature, whose postmodern framework, Gavillon emphasizes, is ­nevertheless shaped by a desire to bring about “a proper relationship with the earth and its life-forms,” thus exemplifying how deeply the “ethical turn” has inflected the postmodern focus on language and (de)construction of reality. Although such phrasing may sound surprisingly prescriptive, Gavillon shows that enhancing environmental awareness is not driven by normative ethics, but by principles such as the just and the meaningful. A key rationale of ecocritical studies is their positing an intrinsinc link between sense of belonging (also known as sense of place) and environmental awareness: you respect what you know—and feel close to—and know what you respect (although one can also care about a distant sublime landscape that one does not belong to, such as the A ­ rctic National Wildlife Refuge). Sense of place, in our contemporary, g­ lobalized world, need not be a parochial stance, but is a function of involved experience. Anne Dromart, in “Urban Ambivalences and Narrative Domains in Defoe’s Novels,” suggests that the early English novel, although it does not evince any environmental concern, displays a deep sense of the way the physical

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e­ nvironment conditions individual development. Framed as it is within a concomitant economic and social shift from the country to the city, the emergence of the novel in England appears as a way of reflecting on individual life in the modern world. Building on Thomas Pavel’s notion of “narrative domain,” Dromart suggests that the physical environment in Daniel Defoe’s novels offers a perfect counterpart for the novels’ “narrative domains”: the physical environment to be experienced in London appears as a metonymy for the inherent complexity and mobility of the new social order that is part of modernity. As ­Dromart makes clear, mobility is not only instability but openness, and it is this openness which generates or engenders the narration. She thus shows that the town and country dichotomy is inseparable, not only from their physical features, but from a mental topography that bears on the construction of ­personal identities in a deeply changing world (the diversity, or heterogeneity of the urban environment—as distinct from the supposed homogeneity of the rural environment—echoes the multiple social identities of the main ­characters). In this perspective, the city is not just a setting, but a metonymy for the changing s­ocial conditions that model the modern individual. Dromart, then, ­suggests that the city in Defoe’s novels should not be regarded as a r­ealistic representation, but operates as a metaphor for man’s newly-defined ontological situation in a rapidly-evolving world, one that adumbrates the modern and even postmodern sense that individuals are no longer dwellers but temporary, provisional inhabitants of a world in which they can never fully be at home. ­Although it is neither strictly referential nor even fully ­particularized, the ­urban ­environment in Defoe’s novels does matter, and this recognition ­testifies to modernity’s incipient sense of environmental awareness, one that is inseparable from the early novel’s use of narrative as a form of cognitive mapping— although Dromart certainly makes clear that nature writing could not have emerged in eighteenth-century England. In “Thoreau’s Environmental Humanism,” François Specq probes the complex pragmatics of “environmental texts,” and, more specifically, how Thoreau artfully designed Walden to offer a sustained, if not systematic, exploration of three competing modes of environmental awareness. The argument is that the latter part of Thoreau’s Walden, far from being mere light-hearted playfulness or idiosyncratic musing over seasonal change, articulates the defining ­tensions within Western modernity, in which the desire for scientific knowledge, economic appropriation, and aesthetic enjoyment reached an unprecedented level of intensity. Thoreau here strives to comprehend and to redefine man’s relation to the physical world in the context of the triumph of scientific and economic “modernity.” He means both to induce his readers to reflect on the terms which characterize our relation to the material world, and to tip the

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scales toward a new equilibrium, one in which the human desire for d­ ominion is kept in check by an equivalent desire for reverence and wonder. He thus ­challenges the s­ tandard ways we relate to the world, from a perspective that draws on and supports a definition of “the wild” that is not merely topographical (a separate, merely peripheral, sphere elsewhere), but intellectual—a mental “frontier,” central to our very existence, relocated as the necessary, ­nurturing questioning of what we assume is human and defines humanity. Organizing his narrative so as to emphasize his distance from two common ways of ­appropriating the physical world (scientific knowledge and economic exploitation of natural ­resources), and foregrounding a phenomenologicallyoriented poetics in which writing (trans)figures the processes of nature, Thoreau thus emphasizes that his environmental advocacy is grounded in a broader regard for the indomitable power and enduring secrecy of the physical world, and lays the ground for a more complex and balanced environmental humanism. Bertrand Guest’s essay, “Environmental Awareness and Geography: ­Reading Reclus Ecocritically?” is a potent reminder of the necessity to avoid linear readings of the history of science, which would ascribe each writer a set position in an order of development inevitably moving toward ever greater ­rationality. On the contrary, Guest sees Reclus as both heir to the Romantic philosophy of nature and forerunner of contemporary attempts at developing a better integrated conception of man and environment. His analysis resonates with Jean-Daniel Collomb’s consideration of Muir’s post-mortem radicalism: ­Reclus chose not to tone down his radicalism and as a consequence suffered oblivion, whereas Muir was able to promote environmentalism to a certain extent. To be sure, there are essential differences between Reclus and Muir. Muir remained far more faithful to his Protestant inheritance than the French geographer, who also developped a political reading of environmental awareness, as he drew a link between the scientific study of nature as system (the nascent science of ecology) and the impact of the capitalist revolution upon the environment (social ecology). If both were eager to reorient their contemporaries’ approaches to the physical world, through an acknowledgement of our deep links to the material environment, Reclus was far more of a political radical, blending social criticism with environmental awareness in a way that makes utopia truly grounded in the actual. As Guest makes clear, Reclus was one of the last in the Humboldtian tradition that saw science and literature as entirely compatible. He thus appears representative of a form of environmental awareness that flourished in the nineteenth century and, in spite of its seeming irremediably dated to some, may still inspire the layman of today. Guest clearly highlights Reclus’s unconventional geographical thinking, as he

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emphasizes his resistance to the positivism and scientism of official geography. The most f­ ascinating aspect of Reclus’s work, the one that gives its most vivid dimension to his form of environmental awareness, is his utter rejection of any form of subjection, which bears on his refusal to mindlessly bend nature to human power, on the one hand, and on his rejection of political domination, on the other (­preserved natural areas, Reclus claims, would both empower man spiritually and provide a refuge from socio-political oppression). Guest thus draws our attention to what may be seen as an intrinsic political dimension of environmental awareness, in so far as the latter often resists or counters forms of domination, favoring instead cooperation and solidarity, partnership and relatedness. In this respect, Reclus’s thought appears as a resolute response to ­social darwinism, which purported to apply Darwin’s description of the struggle for life to the social order, which was thus naturalized. Reclus, on the ­contrary, chose to privilege interdependence. It may even be argued that Reclus actually developped a kind of “inverted social darwinism,” in so far as he advocated the idea of a parallel between ecological processes and social processes, but oriented it not toward a primacy of the law of the strongest, but a celebration of an essential interdependence. Emphasizing “solidarity” between man and the earth, Reclus simultaneously celebrates the physical environment in ways that sound somewhat mystical and points to an anthropocentric conception. To be sure, Guest describes Reclus as a humanist, not a biocentrist. Jean-Daniel Collomb, in “Ecological Awareness and the Democratic Consensus: John Muir’s Post-Mortem Radicalism,” considers a central figure of the American environmental movement that to a large extent parallels ­Elisée ­Reclus. Like Reclus, Muir was indebted to Alexander von Humboldt for his conception of a science not divorced from the literary imagination. He ­fundamentally believed in the necessity to understand man’s relation to environment not only strictly rationally, but in a way that acknowledged aesthetics and emotions as key elements. Both writers are also characteristic heirs to ­Darwin, who largely initiated ecological thinking through his systemic analysis of the natural world as in a process of constant adaptation to new conditions between interrelated parts. The key link between scientific ecology and environmental thinking, in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, is thus the notion that the health of the whole depends on the health of each part and vice versa (although Darwinism emphasizes individual adaptation, rather than a more static holistic interdependence as in the older notion of the “economy of ­nature”). In this respect, as Collomb makes clear, what may initially be regarded as old-fashioned romanticism—whether in Humboldt, Reclus or Muir—­eventually proves to be a fruitful contribution to scientific modernity and a blueprint for contemporary environmentalism and ecology.

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A key tenet of Muir’s ecology, one that resulted from Darwin’s new conception of the natural world, is the intrinsic value of each living being, whether human or non-human. Muir’s stance implied a ­fundamental rejection of anthropocentrism, and an egalitarian status for all beings—a notion Muir shared with Reclus, although the latter gave it a decidedly politically radical twist. Thus questioning the fundamental underpinnings of the social order of his time, Muir, like Reclus, was faced with the same threats, that of rejection by his c­ ontemporaries. It is Collomb’s contention that Muir, who was perhaps more astute than Reclus, deliberately chose to tone down his radicalism so as not to alienate his contemporary audiences, as his purpose was to persuade his fellow citizens to support his call for the creation of national parks. As a consequence, Collomb explains, Muir’s radical ideas were not made public at the time and were only rediscovered by latter-day activists, including the Deep Ecologists, and he instead grounded his plea for p ­ rotected areas on a more traditional aesthetic celebration of ­wilderness, in line with a Victorian belief in the educational virtues of landscape ­aesthetics—an approach that has tended to be ­approached with suspicion by ecocritical discourse. Collomb also suggests that Muir’s attitude was governed by his fundamental distrust of democratic processes, which made him doubt the possibility of defending such ideas as the intrinsic value of nature or the equal status of all living ­beings. Collomb thus draws a Janus-like portrait of Muir, whereas Guest ­emphasizes the deep unity of Reclus’s thought, who did not try to make his ideas more amenable and had to pay the price. In Muir’s works, aesthetics appeared as a more gentle form of environmental awareness than the more ecological approach. In a way, then, the Humboldtian harmony of science and art may have become a strategy for social consensus. Collomb shows the contradiction inherent in Muir’s approach, as his resorting to the aesthetics of the sublime perpetuated an anthropocentric worldview that was at odds with his belief in the equality of all living beings. While he was fundamentally drawn to a biocentric worldview, his desire not to alienate his readers made him espouse a vaguely—aestheticized—­anthropocentric approach. Collomb thus brings to the fore the dilemma of environmental thinking, as it is caught between idealism and pragmatics, thus raising a central question about the link between environmental awareness and politics. Collomb then goes on to make Muir an illustration of a more general rule regarding the status of the environmental thinker and writer in a democratic society in which materialism and utilitarianism reign supreme. Muir took pains not to be counter-cultural because it would have compromised the cause he was eager to promote. One may wonder, however, whether Muir, perhaps, as well as Reclus, were not fundamentally humanists who just could not endorse a stance that would

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culminate with the anti-humanist and sometimes misanthropic tone of contemporary biocentric discourse. Beyond their differences, they may both have been, in comparatively similar ways, true humanists. In “John C. Van Dyke, The Desert (1901): Under the Shadow of the Artificial Desert,” Michel Granger considers a figure who was more decidedly and uniformly humanist in his celebration of the American desert. Granger’s ­essay tackles one of the key questions facing those eager to raise environmental awareness: how can one draw attention to what is seemingly ordinary, plain, insignificant? How can one justify preserving the common? Van Dyke’s answer is resolutely simple: through what Granger calls a “literary transvaluation,” one that is thus essentially aesthetic, although not indifferent to specific know­ ledge of the environment. In this respect, Van Dyke’s approach somewhat parallels Muir’s, although the latter was more explicitly militant. Van Dyke’s contribution to raising environmental awareness, to be sure, was more indirect, in that his purpose was first and foremost to convince his industrialist friends, such as the dedicatee of his book, Andrew Carnegie, whereas Muir had in mind the widest audience possible. Van Dyke also differs from Muir in that he was both much less scientific and religious, and even a resolute ­opponent of metaphysics. His approach was fundamentally that of an art historian, and thus his aesthetics was not a strategy to make his environmental approach ­acceptable by the greatest number, but was in fact the very mode of his environmental awareness. Van Dyke used a language that was widely shared, that of art and art criticism: he resorted to the classic aesthetics of the sublime, and applied it to new areas of perception, to open the eyes of his contemporaries. His insistence on bewilderment in face of the desert—a traditional mark of the sublime experience, when words fail the observer—appears as the ­emotional and cognitive counterpart, or translation, of wilderness. If his stance appears as less complex than Muir’s or Reclus’s, he played a pioneering part in the emergence of a new consciousness of desert areas, along with his contemporary Mary Austin. Of a less radical brand, somewhat conservative even, his approach did not question the very underpinnings of American society, but on the contrary relied on an aesthetic stance that was more likely to warrant consensus. He also forms an important contrast with Muir in the sense that he does not conform to the widely prevalent notion of the environmental writer as an adventurer; indeed, he has even been criticized for his supposed dependence on seeing the landscape out of a railroad coach, rather than relying on firsthand experience. In his case, perhaps, awareness was more abstract, more distant, but there is no reason to think that it was less sincere—and, to be sure, he is as passionate about the necessity of preserving wild nature from human threats as Muir. In so far as he focused on aesthetics, and was not quite

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aware of Darwinian ecology, he remained firmly entrenched in the tradition of man as the Other of nature, both as its superior as aesthetic subject (the subject of the sublime experience) and as its material enemy, rather than its participant. He also exemplifies a central dilemma in contemporary environmentalism: is recognizing the fact that nature retains its beauty in spite of desecration a form of “aesthetic resilience,” or, conversely, does such a recognition inherently—­albeit unwittingly—condone environmental damage? One of the key aspects of Granger’s essay is the idea that many of Van Dyke’s observations are actually “provided to allow the reader to conjure a mental image.” Although ecocriticism, as Gavillon suggests, has largely favored ethics over aesthetics, and has been suspicious of Van Dyke’s aesthetics in particular, the latter’s work provides a good example of the participatory aesthetics of much “nature ­writing,” which has always aimed at educating readers, through improving and ­enhancing perception. Like Gavillon, Granger insists on the ethical commitment involved in Van Dyke’s approach—driven as he was by a desire to “speak a word for nature,” as Thoreau wrote. Alexa Weik von Mossner, in “Encountering the Sahara: Embodiment, ­Emotion, and Material Agency in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky,” explores a version of environmental awareness that, compared with Thoreau or Reclus, has more to do with emotion than with cognition, one that is also considerably darker. Although, in her analysis of Paul Bowles’s fiction, physical nature is also deemed to exert a transformative power (as opposed to being merely symbolic, as scholarship on Bowles has often assumed), it is one that is less regenerative than threatening, alienating and eventually disintegrative. While the wild, in this version of environmental awareness, is originally taken to be a refuge from—or an antidote to—the alienating effect of (American) consumer society, thus echoing the Romantic tradition, it eventually proves to be too challenging for a trio of tourists venturing into an alien environment abroad. Unable to truly connect with their environment, they never experience any meaningful sense of place, and, Weik argues, are even “dislocated.” Her analysis, then, suggests that one’s physical environment is always a s­ haping force, whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not. Compared with the more discursive literary genres that are analyzed elsewhere in this volume, Bowles’s fictional treatment allows an exploration of diverging viewpoints or attitudes towards the physical environment, from celebration to denial. But, although their premises differ, the various characters eventually share the deracination exerted by the North African desert, which, far from being mere background for narration, is e­ ndowed with agency. The characters’ various trials and o­ rdeals ultimately derive from their inability to acknowledge the concrete ­reality of the physical world, beyond their emotional response to it. It seems

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significant that Bowles’s narrative features a character who, enjoying the ­desert but consistently projecting his state of mind upon it, eventually dies—thus bringing to mind Armbruster and Wallace’s contention that the “shaping force [of the natural environment] can only be ignored or suppressed at a price” (2001: 7). Dramatically sensitive to, and powerfully capturing, the ambiguity of a place where one can find or lose one’s identity, and which oscillates on a tight line between shelter and anguished emptiness, Bowles tips the scales toward a dark version of “the complex relationship between humans and the more-than-human-world.” Bowles’s novel thus undeniably questions the idealism that is inherent in the “romantic sublime”: whereas the romantic sublime is based on a negative moment through which the integrity and identity of the subject are reaffirmed and enhanced, Bowles’s characters’ encounter with the sublime landscape of the North African desert crushes them for good. It is this way of dismissing the regenerative sublime that makes Bowles a (post-) modern writer. Nathalie Cochoy, in “Dillard Dancing: An American Childhood,” makes it clear that Annie Dillard, contrary to such authors as Paul Bowles or Duff Wilson (see Alain Suberchicot’s essay), pursues or revives the Thoreauvian tradition of intimacy and closeness to—or “respectful neighboring” of—the physical world. But, compared with Thoreau, her prose is less “cognitive,” and more oriented toward capturing or espousing the emotional texture of the ­individual’s ­relation to her or his environment—what Dillard, speaking about Giacometti’s sculpture entitled Man Walking, powerfully defines as “pure c­onsciousness made poignant.” Dillard celebrates a fluid contact between self and world, which is symbolized by the two metaphors of dancing and the skin, with their combined suggestions of sensitivity and fragility. Inheriting a sense of the reciprocity of self and world from the Romantic tradition, Dillard’s writing offers a seismography of the living world that purports to fend off the framing and taming devices of language to create a text fully attuned to the ambiguous zone in which memory and desire intersect to make one’s relation to environment almost “palpable.” But although the Thoreauvian ­tradition would seem to be fundamentally untainted by any sense of loss—in spite of ­Thoreau’s ­famous and cryptic allusion to his having lost “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove” in Walden—Cochoy shows how Dillard’s writing is haunted by a sense of loss. Loss, however, in this version of environmental awareness, as opposed to Bowles’s, is never irremediable, but, on the contrary, a necessary stage toward a more intense contact or “neighboring” with the real, and thus conducive to revelation. Dillard’s narrative artfully unfolds from this interplay of loss and recollection, as it seeks to capture

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the essential coming and ­going inherent in the process of awareness—what the writer, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, calls “­touch-and-go” between language and landscape. Ever sensitive to the ­unknown, the elusive, the tentative, her prose thus gives a somewhat ­postmodern swing to the Thoreauvian tradition. But Cochoy makes it clear that the self-reflexive and metatextual character of Dillard’s text does not amount to turning one’s back on the physical world, but only radicalizes the observer’s sensitivity to the mysteries and wonders of the world. She also emphasizes that her w ­ riting harks back to a quest for the universal, in the guise of “a sharing of the i­ ncommensurable dimension of life that men have in common.” Cochoy thus articulates the complex ways Dillard’s writing, far from simply “mirroring” the world, purports to recreate a linguistic equivalent of a child’s g­ rowing awareness of her environment. The metamorphic character of her fiction ­embodies the ever-changing transformation of the human interaction with the physical environment. She especially focuses on “the motif of the skin [which] thus reflects and embodies the wondering expansion of c­ onsciousness towards the unknown territories of life or land.” What makes Dillard’s book so appealing is its “oscillating on the shimmering surface ­between the naïve wonder of the child and the doubtful wonder of the adult,” and her desire to share that experience with the reader in the most intense way. Finally, Alain Suberchicot, in “On Duff Wilson: Community, Agribusiness and Environmental Testimony,” offers an analysis of Duff Wilson’s Fateful Harvest that addresses two central issues, environmental justice and generic categories. Focusing on the toxic deterioration of land in the American West resulting from irresponsible corporate power—intensive farming, agrochemical industrial expansion, and development of food-processing industries— Wilson’s “ecotext” brings forward a sense of dispossession, incapacitation and suffering that echoes Bowles’s theme of alienation and threat. Both produce a darker vision of environmental awareness, one that is simultaneously disrupted and enhanced by tragedy and disaster, but Wilson, as distinct from Bowles, considers not psychological but social pressures on our relation to environment. Suberchicot’s analysis is crucial in that it does not merely stick to the idea of a socially-constructed environment, but insists on the various ways the individual and the collective enmesh. He analyzes the more communal aspects of environmental awareness and “place-connectedness” (Buell), thus sounding a significantly different note from Thoreau or even Reclus, who, although an anarchist, was still indebted to Romantic approaches in which the individual is the pivotal element of the relation between mankind and environment. Wilson’s book, in this perspective, dramatizes how this relation has ­inevitably become more communal, more social, as a consequence

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of the increasing power of science and technology associated with modernity. As opposed to Humboldt’s fundamentally democratic understanding of science, to which both Thoreau and Reclus’s forms of environmental awareness are i­ndebted, Duff Wilson’s book points to the current impossibility for the individual to ­develop a fully-informed type of consciousness. This certainly raises an ­important question for us: is then Romantic appreciation of nature, paradoxically, the only possibility left for individuals who are at a loss in our contemporary world, being dispossessed of their land and of themselves? Suberchicot makes it clear that there is room for more than aesthetic escapism, as Wilson’s book binds the ethical and social dimensions of environmental awareness, and calls for responsibility and militancy in a way that celebrates the energy inherent in the core civic values characteristic of democracy. Suberchicot’s analysis simultaneously pursues a generic questioning of the seemingly well-established dichotomy between fiction and non-fiction. Alhough he squarely situates Wilson’s book in non-fiction, and consistently refers to it as “ecotext,” he shows how Wilson’s complex use of voice and narrative patterns produces a subtle “out-of-focusness” that powerfully displaces and qualifies the didacticism that seems to inhere in environmental non-fiction, thus producing a form of literariness. Although such a stance has been contested by deconstructionist approaches, this volume is thus driven by a sense that texts are always to some extent explorations of a personal vision, a “sense of things,” and an understanding of space and place as resulting from a complex interaction between physical and mental worlds. This is not to say that authors are always in full command of their medium and that interpreting texts is merely deciphering what has been “coded” by the creator’s aesthetics, nor that the works may be reduced to tightly organized wholes. But the postmodern erasure of consciousness in favor of language and self-consciousness may have gone too far. The fact that there is no utterly sovereign subject does not mean that there is no subject at all. It has been all too easy to discard the age-old notion that artists have b­ etter abilities to perceive and express the world than the common man. Even if we no longer entirely subscribe to the notion of the creator’s privileged status, there remain ways in which a writer, an artist more generally, leads the way, offers, if not a model, at least a nurturing example of the work of consciousness. Herein lies the possibility that creating minds offer guidance as to how to respond to our environment, both physical and historical. This book would like to explore various forms of environmental awareness, or ways of articulating, diagnosing, or reflecting upon the situation of mankind and the physical world, be it predicament or glory.

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Works Cited Armbruster, Karla and Kathleen R. Wallace (eds). 2001. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Branch, Michael P. (ed.). 2004. Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. “The Ecocritical Insurgency” in New Literary History 30(3): 699–712. ———. 2001. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell. Garrard, Greg. 2011. Ecocriticism, New York: Routledge. ———. (ed.). 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (eds). 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. 2005. “Beneath and Beyond the ‘Crisis in the Humanities’” in New Literary History 36(1): 21–36. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingram, Annie Merrill, Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon and Adam W. Sweeting (eds). 2007. Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Outka, Paul. 2008. Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Philippon, Daniel J. 2012. “Sustainability and the Humanities: An Extensive Pleasure” in American Literary History 24(1): 163–179. Phillips, Dana. 2003. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Slovic, Scott. 1992. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, & Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 2008. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press.

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Sweet, Timothy. 2010. “Projecting Early American Environmental Writing” in American Literary History 22(2): 403–416. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rights: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and the Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ziser, Michael. 2013. Environmental Practice and Early American Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 2

American Ecocriticism and the Ethics of Commitment François Gavillon Abstract It is apparent that contemporary American nature writing and environmental f­ iction have, for decades, evinced a trait that Lawrence Buell sees as definitory: “Human ­accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.” The best of the environmental essays and fictions of the late twentieth, early twenty-first centuries share an implicit, and often, explicit, ethical configuration wherein human agency calls for responsibility, respect, and care. Has literary criticism, and ecocriticism in particular, engaged this ethically charged literature with a similar sense of responsibility and commitment? Are ecocritical discourses intrinsically ethical, intrinsically committed and transformative? It is the aim of this article to answer these questions by considering some of today’s most stimulating discussions, among ecofeminists and environmental justice actors, in particular, and by examining related fields such as bioregionalism and animal rights. This study will show that environmental criticism reveals, indeed, an ethical orientation which results in various types of engagement (intellectual, and sometimes physical) and in theoretical and social commitment.

Keywords Alaimo, Stacy – animal rights – bioregionalism – Buell, Lawrence – carnophallogocentrism (Derrida) – commitment – Derrida, Jacques – Diamond, Cora – ecoethics – ecofeminism – ecologocentrism (Timothy Morton) – environmental justice – ethics – Glotfelty, Cheryll – Lynch, Tom – material feminism – Morton, Timothy – Nussbaum, Martha – placedness – Plumwood, Val – Reed, T.V – Slovic, Scott – Sunstein, Cass – Sze, Julie – Warren, Karen – Wolfe, Cary

At the end of the 1980s, Martha Nussbaum called for a literary theory which would include the study of the practical and ethical dimension of a literary work, and not only its formal or “aesthetic” aspect (assuming that the a­ esthetic appreciation can be wholly separate from practical experience). She ­envisioned

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324831_003

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“a future in which literary theory (while not forgetting its many other pursuits) will also join with ethical theory in pursuit of the question, ‘How should one live?’” (1990: 168). Despite the critical works of John Rawls, Stanley Cavell, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling among others, she noted the absence of an ethical viewpoint (“The Absence of the Ethical”) in the literary criticism of the 20th century, from formalism and the New Criticism up until postmodernist criticism. For many followers of the latter, correlating the text to real life (to the author’s biography for example) or seeing in it a form of practical discourse amounted to heresy. This was an insult to the beautiful derealized (inter)­ textuality of the text. It was assumed that any work that attempts to ask of a literary text questions about how we might live, treating the work as addressed to the reader’s practical interests and needs, and as being in some sense about our lives, must be helplessly naive, reactionary, and insensitive to the complexities of literary form and intertextual referentiality. (20) Yet, for the last twenty years or so, the idea that literature can, in its way, teach us something about the human condition and explain our behavior— “literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all” (171)—has become more and more widely spread. During the period when Martha Nussbaum was calling for a philosophical revision of literary criticism, it may not have been a coincidence that Cheryll Glotfelty obtained (in 1990) the first position for “Literature and the ­Environment” at the University of Nevada in Reno. During the same years, ­environmental literature was appearing in conference programs, as in a special session of the Modern Language Association entitled “Ecocriticism: The Greening of Literary Studies” in 1991, and then the following year during the  conference of the American Literature Association. In 1992, Scott Slovic, Cheryll ­Glotfelty and others founded ASLE, The Association for the Study of ­Literature and Environment.1 Today, these scholars are known, like many of 1 The stated mission of the association is “to promote the understanding of nature and culture for a sustainable world by fostering a community of scholars, teachers, and writers who study the relationships among literature, culture, and the physical environment. ASLE seeks to support the above mission by: supporting academic research, teaching, and creative work in environmental literature, arts, and humanities; fostering an active and energetic community through conferences, networks, publications, and other forums; reaching across national, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries to enhance diversity and inclusiveness; and maintaining and advocating ecologically sustainable practices.” (http://www.asle.org/site/about/ [last accessed 12/15/2014]).

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their ­ecocritical colleagues, not only for their work as researchers and professors, but also for their environmental commitment, a commitment which confirms Lawrence Buell’s pronouncement that “criticism worthy of the name arises from commitment deeper than professionalism” (2005: 97). Can one imagine an ecocriticism which is not an ethical discourse as well? If ecocriticism is an ethic, is this ethic speculative and theoretical or is it pragmatic? When one considers the various trends in contemporary American ­ecocriticism, it appears that its ethical dimension—inseparable, it seems, from critical reflection—is of an active, or “transformative,” nature.2 At least that is what this study aims to demonstrate by examining a selection of recent individual and collective works representing the major offshoots of current American ecocriticism. Origins In her anthology, The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty was the first to offer an introduction to the new field of “ecocriticism,”3 which she defined as the study of the relationship between literature and the physical world (1996: xviii). She recollected the circumstances of its emergence and rapid development. She also indicated the nature of the awareness and the motivations which account for the specific approach of American ecocriticism: […] most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet’s basic life support systems. We are there. Either we change our ways or we face global catastrophe, destroying much beauty and exterminating countless fellow species in our headlong race to apocalypse. Many of us in colleges and universities worlwide find ourselves in a dilemma. Our temperaments and talents have deposited us in literature departments, but, as environmental problems compound, work as usual seems ­unconscionably frivolous. If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem. 2 Regarding ecophilosophy, philosopher Arne Naess’s “Deep Ecology” in particular marked a significant turning point in the development of American ecocriticism. This ecology, based on biocentric, holistic and egalitarian ethics, was introduced to the United States thanks to Bill Devall and George Sessions (1985). 3 William Rueckert invented the term “ecocriticism” in 1978 (Rueckert 1996).

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[…] How then can we contribute to environmental restoration, not just in our spare time, but from within our capacity as professors of ­literature. (xx–xxi)4 Then, defining the epistemological outlines of the ecocritical field, Glotfelty suggested that, in addition to the usual questions of theme, form and representation, ecocriticism also focuses on questions which point to its pragmatic aims: What view of nature informs u.s. Government reports, corporate ­advertising, and televised nature documentaries, and to what rhetorical ­effect? What bearing might the science of ecology have on literary studies? How is science itself open to literary analysis? What cross-­ fertilization is ­possible between literary studies and environmental discourse in r­ elated disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and ­ethics? (xix) It is thus obvious that the aim of ecocriticism, from the start, has been to ­develop as an interdisciplinary approach and to combine theory and practice so that, for once, academia should not remain apart from the world (“­scholarship ­remains academic in the sense of ‘scholarly to the point of being unaware of the outside world’ [American Heritage Dictionary],” xv) and that its ­cogitations should exist beyond campus walls. Bioregionalism If there is one central question in the ecocritical investigation of what “makes the environment,” it is indeed that of place—which can be a place for living, for working, for leisure, or for spirituality. Ecocriticism reveals all the ecological, social-political, cultural and psychological topologies as well as the dynamics at work in states or processes of “placedness.” How does space become place? 4 Karla Armbruster comes to the same conclusion. While presenting her paper “Saving the Earth: Are Words Enough?” at the Western Literature Association Conference in Albuquerque in October 1997, she said: “While an ecocritical approach can certainly provide new and exciting insights into literature and cultural texts, most ecocritics are primarily drawn to the field through a troubling sensation that human relations with the natural world have reached a crisis point and can no longer be ignored.” This pragmatic concern is also apparent in the article she devoted to the work of Rick Bass (2001).

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What relationship, what sense of place, what identity process, are at play between an individual or a community and the environment they inhabit? Don’t the cultural and economic conditions of a global world lead to conceiving of other more cosmopolitan forms of attachment? Is the very notion of “place” still meaningful everywhere?5 Tom Lynch’s ambition in Xerophilia (2008) is to rehabilitate an often discredited region of the United States, the deserts of the Southwest. As the author reminds us, animal and plant organisms which thrive in an arid climate are called xerophilous. Lynch’s aim is to show that the disrepute which has been brought upon these arid lands is due to a cultural and aesthetic prejudice which dates back at least to colonial times. For centuries, “green” has been representative of the health and wealth of the natural environment. In collective representations, the desert is a land of deficiency. The English language, like all languages, carries the mark of the physical environment which in part shaped it. English reflects this Eurocentric prejudice: the desert is always The Default Country,6 a pale copy of the green hills of the mother-country. Lynch’s ecocritical reflection, in which the authorial voice is very present,7 is sustained by the natural sciences (entomology, biology) as well as by the ­humanities (environmental history, anthropology, aesthetics). Abandoning the term “region,” which is too vague, Lynch prefers “bioregion” (or “ecoregion”) in order to show that these lands which extend from the Great Basin Desert in the North to the deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua in the South, r­ eveal ­climatic, ­hydrologic and biological coherences which ignore a­ dministrative and p ­ olitical borders. Likewise, these ecoregions determine a community of culture among the human groups who live there, which is visible in housing, land use, as well as in social and economic networks. This shared culture 5 On these questions, see in particular the studies by Yi-Fu Tuan (1974 and 1977) and by Ursula Heise (2008). 6 Here, Lynch is alluding to the title of the work published in 2003 by Australian lexicographer Jay Arthur, which focuses on a similar situation in Australia. On the same question, one can also refer to Scott Slovic’s Getting Over the Color Green (2001), the title of which pays tribute to Wallace Stegner, who advised Americans wishing to live in the Southwest to “get over the color green.” 7 Personal experience and the physical relationship to places play a fundamental role in the appreciation of the environment as well as in the modes of writing. According to Lynch, “There is, in short, no disembodied location from which to view this or any prospect, no aloof perch for the panopticon. There is only a continual embedding of my flesh with the flesh of the world, a continual interfusion of self and environment through the semi-permeable membranes of my skin, senses, and imagination. […] Whether I wish it or not, there is only and always engagement, only and always intimacy.” (2008: 11).

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­creates a sense of belonging which fosters a sustainable and attentive relationship to the environment. “Bioregion,” according to the definition given by Robert L. Thayer, Jr. (quoted by Lynch 2008: 18), is synonymous with life-place: not a temporary place, but a place where one establishes oneself and where one learns to live. Lynch ­focuses here on the concept of “reinhabitation,” in reference to Kirkpatrick Sale’s Dwellers in the Land (1985), to Peter Berg and Raymond Dassman’s “Reinhabiting California” (1990), and to the essays of philosopher, essayist and poet Gary Snyder. In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder does not define indigenousness (“­being inhabitory,” “being place-based,” 1990: 26, 143) in terms of origins and time but in terms of involvement “grounded in information and experience” (39). Bioregionalism typically favors local economy and small shops rather than big chain stores. It defends vernacular cultures, supports organic agriculture, actively participates in local political life, and encourages ecological ­practices. It educates one in conviviality as well as in the aesthetic appreciation of the specificities of place. It promotes the development of artistic expressions, in particular literary ones, conducive to developing bioregional imagination (Lynch 2008: 19). The rehabilitation which Lynch calls for engages various aspects of the bioregional wealth of the Southwest. The author presents the region’s agropastoral customs and highlights a traditional and ecological irrigation p ­ ractice (Chapter 1: “Acequia Culture”). He encourages an aesthetic revaluation and a sensitive appreciation of the desert (Chapter 4: “Re-Sensing Place”). He ­reinstates what has been neglected by natural sciences (Chapter 3: “Dignifying the Overlooked”) or human siences (Chapter 2: “Border(home)lands”). As suggested by the subtitle, Explorations in Southwestern Literature, the issues raised in the book are developed through the study and celebration of local (and bioregionalist) literature which is often little known. He thus explores the works of Cleofas Jaramillo, Frank Waters, John Nichols, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Charles Bowden, Susan Tweit, Ray Gonzalez, Pat Mora, Gary Nabhan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ofelia Zepeda, Edward Abbey, Ann Zwinger, Charles Bowden, Terry Tempest Williams, Janice Emily Bowers, and Ken Lamberton. If some of these writers are famous, many of them remain unknown to most readers, and one sees how this xerophilous literature is redignified by a mediator who is himself an engaged proselyte and xerophile: I consider xerophilia to express a human affection for arid places and for the biotic community that comprises and inhabits such places. It implies not just an aesthetic appreciation for lovely desert vistas, but also the sort of ethical commitment one feels towards loved ones […] (13)

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I consider ecocriticism to be an ethical criticism concerned not only with analyzing the interrelationships between literature and the morethan-human world, but also with determining how literature contributes in its own way to the human destruction of that larger world, and ­therefore, as a result, with pondering how literature can serve to protect nature by fostering an imaginative and ethical consideration for that world. (16) Like many of his colleagues who campaign for the preservation of a precise place (a valley, a mountain, a river…), Lynch is an academic whose inflections are often those of an activist. The very anthropocentric dialectic about the relationship between man and the earth may be the way to salvation for numerous bioregions in the world. The last paragraph of the book highlights the ­effective character of ecocriticism. As understood by the author, it is inseparable from a transformative ethic. Can this book, or any number of such books, really save the Tortugas Arroyos of the Southwest? I hope it is not entirely naive to think that the answer might be yes, that literature—and even, dare I say, literary criticism—can help to transform society in such a way that we, as both individuals and as a community, will improve our relations with the natural world. (232) Ecodeconstruction In his very postmodern Ecology Without Nature (2007), Timothy Morton intends to deconstruct the ideological bases of what he calls “ecologocentrism.” Yet, on the very first page, the text admits to delivering a message of environmental justice. Admittedly, the idea of nature is a matter of construction (“­worldview,” “Weltanschauung”) determined by an aesthetic heritage—a ­romantic one, in particular—and by linguistic constraints. The concept of nature blurs that which in itself deserves to be rethought, ethically and scientifically: “…nature keeps giving writers the slip. And in all its confusing, ideological intensity, ­nature ironically impedes a proper relationship with the earth and its life-forms, which would, of course, include ethics and science” (2). However, ­behind the notion of “nature,” even a problematic one, there remain, as one sees, the earth and its life. And if environmental criticism, like environmental art, remains in the field of conceptualization and representation, it is nonetheless the sign of an attachment to the natural world: “[…] we care about the

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earth, and, indeed, the future of life-forms on this planet, since the humans have developed the tools necessary for their destruction” (5). The new environmental thought which Morton outlines is not strictly environmental in the traditional meaning: it can—must—go beyond the idea of nature. In the introduction, Morton announces his aim of developing a theory of ecological criticism, following a metacritical approach as it were, which would place it both outside and within ecocriticism. Yet here again, the apparent concern is to remain as close as possible to the object of study and not to give in to lofty abstractions, since in the end the analysis is conducted on behalf of both human and non-human suffering beings: “The point is to go against the grain of dominant, normative ideas about nature, but to do so in the name of sentient beings, suffering under catastrophic environmental conditions” (12). Even if Morton’s deconstructionist ecology aims primarily at questioning the epistemological paradigms and the conditions of representation (art and language) which shape, and even conceal, the relationships between environmental criticism or art and nature, it does not forget that there is an “outside-of-us” with which it is important to interact in the right way: “meaningful engagements with what, in essence, nature is all about: things that are not identical to us or our preformed concepts” (7).8

Animal Rights

Even if the critical fields of ecocriticism and animal rights do not strictly overlap, they both question the nature and status of what surrounds us. This questioning is basically that of limits, of borders, of identity, and of otherness. Like the physical world, animals environ us, and the question of the borders between humanity and animality is one of those which has raised the most passion and resistance since the beginning of the 1990s, because its implications are so great. In the introduction to Animal Rights (2004), Cass Sunstein defines the field of reflection by reminding us of its theoretical origins and its most sensitive issues. The theoretical side of the reflection on animal rights partly originates in two philosophical and ethical conceptions: that of Kant, who conceived of the animal as an instrument of man and towards which man thus has no moral obligation other than the indirect duty to behave human(e)ly and to thus obey his human moral vocation; that of Bentham, who recognized animals’ 8 For a constructivist or constructionist approach (and often a deconstructionist one) to the question of nature, see in particular Donna Haraway (1991), Neil Evernden (1992), and ­William Cronon (1995).

