Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 179363159X, 9781793631596

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Dwellings of Enchantment

Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board: Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.

Recent Titles Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth, edited by Bénédicte Meillon Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes, edited by Sinan Akilli and Serpil Oppermann Avenging Nature: The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, Rebeca Gualberto Valverde, Noelia Malla Garcia, María Colom Jiménez, and Rebeca Cordero Sánchez Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong's Women Migrant Workers, by Zhou Xiaojing Climate Consciousness and Environmental Activism in Composition: Writing to Save the World, edited by Joseph R. Lease Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Ecocriticism and the Tangled Landscape of American Romance, by Steven Petersheim Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent, edited by Beate Neumeier & Helen Tiffin The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times, edited by Naomi Milthorpe Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950, by Vidya Ravi The Way the Earth Writes: How the Great East Japan Earthquake Intervened in Conventional Literary Practice and Produced the Post 3.11 Novels, by Koichi Haga

Ecomasculinities: Negotiating Male Gender Identity in U.S. Fiction, by Rubén Cenamor and Stefan Brandt Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays, by Isabel Sobral Campos The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the line in Philoso phy and Fiction, edited by Mario Wenning and Nandita Batra Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), Gianni Celati, A Critical Edition, edited, translated, and introduced by Patrick Barron Gender and Environment in Science Fiction, edited by Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature, edited by Mark Anderson and Zelia M. Bora Confronting Climate Crises through Education: Reading Our Way Forward, by Rebecca Young Environment and Pedagogy in Higher Education, edited by Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson

Dwellings of Enchantment Writing and Reenchanting the Earth

Edited by Bénédicte Meillon

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944436 ISBN 978-1-7936-3159-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-3160-2 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Foreword: Ecopoetics at the Tipping Point by Joni Adamson xv Introduction: What Matters Sings: Ecopoetics of Reenchantment by Bénédicte Meillon 1 PART I: THEORIZING ECOPOETICS OF (RE)ENCHANTMENT 21 1 Necessary Wonder: Promises and Pitfalls of Enchantment Charles Holdefer

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2 “I Turn Homeward, Still Wondering”: Reasons for Enchantment Yves-Charles Grandjeat

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3 Everyone Is Absorbed: Enchanting Substance in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Randall Roorda

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4 Nature’s Speech and Storytelling: The Voice of Wisdom in the Nonhuman Françoise Besson

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5 “A Place Grown Intense and Holy”: Dwelling in the Enchanted World of Words Isabel Maria Fernandes Alves

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PART II: DWELLINGS OF ENCHANTMENT IN LITERATURES OF PLACE, OLD, AND NEW vii

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6 Wonder, Enchantment, and the New Nature Writing Joshua Mabie

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7 Eco-memoir, Belonging, and the Ecopoetics of Settler Colonial Enchantment Tom Lynch

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8 Aesthetic Choices for the Anthropocene Era in the New American Literature of Place Wendy Harding

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PART III: OF ANIMAL ELUSIVENESS, DEATH, AND WONDER: ZOOPOETICS AND THE QUEST FOR COMMON GROUND 9 Zoopoethics: Literature Challenged by Industrial Livestock Farming Anne Simon 10 Ron Rash’s Above the Waterfall, or the Square Root of Wonderful Frédérique Spill 11 A Poetics of Traces in Rick Bass’s Short Stories Claire Cazajous-Augé PART IV: OF POSTCOLONIAL AND ECOFEMINIST SPELLINGS AND SPELLS: WHEN MAGICAL REALISM CHALLENGES MODERN ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY 12 Conversations with the Living World: Mutual Discovery and Enchantment Carmen Flys Junquera

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13 Writing a Way Home: Liminality, Magical Realism, and the Building of a Biotic Communitas in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and People of the Whale 207 Bénédicte Meillon 14 The Magic Realist Compost in the Anthropocene: Improbable Assemblages in Canadian and Australian Fiction Jessica Maufort

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15 Learning to Live in the Anthropocene: Orality as Recycling in Contemporary Latin American Indigenous Poetry Antonio Cuadrado-Fernandez

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16 Shadows of Enchantment in Indian Forest Fiction: Mahasweta Devi’s “The Hunt” and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey 277 Alan Johnson 17 Anna Livia’s Glamorous Ecopoetics Rachel Nisbet 18 Theodore Roszak's Glade in The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein: An Ecofeminist Dwelling of Emancipation Noémie Moutel PART V: WRITERS’ CORNER: AN ESSAY BY CHICKASAW WRITER AND POET LINDA HOGAN 19 Ways of the Cranes Linda Hogan

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Index 355 About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

So many people have contributed to this book one way or the other that it seems impossible to list them all. I would first like to thank the various institutions that have made possible the initial project leading to this publication, by sponsoring the international conference the chapters here included have stemmed from: The Perpignan Townhall and Denis Saez, Christophe Soler and his team, the Conseil Départemental 66 and Nathalie Clerc, the Région Occitanie Pyrénées Méditerranée, the US Embassy, and Vanessa Tiersky. I am greatly indebted to the University of Perpignan Via Domitia and the many branches that were involved throughout: the English Studies department, our transdisciplinary laboratory, the CRESEM, and its Ecopoetics research workshop, the Arts and Humanities Faculty, the UPVD departments of Culture and of Communication, the Doctoral Schools, Platinium, the UPVD Scientific Board. More specifically I would like to thank all of those who have kindly and professionally offered time, support, creative ideas, enthusiasm, and wonderful work at different stages of this project: Joni Adamson, Athane Adrahane, Pascale Amiot, Françoise Besson, Nathalie Blanc, Valérie Boineau, Belinda Cannone, Isabelle Cases, Joanne Clavel, Nathalie Cochoy, Dawn Cornelio, Jocelyn Dupont, Caroline Durand-Rous, Stéphanie Fernandez, Carmen Flys, Martin Galinier, François Gavillon, Yves-Charles Grandjeat, Christine Guériteau, Wendy Harding, Cendrine Hernandez, Linda Hogan, Guilhem Hugounenc, Barbara Kingsolver, Margot Lauwers, Edith Liégey, Noémie Moutel, Nicolas Picard, Jonathan Pollock, Josy Portillo, Marie-Pierre Ramouche, Ron Rash, Anne Simon, Scott Slovic, Pierre-Yves Touzot, Xavier Py, Fabienne Py-Renaudie, and, last but not least, the students who offered much time and energy to provide a warm welcome for all our colleagues as part of the Student Staff for the June 2016 conference: Cécile Besnard, Anta xi

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Mbaye, Pierre Baubet, Isabelle Benedetti, Sonja Bottger, Noyelle Depierre, Melanie Etave, Ludovic Biencourt, Diane Deplante, Cecile Bouf, Nicolas Loupia, Fabien Rouget, Layla Lavenu, Lisa Maumy, Fanny Monnier, and our lectrices Anna Chivers and Lorraine Wowo. I am particularly grateful for the constant warmth, kindness, guidance, and strength offered by Joni Adamson, Yves-Charles Grandjeat, and Linda Hogan over the years—their work stands at the heart of this book, and their mentoring and friendship have opened up new horizons. I would like to thank all the participants in the June 2016 international Perpignan conference who have played a part in allowing for this book to take shape. If, for the sake of cohesion and length, I have kept here only a very tight selection of papers out of the hundred that were initially presented, I may earnestly say that I have learned from all of you. A selection of papers in French was first published in a special issue of the international journal Crossways in June 2018, Lieux d’enchantement: approches écocritiques et écopoét(h)iques des liens entre humains et non-humains, which certainly paved the way for the work here presented. I want to thank Margot Lauwers who helped me edit the collective volume with Francophone contributions, as well as each of the contributors to the issue for their wonderful work: Athane Adrahane, Frédéric Barbe, Nathalie Blanc, Belinda Cannone, Dawn Cornelio, Fabiola Obamé, Abeline Léal, Nicolas Picard, Roberta Sapino, Marinella Termite, Stéphanie Mousserin, Sylvain Rode, Joachim Zemmour, Davide Vago. I am also indebted to all the participants and sponsors of the June 2019 international conference on “Reenchanting Urban Wildness”—the work carried out in that context emerged as a spinoff of the whole Dwellings of Enchantment project and has also in turn influenced this book. This will lead to its own publication in due time; meanwhile, special thanks go out to Belinda Cannone, Nathalie Blanc, Serenella Iovino, Nathanael Johnson, and Anne Simon, whose work has guided much of that second conference and some of the thinking behind this very book too. Many thanks go out to the scholars engaged in EASLCE and ASLE, who carry out so much inspiring work in ecocriticism and ecopoetics—many of us would not have come this far without the pioneering work led from within these dedicated communities. The work we do is all about braiding, and all the various strands of ecopoetics are ultimately entangled. Very special, full-hearted thanks evidently go out to the contributors to this book, which has been three years in the making. I am grateful for your sustained efforts, our many exchanges and discussions, the challenges some of you have raised, which forced me to clarify my aims and ideas, your enriching contributions, your patient revisions of your papers, and your long-held trust despite the postponement of this project several times. Thank you for trusting me to lead this collective project. Benefiting from the rich fertilizer

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each of you has contributed I have grown so much in the process, simultaneously with this book. Thank you to Douglas Vakoch, Michael Gibson, Mikayla Mislak, and Becca Beurer, from Rowman & Littelfield, as well as their editorial board and team for their great help with the publication process. Thank you to Margot Lauwers for the beautiful cover photo. Special thanks to Amélie Chevalier for her invisible yet precious help with the final layout and some of the copyediting and indexing. Closer to me, my thanks go out to my parents-in-law, Ellen Ruell and Jay Himmelstein, for helping me through some of the final stretch of work by keeping my daughters happy and well-taken care of that summer in Québec. Many, many colorful and enchanted mercis to my soeurcières, for their precious sorority and magic, for their great power and ongoing encouragement. Last but not least, I wish to thank Jesse and our two wonderful daughters, Zoë and Leah, for their unfailing love, their joy, laughter, dancing, musicplaying, and singing, for their constant support, their extraordinary sensitivity, and for their faith in the world. The three of them are a sprightly source of enchantment.

Foreword Ecopoetics at the Tipping Point Joni Adamson

Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth is an urgent invitation to ponder how environmental literature can reconnect contemporary societies and individuals to the wonder of the sentient beings and ecosystems that make life possible. As many agree, we are nearing planetary “tipping points” where ecosystems have been so damaged they may no longer have the resilience or capacity to support the continuation of life. Glaciers are melting at an unprecedented pace, Pacific Islanders and Alaskan indigenous peoples are being displaced by rising oceans, fisheries are collapsing, and coral reefs are dying. As I write, it is estimated that over half a billion animals have been killed in the 2019 conflagration in Australia and no one has yet estimated what was surely lost in similar fires this past summer in the Amazon. The grief and horror over fires that have burned rainforests so ancient that they have never before known fire do not make it easy for ecocritics and ecopoeticians to ponder how environmental literature and theory might invite individuals and communities to address the uncertainty of the tipping points we face. It now seems so long ago (it was the late 1990s) that the first ecocritics, newly fledging their wings, myself among them, were confidently and passionately focusing on the power of nature writing to influence politics and policy in ways that would protect and conserve ecosystems and endangered species. Nearly thirty years later, at a four-day 2016 conference in Perpignan, France, students, artists, writers, and scholars from twenty-three countries, all well aware that international efforts to stem climate change were failing despite all our efforts, came together to reflect on the multiple new directions in ecocriticism and its sister disciplines in the environmental humanities. We xv

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met with a commitment we all still felt and with a passion to discover where hope might still be found. This gathering, co-organized by Bénédicte Meillon, the editor of Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth, gave conference attendees an opportunity to become acquainted with the seminal work of French thinkers in the ecopoetics and zoopoetics, to delve, if they had not already, into the work of leading scholars of ecofeminism, multispecies ethnography, and new materialism, and to discuss emerging fields of knowledge, including biosemiotics, that are suggesting a world that is “vibrant” (Jane Bennett) with the “languages” of trees, ants, bees, birds, and cetaceans and that must be cared for and protected. Participants presented papers that pushed back against the processes that Max Weber, Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, and David Abrams have characterized as a “disenchantment of the world” (Weber 1946, 155). These processes, a number of papers proposed, are those that have allowed humans to justify environmental disruption on such a massive scale that today, there is nearly no place on the planet that could be even metaphorically be described as “wilderness.” In her introduction to Dwellings of Enchantment, Meillon recalls the process of pulling together the conference from which this exciting new collection has emerged. She initially encountered unexpected skepticism from scholarly colleagues toward the theme of “enchantment” she was proposing. She was cautioned that the notion of “reenchanting the world” might suggest a collective and naïve hankering for a return to untouched paradise or a “pristine wilderness” that failed to account for the histories of colonization and imperialism that had driven the processes of genocide, dispossession, climate change, biodiversity loss, and rising rates of extinction we are seeing everywhere in the world today. She and her co-organizers, however, strongly assured doubters that the meeting would not be a place for entertaining notions of a return to prescientific worldviews. Rather, all presentations would be firmly rooted in the entangled, cross-pollinating, life-affirming, and up-to-date fields of ecopoetics, indigenous studies, geology, physics, ecology, biosemiotics, ethology, and anthropology (Meillon, “Introduction”). Meillon and her co-organizers asked all participants to cultivate a common vocabulary and sense of direction even before arriving in Perpignan by reading the creative works of Linda Hogan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ron Rash. Linda Hogan, the renowned Chickasaw poet and writer and the author of the novel Solar Storms (1995), was in attendance at the conference. Nearly everyone, if not everyone at the conference, had already read Solar Storms and was familiar with Hogan’s decades-long, inspiring conversation with the living world. In a self-reflection on the novel published recently, Hogan recalls she was inspired to write Solar Storms by the Cree and Inuit peoples who vigorously resisted construction of eight hydroelectric dams owned

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by Hydro-Quebec on the La Grande River in northwestern Canada because they understood that such a massive diversion of water would not change just one place but interrupt what Hogan has called the “circuitry, electricity, and impulses” of the Earth “that are active and dynamic” (Hogan 2017, 22). Dams interrupt Earth’s circuitry by slowing the flow of water so that it warms before entering the ocean (Hogan 2017, 22). As a result, just as Solar Storms anticipates, today, huge quantities of warming water flowing out from the Hydro-Quebec complex, and many other mega-dams around the world, are changing the patterns of air and water at a planetary scale, and become a troubling source of the extreme uncertainty, and tipping points, we are facing. At the end of her keynote in Perpignan, Hogan observed that for too long, modern humans have ignored indigenous understandings of nonhuman intelligence and the Earth’s circuitry and impulses. She called upon her audience to put their own writing to work to ensure a survivable future. My own keynote gave me the opportunity to reflect on the ways that I had been introduced to the more-than-human world described by Linda Hogan and other indigenous elders and writers who have studied oral traditions that teach humans about nonhuman communicative capacities and Earth’s impulses. In the early 1990s as a doctoral student, I was fortunate to study with renowned indigenous North American poets and writers including Joy Harjo (Creek), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), and Simon Ortiz (Acoma). As a result of what I learned from these writers, and throughout my career, especially working in the Amazon with Juan Carlos Galeano on Latin American cosmologies and contemporary indigenous poetry, documentaries, and literatures, I came to see that “transformational” or liminal characters found in indigenous oral traditions are not simple myths. Indeed, today, indigenous groups from around the world are organizing a “cosmopolitical movement” that seeks to reclaim sovereignty over rivers, forests, and mountains based on the authority of cosmological oral traditions or “cosmovisions” about sentient beings with names such as Pachamama or Mother Earth. Stories about these “living beings” or “persons,” according to the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, are to be understood as an articulation of complex indigenous ethnoscientific literacies about the interrelationships of “energy and life” necessary for the continued survival and flourishing of “ecosystems, natural communities, species and all other natural entities which exist as part of Mother Earth” (UDRME 2010, Art. 4.1 n.p.). In solidarity with Hogan and activists around the world engaged in cosmopolitical resistance, I called upon the audience to put their own writing to work ensuring intergenerational justice and flourishing for all life. Each of the contributors to Dwellings of Enchantment rises to these challenges. They call upon readers to strive for richer, more culturally integrated understandings of complex knowledge systems (including Western science)

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that are the basis of multispecies, ecofeminist, and postcolonial approaches to literature that contest limited notions of human exceptionalism. Chapters also explore a widespread quest for a sense of belonging among many members of contemporary nonindigenous societies. Some of the best ecopoetic literature and writing, contributor Tom Lynch observes, is showing us how we can become “a friend, neighbor, ally” who can “belong to a place, can be enchanted by it, without denying the rightful presence of its original inhabitants who also belong to and are enchanted by it.” Dwellings of Enchantment brilliantly invites readers to become friends and allies who belong to the Earth. Meillon succinctly captures the reasons we need this collection in our university libraries and on our home book shelves: “The very fact that this enterprise was viewed by some as beside the point in the face of current environmental issues, global politics, and economics came to me as evidence that fighting against widespread loss of the capacity for wonder was absolutely necessary” (“Introduction”). I am very grateful that she persisted in gathering such a stellar group of contributors together to make the case for creatively working, in the face of dire tipping points, to preserve our wondrous, sentient world. BIBLIOGRAPHY Hogan, Linda. 2017. “Backbone: Holding Up Our Future.” In Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, edited by Joni Adamson and Michael Davis, 20–32. New York: Routledge. Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change. 2010. “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.” April 22, 2010. Accessed September 17, 2010. Retrieved from https://pwccc​.wordpress​.com​/programa/ Weber, Max. 1946. “Science as Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

Introduction What Matters Sings: Ecopoetics of Reenchantment Bénédicte Meillon

Does the world need to be reenchanted? This could seem to be the premise underlying the title of this book. Rather, the title gestures toward the enduring, enchanting power of places and of the earth beings that inhabit them, asserting that the world itself has never lost its capacity to trigger awe and wonder. Despite the view perpetuated by modern, reductionist and mechanistic sciences, the postmodern sciences of the last five decades such as quantum physics, biology, and ethology have continuously revised misguided beliefs about (other-than-human) nature—the more-than-human world is not made of mute, inert matter that can hold no mystery for humans’ prying eyes and tools. This book is an invitation to ponder how environmental literature can make us aware of the wonders of the world and attune us better to our earthdwellings. It looks for ways to sing with the world, to pay more attention to the humming of vibrant matter that we, humans, cannot extricate ourselves from, although most of us have been taught to turn a deaf ear to it.1 To take up the poetic vision of Native American writer Jack D. Forbes, “We and all the animals and/living things/We complete the world/We are its skin/ its membranes [. . .]/We are its flutes/ its drumheads/We are its maracas/ its voices/ We are not alone,/not separate./If the world be a drum/we are its taut skin/ vibrating/with its messages” (Forbes 2008, 202). Michel Serres’ notion of a “natural contract” lies in his intuition that the world must be speaking a certain language that might allow us, should we be able to hear it, to articulate ourselves within it. As Serres deplores our ignorance of the languages of the world, he underscores that we actually know only the animist, religious, and mathematical versions of that language. “In fact,” he argues, “the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, of links and interactions, and this suffices to establish a contract” (Serres 1990, 69, translation mine). Following Max Weber and, later, ecofeminists, it may be said 1

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that modern science has disenchanted the world, that its obsession with calculation and causal mechanisms has sterilized humans’ capacity for wonder. Weber lamented “the fate of our time, with its characteristic rationalization, intellectualization, and above else, the disenchantment of the world” (Weber 1946, 155). He intimated the loss of ethics inseparable from the erasure of magical and religious forces from the world, forces that had given rise to “spiritual obstacles” to inconsiderate, overexploitation of nature (Weber 1958, 26). As for Bruno Latour, he posits that science has from the start been “singing a totally different song” (Latour 2015, 97, originally in italics, translation mine). Yet, standing at a transdisciplinary crossroads between geology, physics, ecology, biosemiotics, ethology, anthropology, and ecopoetics, among others, today’s new approaches to the languages of nature and the nature of language tend to re-instill a sense of the marvelous in the complex “intra-actions” between all life-forms, whether human or nonhuman (Barad 2007, 214). We are now re-learning the language of trees, ants, bees, birds, and cetacean, or how matter travels across human and nonhuman boundaries to convey information and meaning. New materialism and agential realism call for new perspectives onto the world—a world perceived as “vibrant” (Jane Bennett), as “a web teeming with meanings” (Wendy Wheeler), where “naturecultures” (Donna Haraway) evolve in rhizomatic ways that determine our co-becoming with nonhuman organisms. Consequently, this book calls for an investigation of how contemporary ecopoetics, as it takes part in reenchanting the earth, has interwoven old and new discourses about the many naturecultures entangled within the fabric of the world. It questions whether ecopoetics might be relaying the other-than-human voices and rhythms that take part in the polyphonic song of the world—some of which can be picked up by our human ears and sensing selves, while the rest can only be envisioned via the discoveries in ethology, physics, biology, or zoology, as these inform us about other earth beings’ specific perceptions of the environment (of say a bat, a tick, a whale, or a tree) and semiotic systems. And what does a “dwelling of enchantment” refer to? What this book is not about is a return to a prescientific worldview. If it calls onto indigenous narratives and worldviews, it is certainly not to turn our backs on science; on the contrary, making way for indigenous and ecofeminist ecopoetics seeks to draw new bridges and to identify constellations of images and meanings enfolding both poetic and scientific discourses. Indeed, we are finally starting to do justice to the ancient knowledge of the land and its ecosystems that were weaved into ecopoetic, ancient stories long before patriarchal Europeans imposed their own, monolithic form of scientific discourse onto what was then discredited as “pagan.” Nor did the call for papers out of which this collection emerged imply a naïve invitation for readers to consolidate such problematic constructs as “the wilderness,” “the ecological Indian,” or “nature,”

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with a pastoral vision of a neatly ordered world—with humans living in total harmony with a nonhuman world they can control. Rather, the chapters in this collection expand upon the implications of chaos theory and quantum physics while taking up contemporary debates in the humanities. The theories employed in this collection have been developed in the past half-century by ecocritics, ecofeminists, ecopsychologists, ecoanthropologists, multispecies ethnographers, and environmental philosophers involved in the cross-disciplinary fields now grouped together under the umbrella term “environmental humanities.” While it is not the point here to rehearse the field’s genealogy, readers may refer to some of the excellent collections listed in the bibliography (Iovino and Oppermann, Alaimo and Hekman, Choné et al. Adamson and Davis, Garrard, and Hiltner). All these studies prompt us to reconsider entirely, on the one hand, the “modern” worldview of a purely mechanistic universe that might be rationally grasped, measured, and predicted by linear mathematics, and, on the other hand, dualistic thinking that systematically pits matter against spirit, body vs mind, nature vs culture, science vs religion, history vs myth, woman vs man, reason vs emotion, etc.—the better to hierarchize them, and to then justify the imposed dominion of one (e.g., spirit, mind, reason, culture, [white] man, and science) over the other (e.g., matter, body, emotion, nonhuman nature, women, nonwhite man, and myth). The initial approach to the idea of “dwellings of enchantment” here is enlightened by studies in the arts and in the humanities and sciences tackling the naturecultures of humankind in relation to those existing in more-than-human worlds, particularly as these issues have been scrutinized by ecofeminists. Among those are Val Plumwood and Susan Griffin’s thorough deconstructions of dichotomous discourse and of a patriarchal ideology of nature, as well as Carolyn Merchant’s sweeping study of the elaboration of a mechanistic worldview. All three thinkers demonstrate the ensuing subordination of nature and women to a masculine form of reason, science, and power. Merchant, just like Max Weber, bemoaned the loss of consideration for the Earth entailed by the Scientific Revolution: “The image of the earth as a living and nurturing organism had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings. [. . .] As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it” (Merchant 1980, 3). The images and myths humans create to represent the world come with a “normative input”: “Descriptive statements about the world can presuppose the normative; they are ethic-laden. [. . .] The norms may be tacit assumptions hidden within the descriptions in such a way as to act as invisible restraints or moral ought-nots. [. . .] To be aware of the interconnectedness of descriptive and normative statements is to be able to evaluate changes in the latter by observing changes in the former” (Merchant 1980, 4–5). The

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thinking behind the present book was also influenced by Donna Haraway’s investigations of multispecies entanglements, Bruno Latour’s environmental philosophy, Karen Barad’s study of “intra-actions” in the light of quantum physics, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Kohn’s anthropological enquiries into the worldviews of indigenous cultures, recent studies in biology and zoology that reveal how critters and plants communicate and live as humans do in a biosemiotic world, writings by thinkers descended from indigenous peoples, current debates related to the Anthropocene, and much postmodern theory deconstructing human-made discourses of reality and truth, whether those be called “myth,” “literature,” “history,” or “science.” More specifically, this collection is influenced by Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life. Bennett peers into the workings of and the different sources of enchantment that can be found in today’s world, with various positive effects over the human mind. She insists that “enchantment has never really left the world but only changed its forms” (Bennett 2010, 91). Her counterstory to tales of disenchantment, she explains, “seeks to induce an experience of the contemporary world—a world of inequity, racism, pollution, poverty, violence of all kinds—as also enchanted—not a tale of reenchantment but one that calls attention to magical sites already there” (Bennett 2001, 8). Moreover, “[enchantment] consists of a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance, a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain and to move you from the actual world to its virtual possibilities” (Bennett 2001, 111). Bennett underscores the ethical power of enchantment that may move humans to action in the political and ecological spheres: “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities” (Bennett 2001, 174). Like Merchant and Bennett, ecocritics are aware of “the performativity of social representations” (Gibson-Graham 1996, ix)—hence our earnest interest in studying the ways literature and arts simultaneously relay, deconstruct, and reinvent our perceptions and representations of the living world and of our place within it. Tales of disenchantment, enchantment, or reenchantment matter in that they perpetuate “cultural narratives that we use [and that] help to shape the world in which we have to live” (Bennett 2001, 9). In their article that insightfully teases out how postmodernist concepts of materiality, agency and narrativity intricately form “material ecocriticism,” Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann foreground the latter’s potential to reenchant the world: Material ecocriticism invites us into a polyphonic story of the world that includes the vital materiality of life, experiences of nonhuman entities, and our

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bodily intra-actions with all forms of material agency as effective actors. [. . .] In this “alter-tale” the new narrative agents are things, nonhuman organisms, places, and forces, as well as human actors and their words. Together, they anticipate an alternative vision of a future where narratives and discourses have the power to change, re-enchant, and create the world that comes to our attention only in participatory perceptions. (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 88)

Over half a century ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring rang the first ecological wake-up call leading to the ban on DDT-spraying in the United States. Carson forced scientists and politicians to reevaluate the ecocidal backlashes of a disenchanted ontology resting on the arrogant conception of a human “control of nature”—one leading to “a spring without voices,” the extinction of birdsong indicating that something has “silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world”: “On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay in the fields and woods and marsh” (Carson 1962, 2–3). While calling our attention to humans’ reliance on bird song, on “the obliteration of the color and interest and beauty they lend to our world,” Carson launched a call for scientific humility in dealing with “the fabric of life—a fabric that is on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways” (Carson 1962, 103, 297). It is this enchanting—if sometimes invisible to the human eye—fabric of life, with its wondrous polyphony and its material connective threads, that the concept of “dwellings of enchantment” seeks to encapsulate. Many other scientists such as David Bohm, Jean-Pierre Luminet, Hubert Reeves, or Rupert Sheldrake have long joined the chorus calling for a scientific reenchantment of our vision of the world and of science. The Reenchantment of Science, edited by David Ray Griffin in 1988, laid down four decades ago the foundations for “a postmodern science” to approach the world’s enchantments, even allowing for “a postmodern spirituality”— defined as a “relational, ecological, planetary, postpatriarchal spirituality” (Griffin 1988, xviii). In his paper arguing for a “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World,” Bohm argues: If we think of the world as separate from us, and constituted of disjoint parts to be manipulated with the aid of calculations, we will tend to become separate people, whose main motivation with regard to each other and to nature is also manipulation and calculation. But if we can obtain an intuitive and imaginative feeling of the whole world as constituting an implicate order that is also enfolded in us, we will sense ourselves to become one with this world. [. . . We] will feel genuine love for it. We will want to care for it, as we would for anyone who is

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close to us and therefore enfolded in us as an inseparable part. [. . .] Because we are enfolded inseparably in the world, with no ultimate division between matter and consciousness, meaning and value are as much integral aspects of the world as they are of us. If science is carried out with an amoral attitude, the world will ultimately respond to science in a destructive way. (Bohm 1998, 67)

In a sense, and from his standpoint as a specialist in quantum physics, Bohm is here echoing Aldo Leopold’s plea for a land ethic, and, later, Carson the biologist’s stance against scientific hubris. As early as 1949, Aldo Leopold insisted that “the evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as an emotional process” (Leopold 1966, 263). Leopold pledged for an ethic of love and respect for the land, and for the “cultural harvest [that it yields]” (Leopold 1966, xix). Recalling the basic concept of ecology, Leopold argued: “We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (Leopold 1966, xix). The call for reenchantment that motivated the 2016 international ecopoetics conference held in Perpignan had stemmed from a simple observation: who would care to protect and fight for anything or anyone they did not feel for in the first place? As the world is becoming increasingly aware of the urgency of our global environmental crisis, this book asks: how can ecopoets and ecocritics contribute to a shift in the language and politics that we humans rely upon to relate to the world, and ultimately, to determine its and our own fates? To reconnect with our earthly roots and rediscover the value and the precious wonders of our dwelling place, our oikos, whether on a local or a global scale, this volume demonstrates that artists can inspire within us a wonderful feeling of co-becoming. As this book reveals, ecopoetic creations are born as cocreations with the world. Ecopoets show us that being alive is first and foremost tied to feeling—both feeling for and feeling with. Besides, these works of art instill in their readers a reverence for the mysteries of the amazing worldings any one being or thing both stems from and buds into. Ecocritics and ecopoeticians here investigate to what extent, and how, environmental literature might offer stories of enchantment that can help humans live at once more responsively and more responsibly toward the many lifeforms with which we must coevolve. Focusing on literature as a dwelling of enchantment—itself embedded in material dwellings of enchantment—the chapters here included trace the braided, biocentric strands of ecopoetics that help us move beyond anthropocentric paradigms. The various contributors gauge what literary genres and modes such enchantment may take, from poetry, to novelistic prose (long and short), memoirs, and nonfiction essays— some relying on various modes such as realism, lyricism, mythopoeia,

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climate fiction, or magical realism. Furthermore, this volume brings together corpuses and approaches often separated into different critical trends, such as postcolonial and anthropological studies, ecofeminist studies, or ecocriticism and nature writing (the early forms of which, in the steps of Thoreau, came from a more masculine, white perspective). In addition, this volume aims to shed light onto ecopoetics of enchantment as a form of singing in tune with “the land’s wild music,” as Mark Tredinnick puts it in his book by that title (2005), or, to quote Jonathan Bate’s seminal work, taking part in “the song of the Earth” (2000). The aim is to ponder the notion of a “voice of the Earth,” as Theodore Roszak titled one of his books (1992)—or rather, the many voices of the earth that together take part in a polyphonic symphony, translated by Jean Giono throughout his eponymous novel Le chant du monde (The Song of the World, 1934). Hence the section on zoopoetics focusing on animal existences and poetics—a topos that resurfaces in many of the papers. In the end, all the chapters collected in this book align with cosmologist Brian Swimme’s plea for us to turn to poets, storytellers, and mystics who tell “the Earth story” (Swimme 1988, 52): “Rocks, soils, waves, stars—as they tell their story in 10,000 languages throughout the planet, they bind us to them in our emotions, our spirits, our minds, and our bodies. The Earth and the universe speak in all this” (Swimme 1988, 56). David Abram’s work in ecophenomenology also provides a cornerstone and influential effort to re-entangle human languages within nonhuman speech: “It is the animate earth that speaks: human speech is but a part of a vaster discourse” (Abram 1996, 179). In the process of putting together the international conference in which this book originated, I initially encountered unexpected skepticism, mostly coming from academics who seemed to regard such collective hankering for a reenchantment of the earth as naive. The very fact that this enterprise was viewed by some as beside the point in the face of current environmental issues, global politics, and economics came to me as evidence that fighting against widespread loss of the capacity for wonder was absolutely necessary—in great part because wonder is uplifting. The pervasive sense of disconnection, alienation from the living earth, and pessimism as to the possibility of redressing some of the wrongs inflicted upon our oikos, our home—ultimately onto ourselves—makes it even more urgent that we collectively reenchant the stories and worldviews that have precipitated the uprooting of a majority of humans—or at least of those in power to inflect our policies, our economies, and the mainstream stories circulating in the media and in much of the intelligentsia. Because, as ecofeminists (Gunn Allen, Susan Griffin, Julia Scofield Russell, Starhawk) and ecopsychologists (Theodore Roszak, Elan Shapiro, Paul Shepard) have been claiming for a while, resonating with many voices originating in the first peoples of the world, what we do to the earth we eventually do to ourselves. In alienating ourselves from the potent powers

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that connect us to the other-than-human living world, we have been severing ourselves from vital sources of life, of energy and nourishment for the human soul and body. Because of our modern, impoverished worldviews and because of our arrogant, hegemonic myths of the human self with its elevated, enlightened culture, we are now dealing with a severe crisis where our arid, devitalized languages and stories of the earth have led us onto the brink of an ecocide, with humans standing there paralyzed, unable to respond with both nerve and logic, or sense and sensibility, to the disasters of the Anthropocene. This book is therefore by no means about turning away from any scientific knowledge. Rather, it questions, expands, and revitalizes our epistemologies in the light of our sensitive intelligence. Because enchantment is an immediate experience of the world that tends to short-circuit the logocentric channels of our cognitive functions, it possesses the capacity to shock us out of a generalized state of anesthesia. Ecological data is now widespread via specialized and popular media, and yet, raw information has proved unable to bring about the effective changes in human attitudes, policies, economies, and ways of life that are called for by the acceleration in climate change and erosion of biodiversity. This paradox can be explained in part by psychological defense mechanisms such as “psychic numbing” (Slovic),2 denial (climate skeptics), or mental dissociation. This is where environmental literature—and arts in general, can potentially make a difference. Whereas ecological textbooks and scientific publications may be experienced as overly specialized and lacking vitality, many will happily learn facts about the world via a good novel or movie. Prose ecopoets that write what Lawrence Buell calls “environmental literature” craft stories and voices that can teach much about humans’ and nonhumans’ intra-actions with each other and with their environment, thus passing on cosmopolitical and scientific knowledge that readers might otherwise feel reluctant to learn about. Resting on the temporary, willing suspension of disbelief pact, reading ecopoetic fiction resonates within our embodied consciousnesses and stirs our affects, further affecting our ethical stances. Recent studies such as Pierre-Louis Patoine’s (2015) and Alexa Weik von Mossner’s (2017) have majestically reviewed the state of the art in cognitive science as to the affective power of literature and arts. Besides, through their subtle, self-reflexive readings of literature and film, they have teased out the complex mechanisms that conduce us to empathy, feeling and emotion as we read or view fictional works of art. While steeped in the diegetic milieu of experience, a reader’s embodied consciousness evolves as it intra-acts with the meaning-making world of story-telling. Eventually, one never comes out of a reading experience—of immersion in any artistic oeuvre for that matter—quite the same as on entering it. The 170 communication proposals initially received by the scientific committee for the Perpignan conference on Dwellings of Enchantment offered

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encouraging proof that there indeed exists a shared faith and interest, not to mention research into, the capacity and willingness of humans to change the mentalities underlying many of the activities that are responsible for some of the worst damage to the world. Capturing attention across generations and nationalities, this project and its spinoffs have made it manifest that reawakening humanity’s intrinsic capacity for awe and respect for the natural world that we have emerged from and belong to is something many of us are laboring for. The 2016 conference held in Perpignan garnered interest from academics and non-academics, writers, research students and undergraduate students, with participants and attendants from at least twenty-three different countries. During the four-day gathering, with roughly a hundred speakers, the prevalent feeling was one of strength, hope, and confidence in the true value of such joint effort. Our common aim was to research, teach, write about, and even practice an ecopoetics of reenchantment, encouraging one to pay attention to and value the wonders of the earth. The international collection at hand was braided from a careful selection of expanded papers turned into rhizomatically connected chapters. Throughout the revision process, the authors have worked together, reflecting over the ecopoetics discussed by the invited writers and keynote speakers, assembling the theoretical framework and conceptual tools best suited to the subject. During the conference and since then, participants have entered a fruitful conversation that is reflected in the individual chapters—with many an echo from or reference to each other’s work. Contributors refer throughout to interviews by Linda Hogan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ron Rash—all of whom were invited as guest writers for the conference. Even though Barbara Kingsolver was not able to attend, her writing remained an influence on our discussions, and her generosity in accepting to fill in the same questionnaire as Ron Rash and Linda Hogan is very much appreciated. In these interviews, the three writers share their thoughts on ecopoetics of enchantment.3 The first section in this volume negotiates the theoretical frames and conceptual or even ontological implications of an ecopoetics of reenchantment. Charles Holdefer warns against some of the “promises and pitfalls of enchantment” but then argues that the ecopoetic text itself can offer a dwelling of enchantment that helps us see. His focus is mostly on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. While drawing from Franchophone and Anglophone nature writers and ecocritics, he (perhaps regrettably) only touches upon Scott Knickerbocker’s seminal contribution to the field of ecopoetics, with his illuminating reading of Dickinson’s poems. Starting from Leopold—whose thinking is also central to Holdefer’s paper, Yves-Charles Grandjeat then ties the notion of dwelling to that of wonder. Exploring trails leading from the ecopoetics of David Abram, Rick Bass, Linda Hogan, Aldo Leopold, and Gary Snyder, Grandjeat investigates the terrain of magic and poetic space as “approximation”—“one in which contact with other living creatures, other life-forms, is actually realized as that

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which defies intellectuation or translation yet is given as experience.” Looking at the epistemological and ethical underpinnings of reenchantment, Grandjeat leads us into ecopoetics as a practice of “dislocation”—that is “a cognitive rift hurling humans beyond the limits of their own world.” Randall Roorda then shares his own reluctance to the notion of reenchantment. He first teases out some of the premises he assumes underlie the idea of reenchanting the earth, the better to then embrace the secular, materialist ecopoetic enchantment taking place in VanderMeer’s cli-fi novel Annihilation. Roorda’s chapter covers broad theoretical ground, going back to Schilling and Max Weber, who famously defined modern disenchantment as the “elimination of magic,” a process of “de-devinization” of the world of matter. Roorda deftly brings in Bennett, Bruce Robbins, and Kenneth Burke’s works on the notions of enchantment, secularism and substance, staying away from any notion of magic, animation, or spirit. One might have wished for a lengthier discussion of the ontological and conceptual implications in the oxymoron giving its name to “magical realism”—something that many of the chapters in section 4 later address—and why introduce the competing term of “natural magicalism.” Françoise Besson’s essay then comes in stark contrast with earlier recalcitrance to notions of enchantment and magic. Her sweeping contribution interweaves analyses of ecopoetic texts with narrative scholarship and theoretical inquiry into what “an ecology of magic” might mean. She examines instances of conversations between humans and animals. She earnestly regards the landscape as a storyteller, and animals as guides for humans. Also allowing for a wondrous sense of mystery, kinship, and even spirit, to be found and experienced in the living world, Isabel Maria Fernandes Alves first traces the concept of “wonder” in North American nature writing. Moving away from Transcendentalism, Alves tackles contemporary thinkers of enchantment, of both indigenous and European descent, such as David Abram, Paula Gunn Allen, James William Gibson, Scott Momaday, and Leslie Van Gelder. The latter’s work is brought into a cogent dialogue with Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World—one of the major sources of inspiration steering me to title this volume, and the conference it emerged from, Dwellings of Enchantment. Alves’s chapter rehabilitates the ecopoetic power of words and language, allowing humans to inhabit the world, “weaving a way home” (Van Gelder), or, as Alves puts it “weaving a dwelling of words.” Section Two investigates the notion of dwellings of enchantment in literatures of place, old and new. The chapter by Joshua Mabie surveys the “New Nature Writing” growing in the United Kingdom, while the last two chapters study nature writers living in the United States. Taken together, these three papers offer a cross-Atlantic dialogue between ecopoets of different Anglophone countries dealing simultaneously with dwelling and

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enchantment—a conversation started specifically in Mabie’s chapter. Mabie first tackles contemporary trends in British and North American Nature writing. He then looks into the “genre’s reinvigoration” in the United Kingdom, which, he argues, “has been due, at least in part, to Robert Macfarlane’s, Kathleen Jamie’s, and Helen Macdonald’s ability to experience and represent the wonder of places long ago forgotten, disregarded, and overlooked.” Setting out to prove his hypothesis, Mabie touches upon the move away from Romanticism, from the Pastoral and from lyricism, while making a distinction between wonder and enchantment in the writings of Jamie, Mabey, and Macfarlane. These writers are looking for “a language of wonder” that reflects over old languages and old landscapes, envisioning how the one might ecopoetically reinvigorate our relationships to the other. Addressing the thorny question of appropriation an ecopoetics of reenchantment might conduce to, Mabie connects endangered languages with the risk of erasing both landscapes and indigenous peoples. Looking at ecopoetics that mobilizes “old-growth languages,” Mabie’s closing remarks open onto prospects for New Nature writing in the light of Native American ecopoetics. Lynch starts from the erasure of Native presence and inhabitation that is a characteristic of many settler colonial eco-memoirs. Dealing mostly with Jerry Wilson’s Waiting for Coyotes Call: An Eco-Memoir from the Missouri River Bluff, published in 2008, Lynch demonstrates how the genre “involves the writing of self into place and place into self.” For him, “[eco-memoir] is an ideal genre for the cultivation of an ecological awareness and bioregional identity [. . .]. It is arguably one of the literary forms most suited to attuning us to the ‘land’s wild music.’” Yet, when Native American perspectives are absent, the quest for a sense of belonging by members of contemporary settler colonial societies puts their potentially ambiguous ecopoetics of dwelling at risk of “complicity with the settler colonial project.” Lynch intimates some of the ways Wilson acknowledges the continuing presence of Native dwellers—by writing about his Lakota neighbors and about their own ecopoetic ceremonies and traditions. The last chapter in this section, by Wendy Harding, shifts attention to the “New American Literature of Place,” tackling Anthropocene ecopoetics. Analyzing the work of (mostly female) writers Ellen Meloy, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Sullivan and Cornelia Mutel, Harding’s essay pinpoints aesthetic strategies that “break with the old mental frameworks of nature writing.” Using irony, parody, burlesque, and a palette of stylistic devices, these prose writers “explore places in which strange hybrids of natureculture can be found.” What their ecopoetics sheds light upon is the uncanny, Anthropocenic naturecultures—at once marvelous and threatening—that we must deal with today. The third section in this volume illuminates the overlapping between ecopoetics and zoopoetics, with its close focus on animal existences, points of

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view, and even poetics. The first chapter, by Anne Simon, is more concerned with the disenchantment and horror that characterize industrial livestock farming as a literary topos. With an expansive study of the butchering and slaughtering of animals in nineteenth-century to present-day zoopoetics, Simon approaches literature itself as a dwelling place. “[A] home for what can otherwise seem unwelcome, [. . .] literature provides a safe place for testimony—albeit a paradoxical kind of testimony that takes place through imagination.” Oscillating between ethical and poetic considerations, her piece unravels the tensions proper to, on the one hand, writing a testimony through fiction, and on the other hand, expressing the points of view and the suffering of animals that are bereft of the ability to express themselves in the form of an articulate, human speech. While her chapter by no means seeks to reenchant the horror underlying such fiction, it does elucidate the hospitable value of zoopoet(h)ics, which grants matter, voice, and place to the horrific suffering of animals. Also wavering between disenchantment—here tied to the “gritty realities of modern-day Appalachia”—and ecopoetics of reenchantment, Frédérique Spill’s chapter focuses on Ron Rash’s environmental fiction and poetic prose. It problematizes what the idea of a love of nature might mean in the Anthropocene. Spill demonstrates how Rash translates wonder at the flashing beauty of nonhuman creatures, trout and red-winged blackbirds for instance, some of them extinct or endangered in the United States, such as the Carolina parakeet or the jaguar. Within a theoretical framework including seminal contributions to the conceptualizing of ecopoetics—Merleau-Ponty, Charles Bernstein and Scott Knickerbocker—her essay foregrounds the rematerializing of language at play in Rash’s ecopoetics. Her close readings highlight how Rash’s hybrid, synesthetic style sounds the colorful humming and vibrancy of the living world and chants in tune with it. Thus, Spill shows, “nature has its say.” Spill elucidates the polysemy, intertextuality, and intersemioticity that characterizes Rash’s wonder-full fiction, the reading of which “involves the opening up to sounds and silences, colors and lights, smells and textures that are mostly foreign to the ordinary experiences of men and women. It is a form of surrender to the timeless magic of a world that generates its own improbable language.” The following chapter, by Claire-Cazajous-Augé, ties in with Spill’s—and also with Grandjeat’s from section 1. It looks at an ecopoetics of wonder in the light of “furtive encounters” with animals who remain elusive. Examining Rick Bass’s short stories—a genre that is particularly suited to an ecopoetics of “the fleeting appearances of animals”—Cazajous offers a reading of Bass’s ecopoetics of animal traces, which, she demonstrates, “constantly negotiates between the attempts to recreate the moment of enchantment we may experience on seeing other ways of inhabiting and perceiving the world, and the wish to reveal the reciprocity tying human and nonhuman animals, while maintaining

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a safe distance between them.” Taking up much pioneering work carried out by French thinkers in the environmental humanities—Marielle Macé’s work on “animal styles,” Jean-Christophe Bailly or Dominique Lestel’s work on the animal question—as well as François Gavillon’s, Yves-Charles Grandjeat’s, or Thomas Pughe’s contributions to Franco-Anglophone ecopoetics, this essay moreover summons Jakob von Uexküll and Carlo Ginzburg in an array of animal studies that helps Cazajous demonstrate how Bass’s ecopoetics of traces “seeks a solution to the various dilemmas of nature writing.” The fourth section of this collaborative volume contains seven chapters expounding various facets of a multinaturecultural perspectivism—a form of perspectivism that alloys multinaturalist, indigenous worldviews, such as those studied by Viveiros de Castro or Eduardo Khon, with multicultural perspectives found in postcolonial and ecofeminist ecopoet(h)ics of reenchantment. Titled “Of Postcolonial and Ecofeminist Spellings and Spells,” this final section goes deeper into the exploration of what would be lost if indigenous and female perspectives and stories kept getting erased from shared knowledge about land, ecosystems, and their earth-dwellers. All seven contributors come to grips with non-dualistic, nonanthropocentric thinking, offsetting Western, modern ontology and epistemology by activating what, from a postmodernist, Western literary perspective, can be approached as magical realist ecopoetics. While the take on magical realism is as broad ranging in these chapters as it is in the existing theory of the mode, many authors here align in great part with what may be the most cogent framework and study of this specific mode, that is, Wendy Faris’s thorough research into the field. Dealing with various multinaturecultural contexts and ensuing types of ontological and epistemological hybridity, the chapters in this section indeed align with Wendy Faris’s postulate that, [by] incorporating a mysterious dimension into the discourse of literary realism, magical realism both questions and replenishes it. Magical realism would then represent a moment of cultural retrospection that is a reverse image of the “moment of desacralization” Fredric Jameson investigates [. . .]. From this perspective, magical realism would constitute a latent tendency to include a spirit-based element within contemporary literature—a possible remystification of narrative in the West. (Faris 2004, 64–65)

Consequently, all of the chapters here included to a certain extent breathe new life into old stories, furthermore eroding the boundaries in Western oppositions between the magic and the real, between supernatural events and rational reality, between myth and science. The first chapter, by Carmen Flys, is grounded in philosophical (Val Plumwood, Freya Mathews), ecophenomenological (Merleau-Ponty and

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David Abram), anthropological (Eduardo Khon) and biological (E. O. Wilson) notions of affiliation and reciprocity. By looking at two different novels, Flys confronts inverted modes of ecopoetic reenchantment: on the one hand, the magical realism of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, moving “in a direction away from rationality, to dreaming, that alternative way of knowing” valued in many indigenous communities; and, on the other hand, in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, the nearly opposite process, moving “from ‘miraculous visions,’” or anamorphic ones, “to a rational scientific understanding.” In one case, it is a return to the myths and worldviews of Hogan’s elders that allows her protagonist to enter multispecies conversations; in the other, it is through the discovery of science. Nonetheless, both types of discourse are valued as empowering for the female characters—both of which are seeking ways of knowing, gathering ingredients to nourish their sense of wonder at the world. The following chapter, my own, takes up Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s reenchanting poetics of dwelling. My essay delves into the liberating potential of magical realism, hinging on liminality on many, imbricated planes. The oxymoronic mode ushers us into an in-between space where conventional borders between realms—dreaming vs reality, mater vs spirit, animal and vegetal vs. human, life vs death, intuition vs knowledge—are momentarily brought down, as in initiation rituals. Resting on the anthropological understanding of liminality developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, I explore the building of a biotic communitas taking place in Linda Hogan’s postcolonial novels Solar Storms and People of the Whale. Drawing from the totemism and myths of her elders, Hogan’s magical realist ecopoetics reterritorializes American cartographies and imaginaries, thereby reclaiming ecopoetic ways of dwelling that gesture toward a different ontology. Her writing provides deeper insight into the world as a resilient, yet fragile and precious web of interconnected beings, matter, and stories, always in the making. Hogan’s ecopoetics sustains Faris’s definition of magical realism as an artistic mode of enchantment that “often merges ancient or traditional—sometimes indigenous—and modern worlds. Ontologically, within the texts, it integrates the magical and the material. Generically, it combines realism and the fantastic” (Faris 2004, 21). As if backlashing against the erasure of magic from the world celebrated by Weber, postmodern magical realism reopens the human mind to the possibility of wonder, of an “ineffable mystery” palpitating at the heart of matter (Faris 2004, 65). Ecopoetic magical realism probes the depths of an immanent reality. It springs from the indwelling agency of earth beings and matter, and from the enchanting interconnections between them that may remain invisible to the modern, Cartesian, human eye and rationality. As the chapters here included corroborate, magical realism, with its many destabilizing properties, “reorients not only our habits of time and space but our sense of identity as well. The multivocal nature of the narrative and the cultural

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hybridity that characterize magical realism extends [sic] to its characters, which tend toward a radical multiplicity” (Faris 2004, 25). In the next chapter, Jessica Maufort ventures her own concept of an ecological and ecopoetic magical realism. Grounded in solid theoretical foundations to discuss the intricacies of magical realism as a mode (Roh, Zamora and Faris, Delbaere-Garant), her paper generates enthralling echoes with the previous ones and opens up new paths to theorize an ecopoet(h)ics of reenchantment. Shuttling back and forth between material ecocriticism and magical realism, Maufort convincingly mobilizes the notion of “a compost poetics/aesthetics,” which she then applies as a reading lens in a comparative study of three contemporary Canadian and Australian novels activating postcolonial ecopoetics: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle, and Thomas Wharton’s Icefields. Her study draws from Bennett’s, and Iovino and Oppermann’s work on vibrant matter and narrative agency—the latter being identified, in Oppermann’s words, as “the world’s reenchanting property,” appearing as “a meshwork, a process, an enactment, or a performative practice.” As Maufort demonstrates, compost poetics/aesthetics characterizes a magical realist mode that “creates improbable assemblages out of elements from the environment itself.” Traveling further to Central and South America, Antonio CuadradoFernandez’s contribution foregrounds Latin American cultures and geographies that are oft-forgotten in the predominantly North American corpus of ecocritical studies. Refracting Maufort’s earlier chapter on compost aesthetics, the prevailing image in Cuadrado’s paper is that of poetry as a form of recycling. His chapter starts from the United Nations’ call for the preservation of indigenous knowledges and practices that will prove essential if we wish to maintain biodiversity in the era of the Anthropocene—or, as Haraway and others have it, the Capitalocene. Cuadrado focuses on the work by three different poets: Cecilia Vicuna, from Santiago de Chile, Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’abal, and Mexican poet Natalia Toledo. His starting point is that poetry is here a continuation of indigenous cosmologies that have emerged from and sustained animistic cultures. Referring to Tim Ingold and Viveiros de Castro, Cuadrado underlines how the animistic worldviews translated in their poetry lead to a form of perspectivism conducive to empathy and respect for nonhuman points of view. Cuadrado insists that “there is no re-enchanting of the Earth without indigenous cultures.” Moreover, by taking us closer to “the biocultural roots of orality,” their poetry is analyzed as a bridge between Western science and indigenous epistemologies. Looking at poems as “creative psychogeographies,” Cuadrado draws on Maturana and Varela’s study of autopoiesis, which, he shows, illuminates the dynamic, creative process of engagement with the environment that the poems stem from. This chapter successfully demonstrates that, like the indigenous ecopoetics of

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many different places in a postcolonial, postmodern world, “[the] cosmovisions evoked in the poetry of Toledo, Ak’abal and Vicuna are poetic stars in a constellation of political discourses threading imagined, alternative universes that will hopefully guide us in the darkness of the Capitalocene era.” Alan Johnson’s chapter then embarks on a journey through Indian forest fiction, within a theoretical framework that shuttles back and forth between Indian (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kavita Daiya, Raja Rao, Rajan Ravi, Gayatri Spivak), European, and U.S. thinkers (Clark, Garrard, Iovino and Oppermann, Naomi Klein, Wheeler, etc.). Homing in on the image of a shadow delineating “alternatives to post-enlightenment worldview,” Johnson explores the ecopoetics of “shadowy worlds [that] are grounded in nature.” In his reading of Mahasweta Devis’ short story “The Hunt” and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s novel The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, Johnson scrutinizes the worldviews of tribal women intertwining mythopoeia with modernity, thus undermining “the false dichotomy between enchantment and disenchantment.” Elucidating the various disorienting strategies at work in these texts, Johnson ponders linguistic, geographical, and cultural estrangement in texts incorporating nonhuman and supernatural elements they do not seem to question. Johnson pinpoints the crucial issues of irony, cultural, and linguistic translation. Meanwhile, he touches upon the “psychic disorder” of the Anthropocene (Clark) experienced in the first place by colonized peoples, whose “perceptions of, and relations to, time and space are often incompatible with a modernizing world.” It goes without saying that Johnson’s paper ties in with the previous chapters dealing with magical realism, as he argues that being human entails coexistence with “unseen webs of being.” These webs, he shows, are revealed through the writers’ ecopoetic fiction, helping us “see beyond the boundaries inherited from colonial modernity.” Moutel’s chapter then addresses themes found in my own chapter on liminality in Linda Hogan’s fiction and in Johnson’s chapter on forest ecopoetics. She focuses on the glade as a dwelling of enchantment in Theodore Roszak’s ecofeminist rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Moutel sheds light on Roszak’s seminal contribution to ecopsychology, demonstrating its potential to pollinate the field of ecopoetics. Foregrounding concepts such as “ancestral sensibility,” “vital reciprocity” or “environmental reciprocity,” and the “ecological unconscious,” Moutel studies the emancipation journey of the protagonist in Roszak’s rewriting—a journey taking her through the hearth of her home, then out across the edges, into the forest, and at the heart of the glade. She then turns to the ecofeminist, initiation ritual the main character undergoes, unpacking the various dimensions of her transformation during the liminal phase of her experience. Finally, Moutel draws from Faris’s theory of magical realism and shows how the mode allows for “an ecopoetic experience where matter is infused with volition and agency.” Exploring the function of

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the glade as a “dwelling of emancipation from patriarchal norms,” she argues that the glade simultaneously becomes a reenchanting place of “connection to one’s ecological unconscious.” Such connection works toward healing through bodily and psychic entanglements within nature, which are as old and mythical as they are tangible and present. Moreover, striking the chords and poetic echoes implied in the notion of reenchantment, Moutel explicates how much of the healing and initiation ceremonies reinvented here call onto the power of multispecies communication, of music, incantations, and natural rhythms. The next and final chapter offers an original, ecopoetic reading of James Joyce’s Anna Livia chapter in part one of Finnegan’s Wake. As Rachel Nisbet demonstrates, Anna Livia is both a female character (as housewife Anna Livia Plurabelle) and a “glamorous, allegorical figure for the life-giving potential of the River Liffey’s watershed.” Anna Livia thus flows through the chapter as an enticing, shape-shifting, and complex personification of ecological relations. Studying Joyce’s avant-garde, postcolonial and Irish ecopoetics, Nisbet emphasizes how it anticipates on Latour’s theorizing of human and nonhuman actor networks, and on current understanding of autopoietic systems, environmental justice, and the Anthropocene. Focusing on the personification of the central river-woman, Nisbet breaks down the imbricated mechanisms of such a complex, poetic, and rhetorical device as that of Anna Livia, involving animism, anthropomorphism, irony, mythopoeia, and allegory. This chapter taps into and consolidates the hypothesis of an ecological, “cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious” formulated by Seymour Epstein and taken up by Slovic. Nisbet illumines Joyce’s enchanting ecopoetics as embedded in intuitive psychology. Her chapter, like many in this book, resonates with much of the work charted out by ecofeminist and ecopsychologist thinkers as to the ways in which humans can dwell within the world. As a coda, this book has made room for an unpublished essay by Linda Hogan, “Ways of the Cranes,” which she read from at the Perpignan conference in 2016. Tackling human and nonhuman ecopoetics, Hogan’s writing paves the way for wonder and enchantment. It beckons toward the wonder of our cohabitation with nonhuman animals in our dwelling places. Focusing here on cranes, Hogan invites us to take our cue from them, and, more generally to read into the languages and behaviors of earth others, as Plumwood might say. Structured with multitudinous over-arching themes and references, while making way for diverging perspectives and theoretical frameworks, this volume seeks to give more visibility to the contribution of ecopoets and ecocritics around the world. Indeed, the braided chapters invite us to consciously take part in the choreographies and symphonies that emerge from the ever-changing patterns, fluxes, and voices of the earth. We do not encourage naive ecstasy or solipsistic, nostalgic refuge in the wonderful remnants of by-gone conceptions of a wilderness that hardly existed. On the contrary, this book forms an attempt

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to rekindle humans’ capacity for wonder in their everyday, postmodern lives, even in cities and towns. In the face of the despair and anxiety we sometimes inevitably feel as we contemplate the mass extinction processes under way, we must reopen our ears to the birdsongs in urban and nonurban areas, sense the trees humming and rhizomatically connecting in parks and forests, and open our eyes and hearts to the overlooked species, from insects to bacteria, existing all around us. This book is a humble act of resistance. It wants to prompt humans to hear the songs and notice the lives they are interconnected with, while learning to interweave western science and philosophy with indigenous stories, and with analytical frameworks derived from them, such as ecopsychology, ecofeminism, or multispecies ethnography. It intimates works of resilience, thus sowing seeds of hope for the future of humankind together with its co-dwellers of the Earth— be they animal, vegetal, mineral, or elemental. The multispecies voices that arise from this book are carriers of a transcultural approach. This volume makes way for scholars whose backgrounds and influences cross over many different cultural, geographic, and linguistic areas. Ultimately, this book intends to read as a reminder of our capacity to keep muting the voices of the earth and turn a deaf ear to its songs, a blind eye to its languages, or, conversely, to join the chorus of the world and make these voices heard despite their muffling by the human tumult that has increasingly drowned out polyphonic, multispecies chants. NOTES 1. I am taking cue from Jane Bennett’s new materialist approach of “vibrant matter” in her eponymous book. This is part of a larger project for a monograph my on the singing and humming of the world that I am working on, tied to an ecopoetics of reenchantment and liminal realism. For my use of the phrase “the humming of vibrant matter,” see for now my paper in French on the subject (Meillon 2018). My bibliography only includes the references I have brought to write the introduction. Readers may refer to the individual chapters for the references provided in each contribution. 2. The term was first ventured by Robert Jay Lifton. Cf. Scott Slovic (2008, 143–63). 3. The latter are available on the ecopoetics website attached to the University of Perpignan Ecopoetics workshop: https​:/​/ec​​opoet​​ique.​​hypot​​heses​​.org/​​categ​​ory​/e​​ntret​​ iens-​​daut​e​​ur​-ri​​ce​-s.​

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books. Adamson, Joni, and Michael Davis. 2018. Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice. New York: Routledge.

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Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allen, Paula Gunn. 1992 (1986). The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press. Allen, Paula Gunn, and Carolyn Dunn Anderson. 2001. Hozho, Walking in Beauty: Native American Stories of Inspiration, Humor, and Life. Chicago: Contemporary Books. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bate, Jonathan. 2000. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bohm, David. 1988. “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World.” In The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals, edited by Ray Griffin. Albany: State University of New York Press. Callicot, J. Baird. 2009. Genèse. Translated by Dominique Bellec. Marseille: Wildproject Editions. Carson, Rachel. 2002 (1962). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Choné, Aurélie et al., eds. 2017. Rethinking Nature: Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries. New York: Routledge. Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-Delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Faris Wendy, B. 1995. “Scheherazade’s Children.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B, 163–190. Faris. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Forbes, Jack D. 2008 (1978). Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Garrard, Greg, ed. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Giono, Jean. 1934. Le chant du monde. Mayenne: Gallimard. Griffin, Ray, ed. 1988. The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals. Albany: State University of New York Press. Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper & Row. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hiltner, Ken. 2015. Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader. New York: Routledge. Hogan, Linda. 1995. Dwellings. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2012. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@ 3(1): 75–91. ———, eds. 2014. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545–76. Knickerbocker, Scott. 2012. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2015. Face à Gaïa. Paris: La Découverte. Leopold, Aldo. 1966 (1949). A Sand County Almanach. New York: Ballantine Books. Meillon, Bénédicte. 2018. «Le chant de la matière: vers une écopoétique du réenchantement à travers quelques auteurs des Appalaches.» In Transtexte(s) Transcultures, edited by J. D. Collomb and P. A. Pellerin 13(20). Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Patoine, Pierre-Louis. 2015. Corps/texte: Pour une théorie de la lecture empathique: Cooper, Danielewski, Frey, Palahniuk. Paris: ENS Editions. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Roszak, Theodore. 1992. The Voice of the Earth. New York: Simon & Schuster. Serres, Michel. 1990. Le Contrat naturel. Paris: Editions François Bourrin. Slovic, Scott. 2008. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Swimme, Brian. 1988. “The Cosmic Creation.” The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tredinnick, Mark. 2005. The Land’s Wild Music: Encounters with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams & James Galvin. San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press. Weber, Max. 1946. “Science as Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. Affective Ecology: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wheeler, Wendy. 2011. “The Biosemiotic Turn: Abduction, or, the Nature of Creative Reason in Nature and Culture.” In Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, 270–82. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 2016. Expecting the Earth: Life/Culture/Biosemiotics. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd. White, Junior Lynn. 1996. “The Historical Roots of our Crisis.” In The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Gloftelty and Harold Fromm, 3–14. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press.

Part I

THEORIZING ECOPOETICS OF (RE)ENCHANTMENT

Chapter 1

Necessary Wonder Promises and Pitfalls of Enchantment Charles Holdefer

Why should we take it upon ourselves to “reenchant the earth?” Hasn’t our busy species already caused enough trouble? The prospect of enchantment is appealing, to be sure, but reenchanting suggests a return to a prior state, a movement toward delight that is also nostalgic. The implication is that we have been there and done that—and if we wish, we can do it again. But what powers this movement? At the risk of sounding churlish, I confess that the agency implied in “reenchanting the earth” makes me nervous. It sounds like something that could easily devolve into another pretense of mastery over nature or an appropriation of its processes. In the Genesis myth, after evicting Adam and Eve from the garden, God tells them to replenish the earth and subdue it, and claim dominion over every living thing.1 The earth is humans’ consolation prize, theirs not only to toil upon but also to exploit in service of their desires. The rest, as the saying goes, is history—and this history is shared by unreflecting consumers and devoted conservationists alike. In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon (1996) calls into question nature-lovers’ fondness for parks and their efforts for preservation, observing that “Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in some petty human building but in God’s own creation, Nature itself” (96). Does the idea of “reenchanting the earth” imply a similar effort? Is it a recycled version of the narcissistic idea of dominion, of treating the earth as one of our spoils? Or is that an unfair characterization? After all, a precondition of enchantment is a sense of wonder, of being put under a spell, of giving ourselves up to delight.2 In some respects, at least, enchantment invites us to be more yielding, not more domineering. Ron Rash has underlined how humans are “so much in the world but such a small part of it” (2016). Instead of going out to 23

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conquer the earth, perhaps we are engaging in another kind of transaction, a mode premised on paying attention, on listening to something both inside and outside ourselves. Moreover, if the audacity of “reenchanting the earth” gives me pause, so does the prospect of an earth without enchantment. Yes, the pitfall of over-reaching narcissism is real—but a cautious and claustrophobic purism can be just as empty. In either case, the possibility of engaging with the earth is diminished, not enlarged. Enchantment, in contrast, might offer a mode of engagement which is both respectful and liberating. But where does one find it? How does one experience it? In a recent essay, Mark Cocker complained that reenchantment is “a diffuse term that seems to mean whatever the author wishes. What it usually involves is clothing a landscape in fine writing” (2016). Without being prescriptive, this discussion will try to avoid this tendency. Instead, it will emphasize the importance of language as something other than “clothing” or ornamentation of its referent. Rather, I will argue that the text itself can become a dwelling of enchantment. I will focus primarily on poem 721 by Emily Dickinson to illustrate some of the issues at play when writing and reading about nature. Dickinson grapples with the problem of mediation, and shows how modesty can be a catalyst for wonder. WHERE TO LOOK? WHERE TO LISTEN? In nature writing—and in the end all writing is nature writing, in the sense that it is inextricably bound up in natural processes; what often gets called “nature writing” is a sort of generic shorthand to talk about foregrounded themes—human subjects are forever trying to apprehend something vast of which they are also a constitutive element. Where to begin? Dickinson’s poem 721, written in 1863, dramatizes this predicament: “Nature” is what We see— The Hill—the Afternoon— Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee— Nay—Nature is Heaven— “Nature” is what We hear— The Bobolink—the Sea— Thunder—the Cricket— Nay—Nature is Harmony— “Nature” is what We know— But have no Art to say—

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So impotent our Wisdom is To Her Sincerity— (322)

The speaker in Dickinson’s poem is not only talking about nature, but also about how tricky it is to talk about nature. For her, it seems to be a process and a matter for improvisation, contradiction, and even failure. The poem begins with a nod toward nineteenth-century empiricism which is purposely bland, even anodyne (Vendler 2010, 13). A definition of “Nature” is based on “what We see,” beginning here with “The Hill—the Afternoon—/Squirrel.” There is perhaps a hint of the picturesque, but this is followed by “Eclipse.” A plunge into darkness, a challenge to a positivist method, and an acknowledgment of larger forces and bodies at play, of the earth itself as the piece of a larger solar system.3 The sense of scale shifts. The modest “Bumble bee” then appears, only to be negated, along with the other examples, by the otherworldly and decidedly non-empirical declaration that “Nay—Nature is Heaven.” The second stanza also starts with an empirical strategy in its first three lines, but this time with sensory reference to sound, before once again contradicting itself in the fourth line. As in the first stanza, a methodical approach is thwarted. The initial examples of “The Bobolink” and “the Sea” are readily construed as pleasant sounds, whereas “Thunder,” conventionally speaking, is more problematic, maybe menacing. The sound of the “Cricket,” like the appearance of the “Bumble bee” in the previous stanza, marks a return to a humble scale, but then the premise of the stanza is undermined by the reappearance of “Nay.” The ostensibly improvising speaker opts instead for the idea of “Harmony,” which suggests a larger blending of many elements— perhaps the very ones listed in the stanza. But let us put that idea to the test. How does one harmonize a cricket with thunder? And are not heaven and harmony human concepts imposed on the nonhuman examples listed in the first two stanzas? Still, perhaps this incongruity is the point. It is now a common ecocritical assumption that bridging the human and nonhuman is a necessary practice (Buell 1996, 7). Terry Gifford has underlined the permeability of our experience, and how “our inner human nature can be understood in relation to external nature” (1999, 156). Yves-Charles Grandjeat, with reference to Wendell Berry, Mark Tredinnick, and Paul Carter, has referred to “poetic co-operation” and to a “middle voice” that arises partly from the nonhuman subject (2015). Of course this is a difficult project and it is fraught with the usual risks of appropriation and the limits of anthropomorphism. Or, to put it more pointedly, the limits of who I am. While I can sincerely try to listen to the voice of the land, I am reminded of the old joke about a governor in Austin claiming that if speaking English was good enough for Jesus Christ,

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it was good enough for the children of Texas. How much dare I assume? Because if the land speaks Igbo or Apache, for instance, a person like me will need a good translation, and that is only considering the human side of things. It will be tougher still when I have to rely solely on pollen or spores or echolocation. I own up to being parochial, on both sides of the human and nonhuman divide. I do not assert this complacently or defensively, or while assuming a necessary rivalry; I am simply recognizing an aspect of my subjectivity. Grandjeat acknowledges the difficulty of imagining “what language such a middle voice, arising partly from the non-human subject, might speak and how it could filter through discursive artefacts produced out of human language” (2015). But he also points out that just because it is not easy does not mean the project is not worth pursuing. Quite the contrary, and just as my parochial self might learn something interesting or useful or perhaps enchanting via Igbo or Apache or, further afield, pollen or spores or echolocation, I would argue that Emily Dickinson is grappling with a similar project, in English.4 Consider the third stanza of the poem, which proposes yet another definition but this time, instead of looking outward, toward the sensory experience of the world, the speaker directs the gaze inward, to the questions of “what We know” and what we can say. But there seems to be a gap, or a lack, when it comes to summoning the necessary “Art” to express ourselves. As a consequence, we fail to do justice to “Her Sincerity,” which might here be read as the impersonal processes of nature. Our “Wisdom” appears impotent when faced with something so vast and far-reaching. In sum, we do not know much. And we successfully communicate even less. But does that mean that this poem is a testimony to futility, a calculated resignation? Or is the poem performing another kind of meaning, one that still has something to say about the speaker’s position in nature, or even the poem’s position in nature? Perhaps it is not only a question of where we look and listen, but how. HOW TO LOOK? HOW TO LISTEN? In a general context, Terry Eagleton has observed that “‘Literature’ may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them” (1983, 7). In respect to ecopoetry, Thomas Pughe (2016) has referred to the “work of the poem,” pointing out how meaning emerges not merely from what a poem is ostensibly “about” but also from its formal strategies and the reader’s role in engaging them. He underlines how “the eco in ecopoetry derives from aesthetics as much as from theme.”5 Hubert Zapf (2008) has located an “ecological” quality in Dickinson’s poetry which

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depends not on “realistic nature writing” but on reading for “metaphoric, narrative, and aesthetic dimensions” (858). Let us return to the beginning of the poem, the first word: “Nature.” Dickinson has chosen to put the word in quotation marks. These have a distancing effect, suggesting that the speaker’s attempt to define nature—even with examples based on empirical observation—is constructed and exists at a certain remove. She is not saying nature as much as “so-called nature.” The following stanzas repeat this device, undermining what is said, even as it is said. Of course, this kind of punctuation, sometimes called “scare quotes,” became a cliché of the postmodern era, an overused stylistic tic. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was less prevalent and, along with her signature dashes, figures among Dickinson’s idiosyncratic repertoire of textual effects. Early posthumous editions of her work in 1890 and 1924 naively corrected her texts and removed these quotation marks. But it is obvious to today’s reader that this kind of editorial presumption changes the meaning. The poem dramatizes a quest to find the right examples to invoke nature, while at the same time wondering how a poem could presume to do as much. It is not only saying look at this or listen to that (e.g., the hill, the squirrel, the bumble bee; the bobolink, thunder, the cricket), it is also saying, look at me, a piece of “what We know” which is also, according to the beginning of the third stanza, “Nature.” Even if it cannot fully articulate itself (“have no Art to say”), it stakes out a territory of its own. The text is no Garden of Eden, but it is a place on earth to which human consciousness can go forth. And maybe, with the right effort, be fruitful. And what form will that struggle take? This might be time for me to address several other allusions to nature that further complicate the picture. Twice in the poem there is a reference to Nature which is not set off by quotation marks. This occurs in lines four and eight, identifying Nature with “Heaven” and “Harmony.” Both are introduced as alternatives, following the empirical examples which have been rejected with “Nay.” Both “Heaven” and “Harmony” are of a different, immaterial order. Although the capitalization here is banal and probably not significant (in this poem Dickinson capitalizes all her nouns), the poet’s choice to avoid a distancing punctuation, along with the categorical difference of these examples (how do you compare a squirrel, say, to heaven and harmony?), might be read as a suggestion of transcendence, even of religious orthodoxy. But this is questionable, too. Dickinson’s Congregationalist upbringing and her education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary certainly inform her work, but numerous readers have noted how, in regard to religion as with much else, the adult Dickinson is hard to pin down and often expresses skepticism or heterodox views (Molson 1974, 404–26; Gordon 2010, 214). And

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at a textual level, it is interesting to compare Poem 721 to an earlier piece from 1861, Poem 202: “Faith” is a fine invention For Gentlemen who see! But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency! (95)

Poem 202 has a deceptively easy aphoristic quality, and clearly it is a jab at religion and a defense of science. And like Poem 721, it calls attention to its own devices, bringing into play the scare quotes for “Faith” and an added italicized emphasis on the word “see,” which contradicts the Pauline notion of faith as belief in things unseen.6 There is a possible pun, too, revealing a shift in perspective, as “an Emergency” may also be heard as an “emergent see.” Thus it announces itself as a text, a site in its own right, a piece both of and in the world, in the process of revealing itself. HOW TO FAIL For Dickinson’s speakers, language and consciousness are put forward as elements in which we dig and explore and, perhaps, find a way to engage with the earth. Aldo Leopold’s oft-cited invitation to “think like a mountain” (129, 132) has something to say about human interaction within an ecosystem, to be sure, but in its use of simile it also locates the reader in figurative language as an appropriate and compatible dwelling to occupy, to linger in, in order to pursue this thought process. In a similar fashion, Leopold’s observation, “I would I were a muskrat!” (22), is a hypothetical envy of his neighbor that expresses not only a desire to increase his range of practical knowledge but also a hunger for a more marvelous—one could say enchanting—experience of the world. Such sentiments are easy to caricature and account for reactions like Joyce Carol Oates’ essay “Against Nature” (1986), which complains that “[nature] inspires a painfully limited set of responses in ‘nature writers’— REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS” (236). Seen this way, nature writing sounds a bit like sitting in church: it is fine, if you go in for that sort of thing, but if you are not a believer, it quickly becomes a tedious business. And indeed, in the hands of less able, more prosaic writers, there is surely truth to the caricature that nature writing is well-intentioned propaganda or preaching to the choir. Its virtues can seem rarefied and otherworldly, a sort of bobo Swedenborgianism. Robert Macfarlane, in a spirited defense of nature writing that appeared recently in the New Statesman,

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admits, “There could also be a lot more jokes” (2015). Still, there is no shortage of writers whose responses are highly nuanced and not reducible to pious caricature, and among them, of course, is Aldo Leopold himself, who is attuned to ironies and refers wryly to the kind of nature-lover “who writes bad verse on birchbark” (167). This product, presumably, is not a better part of what Leopold called the “esthetic harvest” of the land (vii, my emphasis), and it brings me back to Emily Dickinson, whose astringencies are anything but prosaic. Let us take a final look at the third stanza, which points to a breakdown in communication. The speaker, who is still generalizing with “We,” admits to a lack of “Art” and impotence compared to the “Sincerity” of “‘Nature.’” It is, in one sense, an admission of failure. The rhetorical gambit introduced in the first stanza, which indicated the speaker would define nature, has reached an impasse. But is it only failure? Or is it perhaps necessary failure? Taken as a whole, the poem seems to mock the presumption that nature is going to be summed up by our perceptions or domesticated by our language. It is not, as in Mark Cocker’s description, “clothing a landscape in fine writing” (2015). Instead, the poem offers a humbling recognition of our limitations, made apparent by an unfolding performance. The performance, not any neat definition put forward by the speaker, is perhaps the larger point. Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer have underlined how the most interesting texts about nature “have sensed the power of nature to resist [. . .] the meanings we attempt to impose on the natural world” (2001, 252). Yves-Charles Grandjeat has referred to a necessary vulnerability and “narratives of abnegation” and has underlined that “in textual practice, vulnerability promotes a willingness to admit representational defeat” (2016). Such a defeat can be a more probing performance than an ersatz success. For this reason, failure need not be seen as unfruitful. Humility is itself a fruit, offering benefits, possibilities of more subtle awareness. What is more, our efforts are full of ironies and unintended consequences which are not all bad and which, sometimes, pleasantly surprise. Aldo Leopold has noted how the railroad industry, with its fenced right of way, emerged as the “outstanding conservator” of native prairie flora (48). A structuring form from humans’ industrial revolution actually preserved the plants from depredating farmers. So, too, by analogy, a patch of poetry might offer a space for growth, for wildness, for richer consciousness or a spiritual dimension. It reminds us that literary activity is more than a cliché of self-indulgent, formalist fiddling while the planet burns. Dickinson’s use of ambiguous scansion for the last word of the poem—if one cares to go there, to fondle those syllables—on “Sincerity,” is a final testimony to the work of the poem. Do you accent it conventionally, “sincerity,” or do you cede to the iambic momentum of its surrounding linguistic environment, for a childlike “sinceritee?” Not a

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complicated question, on the face of it, but still I wonder: how, indeed, do we perform “Nature’s sincerity”? What will it mean in our thoughts, words and actions in 2019 and beyond? This reading puts the poem and the reader very much in the thick of things.