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c­ apacity to suffer, and from there, considered the absence of rights for animals as a tyranny: a form of human racism towards non-human species which today is called “speciesism”:9 The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny […] A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? bentham 1988: 311–312

According to Sunstein, there is today a very broad consensus on the idea that animals, like humans, have rights. But within this general position, views can vary widely. The upholders of animal welfare, for example, consider that it is fair for animals to be legally protected against cruelty and abuse. Provisions e­ xist in France, in England, in Germany and in the United States, which garantee such rights, even if they raise practical issues of procedure and of application. The philosophy of the upholders of animal rights, however, goes beyond the mere guarantee of a humane treatment for animals. It questions whether it is fair for animals, even if they are well-treated, to be in the end subjected to the interests of humans: used for laboratory experiments, or hunted, f­ attened, slaughtered and eaten. The question is that of the autonomy of animals, of their belonging to themselves and not to a master—which shows an analogy of course with slavery and all other forms of enslavement, whether social, ­political or sexual. At stake is also the issue of whether all forms of animality have equal rights: is it ethically acceptable to kill a horse, a rabbit, a trout, a mosquito?10 Among these questions touching on animal rights, that of vegetarianism is one of the most sensitive. In her contribution to Animal Rights, philosopher Cora Diamond proposes to lay a new moral foundation for the practice of ­vegetarianism based not on rationalist anti-speciesism, but on the experience 9

10

The concept of “speciesism” (the term was coined by British psychologist Richard D. ­ yder in 1970) was placed at the center of the ethical debate on animal rights by philosoR pher Peter Singer. See his landmark work, Animal Liberation (1975). Or, as Tim Luke writes: “Will we allow anthrax or cholera microbes to attain self-realization in wiping out sheep herds or human kindergartens? Will we continue to deny salmonella or botulism micro-organisms their equal rights when we process the dead carcasses of animals and plants that we eat?” (quoted in Wolfe 2003: 26).

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of a common destiny between men and animals. The latter, like us, are mortal, and accompany us in this mortal destiny as “fellows in mortality” (2004: 102). As such, they deserve our charity and respect, or “friendship-or-companionshipor-cordiality,” as Diamond puts it (102). More than rationality—which can at best produce only an abstract idea of equality—it is this other human c­ apacity, pity, which can guide us on the path of ethically fair behavior. Pity, beyond its more primitive manifestations, depends upon a sense of human life and loss and a grasp of the situations in which one human being can appeal for pity to another, ask that he relent. When we are ­unrelenting in what we do—to other people or to animals—what we need is not telling that their interests are as worthy of concern as ours. And the trouble—or a trouble—with the abstract appeal to the prevention of suffering as a principle of action is that it encourages us to i­ gnore pity, to forget what it contributes to our conception of suffering and death, and how it is connected with the possibility of relenting. (106) Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites shifts the debate, as suggested by the pun in the title, to the field of “rituals” that our narratives and our metaphors on “animals,” “the anima,” and “animation,” contribute to developing. In the preface (2003: ix–xiv), W.J.T. Mitchell presents the issue of animality and of rights, and underlines the philosophical, ideological, and religious objections as well as the economic, judicial and practical obstacles which stand in the way of achieving these rights. Mitchell first observes that in the philosophical tradition ­established by Hobbes, Burke and Hegel, a right is something which is not granted but conquered—as has been shown by the history of Europe. Moreover, how important are animal rights when human rights are flouted everywhere? Should these rights include plants and things? Finally, in this period of genetic manipulation, of cybernetics and of nanotechnology, new ethical questions must be asked—questions often explored in science-fiction films and books.11 Thus, Animal Rites is more than a defense of animal rights. The book ­deconstructs the practices and paradigms which underlie the animal/human 11 “Animal Rites must be read in the context of a very widespread outpouring of thought on questions of culture and nature, the human sciences and biology. The question of the animal is just one component in a rethinking of a whole set of nonhuman entities that seem to take on organic, lifelike, or ‘autopoietic’ characteristics—intelligent machines, of course, but also systems and swarms, viruses and coevolutionary organisms, corpses, ­corpora, and corporations, images and works of art. There is, in short, a new kind of vitalism and animism in the air, a new interest in Nature with a capital N.” (Wolfe 2003: xiii).

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­ olarity and which shape our idea of humanity. As analytical as it may be, p Wolfe’s investigation is nevertheless motivated by an ethical reflection which involves practical consequences: […] debates in the humanities and social sciences between well-intentioned critics of racism, (hetero)sexism, classism, and all other -isms that are the stock-in-trade of cultural studies almost always remain locked within an unexamined framework of speciesism. This framework, like its cognates, involves sytematic discrimination against an other based solely on a generic characteristic—in this case, species. In the light of developments in cognitive science, ethology, and other fields over the past twenty years, however, it seems clear that there is no longer any good reason to take it for granted that the theoretical, ethical, and political question of the subject is automatically coterminous with the species distinction betwen Homo sapiens and everything else. (2003: 1) Speciesism plays a fundamental role in the practical and ethical construction of our societies. It establishes a dividing line which (whatever the location of this division: race, gender, species…) legitimizes and institutionalizes discriminatory practices—making possible, in particular, what Jacques Derrida calls “a noncriminal putting to death” of animals. Speciesism is reinforced by a ­collective logic of domination which is partially unconscious, and which, with sexism, constructs a “carnophallogocentric” rationality.12 12

Wolfe’s quotations, “a noncriminal putting to death” (6) and “carnophallogocentrism” (8), are taken from an interview given by Jacques Derrida (1989). Concerning the sadness of animals according to Heidegger, Derrida commented: “Are we responsible to the living in general? The answer is always no, and the question is formulated, asked in such a way that the answer has to be no in all the canonized or hegemonic discourse of Western metaphysics or religions, including in the most original forms it can assume today for example with Heidegger or Lévinas. I am not recalling this to help save vegetarianism, environmentalism or societies for the protection of animals—which I could also want to do, and we would thus reach the heart of the subject. In following this necessity, I would like to highlight in particular the sacrificial structure of the discourses I am referring to. I don’t know if ‘sacrificial structure’ is the most accurate expression. It is a question in any case of recognizing, in the very structure of these discourses which are also ‘cultures,’ a place left open for a noncriminal putting to death: with the ingestion, incorporation or introjection of the dead body. It is an actual operation, but also a symbolic one when the body is an ‘animal’ one (and who believes the argument that our cultures are carnivorous because animal proteins are supposedly irreplaceable?); a symbolic operation when the corpse is a ‘human’ one. But the ‘symbolic’ is very difficult, in truth impossible, to delimit in this case, which explains the enormity of the task, its essential excessiveness, a certain

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It is thus the procedures of subject definition and valuation that Wolfe is interested in defining. In his study, he chooses to rely on the works of post-Wittgensteinian and post-Foucaldian European philosophers: Lyotard, Deleuze, Lévinas, Derrida (a lot), Spivak, Zizek. This postmodernist-inspired critique is fundamental for the analysis of the humanist construction of the subject. It is even more so for the posthumanist deconstruction of this construction: “[…] the ‘human,’ we now know, is not now, and never was, itself” (9). It allows Wolfe to revise the modernist presumption that the subject is one, whole and separate, a pure presence to itself, and to show on the contrary “the embeddedness and entanglement of the ‘human’ in all that it is not, in all that used to be thought of as its opposites or its others” (193). This deterritorialization of the subject has ethical implications: the question of the relationship of the human animal to the non-human animal has to be rethought. The Derridean questioning of the “calculation of the subject” had a dual focus: to decide philosophically on the elimination or on the persistence of the subject, and correlatively (or perhaps centrally: “… and we would thus reach the heart of the subject”) to underline the sacrificial structure of a culture (of an ethic) which allows and justifies the putting to death of animals. Cary Wolfe’s investigation also demonstrates this twofold stake. If the approach is exploratory and analytical, it also points to the practical consequences that a posthumanist ethic could have one day: I think it entirely possible, if not likely, that a hundred years from now we will look back on our current mechanized and systematized practices of factory farming, product testing, and much else that undeniably involves animal exploitation and suffering—uses that we earlier saw Derrida compare to the gas chambers of Auschwitz—with the same horror and disbelief with which we now regard slavery or the genocide of the Second World War. (2003: 190)

Environmental Justice

In their anthology, The Environmental Justice Reader (2002), co-editors Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein give the following definition of the movement called “Environmental Justice”:

anomy or monstrosity, of that which needs addressing here, or in front of which (who? what?) one needs to respond.”

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We define environmental justice as the right of all the people to share equally in the benefits bestowed by a healthy environment. We define the environment, in turn, as the places in which we live, work, play, and worship. Environmental justice initiatives specifically attempt to redress the disproportionate incidence of contamination in communities of the poor and/or communities of color, to secure for those affected the right to live unthreatened by the risks posed by environmental degradation and contamination, and to afford equal access to natural ressources that sustain life and culture. (4) To call this formulation anthropocentric is a euphemism. To say that environmental justice is underpinned by an ethic of engagement is a tautology. It is indeed difficult to imagine what the movement would be without the profound desire which motivates it to remedy situations of injustice or of risk which threaten underprivileged individuals or human groups. Its inherent activism can be seen in its egalitarian, collaborative and transformative rhetoric. The first lines of the book acknowledge “… all those in the field who are working for environmental justice through political channels, community organizing, teaching, and the arts” (ix). The editors’ introduction underlines “…the potentiality of future collaborations between artists, activists, scholars, teachers, and students working toward environmental justice.… we assert that both teaching and making art are intrinsically political acts.… our text is an attempt to join political, poetic and pedagogical acts of resistance back together” (7). With this resolutely activist agenda in mind, it is legitimate to wonder if environmental justice leaves any room for environmental criticism. T.V. Reed provides the answer. In his contribution to Adamson, Evans and Stein’s volume, Reed explains the necessity of developing “an environmental justice strand of ecocriticism”: While the field of ecocriticism is in many respects very broad, it has not often dealt seriously with questions of race and class, questions which I and many others believe must be at the heart of any discussion of the history and future of environmental thought and action. (2002: 145) Reed proposes a typology of the different American ecocritical approaches by presenting the issues they each raise. The questions posed by environmental justice provide a blueprint for a program of intellectual and practical action: Typical questions: How can literature and criticism further efforts of the environmental justice movement to bring attention to ways in which

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e­ nvironmental degradation and hazards unequally affect poor people and people of color? How has racism domestically and internationally enabled greater environmental irresponsibility? What are the different ­traditions in nature writing by the poor, by the people of color in the United States and by cultures outside it? How can issues like toxic waste, incinerators, lead poisoning, uranium mining and tailings, and other environmental health issues, be brought more fully in literature and criticism? How can issues of worker safety and environmental safety be brought together such that the history of labor movements and ­environmental movements can be seen as positively connected, not antagonistic? How can ecocriticism encourage justice and sustainable development in the so-called Third World? To what extent and in what ways have other ecocritical schools been ethnocentric and insensitive to race and class? (149) Literature and literary criticism are thus invaluable reference tools. The romantic aesthetization of nature (sublime or picturesque) and its utilitarian ­reduction to outdoor recreation originated, according to Reed, in the perception and desires of a privileged class. Such distorted appreciation of nature led to environmental problems being ignored and even concealed: Aesthetic appreciation of nature has not only been a class-coded activity, but the insulation of the middle and upper classes from the most brutal effects of industrialization has played a crucial role in environmental devastation. Aesthetic appreciation of nature has precisely masked the effects of environmental degradation. (151) Thus T.V. Reed has focused for several years on developing a field of reflection (“Environmental Justice Culture Studies”) which aims at examining questions of environmental justice in the light of theoretical perspectives (political ecology, cultural studies, postcolonial criticism, minority studies) as well as literary ones, in a broad sense (“cultural poetics”), with a sensitivity to the problematics “of race, class, genre and sexuality” (153–154).13 Likewise, Julie Sze insists on the necessary link between theoretical and literary input. She proposes that the field of environmental justice will ­benefit 13

One can find the definition of the field of research as well as its main approaches on http:// culturalpolitics.net/environmental_justice [last accessed 12/3/2015]. For a bibliographical overview, see also http://culturalpolitics.net/environmental_justice/­bibliography [last accessed 12/3/2015], as well as the ASLE site: http://www.asle.org/wp-content/uploads/ ASLE_Resources_OnlineBibliography.pdf [last accessed 12/3/2015].

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from contacts with critical movements (ecofeminism) or human and social sciences (the foundational sociology of Robert Bullard, for example). But above all, Sze underlines the contribution of cultural-literary expressions to the development of the reflection on environmental justice: Cultural texts, such as novels, broaden the emerging academic field of environmental justice studies by enhancing our understanding of the experience of living with the effects of environmental racism in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and connecting environmental justice with other intellectual and activist fields. (2002: 163) What was true in the last decades of the twentieth century certainly still holds true for the beginning of the twenty-first: during social-environmental disasters in 2005 (Hurricane Katrina) and in 2010 (Deepwater Horizon oil spill), social anthropology, medecine and psychology have all shown how some segments of the population were adversely affected (the inhabitants of black and/or poor neighbourhoods of New Orleans) or threatened in their means of s­ ubsistance (the Huma Indians).14 But “cultural texts,” as Sze significantly calls them, are invaluable means of expression: these non-scientific alternative forms—­poetry, novels, narrative essays—often favor personal accounts and claims.15 It is with this in mind that the novels of Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan, or the poetry of June Jordan and Adrienne Rich (to mention just a few names) are now studied. In the conclusion of her study of Karen ­Yamashita’s novel, Tropic of Orange, Sze shows that literature, far from always being that famous “means of evasion,” offers new tools to expose and denounce environmental racism. As such, literature constitutes a unique instrument of environmental justice. Ecofeminism Very early on, many American academics felt the need to broaden the field of ecocriticism beyond the boundaries suggested by Cheryll Glotfelty’s d­ efinition. The oikos of ecology is not only a physical environment, it is also a space the 14 On the close relation between poverty, political under-representation and social, ­economic and medical injustice in the case of disasters (whether they are a­ nthropogenic, or “natural”), see Michael Eric Dyson (2006), Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires (2006), David Brunsma et al. (2010), and Virginia Brennan (2009). 15 Regarding Katrina, see for example the non-fictional narrative by Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (2009).

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political and social dimensions of which environmental justice actors have underlined, as we have seen. It is also a cultural space, structured by collective representations and institutionalizing practices. Cultural studies have been instrumental in highlighting these cultural-societal functions. Feminist critique, in particular, has always represented a major contribution to the analysis of the paradigms that rule our modes of representation and of their incidence on the economy of our social or environmental exchanges. A part of the feminist theory has moved into the critical debates of environmental justice, animal rights, relations of domination. “Ecological” or “environmental feminism,” or more generally “ecofeminism,” has contributed to rethinking questions of race, sex, class, nature. It has highlighted the rhetoric and policies of power as well as the precariousness of the old polarities of white male reason. Karen Warren, Val Plumwood and others have contributed to laying the foundations of a f­ eminist ecophilosophy (“feminist environmental philosophy”) aiming at questioning the dualism and rationalism which characterize Euroandrocentric thought and at elaborating new modes of investigation as well as a new ethic, informed by empathy—even if one cannot reduce this ethic to the concept of “ethic of care,”16 which is often employed. This revision, which Plumwood grounds on the notions of reciprocity and solidarity, is thus presented in the introduction to Feminism and the Mastery of Nature: “We need a common, i­ntegrated framework for the critique of both human domination and the domination of nature—integrating nature as a fourth category of analysis into the framework of an extended feminist theory which employs a race, class, and gender analysis” (1993: 1–2). Warren, in Ecological Feminist Philosophies, also insists on the correlation between the domination of women (among other forms of human oppression) and the domination of nature. Ecofeminist criticism has constantly developed and diversified. Among this wide-ranging field, works such as Greta Gaard’s Ecofeminism (1993), Noël Sturgeon’s Ecofeminist Natures (1997), or Marti Kheel’s Nature Ethics (2007), highlight the ethical dimension common to the different branches of ecofeminism. These various approaches (social feminism, material feminism, ­environmental justice…) maintain a strong link between critical reflection and practical ­engagement. Thus, the epigraph of Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010) reads: “For environmental activists everywhere.” As in her earlier edited collection, Material Feminisms (2007), Alaimo insists on the material aspect of the body and on the materiality of the natural environment. The concept

16

For an introduction to the various applications of the concept and to the links between “care” and feminist ethics, see Rosemarie Tong and Nancy Williams (2014).

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of ­transcorporeality enables her to underline the materiality of exchanges ­between the human body and a more-than-human nature.17 It allows one to rethink, on the epistemological and ethical levels, the incidence that these zones of contact and interaction have on the construction of human life: Emphasizing the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world—and, at the same time, acknowledging that material agency necessitates more capacious epistemologies—­ allows us to forge ethical and political positions that can contend with numerous late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century realities in which “human” and “environment” can by no means be considered as separate. (2010: 2) The environment, as Alaimo concludes, is not somewhere outside of ourselves: it is precisely what constitutes us (“the very substance of ourselves”).

Retreat and Engagement

Perhaps the best way to conclude this overview of the various forms of contemporary American ecocriticism is to consider Scott Slovic’s approach in Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (2008). The awareness of deep social and environmental crises has become inescapable. Scholars in particular, says Slovic, are faced with constant ethical questions: The modern thinking person, daily confronted with the new information about natural and social disasters, is confronted as well with the incessant ethical decisions: how to consume goods and services, how to travel from home to the office, how to communicate concerns to public officials, how to allocate money to a dizzying array of worthy causes. To be a literary scholar operating with an acute awareness of social and environmental concerns means bearing the constant burden (and opportunity) of considering the gravity of the world’s predicaments, while acting through the diffuse, delayed processes of teaching and writing […] (4)

17

The “corporealist” vocabulary and epistemology of Stacy Alaimo are reminiscent of the phenomenological approach of philosopher David Abram (1997), who coined the expression “more-than-human.”

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Slovic’s intimate first-person voice suggests how the tension between engagement and distance is essential to responsible ecocriticism. This engagement, whether it expresses itself in writing, teaching, or activism, always proceeds from a personal and attentive relationship to the world. In order to save, one must first savor (“to savor and to save”). The great merit of environmental literature is to make possible a reassessment and revaluation of the natural world, through narratorial and metaphorical means which are its own. The work of ecocriticism is to shed light on this literature, to put it into context and to show that literature is not purely an aesthetic object but that it also has things to say, and that nature counts: Literary scholarship and literature itself are, on the most fundamental level, associated with human values and attitudes. We should, as critics and teachers of literature, consider how literary expression challenges and directs readers to decide what in the world is meaningful/important to them. (28) Academics have numerous means of action at their disposal. They can write or edit books, articles, write narrative essays, teach ecoliterature, give lectures, organize debates, write letters to political leaders, to corporate managers, circulate petitions, take their students to the woods or to the mountains for field work. Just like anyone else, they can also participate in protest marches, be active in local, state, or national, associations. But it is by keeping a foot in “actual reality” (“the solid ground,” “the real thing”), by maintaining alive the intimate relationship one has with nature—by staying away for a moment from the noise of the world—that one can best fulfill one’s duty as a citizen, teacher and environmentalist. Each one has to find the right balance between retreat and action, between personal experience and political engagement. But it is in this effort, says Slovic, that the word “responsibility” takes on its meaning. As one can see, there are multiple offshoots in American ecocriticism. Some observers and participants have tried to establish typologies and chronologies of its developments. In The Future of Environmentalism, Lawrence Buell distinguishes two waves of ecocriticsm (2005: 21–22). The first is mainly linked to a body of literature which is often Anglo-Saxon and non-fictional, and which focuses primarily on the physical world and the necessity of preserving its integrity. One of its core questions is the relationship between human life and the non-human world. Its ethical orientation is mainly of the biocentric or ecocentric type. The second one is more multicultural. It considers other literary genres and other languages. The notion of environment is approached

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from a broader perspective: as a place, which can be urban or suburban, as a social, cultural, political, space, in which local concerns and local expressions are given attention. Nature is problematized in relation to questions of race, sex, power and justice. Its ethical orientation is partly anthropocentric. As for Scott Slovic, he perceives a third wave taking place at the beginning of the years 2000 in which the issue of place, located somewhere between situation (“embeddedness,” “situatedness”) and deterritorialization (“cosmopolitanism”) is dialectically reassessed (“eco-cosmopolitanism,” “rooted cosmopolitanism,” “nested bioregionalism,” “translocality”). In essence, this third wave is comparatist and postnational. At times more materialistic and posthumanist, it focuses on criticism of the body, of vegetarianism, of animality. Its ethical orientations are very diverse. In his typology of ecocritical discourses, Slovic highlights three tendencies: an ecocriticism which can be called postmodern, which questions ideology and the language of our epistemological and ethical paradigms; a scientific ­ecocriticism, which considers the knowledge provided by life and earth sciences as indispensable for critical discourse; an activist or transformative ­ecocriticism, aiming at reforming practices contrary to the well-being of ­humans, animals and the physical world. Even so, these boundary lines do not constitute impermeable frontiers and the fields of study often intersect. As we have seen, a scientific or deconstructionist form of ecocriticism can also be transformative. Moreover, Slovic and Buell agree on the partial contemporaneity of these tendencies and on their relative community of interests: “… ‘­palimpsest’ would be a better metaphor than ‘wave,’” writes Buell (2005: 17). In any event, these typological distinctions cease to be discriminating as soon as the examination focuses on the field of ethics. Indeed, this study shows that the ecocritical discourses presented here all have in common the fact that they are also ethical discourses, in so far as their philosophical ­deliberations aim at defining the right way to conduct one’s life in an environmentally situated existence, a state of being which is essentially relational. It is also apparent that these ethical considerations lead in practice to an attitude of ­commitment. One could perhaps introduce the term “ecoethics” to name, on the one hand, the branch of ethics which offers a philosophical examination of the o­ ntological “environmentality” of the human condition, and on the other hand, the forms of applied ethics which are visible in the conduct of environmental theoreticians, artists, teachers, and activists. The term would in any case i­ ndicate the propensity of American ecocritics to incorporate their theoretical reflection and their practical activity into a fundamental quest for well-living.

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Works Cited Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-­ThanHuman World. New York: Vintage Books. Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (eds). 2002. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and The Material Self. ­Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman (eds). 2007. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: ­Indiana University Press. Armbruster, Karla. 2001. “Can a Book Protect a Valley?: Rick Bass and the Dilemmas of Literary Environmental Advocacy” in Weltzien, O. Alan (ed.) The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press: 197–222. Arthur, Jay. 2003. The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth-Century A ­ ustralia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Bentham, Jeremy. 1988 [1781]. The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chap. XVII, ­Section IV. Amherst: Prometheus. Berg, Peter and Raymond Dassman. 1990. “Reinhabiting California” in Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant and Eleonor Wright (eds) Home! A Bioregional R ­ eader. Philadelphia: New Society: 35–38. Brennan, Virginia. 2009. Natural Disasters and Public Health: Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brunsma, David L., David Overfelt and Steve Picou (eds). 2010. The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell. Cronon, William (ed.). 1995. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human place in Nature. New York: Norton. Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “Il faut bien manger, ou le calcul du sujet: Entretien (avec J.-L. Nancy)” in Confrontations 20: 91–114. Devall, Bill and George Sessions (eds). 1985. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Layton: Gibbs M. Smith. Diamond, Cora. 2004. “Eating Meat and Eating People” in Sunstein, Cass R. and ­Martha Nussbaum (eds) Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. New York: ­Oxford University Press: 93–107. Dyson, Michael Eric. 2006. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. New York: Perseus Books Group. Eggers, Dave. 2009. Zeitoun. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books. Evernden, Neil. 1992. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins ­University Press.

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Gaard, Greta. 1993. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple ­University Press. Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (eds). 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hartman, Chester and Gregory Squires (eds). 2006. There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina. New York, London: Routledge. Heise, Ursula. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: the Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Kheel, Marti. 2007. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Luke, Tim. 1988. “The Dreams of Deep Ecology” in Telos 76: 65–92. Lynch, Tom. 2008. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. ­Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge (Mass) and London: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge. Reed, T.V. 2002. “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism” in Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein (eds) The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press: 145–162. Rueckert, William. 1996. “Literature and Ecology: An experiment in Ecocriticism” in Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press: 105–123. Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1991 [1985]. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. Philadelphia: New Society. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: Avon Books. Slovic, Scott. 2001. (ed.) Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental ­Literature of the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———. 2008. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. Reno, Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press. Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. New York: North Point Press. Sturgeon, Noël. 1997. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. New York: Routledge. Sunstein, Cass and Martha Nussbaum (eds). 2004. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Sze, Julie. 2002. “From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice” in Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein (eds) The ­Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press: 163–180. Thayer, Robert. 2003. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tong, Rosemarie and Nancy Williams. 2009. “Feminist Ethics.” On line at http://plato .stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/feminism-ethics/ (last accessed 12/4/2015). Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and ­Values. Englewoods Cliffs: Prentice Hall. ———. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Warren, Karen. 1996. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press.

chapter 3

Urban Ambivalences and Narrative Domains in Defoe’s Novels Anne Dromart Abstract Drawing upon Thomas Pavel’s notion of “narrative domains,” this essay shows how Daniel Defoe’s novels, although they predate the emergence of any form of ecological awareness, nevertheless offer crucial explorations of the ways human beings are shaped by their relations to their physical environments. As a new genre, the novel in eighteenth-century England, through its depiction of “spatialized subjectivities,” initiated and reflected a deeply modified sense of human identity, as the mobility and instability of the urban environment both mirror and model the modern individual’s many-faceted identity. Even though the early English novel provides no mimetic representation of the areas of London or of the places the heroes go to or stay at, geography in Defoe’s novels provides a genuine fictional environment that fulfills a specific cognitive function. Defoe’s description of urban life testifies to the way the new narrative forms enabled cognitive mapping, constructing reality on a mode that offers an analogy of the modern individual’s consciousness of his or her perception of the world he or she lives in.

Keywords Cognitive mapping – community – Defoe, Daniel – geography – identity – Journal of the Plague Year – mobility – modernity – Moll Flanders – narrative and narration – novel (English) – Pavel, Thomas – perception – Roxana – subjectivity – urban environment

Even though the assumed superiority of man over the natural world seems to preclude any ecological concerns at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the role played by the environment in the early novel deserves attention. At first sight, Daniel Defoe’s novels, with their emphasis on the individual’s ­struggle for existence, identity and recognition, do not seem to concern themselves much with the natural world. But as the novels’ narrative

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domains1 make the reader aware of the predicament of the individual, he or she becomes aware of the peculiarities of the city as a physical environment, which proves that as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century the milieu one inhabits is “a ­shaping force of individual […] psychology and identity” (­Armbruster and Wallace 2001: 7). It is the interrelation between the generic features of the novel and the representation of the characters’ environment that comes to the fore, particularly so when one considers the urban backdrop that makes the topographic framework of most of Daniel Defoe’s novels: the insertion of  the characters in an urban environment at a time when urban expansion was accelerating has much to do in Defoe’s stories with the idea that our “experience of the world is shaped by the processes and practices by which we signify or represent the world” (Hastings 1999: 7). Defoe’s depiction of the geographic settings of his stories seems to play a decisive role in his understanding of the individual. Many critics have underlined aspects of the pastoral tradition lingering in the Georgian novel. “[T]he classic eighteenth century novel begins in a city and ends in a garden” (Hahn 1991: 1), which seems to argue in favor of a ­representation of the environment that would highlight the evils of urban development with both moral and political undertones reminiscent of the pastoral and ­georgic tradition: “That ‘God made the country, man made the town’ was a widespread sentiment”; consequently the country was associated with “a ­certain innocence or virtue, peace, and simplicity” (Duncan 1968: 255) and the town seen as a place of “uncertainty and insecurity” (George 1987: 55). Though concern for the environment is not inexistent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as, for instance, John Evelyn’s text of 1661 on pollution, Fumifugium, clearly evidences, the early British novel, however, has little interest in man’s detrimental action on nature. Instead, it pays great attention to the insertion of the characters in their environment, so much so that the urban landscape seems to have much to do with their unstable existence and personal construction in a way that echoes modern-day anthropology’s concern to “think about and situate the individual” (Augé 2008: 31) in terms that mark a movement away from a collective approach to people’s existences. Admittedly the sense of community is traditionally a great deal stronger in the country than in the city. Consequently the force of wild individualism is generally more harnessed in a rural than in an urban environment, where the moral norm seems to fade away. Indeed, whether you read Richardson, 1 The narrative domain of a character is the set of actions central to the plot implemented by a character, along with his or her reasons for acting as he or she does. “A domain contains ontological, epistemological, axiological and action propositions” (Pavel 1980: 106).

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F­ ielding or Smollett, the country expresses the nostalgia for an imaginary golden pastoral, rural age that stands for moral order when London is invariably represented as a dark and inhuman place, dirty and smelly, full of dangers and deceptions (“snares” is the word repeatedly used by Defoe himself),2 a city of solitude akin to Bunyan’s City of Destruction, Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair altogether. “Cities are the abyss of the human species,” said Rousseau in Emile (1979: 23). Tobias Smollett, with the chamber pot episode and the stories of Miss Williams and Mr Melopoyn in Roderick Random (1999: 68, 117, and 378) that show the dangers of London for the innocent, as well as Henry Fielding and Jonathan Richardson, also associate London with stench indeed, but more often with solitude, danger, unreliability, and moral decay. Defoe repeatedly associates urban life with the “confusion of spiritual and material values” (Duncan 1968: 270). W. Austin Flanders explains that “it is the ­temptations of an economy torn from its roots in a traditional social order, temptations ­concentrated in London life, that clearly provide the vehicle for Wilson’s ­degradation” in ­Joseph Andrews (1991: 59). London is “a scene of rapine and danger” (Defoe 2000: 280), all of the authors concentrating on the degradation of moral behavior in the city. The r­ ecurrent images of imprisonment in ­London in the writings of the early novelists, along with the references to the possibility or necessity of ­concealment for the heroes, contribute to conveying the themes of criminality and waywardness. The permanence of country life, or plantation life sometimes in Defoe too, is opposed in many early British novels to urban life and the instability that accompanies all its correlative features, as if the desirability and stability that rural life symbolized was still very much the means to wealth, respectability and safety, a protected world where the individual could thrive and live quietly. Financial considerations sometimes seem to emphasize this ideal of life in the countryside: in many novels land is shown as a secure investment, and hence a place of ease and pleasure, when a fortune based on cash assets can prove unreliable, a source of ruin and misfortune. Yet again, for most novelists, reliability of land property generally turns out to be a m ­ etaphor for the changing social composition of the city inhabitants, and the loosening social ties and moral imperatives that went along with the development of London. In Defoe’s novels, a closer reading suggests that the cases of financial ruin often justify his plea for the creation of a national bank as much as they reveal the plight of the imprudent, naïve or careless individual. It would indeed be a mistake to imagine that Daniel Defoe, when he relates that Moll’s or R ­ oxana’s 2 This is true for all cities: “The Bath is a place of gallantry enough; expensive, and full of snares” (Defoe 1973: 84).

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husbands go bankrupt (in Moll Flanders and Roxana, respectively), might condemn the modern development of urban life or that he meant to support a conservative ideology to attack the new economic and social values of his time. Though Roxana and Moll are ruined when their husbands mismanage their businesses, though Moll, Jack and Robinson acquire vast fortunes thanks to their plantations, though London in both Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack is the perfect scene for a career as a thief, Defoe’s treatment of the urban landscape that forms the scene of most of his narratives still echoes his pride in the capital city as he describes it in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain: “New squares, and new streets rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings, that nothing in the world does, or ever did, equal it, except old Rome in Trajan’s time” (1986: 287). While it is tempting to try to situate Defoe in the Court/Country political and cultural controversy on which the beginning of the eighteenth century has been said to hinge,3 it appears rather that the chronotope of his novels has little to do with the strife between Whigs and Tories. Instead, it does much to bring the reader to a mental comprehension of situations that, by their anchoring in a realistic urban environment, do acquire the necessary credibility and actuality that allow the cognitive process and even the empathy that fiction relies on to happen in order to provide an emerging reflection on individual life. In Defoe’s novels London is indeed clearly both a place of all dangers and a land of plenty. Even though she is reduced to utter poverty, London remains in Jack’s and Moll’s eyes a place where they should find the opportunity to improve their fortune thanks to the wealth on display. The capital city juxtaposes beautiful buildings and large streets where the more fortunate live (Moll Flanders when she has money) and an assemblage of narrow, dark, winding, labyrinthine alleys that seem to offer a metaphor for the lowest rank of society it harbors (Moll Flanders when she is a thief). The physical layout has more to do with a mental map, something Defoe was a master at, as his Journal of the Plague Year, published in the same year as Moll Flanders, shows (Novak 1977, Schonhorn 1968). What is striking is the “psychogeography”4 at work in his writings, i.e. the meeting of topography and psychology. This representation of 3 “The Court’s opposition was the Country Party […] Deriving from contra, country stands outside and opposed to the city, and it is to England’s greatest city that the Country Party referred in illustrating the troubles of the times. And synonymous with nation, the word country awarded semantic patriotism to the opposition to city interests” (Hahn 1991: 6, 14). The Whigs were traditionally associated with the Court Party and the Tories with the Country Party, though this assumption is now questioned because deemed simplistic. 4 On this notion, see Coverley.

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the geographical environment, focusing on the behavior, feeling, existence and identity of people as “spatialized subjectivities” (Knox and Pinch 2006: 51), is what I believe to be at stake in Defoe’s first-person fiction narratives.5 “London, a large and gay City” (Defoe 1988: 5), as Roxana describes it, contains the great opportunities that a commercial center and busy trading place can offer; it also hosts the popular masquerade that reveals insincerity and moral irresponsibility (Castle 1991: 71). It is indeed a market as Jack, Moll ­Flanders and Roxana make clear, where they try to make a living at the expense of virtue and lawfulness. “I was not to expect at London what I had found in the country” says Moll Flanders to stress the peculiarity of this environment at the same time as she draws the reader’s attention to the specificity of her case (Defoe 1973: 53). Moll Flanders, though she often complains of her solitude in this anonymous environment where charity and solidarity are non-existent— “I had no friends, no not one friend or relation in the world” is a leitmotiv in her narrative—also knows how to take advantage of “the freedoms of urban anonymity” (Tonkiss 2005: 9). London provides a conveniently heterogeneous crowd where one can hide from creditors or from witnesses of past misbehavior, even easily change names and identities: “The first thing I did was to go quite out of my knowledge, and go by another name: this I did effectually, for I went into the Mint too, took lodgings in a very private place, drest me up in the habit of a widow, and call’d myself Mrs Flanders” (Defoe 1973: 51). Moll only has to change lodgings in order to have “a new scene of life” in a series of repeated moves that allow her to appear under a different name and assume a different character, and she is very good at mixing with the crowd when she needs to hide. The city is a perfect place for the person who wishes to move away from trouble or undesired living circumstances, as the heroes repeatedly go to a different district and take on new identities: [A]way I went to London. defoe 1973: 93

I had now a new scene of life upon my hands. defoe 1973: 33

I resolved therefore as the state of my present circumstances that it was absolutely necessary to change my station, and make a new appearance

5 “Spatialized subjectivities” is defined as “a term that recognizes the explicit role of space in the formation of subjectivities and identities” (Knox and Pinch 2006: 333).

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in some other place where I was not known, and even to pass by another name if I found occasion. defoe 1973: 61

The twenty-first century reader recognizes this homelessness as a characteristic feature of modernity: Defoe’s writings repeatedly associate freedom and lack of stability, absence of permanence in all the positive and negative ­consequences such absence of ties can entail (liberty and loneliness), showing the link between lack of grounding and alienation, drawing our attention to the multiple manifestations of disconnectedness and more particularly to the complex structure of the individual’s many-faceted identity.6 Yet, more than a negative outlook on such urban characteristics, it is the potential for resilience, for the re-creation of an existence in keeping with one’s desires that seems to stand out in Defoe’s novels.7 Movement punctuates the stories that focus on the temporary (temporary lodgings, situations, relationships) and the inherent flexibility and energy that go along with it for the individual who knows how to take advantage of this. It appears thus that the urban environment that frames the stories is particularly adapted to the instability described in the narrative domains; the street is a representation of mobility, and the novels, lay translations of the biblical homo viator, are all about displacement: travelling heroes, changing identities, unsteady social status. The heroes only settle down when their lives are restful and quiet: “Now I seem’d landed in a safe harbor after the stormy voyage of life past was at an end” (Defoe 1973: 146), says Moll several times in her narration, welcoming these pauses in her wanderings that invariably create an ellipsis in the narrative, as if then there was no more to say, as if stability precluded story. Among the ideals of the countryside are durability, lastingness and fixity, which explains why many of the stories’ happy endings, after due repentance, take place in the country: what this symbolizes is the accession or the return of the individual to a sedate, settled, respectable social and moral life which, ­interestingly, seldom happens in town. As a place is a set of relations between the i­ ndividuals and their environment, in the novels the mythical value 6 The early novel thus embodies in its use of the London setting the “Transcendental ­Homelessness” which Lukàcs sees as the essential condition of modern man behind the ­development of the genre. 7 As Knox and Pinch point out, “Urban environments also have a crucial impact upon ­subjectivities because they tend to bring together in close juxtaposition many different types of people. This mingling requires a response on the part of the city dweller, whether this is indifference, fear, loathing, incomprehension, admiration or envy” (2006: 44).

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of life in the country takes over as if to remind the reader of the necessary ingredients for an individual’s sense of completion and happiness. Yet before such happy endings take place (when they do) the heroes’ uncertain identities and e­ xistences are best represented in the city. Consequently the nomadic eighteenth century hero walking in the city can be read as a representation of the modern subversion of moral and traditional order. More often than not, ­Defoe’s heroes are rebellious outcasts, walkers in the urban sense of street walkers, i.e. thieves or prostitutes or both, endeavoring to shake off the identity society keeps giving them, that of the reprobate, the outcast, when they see themselves as gentlemen or gentlewomen. The city is the place that allows this unstable identity to fight for recognition as if social mobility was translated into the physical mobility of the nomadic urban hero. It is life in the city and its mass of related problems and thriving opportunities that is at the center of the narratives to represent individual life. The individual’s predicament in the city is rendered in terms of strife, hardships, and hostility, as if the environment was so hostile to the human being that it could be compared to the prehistoric wilderness with both dreary absence of easy comfort for the lonely creature and abundance of riches for those who manage to shift for themselves. It is quite striking that the vocabulary used makes the city appear as a place where the protagonists expect to find their livelihood— food and opportunities of all kinds8—as if they were engaged in what Rebecca Solnit calls “primordial hunting and gathering” (2002: 173), what man would do in a natural setting, trying to find ways to obtain a sustainable livelihood in a hostile but fertile natural world. The city is a place for human predators where they hunt down their prey, are on the lookout, wait for opportunities (Defoe 1973: 138). Speaking of the way she keeps a man waiting, Moll Flanders says, “I played with this lover as an angler with a trout”; at another time she hopes her future husband is “fast on the hook” (110). She keeps laying “baits,” “snares,” as primitive hunters would. Again the wilderness thus described in the novel is social rather than natural and what is hinted at through this vocabulary is more the moral anarchy that develops in the anonymous urban environment than the dangers of unruly urban planning, though the absence of street lighting and night watch along with inadequate or unenforced legislation is also clearly shown as being part of the problem.

8 Moll Flanders goes “fortune hunting” (153). Words frequently refer to gleaning or to the natural world: “I walked frequently out into the villages round the town to see if nothing would fall in my way there”; “seeing the coast was clear” (153); “happening to be upon the hunt” (159), etc.

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The narrative domains make it clear that this urban wilderness is the perfect medium for describing the modern individual. The winding streets echo Moll Flanders’s difficulties in life (“I was ingulph’d in labyrinths of trouble” [158]) as much as her circuitous ways in the sense that, as a thief she manages to hide in nooks and corners and lose her followers in the maze of little dark winding streets (“I fetched a long circuit thro’ the streets” [155]), in the same way as she loses the reader in the meanders of her casuist reflections and self-justifications. Her forced mobility has been argued to recall the modern mobility of capital, indeed, and the breakdown of charity and human sympathy pictures the modern anonymity, privacy and indifference of urban life. “The modern city forces an awareness of essential solitariness that no other setting does” (Backsheider 1990: 33) and which has nothing to do with the tremendous awe felt in the solitary contemplation of nature. It provides the best textual environment for a depiction of individualism as it appears as a space that models the behavior of the heroes.

…

Clearly the early novel is characterized by its focus on an ordinary individual’s life and the difficulties this individual encounters, in existential as well as ­ontological terms, and not, as romances used to do, by an attention to the ­supernatural or to admirable knights or princesses. Hence, as it has been ­extensively argued (Watt 1985, Hahn 1991, Trickett 1985, Varey 1990), the presence of a realistic backdrop, and a number of shared features in the early Georgian novel: orphaned or destitute heroes forced into the street and left to fend for themselves in the streets of London by circumstances, deprived of help, struggling to achieve whatever status or identity they think are theirs by right. The urban environment that is the setting of the major part of these early novels offers a modern treatment of individualism in opposition to a normative framework based on traditional gentility: “London was the supreme spectacle portraying the vicissitudes of modern life” (Defoe 1973: 45). The urban scene triggers the reader’s awareness of important issues of modern human existence by offering a landscape of hope and despair, urban prosperity and individual poverty. As Bakhtin puts it, “the eighteenth century […] was in fact a time of concretization and visual clarification of the real world” (2004: 44) and such is what I think the city in Defoe’s novels makes the reader focus on. Logically, then, places have no real referential function. Whether he reads about London, Paris, Colchester or Bath, the reader is ­given little detail apart from a vague characterization—illustrating what Cynthia Wall calls “descriptive barrenness” (1998: 389)—such as Bath as a town of

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pleasure, which boils down to stating a function rather than describing an actual place. As Edward Copeland notes, “space in Defoe’s London is admittedly hard to describe. ‘What does he actually show us?’ Samuel Monk asks, and answers his own question: ‘Nothing.’—Max Byrd agrees” (Copeland 1998: 407). The different lodgings the heroes occupy are never described either: they only represent the short duration of the heroes’ stay and help the reader see the difference between lodging and dwelling, between the place where one stays briefly and home. The texts, in spite of their undeniable realistic q­ uality, ­contain a subjective rendering of the environment more than an actual description of the real world. There is no mimetic representation of the areas of London or of the places the heroes go to or stay at, not even a pretended description; nevertheless, geography in Defoe’s novels provides a genuine ­fictional environment that fulfills a specific cognitive function (Pavel 2000: 524, and Bakhtin 2008). The topology does not provide a discourse that is valuable ­because it is true to life: even if names of streets are given, even if the real London comes through, the places where the heroes’ adventures take place are quite inaccessible to the reader as if the narrative pointed to the existence of a gap, to the generic distance from reality that fiction entails. Such distance is present both in this structural organization of space and in the narrative domains : throughout the novels the characters feel the urge to remove, to go away (“to stand off,” “a great way from him” are recurrent words) in order to start anew in the vagrant itinerary of their broken lives, a non-cohesiveness that is mirrored in the different and totally unrelated districts of London: the Mint for debtors, the Strand for fashion, the dark narrow alleys around Billingsgate’s fish market to hide after shoplifting, Smithfield for boisterous and unruly company, etc. The fictional world created by Defoe reflects and comments on the actual world in which the twenty-first-century reader lives. As a result, the reader’s mental comprehension of the semantic domains is based on his or her cognitive processing of the world—both the spatial detail and the unfolding of the plot—created by the text. The ambivalence of what the city stands for, both danger and opportunity, life and death, man-made environment that yet can prove hostile to human beings, seems to be mirrored in the organization of the novels’ narrative domains that keep underlining the uncertain interpretation of the individual’s actions. In Defoe’s novels, the axiological propositions9 are ambiguous though the narratives are ontologically homogeneous, and epistemologically clear enough. But the ironic gap created by the several narrative

9 This term refers to the concepts of value and value judgments, i.e., “what is good/better/bad/ worse” (Pavel 1980: 106).

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voices10 provides a space of interpretation that makes it impossible to consider the narrative as pure mimesis, to take up Aristotle’s distinction. In the fictional world, what Moll experiences or does, just as the environment in which she lives, is not composed of straightforward denotative acts: most of her decisions can be seen as opportunistic and immoral, but can also be understood to delineate her qualities as a resourceful and resilient individual. Consequently, her behavior has no exemplary force, if only because her true motivations are unclear, either for the other characters, or for the readers (Dolezel 1998, Pavel 1980). This is why, though her actions and decisions are perfectly clear to the reader, the narrative is never purely mimetic. The representation of space and the geographical framework conform to the same pattern as the fictional character: it is an artifact that is at a distance from the real world. This does not preclude a reference to actuality, but means it is here as an oblique example that has nothing to do with pure imitation of reality: as Lubomir Dolezel points out, “fictional worlds are not constrained by requirements of verisimilitude, truthfulness, or plausibility; they are shaped by historically changing aesthetic factors, such as artistic aims, typological and generic norms, period and individual styles” (1998: 19). The complexity of the axiological propositions is mirrored in the subjective representation of the urban environment as both a world of opportunities and a place of destruction, and in the superimposed narrative voices that reveal both the moral norm and the individual’s transgression of them. The extent of Moll’s guilt and the veracity of her repentance have been debated at length; in the end, in spite of all the undeniable realism and the perfect intelligibility of the actions that constitute the plot, it is, paradoxically, the inaccessibility of both places and minds that comes across: Moll’s true self remains elusive, and the description of London suggests but does not recreate the actual, geographical London. If, as Thomas Pavel suggests in his study on the novel (2003), one considers that in spite of the accepted absence of definition, the novel is best characterized as the representation of the moral force of individuals and their deep insertion (or not) in their environment, then the topographical framework and the psychological wanderings of the heroes are bound to correspond, as an ideography. This is partly what Cynthia Wall may have had in mind when she wrote that “topographical detail in early eighteenth-century novels not only describes but also creates space at the same time that narrative ‘creates’ 10

There are generally three layers: that of the implied narrator as a young man or woman who goes through the related adventures, the more mature man or woman supposed to have repented and to write his or her story on the verge of old age, and that of the author, which Pavel calls “the author’s implicit guidance” (Pavel 2000: 537).

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­ otion, and second, that such detail becomes part of the ‘modern’ sense of m space as abstract, shifting, fluid—itself a source and form of motion” (1998: 391). One might even feel tempted to see in Defoe’s description of urban life the way narratives enable cognitive mapping, and indeed it seems that Defoe’s narrative construction of reality proposes an analogy of modern consciousness, of the modern individual’s awareness of the non-cohesiveness of his or her perception of his or her existence and of the world he or she lives in. The modern fragmented apprehension of reality finds its literary equivalent in the picaresque juxtaposition of adventures and scenes and in their lack of a ­mimetic reality that opens up “a textual space” (Wall 1998: 405). In Defoe’s novels, London is clearly more a promise than a threat for the heroes, whose ability to bounce back and take advantage of what the city has to offer is contrasted with the downheartedness and lack of resourcefulness of other characters.11 The capitalistic development and the endless search for profit that is typical of the capital city in his first-person narratives bring about no inhuman change or reorganization. His stories are not accounts of urban transformations that might irremediably disorientate individuals: on the contrary, it is thanks to their entrepreneurial instinct and ruthless behavior that the heroes manage at last to achieve the social status and identity they were eager to obtain by taking advantage of the fluidity that the circulation and availability of wealth create. If one takes into account the many projects that Defoe elaborated for the ­improvement of London and city living—as in An Essay upon ­Projects (1697), Every-Body’s Business is No-body’s Business (1725), The Protestant M ­ onastery (1727), and Augusta Triumphans (1728)—one might even think that the role of the capital city in his novels is two-fold: it both highlights the social and psychological obstacles met by the city dweller and shows the great opportunities offered the resilient and resourceful individual, i.e. the one who takes part in the production/consumption movement. The labyrinths Daniel Defoe evokes (“I was ingulph’d in labyrinths of trouble too great to get out at all” [1973: 158]) are those of hypocritical and immoral behavior that makes an individual’s path through life ever so complex, whereas the spreading of L­ ondon is more a source of pride and joy than a cause for worries as the Tour and the novels make clear. 11

Defoe’s condemnation of Moll’s husband, the banker who goes bankrupt and dies c­ onsumed by worry and sorrow, is clear enough: “the loss fell heavy on my husband, yet it was not so great neither, but that if he had had spirit and courage to have look’d his misfortunes in the face, his credit was so good, that as I told him, he would easily recover; for to think under trouble is to double the weight, and he that will die in it shall die in it” (1973: 147–148).

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Interestingly, Defoe pays no attention to aesthetics in his fiction. Architectural detail, the beauty of a garden, or considerations about the unruly spread of urbanization, are notably absent. Yet his choice of the city to ­explore an individual’s life is an example of the ways literature examines social and ­psychological issues and links them to an environmental reflection, showing the shaping force of both the urban environment and of the narrative in a way that echoes Marshall Berman’s definition of modernity: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are” (1983: 15, quoted in Ogborn 1998: 5). Works Cited Ambruster, Karla and Kathleen Wallace (eds). 2001. Beyond Nature Writing: Expounding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia. Augé, Marc. 2008. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London: Verso. Backsheider, Paula R. 1990. Moll Flanders: the Making of a Criminal Mind. Boston: Twayne. Bakhtin, Mickael. 2004. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2008. “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” in The Dialogic ­Imagination: Four Essays (ed. Michael Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press: 84–258. Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity. ­London: Verso. Castle, Terry. 1991. “The Carnavalization of 18th century English Narrative” in Hahn, H. George (ed.) The Country Myth: Motifs in the British Novel from Defoe to Smollett. Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 69–94. Copeland, Edward. 1998. “Defoe and the London Wall: Mapped Perspectives” in ­Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10(4): 407–428. Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. 1973 [1722]. New York and London: Norton. ———. 1986 [1724–26]. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1988 [1724]. Roxana. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989 [1722]. Colonel Jack. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1990 [1720]. Captain Singleton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000 [1728]. Augusta Triumphans: or, the Way to make London the most flourishing City in the Universe (ed. Owens and Furbanks). Political and Economic Writings 8. London: Pickering & Chatto: 258–287.

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Dolezel, Lubomir. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Duncan, Jeffrey L. 1968. “The Rural Ideal in 18th century Fiction” in Studies In English Literature 1500–1900 8(3): 517–535. Flanders, W. Austin. 1991. “Urban Life and the Early Novel” in Hahn, H. George (ed.) The Country Myth: Motifs in the British Novel from Defoe to Smollett. Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 45–68. George, Dorothy. 1987. London Life in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hahn, H. George. 1991. “Country Myth and the Politics of the Early Georgian Novel” in Hahn, H. George (ed.) The Country Myth: Motifs in the British Novel from Defoe to Smollett. Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 1–44. Hastings, Annette. 1999. “Discourse and Urban Change: Introduction to the Special ­Issue” in Urban Studies 36(1): 7–12. Knox, Paul L. and Steven Pinch (eds). 2006. Urban Social Geography: An Introduction. Harlow: Pearson. Novak, Maximillian E. 1977. “Defoe and the Disordered City” in PMLA 92(2): 241–252. Ogborn, Miles. 1998. Spaces of Modernity: London Geographies 1680–1780. New York and London: The Guilford Press. Pavel, Thomas. 1980. “Narrative Domains” in Poetics Today 1(4): 105–114. ———. 2000. “Fiction and Imitation” in Poetics Today 21(3): 521–541. ———. 2003. La Pensée du roman. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1979. Emile: or, On Education (tr. A. Bloom). New York: Basic Books. Schonhorn, Manuel. 1968. “Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year: Topography and Intention” in The Review of English Studies New Series 19(76): 387–402. Smollett, Tobias. 1999. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solnit, Rebecca. 2002. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso. Tonkiss, Fran. 2005. Space, the City and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Trickett, Rachel. 1985. “‘Curious Eye’: Some Aspects of Visual Description in EighteenthCentury Literature,” in Patey, Douglas Lane and Timothy Keegan (eds) A ­ ugustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis. Newark: University of Delaware Press: 239–252. Varey, Simon. 1990. Space and the Eighteenth Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wall, Cynthia. 1998. “Details of Space: Narrative Description in Early Eighteenth-­ Century Novels” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10(4): 387–405. Watt, Ian. 1985. The Rise of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

chapter 4

Thoreau’s Environmental Humanism François Specq Abstract This essay explores Thoreau’s staging of competing modes of environmental consciousness in Walden’s final two chapters, and shows how this provides the groundwork for his foundational call for nature preservation. Carefully organizing his n ­ arrative so as to question standard ways of appropriating the world (scientific inquiry and economic exploitation of natural resources), and propounding a poetics in which the dynamics of writing (trans)figures the processes of nature, Thoreau grounded his environmental advocacy in a broader regard for the indomitable power and enduring secrecy of the physical world. Accepting the existence of nature as exceeding human control and signifying processes shifts the human/nonhuman divide, thus laying the ground for a more complex and balanced environmental humanism.

Keywords Cartography – economics – exploration – grotesque (aesthetics) – Humboldt, ­Alexander von – mapping – maps – materialism – matter – nature preservation – ­picturesque – Thoreau, Henry David – Walden – science – scientific inquiry – poetic language – wilderness – wild nature – translation

…

What is man but a mass of thawing clay? Walden 3071

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Succeeded as they are by the fiery (self-)exhortatory eloquence of the “­Conclusion,” the last two chapters of Walden (“The Pond in Winter” and 1 Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent parenthetical references are to Thoreau 1971.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324831_005

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“Spring”) have been comparatively neglected, because they seem to adhere to the conventions of seasonal literature.2 But Lawrence Buell wisely cautions us against d­ eceptive appearances: “from now until spring, seasonality dominates. To some extent this change makes the latter third of Walden a more ­conventional logbook. In other ways, the appearance of straightforwardness increases the opportunities for deviance” (1995: 244). Building upon this ­intuition, I would like to suggest that they actually offer a sustained, if not systematic, exploration of three competing modes of environmental awareness: by this, I mean ways of considering, if not bridging, the gap between matter and consciousness.3 These modes correspond to the three highlights of these chapters: Thoreau’s charting of Walden Pond, the ice-cutters’ harvest of the Walden ice, both from “The Pond in Winter,” and the famous flowing sandbank passage from the “Spring” chapter—which for convenience’s sake will be respectively referred to as sequences 1, 2, and 3 in this essay. My contention is that these passages form a triptych in which antithetical options are balanced against each other, and should thus be read in conjunction—not as merely seasonal narrative, but as rhetorical argument substantiating what I will define as Thoreau’s environmental humanism. Put in a nutshell, they demonstrate a move from a denial of materiality in the name of commonly conceived humanism, through misguided, all-too-human materialism, to “true” materialism. The latter, while it does not abdicate the human desire “to explore and learn all things” (317), is premised on a double acknowledgment of the concreteness of one’s environment and of the materiality of language, thus amounting to a more fully realized—less “imperial”—form of humanism. If the first two sequences f­eature self-enclosed systems embodying a conversion or translation of the real (­respectively: the map and the ethical lesson which replicates it on a higher, more abstract intellectual level; the icestack, which merely displaces the body of water the better to translate it into monetary value), the third one (the sandbank passage) offers a much more open structure, one that enhances the idea of the untranslatable character of the real, which serves as the r­ationale for 2 This is a revised and expanded version of an essay first published in Journal of American S­ tudies of Turkey 30 (Fall 2009). 3 This exploration of varieties of “awareness” in Walden extends Scott Slovic’s foundational discussion in Seeking Awareness, whose chapter on Thoreau is devoted to the Journal. My use of the notion of environmental awareness, however, is somewhat different from that adopted by Slovic, who defines it as “heightened attentiveness to our place in the natural world” (1992: 3): the various ways human beings relate to the physical world always embody a form of “awareness,” whether or not they involve specific “attentiveness.”

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the notion of “wildness” and the ensuing idea of nature preservation which concludes the chapter: Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. (317–318) Thoreau’s eloquent plea for wild nature anticipates his well-known call for nature preservation to be found in The Maine Woods (1864: 156), which has been a foundational reference for the environmental movement.4 But it takes on broader resonance, as it foregrounds the tensions between two antithetical aspects of human experience: one that seeks to comprehend (to explore, to survey, to fathom), and thus to convert or translate the real; the other that resists this desire and instead advocates the nurturing quality of the unexplorable and unfathomable, or untranslatable. I would like to show how the question of the translation of the real shapes Thoreau’s thinking in Walden’s two final chapters.5

Charting Space and the Self

In January 1846, Thoreau, who was a professional surveyor, carried his surveyor’s tools—“compass and chain and sounding line” (285)—to the ice-locked pond and drew a careful map of its shoreline, with more than a hundred soundings 4 On Thoreau’s environmental rhetoric in this passage, see François Specq (2003). 5 Thoreau makes reference to the idea of the translation of nature in crucial passages, as will be apparent in the two examples given later in this essay.

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of its depths, an experience he reported in Walden’s antepenultimate chapter, “The Pond in Winter,” which also includes a copy of the map itself (286).6 Thoreau’s extended passage on drawing a map of Walden Pond is fundamentally divided into two parts: the charting of the lake, on the one hand, and the translation of this process into an ethical lesson, on the other. This two-part structure reflects the tension between two opposite approaches to transcendence: put briefly, mapmaking, as a classic humanistic form of knowledge, is meant to “de-transcendentalize,” as Thoreau’s purpose is to disprove legends about the lake’s bottomlessness, whereas the ethical translation appears as a way of “retranscendentalizing” the physical world. Mapmaking illustrates the demands of rational inquiry that characterize modern science—“It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it” (285)—and especially appears as a Humboldtian activity—answering Alexander von Humboldt’s call for the “delineation of nature” (1850: I:79). As Laura Dassow Walls notes, “Thoreau’s local would always speak to the cosmic: Walden, like Eureka, was a response to Humboldt’s Cosmos” (2009a: 264).7 It will be remembered that the opening page of Walden (evoking Thoreau’s desire to write as if “from a distant land” [3]), echoed Humboldt’s notion of the equivalence between experiment and the infinity of the world: “The study of a science that promises to lead us through the vast range of creation may be compared to a journey in a far-distant land” (1850: I:50). Within that tradition, the map represents the synthesizing power of knowledge. The essential aspect of the mapmaking process, in the rhetorical economy of Thoreau’s text, is that the lake is objectified: it becomes an object of rational knowledge, undergoing an ontological transformation by being experienced as a site of measurement rather than imagination, which is here dismissed as fancy: “The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes,” the narrator proclaims (288). Through this process of imaging—as distinct from and opposed to imagining—, the otherness of nature is denied, or rather reduced, as it is bent to our frames or to our reason (as advocated by Humboldt: “the traveler … is guided by reason in his researches” [1850: I:51]), if not to our will. Mapmaking relies on a disjunction between matter and consciousness, and 6 The original map is kept at the Concord Free Public Library, Massachusetts (Thoreau 1846), among dozens of surveying charts produced by Thoreau. 7 Laura Dassow Walls’s parallel invites further consideration: although this essay would like to contribute to such an exploration, a full analysis goes beyond its scope. Walls offers the most comprehensive analysis of Thoreau as Humboldtian figure in Seeing New Worlds (1995, see especially “Thoreau as Humboldtian,” 134–147).

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on the ­simultaneous belief in the possibility of bridging the gap intellectually: although the mapmaking process is not entirely devoid of sensory perception, the otherness of nature is eventually subsumed. While the strong humorous undercurrents running through this passage may invite us not to take the narrator’s statements too seriously, there is nonetheless no doubt that mapmaking, in the economy of Thoreau’s text, essentially enacts an idealizing of nature, which desubstantializes and produces a ­closure (or enclosure) of the real. This approach seems to be governed by a desire to escape contingence, thus heeding Humboldt’s call for “trac[ing] the stable amid the vacillating, ever-recurring alternation of physical metamorphoses” (1850: I:xii; emphasis in original). However playfully, mapmaking seems to deny or resolve the mutability of things, thus enforcing or supporting a rhetoric of the ideal, which in its turn can support a rhetoric of empire, as suggested by Humboldt: […] so ought we likewise, in our pursuit of science, to strive after a ­knowledge of the laws and the principles of unity that pervade the vital forces of the universe; and it is by such a course that physical studies may be made subservient to the progress of industry, which is a conquest of mind over matter. (1850: I: 53–54, my emphasis) Although maps, as spatial constructs intent on communicating meaning in a linear fashion, drawing on such principles as rationality and progress, can be enrolled in the banner of expansion, the beautifully scalloped shape of the outlying, asymmetrical body of water called Walden Pond, may certainly be read as an oblique comment on the American passion for the conquest and ­dehumanization of space through geometry—a stance that reaches back to William Penn’s gridiron plan for Philadelphia (1681), and, in an even more spectacular way, to the u.s. Congress’s Land Ordinance of 1785, which divided the Northwest Territory (West and North of the Ohio River) into uniform sections and enabled surveyors to impose a grid pattern on the landscape, thus ­offering crucial support for territorial expansion and the accompanying doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Thoreau’s map of Walden Pond—along with his emphasis on winding paths rather than straight lines—implicitly questioned such a way of relating to the land. In the rhetorical economy of Thoreau’s text, however, the map primarily ­assumes that it is possible for the perceiver to transpose the physical world into a different order of reality: it is, strictly speaking, a process of translation—not merely in the sense of a removal from one place to another, but of a transference from one condition to another, a process whose most visible sign is the

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reduction from three to two dimensions in the physical order. The associated claim is that it is thus logically possible to subject the physical world to another kind of translation (almost in the old religious sense of removal from earth to heaven),8 one which turns it into an allegory of man’s moral physiognomy: What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. (291) Thoreau here unmistakably echoes Emerson’s famous maxim in Nature: “The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics” (2001: 38). In this version of ­environmental awareness, the material world is not just matter, but almost immediately endowed or imbued with allegorical meaning, if we agree on defining allegory in its broadest sense, as an illustration of the general by the particular, a particular which may be circumscribed. The allegorical mode is predicated on the idea that it is possible to apprehend the correspondences through rational thought—rather than through the imagination or the creative exuberance that is later at the heart of the sandbank passage in “Spring.” Allegory is imagination in the service of discursive meaning, as it is based on logical sequence rather than substitution or symbolic equivalence. Making sense of the world in this way thus involves not only delineating topographical limits, but erasing its material dimension through a process of translation. One may again wonder, however, whether the narrator’s allegorical reading of the lake is to be taken seriously. Or is he only paying lip-service to conventional allegorizing in the Emersonian manner or in the typological tradition? In my view, Thoreau only toys with the idea of allegory, and the last two chapters of Walden are meant to celebrate symbolism at the expense of allegory, which will eventually be dismissed as too rational, discursive, and linear. Buell argues that in the mapmaking passage Thoreau “completely suspends the ‘poetic’ dimension of Walden for the nonce and lets geometry take over” (1995: 276). It would be reductive, however, to think that the map merely impedes perception: mapmaking, in a way, opens up vision, precisely because it is the first time we have had a chance of figuring out what the lake looks like. As for 8 Thoreau alludes to this sense in his Journal entry for 18 February 1852: “[…] the most interesting & beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from heaven to earth–” (1992: 356).

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the kind of geometry it foregrounds, it remains extremely “poetic” and very different from the one favored by the nation’s planners or the ice-harvesters in sequence 2. And if the narrator seems to reject the vagaries of fancy, it is only to let the most unrestrained imagination hold sway again later in “Spring” (­sequence 3). Thoreau gently pokes fun at the reader when he dismisses the free play of the imagination as he begins narrating his cartographical survey of the lake. But I think that Buell is also right when he points to one of the undercurrents of the passage as testifying to Thoreau’s anxiety about the possibility of reconciling poetry with science (1995: 276). In the end, Thoreau’s surveying of Walden Pond is a mock-serious endeavor which seems to be meant as a parodic version of the individual’s necessary contribution to socially accepted activities. Thoreau draws on, and h ­ alf-­ironically bows to, the figure of the Humboldtian explorer and his humanist focus on knowledge, the better to give it a subsequent twist. To the extent that it represents socially acceptable work, mapmaking, as a legitimate intellectual ­appropriation of the pond, anticipates and parodies the exploitation—i.e., the economic appropriation—of the Walden ice, which immediately follows, ­constituting the second part of what Buell calls “a diptych of ‘enterprise’ scenes” (1995: 277). It thus contributes to a questioning of the conventions and standards by which human beings generally hope to attain reassuring normality.

Harnessing the Land

The middle sequence is devoted to the harvesting of the Walden ice: the winter following the pond survey, a crew of a hundred ice-cutters arrived at Walden to cut the ice for shipment to various places all over the world, including India for instance. The ice-cutting parallels the mapmaking sequence insofar as it is a socially acceptable undertaking—a form of business, as opposed to the idleness of the wandering poet or of poetic vagrancy. The first two sequences should ­indeed be envisaged together, as aspiring to social approbation and intellectual or commercial gain. Mapmaking, however auto-derisive, was still nodding to social recognition. This desire was certainly important to Thoreau (who was a sought-after land surveyor), even if he also often lamented its pressure, as indicated by his famous and repeated metaphor for surveying (“­tending the flocks of Admetus”)9 and by his statement in the passage analyzed here:

9 Thoreau often compares his dependance upon the necessity of making a living through ­socially accepted work, such as surveying, to the subjection of the god Apollo banished from

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[We] are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them [i.e. our thoughts]. (292) Thoreau’s statement is part of a long series which shows that scientific inquiry was not meant to appear as his preferred form of environmental awareness— although, to be sure, he was himself a competent naturalist.10 The second sequence fundamentally differs from the first, however, because it does not correspond to any form of inquiry. In this middle sequence, ­matter is just matter: it is neither allegorical nor symbolical, but a mere resource to be exploited for practical purposes and material gain. Indeed, the grid pattern implemented by the ice-harvesters sharply contrasts with Thoreau’s map of the lake because of its absolute regularity: geometry embodies the human control over the land in a way which distinctly echoes the layout projected by the Land Ordinance of 1785. This sequence also conveys Thoreau’s critique of economic exploitation, as the physical world is not comprehended, and even less enjoyed, but merely displaced and turned into a source of profit.11 What indeed matters, in the rhetorical economy of Thoreau’s text, is that this logging of the ice is not liable to any form of translation or conversion— except a monetary one, eventually—and even less amenable to a transcendentalizing process. Even more than mapmaking, ice-cutting is predicated on the power of sequence, linearity, and causality. Ice-cutting intrinsically negates any form of substitution, but instead favors repetition of the same—as indicated by the telling image of the contractor commissioning the exploitation of the Walden ice “in order to cover each one of his dollars with another” (294). This is a ­process of mere duplication and replication ad infinitum (the ice blocks “placed evenly side by side, and row upon row” [295]): instead of producing difference or expansion, it contracts and reduces the real. Exploitation is based on a principle of repetition and identity. The only substitution it operates is of stasis for process and energy (seasonal flux): the massive, monumental, static icestack is meant to substract matter from its normal life cycle, and to disrupt or

10 11

Olympus and obliged to spend some time on earth as servant to the king of Thessaly, Admetus. He refers to this story in Walden (70) for instance. On this complex issue, see the anthology of passages from Thoreau’s writings in Thoreau 1999, and the introductory essay by Laura Dassow Walls (1999b). Note, however, how Thoreau denounces the economic logic behind ice-cutting (294), but remains friendly to the poor fellows who are the agents of what he describes as environmental degradation, even trying his hand at the logging of the ice (295).

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blur the normal succession of seasons, by providing cold in the summer (thus, like mapmaking, also suppressing contingence, albeit in a different way). This is because ice-cutting is based on a capitalistic downplaying of the present in favor of future interest. On the contrary, Thoreau’s environmentally-friendly logging of the real and of its immediate flavor—which Walden ­celebrates and which the Journal, or log, embodies—is primarily meant to enhance one’s ­relation to the present. Each in its own way, the measuring of the pond and the harvesting of its ice are thus figures of perfection: mapmaking points to ideal or transcendentalizing wholes, and ice-cutting eventuates in a perfectly regular icestack that ­appears as a parodically reductive transposition (as distinct from translation) of wholeness—here also may be heard echoes of Humboldt’s desire for “wholes.” Like mapmaking, ice-harvesting enacts a suppression of the contingent. But, Thoreau suggests, the contingent and the particular cannot be ­suppressed without eliminating life itself, without draining life of its substance—hence Thoreau’s diametrically opposite desire to pay attention to the singular, “to individualize” (292). In sequence 2, matter is simultaneously and paradoxically treasured and dematerialized, as it can only be subjected to a monetary conversion or translation. The ice-cutters embody—or are the driving belt of—a materialistic worldview. But it is a materialism of substraction,12 (even though the lake will eventually be replenished, as Thoreau emphasizes [297]), as opposed to the one that is propounded in “Spring,” sequence 3 in Thoreau’s carefully staged final part of Walden.

Rethinking Humanism

The third sequence focuses on the thawing bankside of the “Deep Cut” of the railroad skirting Walden Pond (304–309). This passage, taken in isolation, is often regarded as Walden’s climax, and has generated a wide range of ­commentaries.13 It is also understood as the culmination of the book’s ­seasonal 12 13

It actually operates as a dual system involving (material) substraction and (monetary) addition. Offering even a brief overview of critical approaches to this passage is beyond the scope of this essay. Important starting points are Boudreau (1990: 105–134), which includes a useful bibliographical essay, Milder (1995: 151–160), and West (2000: 183–196). Although most books devoted to Thoreau consider this passage, my purpose here is somewhat ­different, in so far as I do not purport to analyze it as a discrete, autonomous entity a­ ccording to broader critical or theoretical concerns, but as an integral part of the rhetorical dynamics of the latter part of Walden as a whole.

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pattern. It is important to be aware, however, that it is to some extent a constructed event—which Buell even describes as a “conceit,” pointing out that it was “introduced into the last drafts,” and that it “drew on periods of thaw that took place in December, January, and February” rather than in Spring (1995: 245, 246).14 This certainly indicates a specific purpose—perhaps what Thoreau called the discovery of the “spring of springs” (41)—and it reminds us that ­Thoreau deliberately orchestrated the final stages of his book, not merely to complete the course of the seasons, but to achieve maximum literary impact, eager as he was to “wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced” (324). Structurally, the sandbank passage may be seen as forming a kind of arch with the description of mapmaking, in the sense that they are both forms of inquiry of the real, whereas there is no inquiry whatsoever in the central ice-cutting passage. By inquiry, I do not mean a metaphysical exploration of the origins and ends of the universe, but rather of its material dimension: the earthly configurations of water, ice, and sand. If the shadow of metaphysics still reverberated in sequence 1—eventually leading to a containment or subsumption of matter—there is nothing metaphysical in the third sequence. This passage is a striking ode to the preeminence of matter and focuses upon a concrete, palpable reality, which sharply contrasts with the artificialized and almost derealized matter exploited by the ice-cutters. The richness of the earth’s surface, with its color, its mineral and organic profusion, as evoked in a phenomenological approach, and the pleasure of the sensible, are the focus of the writer’s attention. The observer remains fiercely earthbound, and he is eager to make the most of this restriction. His purpose is certainly quite different from Humboldt’s desire “to trace the stable”: The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,—for the sun acts on one side first,—and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh 14

This point has been considered at greater length by J. Lyndon Shanley (1957: especially 62–63).

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designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, (λείβω, l­abor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; λoβoς, globus, lobe, globe, also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. (306–307) Whereas mapmaking and ice-harvesting were too forms of “business,” Thoreau here asserts his idleness and claims the right not to be serious in an ordinary (social) sense. In a much more radical way than in sequence 1, Thoreau here appears as subverter of all productive systems, and as promoter of an art indifferent to any social approbation or economic gain—he was certainly eager “to transact some private business” (19)—and becomes a figure fiercely resisting social expectations and aesthetic integration. The writer decidedly refuses to offer a gentle, sentimental depiction of Spring (no gently twittering birds…), instead figuring Spring in its “raw,” “untamed” character—and, to be sure, it is impossible to illustrate this passage the way the first two sequences can be. But, more deeply, the passage points to the profoundly anti-institutional dimension of Thoreau’s prose, in agreement with his own belief that good books “make us dangerous to existing institutions” (Thoreau 1980: 96). It is hard to imagine today what the sandbank passage as literature represented at the time: it amounted to nothing less than a rejection of literature itself as institution. In a widely tamed if not decorous literary world, Thoreau’s famous etymological ramblings were, in some sense, analogous in their impact to Emily ­Dickinson’s use of language.15 In this passage, Thoreau seems to owe no obligations to 15

Thoreau’s etymological ramblings were encouraged and fueled by Hungarian linguist Charles Kraitsir’s Glossology and English minister and lexicologist Richard Chenevix

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­society and almost to be oblivious of the very existence of society—forgetting all knowledge or literacy, all received ideas, in a powerful example of his desired “extra-vagan[ce]” (324). The reader is here confronted with a text which is too frenzied to submit itself to a straightforward obligation to communicate—be it truth, method, or value, as in the first two sequences—but is ­instead intent on circulating energy and diffusing the relations between mysterious, but supremely concrete, phenomena. Through a radical disruption of our ordinary modes of seeing, Thoreau gives us a more substantial, literal form of the transaction between nature and consciousness, finally refusing to separate matter and spirit (a separation that is implied by all forms of translation of physical reality).16 Mankind is no longer master of matter vis-à-vis submissive or compliant nature, but mere witness to a reality that is autonomous if not rebellious,17 and that turns itself into the agent of its own translation: “The very globe continually transcends and translates itself…” (306, emphasis mine).18 The real’s self-translation precisely defines and warrants its untranslatability by human means, as Thoreau’s bewildered juxtaposition of words from different languages indicates. Such radicality boldly sets this passage apart from the second sequence, but also from the first one, from which there are a number of crucial differences. The first difference may be encapsulated in the sweeping statement that the prevailing aesthetic mode moves from the picturesque to the grotesque. One will notice that Thoreau, in the course of the mapmaking passage, explicitly refers to one of the high priests of picturesque description and theory, William

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Trench’s On the Study of Words (both published in New York in 1852). But what matters here is that he turned this linguistic material into literature. On Thoreau’s interest in language matters, and especially on his passion for puns and for playing with words, see West 2000 and Gura 1981. This may seem to suggest that Thoreau adopted an approach convergent with non-­ dualistic philosophies such as the “Oriental” ones he was familiar with—he was an avid reader of mostly Hindu, but also Chinese and Persian, texts (see Hodder 2001: esp. ­174–217). What I will suggest, however, is that Thoreau did not reject dualism, but strove for modes of perception that moved beyond the standard separation of matter and spirit enacted by appropriative modes of relation to the physical world. This is indeed suggested in an often-overlooked apologue inserted into the ice-cutting passage itself—the “revenge” of “Squaw Walden”—which Clemens Spahr analyzes as a metaphor of “the revenge of the non-identical which defies the laws of the market” (2011: 217). This, Spahr suggests, exemplifies how Thoreau’s “materially grounded aesthetics” (217) is inherently political, pointing to the “submerged […] radicalism” (222) running throughout Walden. Such a remark, seen from a different perspective, also testifies to the direction of a way of thinking that anticipates the idea of evolution.

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Gilpin (“who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes” [287]), whereas he highlights (using italics) a reference to the aesthetics of the ­grotesque in the sandbank passage (305).19 The grotesque appears as a metaphor for ­non-linearity, for metamorphosis, for the liberation from standard, orthodox worldviews. The thawing bank passage is deeply anti-picturesque. The picturesque aimed at endowing landscape with respectable aesthetic appeal and cultural meaning. At a time when one of the central aesthetic aspirations was for “associations” that would put the United States on a par with Europe in respect to “taste,” those offered by Thoreau in this passage (including the excrementitious), were certainly not the favored ones. The picturesque fundamentally relies on disembodied thought and perception (with a primacy given to the ocular), whereas the body plays a central role here. The picturesque is also a mode that focuses on legibility (as a worthy, if slightly paradoxical, inheritor of the Enlightenment), i.e., on the possibility of reading and rationally ­ordering the landscape—thus effecting a form of translation. In sequence 3 there is ­indeed some ordering, but one that has much more to do with a mystical— or is it proto-ecological?—sense of generalized relationality: “Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf” (308). Thoreau also confronts the possibility that the world is illegible or impossible to read rationally—that the fabled “Book of Nature” is now so irremediably timeworn that it can only be apprehended through a somewhat chaotic sequence of words and syllables— a world more chaos than cosmos, but thereby “living earth” again (309).20 The third sequence also differs crucially from the first one through its f­ ocus on the unmeasured and unmeasurable—in praise of the real “unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (318)— that appear as the ­essence of poetry (as also suggested by Humboldt). If mapmaking meant ­delimiting or imposing limits—to the land as well as to our imagination—the sandbank passage, on the contrary, is predicated on the opposite notion of the value of ­having “our own limits transgressed” (318), as Thoreau sums up his thought at the end of the “Spring” chapter (317–318)—our own limits, i.e., also our own c­ onstructs 19

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Thoreau responded to the writings of William Gilpin (1724–1804) with mixed feelings of admiration and defiance. Even though he avidly read Gilpin’s writings and praised them, he soon voiced reservations about them: “An elegant writer of English prose— I wish he would look at scenery sometimes not with the eye of an artist […] However his ­elegant moderation his real discrimination–& real interest in nature, excuse many things” (­Thoreau 1997: 283–284 [6 August 1852]). For an illuminating overview of the tradition of the “Book of Nature” in American literature, see Barton Levi St. Armand 1997.

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(nature has now ceased to be “constantly and obediently answer[ing] to our conceptions” [97]). This notably involves transgressing the limits of l­anguage (the linguistic material), i.e., its mastery over the world—just as we are requested to acknowledge the uncontainable flowing or flowering of matter. What Thoreau propounds is an economy of excess and not one of containment or substraction (see “excess of energy” [306]). The third sequence focuses on the power of the imagination as exceeding—though certainly not ­suppressing—knowledge derived from experience. It foregrounds signifying processes that question or challenge logical meaning and conceptual definition, giving free rein to the play of substitutions on the paradigmatic axis at the expense of sequential continuity, as “translation” would request. Excess is fundamental: in Thoreau’s view, nature is what is in excess of all things human. In a way, whereas imagination, in the first sequence, was part of and support for a larger humanist project, Thoreau here accepts the idea of an imaginative process that is dissociated from imaging or representation (it is ­undeniably more difficult to picture the world evoked in the sandbank ­passage) and that is distinct from any easily definable or transparent meaning, yielding instead to the sway of an untranslatable reality. If mapmaking appeared to be a ­fundamentally humanist project, the sandbank passage sets forth a form of imagination that both recuperates matter and exceeds ­definition—but does certainly not negate meaning. Or, put slightly differently, it questions or s­ uspends linguistic meaning, but not human significance, ­opening itself out to symbolic flowering.21 As the idea of the untranslatable character of the real points to the impossibility—and undesirability—of fully grasping (­synthesizing or translating) our experience of the world, it ­ultimately serves as the f­oundation for Thoreau’s plea for the preservation of nature at the end of “Spring”: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (317). 21

Leo Marx has offered a critical approach which my own reading to some extent pursues: “The description of the melting railroad bank is an intricately orchestrated paean to the power of the imagination. […] Meaning and value […] [do] not reside in the natural facts or in social institutions or in anything ‘out there,’ but in consciousness. It is a product of imaginative perception, of the analogy-perceiving, metaphor-making, mythopoeic power of the human mind” (1964: 261 and 264). It is important to note, however, that, as Dieter Schulz puts it, “in Thoreau’s view metaphor is not just an operation of the human mind. In speaking metaphorically, we reproduce a process that occurs in nature all the time” (2012: 164).