CONCLUSION Seen in this light, literature can serve not as an escape from the world but into the world. The surrender of self can facilitate aesthetic pleasure, including enchantment, which can be considered a response consistent with an accommodated relationship with the earth (Gifford 1999, 149). Of course it is not the only response, and the text is not the only place to visit. Activity on other fronts is inevitable and necessary. Still, the text remains a vital site worth exploring, and to underestimate it or to treat it as merely a vehicle for thematic concerns is to avert one’s gaze from a potential marvel. In “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake sought to “see a World in a Grain of Sand.”7 Although language and consciousness do not occupy the same ecological niche as a grain of sand, they are part of our ecological niche, not above or outside it. Literary qualities, let it be said one more time, in an era of urgency, are not merely a decorative or nostalgic indulgence. Literature points to a simple but fundamental insight: in order to be more accurate about the human position on earth, it makes practical sense to seek enchantment, because enchantment helps us to see.

NOTES 1. “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28, KJV). 2. “en∙chant: [. . .] to cast under a spell; bewitch [. . .] to delight completely; charm; enrapture” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1976). 3. “Eclipse” might also mark Dickinson’s attitude in regard to the theological order implied by “Heaven.” In a letter to Thomas W. Higginson, she offered this description of her family: “They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their ‘Father’” (Letter 261, April 25, 1862). 4. See also Knickerbocker (2012). 5. Pughe (2016) is building on Jonathan Bate’s idea of “ecological work” (Bate 2000, 200) and Forrest Gander’s ecopoetic distancing himself from nature as a theme (Gander and Kinsella 2012, 2). Pughe’s approach pointedly engages the reader’s responsibility in accomplishing a share of the “work.”

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6. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1, KJV. 7. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower: Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” (Blake 1979, 209)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bate, Jonathan. 2000. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blake, William. 1979. Blake’s Poetry and Designs, edited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: W.W. Norton. Buell, Lawrence. 1996. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carter, Paul. 1996. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber & Faber. Cocker, Mark. 2015. “Death of the Naturalist: Why Is the ‘New Nature Writing’ So Tame?” New Statesman. Accessed June 17, 2015. http:​/​/www​​.news​​tates​​man​.c​​om​/ cu​​lture​​/2015​​/06​/d​​eath-​​natur​​alist​​-why-​​new​-n​​ature​​-​writ​​ing​-s​​o​-tam​​e. Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness.” In Best American Essays 1996, edited by Robert Atwan, 83–109. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dickinson, Emily. 1862. “Letter 261 to T.W. Higginson, April 25, 1862.” In Emily Dickinson: The Letters. http:​/​/www​​.emil​​ydick​​inson​​.it​/l​​0261-​​028​0.​​html. ———. 1999. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gander, Forrest, and Kinsella, John. 2012. Redstart: An Ecological Poetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Gifford, Terry. 1999. Pastoral. London: Routledge. Gordon, Lyndall. 2010. Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds. London: Virago. Grandjeat, Yves-Charles. 2015. “Poetic Co-operation in the Works of ‘Nature Writers of Our Own Time.’” Miranda 11. http://miranda​.revues​.org​/7024, doi:10.4000/ miranda.7024. ———. 2016. “‘I Turn Homeward, Wondering’: A Short, Enchanted Journey Through Some of the Wonders Literature Can Do for Ecology.” International Conference on Ecopoetics: “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” Perpignan, France, June 22–25, 2016. http:​/​/eco​​poeti​​csper​​pigna​​n​.com​​/ watc​​h​-vid​​eos​-k​​eynot​​es​-wr​​iters​​-an​d-​​acade​​mics/​. Knickerbocker, Scott. 2012. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Leopold, Aldo. 1989. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macfarlane, Robert. 2015. “Why We Need Nature Writing.” New Statesman, September 2, 2015. http:​/​/www​​.news​​tates​​man​.c​​om​/cu​​lture​​/natu​​re​/20​​15​/09​​/robe​​rt​ -ma​​cfarl​​ane​-w​​hy​-we​​-ne​ed​​-natu​​re​-wr​​iting​. Molson, Francis J. 1974. “Emily Dickinson’s Rejection of the Heavenly Father.” The New England Quarterly 47 (3): 404–26. JSTOR Stable 364379. Morris, William, ed. 1976. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Oates, Joyce Carol. 1986. “Against Nature.” Antaeus 57 (Autumn): 236–43. Pughe, Thomas. 2016. “Introduction: Pastoral and/as the ‘Ecological Work’ of Language.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 20 (1): 1–7. Raglon, Rebecca, and Marian Scholtmeijer. 2001. “Heading off the Trail: Language, Literature, and Nature’s Resistance to Narrative.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, 248–262. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Rash, Ron. 2016. “Readings from Above the Waterfall.” International Conference on Ecopoetics: “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” Perpignan, France, June 20, 2018. http:​/​/eco​​poeti​​csper​​pigna​​n​.com​​/watc​​h​-vid​​eos​-k​​ eynot​​es​-wr​​iters​​-an​d-​​acade​​mics/​. Tredinnick, Mark. 2005. The Land’s Wild Music. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. Vendler, Helen. 2010. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Zapf, Hubert. 2008. “Literary Ecology and Ethics of Texts.” New Literary History 39 (4) (Autumn): 847–868. JSTOR Stable 20533119.

Chapter 2

“I Turn Homeward, Still Wondering” Reasons for Enchantment Yves-Charles Grandjeat

THE MAGIC WAND “I turn homeward, still wondering”: the last sentence in “January,” the opening section of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, chimes in suggestively with the idea of ecopoetic writing as a means of “reenchanting the earth.” Indeed, Leopold’s polysemous “wondering” here mostly shows a baffled narrator confronted by the mystery of animal motivations and itineraries. The musing narrator is indeed left with a flurry of unanswered questions, a commitment to respect the privacy of the animal, and a sense of amazement, as he gives up tracking a skunk aroused from hibernation by an untimely spell of wintertime thaw. The tenuous line of tracks on the melting snow—a striking metatextual evocation of Leopold’s own fragile ecopoetic writing itself—leads straight to a pile of driftwood, from which they do not emerge. The writer-tracker follows yet is content to listen briefly to “the tinkle of dripping water among the logs,” fancying that the skunk “hears it too,” before turning back just short of making sure that the skunk is actually in there, and thus leaving the animal undisturbed (Leopold 1949, 5). Wondering about the possible presence of the animal is thus fully preserved, and perhaps, too, wondering about the wisdom and meaning of so patiently tracking an animal only to turn back just before making actual contact. In the absence of objective confirmation, a space in the quest remains open. And that soft, hazy, dreamy space is extremely busy. It marks an invitation to marvel at the wonders of an enigmatic, yet so tantalizingly close “fellow creature”1 whose mysteries are part of a broader, more-than-human living world teeming with other perceptions, other languages, other minds—a world which humans can only sense and praise since it encompasses, yet overwhelms, them. 33

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Aldo Leopold’s choice to preserve the wonder points the way “homeward.” Indeed, wondering marks the human dweller’s ability not to dwell home alone. It allows humans to keep in gentle touch with all the other lives with whom they share the many-hued, multivocal, vibrant Earth, even though these other lives can never be apprehended through a human-made prism: our fellow creatures live their own lives, equipped with perceptive abilities that shape for them worlds which we will never have access too, although we can try and imagine them—the world of the dog, the cat, the sparrow, the bee, the worm. Making space in our world for these many other worlds, recognizing their existence and their right to continue to exist, as well as rejoicing at their continuous enriching of our world in unimaginable yet actual ways, calls for living in an open, reserved, respectful manner toward all our fellow creatures. This is the only possible way of inhabiting together the common “meta-world” incorporating these myriad worlds. Acknowledging this state of affairs might stem from rational deliberation, yet it leaves a vacancy which rational deliberation must deliberately refrain from harnessing. This space of reserved contact, recognizing and rejoicing in the otherness of the other, is an empathic space where intellectual restraint meets with emotional generosity: it is a poetic space of approximation: one which makes it possible to draw near without clashing, one in which contact with other living creatures, or other life-forms, is actually realized as that which defies intellection or translation yet is given as experience. As Aldo Leopold puts it, “the chit-chat of the woods is sometimes hard to translate” (Leopold 1949, 90), yet it can definitely be heard, if one pays sufficient attention. Plunging into it necessarily presents itself as a sort of dislocation, a cognitive rift hurling humans beyond the limits of their known world. It wrenches the human subject from familiar cognitive categories to offer a perceptual glimpse into the many other worlds within the one he inhabits. This space of poetic, cognitive decentering can be hinted at in a variety of ways. As the closing sentence of “January” suggests, the term “wondering” is fit for the job. It brings out this odd mix of puzzlement, astonishment and marveling gained from the release of the rational intellect, in which the “esthetic principle” (Leopold 1949, 280) is free to roam. We may also, as I will try to suggest, call it “enchantment” since, like a magic wand, it projects us instantly into a world other than the one we are familiar with and call “normal,” and ushers us into other worlds, other realities. A POLITICS OF ENCHANTMENT The idea of ecopoetics as a means of enchantment, or reenchantment of a disenchanted world also sounds an enticing note, since it contrasts with the

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often bleak, apocalyptic discourse in which calls for environmental awareness have most often been wrapped, whether announcing Collapse (Jared Diamond), The Revenge of Gaia (James Lovelock), or various forms of Silent Spring(s) (Rachel Carson) in devastated landscapes. Of course, the notion or experience of “enchantment” might at first seem oddly irrelevant to environmental causes in the present extremely bleak context, since Donald Trump and his team have started rolling back decades of U.S. environmental regulations. Prospects herald years of grueling fights, demonstrating, organizing, litigating, lobbying work in a real and sometimes ugly world, not a vacation in wonderland. Occasions to rejoice about U.S. Environmental politics have come and gone. They came when President Obama vetoed the XL Keystone pipeline, or, to mention a less publicized case, when in December 2015, the work of several conservation groups led to a move by the U.S. Department of Interior to cancel oil and gas leases in the Badger, Two-Medicine area, a critical zone for wildlife habitat connecting the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Glacier National Park, as well as sacred grounds to the Blackfeet Indians. Those victories were as short lived as the administration that granted them, proving that political struggle is the key. Certainly, it was hard political work, not praying or chanting—or, rather, I should say not only and perhaps not mainly praying or chanting—which brought them about, since praying and chanting were part of the work. More hard work now looms ahead to save previous victories from vanishing into the thick air of Trump’s campaign to give coal and oil companies a free ride during his presidency. It should be noted, however, that recent high-profile environmental battles have often included, in addition to hard-headed political organizing, marked spiritual and artistic dimensions. This suggests that realistic politics and spiritual dedication are all but contradictory—as they might seem from the perspective of an orthodox Marxist perspective, viewing the religious as a smokescreen deterring social actors from an objective analysis of objective power relations. Spiritual action in environmental battles is only a means of formalizing an acknowledgment, on the level of deep-seated personal convictions, of the existence of vital, profound connections with a more-than-human world that are not immediately visible, while dedicating oneself to serve and respect them. It thus involves a decentering of the subject’s perceptive and cognitive self-centered habits. This may bring to mind magic if we consider that, from a non-western, animistic perspective, magic, as ecophilosopher David Abram puts it, just plays on “the fact that humans, in an indigenous and oral context, experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness among many others” (Abram 1996, 9, my emphasis). In that context, magic operates for the human magician as a connector with those other forms of awareness, yielding other realities. It is, if we keep following Abram, a means the way for the magician or the shaman, who work in

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similar cross-cognitive perspective, “to slip in and out of his or her state of consciousness precisely to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined.” […] The shaman’s magic indeed makes her or him receptive to “the meaningful solicitations—songs, cries, gestures—of the larger, more-than-human field” (ibid.). It seems only logical, then, that environmental battles waged to protect the integrity of a coherent “land community”—to take up Leopold’s famous phrase—in which humans interact harmoniously and respectfully with nonhuman life-forms2 should include rituals affirming a commitment to honor the many, various, forms of life that come into the community. As Leopold argues in his analysis of the process leading humans to commit themselves to a “land ethic,” “economic and ethical manifestations are results, not causes of the motive force” (Leopold 1949, 283). What is “the motive force”? As we shall see in more details later on, it is an intimate, private, motivation to act, which originates in the psyche. This driving force can only move when fueled with intimate desire, or spiritual convictions. Or, as ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak wrote in his Voice of the Earth: What the Earth requires will have to make itself felt within us as if it were our own most private desire. Facts and figures, reason and logic can show us the errors of our present ways; they can delineate the risks we run. But they cannot motivate, they cannot teach us a better way to live, a better way to want to live. That must be born from inside our own convictions. (Roszak 1992, 47)

This, then, calls for rituals, which work in two simultaneous directions. On the one hand, they recall that the reason to struggle derives not just from an objective understanding of the diversity of life, but also from the human experience of participating in this diverse community in relation with other life-forms. On the other hand, they reactivate the “motive force” driving the spirit of the struggle. In the battle of the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies against the Dakota Access pipeline, gathering to pray and chant to honor “Wni’ Miconi,” the Sacred Water, was as important as political organizing. Spiritual values and sovereignty concerns were of also equal significance when, in October 2016, a dozen Indian tribes, including the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, signed the “Grizzly Treaty”—“The Grizzly: A Treaty of Cooperation, Cultural Revitalization and Restoration,” vowing to fight efforts to take the Grizzly bear off the list of federally protected endangered species. The treaty mentions “the reverence that tribes have for the grizzly bear, and the spiritual, cultural and ceremonial role the grizzly plays in the life and history of each signatory tribe.”3 As CSKT Chairman Vernon Finley underlined, “At the heart of the treaty is the tribal alternative to delisting and trophy hunting the grizzly: the reintroduction of grizzlies to sovereign tribal

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nations with biologically suitable habitat in the Great Bear’s historic range, for cultural, spiritual, environmental and economic revitalization” (Piikani Nation Treaty 2016, my emphasis).4 In addition to fighting for a cultural and spiritual perspective which envisions animals as “brothers and sisters” (ibid.), the move bears witness to a general sense among tribal activists that they have not been properly consulted, and that it is time for them to turn back the tide of political neglect.5 The Piikani Nation Chief, Stan Grier, thus sees the delisting of the grizzly bear as part of a broader political history of “sovereignty, treaty, consultation, and spiritual and religious freedom violations.”6 The Blackfeet nation, again, as well as the Hopi, the Shoshone, and many other western tribes have joined forces to fight the delisting proposal, on account of this political and spiritual significance of bears in their culture. One Hopi leader, Ben Nuvamsa, declared: “We regard him (the bear) as part of our family, and it’s really important to all of us natives to keep him around. [. . . ] It doesn’t matter where the bears are. We pray to them when we see them.”7 Spirituality, sovereignty, and ecology are here clearly intertwined. In the Native American battle for the bears, social and political action is thus fueled by an urge to protect a powerful source of spiritual inspiration. Numerous similar cases similarly testify to an intricate intertwining of political, sovereignty, and environmental concerns with cultural, spiritual considerations in battles fought by tribal governments to “manage” what one can call “natural resources” only in the broadest sense of the term— including a spiritual dimension—on tribal lands. When, four years ago, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes won back control of the Kerr dam on their reservation, or, recently, moved toward securing management of the National Bison Range wildlife refuge,8 previously run by the federal government on tribal land, we saw cases in which concerns protection of environmental and spiritual resources converged with tribal sovereignty interest. In the case of the dam, again, water is seen by tribal spokespeople as a “spiritual” and cultural as well as an ecological and economic resource. This is also true of the bison—the animals on the bison range refuge are descended from a herd which was protected by the tribe in the late nineteenth century when bisons were slaughtered by the millions in the United States. Under the leadership of Tom McDonald and Germaine White, the CSKT’s Natural Resources Department organizes a yearly River Honoring Festival on the Flathead lake, and has produced important teaching material on water, including the remarkable DVDs Explore the River and Lower Flathead River, in which tribal elders praise the river as a sacred bond to the earth, to the past, and to others in the community of the living. In one of the DVDs, Vernon Finley, an elder from the Kootenai Cultural Committee, recalls how for “old-timers,” traveling down the river was not just “a way of getting from one place to another,” but a “spiritual statement” about “the way you

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carry yourself on this earth.” It was also a way to connect with the whole of nature: “the water, the trees, every different tree, every different grass, the wind itself, had songs, and each of us has the ability to hear those songs,” Finley declares.9 Much of the money that has come to the tribe from the U.S. Department of Interior, as part of the recent Cobbell Settlement,10 has been put to use to reclaim and restore lands along the Jocko River, so that those songs can be heard again. As these examples amply demonstrate, a sense of the sacred does not preclude hard-headed political action through effective organizing and expert litigating; rather, in the case that we have just reviewed, it often feeds and guides it. And it keeps open a spiritual dimension in which enchantment can lead one to “enter into relation with other species on their own terms” (Abram 1996, 9), or to maintain the connection once it has been established. In the daily life of environmental activism, and even in a mainstream western, non-tribal context, a sense of enchantment, albeit in a more watereddown, profane fashion, is also recurrently called upon to urge citizens to protect their environment. The banners adorning lamp posts on Higgings avenue, last Summer, in downtown Missoula, urging strollers to “Protect what you love” were put there by the Five Valleys Land Trust, a Missoula organization which has vowed to “conserve important landscapes and family places in Western Montana.” The thriving local conservation group has succeeded in bringing together diverse messages and goals such as “protecting family places, linking generations and communities” and “protecting the land for all living things,” as two of its 2012 Landmarks newsletters proclaim. As with other, larger, and equally successful groups such as the Montana Wilderness Association, the communication strategy favors messages carefully crafted to balance concerns for the human and nonhuman communities. The two thus appear as intermingled, mutually dependent, and inseparable, as they are in Leopold’s land community. The communication strategy puts equal emphasis on public recreation, family and community values, and even economic values, on the one hand, and wildlife protection on the other. Evidence is here offered that the not so great “Wilderness debate” may be an academic construction irrelevant to social praxis. William Cronon’s claim that “wilderness embodies a dualistic notion in which the human is entirely outside the natural” (Cronon 1996, 80) is contradicted—there is no opposition whatsoever here between the defense of the wilderness as such, as having intrinsic value, and humanistic, even anthropocentric considerations. Literature illustrates this intertwining. Two of the Five Valleys Land Trust’s 2012 quarterly publications carry epigraphs quoting the famous zen ecologist poet Gary Snyder and Tim Linehan—a local fishing guide who appears in some of Rick Bass’s work, and has contributed to an anthology of stories: The Roadless Yaak. Gary Snyder’s poem, “Hay for the Horses,” is a

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tribute to a farmer, while Tim Linehan’s piece features a bald eagle swooping down on a duck. The balance between the human and the wild is calculated in all Five Valleys messages: “thriving wildlife communities, like thriving human communities, need vast and connected11 habitat to survive. Five Valleys has long been working with the most powerful tool for connecting important open land—neighbors.”12 Of course, the term “neighbor” must here be enlarged to incorporate the more-than-human word. Tim Linehan’s evocation of the eagle splash-landing on the pond is described as a moment of sheer enchantment for the viewer: “the wonder and beauty of this moment captures well the complexity and amazement that comes with living in a place where we encounter wild creatures in our daily lives.”13 Again, the word “wonder” seems well fitted to describe the effect produced by a human encounter with the nonhuman living world, its inhabitants, their languages, their world views, their ways of being in the world—or, better, their worlds, following Giorgio Agamben’s idea in L’aperto. L’huomo e l’animale,14 envisioning each organism as inhabiting a different perceptive world, or “unwelt.” Once again “Wonder” describes the feeling aroused by the unlikely encounter, in a common space, of two different beings living in distinct perceptive spaces. Access to that common space is only granted to humans who momentarily relinquish their own perceptual schemes—the cognitive frames through which they map their own worlds, and which hold them captive to these worlds. Or, to quote David Abram again, it is granted to those of us who “make our stand along the edge of that civilization, like a magician, or like a person who, having lived among another tribe, can no longer wholly return to his own” (Abram 1996, 28). Wonder is a breech in the cognitive process. It opens an uncharted cognitive path, toward another, more inclusive social model—the land community—in which humans and nonhumans can coexist. Common ground can then be found. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHER WORLDS Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac is so famous for the one vignette, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which Leopold relates the poignant death of a wolf as the epiphany which spurred his ecological awareness, that it is easy to forget that Leopold was more interested in chickadees than in wolves. The aim of the Almanac is clear—promoting a “land ethic” that will change “the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold 1949, 240). Yet the adequate means to bring about such change is not so easy to come by. Scientific knowledge plays a great part, and Leopold often calls on biology to back him up, yet this is not enough. Leopold’s embrace of what he himself calls “intellectual humility”

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(Leopold 1949, 241) includes an awareness of the limits of science, compounded by a sense that science can also easily be made to serve regressive or destructive forces, and cannot in itself be entrusted to lead to progress: “It [(science)] serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands,” Leopold writes in a passage in which he declares his preference for music, poetry, or art (Leopold 1949, 163). Economic interest will not do either, while political expediency cannot be trusted. A sense of ethical obligation is needed, yet how can the latter assert itself? Leopold does not see this as the result of mere intellectual deliberation: “the evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as an emotional process,” he states (Leopold 1949, 263, my emphasis). The fundamental “shift of values” (Leopold 1949, xix) envisioned by Leopold requires the force of a spiritual conversion. In Leopold’s hierarchy of forces impelling human choices, the originating principle, “the basic motive, the raison d’être” is neither rational, nor moral. It is the psychological manifestation of an appetite for pleasure, which Leopold calls an “esthetic exercise”—not a rational one (Leopold 1949, 283). For Leopolde, the chickadee, as a low-profile, small, ingratiating creature everyone can feel friendly toward, is a more democratic, therefore more efficient ambassador than the wolf to promote the emotional conversion required. From pleasure to wonder, Leopold’s chronicles offer many enchanted moments of encounter with trees, animals, their languages, their itineraries, their ways of dwelling in the world. Again, this requires an ability to let go of the need to control the world through logocentric mapping: “like people, my animals frequently disclose by actions what they decline to divulge in words. It is difficult to predict when and how of one of those disclosures will come to light” (Leopold 1949, 83). The Almanac yields a rich crop of anecdotes in which Leopold’s animals are shown to have their own communities and territories, their own charts and systems of navigation, forms of knowledge, perceptions, languages, ideas and feelings familiar enough to be approached, yet strange enough to resist appropriation. This effect of familiar unfamiliarity is reinforced by Leopold’s choice to focus on familiar small creatures— mice, rabbits, and chief among his collection of birds, chickadees. Most of Leopold’s ecological lessons are not delivered by impressive, large predators, but, rather, by trees growing next to the farm and by the small, humble nations of the fields and woods, presented to the readers as next of kin: “He (the rabbit]) almost insists that some salads be preconditioned before he deigns to eat them” (Leopold 1949, 81); “If the chickadee had an office, the maxim over his desk would say: Keep calm” (Leopold 1949, 97). Such occasional anthropomorphizing serves an attempt to reach out to an audience larger than hard-core wilderness lovers—an audience of nature lovers who may identify with the friendly, no-nonsense farmer rather than the

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extreme backpacker. Yet, as we have seen, this urge to invite animals into the human world is consistently checked by a concern not to annex the animal’s territory. No matter how close he tries to get, Leopold refrains from invading the animal’s world, reducing him to an object of study, thereby eliminating his right to otherness and agency, and/or denying his privacy. It is this tension between the quest for common ground and the recognition of a right to difference that generates wonder. Wonder is the wavering, uncertain meeting ground opened up by a sense of communication despite the acknowledging of cognitive dissonance and ethical distance. Leopold’s stories thus dramatize a fine tension between the yearning to know and the obligation to respect, the longing to capture and the need to let go. In the process, discreet, lateral knowledge is gained from tracking, from guesswork rather than direct observation. Some contact has been experienced, enough to briefly jolt the observer from his world, granting him a fleeting glimpse of a life which he will never know, before returning him back to his own devices—back yet indelibly marked. “I turn homeward, still wondering”: the final turnaround signals both an ontological choice and an ethical position. This may bring to mind what Rick Bass contends in The Book of Yaak, “there can be just as much power, or more power, in restraint as there can be in the desire to shape, manipulate, alter or impose” (Bass 1996, 182). Bass’s restraint, his general choice of “soft” rather than “hard” modes of tracking, is consistent with Leopold’s humble approach. For Bass, this may even involve a decision not to name: “I am reminded now of how Native Americans never said the names of either the dead or their respected woods-mates. They would call the grizzly, for instance, ‘Grandfather’ [. . .] For this same reason I will not speak the name of this mountain” (Leopold 1949, 29). In Bass’s narratives, his art of restraint and respect manifests itself in typical, recurrent hesitations of the sort “Perhaps . . . or perhaps not,” or in questions repeatedly puncturing the text and left unanswered, as well as in countless stories of uncertain encounters followed by vanishing tricks: “I had hoped to see him again the next time I went up the mountain but I never did. [. . .] I never saw that coyote again” (Leopold 1949, 31). The epistemological and ethical lesson is clear. It might be possible to project oneself poetically into the animal world, perhaps, even, to intuitively recover the animal spirit still lingering in the human self, rousing old genetic memories of the times when, to quote Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms, “there once had been a covenant between animals and men” (Hogan 1995, 35) and “there were times, even recent times when they both spoke the same language” (Hogan 1995, 85). Bass also glimpses this possibility of “the elk roaming through our chests and arms [. . .] which we will never know but can always honor” (Bass 2009, 159), as does Gary Snyder: “Our bodies are

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wild. [. . .] and that is where a bobcat is right now” (Snyder 1990, 17). But as Hogan makes clear, again, reactivating this connection cannot take place in the realm of science: “Others have tried for centuries to understand the world by science but have not yet done so, not yet understood animals, finite earth, or even their own minds and behaviour” (Hogan 1995, 19). How can I, then, in a man-made system of representations, fashion in myself a space for what lies outside of me? As Jacques Derrida wrote in L’animal que donc je suis, this opening can only occur outside of rational logics, in a dreamlike vagary state: “Je rêve, donc, au fond d’un terrier introuvable et à venir. Je rêve sur le rêve de l’animal et je rêve de la scène que je pourrais faire ici” (Derrida 2006, 92).15 TRANCE/TRANS-SPECIES WRITING In Rick Bass’s stories, encounters with animals are granted in this dreamlike, enchanted state. The Wild Marsh. Four Seasons at Home in Montana is a good case in point: “I’m daydreaming, walking through the early morning blue wind, not really hunting” (Bass 2009, 320). Writing is explicitly and selfreflexively presented as similar to tracking—an art of respectful, restrained approach: “trying carefully to follow the path of my own sentences, as if trailing the tracks of some elusive quarry through the woods” (Bass 2009, 312). This fine mix of elusiveness and suggestiveness is part of the magic: “I was up one of the mountains I’m fighting to protect when I saw the tracks in the new snow. It was a miraculous week in October” (Bass 2009, 47). Thus starts a typical tracking story, picturing Bass “daydreaming (instead) about big mule deer, and about elk—and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed footprints in that fresh snow” (Bass 2009, 48). The bear tracks are not seen from the frontal, rational perspective of a realistic observer, but glimpsed from a lateral gaze, “out of the corner of my eye.” This sort of encounter occurs in one of those “places and moments where we must put away the yardsticks and rulers,” (Bass 2009, 51), and it fuels a sense of elation: “I felt something filling me, coming from the feet up, some kind of juice, some wildness, some elixir” (Bass 2009, 50–51). In Bass’s The Lost Grizzlies too, only in the enchanted dream-world can the bear be approached. The space of encounter is one roamed by forces “deeper than physics” and “a way of thought older than measured time, less primitive than the rational present,” to quote Linda Hogan again (Hogan 1995, 19). This is a world of matter—of vibrant matter, to be sure, “quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Jane Bennett 2010, viii)—live, teeming, tangled matter, with a pulse and rhythm of its own, communicated to the writer’s body. In Bass’s writings, outdoors

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activities impel an organic synchronicity wedding muscle and wood, breath and branches, foot and hoof, which then shape a narrative connected to “the hidden text out on the living canvas or tablet of the marsh” (Bass 2009, 185)—an organic text briefly scripted by the wind (Bass 2009, 185). Stacy Alaimo’s notion of transcorporeality as a “materialistic and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environment” (Alaimo 2014, 476) comes to mind here. So does Scott Knickerbocker’s “rematerializing” of the text, in a “sensuous poesis” grounded in a materiality not seen as inert, or passive but as a network of active relations. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman’s new materialism also suggests how matter produces meaning, while meaning is grounded in matter: “discursive practices intra-act and are co-extensive with material processes in the many ways the world articulates itself” (Iovino and Opperman 2012, 454). This is what Rick Bass practices as he descends into the Yaak valley and lowers himself into the hollow he has chosen to write from, tuning in to the “dense, rhythmic layering of substance and meaning, the substance of a thing creating its meaning, and then that meaning creating another, similar substance” (Bass 2009, 195). The slow, patient immersion into the land necessarily precedes a rising back to the surface: “to achieve that place in fiction, you really have to descend [. . .], as if lying down to sleep in winter” (Bass 2009, 291). The two-way motion feeds a “narrative momentum” which itself appears as “one of the underlying forces or currents of the world itself” (Bass 2009, 54). This is a narrative of “reinhabitation,” to take up the term coined by Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, for whom the latter process may come “with the rational and scientific realization of interconnectedness and planetary limits. But [. . . it is] so physically and intellectually intense that it is a moral and spiritual choice as well” (Snyder 1995, 190–91). For Bass, fiction, indeed, calls for strenuous and sensuous physical, emotional and intellectual friction, a rubbing, scraping, grueling, gurgling, perspiring engagement with the land. Such practices, he claims, take the writer closer to mystical connection than intellectual elaboration. The rational Western mind, indeed, must be tricked, for it has been too heavily burdened, for too long, with dualistic representations cutting it off from the body, and from the way in which the body phenomenologically inhabits the vibrant, material, more-then-human world. In The Wild Marsh, reconnection takes the form of intense rituals which may seem utterly senseless—such as hauling small buckets of water to a gigantic fire all night long—or eminently humble—bringing the dweller down on his knees, endlessly and pointlessly pulling off invasive weeds: “dozens of hours spent on hands and knees, in ultra-close proximity to the ground, grubbing and pulling, as a kind of sacrament, or insignificant tithing, or even a modest kind of prayer” (Bass 2009, 219). Lowering oneself also reorients the gaze down

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from a commanding view of landscape to a grazing, tangled, blurred closeup view, favoring epistemological humility. The toiling, sweating body can then mix and mingle with the land, which weakens the mental mechanisms that maintain the sense of an ideal, theoretical self-separated from the world. The dazed earth-dweller is then brought to an exhausted trance that lets in the world at last: “we’ll run ourselves ragged. [. . .] and perhaps in this exhaustion, we will reach the dream-state, the descent or immersion that is required of the season after all” (Bass 2009, 293). “It’s magic, There is no other word for it—no way known to explain it” (Bass 1996, xiii), Rick Bass writes in his introduction to the Book of Yaak, trying to describe place-rooted writing in connection to the Yaak valley: “I love the sound and magic of the deep woods best” (Bass 1996, 21). And then, in The Wild Marsh, “Who needs any more magic? Isn’t it already everywhere, in every stirring of a taut and full world?” (Bass 2009, 313). Bass’s writing, like Leopold’s, suggests that there are rational and ethical reasons to try and make space in environmental awareness and action for a poetics of enchantment leaping out of the rational mode. Like writing, reading then also becomes, for us readers, another form of tracking. How do you read, then? There is a homology between picking up words on a page, and animal signs on the snow. This of course is enhanced when words seek to refer to animal tracks. Words point toward animal marks, they become marks of marks, while the narrative line itself marks the animal track, and calls on the reader to look at her/his own reading as a means of redoubling, on a textual level, the tracker’s activity in the snow. Such a connection is not just based on analogy. If we follow the thinking of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg on this matter, text reading and track reading are two examples of what he calls the indicial paradigm, based on a similar work of deduction, and it is possible to see the former—text reading—as historically rooted in the latter—track reading. Ecopoetical writing might thus succeed in enlarging to the more-thanhuman world the experience of precarious yet astonishing encounter with the other which Emmanuel Levinas describes as such: “Discourse is thus made to be the experience of something absolutely other, the pure “knowledge” or “experience,” the “trauma of wonder” (Levinas 1971, 71). From a non-Western perspective in which myth still operates as an effective mode of thinking, the bond with the nonhuman can be envisioned as the norm, and chanting may ensure its preservation, even in the midst of hard political fights. From a Western perspective influenced by centuries of rational, oppositional thinking, this sort of connection calls for a suspension of Reason and a flash of enchantment that leaves us wondering; a poetics of encounter can then inscribe itself in ceremonial writing. Who needs more wonder, more magic, more enchantment? Ecopoetical writing does, reawakening the dim spaces in our vibrant bodies that know how “[The] breathing,

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sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants and elements that surround it” (Abram 1996, 46). And so do humans longing to dwell in motley company in this more-than-human world, and seeking a language to acknowledge, honor, and praise their many relations. I, for one, both “need” more magic, more wonder, to stay alive to the many worlds in this one, and also certainly want the treat of more and more, so I can thrive on unexpected encounters. For it does appear to me that the choice to live an environmentally ethically conscious life will not merely stem from a will to be logically consistent with demonstrably rational principles, in the manner described by Paul Taylor in his “Ethics of Respect for Nature” (Taylor 1981). It will also be fueled by an urge to be granted the blessing of encountering, however fleetingly, elusively, in a sudden, dizzy flash of enchantment, one of my other fellow creatures—fellow yet mysterious, living in a not-quiteunimaginable other-than-mine world.

NOTES 1. I am here beckoning in the direction of Christine M. Korsgaard’s recent book on animal ethics Fellow Creatures (Oxford University Press, 2018). 2. “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (Leopold 1952, 1966, 239). 3. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pii​​kanin​​ation​​treat​​y​.com​​/the​-​​treat​​y, consulted September 1, 2019. 4. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pii​​kanin​​ation​​treat​​y​.com​​/the​-​​treat​​y, consulted September 1, 2019. 5. https​:/​/na​​tiven​​ewson​​line.​​net​/c​​urren​​ts​/co​​nfede​​rated​​-sali​​sh​-ko​​otena​​i​-tri​​bes​-j​​oin​ -m​​oveme​​nt​-pr​​otect​​-sacr​​ed​-​gr​​izzly​​-trea​​ty​-si​​gning​/, consulted September 1, 2019. 6. http:​/​/nat​​ivene​​wsonl​​ine​.n​​et​/cu​​rrent​​s​/con​​feder​​ated-​​salis​​h​-koo​​tenai​​-trib​​es​-jo​​in​ -mo​​vemen​​t​-pro​​tect-​​sacre​​d​-​gri​​zzly-​​treat​​y​-sig​​ning/​, consulted February 13, 2017. 7. http:​/​/tri​​b​.com​​/news​​/stat​​e​-and​​-regi​​onal/​​tribe​​s​-wan​​t​-pro​​tecti​​ons​-t​​o​-rem​​ain​-f​​or​ -sa​​cred-​​grizz​​ly​-be​​ars​/a​​rticl​​e​_da0​​3ea49​​-05c7​​​-52e2​​-b5ba​​-7fd1​​428ed​​0c3​.h​​tml, consulted June 16, 2016. 8. There have been setbacks to this since I wrote this paper. 9. Explore the River, Bull Trout, Tribal People and the Jocko River, an interactive DVD, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Natural Resources Department, CSKT, P.O. box 278, Pablo, MT 59855. 10. The settlement provided $1.9 billion, in the form of a Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations to purchase fractional land interests held in trust, to consolidate and restore them to tribal trust ownership, for uses benefiting the reservation community. 11. My emphasis. 12. Five Valleys Land Trust, Landmarks (Winter 2012). Five Valleys Land Trust, P.O. box 8953, Missoula, MT 59807. 13. Ibid. 14. Agamben is elaborating on an idea of the naturalist Jakob von Uexküll.

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15. I am reminded here of the title of one of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels, Animal Dreams.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abram, David. 1997 (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Random House. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. L’ouvert. Paris: Payot. Alaimo, Stacy. 2014 (2012). “States of Suspension: Trans-Corporeality at Sea.” ISLE 19 (3) (Summer): 476–93. Bass, Rick. 1996. The Book of Yaak. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 2009. The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons in Montana. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press. Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. n.d. Accessed September 1, 2019. http:/www​.csktribes​.org. Cronon, William, ed. 1995. “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Uncommon Ground. New York: Norton. Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Natural Resource Department. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée; Missoula, MT: Five Valleys Land Trust. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. «Signes, Traces, Pistes, Racines d'un paradigme de l'indice.» Le Débat 6: 3–44. Paris: Gallimard. Hogan, Linda. 1995a. Dwellings. New York: Norton. ———. 1995b. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Opperman. 2012. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.” ISLE 19 (3) (Summer): 448–75. Knickerbocker, Scott. 2012. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. 2018. Fellow Creatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leopold, Aldo. 1970 (1949). A Sand County Almanach. New York: Ballantine. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1971. Totalité et Infini. Paris: Livre de Poche Biblio Essais. Native News Online Staff. 2016. “Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Join the Movement to Protect the Sacred with Grizzly Treaty Signing.” Accessed September 1, 2019. https​:/​/na​​tiven​​ewson​​line.​​net​/c​​urren​​ts​/co​​nfede​​rated​​-sali​​sh​-ko​​ otena​​​i​-tri​​bes​-j​​oin movem​ent-p​rotec​t-sac​red-g​rizzl​y-tre​aty-s​ignin​g/. Piikani Nation Grizzly Treaty of Solidarity. n.d. “The Treaty.” Accessed September 1, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pii​​kanin​​ation​​treat​​y​.com​​/the-​​​treat​​y. Roszak, Theodore. 1992. The Voice of the Earth. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D Kanner. 1995. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press. ———. 1995. A Place in Space. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Taylor, Paul. 1981. “The Ethics of Respect for Nature.” Environmental Ethics 3 (Fall): 197–218. University of North Texas.

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———. 2011 (1986). Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Trib. 2015. “Tribes Want Protections to Remain for Sacred Grizzly Bears.” Accessed June 16, 2016. http:​/​/tri​​b​.com​​/news​​/stat​​e​-and​​-regi​​onal/​​tribe​​s​-wan​​t​-pro​​tecti​​ons​-t​​o​ -rem​​ain​-f​​or​-sa​​cred-​​g​rizz​​ly​-be​​ars​/a​​rticl​​e.

Chapter 3

Everyone Is Absorbed Enchanting Substance in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Randall Roorda

Are there fables to be made in the wonders of disenchantment? Here is one prospect: For the bat mitzvah of his daughter, the rabbi brought in copies of a study edition of Torah so congregants could follow as the prescribed passage was read. Leafing through one, I found the chapter in Exodus where the chosen people, wandering in wilderness, are saved from starvation by one of scripture’s signal miracles: the rain of manna. Food from on high: what more fantastic an intervention can be managed? Yet the commentary proved more fantastic than the tale. It happens that in the desert where this miracle was situated, indeed to this day there is something like manna to be found. It’s a sap-like substance that drops from tamarisk trees. Its name to Bedouins resembles the one in scripture. The droplets congeal overnight and dissipate by day, so they must be gathered in early morning, as the chosen were enjoined to do. Collected in pouches, the substance is more a confection than staple to its gatherers: as the scholars remark, it could not have sustained a wandering nation. The scholars, being theologians, adduce this observation to preserve some aspect of heavenly grace and succor, some supplement to natural fact. Yet the greater wonder (besides how facts get lodged in lore like ambered flies) is the revelation that manna does not issue from the tamarisk as such, rather from an insect that taps it and excretes a saccharine essence. The dispensation is threefold, with tree, bug, and people chosen alike: threefold at least, for who knows what further vectors figure in this particular marvel? They may proliferate like angels on pinheads. The revelation is enchanting indeed, on a par with the recent finding that not one but two forms of fungi align with algae in the association we call a lichen—a braiding we might liken to a dance did it not so far exceed such expression. 49

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If the news that bugs crap manna strikes you as a revelation—not as a debunking, an undermining, a stripping of luster, a bleaching of shades— perhaps it’s not disenchantment you are subject to at all. You may be sway, let’s say, to a secular enchantment. As moral to the Exodus story, you’ll take not that God provides but that provision gets divinized, barring intervention by other words. Further conversions in enchantment’s parlance may follow. Not dark lords but dark matter may arrest and enthrall you. For angels on pinheads, you’ll think cilia on bacterium in guts of mites that subsist on your face for life; you’ll think of what lives on those cilia. For fairies, you may envision not Tinker Bell (wrought-metal consort to stalled growth) but what’s called a fairy ring, where new trees spring unbidden in the orbit of a felled redwood. That beats a phoenix all hollow. Such wonders crop up in rings around the husk of what used to pass for enchantment, before enchantment, we’re told, passed away. That some prevailing condition called enchantment did topple, that we must seek ways to resurrect it, is a premise underlying this occasion—this collection and the conference it stems from. In this essay, I mean to do two things. I mean to raise as an issue this premise, its key terms and assumptions—the notion of enchantment, the need for something called reenchantment, the presumed condition of disenchantment occasioning that need—relating that to Kenneth Burke’s discussion of “substance,” which can help unpack it. And I mean to discuss how these matters get instantiated in a novel called Annihilation (VanderMeer 2014a), the first volume in the so-called Southern Reach trilogy, by a writer named Jeff VanderMeer, who published all three books within a single calendar year. Enthusiastically received—since adapted as a major motion picture, in fact1—Annihilation is a richly imagined fantasy that depicts and conjures enchantments profoundly materialist and secular in character, if such descriptors as “materialist” and “secular” can be dislodged from lock-step association with psychic impoverishment, sprung from confinement in the disenchantment tale that inflects this occasion’s premise. If, as Burke suggested some eight decades ago, literary artists are barometers for their time, then the intense atmospheric pressure of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach registers tellingly the psychic weather of our protracted end times, this slow apocalypse, backlit in red, where the forecast is for other than manna. It is widely assumed that what we call modernity is afflicted with a condition called disenchantment. With the rise of reductionist science and rationality and the demise of gods and spirits alike, some essence of meaning, purpose and vitality is said to have passed from the world, like luster from a fish as it gasps and dies on dry land. A world comprised exclusively of matter is dead on arrival: instrumentally efficacious but experientially and ethically spent. Under these circumstances, reenchantment is called for, figured variously as supplement—something injected into or draped over a wizened world—or as

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recovery, restoration, arguably regression, a move back toward prior states and capacities, as with systems of myth and modes of conjuring evoked in the absence of circumstances that once informed them. This, in broad strokes, is the disenchantment tale. We are all subject to it, pretty much. But for all its prevalence, the tale is not uniformly accepted or espoused. Asserting this, I am drawing primarily on the work of some major critics of the disenchantment tale: Jane Bennett, whose book The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) precedes and leads into her influential Vibrant Matter (2010), and George Levine, who espouses what he terms “secular re-enchantment” in his book Darwin Loves You (2006), along with contributors to Levine’s collection The Joy of Secularism (2011), which comprehensively explores these terms and issues. What in English we call “disenchantment” stems from words in German with rather different valences. The coinage most circulated is Max Weber’s, which in English translates as “elimination of magic.” Weber draws on earlier work by Schilling, whose version in English translation amounts to “de-divinization.”2 In recasting the term, Weber may have meant to take the edge off the onus of assailing religion. Bruce Robbins points this out in his contribution to The Joy of Secularism, wonderfully entitled, “Enchantment? No, Thank You!” He pithily sums up his stance thus: “disenchantment seems to me one of the more disabling and sneakily misleading stories we are in the habit of telling ourselves regularly. It’s a habit I’d like to see us kick” (Robbins 2011, 74). Robbins, I would say, occupies one end of a spectrum of attitudes toward notions of enchantment, its supposed loss, and its longed-for restoration. Levine appends “secular” to the locution “enchantment,” Bennett talks up a quality called enchantment while denying that it ever went missing, and Robbins responds to Bennett by disputing whether we ought even to credit any such thing as enchantment. Their mission, broadly speaking, is the same: as Levine puts it, to assert “that secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition,” one “essential to our contemporary well-being,” altogether “capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised” (Levine 2006, 1). Whether and how “enchantment” furthers this end depends, of course, on how you construe and deploy it. Bennett, for one, takes it to mean a certain order of experience, “a state of wonder”: a sort of moment, indeed, characterized by “temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement,” during which you’re both unusually alert to what’s around you and swept up by strong feeling (Bennett 2001, 5). With enchantment thus regarded as a basic experiential entitlement, an evolved capacity, “disenchantment” makes no sense since enchantment cannot be said ever to have left. Bennett’s issue with the disenchantment tale (as she calls it) is that, by assuming enchantment ever has left, the tale tends to sunder our “affective attachment” to a world

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deemed inert (Bennett 2001, 3). Further, crucially, the disenchantment tale often takes the form of a call for reenchantment that is teleological in nature: something directed, a visitation, implicitly reinstated by some outside agent. On both counts, she insists, the tale is pernicious not just personally but ethically. Her book is a smart, supple praise-song to a species of experience she locates in a range of sites, from Thoreau’s formulations of wildness to genetic recombination to elements of commodity culture—an inquiry far outstripping my crude précis. Yet as Robbins points out, even though she acknowledges that risk and danger may accompany its beauty and thrill, for Bennett enchantment is primarily a positive state, a sort of experiential cure-all—a valence discernible in strains of this collection. Enchantment may be more equivocal and troubled than that. It may mean to fall under a spell, in which case you are vulnerable to influences imperiling your identity as a discrete being, a human being, individuated, separate from what surrounds you. You might become possessed. You might assume a different form. Thus compromised, you might die: why enchanted forests get marked Keep Out. Possession, transformation, compromising of human boundedness (not so much death, though): these sorts of states are celebrated in some key notions presently circulating in ecopoetics. There’s Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” as I’ve suggested, closely linked with her valorizing of enchantment. There’s Stacey Alaimo’s term “trans-corporeality,” central to her Bodily Natures (2010). Both entitle processes and understandings conducing to what Levine calls “secular enchantment,” in which a thoroughgoing materialism is not deemed antithetical to experiences and values we cordon off as affective, spiritual, or sacred. The coinages are recent, but there are kindred notions of long-standing. In Bennett’s work, for instance, Spinoza and especially Lucretius are key, not to mention Kant and more usual suspects like Thoreau. I want to focus on a key term and formulation anticipating and, in a sense, comprehending these more recent ones, this from the mid-twentieth century, from the great American critic Kenneth Burke. It’s one alluded to in my title: the notion of “substance.” “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in” (Wolfe 1973, 439). This utterance by John Muir figured in Wendy Harding’s talk (2016) at the Perpignan conference. Harding called attention to its paradox between outside and inside as regards wilderness, and adduced it to suggest that Muir is enacting some sort of move to incorporate an entire nonhuman landscape into his capacious human self. She noted that the passage has been widely quoted: indeed I have quoted it more than once myself, but to different effect. In my view, the likes of Muir could not venture to “go out” without “going in.” The paradox he expresses distills what Kenneth Burke calls the “paradox of substance.”

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As Burke notes, “the word ‘substance,’ used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating something that a thing is not.” An entity’s substance—what’s “intrinsic” to it—is defined by its sub-stance, what’s “extrinsic,” what it stands upon. Burke deems this “an inevitable paradox of definition, an antinomy that must endow the concept of substance with unresolvable ambiguity” (Burke 1969, 23–24). It is especially pronounced in discourse on “nature,” a term whose senses shuttle between these antinomian poles: nonhuman outdoors, inmost human disposition.3 It circulates ceaselessly in talk of wilderness experience, as in another of Muir’s aphorisms of nature enchantment: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us” (Muir 1987, 15–16). And it does not end there, with nature talk, but informs or imbues any number of manners of speaking. Here, for instance, is the bit of verbiage from which I have drawn the title of this piece, the part before the colon. It is from the long poem “The Art of Poetry,” by Kenneth Koch: Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence— It should not make you feel guilty. Everyone is absorbed in something. The sailor is absorbed in the sea. Poetry is the mediation of life. (Koch 1975, 201) This has stuck with me a long time, and it came back to mind as I was thinking about the novel Annihilation. It’s an apologia for devoting oneself to poetry (as I thought I was doing when I came across it), figuring what might seem a narrow, exclusive concern as instead all-encompassing, like the sea. But what does it mean for the sailor to be “absorbed in the sea”? He or she is not in the sea (otherwise she or he could not be said to be sailing), and is not absorbed in the sense that salt is absorbed in seawater, disappearing entirely, taken in. As a quality of attention—or, if you like, enchantment— “absorption” instantiates the paradox of substance, with traffic between intrinsic and extrinsic coded in a single expression. Another such word is “participation,” which I worried over some years ago in an article entitled “Antinomies of Participation in Literacy and Wilderness” (Roorda 2007), noting how frequently some version of this word is found, inconspicuous and un-highlighted as a term, at hinge points in discussions of nature, wilderness, and writing: points where bounded self passes into environing grounds, becoming, as Burke says, “consubstantial,” sharing substance with it. It takes but a moment’s analysis to recognize antinomies of substance in both recent ecopoetic coinages I have mentioned, in tension and traffic between the constituent parts. In “vibrant matter,” “vibrant” evokes the intrinsic, inner animation, vital essence, with “matter” the extrinsic, the ground, what an entity resolves as when regarded from without. “Trans-corporeal”

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similarly encodes alchemies of substance, extrinsic “trans-” with intrinsic “corporeal”; it is an effectual synonym for Burke’s “consubstantial.” In strictly literary parlance, we can spot such antinomies in a term that cropped up here and there in the conference proceedings: “magical realism.” Realism suggests extrinsic regard, magic intrinsic animation and effect. It is a term coined for a genre specializing in effects of what we are pleased to call enchantment, shuttling across the very poles—the real and the magical—presumed to be sundered in Weber’s original expression for what in English we call disenchantment: the elimination of magic. This brings me to where I started: the presumed condition of disenchantment in a world where divinity is defunct and magic is missing. It is significant that among our most honored professional magicians are some most vocally debunking professed spiritualists and, in some cases, espousing a confirmed atheism, as has the scintillating Penn Jillette, the vocal half of the duo Penn and Teller.4 Magic, it would seem, has been exposed: mere nightclub hoodwinking, notwithstanding the wand-play in Harry Potter books (and special effects at the theme park). Yet just as Bennett insists that enchantment on secular terms has always existed, never gone away, and that it can be personally and ethically detrimental to promote tales that presume otherwise, so it goes for magic. In secular, Darwinian terms, what we call magic is the same now as it has always been, as professional magicians and precursor shamans have practiced it: the directing, or misdirecting, of perception. What is eliminated, and justly so (as Bennett says of enchantment), is telos, the attribution of intention, of design and overarching purpose. God (or some divinized equivalent) does not throw dice, or play shell games, for that matter. Those bets are off: the shells move themselves. What are some elements or variants of adaptive magic, the magical salvaged as a category and construed in secular, Darwinian terms, without spirits or skyhooks? Let me brainstorm a few. There’s the realm of deception, mimicry, disguise, perhaps undertaken with intention (which, as Frans de Waal [2016] shows, is far from exclusive to humankind) but often lacking larger design—as with flowers evolved to resemble their pollinators. There are altered states, intoxication, trance, kindred to poison and contagion. There is metamorphosis of all sorts. There is possession, like what certain worms do to wasps or words do in your head. There’s a special case of this with hypnosis, a hotwiring of presumed intention. And there is total absorption: the disappearing act, like what happens when you die or—in substance, as vibrant matter—cannot ever die at all. All these variants operate in VanderMeer’s Annihilation. I want to sketch out how this novel can serve as what Burke would call a representative anecdote of secular enchantment, substantial enchantment, along lines I’ve laid out.

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The Southern Reach trilogy is a tough work to categorize. It’s a fantasia of rewilding, less magical realism than natural magicalism, so to speak, in how natural history comes off as sleight of hand therein. It’s billed as a horror thriller, and indeed it evinces horror story tropes—violent deaths, haunted ruins, strange moaning at night, characters morphing and turning on each other, possession and revivification—yet without a hint of the supernatural, of extra-material, teleological, quasi-divinized intervention and agency typical of the genre.5 It has elements of ecological dystopia, the genre it’s most liable to be aligned with; yet it’s not an extrapolation from present trends as such (dystopia’s prevailing mode), rather a visionary reformulation, the upshot of lucid dreaming about such trends. I mean dreaming literally: discussing Annihilation, the trilogy’s opening volume, VanderMeer (2015a) has reported dreaming, then recollecting entirely the novel’s locale and scenario, right down to a text that figures centrally in it, which he transcribed on awakening: a Kubla Khan for posthumanism.6 Annihilation is framed as the journal of a young woman known only as the biologist. She is one of four members—all women, all likewise identified only by profession—of the latest expedition to a mysterious region called Area X, an irruption onto ordinary earthly terrain. Area X is sealed off by an invisible, impenetrable boundary that strikes dead anything that strays onto it. There’s just one access point, a nebulous interface controlled by a shadowy governmental agency known as the Southern Reach—hence the trilogy’s name. The general public is clueless as to the Southern Reach’s activities and domain; they’ve been led to believe that, some thirty years earlier, this section of the south Atlantic coast, near a military base, was subject to some generalized environmental catastrophe—some north Florida version of Love Canal, which historical event author VanderMeer has cited as a source for his imaginings. Environmental crisis of a sort has indeed affected Area X, but not a sort typical of eco-dystopian fantasies. On the contrary, to all appearances, the place is a pristine wilderness.7 It has the aspect of an inviolate coastal ecosystem, a succession of habitats hosting a profusion of life-forms, lavishly evoked.8 It’s rife with opportunities for nature enchantment, particularly to a character like the biologist, whose preferences and expertise decidedly run this way. A sort of Eden, seemingly—the catch being that in Area X, human visitors have a way of ending up dead, by their own hand, often, or those of compatriots on their expedition. Or if an expedition’s members aren’t killed off, they or semblances of them mysteriously turn up back across the border, oddly vapid and pliant, reporting nothing of note, then dying of cancer (as if dosed with radiation) within weeks of their return. Elements of an environmental unconscious are at play here, a sort of return of a repressed wilderness condition—a restoration reminiscent of what

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we call rewilding. It’s as if that bête noir of many in our field—wilderness conceived as region evacuated of humans9—had been not just entirely realized but mysteriously policed. A prevailing script is turned on end: here it’s wilderness that’s an alien presence, invasive and threatening: a garden in the machine. This is crossed with Silent Spring-like overtones (Carson is another source the author cites), an evil spell descending upon or upwelling from an idyllic locale. The spell thickens, in more ways than I can here remark. I’ll gloss some key aspects. First, there’s the profession and character of the biologist. She specializes in “transitional environments,” her expertise suited to the Area’s tight succession of ecosystems (VanderMeer 2014a, 11) yet ramifying, obviously, for a place testing conceits of boundedness. Temperamentally furtive and socially maladroit, she has a propensity for immersion in place. Of herself she reports “an instinct for concealment” (VanderMeer 2014a, 25) and confesses, “my sole gift or talent . . . was that places could impress themselves upon me and I could become a part of them with ease” (VanderMeer 2014a, 110). Her scientific work is affected by this, her reports to superiors suffering, she says, “because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me” (VanderMeer 2014a, 173). This talent for becoming consubstantial makes her an adept at human–nonhuman boundary-blurring—something Area X will turn out substantially to invite or impose. Boundary-blurring is imposed, for in Area X, indeed, everyone is absorbed. No one seems to die for good, exactly. Merger of human into animal forms prevails. Animals that appear otherwise ordinary—a wild boar, a dolphin— appear for split seconds to bear a human look in the eyes. There are other, more ominous and spectacular human-animal crossings and metamorphoses that it’s as well I lack space to detail, since to do so might spoil your own reading. A crucial realm of crossing concerns the vibrant materiality of writing itself. In her presentation, Harding referred to one critic as questioning whether writing is even that helpful or pertinent for addressing human–nonhuman interfaces, since it so imposes human understandings on more-thanhuman entities and circumstances. I’ve long entertained such thinking and mused about it in the article mentioned above and elsewhere. Yet I’ve started to second-guess this line, wondering if this posture toward writing as such isn’t another way we humans think we’re so special. Who are we to think writing is so discrete, so distinctive, so exclusive among biological phenomena? I’m interested in how Annihilation dramatizes writing as organic substance, as “medium” in a spectrum of senses, in key features of Area X. It’s like this.10 The biologist and her expedition have been briefed before entry about one key landmark, a lighthouse, which they’re charged with

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exploring. But there’s another they haven’t been told of, one they stumble across right away: a huge hole in the ground with a spiral staircase winding downward. It’s a feature that the others call a tunnel but the biologist immediately perceives and refers to as a tower. Upon descending the tower, the explorers find there’s a written text continuously unfurling along its wall— words written in living plant matter. Comprised of “symbiotic fruiting bodies” (VanderMeer 2014a, 26), the text is “a miniature ecosystem,” its minute stalks waving like trees or sea grasses (VanderMeer 2014a, 24). A key plot instigator comes when the biologist, leaning close to examine the script, has a tiny pod erupt at her nose and accidentally inhales a spore. Her being thus infested, contaminated, inoculated, cohabited, or empowered—her condition has all these aspects as it develops—is crucial to what transpires. It’s all wrapped up in the writing, an unfolding text of a strange, prophetic character: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that” (VanderMeer 2014a, 23). (It’s this text that VanderMeer reports transcribing verbatim from his dream—much longer, it turns out, than this first installment.) This ominous, incantatory utterance seems to the biologist to be “infiltrating [her] mind, finding fertile ground”; casting a spell, as it were, even as the inhaled spore finds fertile ground within her. It’s spot-on to call it a spell, for both the script’s unfurling and the spore’s incubation produce effects altogether consonant with what Bennett describes as enchantment. The biologist is “enthralled” by its discovery, feels powerfully drawn to follow the script to unfathomed depths, and feels duped into leaning so close as to be infected, “tricked into thinking that words should be read” (VanderMeer 2014a, 23). Whatever compulsion informs this writing impels its reading as well. As for the spore’s effects, suffice to say they produce a condition the biologist comes to call “the brightness” (VanderMeer 2014a, 83), marked by heightened senses, aliveness to surroundings, a feeling of being present to and suspended in the moment—enchantment’s whole syndrome as per Bennett, amplified ultimately to something like superhero powers (VanderMeer 2014a, 74–75). It’s characterized especially by a dawning dissolution of self, softening identity, a feeling that she used to be “someone else” (VanderMeer 2014a, 75). Foregoing individual boundedness, actualizing symbiotic ties—posthumanism’s desideratum—is proper to Area X, requisite to survival. It happens through enchantment, and it comes from sticking your nose in a book. Characterizing this script’s subterranean site as a tower proves apt, for the staircase winding into it turns out to be a double for one in the lighthouse. These twin towers—one upward, one downward—comprise a sort of architectural double helix, crux and code for the anomaly of Area X.11 The lighthouse contains a counterpart to the living script of the tower. I noted that the novel is framed as the biologist’s journal from the expedition; I’ll add that all

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members of all expeditions to Area X are instructed to keep such journals. It turns out that, under a trap door at the lighthouse’s summit, all those journals are deposited in a giant heap: notebooks from scores of expeditions, many more than the present group has been told of, with the bottom layers moldering, turning to rot and compost. The poles of the twin towers are matched by a polarity of conditions of scripts: prophetic writing on the wall, a living thing, a germ in the mind; and an archive turned midden, deposited in strata, reverting to earth.12 It’s a powerful imagining of writing’s import and material as consubstantial. It’s clear that some agency we’d call alien is writing this script, heaping these texts, giving wild creatures the affect of humans, and so forth. Yet it’s misleading to call this agency, for as I’ve suggested, while Area X’s origins may prove to be extraterrestrial, they are not supernatural and not directed by some central intelligence.13 They are not teleological. The biologist, toward the end of her journal, hazards a guess: And what had manifested? What do I believe had manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. (VanderMeer 2014a, 190–91)

Area X is taking over but it means nothing by it. This magic has no magicians. What’s uncanny is perfectly natural. The threat is not to humans as such but to human exclusivity, presumption, and authority—Authority being the name of the second novel in the trilogy. The third is called Acceptance, which is the state the biologist is approaching at Annihilation’s end. “I can no longer say that this [the change, the stirring in Area X] is a bad thing . . .. I see that I could be persuaded” (VanderMeer 2014a, 192). Persuasion, too, enacts the paradox of substance, an effecting of consubstantiality, a hinge between extrinsic and intrinsic, attention and absorption. Everyone is persuaded because everyone is absorbed. But it’s not clear yet if I’m persuaded by enchantment. I want to return to the term and sound out how the novel and I both equivocate on that score. Summing up his brief against enchantment, Robbins makes these points. First is that while the disenchantment tale per Weber takes rationalization as its culprit, rationalization is not really the problem. A surfeit not of bureaucracy but of brazen chaos most afflicts us: capitalism’s vicious whims, its stats-based excesses and fevers. “In short, disenchantment is the wrong diagnosis. And reenchantment is the wrong remedy” (Robbins 2011, 92). Worse than that, the reenchantment tale turns against itself, “doing precisely

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the opposite of what it wants to do,” buying into the notion that routine life is depleted and drab, redeemable through exceptional moments alone. “To decide that everyday life is rationalized, bureaucratized, or routinized is to kill it in order to get a pat on the back for rescuing if from the dead” (Robbins 2011, 93). It’s understandable why the tale appeals: with so much imperiled, we’d like to be in on the rescue. I’m inclined to agree with Robbins, mostly: to deem a world without telos as not unfortunately but wonderfully profane, and thus resolve “to give up on the sacred, and on enchantment in all its variants,” instead plying “other and better ways to say nice things about the world” (Robbins 2011, 94). Yet I’m tempted as well to debunk this debunking; I just don’t think words pan out this way. That’s not just because the sacred seems obdurate, both selected through evolution (we’re all chosen people) and inevitable (in some guise) to any dispensation that resolves into hierarchies, as Burke (1984) insists terms must.14 More proximately, it’s because enchantment’s “variants” are legion and multiform, outstripping mere professions of wonder and awe. Enchantment isn’t something you can “give up on” or hew to, support or oppose: it’s cross-grained, it resists splitting. Its valence is irremediably mixed. For a stray instance, take this remark from Donna Haraway (2016), whose verbal matter is so vibrant it palpitates. In an essay stacking up neologisms (“Chthulucene” and “Capitalocene” versus “Anthropocene”) with exuberance in proportion to alarm, she proclaims, “another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of Progress” (Haraway 2016, 8, italics added). “Ensorcell” is outré, not a verb I’d encountered, but I could sniff out its root. Sure enough, it’s related to “sorcery”: a synonym in English is “enchant.” In this formula, the very condition that enchantment would redress, enchantment effects. If you care for the spell, it’s magic; if you don’t, it’s sorcery (or secularly, mystification). Either way, you’re enthralled, which is to say in thrall: subject to some substance, the extrinsic worming within. Possessed. It’s this ambivalence, this shuttling between poles of an antinomy, that Area X dramatizes: enchantment that imperils, sorcery that persuades. If its tale is debunked and its spell broken, what’s called disenchantment might as soon be called disappointment: plain old regret at how things turn out. There’s plenty to regret, for sure: the whole condition that, in opening this essay, I called a slow apocalypse. That’s not my expression, it’s VanderMeer’s, from an essay of programmatic reflection on fiction pitched toward addressing dire straits. In his essays, a recurring concern is the “surreal lie” imparted by representations of the past that take present conditions as “the norm throughout time,” neglecting the sheer extent, the wild enormity of the life that’s been extirpated: films, for instance, omitting pigeon storms

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and forests of stature once routine yet now extraordinary (VanderMeer 2014b).15 One way to think about Area X is as the imaginative restoration of this lost world, a return of the biological repressed, such that the spell the Area exerts is like the breaking of a spell we’ve been under since that world vanished and we ceased to suspect it ever existed. The Area’s enormities are of a magnitude with the losses repressed. VanderMeer, I think, would agree that, from this vantage, “slow apocalypse” is neither: not slow in its postwar, asymptotic acceleration; not apocalypse except to what’s gone, since life (in some measure or kind) is bound to persist. The Southern Reach trilogy breaks the spell, insisting that the end(s) of humans is/are not the end(s) of creation, in dazzling ways I can’t begin to describe. But Area X might as well be thought a counter-spell, a redoubling of spells, both within and outside the novel’s imagined world. Within the novel, it’s suggested that Area X holds sway through a pervasive, insatiable capacity for mimicry and dissemblance, with writing its medium and catalyst. Both within the novel (its diegesis) and beyond it (the circumstances of its creation as reported by its author), the living script within the downward tower resembles nothing so much as vatic utterance: a dreamed solution to insoluble psychic knots. It’s a rhapsode’s shamanic vision, individualized in origin and paranoiac in nature, imparted to others whose psychic makeups are likewise afflicted and who thus are possessed, enchanted, reconfigured by that utterance. First crisis cults, then entire religions, arise in this way. The Ghost Dance, too, was a lost world’s restoration: a poignant, embroidered delusion.16 What we’re prone to call enchantment encompasses not just modes of heightened sensation, not just postures of longing and nostalgia, but entire programs of delusion. This too is consubstantiality: hordes at Nuremburg made as one by vision and voice. For such conditions, disenchantment is literally disillusionment: not affliction but prescription, properly speaking. Unless it’s considered that any movement must necessarily come off this way: in vatic dream concoctions misconstrued as entire truths. In this case one picks one’s poison-prescription, one’s pharmakon, staging a Supreme Fiction with sidelong winks to the wings. This is an ironist stance, one that Burke elaborates remarkably throughout his work, touting critical inoculation against contagions of belief and incredulity alike.17 That’s more like what VanderMeer is up to, I think. It seems to me he was visited, so to speak, with a vatic vision and utterance that he recognized and ran with as such. The tower’s living script, its incantatory rhythms and prophetic future tense, is an index to a paranoiac vision that he proceeded to unwind into a plot about paranoiac vision, the persistence of mimicry, appropriation, and dissemblance not contrasting but consubstantial with wildness. It speaks to our moment, to vibrant matter and troubles with wilderness, a moment that Haraway in her own visionary exuberance would like to persuade (or

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ensorcell) us to call the Chthulucene, alluding to sources evincing both brute facticity and patent fabrication. The vatic utterance is a psychic measure, a subconscious solution to intolerable straits. A tissue of dream, it turns out to be meliorative. Might the Southern Reach function this way? Can any novel, any work we deem literary? The question preoccupies VanderMeer. He wonders why earlier works of speculative fiction have not proven more potent in refiguring attitudes and redressing environmental distress: “If sharp, intelligent fiction from the 1960s and 1970s… did not create sustained change then why should we think our fictional efforts now will result in a different effect?” He wonders if poetry, of all things, might do better than sci-fi or mainstream fiction, might be “even more aligned” to recent findings “in philosophy and science” (VanderMeer 2015b). However, “attuned to the subtlety” of its sources it may be, though it pains me to say this, poetry must be about the last thing on earth that can save the earth.18 I don’t suppose novels can fare better, not if they’re any good. That’s expecting of them something they’re not for, like asking a barometer to seed a cloud and make it rain manna. But I seem to be in thrall to debunking, enchanted by a capacity to disenchant. I had better snap out of it, see if I can be persuaded. After all, why presume? Who knows what hosts may be pricked and smitten by this Southern Reach thorn? Marvels without miracles, intercession that’s not internecine, magic but in a manner of speaking: this book has infiltrated me. It’s absorbing. I hope it goes viral. Plus there’s more to my fable of disenchantment’s wonders than I first figured. The Torah scholars’ down-to-earth gloss on the miracle of manna turns out to be just one version, underwriting a nouvelle Biblical cuisine featuring insect-secreted essence of tamarisk, a delicacy, the latest Holy Land export. A rival theory posits manna rather as a psychedelic mushroom: agent of trance and vision.19 A diet of such might indeed sustain the distant prospect of a promised land, sufficing, one hopes, till milk and honey materialize. This manna I’d micro-dose. Enchantment? You bet! I guess.