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In this concluding sequence, which may also appear as the rationale for Thoreau’s Journal, nature retains its otherness or unstranslatability, as there is an acceptance of the gap between nature and consciousness—“Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” (Thoreau 1980: 382). Nature has now been acknowledged as a force both within and outside the human, and, specifically, as that which exceeds and disorients, but also animates, human language. Language in its materiality is precisely what, in turn, prevents the assumption of nature into human consciousness. In his hard-fought attempt at breaking out of closure, Thoreau strove to ­attain the purity of a new beginning, of raw materials instead of prefabricated ideas and preconceived ideals. He seems to be eager to devour language itself raw—like the woodchuck he caught a glimpse of in the dark on his way home from fishing, and, “[feeling] a strange thrill of savage delight […] was strongly tempted to seize and devour […] raw” (210). His language here smacks of such a “savage delight,” it is irrational, even unfathomable, as opposed to the pond (which can be fathomed but also recuperated by reason and rationality, as the “ethical translation” indicates). Language is not just a tool but seems to play an active role and to restrict the degree of control exercised by the perceiver. In that sense, in the sandbank passage Thoreau puts himself—i.e., the human—at risk: he accepts losing control of the real as being a part of the accomplishment of one’s humanity; he accepts the existence of nature as exceeding our control and our signifying processes (our ways of translating it). The reader is not invited to mentally picture and acquiesce in realistic forms of mastery over the real (such as mapmaking or ice-cutting), but to engage in a process of figuring new, hitherto unimagined relations to the physical world and forms of awareness, in which the symbolic function proves to be liberating. He thus puts himself at risk, insofar as he chooses to ignore the safety devices that we construct in order to sidestep the dangers that are inherent in our being-­inthe-world. The aim is not to convey an abstractly figurative meaning, but to create through the linguistic material a heightened awareness of our environment, where the reader can experience the imaginary dimension of perceiving. Far from threatening perception, this denial of transparency and linearity is precisely what enriches and enhances awareness, permitting us to capture the real in the process of its coming into being. Works Cited Boudreau, Gordon V. 1990. The Roots of Walden and the Tree of Life. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

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Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2001. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry (ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris). New York: Norton. Gura, Philip F. 1981. The Widsom of Words. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Hodder, Alan D. 2001. Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Humboldt, Alexander von. 1850. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (tr. Elise C. Otté). 2 vols. New York: Harper. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press. Milder, Robert. 1995. Reimagining Thoreau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schulz, Dieter. 2012. Emerson and Thoreau, or Steps Beyond Ourselves: Studies in Transcendentalism. Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag. Shanley, J. Lyndon. 1957. The Making of Walden. With the Text of the First Version. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slovic, Scott. 1992. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Spahr, Clemens. 2011. Radical Beauty: American Transcendentalism and the Aesthetic Critique of Modernity. Paderborn: Schöningh. Specq, François. 2003. “Thoreau’s ‘Chesuncook’ or Romantic Nature Imperiled: An American Jeremiad” in Bak, Hans and Walter W. Hölbling (eds) Nature’s Nation Reconsidered: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Amsterdam: VU University Press: 126–134. St. Armand, Barton Levi. 1997. “The Book of Nature and American Nature Writing: Codex, Index, Contexts, Prospects” in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 4(1): 29–42. Thoreau, Henry David. 1971 [1854]. Walden (ed. J. Lyndon Shanley). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1980 [1849]. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (ed. Carl F. Hovde et al.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. Journal, Vol. 4: 1851–1852 (ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1997. Journal, Vol. 5: 1852–1853 (ed. Patrick F. O’Connell). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. Material Faith: Thoreau on Science (ed. Laura Dassow Walls). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Walls, Laura Dassow. 1995. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and NineteenthCentury Natural Science. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2009a. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2009b. “The Man Most Alive” in Thoreau, Henry David, Material Faith: Thoreau on Science (ed. Laura Dassow Walls). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin: ix–xviii. West, Michael. 2000. Transcendental Wordplay : America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature. Athens: Ohio University Press.

chapter 5

Environmental Awareness and Geography: Reading Reclus Ecocritically? Bertrand Guest Abstract By discussing recent attempts at reading French geographer Élisée Reclus from an ecocritical perspective, this contribution emphasizes his holistic and dialectic vision of man and nature. A reception study of his work enlightens early fragmentation and rejection of his thought, in that it has been a critical approach to either capitalist or marxist prometheism. Those subversive insights combined with historical awareness and knowledge appear to be the very reason for his revival since the 1970s. This ­geographical approach explains the blended phenomenon of human oppression of man together with the destruction of the Earth. Reclusian socialism constantly ­involves the Earth, in such way that one cannot defend nature against man, nor can one do the reverse. If the unity of the geographical and anarchistic aspects is not called into ­question any more, we still need to reread Reclus as a poet and as an environmentalist, the author of a characteristically global depiction of the cosmos, a perceptive and e­ xperimental inquiry on time and space and an essayist’s meditation on man’s ­progress and regress, all in one.

Keywords Anarchism – anthropocentrism – cosmos – essay – freedom – Geddes, Patrick – Goethe, Johann Wolfgang – Guyot, Arnold – Haeckel, Ernst – holism – Humboldt, ­Alexander von – Kropotkin, Piotr – malthusianism – Marsh, George Perkins – ­naturalism – ­rationalism – Reclus, Élisée – revolution – Ritter, Carl – romanticism – social ­geography – Thoreau, Henry David – universalism – vegetarianism – Vidal de la Blache, Paul

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324831_006

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Our new world is growing around us, as would a new flora under the ­garbage of the ages.1 élisée reclus, L’Anarchie 31

∵ One cannot help but notice the revival, some even say the “renascence” (­Dunbar 123) of Reclus’s works, illustrated by the international conference in Lyon in 2005. As could seem surprising for a French-centered readership, French reviews are all quite recent, and are part of a rediscovery which started with Béatrice Giblin and Yves Lacoste’s Hérodote issue in 1981. Although there may seem to have been few English-language readers until recently—as the anecdote about Italo Calvino’s tale “Un pomeriggio, Adamo” suggests, the ­Italian referring to Reclus, who is replaced by Kropotkin in the English translation (Calvino 1958: 24; 1957: 15)—they actually gave a strong impulse to Reclusian studies, promoting transdisciplinarity in order to renew critical approaches. One can consider in particular the decisive part played by English-language studies in emphasizing the environmental concern of this nineteenth-century libertarian and geographer. Gary S. Dunbar’s book, and Marie Fleming’s The Geography of Freedom, were, for a while, the only English-language studies of Reclus’s political philosophy. In 2004, John P. Clark and Camille Martin gave an introduction to selected writings of Reclus in the United States, stating that “Reclus’s strongly holistic account of natural processes often prefigures contemporary ecological analyses” (23). Their “Introduction to Reclus’ Social Thought” is part of a very strong debate between upholders of Reclus’s role as a forerunner of modern ecology, and those denying it, such as the French geographer Philippe Pelletier (1998, 2009), who affirms that Reclus was not an organicist thinker and basically has nothing to do whether with social or deep ecology. Considering that the ecocritical perspective remains a typical Englishlanguage take on the matter, only slowly emerging in French, the anglo-saxon approaches to Reclus’s works might be the very ones which first underlined Reclus’s ecological awareness. However, French writer Joël Cornuault, who

1 When unspecified, all French quotations are given in our English translation, followed by the original text if necessary. “Notre monde nouveau point autour de nous, comme germerait une flore nouvelle sous le détritus des âges.”

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founded the Cahiers Élisée Reclus, the first periodical to re-publish a number of texts by the anarcho-geographer, wrote a sequence of ecocritically-oriented monographs in the 1990s (1995, 1999). These essays emphasized the Reclusian dialectic between rationalism and romanticism, encyclopaedism and aestheticism, scientism and poetic impulse. In a few words I would like to sketch a history of a particularly muddled reception, and think about the way ecocritical readings—whether or not they make Reclus an environmentalist—have renewed the studies about his writings for the past two decades, possibly putting an end to a characteristically splitted reception between purely anarchistic interpretations and purely geographical ones.

Early Rejection

The least we can say is that Reclus was not a mainstream scholar. His first ­reception therefore consisted in a form of deliberate oblivion. His anarchism, including his part in the Commune insurrection and his support of the “­Terreur noire” in the 1890s, but also his idea of teaching—he saw nature as a better teacher than school—made him look suspicious in the eyes of almost all academic geographers, except for a few peers from Leipzig, as is visible in this review of L’Homme et la Terre (Man and the Earth): Such were the clarity of exposition, the novelty of insights, the poetry of descriptions, an enthusiastic tone not excluding precision, that the book conquered cultivated men from the beginning and made his author the initiator of a new science. It appeared as geography’s Discourse on Method.2 The history of geography, though, never fully acknowledged Reclus as one of its distinguished figures, preferring Vidal de la Blache as the founder of ­French-style human geography. Béatrice Giblin regards it as unfortunate that Reclus should have been “erased,” a proposition that Dunbar does not agree with (1978: 129). Yet there is no doubt that his political radicalism prevented 2 Quoted in Béatrice Giblin, general introduction to L’Homme et la Terre (1998: 32 (my ­translation). “Telle était la clarté de l’exposition, la nouveauté des aperçus, la poésie des descriptions, un ton d’enthousiasme qui n’excluait pas la précision, que le livre conquit d’emblée tous les hommes cultivés et plaça son auteur au rang d’initiateur d’une science nouvelle. Il apparut comme le Discours de la méthode de la géographie.”

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him from being acknowledged by academic geographers, in France and even in Brussels where in the end he was denied a chair. He made geography a tool to criticize powers, which explains his marginalization at a time when this ­discipline only had duties as a handmaiden to governments, providing them with maps and charts to make war. Ironically, Reclus’s subversive insights, highly critical of past and present politics, appear to be the very reason for his revival since the 1970s. Until that moment, skipping Reclus’s works was finally the best way to get around the difficulties they were creating, and, especially, to avoid the very question of capitalism oppressing men and destroying the Earth, or of the vanishing link between man and nature in modern societies. Social criticism by the anarchistic geographer is always concerned with possible ways of inhabiting the world. Fundamentally, Reclusian socialism and political concern constantly involve the Earth. After years of condescension and oblivion, geographers, whatever their previous stances, started rediscovering Reclus, writing about his radicalism as an anarchist, though not always connecting his thinking about space, including human geography and philosophy of nature, to his politics. The main problem when reading Reclus might be the presence of essential incompatibilities amongst his readership.

Fragmenting Reclus’s Work

As Reclus finally emerged out of rejection, the major discrepancy lay between two distinct receptions which allegedly did not match: the geographical restoring to favor and the political interpretation, pursuing the tradition of an anarchistic reading of Reclus (see Gonot), although this approach has not been endorsed by the academic world. This split long structured Reclusian scholars, the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle being read by geographers, while ­anarchistic followers focused on the many political essays published in several issues of the Revue des deux mondes, among others. A political reception in fact appeared long before the late twentieth century, but only marginally. According to Gary Dunbar, “it is said that Stalin had derived his basic notions about environmental influences from Reclus” (1978: 126), an idea which makes us wonder what he found in Reclus that was in accordance with his own conceptions. Chinese intellectuals in Paris after 1905 were also imbued with anarchistic writings by Reclus and Kropotkin, but it is Latin American revolutionaries who probably tried best to implement those theories. Yet, for sure, it is not the ecologist who has been read politically, but rather the libertarian or the socialist. Each scholar was reading his or her own Reclus, so to speak.

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In fact, Reclus’s works belong at the same time to nearly all human sciences and to poetics and should be read as such,3 for he was, along with Alexander von Humboldt, one of the last scholars and writers to see no boundaries ­between these various domains, nowadays strictly separated from one another. In the nineteenth century, the idea that geography could be at the same time poetry and philosophy did not frighten geographers, at least the Romantic ones: ­science and literature were not mutually exclusive, until Baconian science made them so in America, and “science positive” in France. Reclus probably counted himself among “men loving poetry and science at once” (­Reclus 1995: 16, my translation). The problem of his reception therefore goes far ­beyond an epistemological clearing of his name, meant to acknowledge him at last as the true founder of French-style geography, that is to say, a real scientist, in spite of the fact that he was an anarchist, a poet and a free thinker. What ultimately matters is the intrinsic unity of his political, geographical and ecological insights, that is to say, the need to understand his “global” (Giblin) or “synthetic” (David Stoddart, Marie-Claire Robic), maybe even his “integral” and “holistic” (Clark), perspective.

Narrative Biographism

From a literary point of view, biographism, as a tendency to explain a body of work by its author’s biography, is a very common take on things, but in Reclus’s case, it has been sharpened both by oblivion and by fragmentation, so that ­critics are inclined to narration. The strongly biographical aspect of criticism may lead to the conjecture that throughout the history of the readings of Reclus, the main points of interest—conceptually—have been missed, as though the sole purpose of said criticism were to pull this thinker out of oblivion, not to understand the integrity of his thought as contributing to an analysis of the world we still live in. Furthermore, Reclus’s biography in a sense is the only thing everybody can agree on, before each critic takes the risk of fragmenting his thought. It does not concern only novelists or independent writers fictionalizing a life which was indeed very adventurous (Chadrak, Sarrazin). 3 According to Joël Cornuault (1999: 11, my translation), “Élisée Reclus’s works have been read geographically. Politically. Both simultaneously. At a time when scientific literature seems to go back to literary expression, it is not forbidden to read it poetically.” (“On a lu les œuvres d’Élisée Reclus géographiquement. Politiquement. Les deux à la fois. À un moment où ­semble s’amorcer un retour de la littérature scientifique vers l’expression littéraire, il n’est pas interdit de les lire poétiquement.”).

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The first Reclusian scholars were in a sense biographers, from his nephew Paul Reclus to many contributors to his Élisée and Élie Reclus: In Memoriam. Even today, to a certain extent, it looks as though no criticism is possible unless it is a b­ iographical one. Jean-Didier Vincent recently updated the biography of Reclus, asserting that he was a geographer, an anarchist and an ecologist at the same time (Vincent 2010). Béatrice Giblin, one of the major contributors to Reclusian studies, who edited, and wrote an introduction to, an abridged version of L’Homme et la Terre (Reclus 1998b), cannot do otherwise but to tell his life first. We cannot understand how he became a geographer and an explorer— nor the emergence of his philosophy of nature—without considering his Irish and American exile after 1851, a direct consequence of his political beliefs. The lack of global perspective in reading Reclus still constitutes a major difficulty: if the unity of the geographical and anarchistic aspects is not called into ­question any more, some refuse to read him as a poet and as an environmentalist, even if biographies for the most part depict such a man. It is the consistency of his life, but, just as importantly, the consistency of his thought and work, which matters. Reclus was a scholar and an outlaw, a traveller and a writer, a man of experience, enacting what Laura Dassow Walls calls a Humboldtian ­program—“explore, collect, measure, connect” (1995: 134)—­considering all things together, societies, men, ways of inhabiting the world, and of perceiving and dealing with nature. Since the “popular ‘discovery’ of ecology has given a special cachet to radical or activist geographers” (Dunbar 1978: 128), the discrepancy in Reclus’s reception actually moved from a separation between anarchists and geographers to a new antagonism: ecocritical interpretation is not established in the eyes of all.

(Re)interpreting Reclus

We are now going to discuss recent attempts at reading Reclus from an ­ecocritical perspective, which to a large extent contributed to his most recent revival. Nowadays an interdisciplinary approach to his works seems to emerge, that is at last able to go beyond discrepancies in Reclus’s reception, and recover the multifaceted dimension of his work. Above all, the ecocritical reading of Reclus has the advantage of offering a comprehensive interpretation of a body of work which itself is comprehensive: La Terre, and later L’Homme et la Terre, attempted a synthetic description of the world, just as Kosmos (1845–1862) by Humboldt was an attempt at a physical description of the world (“Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung”). More than ever, Reclusian studies seem

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to focus on the essential link between Reclus’s thinking about nature and his analysis of society. The awareness of holistic thought within the works of ­Reclus is gaining ground among scholars and the development of ecocriticism, with its focus on the relationship between human and non-human worlds, may finally allow Reclusian insights into the cosmos to recover their initial consistency. There is obviously much to be rediscovered in Histoire d’un ruisseau and Histoire d’une montagne, often presented as books for the layman, “too poetical to please geographers and too geographical to be approved by poets” (Cornuault 1995: 13), and of course in L’Homme et la Terre, Reclus’s last and probably most important work, a gigantic essay on man’s interaction with various natural habitats, the motto of which specifies that “Man is Nature that gets aware of itself” (2). Gary Dunbar reports that Histoire d’un ruisseau was Reclus’s favorite amongst his own books. This “praise of minor vegetal, animal, mineral and geographical phenomena” (Cornuault 1995: 15) brings to mind Thoreau’s Journal, which may be seen as an effort to capture the wholeness of the natural world through “the maze of phenomena” (Thoreau 1949: xi, 273), and constitutes an epic poem of the stream just like Whitman wrote an epic poem of the grass. In the eyes of geographers, the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle has always been Reclus’s magnum opus. But it is in L’Homme et la Terre that we encounter Reclus as a philosopher, and also as the true poet and stylist that he is. So much so that the publisher, Hachette, clearly dissuaded him from stating his political theories in the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, whereas L’Homme et la Terre expounds a global depiction of the world based on sensible experience, a synthesis mixing scientific description of the human and natural world, philosophy of history, and an essayist’s meditation on man’s progress (“progrès”) and regress (“régrès”). I sketched out a new book in which to display the conditions of the soil, the climate, and the whole environment [ambiance] where the events of history unfolded, in which the agreement between Man and Earth should appear, in which the actions of peoples would be explained, in a cause and effect relationship, by their harmony with the evolution of the planet. […] We are allowed to trace back into time each period in the lives of peoples in relation with the changes in milieus, to observe the combined actions of Nature and Man himself, as reacting on the Earth that formed him.4 (1905–1908: i, 5–6) 4 “Je dressai le plan d’un nouveau livre où seraient exposées les conditions du sol, du climat, de toute l’ambiance dans lesquelles les évènements de l’histoire se sont accomplis, où se montrerait l’accord des Hommes et de la Terre, où les agissements des peuples s’expliqueraient, de

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As such, it was at first despised by geographers as sociology and history, as for instance by Jean Brunhes in 1934: “Je préfère ne pas parler ici de l’œuvre posthume de Reclus qui contient d’intéressantes vues géographiques mais qui est surtout histoire ou sociologie” (i, 38). This paradoxical marginalization of Reclus’s real opus magnus by early-twentieth-century geographers partly explains the misunderstanding that still opposes contemporary geographers to non-geographers, and among the latter, to ecocritics in particular. Pelletier thus blames ecocritics for their ignorance of geography’s prior concern about the relationship between nature and society, implying that Reclus wrote about it as a geographer, not as an early ecocritical writer. One could answer that Reclus did not write about nature like any geographer, for he was fighting determinism and the Vidalian naturalization of the region, without, for all that, denying natural influences on mankind, nor the tangible consequences of the sentiment of nature: just as Ritter and Humboldt had done, he was studying nature itself as well as its perception by man, whose importance he constantly underlined. His works deserve both global interpretation and comparative study, to shed light on their universality.

Was Reclus an Environmentalist?

Reclus, as Pelletier reminds us, does not use the word “ecology,” which was coined in 1866 by German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, preferring “naturalism” and “mesology” to refer to the description of natural environments as interrelated wholes. But this does not mean that he was not, in a way, studying ecology and announcing ecocritical concerns and approaches. A number of scholars have pointed “similarities between Reclus’s concerns about the environment and questions being raised by contemporary ecologists” (Fleming 1988: 24). He was one of the first thinkers in human geography unifying physical and economic data with a view to studying interactions ­between man and its natural environment. To be more precise, the French word “milieu” used in his books (“environment” is transferred into French by Vidal around 19215) cause à effet, par leur harmonie avec l’évolution de la planète. […] il nous est permis de poursuivre dans le temps chaque période de la vie des peuples correspondant au changement des milieux, d’observer l’action combinée de la Nature et de l’Homme lui-même, ­réagissant sur la Terre qui l’a formé.” 5 The Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé dates the first French use of “environnement” in  its ecological meaning from this 1921 quotation: “Mais, si l’on réfléchit à tout ce qu’implique  ce mot de milieu ou d’environnement suivant l’expression anglaise, à tous les

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does not make man step out of the natural world and consider it as an object. Reclus does not dissociate man from nature, pointing instead to their cohabitation and dialectical interaction, that is to say, man and nature’s consubstantiality or “humanity-in-nature” (Clark 2004: 20). On the one hand, man has to emancipate from nature’s constraints to achieve freedom, on the other hand becoming aware of his involvement and responsibility in nature’s harmony. As “the conscience of the Earth,” he learns that every progress implies possible regressions. To read Reclus globally, we would have to measure carefully his part in the complicated relationship between geography and ecology, as regards the dialectic of nature and society. The action of man gives […] the surface of the Earth the greatest diversity in aspect. On one side the former destroyed the latter, on the other it improved it; according to the social state and progress of each people, it contributes either to degrading Nature, or to embellishing it. Standing firm like a passing traveller, the barbarian plunders it; he exploits it forcefully without giving back, through culture and diligent attention, the goods that he pillaged; he even ends up devastating the country he inhabits and makes it unfit to live in. Properly civilized men, in the understanding that their own interest merges with the interests of all and that of Nature itself, act quite differently. […] Once become the ‘consciousness of the Earth,’ that man who is worthy of his mission endorses, through that dignity, a share of responsibility in the harmony and beauty of the surrounding nature. reclus 1864: 762–7636

Jean-Didier Vincent stresses the environmental concern of Reclus, who closely associates man and environment in what may be described as social g­ eography. He reminds us of his readings of Naturphilosophen (99), whose insistence on fils ­insoupçonnés dont est tissée la trame qui nous enlace, quel organisme vivant pourrait s’y soustraire?” (Vidal 7). 6 “L’action de l’homme donne […] la plus grande diversité d’aspect à la surface terrestre. D’un côté, elle détruit, de l’autre elle améliore ; suivant l’état social et les progrès de chaque peuple, elle contribue tantôt à dégrader la nature, tantôt à l’embellir. Campé comme un voyageur de passage, le barbare pille la terre ; il l’exploite avec violence sans lui rendre en culture et en soins intelligents les richesses qu’il lui ravit ; il finit même par dévaster la contrée qui lui sert de demeure et par la rendre inhabitable. L’homme vraiment civilisé, comprenant que son intérêt propre se confond avec l’intérêt de tous et celui de la nature elle-même, agit tout autrement. […] Devenu la ‘conscience de la terre’, l’homme digne de sa mission assume par cela même une part de responsabilité dans l’harmonie et la beauté de la nature environnante.”

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human sensitivity toward nature allows mankind to be seen as belonging to the Whole, and of his close friendship with Patrick Geddes,7 another upholder of “think global, act local.” I would like to suggest that what makes the deep unity of Reclus’s thought, including anarchism and geography, has to do with environmentalism, in so far as it connects the various parts and aspects of the Earth one with another, and with ecology, in that it contributes to a scientific description of milieus. Given the innovative aspect of Reclus’s geography, and its relevance to the current state of affairs, one may make him one of the fathers of modern ecology. Modern ecology, which is too vague, if not too confused epistemologically speaking, would benefit from turning towards Reclus’s scientific and libertarian geography. It is a matter of closeness, if not of affinity. […] G.P. Marsh, the great American geographer, author of Man and Nature (1864), whom Reclus introduced to Europe and who is at the root of the creation of Natural Parks in the u.s., mentions that ‘his descriptions of Nature’s face and of the visible action of physical forces […] form a continuous comment on geographical principles.’ vincent 2010: 178

The fact that Marsh was exchanging letters with Reclus from 1868 to 1870, and prefacing an American edition of The Earth,9 suggests the environmental concern of Reclus’s works, which, according to John P. Clark, “expanded social ­geography beyond the conventional limits of the geographical into a ­comprehensive worldview” (2004: 15), and are at the same time “a powerful contribution to introducing this more ecological perspective into anarchistic thought” (19). Reclus’s works, he continues, have a great deal in common with social ecology. As far as “social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all 7 Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) was a biologist, sociologist, philanthropist and pioneering town planner who founded the Collège des Écossais in Montpellier. Linking space, education, society and evolution together, he advocated social town planning and nature conservation. 8 “On serait autorisé, au vu du caractère innovant et très actuel de la géographie de Reclus, de faire de lui un des pères de l’écologie moderne. Celle-ci, actuellement trop diffuse, sinon confuse sur le plan épistémologique, aurait intérêt à se rapprocher de la géographie à la fois scientifique et libertaire de Reclus. On parlera de voisinage, sinon d’affinité. […] Le grand géographe américain G. P. Marsh, auteur du livre Man and Nature (1864) que Reclus a fait connaître à l’Europe et qui est à l’origine de la création des parcs naturels aux Etats-Unis relève que ‘ses descriptions du visage de la nature et de l’action visible des forces physiques […] forment un commentaire ininterrompu des principes géographiques.’” 9 For a French translation of George P. Marsh’s introduction to the American edition of La Terre see Marsh 1999.

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of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social p ­ roblems” (Bookchin 2007: 19), no one can deny that Reclus was highly aware of this connection. He explains for instance that the development of ugly suburbs results from the greed of owners: Unfortunately this overflow of towns towards the outside always implies that the countryside is spoiled: not only do all sorts of rubbish clog the space comprised in between cities and fields, but worse still, real estate speculation takes hold of all the charming sites in the vicinity, divides them into rectangular lots, encloses them in monotonous fencing walls, and then builds pretentious, petty houses by the thousands. For the wanderer strolling along the muddy paths of that so-called countryside, ­nature is represented solely by clipped shrubs and flowerbeds, that are to be seen through the railings. reclus 2002b: 6510

Dunbar, however, notes that Reclus and Marsh “were on parallel courses, ­appreciating of each other’s work but not borrowing their essential ideas” (1978: 45). Whereas the geographer clearly advocated a (harmoniously) humanized Earth, the ecologist “stressed the destructive effects of man’s occupance more than his constructive effects” (44). As far as he was interested in man’s interactions with nature, Reclus was abreast of the ecology of his age, though not defending nature against man (he was for instance fighting neo-malthusianism). Whether he really was a forerunner of ecology, Giblin and Lacoste only took it as a hypothesis, whereas Clark asserts it, and Pelletier denies it, though “closeness” or “affinity” is obvious.

Universal Work and Holistic Vision

Reclus’s approach to nature is marked by the idea of freedom, as showed by the frequent use of the expression “libre nature” [free nature]. It also has a tinge of 10

“Malheureusement ce reflux des villes vers l’extérieur ne s’opère pas sans enlaidir les campagnes : non seulement les détritus de toute espèce encombrent l’espace intermédiaire compris entre les cités et les champs ; mais, chose plus grave encore, la spéculation s’empare de tous les sites charmants du voisinage, elle les divise en lots rectangulaires, les enclôt de murailles uniformes, puis y construit par centaines et par milliers des maisonnettes prétentieuses. Pour les promeneurs errant par les chemins boueux dans ces ­prétendues campagnes, la nature n’est représentée que par les arbustes taillés et les ­massifs de fleurs qu’on entrevoit à travers les grilles.”

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wholeness to it, which one may call universality or sense of cosmos, brought to mind by a deep need of communication with all lifeforms: “Even when on his own, the bearer of knowledge must shout and reveal his treasure to the birds in the air, to the stars, to all of nature” (1905–1908: vi, 460–462).11 Animals are often seen as models or partners, in which respect Reclus places himself in the Darwinian tradition that considers man as part of a continuum which involves them, as in this note about China: In many a river of the inner regions, the free alliance—that treats man and bird on equal grounds—has not been violated yet in favour of the stronger. Also, leagues have frequently been agreed upon, not for food, but for defence, notably against snakes.12 (1905–1908: vi, 155) “L’Homme et la Nature—De l’action humaine sur la géographie physique,” a  review of Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh (1864), which Reclus wrote for the Revue des deux mondes, gives a list of endangered species and environmental risks to which the planet was already exposed. This essay bears testimony to a kind of cosmic awareness in Reclus’s mind, as he advocates ­nature preservation: Amongst the races of birds the extinction of which man must undoubtedly blame himself for, one must mention the Alca impennis from the Faroe Islands, the dodo of Mauritius, the Reunion Ibis, the Madagascar Æpyornis, the Dinorsis of New Zealand. Besides, the disastrous consequences of the annual slaughtering of birds in hunting countries are a matter of fact. Owing to the inane intervention of Man, the tribes of ­insects, ants, termites, locusts are set free from the birds that waged war on them, and increase in number to the point of becoming in their turn genuine geographical agents. reclus 1864: 76713

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“Même seul, il faut que le porteur de la connaissance crie son trésor aux oiseaux de l’espace, aux astres, à la nature entière.” “En mainte rivière de l’intérieur, l’alliance libre — parts égales entre l’homme et l’oiseau — n’a pas encore été violée au profit du plus fort. Des ligues se sont aussi conclues fréquemment, non pour la nourriture, mais pour la défense, notamment contre les serpents.” “Parmi les races d’oiseaux dont l’homme doit sans doute se reprocher aussi l’extinction, il faut citer l’alca impennis des îles Feroë, le dodo de Maurice, le solitaire de la Réunion, l’æpyornis de Madagascar, les dinorsis de la Nouvelle-Zélande. En outre, on connaît les résultats déplorables que la tuerie annuelle des oiseaux a produits dans tous les pays de chasse. Délivrés, grâce à l’intervention insensée de l’homme, des oiseaux qui leur faisaient

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One notes the ecological reasoning of this text, delineating the impact of individual evolutions within the whole habitat. What Reclus calls “agent géographique” is in fact an ecological agent, which suggests how his conception of geography was framed by ecology. Many things have been said about Reclus’s vegetarianism and opposition to meat-eating, whose essential link with his anarchistic thought probably lies in his fight against all forms of domination. First published in Le Magazine international in 1897, the essay “La grande famille”—a masterpiece of Reclus’s ethno-geography, using references to other cultural eras than Greek or JudaeoChristian—presents alternative possibilities of living with animals: Whereas we now think of education and domestication as a form of subduing when it comes to beasts, primitive man envisaged those as brotherly association. He regarded these living beings as companions, not as ­servants, and indeed beasts–dogs, birds, snakes–had come towards him in cases of shared distress, especially at times of floods and thunderstorms. reclus 2002c: 13114

Let us consider what the anarchist Johan Most wrote about his encounter with Reclus in New York: “His eyes penetrate the universe and give one the feeling that one is, in the struggle for the emancipation of the workers, in unity and harmony with cosmic forces” (Ramus 1927: 124–125). “His spirit of nondomination,” Clark adds, “extended beyond human beings to all other creatures and, indeed, to nature as a whole” (2004: 13). Thinking about the “infinite pantheism” that “perceives an immense solidarity between all that lives” (Rothen 1927: 145), I would like to add that the holistic perspective does not necessarily imply obscurantism or religion (as feared by some scientific readers). Reclus was indeed a protestant—his father was a minister—and even studied theology in Montauban with his brother Élie, but he literally escaped from school and clearly renounced religion as he became an anarchist, eventually writing anticlerical essays. In spite of this, one might notice, in his prophetic tone and pantheistic sentiment of nature, remains of secularized natural theology.

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la guerre, les tribus des insectes, fourmis, termites, sauterelles s’accroissent en nombre de manière à devenir, elles aussi, de véritables agents géographiques.” “Tandis qu’à l’égard des bêtes nous parlons aujourd’hui d’éducation ou de domestication dans le sens d’asservissement, le primitif pensait fraternellement à l’association. Il voyait dans ces êtres vivants des compagnons et pas des serviteurs, et en effet les bêtes — chiens, oiseaux, serpents — étaient venues au-devant de lui dans des cas de commune détresse, surtout aux temps d’orage et d’inondation.”

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Reclus, furthermore, shares Thoreau’s Humboldtian “rational holism” (Walls 1995: 60–70), which combines globally extended care and plural approach (consciously following Humboldt, Reclus is usually writing from a geographical, historical, sociological and anthropological standpoint). Reclus is holistic for at least two reasons: he combines diverse points of view and he praises “solidarity” between man and the Earth, as in this passage from “L’Homme et la Nature” (1864: 762): A Humboldt, a Ritter, a Guyot have all established by their works the solidarity of Man and Earth. The idea at the root of the inspiration of the famed author of the Erdkunde as he was composing his great encyclo­ pædia on his own, the finest geographical monument of all time, is that the Earth is the body of Mankind, and Mankind, in turn, is the soul of the Earth.15 “In a manner reminiscent of Carl Ritter, Reclus stressed the mystical bond between man and nature” (Dunbar 1978: 43). Reclus’s presumed mysticism is one of the most debated questions: how, some critics wonder, could an anarchist, a materialistic geographer, a scientist criticizing religion, remain a mystic? Let us remember that his father was a minister, and that he himself studied theology. If he distanced himself from religion, one can imagine that he did not turn his back on any sense of the Sacred, and that he did not choose materialism and class struggle against spirituality and nature-mysticism. Why then would he regard nature as the great educator? How would one explain his praise of preserved natural areas where men can rest and learn, far from the oppression inflicted by the different forms of power, as in this passage from an article published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1866? Therefore we may joyfully greet this generous passion that leads so many men—even, shall we say, the greatest—to roam the virgin forests, the marine beaches, the mountainous gorges, to visit nature in all places around the globe where it has preserved its primal beauty. One feels that, lest intellect and morale should dwindle and vanish, one must at all cost balance the vulgarity of so many awful and mediocre things which the narrow-minded identify as the expression of modern civilisation, by the 15

“[…] les Humboldt, les Ritter, les Guyot ont établi par leurs travaux la solidarité de la terre et de l’homme. L’idée-mère qui inspirait l’illustre auteur de l’Erdkunde lorsqu’il rédigeait à lui seul sa grande encyclopédie, le plus beau monument géographique des siècles, c’est que la terre est le corps de l’humanité, et que l’homme, à son tour, est l’âme de la terre.”

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sight of the greatest sceneries of the Earth. The direct study of nature and the contemplation of its phenomena become, for any complete man, one of the essential elements of education. (2002b: 66–67)16 The whole of Reclus’s works can be seen as reflecting a balance between ­scientific knowledge and a mystical sense of nature: Humboldt and Goethe were the godfathers of this duality—the double aspect of Elisée the rationalist scholar keen on the physics of the earth and at the same time the romantic lover of Man and Nature. Out of the ancient embers of a puritanical conscience that nothing could ever smother, a religion of man and the earth was rising, from which he would derive his beliefs and commitments. vincent 2010: 99

Reclus was of course thinking about social progress: the real center of his works is mankind. The originality of his philosophy, however, is the dialectical interaction of mankind with nature, so that each term is linked to the other. Thus, more than the distinct object of a comparison with nature, man is as “a part and parcel of Nature,” as Thoreau said in “Walking” (2007: 185), seen as continuous with and belonging to nature, by the effect of an analogical link with the mutual dependance of body and soul. It seems that I have become part of the surroundings; I feel as if I am one with the floating aquatic plants, one with the sand swept along the ­bottom, one with the current that sways my body. History of a river, English translation quoted by clark 2004: 2417

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“C’est donc avec joie qu’il nous faut saluer maintenant cette passion généreuse qui porte tant d’hommes, et, dirons-nous, les meilleurs, à parcourir les forêts vierges, les plages marines, les gorges des montagnes, à visiter la nature dans toutes les régions du globe où elle a gardé sa beauté première. On sent que, sous peine d’amoindrissement intellectuel et moral, il faut contre-balancer à tout prix par la vue des grandes scènes de la terre la vulgarité de tant de choses laides et médiocres où les esprits étroits voient le témoignage de la civilisation moderne. Il faut que l’étude directe de la nature et la contemplation de ses phénomènes deviennent pour tout homme complet un des éléments primordiaux de l’éducation […].” “Il me semble même que je suis devenu partie du milieu qui m’entoure, je me sens un avec les herbes flottantes, avec le sable cheminant sur le fond, avec le courant qui fait osciller mon corps…” (Reclus 1995: 137).

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If those lines are clearly inspired by the Romantic aesthetics of man’s merging into the whole of nature, we need to understand the Reclusian conception of man and the Earth as a dialectical one: man is naturally transforming the Earth, as the Earth determines him. As Clark specifies: Nature thus shapes humanity at the same time that humanity reshapes the natural world. While modern civilization has devoted much attention to the latter side of this dialectic, the power of humanity to transform ­nature, it has exhibited little concern for humanity’s moral responsibilities in its interaction with nature. (2004: 27) Reclus intends to describe this dialectic, without taking sides, hence the ­wavering as to whether he is an ecologist or not. In his eyes, artefacts are also naturalized as parts of the Earth, in which respect Reclus blamed neither cities, nor technique. This is a decisive point differentiating his proto-­ environmentalism from later deep ecology. In his discussion of the impact of man upon nature, he stressed not only the destructive effects, like his American contemporary George Perkins Marsh, but also the constructive efforts. Like his Christian mentor, Carl Ritter, ­Reclus thought of the Earth as the home of man, a place created for man’s use and enjoyment. Instead of always desecrating the Earth, man often improves it (Dunbar 1978: 42–43). In doing so, Reclus is rereading the biblical cosmology of human stewardship over the Earth, as seen in Genesis: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (i, 26) […] And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (ii, 15) In the eyes of the anarchist geographer, the part of mankind in this double narration of origins is to be interpreted rather as keeping stewardship than as “dominion.” He even praises partnership with animals in primitive societies, association, brotherhood and careful education.

Anthropocentric Care for Nature

Rather than an ecocentric or a biocentric perspective, it seems that Reclus ­developed an anthropocentric, but careful, approach to nature. He “expounds

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a theory of social progress in which human self-realization and the flourishing of the planet as a whole can finally be reconciled with one another” (Clark 2004: 20). There is little doubt concerning Reclus’s globally anthropocentric perspective, even within those of his works which are most penetrated by the romantic sense of nature: If one ever manages to use freshwater fish domestically to produce flesh in sufficient quantities for the nourishment of all, then of course it shall be an object of contentment since all inferior forms of life are devoted to the sustainment of human life; but then there will be no other possibility but to look back with nostalgia on the era when all these animals swam freely. (1995: 151)18 The geographer believes in progress and science, even if he dialectically couples progress with possible regress. Yet he did not remain attached to a purely anthropocentric perspective, as he wished “full unification of the civilized with the uncivilized.”19 I have already underlined his praise of man’s harmonious interaction with nature. As a matter of fact, he stressed interactions and dialectics: his philosophy is therefore not centered at all. So-called bio-centrism or eco-centrism is in fact a very problematic notion because it suggests that there is still a center of the universe, even though biocentrists claim the contrary. Clark makes Reclus a biocentric thinker: “What is striking about his viewpoint is the degree to which he could transcend many of the dominant ideas of his century in shifting from an entirely human-centered to a more earth-centered perspective” (2004: 23), which Pelletier diametrically contradicts: Not only Haeckel’s “ecology,” but Isidore Geoffroy’s “ethology” (1859), Saint-George Mivart’s “hexicology” (1880), E. Ray Lancaster’s “bionomics” (1889), without even mentioning Thomas Huxley’s “physiography,” which he appreciates but also criticises alongside Kropotkin, all these disciplines claiming novelty and heralded by neologisms must have sounded too naturalistic to Reclus, too oriented in one direction detrimental to human dynamics, too remote from his position which n ­ owadays 18

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“Si jamais on arrive à domestiquer complètement les poissons d’eau douce et à manufacturer ainsi de la chair à volonté pour l’alimentation publique, certes il faudra s’en réjouir, puisque toutes les vies inférieures sont encore employées à sustenter la vie de l’homme; mais on ne pourra s’empêcher de regretter le temps où tous ces animaux nageaient en liberté.” “l’union plénière du civilisé avec le sauvage” (1905–1908: vi, 538).