NOTES 1. The film version was written and directed by the auteur of Ex Machina, Alex Garland, and features Natalie Portman, no stranger to sci-fi and altered-psyche roles. 2. The words are Entzauberung (Weber) and Entgötterung (Schiller), respectively (Robbins 2011, 75). 3. This suggests, by the way, why it is quixotic to presume to “say goodbye to Nature,” as per part II of Harding’s talk. Proscribing this particular word, you will

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find that some equivalent expression crops up, something discharging its function in the calculus of substance. See my “Antinomies of Participation” (Roorda 2007), referred to below. 4. Among Jillette’s many emissions on the topic, see his op-ed piece on the CNN website, “Time for atheists to stand up and be counted” (2016). 5. IMDb’s blurb for the film version of Annihilation reflects its square-peg slotting into a genre round hole: “A biologist signs up for a dangerous secret expedition where the laws of nature don’t apply.” Far from not applying, ways of nature pervade and prevail, only “laws” seems a paltry way to name them. 6. VanderMeer reports this in an article for The Atlantic website: “From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey” (2015a). 7. Note that this is an expression—“pristine wilderness”—that the biologist herself employs repeatedly. It’s not my usage, susceptible to the usual qualifications (how no place is “pristine,” how “wilderness” is an untenable construct, etc.), rather a crucial element of a novel that does not simply reproduce it but puts it in play. 8. This coastal region is modeled directly on a north Florida wildlife refuge that VanderMeer frequents, another of the novel’s sources, as he makes clear in the acknowledgments. 9. I am thinking, of course, of a long train of discussion on the valence of “wilderness.” largely following William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1995). This too figures in my essay “Antinomies of Substance.” 10. This is sort of a spoiler but not really: the novel’s first words are “The tower, which was not supposed to be there” (VanderMeer 2014a, 3), as it launches into this scenario tout suite. 11. This spiral repetition’s resemblance to DNA is all the more telling when it turns out—major spoiler alert here—that the downward tunnel is actually a living thing, gently pulsating, the whole shebang an organism housing an organism employing a further organism to write (VanderMeer 2014a, 51). The biologist realizes this when, as an effect of the spore’s infiltration, she finds herself immune to post-hypnotic prompts implanted during her training and exercised by the expedition leader, called the psychologist. The word entitling the book, “annihilation,” turns out to be such a prompt; I won’t spoil what it’s for. 12. On top (so to speak) of a stack of intertextual sources one might adduce for this dream dispensation—Tower of Babel, Borgesian library, Escher engravings and more, as the editor has helpfully suggested—there’s one I long overlooked but now spot at last, in my usage of the expression “twin towers”: shades of the World Trade Center, the terrible figure of a tower gone to ground. 13. In diegesis, at least. 14. A compact (for Burke) version of this case is found in his essay “On Human Behavior Considered Dramatistically,” appended to the third edition of Permanence and Change (Burke 1984). Schematically, it runs like this: Humans, as sign-users, cooperate. Cooperation means division of labor. Division of labor necessitates pyramidal social form. And so terminologies are infused with the spirit of hierarchy, recapitulating divisions while “transcending” them, rendering them “consubstantial.” Hence something like the sacred, whatever it happens to call itself. It’s possible,

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Burke muses that this doesn’t have to be the case; it’s just that, so far, it always has been. It seems to be the nature of the beast. This seems to me a crucial understanding, insufficiently recognized. 15. Quoted phrases are from “Bear Versus Texting Man: Our Spectacular Disconnection from Nature” (VanderMeer 2014b) which discusses this “lie” with respect to depictions of alien planets. The theme is touched on in “The Anthropocene, Rick Scott, and Malign versus Useful Stories” as well, to wit: “Even a seemingly innocuous movie like Terence Malick’s The New World creates agitprop by depicting a past starved of animals, despite accounts from that era of sheer numbers of wildlife that would, to the modern mind, appear ridiculous if shown on the screen” (VanderMeer 2016). Both pieces and a plethora of others are found on the author’s website, jeffvandermeer​.co​m. 16. I draw heavily here on Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (1970), a now obscure volume in syncretic anthropology that to me, non-specialist that I am, seems unjustly neglected. Thick-description practitioners may have bristled at its generalizations, but to me it’s been revelatory. 17. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), among other titles. Wink-nudge references to pharmakon and Supreme Fiction are to Derrida (1981) and Wallace Stevens (1957), respectively. The latter is a poesis-driven version of all things, one that you know is a fabrication but sign on with all the same: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else” (Stevens 1957, 189). The former is a Greek word meaning both poison and medicine, which in Plato’s Phaedrus figures as a trope for writing in ways Derrida unpacks but I won’t. 18. Quotations are from VanderMeer, “Hyperobjects: The Slow Apocalypse and Fiction” (2015b). As for poetry saving the earth: this is the question posed in the title of John Felstiner’s book, Can Poetry Save the Earth? (2009). It’s a long, bright volume, but a short answer to the question might not encourage. This is not to say that total absorption in poetry is not a fine thing that ought not to occasion guilt feelings. 19. See Mikaela Lefrak’s Washington Post piece (2018) on manna-based cuisine, which quotes a botanist thus: “It’s very hard to research things that fall from heaven.” Ditto with heavens that precipitate from things.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, the Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1969 (1945). A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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———. 1984. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cronon, William. 1995. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon, 69–90. New York: Norton. de Waal, Frans. 2016. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: Norton. Dennis, Carl. 2004. New and Selected Poems, 1974–2004. New York: Penguin. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Felstiner, John. 2009. Can Poetry Save the Earth? New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E-flux Journal 75, September. https​:/​/ww​​w​.e​-f​​l ux​.c​​om​/jo​​urnal​​/75​/6​​ 7125/​​tenta​​cular​​-thin​​king-​​anthr​​opoce​​ne​-ca​​pital​​​ocene​​-chth​​uluce​​ne/. Harding, Wendy. 2016. “Aesthetic Choices for the Anthropocene Era.” Presentation at International Conference on Ecopoetics, Perpignan, France, June 24. Jillette, Penn. 2016. “Time for Atheists to Stand Up and Be Counted.” CNN, June 2. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cnn​​.com/​​2016/​​06​/02​​/opin​​ions/​​athei​​sts​-r​​eason​​-rall​​y​-jil​​let​te​​/inde​​x​.htm​​l. Koch, Kenneth. 1975. “The Art of Poetry.” Poetry 125 (4) (January): 187–203. La Barre, Weston. 1978 (1970). The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion. New York: Dell. Lefrak, Mikaela. 2018. “Is This Biblical Food the Next Foodie Fad? This Chef Thinks So.” Washington Post, August 7. https​:/​/ww​​w​.was​​hingt​​onpos​​t​.com​​/life​​style​​/maga​​ zine/​​is​-th​​is​-bi​​blica​​l​-foo​​d​-the​​-next​​-food​​ie​-fa​​d​-thi​​s​-che​​f​-thi​​nks​-s​​o​/201​​8​/08/​​03​/1f​​ 2cafa​​2​-8b6​​0​​-11e​​8​-8ae​​a​-86e​​88ae7​​60d8_​​story​​.html​. Levine, George. 2006. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-Enchantment of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———, ed. 2011. The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Muir, John. 1987 (1911). My First Summer in the Sierra. New York: Penguin. Robbins, Bruce. 2011. “Enchantment? No, Thank You!” In The Joy of Secularism, edited by George Levine, 74–94. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roorda, Randall. 2007. “Antinomies of Participation in Literacy and Wilderness.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14 (2): 71–88. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, Wallace. 1990 (1957). Opus Posthumous. New York: Vintage/Random. VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014a. Annihilation. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. ———. 2014b. “Bear Versus Texting Man: Our Spectacular Disconnection from Nature.” Jeffvandermeer​.com​, September 17. http:​/​/www​​.jeff​​vande​​rmeer​​.com/​​ 2014/​​09​/17​​/bear​​-vers​​us​-te​​xting​​-man-​​our​-s​​pecta​​cular​​​-disc​​onnec​​tion/​. ———. 2015a. “From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey.” The Atlantic, January 28. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/en​​terta​​inmen​​t​/arc​​hive/​​2015/​​01​/ fr​​om​-an​​nihil​​ation​​-to​-a​​ccept​​ance-​​a​-wri​​ters-​​​surre​​al​-jo​​urney​​/3848​​84/.

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———. 2015b. “Hyperobjects: The Slow Apocalypse and Fiction.” Electric Literature, April 23. https​:/​/el​​ectri​​clite​​ratur​​e​.com​​/the-​​slow-​​apoca​​lypse​​-and-​​​ficti​​ on/. ———. 2016. “The Anthropocene, Rick Scott, and Malign Versus Useful Stories.” Jeffvandermeer​.com​, February 23. http:​/​/www​​.jeff​​vande​​rmeer​​.com/​​2016/​​02​/23​​/ rick​​-scot​​t​-the​​-anth​​ropoc​​ene​-a​​nd​-ma​​lign-​​versu​​​s​-use​​ful​-s​​torie​​s/. Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. 1979 (1938). John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Chapter 4

Nature’s Speech and Storytelling The Voice of Wisdom in the Nonhuman Françoise Besson

As David Abram says, “We are human only in contact and conviviality, with what is not human” (Abram ix). Etymologically, “conviviality” means “to live with.” In his seminal book about “the spell of the sensuous,” ecologist and philosopher David Abram—who is also a magician—suggests that it is conviviality with the nonhuman that makes us human. In her keynote lecture at the conference “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the world,” which took place in Perpignan in June 2016, Joni Adamson spoke about the indigenous population’s role in the protection of species and she discussed how physical contact between humans and nonhumans is tied to awareness.1 She closed her lecture by showing the role of writers and artists in the protection of life: Writers like Linda Hogan, [. . .], artists are showing us that multi-species relationships involve that advocation of understanding oral and written stories as archives of scientific literacies and ecosystemic complexity. [. . .] We, the humanists, the ecopoets, their audience, are taking up these stories, and we’re taking them up into our classroom, we’re taking them outside into community and we’re illustrating how we might come together with scientists and people across other disciplines to build a cosmopolitical movement with life and environmental justice as its goal.2

“Oral and written stories as archives of scientific literacies and ecosystemic complexity” (ibid.), this is what ecopoets and ecocritics underline to lead people to the consciousness of “multi-species relationships” (ibid.). David Abram adds: “The traditional magician or medicine person functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only 67

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secondarily as a healer” (Abram 1996, 9). To heal, it is necessary to perceive the links between the human and nonhuman. The second part of the title of the conference “Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” suggests that the world is disenchanted, literally no longer enchanted. But is it the world that has lost all forms of enchantment or are humans projecting their disenchantment onto the world because they no longer know how to listen to its voices? For it is a matter of listening. There are multiple stories told by nature and its voices have simply to be heard, which the word “enchantment” suggests, as it is linked with orality, since in Latin—and Provençal—“to enchant” means to work through magical chants. Disenchantment comes from the fact that we have ceased hearing the chant of the world because it is too often muffled by the noise and screams caused by war and violence. How can we still hear the voice of the sand in the desert bombed by human madness? And yet deserts speak to us. In his beautiful poem “Desert Revised,” Christopher Arigo writes: “words were born in the desert then bombed then bombed again— each death takes its bite and leaves you listing a bit to one side—each death eats more necessary words” (Arigo 2010, 817).3 Violence is the devourer of language, language which allows human and nonhuman creatures to communicate. I would like to evoke the magical chants which already exist in the nonhuman world, and which literature enhances. These notions of enchantment and reenchantment are not to be opposed with the rationality of science, and imagination is not to be opposed to rationality. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species ends on the notion of wonder while Einstein insists that, before there could be equations, acts of imagination first occurred. Can we speak of nonhuman imagination? Perhaps nonhuman imagination stems from the relations between all elements in which ecosystems become mandalas as Gary Snyder suggests, saying that “an ecosystem is a kind of mandala in which there are multiple relations that are all-powerful and instructive” (Snyder 2008, 76). Can we speak of a speech of the land? Can we speak of orality when the nonhuman world is at stake? Is there such a thing as animal storytelling? I would like to show how animals, plants, water, and stones, that is the nonhuman in general, let those who will listen to them hear some kind of speech, which is not the articulate speech that most human beings consider as the only one, but a more cryptic one, uniting things and beings instead of dividing them, which may be the key to our relationship to the world; this suggests that the nonhuman world and particularly animals and plants let us hear a speech evoking reciprocity instead of individualism. Italo Calvino says that “literature gives a voice to whatever is without a voice”4 (Calvino 1986, 98). Does literature simply “give a voice to whatever is without a voice” or does it make the human world aware that everything actually does have a voice?

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NONHUMAN VOICES AS “THE ECOLOGY OF MAGIC” Nature writers perceive the magic of nature in every nonhuman voice and their writing is a way of sharing that sense of magic. As Ann Haymond Zwinger writes: “I want to share my enchantment with the natural world and its intricate workings with anyone open to its wonders” (Ann Haymond Zwinger 2000, 67). This is also what is perceived in oral cultures as David Abram suggests: “In indigenous oral cultures, nature itself is articulate; it speaks. The human voice as an oral culture is always participant with the voices of wolves, wind, and waves—participant, that is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth” (Abram 1996, 116–117). A first way of reenchanting the world may consist in raising awareness that the nonhuman world speaks to us humans who tend to be deaf to nonhuman speech. For there is a nonhuman speech that literature may help us to hear. Literature must not be opposed to sciences: it should help scientists to listen to the nonhuman world, without any instrument such as tape recorders or more sophisticated machines; it should help us to hear the voices of the nonhuman, be it vegetal, animal, or mineral, guiding us on the path to wisdom. Isn’t the “ecology of magic” evoked by David Abram the mere consciousness that nonhuman voices must be heard, for us to understand our own human voice? “The most sophisticated definition of ‘magic’ that now circulates through the American counterculture is ‘the ability or power to alter one’s consciousness at will,’” says he (Abram 1996, 9). When in Biogée, Michel Serres imagines a dialogue between him and the man he calls “le Taiseux” (the Silent one), a man who is Noah at the moment when he decides to build the Ark, the character starts a long monologue, suggesting the necessity to listen to the voice of the earth: “Pourrai-je un jour déchiffrer cet appel de la terre? Ecoute sa voix. Notre terre parle, tu la sens, elle nous raconte quelque chose, comme faisait ta mère, le soir, quand tu ne t’endormais pas, elle dit ce qu’elle sait” (Serres 2013, 12).5 In this sentence, Michel Serres uses the lexical field of speech and knowledge to insist on the earth’s voice and on its speech. The oral image of the mother’s lullaby suggests that the earth has a voice that reassures us and informs us of dangers, a voice that is heard most of the time only by nonhuman animals, as at the moment of the Indonesian tsunami: only those who followed the elephants long before the arrival of the gigantic wave, because they understood what they said, were saved. What is instinct but that capacity to hear the voice of the earth that most humans no longer know how to hear? Michel Serres’s Silent Man, that Biblical character coming into the philosopher’s present time to teach him to listen to the voice of the Earth, to bring him the gift of listening, guides us toward nonhuman voices. We have interrupted communication with the Earth, but the nonhuman world keeps on saying that it is not broken,

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that listening can be restored. At the time of modern technologies allowing us to communicate in a few seconds with the whole world, often saying “it’s magic,” Michel Serres asks this question: “Qui communique le mieux, le plus vite, le plus loin, le plus fort? Nous autres par Internet, ou les éléments du monde, le feu, la terre et l’eau”?6 He adds: “Ainsi, courante et banale, la vie ne cesse de rencontrer des messies parmi les choses et les êtres, comme brins de paille parmi des milliards d’aiguilles d’or.”7 Are those “Messiahs among things and beings” in contradiction with Christ who, for Christians, has come to save the world? Or are they guides showing us the way to save the world, by watching over those who are not like us instead of severing our connections to them? Jean-Jacques Péré, a priest and theologian, wrote an article about the ox and donkey that have surrounded Christ child since Francis of Assisi added them to the crib. Péré sees them as both an interpretation of Isaiah’s text and an assertion of the interrelation between the human and the nonhuman. He quotes American poet Walt Whitman, writing in Leaves of Grass: “Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.” JeanJacques Péré adds: “il m’est apparu judicieux s’écoutre la leçon de l’âne et du bœuf pour en tirer, finalement, un motif d’espérance.”8 The theologian does not oppose those two nonhuman creatures to either men or Christ. Rather, he sees them as messengers whose very life is a voice. This “ecology of magic” seems to lead naturally to the spiritual link between animals and men. SPIRITUAL CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN HUMANS AND ANIMALS A twelfth-century Sufi poem known as “the conference of the birds,” by Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar, tells the story of the birds of the world who, guided by the hoopoe, lead a quest through the seven stages of spirituality, in a “conference.” They “bear together”—that is “think together”—the story of the quest supposed to lead people on the right spiritual path. A bird speaks to other birds, when sometimes men speak with birds, like St Francis of Assisi. Everybody knows about Francis of Assisi’s conversations with birds and other animals and all elements of the nonhuman world he addressed as “Brother” and “Sister.” Joseph Delteil, a French writer who was born in Southern France, prolongs the idea of an oral exchange between Francis and animals when he evokes animals’ speeches after Francis’s death: La mort d’un homme, et d’un tel homme, est toujours chose simple, auguste et nue. La mort, cette voie lactée d’âmes entre terre et soleil . . . le retour au soleil [. . .]

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Cependant quelqu’un quelque part fit un grand signe. Compris aussitôt des oiseaux, du torrent, des nuages. Un rais de soleil s’infiltra par les interstices de la bruyère, se posa sur l’oreiller. “Le grand Saint est mort!” criait la pie à l’agnelle. Au loin l’écureuil se grattait l’oreille. Le merle, droit sur une patte, ver au bec, écoute. La truite en chasse derrière son caillou rêve. Le cyprès se met au garde à vous. Un brin d’herbe pleure. Un chien perdu se faufila jusqu’à la porte, flairant à vide, inquiet, avec soudain un gros œil exquis, quasi humain. “Le grand Saint est mort!” chantait le coq.9

Why do most readers not see this evocation of animals’ reactions at the moment of Francis’s death, as anthropomorphism? Why do we not see the weeping blade of grass as a romantic, pathetic fallacy? Perhaps because we read the text with the story of St Francis in mind and in this story, there is Francis communicating with animals. So in that enchanted world—only enchanted insofar as it reveals creatures listening to one another—animals communicate between one another to warn each species about the death of a man who could listen to them, who could understand them because he could hear their voices. As there seems to be a network in which all things are related as in a gigantic cobweb, in our modern reality, we can find echoes to Joseph Delteil’s literary evocation of animals announcing Francis’ death: it has been reported that at the moment when international conservationist Lawrence Anthony, the “elephant whisperer,” died in South Africa in 2012, two groups of elephants living on different areas on the reserve of Thula Thula, set off at the same moment. When the two groups arrived, nearly simultaneously, at the place where the man they knew was lying dead, they walked around the house several times and left. They had been warned in a mysterious way about the man’s death and had all decided to go and say good-bye to him. Their gestures and walk were the physical translations of what we humans would call words of compassion. Like the couple of lions lying on Dennis Finch-Hatton’s grave, as Karen Blixen recounts in Out of Africa, the elephants communicated together; they communicated with the land; and they communicated with the man who had listened to them, to show their affection. And as men’s suffering or death can be felt or “heard” by animals, animal voices can be heard by men, particularly by Native Americans whose tales and spirituality are full of speaking animals. To say is the primordial action. The importance of what is said is fundamental for Native Americans: the oral word has a creative value; in all the myths of creation, the oral mythical story tells the history of a people integrated in the nonhuman world. It is a mythical animal that Momaday entrusts with the task of speaking with God; the mythical bear, Urset, has a dialogue with Yahveh. In Momaday’s play Dreams, language associates a mythical animal with God through a spiritual conversation.

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In “The Ways of the Cranes,” Linda Hogan argues that the cranes “tell a story”: “they seem to write in the sky,/They fly like words and sentences.” She adds that “birds tell stories to tribes, tribes tell stories to birds.”10 A reciprocal relationship is thus recreated between human beings and other animals to guide us toward a new relationship with the world. As seen by Native American culture, animals convey the importance of language. They convey relationships between humans and the land, between humans and mysterious spiritual forces, as appears for example in N. Scott Momaday’s Circle of Wonder or in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale, among other texts. Animals give us messages. Athane Adrahane recalls that Aldo Leopold received his expression “thinking like a mountain” from a female wolf that he and his companions had killed.11 Like the goose in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, killed by Abel’s brother and remembered by Abel who, years after his brother’ death, remembers the reflection of the moon in the bird’s eye at the moment of her death, or like the partridges killed in a hunting party and leading Maurice Genevoix to say that the shadow of death is the same in the eyes of a partridge killed at a hunting party and in the eyes of a soldier killed at war,12 Aldo Leopold’s female wolf gives the men who have killed her a message of life, some inkling of the beauty of nonhuman life. Those experiences sound like epiphanies: the dying creatures’ eyes reveal both how enmeshed their lives are with the whole world and the cosmos and make the observers aware of their own connection with the dying birds or wolf. The animal’s eyes make the human hunters aware of the fact that life has been killed. Through their dying eyes, the killing gesture is replaced by a glint of life. LANDSCAPE AS STORYTELLER Native American myths are told by the landscape. In his essay “A First American Views his Land,” Momaday evokes “a Navajo ceremonial song that celebrates the sounds that are made in the natural world, the particular voices that beautify the earth”: Voice above Voice of thunder, Speak from the dark of clouds: voice below, grasshopper voice, speak from the green of plants;

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so may the earth be beautiful (Momaday 1976, 34)

Everything in nature has a voice in the Navajo conception of things relayed by Momaday. But in the ceremonial song, Navajo people go farther as they shift from voice to speech (“speak”). The nonhuman world guides human beings toward the awareness of beauty. Nature tells stories about the presence of beauty everywhere in the world. David Abram speaks about “the many-voiced landscape” (Abram 1996, ix) and we could go as far as saying that the landscape is a storyteller. Both Devils Tower in Wyoming and the Big Dipper constellation in the sky tell the Kiowa legend of the bear boy often told by Momaday. The legend tells that eight children, seven girls and their brother, were playing in the desert when the boy was gradually changed into a bear and ran after his sister, whereas the girls were called by a tree and taken into the sky where they became the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Devils Tower, Tsoai in Kiowa (meaning the rock tree), is supposed to be the stump of the tree of the legend. The landscape thus articulates a story inscribed into the Wyoming earth and into the larger, stellar cosmos, a story that has been deciphered and turned into a legend by the Kiowa people. In the Spanish Pyrenees there are twin mountains telling the legend of shepherds who are said to have been petrified and changed into those beautiful mountains called The Enchanted Mountain. Robin Fedden’s book The Enchanted Mountains only takes up this place name speaking about enchantment to tell the story of his mountaineering experience and his own enchantment in front of the landscape telling a legend of enchantment and being itself an enchanted place. Furthermore, historical and metaphysical stories are sometimes told by seeds. Through trees and plants making and transforming landscapes, seeds tell the history of colonization and may also speak about life and death, as appears in Momaday’s essay recounting his impressions of Granada, in Spain. The landscape narrates the history of Spain: “There were endless groves of olives in intricate patchworks as far as the eye could see. Here, in 1246, when the Castilians were encroaching upon other Almoravid states of al-Andalus, an Arab chieftain, Mohammed ibn-Yusuf ibn-Nasr, moved his capital to the south, to the town of Karnattah, where he established the Nasrid dynasty” (Momaday 1996, 149). The olive trees lead him through the story of Spain and the Moorish invasion, which in turn leads him to the notion of “encroaching.” The seed reminds him about the invasion of the Americas by Conquistadores: On the vast tableland of Castille-La Mancha there are abandoned haciendas in the foreground and castle ruins on the skyline. There is a hint of desolation

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and an unforgiving aspect to this land, a resonance of the Extremadura next door to the west, from which came so many of the Conquistadores, men peculiarly equal to the hardships of the New World. (Perhaps they bore seeds as well as swords. Along Coronado’s route in Mexico and Arizona, I have seen hummingbirds at a hundred pomegranate trees). (Momaday 1996, 148–49, my emphasis)

The double landscape of Spain and Arizona tells a story of violence and conquest through the peaceful traveling presence of a seed counterbalancing the violence of swords. In Thoreau’s essay “The Dispersion of Seeds,” Faith in a Seed, the seed tells a story of life and death: In an account of Duxbury in the Massachusetts Historical Collections written in 1793, it is said: “Capt. Samuel Alden, who died twelve years since, recollected the first white pine in the town. Now the eighth part, perhaps, of the woodland is covered with this growth.” Pigeons, nuthatches, and other birds devour the seed of the white pine in great quantities, and if the wind alone is not enough, it is easy to see how pigeons may fill their crops with pine seed and then move off much faster than a locomotive to be killed by hundreds in another part of the country, and so plant the white pine where it did not grow before.13

Carried by the wind or birds, the seed of the unique white pine seen by Captain Alden raises metaphysical questions as the pigeon eats seeds to survive a long journey at the end of which he is killed, and, through his very death, perpetuates in a different place the species of a tree whose seed he has eaten—a story of life and death told by a tree and a pigeon. Trees have a voice and can speak about solidarity. Abrams speaks about “the voice of trees” and Lawrence Durrell, in “Coral in Corfu” writes that “trees speak and doves talk.” We may also think about Baudelaire’s poem, “La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers/Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.”14 Are those phrases merely poets’ words or do they prolong and voice reality? Who has not heard the murmur of the wind in the leaves, or the strange squeals of trees in the forest? Even scientists are now studying communication between trees. In Les langages secrets de la nature, devoted to communication between animals and plants, Jean-Marie Pelt relies on experiments led by scientists and on his own keen eye for nature to show how trees communicate and warn their fellow trees of a danger, how plants possess some sensitivity and express it. Pelt uses the word “message” to speak about that phenomenon and Peter Wohlleben speaks about “the language of trees” (Wohlleben 2015, 19–26). South African researchers brought a group of students near a group of acacias and to simulate a strong predation, whipped the trees. The latter interpreted that as an attack of kudus,

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animals particularly fond of acacia leaves. Hardly a quarter of an hour afterward, the whipping had strongly increased the quantity of tannin on their leaves. Even the trees spared by the blows, if they were situated less than three yards beside the whipped ones, also increased the quantity of tannin. This “message,” Pelt says, “can only be a volatile substance emitted by the wounded leaves” (Pelt 1998, 107). In other words, they warn the other trees of a danger. A comparable example found on an internet site about botany concerns maples: When the maple is attacked by herbivores, it starts a strategy of defence: it gradually increases its production of tannin, so that its leaves become toxic. The problem is that the reaction takes 75 hours. Thus the animal attacking the tree has time to eat all the leaves. But the tree has a parallel strategy based on communication: the tree liberates ethylene, which is picked up by the neighbouring maples. Ethylene acts as a stimulus allowing them to start producing tannins before the devastating animal’s arrival.15

Solidarity also exists between animal and vegetal species. In her famous book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson envisions the numerous solutions that should allow humans to avoid the use of pesticides and simply observe nature in which all solutions are given. To do so, Carson evokes the case of spiders in German forests (spiders that exist elsewhere and particularly in the United States, she says), which protect the young shoots of trees from flying insects: “they spin in a team work a net umbrella above the top shoots of the trees and thus protect the young shoots against the flying insects” (Carson 1962, 295). In this case, it is not conscious solidarity unlike what happens concerning acacias or examples of animals rescuing other species. But even when it is not conscious, we might see that as a common language of nature in which some species, in gestures concerning their own life, protect other species, thus suggesting that a sharing of the world is possible. It is this interaction between humans and other species that Eduardo Kohn demonstrates in his beautiful book How Forests Think. In a book symposium, he gave “Further thoughts on sylvan thinking” and explained what he meant to do: “I want to explore and harness [the world’s] many specific properties. My claim is that constitutive absences, selves, and futures, as I’ve discussed them in the book, make themselves manifest in specific ways that are particularly apparent in specific parts of the world. And I want to find ways to think with these in ways that can change our thinking.”16 This is what all the above examples show; humans must agree to communicate with the other species first then to be able to change their thinking.

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ANIMALS’ SPEECHES TO LEAD US TO AWARENESS AND WISDOM Abram highlights that Socrates calls cicadas “those mouthpieces of the Muses” (Qtd in Abram 1996, 115). In Rudy Wiebe’s Canadian novel, A Discovery of Strangers, an unborn caribou in his mother’s womb hears the wolf’s voice and recognizes a threat in it. Wiebe’s baby caribou hearing the wolf’s voice from inside his mother’s womb hears the story of his life to come. He does not hear that voice as sound, but, rather, as a meaningful message. In Wangari Maathai’s autobiography, Unbowed, a Memoir, wildlife is not seen in opposition with human life but placed on a par with it. The author’s mother’s advice to speak to the leopard—“You and I are both leopards so why we disagree?” (Maathai 2006, 43)—asserts a common belonging, the conscience of which is synonymous with survival. When applied to all species, this changes our mode of behavior toward one another. The author opposes the conversation with the jaguar to the villagers’ yelling: if meant to frighten elephants away, it actually prompts the Kenya Wildlife Service to kill them just to calm people down: “This sad state of affairs is caused by a lack of understanding of animal behaviour, something my mother’s generation seemed to grasp” (Maathai 2006, 44). What might appear as a sad anecdote is in fact presented as a part of a long chain of communication starting with forests in which birds live. Wangari Maathai remembers the bird she enjoyed listening to when she was a child, and when she asked her mother “what the bird was saying,” her mother “told [her] it was warning [them]” (Maathai 2006, 44). The bird “warning” people leads to children’s education. It all amounts to communication: communication between children and adults, between human beings and leopards, between birds and humans. When this chain of communication is broken—for example when villagers use their voices to frighten elephants away, which is a distorted form of communication—life is destroyed: the bird sings to warn human beings of a danger. The men yell to assert their strength. It is a one-way communication where no answer is possible since men could not understand the animals’ behavior. Recent ethological research has proven the existence and intricacy of animal languages.17 The recognition of animal communication might encourage modern humans to start learning how to read the book of nature again. David Abram reminds us that many tribes consider language to have been given to them originally by animals: Many tribes, like the Swampy Cree of Manitoba, hold that they were given spoken language by the animals. For the Inuit (Eskimo), as for numerous other peoples, humans and animals all originally spoke the same language. According

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to Nillungiaq, an Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmu​ssen ​ early​  in  t​he  tw​entie​th  ce​ntury​: In the very earliest time/when both people and animals lived on earth,/a person could become an animal if he/wanted to and an animal could become a human being,/Sometimes they were people/and sometimes animals/and there was no difference./All spoke the same language./That was the time when words were like magic./The human mind had mysterious powers,/A word spoken by chance/might have strange consequences./It would suddenly come alive/and what people wanted to happen could happen—/all you had to/do was say it./ Nobody could explain this:/That’s the way it was. (Abram 1996, 87) Despite this original language common to both people and animals, the various animals and other natural forms today speak their unique dialects. But nevertheless all speak, all have the power of language. (Abram 1996, 87–88)

The Native American mythical idea according to which animals spoke at the beginning of times is perhaps a poetic way of evoking the memory of language, since human language is based on signs that were first produced by animals. As ethologist Boris Cyrulnik says: “Animals help us to better understand the language preparing us for speech.”18 He demonstrates that animals teach us the origins of our own behaviors (Boris Cyrulnik 2000, 115). Even if modern humans have exhibited a tendency to forget their animal origins, even if they are not always willing to see the mysteries of nature, they can still listen and be responsive to the nonhuman world. Animals’ gestures and squeals form conscious language; they convey a will to communicate. Like “the angle of geese” described in Momaday’s work again and again and repeating the birds’ journey from time immemorial, animals narrate a story. If we go back to the etymology of the word, to narrate is etymologically “to give people knowledge”: the old form of narrare is gnarigare, from gnarus and agere, “to bring people knowledge” (French electronic Littré). Animals give us knowledge. In “The Spiritual Mountain,” Momaday evokes the time when “dogs could talk” (Momaday 1969, 53). The story of a talking dog rescuing a man who is about to die seems to celebrate the double power of words and of nonhuman animals: humans listening to animals’ language realize it is their only condition for survival; they can only survive if they remember the immemorial narratives animals used to tell. Through literature, animals are not limited to their biological reality. From biology to myths and from poetry to medicine, animals draw a circle of knowledge reminding us of our common presence in the world and our common presence in the element of language. To borrow from Momaday’s words: “Language in an element in which we live.”19 The stories told by Momaday and other writers tell us that we should perhaps listen more carefully to the

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first narratives transmitted by the animal world that teach us to remember the Earth, as Momaday argues in a documentary: “Once in our lives we ought to concentrate our minds upon the Remembered Earth.”20 On being reminded, at a conference on Companion Species taking place in Toulouse,21 of a sentence from Moby Dick and Ishmael saying, “has the sperm whale ever written a book or spoken a speech?” I said to myself “perhaps” he has. Of course I felt like demonstrating (or rather letting scientists demonstrate) that the answer was indeed that he had. French biologist and engineer in biochemistry Michel André, studied cetacean songs and he realized that cetacean communication was conveyed through rhythm. He perceived the “rhythmical cohesion” (André 2000, 51)22 of the sounds emitted by the whales. At the same time, a friend of his made him listen to music from Senegal. He noticed the “rigorous, nearly mathematic organization of this sort of music based on rhythm” (André 2000, 51–52).23 So he asked a master drummer to come and listen to the exchanges between a group of sperm whales. After only a few minutes, the musician identified the leader of the group, determined the number of animals emitting sounds and distinguished which individuals had adapted their rhythms to that of the leading animal. What had taken Michel André long months and sophisticated machines to decipher was unraveled in a just few minutes by the African musician. Moreover, the man told him that he could enter the rhythm. Hence the question that Michel André asked himself: “Could it be possible that there should exist a common language between humans and animals through rhythm?” (André 2000, 53). Karine Lou Matignon speaks about “the extraordinary revelation which had just been brought to the scientist thanks to a Master drummer, having to do with humankind’s old dream of conversing with animals” (André 2000, 53). Matignon also gives the example of the Suya Indians who, in the Brazilian jungle, enter into dialogue through chanting and rhythms. She furthermore evokes the extraordinary ability of some animals to imitate sounds, whether animal sounds or the sounds of machines. Those examples illustrate dialogues between humans and nonhumans and whenever a dialogue can start, it makes those who try to communicate progress toward mutual understanding; thus the dialogue between humans and nonhumans may take humans away from violence and show them the way to reconciliation. ANIMALS SHOW US THE WAY If the law of the jungle is at the core of both nonhuman and human life, we should nevertheless remember that animals only kill other animals to survive, that is, to eat or to defend themselves. There are fights but in most cases no wars in animal communities.24 On the contrary, solidarity is the keyword as

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Jean-Marie Pelt demonstrated in his book about “solidarity between species,” La solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains. The examples of animals trying to rescue or to protect animals from different species are innumerable. Many mother cats for instance feed small rabbits or hedgehogs with their kittens; we may also draw from a lioness protecting an antelope whose mother had been killed. In the nineteenth-century Pyrenees, there was a woman who was called “the mad woman of the Pyrenees”—deemed mad only because she no longer wanted to speak after two years spent living naked in the mountains. The only sentence she uttered was to protest when human beings asked her how she had survived among bears: “Bears? But they were my friends, they protected me.”25 Bears protected her in the mountain for two years whereas men, because they did not understand her new language and thought her a lunatic, let her die in a prison. I also remember an episode that filled journalists with so much wonder that they devoted a part of the 8 o’clock news to it: the report was about the attack of an antelope by an alligator and the attempt of a hippopotamus to save her. He rushed to make the alligator flee and drew the antelope out of the water. As she was seriously wounded he stayed with her until she died, supporting the antelope’s head within his wide-open mouth. Manifesting their capacity to understand other species’ distress, the Pyrenean bears, the hippopotamus, and so many other animals show us the simplest ways to compassion and to hearing nonhuman others. Instead of asking animals to copy our languages and behaviors, Pascal Picq, a paleoanthropologist, argues that on the contrary, we must try and “reach their mental worlds without distorting them” (Picq 2000, 91). Picq adds that “to be human is to be aware of the differences that elude us, of the many links that tie us to the other species, enriching our universe of knowledge” (ibid).26 Finally, I remember the multiple conversations that my mother used to have with dogs or my father with blackbirds through whistling. I can sometimes hear the same melody whistled by a blackbird reproducing the melody that his father’s father’s father whistled years ago, a melody which, back then, my father answered. Who whistled the melody first, the bird or my father? I can’t remember. The only thing that seemed to matter was that they both liked speaking to each other. And through the bird whistling the same melody years later, I can still hear this conversation going on between a man and a bird. I also remember the day when, while we were planting strawberries and I was cutting a plastic bag with scissors, I could hear the sound of my scissors reproduced in the air by a starling who was listening to us. An enchanting experience . . . Wasn’t that bird showing us that the only way of reenchanting the world is simply to listen to one another? Karine Lou Matignon quotes Simone Weill saying that “the scientist’s aim is to be united

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with mysterious wisdom, eternally inscribed in the universe” (Matignon 2000, 54, my translation).27 It is that awareness of some wisdom inscribed in the universe and explained by the nonhuman world that might save the world. Of course, as Scott Slovic has said in reply to Rebecca Solnit’s warning that “saving is the wrong word,” air, water, animal, and vegetal species “are never ‘saved’ once and for all. Nonetheless, with the understanding that all ‘saves’ are contingent and temporary, the urge to help and protect is a forceful one” (Slovic 2008, 2). The hippopotamus rushing to “save” the antelope failed to save her life. Yet, when showing that he simply listened to the voice of suffering and tried to be with the dying antelope, the hippopotamus, through his gesture of compassion, showed us that if a life had not been saved in the end, the way to life had been saved as this apparently awkward creature guided us toward the perception of another’s suffering. The hippopotamus had saved something indeed: he had saved our capacity to try to save, even if it is transient. It is transient as the breeze is transient; and yet in its very transience, it makes all species breathe and live, in an ephemeral way as life is ephemeral, except if we consider each life as a part of a great web in which everything speaks to us from time immemorial. We simply have to listen to the world’s rhythms, to pay more attention to what most of us regard as non-words, and thus maybe will we come to realize that the world has always expressed itself in an enchanting language guiding us onto the path to awareness.

NOTES 1. She evoked a project of sturgeon protection and told how children “with their hands put the fish into the great lake. Literally they touched the baby fish” and how “little American kids of all races, genders, go to the great lake and they touch the fish. They protected a species that brought all people together,” Joni Adamson, “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections in Native American Writings,” international conference “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” Perpignan, June 23, 2016. 2. Joni Adamson, “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections in Native American Writings,” international conference “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” Perpignan, June 23, 2016. 3. Christopher Arigo. “From Desert Revised.” ISLE 17, no. 4 (2010): 813–817. 4. Italo Calvino. The Uses of Literature. Translated by Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1986). 5. “Will I be able on day to decipher that call from the earth? Listen to its voice. Our earth speaks, you feel it, it tells us something as your mother did in the evening when you didn’t fall asleep, it tells what it know?” (Serres, Biogée, 12, my translation).

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6. “Who communicates best, the most rapidly, the farthest, in the strongest way? Do we, via the internet? Or do the world’s elements, fire, earth and water?” (Serres 112, my translation). 7. “So, common and trite, life keeps on meeting messiahs among things and beings, like straw wisps among billions of gold needles” (Serres, Biogée, 137, my translation). 8. Jean-Jacques Péré, “I think it wise to listen to the lesson of the ox and the donkey to finally draw from it a motif of hope,” “Quel est ce Dieu que vous prétendez adorer et server,” in Foi et vie n° 63, December 2010, 150th year, 18, my translation. 9. “The death of a man, and of such a man, is always a simple, august, naked thing. Death, that Milky Way of souls between earth and sun . . . The return to the sun . . . [. . .] However somebody somewhere gave a great sign. It was immediately understood by the birds, by the torrent and by the clouds. A sun ray filtered into the cracks of heather, alighted on the pillow. “The great Saint is dead!” the magpie shouted to the female lamb. In the distance, the squirrel is scratching his ear. The blackbird, standing right on one paw, a worm in his beak, listens. The trout, hunting behind a pebble, is dreaming. The cypress stands to attention. A blade of grass is crying. A stray dog edged its way to the door, sniffing in neutral, anxious, with suddenly a big exquisite, nearly human eye. “The great Saint is dead!’ the cock sang.” (Delteil 692, my translation). 10. Linda Hogan, Lecture, International Ecopoetics Conference, Université Perpignan Via Domitia, Couvent des Minimes, June 23, 2016. 11. Athane Adrahane, “Ecrire à dimension des montagnes, des papillons et des étoiles.” Crossways Journal 2, no. 1 (2018). Places of Enchantment/Lieux d’enchantement, https​:/​/cr​​osswa​​ys​.li​​b​.uog​​uelph​​.ca​/i​​ndex.​​php​/c​​rossw​​ays​/a​​rti​cl​​e​/vie​​w​ /468​​9. 12. “La grande ombre dont parlait Homère, on peut la reconnaître aux prunelles d’une perdrix qu’on ramasse, une goutte de sang au bout du bec, comme je l’ai reconnue tant de fois, à l’instant où le regard s’en va, dans les yeux des jeunes soldats tués” (“he big shadow evoked by Homer can be recognized in the pupils of a partridge that you pick up, with a drop of blood hanging from its beak, as I recognized it so many times at the moment when a gaze vanishes, in the eyes of young soldiers who have been killed,” my translation). “‘L’ombre bleuâtre de la mort’ dans l’œuvre de Genevoix” accessed May 18, 2017. https​:/​/ce​​uxde1​​4​.wor​​dpres​​s​.com​​/2013​​/08​/2​​3​/lom​​ bre​-b​​leuat​​re​-de​​-la​-m​​ort​-d​​ans​-l​​​oeuvr​​e​-de-​​genev​​oix/.​ 13. H.D. Thoreau, http:​/​/www​​.arvi​​ndgup​​tatoy​​s​.com​​/arvi​​ndgup​​ta​/th​​​oreau​​.pdf.​ 14. “Nature is a temple where living pillars/Sometimes let out confused words”. Charles Baudelaire. 1857. “Correspondances,” Les Fleurs du Mal (my translation). 15. http:​/​/pla​​nete.​​gaia.​​free.​​fr​/ve​​getal​​/bota​​nique​​/com.​​chimi​​q​ueme​​nt​.ht​​ml (my translation). 16. Eduardo Kohn, “Further Thoughts on Sylvan Thinking,” HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 2 (Autumn 2014), accessed August 31, 2018, https​ :/​/ww​​w​.jou​​rnals​​.uchi​​cago.​​edu​/d​​oi​/fu​​ll​/10​​.1431​​​8​/hau​​4​.2​.0​​16. I would like to thank Bénédicte Meillon for all her interesting suggestions.

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17. See Konrad Lorenz and Boris Cyrulnik’s works for example. One may also cite the books by Fernand Méry, Les bêtes ont aussi leur langage (Paris: Ed. Presses Pocket, 1971). 18. Boris Cyrulnik, preface to Karine Lou Matignon 14–15. (“Les animaux nous aident à mieux comprendre le langage qui prépare à la parole,” my translation). 19. N. Scott Momaday, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” eds. Laurence J. Evers (1974), and Schubnell (1997), 44. 20. N. Scott Momaday. Remembered Earth: New Mexico High Desert, directed by John Grabowska. Idaho Public Television, 2005, Idahoptv​.or​g, 2005, accessed July 28, 2013, www​.pbs​.org​/rememberedearth​/script​.html. 21. “Companion Species in North American Cultural Productions,” seminar organized by Wendy Harding and Claire Cazajous-Augé, Université Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès, June 17, 2016. 22. “une extraodinaire cohérence rythmique.” 23. “j’ai constaté que ces musiques recelaient en fait une organisation rigoureuse, presque mathématique, basée sur le rythme.” 24. We must mention the exception of the Tanzanian Gombe chimpanzees’ fouryear war, from 1974 to 1978, between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park. Again I would like to thank Bénédicte Meillon who put me on the trail of those chimpanzees. See Jane Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 25. See Pierre de Gorse, “La Femme nue des Pyrénées.” In Pyrénées no. 50, 73–77, and Pyrénées no. 51, 169–180. 26. Il nous faut [. . .] accéder à leurs univers mentaux ne les dénaturant pas. [. . .]. Etre humain, c’est avoir conscience des différences qui nous échappent, des multiples liens qui nous relient aux autres espèces et qui enrichissent notre univers de connaissances” (my translation). 27. “Le savant a pour but l’union de son propre esprit avec la sagesse mystérieuse, éternellement inscrite dans l’univers.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abram, David. 1997 (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than Human World. New York: Vintage Books. André, Michel. 2000. “Les rythmes du monde.” Sans les animaux le monde ne serait pas humain, edited by Karine Lou Matignon, 49–54. Paris: Albin Michel. Andrews, Kristin. 2014. The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition. London: Routledge. Arigo, Christopher. 2010. “From Desert Revised.” ISLE 17(4): 813–817. Bailly, Jean-Christophe. 2007. Le Versant Animal. Paris: Bayard. Blixen, Karen. 1954 (1937). Out of Africa. London: Penguin Books. Brosse, Jacques. 1993 (1989). Mythologie des arbres. Paris: Payot. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge, MA, London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Calvino, Italo. 1986. The Uses of Literature. Translated by Patrick Creagh. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. Carson, Rachel. 2002 (1962). Silent Spring. Geneva: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Cyrulnik, Boris. 2000. “L’homme qui nous réconcilie avec les animaux.” Sans les animaux le monde ne serait pas humain, 109–118 edited by Karine Lou Matignon. Paris: Albin Michel. Darwin, Charles. 2006 (1859). On the Origin of Species. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. Delteil, Joseph. 1961 (1960). «François d’Assise.» Œuvres complètes. Paris: Grasset. Deming, Alison Hawthorne. 2000. Writing the Sacred into the Real. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Fedden, Robin. 1962. The Enchanted Mountains. London: John Murray. Fontenay, Elizabeth de. 2013. Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Points. Forsberg, Niklas, ed. 2014. Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond. Bloomsbury Academic USA, ed. NIPPOD. Goodall, Jane, and Dale Peterson. 1993. Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. ———. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Harrison, Jim. 2007. Returning to Earth. New York: Grove Press. Haymond Zwinger, Ann. 2000. Shaped by Wind and Water: Reflections of a Naturalist. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, Credo Collection. Hogan, Linda. 2008. The People of Whale. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Hogan, Linda, and Brenda Peterson. 2001. The Sweet Breathing of Plants. New York: North Point Press. Kohn, Edwardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lorenz, Konrad. 1970. Essai sur le comportement animal et humain. Paris: Seuil. Maathai, Wangari. 2006. Unbowed: A Memoir. New York: Knopf. Matignon, Karine Lou. 2000. Sans les animaux le monde ne serait pas humain. Paris: Albin Michel. Méry, Fernand. 1971. Les bêtes ont aussi leur langage. Paris: Ed. Presses Pocket. Momaday, Natachee Scott. 1975 (1965). Owl in the Cedar Tree. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Momaday, Navarre Scott. 1968. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1976. “Native Attitudes to the Environment.” Seeing with a Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion by Walter Holden Capps. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1997. The Man Made of Words. New York: Saint Martin’s Griffin. www​.pbs​ .org​/rememberedearth​/script​.html. ———. 1999 (1994). Circle of Wonder, a Native American Christmas Story. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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———. 2005. Remembered Earth: New Mexico High Desert. Directed by John Grabowska. Idaho Public Television. Idahoptv​.or​g. ———. 2010. “Dreams.” Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World, edited by Françoise Besson. Newcastle Upon Tyne: CSP. Pelt, Jean-Marie. 1998. Les langages secrets de la nature: la communication chez les animaux et les plantes. Paris: Le Livre de poche. ———. 2000a. La terre en héritage. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2000b. A l’écoute des arbres. Photographies by Bernard Boullet. Paris: Albin Michel Jeunesse. ———. 2004. La solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains. Patis: Fayard. Péré, Jean-Jacques. 2010. “Quel est ce Dieu que vous prétendez adorer et servir.” Foi et vie 63: 16–18. Picq, Pascal. 2000. “Cet autre de l’homme.” Sans les animaux le monde ne serait pas humain, edited by Karine Lou Matignon, 84–91. Paris: Albin Michel. Salgado, Sebastião. 1993. La main de l’homme. Paris: Editions de La Martinière. Schubnell, Matthias. 1985. N. Scott Momaday, the Cultural and Literary Background. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. Schweninger, Lee. 2008. Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Serres, Michel. 1990. Le Contrat naturel. Paris: François Bourin. ———. 2013. Biogée. Paris: Editions Le Pommier. Slovic, Scott. 1992. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 2008. Going Away to Think. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press. Snyder, Gary. 2008. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watresheds. Berkeley: Counterpoint. ———. 2016 (1990). The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Solnit, Rebecca. 2004. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York: Nation Books. Thoreau, Henry David. 1993. “The Dispersion of Seeds.” Faith in a Seed, edited by P. Dean. Washington, DC: Island Press. Wenders, Wim, and Juliano Ribeiro. 2014. Le sel de la terre, un voyage avec Sebastião Salgado. DVD France tv Distribution. Wiebe, Rudy. 1995 (1994). A Discovery of Strangers. Toronto: Random House, Vintage Books. Wohlleben, Peter. 2017 (2015). La vie secrète des arbres. Paris: Les Arènes.

Chapter 5

“A Place Grown Intense and Holy” Dwelling in the Enchanted World of Words Isabel Maria Fernandes Alves

In The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature Tony Tanner demonstrates the importance of “wonder” in American literature, highlighting American writers’ “predilection for the strategy of naïve vision” (1965, 11), that regard for reality with “minimum reference to previous familiarity, that enduring preference for wonder over analysis” (1965, 11).1 In addition, Tanner remarks that from the start “wonder was put to much more far-ranging uses in American writing than in any other literature,” while also affirming that early American writers needed to recognize and contain a new continent, adopting “the wondering vision” as a prime method of “inclusion and assimilation” (1965, 10). Moreover, in American literature, as Tanner contends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, influenced by Thomas Carlyle (and Alexander von Humboldt, I would add), helped to disseminate a vision that prompted human beings to enjoy a deep relationship with nature, to approach it with reverence, and experience “a new sense of total glory” (1965, 10). Encouraging his readers to maintain a close relationship with nature, Emerson aimed to promote a renewed faculty of wonder, and to communicate “the notion of some sort of verbal intimacy with the stuff of nature, a state in which words and things are at their closest” (Tanner 1965, 40). This was, Tanner argues, Emerson’s greatest benefit on American literature (1965, 45).2 If this new intimacy with nature has proved relevant throughout American literature, in Tanner’s book little is said about Native Americans, whose cultural and literary traditions postulated an inseparable relationship between human and non-human world, believing in the inter-relatedness of all things, and to whom nature represented a harbinger of meaning. Tanner’s insistence on the meaning of wonder is nonetheless relevant for my purpose, because he stresses the vital idea that “the habit of wonder, the cultivation of a naïve eye” (1965, 339) is an important mode within American literature, one 85

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which will offer the reader the opportunity “to replenish and revivify” (1965, 361) his/her vision of the world. In the same sense, Leslie Marmon Silko, one of the relevant voices within Native American literature, acknowledges the influence of American Transcendentalism in today’s environmental movement, calling one’s attention to “this awareness of plants, animals and earth being much more of a holistic unit” (2000, 180). Admitting that Transcendentalism influenced her writings (and that Native American traditions were certainly an inspiration to Transcendentalists), Silko concludes that there is “something transcendental about Native American views of the world and relationships” (2000, 180).3 After Native American authors “came into prominence” (Padget 2001, 17) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the stories they had to tell were full of reverence for nature, and for the wonder words illustrate. In a time devoid of the traditional unity between humans and the nonhuman world, I argue that Native American way of understanding the cosmos offers the contemporary reader the possibility to visit magic, to rediscover enchantment and regeneration through rituals, to experience models of respect for all the living world—as Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995) demonstrates. My aim is that the following considerations may join the modern movement that considers “caring for the land a necessity for material and spiritual well-being, as well as a moral obligation” (Gibson 2009, 37). In today’s world it is urgent that we, teachers and critics, insist on spreading the words and the perspectives of those that we assume can help society find new ways of caring for the earth, a purposefulness in line with Paula Gunn Allen who stated that parallel to the affirmation of tribal values and thought in the last decades of the twentieth century one can find not only voices claiming for “peace, freedom, and dignity,” but also an increasing “respect for the rights of our nonhuman relatives, plants and animals alike” (2004, xiv). Although my main focus will be Linda Hogan’s collection of essays, it is also my intention to discuss Leslie Van Gelder’s Weaving a Way Home (2008). Indeed, both Dwellings and Gelder’s text convey a deep sense of relatedness between humans and the nonhuman world and open up new ways to reconnect human hearts with the Earth. Moreover, I claim that Van Gelder’s text reiterates Hogan’s assertion that “Indian people must not be the only ones who remember the agreement with the land” (Hogan 1995, 94). Like Hogan, Van Gelder understands that telling stories and listening to others’ stories about the natural world is a way of learning about ourselves and our planet, drawing attention to a new kind of understanding and appreciation of our living world. The comparative analysis of the two books also aims to highlight that both Hogan’s and Van Gelder’s words express care for the whole cosmos and that their words stand for realms of enchantment, places

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of intense and holy spirituality. The act of reading Dwellings and Weaving a Way Home is the equivalent to the performance of a ceremony, during which the reader, dwelling in the enchanted world of words, will acquire a larger sensitivity that will conduct her/him to a deeper view about the liveliness of the Earth and how much it deserves human sympathy and respect. This perspective, I contend, is related with what Rita Felski addresses in Uses of Literature, namely when she argues that “aesthetic experience has analogies with enchantment” (2008, 25). In literature, Felski states, the sense of wonder comes through words, and through the way in which “selves interact with texts” (2008, 11). The result of this interaction is that readers transform not only their inward vision but are also “soaked through with an unusual intensity of perception and affect”4 (2008, 55). In this sense, I also argue that the act of reading Dwellings and Weaving a Way Home conveys a sense of wonder and respect for the land, urging the reader to respond individually and intensely to the world. Departing from the wonder words convey—or, in Felski’s terms, from the “experience of absorption and self-loss” (Felski 2008, 67)—my intent is to contribute to “the renewed attentiveness” and “sensorial empathy with the living land” (Abram 1997, 50) that both texts communicate. Ultimately, both Hogan’s and Van Gelder’s texts compel our attention toward the necessity of promoting the sense of unity among all things which constitute our planet. WORDS ARE INTRINSICALLY POWERFUL In The Spell of the Sensuous: Perceptions and Language in More-ThanHuman World, David Abram quotes a poem with which a Lakota medicine person addresses a stone; according to Abram, those words “do not speak about the world; rather they speak to the world, and to the expressive presences that, with us, inhabit the world” (1997, 51). This manner of interacting with the world, he recalls, carries a different significance from that of the Western civilization. Among indigenous people, language “seems to encourage and augment the participatory life of the senses,” useful “not simply to dialogue with other humans but also to converse with the more-than-human cosmos” (Abram 1997, 51). If I will contend that both Dwellings and Weaving a Way Home use a language that calls for a renewal of human relationships with the surrounding entities of earth and sky, a special meditation on the value of words for indigenous people is required. In “The Native Voice,” Scott Momaday states that “language and literature involve sacred matter” (1988, 5), adding that “at the heart of the American Indian oral tradition is a deep and unconditional belief in the efficacy of language” (1988, 7). These statements embody an important part of Native

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American thought, enabling us to better understand Momaday’s other affirmation: “words are intrinsically powerful. They are magical. By means of words can one bring about physical change in the universe” (1998, 7). Historically, Native American literatures were oral; stories, songs, prayers, and chants were all to be listened to in a communal context, recited through memory and performed in particular situations, conveying a religious sensibility, a sacredness that underlines a deep sense of attachment between people and the land. As A. La Vonne Brown Ruoff explains, Native Americans regard language as having a creative function: “American Indians hold thought and word in great reverence because of their symbolic power to alter the universe for good and evil.” Moreover, Ruoff expands, “the power of thought and word enables native people to achieve harmony with the physical and spiritual universe: to bring rain, enrich the harvest, provide good hunting, heal physical and mental sickness, maintain good relations within the group, bring victory against an enemy, win a loved one, or ward off evil spirits” (Padget 2001, 18). Thus, to Native Americans, language is the medium through which they make visible a deep belief: human beings are part of the landscape; survival and harmony depend upon cooperation among all things—human and nonhuman.5 In Linda Hogan’s memoirs, The Woman who Watches over the World, the Chickasaw poet and writer says that for a long time in her life she had “little of the language [she] needed to put a human life together” (Hogan 2001, 56). She assumes this situation to be the result of an imposed silence, by both family and history. The relief from moments of tension, she explains, came through language: “Words,” she says, “are the defining shape of a human spirit. Without them we fall. Without them, there is no accounting for the human place in the world” (Hogan 2001, 56). Although Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World was published in 1995, prior to Hogan’s memoirs issued in 2001, the author’s entire literary life stems from her search for a language that heals the human relationship with the land and with the animals, a language “that takes the side of the amazing and fragile life on our life-giving earth” (1995, 59). Thus, as Paula Gunn Allen refers, Hogan’s work evinces concern for the political issues of our time because she fears destruction: not only of Indian tribes but of all life. Consequently, Hogan uses language to articulate the connection between “the alienated vision of the technocracy she lives in and the living world of creatures, human and nonhuman, within which she dwells” (2004, 169). According to Allen, Hogan’s view translates a spirit-centered consciousness, for she is “conscious of the real nature of spirit presence in the world” (2004, 168). If words matter for Native American literatures, and namely for Linda Hogan’s creative world, for Leslie Van Gelder the term “Homo narrans— the storying species” (2008, 4) is the most accurate to define our species. Stories, Van Gelder, states, “help us to explain experience and time” (2008,

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4), functioning like “thistle seeds,” forming connections “among people, between humans and nonhumans, between jewels of memories we hold” (2008, 12). Van Gelder is an educator and archaeologist with interest in the relationship between place and story, and particularly in cultures that value place over time. Weaving a Way Home results from her research on place and story, and her belief in works and words that value place, community, and the natural world, and that the interconnection of these elements will continue to inspire a “geography of hope around the world” (2008, vii).6 Like Hogan, Van Gelder reminds her readers that “to be human, to be of a place, is to be a member of a community of living beings,” urging us, “members of the storying species,” to share words and stories, and thus to find “a way to weave our way home” (2008, 13), that is, to find “the place of our stories, of who we are and where we want to be” (2008, 58). Importantly, Van Gelder quotes David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous saying that in Abram’s analysis, “the sensuous experience of being of the world has become less important than being able to master descriptions of being in the world” (2008, 27). For Van Gelder, this suggests that the transformation of real places into linguistic abstractions leads to human emotional separation from nature, disrupting a relational communication, deepening the “rift between knowledge acquired first hand through sensuous, vocalized experience, reciprocal exchange, and knowledge acquired second hand through reading” (Van Gelder 2008, 26–27). In this sense, Van Gelder, like Hogan, writes about the perils of human alienation from land: “Emptiness and estrangement are deep wounds, strongly felt in the present time” (Hogan 1995, 82). In clear opposition to the modern scientific-technological paradigm, Van Gelder states that a literary genre of new wild tales has begun to emerge offering “a clearer path for illuminating complexity in the relationships we have with the wild.” Moreover, the author adds, this new form of writing “illuminates the power of our individual personal relationships with wildness, an environment woven into the internal through the outside” (2008, 34). Van Gelder names authors such as Terry Tempest Williams, Paul Gruchow, Gretel Erlich, and Gary Snyder, stating that all of them are telling stories “rooted in what might be some of the oldest human storytelling traditions of all, one we learned when we didn’t know a word for wilderness at all” (2008, 35). Significantly, in Weaving a Way Home Linda Hogan’s words used as epigraph insist that we have to find a language to define the term “wild”: “we have to work very hard and try with all our energy to find a way to speak what wilderness is” (Van Gelder 2008, 14), attesting that for Linda Hogan and Leslie Van Gelder words are powerful because they forge new stories in which the world is depicted alive and in which human connection to the fabric of other lives is a reality. Accordingly, Hogan insists, one should “hear the world new again” (1995, 51) for “our lives depend on

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this listening” (1995, 52). For Hogan, ordinary English is not able to say life in all its complexity: “ours is a language of commerce and trade, of laws that can be bent in order that treaties might be broken, land wounded beyond healing” (1995, 46). Such a language, she suggests, “is limited, emotionally and spiritually, as if it can’t accommodate such magical strength and power” (1995, 46). In this regard, Hogan proposes that a new language may be used to heal the broken connection between humans and earth, “a language that takes hold of the mystery of what’s around us and offers it back to us, full of awe and wonder” (1995, 59). This healing process is essential to Linda Hogan; not only does she state it in Dwellings but she also titles a volume of her poetry The Book of Medicines.7 In my view, both authors encourage their readers to search for a new language, one that may activate human enchantment for the earth and stimulate relationships with place and the stories which define them. This is also the thesis of James William Gibson in A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature, who acknowledges that industrial societies have disseminated the view of nature as a mere source for human use, treating the land as a commodity, contaminating and polluting air, water, soil, killing plants, animals, and people. Yet, as Gibson’s title indicates, there is a growing sense that there is a better way of caring for the land and of dwelling on the land; Hogan and Van Gelder search for words that may translate this need: “We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, have no place of our own within the creation” (Hogan 1995, 60). Or, as Van Gelder puts forward: we are all “looking for a language for love” (2008, 35). CEREMONIES: WORDS THAT HEAL AND RESTORE If the chapters “What holds the water, what holds the light” and “A different yield” are vital to understand Hogan’s perspective on the power of words, “All my relations” is a pivotal text to grasp the author’s relationship to her cultural world and to the means by which it enabled her to cultivate respect for the land. Significantly, the essay illuminates Hogan’s faith in the idea that relationships provide the foundations of any sense of dwelling. Storytelling is part of the ceremony and is “at the very crux of healing, at the heart of every ceremony and ritual in the older America.” The ceremony, Hogan continues, also includes “the unspoken records of history, the mythic past, and all the other lives connected to ours, our families, nations, and all other creatures” (1995, 37). In “All my relations,” Hogan’s intention is to narrate a sweat lodge ceremony, underlining the fact that during the ceremony “the entire world is brought inside the enclosure” (1995, 39): animals, water, wind,

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lithe willow branches, thunderclouds, air, sky, and stars. It is by the presence of this larger world in one site that it becomes “a place grown intense and holy” (1995, 40). Hogan’s description of the ceremony illustrates Paula Gunn Allen’s insistence on the purpose of a ceremony: “to integrate: to fuse the individual with his or her fellows, the community of people with that of the other kingdoms, and this larger communal group with the worlds beyond this one” (2004, 62). As the Keres poet and critic meaningfully demonstrates: “transformation, or more directly, metamorphosis, is the oldest tribal ceremony” (2004, 162). An idea that reinforces Hogan’s own words about ceremonies: “within ourselves, we bring together the fragments of our lives in a sacred act of renewal, and we reestablish our connections with others” (1995, 40). The ceremony is, then, a time to remember “that all things are connected” (1995, 40). In fact, the purpose of the ceremony is to remember: not only that the old connection between humans and nonhumans has been broken, but that mending that separation is a necessity. According to Linda Hogan, one way of doing it is to say the words “All my relations”; these words, she underlines, “create a relationship with other people, with animals, with the land” (1995, 40). This idea is the vital core not only of “All my relations,” but of Hogan’s whole book: to make the reader understand that humans belong to a cosmic universe, to a larger home. In a crucial passage, one can read: “the intention of a ceremony is to put a person back together by restructuring the human mind. This reorganization is accomplished by a kind of inner map, a geography of the human spirit and the rest of the world” (1995, 40). Thus, the purpose of the ceremony is to heal both the body and the spirit, a rite involving a process of unison and merging: “the animals and ancestors move into the human body, into skin and blood” (1995, 41). By the end of the ceremony, the participants, whose sympathy has been enlarged, evince a deep “sense of being at home,” and a more “compassionate relationship to and with our world” (1995, 41). My argument is that the readers of Dwellings mirror the transformation undergone by the participants in the ceremony described by Hogan. If, as proposed by Rita Felski, reading provides people with a magical experience, the “voluptuous and sometimes vertiginous pleasures of self-loss” (2008, 70), then, Hogan’s words offer the reader the possibility “to be pulled into an altered state of consciousness” (2008, 76), that is, they allow them to enter “a place of immense community and of humbled solitude,” noting that “all things are connected” (1995, 40). This passage not only clarifies Hogan’s cosmic notion of home, but helps us establish a connection with Gelder’s meditation on the power of words and stories and their capacity to help us find “a way to weave our way home” (2011, 13). For Leslie Van Gelder human capacity to form relationships is best reached through the sharing of stories: “how else can we know the mountains,

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canyons, and wild rivers inside ourselves and inside others, unless we hear the most extraordinary tales in the world—the stories of how we live our lives?” (2011, 12). Undoubtedly, Gelder, much like Hogan, pays attention to the course words and stories take to form connections, not only between humans but also with the larger world around. For instance, she says that to be in relationship with a place presupposes that one knows intimately “its patterns, its way of being” (2011, 46), a process in which “otherness and self blur” (2011, 47). Like Hogan, Gelder also makes clear that human journeys are always about relationships, forever “linking and connecting us to the fabric of other lives” (2011, 47). Gelder also uses the Lakota expression “Mitakuye Oyasin,” which translates as “All my/our relations,” suggesting that “we continually engage, whether consciously or unconsciously, with all our relations” (2011, 47). In parallel with Hogan, Gelder also states that the wealth of life is revealed “in the maintenance of relationships in a world of kinships where the life of one is interwoven or interconnected with the life of all others” (2011, 135). In this sense, Gelder also emphasizes the relevance of ceremonies, for she is aware that in an anthropocentric world there is no language and there are no ceremonies or forms of expressing “the love relationship many feel with the world around them” (2011, 140). Hence Gelder’s quotation of Vine Deloria in which he affirms that the essential theme of ceremonies “is one of gratitude expressed by human beings on behalf of all forms of life” (2011, 138). Clearly, reading Hogan and Van Gelder’s texts is, in James William Gibson’s words, an invitation to reenact our kinship with nature, and a return to the senses as proposed by David Abram; moreover, Hogan’s and Gelder’s texts illustrate the way the natural world may be experienced and “lived from within by the intelligent body” (Abram 1997, 48). Interestingly, as the author of The Spell of the Sensuous affirms, it is the recognition of the sensorial dimension of experience that helps us understand “the primacy of language and word magic in native rituals of transformation, metamorphosis, and healing” (Abram 1997, 60). To participate in ceremonies, like the one described by Hogan, helps to appreciate the world not as a static entity “but one in dynamic and continuous creation” (Gelder 2011, 138); furthermore, as the author of Dwellings claims, the outside world joins the human body, “as if skin contains land and birds” (Hogan 1995, 41). In addition, and as previously mentioned, to read Dwellings and Weaving a Way Home may be seen as a ceremony in itself, a performance that will function as a transformative experience, a doorway to “the sensuous and somatic qualities of aesthetic experience” (Felski 2008). Ultimately, in this regard, ceremonies serve to remind us that dwellings are places of large intertwined webs and relationships, nests holding “the pull of earth and life” (Hogan 1995, 61).

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WEAVING A DWELLING IN WORDS In the preface to Dwellings, Hogan writes that the book is an exploration of the human place in a larger world, connecting “the small world of humans with the larger universe” (1995, 12), something she illustrates further on in “Dwellings,” when she describes a fallen nest near her house, recognizing in it a piece of blue thread from one of her skirts entwined with feathers, sage and wild grass. It pleases her “that a thread of [her] life was in an abandoned nest, one that had held eggs and new life” (1995, 124). Using that image, Hogan intends to offer the nest as a symbol of how human and nonhuman lives interconnect and relate; how the whole world may be seen as a nest “in the maze of the universe, holding us” (1995, 124). Hogan’s concern with the idea of dwelling is restated in a recent interview—Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth—in which she affirms that her favorite place is home: “Where I live, the dwelling place.”8 Apparently, her answer provides a definition of home as a fixed point, a physical building around which she structures her spatial reality; however, it also relates to the larger and inclusive idea of home as postulated by Martin Heidegger. For the philosopher, home, or dwelling, means the “manner in which we humans are on earth” (Heidegger 1971), that is, the way in which we build relationships with the larger world. Hogan’s dwelling is also made of relationships and stories, a symbol integrating much more than just a material construction, and an existential building; her place is one “with and among things” (Heidegger 1971). In the referred interview, Hogan offers a larger view of home: by opening windows and doors, by planting hyssop everywhere in the room—so the humming birds will come into her house—she means “to maintain peace, to repair what is broken,” and, in addition, “to keep her own self in touch with the world” (Hogan 2016). In Weaving a Way Home, Van Gelder develops ideas about home similar to the ones offered by Heidegger’s and Hogan’s; for her, home is “a system of dynamics moving in place, time and memory, becoming a rich tapestry woven of location and movement, kinship and tradition, exploration and explication” (2011, 57). Home, she adds, is the place “of our stories, of who we are and where we want to be” (2011, 48). Homes, Van Gelder argues in another passage, “are crafted not only by walls and windows but by voice” (2011, 95), namely by the voices of the animated earth. In her own words: “we must make our world a place where our hands do not destroy so much as shape and in our inscapes find a way to dream, love, celebrate, give voice, and listen to the members of our greater family, the myriad beings with whom we share our world” (2011, 97). Hence, her view of home combines with those of both Heidegger and Hogan in the sense that for all of them human beings

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must forever “search anew for the nature of dwelling,” and “must ever learn to dwell” (Heidegger 1971). As an archaeological educator, Van Gelder studied the paintings of the Rouffignac caves, in French Dordogne, because she wanted to be familiar with “the stories that accompany the images of lines, or mammoths.” Those stories, she argues, helped her view the paintings as they “were meant to be. Alive” (2011, 3). Each of the seven essays in her book explores her central argument: to question the “complex relationship among people, place and story” (2011, 3), but her insistence on the meaning of cave painting is because she sees them as repository of stories, which, in turn, offer an “authenticity in humanity and humanity’s relationship with the natural world” (2011, 107). They represent, she contends, “the catalysts for storying and the imagination,” letting us know, through the interaction with the nonhuman, “what it means to be human and how we feel about ‘what we left behind’” (2011, 122). Hogan’s chapter “The caves” also establishes connections between caves and stories, namely creation stories, illustrating that in oral cultures there is no element of the landscape that is “void of expressive resonance and power” (Abram 1997, 75). Her fascination with caves derives from the fact that in many creation stories those are places “that bring forth life” (1995, 31), also indicating Hogan’s belief in “the feminine power of universal being” (Allen 2004, 264). Feminine and curative, the caves translate the power of inner earth, just like language translates “acts of interior consciousness” (1995, 81). For both Hogan and Van Gelder, one may reach home through language and words, that is, by being in contact with stored stories which remind us of our connection to an invisible world of connection and meaning—to the sunflower’s golden language, to the underground current, to the booming voice of an ocean storm, to the redwoods beating (Hogan 1995, 158). Caves are also a powerful symbol to denote the original internal structure of Native American consciousness and art, the “objective/internal perception of spiritual forces” (Allen 2004, 165), thus holding a central place in American Native women writing. Consequently, when Hogan writes about caves she is reinforcing the idea of internal sources, thus emphasizing that in Native American literatures words stem from within private bodies and consciences, and from within “tribal psychic reality” (Allen 2004, 165). In Dwellings, Hogan offers her readers stories, which result from her having watched, listened to, and felt the surrounding world; then, as the central image in “Waking up the rake” illustrates, she gathers words “to smooth the broken ground” of human souls, that is, through language Hogan wishes to weave a home, a place to cure “the severed trust we humans hold with earth” (1995, 153). The essay tries, once again, to make sense of the idea of relationship, the system through which dead animals, dead leaves, and dead wood contribute to the continuous resurrection of life: “we gather it back together

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again with great care, take the broken pieces and fragments and return them to the sky.” Referring to the art of raking—“a very fine art, one with rhythm in it, and life” (1995, 153)—Hogan is simultaneously describing the purpose of writing: “watching the turning over of life” (1995, 154), making human and nonhuman lives a visible cycle of correspondences and harmonies. Thus, Hogan shows her belief in the power of words and in the healing power of ceremonies, offering her readers the possibility of communion between self and the world, or, in another words, the reader, like the author before her/ him, is “restored to conscious harmony with the universe” (Allen 2004, 62). Grown out of “a lifelong love for the living world and all its inhabitants” (1995, 11), Hogan’s words carry in themselves “pivotal magic” (Abram 1997, 162), opening the reader’s mind and heart to other forms of “terrestrial intelligence” (1995, 11). Correspondingly, Van Gelder’s book builds a home in words, a home in which the reader is invited to reflect upon our common home as the place where our stories are rooted in, condensing “who we are and where we want to be” (2008, 57). Importantly, for Van Gelder, to transform words into a place one can call home means that as humans “we believe we have the power to be agents of change capable of turning internal imagination into reality” (2008, 91). Indeed, Hogan would agree with Van Gelder’s words: “the wealth of life is measured not in the acquisition of possessions but in the maintenance of relationships in a world of kinships where the life of one is interwoven or interconnected with the life of all others” (2008, 135–36). Thus, “the place grown intense and holy” (1995, 40) quoted in the title of this paper signifies that the reader enters a realm in which one is invited to relate to the world, to intertwine human life with visible and invisible relations— whether human or nonhuman. In The Reign of Wonder, quoted previously in this text, Tanner explains Emerson’s encouragement of a new way of observing translated as a need to communicate “some sort of verbal intimacy with the stuff of nature”; a state, Tanner adds, “in which words and things are at their closest” (1977, 40). According to Tanner, Emerson’s aspiration is that language be full of tangible factualness, for it would mean a new and renewed intimacy with those facts, which, in turn, would afford us the “quickest means of contact with the unifying sublime presence which runs through all things” (1977, 41). Emerson’s praise of the interrelation of things and people and of the wondering view it supposes illustrate tendencies which recur both in Dwellings and Weaving a Way Home; in this regard, both Hogan and Van Gelder present ways of looking at the (natural) world with renewed wonder. To conclude, I hope I have managed to demonstrate that Hogan’s and Van Gelder’s texts offer a “spirit-based vision,” awakened to “the real nature of spirit presence in the world” (Allen 2004, 168), compelling us to cultivate an acute awareness toward the living world, or, paraphrasing Linda Hogan, to

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enter a place of immense community and of humble solitude, where we sit together in our aloneness and speak, one at a time, our deepest language of need, hope, loss, and survival (1995, 40). I would have been successful if, as Hogan writes, “we remember that all things are connected” (1995, 40). NOTES 1. Cf. “All My Relations.” In Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, 40, eds. Linda Hogan. 2. Emerson was an avid reader of Carlyle’s work; as Tanner suggests, three of Emerson’s key ideas received inspiration from Carlyle’s work: “First, the need for a new attitude of ‘wonder’ towards nature; second, the conviction that any object, no matter how trivial, was a ‘symbol’ of God and could serve as a ‘window’ to ‘infinitude’ if viewed aright; third, the rejection of history in favor of the ‘everlasting NOW’” (Tanner 1965, 9). 3. See “Thoreau and Indian Selfhood” by Barbara Novak. The author tries to perceive how much Thoreau and Emerson knew ideas and beliefs of the American Native, underlining the irony that “the Indian circles, even as the extermination of their makers progressed, signified a quest for a wholeness of self in relation to nature and a sacral universe that has been a latent but persistent strain in American culture from the Transcendental moment until the present” (2007, 50). 4. See Felski definition of enchantment: “Time slows to a halt: you feel yourself caught in an eternal, unchanging present. Rather than having a sense of mastery over a text, you are at its mercy. You are sucked in, swept up, spirited away, you feel yourself enfolded in a blissful embrace. You are mesmerized, hypnotized, possessed. You strain to reassert yourself, but finally you give in, you stop struggling, you yield without a murmur” (Felski 2008, 55) 5. On the interrelationships between Native Americans and landscape, see Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Landscape, History, and Pueblo Imagination.” 6. See http:​/​/www​​.lesl​​ievan​​gelde​​r​.com​​/inde​​​x​.htm​​l. 7. Cf. Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines. 8. Linda Hogan, http:​/​/eco​​poeti​​csper​​pigna​​n​.com​​/wp​-c​​onten​​t​/upl​​oads/​​2016/​​08​/Li​​ nda​-H​​ogan-​​Write​​​rs​-in​​tervi​​ew​.pd​​f.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Allen, Paula Gunn. 2004. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press. Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Gibson, James William. 2009. A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature. New York: A Holt Paperback.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” http:​/​/www​​.wwf.​​gr​/im​​ages/​​ pdfs/​​pe​/ka​​toike​​in​/Fi​​losof​​i a​_Bu​​ildin​​g​%20D​​welli​​ng​​%20​​Think​​ing​.p​​df. Hogan, Linda. 1995. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York/ London: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2001. The Woman Who Watches Over the World. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. Meillon, Bénédicte. 2016. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. Interview: https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/2187. Momaday, Scott. 1988. “The Native Voice.” In The Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott, 5–15. New York: Columbia University Press. Monaghan, Patricia. 2009. “Weaving a Way Home.” Book Review. ISLE 16 (2): 385–86. Accessed May 26, 2016. doi: 10.1093/isle/isp017. Novak, Barbara. 2007. Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels, and Patterns in American Art and Literature. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Padget, Martin. 2001. “Native American Fiction.” In Beginning Ethnic American Literatures, edited by Helena Grice, Candida Hepworth, Maria Lauret, and Martin Padget, 10–63. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1996. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 264–75. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press. ———. 2000. “Listening to the Spirits: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.” In Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, edited by Ellen L. Arnold, 162–95. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Tanner, Tony. 1965. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Gelder, Leslie. 2008. Weaving a Way Home: A Personal Journey Exploring Place and Story. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Walls, Laura D. 2009. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Part II

DWELLINGS OF ENCHANTMENT IN LITERATURES OF PLACE, OLD, AND NEW

Chapter 6

Wonder, Enchantment, and the New Nature Writing Joshua Mabie

As recently as 2003, British writers lamented the derelict state of British nature writing. In a March 2003 Guardian article, Richard Mabey declared that Britain’s long and distinguished tradition of nature writing and filmmaking had been “replaced by a vapid and repetitive strain of guidebooks and pop science volumes” (Mabey 2003). Later that year, Robert Macfarlane affirmed much of Mabey’s grim assessment in a Guardian essay of his own. Like Mabey, Macfarlane looked back on a rich tradition of nature writing from Thomas Gray and John Clare to W. H. Auden and Vita Sackville-West, but Macfarlane too saw departure from this venerable tradition: “It is far harder,” he writes, “to come up with a list of names, comparable either in stature or in number, from the 1940s onwards.” Unlike Mabey who saw the trend toward uninspired, peering scientism continuing, Macfarlane tempered his grim assessment with hope. Toward the end of his essay Macfarlane directs his readers’ attention to some green shoots of a renaissance of British nature writing: “The vital signs [of a revival] are dispersed,” he writes, “but they are there” (Macfarlane 2003). A decade and a half after these Guardian comments on the sad state of British nature writing, the revival Macfarlane predicted is in full flower. Led by Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, and Helen Macdonald, British nature writers have won awards, critical acclaim, and massive popular success. Macfarlane followed his award-winning Mountains of the Mind (2003) with similarly lauded The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), and Underland (2019). These books have led to BBC specials, half a dozen literary awards, and the chair of the Booker Prize committee for Macfarlane. Scottish nature writer Kathleen Jamie won the Costa Poetry Award for her 2012 book of poems The Overhaul; her other poems and her nonfiction works Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) have prompted a score of 101

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scholarly essays. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk (2014) is a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it won the Samuel Johnson Prize, and it was named Costa Book of the Year. Nature writing is alive and well in Britain, a fact was not lost on the American nature writer Terry Tempest Williams who tweeted, “The Brits are on fire” in response to an announcement of readings by Macfarlane and Macdonald at the 2016 Balham Literary festival. Just as surprising and dated as Macfarlane’s reflection on the sad state of British Nature Writing is his admiration for the vigorous state of American nature writing. In the Guardian article, Macfarlane directly contrasts the dearth of quality British nature writing with what he saw a robust American tradition: “The withering away of British nature writing becomes dismayingly visible if we look across to North America,” Macfarlane observes, “American nature writing, indeed, has developed all the signs of a tradition in exceedingly good health: epiphytic sub-genres . . . university courses devoted to its exegesis, and a resistance from its leading practitioners to being included within its boundaries” (Macfarlane 2003). Macfarlane’s assessment is surprising today not only because of the revival of British Nature Writing, but also because of a noticeable falloff of American Nature Writing. While British nature writers have achieved popular and critical success, American nature writing has fallen on hard times. Indeed, the “Nature Writing is Dead” essay has become something of a fixture of American ecocriticism. David Gessner, one of the most important American nature writers active today, declared in his 2004 essay “Sick of Nature” that he “hated nature, or at least hated writing about it in [the] quiet and reasonable way” that the genre demanded. Dan Philippon introduces the Nature Writing entry in the Oxford Companion to Ecocriticism by asking, “After some three centuries of American nature writing, give or take a century or so, has the genre of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson outlived its usefulness? Is it time not merely to espouse ‘ecology without nature’ or extend our reading ‘beyond nature writing’ but to declare the death of nature writing?” (Philippon 2014, 391). William Deresiewicz explains Annie Dillard’s relative silence since 2000 as the inevitable result of the “her choice of materials, her idiosyncratic sensibility, [and] the very nature of her project,” an assessment that echoes Moira Farr’s earlier description of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as “nature’s last will and testament” (Deresiewicz 2016; Farr 1993, 19). While British nature writers have won awards, critical acclaim, and massive popular success, American nature writing has fallen on hard times. While the styles and interests of British nature writers vary greatly, the genre’s reinvigoration has been due, at least in part, to Robert Macfarlane’s, Kathleen Jamie’s, and Helen Macdonald’s ability to experience and represent the wonder of places long ago forgotten, disregarded, and overlooked. To date, American nature

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writers have been less successful in summoning and representing similar wonder. WONDER AND THE NEW NATURE WRITING Macfarlane, Jamie, and Macdonald are the most prominent members of a loose group of writers that Granta described in a 2007 special issue as New Nature Writers. In the editor’s note that prefaced the special issue, Jason Cowley defined the New Nature Writing in opposition to the same post-war nature writing that so underwhelmed Mabey and Macfarlane. According to Cowley, the “old nature writing” was “primarily a lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer.” The New Nature Writers, however, “approach their subject in heterodox and experimental ways,” explore close to home to find the “extraordinary in the ordinary”; they move through the landscape “with wonder, but also with care” (Cowley 2008, 9–11). Unlike Mabey, who saw nature writing’s fall into “pop science” and its preference for “technical wizardry” over emotion and imagination as the causes of its demise, Cowley sees an overly romantic sensibility as the cause of twentieth-century nature writers’ slump. Like Cowley, Macfarlane saw Romanticism as a problem for British nature writing. Macfarlane dates the November 1932 publication of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (a satire of melodramatic accounts of rural life and a send up of “all those gushingly naïve descriptions of ‘nature’ and ‘landscape’”) as the precise moment of British nature writing’s death (Macfarlane 2003). Kathleen Jamie also suggests that Romanticism is what ails nature writing but she argues that Macfarlane is complicit in the romanticization of British nature. Indeed, the basic argument of her scathing 2008 review of The Wild Places is that Macfarlane only encounters wildness in Britain by imposing his imagination on the landscapes he travels through. According to Jamie, an encounter with the empty, ahistorical wildness that Macfarlane seeks is only possible with a “willing suspension of disbelief,” that screens out the omnipresent evidence of human activity and transformation of the environment (Jamie 2008, 25). Jamie’s description of The Wild Places is not entirely accurate; she places too much emphasis on Macfarlane’s opening statement “to reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside of human history,” and does not give him enough credit for using the rest of the book to undercut this initial, flawed assumption (Macfarlane 2007, 7; Jamie 2008, 26). Macfarlane explicitly repudiates his own naïve understanding midway through the book, confessing, “My early vision of a wild place as somewhere remote, historyless, unmarked, now seemed improperly partial” (Macfarlane 2007, 316)

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Jamie admits that her critique of Macfarlane’s search for wild places “outside human history” is not fair: “Is all this fair?” Jamie asks rhetorically, “Well, no, of course not.” The “outside human history” bit was just an opening gambit—or a brave admission—and he will graciously recant in due course. Jamie’s concession is bracketed and undercut however by her description of Macfarlane “quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words” on one side, and the critique “But there is a lot of boldly going. Mostly alone, occasionally in the company of his friend and mentor the late Roger Deakin” on the other. Jamie is perhaps content to let this less-than-accurate picture of Macfarlane stand because the romance of wildness as a place “outside human history” is so common a trope in nature writing and because she is so familiar with the type of writer who would make such a claim. Jamie recognizes Macfarlane as one of the old romantic nature writers that Cowley describes; he appears to her at the beginning of the book as just another one of those “Lone Enraptured Male[s]! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, ‘discovering,’ and then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.” Jamie’s conclusion is hasty, but it is understandable given the history of old nature writing Cowley and even Macfarlane himself describe. The New Nature Writers navigate a way between peering, vapid scientism, and romantic disregard for the material world. Cowley points to the American Barry Lopez as an example of an antecedent who, like the New Nature Writers, successfully negotiates this double bind. Cowley asserts that Lopez’s writing about the North American Arctic “was not an exercise in self enthronement; he was not, like [Christopher] McCandless, a romantic adventurer and wilderness was not a screen on which he wanted to project his longings and needs.” Instead, Lopez “was engaged in nothing less than a struggle for exactitude: the struggle to find a language, free from cliché, in which to describe and explain in all its complicated particularity a landscape undergoing irrevocable change.” According to Cowley, the New Nature Writers “don’t simply want to walk into the wild, to rhapsodize and commune: the aspire to see with a scientific eye and write with literary effect.” They move “through the landscape with wonder, but also with care.” Cowley’s choice of the word wonder to describe the New Nature Writers’ posture toward the environments they encounter is significant. Wonder has been a recurring theme for many of the New Nature Writers. In June 2007, Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald, and R. F. Langley convened for a conference in Cambridge titled “Passionate Natures: Ecology and The Imagination.” The organizers of the conference staked a quotation by JBS Haldane—“The world shall not perish for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder”—as the central claim of the conference. Cultural geographer David Matless, who spoke on a panel with R. F. Langley, Richard Mabey,

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and Helen Macdonald, recalls the centrality of wonder to the conference and describes a sustained debate among the speakers over the two senses of the word present in Haldane’s quotation. While some of the conference speakers described wonder as an “an emotionally demonstrative, almost new age, enchanted wonder at things,” Matless notes that R. F. Langley in particular emphasized “a more restrained and questioning nature voice . . . a quizzical wondering about things” (Matless 2009, 185). Wonder can be both a noun and a verb (what a wonder . . . , I wonder . . .), and as Matless points out, it can express either awe at a marvelous object or a pondering. Common to all wonder’s definitions though is a posture of humility, receptivity, and, in Langley’s word, restraint. To encounter a wonder is to be overwhelmed by it, to wonder about something is to ponder it, to try to know it more fully. WONDER AND ENCHANTMENT These senses of wonder (noun and verb, being awestruck and pondering) share much in common with the notion of enchantment that Linda Hogan describes in the interview from the 2016 ecopoetics conference in Perpignan that appends this volume. Just as wonder is something to be discovered, not made, invented or imposed, Hogan considers enchantment to be an already existing presence rather than something magical that human beings add to or throw over their environment. “It is not so much that we are trying to re-enchant the world,” Hogan says, “[enchantment] is already there. It is that we are trying to keep our own selves in touch with that. It is the human being trying to remember that the entire world outside of them is a part of them, all enchanted.” At the end of her comments, Hogan connects her understanding of enchantment to her environmental ethic of openness to the world. Hogan describes her “little cabin” as enchanted because it is made of “the elements of [its] environment” and because its boundaries are permeable: dragonflies, hummingbirds, and even wasps move in and out of the cabin throughout the day. Hogan sees enchantment as an attunement or a “trying to remember” at work in Navajo ceremony and the Yaqui Deer Dance, but she also recognizes a European notion of enchantment that is very different from the Native American concept she describes. In Hogan’s description, this European enchantment is a ‘form of magic . . . practiced by Circe or the Sirens through song or story [that casts] a spell over the listener.” The Oxford English Dictionary confirms Hogan’s sense of the European definition of enchantment and documents a long European history of regarding it as a product of human art, skill, or rhetoric rather than a presence to which a person might become attuned. According to the OED, to enchant is to “charm, delight, enrapture.”

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It is to “exert magical influence upon; to bewitch, lay under a spell” and to “influence irresistibly or powerfully, as if by a charm, to hold spellbound; in a bad sense, to delude, or befool.” In contrast to Hogan’s notion of enchantment as a presence to which we might become attuned through openness and humility, the Sirens and Circe destroyed or mutilate those they enchanted. So too does Prospero, whose lines (“Now I want Spirits to enforce: Art to enchant”) the OED includes in its list of representative uses of enchant. While Hogan is wary of imposing on the environment that she and her cabin are a part of, Emerson lauds Prospero in Nature as a model for the poet of nature because he admires Prospero’s artistic and imaginative control over his world. Drawing on Prospero’s example, Emerson commands his readers to “Build therefore your own world . . . make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and . . . assert the predominance of the soul” (Emerson 1836, 33). Unlike Hogan’s humble receptivity but like Circe and the Sirens, Prospero influences his fellow castaways’ perception of the island for his own benefit and, often, to their detriment. Beyond representation, Prospero’s material transformation of his island contrasts sharply with Hogan’s relationship to the wasps that live in her bedroom. Hogan learns “from them, their intelligence, their way of communicating, how they recognized me and my participation in their lives” Circe, the Sirens, Prospero, and Emerson illustrate what David Matless observes about the reason for New Nature Writers’ suspicion of enchantment: “Enchantment, for all its joy and elation . . . can carry a submissive quality” (Matless 2009, 186). Unlike enchantment which influences, transforms, creates, and destroys environments with magic or art, wonder is a response of astonishment. Wonder’s noun form (“a marvelous object, a marvel”) and its verb form (“to be desirous to know or learn”) both suggest a humble receptivity that corresponds to the Navajo, Yaqui, and Chicksaw understanding of enchantment that Hogan describes. Over the past decade, Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, and Helen Macdonald have shown themselves to be more interested in recovering wonder at the world than they are in trying to reenchant it. Macfarlane engages enchantment in his 2015 Landmarks by way of lamenting the disenchantment of the world, but the particular type of enchantment that Macfarlane believes has been lost is far more similar to Hogan’s description of Navajo, Yaqui, and Chicksaw enchantment than to the OED’s European one. Unsurprisingly, given the affinity between his and Hogan’s understanding, Macfarlane draws upon Apache culture to define enchantment. For Apaches, Macfarlane writes, “language is used not only to navigate but to charm the land. Words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land—to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it” (Macfarlane 2015, 22). If Macfarlane’s phrase “charm the land” suggests an echo of the OED’s “exert

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magical influence upon,” his subsequent association of enchantment and wonder makes clear his understanding human beings’ role as perceivers not creators of enchantment. Macfarlane cites Max Weber’s definition of disenchantment as a replacement of “wonder” with “will,” and “mystery” with “mastery,” and he argues for a reenchantment that reprioritizes wonder over human dominion (Macfarlane 2015, 24). DISSOLVING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN HUMAN AND NONHUMAN, PAST AND PRESENT Most critics who have defined the New Nature Writing since its Granta introduction have identified the writers’ interest in demonstrating the artificiality or permeability of the boundary between human culture and nonhuman nature as a defining feature of the subgenre. Deborah Lilley, Jos Smith, Neal Alexander, Laura Severin point to New Nature Writers’ interest in the intermingling of human beings and nonhuman nature as a distinctive thematic concern of their work (Lilley 2013; Smith 2013; Alexander 2015; Severin 2011). Smith and Alexander are so assured of the centrality of this theme that they reject the label “New Nature Writing” as inaccurately emphasizing nature’s separation from human beings as an object of study. Smith suggests “Archipelagic Place Writing” as a replacement that more accurately reflects “the way its authors are concerned with how this cluster of islands and ecological niches is related in complex ways to human communities” (Smith 2013, 6). Alexander coins the label “Landscape Writing” to capture the writers’ “interest in the mutual entanglement of natural and cultural processes in any landscape” (Alexander 2013, 3). As David Matless points out however, literary engagement with contact points between human culture and nonhuman nature is continuous with “past conventions of nature writing” rather than a divergence (Matless 2009, 179). The New Nature writers are intensely focused on dissolving the boundaries between human culture and nonhuman nature, but Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie represent human and nonhuman nature interactions over much longer spans of time than British writers of writers of a decade or two before. Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie’s expanded historical frame allows them to represent a broader and more complex range of interactions between human culture and nonhuman nature, including instances where nonhuman nature overwhelms human culture through the process of succession. To engage this much longer history of human and nonhuman interaction and to describe the wonder they find in it, the New Nature Writers uncover and resuscitate long-established and intensely local words for particular landscape features and processes.

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Helen Macdonald represents the porous human/nonhuman interaction in H is For Hawk (2014) so intensely and so personally that the book might as well be titled Helen is a Hawk. The book is less about exerting human will over a raptor than it is about Macdonald becoming a human hawk.1 From Macdonald’s description of trying to contort her body into hawk form as a little girl by sleeping with her arms folded behind her back to describing the anxiety she shares with her goshawk Mabel when they encounter human strangers on the streets of Cambridge, Macdonald shows the ease with which she slips into an experience of the world that she shares with the hawk on her arm. Just as Macdonald slips between human and hawk perspectives, she also slips between the past and the present. H is for Hawk is a memoir of Macdonald’s time training Mabel, but it is also a literary and cultural history of falconry. Macdonald experiences Mabel and the fields where she flies her in the present, but she filters these experiences through a long history of human– hawk interactions. Macdonald begins one description of T.H. White’s experience training his hawk, Gos, in the past tense of the objective literary scholar, writing White was “caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent in the English sky, of all the imaginary lines men and time had drawn upon the landscape” (Macdonald 2014, 104). Writing as a cultural historian, Macdonald distances herself from White’s nostalgia by linking it to Jed Esty’s description of the interwar “pastoral craze” that sent thousands of new walkers out into the English countryside looking for an encounter with the Merrie England of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Arthur, and Druid worshippers. In the very next paragraph, however, Macdonald slips out of the past tense and objective literary history into what sounds like present-tense narration, “The cloud-base is low today. It does not matter,” she begins as if she is describing her own assessment of the flying conditions. The next sentence reveals that she is describing White’s experience though, not her own: “He is not flying today. He is walking . . .” What appears to be the present tense in these sentences is actually the historical present, and Macdonald uses the tense ambiguity to blend her own experience with White’s and with the thousand years of British falconers that came before them. Macfarlane makes similar leaps back into the past throughout The Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways (2012); indeed, Macfarlane’s coming to grips with history may well be the dominant theme of these last two books of his trilogy. Jos Smith describes The Wild Places as a bildungsroman, where Macfarlane leaves behind his naïve desire to find a truly wild (that is, a remote and purely nonhuman place) to instead embrace a definition of wildness that includes the nearby, the ordinary, and the human.2 Smith is right to categorize the work as a description of Macfarlane’s growth, but he overlooks the

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explicitly historical claim in Macfarlane’s description of that growth. Early in The Wild Places Macfarlane describes his naïve belief that “To reach a wild place was to step outside of human history” as a preliminary definition of wildness (Macfarlane 2007, 7). Throughout the rest of the book, though, Macfarlane rejects this original assumption. After visiting Ireland, Macfarlane comes to understand that the Burren’s wildness comes not from its lack of human beings or its absence of human impress on the land but from what he calls its “thick” human and nonhuman history. The material record of this history is literally “thick.” Macfarlane observes that 5000 years of human graves honeycomb land and that limestone tombs of trillions of sea creatures were layered and compacted into a “necropolis of unthinkable dimensions” epochs before the graves were dug (Macfarlane 2007, 163, 173). That the graves are dug into, filled with, and marked with limestone means that the human and the nonhuman history are literally, materially imbricated not merely in an instant of experience and representation but over the course of millennia. As a result of this experience with the Burren, Macfarlane concludes, “Wildness as inhuman, outside of history had come to seem non-sensical, irresponsible” (Macfarlane 2007, 176). Macfarlane extends this theme in The Old Ways, a book explicitly focused on exploring tracks worn in the landscape by human beings over very long periods of time. Macfarlane begins the book with an epigram from Emerson that makes an historical claim: “All things are engaged in writing their history,” Macfarlane quotes, “ Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures” (Macfarlane 2012, 5). Later, Macfarlane explains his relationship to the landscapes he walks, writing that they insist that he take their history into account even as he encounters them in the present: “The journeys told here take their bearings from the distant past, but also from the debris and phenomena of the present, for this is often a double insistence of old landscapes: that they be read in the then but felt in the now” (Macfarlane 2012, 33). As in the Burren episode in The Wild Places, Macfarlane works his way back into the ever more “distant past” in The Old Ways. In the opening chapter, he makes his way on a Roman road (ca. 43–410CE), past an Iron Age ring-fort (ca. 800 BCE to 100 CE), and beside a Bronze Age burial barrow (ca. 2500 BCE to 800 CE). Interspersed with these “bearings from the distant past” are more immediate and transitory objects and phenomena: moonlight, a “bird moving in a tall ash tree,” snow, and the taste of whisky (Macfarlane 2012, 8–9). The road, ring-fort, and barrow are subtle features that are easily overlooked in a workaday world illuminated by cones of car headlights, but Macfarlane’s responsiveness to them (his route is determined by them; he follows the road, skirts the fort, tracks over the barrow) at a walking pace allows him to wonder at the past history in the present landscape.

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Macfarlane’s and Macdonlad’s engagement with the distant past contrasts with that of Roger Deakin, Macfarlane’s friend and mentor. Waterlog is a beautiful book and Deakin’s attention to overlooked and forgotten places in Britain prefigures much of what the New Nature Writers would do a decade and a half after its publication, but when compared to these newer nature writers, Waterlog has the feel of an elegy to now-lost past that was purer, simpler, and more beautiful. Deakin sees public swimming pools abandoned, rights of way revoked, and rivers polluted over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout Waterlog, Deakin prefers the idiom “used to” and with the conditional perfect “would have.” His description of swimming the Cam through Cambridge is but one example: Competitors would swim down the backs [of the colleges] . . . Just as you were feeling the cold at Magdalen Bridge, you would swim past the outflow of the old electricity power station, and the water would turn miraculously warm. The swim ended at Jesus Green, and was eventually abandoned in the early sixties because of the polluted state of the river. In earlier years the river water had been so clear that Charlie Driver would often put a glass of it on the table in the pavilion at the bathing sheds to extol its purity. (Deakin 1999, 42)

Farther up the Cam, Deakin again laments its change: I went up to Grantchester, ignoring Byron’s pool because it is now ruined as a swimming hole by an ugly concrete weir and the constant drone of the M11 a few hundred yards away. Byron and Rupert Brooke who both loved this place and swam naked here would hardly recognize it . . . The nymphs, like T.S. Eliot’s in The Waste Land, are departed, and have left no addresses. (43)

In contrast to Deakin’s linear account of environmental degradation from the 1950s to the late twentieth century,3 Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie represent uneven, nonlinear histories of the ebb and flow of human transformation of environments and natural succession that covers up but never completely effaces human impacts on the land. Whereas Deakin sees loss and degradation separating him from beautiful and pure swimming experiences of the inter- or post-World War-Two period, Macdonald and Jamie see nonhuman nature reestablishing itself in abandoned human landscapes. Macdonald begins H is for Hawk with a description of the Brecklands as a thoroughly humanized landscape, it is “a land of twisted pine trees, burned out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and US Air Force bases” (Macdonald 2014, 3). Where most visitors to the Brecklands would find only broken, used up forest, Macdonald finds goshawks. To encounter the wonder of the place and its birds, not merely its squalor, Macdonald moves through the landscape

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in “very old and emotional ways . . . experiencing forms of attention and deportment beyond conscious control” (5). “Old ghostly intuitions that have tied sinew and soul together for millennia” lead Macdonald to a pond that was excavated by a German bomb that is now ringed with sand sedge and a variety small birds. She also encounters “Great tracts of reindeer moss . . . ancient flora growing on exhausted land,” flint shards made by Neolithic craftsmen, and the remains of giant rabbit warrens that wrought ecological disaster in the seventeenth century (6). Her timeframe for considering human and nonhuman interaction is not just the post-World War Two period of “fences, tattoo parlours and US Air Force golf courses,” but the Restoration (warrens), the Neolithic (flint shards), and the Pleistocene (reindeer moss) (3, 6). Macdonald loves the Brecklands because it is a “ramshackle wildness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness,” but also because it is “rich with the sense of an alternate countryside history” (7). Like Macdonald, Kathleen Jamie considers changes to landscapes over very long periods of time and her expanded historical frame helps her to see the uneven processes of human settlement, environmental degradation, and recovery. Instead of making the elegiac move to show development crowding out formerly wild or pastoral places, Jamie’s poems often describe scenes of incomplete human dominance over the landscape and natural succession after humans depart. In the poem “Glacial,” Jamie relates her struggle to move through a mountainous landscape to the Romans’ inability to conquer Scotland. A thousand-foot slog, then a cairn of old stones – hand-shifted labour, and much the same river, shining             way below as the Romans came, saw,    and soon though the better of. Too many mountains, too many          wanchancy tribes whose habits we wouldn’t much care for (but probably could match), Too much grim north, too much faraway snow Let’s bide here a moment, catching our breath and inhaling the sweet scent of whatever          whin-bush is flowering today and see for miles, all the way hence to the lynx’s return, the re-established wolf’s. (Jamie 2015, 4)

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Human presence is apparent in this landscape (the cairn, the wanchancy tribes, and Jamie herself “biding a moment” show that this place is not a historyless, nonhuman wild). The Highland landscape has, however, resisted human attempts to subdue it for millennia. At the end of the poem, Jamie anticipates the inevitable reestablishment of lynx and wolf population, rather than a ski resort or a subdivision of vacation homes. Instead of framing her view of the landscape with reference to the early twentieth century, Jamie reaches back to Roman antiquity and the Pleistocene for perspective that allows her to see expansion and contraction of human impact on the landscape. Jamie’s prose similarly challenges the notion of the linear regress of human conquest and degradation of beautiful, wild, natural environments. In Sightlines (2012), Jamie considers the scant evidence of human inhabitation of the remote North Atlantic island St. Kilda: “A ‘cultural landscape’ they called it, but up on the island’s heights, giddied by the cloud shadows over the turf, and by sea and sky, and distracted everywhere by birds, you could be forgiven for asking where, in this wild place, was the culture? But soon I understood that, ranged along the clifftops, camouflaged by stone and turf, were yet more cleits. They were everywhere” (Jamie 2012a, 149). Human beings have transformed this landscape over centuries of inhabitation, but in the twenty-first century “stone and turf” have slowly but persistently covered up the evidence of human culture. THE LANGUAGE OF WONDER Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie experience wonder through careful attention to places’ long histories, but representing wonder presents a challenge: how can writers give their readers the emotional charge of enchantment without subordinating the material world to their imagination? How can writers provide readers with access to the wonder of the landscape instead of their own prose? Jamie argues that Macfarlane’s “lovely, honeyed prose” spills over into enchantment. The danger of Macfarlane’s style, she contends, is that in his writing, it is not the “wild places we behold, but the author . . . this begins to feel like an appropriation, as if the land has been taken from us and offered back, in a different language tone and attitude” (Jamie 2008, 26). David Matless similarly contrasts Macfarlane’s “conspicuously wrought prose” with Jamie’s “carefully honed colloquial modesty” (Matless 2009, 186). Matless’s stylistic distinction is oversharp though, and Jamie’s assessment overlooks her and Macfarlane’s similar use of archaic and intensely local words to describe the environments that they experience. To engage the long history of human and nonhuman interaction and to describe the wonder they find in it, Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie

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uncover and resuscitate long-established and geographically circumscribed words much as they uncover wonderful landscape features and processes. In Landmarks, Macfarlane makes explicit the degree to which he depends upon found words to create the wonderful prose that so distinguishes his works. As Macfarlane notes in the opening chapters of Landmarks, particular and exact words for landscape are endangered. If the words are lost, Macfarlane argues, so too will be our ability to represent and experience the features and processes they describe. It is an archival impetus that causes Macfarlane to present a glossary of endangered landscape words after each one of Landmark’s chapters. In contrast to technical or scientific language which is imposed upon the landscape at a particular instant (what Hobsbawm might describe as “invented” language) the words that Macfarlane collects have developed over long periods of time. Hobsbawm might call this “old,” or “genuine” language, but “old-growth” language seems more precise in this context (Hobsbawm 1993, 1–14). Rather than imposing a generalized or global vocabulary on the landscape to appropriate or enchant it for his ends, Macfarlane describes the landscapes he travels through in words that people developed over generations of close contact with the land. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane uses Hebridean terms to distinguish three separate types wet moorland that most nonresidents would simply collapse into general term like bog or wetland: “So it was that these routes became cairned on the moor as guide-lines designed to avoid boglach (general boggy areas), blàr (flat areas of the moor that can be very boggy) or, most dangerously, breunlach (sucking bog disguised by the alluringly bright green grass that covers it), and lead the walker safely to tulach na h-àirigh— the site of the shieling” (Macfarlane 2012, 142–43). Because he recognizes that language has the power to shape our sense of place, Macfarlane seeks a precise, particularized, and intensely local vocabulary to describe places (Macfarlane 2015, 25). He acknowledges that Landmark’s “Glossaries do not constitute [some] unwriteable phrasebook,” but he hopes that “they might offer a sight of the edge of the shadow of its impossible existence” (Macfarlane 2015, 32). Macdonald and Jamie are less conspicuous with their use of old-growth language to describe their experiences in particular places, but both authors are similarly attentive to words’ historical and geographical range. Macdonald recuperates an archaic language of falconry to describe her relationship with Mabel. Some of these words or phrases—“hoodwink” or “watch like a hawk,” and “carriage,” for example—persist today as dead metaphors, but Macdonald’s literal use of them in their original context returns a vitality to them that has been lost (Macdonald 2014, 73, 86, 97). Macdonald describes the “disconcertingly complex vocabulary” of falconry, where “wings were sails, claws pounces, tail a train . . . Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they feak. When they defecate they mute. When they shake themselves they rouse. On

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and on it goes in a dizzying panoply of precision” (47). Macdonald notes that historically, the specialized vocabulary of falconry was a marker of class and distinction that separate people from the experience of hawks, but for Macdonald, “the words weren’t about social fear when I was small. They were magic words, arcane and lost” (48). Jamie uses Scots words throughout the poems of The Overhaul (2012) and especially The Bonniest Companie (2015). In “The Longhouse,” Jamie describes an old house as “Hefted to its own lan/like its few yowes” (Jamie 2012b, 12). While “yowes” is an archaic spelling of ewes that echoes Robert Burns (“Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes”), “hefted” is used by highland shepherds use to describe sheep that have become habituated to place.4 Even more particular, long-established, and closely tied to the land is Jamie’s landscape diction in The Bonniest Companie, a collection of poems written in the months leading up to the Scottish independence referendum.5 Jamie defines the word “Merle” that titles the third poem of The Bonniest Companie for her non-Scots readers (“A merle is a blackbird”) but leaves most of the other local words she uses unglossed.6 “Thon Stane” begins, “Thon earthfast boulder by the bothy door,/. . . stood there in his mossy boots/like just this very forenoon/ wandered down the brae” (emphasis added, Jamie 2015, 6). Another bothy (“A building used to provide accommodation, sometimes in a single room, for (esp. unmarried male) farmworkers or other labourers” [OED]) appears in the opening lines of the collection’s next poem “The Lighthouse”: As good a climb as any, now the day’s near done    the hill ahent the bothy a dry burn then a basalt knuckle like a throne,     should you care to queen it among shivery bracken        a wheen grazing sheep. (Jamie 2015, 7)

Jamie, Macdonald, and Macfarlane all seek to avoid domination of the landscapes they experience by describing them in places’ own terms. Their attention to old-growth language is evidence of the wonder and care that characterizes their movement through and writing about their environment. PROSPECTS: A NEW AMERICAN NATURE WRITING If the new British nature writing depends upon engagement with landscapes’ ancient history and old-growth language for its success, it is easy to see why

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recent American nature writers have not found similar success. American nature writers have long failed to fully reckon with their deep environmental histories. Thoreau’s description of the history of his cabin-site at Walden Pond illustrates just how short American landscape history is. Macfarlane, Macdonald, and Jamie consider millennia of human–nature interactions, but Thoreau’s history of the former inhabitants of Walden Pond extends back little more than a century as he works his way through the stories of Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, Brister Freeman, the Stratton family, and Hugh Quoil. Before these stories is only “an extinct nation [that] had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land” (Thoreau 1992, 105). Acts of Enclosure, the Clearances, famines, and emigration complicate twenty-first century Britons’ relationship to their environment, but non-Native Americans are especially cut off from the deep environmental history of their landscapes by their violent history of Indian removal. Until Americans reckon more fully with this history, non-Native American writers will continue to find it difficult to work their way into their deep past. Nowhere is the separation of Americans from their environmental history more apparent than in the dearth of old growth American landscape words. Barry Lopez’s wonderful dictionary (which Macfarlane cites as an inspiration for Landmarks) Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (2006) contains only a handful of Native words for American landscape features or phenomena.7 The book is filled with specific words for particular landscape features, but the overwhelming majority of them are imported words imposed on the landscape by settlers. To be sure American maps are filled with remnants of ancient descriptions, but most of these like Chicago, Nebraska, and Mississippi exist as transliterated corruptions and dead metaphors. More particularly, a brief statement on “common or vernacular” names for Wisconsin plants in John T. Curtis’s The Vegetation of Wisconsin testifies to the thinness of landscape vocabulary for the place where I live. Curtis observes that “Frequently the same common name is applied to more than one kind of plant, furthermore, the majority of plants of Wisconsin have never received common names because of their rarity or inconspicuousness” (Curtis 1974, 5). Curtis’s assessment overlooks the thousands of particular and exact names for plants, animals, features, and phenomena that Wisconsin’s earliest inhabitants developed over centuries of close contact with the land, yet he is right that very few of these words persist today in common use. Just a fraction of this landscape lexicon survived my ancestors’ clearance of the land and removal of its former inhabitants. 175 years is not nearly enough time for replacement words to sprout, much less grow to maturity. New American nature writers may well find other ways to popular and critical success, but until they reckon with the history of Native American displacement and the loss of particular, exact, and long-established language that attends that displacement, American nature writers will continue

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to struggle to summon the wonder that New British Nature Writers have encountered. All is not lost, however. As Macfarlane wrote about British nature writing at the turn of the millennium, “the vital signs of an . . . [American] revival are dispersed but they are there” (Macfarlane 2003). In Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), Robin Wall Kimmerer poses the example of Nanabozho, the Original Man, as a way to renew our wonder at and restore a right relation to the world we inhabit (206). Nanabozho’s role, according to Kimmerer, “was not to control or change the world as a human, but to learn from the world how to be human.” He did this by “learn[ing] the names of all beings. He watched them carefully to see how they lived and spoke with them to learn what gifts they carried to discern their true names” (Kimmerer 2013, 208). Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a plant ecologist, acknowledges the possibility of encountering the world like Nanabozho, discerning particular, poetic names of species instead of merely imposing Latin binomials onto them. In a remarkable gesture of grace and generosity, Kimmerer holds out the possibility that the native words, stories, and relationship to the land that she describes can be extended to the descendants of settlers who sought to erase these very words, stories and relationships. “America has been called the home of second chances,” Kimmerer writes, “For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place” (Kimmerer 2013, 207). If a new American nature writing is to sprout, non-native American writers must surely “become naturalized to place, . . . throw off the mind-set of the immigrant . . . live as if this is the land that feeds [them], as if these are the streams from which [they] drink, that build [their bodies and fill [their spirits].” To do this, new American nature writers must also “meet [their] responsibilities . . . to take care of the land as if [their] lives and the lives of all [their] relatives depend on it” (Kimmerer 2013, 214). If American writers can accept Kimmerer’s invitation with humility commensurate with the generosity of her offer, we might look forward not only to a new and vigorous tradition on this continent but also to the possibility of helping heal settler Americans’ broken relationship to the earth.

NOTES 1. Cf. Macdonald, H is for Hawk, 85, “I was turning into a hawk.” 2. Smith, “An Archipelagic Literature,” 7. 3. There are exceptions to this narrative of regression in Waterlog of course: “The Dart used to be polluted by dieldrin from the sheep dip chemicals washed out of wool

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at a carpet factory in Ashburton . . . to make matters worse, the detergent used to wash the wool began over-enriching the river with phosphate and froth, but at last the river seems to be recovering, and the otters with it” (129). Deakin’s last book, Wildwood (London: Penguin, 2007), published posthumously in 2007, just eight years after Waterlog, is far more similar in historical scope to Macfarlane’s, Macdonald’s, and Jamie’s works. See especially the chapter “The Sacred Groves of Devon,” 110–25. 4. See, for an example of contemporary usage, James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape (2015). 5. In the “Notes and Acknowledgements” that follow the poems of The Bonniest Companie (London: Picador, 2015), 61, Jamie writes, “In 2014 I strove to write a poem a week. Those poems became this book. The Scottish independence referendum was held on 18/9/14.” 6. “Merle” is the common French name for blackbird, but the Oxford English Dictionary notes its distinctive Scottish poetic use: “Perhaps never in general use but occurring frequently in Scottish poetry from the 15th cent. onwards. Drayton adopted from Scottish poetry the traditional association of ‘mavis and merle’, which he frequently repeats, and which in the 19th cent. often appears in English and American poetry in imitation of Scott or Burns. As used by Caxton (quot. 1483) and Philemon Holland, the word is an independent adoption from French.” 7. I counted just fourteen words in the dictionary that grew out of the American landscape, as opposed to words that were imposed upon it by settlers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Neal. 2015. “Theologies of the Wild: Contemporary Landscape Writing.” Journal of Modern Literature 38 (4) (Summer): 1–19. Cowley, Jason. 2008. “Editor’s Letter: The New Nature Writing.” Granta 102: 7–12. Curtis, John. 1974. The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Deakin, Roger. 1999. Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain. London: Vintage Books. ———. 2007. Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. New York: Free Press. Deresiewicz, William. 2016. “Where Have You Gone Annie Dillard?” The Atlantic, March 2016. http:​/​/www​​.thea​​tlant​​ic​.co​​m​/mag​​azine​​/arch​​ive​/2​​016​/0​​3​/whe​​re​-ha​​ve​ -yo​​u​-gon​​e​-ann​​​ie​-di​​llard​​/4268​​43/. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1836. “Nature.” In The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, edited by Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson, 8–48. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971. Farr, Moira. 1993. “The Death of Nature Writing.” Brick 47: 16–27. Gessner, David. 2004. “Sick of Nature.” In Sick of Nature, 3–12. Lebanon, New Hampshire: Dartmouth University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. “Introduction.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Jamie, Kathleen. 2008. “A Lone Enraptured Male.” Review of The Wild Places, edited by Robert Macfarlane. London Review of Books 30.5 (March 6, 2008): 25–27. ———. 2012a. Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World. New York: The Experiment. ———. 2012b. The Overhaul. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. ———. 2015. The Bonniest Companie. London: Picador. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Lilley, Deborah. 2013. “Kathleen Jamie: Rethinking the Externality and Idealisation of Nature.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 17.1: 16–26. Lopez, Barry, ed. 2006. Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. Mabey, Richard. 2003. “Nature’s Voyeurs.” The Guardian, March 14, 2003. https​:/​/ ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​003​/m​​ar​/15​​/feat​​uresr​​eview​​s​.​gua​​rdian​​revie​​w1. Macdonald, Helen. 2014. H Is for Hawk. New York: Grove Press. Macfarlane, Robert. 2003. “Call of the Wild.” The Guardian, December 5, 2003. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​003​/d​​ec​/06​​/feat​​uresr​​eview​​s​.g​ua​​rdian​​revie​​w34. ———. 2007. The Wild Places. London: Granta Books. ———. 2012. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. New York: Viking. ———. 2015. Landmarks. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2019. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: Norton. Matless, David. 2009. “Nature Voices.” Journal of Historical Geography 35 (1) (January): 178–88. Philippon, Daniel. 2014. “Is American Nature Writing Dead?” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 391–407. New York: Oxford University Press. Rebanks, James. 2015. The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. New York: Flatiron Press. Severin, Laura. 2011. “A Scottish Ecopoetics: Feminism and Environmentalism in the Works of Kathleen Jamie and Valerie Gillies.” Feminist Formations 23 (2) (Summer): 98–110. Smith, Jos. 2013. “An Archipelagic Literature: Re-framing ‘The New Nature Writing.’” Green Letters 17 (1): 5–15. Thoreau, Henry David. 1993. Walden: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton.

Chapter 7

Eco-memoir, Belonging, and the Ecopoetics of Settler Colonial Enchantment Tom Lynch

The genre we might refer to as “eco-memoir” involves the writing of self into place and place into self. In many ways it is an ideal genre for the cultivation of an ecological awareness and bioregional identity, as key texts such as Thoreau’s Walden or Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which we might consider to be early versions of eco-memoirs, demonstrate. It is arguably one of the literary forms most suited to attuning us to the “land’s wild music,” as Mark Tredinnick, the author of another eco-memoir, The Blue Plateau, has phrased it. The genre clearly has much to offer in the development of a bioregionally informed place-based identity and ecopoetics of dwelling.1 On the other hand, however, to the degree that the genre works to generate a “becoming-native-to-this-place” sense of belonging among members of settler colonial societies, it risks complicity with the settler colonial project of, in Patrick Wolfe’s useful phrase, “the logic of elimination” of the Native people (Wolfe 2004, 387). It is a genre that can be seen to at least unintentionally supplant, replace, or efface indigenous claims to prior and, equally importantly, to continuing belonging. It could be seen to, if not physically, then at least discursively eliminate the Native. That is, from a purely ecocritical perspective the eco-memoir is an ideal genre, but from a settler colonial studies perspective it is suspect, and for that reason, in order to promote a socially just bioregionalism, we ought to be prepared to analyze and put under critique one of ecocriticism’s and nature writing’s most cherished genres. As an example of the genre and the issues it raises I would like to consider Jerry Wilson’s Waiting for Coyotes Call: An Eco-Memoir from the Missouri River Bluff, published in 2008. Like many such memoirs, his is situated in recognizably settler colonial circumstances in which “frontier” ideologies 119

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continue to predominate. His rural eastern South Dakota setting is not too far from DeSmet, the location of the homestead made famous by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her “Little House” books. DeSmet continues to celebrate itself as “the little town on the prairie,” and commemorations of pioneering are a mainstay of the local economy. Ole Rolvaag’s novel of nineteenth-century Norwegian pioneers, Giants in the Earth, is also set nearby. Eastern South Dakota is a region with a strong tradition of pioneering literature in the settler colonial tradition; many of the region’s residents continue to promulgate a strong social and personal identity as part of that tradition. In various ways Wilson’s text simultaneously reanimates and resists these settler colonial frontiering and homesteading tropes. Like many books in the eco-memoir genre, his is concerned with the idea of bioregional belonging and of “becoming native” to place, a concept at once necessary and problematic. I want to examine how his eco-memoir negotiates the fraught territory where a discourse and ecopoetics of belonging-to-place intersects with the discourse and poetics of the settler colonial frontiering imaginary as well as the key role of a powerfully affective landscape enchantment in that process. Books such as Wilson’s, environmentally inflected and bioregionally specific memoirs and autobiographies, are an increasingly common genre in the United States, Australia, Canada, and other Anglophone settler colonial nations. This is not a coincidence. Environmentally attuned people of settler ancestry who reside in these still rather recently colonized places often feel they lack a deep belonging to place, a circumstance exacerbated by the tendency of Americans, in particular, to move frequently to new locations. It is, indeed, out of such circumstances that bioregionalism developed in the 1970s. Bioregionalists often lament the rootlessness of settler North Americans. Think, for example, of the work of Wendell Berry, or of Scott Russell Sanders, whose best-known book is titled Staying Put. Early bioregionalism drew inspiration from indigenous peoples, no doubt romanticized at times, but not completely wrong-headed, and the literature of early bioregionalism is replete with an awareness, at times a palpable envy, of the deep connections indigenous people had, and these members of settler cultures wished they had, with their local ecology. In their 1977 manifesto that inspired the bioregional movement, “Reinhabiting California,” Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann propose that “Once all California was inhabited by people who used the land lightly and seldom did lasting harm to its life-sustaining capacity. Most of them have gone. But if the life destructive path of technological society is to be diverted into life sustaining directions, the land must be reinhabited” (Berg and Dasmann 2015, 36). Note in particular the “most of them have gone” passage and then the subsequent need to reinhabit the place these indigenous people had once inhabited. The basic pattern suggested is: Indians lived in harmony with nature; we settler colonials eliminated them;

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we need to learn to be more like them. As a felt need and as an aspiration bioregionalism clearly grew out of settler colonial circumstances, and it could be fruitfully understood as in part a response to those circumstances. I am not suggesting that bioregionalism is inherently and of necessity complicit with settler colonialism; in fact in some ways I think it could be seen as an effort to reconcile settler societies with indigenous ones. For example, the materials published by Peter Berg’s Planet Drum Foundation (a name inspired by the image of an indigenous Sami shaman) were highly supportive of land claim efforts of indigenous people not only in North America but around the planet. Berg’s own broadside manifesto, “Amble Towards Continent Congress,” published as a response to the U.S. bicentennial celebrations of 1976, is a remarkable early expression of the concepts now familiar in settler colonial studies, denouncing both the social and ecological destructiveness of the invader society and offering bioregionalism as an ethical alternative (Berg 1976). This and similar documents convincingly represent bioregionalism as a decolonial response to the ravages of settler colonialism in North America and elsewhere. Planet Drum publications, such as their Raise the Stakes series, regularly included articles by Native Americans and about Native cultures. They publicized and supported indigenous land struggles. And at various bioregional gatherings and “congresses” Planet Drum and other bioregional groups organized sessions on local Native culture and issues and then considered how to integrate them into bioregional practice. However, although I think many bioregionalists were and continue to be sincerely interested in practicing a counter-settler-colonial agenda, much of the discourse and poetics of bioregionalism can nevertheless easily slip into a mode that furthers rather than counters settler colonial imaginaries and practices, in particular the discourse involved with “becoming native to this place.” Immediately following their lament for the decline of Native California tribes cited above, Berg and Dasmann define a key concept of bioregionalism, reinhabitation, which they explain, “means learning to livein-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it” (Berg and Dasmann 2015, 36). While I appreciate what they mean by the phrase, “becoming native to a place,” one that Wes Jackson adopted as the title of his best known book, I would be reluctant to endorse it. To avoid complicity with settler colonialism, bioregionalists need to be cautious of such language and seek alternative expressions of belonging. It is noteworthy, for example, that Jackson begins his own book with a discussion of the Native peoples who used to reside in Kansas prior to the arrival of European settlers; he notes that they prospered in large numbers in the very locations where Europeans have been struggling to persist, as indicated by ever declining population numbers

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in rural Kansas counties, but he fails to make any reference to contemporary Native cultures. In the “becoming native” story he tells, it seems as if Europeans need to figure out how to replace the perhaps regrettably displaced Kiowa, Kansa, Osage, Pawnee, and Wichita as the new natives. Early in his book Jackson makes continual contrasts between the Native way of living and the European settler way, noting, for example, how settlers unnaturally demarcate the land and divide it up into private holdings whereas the indigenous peoples held it in common. At one point he explains that in 1874, “Natives were in steep decline but still around.” He then offers that “Now a different sort of nativeness would be required” (Jackson 1994, 18). The implication is that in 1874 there were still some Native Americans in Kansas, but “now” they are all gone, and, if only to promote environmental sustainability, the people who replaced them need to figure out how to become the new natives. “We are unlikely to achieve anything close to sustainability in any area,” Jackson argues, “unless we work for the broader goal of becoming native in the modern world, and that means becoming native to our places in a coherent community that is in turn embedded in the ecological realities of its surrounding landscape” (Jackson 1994, 3). From an ecological perspective, this is a wonderful sentiment, but if that coherent community does not include indigenous people, and does not respect their rights, including their land claims, then it will serve as but a new, perhaps greener, chapter in the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples. Eco-memoirs in general, and Jerry Wilson’s in particular, can be seen as attempts to practice Berg and Dasmann’s bioregional reinhabitation, and to narrate the process by which we can create the different sorts of modern nativeness embedded in ecological realities that Jackson desires; the question is, must they do so at the expense of the original, and, in spite of what Jackson implies, still persisting, human inhabitants? Wilson’s Waiting for Coyote’s Call describes his experience of twenty-five years settling onto and restoring an eastern South Dakota 140-acre farmstead perched on a bluff above the Missouri River. As the numerous quotations from Aldo Leopold make clear, his book is heavily influenced by Leopold’s Sand County Almanac in terms of both philosophical musings and as a practical guide. Much like Leopold’s project at his Wisconsin farm, the Shack, Wilson is seeking to restore a damaged land. In bioregional terms, his book is an excellent example of a reinhabitation narrative. In terms of ecopoetics, Waiting for Coyote’s Call includes passages of what we might consider to be lyrical or poetic prose. Narrative sections that begin in a fairly prosaic voice will at times transform into highly lyrical passages, and they often do so at precisely those moments when the sense of belonging to place is most heightened and when a sort of spellbinding enchantment encompasses the author. In her book The Enchantment of Modern Life, Jane

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Bennett provides a working definition of “enchantment” that could be suitably applied to Wilson’s book. “To be enchanted,” she offers, “is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday.” And she elaborates that enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound . . . Thoughts, . . . are brought to rest, even as the senses continue to operate, indeed, in high gear. You notice new colors, discern details previously ignored, hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and intensify. The world comes alive as a collection of singularities. Enchantment includes, then, a condition of exhilaration or acute sensory activity. (Bennett 2001, 4–5)

This definition matches nicely with Wilson’s book. For example, one particular enchanting moment, expressed in some of the most ecopoetical language found in the book, occurs when the author first commits to living on a particular plot of land. When Wilson and his wife had originally moved to South Dakota (to teach at the university) they lived in Vermillion. But they soon began looking for a place in the country. One evening, out for a casual drive, with no real intent, they visited a farm that they had heard was for sale. At first they just stood at the barbed wire fence by the side of the road, Wilson toting their new baby, Walter, in a backpack, and surveyed the farm from a distance: in Bennet’s terms a “familiar,” “everyday” situation. But soon they felt compelled to investigate, an experience Wilson describes in a passage that becomes increasingly charged with a kind of enchanted ecopoetry: We climbed the fence. We had planned an evening drive, a chance to look and dream; I was prepared for nothing more. My feet were shod in flimsy sandals, not ideal for a trek through pasture and brush and perhaps burs, but we plunged ahead regardless. Halfway across the forty acres, we paused on the southern slope to watch Venus define itself in the western sky. We sat down in the grass, surrounded by blooming prairie roses. From atop a box elder in the draw, a whip-poor-will sang the first bar of his nightly serenade. Dusk deepened, and in the distant valley, a farmyard light flickered on. A rosy aura enveloped Yankton, the old capital of Dakota Territory. A great horned owl hooted from up in a cottonwood on Clay Creek. Somewhere along Turkey Ridge, a pack of coyotes greeted the hunt with cacophonous calls. “Yes,” Norma whispered. We lingered too long on the hillside. The grass in which we lounged lost its resolution, but in the sky, uncountable points of light emerged. We rose and

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stumbled westward, picking our way toward the boundary line. When we hit the fence, we followed it south into the draw, toward the subdued babble of a spring. We followed a deer trail to the edge of a bog, then the trickle to its source. I knelt, cupped my hands, and drank. We climbed back to higher ground and picked our way east through a thicket of drooping sumac heads and overripe plums. Fruit fell into our hands at the lightest touch. We bit the bitter skin and sucked sweet meat and juice. Then we climbed again the sloping hill below Venus. (Wilson 2008, 16–17)

As Wilson stood savoring the landscape, drinking from its springs and sucking its fruits that had fallen unbidden into his hand, his wife remarked: “You look so good here, I think we should buy it,” and Wilson then draws the scene to a close: “Walter stirred from his baby nap and murmured what seemed to be assent. Had we been chosen by this land? It seemed that we belonged” (Wilson 2008, 15–16). Here we see a quintessential and numinous ecopoetical moment of settler belonging. This is the place, and we haven’t chosen it; rather, in a wonderful trope of the settler colonial imaginary, the land has chosen us. Few things could more assert the settler’s right to belonging, regardless of prior indigenous claims, than the idea that the land chooses the settler. The land, its beauty and fertility, has cast an enchanting spell on the author in precisely the way Bennett would have predicted. In the midst of ordinary experience, suddenly the author is transfixed, colors intensify, ordinary sounds become extraordinary, details sharpen and stand out, the world comes alive with an acute intensity in all his senses, everything takes on specific singularity, and in the exhilaration of the experience Wilson and his wife feel that yes, this is the landscape to which they belong. Wilson is aware, of course, of the pioneering and homesteading tradition which he is mimicking, and he is at times troubled by his conflicted relationship to that tradition. On the one hand, he notes that “it is too late for me to tell a pioneering story of ‘going back to the land’ or of discovering principles by which we might sustain Earth.” And he offers humbly that “Thoreau, Leopold, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Candace Savage, and many others have told that story before me, thought those thoughts, and confronted and clarified contradictions, dilemmas, consequences, and paths to salvation” (Wilson 2008, 1–2). It is notable that his examples of pioneers are folks like Leopold and Berry, rather than folks like the Ingalls family. (Though perhaps the difference is not as great as it might seem.) In spite of his disavowal, however, his is indeed a pioneering story, though with reinhabitory inclinations: With help from my wife Norma and from friends, I designed and built our geosolar home. I have rehabilitated over twenty acres of native prairie. I have slept under meteor showers and wandered the woods by moonlight. I have grown

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acquainted with a hundred species of birds. I have learned to watch, listen, and learn. (Wilson 2008, 2)

In spite of his claim that it is too late to tell a pioneering story, the motifs of homesteading circulate through his book. The building of his own home, for example, is a common trope in both earlier pioneering and newer reinhabitory narratives, and seems designed to enhance one’s claim to belonging. Indeed the book’s first section is titled “Rehomesteading the Prairie.” The first chapter, which I quoted from above, is titled “Chosen by the Land,” and opens with an epigraph from Willa Cather’s classic pioneering narrative, My Antonia: “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great” (Wilson 2008, 15).2 This passage is one of the classic expressions of the settler colonial imaginary’s ecopoetics of belonging, and illustrates again the uses of enchantment to enhance settler claims. The problem with Cather’s humble expression of oneness with the land, however, is that, as Cather’s narrator Jim Burden is lying in his grandmother’s garden, the “something complete and great” into which he wishes to be dissolved is land recently taken from indigenous people, though you will never learn this from him or from Cather. Such knowledge would undermine this classic moment of transcendental settler belonging. It seems churlish to intervene in Cather’s enchanting moment to remind readers that this lovely experience takes place on land only recently cleansed of the Pawnee. Unlike the earlier pioneers, such as Cather’s characters, who set out to destroy the prairie and replace it with crops, Wilson’s plan is to restore some of that prairie to something approaching its original state. Like a good bioregional reinhabitor he goes to great efforts to remove invasive plants and restore native grasses and forbs. On the other hand, however, he engages in the classic settler colonial pioneer activity of tree-planting: I have lived most of my life on the Great Plains. But I have never lived well without trees. That is why the first thing we did when we acquired a piece of the plains was plant trees. We planted many species, in many ways. Even before the land was ours, we had selected the hillside for our burrow, and on our first Saturday of possession, we planted the eyebrow of trees along our northwest rim—a token of hope for a future sheltered from winter winds. (Wilson 2008, 63)

The species of trees they plant as part of the ritual of possession include natives, but also, surprisingly, many non-natives, including “Russian olive, lilac and honeysuckle bushes, Austrian and ponderosa pines” (Wilson 2008, 63). It is worth pointing out that, though pioneers are usually condemned for cutting down trees, in many cases they caused an equivalent amount of environmental damage by planting trees. Afforestation projects are a major part

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of the settler colonial imaginary. Though valorized in environmental circles, tree-planting projects can, in the wrong circumstances, be both ecologically damaging and a key dimension of the settler colonial project. J Sterling Morton founded Arbor Day on the Great Plains of Nebraska not only because he incorrectly perceived the treeless prairie ecology to be deficient, but also, and more importantly, because he saw it as essential to the success of European settlement. In his historical analysis of afforestation projects, John Husmann explains that in Morton’s mind “tree planting became a marker of Euroamerican conquest and settlement of the Plains of Nebraska” (Husmann 2004, 162).3 In spite of these settler colonial gestures, however, Wilson’s memoir also contains considerable references to indigenous people, far more so than is typical of books in this genre. Indeed in the book’s acknowledgment, he expresses his thanks to “the Yankton Sioux people for the land on which my family and I live, for the environmental ethos that we inherit from American Indian traditions, and for the inspiration to live in harmony with the natural world” (Wilson 2008, 11). When he is pondering the local history of his region, he shares numerous moments such as this: “History books do not tell when the first woman or man dug the first tinpsila, or prairie turnip, from the soil or ate the first wild plum or butchered the first bison on our piece of bluff. It may be that Initial Middle Missouri Gardeners, ancestors of the Mandans or the Arikaras, tilled the river bottom and planted corn” (Wilson 2008, 107). Unlike the characters in settler colonial novels such as Cather’s My Ántonia, he does not imagine that the history of human residence on the land begins with the first Europeans. Nevertheless, he still struggles to accommodate his bioregional becomingnative-to-place imaginary with his awareness of indigenous occupancy and legitimate ownership. In one passage he explicitly engages with the issue of land ownership and belonging, again growing increasingly poetic as the passage evolves from a dry discussion of county records to an ecstatic celebration of the whole planet and the vastness of time: An entry in a record book at the courthouse says, in legal terms, that this land is our land. But we know that is not true. In a profound sense the land belongs to nobody, and even in legal terms one might argue that it still belongs to the Yankton Sioux, from whom it was extorted at the price of a dime an acre. So the land belongs to the Yanktons, to the Seversons, the Rices, the Oaklands, the Ourslands, the Paulsons, the Austins, the Jensens, the Johnsons, and to every man, woman, and child who sweated, planted, and harvested here. It belongs to everybody who slept on the land and ate the bounty it produced. It belongs to the foxes, the coyotes, the raccoons, the deer, and the myriad other creatures that know nothing of deeds. But ultimately, it belongs to Earth, and we and

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our fellow creatures that inhabit it are but a brief blip in the vastness of time. (Wilson 2008, 136)

This is a compelling, dare I say an enchanting, passage, but, we must admit, a bit slippery. It acknowledges that the land on which Wilson resides was extorted from the Yankton, a statement that has dire implications for his project if carried to its logical conclusion, for justice would require a restoration of stolen property. That will not do, so instead he waxes metaphysical: Who can really own the land? It belongs to the Earth and all its creatures, etc. Gary Snyder has engaged with this issue as well. In his essay “Bioregional Perspectives” Snyder observes that Native Americans lived for the most part in territories that conformed closely to what we would call bioregions. Later, he declares that bioregionalism, prepares us [that is, settler colonials, though he does not use the term], to begin to be at home in this landscape. There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans, to be sure, have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into fellow “native Americans.” For the non-Native to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island. (Snyder 1990, 18)

This is a rich, complex passage. Snyder affirms that most North Americans of immigrant descent, however many generations they have lived in the place, yet reside as aliens in what they consider to be their homeland. They lack any meaningful connection to the continent, which he returns to one of its indigenous names, Turtle Island. Sympathetic to Native cultures, however, he also recognizes that wanting Europeans to “become native,” while desirable in ecological and bioregional terms, nevertheless might be seen as a displacement of the original Natives. Hence he proposes making the interesting distinction between “Natives,” people of ancient residence, and “natives,” people who have more recently arrived. Other settler colonial nations, such as Canada and Australia, have somewhat resolved this issue by using terms such as First Nations, Aboriginal, or Traditional Owners, to identify people of indigenous ancestry. But in the United States “Indian” or “Native American” remains the preferred terms. His suggestion to distinguish “native Americans” from “Native Americans” is worth considering. Even as he employs settler discourse and tropes, it is only fair to say that Wilson is much more engaged with his indigenous neighbors than are most Americans who write eco-memoirs, in ways that, I think, serve as a model for

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how to negotiate this fraught territory. For example, he participated in support activities, working with the Black Hills Alliance “a coalition of ranchers, American Indians, and South Dakotans” to stop a planned uranium mine in the Black Hills. One of the goals of the Alliance, he notes, was also to seek to restore indigenous ownership to the Black Hills (Wilson 2008, 246). Such efforts do much to mitigate, if not entirely overcome, the settler colonial dimensions of his project. Wilson’s book concludes with a monthly almanac, modeled on the opening almanac section of Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. For each month, a few pages are devoted to highly poetic descriptions of seasonal activities. Among these activities we glimpse neighborly engagement with the Lakota community: As summer solstice approaches, prairie grasses and forbs define themselves in delicate hues. On a slope of unplowed native prairie, we gather sage with the Turtle Woman Society—Lakota women and friends. Sage smoldering in an abalone shell will purify participants to commence the Sun Dance and other sacred ceremonies. Before we gather the herb, elder Patty Wells seeks the blessing of the Great Spirit, a young woman sets out a plate of spirit food for the ancestors, and the living share a meal. (Wilson 2008, 260)

And again in the following month: Norma and I pick chokecherries, food for the annual Wase Wakpa Sun Dance north of Vermillion. We are not tempted to eat as we pick, as we do from our domesticated cherry tree; the chokecherry skin is bitter and the seed is hard as stone. But crushed dried chokecherries have for centuries been mixed with tallow and dried buffalo meat to make pemmican, and the cherries also make wojapi, a delicious pudding to eat with frybread. (Wilson 2008, 261)

These passages, coming at the end of the book, are a bit surprising. Very little foundation has been laid for them previously, and I would prefer to see these sorts of engagements with the Lakota community more fully integrated throughout the memoir. Nevertheless, they do offer one element of a corrective to the “becoming-native-to-place” narrative. Wilson shows himself in these passages not as a new native replacing the old, but as a friend, neighbor, ally, and so offers some suggestion of how settler colonial bioregional reinhabitants can belong to a place, can be enchanted by it, without denying the rightful presence of its original inhabitants who also belong to and are enchanted by it.