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would be termed “anthropocentric,” but which he himself named “social.” (2009: 113–114) However, long before these categories were put up against each other, he was considering points of partition between biocentrism and anthropocentrism, as we can see in this excerpt from his 1895 lecture entitled “L’Anarchie,” even though it was in a context which is more political than ecological: It is indeed the struggle against all official powers that distinguishes us essentially: each individuality seems, to our eyes, to be the center of the universe, and each has the same right to fulfillment, without the intervention of a power that rules it, rebukes it, or castigates it. (2009: 14)20 What is at stake in this debate about the object that was at the center of his geography, is nothing less than a possible partisan use of Reclus, either by radical ecology, or by town and country planning—the former making him a forerunner of deep ecology though it may be an anachronism, and the latter seeing him as a mere proponent of human growth and power. As nature’s conscience, man only remains the real center of Reclus’s cosmology so long as he pays ­attention to and proves concerned with other species. Reclus establishes the tenets of what was to become ecocriticism, by removing man from its central position. As an anarchistic thinker, Reclus deconstructed social laws in order to replace them only by the laws of nature. According to him, mankind cannot achieve independence from nature. It can only get free in conforming to its laws, though it shall not give in and become passive. Human freedom is a ­dynamic process, but it always makes compromises with nature’s constraints. “Our freedom in our relationship to the Earth,” Reclus writes, “consists in ­acknowledging its laws so as to run our lives according to them.”21 Reclus’s ­environmentalism consists in finding this harmony or balance between natural laws and the human quest for freedom. In this respect it has nothing to do with biocentrism, but as far as it connects Man and Nature, it does not consist in pure anthropocentrism either. 20

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“C’est bien la lutte contre tout pouvoir officiel qui nous distingue essentiellement : chaque individualité nous paraît être le centre de l’univers, et chacune a les mêmes droits à son développement intégral, sans intervention d’un pouvoir qui la dirige, la morigène ou la châtie.” “Notre liberté, dans nos rapports avec la Terre, consiste à en reconnaître les lois pour y conformer notre existence” (1868: ii, 623).

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We can finally understand Reclus’s vegetarianism and concern for forests in this careful though anthropocentric perspective, and read him as a forerunner of both scientific ecology and political environmentalism. This geographer advocated nature conservation and abided by his principles in his way of life, being a militant vegetarian, just as he advocated social justice and struggled to uphold it: I have a distinct remembrance of horror at the sight of blood. One of the family sent me, plate in hand, to the village butcher, with the injunction to bring back some gory fragment or other. In all innocence I set out cheerfully to do as I was bid, and entered the yard where the slaughtermen were. I still remember this gloomy yard where terrifying men went to and fro with great knives, which they wiped on blood-besprinkled smocks. […] I remember one of them bleeding the animal slowly, so that blood fell drop by drop; for, in order to make really good black puddings, it appears essential that the victim should have suffered proportionately. She cried without ceasing, now and then uttering groans and sounds of despair almost human; it seemed like listening to a child. reclus, “Vegetarianism,” English translation quoted by dunbar 1978: 77–78

First of all, the narrator refers to experience, like Thoreau who, “having been [his] own butcher, and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, […] can speak from an unusually complete experience” (1971: 214). Secondly, he is drawing a comparison between animal and man, which, as we begin to think about it, becomes unbearable. Reclus also complained about pioneers cutting and burning forests as in Histoire d’une montagne, at a time when few people did care about their function in the ecological health of the earth: [When lumber-jacks] plan their cuts carefully, so as to leave a reserve of wood standing for the following years, humanity can only rejoice over the sight of the new wealth they produce. But, when they cut and destroy the whole forest at once, as though under some frenetic spell, may one not put a curse on them? (1998: 134)22 22

“[Si les bûcherons] règlent soigneusement leurs coupes, de manière à laisser sur pied des récoltes de bois pour les années suivantes et à développer dans le sol forestier la plus grande force de production possible, l’humanité n’a qu’à se féliciter des richesses ­nouvelles qu’ils procurent. Mais lorsqu’ils coupent, détruisent d’un coup la forêt tout ­entière, ­comme s’ils étaient saisis d’un accès de frénésie, n’est-on pas tenté de les maudire?”

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Reclus’s work might be read as cosmic poetry, as well as materialist theory. As we can see, his human geography is affective as well as scientific knowledge. Avoiding the words of the specialists and escaping at last from any closed ­category, he was a free thinker seeking after cosmos, an observer of man and nature’s dialectical evolution, a geographer, a writer and a poet at the same time. His description of the world stands “halfway in-between romantic solitude and collectivistic gregariousness” (Cornuault 2008: 49) and develops a­ ffinities with environmentalism. It articulates order and disorder, progress and regress, just as it seeks after unification of Man and Nature. Reclus is a thinker whom geography did not draw away from poetry, from romantic nature, toward a narrow scientism. Neither was he drawn away by materialism and atheism from the cosmological “sentiment of Nature.” Works Cited Bookchin, Murray. 2007. Social Ecology and Communalism. Oakland: AK Press. Brunhes, Jean. 1934. La Géographie humaine. Paris: Félix Alcan. Calvino, Italo. 1957. Adam, One Afternoon and Other Stories. English translation by ­Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright. London: Collins. ———. 1958. I Raconti. Turino: Einaudi. Chardak, Henriette. 1997. Élisée Reclus. L’homme qui aimait la Terre. Paris: Stock. Clark, John P. and Camille Martin (eds). 2004. Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Élisée Reclus. Oxford: Lexington Books. Cornuault, Joël. 1995. Élisée Reclus, géographe et poète. Gardonne: Fédérop. ———. 1999. Élisée Reclus, étonnant géographe. Périgueux: Fanlac. ———. 2008. Élisée Reclus, six études en géographie sensible. Paris: Isolato. Dunbar, Gary S. 1978. Élisée Reclus: Historian of Nature. Hamden, Connecticut: Shoe String Press. Fleming, Marie. 1988. The Geography of Freedom, the Odyssey of Élisée Reclus. New York, Montréal: Blackrose Books. Gonot, Roger. 1996. Élisée Reclus prophète de l’idéal anarchique. Pau: Covedi. Humboldt, Alexander von. 2004. Kosmos, Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung. Ed. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn. Lacoste, Yves. 1990. Paysages politiques, Braudel, Gracq, Reclus (191–233). Paris: Le livre de poche. Marsh, George Perkins. 1864. Man and Nature. London: S. Low, son and Marston. ———. 1999. “Introduction inédite à l’édition américaine de La Terre.” French translation by Joël Cornuault. Cahiers Élisée Reclus 20. Pelletier, Philippe. 1997. “John Clark analysant Élisée Reclus, ou comment prendre ses désirs pour des réalités” in Le monde libertaire (2–8th January 1997).

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———. 1998. “Géographe ou écologue ? Anarchiste ou écologiste ?” Itinéraire 14/15: 29–39. ———. 2009. Élisée Reclus, géographie et anarchie. Paris: Éditions du monde libertaire, and Saint-Georges d’Oléron: Éditions libertaires. Ramus, Pierre. 1927. “Elisée Reclus Recollections” in Ishill, Joseph (ed.) Élisée and Élie Reclus: In Memoriam. Berkeley Heights, New Jersey: The Oriole Press. Reclus, Élisée. 1864. “L’Homme et la Nature — De l’Action humaine sur la géographie physique” in Revue des deux mondes 54: 762–771. ———. 1868. La Terre. Description des phénomènes de la vie du globe. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1876–1894. Nouvelle Géographie Universelle. I–XIX. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1905–1908. L’Homme et la Terre. I–VI. Paris: Librairie Universelle. ———. 1995. Histoire d’un ruisseau. Arles: Actes Sud. ———. 1998a. Histoire d’une montagne. Arles: Actes Sud. ———. 1998b. L’Homme et la Terre (ed. Béatrice Giblin). Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2002a. Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes et autres textes d’Élisée Reclus (ed. Joël Cornuault). Charenton: Premières Pierres. ———. 2002b. “Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes” in Cornuault, Joël (ed.) Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes et autres textes. ­Charenton: Premières Pierres: 47–72. ———. 2002c. “La grande famille” in Cornuault, Joël (ed.) Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes et autres textes. Charenton: Premières Pierres: 129–136. ———. 2006. L’évolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique. Loverval, Belgium: Labor. ———. 2009. L’Anarchie. Paris: Mille et une Nuits. Reclus, Paul. 1964. Les frères Elie et Élisée Reclus ou du protestantisme à l’anarchisme. Paris: Amis d’Élisée Reclus. Rothen, Edward. 1927. “Elisée Reclus’ Optimism” in Ishill, Joseph (ed.) Elisée and Élie Reclus: In Memoriam. Berkeley Heights, New Jersey: The Oriole Press. Sarrazin, Hélène. 2004. Élisée Reclus ou la passion du monde. Paris: Sextant. Thoreau, Henry David. 1949. Journal (ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen). I–XIV. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Cambridge (Mass.): The Riverside Press. ———. 1971. Walden, or Life in the Woods (ed. J. Lyndon Shanley). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. Excursions (ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vidal de la Blache, Paul. 2008. Principes de géographie humaine. Paris: Archives K ­ aréline (facsimile). Vincent, Jean-Didier. 2010. Élisée Reclus. Géographe, anarchiste, écologiste. Paris: Robert Laffont. Walls, Laura D. 1995. Seeing New Worlds: the Concillience of Emersonian Wholes and Humboldtian Science in Henry David Thoreau. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

chapter 6

Ecological Awareness and the Democratic Consensus: John Muir’s Post-Mortem Radicalism Jean-Daniel Collomb Abstract Taking the late-nineteenth century nature writer and environmental activist John Muir as a case study, this article aims to highlight the difficulties any environmentalist is bound to run into when he or she enters the political arena in order to promote what has come to be called in the last quarter of the twentieth century an ecocentric ­perspective on human affairs and the natural world at large. John Muir presents the ­historian of American environmentalism with a paradox: on the one hand, ­modern-day radical environmentalists often claim him as one of their own but, on the other, Muir came across as a rather moderate figure in his lifetime. Therefore it is worth analyzing the gap that separates Muir’s early commitment to radically innovative ideas about nature and man’s proper relationship to it, and the conventional arguments he made use of to advocate the national park idea in the early twentieth century. Muir’s reluctance to set forth his most challenging views in the public sphere is all the more relevant as several other radical environmentalists followed in his footsteps throughout the decades that followed his death. Ultimately, then, this article is an attempt to explain why ecocentrism and political expediency seem mutually exclusive.

Keywords Anthropocentrism (anthropocentric) – Carson, Rachel – Christianity (Christian)  – Darwin, Charles – Deep ecology – ecology (ecological) – Emerson, Ralph Waldo  – ­environmentalism (environmental, environmentalist) – Forest Service – George, ­Henry – Haeckel, Ernst – Hetch Hetchy – Humboldt, Alexander von – Johnson, ­Robert Underwood – Lasch, Christopher – Leopold, Aldo – Milton, John – Muir, John  – Naess,  Arne – picturesque – radicalism (radical) – scientism – Sessions, George – ­Sierra Club – sublime – Thoreau, Henry David

This essay aims to highlight the quandaries any environmentalist thinker is bound to contend with when he or she enters the political arena in order to

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324831_007

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promote what has come to be called in the last quarter of the twentieth century an ecocentric perspective on human affairs and the natural world at large. John Muir will serve as a case study. Interestingly, although Muir is often looked up to by radical environmentalists today, he came across as a rather moderate figure in his lifetime. Therefore it is worth shedding some light on the gap that separates Muir’s early commitment to radical ideas about nature and man’s proper relationship to it, and the conventional arguments he made use of to promote the national parks. One may also wonder to what extent Muir’s choices are relevant to the history of American environmental activism at large. John Muir left his native Scotland to emigrate to America with his family in 1849, when he was only 11 years old. Daniel Muir, his father, was a Campbellite (he belonged to the Disciples of Christ, a fundamentalist offshoot of Scottish Presbyterianism). That he was a religious dogmatist can hardly be overstated. He enforced stringent discipline at home. As a teenager, John had to contend with his father’s obduracy in order to quench his insatiable thirst for knowledge. Indeed, Daniel Muir singled out the Bible as the only book worth reading and discarded all other books as pernicious tools liable to pervert a truly Christian soul. In this oppressive intellectual context, John artfully circumvented his father’s authority and managed to borrow books on all sorts of subjects from young neighbours living in more liberal households. Although he attended the university of Wisconsin for about 2 years, Muir was largely self-taught. Above all things, he proved to be very eclectic in his intellectual interests. He was mainly concerned with the natural sciences, whether it was geology, botany or glaciology—to name just a few of the scientific subjects he indulged in—but he also had an interest in literature and history. Muir was an insatiable reader of the Scottish romantic poet Robert Burns and highly rated John Milton’s Paradise Lost. He also revelled in what he saw as the poetical tone of the Bible. There is no question, however, that the lynchpin of his studies was scientific enquiry. In more ways than one, Muir was a peculiar sort of naturalist, typical of the early decades of the nineteenth century. He was, to quote Georges Canguilhem’s characterisation of Charles Darwin, a “scientist-in-thefield” (1994: 101). As suggested by their name, the so-called “scientists-inthe-field” were used to going out into nature so as to observe natural ­phenomena at close range and decipher the rational order which, they were sure, dominated the world. Typical of the ways of these naturalists was Muir’s repeated refusal to be confined to a study or a laboratory. He even refused to teach at mit where he was offered a position in the 1870s. To him science was worth practising only if one could experience nature at first hand. Muir’s intellectual role model was none other than Alexander von Humboldt. This should come as no surprise as Muir had been fascinated in his

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b­ oyhood by Humboldt’s account of his two-year expedition into the South American wilderness in the last years of the eighteenth century (1997b: 129). As noted earlier, Muir was interested in various scientific fields and refused to specialise in one particular subject. Drawing much of his inspiration from Humboldt, he was loath to dissociate scientific enquiry from the faculties of the imagination. This is why, even as the twentieth century began, he would have nothing to do with the new positivistic trend in science which was coming into its own, promoting the very perception of science he was reluctant to espouse. In that respect, Muir was averse to scientism, very much in the vein of Henry David Thoreau. The proponents of scientism usually argued for the application of a narrow form of rationalism to all realms of life, to the exclusion of any other approach, whether religious, moral or simply aesthetic. Although Thoreau died as early as 1862, several years before scientism became prominent in Western intellectual life, he still seized the opportunity to take issue with this new sort of epistemology in The Maine Woods. Observing a willo’-the-wisp he made it plain that there was more to it than a mere physical manifestation: .

A scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there […] Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself anyday [sic],—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them. Your so-called wise man goes trying to persuade himself that there is no entity there but himself and his traps, but it is a great deal easier to believe the truth. (1972: 181) Muir’s conception of science was very close to that of Thoreau. On no account should such comments be interpreted as a rejection of science. It was not about science per se that Muir and Thoreau had reservations. They merely disapproved of a practice of science which left no room for human emotions and aesthetics. Muir’s link to Thoreau can hardly be overstated since the former derived a good deal of his ideas about nature from the so-called Transcendentalists. Muir fondly admired Thoreau and Emerson because a rational and scientific streak was implicitly contained in their works. Their belief was that man ought not to

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be misled by the apparent profusion of natural phenomena. Muir’s career as a naturalist consisted in uncovering what Emerson once dubbed the method of nature, namely the perfect balance which nature invariably attains when left to her own devices. What most appealed to Muir about the transcendentalists was their constant emphasis upon holism. Emerson shared Humboldt’s rejection of the fragmented vision of nature put forward by some empiricists at the time. In taking Emerson’s holism on board, Muir was only upholding ideas that he had discovered thanks to Humboldt. Furthermore, Thoreau’s association of science and aesthetics, also a feature of humboldtian science, made it possible for Muir to present a strong case against scientism. Finally, one of the distinctive contributions of Transcendentalism to American life was a greater appreciation of wild nature which hitherto had been only regarded as an obstacle to be overcome or a pool of resources to tap. All of a sudden nature came to be seen, at least among part of American elite circles, as a place to be admired and to learn from, no mean feat in a culture long ­dedicated to utilitarianism (Nash 2001: 67). Long accustomed to solitary ventures into the Californian Sierra Nevada, where he settled after 1867, Muir decided to set his mind to furthering the ­preservation of at least part of American natural features from the 1890s onwards. In the face of the wanton destruction his contemporaries wrought on nature recklessly, Muir could no longer shun human presence as had formerly been his wont. He started to write books promoting the American national park system to bring his fellow Americans to an awareness, not only of the beauty of American wild landscapes, but also of their fragile state in a rapidly expanding economy in which people had always regarded nature as a means to an end, and natural resources as inexhaustible. In endeavouring to confront the all-pervasive materialism and the rampant utilitarianism he was up against, Muir came up with radically innovative ideas. Before going into details about Muir’s ecological perspective, a word need be said about the meaning and implications of the notion of ecology. During the Enlightenment, most natural philosophers, as they were then called, portrayed the cosmos as a self-setting clockwork mechanism. Isaac Newton had done much to advocate the notion that the Creator had constructed a perfectly harmonious clockwork mechanism and had then set it to work according to immutable laws. Once in motion, the cosmos abode by a mechanical order which reflected divine perfection. The nature of the Enlightenment knew no irregularity and followed an endlessly identical pattern. Such a world was so well-ordered that the Creator no longer had to interfere with it. The world could go on its circular and repetitive course. The eighteenth century thesis of

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natural order collapsed when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin’s theories brought about a profound redefinition of nature and of man’s place and status in it. Put simply, Darwin argued that, as time goes on, all living beings, animals, plants, insects and so forth, develop and change under the influence both of the natural setting they inhabit and of the other living beings with which they interact. Evolution, therefore, is an ongoing process of natural selection through which those living beings most capable of adapting to their natural habitat survive. Darwin’s findings discredited the vision of the cosmos as clockwork. Though Darwin’s nature is also in constant motion, it does not abide by a fixed and pre-ordained framework. The process of evolution is characterised by innovation rather than repetition. Muir was greatly impressed by The Origin of Species. Some passages of his book Our National Parks unmistakably echo Darwin’s approach in almost lyrical terms: “Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and ­flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another” (1991: 73). Muir’s rhetoric is one of unceasing creative change, pointing to the dynamic forces at work in nature. This environment in flux ushered in a perception of nature as oikos, the Greek for household and the root of the word ecology. Interestingly enough, Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who coined the term “ecology” in 1866 was a steadfast advocate of evolutionism. In more ways than one Darwinism can be regarded as a blueprint for ecological thinking. Since the process of evolution rests upon constant interactions between all living beings in a given habitat, a slight modification of a single natural element may spark off a chain reaction, resulting in unexpected consequences. Hence the need to take a ­general perspective on the natural environment, to treat it as a whole whose precarious balance hinges on the health of each one of its parts. Muir wholeheartedly endorsed the Darwinian outlook and can safely be regarded as one of the pioneers of American ecology alongside Henry ­David ­Thoreau and, more importantly still, George Perkins Marsh, who wrote Man and Nature in 1864: this book sought, in surprisingly ecological terms, to ­emphasise the long-term consequences of man’s destructive action on the environment. No doubt the science of ecology was only in its infancy and would really only come into its own in the second half of the twentieth century but it can hardly be denied that some of Muir’s reflections anticipated some of the trends of twentieth-century ecology. Chief among Muir’s ecological contributions to the American intellectual debate was his portrayal of nature as a whole made up of interrelated parts.

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Along with today’s environmentalists Muir shares an acute awareness of systemic dangers. Such a contribution was certainly very innovative on his part, although George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature is based upon a very similar principle. There is no doubt that Muir was familiar with Marsh’s work (Worster 2008: 236). A systemic approach to natural phenomena is commonly accepted today and one of the raisons d’être of twenty-first-century ecology. Muir’s approach to California’s forest fires certainly sheds light on the kind of systemic analysis he tended to favour. In California shepherds were quite accustomed to resorting to fire in order to clear forest lands for grazing, which infuriated Muir who bemoaned the massive damage caused thereby (1997a: 437). This, however, did not lead him to discard all forest fires as an evil to be stamped out. Very early on, Muir grasped the important function of forest fires in the economy of American forests (1997a: 431). The upshot was that it was necessary to make a distinction between natural fires, which could help regenerate forest soils, and man-made fires which destroyed the ecological balance of the forests. Here again, Muir appears to have been well ahead of his time as the officers of the u.s. Forest Service, well after Muir’s death, took the view that it was necessary to quell any sort of fire (Pyne 1999: 260). Another idea which was part of Muir’s proto-ecological ethos was the ­notion of the intrinsic value of all living beings, another consequence of Darwin’s ­evolutionism. After tearing apart the eighteenth-century idea of nature, Darwin went on to undermine one of the most well-entrenched Judeo-Christian beliefs, namely man’s special status in the Creation. As God’s chosen creatures, human beings set themselves apart from the rest of the Creation. The special status God had purportedly bestowed upon them allowed them to treat other living beings as inferiors and to subdue the wilderness in order to reclaim it and turn it into a garden. When Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, he did what he had hitherto been loath to do: he applied the evolutionary principle to all living beings, including man, seriously questioning the story of Genesis and putting an end to man’s special status. Darwin’s ideas had many far-reaching repercussions. Not only did evolutionism serve to rehabilitate much-maligned creatures like predators and ­insects, it also dented, in an irreversible manner, the central role Christianity had conferred upon man in the Creation. With all this Muir heartily agreed. “Lord man,” as he sarcastically calls him in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico (1998: 133), would now have to come down from his pedestal. He tirelessly repeated that all creatures had a stake in the health of the land. Each living being, animals, insects, plants, minerals even, had a part to play in the biosphere and their existence found its legitimacy in the precarious balance of the oikos. By way of consequence, all these living beings had value in and

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for themselves. Were man to fail to acknowledge this fact, he would inevitably come to grief. Muir’s attempt to rehabilitate predators bore witness to that fact. In A Thousand-Mile Walk, for example, Muir seeks to reverse the highly negative connotations attached to the alligator. Muir’s contemporaries were inclined to regard alligators as evil creatures to be wiped out. As such, alligators came to embody treachery and cruelty. Muir states that these creatures do belong in their natural habitat, regardless of man’s feelings (1998: 97–99). To Muir, man’s hate for alligators stemmed from a lack of knowledge in the ways of nature. Alligators, and predators in general, were not nuisances to be eliminated, he argued. They were in fact necessary to the cycles of natural life and to the equilibrium of the place into which they were born. Darwin made this point very clear. In a coherent move, Muir extended this proto-ecological rationale to insects and microscopic beings: “We all are only microscopic animalcula,” he daringly suggested (1998: 103). In that regard, it is fair to say that Muir anticipated Rachel Carson’s ecological plea on behalf of microscopic beings in her much-acclaimed Silent Spring, published in 1962, nearly a century after Muir’s walk through America. To conclude this account of Muir’s proto-ecology without making mention of his indictment of western anthropocentrism would be unfair. Muir’s scientific investigations prompted him to question the philosophical underpinnings of the society he lived in. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that materialism held sway in Muir’s America. In the main, Muir’s contemporaries derived their attitude towards nature from the Judeo-Christian tradition in which men were required to “grow and multiply” and turn the wilderness into a garden. Such an ethos left little room, if any, for the perception of nature as oikos. In the Judeo-Christian scheme of things, man was at the centre and nature was conceived of first as a wilderness to be subdued and set in order, then as a pool of resources to be exploited at will. As a continent blessed with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of land for the taking, America witnessed the triumph of an extreme form of utilitarianism. From the early days of the American republic, the federal government had stuck to the same kind of land policy, consisting in giving away land to private interests, whether they were companies or individual farmers. For most of the nineteenth century, American land policy boiled down to privatising the public domain (Allin 1992: 4–20) lest the pioneers should accuse their political representatives of seeking to revive the European feudal past in the New World where they had come to get the property they could not have in their homeland. Muir for one was desperate to dissociate himself from this frame of mind. Following Thoreau’s work, he strove to bring about a respectful attitude towards wild nature in a culture which had little time for it. Voicing the same

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concerns as today’s environmentalists, Muir dreaded the day when human economic expansion would know no territorial boundaries. He was deliberately straying away from the spirit of the age when he urged for an attitude of restraint on the part of his contemporaries: […] even of the land only a small portion is free to man, and if he, among other journeys on forbidden paths, ventures among the ice lands and hot lands, or up in the air in balloon bubbles, or on the ocean in ships, or down into it a little way in smothering diving-bells—in all such small adventures man is admonished and often punished in ways which clearly show him that he is in places for which, to use an approved phrase, he was never designed. (1998: 179) Man does not belong everywhere. There are some places he should not settle and develop. * All this marks Muir out as a radical thinker, even by twenty-first-century standards. His reflections amounted to a radical departure from the American consensus. And yet, when he died in 1914, Muir was not known as a radical figure. As a rule, he was simply labelled as a nature lover. The ideas I have just presented hardly elicited any interest among the general public. In fact Muir very seldom set them forth at the time. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico, the journal of his foray into the American continent, is a case in point. By far Muir’s most radical and innovative work, it was published posthumously, in 1916, 49 years after the naturalist had written it. What is more, many of his proto-ecological propositions feature in his diaries and in his personal notes, most notably his defence of predators and his most unequivocal questionings of the American consensus. Muir’s proto-ecology appears in an adulterated and marginal form in the books and articles published in his lifetime. So the question arises: why did he choose to conceal his radical ideas from the general public when he was alive? It was the editor of the Century Magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, who convinced Muir to become a writer and to act politically in order to promote wilderness preservation and the national parks. From the 1890s onwards Muir did his utmost to advocate tourism and recreation. To that purpose, he wrote books and articles, gave public addresses, founded the Sierra Club, resorted to political lobbying and so forth—all this on behalf of the national park system. When he began his political career, Muir quickly came to the realisation that

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if he did not take a pragmatic approach to the task at hand, he would fail to make himself heard. Muir actually disliked politics. To him, politics was nothing but a necessary evil in the larger scheme of preservation. He was a staunch individualist who distrusted democracy and who was mostly preoccupied by the contemplation of the natural world, whether from an aesthetic or rational point of view. So it was only reluctantly that he entered the political arena. He was well aware that talk about the equality of all living beings and the intrinsic value of nature, regardless of man’s needs, would elicit contempt, or indifference at best, on the part of his contemporaries. His was a complicated task to say the least. Consequently Muir set modest goals for himself. Above all things, he sought to firm up the nascent national park system, which numbered only a few parks in the early nineteenth century. His role would also consist in getting a nation of entrepreneurs partial to a ruthless exploitation of nature to cast a more ­favourable eye on the American wilderness. The way he went about doing this forced him to stray away from his proto-ecological principles. Muir saw that, as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the mentalities of his f­ ellow Americans as regards nature were undergoing a gradual change. When the closing of the American frontier was made official in 1890, American natural resources no longer looked as inexhaustible as American citizens had been apt to believe in the first place. Moreover, after the Civil War, the United States had gone industrial and urban. The young republic had been through a transition from a decentralised and mainly rural economy composed of small-sized businesses, independent farmers and artisans to a large-scale industrial nation, more mechanised and more urban. The stupendous economic take-off which occurred after 1865 was an event of paramount importance. To paraphrase political economist Henry George, with the benefits of economic progress came poverty and urban squalor. The fact of the matter was that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, more and more American people fretted under an overcrowded and exacting social environment. Such a constraining social ­atmosphere gave rise to a sort of wilderness cult which Peter J. Schmitt has described (Schmitt 1990: 19). More and more city parks were being built on the pattern of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York City. John Muir saw his opportunity. He endeavoured to cater to the needs of a society which increasingly looked to nature for recreation and rejuvenation. He also intended to make the most of the profound shift in values which was then taking place from an emphasis on production to a priority given to consumption. In a country where the work ethic of the puritans had once ruled supreme, production was progressively being superseded by consumption (Cotkin 1992: 123). The ever increasing number of visitors to the national parks

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testified to this trend. So much so that when Muir put pen to paper he would always bear in mind the expectations of his urban middle-class readers. Central to his writings were the motifs of the sublime and the picturesque. Muir’s version of the sublime, which was a good deal more benign than the sombre kind of sublime Edmund Burke had depicted in his philosophical enquiry, played on the imagination of his readers by setting forth dazzling landscapes which bore the hallmark of divine grandeur. The picturesque, an artistic convention Muir used less frequently, forced nature to conform to an already existing set of aesthetic expectations. This was all very well but this sort of passages, and there were many, bore ­little resemblance to Muir’s proto-ecological ethos. Although it shed an ­appealing light on American landscapes, Muir’s sublime also helped foster a highly anthropocentric view of nature. A picturesque scenery was arguably a far cry from the oikos. As a matter of fact it turned nature into a spectacle for the exclusive pleasure of men. Nature could hardly be examined and comprehended on her own terms by the ordinary tourists. Not only did the artistic conventions of the sublime and the picturesque not mention the Darwinian equality of species or the intrinsic value of living beings, they also sometimes marginalised rational enquiry as a worthwhile activity to pursue in nature. The stress was laid on aesthetic sensitivity rather than on rational analysis. After 1900, Muir seems to have accepted that he had to compromise on ­several of his principles. He did not seem to anticipate the overcrowding of ­national parks. When he died, there were already 335 000 visitors a year in American national parks (Schmitt 1990: 155). In his book entitled The Yosemite, Muir refuses to criticise the tourists who leave litter in their wake in some parts of the park (2003: 171). Very early on he also upheld the authorisation of cars within the precinct of Yosemite national park. He declared himself to be in favour of this in 1891, 24 years before it was officially accepted (Muir 1988: 202). Today, Muir’s name is usually attached to the American preservationist m ­ ovement. Interestingly there is no denying that the management of the national parks in the early twentieth century—before and after the creation of the National Park Service in 191—was a far cry from Muir’s proto-ecology: shows were put on for tourists in which bears were encouraged to eat litter, fishes were introduced into the rivers to satisfy the anglers, insects which fostered the growth of supposedly ugly-looking trees were eradicated (Sellars 1997: 69–90). Muir chose not to take a stand against these dubious activities, clearly out of step with his own inclinations. In the end, he turned out to be a very successful writer. Nevertheless, the John Muir who was so popular during the progressive era was no ecologist. His literary career should give us pause for it bears ­testimony to the difficulty of conveying a genuinely ecological

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­ essage to a wide audience in the context of a democratic regime and of a m highly ­materialistic culture. In  other words, the case of John Muir seems to suggest that the political prospects of radical environmentalism are limited to say the least. The question is thus the following: is it possible to make so radical a notion as the intrinsic value of all living beings palatable to the majority? Towards the end of his life Muir seems to have answered by the negative. Neil Evernden thinks likewise: Those who raise […] questions [of a truly ecological sort] regularly face charges of irrelevance or impracticality, for it is commonly expected that all worthwhile studies are to end with the optimistic provision of a practical solution. Failure to do so ensures dismissal to the “ivory tower” ­category of literature. evernden 1992: x

And this was something Muir was desperate to avoid. He had no intention of becoming politically impotent. There is a wealth of other examples of such quandaries in the history of American environmentalism. A Sand County A ­ lmanach, Aldo Leopold’s ground-breaking ecological work in which he coined the notion of land-community and conceptualised the land ethics, was published posthumously, in 1949. In a similar way, the American biologist Rachel Carson, writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, came under the same kind of pressure. Although Silent Spring was arguably more straightforward and more comprehensively ecological than any books Muir lived to publish, Carson took great care not to displease her readership. Her ecological message was partly adulterated in the process, most remarkably when Marie Rodell, her editor, persuaded her to change the title of her book from The War against Nature to Silent Spring, arguably a more conciliatory title (Lear 1997: 386). All these writers had to accommodate western anthropocentrism and utilitarianism at some point. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that some critics have underscored the blatant limitations of Muir’s public strategy. For instance, Yves Figueiredo argues convincingly that Muir’s enthusiastic promotion of national parks did not do justice to his ecological views, since science played virtually no role in the creation of the park system. So much so that the arguments Muir set forth during the progressive era glossed over the innovative character of his perception of nature (Figueiredo 2005: 589). Although Figueiredo’s assessment is accurate, this is not the whole story. Actually Muir’s radical vision had not been vain since it was to be revived much later, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

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In point of fact, when dealing with Muir’s intellectual heritage, one may a­ rgue that his was a post-mortem radicalism. Indeed, the environmental movement which came into existence after the 1950s gave Muir’s radical views a new lease on life. The way the so-called Deep Ecologists think and write about John Muir is a case in point. The expression Deep Ecology was coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973. The ideas floated by Arne Naess can be regarded as an ecological continuation of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. Deep ecology is radical ecology par excellence. Naess pits deep ecology against conservationism which he dismisses as shallow (2003: 27). Naess’s brand of ecology marks a radical departure from western anthropocentrism on to a full-fledged biocentric vision. Michael Tobias, an American Deep Ecologist, makes it plain that the human condition is of far less significance and importance than the integrity of the biosphere as a whole: Deep Ecology concerns those personal moods, values, aesthetic and philosophical convictions which serve no necessarily utilitarian, nor rational end. By definition their sole justification rests upon the goodness, balance, truth and beauty of the natural world, and of a human being’s biological and psychological need to be fully integrated within it. tobias 1984: vii

The Deep Ecologists, in the words of George Sessions, call for “a total reorientation of the thrust of Western culture” (Tobias: 29–30). Industrial activity, consumption, technical progress, tourism, all come in for much criticism. The equality of all living beings and their interrelatedness form the cornerstone of Deep Ecology. Naess and his American followers all regard John Muir as one of the most prominent forerunners of Deep Ecology, in line with a radical tradition that subverts the Western consensus on nature. Arne Naess and George Sessions quote Muir on several occasions, presenting him in a highly favourable light (Tobias 1984: 38; Naess 2003: 33). So where does the truth lie? There is no ­gainsaying that many parallels can be drawn between John Muir’s radicalism and Deep Ecology. In an article entitled “Identification as a Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes,” Naess draws a list of the principles which define his thinking: Animals have value in themselves, not only as resources for humans. Animals have a right to live even if of no use to humans. We have no right to destroy the natural features of this planet. Nature does not belong to man.

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Nature is worth defending, whatever the fate of humans. A wilderness area has a value independent of whether humans have access to it. tobias 1984: 269

Right until the end of his life, Muir would have agreed with such statements because they reflect his idea of nature and man’s ideal place in it. Even though the writer/naturalist chose to take a moderate path in his lifetime, there is no doubt that his radicalism came back to the surface half a century later. Of course the Deep Ecologists’ reading of Muir’s life and work is biased and ­partial to a high degree. Unsurprisingly, the only book they quote is A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico, which Muir preferred not to publish. Naess and Sessions make no mention of the compromises Muir had to make in order to further the preservationist cause. In fact, they decide to ignore the complexities which are consubstantial to any effort to bring across ecological ideas in a modern, industrial liberal democracy where the use of natural resources and the consumption of manufactured goods are in the forefront. The dual nature of Muir’s work testifies to the obstacles any environmentalist is liable to be confronted with when trying to resist the anthropocentric trend in a highly utilitarian culture. Today as yesterday, making genuinely ecological ideas palatable in the democratic debate is far from a foregone conclusion. Muir’s was the mind of a truly radical environmentalist. And yet, he seldom acted like one. Even during the Hetch Hetchy controversy—when the Sierra Club and other associations had fought to prevent a dam from being built within Yosemite park—Muir had only emphasized the aesthetic value of Hetch Hetchy valley and suggested alternative sites where the dam could be built. Never was the intrinsic value of the valley and of the living beings it contained mentioned at any point. Muir and the Sierra Club put up a good fight and they did defy all odds in delaying the project for several years but eventually to no avail. Moderation and compromise, Muir learnt towards the end of his life, could work wonders but they were helpless when faced with the juggernaut of economic development and technical progress. The fact remained: in order to achieve political success—and on several occasions he did achieve remarkable political success—John Muir had not lived up to his radical ideas. In his lifetime he had been a radical environmentalist in hiding. Can it be then that in a highly anthropocentric culture whose hopes are mainly vested in the promise of man’s control of his natural environment through the use of science and technology, an environmentalist willing to make a difference should be content with piecemeal improvements and ­imperfect achievements? The Deep Ecologists appear to think otherwise. They

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tend to dismiss the compromises struck by some environmental organisations as vain and self-defeating efforts. Unlike Muir and Leopold, their role models, they have no compunction in taking a radical path. The main objectives of their writings and actions are the deconstruction of western anthropocentrism and the advent of an ecocentric ethos. No doubt John Muir would have concurred. But one may wonder about the potentialities of radical environmentalism at the very moment when western societies are busy indulging in what Christopher Lasch once referred to as “the culture of narcissism,” namely a state of society driven by a compulsive urge to master nature through the use of ­technology in order to bend it to human desires and refuse the limitations imposed on human action by nature and life itself (Lasch 1991: 243–244). Put simply, environmental radicals demand nothing short of a complete transformation of American contemporary culture, which appears extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future. Works Cited Allin, Craig. 1992 [1982]. The Politics of Wilderness Preservation. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. Canguilhem, Georges. 1994 [1968]. Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie. Paris: Vrin. Carson, Rachel. 2000 [1962]. Silent Spring. London: Penguin. Cotkin, George. 1992. Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture 1880–1900. New York: Twayne. Darwin, Charles. 1957. The Darwin Reader (ed. Marston Bates and Philip S. Humprey). London: Macmillan. Evernden, Neil. 1992. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Figueiredo, Yves. 2005. Du Monumentalisme à l’écologie: politique et esthétique de la nature en Californie, 1864–1916, thèse de doctorat présentée à l’université Paris VII, 2005. Lasch, Christopher. 1991 [1979]. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton. Lear, Linda. 1997. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Leopold, Aldo. 1966 [1949]. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine. Marsh, George Perkins. 2003 [1864]. Man and Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Muir, John. 1988 [1968]. South of Yosemite: Selected Writings of John Muir. Ed. Frederick R. Gunsky. Berkeley: Wilderness Press. ———. 1991 [1901]. Our National Parks. San Francisco: Sierra Club. ———. 1997a [1894]. The Mountains of California in Nature Writings (ed. William Cronon). New York: The Library of America. ———. 1997b [1913]. The Story of my Boyhood and Youth Nature Writings in Nature Writings (ed. William Cronon). New York: The Library of America. ———. 1998 [1916] A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Boston: Mariner Books. ———. 2003 [1912]. The Yosemite. New York: The Modern Library. Naess, Arne. 2003 [1989]. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (tr. David Rothenberg). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nash, Roderick Frazier. 2001 [1967]. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, Yale University Press. Pyne, Stephen. 1999 [1982]. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire in America. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Schmitt, Peter. 1990 [1969]. Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sellars, Richard West. 1997. Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. New ­Haven: Yale University Press. Thoreau, Henry David. 1972 [1864]. The Maine Woods (ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tobias, Michael. 1984. Deep Ecology (ed. Michael Tobias). San Diego: Avant Books. Von Humboldt, Alexander. 1961 [1807]. Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent fait en 1799 et 1800 par Alexandre de Humboldt et Aimé Bonpland. Paris: Club des libraires de France. Worster, Donald. 2008. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. New York: Oxford University Press.

chapter 7

John C. Van Dyke, The Desert (1901): Under the Shadow of the Artificial Desert Michel Granger Abstract A librarian, a professor of art history at Rutgers College and an art critic, John C. Van Dyke was an unlikely writer of environmental literature, but he loved nature, especially the American Southwest, and wrote a famous book devoted to the beauty of arid landscapes, an impassioned poetic celebration of the aesthetic aspects of these barren regions. His rhapsody was meant to educate American readers at the turn of the century, to open their eyes, to make them perceive the beauty of these apparently worthless expanses of rocks and sand. Van Dyke came to realize that the economic forces at work in the exploitation of natural resources threatened this fragile environment, that greedy human activity might soon destroy these precious landscapes and their sparse wild life. Without being a militant environmentalist, he was worried that this still remaining wilderness would be transformed into an “artificial desert.” It is significant that his compelling plea was dedicated to Andrew Carnegie, in the hope that the heightened awareness the book was intended to develop would lead this wealthy industrialist and art collector to support the protection of these deserts.