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NOTES 1. I am using the term “ecopoetics” not simply in relation to poetry per se, but also in relation to prose works that contain what are usually referred to as “poetic” elements such as tropes, attention to the musicality of language, sensuous detail, heightened emotionality, etc. 2. As is typical of people quoting from My Ántonia, Wilson attributes the statement to Cather rather than to her invented narrator, Jim Burden. 3. See also my own “‘Nothing but land’: Women’s Narratives, Gardens, and the Settler Colonial Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback,” Western American Literature 48, no. 4 (2014): 375–99.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Berg, Peter. 1976. Amble Towards Continent Congress. San Francisco: Planet Drum. Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. 2015. “Reinhabiting California.” In The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel, 35–40. New York: Routledge. Hussman, John. 2004. “Transplantations: A Comparative History of Afforestation in Nebraska and South Australia, 1870s–1940s.” Ph.D. Diss., University of Nebraska. Jackson, Wes. 1994. Becoming Native to This Place. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Lynch, Tom. 2014. “‘Nothing but land’: Women’s Narratives, Gardens, and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback.” Western American Literature 48 (4). doi: 10.1353/wal.2014.0024. Snyder, Gary. 1990. “Bioregional Perspectives.” In Home! A Bioregional Reader, edited by Judith Plant, Christopher Plant, Van Andruss, and Eleanor Wright, 35–38. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. Wilson, Jerry. 2008. Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-Memoir from the Missouri River Bluff. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. doi: 10.1080/14623520601056240.

Chapter 8

Aesthetic Choices for the Anthropocene Era in the New American Literature of Place Wendy Harding

Although they are not usually concerned with recent history, geologists have lately begun to suspect that we have seen the end of the beneficent era of the Holocene whose temperate climate conditions helped humans develop many of the skills and institutions that define our species.1 With the Industrial Revolution the intensive consumption of fossil fuels began, and mechanized agriculture (among other things) permitted the human population to grow exponentially. This ushered in the Anthropocene—a new epoch in which “the actions of humans altered the course of Earth’s deep history” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010, 2228). Our impact on the planet is now measurable in the air, on the land, and the ocean. So we can no longer sustain the belief that “man” is distinct from “nature.” Bruno Latour has argued that by thinking ourselves separate from the milieu in which we live, we moderns claimed control over everything that we classify as nonhuman (Latour 1993). By dividing the world into thinking beings (res cogitans) and material objects (res extensa), we gained power, but we reimagined our environment in ways that robbed it of its magic. The word “enchant” is from Latin incantare—to pronounce spells. In the modern era, literature takes up the task of reweaving the connections severed by scientific advances. When the Industrial Revolution reached the United States, American poets and writers worked to reenchant their world by celebrating spaces unsullied by human activity. John Muir finds refuge in the sublime landscapes of the Sierra Mountains, regretting only the signs of human occupation (Muir 1911). Edward Abbey basks in his western desert and rails against the tourists who disturb his solitary communion with the land (Abbey 1971). Ironically though, literary celebrations of pristine sites may serve to perpetuate an American tendency to compartmentalize space 131

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that has—indirectly—brought on the rapid planetary changes we are now experiencing. This is the thesis William Cronon advances in his much-cited essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” where he argues that the convergence of the aesthetics of the sublime and the concept of the frontier led to the preservation of sanctuaries that protected exceptional landscapes and permitted the aggressive exploitation of the rest of the American territory (Cronon 1995). So, in the brave new world of the Anthropocene, perhaps we should question whether reenchantment is really needed. Should writers continue to cherish a wildness that they conceptualize as humanity’s other?2 Should readers console themselves by contemplating a wild, green world that exists more in the cultural imagination than in reality? The pastoral mode certainly has its uses,3 but since we know that our way of life has drastic effects on the entire planetary system, literature should also acknowledge the new ecological paradigms and confront the ways in which the Anthropocene upsets our habitual understanding of time and space. In Ecocriticism on the Edge, Timothy Clark provocatively questions whether writing is a mode that can address contemporary ecological issues at all, since language is bound to vehicle a human point of view.4 Despite the ways in which human lives are inextricably bound up with other things in complex meshworks,5 what we think of as the other-than-human—what Descartes called res extensa—has been allotted a decidedly minor place in literatary studies.6 An ecological event like climate change takes place on a much larger scale than the personal and social realms that are generally regarded as the focus of literary works. Indeed Clark reads a number of texts for what is not spoken about, pointing to silences and omissions in a critical move similar to the one Toni Morrison employs in Playing in the Dark, where she reflects on the meaningful absences of African Americans in canonical works of American literature (Morrison 1992). Contemporary writers face the challenge of overcoming the evident disconnection between our growing knowledge of the complex systems shaping our existence and the aesthetic modes available to imagine them. Since inventing new forms of discourse is one of the ways cultures adapt to changing circumstances, writers play an important part in the necessary work of pushing beyond inherited terms and perceptions. In this paper I will discuss a selection of books written just before or after the turn of the millennium that focus on American places. The writers I focus on have begun to produce imaginative and creative accounts of the ways that human activities have altered the Earth’s ecological balance. They focus on places that humans have transformed by nuclear energy development (Meloy 2000; Solnit 1995), by waste disposal (Sullivan 1999), or by carbon emissions (Mutel 2016). Their works are transitional, poised at a threshold at which the writers bid farewell to the era of Nature and usher in the Anthropocene. They are part of a

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tradition begun by Thoreau when he built a cabin at Walden Pond as a site from which to critique the growing materialism of the newly industrialized American nation. He was writing at the moment that many scientists would identify as the beginning of the Anthropocene era. The problems he saw were minor compared to those that we now face and so our conceptualization of our planet has had to change in response. DENIAL AND THE CONSOLING LURE OF “NATURE” Loren Eiseley saw his contemporaries as “the world eaters” (Eiseley 1970, 54); E. O. Wilson sees us as “planetary killer[s]” (Wilson 2002, 102); moreover, both writers are aware that if humanity has set its home on fire we are unable to provide an escape. Like all other Earth dwellers, our species depends on the life-sustaining conditions that our planet provides. Rather than succumbing to panic, most of us find ways to avoid considering the prospect of our own extinction. I am not simply referring to the climate skeptics or the politicians who put growth before sustainability. Most of us balance conscientious efforts to improve the situation with comfortable but destructive habits. It’s not that we are not looking for solutions. In reply to my question about how to save the planet, Google pulled up over 435 million websites. The actions listed to help reduce greenhouse gases generally required only minor adjustments to the typical affluent person’s lifestyle—using wax paper instead of plastic to wrap food, turning off lights when you aren’t in the room. Practicing some of these little things that we can all do in the Anthropocene era to “save the planet” allows us to indulge in a mild form of denial, as if it were not the continuation of our own species that is threatened—at least in its current mode—rather than the planet.7 Perhaps in continuing to seek consolation in “Nature” we are like the people who are facing the end of their lives in the 1973 film Soylent Green, soothing their exit from the damaged world of the Anthropocene era with images of the gone-but-not-forgotten green world. That longing for a phantasmal pristine world probably dates back to Genesis. Europeans thought they had rediscovered it on arriving in America. Some of their descendants tried to sustain the illusion in embracing the idea of wilderness and binding it to ideas of American exceptionalism. In the twentieth century, such men would go to the mountains to find themselves, as John Muir so memorably remarks in a much-quoted journal entry: “Not like my taking the veil–no solemn abjuration of the world. I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was going in” (Muir 1979, 427). The paradoxical conflation of outside and inside collapses the Cartesian opposition between res cogitans and res extensa, but it does so by having the subject

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completely engulf the world. To create his world-embracing substitute for the anchorite’s cell, Muir has to imagine the landscape emptied of all signs of humanity. This is a way of avoiding the messiness of humans’ insertion in the environment. It is also a way for an immigrant to efface all prior claims to the land. In Savage Dreams Rebecca Solnit quotes the journal entry Muir made after he camped on the shore of Lake Tenaya (a lake ironically named after the ousted Indian chief) in what is now Yosemite National Park: The lake with its rocky bays and promontories well defined, its depth pictured with the reflected mountains, its surface just sufficiently tremulous to make the mirrored stars swarm like water-lilies in a woodland pond. This is my old haunt where I began my studies. I camped on this very spot. No foot seems to have neared it. (Solnit 1995, 220)

One cannot help feeling enchanted by Muir’s shimmering image of the “mirrored stars” that he transmutes into flowers in a poetic rendering of the lake’s optical inversion of the sky. With the incantatory magic of his words, he transmits to his readers a reverence for this particular American landscape. Solnit’s book undoes the spell that Muir weaves in his depiction of Lake Tenaya by pointing out what the writer does not see there. She reminds readers that Yosemite is a homeland shaped in the interactions of all its dwellers, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and not least of all by the Indians that the Mariposa Batallion had tried to exterminate in order to open up the land to the extractive economic activities that lured white settlers to California (Solnit 1995, 220). SAYING GOOD-BYE TO NATURE Instead of using the power of words to restore a sense of wonder, Solnit, along with other more or less contemporary writers of place, writes in order to establish a new Euro-American relation to the land by showing the complexity of its history. In place of the timeless nature contemplated by earlier writers, the new literature of place features enmeshed spacetimes evolving in the interactions of human and nonhuman agents.8 It does not relinquish the attempt to make emotional connections with the environment, but it tries to care about place without sacrificing a sense of its mixedness. Some of the writers start from the dream of renewal in a return to a green world, but then they move on to the recognition that humans have always cocreated and codefined the places where they find themselves. Neither peoples nor places are stable and unchanging. In the mesh of connections and interactions, what we

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have done and what we do have consequences that are too complex to be predicted, let alone controlled. We live in what Latour (borrowing the term from William James) has called an “entangled pluriverse” (Latour 2010, 481). Traditionally, as Scott Slovic has shown in his study of writers from Thoreau to Barry Lopez, nature writing explores the individual consciousness in the process of perceiving the natural world (Slovic 1992). The writers go out, like John Muir, to find that they are going in. The environment of the Anthropocene disrupts this harmonious relationship, and writers have to account for a new sense of a misfit between outside and inside. Ellen Meloy relates this experience in The Last Cheater’s Waltz, a book in which she recounts her exploration of the territory surrounding the house she is building in the Utah desert. The waltz of the title describes the desertdweller’s habitual embrace of her surroundings in a love dance with a place whose incandescent beauty, coupled with her capacity to respond, is her means of gaining a thrilling affirmation of her own existence. She claims to have “a local, if not a regional, reputation for sensory intensity” (Meloy 2000, 4). Surprisingly, though, the book begins with a domestic accident that changes her relation to her milieu: One morning in a rough-hewn, single-room screenhouse, in a cottonwood grove but a few wingbeats beyond the San Juan River, I poured scalding water through a paper coffee filter into a mug that, unbeknownst to me, contained a lizard still dormant from the cool night. I boiled the lizard alive. I sat on the front step of the screenhouse with sunrise burning crimson on the sandstone cliffs above the river and a boiled reptile in my cup. I knew then that matters of the mind had plunged to grave depths. I was either helplessly unmoored from my Self or hopelessly lost in the murk of Self. The problem, obviously, was that I could no longer make the distinction between the two. (Meloy 2000, 3)

The sunrise, desert, and dormant lizard are just a few elements in the web of connections that includes the caffeine-loving desert-dweller. The scene features a key insight of the Anthropocene that the speaker has been ill-prepared to acknowledge: the unintended consequences of the interactions she engages in. Her fatal encounter with a coinhabitant of the desert prompts her realization of her confusion about both her surroundings and her self. The distinctions between inside and outside have collapsed; she is either “unmoored from . . . Self” or “hopelessly lost . . . in Self.” The writer strains metaphor to a breaking point to capture her disarray at this traumatic discovery of her entanglement with other things; she becomes a “footless nomad caught in a slipstream of indifference” (Meloy 2000, 5). This breakdown is the first stage toward gaining awareness of the state of things in the Anthropocene.

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In order to take their distance from the traditional modes of relating to their milieu, the new American writers of place mobilize the stylistic resources of literature to challenge entrenched ideas. Parody is one of the modes available. Meloy caricatures a scenario in which the subject merges with her surroundings in psychic fusion. This is the point of her pages on the quest for the claret cup cactus flower. Seeking “fundamental union with primordial nature,” she drives seventy miles to find “enough of those gorgeous grenadine blooms to drive me mad with love,” for, she explains, “a mound of claret cups in full bloom throws its glory against the russet desert in brazen harlotry.” The sensuous hyperbole of her description turns parodic when she imagines she becomes “a very small bug, hovering over a bloodred cup, and little bug heart pounding, d[i]ve[s] in” (Meloy 2000, 11–15). This parody of the search for immersion in the natural world prepares for her discovery of the way the desert landscape has been modified by its induction into the nuclear age. In a book that recounts an exploration of the swampland that overlooks the skyscrapers of Manhattan, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City, Robert Sullivan evokes traditional modes of place writing in order to draw attention to the novelty of his own account. The “Walden Swamp” chapter of the book makes these connections explicit, while drawing attention to the comic disparity between Sullivan’s latterday adventure and its most famous precedent. Like Thoreau, Sullivan explores a place that is near at hand, on the edge of more fully settled territory: “I began to consider taking a trip to Walden Swamp and then spending some time out there and maybe even contemplating nature and civilization just like Thoreau, or someone like that” (Sullivan 1999, 75). He is “determined . . . to commune with nature and what have you” (Sullivan 1999, 87). The familiar language has a distancing and debunking effect that smacks of burlesque. Similarly, the itemized list of the equipment the adventurer purchases to explore this swamp in the northwestern corner of the Meadowlands imitates both the “Memorandum of Articles in readiness for the Voyage” from the Lewis and Clark expedition (Lewis and Clark 1904, 15) and Thoreau’s lists of expenses in the “Economy” chapter of Walden (Thoreau 1854, 54–66), except that the items’ snappy brand names and their inflated prices show the extent to which consumerism has triumphed in Sullivan’s America (Sullivan 1999, 77). These texts humorously illustrate how much the engagement with a milieu is shaped by already-produced scripts. Thanks to a literary tradition that includes many narratives of discovery and much nature writing, travelers in America can easily imagine themselves finding adventure in unexplored wilderness or attaining harmony in spaces of pristine natural beauty. The canonical texts of North American place writing mediate one’s experience of the land and helps one sustain the fantasy that there are places outside the thoroughly humanized spacetime of the Anthropocene. By ironically

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measuring their distance from that literary tradition, the new writers of place writing bid farewell to earlier modes of interaction. A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE: LOOKING WITH THE “UNNATURALIST’S EYE” One of the first things that these writers have to do is to adjust their range of vision. Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” is not adequate to the task of mediating the landscapes of the Anthropocene. These writers take a longer view, exploring what is beyond the horizon and consulting scientific studies that stretch the limits of sensory perception. They have to look with what Ellen Meloy calls “the unnaturalist’s eye” (Meloy 2000, 177). When she extends her vision beyond her cactus flowers and beyond the “intricate network of dry washes that fanned out . . . like dendritic veins,” Meloy discovers the thing that triggers a new quest: “Cutting across the wash was an unlikely sight: the world’s longest, curviest landing strip” (Meloy 2000, 16–17). The metaphors war with each other here; the landing strip, its oddity accentuated by the superlatives, disrupts the more familiar dendritic veins of the arroyos with the violence of a knife slicing into a body. The strip cutting through her beloved desert landscape turns out to be a road “as elegantly broad as a Parisian boulevard” (Meloy 2000, 17). It leads her on a journey to knowledge of the atomic history of the Great Basin. In a similar adjustment of vision, Sullivan learns that a body of water that looks “natural” in Walden Swamp, was in fact “formed by the construction of railroad lines and the new and old turnpikes” (Sullivan 1999, 81), and the “green hills” he sees there are “grass covered garbage dumps” (Sullivan 1999, 82). Arriving at her campsite in the Nevada desert, Solnit has to remind herself “to be afraid of the dust,” because its potential danger is invisible: “to see mortality in the dust by imagining it in the unstable isotopes of radioactive decay took an act of educated faith” (Solnit 1995, 4). To get a wider view of global warming from her home in Iowa City, Cornelia Mutel has to pore over the curves on a graph charting “global-average surface temperatures, actual and predicted, from 1900 to 2100” as well as to study “what such dramatic temperature increases would mean” (Mutel 2016, 160). In order to come to terms with the Anthropocene’s paradoxical “geography of consequence” (Harding 2014, 106), these writers have to broaden the span of spacetime that the American literature of place usually considers. It is no longer possible to remain focused on the moment as if places had no past or future, nor is it possible to think of a locality as contained within definable boundaries. The toxic waste that made mercury “the key landscape ingredient” (Sullivan 1999, 85) in Walden Swamp was dumped there between 1929

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and 1974 (U.S. Department of Commerce et al. 2014). Unsurprisingly, a 2015 Fish and Wildlife Service report shows that the water is still heavily contaminated (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2015), in spite of the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency designated adjacent industrial sites as Superfund cleanup spots in the 1980s (Sullivan 86). Further west, the atomic testing in the Four Corners region produced radioactive waste whose danger to the environment will stretch over millennia. Meloy mentions one nuclear burial site in New Mexico that bears the epitaph: “THIS SITE SHALL REMAIN DANGEROUS FOR 24,000 YEARS” (Meloy 2000, 174). Solnit learns that that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) makes a slightly less conservative estimate of the danger of nuclear waste, only 10,000 years. When she asks geologist Steve Frishman about the reasoning behind the figure, he explains, “that if you are going to do a probabilistic risk analysis and you’re looking out to some distance into the future, when you get to about 10 to the 4th, meaning about 10,000 years, you start vastly increasing uncertainty” (Solnit 1995, 81). In fact, Solnit goes on to explain that “the DOE expects that in 10,000 years our language and culture will be extinct, since none has ever lasted a fraction of that time. Marking the waste-deposit sites in such a way that the warnings will last ten millennia and be meaningful to whomever may come along then has been something of a challenge to the DOE’s futurists” (Solnit 1995, 82). Clearly the timespans involved in man-made disturbances of the environment surpass our normal imaginative faculties. Another challenge brought to us in the Anthropocene is that of projecting how the consequences of our greenhouse-gas emissions will play out in time. Scientists make graphs to project into the future, but they are too abstract for the general public. Besides, industrial lobbyists have seized on the professional caution written into scientific hypotheses to discount their projections. At the other extreme, the science fiction writers’ apocalyptic visions of future destruction can seem too fantastic to modify our sense of the real. What about the literature of place? Environmental writer Cornelia Mutel wrote A Sugar Creek Chronicle in order to heighten awareness of the extent and reach of the dangers involved in climate change. Her book employs a twofold personal chronology. First, imitating Thoreau’s Walden, she presents an account of one year in her woodland home from January to December of 2012. She describes the cycle of seasonal changes, noting the ways in which the year deviates from earlier climatic norms and making projections as to how this might upset the ecosystem of the oak forest where she lives. Nevertheless, the scale of climate change is so vast, that the view of a single observer would be hopelessly inadequate. Thus, her chronicle of the year includes details from various news sources about weather-related anomalies taking place in a much wider geographical radius. Then, alongside these journal entries, she

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interleaves a second timeline that covers some of the events in her life from childhood onward. She documents the time of her ignorance, drawing readers in with a rhetorical question and admitting to her own insouciance during the 1970s: “Why dwell on potential problems before being forced to do so? Our days were full and good. . . .. I assumed that humanity could never irreversibly alter two of Earth’s largest entities, the globe’s atmosphere and its oceans, nor could we ever destabilize something as huge and complex as our planet’s climate system” (Mutel 2016, 95). The recourse to this double persona—her earlier self contrasting with her present self—produces dramatic irony and engages readers’ complicity and comprehension. To address the problem of scale that climate change poses, A Sugar Creek Chronicle retracts the temporal span of the Anthropocene to human dimensions. The book’s double timespan allows the writer to make an analogy between the unsuspected dangers of climate change and the unforeseen development of cancer in her mother’s body and her own: “Both can distort healthy functions and ultimately lead to dramatic changes, and both are best treated by strong actions taken early, before they spin toward points of no return” (Mutel 2016, 8). By putting a personal problem in parallel with a planetary one, Mutel shrinks the vast global warming phenomenon down to a humanly imaginable size. As a child she “assumed that regardless of what we did human life and my family would go on forever; it could not in its most fundamental manner ever change.” Nevertheless, things did change. Her mother’s cancer was diagnosed too late, when it was past the “tipping point” (Mutel 2016, 38), and at age eighteen the writer lost the safe refuge of the family home. She offers her life experience as a parable about the urgency of taking action in the face of global warming. A NEW, PLURIVERSAL AESTHETIC Radiation, Pollution, Global Warming—these are rather dismal subjects to evoke in creative nonfiction about place. They discourage joyous celebrations of individual renewal in contact with nature’s eternal beauty. Nonetheless, all of the writers I am considering here express passionate commitment to the places they write about and their texts engage readers too, but in ways that differ from earlier nature writing. One of the ways they do this is by opening their texts to multiple voices and opinions, deviating from the somewhat monologic tendencies of nature writing. On their quests for a fuller representation of place, they weave into their texts extracts from maps, books, and reports. In addition, they question other people and relay their experiences and opinions. Place emerges as contested, traversed by competing interests, even as it compels attachment. Ellen

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Meloy interviews the director of the Los Alamos atomic facility who admits not considering anything so far-reaching as “the future of mankind” when he was the leader of the bomb assembly team: “We were at war and the damn thing worked” (Meloy 2000, 73). She talks to a neighbor who used to be a “trucker hauling uranium ore from mines to mill during the cold war boom” and for whom the end of that era is “the region’s great tragedy” (Meloy 2000, 115). Solnit speaks to the victims of fallout and retells their stories, but she also tours Ground Zero with a DOE public relations representative to get the official account of affairs at the Nevada Test Site. She makes a difference between the two kinds of discourse: the former she calls “a strong foundation of stories,” the latter, “a tissue of tourism” (Solnit 1995, 211). By mentioning both, she furthers readers’ understanding of how Americans could have rendered part of their territory unfit for human habitation. The Meadowlands swampland that Sullivan explores is fringed with towns and crisscrossed with roads. To investigate, he enters into contact with diverse humans with surprising attitudes and experiences, like the Mayor of Secaucus who boasts of how he “polishes” the town’s dubious reputation by reframing pig farming as recycling (Sullivan 1999, 27), or the owner of a garbage dump who tours his property like an adventurer, ever alert to fresh discoveries (Sullivan 1999, 104), or the mosquito inspector who counts the numbers of mosquitos that land on him and brags about holding the all time record. Sullivan relays these Meadowlands voices with gusto, capturing their different sociolects and idiolects, and their particular modes of relating to their surroundings. Through their voices the despised swamp takes on character and interest. It is part of people’s lives, even as it resiliently repels their schemes to tame it and to make it serve human designs. The voices that Cornelia Mutel quotes in A Sugar Creek Chronicle are those of her family members, her neighbors, or the radio reporters who relay news of the exceptional weather events of 2012—the drought in Iowa, the fires in the West, Hurricane Sandy in New York, or Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, but she also receives messages from nonhuman sources. Things “speak” to her: fossils tell her about the past (Mutel 2016, 62), the orderly seasonal comings and goings of plants and animals “speak of the maintenance of life” (Mutel 2016, l52), while the fissures in the earth and the shriveling of the plants protest the lack of water during a summer of drought (Mutel 2016, 72, 121). To bring home to readers the lively agency of more-than-human things, these texts embrace an aesthetic of mixedness. For Mutel, initially, the interactivity of things seems miraculous: for example, the fact that nutrients circle around the globe as well as within my body. That the silent magical decomposition executed by trillions of bacteria

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and fungi allows life to prevail. That somehow all life depends on energy pouring down from the sun. That rain falling on my face ends up in the oceans, from there rising again to the skies. That all this complexity is both gift and responsibility. (Mutel 2016, 44)

This sense of wonder remains as Mutel grows older and learns more about ecology, but she becomes aware of another dynamic taking hold: And so, even as I was studying nature’s integrity, I began discovering how outof-control growth of many types was spreading throughout the landscape. As the U.S. population and per-person consumption grew, fossil fuel use soared exponentially. Resources were depleted. Native plants and animals dropped in number. And toxic wastes multiplied. Local problems inflated into regional dilemmas, and regional problems spread around the globe. (Mutel 2016, 91–92)

The “idyllic daily life in the Colorado mountains” that fostered in the writer’s younger self a sense of ecological harmony contrasts with her more mature understanding of the environmental damage wreaked by American prosperity. She becomes aware that the things that humans exploit have their own weird chemistry that works to make the environment less and less hospitable to us—the opposite effect to the one that is intended. The language of place writing has to expand to take in these unwanted and unexpected interactions. While Mutel’s exposition of environmental contradictions is straight and serious, Solnit chooses irony to describe the strangeness of American places in the Anthropocene. For example, she tells of passing the town of Rhyolite in Nevada and seeing “a pretty gleam of silver in the distance.” Rather than the picturesque mountain lake of conventional place writing, it is “the largest cyanide pond in the world [with] next to it a mountain being digested into tailings for its gold” (Solnit 1995, 77). In the extractive industrial West that seldom features in literature, what seems “pretty” from a distance can be deadly, and what seems eternal can be “digested.” Discussing Richard Mishrach’s photography, Solnit writes of “the post-modern sublime” that reveals awe-inspiring beauty in what is “deadly” or “damaged” (47). The convergence of categories that would conventionally be opposed is part of the pluriversal aesthetics of the Anthropocene era. In Meloy’s and Sullivan’s books we find an absurdist humor of contraries that makes the anomalies of the Anthropocene as fascinating as they are disturbing. In Meloy’s desert landscape, the descriptive categories normally defining animal, vegetable, and mineral become mixed or inverted. Roles reverse when the spadefoot toads vaporized by the atomic blast at the Trinity

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test site, “writ themselves into history” while the “scientists spawned the primary death anxiety of the rest of all time” (Meloy 2000, 26). Metaphor creates new hybrids to describe the achievement of the scientists who turned uranium into plutonium, an element that “feels warm, like a live rabbit’” (Meloy 2000, 27). In a dizzying collapse of boundaries, animals write history, males give birth and inorganic things come alive. In Sullivan’s Meadowlands, the cars follow “migratory patterns” (Sullivan 1999, 87), a driver encounters “a herd of trucks” (Sullivan 1999, 204), and fish have “scales on their backs [that] were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires” (Sullivan 1999, 81). This mixing of categories recognizes that the natural and the human-made are not separate; moreover, they come together in new ways in the Anthropocene era. Instead of filtering out what is not human in order to sustain illusions about the separation of the natural and the social, these writers confront us with the bizarre hybridity of the contemporary world. This new aesthetics of incongruity emphasizes the fact that we can no longer expect orderly, predictable forms and cycles. The unexpected becomes the new ecological pattern. Places are not stable; their evolution is unpredictable. This realization might induce a sense of the futility of action, but that is not what these books advocate. In different ways, their investigations of place open onto the future. Meloy has to come to terms with the fact that her beloved desert is not pristine. Rather than a reason for despair; she takes this as a call to responsibility: “I look into my coffee cup before I pour, and I try to live here as if there is no other place and it must last forever. It is the best we can do. Everyone’s home is the heartland of consequence” (Meloy 2000, 224). Solnit finishes her book with a description of a counterquincentennial Columbus Day celebration at which the antinuclear protesters, descendants of both indigenous and settler peoples, join together in a circle dance to celebrate their earthly home and their shared desire to defend it. Mutel ends with a list of positive actions that readers can take to work toward planetary recovery. Sullivan ends with an apostrophe to the swamp: “Oh, Meadowlands . . . how is it that you will somehow manage to be spoiled but unspoiled, trod upon and bulldozed, remediated and reclaimed, dumped in and sprayed all over but somehow never spent?” (Sullivan 1999, 203–4). Past efforts to exploit the swampland have ended in failure; schemes have gone awry, transforming the land in unintended ways. The Meadowlands remains, vulnerable but resistant to new endeavors to extract profit from it. It is humanity’s place on earth that is called into question. In conclusion, the texts that I have considered here bid farewell to the belief that “nature” is separate from human beings, whether as something to be enjoyed or exploited. They also revise the old idea that places are separate

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from one another, showing the error of celebrating the transcendent beauty of spaces unspoiled by human interference. They advocate reconnection rather than reenchantment. To address the dissolution of boundaries in the Anthropocene era, they employ hybrid figures that acknowledge the unpredictable interactions among things. At the sites they depict, competing interests converge and sometimes clash, so the texts’ polyvocality suggests the variety of intentions that have to be negotiated and debated among Earth’s many codwellers. Just as humans raise their voices in debate, things also have their say one way or another. The new literature of place improvises a forum that invites readers to pay attention to the mutual interactions of what Bruno Latour designates as “quasi-subjects” and “quasi-objects” (Latour 1993, 139)—the hybrid assemblages that include us and shape our earthbound existence. Our planetary home hosts assemblages that seem both familiar and alien; they strike us as ironic or even uncanny because we have repressed the awareness of how nothing truly separates the categories of human and otherthan-human. The resulting “naturecultures” (Haraway 2003) are marvelous as well as threatening. Finding words to describe both the dangers and the wonders of that newly recognized state of affairs is an essential step toward inhabiting the planet in a more responsible way.

NOTES 1. Paul Crutzen and his colleagues gave the name “Anthropocene” to the phenomenon that various scientists have been observing over the past decades and they have lead the movement to see it recognized as an geological epic. See for example, Jan Zalasiewicz et al. 2010. For the comment on the beneficent Holocene, see Mutel 2016, 63–64. 2. This is certainly not the attitude revealed in the writings of Linda Hogan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ron Rash. In their replies to questions concerning their attitude to nature, all three expressed the belief that there is no separate realm outside of us that we could label “nature.” Linda Hogan insists: “Plants, minerals, animals, we people, all are interconnected and work together with one another to keep things whole” (2016). Barbara Kingsolver echoes the same sentiment: “I think of the world as a vast, interconnected network of living forms and elements” (2016). Similarly, Ron Rash declares: “As humans we are part of nature and it is part of us” (2016). 3. See the case made by Glen A. Love (Love 1992, 195–207). 4. “Linguistic narrative in particular seems at issue solely as that mode which, by implication, fits least well the demands of the Anthropocene, seemingly more allied with forms of anthropocentric thinking to be overcome, or as an art of sequences of human action or attention geared to a definite significant end in some fulfilled or unfulfilled intention” (Clark 2015, 187).

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5. “Meshwork” is a metaphor that Tim Ingold favors because it helps readers to conceptualize the interconnectivity of things in a way that accounts for their mobility and unpredictability. He argues for replacing the network image from Actor Network Theory with that of meshwork: “the relation is not between one thing and another— between the organism ‘here’ and the environment ‘there’. It is rather a trail along which life is lived. Neither beginning here and ending there, nor vice versa, the trail winds through or amidst like the root of a plant or a stream between its banks. Each such trail is but one strand in a tissue of trails that together comprise the texture of the lifeworld. This texture is what I mean when I speak of organisms being constituted within a relational field. It is a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines; not a network but a meshwork” (Ingold 2011, 69–70). Like Barbara Kingsolver, I am uncomfortable with the word “nature.” For Kingsolver it is a “dangerously reductive” term that shows human beings’ hubris (Kingsolver 2016). Moreover, “nature,” in the modern sense, is supposed to be governed by laws that the objective, detached observer can discover and contemplate or exploit. Terms like “milieu,” “surroundings,” or “environment” do not so easily admit the imaginary detachment that fosters the illusion of control. Although all the terms with which we describe our surroundings are bound to be problematic because of the anthropocentric bias of language, avoiding the nature/ culture duality is a first step toward admitting our entanglement with everything else. 6. Obviously this is not true of the works of Linda Hogan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ron Rash. 7. Kari Norgaard’s study of a Norwegian village (quoted in Clark 2015, 166) shows a widespread pattern of climate change denial even among people who pride themselves in their environmental awareness. 8. For a philosophical account of this new perception of relations between what has historically been thought of as separate human and nonhuman realms, see Karen Barad’s work, notably her 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbey, Edward. 1971. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Ballantine. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury. Cronon, William. 1995. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, 69–90. New York: Norton. Eiseley, Loren. 1970. The Invisible Pyramid. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

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Harding, Wendy. 2014. The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto.’” New Literary History 41: 471–90. Lewis, Meriwether, and William Clark. 1904. Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. 1, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. Love, Glen A. 1992. “Et in Arcadia Ego: Pastoral Theory Meets Ecocriticism.” Western American Literature 27: 195–207. Meillon, Bénédicte. 2016. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. Interview: https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/2187. ———. 2016. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. https:// ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/3767. ———. 2016. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Ron Rash.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. Interview: https:// ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/3723. Meloy, Ellen. 2000. The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark-Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Muir, John. 1911. My First Summer in the Sierra. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1979. John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mutel, Cornelia. 2016. A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland. Iowa City: Iowa University Press. Slovic, Scott. 1992. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Solnit, Rebecca. 1995. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. New York: Vintage. Sullivan, Robert. 1999. The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City. New York, Anchor. Thoreau, Henry D. 1854. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. United States Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States Department of the Interior, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 2014. “Preassessment Screen Determination for the Berry’s Creek Watershed Bergen County, New Jersey.” Accessed September 18, 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​.fws​​.gov/​​north​​east/​​njfie​​ldoff​​i ce​/p​​df​/BC​​​SA​_PA​​S​.pdf​. United States Environmental Protection Agency. 2015. “Lower Hackensack River, Bergen and Hudson Counties Assessment, New Jersey. Preliminary Assessment.”

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Accessed September 18, 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​.epa​​.gov/​​sites​​/prod​​uctio​​n​/fil​​es​/20​​15​-11​​ /docu​​ments​​/r​_ha​​ckens​​ack​_r​​iver​_​​pa​_09​​29201​​5​.pdf​. Wilson, Edward O. 2002. The Future of Life. New York: Vintage. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Will Steffen, and Paul Crutzen. 2010. “The New World of the Anthropocene.” Environmental Science and Technology 44: 2228–31.

Part III

OF ANIMAL ELUSIVENESS, DEATH, AND WONDER ZOOPOETICS AND THE QUEST FOR COMMON GROUND

Chapter 9

Zoopoethics Literature Challenged by Industrial Livestock Farming Anne Simon

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY MARGOT LAUWERS AND BÉNÉDICTE MEILLON Some of the literary works that focus on butchering or on the slaughtering of animals evoke some kind of overt or concealed fascination with outrageous violence, with the beauty of flesh, or with the paradoxical vivacity of decomposition.1 Zooming in on industrial livestock farming and slaughtering, the issue of enchantment clearly turns into that of disenchantment. I have therefore deliberately homed in on the first term of the conference title by considering literature as a dwelling place, a home for what can otherwise seem unwelcome, as literature provides a safe place for testimony—albeit a paradoxical kind of testimony that takes place through imagination. As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, the objectilization of the living and the denial of suffering that went hand in hand with the industrialization of agricultural production gave rise to political and metaphysical turmoil. At the same time, many writers felt compelled to take clear stands. Starting with nineteenth-century narratives, the slaughterhouse first constituted a passage at the very edge of the word’s possibilities; it brought to the fore the mass movement of animals gathered for a crucial moment, that of their killing—an acme considered worthy of literature, whether the killing was envisaged as nonsense or as an epiphany. With the relegation of slaughterhouses to both the “non-places” and nolle prosequi of the meat industry,2 however, the encompassing trope of factory farming has become a major motif in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, be it in Europe or in Anglo-Saxon and North American contexts. 149

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Beyond the ethical vigilance required by their infernal lack of measure, intensive livestock farming and slaughtering pose a multilevel, ontological challenge for literary creation. It questions how literary creation may be elaborated and how it might endure. First, the very functions and use of literary creation are put to the test insofar as the latter must testify for victims who are intrinsically bereft of the ability to express their suffering in an articulate manner. Indeed, the ineffable quality of concentration-camp realms is reinforced by “the silence of critters” (de Fontenay 1998) that humans witness and feel moved to take charge of. It is a supernumerary silence, and a specific one too, in the biological sense of the word. Furthermore, the memory of a life must also be invented for these shackled animals, deprived as they are of any sociability and, subsequently, of the capacity to pass on escape behaviors as they normally do when evolving in adapted environments. Fiction has an ethical role to play––albeit one that is a priori nearly impossible to fulfill––in hampering the programmed erasure of the real that serves as one of the key cogs in the agri-food machinery and that rests on industrial secrecy: “the pigsty did not show on the GPS map” (Sorente 2013, 53). Lastly, a testimony that calls for fictional invention evidently raises the question of its true point––can literary imagination affect the social? In addition, it brings us to ponder to what extent such literary testimony can be achieved: by what means and how far can a writer psychologically go along with the suffering of animals who are at once innumerable (there are billions and billions of them), singular, and endowed with corporeal and emotional schemas that are theoretically unimaginable? To what extent can one avoid the pitfalls of literary aestheticization when dealing with the unspeakable? On top of these initial, quasi aporias, the question arises of the very legitimacy of the subject, the handling of which has evolved historically: in France, it has only recently been a source of concern for a widespread audience. This can be accounted for by the work carried out by organizations such as L214, reaching out to the larger public; by our ethical stance toward food, which keeps shifting faster than it used to; and by the novels that now come out with each new literary season, dealing with turmoil caused by animal husbandry and the food industry. This evolution is fairly recent: while animals have always been present in literary works, until recently they were mostly considered and represented as an unworthy scriptural subject––as opposed to human beings with their emotions, their urban habitats and their roles in the course of History––and were thus relegated to marginal genres.3 The animal as victim is therefore the object of twofold distrust, with everything pointing to the fact that taking it into account might represent a twofold risk. The first risk is a very grave one: it is the risk of ironing out the scandal of the systematic dehumanization––for economic or ideological reasons––of enslaved or exterminated human beings, following an industrial model (human beings

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who have been associated with pests beforehand). The second risk is that a focus on animals––which some will suspect of misplaced sentimentalism— might jeopardize the humanist (in the larger sense of the word) and serious dimensions of testimonial literature. THE “VISIT TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE” TROPE (1830–1950) During the nineteenth century, visits to the slaughterhouse developed into a literary trope. As soon as 1838, in an article called “Montfaucon”4 that recalls a “romantic and ultra-picturesque excursion” (Gautier 1856, chap. 1), Théophile Gauthier lingers over scenes of horses being quartered. Those scenes become even more unbearable as they are aestheticized with a touch of irony. At a time when Romanticism was still subversive, Gauthier’s purpose was, on the one hand, to offend his sensitive, female bourgeois readership5 and, on the other hand, to distance himself from his own marble-like aesthetics (Ibid., 328), striving for self-mockery. With a narrative voice that plays up its casualness and affective distance, this gives way to a descriptive escalation taking precedence over the subject. As a result, it transforms an unbearable reality into an enchanting picture, with the kind of praise one might expect, rather, from a critic strolling through an art fair: “The skin was already partly taken off, and the flesh with its bloody moistness was gleaming in the sunlight. One could not have imagined a more splendid occurrence of colors: the tints were pearly, rosy, varnish, violet purple, sky blue, pea green, silvered the prettiest and richest tropical seashell” (Ibid., 334). Humor and artistic rendering by contrast highlight the violence of the killing and the way those corpses are being handled. This is emphasized by a gaze that is indeed fascinated with the play of color and matter (Ibid., 333), and, to take up Gauthier’s poetic neologism, with “carrionian marvels” (Ibid., 336). At the time, however, most writers who narrated the mechanized and anonymous suffering of animals did so in a more explicit fashion. The point was to advocate convictions following in the tracks of animal welfare regulation acts that were implemented during the second half of the nineteenth century—with, among other things, the banning of public cruelty to animals (i.e., the Grammont law of 1850).6 This ties in with the conviction that a man abusing an animal and refusing to consider it as a sentient being might do the same to another human being. As such, it is humans’ very humanity that is at play through the mass culling and the unprecedented denaturation of animals. Furthermore, humankind thus in spite of itself becomes an “accomplice,” like George Duhamel who feels contaminated by Chicago, where mass slaughterhouses were first developed in the United States, with the city being compared

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to “a serious disease” (Duhamel 1934, 68). In Plaisirs Cruels (1895), Leon Tolstoï asserts that the meat-producing industry binds humans to the sins of gluttony and cruelty––as a matter of fact the Christian dimension of the killing seen as a sacrifice was one of the reasons for the writer’s vegetarianism. Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906), Alfred Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and Georges Duhamel all clearly link the violence inflicted onto animals to human, social, and political aberrations. Hence the number of scenes in their writings exposing many sanguinary details, recounting poorly borne blows and deep terror. With Sinclair, the character who visits the Chicago “killing machine” (Sinclair 2003, 57) later gets entwined within a production line that will socially crush him. To the great dismay of The Jungle’s author, the book prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to take measures for the sanitary improvement of the meat industry7 rather than to improve the working and living conditions of critters and workers. For Sinclair as well as for Döblin, the disproportionate crime scene represents the logical outcome of drifting lives, of social abandonments, and of the laying bare of nations on the verge of collapse. In an analogical perspective, the slaughterhouses as described by Duhamel, at the core of his essay, serve as a parable for the United States, assimilated to an overconsuming, “omnipotent porkocracy” (Duhamel 1934, 63). Years later, in his 1953 short story “The Scarlet Life,” Pierre Gascar recalled how society moved from artisanal slaughtering to industrial slaughterhouses. The short story describes animal killings as well as the social death of a butcher who has lost all bearings and plunges into a bloody frenzy. As for Joel Egloff, his novel L’Étourdissement, published in 2005, centers so heavily on two distressed “killers” that it almost discards animals from the writing, not so much to erase them from his story-telling as to mark their obliteration (Egloff 2005). The protagonist’s dream at the end of the novel is symptomatic, in that he pictures himself placed on the slaughter line following the example of what actually happens to the somewhat simple-minded protagonist within the fictional space of “Pig” (1960), by Roald Dahl. Another scene bordering on this literary motif is found in the short story “Les porcs,” by Sylvain Tesson, where the industrial livestock farmer––haunted by dread and remorse––hangs himself and, in compensation, leaves his body for wild animals to carve out (Tesson 2009, 45–46). If the focalization chosen by many of these authors remains external, it nevertheless leaves room for committed points of view. This is due partly to the narrow attention with which the narrators recount every single step of the “visit,” objectively reporting the implacable and massive nature of the culling. Moreover, the wealth of detail conversely allows to personify or singularize this one animal or breaking point. Besides, these works often shift perspectives, at times moving from external to internal focalization, the latter

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providing insight into the horrified feelings of the character serving as witness, or of the writer, as in Tolstoï’s and Duhamel’s essays: “The knife came out, the lamb retained its blood for a few seconds and with my hand laying on its side, I felt it shivering from within, exactly as I did when I restrained from crying, stiffened by this hopeless retention which threw every second of life into a silent panic” (Gascar 1978, 43). Early on then, empathy became visible as writers shifted away from a strictly external focalization as with Döblin who used descriptive, axiological, and affective features (“What exactly is this man doing with that adorable little calf?” (Döblin 2009, 199), dialogically schemed reciprocal forays (“Now the palpitations calm down. Now you are quiet.” Ibid., 191), speculations (“the animal doesn’t move; it surrenders, yielding with peculiar facility as if it agreed and now gave its consent, having seen it all, knowingly.” Ibid., 192). Such literary devices can be found in works by other writers as well because, on the one hand, they allow for the inscription of human and animals within a common destiny (Simon 2016), and, on the other hand, because they take us inside animals’ inner worlds, testifying to their emotions. Such non-sacrificial, massive immolation is often paralleled with human historical events—even though this may prove tricky for the authors who do so. Slaughterhouses are evidently reminiscent of World War I, often referred to as the “butchery.” In Giono’s writings for instance, the “large herd” of humans is headed toward its ruin: “the blue herd of French soldiers crested the grass, gliding toward the hills and smoke. ‘To the slaughterhouse!’ yelled the Hen” (Giono 1971, 717). In Duhamel’s work, domestic animals get “sucked into” the “meat factory” where they are “pushed inside [its] covered tunnels,” as were the “soldiers, pushed into the bowels of a battlefield”—“an appalling comparison which imposes itself so forcefully that we cannot help but endure it” (Duhamel 1934, 61). The choice of the verb “to endure” here is crucial: with the violence of sacrilege and the unease that comes with lack of precision, the comparison may force itself every now and then as part of a surge of affect or a flash of memory. In systematically establishing such comparisons with war, slavery,8 or genocide, without however grasping the structural and cultural specificities of each, and failing to acknowledge the uniqueness of each and every one of the lives that have been ripped out, such tendencies can induce generalizations that implicitly point to something that still needs to be thought through, something often slightly too historical to be anodyne. The road to hell is paved with good, animalistic intentions: an imaginary or memorial work that groups human and nonhuman victims together can come to lumping together—for the second time, and with hindsight, that is, with the full knowledge of what such animalization has led to—Native Americans, Jews, or Gypsies into one cluster, and thus relativizing their very belonging to humankind. In short, this assimilation amounts to playing the

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same game of specific exclusion as that played by European colonists and Nazis. The recurring superimposition of the industrial slaughter of pigs with “Treblinka” or “Auschwitz”—used as purely generic names which no longer reflect any distinctive reality except that of mass horror—is a particularly interesting example that can also be found in the pictures of human and nonhuman corpses displayed side by side on some animalistic websites. Such comparison has only become “natural” and “obvious” because it is rooted in a very old cultural imagination, that of the Jewish people’s assimilation with swine, most notably with the common representation of the Judensau (Jewish Sow)9 or with the use of the term “marranos”10 to designate those who were forced to convert during the Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula. Needless to say, it is the exact same kind of imagination that has served to vindicate the worst abuses carried out for centuries in Europe. In 1968, Isaac Bashevis Singer published the short story “The Letter Writer,” suggesting via the protagonist’s discourse that factory farming was a form of never-ending Treblinka for animals. Since then, the extermination of the Jews of Europe has progressively come to systematically represent something other than itself, namely the breeding and killing of animals on a large scale—the thesis novel Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee, published in 2003, is one of the most telling examples that come to mind. Yet the victims’ experiences differ from each other and the goals diverge greatly. The two concentrational worlds aforementioned work toward opposite aims: on the one hand, animals are bred to be fattened and to reproduce endlessly, and eventually to die for human dietary purposes—ends that are presented as necessary and which seem to justify the means; on the other hand, humans are starved and struck regardless of their age for ideological reasons, with the admitted goal of complete eradication. As Marc Crépon contends, even if in both cases there is an implicit “murderous consent” (Crépon 2012) transforming into some sort of unavoidability what originally corresponded to decisions leading to unjustifiable ethical violations, we must nevertheless “think through the fundamental limits of the analogy” (Crépon 2018, 188). In the case of factory farming, overemphasizing the anthropozoologic divide has served to justify the worst forms of cruelty toward animals, whereas in the case of concentration camps it is the “transgressive, annihilation of this same boundary” (Ibid., 189) between humans and animals that has warranted the vicious slavery or extermination of millions of human beings who were assimilated to vermin or impure animals. Preserving the irreducibility of these two types of victims does not entail tempering the scandalizing violence each has suffered or might still have to suffer. On the contrary, it remains a case in point that the most efficient narratives are those which, instead of merging immeasurable historical experiences, gesture toward clusters of systemic convergence—U.S. slaughterhouses followed by Fordism may have offered a

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structure among other structures and other events which eventually gave rise to the mechanics presiding over genocide, while cattle cars were indeed used in both cases. Stories based on complex narrations direct us toward shared affects—intense absurdity and organized, bulk pain; the comfortable dodging of those who withdraw from the scene of an omnipresent tragedy—and toward diversified, individual stories rather than a whittling-away of experiences. The assimilating comparison proves harmful to the victims—be they human or nonhuman animals—because it reinforces that which served as a breeding ground for both Nazism and the food-processing industry, that is anonymity, the flattening and desingularization of experiences, and the exit from historical or natural temporality by way of a locking-up into the crude present of survival and dereliction. Lastly, it is almost as if those who reverted to such analogies needed whichever human endorsement they might find to legitimize their compassion toward animals. FROM THE LACK OF MODERATION IN AGRI-FOOD BUSINESS TO THE SINGULARITY OF ANIMAL VICTIMS As a matter of fact, fictional narratives have taken on the mission to restore animal existences “in the first person” (Burgat 2012, 320, and following). In the last twenty years, what has become a true topos in contemporary literature has moved beyond the slaughterhouse to encompass animal breeding itself. Such evolution has taken place on more than a merely thematic level: it signals a historical shift in the writing of fictional testimonies, the latter moving away from the anthropocentric perspective that had theretofore prevailed in slaughterhouse visits. In these more recent narratives, denouncing mechanized animal slaughter is no longer backed by a denunciation of the social marginalization or extermination of humans. Animals can now be contemplated as full victims. As with the child or the madman, critters are endowed with traits that characterize them as such epitomes—namely with enforced passivity, with functional circles (von Uexküll 2010, 40) and specific oikoï that have been trampled, with transmission inaptitude, duplicated silence, and with nonsense that cannot be held at bay. As they avoid turning every suffering critter into a metaphor for humans, and vice-versa, writers strive to decenter the work of testimony and remembrance. Potentially awakening those eye-wide-shut humans, such writers keep vigil over those living in the dark, shrouded as they are in absolute invisibility and unspeakability. This evolution acknowledges the fact that lives twice unworthy of being lived—because they are those of the powerless and, what is more, of animal beings—may yet be deplored. For today’s writers who care to bring animal

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experiences into light, it is the duty of literature to testify for other species, including fish and aquatic mammals—all too often forgotten—as in Le Règne du vivant, by Alice Ferney (2014). In so doing literature redeems the paradoxical power of testimony and truth held by invention. Remembering what it has not experienced, it proceeds to a memorial elaboration, imagining the nonlife of the other. Paradoxically, in order not to forget critters—all critters, each and every one of them—one must scale down. The goal is to offer readers a small number of singularized experiences of beings bestowed with a name, a biography, a life-story, and with their own affects and temperaments. This does not however prevent writers from evoking—as in the slaughterhouse topos—the psychological and social trials of workers that are subservient to the ordeal of cutting into the flesh. Writers likewise do not refrain from depicting the “metaphysical,”11 apocalyptic, if not comical aspect of industrial excessiveness: the “immolated sky” in Duhamel (1934, 64) becoming an unbearably polluted zone in Egloff; the Flood and the end of the world in Roland Buti (2013); or the madness of a butcher who worships aestheticized meat in Joy Sorman (2012). Everything that takes places suggests that by giving up on domestication (grafted in a shared home) in favor of mechanization (relegated and dismissed in a non-place), humans have quit hominization even before entering the process of humanization. With the mechanized lives of beasts in an industrial setting, it is the sacredness and mystery of animals—emphasized by many authors from Hölderlin to Hofmannsthal—that end up vitiated: in Beat Sterchi’s work, the cow’s open belly points to a simulacrum of animal sacrifice and divination by haruspices, and in fact “contains no more secrets” (Sterchi 1987, 101); meanwhile Yves Bichet’s La part animale (1994) wavers between crushingly comical non-sense and a turkey inseminator’s obsession with Rilke’s eighth Elegy of Duino. It is no wonder that fictional testimony and memory—that are anything but fictitious—come on top of indignation, kindness, critique, and shame—those emotions that, according to Marc Crépon, prevent us from consenting to murder (Crépon 2012). Contemporary writers have actually seen documentaries or films, have read essays written by journalists, zoo technicians or philosophers dealing with the insufferable abuse going on in agri-food business. What is specific about a fictional story is that it can perform embodiment of individual cases; it contextualizes the gargantuan horror the proportion of which tends to make it abstract and unimaginable. In short, it makes visible that which has been conceived to remain invisible. Novelistic imagination taps into empathy and into human’s capacity to step out of themselves. It also rests on the indeterminacy of potential lives and events, and on openness to the unknown.12 In that respect, the “vicious circle”13 of the agri-food industry clearly affects poetic language: in order to reallocate a memory to those who have been bereft of

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it, poetic language has to make do with lives that are anything but livable, that can be turned into anything but a novel. How can one narrate, on the one hand, what has already been written out—from the beginning (insemination) to the end (slaughtering)—and, on the other hand, what is repetitive and psychologically grueling to imagine? In 180 days, Isabelle Sorente founds her tale on relentlessly Racinian unities: unity of time (“110 kilos = 180 days = finished product.” Sorente 2013, 56); unity of action (fattening and breeding); and unity of place (shrinking as the animals grow larger, the cage turns into “the absolute opposite of a territory” which is supposed to provide extensive space for flight and shelter, Aillaud and Bailly 2009, 16). Tampering with the cogs of the relentless machinery leading to “the Tool” (i.e., the slaughterhouse, Sorente 2013, 460), the novelist therefore allows her reader to breathe every now and then outside of such a Beckettian sense of the tragic and the absurd, devoid of any intensity other than the exponential length of suffering: her novel stages altruistic infanticide, the dreaming and crying of piglets, the christening of animals, the attack of a boar against a human. All of these gesture toward what zootechnician Jocelyne Porcher has observed about animals, as they come to hang on their flimsiest potential, striving to escape the hell of endless repetition via micro-actions (Porcher 2010). JeanBaptiste del Amo on his end imagines the unimaginable: one boar manages to flee the farm, running for survival far away from humans. This closing passage, in italics, is structured as a dream. It provides an escape out at the end of this novel of infernal claustration, paving the way for another, more appeased novel. An ethics that is mediated by fiction thus specifically embodies diversified existences and complex animal emotions,14 rather than concepts and theories that are all too obvious and uniform, such as those at the heart of hardly veiled thesis novels. In all the tales under study, there is a leitmotif that grants animals agency within the hell they find themselves in: “the screaming! The screaming of animals!” (Duhamel 1934, 64). They scream because of what we have been doing to them, and what that has been doing to our humanity too, by ricochet, and their screaming transforms the muteness that is imposed upon them into a fleeting, yet constant testimony. Testifying in the name of animals via a fictional mode may seem oxymoronic—in reality, given that such fiction deals with invented memory and, what is more, memory which has been transposed from one species to another, these works have more in common with works-as-memorials rather than with works of memory because these stories function like sepulchers, which can exist only within the fragility of language and can only be deployed in the space of readers’ hospitality. As such, by no means does to chant horror work to reenchant it; it simply and quite significantly grants it both matter and place (Del Amo 2016, 414–19).

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NOTES 1. A French, shorter version of this study was published online in December 2015, as “Animal: l’élevage industriel” in Encyclopédie critique du témoignage et de la mémoire, last accessed on August 4, 2019, http:​/​/mem​​ories​​-test​​imony​​.com/​​notic​​e​/ ani​​mal​-l​​eleva​​ge​-​in​​dustr​​iel/.​ 2. The initial meaning of the term “non-lieu” in French is judicial; it refers to a case dismissal, referred to as nolle prosequi in Latin and English. Throughout this chapter, however, I use it in its literal meaning—rarely used in the French language— which has to do with the impossible dwelling place, sojourn, or oïkos. The translation in English precludes the pun intended when using the “non-lieu” in French, which is meant to pinpoint both the dismissal of the animal case, that is, the judicial lack of existence for production animals, and also the nonexistence of dwelling places for these animals to live. Production animals live in existing places (outskirts, livestock farms, cages) but these spaces, banned as they are on the outskirts of society, are everything but livable spaces; they are therefore “non-places.” Accordingly, every time the term “non-lieu” will appear in this article, a translation with the prevailing value of the term in the given context will be chosen. The judicial value might be the least important since it is the idea of place that predominates here. 3. For a development on this subject, see Simon, Anne. 2015. “Animality and Contemporary French Literary Studies: Overview and Perspectives.” In French Thinking about Animals, 75–88, eds. Louisa Mackenzie and Stéphanie Posthumus. Ann Arbor: Michigan Press. 4. I thank Nathalie Solomon for guiding me toward this article initially published in La Presse, June 9, 1938. 5. “Before I start, I would like to urge my female readers to keep a vial of English salts at hand;” and then “to read a couple of musky pages of Dorat” (ibid., 327). Unless stated otherwise, all quote translations are by the translators of this paper, that is, Margot Lauwers and Bénédicte Meillon. 6. “Anyone inflicting public and abusively cruel treatment on domestic animals will be sentenced to a fine ranging from 5 to 15 Francs and possible imprisonment from 1 to 5 days.” Protecting human sensitivity above all, the law was reinforced in 1959 by a decree which no longer specified the public nature of the acts of cruelty. 7. 1906 was the year the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed. It is also when the Chemical Office of the Department of Agriculture of the United States was created, known since 1930 as the Food and Drug Administration. 8. In Défaite des maîtres et possesseurs (Paris, Seuil, 2016), Vincent Message imagines a factory farm where humans are bred in order to feed the dominant extraterrestrial beings. 9. The term Judensau (literally “Jews’ sow”) refers to the defamatory bestial portrayals of Jews in anti-Jew Christian and in anti-Semitic, German art in the MiddleAges, in reference to the nonconsumptive status of pork meat according to Kashrut laws. For example, in statuary and paintings, Jews were represented as suckling a sow or licking its anus.

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10. In Spanish, “marrano” means swine. The Jewish community would later reclaim the use of the term. 11. In some books, this aspect becomes more important that the animals’ fate: see Kobayashi, Takiji. 2010. Le Bâteau-usine [1929], translated from Japanese into French by Evelyne Lesigne-Audoly. Paris: Éd. Allia and Egolf, Tristan. 1998. Le Seigneur des porcheries, translated from the English (USA) by Rémy Lambrechts. Paris: Gallimard. 12. For further reference, see Simon, Anne. December 2017. “Une arche d’études et de bêtes” and “La zoopoétique, une approche émergente : le cas du roman.” In Revue des Sciences Humaines n°328. “Zoopoétique. Des animaux en littérature moderne de langue française,” eds. André Benhaïm and Anne Simon, 7–16 and 71–89. 13. “In the past four centuries Western man has come to the best moment in history to come to grips with the fact that as he had granted himself the right to impose a radical separation between humanity and animality, and as he had granted humans everything while denying everything to animals, he had been initiating a vicious circle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate men from other men and to claim—to the benefit of ever smaller minorities—the privilege of a form of humanism that had been corrupted at birth, as its very principle and notion had been born from hubris.” Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1976. Structural Anthropology, Volume II, 41. Translated from the French by Monique Layton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 14. For further reference, see Simon, Anne. March 2017. “Du peuplement animal au naufrage de l’Arche: la littérature entre zoopoétique et zoopoéthique” (“From animal settlement to shipwreck of the Arch: literature at the edge of zoopoetics and zoopoethics”). In L’Esprit créateur 57.1, “L’Écocritique française” (“French Ecocriticism”), eds. D.A. Finch Race and J. Weber, 83–98.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aillaud, Gilles, and Jean-Christophe Bailly. 2009. Le Visible est le cache. Paris: Gallimard. Musée de la chasse et de la nature. Le promeneur. Bichet, Yves. 1994. La Part animale. Paris: Gallimard. Burgat, Florence. 2012. Une autre existence: la condition animale. Paris: Albin Michel. Buti, Roland. 2013. Le milieu de l’horizon. Geneva: Éditions Zoé. Coetzee, J. M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. Translated by Catherine Lauga du Plessis. Paris: Seuil. Crépon, Marc. 2012. Le Consentement meurtrier. Paris: Éd. du Cerf. ———. 2018. “Des hommes et des animaux: la condition des vivants.” In Inhumaines conditions: Combattre l’intolérable. Paris: éd. Odile Jacob. Del Amo, Jean-Baptiste. 2016. Règne Animal. Paris: Gallimard. Döblin, Alfred. 2009. Berlin Alexanderplatz. Histoire de Franz Biberkopf. Translated by Olivier Le Lay. Paris: Gallimard.

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Duhamel, Georges. 1934. Scènes de la vie future [1930], 30 original woodworks by Guy Dollian, Paris: Arthème Fayard & Cie. Egloff, Joël. 2005. L’Étourdissement. Paris: Buchet Chastel. Egolf, Tristan. 1998. Le Seigneur des porcheries. Translated from the English (USA) by Rémy Lambrechts. Paris: Gallimard. Ferney, Alice. 2014. Le Règne du vivant. Arles: Actes Sud. Fontenay (de), Élisabeth. 1998. Le Silence des bêtes. Paris: Fayard. Gauthier, Théophile. 1856. “Voyage hors barrières,” chapter I “Montfaucon.” In Caprices et Zigzags. Paris: Victor Magen. Giono, Jean. 1971. «Le Grand Troupeau [1931].» In Œuvres romanesques complètes (Complete Fiction Works), t. I. Paris: Gallimard. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.” Kobayashi, Takiji. 2010. Le Bâteau-usine [1929]. Translated from Japanese by Evelyne Lesigne-Audoly. Paris: Éd. Allia. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1976. Structural Anthropology, Volume II. Translated from the French by Monique Layton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Message, Vincent. 2016. Défaite des maîtres et possesseurs. Paris: Seuil. Porcher, Jocelyne. 2010. “Une sociologie des animaux au travail.” In Les animaux: deux ou trois choses que nous savons d’eux, edited by Vinciane Despret and Raphaël Larrère. Paris: Hermann, 101–114. Simon, Anne. 2015a. “Animal: l’élevage industriel.” In Encyclopédie critique du témoignage et de la mémoire. http:​/​/mem​​ories​​-test​​imony​​.com/​​notic​​e​/ani​​mal​-l​​eleva​​ ge​-i​n​​dustr​​iel/. ———. 2015b. “Animality and Contemporary French Literary Studies: Overview and Perspectives.” In French Thinking About Animals, edited by Louisa Mackenzie and Stéphanie Posthumus, 75–88. Ann Arbor: Michigan Press. ———. 2016. “Hommes et bêtes à vif: trouble dans la domestication et littérature contemporaine.” In Le Moment du vivant, edited by Arnaud François and Frédéric Worms, 415–434. Paris: PUF. ———. 2017a. “Une arche d’études et de bêtes” and “La zoopoétique, une approche émergente: le cas du roman.” In Revue des Sciences Humaines n°328, “Zoopoétique. Des animaux en littérature moderne de langue française,” edited by André Benhaïm and Anne Simon, 7–16 and 71–89. ———. 2017b. “Du peuplement animal au naufrage de l’Arche: la littérature entre zoopoétique et zoopoéthique.” In L’Esprit créateur 57.1, “L’Écocritique française,” edited by D. A. Finch Race et J. Weber, 83–98. Sinclair, Upton. 2003. La Jungle [1906]. Translated from the English by Anne Jayez and Gérard Dallez. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Sorente, Isabelle. 2013. 180 jours. Paris: JC Lattès. Sorman, Joy. 2012. Comme une bête. Paris: Gallimard. Sterchi, Beat. 1987. La Vache (The Cow) [1983]. Translated from German by Gilbert Musy. Geneva: Éditions Zoé. Tesson, Sylvain. 2009. “Les porcs.” In Une vie à coucher dehors. Paris: Gallimard. Uexküll (von), Jakob. Milieu animal et milieu humain. Translated from the German and annotated by Charles Martin-Fréville. Paris: Payot et Rivages.

Chapter 10

Ron Rash’s Above the Waterfall, or the Square Root of Wonderful Frédérique Spill

“[L]anguage, spoken or written, is no longer out of reach, but it remains just as magical as that bright-green moth. What writer would wish it otherwise.” (Ron Rash, “The Gift of Silence”)

Though radically different, Above the Waterfall, which was first published in 2016, has quite a lot in common with Ron Rash’s second novel, Saints at the River, published twelve years earlier in 2004. Both titles evoke water flowing in natural environments; both plots are set in contemporary Appalachia, which puts them in a category of their own since, while Rash’s other novels are set in the past, in these two the challenge was for him to recreate present-day Appalachia. According to Ellen Gamerman, “the rural community” of Cullowhee, N.C., “is the unofficial setting” of the novel. As another reviewer puts it, in Above the Waterfall, “Rash [. . .] captures the gritty realities of modern Appalachia with mournful precision: families fractured by violence and addiction, petty small-town conflicts, the gap between the haves and have-nothings” (Butler). Saints at the River similarly depicts the Appalachian facet of what has come to be known as today’s “Rough South.”1 Both storylines—this is a recurring feature in Rash’s writing—contrast the action in the present with past, traumatic experiences that relentlessly haunt the characters’ lives. Hence their common need to be reenchanted, so as to go on with their trajectories. Indeed, when, in an interview for this volume, Bénédicte Meillon asked Ron Rash how much of his writing was about “re-enchanting the world,” this is what he answered: “I would say a good portion of my poetry. Above the Waterfall is definitely about the necessity of doing so. For Becky [who ends up working as a park ranger], the world would be unbearable otherwise. Saints at the River also 161

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emphasizes the need to re-enchant the world.” In both cases, reenchantment is a quest that is pursued in the natural world; it is at the same time a way to escape from the strife of humans and to make life among them more acceptable. From a narrative perspective, the two novels are told by first-person narrators—there are actually two of them in Above the Waterfall—whose voices keep interweaving the present with the past. Other similarities include scattered references to cave paintings and the staging of a sermon—a key moment in both plots. Though the emphasis of the more recent novel’s plot lies on drug culture and ecoterrorism rather than on environmentalism proper, it comparably expresses Rash’s concern with the preservation of the environment through the depiction of characters that enjoy a particularly intense kinship with nonhuman nature. The plot of Above the Waterfall indeed revolves around “[a]n act of sabotage [that] wipes out a population of trout” (Butler), thus engendering momentary chaos in the community. Some reviewers have questioned the relevance of such a plot, considering it “a not-so-compelling and seemingly manufactured ‘who-dun-it’ concerning the poisoning of trout” (Schleicher). It is, however, quite significant that the police investigation that underlies the plot should—quite anticlimactically, it is true—revolve around trout, the fish being one of the most frequent images of natural beauty and vivacity in Rash’s writing. It often comes as a surprise, as, for instance, in each of the trout’s unexpected appearances in The Cove (2012) or in the last pages of The World Made Straight (2006), after three of the main characters, both good and evil, have lost their lives in a car wreck that is not altogether accidental:2 Trout have to live in a pure environment unlike human beings; they can live in filth! And so I think there is a kind of wonder; to me, they’re incredibly beautiful creatures. [[ca]]remember being only four and five and staring for long peri[[s]]t them, just watch[n[]t]em swimming in [h[ ]a]er. But also, like Faulkner in “The [e[],] the idea that when such creatures disappear, we have lost something that cannot be brought back. And I think this is what McCarthy is getting at, at the end of The Road. They mean many things: beauty, wonder, and fragility, in the sense that they can be easily destroyed. In The World Made Straight I felt that Travis’s response to the trout showed his maturity: first he’s just catching them without even caring about killing them, but[t[e] he has that moment when he is in the field and sees the beauty of them and he never has before. To me, that’s a sign of maturation and wisdom on his part. (Spill)

Both “a thing of beauty”3 and a symbol for nature’s resilience as opposed to man’s brittleness, the dead trout in Above the Waterfall are a compelling metaphor for man’s potentially harmful initiatives against the natural world.

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As for the novel’s plot, it is merely a counterpointing pretext allowing the development of both poetical and ethical considerations. Echoing Carson McCullers’ suggestion that the wonderful is an unsolvable conundrum,4 this chapter focuses on how the polyphonous and hybrid aspects of Above the Waterfall contribute to making it a particularly strange bird (or fish, for that matter), whose bright colors, which keep traversing Rash’s writing, can be identified as part and parcel of the writer’s signature–with brightness as forever undistinguishable from a sense of loss. POLYPHONY Far from being univocal, Above the Waterfall and its predecessor, Saints at the River, both show how Rash’s writing makes conflicting approaches to nature cohabit, in an uninterrupted polyphony allowing differing voices to develop simultaneously. In the process, the writer skillfully avoids the excessive simplicity of a binary discourse; he also manages to shirk the kind of pigeonholing which he is so reluctant to: I have readers who are not reading me as an “environmental” novelist. I view my role as an artist to be more a witness than an advocate. I don’t feel the role of my fiction is to tell my reader what to think. If I wish to do that, I will write a non-fiction piece, as I recently did about the contaminated ground water in part of Appalachia.5 Nevertheless, I do bring up environmental issues in my fiction, and my hope is that readers will contemplate such issues. (Meillon)

In A Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold distinguishes between two radically opposed responses to what he calls “the land” around the notion of belonging: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (Leopold xviii–xix). Though in Rash’s novels diverging perspectives of the environment are embodied by antithetical characters that would probably fit in Leopold’s clear-cut categorization, I also believe that he purposely keeps blurring classifications, thus suggesting how difficult it is to stick unswervingly to a radical stance toward the land. The people that take advantage of the land for economic reasons may also respect it; in Rash’s world, the two logics are not necessarily exclusive of each other. His blurring of Leopold’s unambiguous (di)vision is conveyed by the way he occasionally represents those whose position he is most likely to share. Indeed, in Saints at the River, the environmentalists may be a bit too eager to highlight the holiness of their quest; they are, in addition, quite humorously referred to as “tree huggers” (Rash 2004, 61). Likewise, in Above the

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Waterfall, the seriousness and intensity of Becky Shytle’s connection with nature is given full poetic rein. But, now and again, Becky is also teased: for instance, when she first meets Richard Pelfrey, her lover turned ecoterrorist, he spontaneously assumes that, like most people, she is green at heart, but noncommittal: “Let me guess, he’d said. You work at a library or a bookstore. You want to save the world if it doesn’t take more than one evening every two weeks. You love ‘nature’ but never camped more than a quarter mile from asphalt” (51).6 Similarly, as Becky “want[s] to show [him] [. . .] something across the bridge,” even sympathetic Sheriff Les Clary jokes that “[i]f this is another episode of Nature’s Wonders, it needs to be a short one” (37). In turn, Richard and Les both resort to stereotypical representations of “the lover[s] of nature” (Emerson 6), as Emerson would put it: on the one hand, that of the privileged city-dweller who buys herself a good conscience by worrying about the future of the planet, but who would rather sleep in a comfortable bed and enjoy nature in books; on the other hand, the tireless, but possibly tedious, admirer of imperceptible natural phenomena, which, proselytizing, she insists people must pay attention to. As she is certainly closer to the second category, Becky, who much prefers to ride her bike than drive a truck across the park and spends most of her time alone in contemplation, tends to be seen as a weirdo—one character calls her “[t]hat hippy park ranger” (49). In both novels, the distinction between those who consume nature and those who commune with nature is materialized by places. A leisure resort is at the core of both stories: unscrupulous Tony Bryan in Saints at the River thus parallels Harold Tucker in Above the Waterfall. The latter has been running the Locust Creek Resort since his family transformed their farm into a tourist resort for “bird watchers and flower sniffers” (31) to enjoy “the rustic experience” (18). Tourists mostly take a vacation there to fish “well-stocked” (28) streams, in outfits that make them look as if they were “posing for an Orvis catalog, wicker creel and all” (28), an attire that contrasts with the plainness of Becky’s uniform as a park ranger. Ironically, their experience of nature is by all means an essentially artificial venture. Neighboring the resort is Locust Creek State Park, a state-owned entity. As noted by BoutinBloomberg in his review of Above the Waterfall, “[t]he existence of these two entities creates a tension between private enterprise and the publicly administered land.” The geographic proximity of the two places, whose very contiguity illustrates the diverse uses that can be made of the same land, certainly aggravates the tension between some people’s unabashed exploitation of the land for economic purposes and others’ inflexible protection of nature, conceived as a sacred shrine. In Rash’s 2008 novel Serena, the way the Pembertons’ exploitation of the forests challenges the representatives of the National Park movement represents an earlier version of the same lasting conflict. But, as Rash seems to insist throughout his work, the jobs that are

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much-needed in a rather desolate area come from the former; they cannot altogether be considered negatively. Therefore, though some of Rash’s most compassionate characters certainly reflect Thoreau’s famous maxim “that in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (Thoreau 609), his plot constructions testify to his very humane awareness of the compromises idealism and practicality must often make for people to go on living in the same place. In Above the Waterfall, this essential ambivalence is encapsulated by the repetition with variation of the title throughout the novel; while the phrase “above the waterfall” and its variants designate the pristine source of the stream, where speckled trout exhibit their unsullied beauty (“‘I like to go above that waterfall and look at them specks. [. . .] That water’s so clear you can see every dot on them. It ain’t about nothing but setting on a rock and watching them,” 32), the expression ends up referring to a crime scene: “Trout were killed above the waterfall, Les, speckled trout” (126). But what is remarkable is that one connotation does not chase the other away; the two cohabit throughout until the water is cleansed and the sense of wonder can prevail again. Despite their numerous common features, which confirm the perseverance of certain images and issues in Rash’s writing across the years, the two novels are also drastically dissimilar. They are actually as different as two novels can be. Indeed, while Saints at the River displays the hesitancies of a writer still looking for a proper voice for his place and motifs, Above the Waterfall compellingly demonstrates that Rash has achieved his quest, as a result of “three years of struggle” (Gamerman) and decades of writing. His voice now has the gift of juggling between fiction proper and poetry within the same space. He now takes his readers exactly where he wants, experiencing with materials with a compelling sense of freedom. STRANGE BIRDS This is how Chapter Two of Above the Waterfall starts, with Becky’s wild hope that animals labeled forever extinct might defy their official status and still be roving wild remote places: Somewhere in Arizona a jaguar roams. On this day of another school shooting, such news is so needed. Scat and paw prints confirm the sighting. Gone forever from the United States since the 1940s, many believed. What more wonder might yet be: ivorybill, bachman’s warbler, even the parakeet once here in these mountains. When I see them in dreams, they are not extinct, just asleep, and I believe if I rouse them from their slumber, we will all awake in the world together. (11)

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Becky’s ability to question what “many believed” in the preterit (as opposed to “I believe” in the present) and see things otherwise is part and parcel of her urge and ability for “wonder.” Confirming Rash’s admitted fascination for “animals that are near extinction or recently extinct” (Meillon), Becky’s fantasies envision extinction as a form of momentary torpor, from which the slumbering creatures can be roused, much in the way the writer himself conjures up Paleolithic, almost 17,000-year-old, “bison and ibex, but others lost elsewhere to the world: saber cats and woolly mammoths, irish elk” (4), allowing them to roam again in the pages of Above the Waterfall. What’s more, the clause “we will all awake in the world together” points to Becky’s closeness to those sleeping species, together with her faith in a form of redemption in a context of ordinary, unpredictable violence since not even American schoolchildren are spared from demented firings.7 Used as a substantive, which is the case in the above quotation, wonder designates a feeling of surprise and admiration deriving from the observation or experience of something that is beautiful, unusual, unexpected, or all of those at the same time. Wonder is sometimes synonymous with awe—a mélange of admiration and reverence. By extension, a wonder also designates a thing that fills one with surprise and admiration.8 When used as a verb, wonder either refers to an action—the fact of thinking about something and trying to decide what is true, what will happen, what should be done, etc.—or to a reaction, that of being very surprised by something. The way Becky’s strongly assertive use of the present tense plays with the future conveys her determination to let nature astonish her, both in the present and in the future. Indeed, Becky will no longer yield to the nostalgia of things past; while the past certainly weighed on her mind for most of her life, she now appears to be resolved to move forward toward an all-encompassing sense of community, if not communion, with nature. This is what is suggested by the disordered inventory she starts as the novel begins. Indeed, at this point in her life, Becky has made herself available to whatever wonder nature is prone to hoard: she observes and describes, in the most adequate language—a very sensuous poetic language—the minutest details of the multiple sensations nature elicits. The novel’s prologue emphasizes Becky’s microscopic attention to the slightest vibrations of a miniature world, for the description of which she develops a language of its own, strewn with metaphors that, like those of her author, “are steeped in the natural world” (Meillon), mirroring its motions: “I watch last light lift off level land” (3; my emphasis), and humming its song. For, as Charles Berstein puts it in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, “Sound is language’s flesh, its opacity as meaning marks its material embeddedness in the world of things” (22). Becky’s favorite posture—that of the rapt observer—is signaled by the introductory verbal form: “I watch.” Dusk is described as a lifting (rather than a dropping), as of veils, whose

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delicacy is suggested by the fluid alliteration in [l] in “I watch last light lift off level land” (3; my emphasis). Gradually, Becky’s senses awaken to the wonders of the land, as she listens, feels, touches, smells, and walks within. Her hankering for Hopkinsian “invisioning,” a type of vision that merges with what Merleau-Ponty referred to as “the flesh of the world”—a true in-sight— is fulfilled through her humble, quiet and attentive immersion in nature.9 Scott Knickerbocker’s analysis of Hopkins’s sonnet “The Windhover: To Christ our Lord” in the introduction to Ecopoetics. The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language somehow bridges the gap between Becky and her favorite poet, highlighting how they similarly get absorbed into the compact, sensuous density of the natural world: “Contrary to traditionally conceived aesthetic experience, in which a perceiver coolly enframes an object from a detached point of view, Hopkins’s speaker expresses an intensely involved perception wherein the line between subject and object becomes blurred” (15). That the breathtaking prelude to Above the Waterfall should explicitly refer to Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” to which the image of the plow, the mysterious phrase “sillion shine” and an overwhelming sense of radiance echo, is of course not an effect of chance.10 Becky’s contribution to Above the Waterfall essentially consists in such poetic endeavors to make her observations of nature coincide with language as closely as possible, as she makes her own words chant in tune with nature.11 It all starts with a jaguar or a parakeet that her dreams and imagination are able to awaken from the depthless sleep in which they have vanished so that they become again sources of wonder. Parakeets fly throughout the past of Ron Rash’s fiction and poetry; but, except in Becky’s visions, their being an extinct species excludes them from the present. In the short story entitled “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars” in Burning Bright (2010), though the rather irrational quest Ruth Lealand embarks on is for a lost jaguar, as the title implies—a quest that soon becomes the metaphor and symptom of her own harrowing sense of loss—her visit to a specialist of endangered species at the Columbia Zoo faces her with the image of the splendid lost bird: “The walls are bare except for a framed painting of long-tailed birds perched on a tree limb, their yellow heads and green bodies brightening the tree like Christmas ornaments, Carolina Paroquet emblazoned at the bottom” (Rash 2010, 102). For lack of substantial information about jaguars, Dr. Timrod, the ornithologist who is nice and patient enough to devote time to Ruth’s strange query, tells her the story of Carolina parakeets: “There were still huge flocks in the mid-1800s. Audubon said that when they foraged the fields looked like brilliantly colored carpets” (104). Then, he goes on, whole flocks were killed by farmers who “didn’t want to share the crops and fruit trees” (104). Indeed, the birds were known for flocking to where one of them would be wounded, dying or dead, thus making it possible for hunters to decimate whole flocks at once. In other words, the reason

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why entire flocks could be annihilated in less than no time is that the birds, somehow indifferent to danger, stuck together, “[t]hey wouldn’t abandon one another” (105). The birds thus demonstrated a sense of togetherness that implicitly makes today’s disconnected communities of men burn with shame. The testimony from which Dr. Timrod reads mentions how “[at] each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase” (105). That this ingrained, collective support for the dying individual, when conjoined with humans’ killing hunger, should entail collective death is tragically ironical. In Raising the Dead (2002), a small, beautiful, poem entitled “Carolina Parakeet” is devoted to that strange bird, which appears in the form of a “bright vanishing” (Rash 2002, 62). Once again, the bird’s colorful beauty interlaces with the brutal image of “whole flocks slaughtered in a day” (62), bloodstains merging into the “brilliantly colored carpets.” In The Cove, recollections of the bygone bird reappear right from the start through Laurel’s perception of an indescribable song emerging from the woods. As the novel opens, this song conjures up images of “the green body and red and yellow head” (Rash 2012, 7); the song also attracts Laurel into the dazzling brightness of the sun, away from her daily chores in the shade of the cove, away from her solitude. Laurel is thus quite literally enchanted into communion with the world around her by a song that casts a spell, lifting her out of the quotidian. But it is through her remembrance of a school day sixteen years earlier that she is first presented to the reader: that day, the teacher, Miss Calicut, passed around a bird’s frail dead body wrapped in a handkerchief for students “to look closely and not forget what it looked like, because soon there’d be none left, not just in these mountains but probably in the whole world” (Rash 2012, 7). No wonder this encounter with finitude has left a deep mark on a sensitive childlike Laurel, whose young life is already marked by failure and loss. While literally gauging the weightlessness of death with her little hands, on that day she was also given a chance to examine closely a specimen of sheer natural beauty. Consequently, if Miss Calicut’s pupils’ simultaneous experience of beauty and death has become a lifelong teaching, it is because one of the main paradoxes of the natural world has fortuitously been revealed to them: while nature develops on a scale and in a timeframe that considerably exceed that of human lives, it also keeps exemplifying the transience of its species and the vulnerability of its beauties. At that point, the children’s reverential observation of a single dead bird is once again juxtaposed with an evocation of the massive killings of Carolina parakeets, thus highlighting their disproportionate brutality. In The Cove, this new version of the birds’ massacre is elicited by a snickering boy wondering at their stupidity for not “fly[ing] away but keep[ing] circling until not one was left alive” (9). “It’s not because they’re stupid,” the teacher argues, “[t] hey never desert the flock” (9).

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Throughout Rash’s work, the Carolina parakeet therefore becomes a multifaceted metaphor for conflicting interests and irreconcilable conceptions of the natural world, yet represented conjointly by the grace of a single bird; for the harrowing evanescence of beauty; for an unwavering sense of belonging to a community (that watches over its frailest, the wounded and the dying—potentially gesturing to an ethics of care for precious, vulnerable and disappearing life-forms that we humans might learn from?). In The Cove, the metaphorical significance of the Carolina parakeet is enhanced by the black and white reproduction of a small, stylized bird on the blank page indicating the beginning of each of the novel’s five parts. Those five parakeets strikingly all appear in the exact same spot, in the upper left corner of the page, paradoxically flying and frozen. With their gaudy colors and what could anthropomorphically be interpreted as their determination to stick together to the death, the parakeets certainly are strange birds. Their likely definitive disappearance from the mountains they once inhabited contributes to enhancing their strangeness, endowing them with an almost mythological dimension. Because they constitute an inexhaustible source of wonder, the intercrossing visions of Carolina parakeets in Rash’s fiction also exemplify the writer’s sense of longing for lost beauties, as well as his poetical response to such loss. That odd bird is also striking as an effective metaphor to describe the singularity of Ron Rash’s sixth novel. HYBRIDITY Above the Waterfall is certainly a very singular book: the novel seems to result from the breeding of different species, to be the product of mixing different heterogeneous elements. With it, Rash offers his readers something radically new: though an unmistakable part of it, it is a bird that stands out against the rest of the flock, whereby the ineluctable process of extinction is somehow counterbalanced by the emergence of new forms. The text is made of two interwoven first-person narratives, developing at the crossroads of Southern noir fiction, poetry, and contemplation. Les Clary, one of the two homodiegetic narrators who, in turn, are in charge of the narration, is about to retire from his position as county sheriff at the time he starts to tell his story. He has been quite battered by his life-long dealings with his county’s criminals, mostly drug cookers and peddlers, and by a marriage the failure of which he cannot help feeling guilty about. The second character-narrator, Becky, has recently arrived in the community to run the Locust Creek State Park, a place that, in the seclusion of the woods, offers her long-needed comfort and solace. The traumatic experience she had to face as a child surviving a school shooting literally left her speechless for a while; as

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an adult, she fell in love with a man, Richard Pelfrey, whose radical activism turned into terrorism; he ended up being killed short after she decided to split with him because of his extremely violent methods. Sheriff Clary conjures up the figure of another retiring sheriff with a meditative leaning, Cormac McCarthy’s Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men—a title that Les could consider as his own motto. Meanwhile, though such a parallel may sound farfetched, it is tempting to regard Becky as a twenty-first century Appalachian version of eighteenth century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially as he displays himself in Chapter V of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Indeed, both enjoy a minimalist lifestyle, manifesting a sense of indifference to comfort and earthly possessions12; both of them show an acute awareness of the physical world, which imperceptibly becomes a privileged gateway into metaphysical considerations about humans’ place on earth: Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. [. . .] Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment. (Rousseau 88)

Rousseau’s ample sentences undoubtedly are a far cry from Becky’s fragmentary, often nominal, syntax, which is undoubtedly much closer to Hopkins’s poetry; yet it is tempting to think that she, who, though for quite different reasons, similarly finds in nature a refuge from the unpredictability of men, could find this thought significant. References to American transcendentalists, McCarthy and Rousseau, among others, are part of my response to Above the Waterfall as a reader and as a critic. But the novel actually contains a multitude of explicit but equally diversified echoes, which contribute to the overwhelming sense of hybridity it conveys. Indeed, as already pointed out, nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is omnipresent throughout Becky’s observations; his being a constant source of inspiration and wonder for Becky actually appears right from the start: “How strange that Hopkins’ quill scratches let me see more” (4). References to Hopkins’s poetry, either overt or concealed, intercross with Johnny Cash “[singing] of hard times chopping cotton in Arkansas” (172), with several allusions to the cave paintings of Lascaux, with “the bold yellow” (3) of “Van Gogh’s sunflowers” (26), reflected in Becky’s descriptions of black-eyed Susans, and with evocations of Edward Hopper’s “Freight Car at Truro,” a reproduction of which hangs in Les’ office and which Becky responds to as follows: “Even Hopper’s boxcars are alone” (7).13 Conspicuous references to the art of painting obviously echo the painterly quality of Becky’s language and the visual aspect of the book, which, more than any other book by Rash, plays with the interactions

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between text and images. When asked whether “other fields from arts and humanities have any impact on the vision of the world [he tries] to (re)create in [his] writing,” Rash responds as follows: “My father was an art teacher so I have always had a love of painting. My middle name is Vincent, after Van Gogh, so I have been impacted by his work, especially in Above the Waterfall. In that novel I wanted Becky to see the natural world with an intensity similar to Van Gogh’s” (Meillon). The mélange of genres,14 materials and intertextual references conveys the book’s postmodern tang—though the writer may not be too fond of this label. The merging of extremely heterogeneous references certainly makes Above the Waterfall an object of wonder. The inclusion of images, schemes, and various typographies differentiating the several levels of narration and writing within the narrative further confirms the impression that, with Above the Waterfall, Rash experimented with the potentialities of book writing with an unembarrassed sense of independence. Here is what you see when you open the book. Overall, Above the Waterfall is, literally, a very aerated novel. Not only does it mostly take place in the open (the few interiors that are described actually tend to be quite claustrophobic), it also contains regular blanks—small spaces and whole pages—that constitute momentary pauses in the narrative, somehow materializing the longed-for quietness of nature. At the bottom of the title pages, a row of trees—their figures evoke firs and poplars—stretches from left to right; since the woods thus represented are not framed the trees somehow seem to dilute into the book, extending far beyond this opening image. Indeed, each of the five parts making up the book is similarly separated by a double page indicating the part number and repeating, in the form of a blurry gray monochrome, the same image of woods, with a slanting tree near the middle, and not a single trace of humanity. Each of the five repetitions of this image looks gradually printed in darker and darker shades of gray, heightening the contrasts: the impression is that of mist lifting, that of an elusive landscape slowly materializing and allowing us, readers, to see more. This arrangement somehow echoes the publication of Waking, Rash’s fourth collection of poems by Hub City Press in 2011, though in Waking each of the five parts introduces a different image—a car covered in snow, haystacks in front of barns, naked trees, the frozen ground—of the Appalachian countryside in winter.15 In Above the Waterfall, the image is insistently the same: how is this to be interpreted? I would suggest that, set against the tribulations of the plot, which evokes petty crimes, irreparable addictions, treasons, corruption, disappointments, and a great deal of suffering, the rhythmical appearance of the trees somehow allows the reader a breath of fresh air, echoing the way Becky chronically escapes the contact of her peers to resource herself deep in the woods. Besides, the permanence of

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trees, which, even though some of them may be slanting, keep standing, can be construed as a silent commentary on nature’s resilience as opposed to the vanity of humans’ gesticulations.16 Other visual elements similarly heighten the singularity of Above the Waterfall: the reproduction of the sound of “a red-winged blackbird” at the beginning of Chapter Eleven: “Chkkk chkkk,” translated as “away from me keep, away from me keep” (71), echoes the parakeets’ “sharp cry of we we we” (Rash 2012, 9) in The Cove. Poems or fragments of poems written by Becky are reproduced in a typography that is different from that of her poetical prose.17 Becky’s sections also include graphs and drawings, corresponding to her diverse, but relentless, attempts—both with signs and symbols—to grasp (to translate?) the sensible qualities of her observations. Becky’s visual inscriptions of what she envisions in her notebooks actually combine text and image, blurring the frontier between words and visual art, as when she registers the presence of a “river slick,” a fish also known as a “tangerine darter” or “Percina aurantiaca” (72); Becky indeed uses both lines and letters to trace “the outline of the dorsal fins” (73). Likewise, the letters making up the two words “snake doctors,” a common appellation for dragonflies, evoke their cross-like shape (87); even more mysterious is the representation of the unfinished message of “a writing spider’s ” “eyelash-thin leg,” which says “T? R? G?” (117), the question marks separating each of the three letters somehow implying that no meaning should be forced upon whatever the spider has to say. While orb weaving may be regarded as a form of writing, what is suggested is that Becky’s experimentation with lines and letters to grasp natural phenomena, the poetry that is represented as hers—her whole ecopoetical quest—may be reciprocated by the infra-linguistic way nature has its say. CONCLUSION Because of its curious nature, Above the Waterfall somehow resists the application of usual academic tools; for the reader and critic, it is a boundless source of wonder, in the plurality of its significations. Reading the novel and writing about it is like taking a meandering walk in the understory of dense woods, occasionally getting lost, then picking up one’s trail again, meanwhile gathering small things on the way—a fir cone, a stone, a berry. It involves an opening up to sounds and silences, colors and lights, smells and textures that are mostly foreign to the ordinary experiences of men and women. It is a form of surrender to the timeless magic of a world that generates its own improbable language: “In its wake, a caught wave of sillion shine” (3). What reader would wish it otherwise?

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NOTES 1. Thomas Ærvold Bjerre has devoted a 2016 article to “The Rough South of Ron Rash.” In Rough South, Rural South, eds. Jean W. Cash and Keith Perry, a volume focusing on the question of “Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature.” 2. I commented in detail on the symbolism of trout imagery in Ron Rash’s writing in an article published in a 2018 issue of Revue Française d’Études Américaines on “The Pursuit of Happiness.” 3. The phrase derives from a poem by one of Ron Rash’s favorite poet, John Keats’ “A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever.” 4. The title of this chapter is, indeed, borrowed from the title of Carson McCullers’ second and last play for its magical ring, though there is obviously not the least similarity between Rash’s sixth novel and McCullers’ 1957 drama. 5. This piece was recently translated into French and published in the April 2018 issue of the French magazine America, “Que reste-t-il de l’Amérique sauvage?” 6. If no other information is conveyed, the page references between parentheses correspond to the original 2015 edition of the novel by Ecco. 7. This is an aspect of everyday life in today’s America that Rash refers to twice in Above the Waterfall. While, as a child, Becky was the eyewitness of a school shooting in the course of which she saw people die, as an adult, she is, understandably, terrified by the permanence and regularity of such tragedies. Her own protective stance toward the schoolchildren she welcomes in the state park and introduces to the wonders of nature may be interpreted as her own small-scale attempt to fend off their potentially violent urges. 8. In its informal use, a wonder also is a person who is very clever at doing something; a person or thing that seems very good or effective. 9. These reflections are particularly indebted to Bénédicte Meillon’s suggestions (some phrases here are her own), which are infallibly inspired by a very sharp ecopoetic insight. She also oriented me toward Scott Knickerbocker’s Ecopoetics, which, indeed, proved to be a very inspiring reading. Thank you so much, Béné. 10. It is very striking that, in the same introduction, Scott Knickerbocker should bring together Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Indeed, if Hopkins constitutes the most obvious intertextual reference in Above the Waterfall, Rash acknowledged that he thought about Dickinson when he created Becky’s voice: “In this novel I really wanted to attempt to create a first-person narrative voice that was as intense as poetry. In a way I had Dickinson in the back of my mind—the way Dickinson perceived the world in a way no one else ever has, or could. Hopkins also has this ability. I would like to think that Becky does some of that. She is seeing things in a deeper way than most of us can. She sees feelingly, as Shakespeare puts it. She also has this ability to enter things, as in the case of the moldboard plough at the beginning. She’s also a character who is attempting to be purely in the present, in sensation, for psychological reasons because the past is so overwhelming for her. I thought that would be interesting to create a voice with a lyrical poem’s intensity and to counter that with a more traditional narration, and see how that works, hoping the

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way Les and Becky use language reveals so much about them in other areas.” This reflection is derived from a June 2016 interview conducted in Perpignan, “Poems {New and Selected}. Ron Rash, the Poet: An Interview,” published in The Radiance of Small Things, 211–233. 11. I devoted the last chapter of my upcoming monograph on Ron Rash’s work to Above the Waterfall. This chapter, entitled “‘The world’s understory,’ or Renewing Wonder in Above the Waterfall,” contains a detailed reading of the novel’s prologue, in which its dense intertext is explored. 12. Rousseau mentions that on arriving on the Swiss island in which he was to spend “the happiest time of his life” (83), he didn’t unpack “a single box or trunk and lived in the house where he intended to end his days, as if it had been an inn which he was to leave the following day” (83). Les’ description of Becky’s in Chapter One conveys a similar impression. 13. In passing, the reader will also find the now almost classical reference to Deliverance—in this case John Boorman’s film adaptation of James Dickey’s novel. This is, indeed, how Gerald is described: “Damn it, Les, he looks like he just walked off the set of Deliverance” (17). 14. In his review of the novel, Butler remarks “the book begins as a lyrical, farreaching reflection on nature and modern-day loneliness and flirts with an mishmash of ideas before evolving into an atypical Southern Noir whodunit.” 15. For a detailed analysis of the relation between text and image in Waking, see Chapter 8 of The Radiance of Small Things “Ron Rash’s Elemental Poetry: Waking, or ‘the wind’s harsh sibilance.’” 16. “I think the psychological makeup of mountain people is very interesting. A person has to be influenced at seeing these things that have been there for millions of years, blocking any long gaze, reminding oneself of one’s small life, perhaps its insignificance?” (Spill). 17. See pages 45, 177–78 and 236. Plays with typography are also to be found in the reproductions of a plaque (23; two lines by Hopkins) and signs (28, 234) in capital letters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, Charles. 1998. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press. Bjerre, Thomas Ærvold. 2016. “The Rough South of Ron Rash.” In Rough South, Rural South, eds. Jean W. Cash and Perry, Keith. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Boutin-Bloomberg, Eric. 2015. “Review of Ron Rash’s Above the Waterfall.” Deep South Magazine, September 18. http:​/​/dee​​psout​​hmag.​​com​/2​​015​/0​​9​/18/​​revie​​w​-of-​​ ron​-r​​ashs-​​above​​-t​he-​​water​​fall/​. Butler, Tray. 2015. “Ron Rash’s ‘Waterfall’ Searches for Answers in Ruined Appalachia.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, September 3. http:​/​/www​​.myaj​​ c​.com​​/news​​/life​​style​​s​/ron​​-rash​​s​-wat​​erfal​​l​-sea​​rches​​-for-​​answe​​rs​-​in​​-ruin​​ed​/nn​​ShP/.

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Carmin, Jim. 2015. “Review: Above the Waterfall.” Star Tribune, September 19. http:​/​/www​​.star​​tribu​​ne​.co​​m​/rev​​iew​-a​​bove-​​the​-w​​aterf​​all​-b​​y​-ron​​-r​ash​​/3282​​02691​/. Crowe, Thomas. 2015. “Rash’s Poetic Prose Infuses New Novel.” Smoky Mountain News, Wednesday, November 18. http:​/​/www​​.smok​​ymoun​​tainn​​ews​.c​​om​/co​​mpone​​ nt​/k2​​/item​​/1674​​5​-ras​​h​-s​-p​​oetic​​-pros​​e​​-inf​​uses-​​new​-n​​ovel. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2000. “Nature.” In The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: The Modern Library. Gamerman, Ellen. 2015. “Ron Rash’s Risky Novel Above the Waterfall.” The Wall Street Journal, September 3. http:​/​/www​​.wsj.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/ro​​n​-ras​​hs​-ri​​sky​-n​​ew​-no​​ vel​-a​​bove-​​the​-w​​at​erf​​all​-1​​44131​​3164. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 2009. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knickerbocker, Scott. 2012. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press,. Leopold, Aldo. 1966. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine. McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. No Country for Old Men. London: Picador. McCullers, Carson. 1997. The Square Root of Wonderful. Marietta: Cherokee Publishing Company. Meillon, Bénédicte. 2016. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Ron Rash.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. Interview: https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/3723. Mosher, Howard Frank. 2015. “Above the Waterfall Review: A Powerful Tale of Modern Appalachia.” The Washington Post, September 2. https​:/​/ww​​w​.was​​hingt​​ onpos​​t​.com​​/ente​​rtain​​ment/​​books​​/abov​​e​-the​​-wate​​rfall​​-revi​​ew​-a-​​power​​ful​-t​​ale​-o​​f​-mod​​ ern​-a​​ppala​​chia/​​2015/​​09​/02​​/18dd​​882a-​​5165-​​11e​5-​​933e-​​7d06c​​647a3​​95​_st​​ory​.h​​tml. Rash, Ron. 2002. Raising the Dead. Oak Ridge, TN: Iris Press. ———. 2004. Saints at the River. New York: Picador. ———. 2006. The World Made Straight. New York: Picador. ———. 2010 (2008). Serena. New York: Canongate. ———. 2011. Waking. Spartanburg: Hub City Press. ———. 2011 (2010). Burning Bright. New York: Ecco. ———. 2012. The Cove. London: Canongate. ———. 2015. Above the Waterfall. New York: Ecco. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1979. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Translated by Peter France. New York: Penguin. Rusoff, Marly. “The Gift of Silence by Ron Rash.” http:​/​/www​​.ruso​​ffage​​ncy​.c​​om​/au​​ thors​​/rash​​_r​/ro​​n​_ras​​h​_gif​​t​_o​f_​​silen​​ce​.ht​​m. Spill, Frédérique. 2014. “An Interview with Ron Rash.” Transatlantica [On line], 1, July 9. http://transatlantica​.revues​.org​/6829. ———. 2019a. “The Pursuit of Happiness, or Contemplating Trout in Ron Rash’s Fiction.” In The Pursuit of Happiness, Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines, no°157, p. XX. ———. 2019b. The Radiance of Small Things in Ron Rash’s Writing. Columbia: South Carolina University Press. Thoreau, Henry David. 1982 (1947). “Walking.” In The Portable Thoreau. New York: Penguin.

Chapter 11

A Poetics of Traces in Rick Bass’s Short Stories Claire Cazajous-Augé

In his short stories, Rick Bass insists on the elusive presence of animals. Because deer jump out of the woods, egrets fly away, and redfish dive deep into water, animals appear in furtive and often dream-like encounters. However, Bass’s writing does not only aim at showing the wonders of the fleeting appearances of animals; it also tries to find respectful ways of approaching nonhuman worlds. Indeed, Bass’s writing constantly negotiates between the attempt to recreate the moment of enchantment we may experience on seeing other ways of inhabiting and perceiving the world, and the wish to reveal the reciprocity tying human and nonhuman animals, while maintaining a safe distance between them. In order to recreate the furtive encounters between humans and animals in his writing, Rick Bass relies on descriptive traces such as ellipses and synecdoches, as well as on depictions of physical traces such as footprints or drops of blood. Traces draw attention to the absence of the animal whose track is being followed, thus emphasizing the physical and temporal distance separating the animal from the hunter looking for traces of his prey. Because many animal descriptions in Bass’s short stories rely on aesthetic devices reproducing the elusive dimension of the nonhuman world, Bass invents a poetics of traces that is respectful of what directly appears in nature as an “animal style,” to take up Marielle Macé’s phrase.1 In an article entitled “Styles Animaux” (“Animal Styles”), Marielle Macé shows that each animal species can be considered as a “way of being, a stylistic yearning” (Macé 2011, 97). She thus argues that each animal species has a specific style that is “a way to connect with oneself and with the world” (Macé 2011, 103). Insofar as literature is endowed with the power to identify and reproduce a variety and diversity of ways of being, and therefore a variety of styles, the literary representation of “animal styles” holds an ethical dimension: it 177

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ultimately and somewhat paradoxically helps improving our inhabitation of the world by celebrating the intrinsic value of each animal style and inviting us to protect them. In Bass’s short stories, the descriptions of absent animals testify to Bass’s attempt to reproduce animal modes of being. By resorting to stylistic devices that inscribe the disappearances or brief appearances of wild animals into the text, Bass seems to suggest that his writing allows him to bridge the distance between human and nonhuman animals. Yet, the use of descriptive traces also humbly suggests that something always resists man’s wish to intellectually and physically capture animal existences. Indeed, the absence of animals in wild territories leads the writer to question his way of representing the nonhuman world. In an article that defines the role of ecopoetics (“Réinventer la nature: vers une éco-poétique”), Thomas Pughe claims that literature cannot recreate nature. In order to reinvent humans’ relationships with nature, Thomas Pughe remarks, writers can show their dynamic interactions with the nonhuman world by emphasizing their creative effort to give an ethical depiction of nature (Pughe 2005, 73). When he describes a fleeting animal, Bass sometimes adopts different and even contradictory strategies that jeopardize the mimetic relation between text and nature and show the writer’s attempts at finding the most respectful ways of representing the nonhuman worlds. By exposing the very traces of his writing process, Bass reenchants nature—an act of reenchantment that Thomas Pughe defines as the will to give a respectful representation of the modes of being pertaining to the elements composing the nonhuman world: “[with its] aesthetic and ideological ambiguity [. . .], ecopoetics [. . .] seeks to re-enchant [nature], that is to demand a respectful representation of its wilderness character” (Pughe 2005, 74–75)—and suggests how ecopoetics can lead to a more ethical rapport with nature. In his article “Blurring the Tracks: How to write about nature in Rick Bass’s The Lost Grizzlies,” Yves-Charles Grandjeat examines the reflexive dimension of Bass’s writing. Indeed, Bass sometimes exhibits the rhetorical artifices he resorts to when he describes the nonhuman world, such as incongruous comparisons—when climbing a mountain, the narrator compares himself with King Kong going up the Empire State Building (Bass 1995, 212)—and anthropomorphic images—the narrator tries to imagine what ravens might think when they see him (Bass 1995, 158)—underlining the importance of maintaining a respectful distance between man and nature: “rather than representing the wild, it presents its own strategies in representing the wild, and thus makes obvious the otherness of what it represents” (Grandjeat 2004, 53). Yves-Charles Grandjeat adds that, in The Lost Grizzlies, as well as in Bass’s fictional work, the motif of animal tracks acts as a metaphor for the marks the artist leaves in his writing: “The marks on the page call for the same reading as the marks on the ground or

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the trees. They incise the hard surface of experience and open up negative spaces to the work of imagination” (Grandjeat 2004, 57). The quest for an animal becomes “an opportunity to indulge in a metafictional consideration on the good use of signs, not as traps set for a deadly hunt, but as the stuff of dreams, so we can figure out who we are” (Grandjeat 2004, 57). Far from merely giving incomplete descriptions and interrupting the course of the story, the numerous descriptive and narrative traces allow us to reflect on our own styles, and more specifically on our ways of relating to the nonhuman world. Studying some of Bass’s short stories where humans follow animal tracks, this essay seeks to delineate Bass’s poetics of traces. The leitmotif of animal tracks allows Bass to gesture toward the existence of other ways of inhabiting the world. Bass’s writing also gives some access to the worlds of animals, not only by trying to explain how animals perceive their surroundings, but also by suggesting that the physicality of poetic language coincides with the animals’ modes of being. In order to resist anthropocentric appropriation and to intimate that humans cannot fully grasp other modes of being, Bass’s writing constantly maintains a sense of physical and descriptive distance between humans and animals. Surprisingly enough, the author’s strategy does not only rely on the absence of any description of an animal, but also on the presence of a large array of narrative and descriptive traces of this animal. Finally, the traces of Bass’s quest to give an ethical representation of the nonhuman world in his fiction eventually lead to a revelation of humans’ need to reinvent their relationships in the community of humans. APPROACHING ANIMAL WORLDS In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Carlo Ginzburg develops the theory of the evidential paradigm. According to Ginzburg, the epistemological method consisting in reading almost imperceptible clues, in order to uncover events one did not directly experience, emerged in a cynegetic context: In the course of countless chases [the hunter] learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers. (Ginzburg 1989, 102)

It is by identifying and deciphering traces that hunters first managed to reconstruct the physical portraits of their absent preys.

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When they track an animal, Bass’s narrators and characters successfully rely on this evidential paradigm. In “Her First Elk,” Jyl, a young hunter, finds drops of blood from an elk she has shot and can guess the diameter of the wound even though the animal is absent: It was amazing to her how little blood there was. The entry wound, she knew, was no larger than a straw, and the exit wound wouldn’t be larger than a quarter, and even the small wound would be partially closed up with the shredded flesh, so that almost all of the blood would still be inside the animal, sloshing around, hot and poisoned now, no longer of use, but unable to come out. (Bass 2006, 32)

Despite the fact that it is the first time that Jyl is hunting on her own, the scarcity of the traces she finds does not prevent her from giving an accurate description of the elk. Indeed, when Jyl finally finds the animal, it turns out that the wound is so small that it is almost invisible, as she had predicted. In this excerpt, Bass also relies on the physicality of language to render the movements of the animal. At the end of this passage, the clauses progressively shorten and the rhythm of the sentence accelerates, which translates the elk’s stressed heartbeat and gasping. And then, the slowing down of rhythm corresponds to the death of the animal. The evidential paradigm does more than allow the hunter to identify and give a detailed description of the animal that was there. It also helps him to answer the question: “what happened?”2 Ginzburg explains that tracking an animal and telling a story require the same intellectual operations. He goes as far as to suggest that the peoples of hunters-gatherers were the first storytellers: Perhaps the actual idea of narration (. . .) may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks. This obviously undemonstrable hypothesis nevertheless seems to be reinforced by the fact that the rhetorical figures on which the language of venatic deduction still rests today—the part in relation to the whole, the effect in relation to the cause—are traceable to the narrative axis of metonymy (. . .). The hunter would have been the first “to tell a story” because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events. (Ginzburg 1989, 103)

In Bass’s short stories, the narratives that emerge from the discovery of animal traces do not provide the narrators with a general knowledge about the modes of being of a whole species. Because he generally chooses to represent the traces of a single animal rather than that of a herd or a flock, the author puts emphasis on the singularity of each animal. In “The Lives of Rocks,” the traces of the deer Jyl follows indicate that her prey is a graceful

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and vigilant animal: “she heard the sounds of quiet steps approaching” (Bass 2006, 82), “careful steps” (Bass 2006, 106). When Jyl finally gets closer to the animal, the narrative she creates confirms the portrait of the deer she initially drew: “She imagined she could see doubt or anxiety trying to enter the buck’s gaze, and his suspicion that something was wrong” (Bass 2006, 105). Far from being a tool to show the superiority of humans, anthropomorphism here functions as a way to underline the connections between human and nonhuman worlds. In contrast, when Bass presents the modes of being of a given species, he often relies on short phrases including the modals “can” and “would” or the gnomic present—“bears can scent food at distances of seven miles, and wolves even farther” (Bass 2002, 20), “[bears] dig below the earth each autumn and come back out of the earth each spring” (Bass 1997, 35–36)—that seem to have no impact on the course of the narrative. With such devices, Bass expresses general truths about certain animals. On the contrary, the narratives that emerge from the presence of actual, individual traces deal with animals that are not simply considered as members of a species. As Dominique Lestel remarks, because each animal is endowed with specific characteristics that differentiate it from the other members of its own species, it can be considered as an individual (Lestel 2004, 35–37).3 In this respect, animal traces are not only the signs of the “absent-presence” of animals (Bailly 2013, 31), they are also the signatures left by a particular being. Quite significantly, in The Book of Yaak, the narrator claims that he is able to identify a specific animal via the footprints it has left behind: “There’s a big monster of a bear that hangs out on top of this mountain (. . .). I’ve seen him but once though I’ve seen his tracks often” (Bass 1996, 175). Even if the evidential paradigm may reduce the physical and temporal distances between humans and animals by allowing hunters to reconstruct the portraits and the individual stories of their preys, Bass does not try to annihilate the discrepancies between human and nonhuman worlds. Indeed, he insists on the idea that although humans and animals share the same territory, they perceive it differently. In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll explores how human and nonhuman animals perceive the world. He asserts that all living species react to a set of stimuli, or “carriers of significance,” which hold a vital importance to them. For example, ticks only react to three stimuli: the smell, skin, and blood of the animals they feed on. Noticing that the stimuli are different for each species, Uexküll speculates that each animal has its own perceptual environment, which is why he uses the plural “worlds.” Uexküll’s work contributes to showing that even if some worlds are more complex, no world—and therefore no living creature—is superior to another. He adds that our senses and our scientific knowledge allow us to acknowledge the existence of other worlds: “We have developed perceptual aids and effector tools

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that make us able—providing we know how to use them—to broaden and deepen our Umwelt. But we cannot go beyond the perimeter of our Umwelt” (Uexküll 1934, 111). And yet, in the context of the hunt, Bass’s narrators do more than simply revealing the existence of other ways of perceiving the world, by taking animal tracks into account for example. They also penetrate the worlds of the preys by trying to recreate the animals’ perceptions of their environment. According to Uexküll, animals can approach the worlds of other animals through their senses. That is the reason why predators can catch their preys, even though they live in different perceptual worlds. For example, the spider weaves the threads of its web so that the fly cannot see them. In the case of Bass’s hunting stories, it is by combining a methodical approach of the territory—the evidential paradigm—with a more intuitive and sensorial relation to the nonhuman world that the characters manage to catch animals. If Trapper (“The Myths of Bears”) and Jyl’s father (“Her First Elk”) are endowed with the ability to see the world like their preys, it is not only because they are experienced hunters, it is also because they are colorblind or have a monochromatic vision, like many animals. Far from preventing the hunters from tracking an animal, their visual impairments allow them to approach the territory from the perspective of their preys by trying to rely on their sense of smell. In the course of their hunts, Trapper and Jyl’s father depend on cognitive capacities that humans share with animals, such as when Trapper tries to catch his girlfriend’s scent after she escaped from their cabin: “Trapper [. . .] puts his nose in the depression and sniffs, closes his eyes and sniffs, but she’s clever . . . the sulfur odor of the spring confuses all scents, all instinct” (Bass 1997, 39). At the level of discourse, Bass’s writing relies on the tangible substance of language to intimate the role of the senses in the approach to the nonhuman world. In this passage, alliterations—“closes his eyes”—and repetitions—“sniffs [. . .] and sniffs,” “all scents, all instinct”— recreate the sensorial experience trackers and animals, or predators and preys, have of their surroundings. The physicality of language thus becomes a tool in the approach of other worlds, indicating how literature can coincide with the realm of nature. In “The Hermit’s Story,” it appears that some fragments of the narrative and some short descriptions are told from the animals’ points of view. Alain Rabatel has developed the theory of the “PDV” (Point De Vue, or Point of View), which explains the strategies some authors may use when trying to render the expression of a subjective perception in a text. Indeed, some writers cannot or do not want to use direct speech to convey one of their characters’ perspective on the world. This strategy proves especially useful when an author wishes to express the thoughts of animals, as they are deprived of an articulate language that humans may understand. Adverbs, adjectives, or periphrases for example

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serve as tools to imagine how nonhuman beings perceive their surroundings. In his texts, Bass particularly relies on the use of hypotheses in order to penetrate the thoughts of animals. In “The Hermit’s Story,” after Ann and Gray Owl find snipe under a frozen lake, the narrator attempts to describe the birds’ thoughts: “Perhaps they believed that the pack of dogs, and Gray Owl’s and Ann’s advancing torches, had only been one of winter’s dreams. Even with the proof—the scribings—of grace’s passage before them—the vent-holes still dreaming—perhaps they believed it was a dream” (Bass 2002, 16). On the one hand, the anaphoric “perhaps” could suggest that the narrator tries to relinquish a human perspective in order to briefly encharge the birds with the enunciation. On the other hand, the series of hypotheses could also function as a proof of the narrator’s knowledge of the worlds of animals. The ethological knowledge of the omniscient narrator allows him to penetrate the thoughts of the characters, but also of the animals they encounter. Because the source of the PDV remains opaque, Bass shows the reciprocity between humans and animals that he wishes to emphasize. Besides, the blending of human and nonhuman perspectives testifies to the author’s reluctance to forcefully penetrate the worlds of animals, and the “stroll through the worlds of animals” (Uexküll) that Bass offers in his short stories is always temporary. By presenting characters and narrators who constantly shift from a human to an animal perspective, Bass exposes the dynamic relations between humans and animals and maintains a safe distance between the human and the nonhuman worlds. MAINTAINING A SAFE DISTANCE Despite the fact that, in most cases, Bass’s narrators are experienced hunters, many hunting stories do not end with the capture of an animal. A hunt can end abruptly, leading to an incomplete description of the animal, or even to no description at all. But sometimes, several—and often contradictory—narratives of the same hunt are given. And yet, far from being opposed, these two narrative strategies play the same role. Indeed, they function as screens aiming at protecting animals by keeping them at a respectful distance from humans. Sometimes, the characters’ knowledge about animal behaviors and their abilities to decipher animal traces are not sufficient to unveil the mysteries of the nonhuman world. When Martha conducts autopsies on dead deer, she cannot always explain why they died: For some deer the causes of death were obvious: the brittle bones of selenium deficiency, or the puncture marks in the neck from coyotes’ teeth. But for others,

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so many others, there appeared to be no reason for dying. They had just stopped living. It was as if there were something out there that could not be measured: a thing they needed but had run out of. (Bass 2002, 176)

Martha does not try to fill in the blanks of the deer’s last moments thanks to her ethological knowledge. The imprecise nouns she uses—“something,” “a thing”—contrast with the detailed explanations that are given throughout the short story whenever Martha finds the traces of a dead animal. On the one hand, this example suggests that in spite of our scientific knowledge, some elements of the nonhuman world remain mysterious and cannot be unraveled. But on the other hand, the lack of description shows the writer’s wish to create what Yves-Charles Grandjeat calls a “safe area” (Grandjeat 2004, 117), a narrative sanctuary that humans cannot control. In other words, Bass gives space to animals in order to resist the drive to appropriate the nonhuman. When Bass chooses to keep some distance between the worlds of animals and that of human beings, another strategy he resorts to consists in multiplying narrative traces. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur distinguishes between different types of traces. According to him, traces fall into two categories: clues and testimonies. The source of a testimony—whether it is written or oral—can be identified, even though its reliability can be questioned. Clues, however, “testify through their muteness” (Ricoeur 2000, 174) to the extent that they require to be deciphered in order to be meaningful, as it is the case of animal traces. In order to be corroborated, testimonies need clues as “complement[s]” (Ricoeur 2000, 174). It is only when testimonies and clues are combined that an opaque reality—the past, according to Ricoeur— becomes accessible. And yet, in some of Bass’s hunting narratives, narrators and characters choose to ignore the numerous clues and testimonies they are given in order to propose an alternative narrative. For instance, the narrator of “Two Deer” interweaves different versions of the hunt and of the death of a deer. First, a trophy hunter tells the inhabitants of the town of Libby how he has tracked a “record deer” that is tied to the hood of his car. Then, the deer manages to escape. The narrator—a member of the small crowd who has listened to the hunter’s story—recounts how they all follow the animal down the streets until it falls into the river. A few days later, the narrator learns that a hunter has found the frozen dead body of the deer in a river in a newspaper article. The picture of the carcass illustrating the article acts as a clue, a visual trace that aims at certifying the veracity of the second hunter’s narrative and of the deer’s death (Bass 2002, 173). Yet, the narrator and some characters deliberately choose to ignore the written trace—the newspaper article—and then reject the real event—ironically enough, the deer managed to escape a trophy hunter and its frozen body was found by another hunter in Idaho—that took place in order to propose an alternative and hypothetical version of the track:

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There were some among us who believed the deer had not drowned when it hit the water, but had somehow swum that whole seventy miles, and then had drowned. In the long run it doesn’t really matter, the deer’s dead, but I’m one of the ones who believes he almost made it: that he swam that frigid river with his head, and that huge rack, out of the water, plumes of ice-rime ghosting from his nose, swimming through the lonely cold night; swimming for his life, his head held high: and he almost made it; almost. (Bass 2002, 173–74)

Because the reality of the two captures of the deer is not satisfactory to them, and because the narrator has not been able to save a deer he had previously hit with his car (Bass 2002, 162–63), the inhabitants of Libby and the narrator create a fictional narrative that transcends the futility of the animal’s death. Fiction thus provides the narrator with the possibility to imagine a more ethical hunt and a nobler ending to the deer’s life. In this new narrative, the narrator oscillates between efforts to create a logical sequence of events— the insistence on “and then” betrays his desire to reorganize the chronology—and a desire to highlight the fictional dimension of his story. The use of preterition, a rhetorical device consisting in drawing attention to something by professing to omit it4—“In the long run it doesn’t really matter, the deer’s dead, but I’m one of the ones who believes he almost made it”—shows that the narrator is reluctant to give a fictional narrative even though the true story has already been exposed. With an anaphora—“swimming”—an alliteration in “h”—“head held high”—and the image of the frozen deer getting out of the water, the narrator tries to create a narrative trace that is more powerful than the picture of the dead deer in the papers. In Rick Bass’s fiction, what matters is not what actually happened, what constitutes the “historical truth” according to Ricoeur, but what could or should have happened. Even though Bass’s writing explores different ways of ethically approaching wild animals, his characters sometimes resort to a hunting technique that may appear unethical. Indeed, some hunters choose not to kill the prey they have injured so as to follow its blood trail. Tracking wounded game allows them to eventually find the dead body of the animal a few minutes or a few hours later. Because this cynegetic method implies that the animal suffers, it seems to contradict the idea of a fair relationship between humans and animals. In “Antlers,” the narrator regrets that his friend Randy, a bowhunter, chooses to injure his preys and to let them die: “Once shot, the animal runs but a short way—it bleeds to death or dies from trauma. The blood trail is easy to follow [. . ..]. No one wants it to happen this way, but there’s nothing to be done about it; bowhunting is like that” (Bass 1995, 68). And yet, in other stories, a few narrators argue that not killing the prey immediately can be a respectful choice. For example, the narrator of “Two Deer” explains that, if he had been the only one tracking the deer that escaped the trophy hunter,

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instead of following it with a whole crowd, he would have let the animal choose the place where it would die: “If it had been my deer I wouldn’t have pushed it so hard, would have let it go off and lie down to rest and die in peace, and then I would have tracked it, but it wasn’t my deer” (Bass 2002, 172). The ambiguity of the hunt epitomizes the dilemma of nature writing. Like the hunters who have to find a balance between tracking a prey and maintaining a respectful distance with it, between ending an animal’s life and trying to spare it unnecessary pain, Bass’s writing ceaselessly negotiates between the quest for the right words to describe animals and a voluntary restraint from invading the space of the nonhuman worlds. Filling his fiction with marks of his artistic and ethical questioning, the author recalls that language, and most particularly poetic language, provides a medium through which we can access the nonhuman world while respecting its otherness. In this respect, Bass’s self-reflexive fiction eventually improves man’s relationships with the nonhuman, as well as with other humans. THE SENSE OF A COMMUNITY Bass’s fiction suggests that the fleeting presence of animals can help us reflect on our own ways of inhabiting the world. The author patiently tracks and traces in his writing what animal teach us, in flickering moments of revelation. When they appear in dream-like encounters, or when they suddenly disappear, they give us a glimpse of the grace and the almost magical dimension of the natural world. François Gavillon argues that many of Bass’s short stories often display tension between reality and mystery and give a sense of “sweet uncertainty” (Gavillon 2005, 55). They disclose the uncanny dimension of ordinary life that “takes the characters, and the readers along with them, into near-magical, sometimes unsettling, sometimes wondrous, experiences” (Gavillon 2005, 50). For example, in “The History of Rodney,” the skeleton of a deer is impaled on the fence of a graveyard (Bass 1995, 15) and pigs are said to be descended from Union soldiers (Bass 1995, 5). “Two Deer” particularly exemplifies the manners in which animals may draw our attention to the unexpected intensity of commonplace events or natural phenomena. In the story, the narrator is struck by the beauty of a deer escaping from an icy lake—“The ice had frozen into a glass coat around the deer, and as the deer ran, the ice shattered and tinkled. It was like a kind of miracle” (Bass 2002, 169–70)—and marvels at the “glittering drops of crystalline blood” (Bass 2002, 171) left by a wounded prey. The descriptions of the deer and of the animal tracks, which rely on a sacred—“miracle”—and a luminous imagery—“glittering,” “crystalline”—testify to the narrator’s sense of enchantment. The ways animals dwell on the earth show him the beauty of

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the natural world and, by doing so, encourage him to renew his own style, his own way of inhabiting the world. Indeed, sharing a territory with wild animals has taught him to discard the measuring tools he formerly relied on—he used to study engineering—and how to live in a “place of wildness and mystery” (Bass 2002, 174), how to delve into “all the other invisible things that are the very beat, the very pulse of the earth’s skin itself” (Bass 2002, 175). At the end of the story, the narrator claims that all human and nonhuman beings are interconnected and intrinsically depend on the rhythms of nature: “But it’s all part of a flow. I see that, living up here in the mountains. I see it in the ways of deer, and in the ways of the seasons, and I see it in us, too. It’s neither good nor bad: it just is” (Bass 2002, 175). Not only do animals renew the relationships between humans and animals, and more generally the nonhuman world, they also strengthen bonds between the characters. Indeed, walking in the woods, the narrator feels an “undefinable essence” that tells him that he and Martha “belon[g] together” (Bass 2002, 179). He also comments on the “sense of community” (Bass 2002, 170) that emerges between the people who live in the same valley and who follow the immemorial rhythms of nature, the “hunting-and-gathering cycle of things” (Bass 2002, 171), as when they all follow the wounded deer in the streets of Libby: “the crowd of us, like a posse: men, women, and children” (Bass 2002, 172). The process of deciphering clues left by an animal—or by the narrator— sometimes has the unexpected effect of reuniting men. In this respect, “The Lives of Rocks” is quite significant. In this story, a woman, Jyl, lives alone in the woods and is dying from cancer. To fight her loneliness, she makes paper boats that she sends to her neighbors’ children. She attaches notes about “the beauty of the season, the wonder of the landscape, and the goodness of life in general” (Bass 2006, 72), or parts of a tale. Her fragmented story contributes to showing the “grace” of nature and to initiating a friendship between Jyl and the children. Indeed, after having found the pieces of the story of a dismembered king, Shayna and Sebastian visit Jyl to ask for the end of the tale and eventually take care of the sick woman. But “The Lives of Rocks” does more than showing the vital power of fiction. The self-reflexive quality of Jyl’s story—the fragmented aspect of her tale echoes the dismembered body of the king—alludes to Bass’s metafictional writing. Both storytellers rely on fragments—or traces—to create a bond between the writer and his readers. The comment Sebastian makes when he meets Jyl for the first time draws attention to the necessity to fill in the blanks when trying to reconstruct a story: “I’m not sure we got the ships and messages in the right order, but they kind of tell a story anyway” (Bass 2006, 73). Just like Jyl’s narrative that needs to be reconstructed, Bass’s texts leave blanks that have to be filled so the stories can be meaningful. For example, Jyl appears in “Her First Elk” as a young hunter and then as a dying woman in “The Lives of Rocks.” In order to reconstruct the

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story of her life, readers have to rely on the clues Bass has strewn throughout the two stories. It is not only by showing his readers the existence of other modes of being, but also by asking them to take part in the elaboration of the narratives of characters and animals’ lives and deaths that Bass hints at the vital necessity of a respectful coexistence between human and nonhuman worlds. Bass’s poetics of traces seeks a solution to the various dilemmas of nature writing. Indeed, it allows the author to adjust his writing to nature while intimating that some elements of the nonhuman worlds elude representation. In The Book of Yaak, Bass illustrates his desire to approach nonhuman worlds and his wish to maintain a safe distance with animals thanks to an anecdote. After finding the imprints of a grizzly on the ground, the author hesitates between following the tracks of the animal and going back to his cabin: “I felt it and trusted it and walked carefully down the trail, being careful not to step in the tracks, and feeling very fortunate, very lucky, to be on the same mountain with this bear, to be in virtually the same point in time and space with him. Walking just to the side, and behind, his footprints” (Bass 1996, 50). By refusing to step on the tracks of the grizzly and choosing to walk next to them, the author presents the conditions of an ethical coexistence between humans and animals. Similarly, in his fiction, it is because his narrators express a will to respect other human and nonhuman styles that Bass also reenchants our relationships with the nonhuman world and with other human beings.

NOTES 1. All translations are mine. 2. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari remark that “the essence of the short story as a literary genre is not very difficult to determine: in a short story everything is organized around the question: ‘What is it that happened? What is it that could possibly have happened?’” 3. However, Dominique Lestel adds that ethologists have only been able to prove their theory of animal personalities on a few species (baboons and not ants for example). 4. This definition is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bailly, Jean-Christophe. 2013. Le Parti Pris des Animaux. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Bass, Rick. 1995a. In the Loyal Mountains. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1995b. The Lost Grizzlies. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1996. The Book of Yaak. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

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———. 1997. The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 2002. The Hermit’s Story. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 2006. The Lives of Rocks. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987 (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gavillon, François. 2005. “L’ordinaire, l’étrange et le sublime dans les nouvelles de Rick Bass.” Ecrire la nature. Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines, no. 6, Paris, Belin (December): 50–65. Ginzburg, Carlo. 2013 (1989). Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Grandjeat, Yves-Charles. 2004. “Blurring the Tracks: How to Write About Nature in Rick Bass’s Winter and The Lost Grizzlies.” Sources Université d’Orléans, (17) (Fall): 42–57. ———. 2011. “La place de l’animal dans la littérature d’environnement américaine.” In La Question animale: entre science, littérature et philosophie, edited by Jean-Paul Engélibert, Lucie Campos, Catherine Coquio, and Georges Chapoutier, 107–119. PU de Rennes: Rennes. Lestel, Dominique. 2004. L’Animal Singulier. Paris: Seuil. Macé, Marielle. 2011. “Styles Animaux.” L’Esprit Créateur, 51 (4): 97–105. Pughe, Thomas. 2005. “Réinventer la nature: vers une éco-poétique.” Etudes anglaises, 58 (1): 68–81. Rabatel, Alain. 1998. La Construction textuelle du point de vue. Lausanne/Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé. Ricoeur, Paul. 2005 (2000). Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Uexküll, Jakob von. 2010 (1934). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans; With a Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Part IV

OF POSTCOLONIAL AND ECOFEMINIST SPELLINGS AND SPELLS WHEN MAGICAL REALISM CHALLENGES MODERN ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Chapter 12

Conversations with the Living World Mutual Discovery and Enchantment Carmen Flys Junquera

The sound of the first word was made by a tree,    and the animals and waters answered. The first human being was deaf    and did not hear the living current’s breath. Ever since, that deafness    has been our legacy. (“History” by Esthela Calderón)1

Our Western society finds itself largely estranged from the natural world.2 We, as Calderón’s poem suggests, have become deaf to the more-than-human voices and rarely acknowledge that we are part of that pulsing, live world where, according to David Abram, our perception is totally conditioned by our reciprocal experience of each other (1996: 33). We have come to believe that humans are the center of the world and have backgrounded our dependence on the other-than-human. In our arrogance, we have actually thought that science could indeed totally know and control the world and that has brought us to the present near-collapse of the delicate balance of all living things. Yet given this state of affairs, how can we come to recover our hearing? How can we rediscover our intimate relationship with all living things? As Freya Mathews asks, “How can we sing back to life a world that has been so brutally silenced?” (2013: 8). The objective of this paper is to highlight how the authors of two contemporary novels, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), have the protagonists of these novels engage in conversations with nature in order to find possible ways of reestablishing our enchantment with and embeddedness in the living world. Numerous philosophers are currently addressing our relationship with the natural world. Freya Mathews argues in favor of a contemporary 193

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panpsychism which would acknowledge that the natural world might be potentially “imbued with meanings and/or purposes of its own” (2013: 39). David Abram posits that our contemporary dis-ease, caused by dysfunctions, illnesses and violence are basically the result of our disconnect and imbalance with the earthly biosphere (1996: 22). One of the major tenets of Abram, basing his ideas on Lévy-Bruhl and Merleau-Ponty, is that our perception of nature is reciprocal to the perception nature has of us. We influence each other as we experience each other (1996: 33). As we gaze on nature, we influence it and while the world watches us, our experience is shaped. Likewise, touching is inherently reciprocal. As we touch, we are touched (1996: 68). In his “anthropology beyond the human,” Eduardo Kohn argues that “how other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things” (2013: 1). Freya Mathews also discusses this reciprocity. She argues that accepting that all in the world is living belongs to the realm of subjectivity. She claims our subjectivity is fluid and that the “subjectivity of self is permeable to the subjectivity of other” which induces transformation which will “manifest outwardly in a change of material aspect,” a “shape-shifting” of sorts (2013: 18). This reciprocity brings on another whole dimension to the perception of the natural world. This open stance, one of recognizing the potential of communication and interaction with earth others, is the key to Val Plumwood’s “counter-hegemonic” strategies (2002: 194). Plumwood proposes a “dialogical interspecies ethics,” one that would decenter human-centered ethics by coming to know other species in less biased ways. She suggests we ask ourselves if we, humans, are good enough to engage in ethically rich relationships with earth others, rather than the commonly inverted position of determining if some species are similar enough to humans to warrant moral consideration (2002: 168). In order to answer her own question, Plumwood puts forth a list of “counterhegemonic strategies” as a method to engage earth others in a more ethical manner. These strategies hinge on being open to other ways of knowing and perceiving. She suggests we adopt a listening stance that we try to hear the silent voice of the more-than-human. Our attitude should be one of accepting that they indeed do have a language, and that it is our ignorance which makes us incapable of understanding it. Thus, if we study hard enough, if we observe carefully, we might come to understand that language. David Abram points out that human language evolved in a thoroughly animistic context; it necessarily functioned not only as a means of communication between humans, but as a way of propitiating, praising, and appeasing the expressive powers of the surrounding terrain. Human language arose not only as a means of attunement between persons, but also between ourselves and the animate landscape. (1996: 263)

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In other words, language arose as a dialogical communicative relationship with earth others. It is true that we have lost this ability and become deaf. This is one of the tenets of the biophilia hypothesis developed by biologist E. O. Wilson. Biophilia, as Wilson claims, is the “innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” Although this affiliation is “hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature,” Wilson comments that it is also “likely to be mediated by rules of prepared and counterprepared learning—the tendency to learn or to resist learning certain responses as opposed to others.” Thus, in our civilization, Wilson argues this affinity has been weakened and “untaught,” remaining, to a large degree encoded in ritual and myth (1996: 31). However, if it has been untaught, it means that it can be retaught, that we can relearn how to communicate and feel with earth others. This article thus focuses on how authors Linda Hogan and Barbara Kingsolver take their protagonists on a voyage of relearning their affinity with earth others. In Solar Storms, Angel, after a life in foster homes, returns to the land of her mother and grandmothers. There she learns to listen, to hear the earth speak. Much of her learning also moves in a direction away from rationality, to dreaming, that alternative way of knowing that Richard Nelson finds vestiges of in indigenous communities (1993: 31). In Flight Behavior, the process is almost opposite. Dellarobia moves from “miraculous” visions (and lack of understanding) to a rational scientific understanding, but key in this movement is her process of learning to see and relate to earth others. CONVERSATIONS Val Plumwood suggests that we view the land and places as “communicative project[s] to explore the more-than-human as a source of wonder and wisdom in a revelatory framework of mutual discovery and disclosure” (2002, 233). As we learn about nature, we learn about ourselves. In similar manner Abram states that any experiencing of the world implies, necessarily, a reciprocal experience. Much as we influence the world, the world influences us; we “reciprocate one another” (1996, 33). This leads to the mutual discovery. If we are open to how the world perceives us, we see ourselves in another light, with another perspective and learn about ourselves. Abram suggests that perception always implies an interaction between the perceiver and the perceived, and therefore is inherently participative (1996: 57); thus, our perception of nature involves necessarily a participation in/with it. He considers our perception as a “silent conversation” with nature (1996: 52). Therefore, as one learns to see and listen, one begins conversing with earth others. It is this process of learning to converse with nature, that Angel and Dellarobia

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undergo and in doing so, not only learn about nature, but also about themselves. This experience transforms them and the women we find at the end of each novel are very different from the insecure girls they are at the beginning. Although the process seems to take them in different directions, the essence is the same; by conversing with earth others, whether through dreaming or scientific counting (fictional entomologist Ovid Byron explains to Dellarobia “measure and count. That is the task of science”, Kingsolver 2012: 337) their own lives and identities experience profound change. Their conversations with nature leave them spellbound by the enchanted world they encounter and literally spell out a change in their lives and perceptions. A significant aspect of these conversations is sensorial, experienced directly within the body. Picking up on Merleau-Ponty, Abram argues that the bodily experience is always necessarily open and active, sensing its relationship to all things and to the world (1996: 49). In this sense, it is a continuous conversation with the world, silent perhaps, but nonetheless taking place and influencing both interlocutors. Thus paying attention to sensorial perceptions is essential. In the case of Angel, her vision (both physical and intuitive, awake and dreaming) is central, as well as her increasing capacity to hear and touch. As for Dellarobia, once again, what grounds her perceptions lies in her growing ability to see, on a tiny, detailed scale, as well as her sense of smell and touch. In both cases these enhanced perceptions make the women relate their experience of the world to their lives and understanding of their own relationships to other people and the world. Plumwood insists that we need to adopt an attentive stance, one open to the potential communicative ability of earth others, to try to listen and to see and to invite this interaction. This is precisely what Angel and Dellarobia do, cuing the readers to follow in their paths. Angel learns that for the people of Adam’s Rib, “everything was alive” and “the stones, too, were alive, the stinging nettles, the snails of Fur Island and the tree which folded its leaves when touched by human hands” (Hogan 1995a: 81). She learns to regard earth others as such, as subjects and not objects, as complex beings—another of Plumwood’s strategies. The first time Dellarobia really looks at a butterfly she “held it close to her eyes. The orange wings were scrolled with neat black lines, like liquid eyeliner, expertly applied. In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn’t recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly” (Kingsolver 2012: 73). When Angel is living on Fur Island with the silent woman named Bush, she learns to look beyond the surface, giving up on the mirror that reflected her scarred face. She reads peoples’ eyes to “see what kind of souls they had” or she begins to “see inside water, until one day [her] vision shifted and [she] could even see the fish on the bottom” (Hogan 1995a: 85). Dellarobia, who is nearsighted but rarely wears her glasses, has difficulty seeing and focusing on small details but eventually “she soon [grows] absorbed, feeling something change in her brain as her eyes shut

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out everything else in the world but the particulars of monarch butterfly color and gender” (Kingsolver 2012: 194). Her sight of both the butterflies and of her own life begins to gain focus and understanding. Both women accept the reciprocity of their gaze. John Berger has denounced that when our “imperial” eye observes the nonhuman, we are exercising our power over nature (1980: 14). But in allowing nature to gaze back, in accepting the reciprocity, we acknowledge that we, too, are shaped by the power of nature and this reciprocity is illustrated in both novels. As soon as Angel lands on Adam’s Rib, despite the fog, she observes that “the pale trunks of birch trees stood straight; [she] was certain the dark eyes on their trunks looked at [her]” (Hogan 1995a: 22). As her learning process continues she begins to “wonder what the world had thought of her,” that her life, as that of other people was “witnessed by the birds, by dragonflies, by trees and spiders,” that “[w]e are seen, our measure taken, not only by the animals and spiders but even by the alive galaxy in deep space and the windblown ice of the north” (Hogan 1995a: 80). This awareness begins to condition her perception and shape it. In the case of Dellarobia, what she sees affects her emotions. Her perception of the monarchs affects her inner self and influences her view of both the world and her own life. As she observes the butterflies rise, she perceives “a living flow, like a pulse through the veins, with the cells bursting and renewing themselves as they [go]. The sudden vision [fills] her with strong emotions that [embarrass] her, for fear of breaking into sobs as she had in front of her in-laws that day when the butterflies enveloped her. How was that even normal, to cry over insects?” (Kingsolver 2012: 202). An important element in Dellarobia’s learning process is her capacity to relate the scientific facts she learns about the monarchs and, by extension and observation about other lives, to her own personal life. In this way, she is sharing her experience and animality with earth others, rather than setting human animals apart as a superior category. Precisely another one of Plumwood’s strategies is the rejection of dualisms, such as human/animal and that of affirming our animality. For example, when Dellarobia observes the sheep, she identifies with the pregnant ewes: “These ewes only got extra minerals and a grain ration because they were near lambing, and plainly today they wanted that something extra, a craving Dellarobia knew from her own pregnancies” (Kingsolver 2012: 457). Similarly, Angel realizes that she, too, is part of a larger world where there is continuity between all lives and experiences. She learns that “the division between humans and animals was a false one. There had been times when they even spoke the same language” (Hogan 1995a: 81–82). When she sleeps with the “window wide open, [she] lived inside water. There was no separation between [them]” (Hogan 1995a: 78). Echoing Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, she adds that she had “searched all [her] life for this older world that was lost

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to [her], this world only [her] body remembered. In that moment [she] understood [she] was part of the same equation as birds and rain” (Hogan 1995a: 79). Dellarobia also begins to apprehend the organic quality of all life, its complete entanglement: “‘An animal is the sum of its behaviors’ . . . Its community dynamics. Not just the physical body. Interactions with other monarchs, habitat, the migration, everything. The population functions as a whole being” (Kingsolver 2012: 438). As Kingsolver expresses in an interview, humans are inevitably part of the environment, whether they acknowledge that or not: “[The characters] breathe oxygen that was made inside a leaf. They eat, they exist. Some of them might believe they live in a world of humans and nothing else, but I don’t, and can’t. Ever” (Meillon 2016a: 2). Hogan also asserts the same belief in her interview: “But none of these things you mention are separate. Plants, minerals, animals, we people, all are interconnected and work together with one another to keep things whole” (Meillon 2016b: 3). Both protagonists learn to listen, to participate in that silent conversation between the human body and the world. After spending some time at Fur Island, Angel learns to listen: She “thought [she] heard the voices of the world, of what was all around us—the stones, the waters flowing toward their ends, the osprey with its claws in fish, even the minnows and spawn. [She] heard trees with their roots holding ground” (Hogan 1995a: 181). Similarly, Dellarobia begins to hear the monarchs as one living, breathing organism: “This butterfly forest was a great, quiet breathing beast. Monarchs covered the trunks like orange fish scales. Sometimes the wings all moved slowly in unison” (Kingsolver 2012: 438). While in Solar Storms, Hogan stresses the listening that Angel develops, Kingsolver seems to often highlight the smells.3 Angel notes that the “water’s voice said things only the oldest of people understood” (Hogan 1995a: 73) and as Dellarobia looks carefully at the monarchs, she notices “the smell: like dirt and lightning bugs, as Preston had said, and also like the firs themselves, musky-pungent” (Kingsolver 2012: 194). Dellarobia often inhales deeply, allowing the earth to enter her: “‘Today smells like the time when the lambs get born,’ [Preston] said. ‘It does. Like spring.’ She closed her eyes and inhaled. ‘What is that, dirt?’ They stood together drawing in the day through their noses” (Kingsolver 2012: 511). Both women, as well as other characters in both novels, engage bodily with all their senses to invite interaction and to participate in this conversation. LOVING EYES Plumwood suggests that we not only invite communication with earth others, but that we should also acknowledge their complexity (2002: 194). She