Keywords Abbey, Edward – aesthetic sense – beauty – Carnegie, Andrew – desert – ­environment – environmental literature – exploitation of nature – landscape – McKibben, Bill – ­nature lover – preservation of wild nature – reclamation of deserts – Sonoran Desert – Thoreau, Henry D – Van Dyke, John C – wilderness

Knowing that John C. Van Dyke (1856–1932) was a librarian at the Garner A. Sage Library of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, a professor of art history at Rutgers College and a prominent art critic who specialized in Rembrandt’s paintings, one might at first wonder whether it is relevant to discuss him in relation to environmental awareness. But one should not forget that he

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also referred to himself as a “lover”1 of the deserts of the American Southwest and that he is now remembered as the author of a book, The Desert. Further Studies in Natural Appearances, published in 1901, a highly regarded classic of what is usually considered to be an example of nature writing, devoted to drawing attention to the fascinating beauty of arid lands whose vistas, dunes, mesas and sunsets merit our appreciation.2 Ultimately his attempt to heighten the Americans’ consciousness of the beauty of the Southwest deserts was a plea for their preservation. His famous book, acknowledged as an important precursor by Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire (“Episodes and Visions”), remained in print during most of the twentieth century and contributed to modifying the American perception of the dry, barren regions of the United States. Surprisingly enough, not a single excerpt from his book was included in Bill McKibben’s anthology of environmental writing (2008), even though The Desert adopted an environmental perspective. Van Dyke’s enthusiastic description of the dry Southwest of the United States employs a formulation which is reminiscent of the late nineteenth-century discourse on the duty of wilderness preservation and the necessity for the creation of national parks: “The deserts should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing-spaces of the west and should be preserved forever” (59). The omission from McKibben’s collection of short extracts may be due to the fact that Van Dyke was not interested only in wild nature and that he was not a militant environmentalist; perhaps also, it has to do with the fact that he is not considered to be a “politically correct” writer by some critics of the late twentieth century, since they view him as an aristocrat, a friend of millionaires, industrialists and art collectors, to the point that he seems an unlikely nature lover, incapable of “roughing it.” However, his artistic interests, his training and his job, made him sensitive to the aesthetic aspects of the wilderness—the changing quality of light, the particular colors, the “appearances” of the desert3 and the illusions created by the special qualities of this often uninviting world. The book he finally wrote at the turn of the century was a rhapsody on the desert, an impassioned celebration to 1 “[The desert] never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover” (Van Dyke 1999: xxi). ­Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent parenthetical references are to Van Dyke 1999. For a discussion of this “love story” with the American deserts, see Sylvie Mathé (1991). 2 Its popularity led Charles Scribner’s to publish an illustrated edition in 1918 with photographs by J. Smeaton Chase. 3 He also wrote books about other landscapes: Nature for Its Own Sake: First Studies in Natural Appearances (1898); The Opal Sea: Continued Studies in Impressions and Appearances (1906); The Mountain: Renewed Studies in Impressions and Appearances (1916); The Open Space:­ ­Incidents of Nights and Days under the Blue Sky (1922); The Meadows: Familiar Studies of the Commonplace (1926).

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­encourage his readers to realize the exceptional value of these barren landscapes, even though they were unproductive and, according to him, should remain so. When most Americans thought they benefited only from the exploitation of nature, he tried to raise their awareness concerning the irreplaceable “value” of these apparently worthless lands because of their raw beauty. He aligned himself with the tradition of Thoreau who extolled immersion in Nature and rejected the American utilitarian credo. Van Dyke realized that the economic forces at work in the late nineteenth century threatened this fragile environment, that greedy human activity might destroy these precious landscapes and their wildlife. He wanted the Colorado, Mojave and Sonoran deserts to preserve their special quality of light, their pure air and sunlight, so that they would be able to avoid the artificial, chemical-like colors he had observed in such cities as Venice, Cairo or Constantinople (xix). He had heard that some businessmen planned to reclaim portions of deserts, to irrigate them so that these expanses would become productive farmlands. He worried that mining and railroads too would soon transform the wild Southwest into an “artificial desert—the desert made by the tramp of human feet” (xviii). This article would like to suggest that Van Dyke’s book about “natural ­appearances” was written under the threatening shadow of this impending “artificial desert.” The threat that he became aware of around 1900 gave his passionate descriptions their sense of urgency and their stridency.

The Threat of Destruction

Writing a few years after the Americans had been told that the Frontier was closed and that most of western wilderness had begun to be sparsely populated, Van Dyke was very much aware of the economic and technological changes that might result in the devastation of the desert. The threat of destruction— which is an essential component of environmental writing—may well have been his major motivation for writing such a book before it was too late. It is mentioned on several occasions, notably in the preface where he explains what sort of a book the reader has in his hands. Van Dyke identifies “the destroyers,” “the great annihilator”: “What monstrous folly, think you, ever led Nature to create her one great enemy—man!” (xvii–xviii). He reminds his readers of the fact that “[…] with the coming of civilization the grasses and the wild flowers perish, the forest falls and its place is taken by brambles, the mountains are blasted in the search for minerals, the plains are broken by the plow and the soil is gradually washed into the rivers” (xviii). Caring only about

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money, the “‘practical men’ […] have stripped the land of its robes of beauty, and what have they given in its place? Weeds, wire fences, oil-derricks, board shanties and board towns–things that not even a ‘practical man’ can do less than curse at” (61). Van Dyke identifies many causes for the destruction of the wild West, ranging from the excessive grazing by herds of cattle that displace antelopes to the radical clear-cutting of forests or hydraulic mining. Van Dyke worries that the project of desert reclamation would modify the climate and threaten the supply of hot dry air that is the source of health provided by the “breathing-spaces of the west” (59). Modern hunting is also mentioned as destructive of wild life: “[…] Nature in her economy never reckoned with the magazine rifle nor the greed of the individual who calls himself a sportsman” (165). This may well have been a case of Nature meeting the limits of its adaptive capacity. In his explicit criticism of the exploitation of Nature which would result in the likely extinction of some species, together with the disappearance of beautiful wild landscapes, Van Dyke knew that he stood little chance of ever being listened to at the time, because “the great enemy,” “the practical men” whose “main affair of life is to get the dollar,” had more power than ever over the government and public opinion; he expected that their mainstream utilitarian views would ultimately have the upper hand in America: “To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain.” Nevertheless, he optimistically spoke in defense of “[t]he aesthetic sense—the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination” (60), at the same time as he made a plea for the protection of the deserts. Van Dyke was not trained as a naturalist with scientific interests, nor was he a militant environmentalist,4 and he probably was somewhat ambivalent about the danger of destruction. He admired Nature’s capacity of endurance and resilience far too much to really contemplate the possibility that the worst consequences might happen: his sense of wonder mitigated his fears that the desert might lose its beauty completely. He devoted many pages to explain how the wonderful desert fauna and flora had adopted many fascinating strategies to resist heat and to protect themselves from predators. Nature had thus far provided fertility and multiplicity to help species survive hostile climate conditions (190); it might possibly develop other unexpected means of survival. 4 He does not seem to have been aware of the proposed Hetch Hetchy Dam, which, as early as 1882, the city of San Francisco wanted to build in order to have access to a greater supply of water and increase its possibilities of welcoming an enlarged population and, therefore, enhance the city’s potential for population growth. This valley was included in Yosemite Park in 1890 (see Runte 1997: 78–80).

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The Beauty of the Desert

Van Dyke’s interest in art explains the fact that his approach to the desert was focused on its precious aesthetic qualities: its bewildering beauty fascinated him. He felt it necessary to defend the expression of this “aesthetic sense” which, he said, “is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking” (60). He extolled the beauty of the desert enthusiastically, for example, in his emphatic reference to the quality of sunlight: That beam of light! Was there ever anything so beautiful! How it flashes its color through shadow, how it gilds the tops of the mountains and gleams white on the dunes of the desert! In any land what is there more glorious than sunlight! Even here in the desert, where it falls fierce and hot as a rain of meteors, it is the one supreme beauty to which all things pay allegiance. (4) Dozens of pages are devoted to the systematic description of the various c­ omponents of the xeric landscape in an attempt to understand its essence. The book is organized thematically: for example, Chapter v is entitled “Light, Air, and Color.” There, Van Dyke methodically studies colors, the special ­nature of the colored air and the changes in the quality of light during the day (­85–86). In this effort to abstract what is typical of this “lean and gaunt” life (155), he looks for criteria of beauty—like the “rhythmical and flowing” forms of dunes (53) or the admirable graceful movements of the coyote “slip[ping] through patches of cactus” (173). He realizes that most of this desert beauty has little to do with what is ­ordinarily considered to be aesthetically pleasing: “There is not a thing about it that is ‘pretty,’ and not a spot upon it that is ‘picturesque’ in any Berkshire-­ Valley sense” (25). It is rather related to some form of the sublime. The challenge is to find other tools of analysis that are necessary for the understanding and enjoyment of arid wastes, which, because of the formation of taste in relation to pastoral landscapes, one tends to view as entirely negative. How can one enjoy what is considered as negative—desolate, flat, dreary, gaunt, fantastic, fierce? Nothing in it is pleasant: “It is stern, harsh, and at first repellent. But what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation!” (26) How can one value what lacks the usual qualities of the familiar landscapes of the East  one takes pleasure in contemplating? Listing negative qualities, ­admitting the d­ ifficulty in describing this unusual environment, of course,

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serves to ­introduce his own transvaluation indirectly and to hint at the awesome reality he loved. Van Dyke even launches into a discussion on the sense of beauty that he believes the Southwest natives were deprived of. Has mankind “a feeling for the beautiful” (12) or “an acquired taste” (xx)? “No doubt it is an acquired taste that leads one to admire greasewood and cactus; but can anyone be blind to the graceful form of the maguey, or better still, the yucca with its tall stalk ­rising like a shaft from a bowl and capped at the top by nodding creamy flowers?,” he gives his answer later (144). The awareness of the aesthetic quality of these usually despised landscapes is a sense developed by a few nature lovers who are mostly educated Eastern city-dwellers. Van Dyke would, of course, have liked to share this appreciation of beauty with many more, and this explains why he sought to open his readers’ eyes through his book. The particular difficulty of enjoying the desert landscapes comes from the fact that they are enveloped in illusions and mirages, a characteristic fact of these barren regions: “This is a land of illusions and thin air. The vision is so cleared at times that the truth itself is deceptive” (2). Van Dyke devotes Chapter vii to “Illusions,” in particular to the detailed explanation of the phenomenon of mirages. In the desert, “appearances”—the term he uses to designate the outward aspect he wants to represent—assume an air of “unreality” (35), the landscape being abnormally distorted by “false perspectives” (113). “The ­preconceived impression of the mind refuses to make room for the actual impression of the eyes, and in consequence we are misled and deluded” (110). “Colors, lights, and shadows fall into contradictions and denials, they shirk and bear false witness, and confuse the judgment of the most experienced” (113). These “appearances” are essential and must be accepted as they are; they constitute the essence of this land. For example, the very red color of the Colorado River is problematic: “To call it a river of blood would be an exaggeration, and yet the truth lies in exaggeration” (66). In spite of his systematic method of analysis, the detailed descriptions at times end with the realization that he is unable to see beyond his fascination, to break the spell created by this mysterious environment: In the presence of the unattainable and the insurmountable we keep sending a hope, a doubt, a query, up through the realms of air to Saturn’s throne. […] What is it that draws us to the boundless and the fathomless? Why should the lovely things of earth—the grasses, the trees, the lakes, the little hills—appear trivial and insignificant when we come face to face with the sea or the desert or the vastness of the midnight sky? Is it that

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the one is the tale of things known and the other merely a hint, a suggestion of the unknown? Or have immensity, space, magnitude a peculiar beauty of their own? (106–107) Van Dyke goes no further than raising these questions and stops short of metaphysical or religious speculations.5 In the conclusion of the book, he again resorts to the idea that the desert remains a mystery, “that haunting sense of the unknown” (233), but he does not inquire further. Just as when he discusses the beauty of the blue sky: “[…] that is beautiful in itself and merely as color. It is not necessary that it should mean anything. […] It is a splendid body of color; no more.” (97) The reality of the desert is enough and does not require that one should attach significance to it. In itself, the beauty of the desert is sufficient to justify the preservation of these uninhabited regions that he is calling for.

On the Difficulty of Describing the Desert

Many times, Van Dyke remarks that the desert bewilders: the traveler comes unprepared for these dreary wastes and the writer is incapable of expressing the special beauty of such desolation. How can one convey those strange visual appearances, so full of illusions, when one is equipped only with the ordinary tool of vocabulary used for civilized landscapes? Conventional literary means are not adequate and one may wonder to what extent Van Dyke was successful with his series of exclamations: often, they seem only to convey his enthusiasm. What is required, he believes, is a personal intimate experience of the desert, a direct contact: “The feeling of fierceness grows upon you as you come to know the desert better” (26). Then he considers you will realize the inadequacy of your preconceived ideas, of your stereotyped images, and of your stock phrases; you will try to invent a more appropriate language to operate a transvaluation that will transform the previously negative into the positive. Desert beauty is paradoxical, in opposition to the habitual elements used in the description of the green pastoral world of the East, and it is therefore hard to express. For instance, he takes the noise of the rattlesnake: “The rattle is indescribable, but a person will know it the first time he hears it.” Van Dyke attempts to find adequate expressions for the sound and tentatively suggests that it is “something between a buzz and a burr” (169). 5 However, he justified the writing of his books in religious terms and considered that all of them were infused with “the missionary spirit of carrying the gospel of art and nature to the heathen” (Van Dyke 1993: 128). See Granger 2010.

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The desert poses a similar problem for painters who find it difficult to paint a landscape characterized by a predominance of color and a relative absence of forms; thus they must invent on canvas an equivalent to its “sensuous qualities” (56). Its excess may be responsible for the difficulty of representation: “The desert is not more paintable than the Alps. Both are too big” (202). And yet, Van Dyke felt it urgent to render this beauty that was unfortunately “­destined to destruction” (57). He did write his book when he was staying in the Sonoran desert6 and he applied himself to the task of methodically describing desert landscapes; he tried to convey his puzzled admiration, for as the narratorobserver of his book he did not attempt to disappear from the picture he drew. All the same, his passionate subjectivity should not conceal the fact that his book has an undeniable documentary basis, with painstaking explanations. For example, Van Dyke does his best to describe and understand the morphology of the desert in the second chapter, “The Make of the Desert,” like the erosion of mountains or the formation of a talus, “a great slope of stone blocks beginning half way down the mountain and often reaching to the base or foot” (38–39). He may even be didactic and you can hear the teacher in him explaining refraction, with the help of a dictionary definition (116–117), or telling how light makes color (93).7 But the documentation admittedly does not aim at being scientific8 and his deserts are never geographically situated; there are very few toponyms, as if only the visual impressions made on him by the desert mattered. At times, he is even plainly un-scientific: “One cannot trace the geological ages with such facility. Things sometimes ‘just happen,’ in spite of scientific theories” (38). He provides a minimum of information on each of the birds or animals he mentions, but one feels that the characteristic anecdotes given to identify them are mostly provided to allow the reader to conjure a mental image of their lives, to imagine their mode of defense. Factual information does not seem to be as essential to Van Dyke as the role of imagination in his study. When he tries to guess what the traces of human activity observed on top of a flat mountain meant, he remarks: “A conclusion is instantly jumped at, for the imagination will not make haste slowly under 6 The Preface-dedication was signed in February 1901 at La Noria Verde, a ranch near ­Hermosillo (Sonora, Northern Mexico), where he stayed before he returned to New Jersey in the spring. 7 It would be interesting to have his text read by scientists to know how valid his explanations are (or at least were at the time). 8 Thus, several criticisms made concerning the errors found in the book by Peter Wild or David Teague are not pertinent, for Van Dyke never pretended he could write a study of the desert from a naturalist’s point of view. In fact, these errors are listed here because these critics unconvincingly believe that Van Dyke faked his trips to the desert. Even if this suspicion were right, the literary qualities of the book and its impact would remain.

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such circumstances” (9). Indeed, his impressions of the landscapes, his personal interpretations, are often introduced by “you might imagine” (37), “one can imagine” (39), “One can almost fancy” (43). He thus tries to recreate what the original landscape looked like when the mountains emerged from a sea (51); he animates the mostly mineral landscape (147), telling the adventures of shifting sands (28), of the desert winds “following certain channels or ‘draws’ through the mountain ranges” (29), of erosion gnawing at mountains; or else, he follows a river to the ocean and describes the tidal bore (74–75). He also imagines the lives of the jackrabbit, the mule deer, the coyote, or the vulture. He illustrates these animals’ capacity to survive with short, lively narratives on the adaptation to aridity, underlining their will to live and to protect themselves against predators (139–143).

Educating the Readers

Whatever the difficulties of writing about the desert and Van Dyke’s possible errors, the fact remains that the book was welcomed and frequently reprinted: many critics agree in saying that the book had an influence on the desert ­writers of the twentieth century and that it shaped the American perception of deserts.9 Van Dyke was convincing because he truly believed in the possibility of education, of making people look at these arid expanses and be sensitive to their beauty; he hoped that ultimately they would convince legislators to protect some wild areas of the Southwest. He knew that it was a difficult task to educate the public to be perceptive, especially because he realized that the deserts “are not to be read at a glance” (174): a lengthy experience, making possible a multiplicity of observations, is prerequisite to the perception of their illusory appearances; a passionate and compelling book may stimulate the desire for a trip to the Sonoran desert. Even if the experience is un-heroic and the traveler only looks out of the window of a Pullman car,10 he may be touched by the grace of this experience and join forces with the desert lovers […] He then will feel the necessity to preserve these “breathing-spaces.” However, Van Dyke never explicitly discusses the issue of militancy in favor of preservation: he only tells the dedicatee of the book, Andrew Carnegie, that the deserts so 9 10

See for example Teague 1997, or Peter Wild’s description of The Desert as “the best and most influential book about America’s deserts” (Van Dyke 1993: xxvii). This is one of Peter Wild’s objections to Van Dyke’s narrative, for he has doubts about Van Dyke’s “adventures” and his first-hand experience of the desert (Van Dyke 1993: xxvii– xxx; 235 n. 1).

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far have not had anyone speak for them: “It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover” (xxi). More precisely, he realizes that “our own very inadequate vision” (128) is responsible for the lack of interest in deserts and for the risk that they might some day be reclaimed, inhabited and exploited. It is, therefore, the task he sets for himself in this book of challenging preconceptions about the desert as unpleasant, worthless wastelands: If we could but rid ourselves of the false ideas, which, taken en masse, are called education, we should know that there is nothing ugly under the sun, save that which comes from human distortion. Nature’s work is all of it good, all of it purposeful, all of it wonderful, all of it beautiful. (192) Just as Thoreau devoted so much reflection to the epistemology of seeing, fifty years later, Van Dyke tried to open his readers’ eyes by insisting on the importance of the infinite variations of tints, the subtle changes of light or the special quality of the air in the desert. If after reading his book in the early years of the twentieth century some readers perceived the unique beauty of this unproductive, desolate environment, perhaps some of them left the ranks of the “practical men” and they may have supported the creation of national parks in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. Van Dyke’s The Desert was a first step in increasing the awareness of the American public of the wild, arid expanses of the Southwest. The resulting heightened perception of their beauty and importance for America in the early decades of the twentieth century places Van Dyke’s book in the category of environmental literature that is intended to stir people to action for the preservation of wild nature. He realized early on that a process of destruction had already started, concluding that any lover of the desert—even a mere art historian—is ethically obliged to speak up and try to modify public opinion, ­especially to influence “practical men” like Andrew Carnegie himself: this is the purpose of Van Dyke’s Preface-Dedication—to warn Carnegie of the ­danger of an “artificial desert.” Beyond the fact that The Desert remained in print all through the twentieth century and is still published in a collection of “American Land Classics,” it is difficult to estimate Van Dyke’s success and impact on environmentalists and legislators. At least we know for a fact that Carnegie became involved in the protection of the desert: the Carnegie Institution founded a desert botanical laboratory at Tumanoc Hill, near Tucson (1903), which it supported until 1940. It is now operated by the University of Arizona and is devoted to the study of

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desert ecology. Significantly, the saguaro, a giant cactus, was even named after the industrialist-philanthropist, Carnegiea gigantea. Works Cited Granger, Michel. 2010. “L’Évangile de l’art et de la nature selon John C. Van Dyke.” John C. Van Dyke, Le Désert. Nouvelles études sur les apparences de la nature. Trad. Nicole Mallet. Marseille: Le Mot et le Reste. Mathé, Sylvie. 1991. “Désir du désert: hommage au Grand Désert américain” in Revue Française d’Études Américaines 50: 423–436. McKibben, Bill, ed. 2008. American Earth. Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. New York: Library of America. Powell, Lawrence Clark. 1976 [1903]. “Introduction” to John C. Van Dyke, The Desert. Tucson: The Arizona Historical Society: 1–16. Runte, Alfred. 1997. National Parks. The American Experience. 3rd ed. Lincoln: U ­ niversity of Nebraska Press. Teague, David W. 1997. The Southwest in American Literature and Art. The Rise of a D ­ esert Aesthetic. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Van Dyke, John C. 1993. The Autobiography of John C. Van Dyke. A Personal Narrative of American Life (1861–1931) (ed. Peter Wild). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 1997. The Secret Life of John C. Van Dyke. Selected Letters (ed. David W. Teague and Peter Wild). Reno: University of Nevada Press. ———. 1999 [1901]. The Desert. Further Studies in Natural Appearances (ed. Peter Wild) (“American Land Classics”). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

chapter 8

Encountering the Sahara: Embodiment, Emotion, and Material Agency in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky Alexa Weik von Mossner Abstract The Sahara figures prominently in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky. Few scholars have failed to mention the impressive “setting” of the novel in the North African desert; however, most of them have argued that the “real setting” of the novel is not actually the Sahara. Instead, the desert tends to be read as a metaphor for the character’s barren psychological landscapes. This essay argues that readings that champion the psychoanalytical or existential interiorization of the desert neglect the transformative presence of the material North African environment in the narrative. It demonstrates that in Bowles’s novel the Sahara is in fact both a symbolic landscape—and thus a socially constructed realm—and a physically and geographically present agent that acts directly on the bodies, emotions, and cognitions of the protagonists. It also ­explores how the ecological space of the Sahara, and Bowles’s emotional relationship to it, shaped and partially generated the narrative itself. Such an ecocritical reading of The Sheltering Sky helps us understand that Bowles was not only interested in the complex relationships between humans of all kinds and cultural backgrounds, but also in the complex relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.

Keywords Affective science – agency – Algeria – American literature – “Baptism of Solitude” – biocultural criticism – biophilia – biophobia – Bowles, Paul – cognitive ecocriticism – Damasio, Antonio – desert – embodied cognition – embodiment – emotion – material agency – Sahara – The Sheltering Sky

In their introduction to Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster encourage us to explore the merit of ecocritical approaches to texts that are “as far ‘beyond nature writing’ as the works of Henry James would seem” (2001: 7)—a writer who

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was much more interested in the life of European salons and drawing rooms than in nature or human–nature relationships.1 The point that Wallace and Armbruster are making is that even texts concerned with cultural conflicts and moral ­dilemmas in metropolitan settings can benefit from an ecocritical reading. Such a reading, they explain, “might start with the ecocritical premise that the natural environment is always a shaping force of individual and group p ­ sychology and identity—and that this force can only be ignored or suppressed at a price” (2001: 7).2 In some cases, the price for such ignorance may be psychological and physical distress, disease, or even death. In this essay I will argue that an ecocritical reading is immensely valuable if applied to the work of the American writer Paul Bowles. This is so not only because like Henry James’ international novels, much of Bowles’s fiction focuses on “American expatriates who find themselves in environments where they are distinctly out of place” (Wallace and Armbruster 2001: 8), but also because, unlike James, Bowles foregrounds the complex material interactions of natural and cultural environments and their combined effect on the body and mind of the dislocated individual. As Nancy Easterlin has pointed out, “analyses of literary representations of the love of or aversion to specific places are crucial to an expanded awareness of the dynamic between human social relationships and physical places” (2010: 272), and although Bowles cannot be considered an environmentalist writer in the narrower sense, his intriguing portrayals of people’s conflicted emotions about their material presence in an unfamiliar environment invite a cognitive ecocritical reading of his fiction. Drawing on the insights of cognitive science and environmental psychology, such a reading will pay particular attention to material, cognitive, and emotional processes between a human organism and its surroundings and thereby help us better understand how the bodies and minds of Bowles’s protagonists are shaped by their physical interaction with the foreign environments in which they transplant themselves. On another level, it helps us realize that Bowles’s own experiences and perceptions of the same environments left traces in his work that should not be ignored. 1 This essay first appeared in isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.2 (Spring 2013): 219–238. I am grateful to the editor and to the publisher for granting me permission to republish it in this volume in the present form. 2 Wallace and Armbruster explain that they find it striking how frequently the expatriated protagonists in James’s novels are represented as deeply alienated from both their natural and cultural environment. Particularly well suited for an environmental reading are, in their eyes, James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Daisy Miller (1878) (see Wallace and Armbruster 2001: 7–8). I agree that the latter text, especially, is a prime candidate for a (cognitive) ecocritical reading similar to the one I am providing here for The Sheltering Sky.

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Perhaps the text best suited for such an exercise is Bowles’s first and bestknown novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949). Drafted while Bowles was traveling across the arid inland area of North Africa, The Sheltering Sky explores the potential consequences of a physical immersion in a world of difference previously only imagined from a safe distance. The novel tells the story of three Americans who somewhat naively and carelessly venture out into the Sahara desert with the result that one of them, Port, contracts typhoid and dies a horrible death, and another one, his wife Kit, undergoes a profound psychological transformation which leaves her unable to return to American “civilization.” Few scholars have failed to mention the impressive “setting” of the novel in the North African desert; however, most of them have argued that the “real setting” of the novel is not actually the Sahara. Instead, the desert tends to be read as a metaphor for the characters’ barren psychological landscapes. Steven O ­ lson, for example, claims in his psychoanalytical reading of the novel that “the vertiginous landscapes of Morocco […] provide a projected topography of the ­psychic fissures, cliffs, and abysses formed in a vanished geological age—the age of childhood” (1986: 336). Jay McInerney notes that “the immense doomed sky of the Sahara dominates the book” and argues that “Bowles’s desert becomes—like Conrad’s jungle and Eliot’s wasteland—a symbolic landscape, emblematic of a world in which individuals are radically isolated from one another” (1993: 188). Gena Dagel Caponi calls The Sheltering Sky “a travel book about an inner journey through states of consciousness” (1994: 127). The problem with readings that champion the psychoanalytical or existential interiorization of the desert is, as Syrine Hout has pointed out, that it robs the Sahara “of its historical and geographical particularities” (2000: 118). I agree with Hout’s observation and would like to add that such readings also neglect the transformative presence of the material desert in the narrative. In her book on Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo rightly bemoans that in our readings of cultural texts as well as in human readings of nature more generally “Matter, the vast stuff of the world and of ourselves” has too often been “flattened into a ‘blank slate’ for human inscription. The environment has been drained of its blood … in order that it become a mere empty space” in which human development takes place (2010: 1–2, author’s italics). Bowles’s novel reminds us of the problems and dangers that come with such a “flattening” of the environment into a “blank slate.” The protagonists of The Sheltering Sky tend to understand the Sahara as an empty space, a screen onto which they can project their dreams, fears, and desires. This, however, is shown to be a grave misunderstanding of the actual state of affairs. The region’s natural and cultural environment in fact possesses material agency, shaping the destinies of the protagonists and directly affecting the outcome of the story. Exposing our bodies and minds to

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forces of the desert, we learn in Bowles’s novel, does something to our cognition, emotional state, creative vision, and our very identity. Some of us who take this risk will come back substantially changed, Bowles suggests, and some simply won’t return at all.

Environment, Embodiment, Emotion, and the Human Mind

Landscapes are not something uncontested and objective that are simply “out there.” Instead, the term denotes, as human geographer Denis Cosgrove reminds us, “the external world mediated through subjective human experience […] [I]t is a construction, a composition of that world” and, as such, “possesses an affective meaning” (1998: 13). Christopher Tilley agrees with this notion, ­emphasizing, however, that “landscape is […] always both objective physical place and a subjective cognized image of that place” (2006: 20, emphasis mine). Unsurprisingly, the actually existing landscape has some effects on how we ­perceive and experience it. This is especially the case when we are building a “subjective cognized image” of a place while being physically present in it. In this case, it is inevitable that our material environment has a direct impact on our understanding of it. In Material Cultures, Material Minds, Nicole Boivin insists that “the workings of the mind cannot be understood independently of the environment” (2008: 75) because the very fact that our bodies are in constant physical exchange with our environment affects how we perceive and think. Building on the work of James Gibson and other scholars working in ecological psychology, Boivin reminds us that “just as thinking is a bodily activity, it is also an ecological or situated activity” (75). It would be a mistake to believe that our constructed subjective landscapes are simply something we project outwards. Rather, they exist as a result of physical and mental processes that are at least partially engendered by our surroundings. In addition, embodiment in specific environments has a direct effect on the construction of social identities. As Tilley puts it, “[i]dentities have their basis in the multiple ways in which we perceive and receive the world through all our senses. Embodiment is thus an existential precondition for any sense of identity” (2006: 22). How we relate to other humans, the more-than-human world, and not least to ourselves, is thus to a large degree dependent on our embodied experiences of the world. This complex interplay between the human organism and its environment involves not only perception and rational thought, but also emotion. In Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion, Kay Milton even argues that “emotions operate primarily (though not exclusively) in ecological relations rather than social relations” (2002: 4). With recourse to the work of neurologist

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Antonio Damasio, Milton explains that “our environment is not necessarily or primarily social; it is simply an environment, consisting of things other than ourselves with which we interact,” including what is often called the “natural” environment (4). Since cognition, as neuroscientists such as Damasio and ­Joseph LeDoux have demonstrated, is directly linked to emotion, and emotion is linked to the feelings of the body, it is inevitable that our physical environment influences how we feel and thus also how we think.3 In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Damasio explains that “[t]he organism interacts with the environment as an ensemble: the interaction is neither of the body alone nor of the brain alone” which is why “mental phenomena can be fully understood only in the context of an organism’s interacting in an environment” (2006: xxvii). The relationship and exertion of influence thus goes both ways: our physical interaction with and perception of a certain ­environment (in the widest sense) influences how we feel and think—and thus shapes our very consciousness.4 At the same time, how we feel and think at a given moment changes our subjective perception of the landscape around us. However, it is important to keep in mind that the fact that we at least partially construct our environments does not diminish the importance of that environment’s impact on our feeling and thinking. As Damasio points out, the fact “that the environment is, in part, a product of the organism’s activity itself, merely underscores the complexity of interactions we must take into account” (2006: xxvii). Both the affective meaning of a subjectively constructed landscape and the complex bodily and emotional interaction with a specific physical environment are important for an ecocritical understanding of The Sheltering Sky. In the novel, emotions like fear, dread, hope, love, and hate constantly operate between individual protagonists and their physical environment, and these emotional relationships not only inform the protagonists’ understanding of the landscape around them but are also of central importance for character and plot development. Thus, the desert does in fact not just function as a 3 Antonio Damasio has written a number of books on this topic. In his pioneering Descartes’ Error, he explains that “the soul breathes through the body and suffering, whether it starts in the skin or in a mental image, happens in the flesh” (2006: xxvii). In his third book Looking for Spinoza, Damasio explores the topic further, looking into the relations between philosophy, ethics and neurobiology, respectively. 4 The intricate ways in which our embodiment directly affects our consciousness through ­affects, emotions, and other complex processes in the body and the brain has been the topic of much research in recent years. Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens is dedicated to this subject. Other relevant contributions to the topic include Lisa Feldman Barrett (2005).

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­ etaphor or symbol for the protagonists’ interior battles, as so many scholars m have argued—rather, the protagonists’ embodied presence in a particular environment, and their emotional relationship to it, influences the direction and outcome of these battles. Christopher Tilley explains that things and places are active agents of identity rather than pale reflections of pre-existing ideas and sociopolitical relations. Having real material and ideological effects on persons and social relations, things and places can then be regarded as much subjects as objects of identity. It is through a detailed examination of the effects that landscapes and places have on the way we think and the way we act that we may come to better reflect on how we understand ourselves and how we relate to others. (2006: 17) In Bowles’s novel, landscapes and places do have this kind of visceral effect on the relationships and self-understanding of its characters. The Sahara desert indeed is an active agent of identity in the novel, in the sense that it not only provides the title-giving “sheltering sky” but also has effects on the way people think and act, and on whether they live or die. The desert thus is shown to have material agency—a point I will come back to in the last part of the paper—and this in fact applies not only to the fictional world of the narrative but also to the very shape of the narrative itself. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo argues that “nature can speak back to culture, not only shaping but helping to generate the stories we tell” (2000: 159). Alaimo is mostly concerned with American writers who are traditionally connected with the places about which they write; what makes Paul Bowles’s case particularly interesting in this context is that the natural environments that helped him generate the stories he told were not those of the places he grew up in but those of the places he first explored as a traveler and later as a permanent resident. Describing the profound change he underwent when first traveling in the Sahara, he writes that “I realized that I loved all those things: the sun, the silence, the nothingness. I had never been sure whether I liked those things. But in order to feel all that you have to be completely alone, far from the natives and the colonials” (quoted in Caponi 1993: 225). Bowles’s emotional relationship to the Sahara had a significant effect on his novel. As Timothy Weiss puts it, “Bowles drew inspiration from the terrains (cityscapes, landscapes), the cultural juxtapositions and interactions of North Africa […] They were to him a muse of sorts” (1998: 38). Arguably, though, these terrains were even more than that. Bowles once said in an interview that “much of my fiction starts out with landscape in my head. First there is the scene, where it is laid. And then, if I know the place, I know what can happen there, who can be

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in it, and what the influence of the place is on the protagonists.”5 His choice of landscape, Bowles explains here, in fact determines what story can take place in a novel and what transformations the characters will undergo. For The Sheltering Sky, he did not choose that landscape arbitrarily. In a 1979 interview with Stephen Davis, he insisted that it is the geography of the novel that is most authentic: I’d been to all the places I described, and other locations I visited while I  was actually writing the book in 1948. Wrote most of the story while traveling around the Sahara, so it was a combination of memory writing and minute descriptions of whatever place I was in at the moment, all thrown together into the magma of the memory when I finished it. Quoted in caponi 1993: 109

Bowles’s embodied experience of the Sahara thus had a direct effect on his writing. While the names of towns are often fictional in the novel and the country is never named, Bowles has explained that it probably must be Algeria because it was the Algerian part of the desert in which he traveled while writing the book. He has also repeatedly stressed that he at some point lost control over his narrative and that this did not disturb him because he was certain that the novel “would write itself … once I had established the characters and spilled them out onto the North African scene” (quoted in Carr 2004: 181). We can thus safely assume that the ecological space of the Sahara and Bowles’s emotional relationship to it did not only shape but also partially generate The Sheltering Sky. With this in mind, we might read differently Jay McInerney’s frequently quoted comment that Bowles’s prose is “as hard-edged and dazzling as a desert landscape at noon” (181).

Venturing into the Desert: Environment and Emotion in The Sheltering Sky

The characters Bowles “spills out onto the North African scene” shortly after World War ii have a variety of different relationships to their natural surroundings, but none of them has a sense of place in the desert in the way the local Arabs do. Port Moresby, who is the only one who has been to North Africa before, is only ever able to understand the Sahara (and by extension all other 5 Bowles makes this statement in an interview in Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary film Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles (1998).

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environments) through the symbolic and affective meanings the landscape has for him personally. He is obsessed with movement and whenever he sees a map, he begins “to plan some new, impossible trip which sometimes eventually became a reality” (Bowles 2006a: 5).6 Port’s great predilection for travel is at one level a deeply human emotion. As Easterlin reminds us, travel is a “basically exciting” activity for humans “because the thrill of movement and of new environments served the adaptive advantage of our ancestors” (2010: 268). This excitement tends to be mingled with uncertainty and anxiety about possible dangers and mishaps, but Port seems to experience no such feelings. He thinks of himself as a traveler, not a tourist, and thus as someone who “belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home” (5). Despite Port’s assertion of such multiple attachment, however, we quickly realize that he is in fact a profoundly deracinated man who does not truly feel “at home” anywhere. It is all the more interesting, then, that Port has taken a liking to North Africa and to the Sahara desert. He likes North Africa because, in his understanding, it is as far away as he can get from the consumerist American way-of-life, which he despises. It is the very remoteness from the comforts of American civilization that makes the presumed “otherness” of this area and its people so attractive for him. Nevertheless, his outlook remains profoundly American. As Brian Edwards has pointed out, the novel compares Port’s and Kit’s travels to the familiar American act of pioneering (2005: 315). At one point, Port thinks of his great-grandparents’ encounter with the American “wilderness” and takes satisfaction in the fact that “[a]t present travellers are strongly advised not to undertake land trips into the interiors of French North Africa” (107). His fantasized pioneering, however, is not the only reason why he likes the desert. He perceives the Sahara as a vast, empty, and silent space where he—paradoxically—feels sheltered. When he looks at the “very strange” sky of the Sahara, he has the sensation “that it’s a solid thing up there” protecting him from the “darkness” and “absolute night” behind (99). Port is terrified of this “absolute night,” which seems to reside in his own mind, and at least during the first part of the narrative the stark light and the silence that surrounds him give him emotional comfort. He is too disconnected from his human and nonhuman environment, however, to understand that these are just his subjective emotions and that the natural and cultural environment of the Sahara also exists independently from 6 Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent parenthetical references are to Bowles 2006a.