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argues that we need to view the “world as another agent or player” (2002: 227) with its own interests which might not coincide with ours (2002: 194) and with its own intentionality. Angel realizes the simple but profound intelligence of the natural world, “a tree-shaded place where unaccountable things occurred, where frogs know to wait beneath dark ground until conditions were right for them to emerge” (Hogan 1995a: 73). Dellarobia sets out to look for flowers that the monarchs need for nectar, but once, again, she is amazed that the butterflies got there first: “the air stirred and in plain sight the experiment ran ahead of itself. Monarchs were already there, this source discovered” (Kingsolver 2012: 479). She realizes the greater adaptability of the nonhuman animals, despite her initial attitude of superiority: “Watch and learn, Dellarobia thought, feeling an unaccustomed sympathy for the animals, whose dumb helplessness generally aggrieved her. Today they struck her as cannier than the people. If the forest behind them burned, these sheep would come to terms with their fate in no time flat” (Kingsolver 2012: 33). As one more being in the world, we need to recognize our ignorance and limitations and express willingness to know, but not to control, rather to reach a mutual discovery that will enrich both terms of the equation. This attitude reflects Marilyn Frye’s concept of the “loving eye” as opposed to the “arrogant eye.” A “loving eye” is noninvasive, and one which knows “the complexity of the other as something which will forever present new things to be known.” A “loving eye” acknowledges the difference and independence of the other, and it implies a relationship, a conversation. The “arrogant eye” has connotations of conquest or power, one that attempts to determine the worth of the other (Frye 1983: 66–72). Perceiving with a “loving eye” is very similar to that participatory perception which Abram discusses. Clearly, in both novels, the protagonists express wonder at the intelligence and agency of nature and their perception of that of a “loving eye.” Angel perceives the “hungry, reaching vines that wanted to turn everything back to its origins—walls, door, a ladder-back chair, even a woman’s life. They wanted to cover it all and reclaim the island for themselves” (Hogan 1995a: 73) or as she arrives at the area of the dam construction, she sees a “land that had learned to survive, even to thrive, on harshness” but that later would become “angry land. It would try to put an end to the plans for dams and drowned rivers.” As natural disasters thwarted the plans for the dam, “the Indian people would be happy with the damage, with the fact that water would do what it wanted and in its own way” (Hogan 1995a: 224). Much in the same way that Berger spoke of the impact of looking on animals, philosopher Don Idhe notes that any map is read “from above;” in doing so, the map reader must make a hermeneutic shift. Idhe stresses that the shift of perspective—one from a stance on high—leads to a God’s eye perspective (in Bryson 2002: 15). Therefore, map making and reading subtly reinforce

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the sense of control and dominion of humans over nature. Similarly Abram highlights that throughout history, much of the superiority of certain classes rested on their ability to read or write. Writing was a kind of spell: by putting signs into the correct order, a power was exerted; in other words, a spell was cast by spelling (1996: 133). Thus, in Solar Storms, Angel is able to realize the fallacy of man-made maps: “none of the maps were the same; they were only as accurate as the minds of their makers” (Hogan 1995a: 122), reflecting history and conquest. She asserts that those maps were “not true, they were not the people or animal lives or the clay of land, the water, the carnage. They didn’t tell those parts of the story. What [she] liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will” (Hogan 1995a: 123).4 Dellarobia, too realizes the human bias in most situations: “The trouble with that . . . with what those guys are saying about the butterflies, is that it’s all centered around what they want. They need things to be a certain way, financially, so they think nature will organize itself around what suits them” (Kingsolver 2012: 354). The men she observes only see with an arrogant eye, not the loving eye which would recognize that the land and the butterflies might have other interests of their own. Part of the enchantment with nature implies feeling wonder, wonder at its beauty but also at its power and intricacy. One of Rachel Carson’s most moving texts is precisely The Sense of Wonder (1964), where she highlights the importance of feeling awe at the natural world. Moreover, Plumwood adds that we should adopt a “trickster mind, a shape-shifting mind,” in order to find meaning in contingency, and be open to chaos and feel wonder at the world (2002: 227). As stated before, Mathews also refers to the transformation of subjectivity as “shape-shifting” (2013: 18). Environmental educator Mitchell Thomashow also speaks of the importance of feeling wonder at the natural world. Experiencing wonder implies an appreciation of creation but also alarm at its fragility and its extinction. Wonder also spawns indebtedness and humility and Thomashow considers these feelings essential for environmental learning and responsibility (2003: loc. 789–905). And that is precisely how Dellarobia reacts. She never ceases to be amazed by the butterflies: “A movement of clouds altered the light, and all across the valley, the butterfly skin of the world transfigured in response, opening all the wings at once to the sun. A lifting brightness swept the landscape, flowing up the mountainside in a wave” (Kingsolver 2012: 74). Yet, in learning about science and the impending disaster she tries to “embrace this sadness Dr. Byron had asked her to understand. ‘One of God’s creatures of this world, meeting its End of Days,’ she said after a quiet minute. Not words of science, she knew that, but it was a truth she could feel” (Kingsolver 2012: 315). Angel’s wonder is often expressed by considering earth others to be endowed with memory. She listens to the “sound of the lake talking to the

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sky, revealing some part of itself or what lay inside its blue-green light. The lake was recalling the memory of last year’s ice, the jewelry lost in its waters, the fishermen who’d fallen through storms, and who lay inside it even now” (Hogan 1995a: 95). Angel also embraces that past “covenant between animals and men” which consisted in “car[ing] for one another” (Hogan 1995a: 34). She believes in those affinities between human and nonhuman, asserting that there was a place inside the human that spoke with the land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found directions in their dreams. They dreamed charts of land and currents of water. They dreamed where food animals lived. These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their prey. It was the language animals and humans had in common. People found their cures in the same way. (Hogan 1995a: 170)

David Abram writes extensively about the development of language and its ties to the natural world. He also illustrates in detail how the phonetic alphabet estranged language from its natural referents (1996: 107). Kingsolver, in the interview, asserts that there is a direct connection between the language of the earth and her creative language (Meillon 2016a: 3). Hogan reaffirms these ideas both in her interview and in the development of her novel. In the interview she affirms that her characters “are the environments. They are the world they live in because the world creates us . . . We are enfolded within the ecosystem” (Meillon 2016b: 3). Angel reflects on how language, human language and words, has created boundaries. She reflects that she began to form a kind of knowing at Adam’s Rib. I began to feel that if we had no separate words for inside and out and there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no sky, you would see me. What would meet your eyes would not be the mask of what had happened to me, not the evidence of violence, not even how I closed the doors to the rooms of anger and fear. Some days you would see fire; other days, water. Or earth. You would see how I am like the night sky with its stars that fall through time and space and arrive here as wolves and fish and people, all of us fed by them. You would see the dust of sun, the turning of creation taking place. But the night I broke my face there were still boundaries and I didn’t yet know I was beautiful as the world, or that I was a new order of atoms. (Hogan 1995a: 54)

In many of Hogan’s novels, the protagonist questions human language and its capacity for falsehood, contrasting that with nature’s language which always tells the truth; the only problem being able to understand this ancient

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physical language. For example, in Mean Spirit, Lila Blanket “was a listener to the voice of water, a woman who interpreted the river’s story for her people. A river never lied. Unlike humans, it had no need to distort the truth, and she heard the river’s voice unfolding like its water across the earth” (Hogan 1990: 5). These words are illustrative of Plumwood’s injunction to be “communicative, open to the play of more-than-human forces and attentive to the ancestral voices of place and of earth” (2002: 229). In a similar manner we have previously seen how Dellarobia, though unable to use the language of science, learns to apprehend the emotion behind it and understand. Despite the fact that this article focuses on dreams, wonder and enchantment, science is clearly present in the novels. In Kingsolver’s interview, when she is asked about the degree to which her writing is based on a scientific understanding of the world, she clearly asserts: “Approximately one hundred percent” (Meillon 2016a: 2). Many of her novels have a scientist as a main character and she goes at length to integrate scientific facts and writing into her fiction. But even Dellarobia, whose education was scarce, is able to become involved with science, practicing a citizen science and relating the scientific theories to her own personal life, in order to understand them. When Ovid tries to explain to her the intangible trend of climate change, he translates it into closer realities: “You don’t believe in things you can’t see?” He asked . . . . “Your children’s adulthood?” That nearly floored her of course. . . . “A trend is intangible, but real,” he said calmly. “A photo cannot prove a child is growing, but several of them show change over time. Align them, and you can reliably predict what is coming. You never see it all at once. An attention span is required.” (Kingsolver 2012: 387)

Dellarobia’s path to change is through science. Kingsolver refuses to privilege academia over citizen science as Dellarobia contributes significantly to the research project. Ovid goes out of his way not only to show his respect for her observations, but also to empower her, enabling her to gain an education. Through science Dellarobia learns to converse with nature and experiences that mutual discovery which changes her life. In the case of Hogan, things are different. In her preface to Dwellings. A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995), Hogan states as the purpose of this collection of essays to “search out a world of different knowings,” through connectedness to nature, based on “lessons learned from the land” (Hogan 1995b: 12). In her interview for the June 2016 conference on “Dwellings of Enchantment,” she asserts that there are not only many different ways of knowing, but also different kinds of science and ways of understanding and doing science. Western science is not

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even one that knows the most. The western way of doing research is too often one of disconnection and removing materials from their place to study them. Other sciences are based on millennia of observation. (Meillon 2016b: 4–5)

However, she insists on the need to combine different ways of knowing. In her novel, Angel moves away from Western culture and the science she has learned in school, beginning “to doubt things I’d previously learned” (Hogan 1995a: 105), searching for the traditional ways of knowledge by observation but also by dreaming. Nonetheless, one of the characters, Husk, loves science and read extensively. He often makes comments on scientific theory to explain things, extrapolating the theory to indigenous knowledge. For example, based on the power of sound waves, he explains the power of songs and nature. “Husk, who saw everything in terms of science, told me once how metal bridges were taken down, collapsed by the song of the wind, a certain tone, a certain pitch of the wind” (Hogan 1995a: 102). He also wonders when science will learn things that indigenous knowledge always knew. After reading a scientific magazine he ironically comments “Now they are finding out that insects are intelligent” (SS 91) when he, and all the indigenous people considered all living things as intelligent, and as science is indeed now proving, not only animals but plants also do possess sentience and intelligence.5 ENCHANTMENT However, despite the different initial positionings of both authors and the trajectory followed by the protagonists of their novels, the destination is the same. Whether it be through science or through traditional wisdom, both characters, and the readers in turn, enter a conversation with earth others, as if in a spell of enchantment, a silent bodily conversation, and experience a mutual discovery, influencing each other, as Abram suggests. Likewise, Mathews affirms that adopting a “communicative exchange . . . with one’s own environment is to abide in an enchanted state” (2013: 18). Both women become enchanted with the earth and drastically change their previous beings. One might almost think of magic, particularly in the case of Angel who now dreams the land and plants. Hogan’s work has the trappings of magical realism, defined by Rawdon Wilson as the “fictional space created by the dual inscriptions of alternative geometries” (1995: 225). Magical Realism has often been considered as the hybridization of two sets of reality, two modes of perceptions, as a cross-cultural, hybrid aesthetic theory, characterized by two levels of reality. These two levels of reality might be the real and the supernatural, but in other cases they might refer to two worlds set apart by culture, development, technology or lifestyle, values, and worldviews. Indeed, the world of Adams Rib

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has little to do with the foster homes where Angel had been raised. Likewise the understanding of the life of the rivers and forests of the indigenous peoples of Two-Town has nothing to do with the view of the engineers and businessmen working on the hydroelectric project and the structures of Holy String Town, strung along a road geared for the trucks. These two realities are so far from each other that ordinary conversation seems impossible, as distant as many humans perceive the communicative possibility of earth others. While Kingsolver’s novel, with its scientific basis, has little to do with the literary mode of magical realism, the clash between the poverty-stricken Appalachians and the reality of the scientists, or the environmentalists, produces two other levels of reality and another impossible conversation. A wonderful example is Dellarobia’s reading of the Sustainability Pledge (Kingsolver 2012: 450–454), which illustrates that the environmentalist agenda is neglecting the reality of poor marginalized peoples, issues addressed by environmental justice or environmentalism of the south. In both the cases of the indigenous world or that of poverty, the conversation with the ruling, decision-making classes is rendered impossible. However, both authors empower their characters (and in so doing, invite the readers to follow in their tracks) by enabling them to bridge the gap to an interspecies conversation. A conversation which, ironically, seems easier and more fruitful than a conversation between different social classes of human beings. This article addresses enchantment, often considered as a charm or magic spell. Yet, if we ask ourselves what is magic, the most sophisticated definition accepted today, according to Abram, is “the ability or power to alter one’s consciousness at will.” Abram argues that the magic of the shaman lies in altering his logic to engage with other organisms, with other “forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined” (1996: 9). The magic of the shaman is also replicated by the magic of the poet who alters the audience’s perception of the world. For Hogan, “writing is all about enchantment. It is a form of magic, of something from beyond the ordinary mind of the writer. Beyond that one singular human” (Meillon 2016b: 6) and Kingsolver affirms that the world has always been enchanted for her (Meillon 2016a: 3). In these two novels, the alteration of perception is multiple. Magic implies altering perception and Hogan’s novel certainly engages in changing the reader’s perception of indigenous knowledge and of the natural world, as Angel relearns traditional ways and her innate affinity with the world. Likewise Kingsolver contributes to changing the perception of readers, many indifferent to butterflies or to the implications of climate change to one of caring and concern. Dellarobia’s perception moves from a miraculous vision to a vision of understanding and awe, no less powerful than the initial one. Both women learn to engage in that silent yet participatory conversation with earth others. And thus, regardless of literary mode or the learning path chosen,

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both novels engage in the magic of literature. Both novels enchant the readers, changing their perceptions and illustrating how conversations with earth others lead to mutual discovery.

NOTES 1. Reproduced by permission of the author and translated into English by Stephen White. 2. The funding was provided by the research project “Humanidades ambientales. Estrategias para la empatía ecológica y la transición hacia sociedades sostenibles”: “Relatos para el Cambio” (HAR2015-67472-C2-2-R MINECO/FEDER). 3. I am indebted to Benedict Meillon’s presentation at the conference for noticing the importance of smell in Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, a trait that also can be found in Flight Behavior. 4. See G. Stacks analysis of how Hogan perceives maps as the scarring of the earth, and in this case, paralleled by the scarring of Angel’s face. Hogan manages to use that scarring as an instrument of healing. For more on Hogan’s mapping, see Flys-Junquera, “(Un)Mapping.” 5. See Chamovitz, Kohn, Mancuso and Marder. For example, while David Abram, as well as these authors, clearly illustrates how perception with all the senses facilitates the reciprocal conversation with earth others, it is interesting to note that, according to biologist David Chamovitz and his book What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (2012), plants also perceive using their senses. Their senses, while not located in a specific organ, do perceive and communicate in a similar manner to animal senses, implying reciprocal reactions to our perceptions. As a matter of fact, Hogan’s forthcoming novel has an ethnobotanist meeting an indigenous leaf doctor and discussing this terrestrial intelligence, as she calls it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage. Berger, John. 1980. About Looking. London: Penguin. Bryson, Michael. 2002. Visions of the Land. Charlotesville: University of Virginia Press. Calderón, Esthela. 2008. “Historia.” In Soplo de corriente vital, 7. Managua: Ediciones 400 Elefantes. Carson, Rachel. 1964. The Sense of Wonder. New York: Open Road. Kindle Ed. 2011. Chamovitz, Daniel. 2012. What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Flys-Junquera, Carmen. 2010. “(Un)Mapping (Ir)Rational Borders in Linda Hogan’s Novels.” Canadaria. Revista Canaria de Estudios Canadienses 2 (7): 7–19.

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Frye, Marilyn. 1983. “In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love.” In The Politics of Reality. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press. Hogan, Linda. 1990. Mean Spirit. New York: Ivy Books. ———. 1995a. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner. ———. 1995b. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Touchstone. Kellert, Stephen, and E. O. Wilson, eds. 1993. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Kingsolver, Barbara. 2012. Flight Behavior. New York: Perennial. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. 2015. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Trans. Joan Benham. Washington: Island Press. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Mathews, Freya. 2013. For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Pansychism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Meillon, Bénédicte. 2016a. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/3767. ———. 2016b. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. Interview: https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/2187. Nelson, Richard. 1993. “Searching for the Lost Arrow: Physical and Spiritual Ecology in the Hunter’s World.” In The Biophilia Hypothesis, edited by Kellert and Wilson, 201–28. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Stacks, Geoffrey. 2010. “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Mosaic 43 (1) (March): 161–76. Thomashow, Mitchell. 2003. Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kindle E-book. Wilson, E. O. 2003. “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” In The Biophilia Hypothesis, edited by Kellert and Wilson, 31–41. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Wilson, Rawdon. 1995. “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 209–33. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chapter 13

Writing a Way Home Liminality, Magical Realism, and the Building of a Biotic Communitas in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and People of the Whale Bénédicte Meillon

In distinguishing ecopoetics from the field of ecocriticism, Jonathan Bate ventured that poeisis might be “language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling” (Bate 2000, 76).1 In her book of essays Dwellings, published five years earlier than Bate’s The Song of the Earth, Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan envisioned the notion that the earth may be speaking to us in symptoms. She goes on, “What we really are searching for is a language that [. . .] takes hold of the mystery of what’s around us and offers it back to us, full of awe and wonder. It is a language of creation [. . .] that goes beyond the strict borders of scientific inquiry and right into the heart of the mystery itself” (Hogan 1995, 59). In her writing, Linda Hogan is “looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it,” she continues, “we have no home, have no place of our own within creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of a different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and respect that will carry out to others (Hogan 1995, 60). Hogan’s writing exhibits an inclination toward the numinous combined with ecological and postcolonial awareness. Besides, her fiction embraces a magical realist mode which further contests the Western oppositions between the rational and the intuitive, between the sacred and the profane, matter and spirit, the natural and the supernatural, between magic and realism. Delving into two of Hogan’s novels, Solar Storms (1995) and People of the Whale (2008), I argue that her writing explores enchanting 207

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pathways reconnecting the sensitive with the logical, paving the way for a return to the oikos through the liminal mode of ecopoetic, magical realism. Dwelling on the relationships between indigenous communities and North American culture and history, on the one hand, and between Native characters with other-than-human life-forms on the other hand, Linda Hogan’s fiction pivots on liminality, a key dimension at the heart of her character’s experiences. Meanwhile, her writing reclaims knowledge about ecological systems that Native American stories have long encapsulated. In this sense, Hogan’s ecopoetics answers N. Scott Momaday’s plea for Americans to come to moral terms with the world around them and to reimagine “what we are with respect to the world and sky,” calling for humans to rebuild an “ethical regard for the land” (Momaday 1997, 49). Hogan exhibits the same belief that such a land ethic must be latent in humans and can be reactivated. Hogan’s ecofeminist fiction relays “the healing power that comes from a reconnection of humans to their environmental landscapes” (Schultermandl 2005, 69). This process implies “not only the individual person’s re-initiation into an organic world but also the possibility for consequential change for the entire human race” (Schultermandl 2005, 69). As I focus on such “re-initiation into an organic world,” my claim is that Hogan’s ecopoetics hinges on liminality in a multiplicity of interrelated ways that can help reenchant our sense of dwelling within the earth. To approach the initiatory dimension of Hogan’s writing, I draw on the theory by anthropologist Victor Turner, building on Arnold van Gennep’s analysis of the liminal phase at stake in rites of passage. Briefly put, van Gennep and Turner break down rites of passage into three phases: “separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation” (Turner 1969, 94). Besides, both novels addressed in this paper are set in ecotones—that is, in liminal geographies, in-between land and water. On top of the ecotone as an actual, geographical reality bringing together two distinct ecosystems, my take on the concept is that an ecotone is the space where liminality takes place. Hogan’s postcolonial fiction is moreover culturally inscribed—both in Ashcroft’s terms and building on Homi Bhabha’s association between hybridity and liminality—within “an ‘in-between’ space, or contact zone, in which cultural change might occur” (Ashcroft et al. 1998, 145). Her writing elaborates a transcultural, cross-pollinated, discursive space—“a region in which there is a continual process of movement and interchange between different states” and between different ontologies (Ashcroft et al. 1998, 145). Finally, Hogan’s characters engage liminality as defined by Turner: “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (Turner 1969, 95). For Turner, “[liminal] entities are neither here

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nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (1969, 95). Hogan furthermore explores threshold states, challenging the boundaries between the sensate and the subliminal. In psychology, the concept of threshold evokes the “limit below which a certain sensation ceases to be perceptible” (Ashcroft et al. 1998, 145). Hogan relays the sensitivity of Native people, who “continually receive direct, unmediated revelation from a sacred landscape and the genii loci that populate that landscape” (Smith and Fiore 2010, 50). Hogan’s intricate use of magical realism helps rebuild a communitas bringing together many of the life-forms too often excluded from habitual notions of community in a Western perspective. Her fiction regenerates the stories of her ancestors, creating contemporary narratives of humans’ connections with their co-dwellers on earth. Thus, Hogan invites us to explore what Joni Adamson terms “the middle place where culture emerges from nature” (Adamson 2001, xix), making Native American theory as it is embedded in storytelling accessible to both Native and non-Native readers. As I show in my first part, both stories dramatize conflicts affecting characters that are caught between traditional and more modern ways of life. Hogan’s indigenous characters interact with nonhuman nature—whether animals, plants, or even elements, such as water—restoring the totemism and myths inherited through their elders.2 In a second part, I will rely on Wendy Faris’s definition of magical realism as an intrinsically liminal mode that Hogan’s writing often resorts to, thereby deterritorializing and reterritorializing North American cartographies of space, time, and identity. I will then tackle the characterization of the protagonists, which activates liminal stages affecting our anthropocentric representations of community. In a last part, I will unpack the implications of gazes and songs in Hogan’s ecopoetics of dwelling in an enchanting world. ECOTONES AS CONTACT ZONES Inspired by James Bay, on borderland Cree territory between Quebec and Minnesota, Solar Storms takes place in the fictional town of Adam’s Rib, on marshy boundary land. The opening chapter stresses the elemental inbetweenness of the place, “a maze of lakes and islands” (Hogan 1995, 22): “It was [. . .] the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water” (21). Such images convey a sense of permeability between boundaries, with constant flows turning solidity into fluidity. The novel taps into the true dispute, starting in 1971, over the James Bay Hydroelectric Project, when Quebec imposed the construction of dams on Cree territory. Diverting rivers and flooding areas in the process, the industrial remapping

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of geography spawned the despoiling of the land and the ecosystem it sheltered, forcing the local indigenous communities to yet another displacement.3 Hogan’s community is of enmeshed ancestry—a mix of Cree, Anishinaabe, Fat-Eaters, Chickasaw, and white people. Occurring in the 1970s, the story includes elderly Natives who “were alive at the time of the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee,” and who have since “wanted nothing to do with the new world” (Hogan 1995, 29). Without electricity, Hogan’s people still partly resist assimilation, thriving mostly from hunting and fishing. Their relationship to their environment is clearly governed by older traditions embedded in stories, all of which are threatened by yet another encroachment on their territory and ways. In People of the Whale, the action is grounded in a coastal area inspired by Neah Bay, just south of Vancouver Island at the uppermost tip of Washington State. Once again situated at a threshold between history and fiction, as well as in an ecotone between water and land, this novel also stages conflicts between older and newer ways in a postcolonial context. It draws on the true Makah whale hunt controversy sparked by tribal people’s decision to renew with their whale-hunting traditions at the turn of the twentieth century, killing two gray whales in the process.4 As both Steinwand and Adamson remark, “while whales constantly negotiate the boundaries of air and water, modern indigenous and marginalized ethnic groups of people are ‘liminal figures negotiating the boundaries of the dominant ‘civilization’ and wild nature, of traditional premodern and postmodern late capitalist lifestyles’” (Adamson 2012, 33). The ecotones formed in-between land and water offer spaces where the reciprocity and interdependence between humans and their natural habitat is played out in times of crisis. Hogan’s fiction recalls and renews “the ancient pact land had made with water, or the agreements humans had once made with animals” (Hogan 1995, 22). These ecotones provide a battleground between two opposed attitudes: on the one hand the relatively modern, JudeoChristian vision of the land as wild, to be conquered and tamed, exploited for profit and for the development of “civilization,” and on the other hand, a more ancient tradition imbued with reverence for the natural world, perceived as a “sacred hoop” of interrelated and interdependent species, where humans are justified in taking lives only insofar as they depend on it for sustenance (Gunn Allen 1986, 56–59). Torn between the diverging values of competing worldviews, Hogan’s characters convey the tension and ambivalence proper to hybrid subjects. The characters themselves thus stand as ecotones, forced to adapt to the influences from at least two distinct yet cross-pollinating cultural systems. Thomas and his fellows in People of the Whale indeed struggle with competing allegiances and identities. It is admiration for the United States and desire to belong which prompt Thomas to enlist in the army, in the

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hope of coming to terms with being minoritized: “They believed in America. They did. They were patriotic. ‘I’m not just an Indian. I’m an American too’” (Hogan 2008, 30). People of the Whale homes in on the bonds between humans and sea creatures. As suggested by the oxymoronic title of the novel, this relationship abides by the totemism of traditional stories and practices. In Hogan’s novel, this follows the Native American beliefs and practices centered on the whale and its significance for indigenous coastal peoples, both in terms of kinship, and as a shared object of reverence: The whale is said to be “their ancestor” (Hogan 2008, 43). It holds the members of the clan together: “They have ancestors in common” (26). Hogan dwells on the old stories and rock carvings, transmitting and renewing the meaning of the whale from one generation to the other, as part of their cosmogony; hence the petroglyph “of the whale who gave birth to the humans, the beginning of the octopus and other creatures of the sea” (85). As potentially expressed by the ambiguous genitive tying the people to the whale in the title of the novel, these people are born of the whale; at the same time, they belong to the whale. The totemic animal plays a cohesive, ethical role within the clan: “They were people of the whale. They worshipped the whales” (43). In return for their love and respect, the whale is perceived as benevolent toward humans. First, it offers itself up from time to time to alleviate their hunger and participate in life’s continuum. Second, it is believed to provide protection to the members of its clan. It is implied for instance that Thomas has survived a plane crash, and later the Vietnam War, in part thanks to the little stone whale talisman he always carries inside his pocket. These rites and beliefs regarding the whale follow a spiritual connection between all life-forms that pervade many different nations. Writing about the Ojibway heritage contained in manitou stories, Basil Johnston explicates the links between thanksgiving and offerings in hunting rituals: The victim, whether a deer or another being, was humankind’s cotenant on Earth, with its own purpose, existence, time and right of place and life. [. . .] When the victim fell, the hunter apologized, but the words and sentiments went beyond the expression of remorse; the hunter was declaring a universal truth and reality, that of human beings’ utter dependence on their cotenants on Earth for life, growth, and well-being. (Johnston 1995, 5–6)

Hogan, like Johnston, reminds us that there was a time when humans had “a higher regard for their cotenants and neighbors than many do today” (Johnston 1995, 116). Indeed, Hogan’s literary use of totemism ties in with Gerald Vizenor’s defense of the misunderstood value of totems. Totems, he argues, are potent indigenous metaphors that translate deep conceptual

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mappings underlying humans’ grasp of the complex workings of the world: “The native world is actuated in Anishinaabe totems and stories of survivance. The totem is a native metaphor, a literary connection with creation, shamanic visions, and natural reason. Social sciences have reduced native myths, metaphors and creation to the categorical representations of human development and comparative culture” (Vizenor 1998, 123). Much of the magic in People of the Whale stages new stories of totemic bonds and liminal figures possessing many of the “ambiguous and indeterminate attributes” Turner assigns liminal personae (1969, 95). As Steinwand asserts, “the cetacean-human encounter calls attention to the liminal positions of both cetaceans and humans” (2011, 182). Whether in her fiction or in her nonfiction, Hogan indeed insists on the totemic kinship—to be understood here as connection rather than actual lineage—between humans and whales, the former being mammals who have evolved out of water, the latter mammals who have returned to the primordial waters of the apparition of life on earth. Inasmuch as whales have retained hind leg girdles from the time when they were land-dwelling animals, by some sort of mirror effect, Hogan’s fictional characters show signs of a peculiar atavism, tracing human ancestry back to sea creatures. Hogan’s fictional ecotone thus becomes a multispecies contact zone connecting land-dwelling and water-dwelling mammals who share many amphibian features.5 Witka, “the last of a line of traditional men who loved and visited the whales to ensure a good whale hunt” is referred to as “the man who lived between the worlds and between the elements” (Hogan 2008, 18–19). Part fish, part human, this hybrid family includes Ruth, who is said to have been born with gill slits and is endowed with an extraordinary sense of hearing, “like sonar” (56). Meanwhile, her son, Marco, was born with webbed feet, like seals, which, we are told, count among the clan’s ancestors (116). As this hybrid characterization literalizes—or rather, literarizes—the understanding of humans as descendants of sea creatures, it imaginatively encapsulates interspecies connections.6 In most of her fiction, Hogan furthermore reweaves the ties between her young characters and their ancestors, whether totemic, or related by blood. She designs narrative threads forming a genealogical tapestry that might inspire a sense of identity, of kinship and cultural belonging in the younger generations. As Chadwick Allen has shown, “rebuilding the ancestor and becoming ancestors for future generations is also a major theme” in Native American literature (2002, 161). Hogan’s hybrid characters, some with mixed blood and all of them in-between two cultures, in fact sustain Chadwick Allen’s thesis of the blood/land/memory complex which indigenous literature flows from and continues. Taking his cue from N. Scott Momaday’s “signature trope memory in the blood or blood memory,” Allen builds on this trope and intimates a fluid movement between “blood as narrative and narrative

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as blood” (2002, 1). Clearly, the protagonists of the two novels under study, Thomas and Angel, serve to reclaim a storytelling tradition, which is recollected and regenerated. Contrary to the traditional, unifying function of the whale as ancestor and totem, the animal in Hogan’s novel first becomes a catalyst for dissension. The clan is divided as some of its members have decided upon a whale hunt, purely for reasons of profit-making. Two gray whales get massacred in the novel, each time in total disregard for the many traditional rituals (Hogan 2008, 70–71). In olden times, Hogan’s narrator reminds us, hunters were meant to “care for [the whale] and treat it with respect, to inflict the least pain” (88–89). Humans were to use all of the whale to survive hunger; they made baskets out of the whale’s baleens, with “anything unused [. . .] reverently sent back to the ocean, the men singing” (89). In this late twentieth century context, the totemic relationship to the whale has been perverted by the assimilation of white ways, as suggested by the paronomasia in Dwight/ white’s name. Dwight, the plotter of the hunt, seems to have assimilated the worst of white, North American values: “he had become a soldier and a businessman and he had not retained the old way of being in the world” (69). Hogan avoids the simplistic opposition between stereotypical “ecological Indians” and evil whites.7 The destroyers are certainly identified in this novel as influenced by Euro-American values; yet just as white soldiers disrespectfully carve sacrilegious insults into the corpse of a water buffalo Thomas has accidently shot, Dwight’s men pour beer into a dead whale’s blow horn, transgressing the moral code and ethics ascribed to their people. Ruth sums up the two conflicting attitudes as to “wilderness”: on the one hand, European Americans who perceive wild animals as threatening—and one cannot help but think of Melville’s Moby Dick—that is, to be vanquished, if not exploited; while on the other hand, indigenous peoples feel a spiritual connection with whales, wolves, bears etc., whom they engage in a sacred give-and-take relationship: “What about our ancestors calling them spirit fish when the whites called them devils?” (Hogan 2008, 82). Fighting Manichean stereotypes further, the white policemen who come for Dwight at the end of the novel both “hate shooting animals,” whereas Dwight revels in exhibiting the corpses of raccoons or skunks he has shot for lingering around his dwelling place (Hogan 2008, 294). Unwilling to acknowledge cotenancy with other earth beings, Dwight derives pride and pleasure from extinguishing animals who have trespassed onto his territory. In a similar vein, at the beginning of the novel, some of the A’atsika people want to kill the octopus who later becomes a family totem, because, we are told, they are “afraid of its potent meaning” (Hogan 2008, 16). Despite her reticence to kill “even one” fish because they are “so beautiful,” Ruth is nevertheless pictured killing salmons; however, she does so thoughtfully and frugally. Finally, parallel to the abject

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behavior of American soldiers in Vietnam enjoying the violent raping, torturing and killing of women, children, and babies comes Dwight and his friend’s unempathetic behavior, walking away as Thomas’s father attempts to rape pregnant Ruth. Thereby transcending cleavages between ethnic groups, Hogan’s fiction stages universal, ethical dilemmas. She questions various ideologies and traditions framing humans’ relationships with their environment, inviting us to shift perspectives onto our naturecultures. Echoing Winona LaDuke’s assessment of the extermination of the North American buffalo in the 1870s and 1880s, People of the Whale brings readers to come to terms with “a spiritual mistake: killing without reverence” (LaDuke 1999, 147). Hogan’s literature thus becomes a discursive territory, which, because she opts for a magical realist mode, may itself be approached as an ecotone, bringing together different naturecultures. It thereby questions the foundations of Cartesian thought while transgressing the limits imposed by realism as a literary mode. MAGICAL REALISM, TOTEMISM, AND ORDINARY WONDERS Wendy Faris’s seminal—and to my mind, most cogent and satisfying—theory of magical realism marks the affinity between the literary mode and Turner’s definition of liminality (Faris 1995, 29). If François Gavillon follows behind Patrick Murphy to set Linda Hogan and other women writers apart from other magical realists—arguing that their writing should be viewed in the light of a “major innovative aesthetic strategy” they would rather label “spiritual realism”—I would contend that Faris’ thorough definition of magical realism perfectly grasps the narrative strategies together with the discursive hybridity and the liminality inherent in the mode as cultivated by Hogan.8 Of the most salient five defining traits of magical realism listed by Faris, Gavillon only really deals with two: the “‘irreducible element’ of magic” and the “strong presence of the phenomenal world” (Faris 1995, 7). This leaves out three crucial characteristics of Hogan’s fiction aligning it with magical realism, that is, the facts that “the reader may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events,” that “the narrative merges different realms,” and, finally, “that magical realism disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity” (Faris 2004, 7). I would argue that the term magical realism is better suited to Hogan’s fiction, in the sense that the latter simultaneously offers insight into ordinary wonders—or, in Faris’ terms, “ordinary enchantments”—engaging with the elusive dimensions of the actual world. Hogan’s novels indeed invite us to follow Ruth and Thomas, who, as children “[wandered] the lines between

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land and water at the west end of a continent,” acting as “explorers together in the magic of the world” (Hogan 2008, 159). Going back to the emergence of the term as coined by Franz Roh about German painting in the 1920s, I would say Hogan’s use of magical realism limns the mystery that “hides and palpitates behind the represented world” (Roh 1995, 116), erasing the frontier between the visible and the invisible. Introducing the term “magical realism” in art, Roh pinpointed “that radiation of magic, that spirituality [. . .] throbbing” in magical realist works—the perdurance of which he predicted would take place “on a middle ground,” on “a sharp edge, a narrow ledge between two chasms” (Roh 1995, 23). This is precisely the liminal potential specific to magical realism and apparent in Hogan’s fiction, leaking mystical and mythical fluidity into scientifically charted terrain. This epistemological hybrid resonates with Pierre Durix’ hypothesis: “perhaps the merit of the phrase ‘magical realism’ is to suggest a field of possibilities in which the term will no longer be an oxymoron” (Durix 1998, 190). Irreducible elements of magic are legion in Hogan’s novels. In People of the Whale, Witka, the eldest traditionalist whale-hunter, possesses psychic powers and the ability to converse with whales. He is “a medical oddity, a human curiosity, a visionary [. . .] and a medicine man who could cure rheumatism and dizzy spells” (Hogan 2008, 19). Angel in Solar Storms gradually discovers her gift as a “plant dreamer.” She helps retrieve knowledge of herbal medicine and locates the plants through her dreams. Such extraordinary sensory perceptions abound in Hogan’s writing. Rather than being presented as paranormal, these powers are very much anchored in detailed descriptions of the natural world. It is suggested that they capture a form of knowledge different from Cartesian thinking, a form of intuition about the world at odds with Western rationality: But there was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams. They dreamed charts of land and currents of water. They dreamed where food animals lived. These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their prey. It was the language animals and humans had in common. People found their cures in the same way. (Hogan 1995, 170)

Hogan’s fiction constantly merges different realms: dream and waking reality, the tangible and the world of the mind, intellectual knowledge and infralinguistic intuition. Her characters also challenge the separation between the living and the dead. Thomas can feel the presence and hear the voices of ghosts. He himself seems to inhabit an in-between dimension: “Yes, he thinks, I am alive and I am dead” (Hogan 2008, 180). Solar Storms opens and closes with Agnes’s perception of her late grandmother’s voice and steps,

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which she can hear. At the end, she can both hear the voice and feel the touch of her deceased great-grandmother. These phenomena frame the story and transcend the corporeal limits known in a Cartesian mindset. Hogan furthermore defies the laws of space and time as Euro-Americans believe that they know them. Witka’s wife buries herself underground to counterbalance the unnaturally long time he spends under water holding his breath (“Maybe she breathed for him,” Hogan 2008, 21). Her husband’s underwater visions travel through water and earth so that she can actually see what he does. Ruth is endowed with a similar telepathic gift: she is capable of seeing her husband in Vietnam with his new family and tribe, even though Thomas has been reported dead; she then envisions his daughter, although there is nothing rational that could explain this capacity of hers to picture Thomas’ other, secret life (Hogan 2008, 36). Communication in Hogan’s ecopoetic universe thus extends beyond the limits conventionally agreed upon in Western understanding: “The love between Thomas and Ruth was a love that existed in another dimension, just as Witka [. . .] and his wife had a love that communicated from earth all the way through elements to the depths of water. Ruth had seen through space and time across this world through her own eyes and heart” (Hogan 2008, 36). These liminal powers are also inherited by Marco, their son, who can envision the father he has never met walking in the distant rice paddies of Vietnam (Hogan 2008, 38). As touched upon earlier, Hogan’s magical realism taps into the totemism of her elders. Abiding by traditional beliefs, she engenders these hybrid species born from the initial encounter between Witka and the animal. Indeed, Witka recounts having spent time underwater with a gigantic octopus. The totemic bond between Witka’s family and the octopus is symbolically sealed by the gesture of the octopus, gently working Witka’s wedding ring off of his finger and holding on to it. This original alliance accounts for both the aberrant atavism resurfacing in the next generations, and for the amazing transgression of boundaries the novel opens with. On the day Thomas, Witka’s grand-son, is born, an octopus walks out of water “on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave”—the name of the cave playing with the polysemy of the word “seal,” referring to an animal or to the act of sealing a deal for instance (Hogan 2008, 15). Thomas’s mother’s reaction to the event voices ancient beliefs regarding animal and human relationships: “She was convinced the octopus would be the spirit keeper of her son, because she thought, like the old people used to think, that such helpers existed and they were benevolent spirits” (Hogan 2008, 16). The narrator moreover refers to the octopus species as “the octopus people” (Hogan 2008, 16, my emphasis), thereby crossing boundaries separating humans from animals. Coming to an agreement that the octopus must be holy, should be protected and cared for, the clan members sacrifice some of their finest possessions as a sign of

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allegiance to the critter and his people. Ruth offers the pearl she has inherited from her father, Witka, thus regenerating the give-and-take bond between the two species. This initial pact sealed between the octopus and humans turns out to provide a logic underpinning much of the extraordinary events that follow. First, the botched whale hunt lead by Dwight reads as a breach in the theretofore friendly and respectful relationships between land and sea creatures. The drought that ensues implies a kind of cosmic retaliation, causing the receding of the ocean and dire times for the coastal people, used to living from the ocean, while it also provokes floods on the other side of the earth. As the story unfolds, the return of the octopus in the human form of the Rain Priest who magically brings back the water fulfills the promise contained in the incipit, as the octopus returns to the water: “it knew it was loved by them and it would help them” (Hogan 2008, 18). Drawing from yet another mythical figure at the heart of Native American stories, the octopus indeed reappears throughout as a benevolent and protean trickster. Ultimately, it is suggested that the bond between sea and land creatures has been repaired, although it has entailed much sacrifice on the part of the clan to redeem themselves and restore the symbiotic balance uniting all living creatures. This renewal is expressed by the fact that the shape-shifting octopus, on departing, first insists on being seen in his marine form. He moreover returns Ruth’s fishing boat, which she had previously agreed to sacrifice as a price to pay the Rain Priest for his services. Finally, he gives back the family pearl that Thomas’s mother had left in the cave as an offering for the octopus at the beginning of the novel. Symbolically, these gestures therefore reinitiate the relationship of mutual care existing before the catastrophic, chaotic whale hunts. Another reading can be ventured in the light of the symbolism of Christ. Indeed, Ruth and Thomas’ son, Marco, stands as the elect, with a special destiny to fulfill: “Born an old man, [. . .] he was set apart by his inborn wisdom. He was the incarnation of an ancestor, the elders said” (Hogan 2008, 54, 38). Because he embodies and preaches the sacred teachings of his elders, he reads as a kind of sacrificed prophet, the innocent victim dying for humans’ sins. Marco’s kinship with sea creatures is first signaled by the apparition not of Angel Gabriel, but again of the octopus before Ruth on the day she finds out about her pregnancy (Hogan 2008, 31). After Marco’s early death, his missing body links him further with Christ. In addition, echoing faith in the second coming of the savior, the people carry the hope that Marco might resurrect in another form and maybe even one day return for them: “They say when a great whaler dies at sea he will become a great whale. Maybe Marco will travel on. Maybe he will return one day and feed his people. [. . .] When they are ready” (Hogan 2008, 107). As it is, many elements point to Marco himself as one of the forms temporarily elected by the shape-shifting octopus, who

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does indeed return to save the A’atsika after they have repented and purified their hearts. Just as Marco was said to be “chosen,” Ruth conjectures about the Rain Priest-octopus: “She thinks he would like to be ordinary. [. . .] His countenance is special. A normal life has not been chosen for him” (Hogan 2008, 148). The elusive Rain Priest acts as their savior, and in a Christ-like fashion, he possesses a special ability to make people feel compassion and love. As with Marco, or Jesus, it is guessed that the Rain-Priest-octopus is “awfully old,” not “fully human,” and that he might be “one of the immortals” (Hogan 2008, 132–33). Initially too, whereas Jesus walks on water to convince his disciples that he truly is the son of God, it is on the day the octopus accomplishes the miracle of walking out of water that he is recognized as “holy,” as “a mystery” to be revered (Hogan 2008, 16). Appropriating the myths of the colonizers thus allows Hogan to reclaim the founding stories of her own culture, while offering a syncretic exegesis of Christian texts that might speak to different readers. Whatever their forms, the teachings of Hogan’s liminal sea creatures command us to love our neighbors—be they human or nonhuman—as we love ourselves. In this hybrid rewriting of the gospels, Hogan’s choice of the name Ruth for Marco’s mother is rather telling. Indeed, very much like Hogan’s novel, the book of Ruth in the Bible focuses on a single family, and it emphasizes the loyalty that binds the family together. It similarly revolves around commitment to a divine law. The book of Ruth boldly states that God’s love enfolds people of every nation, beyond the people of Israel. Taking it one step further, Hogan underscores the interspecies links that bind humans and nonhuman peoples together in the sacred organicity of earth-dwelling. This heteroglossic dimension of the novel literally speaks worlds, producing dialogic forms that emerge from contact zones between cultures. Breathing new life into old myths, Hogan’s ecopoetics corroborates Faris’s argument that magical realism “[constitutes] a possible remystification of narrative in the West” (Faris 2004, 65). Taking my cue from Amaryll Chanady, there is a “resolved antinomy” between the magical and the realistic codes enmeshed throughout the novel. The heterodiegetic narrator and shifting points of view do at times underline the problematic, incredible quality of events, only the better to overcome the disjunction in the end between the two codes. We are told for instance that “The doctors were baffled,” on discovering Ruth’s gill slits at birth (Hogan 2008, 27), and that “the nurses were very worried, even afraid” (Hogan 2008, 55). Yet, even the doctors and nurses—blatant metonymies for modern science—must yield to the incomprehensible: “and it took many weeks to sew the gills together and keep Ruth Small breathing through her lungs” (Hogan 2008, 27). Ruth herself, on finding out about the taboo surrounding her extraordinary birth, first expresses a worldview impervious to such magic. As

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her mother tells her in a deadpan tone of voice, “You were a fish even then, my child,” (Hogan 2008, 55), her first reaction is to suspect her mother might be lying or going senile (Hogan 2008, 57). Yet, there is physical evidence, visible in the scars before her ears—traces of the operation she underwent in her infancy to close up her gills. The narrative provides various explanations for Ruth’s freak biology: the doctors consider “a genetic throwback or something,” incidentally confirming the totemic ancestry at work, while the A’atsika elders possess prior knowledge of the strange phenomenon: “it’s happened before. Destiny is water for her, they said” (Hogan 2008, 56). As Ruth the salmon-fisher, doubtful, visits the midwife who has assisted with the delivery, her kinship with fish is confirmed: “Yes, you were born with gill slits. It isn’t rare, especially in these parts. [. . .] I always knew you’d come. Like a salmon. From the ocean to the forest so you could breathe pure forest air” (Hogan 2008, 58). As we later learn, Ruth is from the salmon clan. Overall, the narrator withholds any additional explanation for the disconcerting fictitious world, preserving throughout the “authorial reticence” Chanady identifies as a hallmark of magical realism (Chanady 1985, 16). Cancelling the antinomy between magic and realism, the narrative strategy promotes the same acceptance in the reader. Consequently, one must rely on totemism, accounting for a certain logic to the incredible events. The polyphonic text also gives divergent explanations for the receding shoreline. Ruth and Vince see it as a curse, retributing the sinful killing of the friendly, young gray whale. The Times reporters invoke “the drought and a dreadful dry heat in the area that has caused a change in the temperature of the water,” “a cyclical event” (Hogan 2008, 126); others believe it is due to “a crack in the ocean floor” (Hogan 2008, 127). The postcolonial dimension of the novel is thus evident in the way a traditional world view challenges Western science. The novel turns the tables on imperial superiority, by showing the limited understanding of whites as compared to that of the A’atsika. The Natives’ time-old, land-based knowledge is encapsulated in the conclusion reached by the Rain Priest: “everything here is out of balance” (Hogan 2008, 143). The modern reader cannot possibly remain insensitive to the way Hogan’s retaliation story holds a mirror up to our present-day concerns with climate change. For example, benefiting from an omniscient viewpoint, the narrative voice establishes the link between the receding shoreline in Dark River, and the concomitant “flooding on small islands on the other side of the ocean, as if the earth has tilted somehow, been thrown off course” (Hogan 2008, 128). It is hard to ignore the reflection of our own preoccupations with global ecological balance in the Anthropocene, mostly with global warming and the subsequent record heat waves in some places, the floods, and tsunamis in others, and the various tipping points we now face.

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A rare instance of narratorial intervention occurs with the return of the rain, after Thomas has finally decided to come to terms with his past, to reveal the truth about his actions in the war and his stealthy life in Vietnam, and to go find his daughter, Lin: “Like the sky, he cries. He has given his word. He has made a deal with the rain and he is going to stick to it. [. . .] He believes his sacrifice, his looking at the truth of his life and no longer hiding, brought back the rain and, in all truth, it did help. It was part of something given. No one knows this, not Ruth, not anybody. As always, everything has its part” (Hogan 2008, 151). Here, the narrator’s voice relinquishes its former reticence, corroborating the existence of some arcane, organic principle tying together all living beings and matter. However, in this passage, the point of view shifts from Thomas’s, to that of the omniscient narrator, to, just shortly after, that of the Rain Priest-octopus. The boundaries between the different points of view are therefore blurred, corresponding to the “defocalization” Faris observes in many magical realist texts. Hogan’s narrative is, indeed, often “defocalized,” exhibiting the “strangely indeterminate nature of magical realism’s narrative stance” (Faris 2004, 43). Again, the trick has to do with liminality: Faris affirms that “defocalization creates a narrative space of the ineffable in-between because its perspective cannot be explained, only experienced. Within it, one does not quite know where one is, what one is seeing, or what kind of voice one is hearing” (Faris 2004, 46). As Faris underlines, the unsettling doubts readers may experience as to the magical events is in great part due to our rational tendency to co-opt the marvelous. It can be argued that Hogan’s fiction stages rites of passage, giving insight into “ineffable in-between” spaces, or ontological ecotones. LIMINAL REALISM: DWELLING WITHIN A BIOTIC COMMUNITAS Taking a closer look at the development of the main characters in either novel, it appears that they tightly fit the features Turner associates with “initiands,” that is, individuals undergoing a transition from one state to another as in transformative rites of passage (Turner 1979, 236). Before entering the liminal phase proper, the individual first goes through a detachment, or “separation” phase. Angel’s detachment takes place in the very beginning, as she leaves her American life behind and joins the small, matriarchal community at Adams’ Rib: “I felt I was at the end of something, [. . .] at the end of a way of living in the world. I was at the end of my life in America, and a secret part of me knew this end was also a beginning” (Hogan 1995, 26). Thomas’s liminal situation is likewise foregrounded: “He had two lives now. Now they both seemed as if they belonged to another man. [. . .] He was in a different

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world. He was from a different world. It was a long distance between the two. He thought it would never be crossed” (Hogan 2008, 46–47). As he is about to start his “third life” back into his community but after having fought as an American soldier, Thomas “travels [. . .] the inside passage of his own self” (Hogan 2008, 47, 24). While Thomas’s transformation occurs as he walls himself in, both literally and symbolically—he builds a wall around the hut where he has buried himself, and lives like a hermit, windows shut and curtains drawn—Angel is initiated into liminality by her grandmothers, passing on to her a tradition with different concepts of space and time. Old Dora Rouge for instance has “already begun to step over the boundaries of this world into the next” where she “converses with her gone husband.” She tells Angel about the “next,” “intelligent world”: “from time to time it was difficult to bring her back the long distance from that world to ours” (Hogan 1995, 31). At the other end of both characters’ liminal phases, the same symbolism of passage recurs. Angel’s transformation is expressed via the skin-shedding snake simile, closely connected with acquiring vision: “In all of this, something was stripped away from me. Like a snake, I emerged, rubbing myself out of my old skin, my old eyes. I was fresh, I was seeing clearly” (Hogan 1995, 344). As Turner notes “[undoing], dissolution, decomposition are accompanied by processes of growth, transformation, and the reformulation of old elements in new patterns” (1979, 237). For Angel, the liminal passage takes the form of a journey, as she and her grandmothers paddle two canoes up North, through a maze of water and land. For Thomas, activating a symbolism very much aligned with that of his totem octopus sojourning inside the cave in the incipit, it is his stay inside Witka’s hut which induces his transformation.9 Like Jonah’s Biblical sojourn inside the whale, his prolonged isolation in darkness stands as an initiation death, a prelude to his rebirth: “Thomas has now become something else” (Hogan 2008, 286). Shortly after he emerges from his dark hut, he is lured by the pull of his elders’ calling. He joins them to be initiated to paddling, to their songs, stories and ways.10 As he reaches the place of his elders, he bathes and renews himself (277–79). He subsequently fasts, prays, and scrubs himself with cedar bows, observing purification rituals. Then he takes up staying under water again, thereby following the same trajectory as the octopus—out of water, into the cave, and back into the water. Both Angel and Thomas experience purification though water: “Thomas has now become something else, not one of the conquered any longer but whatever was deep in him all along and precious as if it, too, crossed the water, the old world new in him, yet old” (2008, 286). As for Angel and her grandmothers, their pilgrimage through water takes them through to another realm: “Cell by cell, all of us were taken in by water and by land, swallowed a little at a time. What

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we’d thought of as our lives and being on earth was gone” (1995, 170). Water becomes a threshold allowing for the characters’ transformation. As Paula Gunn Allen argues, “[among] medicine people it is well known that immersing oneself in water will enable one to ward off dissolution” (Allen 1986, 24). Thomas’ diving leads to “descents and passages.” Following the octopus, he becomes “a creature of night water,” one of the “creatures that thrive on darkness” (Hogan 2008, 159). Yet, shortly after joining the elders, Thomas is shot by Dwight and is then swallowed by the ocean. His near-death experience evokes another passage: “he falls backward as if through a door without a room” (286). Thomas nearly drowns, yet emerges, “nearly naked, his clothes washed away, and he is newly born and beautiful” (290). His nakedness and temporary return to water carry classic symbols of purification and rebirth. His metamorphosis too is evoked by comparison with the snake: “he has shed a skin” (293). As apprentices of the old ways being initiated to the spirit world known by their elders, these immersions may help their “transformation from corporeal to spirit” (Allen 1986, 24). After he washes up on the shore where the clan elders live, Thomas, like Angel, paddles his way through water, guided by an elderly man called Feather. They are described as liminal entities, “invisible in the light as if they are ghosts transparent as dragonfly wings in the misty light and maybe they pass to the other side of something” (Hogan 2008, 291–92). The oxymoron “invisible in the light” marks the invisibility which liminality is often likened to (Turner 1969, 95). This last quote ferries the characters across yet another boundary, the nature of which remains elusive (“and maybe they pass to the other side of something”). Thresholds constitute a leitmotif in both novels. Angel recounts her “passing through doors not of this world” (Hogan 1995, 345). Essentially, much of the characters’ quests have to do with acquiring vision: “There is no map to show us where to step, no guide to tell us how to see” (Hogan 1995, 346). Through contact with water, both protagonists experience a numinous revelation, which explains for Thomas and Feather’s radiance, like Elijah in the Bible after seeing the face of God, making them “invisible in the light”: “All the clouds soon lift from the sky and the sun comes to their faces, glints off the ocean. No one can ever tell what it is, but travelers to another world return with a special light” (Hogan 2008, 292). Angel and her grandmothers have embarked on a water journey in and out of time, opening onto liminal dimensions. For Bush, [water] and sky [are] windows she [peers] through to something beyond this world” and time “[drops] away from her” (Hogan 1995, 176). As they access other worlds, the characters typically negotiate interstices in time: “It was this gap in time we entered, and it was a place between worlds. I was under the spell of wilderness, close to what no one had ever been able to call by name” (177). Finding herself “under the spell of wilderness,” Angel discovers that nature has evolved its own, sensuous alphapet, spelling its own, wild language.

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These episodes correspond to the liminal phenomena studied by Turner. They generate “‘a moment in and out of time,’ and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties” (Turner 1989, 96). As they find themselves “in the hands of nature,” they are granted access to places where “things [turn] about and [are] other than what they [seem].” In Hogan’s fiction this new awareness implies opening up to different ways of being in the world, moving beyond the limits of Western hierarchical perceptions of the living world: “New senses came to me. I was equal to the other animals, hearing as they heard, moving as they moved, seeing as they saw” (Hogan 1995, 172). Situating herself on the same plane as “other animals,” Angel debunks the elevated status of humans who, in most Western traditions, assign themselves a higher rank and stand aloof from animals, plants, and natural elements—an elevated place where they think they can afford to no longer experience empathy with the more-than-human sentient world. What Angel describes rings a bell with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “becoming-animal,” whereby one’s identity becomes destabilized, fluid, and nomadic. When diving, Angel envisions existing as a fish, endowed with a gill slit too: “I forgot to breathe, swimming as if once again, as before birth, I had a gill slit. In that moment, I remembered being fish. I remembered being oxygen and hydrogen, bird and wolverine” (Hogan 1995, 179). Angel’s character is in this way comparable to Ruth in People of the Whale, born with gill slits and thus gesturing to humans’ deep genetic or intuitive memory of in-utero life on the one hand, together with the more archaic memory of descending from primordial sea forms of life on the other hand. Moreover, by tapping into water, Angel simultaneously taps into her mixed-blood memory, allowing her to recollect her inherited powers as plant-dreamer, among others, and to re-member her kinship with her relatives, be they humans, animals, plants, or elements. With most of our blood and tissues composed of water, water is an active principle in carrying the undercurrents of memory that run deep “in the blood,” as Momaday might put it. Besides, Angel’s anagnorisis recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-molecular,” whereby the individual exists no longer as a separate entity, but as multiplicities constantly changing and becoming as a result of molecular interaction with other multiplicities—a physical process science has pinned down, and which Stacy Alaimo refers to as “transcorporeality.” These processes of becoming-animal and becoming-molecular clearly fit Turner’s definition of the emergence of a communitas in the liminal period. Passing through “a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state,” the liminal subject witnesses the rise of “society

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as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders” (Turner 1989, 96). Throughout their liminal voyage, Angel and her three grandmothers experience communion with each other, but also with the world around them. Attuned to the landscape, they can decipher in it the voices of their elders: Everything merged and united. There were no sharp distinctions left between darkness and light. Water and air became the same thing, as did water and land [. . .]. It was all one thing. The canoes were our bodies, our skin. [. . .] The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each other in a tribal way. [. . . There] was no such thing as loneliness. [. . .] Now we, the four of us, all had the same eyes. (Hogan 1995, 177)

Liminality becomes a gateway into elemental and animal ways of being in the world. It forms an embracing of interspecies connections, triggering a kind of sensorial empathy with other-than-human life-forms. Hogan dramatizes many a moment of becoming-animal, allowing her human characters to breathe like fish, hear like whales, and move like bears. They develop a different kind of awareness of the world around—an embodied consciousness of the world as a pluriverse, rather than a universe. In Adamson’s words, Hogan’s fiction “[. . . urges readers] to re-vision the planet as a cosmos of multi-species communities existing in intimate, entangled relations” (Adamson 2012, 44). As Thomas “listens to the water,” holding his breath, “he hears the sounds of all the life in water, the clicks and ticking, and for a while, time changes. It seems he [is] there listening, hearing what almost amounted to words and now he no longer needs to breathe” (Hogan 2008, 282). Just as Agnes in Solar Storms becomes “a bear of a woman,” Thomas undergoes a kind of becoming-whale, making him receptive to cetacean language. On coming face to face with a whale under water, not only is he endowed with sonar, he rises to the surface and gasps for air just as the whale does, gently nudged by it. As if to echo Deleuze and Guattari’s statement, that “becoming always amounts to something other than filiation,” that “becoming has to do with alliance” (1980, 291, my translation), this is the moment when Thomas becomes fully aware that humans are meant to care for the whales, that together, symbiotically, they can become, and live on. Via such stories, Hogan revitalizes old myths and reminds us that, far from Descartes’ conception of “man” as “master and possessor of nature,” Native Americans may have always upheld a vision of the world closer to that promoted nowadays by thinkers such as Philippe Descola or Catherine Larrère—of humans as stewards and protectors of nature. Drawing from the old stories of totemic alliances, Hogan reminds

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us that where our trajectories intersect, animals’ ways of being in the world can show humans new paths, connected to the past and branching out into a shared future. To take up Johnston, animals have always been “much more than mere nearby dwellers.” They are “indispensable to humans, not only as sacrificial victims, whose flesh, blood, bones, fur and tissue sustain men and women in their struggle for life, but as exemplars whose habits, character, and work provide insight and knowledge that humans would not otherwise have” (Johnston 1995, 116). Throughout Hogan’s writing, the attention lent to sounds and music suggests that these characters are sensitive to what Mark Treddinick calls “the land’s wild music,” talking to and through them: Sometimes I thought I could hear these things myself, the lonely, sad songs coming through trees and up from the banks of their destruction. Always, behind those songs, I heard our own deep-pitched songs that were the songs of land speaking through its keepers. Sometimes, too, I heard the old ones in the songs of wolves. It made me think we were undoing the routes of explorers, taking apart the advance of commerce, narrowing down and distilling the truth out of history. (Hogan 1995, 176)

Hogan’s liminal characters are endowed with the gift to hear and sing animal songs, thus becoming mediators between the voices of the muted earth and humans. As she empathetically kills the last glacier bear she so loves, to save him from cruelty and spare him undue suffering, Agnes’s compassion for the bear brings about reciprocal care. As life flows out of the animal, it seems to breathe into Agnes the knowledge of “an old, old song,” “a bear song,” so old that Agnes could not possibly have heard it before (Hogan 1995, 46–47). She then cloaks herself with the bear’s skin—a very symbolical, ritual gesture which seems to initiate her becoming-bear, or her becoming “a bear of a woman” (Hogan 1995, 48). This is at least the interspecies transformation contained in the story Dora Rouge recounts: “Agnes is becoming something. Maybe the bear. Maybe she knows her way back to something” (Hogan 1995, 48). In a like manner, Thomas intuitively becomes the recipient and singer of “an old whale song he has never learned. He looks toward the ocean, and the song, it comes to him from out of a hole opened in time” (Hogan 2008, 284). Clearly, these characters are shamans, mediators between the human and the more-than-human worlds. They also serve as ecopoets, as they are attuned to the songs that the earth and its many dwellers channel through them, which they can in turn en-chant, guiding others in their experience of dwelling within the earth. Another catalyst of the characters’ journeys is linked to dwelling within silence. Not only is quietness a necessary condition for recollection, it is a

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required condition to open oneself to the voices and music of the world. At the start of the novel, Angel tells of her entering a room of silence located within herself (Hogan 1995, 27). As for Thomas, he welcomes silence because it shuts down the spectral voices from his traumatic past: “Now there is silence, even peace, no more haunting” (Hogan 2008, 293). Reversely, there are many moments pointing to an infra-linguistic kind of communication, a wordless language to be sounded in silence, as when Thomas and the elders “sit in silent council for days: He understands what is being said. […] The speaking is done through the eyes and through the soul and heart. A person can feel what is considered. Intelligence is passed all around, knowledge is shared. Decisions are made in this way, primal, primary. Stories are told” (Hogan 2008, 291). Hogan here defies an understanding of intelligence and stories pertaining to the realm of the logos. Knowledge is expressed and shared via embodied consciousness, while wordless stories are narrated outside of standard, human language. Calling for silent attentiveness to the music of the world around, elderly Dora-Rouge longingly reminisces with an old friend of “the time when everything was still alive [. . .] the time when people could merge with a cloud and help it rain, could become trees, one with bark, root, and leaf. People were more silent in those days. They listened. They heard” (Hogan 1995, 203). Hogan’s characters follow an animistic intuition and rely on states of fusion with the natural world. They experience moments of being at-one with the world. Instead of striving for control over nature, they let the flow of water and life become their guide: “What mattered, simply and powerfully, was knowing the current of water and living in the body where land spoke what a woman must do to survive” (Hogan 1995, 204). As land, water, air, blood, and memory speak to the body which knows how to be still and listen, then the women are “returned to a place of deep wildness,” to a time before the ancient pact between water and land was broken, when “animals still spoke with humans” (1995, 204). In stillness and silence, Thomas can feel “just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe” (2008, 281). Like Paula Gunn Allen and many of their respective contemporaries, Hogan thus reestablishes Native understanding that “the universe moves and breathes continuously,” and that “all creatures [are] relatives (and in tribal systems relationship is central), [. . . and] necessary parts of an ordered, balanced, and living whole” (Allen 1986, 59). ECOPOETIC INSIGHT INTO DWELLINGS OF ENCHANTMENT Hogan’s fiction drills through the boundaries erected in Western philosophy between humans and other lifeforms.11 As Jack Forbes once put it, “We are,

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indeed, bodies without borders” (“Where”). Hogan’s writing insists that the whole world is alive, and that all lifeforms are entangled, if only by oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide: “Field, forest, swamp. I knew how they breathed at night, and that they were linked to us in that breath. It was the oldest bond of survival” (Hogan 1995, 171). Intuitively picturing and locating plants within her dreams, Angel’s thoughts give way to a meaningful image of entanglement between herself and plants: “Maybe the roots of dreaming are in the soil of dailiness, or in the heart, or in another place without words, but when they come together and grow, they are like the seeds of hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen that together create ocean, lake, and ice. In this way the plants and I joined each other. They entangled me in their stems and vines and it was a beautiful entanglement” (1995, 171). Hogan’s text here echoes Forbes’s vision of all life as forming one, whole existence: That which the tree exhales, I inhale. That which I exhale, the trees inhale. Together we form a circle. When I breathe I am breathing the breath of billions of now-departed trees and plants. When trees and plants breathe they are breathing the breath of billions of now-departed humans, animals and other peoples. As Lame Dear said, ‘A human being too, is many things. Whatever makes up the air, the earth, the herbs, the stories, is also part of our bodies. (Forbes 1978, 182).

Hogan’s liminal moments of revelation help dispel what Alan Watts calls “the illusion of oneself as a separate ego,” reminding us that “differentiation is not separation” (Watts 1966, 21, 79). As Paula Gunn Allen diagnoses, “disease is a condition of division and separation from the harmony of the world” (Allen 1986, 60). Breaking down the barriers between self and Other, or in Jungian terms, between Ego and Self, Hogan’s literature takes issue with the notion of individuality, pointing instead to interspecies enmeshments, or as Haraway puts it, “mortal world-making entanglements that [can be called] contact zones” (Haraway 2008, 4). The concept of a separate self entails boundaries—an individual walled within one’s corporeal prison of the body, and separated from the outside world and from others by skin. This is perceptible for instance in Ruth’s friends’ incapacity to reach beyond the confines of her skin as she is mourning her son, Marco: “Those who loved Ruth—so many—touched her hand, her shoulder, held her lightly, but no one could read the world inside other human bones. They could touch the skin and not feel the grief and pain it held only a skin’s width away” (Hogan 2008, 102). This is also the point of Angel’s realization: “I began to think that if we had no separate words for inside and out and there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no skin, you would see me” (Hogan 1995, 54). But through senses and intuition, skin

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can also become porous. It becomes a threshold between Self and Other. Angel’s closing words call attention to the illusory notion of a bound-in Ego: “If you listen at the walls of one human being, even if that one is yourself, you will hear drumming” (Hogan 1995, 351). On the contrary, extra-sensitive Ruth can for instance feel beyond her husband’s skin, into his deepest feelings: “Ruth knows [Thomas’s] alphabet, his syntax, his silent language. She feels him. His very skin cries out” (Hogan 2008, 160). Skin thus functions as an ecotone, a liminal space which, as Watts insists, can be “a bridge as much as a barrier” (Watts 1966, 56). Just like the North country where the action takes place, “where water is broken apart by land, land split open by water” the individual is embedded in the world in a way that is “both bound and, if you [know] your way in, boundless” (Watts 1966, 21).12 As Forbes has written, humans are both mixed in and part of what Europeans have called “the environment.” For Native Americans, there are no such things as “surroundings” (Forbes 1978, 181). Our rhizomatic rootedness in the earth connects us to the world like trees: We are not autonomous, self-sufficient beings, as European mythology teaches. Such ideas are based upon deductive logic derived from false assumptions. We are rooted, just like trees. But our roots come out of our nose and mouth, like an umbilical cord, forever connected with the rest of the world. Our roots also extend out from our skin and from our other body cavities. (Forbes 1978, 182).