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his psychological projections and is thus likely to have very real effects on both his body and his mind. Port’s wife Kit struggles with her husband’s obsessive urge to be in constant movement, and she in no way shares his fascination with the Sahara. During the first half of the narrative, her prime reaction to the living conditions in the desert is fear. It is her first journey to North Africa, and she is unprepared for its demanding environment. Partly, this is the fault of her husband. We learn that Port withheld information from Kit, showing her “a carefully chosen collection of photographs he had brought from previous trips: views of oases and markets, as well as attractive vistas of the lobbies and gardens of hotels which no longer operated” (107). The North African landscape that Kit expected upon her arrival was thus carefully constructed by her husband with the intention of misleading her about the actual state of affairs. Such betrayal must inevitably lead to disappointment, and so it is hardly surprising that Kit does not share her husband’s delight in the desert. Port, who for some reason believes that their trip might heal their troubled and sexless marriage, reacts with disappointment, anger, and spite. Also, he seeks sexual adventures with the natives, adventures that will give him typhoid fever. Kit, on her part, gets sexually ­involved with their friend and traveling companion Tunner, the most stereotypically American character in the novel. However, despite his efforts, Tunner is unable to give any comfort or assurance to Kit. The only thing that distracts Kit from her anxieties at times is Western consumer goods. When Port returns to one of their many hotel rooms one day, it looks “like a bazaar: there were rows of shoes on the bed, evening gowns had been spread out over the footboard as if for a window display, and bottles of cosmetics and perfumes lined the night-table” (166). Kit has unpacked all of her numerous suitcases and surrounded herself with “her things.” When Port wants to know what she is doing, she points to a window that gives onto the desert: “I felt I’d simply die if I didn’t see something civilized soon … It’d be abnormal if I were able to adapt myself too quickly to all this. After all, I am still an American you know. And I’m not even trying to be anything else” (166–67). Ignoring the blow, Port is grimly amused “to watch her building her pathetic little fortress of Western culture in the middle of the wilderness” (167). The unfamiliar ecological space of the Sahara challenges Kit’s sense of identity, and it soon will become clear that her attempt to anchor it with her American consumer goods is, indeed, pathetic. The deeper she follows Port into the desert, the less is she able to connect emotionally to her belongings. Given their very different emotional relationships to the natural world around them and the dire state of their marriage, it is remarkable that the only moment in the novel in which Port and Kit are united in happiness is directly

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related to their common enjoyment of nature. This key moment is introduced with a description of the landscape as the couple perceives it: As they approached [the ridge], already they could see the endless flat desert beyond, broken here and there by sharp crests of rock that rose above the surface like the dorsal fins of so many monstrous fish, all moving in the same direction…. The sun was at the flat horizon; the air was suffused with redness.… Kit took Port’s hand. They climbed in silence, happy to be together. (96–97) Only a few moments later, however, as the couple sits and enjoys the view, their very different emotional reactions to the natural environment emerge. Port declares facing the sunset: If I watch the end of a day, I always feel it’s the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything…. That’s why I hate cold countries, and love the warm ones, where there’s no winter, and when night comes you feel an opening up of the life there, instead of a closing down. Don’t you feel that? (97) Kit, in fact, does not feel it. Port, she suspects, needs her to love the desert in the way he does, because for him the “solitude” and the “proximity to infinite things” represents “our only hope” (98). However, Kit is never quite sure what he means by that and her own reaction to the seeming infinity of the desert is quite different: “The very silences and emptiness that touched [Port’s] soul terrified her” (98). Kit’s strong emotional response to the quiet and seeming emptiness of the Sahara is not unlike those that Roslynn Haynes has detected among early European travelers to the Australian desert. “The most alarming prospect faced by the inland explorers coming from the confines of heavily populated Britain and Europe,” writes Haynes, “was that of void. That was particularly true of the desert with its repeated vistas of empty horizontal planes under a cloudless, overarching sky” (Haynes 1999: 77). The explorers’ reaction to this unfamiliar environment, however, is rather interesting. Almost paradoxically, their accounts tend to describe the vast landscape “in Gothic terms of enclosure and entrapment” (Haynes 1999: 77).7 Bowles, similarly, makes use of the gothic mode when

7 Of course, neither these traveler accounts nor Bowles’s novel can be considered gothic literature in the more narrow sense. However, as Teresa A. Goddu has noted, “[m]any texts

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offering us Kit’s view of the Sahara.8 She feels entrapped and endangered in the vastness of the desert, regardless of the fact that there are not actually any walls or other material boundaries that would keep her in a certain place. ­However, as Haynes also points out, the traveler’s advance in the desert can also be “blocked by the invisible ‘barriers’ of monotony and thirst” (1999: 78), and the latter, in particular, is a barrier that might separate life from death. It is therefore important to keep in mind that Kit’s emotional response to the Sahara in fact serves a clear evolutionary purpose. As Damasio explains, “the biological function of emotion is twofold. The first function is the production of a specific reaction to the inducing situation […] The second biological function […] is the regulation of the internal state of the organism such that it can be prepared for the specific reaction” (1999: 53). In Kit’s case, her specific reaction to the inducing situation would be to run, to flee the environment that she perceives as threatening. This is why she experiences feelings of fear and anxiety, which prepare her body and mind for the flight response. Nancy Easterlin reminds us that “affective charges connected to specific environmental features,” which saved our ancestors from starvation and dehydration, “still resonate with humans today,” and so Kit’s fear of the desert likely is a result of both evolutionary conditioning and her own perception of the area’s ­barren landscapes (2010: 261). However, because of her attachment to Port, and perhaps a disinclination to leave the desert without him, she does not act on her feelings. Another factor that inhibits her flight response is her husband’s inability to respond to her feelings in any constructive way. Rather than trying to understand why Kit is afraid of the Sahara, Port insists that they are “both afraid of the same thing” (100). Their real problem, he asserts, is not at all with the desert but the fact that neither of them has ever “managed […] to get all the way into life. We’re hanging on to the outside for all we’re worth, convinced that we’re going to fall off at the next bump” (100). This statement is darkly prophetic of where things will be going for the two of them. As it turns out, Port will “fall off” life at the next bump, as he will die of the typhoid germs that are already present in his body. Kit, on the other hand, will arguably “get all the way into life,” even if this process will not always be pretty or pleasant. Port’s relationship to the North African environment is, as pointed out ­earlier, marked by a substantial amount of psychological projection. Although that are not predominantly gothic use gothic effects at key moments to register cultural ­contradictions” (1997: 10). 8 The gothic mode, as Tom Hillard reminds us, tends to depict natural environments as fearinducing and threatening, and it is “typically concerned with extreme states, such as violence and pain, fear and anxiety, sexual aggression and perversion” (2009: 690–691).

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he despises the stereotypical image of the tourist, he is exactly that: someone who comes to a place with an eye full of preconceptions and who then “consumes” the environment, without ever truly engaging with it.9 He seems to consider himself separate from the world around him, an assumption that, as Alaimo reminds us, is quite common in the United States and elsewhere in the western world. However, as she points out, “[a]ttention to the material transit across bodies and environments may render it more difficult to seek refuge within fantasies of transcendence or imperviousness” (2010: 16) and Bowles’s novel repeatedly demonstrates that its protagonists’ bodies are in fact radically open to their surroundings, be it through their intake of food and water, their engagement in sexual practices, or simply their perceptions. Port does not ­really want to see this material dimension of his interaction with the Sahara, not least because he is, as one of his interlocutors remarks, “a young man ­unhealthily preoccupied with himself” (164). When his American passport gets stolen, Port begins to lose his grip on his understanding of himself and of the desert because, as he puts it, “it’s a very depressing thing in a place like this to have no proof of who you are” (165). Without the piece of paper that asserts his Americanness, he is no longer able to construct himself as separate from the North African world. As Brian Edwards notes, “Port’s experience of the Algerian landscape previously viewed from dominating vistas is now made ‘senseless’” (2005: 316). When he makes his way back to the hotel after having reported the theft, he cannot bring ­himself to face the desert: He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present, his energy was lacking…. He did not want to face the intense sky, too blue to be real, above his head, the ribbed pink canyon walls that lay on all sides in the distance … or the dark spots of the oasis below. They were there, and they should have pleased his eye, but he did not have the strength to relate them, either to each other or to himself; he could not bring them into any focus beyond the visual. So he would not look at them. (165–166) 9 Scholars like John Urry (1990) have developed several typologies of tourists as well as different modes of tourist experiences. Port’s behavior and attitude, his need to escape ­American-style consumerism only to then consume the Sahara landscape, fits surprisingly well ­Christopher Tilley’s description of the typical consumerist tourist in search of the new and different. This kind of tourist, Tilley argues, “goes on holiday to seek solace, to find sources of cultural heritage and identity that modernity has destroyed, another world” (2006: 16). See also Yosefa Loshitzky (1993).

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Coinciding with the first symptoms of typhoid fever, the loss of his passport completely transforms Port’s relationship to the North African environment, leaving him unable to experience it as pleasurable. Suddenly the desert flies seem to “have claws” and nature in general takes on a more gothic quality for Port (170). Kit wonders how she can stop her husband “from working himself up to an emotional state” (173), but there is nothing she can do to prevent it. Port is in a process of steady physical and mental decline, not only because the typhoid germs continue their work inside of his body but also because the climatic conditions of the actually existing desert, the one that he does not want to face, worsen his condition and make it impossible for Kit to get him to a place where he can be treated with specialist care. In the remote desert town of Sbâ, she is forced to watch her husband die a horrible death. Port, who always projected his own thoughts and feelings onto the Sahara, is finally defeated and killed by an environment that does not care about his projections.10 Port’s death opens up a new possibility of engagement for Kit. Only now is she able to understand that the terrifying “negation of movement, [the] suspension of continuity” that she experienced in the desert was a “void she had created” and that in reality “some part of this landscape was moving even as she looked at it” (240). As she begins to grasp the ecological space around her in a new way, Kit decides that she no longer needs her American “things” to comfort her and that she will leave them behind with her husband’s dead body. She walks to a nearby oasis where she undergoes a remarkable transformation: She kicked off her sandals and stood naked in the shadows. She felt a strange intensity being born within her…. As she immersed herself completely [in the water], the thought came to her: “I shall never be hysterical again.” That kind of tension, that degree of caring about herself, she felt she would never attain them any more in her life. (263) Letting go of her egocentrism—and arguably also of her sense of self—Kit suddenly feels comfortable and alive in the Sahara; both her emotional relationship to the desert and her thinking have profoundly changed. She now is able to feel “the joy of being” and is determined to “hang on to it no matter what effort it entailed” (265). Without hesitation she makes “for the nearest tree” whose “feathery branches” seem to her “like a tent” in which she goes to 10

Bowles offers us both Kit’s outside perspective on her husband’s death and struggle as well as Port’s own fragmented and distorted experience of his death. Bowles has ­explained ­repeatedly that he was under the influence of drugs when writing these highly disturbing scenes.

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sleep (265). On the next morning, she walks out into the desert, and in the days and weeks that follow she in fact stops being American and becomes something else—something that is profoundly and perhaps disturbingly “other.” Kit is picked up by Bedouins and travels with them across the Sahara, ­apparently indifferent to the fact that she is being raped repeatedly. She seems to quietly enjoy the scant life of the well-adapted desert dwellers, and for the next few months she lives as what some scholars have called a “sex slave” in a small room in the house of Belqassim, the young Bedouin who found her, disguised as a man, and thus hidden from her lover’s three wives. Even as she is practically a prisoner, she is not unhappy, because she feels sheltered by the endless desert sky from what she fears most: her own memories of her past life. Only after Belqassim’s wives have found her out does Kit leave his house and make her way back to the u.s. consulate in Oran. However, the novel suggests that she cannot, really, return from the Sahara. Not only the English language but human speech as such have become strange to her, and the woman from the American Embassy who tries to take care of her is wrong when she says that “The desert’s a big place, but nothing really ever gets lost there” (339). ­Although ironically her American passport is the only worldly possession that Kit has left, she has lost her American identity for good and, according to most ­scholars, her sanity, too. “CANNOT GET BACK” (328) says the telegram she scribbles down after she has been found in the desert, but she does not remember who she wanted to send it to, and in the end she disappears again in the streets of Oran, irretrievably estranged from Western civilization. I argue that the critics who simply explain Kit’s development as a descent into madness do not do her or the novel justice.11 After all, Bowles does not describe this development in terms of madness, but rather suggests that because of her time in the Sahara, Kit has been able to recapture “a feeling of solid delight” that she wants to keep at all cost (264). Syrine Hout’s interpretation, on the other hand, that “[a]fter two confining marriages, the rest of Kit’s life is not necessarily tragic,” and that “[p]erhaps like Bowles, she can find a compromise by settling in a new home in Oran or Tangier” seems overly optimistic to me (2000: 124). Kit has gone too far to be able to simply continue her life in an Algerian or Moroccan city. The Kafka quote that serves as epigraph for the concluding section of the novel suggests such a reading: “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached” (283). If we accept Christopher Tilley’s statement that “[i]dentities must of 11

This has been a common way to interpret Kit’s behavior in the final part of the novel. See Richard Patteson (1987: 70), Steven Olson (1986: 338–339), Yosefa Loshitzky (1993: 118–119), and Wayne Pounds (1985: 7).

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necessity be improvised and changing” and that “[t]hey are both in the mind and of the world, embodied and objectified through action and material practice” (2006: 17), we must conclude that Kit has become someone, something else as a result of her experiences. Her new identity, while still in flux and emerging, is one that collapses the boundaries between sanity and madness, between human and non-human, and the only thing certain in the novel is that it is the direct consequence of her and her husband’s venturing into the Sahara. Bowles has even suggested that the desert must be understood as an agent in its own right, because it determines the fates of his human protagonists: “What I wanted to tell was the story of what the desert can do to us. […] The desert is the protagonist” (quoted in Evans 1993: 54). This, then, brings us back to the question of agency. Much of nonhuman nature, as environmental historian Linda Nash has pointed out, does not have agency in the sense of intentionality or choice. However, Nash suggests that the problem might actually lie with our definition of (human) agency: “Perhaps our narratives should emphasize that […] so-called human agency cannot be separated from the environments in which that agency emerges” (2005: 69). In their introduction to Material Agency, Knappett and Malafouris explain that “[w]hen agency is linked strictly to consciousness and intentionality, we have very little scope for extending its reach beyond the human” (2008: ix). This, however, we must do if we want to account for the manifold ways in which nonhuman living things like trees and seemingly “dead” things like stones and buildings have significant effects on their environments, including humans.12 That natural spaces do have agency and thus direct effects on human consciousness and identity is something Kit begins to understand when she faces, toward the end of the novel, the “violent blue sky” of the desert, which “[l]ike a great overpowering sound … destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her” (336). Kit’s moment of anguished paralysis calls to mind Lee Rozelle’s notion of the “ecosublime,” which he defines as “the awe and terror that occurs when literary figures experience the infinite complexity and contingency of place” (2006: 1). That Bowles’s Sahara desert has even the power to alter ­consciousness 12

As Knappett and Malafouris point out, “an emergent suspicion of the humanistic determinations of agency can actually be traced far back, to the likes of Mauss (1954) and Heidegger (1977). Mauss’s seminal study, The Gift, illustrated the fluidity of the boundary between persons and things and the capacity of the latter to embody and objectify, as well as produce, social consequences” (Knappett and Malafouris 2008: x). With reference to the work of Bruno Latour on Actor-Network Theory, the two scholars state that “action involves a coalescence of human and non-human agency elements and as such the responsibility for action must be shared among them […] No distinctions between human and nonhuman entities can be sustained in terms of agency” (Knappett and Malafouris 2008: xii).

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should not surprise us, given Damasio’s claim that “mental phenomena can be fully understood only in the context of an organism’s interacting in an environment” (2006: xxvii). Bowles seems to have had an intuitive understanding of this complex relationship between environment, body, and mind. As Hout points out, his desert “is an extreme place that allows one to soar high but also to sink deep. It either makes or breaks its visitors” (2000: 129). And in Kit’s case, we cannot be sure which it is—making or breaking. What the desert really does to Kit has perhaps been explained best by Bowles himself, in a now famous essay entitled “Baptism of Solitude” (1963), in which he tries to capture the transformative power of the Sahara. Evoking the impressive desert landscape in front of his readers’ eyes, he describes the peculiar sights and sounds that the traveler experiences: Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. […] Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint- hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. […] When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never ­really grows dark. (2006c: 133) In its poetic and powerful evocation of the absolute silence and beauty of the desert this passage of “Baptism of Solitude” is reminiscent of the work of the French Sahara expert Théodore Monod.13 However, Bowles does not stop there. Such direct physical contact with the ecological space of the Sahara, he suggests, has a profound effect on the onlooker’s psyche: Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptême de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory 13

Théodore Monod was a French explorer, activist, and anthropologist who surveyed the North African desert for more than sixty years in search of meteorites, discovering several new plant species in the process. Timothy Weiss explains that “in Orientalist discourse the desert is a place of intrigue, adventure, and sexual abandon, but in [Bowles’s] essay it is viewed more in the tradition of the anthropologist such as Théodore Monod, or rather, the anthropologist, poet, and spiritual searcher all rolled into one” (1998: 58). See also Monod, Meharées (1994).

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disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. The strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came. (2006c: 133–134) Bowles asserts here that something actively begins to “take its course” inside of those who expose themselves to the desert environment, and this is exactly what happens to Kit in the novel: she loses her memory, and, in Bowles’ words, “nothing is left but [her] own breathing and the sound of [her] heart beating” (2006c: 134). Whether this equals madness is open to debate. For Bowles, at least, it seems to equal something different: a loss of cultural knowledge that is meaningless or even harmful and a reintegration in the natural world, an existence which is (at least temporarily) without memories, without language, perhaps even without consciousness. Bowles claims that this is an inevitable experience common to every traveler who ventures deeply into the Sahara.14 Not everybody who experiences this peculiar sight and sensation, however, goes as far as Kit does or stays as long as she does. Bowles himself, after all, did venture into the North African desert and returned, retaining a deep appreciation for the Sahara throughout the rest of his life, vividly conscious of the shaping force that particular environments can have on people’s psyche and identity. Kit’s development, it seems, illustrates how far the process can go if unchecked. Unlike her husband, who lives his entire life (and death) in alienation from the natural world that surrounds him, Kit becomes part of the natural world and, as a result, stops being American—or even human in the common sense of the word. Bowles seems to neither laud nor criticize this development, simply noting it as a fact.

Conclusion: The Magical Passage between World and Mind

Reading The Sheltering Sky ecocritically, we begin to understand that it was not only relationships between humans of all kinds and cultural backgrounds 14

This notion is echoed in Terry Tempest Williams’s Red. Speaking of the Colorado Plateau, Williams describes the desert as “a landscape of extremes” in which “you learn sooner or later to find an equilibrium within yourself; otherwise you move” (2001: 5). Williams asserts that “you cannot help but be undone by this sensitivity and light” (4), and Bowles, similarly, argues that whoever stays long enough in the Sahara will inevitably become someone—or something—else.

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that interested Paul Bowles, but also the complex relationship between ­humans and the more-than-human world, and the role of emotion in this relationship.15 Looking at his characters’ emotions toward their environments provides us with a scientific explanation for Bowles’s frequently attested fascination with magic. As he explains in his autobiography Without Stopping: “Had anyone asked me what I meant by magic, I should probably have defined the word by calling it a secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage which bypassed the mind” (2006b: 125). What Bowles defines as “magic” here is now the subject of affective neuroscience and cognitive psychology: the intricate ways in which our embodiment in a given environment affects us through emotions and other complex processes in the body and the brain, only some of which we ever get to understand consciously. It is this kind of magic that is also at work in The Sheltering Sky, which is why it is so fruitful to read the novel from a cognitive ecocritical perspective that pays attention to the complex interactions between material nature, body, emotion, and mind. However, it should be clear that Bowles’s novel is far from the only one that can be illuminated by such a reading. As Easterlin points out, “literary works that explore the mind’s positive and troubled relationship with nonhuman nature importantly illuminate the conditions that shape human attitudes […] toward the environment” (2012: 93). A cognitive reading of such literary works, especially when it also considers evolutionary research, can be extremely fruitful for the exploration of human perception, cognition, and representation of nonhuman nature.16 What has particularly interested me in this essay are the emotional dimensions of these interactions and how a literary text such as Bowles’s is a product and at the same time also a representation of the multiple ways in which beliefs and emotions color human perceptions of specific environments and how those environments in turn affect human emotions, beliefs, and perceptions. If it is indeed the case that, as many ecocritics believe, both biophilia and biophobia play a central role in the way we treat the nonhuman environment and the planet as a whole, then it is of great importance that we better understand the nature of such emotional relationships and their ­cultural representations.

15 16

For a discussion of Bowles’s treatment of intercultural encounters between Americans and North Africans, see Weik von Mossner 2014, Chapter 5. For a more sustained discussion and application of the cognitive ecocritical approach, see my forthcoming book Affective Ecologies (2017).

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. 2000. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ———. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baichwal, Jennifer. Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles. 1998. Zeitgeist Video. Film. Boivin, Nicole. 2008. Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on ­Human Thought, Society and Evolution. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Bowles, Paul. 2006a [1949]. The Sheltering Sky. London: Penguin. ———. 2006b [1972]. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. New York: Harper Perennial. ———. 2006c [1957]. Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue. New York: Harper. Caponi, Gena Dagel (ed.). 1993. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 1994. Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Carr, Virginia Spencer. 2004. Paul Bowles: A Life. New York: Scribner. Cosgrove, Denis E. 1998 [1984]. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. London: Harcourt. ———. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. London: Vintage. ———. 2006 [1994]. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. London: Vintage. Easterlin, Nancy. 2010. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and ­Literary Interpretation” in Zunshine, Lisa (ed.) Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 257–274. ———. 2012. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edwards, Brian T. 2005. “Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations” in American Literary History 17(2): 307–334. Evans, Oliver. 1993. “An Interview with Paul Bowles” in Caponi, Gena Dagel (ed.) ­Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi: 38–58. Feldman Barrett, Lisa, Paula Niedenthal, and Winkielman Piotr (eds). 2005. Emotion and Consciousness. New York: Guilford Press. Goddu, Teresa A. 1997. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: ­Columbia University Press. Haynes, Roslynn D. 1999. Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art, and Film. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Hillard, Tom. 2009. “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature” in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16(4): 685–95. Hout, Syrine C. 2000. “Grains of Utopia: The Desert as Literary Oasis in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands” in Utopian Studies 11(2): 112–36. Knappett, Carl, and Lambros Malafouris (eds). 2008. Material Agency: Towards a NonAnthropocentric Approach. Berlin and New York: Springer. LeDoux, Joseph. 1996. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 1993. “The Tourist/Traveler Gaze: Bertolucci and Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky” in East–west Film Journal 7(2): 111–37. McInerney, Jay. 1993. “Paul Bowles in Exile” in Caponi, Gena Dagel (ed.) Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi: 180–192. Milton, Kay. 2002. Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. London and New York: Routledge. Monod, Théodore. 1994. Meharées: explorations au vrai Sahara. Le Méjan, Arles: Actes Sud. Nash, Linda. 2005. “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” in Environmental History 10(1): 67–69. Olson, Steven E. 1986. “Alien Terrain: Paul Bowles’s Filial Landscapes” in TwentiethCentury Literature 32(3/4) (Paul Bowles Issue): 334–349. Patteson, Richard F. 1987. A World Outside: the Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pounds, Wayne. 1985. Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography. Bern and New York: Peter Lang. Rozelle, Lee. 2006. Ecosublime: Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Tilley, Christopher. 2006. “Introduction: Identity, Place, Landscape and Heritage” in Journal of Material Culture 11(1–2): 7–32. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. Wallace, Kathleen R, and Karla Armbruster. 2001. “Introduction: Why Go Beyond Nature Writing and Where To?” in Armbruster, Karla and Kathleen R. Wallace (eds) Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press: 1–25. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2014. Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. Affective Ecologies. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Weiss, Timothy. 1998. “Paul Bowles as Orientalist: Toward a Nomad Discourse” in Journal of American Studies of Turkey 7: 37–61. Williams, Terry Tempest. 2001. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. New York: Pantheon Books.

chapter 9

Dillard Dancing: An American Childhood Nathalie Cochoy Abstract Drawing an analogy between Giacometti’s sculpture, Man Walking, and Annie Dillard’s art, this article attempts to show that the author’s writing appears as a process, incarnating in a performative way its “inner” meditations and its “outer” involvement in the constant metamorphosis of the real. Annie Dillard exposes the dilemma of nature writing: when naming the wild in order to reveal its elusive value, one also runs the risk of taming it into the “freeze-frames” of knowledge. However, far from secluding the text from the world, the self-questioning of discourse succeeds in revealing the pulsing substance of language and its constant adjustment to the fleeting events of nature. In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard’s writing does not so much aim at tracking the wonders of the real as at approaching them in a gesture of respectful neighboring.

Keywords An American Childhood – dancing – Dillard, Annie – landscape – nature writing –­ ­ordinary – skin – walking – wonders

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A written word […] [may] be carved out of the breath of life itself. henry david thoreau. Walden (“Reading”)

…

The black plane […] began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically on each other and never ended. Rahm made beauty with his whole body; it was pure pattern and you could watch it happen. […] Like a ballerina, the plane seemed to hold its head back stiff in concentration at the music’s slow, painful beauty. It was one of Rahm’s favorite routines. annie dillard. The Writing Life

⸪ © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324831_010

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At the end of An American Childhood,1 a book she dedicates to her gradual “awakening” to the mysteries and wonders of the world, Annie Dillard reveals her fascination for Giacometti’s sculpture in movement, Man Walking. She remembers going to the Pittsburgh Museum in order to admire this work of art, during an exhibition, and then attempting to draw it on paper: I drew what I thought of as the perfect person, whose form matched his inner life, and whose name was, Indian style, Man Walking. I saw a stilled figure in a swirl of invisible motion. I saw a touchy man moving through a still void. […] Man Walking was pure consciousness made poignant […]. He knew he was walking, here. […] [N]ot forming conclusions, not looking for anything. He looked freshly made of clay by God, visibly pinched by sure fingertips. […] Man Walking was so skinny his inner life was his outer life […]. The sculptor’s soul floated to his fingertips; I met him there, on Man Walking’s skin. (497) Combining in its thin form the intense reflexivity of consciousness and the marks and scars of its own making and of its moving towards the unknown, Man Walking could emblematize Annie Dillard’s writing of the elusive events of the world. Indeed, like Giacometti’s sculpture, Annie Dillard’s skin-like writing appears as a process, incarnating in a performative way its “inner” meditations and its “outer” involvement in the constant metamorphosis of the real. Annie Dillard’s writing is self-reflexive. Throughout her work, the writer simultaneously alludes to the need to resort to words in order to see the world (“Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it” [1998: 33]) and to the limitations of language. She thus exposes the dilemma of nature writing: when naming the wild in order to reveal its elusive value, one also runs the risk of taming it into the “freeze-frames” of knowledge. However, far from secluding the text from the world, the ceaseless questioning of discourse succeeds in revealing the pulsing substance of language and its constant adjustment to the fleeting events of nature. Annie Dillard thus recalls her drawing Man Walking “in his normal stalking pose and, later, dancing with his arms in the air” (497). Similarly, her writing does not so much aim at tracking the wonders of the real as at approaching them in a gesture of respectful neighboring.2 1 Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent parenthetical references are to Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood (2001). 2 The author ponders this notion of neighboring when she quotes the Bible, and more particularly the question addressed to Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” (409).

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Quoting from Paul Valéry’s essays, Georges Didi-Huberman associates dancing with a “philosophical action” amounting to some “questioning” of the self, some radical “alteration” of form and time—what Valéry calls a “pure act of metamorphosis” leading the dancer to “burst” into a series of “events” (2006: 24–25). In An American Childhood, where she simultaneously explores the transformation of her own self and the transformation of the land, Annie Dillard remembers her dancing lessons and her dancing at home, eyes closed. An American Childhood could thus be considered as a pilgrimage—a return to the “sainte terre”3 of the author’s prehistorical writing of the transmutations of the self and of the territory. When interlacing her white gloved hands with those of boys during dancing lessons, the child experiences the same blend of freedom and restraint, desire and control, proximity and distance that she discovers when she dances at home to the tunes of music or travel narratives. Indeed, Annie and her father always bring up Twain’s Life on the Mississippi or Kerouac’s On the Road when they dance in the evening. They seem to reenact Twain’s or Kerouac’s harmonization of their movements and voices to the open yet bounded courses of the river or the road.4 The ritual of dancing could thus emblematize the coincidental encounter between the constant self-questioning of the narrative, literally incarnated by the ceaseless hesitations or emendations of discourse, and the “unhandsome” (Emerson) mysteries of the world.5 In this respect, Annie Dillard’s childhood memories are also tales of initiation relating the genesis of her “writing life”— the writing of her life, and a life dedicated to writing. Indeed, Annie Dillard’s writing aims at sharing an experience, in a movement that seems strangely 3 In “Walking,” Thoreau associates the etymology of the word “sauntering” with the pilgrim’s unencumbered movement towards some “sainte terre.” He thus implicitly interlaces the walker’s return to some holy, original land and his quest for the origins of language. 4 According to Tony Tanner, this ambivalence between mobility and restraint characterizes American literature: “Between the non-identity of pure fluidity and the fixity involved in all definitions—in words or in life—the American writer moves, and knows he moves” (1977: 18). 5 In this respect, Annie Dillard reminds us of Thoreau. As François Specq suggests: “Forsaking any search for truth behind or beyond appearances, Thoreau, through his Journal, sought not to control nature’s reality, but to co-exist—or maybe even to be co-extensive—with it, to participate in its process. While he first envisioned a desirable facts-as-truth reduction, he progressively came to adopt a relatively de-transcendentalized view: he no longer sought representativity, but instancing, sensations and thoughts born of chance and situatedness: “I see a small flock of blackbirds flying over, some rising, others falling, yet all advancing together, one flock but many birds, some silent, others tchucking,—incessant alternation. This harmonious movement as in a dance, this agreeing to differ, makes the charm of the spectacle to me. […] (Journal xii:44, March 13, 1859)” (2003: 63).

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akin to that of the storyteller. According to Walter Benjamin, the storyteller interweaves various layers of retellings and thus concurrently reveals the “making” of his tale and the involvement of his words in the concrete world— “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (1992: 91). If Annie Dillard evokes her non-fiction writing as “living by fiction,” it is because her art is also neighboring with the art of the storyteller. In her work, the interlaced voices, the ceaseless revisions and variations of discourse recall the construction of a tale. However, the reflections on the limitations of knowing and naming are also attuned to the solitary reflections of a novel. Far from being irremediably lost, as Walter Benjamin bemoans, the transmission of an experience is indeed redefined by the novel as a sharing of the incommensurable dimension of life that men have in common. As Dominique Rabaté asserts: Dès lors, la question du sens de la vie continue certes de se poser, mais comme une sorte de question sans réponse assignable, comme une énigme à la fois individuelle et collective. Le roman proposera des orientations possibles, tracera des directions singulières, mais sans pouvoir ni devoir imposer un surplomb moral qui parviendrait à vectoriser de part en part “le sens de la vie.” L’opacité particulière de ce qui touche à l’expérience vécue entraîne, comme jamais auparavant, du côté de l’indicible et de l’inexprimable. […] C’est en cela que réside l’illisibilité nouvelle et nécessaire du roman moderne: elle n’est ni complication inutile, ni rupture avec le monde réel, mais adéquation difficile à ce qui défie la nomination, à ce qui perturbe et relance le langage. (2010: 17) If Annie Dillard chooses the indeterminacy of an indefinite article and thus turns her most intimate memories into the tale of “an” American childhood, it is because her narrative does not so much aim at “grasping” as at suggesting the “unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life” (Benjamin 1992: 98) that motivates both the search for the self and for the land. As I shall first attempt to show, Annie Dillard resorts to erasures and repetitions in order to reveal her growing awareness of the intertwined topographies of the neighborhood and of the unchartered territory. An evocation of the recurrent motif of the skin will then lead me to evoke the manner in which the author makes the malleable structures of discourse “dance” with the metamorphic surfaces of the world. Now, this “touch-and-go” (Dillard 1998: 204) between language and landscape does not only evince the poetic, graceful adaptation of words to the constant regeneration of the world. As I shall finally try to show, it also illustrates the manner in which art can contribute to a revelation of the most

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i­nsignificant, yet most valuable moments of ordinary life—the manner in which “shadow itself may resolve into beauty” (Dillard 1998: 71).

An Intimate and Impersonal Topography

As in Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, where the meeting point between the muddy Mississippi River and the clear Ohio River is steeped in a thick, white fog erasing all landmarks, the author recurrently evokes Pittsburgh as the “point of land where rivers meet” but systematically eludes all realistic descriptions. By inserting a map of the city about 1800 at the onset of the book, she immediately reveals the bygone origins of the town—the settling and spreading of the fort between the Monongahela River and the Alleghany River. The narrative discourse also seems to rest on a disappearance: the loss of memory that the narrator will experience at the end of her life— “When everything else has gone from my brain […] what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that” (274). As in Teaching a Stone to Talk, where she uses welder’s goggles in order to see an eclipse, a sense of loss seems necessary for the narrator to rediscover the sensations that essentially associate her own self and the land. By erasing the demands of realism and relying on recurrent references to familiar places or events in order to situate her memories, the narrator thus implies that it is in the musicality and materiality of language that she succeeds in recreating the child’s intimate exploration of the territory. If Pittsburgh grew at the meeting point between the “river with falling banks” and the “beautiful river,”6 Annie Dillard’s writing also expands on the borderland where the consciousness of loss paradoxically helps to reveal the beauty of the most common world. This sense of loss first appears at the level of enunciation. Playing with pronouns, the narrator of An American Childhood always situates herself at a near distance from herself—at the end of the narrative, she evokes “this woman with loosening skin on bony hands, hands now fifteen years older than your mother’s hands” (535). Like the man who passionately chases the children across the blocks and backyards of the neighborhood and whose “glory” suddenly vanishes when he catches them (321), the narrative voice tries to maintain a safe distance from the child’s vision it wishes to recreate. The narrator constantly moves between the intimacy of an “I,” the complicity of a “you,” the

6 I would like to thank Blandine Récoulat for this information about the meaning of the Indian names of the rivers.

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estrangement of a “she” and the generalization of a “we” in order to restore within the substance of discourse the oscillation of the child’s awakening consciousness between the known and the unknown.7 The tension of discourse between the adult’s search for memories and the child’s uncertain discovery of the world is also incarnated by the evocation of walks in the neighborhood. Indeed, far from naming or describing the streets the child endlessly roams in the neighborhood around her home, the narrator resorts to recurrent allusions to the same events or places. She thus recreates the child’s invention of a “mental map” of her territory (313). If the narrator’s archeological search for memories seems anticipated by the child’s search for coins or remnants of some prehistorical past, the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of memories, meditations or omissions seems to reenact the child’s rambling through the paths, thickets, sidewalks, porches, gardens or backyards of the neighborhood. Like riffs in a piece of jazz music,8 leitmotivs also contribute to the recreation of the land or time markers that the child failed to remember. The recurrence of the allusions to the father’s journey down the river, to the crawling of the moth on the road, or to the dancing lessons reveals the mental map and calendar that the child needs in order to interpret her world. Leitmotivs evolve as they recur and thus evince their wanting and waiting for a definite form. At the level of the sentences, anaphoras also illustrate the coming and going of the child’s consciousness around the secure microcosm of her home. In their stuttering repetitions, their endless quest for definition and their constant deferment of formulation, the narrator’s sentences do not so much betray her distrust of the gifts of language as they corroborate her unflinching pilgrim’s faith in its capacity for renewal. Like her father who walks “lightly, long-legged, like a soft-shoe hoofer barely in touch with the floor” (279), the narrator thus relies on rhythm, more than on realism, in order to convey the sense of loss that dominated the child’s exploration of the world. The “grain” of the narrator’s voice, or the “friction” between the music and the meaning of words,9 seems to literally incarnate the child’s tentative approach to the unknown—her nearing the unfathomable mysteries of the 7 In this respect, as Dominique Rabaté reminds us, “c’est dans l’épreuve la plus personnelle de l’impersonnel que naît la littérature” (2010: 108). 8 Dillard often remarks that her father was very fond of jazz and wished to go to New Orleans in order to listen to real “stuff.” 9 I am referring to Roland Barthes’s definition of the “grain” of the voice: “Le ‘grain’ de la voix n’est pas—ou n’est pas seulement—son timbre; la signifiance qu’il ouvre ne peut précisément mieux se définir que par la friction même de la musique et d’autre chose, qui est la langue (et pas du tout le message)” (1994: 155).

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land. Now it is precisely by recreating the various stages of her awakening in the substance of her words that the narrator’s childhood memories are also American. Indeed, when making her words dance with the ceaseless metamorphoses of the world, the narrator also recalls the invention of the land. As the recurrent allusions to the skin emblematize, her writing expands on the borderland between the intimacy of the self and the wilderness of an unknown territory. It thus seems to incarnate her imaginary, nearly mythical, evocation of the discovery of the continent, born out of two different versions of walking on the land—the silent walk of Indians, “search[ing] the sky for omens, and inspect[ing] the ground for sign” (402) and the wondering walk of settlers, “walking bright-eyed in, into nowhere from out of nowhere” (349).

The Skin of Discourse

The voice, Jean-Joseph Goux remarks, is similar to a skin, an envelope and an intermediary element (a “friction”) between the self and the other. As such, it involves a certain form of continuity between body and language, and therefore an energy (1999: 149). In An American Childhood, the oscillation of the narrative voice between the retrospective, reasonable, tenderly distant voice of the adult (“the narrating-I”) and the naïve, sensory intuitions of the child (“the narrated-I”) recreates at the level of discourse the increasing interaction of the self with the concrete, ever-more complex historical world. In this respect, the leitmotif of the skin, considered both metaphorically and literally in the narrative, corroborates the intimate relation the narrator is establishing between her own discovery of the world and the settlers’ wonder when walking on the continent for the first time. Before considering the skin of insects or amphibians, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the narrator focuses on the skin of her parents or grand-parents. The vulnerability of her mother’s skin to the creases and embroideries of her sheets (296), the scars and marks on her father’s shinbones (the “diseased irregularities: nicks, bumps, small hard balls, shallow ridges, and soft spots” [296]), the “scaly layers of fragile translucency” or the “floating freckles” (336) on her grand-parents’ limbs thus represent the impressions that time leaves on the self. Conversely, the stretching or shedding of the skin emblematizes the awakening of the self to a consciousness of historical time: A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside her skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate

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the actual, historical stream […]. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers. (346) Like the skin, simultaneously adapting itself to the expansion of the self’s inner life (“[t]he interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars” [359]) and incorporating some concrete elements of the outside world (sand, dust or gravel…), Annie Dillard’s writing is both self-reflexive and an incarnation of the transformations it wishes to evoke. By interlacing layers of intimate memories and literary, artistic or scientific references,10 it transparently reveals its uncertainty about the capacity of words to name the world. However, it also resorts to ruptures or repetitions in order to embody the ceaseless metamorphoses of the world. The analogy the author establishes between the curves of the skin and the variations of the land thus humorously evinces the poetic kinship she wishes to create between the awakening of consciousness and the transformation of the land. If she first evokes the mountains’ lumpy spines and skin (274), she then turns her mother’s hand into a “real mountain chain, the Alleghenies; Indians crept along just below the ridgetops, eyeing the frozen lakes below them through the trees” (295). And if a “house [is] but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world’s skin ever expanding” (316), skin is also “earth; it [is] soil” (295). The motif of the skin thus reflects and embodies the manner in which the uncertain transformation of discourse succeeds in recreating the wondering expansion of consciousness towards the unknown territories of life or land.11 It also reminds us of the intense value of the most ordinary moments when consciousness and senses alike actually “touch” these territories: “What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch—with an electric hiss and cry—this speckled mineral sphere, our present world” (535).

10 11

For instance, Annie Dillard indifferently evokes Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Pough’s Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, and Motherwell’s, Kline’s or Gottlieb’s paintings. The child’s “mental mapping” is also evoked as a liminal “connection” between the inner world and the outer world : “if you pause in your daze to connect your own skull-locked and interior mumble with the skin of your senses and sense, and notice you are living,— then will you not conjure up in imagination a map or a globe and locate this low mountain ridge on it, and find on one western slope the dot which represents you walking here astonished?” (534).

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Touches of the Ordinary

It is by learning to draw that Annie Dillard learns how to see. And it is by reading a book that she learns how to draw. In An American Childhood, the narrator remembers the moment when she initiated herself into the art of drawing by trying to record the creases and lines of her old, worn-out baseball mitt, distorted by the act of playing, arrested in the movement of catching—turned into a form of gesture: I drew my baseball mitt’s gesture—its tense repose, its expectancy, which ran up its hollows like a hand. […] “Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see,” said the book. “Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper.” […] With my pencil point I crawled over the mitt’s topology. I slithered over each dip and rise; I checked my bearings, admired the enormous view, and recorded it like Meriwether Lewis mapping the Rockies. (351) This drawing lesson appears as an illustration of Annie Dillard’s writing of the territory. Indeed, Annie Dillard’s metatextual reflections on the various readings that influenced her vision of the world, or on the limitations of her own writing when confronted with the elusive mysteries of the world—in other words, her meditations on the catching abilities or inabilities of her own hand—do not abstract the text from the concreteness of the real. On the contrary, by introducing an element of doubt within the certainty of fixed definitions, these meditations set the text into relief and into motion and thus make the gesture of the hand coincide with the movements of the land. The dance of the uncertainties of words with the most fleeting moments and movements of the world ultimately illuminates the still unchartered elements of the territory. Far from being extraordinary, these unknown particulars belong to the trite and the commonplace. They are next to nothing—insignificant details of one’s life or of one’s vision of the world that nevertheless contain a most precious singularity. Dominique Rabaté evokes these trivial elements as a “presque rien”— remnants of the ordinary that nonetheless endow life with an extraordinary, novel-like quality: [C]e qui fait la qualité éminemment romanesque d’une vie, c’est d’être un presque rien. C’est-à-dire le contraire du rien. Comme, d’ailleurs, le contraire de toute idée de totalité. Envisagée comme ne formant plus un tout, cette vie ne tombe pas pour autant dans le néant pathétique du

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rien. Elle ne se réduit pas à ce rien, puisque d’elle insiste et persiste tel fragment opaque, tel détail inassimilable, tel biographème énigmatique. D’une vie, il reste toujours des traces, des objets insignifiants, des fétiches dérisoires — sur quoi rêver et compatir. (2006: 182) In An American Childhood, it is precisely when the narrator expounds her difficulty in recording the “transparency” of the child’s vision before the inevitable fall into the “opacity” of the adult’s sensations—“I couldn’t remember how to forget myself” (510)—that she succeeds in revealing the precious nature of the most ordinary moments of life. In other words, it is when she speculates about the limitations of reason and verbalization that she also recreates her most intimate and intuitive childhood memories: But the new scenes I tried to memorize with the aid of sentences were as elusive and random as the scenes I remembered without effort. They were just as broken, trivial, capsizing, submerged. Instead of a suspect’s face I saw red-lighted rain in front of a car’s taillight. Instead of the schoolyard recess scene I loved, the dodgeball game I tried to memorize at one moment, and then at another—my friends and I excited and whooping—I saw a coarse cement corner, and the cyclone fence above it, and only a flash of dark green school uniforms below. Instead of my sister Molly just starting to walk I saw the smocking on her blue dress, and her stained palm. These were torn and out-of-focus scenes playing on windblown scraps. They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzingly away, like a ship’s stern yawning the dark lee slope of a wave. (408) Far from undermining creativity, the narrator’s doubts contribute to the revelation of the imprints of life on memory. Like tattoos on the skin of discourse, these sketches of the past often take the form of screens, stains or scraps in the narrative—an oblong refraction, a stain on the wallpaper, the whirling movements of the poplar leaves or the ice skating of an Irish girl behind the window pane, at night. Prosaic and poetic, these visions “of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things” (439) appear as “treasures” (312) or instants of confluence between the child’s transparent vision and the adult’s awareness of the shadow of death. They often take the form of comparisons: Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: precisely, toe hits toe. The tern

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folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast. (282)12 Oscillating on the shimmering surface between the naïve wonder of the child and the doubtful wonder of the adult, An American Childhood does more than reveal the memories of a woman awakening to the mysteries of life and land or the meditations of a narrator writing and walking through them (“the motion and shed molecules of the traveler” [535]). By making her words dance with the world, Annie Dillard also shares an experience. Having learnt from books how to see the world, she simply leads the reader to notice the most unnoticed wonders of the commonplace: It all got noticed: the horse’s shoulders pumping; sunlight warping the air over a hot field; the way leaves turn color, brightly, cell by cell; and even the splitting, half-resigned and half-astonished feeling you have when you notice you are walking on earth for a while now—set down for a spell—in this particular time for no particular reason, here. (498) Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1994 [1972]. “Le grain de la voix” in Œuvres. Tome 2. Paris: Seuil. Benjamin, Walter. 1992 [1955]. “The Storyteller” in Illuminations. London: Fontana. Chénetier, Marc. 1990. “Tinkering, Extravagance: Thoreau, Melville, and Annie Dillard” in Critique. Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31.3: 157–72. Cochoy, Nathalie. 2005. “The Imprint of the ‘Now’ on the Skin of Discourse: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in Revue Française d’Études Américaines 106 (“Écrire la nature”): 33–49. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2006. Le Danseur des solitudes. Paris: Minuit. Dillard, Annie. 1998 [1974]. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper, 1998. ———. 2001 [1987]. An American Childhood in Three by Annie Dillard. New York: Harper. Goux, Jean-Paul. 1999. La Fabrique du Continu. Paris: Champ Vallon. 12

Let’s note that the musicality of the sentence, with its soft [s] sounds, recreates the delicate landing of the bird. More generally, the child’s memories are conveyed by sensations. And the music of words contributes to the revelation of this intuitive, synaesthetic ­approach of the world. Evoking the music her father would find in New Orleans (“the old stuff, the hot, rough stuff”), the narrator thus notes that the “music would smell like the river itself” (277).

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Rabaté, Dominique. 2006. Le Chaudron fêlé. Ecarts de la Littérature. Paris: Corti. ———. 2010. Le Roman et le sens de la vie. Paris: Corti. Specq, François. 2003. “Thoreau’s Flowering of Facts and the Truth of Experience” in Maeder, Beverly (ed.) Representing Realities: Essays on American Literature, Art and Culture. SPELL 16: 51–66. Tanner, Tony. 1977. The Reign of Wonder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thoreau, Henry David. 1895. “Walking,” in Dircks, W.H. (ed.) Essays and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. London: Walter Scott. White, Kenneth. 1982. “Marcher avec Thoreau” in La Figure du Dehors. Paris: Grasset.

chapter 10

On Duff Wilson: Community, Agribusiness and Environmental Testimony Alain Suberchicot Abstract This essay is an ecocritical analysis of Duff Wilson’s book, Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret (2002). While the book is in many ways the result of journalistic investigation, it also has literary value through its zest for story-telling, giving readers an insight into small-town America, and the weight that bears upon the sense of community owing to the corporate interest of the chemical industry. Duff Wilson’s book narrates how chemical wastes that would be expensive to treat according to current legislation are dumped into fertilizers that are later sprayed across vast expanses of land in Quincy, a small town in Washington State, endangering humans, cattle and the land alike. Lawrence Buell has rationalized the possible polarizations of environmental writing, and found that the “health of the physical environment” is one, while the other is “social welfare or interhuman equity.” Duff Wilson no doubt finds that environmental writing has duties in both areas of concern, but, as he moves on, the biocentric view gets the upper hand, though the more social perspective is not discarded. Duff Wilson’s book, while examining questions which may sound unliterary, such as agricultural price-levels and competition in the chemical industry, delves into issues of literary ethics and grasps human intimacies when they are shaped by those forces. Behind the social and economic mechanisms at work in this small rural community, one encounters cases of human suffering, which Duff Wilson conveys with adroitness and a sense of implicit solidarity. This is what makes his book especially poignant, and capable of exploring the various nuances of social fragility.

Keywords Agribusiness – community – ecotext – environmental justice – ethics – fertilizers – globalization – identity – nimby – non-fiction – place-connectedness – testimony – Washington State – women – Wilson, Duff

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004324831_011

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There never was an is without a where. lawrence buell (2001: 55)

⸪ Duff Wilson is a renowned American journalist with a literary talent that we feel tempted to see as an offspring of the French tradition best exemplified by Albert Londres, the well-known investigator who denounced various woes of French history, like the reviled detention camp for misfits we had in French Guyana up until the nineteen thirties. It is also true that America has had a tradition of progressive writing ever since the end of the nineteenth century, with a roster of leading authors such as Upton Sinclair and Ida M. Tarbell, who wrote on the corrupt tactics of the Standard Oil. Denouncing is an American tradition, and everything environmental in the usa is ground upon which one may easily build. Duff Wilson is now a reporter for The New York Times who covers the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. He published his inquiry into the corrupt practices of the chemical industry in a rural context in 2001 under the following title, which is spectacular enough: Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret. The first question that the book raises has to do with whether this is literature at all. And this interrogation calls for a definition of the literary if we want a correct answer. The book is not nature-writing per se. It would be easier to define as “toxic writing,” of which the study of environmental literature in the us gives many examples: the most obvious one is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, originally published as a series of articles in The New Yorker, then printed in 1962 as a book, and republished in 1994 with an insightful introduction by Vice-President Al Gore. Carson’s book has inspired many followers, among whom one might quote Susanne Antonetta, whose Body Toxic, a gruesome story of loss and attrition focusing on an immigrant family barely surviving in the environmentally fearsome southern part of New Jersey, was published in 2001. What these works have in common is their capacity for investigating into environmentally degraded situations, their skills in terms of written expression, their ability to bond with the actors involved in the story, and, we might add, their zest for story-telling, which is at bottom what makes them literary. One responds to stories in various ways, and one can even track meaning down their inner substance in ways that call for rational analysis, which has to be done when one comes to considering Duff Wilson’s contribution to environmental beliefs in recent American cultural history.

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Blurring Personal Identities

Duff Wilson’s book narrates how chemical wastes that would be expensive to treat according to current legislation are dumped into fertilizers that are later sprayed across vast expanses of land in Quincy, a small town in Washington State, endangering humans, cattle and the land alike. Quincy is located near the Columbia River, one of America’s major water-systems, in a potato-growing zone that feeds the world by marketing its production to MacDonald’s, so that the locals soon realize that not only they but a global world beyond is affected. Hence the title of the book: remaining local, when confronting an ecological difficulty, turns out to be impossible. However, any story needs a hero, and Duff Wilson soon finds out that Patty Martin is going to be perfect in that role because she is the adequate embodiment of the middle-class wife and mother. The message runs clear: you don’t feel concerned as a middle-class reader, but you might be earlier than you think. The ecological hero in toxic non-fiction can be just anybody, and has no exceptional status of her or his own. This single aspect is quite reminiscent of one previous American cause célèbre, the Love Canal affair, which saw the growing involvement of another middle-class wife, Lois Marie Gibbs, who was to make it to the headlines of leading magazines and newspapers across the American nation when she found that the quiet piece of land on which she and her family had made their home was actually a landfill where the Hooker chemical corporation had dumped tons of toxic wastes that threatened their lives, thus waking the global syndrome of corporate irresponsibility. Henry Adams’s admiration for the dynamo (Adams 1918, Chap. xxv) is now of no use, and the days when the Harvard historian and writer thought of technology as a moral equivalent of the Virgin, in whom he saw a norm of benevolence, are long gone. Patty Martin is the main actor in a story which unfolds while involving one community into the fray. That we should be facing an environmental tragedy is obvious enough when one of the members of that otherwise quiet community rises to speak out and says: “We have a problem within our own nest that we need to deal with” (7).1 Interpreting Duff Wilson’s book involves understanding what is meant by this expression. Does “our own nest” mean our home and its immediate surroundings? Might this mean that we need a wider perspective to understand these words? We surely do, but the denizens of Quincy, Washington State, certainly think otherwise, and would never have spoken in terms of precautionary principles and food security had their fields not been poisoned in the first place, and their crops not rotten before having a chance to mature. 1 Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent parenthetical references are to Wilson 2002.

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The book weaves different viewpoints into a single narrative, and that is at bottom what makes it literary. The narrator, none other than Duff Wilson himself, knows for sure that the stakes are high, that Middle America is under duress, and that beyond the narrow confines of a small American town, the whole nation will soon watch what is going on. The book begins as an account of a nimby-type struggle, to end up as a global question, raising issues of State control, trust, and sustainability, issues that a peaceful American community somewhere in the West had never suspected having to come to grips with. If perspectives do communicate and shed light on one another, there certainly is one more perspective that enters the game, the reader’s own. It sure is not an easy task to analyze the reader’s perspective about a book with thousands of copies sold nationally, if we assume a book to play upon the minds of readers, which have contours varying considerably from one to another. However, reception being motley as readers’ garbs are, this is so because any book will elicit a response that calls for alternatives to what the author has actually written down. What if we had a little more of this, and a little more of that? Are those wonderful portraits of people fully satisfactory? Duff Wilson has a talent for giving vitality to the citizens of Quincy. Potatoes are a serious business out there in Washington State, the way they are in Idaho. Thus, the President of the Washington State Potato Commission “has the cocky manner of a man who’s used to having his coffee cup refilled frequently and his advice followed. He wears sunglasses atop his thick, wavy hair, and speaks with confidence” (7). He is the very embodiment of the successful farmer, while another acquaintance of Patty’s, the moral norm inside the book, is an impersonation of the failed farmer, someone quite likely to stir sympathy among friends and foe, so steep his downfall is: “Dennis had once been one of the most successful farmers in the county, worth more than five hundred thousand dollars, but lost everything. Now he mills grain, drives a truck, and lives in a mobile home on his parents’ land” (6). Dennis symbolizes beyond himself, the heyday of American agriculture being but a memory, while the social humiliation of trailer-parks conjures up frightful images of farm bankruptcy, a toxic secret of American rural history that has roots in a culture of economic survival. In H.D. Thoreau’s times, over one and a half century ago, farms did fail as well. As a result of these touches of the pen, Duff Wilson shapes readers’ responses, the way any author should do, so that they are quite likely to want more, and at least to seek elements in the book that already satisfy them in this respect. Duff Wilson’s book has an interest in social history, which he shares with most books of environmental non-fiction. If, for example, Susanne Antonetta writes about industrial pollution in New Jersey, she does so out of an incentive for social analysis. Those hit by industrial pollution were originally from

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Barbados or India, and came to a place which was mostly agricultural. Agriculture has now been swept from New Jersey, so that, together with the changing nature of land, it is the social changes induced by the rise of industry that Antonetta’s memoir chronicles. Her book is both a history and a geography of place, while Duff Wilson avoids history, and this is why his environmental heroes do not seem to be fully-fledged. Beyond the already sad notion that historians and geographers will always look on each other with a degree of diffidence, we realize that environmental non-fiction is shaped by disciplines that ecowriters cannot wholly bring together. Some authors like Duff Wilson will side with geography, some like Antonetta allow history to seep generously into her non-fiction, while others eliminate persons altogether in favor of how nature is affected by chemistry, thus affording a bio-centric view, as Rachel Carson does. Duff Wilson is not entirely subsumed under any of those oftentimes self-centered views. What attracts most in his writing, let us be honest in this, is his capacity to transcend these categories, and steer, perhaps, beyond them, the way he does this being a suitable object of inquiry to understand ecowriting.

The Rural Community

Duff Wilson does not ignore any of the hardships of rural pursuits and the urge to survive that they entail. Though these questions are not the main focus of his story, we do get some elements which run into the picture of how social history and ecological situations hinge. In particular, one of the actors, Dennis, is shown to have faced situations which are quite reminiscent of some of the aspects one encounters in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, a magic literary heritage that associates the non-fiction of today with the major fictional achievements of American literature of yesterday. Rural pursuits do happen to be maiming in both books. The general crippling of rural society is one strong statement in Steinbeck’s novel, and so is the actual crippling of one of the exoduster’s brothers when a harrow accidentally digs into his guts (Steinbeck 1996: 421–422). Duff Wilson goes into similar gruesome situations, when we hear that Dennis, one of the victims of industrial pollution in the rural context under scrutiny, has a brother who “couldn’t get up after falling from a hay truck” (17). The physical damage is one tragic version of the moral damage wrought by the industrialization of agriculture, that has spawned this uncontrolled juggernaut called agribusiness. We wonder where the main focus of the book is to be sought. Lawrence Buell has rationalized the possible polarizations of environmental writing, and found that the “health of the physical environment” is one, while the other is

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“social welfare or interhuman equity” (2005: 97–98). Duff Wilson no doubt finds that environmental writing has duties in both areas of concern, but, gradually, as he moves on, the biocentric view gets the upper hand, while the more social perspective is not discarded. However, the emphasis of most environmental books with a good public following will always be the biocentric rather than the social perspective in the United States ever since the specialized form of environmental writing has emerged. The biocentric emphasis, where chemical effects and the state of ecosystems is the primary concern, has its best known prototype with Silent Spring, where an unexpected hero emerges from these highly complex considerations about chemistry and accounts of scientific trials and experiments, the human liver, which happens to be nobody’s in particular, which somewhat detracts much from an individualized perspective. What we do see is that the biocentric emphasis, or “physical environment as first focus of concern,” according to Buell’s perceptive phrase (2005: 98), tends to blur human intimacies. Is this the reason why there should be so much environmental non-fiction, and so little environmental fiction when we look at environmental writing as a whole? This, of course, is one possibility of interpretation that requires further analysis, and let us say that Duff Wilson’s book, in this respect, is illuminating for its capacity to lead to this question, even if the answer is most certainly not clear-cut, and invites further questioning as to the state of American culture today. This conundrum has at least been partially clarified by a perceptive essay Richard Rorty wrote when looking into the state of the American left. In one of his more cultural rather than philosophical books, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, Rorty comes up with a series of remarks on the disintegration of the American Left. He analyzes precisely the context in which environmental writing has found suitable ground from which to grow. He writes the following, which may seem far-fetched to some: “It is as if, sometime around 1980, the children of the people who made it through the Great Depression and into the suburbs had decided to pull up the drawbridge behind them” (1998: 86). Examining Duff Wilson’s writing in Fateful Harvest, we feel this attitude— that of the drawbridge pulled up behind oneself for protection—is not uncommon, as the book explores questions of social cohesion in the small community out West. Most instances of social interaction, once the deadly chemical waste has been spread upon otherwise generous fields, turn out to be patronizing, while farm failures are on the rise. The very idea of a community is split down the middle, and the smaller unit of American socialization, the village, harbors tensions that seem otherwise invisible. Any idea of solidarity has waned altogether. As a result, the branch manager for Cenex, the chemical ­corporation which comes under fire for understandable reasons, is viewed in a critical fashion. Wilson writes:

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The dark, bulky Williams has an unflappable manner and sensible approach that people appreciated. The work of a field man was to be “a baby-sitter for the farmer,” he said, and he didn’t care if some farmers didn’t like his way of putting it. After all, the metaphor places the farmer in the position of a baby. But Williams was a straight talker, and he stuck up for his company over anyone. (27) Thus, Duff Wilson, through subtle variations of voice, underlines that there is no loyalty left towards the local community from one who is supposed to be part of it, and stand out for the defense of a modicum of solidarity. In other words, Duff Wilson works on themes of power and sovereignty, both proceeding from the corporate interests of a chemical company which bypasses current legislation and has no human decency. What happened to the American small town, we wonder? Has America changed into a suburb eating at the core of the American dream of farming happiness, penetrating still further to the bare threads of the social fabric supposed to have been around for ages? This is not an impossibility, considering the wide-ranging changes that have unfolded in the past decades, marked by the absorption of large tracts of farmland by urban expansion. Kathryn Marie Dudley, the leading Yale anthropologist, has documented this in Minnesota (Debt and Dispossesion), but these changes are more general than what happened in Minnesota. It is the whole fabric of American rural life that has lapsed into decline, for reasons having to do with the ever-increasing pressure placed upon what is left of rural communities for the benefit of corporate America, that fares upon American rural ground like mice upon a corn-field. The effect of this is best described by Richard Rorty’s apt choice of the term we need to describe the rural America of today when he mentions what he calls the immiseration of the workers of globalization, an uncommon word in American English (1998: 85). What Duff Wilson chronicles is the awareness that immiseration, when not fully accomplished among some quarters of American society, is actually a threat: pressure comes from all sides, from slumping price-levels in agricultural products, as well as from raw competition in the chemical industry, that eventually dissolves communities within the United States.

The Ethics of Writing

Are these questions eminently unliterary, or do they push the literary somewhat further, and help it foray into unknown spaces of the literary imagination? One

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may argue in favor of the second proposition, for several reasons. One reason is fundamental in that the literary is oftentimes mistaken for one version of intimacy, and the confusion may well be understood as an effect of the readingprocess, which tends to single out an author-reader connection that neutralizes the conception of literature as public discourse. The other reason is of finer intent and may be seen as specific to environmental writing, while it builds up a sense of intimacy that may seem lost given the social context which comes to the foreground in ecodiscourse. Anthropologists have something to say on this; this is why we need to look into Kathryn Marie Dudley’s thought-provoking case-study of farm loss in Minnesota, Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland (2000). Focusing on rural decline, the study underlines that in the rural, and unnamed county of Minnesota she chose to study, the farm population dropped by 60 percent from 1970 to 1990, which was of course a severe blow to the farming communities there, solidarities and the sense of kinship being wrecked by farm repossession and rising bank loans which sent farmers down the fast lane of debt. Kathryn Marie Dudley thus comes to an anthropology of community, and defines community as “suppressing awareness of the inherent inequality of economic positions,” the economic positions of the bank managers and loan companies, all managed locally, and the farmers trying to survive a depression the way their families had attempted to do in the nineteen thirties (2000: 66). One farmer in particular words this feeling to perfection when declaring that what has been annihilated is the sense of trust (2000: 67): and when trust is gone, when a feeling of dispossession prevails and values are incapacitated, we as readers are calling for a sense of intimacy that belongs with how individual lives and collective events hinge. Duff Wilson has an ear for that kind of suffering penetrating the fabric of American social contexts. Quite characteristically, the words of individual suffering, though not over-emphasized, are conveyed in italics, thus formally standing out as separate entities. They are remarkable for their brevity, and allusiveness. We wonder why they should stand out at some formal distance from the main narrative. Is it that they so stand out because there is an aspect in them that requires compensation? Do we find a repression of anything that might be unleashed and that is not? Which leads to asking why there should be a repression of anything, and what its nature might be. The repression is a repression of the personal in favor of the impersonal. Here are some examples of these italicized words: This is what they do. They dump it on the farmer […] They’re putting it all over the Columbia River […] (61)

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And, for a clear demonstration that these words bear on how the ecotext unfolds, which is more clearly relevant to how the message questions its own formal nature, the main two protagonists are thus described meditating on the form of public discourse that they help generate: “Dennis, Patty said, we have to control this imagination of ours” (62). This of course has to do with the tension being established between the particulars of story grounded in a specific context, and the demonstration that the events unfolding have global significance. It might be argued that identifying the forces of globalization affords the possibility for the ecotext to claim authority beyond the confines of regional literature, which is one of the effects sought, through the construction of a universalist perspective. However, if a question arises as to the necessity of control, it is because the protagonists, who themselves word this necessity, want to evade an inquiry into their personal lives. It surely is an effect of globalization that the victims want to shroud their personal weaknesses from view. We may feel frustrated as informed readers that the ecotext should thus refrain from going into the particulars of how the protagonists may be viewed in terms of their intellectual and social fragilities that have made them into appointed victims in the first place. But we also understand that globalization will hit where it is easier to hit, thus capturing the portrait of a ruthless society which is not immune from social risk, and which citizens must confront. The risk that the ecotext faces, however, is to sink the personal into the implicit, by renouncing a degree of didacticism. On the other hand, it is a well-known fact that the authority of any literary text rests on the avoidance of the didactic. But it is also one of the paradoxes of the ecotext to vie for authority as literature, while being didactic in its genes, given its object of inquiry—how humans in this case may be affected by how other humans act upon the environment. Beyond this, one finds the broader question of the impossibility for incapacitated people to understand the dangers of science, and their lack of expertise in the specialized domain of pesticides and chemicals, an expertise which might have afforded tools for informed resistance. It is the fundamentally non-democratic use of science that Duff Wilson’s book brings to light, together with the difficulty this has generated towards the implementation of any precautionary principle. Duff Wilson’s book incorporates one aspect that is much less visible in many eco-texts, and infuses environmental literature with ethical force. It so happens that the toxic chemicals and pesticides seeping into fertilizers, and poured onto the farms of Quincy in distant Washington State, are the target of a woman’s determination: this is a clear demonstration of feminine purpose, which runs a gender perspective into the book. As a result, much of what happens may be read as resistance to an androcentrically constructed world.

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Women are thus a local and a global norm, and they are much needed to restore a sense of value in a context that tends to eliminate any sense of what is right and wrong. Patty Martin is an impersonation of the gender-defined quest for environmental justice, while she is also the core of awareness from which the narrative unfolds. Thus, Duff Wilson pays respect to an ecofeminist perspective in the general context of environmental writing that has fared on the contributions of such leading women as Rachel Carson, Lois Marie Gibbs, Susanne Antonetta, or, in a more moderate vein, Annie Dillard. Women are thus empowered, by the representation Duff Wilson’s narrative brings on, as moral agents. This representation of womanhood as a moral core of responsibility makes females as capable agents for the protection of domesticity, while the globalization at work through the onslaught of corporate power upon the sense of place is understood as a valid object of refusal. Globalization is precisely identified as a negation of the sense of place-connectedness. The literary imagination at work in Duff Wilson’s book is an adequate example that sheds light on some of Lawrence Buell’s propositions. Analyzing the sense of place, what he also calls more specifically place-connectedness (2001: 64–74), Buell identifies several features that shape the imaging of space. In particular, he finds that “the most familiar way of imaging place-connectedness is in terms of concentric areas of affiliation decreasing in intimacy as one fans out from a central point” (Buell 2001: 64). Nothing could be truer than this when we come to the way awareness moves in Duff Wilson’s book. This critical proposition is not so different from what Emerson has to say on the way the human imagination develops. In “Circles,” in particular, Emerson underlines the rotating design at work as the mind acquires knowledge of what surrounds it (1983: 403–414). This ever-expanding circle that Emerson finds, a metaphor of the powers of the mind, however, is not to be viewed positively when one comes to the effects of globalization in Duff Wilson’s book. It may be surmised to eliminate a core of meaning, in the sense that community, integrity, trust, these core values, are thus made peripheral to human existence, and Duff Wilson’s realization of this effect of globalization is a matter of concern to the analyst who trusts that value cannot derive from a scattergram of notions. Yet there remains hope in this. Duff Wilson’s story, which draws circles around a core event that has general meaning, calls for responsibility as an ever-evolving conceptual circle. By the end of the story, Patty Martin has moved on to being an activist with a nationwide audience, and has set up a nonprofit group called Safe Food and Fertilizer, to spread the word across the u.s.a. (269). Washington State has implemented tighter legislation and set limits to using heavy metals in fertilizers, while issuing an array of stop-sale orders to hamper possible wrongdoing

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from the chemical industries in that State. Though much is to be done, what surfaces from the fray is the interconnectedness of local questions and global ones, a realization that takes its toll on those who want it shared far and wide. Duff Wilson has a final word on this, which is worth perusing when he writes: “This was a small-town story, but in one way or another, we all live in small towns on a small planet” (274), a typical wry notation that testifies to the civic energy of American culture. Thus, Duff Wilson’s book is a testimony about place, and essentially a call to considering that place is not an isolated entity, that stands separated from any other place. On the contrary, any place is connected with others places for which it carries meaning that might be ethically useful. Nature writing accomplishes to the best of its abilities, in this book, a regeneration of the sense of value, that has deteriorated as an effect of globalizing economies, while it avoids being categorized as either nimby, populist, or middle-class culture. The book allies the ecocentric view with the more humane interest for social analysis. Though personal histories are somewhat blurred, the force of the implicit is such that journalism has such a sense of nuance that it acquires a literary dimension. What should be underlined, however, is that the book pays tribute to the force of democracy, and its core of civic values, which reminds one of what Jacques Derrida once said about democracy when insisting that democracy has rarely presented itself without the possibility of brotherhood, although Derrida’s word is fraternisation in French, fraternization, an uncommon word in political vocabulary in English (1994: 13). Perhaps we have that word, fraternisation, in French, because we know that brotherhood is unlike a notion cast in bronze, and that what we need, and what environmental writing can effect, is brotherhood in action, an ongoing process that manifests itself in environmental activism. Duff Wilson understands this effort of civic organization at bottom as a ferment that can establish a sense of togetherness in the face of ecological dangers. A new frontier for social responsibility has thus emerged, which no doubt is to be viewed as an answer from all quarters of American society to the powers of corporate interest which thousands of citizens need to resist, with the help of the written word. Works Cited Adams, Henry. 1918. The Education of Henry Adams. Project Gutemberg. 4 Dec. 2015 . Antonetta, Susanne. 2002. Body Toxic. Washington D.C.: Counterpoint.

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Buell, Lawrence. 2001. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell. Carson, Rachel. 1994. Silent Spring. Introduction by Al Gore. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée. Dudley, Kathryn Marie. 2000. Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. Essays and Lectures. New York: The Library of America. Gibbs, Lois Marie. 1998. Love Canal: The Story Continues. Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada: New Society. Rorty, Richard. 1998. Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Steinbeck, John. 1996 [1939]. The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings, 1936–1941 (ed. Robert DeMott). New York: The Library of America. Wilson, Duff. 2002. Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret. 2nd ed. New York: Harper Collins.

Index Abbey, Edward 22, 105–106 aesthetic sense 11, 63–66, 105, 108–109 agency 11, 17, 116, 130 agribusiness 148, 152 Alaimo, Stacy 17, 32–34, 118, 121, 127 Algeria 116, 122 American literature 52, 64, 90, 105, 116, 136, 148, 152 An American Childhood (Dillard) 12, 136–138, 140, 142, 144–146 anarchism 71, 78 animal rights 5, 17, 24–26, 32 anthropocentrism 5, 8, 69, 86, 96, 100–101, 103 beauty 11, 19, 50, 77, 82, 93, 101, 105–114, 131, 136, 140, 145 biocultural criticism 116 biophilia 116, 133 biophobia 116, 133 bioregionalism 5, 17, 20–23, 35 Bowles, Paul 11–13, 116–135 Buell, Lawrence 3–5, 13, 15, 17, 19, 34–36, 53, 57–58, 61, 67, 148–149, 152–153, 157 Carnegie, Andrew 10, 105, 113–115 carnophallogocentrism (Derrida) 27 Carson, Rachel 90, 96, 100, 149, 152, 157 Christianity 90, 95 cognitive ecocriticism 116–117 cognitive mapping 6, 39, 49 cognitive science 27, 117 commitment 5, 11, 17–19, 22, 90–91 community 13, 18, 21–23, 29, 35, 39–40, 100, 148, 150, 152–155, 157 cosmos 64, 69, 74–75, 79–80, 88, 93–94 Damasio, Antonio 116, 120, 126, 131 dancing 12, 136–138, 141 Darwin, Charles 8–9, 11, 80, 90–91, 93–96, 99 Deep ecology 19, 70, 84–86, 90, 101 Defoe, Daniel 5–6, 39–50 Derrida, Jacques 17, 27–28, 158 desert 10–12, 21–22, 105–132

Diamond, Cora 17, 25–26 Dillard, Annie 12–13, 136–146, 157 Easterlin, Nancy 117, 123, 126, 133 ecoethics 17, 35 ecofeminism 5, 17, 31–33 ecologocentrism (Timothy Morton) 17, 23 ecology 1, 5, 7–9, 11, 19–20, 24, 30–31, 70, 74, 76–79, 81, 84–87, 90–101 economics 52, 58–60 ecotext 13–14, 148, 156 embodiment 11, 116, 119–120, 133, 150–151 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 57, 90, 92–93, 138, 157 emotion 8, 10–12, 116–133 environment 1–5, 7–8, 10–14, 17–18, 20–22, 31–35, 39–40, 42–48, 50, 53, 66, 75–77, 94, 98, 102, 105, 107, 109–110, 114, 116–120, 123–127, 131–133, 148, 152, 156 environmentalism 7–8, 11, 27, 78, 84–88, 90, 99–100, 103 environmental justice 5, 13, 17, 23, 28–32, 35, 148, 157 environmental literature 3, 105, 114, 149, 156 essay 69, 75 ethics 4, 5, 11, 17–35, 57, 100, 120, 148, 154 exploitation of nature 2, 7, 52, 58–60, 98, 105–106 exploration 6, 11, 52–53, 55, 61, 133, 140–141 fertilizers 148, 150, 156–157 Forest Service 90, 95 freedom 43–44, 69–70, 77, 79, 86, 138 Geddes, Patrick 69, 78 Geography 7–8, 39, 47, 71–73, 76, 78, 81, 88, 122, 152 George, Henry 98 globalization 148, 154, 156–157 Glotfelty, Cheryll 15, 17–20, 31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 69, 83 grotesque (aesthetics) 52, 63–64 Guyot, Arnold 69, 82

162 Haeckel, Ernst 69, 76, 85, 90, 94 Hetch Hetchy 90, 102, 108 Holism 69, 82, 93 Humboldt, Alexander von 8, 14, 52, 55–56, 60–61, 64, 69, 73–74, 76, 82–83, 90–93 Identity 12, 21, 24, 39–40, 43–46, 49, 59, 117–119, 121, 124, 127, 129–130, 132, 148 Johnson, Robert Underwood 90, 97 Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe) 39, 42 Kropotkin, Piotr 69–70, 72, 85 landscape 1, 5, 9–10, 12–13, 40, 42, 46, 56, 64, 105, 109–110, 112–113, 116, 118–125, 127–128, 131–132, 136, 139 Lasch, Christopher 90, 103 Leopold, Aldo 90, 100, 103 Lynch, Tom 17, 21–23 malthusianism 69, 79 mapping 6, 39, 49, 52, 54–58, 143–144 maps 52, 54–58, 72 Marsh, George Perkins 69, 78–80, 84, 94–95 material agency 11, 33, 116, 118, 121, 130 material feminism 17, 32 materialism 9, 52–53, 82, 88, 93, 96 matter 52–53, 55–57, 59–61, 63–65, 118 McKibben, Bill 105–106 Milton, John 90–91, 119–120 mobility 6, 39, 44–46, 138 modernity 3, 6, 8, 14, 33, 39, 44–46, 49–50, 55, 72, 82, 84, 102, 127 Moll Flanders (Defoe) 39, 41–50 Morton, Timothy 5, 17, 23–24 Muir, John 7–10, 90–103 Naess, Arne 19, 90, 101–102 narration 6, 11, 39, 44, 73, 84 narrative 6–7, 12, 14, 29, 31, 39–40, 43–44, 46–50, 52–53, 116, 118, 121–124, 130, 138–140, 142, 145, 151, 155, 157 naturalism 69, 76 nature lover 97, 105–106, 110 nature preservation 52–54, 65, 80, 93, 97–99, 105–106, 111, 113–114

Index nature writing 1–3, 6, 11, 17, 30, 106, 116, 136–137, 158 nimby 148, 151, 158 non-fiction 14, 139, 148, 150–153 novel 5–6, 12, 31, 39–40, 44–46, 48, 116, 118, 120–125, 127, 129–130, 133, 139, 144, 152 Nussbaum, Martha 17–18 ordinary 10, 46, 62–63, 99, 111, 136, 140, 143–145 Pavel, Thomas 6, 39–40, 47–48 perception 4, 10–11, 30, 39, 49, 56–57, 63–66, 76, 92, 94, 96, 100, 106, 113–114, 117, 119–120, 126–127, 133 picturesque 30, 52, 63–64, 90, 99, 109 place 3–5, 11–14, 20–24, 35, 40–42, 44–45, 47–48, 53, 84, 93–94, 102, 117, 119, 121–123, 126–129, 131, 148, 152, 157–158 place-connectedness 13, 148, 157 placedness 17, 20 Plumwood, Val 17, 32 poetic language 52, 61–66 postmodern 3, 5–6, 13–14, 23, 35 radicalism 7–9, 63, 71–72, 90, 101–102 rationalism 32, 69, 71, 92 reclamation of deserts 105, 108 Reclus, Élisée 7–9, 10–11, 13–14, 69–88 Reed, T.V. 17, 29–30 revolution 69, 72 Ritter, Carl 69, 76, 82–83 romanticism 2–3, 7–8, 11–14, 23, 69, 71, 73, 83–85, 88, 91 Roxana (Defoe) 39, 41–43 Sahara 11, 116, 118, 121–132 science 1, 7–9, 14, 20–23, 27, 52, 55–59, 71, 73, 85, 91–94, 100, 102, 116–117, 133, 156 scientific inquiry 52, 59 scientism 8, 71, 88, 90, 92–93 Sessions, George 19, 90, 101–102 Sierra Club 90, 97, 102 skin 12–13, 21, 120, 136–137, 139–143, 145 Slovic, Scott 1, 17–18, 21, 33–35, 53 social geography 69, 77–78 Sonoran Desert 105, 107, 112–114

163

Index subjectivity 39, 43–44, 47–48, 112, 119–120, 123 sublime 5, 9–12, 30, 90, 98–99, 109, 130 Sunstein, Cass 17, 24–25 Sze, Julie 17, 30–31 Testimony 13, 80, 99, 148, 158 The Sheltering Sky (Bowles) 11, 116–133 Thoreau, Henry David 6–7, 11–14, 52–66, 69, 75, 82–83, 87, 92–94, 96, 105, 107, 114, 136, 138, 151 Translation 10, 44, 52–57, 59–60, 63–66 universalism 13, 69, 76, 79–80, 156 untranslatable 53–54, 65 urban environment 2, 4–6, 35, 39–40, 42, 44–46, 48, 50

Van Dyke, John C. 10–11, 105–115 vegetarianism 25, 27–28, 35, 69, 81, 87 Vidal de la Blache, Paul 69, 71, 76, 89 Walden (Thoreau) 6, 12, 52–66, 89, 136 walking 12, 45, 136–138, 142–143, 146 Warren, Karen 17, 32 Washington State 148, 150–151, 156–157 wilderness 2–4, 9–10, 45–46, 52–54, 66, 91, 95–98, 102, 105–107, 123–124, 142 wild nature 10, 52, 54, 93, 96, 105–106, 114 Wilson, Duff 12–14, 148–158 Wolfe, Cary 17, 26–28 women 32, 148, 157 wonders 13, 136–137, 146