By reconnecting with the land around them and healing thereby, Hogan’s characters comfort Momaday’s certitude that no being can live entirely apart from the land, and that humans have become “disoriented” as a result of the technological revolution which has “[uprooted] us from the soil” (Momaday 1997, 47). While Momaday laments that “we have suffered a kind of psychic dislocation of ourselves in time and place” (Momaday 1997, 47), Hogan’s fiction points to passages toward relocation, allowing humans to regrow their roots into the natural world in which they dwell. Echoing Momaday’s trope of “blood memories,” Angel thus declares at the end of her initiation: “Older creatures are remembered in the blood. Inside ourselves we are not yet upright walkers. We are tree. We are frog in amber” (Hogan 1995, 351). Undermining Western “egofiction” (Watts 1966, 79) or inviting us to unravel “the hoax of egocentricity” (Watts 1966, 57), encounters with otherthan-human sentient beings are legion in Hogan’s fiction. They funnel compassion for the other. Ecopoetics may therein serve a purpose traditionally accomplished through ceremony, that is, in Allen’s words, to integrate: to fuse the individual with his or her fellows, the community of people with that or the other kingdoms, and this larger communal group with

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the worlds beyond this one. A raising or expansion of individual consciousness naturally accompanies this process. The person sheds the isolated, individual personality and is restored to conscious harmony with the universe. (Allen 1986, 62)

In this process, Hogan stresses the importance of gazes. The gigantic whale’ eye and the octopus’s eye repeatedly arise to be seen by humans, bringing about confrontations where one sees through boundaries, eye-to-eye with animals. Before he is both literally and metaphorically uplifted by a whale from under water so that he may breathe, Thomas comes eye-to-eye with the animal: “He hears [. . .] the low rumble of a whale and it comes to him and looks at him with its wise old eye and he knows everything is in that gaze. He knows how small a human is, not in size but in other ways” (Hogan 2008, 283). Following this humbling encounter, Thomas receives a revelation as regards the interdependence between humans and whales, inspired by the whale’s rumbling and friendly ways toward him. The octopus-Rain Priest is thought by some “to have an eye in his heart because he made them feel” (Hogan 2008, 154). After he has brought back the rain, a token of the renewed alliance between humans and sea creatures, the octopus’ insistence on being seen by a human before going back underwater hints at the function of gazes, which play a major role in Hogan’s writing. Taking up the various meanings of the word “regard,” both to look at, and to have respect for, Hogan shows that recognition and consideration between species may well stem from our capacity to really look at each other. Shifting away from a purely anthropocentric gaze onto the world, Hogan’s writing brings us to ponder the perspective of other species, whether octopus, bear, bat, panther, or whale. Like Jacques Derrida who finds his philosophical certainties destabilized on being confronted with his cat’s gaze onto his naked self, Hogan foregrounds the eyes that animals might see our human world through. The whale’s old and intelligent eye, like the octopus’s earlier in the same novel, resurfaces here and there, triggering moments when humans and animals grant each other mutual recognition, glimpsing into the multiplicity of coexisting subjectivities within a shared pluriverse. Hogan’s fiction thus suggests that by looking one another into the eyes, humans and animals might relearn to live with each other with compassion and respect, in a relationship of interplay and mutual care.13 Similar to the deep, reciprocal compassion that passes through their eyes between Thomas and his caretaker while in Vietnam, Thomas is imbued with compassion for both the people supposed to be their enemies and the earth and plants that are being destroyed by the war: “He became a snake in his movement, a lizard with his eyes, seeing, seeing. He thought like a lynx. [. . .] His body had eyes. His back had eyes. His fingers had eyes. But so did

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the trees, the leaves, the moss and stone” (Hogan 2008, 172). If in Thomas’ case, the synaesthetic world surrounding him may be linked to the ubiquitous presence of the enemies looming in the jungle, Angel experiences a similar sensation of being looked back at by the nature around her: “Sometimes I felt there were eyes around us, peering through trees and fog. Maybe it was the eyes of land and creatures regarding us, taking our measure” (Hogan 1995, 177). In fact, Thomas’ survival through the war might be tied to his compassion for the land, bringing about reciprocal protection and healing: “I am earth, he thinks now. That’s why I lived. I became the earth. This became his way of surviving. / As earth he noticed the plants. Even the roots were being destroyed. [. . .] Even with war around him, it broke his heart” (Hogan 2008, 122). Because Thomas feels sorrow for and identifies with the animals, the people, the plants and earth being destroyed in the Vietnam War, his fellow American soldiers deride him, calling him “as sorry excuse for a man” (Hogan 2008, 173). For here lies one of the quintessential questions at the heart of Hogan’s writing: what can it mean to be human? The answer might lie in the story Angel remembers toward the end of her narrative, encapsulating humans’ greedy hankering for power, and hubris: Tulik had once told me about the men, the human people, who wanted what all the other creatures had. They went to the large bird and said they wanted to fly. They were granted their wish. They went to the mole and said they wanted to tunnel, and this they were able to do. Last, they went to the water and said, We must have this unbound manner of living. The water said, You have asked for too much, and then all of it was taken away from them. With all their wishes, they had forgotten to ask to become human beings. (Hogan 1995, 347)

Adamson aptly argues that in People of the Whale “[the] whale’s eye calls upon readers to engage in a comparative ethnography that reveals the ways in which multiple species conduct their interrelational lives” (Hogan 2008, 40). Drawing from the emergent field in anthropology called “multispecies ethnography,” Adamson concludes: “The goal in multi-species ethnography should not just be to give voice, agency, or subjectivity to the nonhuman—to recognize them as others, visible in their differences—but to force us to radically rethink these categories of our analysis as they pertain to all beings” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 562–63). Studying the imagery in Hogan’s whale poem “Crossings,” Alaimo observes that the poet refrains from the temptation to “envelop the whale in her longing, but instead charts the separate, but intersecting, paths that the two species have taken” (Alaimo 1996, 60). Tapping into Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Alaimo’s conclusion describes what is at work in all of Hogan’s writing: “Hogan

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displaces a ladder of beings with a horizontal, nonhierarchical model of difference” (Alaimo 1996, 60). Whale watching—and more largely, nature-watching—in Hogan’s writing thus provides wonder and insight into the living world as a communitas. During the many passages and liminal phases through which humans and other life-forms interchange positions in her fiction, “[something] of the sacredness of that transient humility and modelessness goes over, and tempers the pride of the incumbent of a higher position or office” (Turner 1969, 97). Turner’s vision of communitas humbles humans together within a society. From a Native American perspective such as Hogan’s, the notion of communitas must be extended to encompass other-than-human lifeforms: “It is rather a matter of giving recognition to an essential and generic human [and nonhuman] bond, without which there could be no society,” or, I would say, no community of the living (Turner 1969, 97). Hogan explores liminality in a way that corroborates Turner’s thesis: Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide humans with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and human’s relationship to society, nature and culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite humans to action as well as to thought. Each of these productions has a multivocal character, having many meanings, and each is capable of moving people at many psycho-biological levels simultaneously. (Turner 1969, 128–29)

The polysemic value of the whale is captured by thoughts attributed to Thomas: “[Thomas] thinks how they used whale fat to see in the dark. The people say the whale always brings light. It enlightens. The whale is illumination. They have always meant this in the many meanings of the word” (Hogan 2008, 111). Gauging the lost beauty of the whale they have killed, Thomas pictures the “gray barnacles on it, sea lice, as if it supported an entire planet” (112). Echoing Jean-Michel Cousteau’s metaphor of whales as “breathing planets,” these “charismatic megafauna,” to take up Laurence Buell and Steinwand’s term, are approached as cosmophores: “When they killed [the whale], he thinks perhaps they killed a planet in its universe of water” (Hogan 2008, 267).14 Just as the whale forces humans to take in its “eye with its old intelligence,” together with the near-magical beauty of the world it carries, maybe all lifeforms, as Agnes mediates and all of Hogan’s writing intimates, somehow “[wear] the face of the world” (Hogan 1995, 177). Reversing habitual hierarchies between species, Hogan nudges us to look at other life-forms in a manner that can pave the way for humans to cease “[pretending] to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their

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grace and dignity” (Hogan 1995, 344). Hogan’s interplays between humans and other earth dwellers tell the story of a quintessential realization—the epiphany that “[something] wonderful lives inside” each and every one of us, that “[something] beautiful lives inside us” (Hogan 1995, 351). Not only does Hogan’s fiction insist that humans are also of the enchanting elemental, animal, vegetal, and mineral worlds, it moreover points to caretaking as “the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time,” suggesting that “stewardship [might] finally [be] our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery of what we are” (Hogan 1995, 115). Taking up a pun by Haraway which may sum up Hogan’s liminal ecopoet(h)ics of care, it may well be that our capacity to be moved by others—our “response-ability”— funnels our sense of “responsibility” toward those same co-dwellers of the earth (Haraway 2008, 70–71). CONCLUSION Creating liminal spaces between magic and realism and between fiction and history, Hogan’s postcolonial ecology of the mind builds an ecopoetic ecotone where science meets myth, where ancestral tradition is brought in contact with modern-day culture, and where humans meet animals, plants, and the elements. As she weaves her hybrid, heteroglossic discourse, her diegetic world is animated by stories of kinship that can help reenchant the world. As Wendy Faris has argued: “[Many] magical realist fictions delineate nearsacred or ritual enclosures, but these sacred spaces are not watertight; they leak their magical narrative waters over the rest of the texts and the worlds they describe, just as that exterior reality permeates them” (Faris 2004, 24). Hogan reopens our eyes and sharpens our senses to the wondrous aspects of the world we inhabit. “Ecology and harmony within a working system,” she claims, “were late sciences for the new arrivals, yet they are concepts that, in our time, are becoming alive again” (Hogan and Peterson 2002, 277). In his typically satirical tone, Gerald Vizenor makes a similar statement while implicitly quoting Shakespeare’s As You Like It. One of his fictional characters in Wordarrows, a white scientist, boasts about his findings: “we find tongues in trees, books in brooks, phrases from the mouths of fish, oral literatures on the wings of insects, sermons in stone” (Vizenor 1988, 93).15 At that, Vizenor’s protagonist retorts, “tribal people have known that since the beginning of the world” (Vizenor 1988, 93). Hogan’s literature reclaims the fact that “American Indian myths tell stories of people, human and otherwise, who [. . .] dwell in and move through an inherently meaningful arena. The explorations described in myth are inseparable from the landscape that acts as a kind of metanarrative itself” (Smith and Fiore 2010, 60).

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Hogan’s ecopoetics can thus be aligned with nature writing as perceived by Scott Slovic, that is, “a ‘literature of hope’ in its assumption that the elevation of consciousness may lead to wholesome political changes” (Slovic 1992, 18). It might be said that what Smith and Fiore claim concerning “the stories contemporary Native Americans often need to hear” also applies to nonindigenous people. Those are stories of resilience “that acknowledge dislocation and isolation while enacting healing for both the individual and a community that includes the natural environment” (Smith and Fiore 2010, 60). Hogan’s literature indeed rekindles compassion for the nature that enfolds us within the sacred hoop of life. As Silvia Schultermandl demonstrates, Hogan’s writing “connects with the heuristic of organicism contemporary ecofeminist critics envision” (Schultermandl 2005, 69). In line with the cosmogony and philosophy described by Paula Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop, Hogan’s writing unravels a simple truth—that to destroy the earth, and to hurt earth beings, ultimately, is to hurt and destroy ourselves. “The face of the land is our face,” her fiction shows, “and that of all its creatures. To see whole is to see all the parts of a puzzle [. . .] What grows here and what grows within us is the same” (Hogan 1995, 97). Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear also summarized his understanding of the interconnectedness between humans and the elements: “We are of the soil and the soil is of us” (Standing Bear 1933, 45). If we are to hear and translate the world’s wild music, then let us humans take part in the planetary instrument vibrating and pulsing with the rhythms and harmonies of the world. Writing new stories onto the palimpsest of the land, Hogan reveals rhizomatic pathways leading to older stories mapped onto the world long ago. She thus sheds light on and reclaims what Kent Ryden calls “the invisible landscape,” or “the unseen layer of usage, memory, and significance” of places (Ryden 1993, 44).16 “And all of it [is] storied land,” Angel marks (Hogan 1995, 177). If humans are to keep treading this land or navigating the oceans much longer into the Anthropocene, we need more stories that help us come to a better understanding of humans’ place in the world, to a sense of belonging: “There is something the men want deeper than what they know, beyond human law and justice. It is to go back to being who they used to be, to love, to the touch of a foot on earth as a sacred touch, to the whale mother, to home” (Hogan 2008, 294). While Latour laments that for Westerners, “‘nature’ has made the world uninhabitable” (Latour 2015, 51, my translation), the tireless optimist that I am will keep striving for an ecopoetics of resilience to inspire and regenerate healthy naturecultures. The hope is that, as ecology, biology, and physics meet multispecies ethnography and knowledge contained in older traditions, and as literature, myth, and art reopen the human mind and heart to a world of intuitive interconnections with the world around, we humans might reclaim sustainable ways of dwelling within this

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beautiful earth. Thus might we “[walk] in beauty [. . .], with a peaceful heart [. . .], directly involved with the beauty and living awareness of the land” (Allen and Anderson 2001, xi–xii)—a manner of being in the world many indigenous peoples tell us they have always sought, and which it is high time we started relearning from. NOTES 1. I presented an embryo of this essay at a Montpellier international conference on “Ecotones” in May 2015. A much shorter version was published in French: Ecopoétique du regard et de la liminalité : entrelacs des formes du vivant dans la fiction de Linda Hogan. La Planète en partage/Sharing the Planet, 129–48, edited by Françoise Besson et al. Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2016. 2. I am indebted to Dr. Durand-Rous, whose Ph.D. on the reinvention of totemism in contemporary indigenous literature I supervised jointly with Professors Amiot and Rigal-Cellard. Her pioneering work has cleared out the foundations of totemism as an anthropological field of studies that provides a precious reading lens for ecopoetics. See Durand-Rous’s paper (2014), and her Ph.D. (2017). 3. Mark Warhus gives a detailed account of the conflict (Warhus 1997, 226–28). Laura Castor also dwells on the historical controversy (Castor 2006). 4. See Schweninger (2008, 202–18). Linda Hogan Brenda Peterson recount these events and question related ethical issues in their 2002 nonfiction book about gray wales. 5. Linda Hogan elsewhere explores these mirroring connections between whales and humans as the poet in “Crossings” describes a whale fetus with human features “Not yet whale/it still wore the shadow/of a human face, and fingers/that had grown before the taking back/and turning into fin” (28). 6. Hogan poetically develops the image in her poem “Crossings”: “Sometimes the longing in me/ comes from when I remember/the terrain of crossed beginnings/when whales lived on land/and we stepped out of water/ to enter our lives in land” (28). 7. In her article “Whale as Cosmos” focusing partly on The People of the Whale, Joni Adamson further discusses issues related to the “ecological Indian” stereotype in environmentalist discourse and in Hogan’s novel. Lee Schweninger also devotes much of his book Listening to the Land to confronting stereotypes of the “ecological Indian” with the ethics of the land one may find in various Native American writings from the 1930s to the present, including Linda Hogan’s. 8. In the past two decades, there has been much controversy over the definition of the term magical realism. Many scholars have come up with new categories and subcategories of this mode: “ontological” or “epistemological” magical realism (Robert González Echevarría), “folkloric,” or “scholarly” magical realism (Jeanne Delbaere), “metaphysical,” “anthropological,” or “ontological” magical realism (William Spindler), “psychic realism,” “mythic realism” or “grotesque realism” (Delbaere again, in a later attempt to categorize various kinds of magical realism), and

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now, “spiritual realism” (Patrick Murphy). If some of the nuances and analyses here involved may cast an interesting light on various aspects of magical realism, many of these categories and attempted definitions in fact overlap or contradict one another, without really adding anything substantial to Wendy Faris’s deep understanding of the history and evolution of the term or the narrative, artistic, and discursive stakes of magical realism. In a book under way, I am taking up much of my research on the ecopoetic and ecofeminist strands of magical realism and arguing for the term “liminal realism.” 9. There are many comparisons drawing attention to this parallel: Thomas we are told, has “[closed] the doors of the world” (24). He wishes for isolation: “wishes that, like the octopus that came to land when he was born, he could place himself inside something small and pull the last stone over the opening” (24). Once he has isolated himself inside Witka’s hut, he is said to be “like an octopus in a dark corner” seeking “the darkness like the octopus coming from water into the cave when he was born” (25). 10. For more on the ancestral art of paddling in contemporary fiction, see Joni Adamson’s article, “Whale as Cosmos.” 11. In his paper on Hogan’s poetry, Gamal Muhammad A. Elgezeery explores breaking boundaries as a central, healing trope in The Book of Medicines. 12. Since first writing this paper, I have discovered that Stacy Alaimo provides a very similar analysis of the role of skin as a liminal zone in Hogan’s poetry. According to Alaimo, skin in Hogan’s poems is described “as a sort of brave corporeal ambassador, crossing borders” (60). Reaching conclusions along the same lines as the ones I have developed here, Alaimo demonstrates that in Hogan’s poems, “the skin as a liminal boundary dissolves, dissolving a distinctly human identity” (61). Hogan, she argues “transforms the skin from a boundary that contains the human form into a liminal zone that connects across and dissolves boundaries” (61). 13. In Hogan’s poem “Mountain Lion,” the encounter with the wild animal’s gaze leads the poet to acknowledge and respect the different perspectives and worlds she and the lion inhabit: “two worlds cannot live inside one single vision” (The Book of Medicines, 27). 14. In their joint introduction to Sightings, Brenda Peterson and Linda Hogan refer to Jean-Michel Cousteau’s metaphor for whales as “breathing planets” (xiv). See also Steinwand’s article that starts with Buell’s notion of whales as charismatic megafauna (183). 15. In As You Like It, Act 2, scene 2, Duke Senior declares: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/ Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 16. In his chapter dealing with “The Invisible Landscape,” Ridden argues: “It is through traditional narratives, both personal and communal, that the human meanings with which the landscape is imbued are given form, perpetuated and shared” (44).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adamson, Joni. 2001. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

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———. 2012. “Whale as Cosmos: Multi-Species Ethnography and Contemporary Indigenous Cosmopolitics.” Evista Canaria De Estudios Ingleses. 64 (April): 29–45. Alaimo, Stacy. 1996. “Displacing Darwin and Descartes: The Bodily Transgression of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler and Linda Hogan.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 3 (1) (Fall): 47–66. Allen, Chadwick. 2002. Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American and Maori Literary and Activists Texts. Durham: Duke University Press. Allen, Paula Gunn. 1992 (1986). The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press. Allen, Paula Gunn, and Carolyn Dunn Anderson. 2001. Hozho: Walking in Beauty: Native American Stories of Inspiration, Humor, and Life. Chicago: Contemporary Books. Ashcroft, Bill, et al. 2013 (1998). Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Bate, Jonathan. 2000. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castor, Laura Virginia. 2006. “Claiming Place in Wor (l) ds: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” MELUS. 31.2: 157–80. Chanady, Amaryll. 1985. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved vs. Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 2001. “A Mixed-Blood, Tribeless Voice in American Indian Literatures: Michael Dorris.” In Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth, 72–90. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne. 1992. “Magic Realism: The Energy of the Margins.” In Postmodern Fiction in Canada, edited by Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 1995. “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 249–63. Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, et Félix Guattari. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. L’Animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée. Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Durand-Rous, Caroline. 2014. « Le Totem réinventé ou la transmission du mythe par la littérature amérindienne. » L’Atelier. Online Journal. 6.2. ———. 2017. Le totem réinventé: exploration de l’identité et redéfinition de soi dans la fiction amérindienne contemporaine. Ph.D., Dissertation, University of Perpignan Via Domitia. Durix, Jean-Pierre. 1998. Mimesis, Genres, and Postcolonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magical Realism. New York: St Martin’s. Echevarría, Roberto Gonzáles. 1977. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Elgezeery, Gamal Muhammad A. 2013. “‘Boundaries Are All Lies’: The Fluidity of Boundaries in Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines.”

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Faris, Wendy, B. 1995. “Scheherazade’s Children.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 163–90. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Forbes, Jack D. 2002. “Where Do Our Bodies End?” Accessed March 14, 2016. http:​ /​/www​​.amms​​a​.com​​/publ​​icati​​ons​/w​​indsp​​eaker​​/wher​​e​-do-​​our​​-b​​odies​​-end. ———. 2008 (1978). Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2001 (1913). Totem et tabou. Paris: Éditions Payot et Rivages. Gavillon, François. 2013. “Magical Realism, Spiritual Realism, and Ecological Awareness in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale.” ELOHI. 3 (January–June): 41–56. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hogan, Linda. 1993. The Book of Medicines. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. ———. 1995a. Dwellings. New York: W. W. Norton &Company. ———. 1995b. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction. ———. 2008. The People of the Whale. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hogan, Linda, and Brenda Peterson. 2002. Sightings: The Gray Whale’s Mysterious Journey. Washington, DC: National Geographic. Johnston, Basil. 2001 (1995). The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology. 25 (4): 545–76. LaDuke, Winona. 1999. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Larrère, Catherine, et Raphaël Larrère. 2015. Penser et agir avec la nature: Une enquête philosophique. Paris: la Découverte. Latour, Bruno. 2015. Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le Nouveau Régime Climatique. Paris: La Découverte, Empêcheurs de penser en rond. Momaday, N. Scott. 1997. The Man Made of Words: essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St Martin’s Press. Murphy, Patrick D. 2009. “Women Writers: Spiritual Realism, Ecological Responsibility, and Inhabitation.” Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies 1 (June): 5–11. Roh, Franz. 1995. “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 15–31. Durham: Duke University Press. Ryden, Kent C. 1993. Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing and the Sense of Place. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Schultermandl, Silvia. 2005. “Fighting for the Mother Land: An Ecofeminist Reading of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17 (3): 67–84.

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Schweninger, Lee. 2008. “Killing the Whale: Sightings and the Makah Hunt.” Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape, 202–18. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. ———. 2013. “‘The Truth Hangs Over Your Head’: Toward an Indigenous Land Ethic.” ELOHI 3 (January–June): 79–93. Slovic, Scott. 1992. Seeking Awareness. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Smith, Theresa S., and Jill M. Fiore. 2010. “Landscape as Narrative, Narrative as Landscape.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 22 (4): 58–80. Spindler, William. 1993. “Magical Realism: A Typology.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29 (1): 75–85. Stacks, Geoffrey. 2010. “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Mosaic 43 (1) (March): 161+. Standing Bear, Luther. 1978 (1933). Land of the Spotted Eagle. Lincoln: University Nebraska Press. Steinwand, Jonathan. 2011. “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera; Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Gosh.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literaures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth Deloughrey and George B. Handley. New York: Oxford University Press. Tredinnick, Mark. 2005. The Land’s Wild Music. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. Turner, Victor. 1979. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, 4th ed., edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, 234–43. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1989 (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1988. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1998. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Warhus, Mark. 1997. Another America: Native American Maps and the History of Our Land. New York: St. Martin’s. Watts, Alan. 1989 (1966). The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. New York: Vintage Books.

Chapter 14

The Magic Realist Compost in the Anthropocene Improbable Assemblages in Canadian and Australian Fiction Jessica Maufort

Comparing Canadian and Australian novels, this essay investigates the possible ramifications between the mode of magic realism and the field of material ecocriticism. It argues that this mode mobilizes a “compost poetics/ aesthetics” manifest in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle (2014), and Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1997). Not only appearing as a physical presence in the narratives, the archetype of the compost also encapsulates the authors’ thematic concerns and formal experiments. The compost image brings forth several issues: the nonhuman world as an active force, blurred ontological boundaries, and the emergence of liminal places. The writers’ aesthetic devices, consisting of structural, syntactic and lexical juxtapositions, reflect the accumulation dynamics of an ecological compost. I argue that comparing magic realism to a compost poetics/aesthetics helps us, on the one hand, understand how this mode assembles antagonistic elements without subsuming them into a homogenous whole, and how, by fostering such ambivalence, magic realism devises places of liminality. On the other hand, this comparison unveils the link of magic realism with material ecocriticism, which theorizes the physical and narrative agency of natural phenomena. In brief, my project is to explore the possible concept of an ecological and ecopoetic magic realism. This essay highlights how this type of magic realism creates improbable assemblages, or unorthodox composts, which contribute to the reenchantment of the world. The importance of bringing magic realism and ecocriticism together in an examination of these novels is justified by their cultural and geographical contexts. Indeed, the three writers belong to postcolonial cultures in which the approach to the 239

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environment has always been paired with storytelling. These stories are often endowed with a magic or “supernatural” quality. They may be indebted to a non-Western, indigenous worldview which explodes the rational/irrational, inanimate/living, human/nonhuman dualisms (Carpentaria and The Back of the Turtle). Alternatively, the nature of these formerly “New World” regions may have triggered the imagination of awe-stricken Anglo-Celtic settlers (Icefields). Furthermore, the history of Canada and Australia has been marked by continuous ecological destruction. In these “remote,” supposedly “empty” or less populated areas, natural resources are still being exploited by business corporations. As the novels illustrate, the ecologically disastrous repercussions of such practices affect people’s relation to their dwelling place. They also influence the way artists write about these places on the verge of disenchantment.1 THE COMPOST: AN ECOLOGICAL AND POETIC PRINCIPLE As the OED tells us, the term “compost” is mostly understood in its specific ecological use, that is, as “a mixture of various ingredients for fertilizing or enriching land.” Yet, deriving from the past participle of the Latin verb “componere”—“to put together”—“compost” broadly signifies “a composition, combination, compound” (OED online). The fertilizing and “recreational capacity” (Rasula 2002, 3) of the natural compost through its combinatory and accumulative principle also inspires and aptly epitomizes creative processes. As Jed Rasula explains, Walden results from Thoreau’s “composting sensibility,” as the book emerged out of his “notebook of entries” (2002, 1). One could thus argue that the compost as an aesthetic principle resonates, for instance, with metafictional concepts, such as intertextuality and intermediality. Like these devices, the compost evokes the tensions between fragmentation and interconnection, chaos and order, or, by extension, between fractured and holistic systems of thought and being. In this essay, I borrow Adam Beardsworth’s phrases “compost aesthetics” and “compost poetics,” which he uses to describe John Steffler’s poetry as foregrounding a “poetics of ecological fragmentation [. . .] [that] define nature as a volatile space, one of decay and renewal” (2014, 239). Therefore, in the way I am using it, “compost” does not imply a total fusion or homogenization of various ingredients. The heterogeneous nature of the compost precisely accounts for the numerous interpretations and meanings it offers us when reflecting upon artistic, literary, and cultural processes. Rather than implying a sense of fragmentation only, my use of “a compost poetics/aesthetics” to characterize magic realist techniques highlights how this mode

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creates improbable assemblages out of elements from the environment itself. Regarding the compost as assemblage bridges the concrete and aesthetic aspects of this combinatory process, as the term “assemblage” also evokes avant-garde techniques (e.g., the art of collage, the found object, the “readymade”). Most importantly, the image of the compost clearly underlines the poiesis of nature, that is, the propensity of natural and nonhuman entities for “making,” or for being as creative as human beings can be. It is worthwhile here to quote Kate Rigby’s synthetic statement about this topic, which coincidentally recalls the self-(re)generating quality of the compost: “The natural systems that have enabled the emergence of these diverse creative practices [e.g. as in birds’ courtship displays] might also be seen as poietic or, rather, autopoietic, continuously generating new forms and patterns, and dissolving old ones, in a dynamic process of open-ended becoming” (2016, 79). On the other hand, comparing the techniques and effects of magic realism to a material and aesthetic compost repositions this mode as potentially contributing to ecopoetics and material ecocriticism. IMPROBABLE ASSEMBLAGES: MAGIC REALISM AS COMPOST The possible link between magic realism and ecocritical/ecopoetic concerns I envision (and thus the notion of an ecopoetic compost) is inspired by the phenomenological underpinnings latent in Franz Roh’s conception of the mode, and by Jeanne Delbaere-Garant’s notion of “mythic realism.” In his attempt to define “Post-Expressionism,” Roh insisted that the new art movement relied on and presented a “magic,” rather “mystic,” kind of realism. For lack of a better word, Roh opted for the former so as “to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” (Roh 1995, 15). Roh’s concept of “magic realism” is firmly anchored in tangible reality: the “recuperation of the objective world,” that is, the renewed attention to the “objects” pertaining to the “exterior world,” lay at the base of post-Expressionist painting (1995, 19–20). “This calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things have their own faces” problematized what was previously taken for granted (tangible objects) and therefore not seen as art material (1995, 20). The latter issue actually hints at the wider debate about the nature/art dynamics in formal representation, now tackled by ecocriticism and ecopoetics as well. Recalling this anchorage into the phenomenal world, Delbaere-Garant’s concept of “mythic realism,” a variant on magic realism, alludes to the active role of nature in creating magic images: the latter are no longer “project[ions] from the characters’ psyches,” but “are borrowed from the physical environment itself” (Delbaere-Garant

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1995, 253).2 Delbaere-Garant thus opposes this variant to what she terms “psychic realism.” In “mythic realism,” “the interpenetration of the magic and the real is no longer metaphorical but literal; the landscape is no longer passive but active—invading, trapping, dragging away, etc.” (1995, 252). This type of magic realism functions like a natural compost, as both foreground the enduring agency of the organic matter that makes up these assemblages. Such agency is manifest in the flexible, changeable and fertile nature of these combinations, thereby negating their allegedly inert state (at least in the layman’s eyes). In ecological magic realism, such as displayed in the novels under scrutiny, what appears as “magic” derives from the reanimation of the environment: to the rationalist’s eye, the nonhuman life-forms now re-invested with agency come across as “magic.” In these moments, the nonhuman world is as potent a force as the human. However, these “magic” elements are readily acceptable to a person who does not “hyperseparate” humankind from nature, to use Val Plumwood’s terminology (1993, 115). Inspired by the notion of mythic realism, an ecological magic realism acknowledges and transcribes the agency and sentience of nonhuman entities through a compost poetics. Secondly, like compost, magic realism also creates and results from dynamic assemblages between disparate elements. As regards its “mechanisms,” Delbaere-Garant explains in another essay that this mode “opens a new interstitial third space of ongoing negotiation” (2012, 17) in which each “antagonistic” component “acknowledges the reality of the Other” and “change[s] into something else” (2012, 22). I agree with Delbaere-Garant that magic realism does not operate as a normalizing “resolution” of two oppositional forms, entities or cultures, as some would argue.3 Extrapolating from the concept of mythic realism, I argue that an ecological magic realism devises liminal or “in-between” realities not only in cultural terms, but also in a biological/ontological sense: as Benito, Manzanas, and Simal suggest, this mode enacts “a fluidity of realms” because it “intertwines realism with incredible, apparently nonreal elements” (2009, 198–99). Most importantly, these contiguous materials are not subsumed into a homogenous whole. In the texts investigated here, the magic realist assemblages are found in fleeting moments during which their various ingredients oscillate between cohesion and collapse. The temporary nature of these magic realist moments shows how the compost poetics mobilized by this mode encodes the tense negotiation between creation and destruction. Despite this precarious process of assembling, a new level of reality emerges. Indeed, magic realism retains the recreational capacity, or fertilizing function, of the ecological compost. One can sense this compost-like fertility in Delbaere-Garant’s definition of the mode: thrown into a state of co-presence, each assembled component “acknowledges the reality of the

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Other before both change into something else” (2012, 22, italics in original). Each element of the compost participates in the creation of a new reality, so that magic realism operates as “an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation” (Zamora and Faris 1995, 6). Moreover, this recreational capacity contributes to the magic aspect of the composts found in the texts examined in this essay. Indeed, the magic realist moments in these three novels simultaneously generate and result in unorthodox composts, or in other words improbable assemblages. Firstly, the physical composts of these narratives combine organic and inorganic—usually humanmade—elements. Secondly, these unlikely combinations still prove fertile composts, which accounts for the magic, uncanny, or wondrous nature of these occurrences—and by extension of the whole atmosphere of the books. In summation, magic realism functions in these three instances as both natural and aesthetic composts of sorts. Starting with the material presence of the compost in the narratives, this essay shows how each writer’s aesthetics inspired by the compost conveys (a) the agency of nature and inorganic matter, (b) the incredible fertility of these mixtures leading to magic effects, and (c) how these combined techniques serve to question the primacy of the human narrative voice and to reposition nonhuman entities as equally powerful narrators, yet without making them completely anthropomorphized characters. MATERIAL ECOCRITICISM: COMPOSTING HUMAN AND NONHUMAN AGENCIES Likening the magic realist mode to a compost poetics unveils its link with material ecocriticism, which theorizes the physical and narrative agency of earthly matter (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 1–2). The phrase “storied matter” crystallizes this concept of narrative, creative, and expressive agency of nature: “the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (2014, 1). In other words, all matter, that is, all living entities and natural phenomena, are “endowed with stories” (Oppermann 2014, 21). Thus described as “storied matter,” the world we live in constitutes a dialogical web of agencies in which nonhuman and human actors equally participate so as to find themselves in a constant intersubjective state of becoming (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 2–10). Thus, within the context of an artistic, literary text, nonhuman life-forms may also actively intervene in its narratological conception. In this sense, they possess creative, ecopoetic skills: the text coproduced by the human artist may also be called “ecopoetic” in that it allows this natural poiesis to disclose itself as such.

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I contend that this acknowledgment of nonhuman agency echoes DelbaereGarant’s concept of mythic realism. Both “mythic realism” and “storied matter” highlight the agency of nature in terms of performativity: although some would object that magic realism and material ecocriticism merely anthropomorphize nonhuman entities, the notion of matter’s “narrative agency” does not derive from an aesthetic projection of human traits onto it. Narrative agency, Serpil Oppermann argues, is a “nonlinguistic performance of matter manifesting itself often in expressive collectives” (2014, 30). The “expressive” aspect of nature is to be detected through its actions (2014, 30): as biologist Lawrence E. Hunter puts it, “What makes something alive is not what it is, but what it does” (Hunter 2009, 17, qtd. in Oppermann 2014, 34; italics in original). My notion of magic realist compost also takes as its focal point this performativity of “vibrant matter,” in Jane Bennett’s terms (Bennett 2010). It sheds light on how, by transcribing this potent and storied matter, magic realism in these three novels can be seen as an ecopoetic mode of writing. The magic realist compost also relies on these eco-spiritual contexts in which such vibrancy can emerge in the first place: the indigenous creation stories that regard the nonhuman environment as animate crucially intervene in Carpentaria and The Back of the Turtle. This spiritual dimension is confounded with or derives from the animated, agential materiality of the Earth-compost. Oppermann further contends that this expressive poiesis precisely denotes a “re-enchantment of nature” (Oppermann 2014, 23, 29), a project that opposes mechanistic and dualistic visions of the world. In a “reenchanted world,” “every entity, living or non-living, macro or micro enacts causal structures” (2014, 25–26) and is entangled with other entities through “a relational process” (2014, 27, italics in original). Oppermann concludes that “narrative agency is the world’s reenchanting property” and can appear “as a meshwork, a process, an enactment, or a performative practice” (2014, 29). In a reenchanted world, human and nonhuman actors “produce narrative emergences that amplify reality” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 8). This ties in with my use of magic realism to denote an “extension of realism” (as Zamora and Faris define it, 1995, 6) which reflects nonhuman agential force. I would argue that this “amplified,” “extended,” or “reenchanted reality” further interrogates human beings’ cognitive ability to perceive and represent the Earth. Examined from this ecomimetic perspective, ecological magic realism could also be explored in relation to the genre of nature writing in fiction. If it remains somewhat implicit in my analyses of Carpentaria and The Back of the Turtle, this issue of the ecomimetic role of magic realism emerges more clearly in the self-reflexive narrative of Icefields. In the three novels under scrutiny, the magic realist composts also combine human and nonhuman agencies, at both physical and aesthetic

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levels. Their human protagonists find themselves bodily enmeshed within nature, while the material performativity of the nonhuman entities could be seen as “driving” the narrative. Thus, the reader may never be sure which human or nonhuman character influences the narrative voice the most. This blurring of identities constitutes the third magic aspect of the improbable assemblages found in the three books. Drawing on the notion of “reenchantment of the world,” an ecological magic realism based on compost poetics/ aesthetics also prompts the question: is the Earth enchanting us or is it enchanted by us? ALEXIS WRIGHT’S CARPENTARIA: WHEN THE SERPENT DREAMT OF A FLOATING JUNK ISLAND The starting point of my merger of magic realism, material ecocriticism, and ecopoetics as encapsulated in “compost poetics/aesthetics” is the physical presence of compost-like assemblages in the three novels. When an apocalyptic flood wipes out an Australian coastal town at the end of Wright’s Carpentaria, the indigenous Australian protagonist Will is carried away to the high seas by the retreating currents (Wright 2006, 491–93). He ends up stranded on a large floating island made of organic and inorganic strata, that is, house wreckage, dead animals, engines and other manufactured waste. The island becomes a huge compost, as vegetation and insects start to proliferate and restore a self-sufficient life circle (495). Despite its fragility and new kind of hybridity, this “drifting structure” becomes a “new land” (495): functioning as a fertilizing compost, this uncanny assemblage creates a new liminal reality. This composting reality emerges at the interstice between land and sea, as it combines their foundational characteristics, that is, their (apparently) static (soil-based) and fluctuating (watery) nature, respectively. Furthermore, the strange island also proves liminal in terms of its concrete internal organization. Indeed, the following passage illustrates not only the powerful and recreational agency of matter, but also how this agency appears as magic, or uncanny, given the normally incompatible nature of the components that make up this compost: the sum total of its parts rubbed, grated and clanked together, as it became more tightly enmeshed into a solid mass that squashed every inch of oil and stench out of the dead marine life it had trapped in its guts. Will listened to the embryonic structure’s strange whines echoing off into the darkness [. . .] the sounds of labour. He felt like an intruder to be clinging to a foetus inside the birth canal, listening to it, witnessing the journey of creation in the throes of a watery birth. (493–94)

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In this chapter, and throughout the novel, the animate status of the natural and built environment is aesthetically conveyed through the conflation of the descriptive lexical fields attributed to human and nonhuman realms. This kind of personification does not go as far as anthropomorphizing nonhuman entities, but it at least reflects their performative agency, which may appear as magic or uncanny to the unaccustomed human eyes. In the passage quoted above, Will witnesses the unexpected recreation of an ecosystem in an inhospitable place. Thus, Will’s sense of reality is expanded so as to view earthly phenomena, however unlikely, as animate, changeable and fertile. This compost poetics/aesthetics extends the realism of Wright’s novel into magic realism. Crucially, human and nonhuman protagonists are inextricably entangled and participate in the creation of this magic, liminal reality. Firstly, they are enmeshed and equally transformed through embodied encounter: just as the human-made objects (i.e., plastic bags, driftwood, wrecked boats) have contributed to construct this peculiar “new land,” Will’s life depends on and is simultaneously part of the compost-like island (494). His enmeshment is such that, after an indefinite time during which he strove to adapt and survive, Will questions his identity as a human being: “what would the discoverers call the sole inhabitant on his sinking oasis: a native?” (502). Contributing to the magic and liminal reality of the island, the text provides either vague or unbelievable temporal markers: indeed, the profuse growth of “magnificent” trees suggests that Will’s stay spans several years, if not decades (495). As a result of his entanglement, Will’s voice is no longer autonomous, or reliable as the sole referential point: the reader may question his sanity—and by extension the recounted events—when Will gets claustrophobic, and unable to distinguish between nightmarish dreams and wakeful hours (497– 502). One could argue that, confronted with the powerful poiesis of nature, Will’s voice as an independent subject is taken over by that of the compost, or in other words the compost’s “storied matter” is so forcefully foregrounded that it becomes a narrative voice. Indeed, the cyclone which devastated the town leading to the junk island is recast in the spiritual context of indigenous cosmology: Will knows that the storm is triggered by the spirit of the ancestral Serpent living in the gulf of Carpentaria and resenting the locals’ ecological exploitation of the region (470 and 479). Before he gets stranded on the island, Will sees the roaring floodwaters destroy the town and assemble “every bit of it [. . .] into a rolling mountainous wall” (491), that is, a collagelike structure “of their own making” (492). As indigenous Australian cosmology acknowledges the environment as an animate field inhabited by spirits, there is no distinction between the elemental forces and the creation spirits that crush the town and assemble its remains. Wright vividly renders this

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eco-spiritual reality in which natural phenomena are already animate presences in themselves (since they constitute or are inhabited by spirits), but are also endowed with stories. In this instance, the cyclone, flood, and construction of the junk island recount the “long-held dream of the water world” (492) and its anger at human exploitation of the Earth. The island could thus be decoded as “storied matter,” whose performativity seems to dominate the narrative process and to reenchant reality. However, as indigenous Australians are familiar with these creation stories and recount them in artistic production (e.g., Wright’s book), human beings who perceive this “storied” world as such also contribute to this reenchanting, compost-like, process.

THOMAS KING’S MOSAIC LIGHTHOUSE: SINGING LIFE OUT OF BONES AND WIRE In King’s The Back of the Turtle, one of the protagonists, a young man called Sonny, builds a lighthouse by assembling salvage—essentially turtle bones, clamshells, and stones—washed up on a Canadian beach. The beacon is intended to call back the sea turtles that used to nest in the area before a new herbicide killed the animals and (Native) inhabitants (King 2014, 268). Here is an excerpt of the construction process: Sonny sits in the sand by his pile of bones and shells and stones, and he sings as he strings each piece on the copper wire. Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, clamshell. Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, stone. Sonny hammers the lengths of rebar into the sand and wraps the wire around the iron. Around and around. [. . .] He presses the bones and the shells and the stones together so that there is no space in between. The wire glows in the sunlight, the bones and the shells burn bright. The darker stones anchor the pattern with grace and solemnity. Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, clamshell. Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, stone. (428)

Because King’s narrative is more plot-driven than Wright’s and Wharton’s, the active force of Sonny’s mosaic-like tower is suggested through the textual juxtaposition of events: as soon as the tower is finished, Sonny discovers a turtle emerging out of a sand dune and making its way to the sea (429). The same turtle returns later on to lay its eggs (487). As the narrative does not provide any other explanation for this sudden return, the reader is free to believe that Sonny’s tower fulfilled its intended purpose. Thus, Sonny’s

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lighthouse qualifies as an improbable compost in both its composition and positive effect: its magic dimension derives from the unexpected fertility of decayed marine life combined with man-made wire. More importantly, the mysterious circumstances surrounding the return of the turtle add to the magic, recreational power of the lighthouse: indeed, this sea turtle had escaped a few weeks ago from the Toronto-based aquarium of Domidion, the very multinational corporation which developed the toxic herbicide (22–25). Throughout the novel, King plays with the reader’s rational reasoning by juxtaposing and accumulating supposedly unrelated events and meanings. These compost-inspired devices also inform the textual structure of the book: the long quote reprinted above, which reproduces King’s original indentation, briefly illustrates the fractured layout of the sentences. This passage disrupts the fluidity of standard novelistic prose, thereby unveiling how the narrative poiesis of the composting dynamics visibly shapes the text. In brief, the novel itself works as a huge compost offering us infinite interpretations. Along with many other elements in the novel, Sonny’s peculiar lighthouse signals the emergence of a liminal, ambivalent reality where allegedly irreconcilable events, when associated, point to the performativity of nature, manifest in the turtle’s return and the guiding tower built from dead organic matter and man-made objects (copper wire). In contrast to Wright’s floating island, Sonny’s human agency is involved to a greater degree in the assembling process of the lighthouse (292). Nevertheless, his enigmatic identity undermines claims about an overpowering human presence. Firstly, Sonny’s self seems completely embedded in his natural environment: as he spends his time collecting salvage without ulterior motive (e.g., egotistical benefit), there seems to be no clear ontological distinction between this human entity and the beach, and the beacon tower in particular. Further, the text never voices Sonny’s speech directly either in a first-person narrative or through dialogues. This could reflect Sonny’s apparent simple-mindedness. Whether the latter is congenital, an after-effect of herbicide intoxication, or a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from witnessing such an ecological catastrophe, this absence of human speech and individuality evokes the fluid interpenetration between Sonny’s self and the surrounding world. However, in the longer quote mentioned above, the verse-like, repetitive description of Sonny’s collaging exercise (“Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, clamshell./Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, stone.” 428) also constitutes a chant accompanying the construction of that peculiar lighthouse. Whether it is actually voiced out loud by Sonny or not, this incantation of sorts recalls Linda Hogan’s notion of “singing as a form of enchantment” (Hogan 2016, and in this volume). I thus construe Sonny as singing into life the salvaged objects of his mosaic in a way that fosters their reenchantment, that is, his chant celebrates the material presence of nonhuman life-forms and acknowledges their recreational power within the natural ecosystem. At the same time, this

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song may also emanate from the magic composting tower itself: the lexical repetition and halted rhythm of the lines “Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, clamshell./Turtle bone, clamshell, clamshell, stone” reenact the juxtaposing method of the building process. The second line even introduces an element of variation (“stone”) into the repetition, a device which echoes not only the structural principle of other art forms (e.g., music and poetry), but also the order/chaos, homogeneity/heterogeneity interplay at work in a compost. The concomitance of this collage-like song with the actual construction of a hybrid entity points to a case of literal or self-enchantment: the lighthouse materially and textually chants its own making. Its magic poiesis (creative power) impacts not only the physical world: the compost-like tower also starts to influence the sphere of language, and especially the text referring to its own construction, in an autopoietic fashion. While it is timidly suggested in King’s novel, the textual (auto)poiesis of the compost takes on greater proportions in Wharton’s Icefields. Finally, as Hogan explains, the practice of singing as a form of enchantment “began with the deer coming out the forest with flowers in its antlers” and was then integrated in ceremonies (Hogan 2016). King also seems to include such singing ceremony intrinsically linked to the presence of animals: the chant of Sonny’s compost-like tower encourages and simultaneously results in the eventual reemergence of turtles in the region. The lighthouse is thus also “enchanted,” or “sung” in Hogan’s terminology. The mysterious aspect of human and nonhuman entanglements deepens when King endows the narrative with a multilayered spiritual dimension inspired by both indigenous creation stories and Biblical imagery. Each ingredient of the compost-like tower is storied: the beach and the turtle recall the indigenous story in which a sea turtle carries the first woman to the land. As he keeps referring to his absent father’s precepts, which he is anxious to observe, Sonny can also be likened to a stranded Jesus Christ (King 2014, 291). Yet, the spiritual and magical energy of the beach, already a significant place because of its liminality, reaches its climax when King names its location none other than “Samaritan Bay.” Because it contains turtle bones and is endowed with Biblical connotations, the mosaic-like lighthouse not only combines indigenous and Western spiritual traditions. With the turtle’s reappearance, the tower also recounts a new creation story: the story of the collaboration between human and nonhuman actors to reenchant a post-apocalyptic world. THOMAS WHARTON’S ICEFIELDS: THE “FROZEN FLOW” OF MATTER AND IMAGINATION While in Wright’s and King’s novels the physical presence of the compost features in specific passages, the compost archetype pervades Wharton’s

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narrative both at the thematic and aesthetic levels. Acting as the central protagonist throughout the book, Wharton’s Canadian glacier in the Rocky Mountains resembles a compost because of its constant layering and melting of ice. The narrative spans twenty-five years in the life of Edward Byrne, an Irish-English doctor, during which he regularly returns to the icefield to study its changing topography as an amateur glaciologist. The man has been obsessed with it since his fall into a crevasse: during the several minutes he became one with the glacier, he glimpsed an angel-like figure in the ice. Before being rescued, Byrne lost some collected seeds into the crevasse. The image of the icefield-as-compost reappears at the end of the book when, twenty years after his accident, Byrne discovers an orchid growing at the bottom of the melting glacier. Echoing the recreational agency of a natural compost, the powerful and constant flux of Wharton’s glacier counters faulty associations of mountainous ice with inertia and death. On the contrary, the glacier very actively shapes its surrounding environment: over time crevasses split open and others close. There are ice quakes that shift the terrain, unpredictable geysers of meltwater that carry away ice aiguilles and other landmarks. And of course the evidence of flow, acts of delicate, random precision: shards of rock are plucked by the ice from their strata, carried miles downstream, and left lying with fragments from another geological age. (Wharton 1997, 119, italics in original)

The peculiarity of this dynamic ice flow is its slowness: the topographic changes described in this passage usually cannot be detected by human eyes in the course of one day. This is why the compost-like, active nature of the glacier seems paradoxical, a strange fact that Byrne tries to express in oxymoronic phrases, such as “Supple glass. Fluid stone” (119) or “frozen flow” (128). The magic aspect of the glacier, at least to the human eye, precisely stems from this odd combination of slow and powerful actions of ice motion. In other passages, this incredible agency borders on the Gothic, when the ice delivers “the bodies of missing explorers mountaineers [. . .] decades, perhaps even centuries, after they were lost” (128). Although such uncanny discoveries are explained by “the laws of nature,” that is, the cyclical dynamics of the glacier (137), they reinforce the idea of the glacier as an improbable compost—improbable because apparently inert: “Fragments embedded in the ice do not move, yet are ceaselessly in motion” (128). In addition to the physical composition of the glacier itself, two other ingredients add to the magic reanimation of the icefield-as-compost: on the one hand, the “extraordinary” growth of an orchid in the wasteland of the glacier’s terminus (205–6), and on the other hand, the winged figure glimpsed

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in the ice by Byrne. With this supernatural figure of sorts, Wharton seems to follow for a moment in the traditional magic realistic vein—à la Rushdie, which incorporates well-defined ghosts, angels, demons, or dragons into the secular plane of reality. These magical elements are supernatural in the sense that they are manifestations external to earthly nature, instead of being inherent in the wondrous poiesis of the nonhuman environment (as Roh envisions the term “magic”). These supernatural figures would clearly clash with our ordinary everyday life; their presence tends to indicate that we are in a different reality altogether, as in most instances of fantasy and science fiction. By contrast, in Icefields, Byrne reflects that the strange entity could have been a chance formation of frozen currents and air bubbles trapped in the ice (8 and 130). The subsequent disappearance of the angel-like form seems to confirm this interpretation. Therefore, I contend that Wharton’s magic realism is indeed ecological—or “mythic” in Delbaere-Garant’s terms—as its magic images originate from the active landscape itself. To convey the creative performativity of the icefield Wharton combines Wright’s and King’s aesthetic techniques. Firstly, ice motion is often described through lexical fields usually attributed to human actions (e.g., the glaciers “were actually crawling,” 128). This subtle personification thus avoids anthropomorphic descriptions (only one such description is used when Byrne learns about early settlers’ incidents, 63), while not diminishing the potent force of the glacier as a subject: its intrinsic and pervasive power is such that it becomes a protagonist of its own in the novel. This idea is reinforced by the multilayered structure of the book, as the composting processes of juxtaposition and accumulation of fragments also shape the man-made narrative. Short chapters, a disrupted time-line, polyphonic narration and the use of generic intermediality deeply fragment the text and confuse the reader. Incidentally, these devices testifying to Wharton’s compost ecopoetics are also typical of traditional postcolonial and magic realist fiction, which challenges the rigid codes of Western realism and rational worldview. Nevertheless, the macro-structure of Icefields provides some organization: the five parts of the novel are named after the five zones or stages of this compost-like assemblage (“Névé,” “Moraine,” Nunatak,” “Ablation Zone,” and “Terminus”). All these combined techniques crucially question the primacy of human agency: are the human characters and the author himself really in control of the storytelling? In brief, the glacier literally constitutes an in-between place, as evoked by its own fluctuating composition and its constant reshaping of the alpine environment. Thus, in this compost-like place of liminality, nature participates in its own reenchantment. The prose of Icefields could be decoded

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as an attempt to transcribe the autopoietic quality of natural systems. Such endeavor does not require anthropomorphizing nonhuman entities, as the latter are already vibrant and creative through their own internal structural processes. As explained above, the simultaneously fractured and ordered layout of the text uncovers the narrative agency of the glacier, which thus recounts its fluctuating state of becoming through Byrne’s and Wharton’s complex prose. Even so, human beings are not only enchanted by this potent and wondrous landscape, but they contribute to the magic realist compost as well. In Byrne’s case, his fall into a crevasse marks the beginning of a human/nonhuman compost: Byrne remains haunted by the icefield, while the latter is also symbolically transformed by the man’s objects left trapped in the ice. In addition to the mountaineers’ embodied involvement, Wharton’s novel highlights in a self-reflexive manner the uncanny entanglement between natural matter and human psyche. Reflecting on real-life glaciologists’ observations, Byrne wonders: is human imagination “an energy locked like latent heat in ancient inorganic nature,” or “a power that overflowed from some unseen source, pressing inexorably forward to enclose and reshape the world?” (127, my emphasis). The intricate structure of Wharton’s text suggests a fluidity between nature and human imagination, as it intersperses Byrne’s scientific observations with anecdotes about the glacier, real-life explorers’ reflections, and the other characters’ perspectives. The novel highlights how flawed the conceptual boundary between the ecological/poetic compost of the environment and the “energy of our own mind-compost” (Snyder 2004, 10) actually is. Taken from an ecocritical/ecopoetic point of view, the notion of “mythic realism” thus retains a bit of its “psychic” counterpart so as to acknowledge the constant inner/outer interplay at work in one’s experience and perception of nature. However, this interplay does not entail dualism either, just as the psychic realism I have in mind does not refer to a forceful, unilateral, and alienating projection of human psyche onto “the outside world.” Rather, since human beings are biologically enmeshed with the wider ecosystem of the Earth, human psyche and language (in the form of stories, indebted or not to ecospiritual heritage, as in Carpentaria and The Back of the Turtle) inevitably shapes and is shaped by its encounter with the other-than-human components of this giant compost. To conclude, Icefields constitutes an intertextual and self-reflexive compost. It offers a hybrid version of nature writing which assembles human perception and the narrative agency of nonhuman entities. This novel shows how an ecological magic realism relies on compost poetics/aesthetics, that is, on the improbable alliance between human and nonhuman entities to reenchant the world we live in, read (about), imagine, and, eventually, give shape to.

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THE MAGIC REALIST COMPOST IN THE ANTHROPOCENE The comparison between the magic realist composts in Carpentaria, The Back of the Turtle and Icefields suggests both continuity and fracture. The writers’ different ways of deploying compost aesthetics bespeaks the richness of the magic realist mode. I contend that this now well-known versatility of magic realism can and must include the ecological dimension. In these novels, the “magic,” wondrous, or uncanny aspect of these composts stems not only from their fluid human/nonhuman combination, but more importantly from the fact that these assemblages of organic and inanimate/man-made materials still prove viable and productive. The recreational performativity of these heterogeneous composts carries deeper implications in light of today’s era of the Anthropocene, that is, the current geological period deeply shaped by humankind’s industrial and ecological activities. Wright’s and King’s books crucially interrogate humankind’s “geological force” (Steffen et al. 2007, 618) by setting it against the apocalyptic background of ecological catastrophe, that is, a devastating cyclone and toxic herbicide. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Icefields stages the concrete beginning of the Anthropocene through the emerging tourist industry in the Rocky Mountains. The novel reminds us that we can wonder at the intrinsic poiesis of nature, however unexpected it may seem. We should not need natural disasters, as in Wright’s Carpentaria, to realize its animate status. Enchanting and enchanted nature has always been with us. Thus, in the Anthropocene, the notion of (re-)enchantment is also linked to the pressing issue of sustainability. My image of the magic realist compost puts this writing mode into dialogue with the aesthetic, material, and ethical principle of recycling. Indeed, the involvement of human actors in the magic realist composts is ambivalent: in the context of the Anthropocene, human beings are responsible for the creation of these unorthodox composts that contain man-made debris or decayed life-forms. Conversely, our enmeshment into the Earth-compost implies that we too may be recycled, if proved useless materials to its viability. In brief, through a compost aesthetics, magic realism transcribes the complex and uncanny reality of living in the shadow of an (impending) environmental apocalypse. Nevertheless, the fertility of the writers’ hybrid assemblages also provides some hope for the future, so that the magic realist compost and its enchanting effect can potentially help us not only write but also transcend apocalyptic narrative writing. These novels show how the “everyday world” can indeed be reenchanted so that we may care for it (Bennett 2010, xi). In this sense, such magic realist enchantment becomes a “poethics,” which conjoins the need for a poetics recognizing the vibrancy of human and nonhuman composts, with

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our ethical duty to concretely sustain them. At the end of these three novels, one question remains: what future compost shall we all together create? NOTES 1. I wish to thank Professors Franca Bellarsi and Isabel Maria Fernandez Alvez for their helpful remarks and suggestions during the Perpignan conference on ecopoetics. I am also grateful to Professor Emerita Jeanne Delbaere-Garant for her support and advice. 2. Delbaere-Garant borrows the phrase “mythic realism” from Michael Ondaatje, in his afterword to Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John. By contrast to Ondaatje, DelbaereGarant envisions mythic realism as a variant or subcategory of magic realism. She elaborates on Ondaatje’s original notion by explicitly connecting it to the performative interventions of the physical world in fictional narratives. In this sense, the term “mythic,” I argue, refers to the “‘grand’ subjects such as heroes, gods or the universe” found in myths (Teverson 2013, 16). Thus, mythic magic realist texts feature such grand power of nature which transcends humankind’s mundane and temporal life on Earth. 3. See for instance Ravenscroft in her essay “Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics” (2010, 210).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beardsworth, Adam. 2014. “‘This Page Stained With/Green’: Compost Aesthetics in John Steffler’s That Night We Were Ravenous.” Studies in Canadian Literature/ Etudes en littérature canadienne (SCL/ELC) 39 (1): 238–56. https​:/​/jo​​urnal​​s​.lib​​ .unb.​​ca​/in​​dex​.p​​hp​/SC​​L​/art​​icle/​​​view/​​22764​. Benito, Jesús, Ana M. Manzanas, and Begoña Simal. 2009. Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realisms in US Ethnic Literatures. New York: Rodopi. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne. 1995. “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 249–63. London: Duke University Press. ———. 2012. “Towards a ‘Third Space’: Magic Realism in English Canadian Literature.” In Eyes Deep with Unfathomable Histories: The Poetics and Politics of Magic Realism Today and in the Past, edited by Liliana Sikorska and Agnieszka Rzepa, 17–32. Bruxelles: Peter Lang. Hogan, Linda. 2016. Readings and Discussion with the Audience. Keynote session, International Conference on Ecopoetics, “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” University of Perpignan Via Domitia, France, June 22–25.

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Hunter, Lawrence E. 2009. The Processes of Life: An Introduction to Molecular Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. 2014. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. King, Thomas. 2014. The Back of the Turtle. Toronto: HarperCollins. Oppermann, Serpil. 2014. “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 21–36. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. Rasula, Jed. 2002. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Ravenscroft, Alison. 2010. “Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics.” Cultural Studies Review 16 (2): 194–224. doi: 10.5130/csr.v16i2.1700. Rigby, Kate. 2016. “Ecopoetics.” In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleeson, and David N. Pellow, 79–81. New York and London: New York University Press. Roh, Franz. 1995. “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 15–32. London: Duke University Press. Trans. Wendy B. Faris. Originally published in Franz Roh. 1925. Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerei. Leipzig: Klinkhardt and Biermann. Snyder, Gary. 2004. “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11 (1): 1–13. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36 (8): 614–21. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/25547826. Teverson, Andrew. 2013. Fairy Tale. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. The Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www​.oed​.com Entry for Compost: http:​ /​/www​​.oed.​​com​/v​​iew​/E​​ntry/​​37811​​#eid8​​​85433​​4. Accessed August 28, 2015. Wharton, Thomas. 1997. Icefields. London: Vintage. Wright, Alexis. 2006. Carpentaria. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds. 1995. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. London: Duke University Press.

Chapter 15

Learning to Live in the Anthropocene Orality as Recycling in Contemporary Latin American Indigenous Poetry Antonio Cuadrado-Fernandez

POETRY, COEVOLUTION AND REENCHANTMENT As stated in the 2010 report on State Biodiversity in Latin America and the Caribbean, these are declared to be the regions with “the greatest biological diversity on the planet and it hosts several of the world’s megadiverse countries. The region holds almost one half of the world’s tropical forests, 33 per cent of its total mammals, 35 per cent of its reptilian species, 41 per cent of its birds and 50 per cent of its amphibians” (UNEP 2010). In the same line, article 8 of the Convention on Biological Diversity of the United Nations urges us to “respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.” (UN 1992). For centuries, indigenous cosmologies in Latin America have contributed to maintain a respectful relationship with the environment, of which they saw themselves as extensions. Animism is defined by eminent anthropologist Tim Ingold as a form of indigenous engagement with the world in which “caring for the environment is like caring for people: it requires a deep, personal and affectionate involvement [. . .] of one’s entire, undivided being” (Ingold 2000, 69), thus playing a crucial role in the preservation of ecological balance. Ingold’s notion of affect in animistic interactions might be complemented by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of perspectivism to include the multiple points of view of reality apprehended by “different sorts of subjects and persons, human and non-human” (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 469). Thus, reciprocity, perspectivism, and respect inherent in animistic worldviews are more than mere romantic elaborations; they are crucial to Earth’s process of 257

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autopoietic renewal precisely because as Varela and Maturana propose, biological life has the capacity to self-organize and co-emerge by regenerating the network of processes (Maturana and Varela 1980, 78). In other words, autopoiesis is based on the way living systems engage with the environment and how animism can be a way of life, a mode of land occupancy where life is embraced and understood form multiple perspectives. The interrogation of Cartesian dualism by Maturana and Ingold concurs with Haraway’s notion of “natureculture,” through which nature and cultural and biological lives are considered inextricable from each other (Haraway 2003), just like in indigenous worldviews, where the whole cosmos is a complex, integrated web of life. This epistemological alliance or coalition between western and indigenous perspectives will be crucial to navigate the dark times of the Anthropocene with a sense of rootedness and awareness of what went wrong in the past, so that humanity’s path toward a more sustainable and respectful relationship with the planet becomes less turbulent. The era of the Anthropocene is the warning sign that this delicate, fragile engagement is now endangered after 500 years of intense exploitation, which was particularly brutal in Latin America. If as scientific evidence confirms, nature and all of Earth’s interdependent processes are being irredeemably altered by human or, to be more precise, capitalist forms of societal and economic organization, it is time to seriously consider that life on Earth is not conceivable anymore without accommodating the imperfect, yet more sensible, sensitive and respectful forms of understanding our existence on this planet: there is no reenchanting of the Earth without indigenous cultures. And the Latin American poetry presented in this chapter testifies to the need for cognitive resistance among as many forms of resistance as we can imagine. Despite their obvious cultural differences, the work of three Latin American indigenous poets, Humberto Ak’Abal (from Guatemala), Cecilia Vicuna (Chile), and Natalia Toledo (Mexico), share a rich imagery of sentient environments embodying environmental knowledge. Equally pivotal in their poetry is their common impulse toward the recycling of elements of their storytelling imagery in the written text as a form of cultural memory of their biocultural heritage. As poetic manifestations of those storytelling traditions, their poetry shows a sort of animistic quality, in which elements of the environment appear as extensions of the human body and human bodies also appear half naturalized. In other words, in these poems, nature is not an external object to be depicted or aestheticized. Rather, the poet presents an empathic bond with the nonhuman world (Brown 2013, para. 2) in which nature and humans appear as parts of an inextricable whole. But more than projecting a harmonious relationship with nature, the interspecies imagery (to paraphrase ecocritical scholar Joni Adamson)1 unfolded in this poetry reveals a world of intricate, hybrid, and sometimes contradictory and conflicting

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interrelations, a milieu of “cosmovisions” (paraphrasing Adamson again) in which trees are human and humans are trees, and both enact each other like autopoietic systems: this is a poetic world in which there is no outside or inside of nature, as Professor Wendy Harding succinctly claims in her talk “Aesthetic Choices for the Anthropocene Era.”2 Furthermore, the ecological knowledge emerging from the poems (through the recycling of oral values) continues to evolve despite the dangers posed by the predatory attitudes of multinational corporations. Embedded within ancestral cosmovisions, these writers do not necessarily need to “consult scientific studies that stretch the limits of sensory perception” (Harding 2016) because they have a reservoir of indigenous knowledge that pours out in their beautiful, sensory, and evocative poems, although these poems testify to the need to create a stronger dialogue between indigenous knowledge and Western science for a more responsible transit through the Anthropocene. Their poetry might be a bridge. The importance of bringing this corpus of American indigenous poetry to the fore of ecocritical studies might be justified by what Professor Steven White defines as the “amnesia towards non-US geographies” prevalent, according to White, in the North American ecocritical academia (White 2013, para. 5). According to White, this amnesia extends as well to the histories of colonized peoples and the environmental degradation they have suffered as a consequence (2013). However, it is fair to recognize the efforts made by a group of North American ecocritical scholars precisely to redress such imbalance. Adrian Taylor Kane’s book The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings is a brave attempt in that direction, according to reviewer Christopher Travis as, in his words, the book features calls by scholars such as Joni Adamson, Lawrence Buell, and Ursula Heise among others to “expand ecocriticism beyond North America” (Travis 2010). What I propose is a way of reading this poetry that takes us closer to indigenous perspectives and to the biocultural roots of orality so that this poetry can contribute to the preservation of indigenous cultures in Latin America. For this purpose, it is necessary to adopt a reading strategy that helps readers share the writers’ cognitive and sensory engagement with the world. Therefore, I encourage readers to adopt what cognitive poetician Reuven Tsur refers to as a delayed categorization type of reading instead of a rapid strategy. Whereas the former invites readers to elicit diffuse cognitive and sensory information (useful for the reading of poetic landscapes, for instance), the latter adopts a quick reading that prioritizes the labeling of emotions according to categories, like sadness or nostalgia. Broadly speaking, in the poetic analysis proposed here, the reader is as important as the text as they mutually construct or enact each other. The relevance of this approach lies in the role I believe (Latin American) indigenous poetry should play in possible scenarios of ecological collapse. In other words, part of the questions

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that I am trying to answer in this chapter echo the questions raised by Scott Slovic in his talk “Enchanting the Earth’s Data with Meaning: Information and Emotion Channelled through Environmental Literature and Art,” that is, how do we apprehend information (in this case indigenous poetry) and make it enchanting? (Slovic 2016)3 How do we overcome the “insensitivity” and “psychic numbing” caused by an increasingly violent and environmentally endangered world? (Slovic 2016). Slovic’s answer is similarly relevant to my discussion: using images, using narratives, personalizing stories, just like the Latin American poets do with their rich creative resources. And more importantly, sidestepping numbness or insensitivity, claims Slovic, can also be achieved by “understanding the psychological processes by which we process information” (Slovic 2016). As mentioned above, my proposal for reenchanting the world focuses on a more precise understanding of what happens in the mind when we read poetry so that spaces of empathy are opened between reader and the often marginalized and misunderstood literary texts of Latin American indigenous cultures. In other words, reenchanting Latin American indigenous poetry or overcoming insensitivity to its inherent beauty means understanding its autopoietic nature because the indigenous oral traditions on which this textual poetry is inspired were structurally coupled with the environment to ensure its continuous renewal. THE POETS: INDIGENOUS WORLDVIEWS FOR RENEWAL The Latin American poetry analyzed in this essay is deeply embedded in and strongly influenced by the writers’ rich oral traditions, which find their way into the text through animistic imagery. The result is a highly spatialized poetry replete with physical landscapes. But more fundamentally, the oral values in this poetry expressed mainly through metaphor, reveal different and culturally unique modes of interacting with the environment. In this poetry, oral values are thus ways of knowing and understanding the world from the writers’ own indigenous perspectives. Cecilia Vicuna (Santiago de Chile 1948) is a Chilean poet, artist, filmmaker, and political activist who locates herself culturally in Andean traditions, particularly in Quechua language. She has written sixteen books of poetry on a diverse range of topics like environmental destruction, indigenous worldviews, social justice, language, and memory. As so and so puts it, “[i]n her oral performances, she weaves languages and audiences into new perceptions, in connection to the land and the ecological crises” (The Heretics 2016, para. 2). Although Vicuna’s environmental message appeals to a universal consciousness, it is often rooted in Mapuche culture, now heavily repressed by the Chilean government. In

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“Word and Thread,” one of Vicuna’s most celebrated poems, the myth of creation is renewed in every performance, as matter and language are rhizomatically recycled or interconnected in an autopoietic fashion, just like the feedback loop of organic and inorganic matter that sustains the nutrient cycle, just like Mapuche cosmology is based on complex notions of spirits that coexist with humans and animals in the natural world, as beautifully summarized by Armando Marileo Lefío Ngenpin, from the Mapuche Documentation Centre: According to our ancestors’ outlook, the diverse elements that constitute our worldview interact and depend on each other in a holistic and systemic manner. Inhabitants, land, nature and powers belonging to both the natural and the supernatural dimensions coexist, producing harmony and equilibrium in the “Nag Mapu.” Our powerful kinship with the environment we inhabit generates a permanent search for a sense of equality, reciprocity and harmony, which constitutes our main endeavour in life. Culture, principles, laws, behaviour codes and relationship systems are the means by which we pursue that endeavour. Our permanent aim of achieving environmental equilibrium and harmony is the logical equivalent of our aim of attaining harmony and balance in our own lives, both personally and collectively, and feelings of emotional, physical, social, cultural, religious and mental wellbeing that such equilibrium can instigate, thus keeping our world, the mapuche universe, as “a world in harmony and equilibrium.” (Ngenpin, para. 3)

Vicuna’s fragment reads: “Is the word conducting the thread, or does thread / conduct the word- / making? // To speak is to thread and the thread weaves the world” (Vicuna, lines 16–17). Isn’t the process of ecological recycling a form of weaving or threading the materials of life? And what an animistic reenchanting of life is to poetically conceive words as “pregnant with other words” (Vicuna 22), and that “the word and the thread carry us beyond/threading and speaking/to what unites us/the immortal/fiber?” (Vicuna, 25–28). Interestingly, Vicuna’s reference to “words pregnant with other words” echoes eminent geneticist Enrico Coen’s conception of organic life and art not as mere reproduction, but as an evolutionary process. In his enthralling book The Art of Genes: How Organisms Make Themselves (2000), Coen traces an interesting parallel between the creative act of painting and the way organisms make themselves, arguing that the development of an organism does not depend on following a series of pre-formed instructions, as computers work. Rather, in organic development, Coen claims, there is no separation between plan and execution (Coen 2000, 9–14). In his view, life happens during the interaction between self-organizing processes and the environment that affords a life-space to thrive. It seems to me that Vicuna’s

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conception of artistic creation echoes Coen’s assumptions about the autopoietic origin of art and life in that the poet does not merely represent an external reality to be aestheticized. On the contrary, poet, word, and environment are threaded onto each other; the voice brings life to life and life presents an environment that eventually becomes the source of more words. What fascinating cultural bridge might potentially emerge from this epistemological connection between Western and indigenous cosmovisions? The work of Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’abal reflects the K’iche Maya cosmovision of which he is a part. The Maya people are formed by a wide range of indigenous peoples in the geographical areas of southern Mexico and northern Central America. As in Mapuche worldviews, Mayan cosmovision is sustained on the cultural biomimicry between the celestial forces of the cosmos, and the “biological, human patterns of life on Earth (microcosmos)” (Maass 2008, 175). Four main principles structure the Mayan cosmovision: integrity, structure of time, equilibrium, and the notion that all life-forms share material and spiritual features (Maass 175). The notions of integrity and equilibrium are particularly relevant for its implication that everything in the world has its place in relation to a higher context; that the world, mountains, rivers, trees, animals, people, and even celestial elements are all related and interact with each other in significant ways has been described as “cosmic connectedness” (Posey 2003, 176). The principle of equilibrium guarantees the preservation and restoration of balance in all aspects of life, which again takes us to the notion of recycling and autopoiesis: as highlighted by indigenous perspectives, both processes depend on reciprocity, on the delicate balance between give and take and continuous reuse. Just like recent approaches in neuroscience suggest that life consists of a process of co-emergence in which “a whole not only rises from its parts, but the parts also arise from the whole” (Thompson 2007, 38), Gods and humans depend on each other for mutual nurture, care, and the cyclical renewal of life (Maass, 178). Ak’abal is one of the most widely translated poets writing in an indigenous language in the Americas, and as the entry for Words Without Borders reads, his poetry is read “easily in a very deep voice that somehow reminds one of the sounds a great tree would make, if trees spoke Kiché” (Words Without Borders, lines 5–6). This can be seen in one of his beautiful poems, “Color of Water,” where he metamorphoses into a tree, in an image of splendid simplicity: “I search for my shadow/And I find it in the water./I have branches/I have leaves/I am a tree . . ./And I look at the sky/As trees look at it:/The color of water” (Ak’abal Ajkem Tzij, 247). In an autopoietic fashion, the existence of one complements the other, just like recycling consists of exchange and interdependence between natural elements. Likewise, a fundamental element in Latin American indigenous cosmologies is the notion of kinship with the natural world, which projects nature as an extension of the human body and

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vice versa, and which seems to inspire Ak’abal to write this Haiku style piece. Kinship and protection of the forest are thus two sides of the same coin: the humanizing element is there to remind us that nature is not exempt of care and affection. Natalia Toledo (Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca; 1968) is a Mexican poet who writes in Zapotec language. She has published four volumes of poetry in bilingual form (Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish) which have been translated into English, French, German, Vietnamese, and Italian. Natalia’s work is deeply entrenched in Zapotec indigenous culture, and the imagery of her poetry leans heavily on the Zapotec’s strong connection to nature as seen in their craft and traditional food. Zapotec cosmology is stunningly rich and diverse, and still nowadays represents a crucial cultural framework for its biocultural survival. As with many other indigenous communities, animism and renewal of life (e.g., land and human fertility) play a fundamental role in their conception of the world. This is why many of Zapotec creation stories feature ancestors that turned from trees or jaguars into people (Crystalinks, “Zapotec Civilisation,” para. 27), or supernatural beings that came from the clouds. As Judith Francis Zeitlin suggests, “Zapotec folktales include stories of Cociyo [Zapotec God of lightning and rain] keeping the elements clouds, rain, hail and wind shut up inside four immense ceramic jars” (Zeitlin 2005, 69). In Zapotec animistic culture, everything that moved was “worthy of reverence and respect and was considered alive” (Toby and Webster 2001, 846). It is thus not difficult to see in Zapotec animistic cosmology elements of cultural and biological recycling as the human and then nonhuman world appear as an inextricable unity, two interrelated aspects of the same reality that contribute to the creation and sustenance of each other: body, mind, and world are coupled onto each other, they enact each other. In Zapotec culture the world is not a separated, external object to be represented or aestheticized; rather, the Zapotec consider themselves as a constituent element of the larger cycle of life. This worldview echoes advances in neurophenomenology, which claims that cognition works as a system in which adaptive behavior results from continuous interaction between the nervous system, the body, and the environment (Chiel and Beer 1997, 555). Equally important is the biocultural role of maize in Zapotec culture, which is a basic ingredient in their diet and their cultural worldviews, because, as Zapotec writer Javier Castellanos claims, “our history is that of corn” (1998, 238); more importantly, corn is an ingredient that, in Zapotec cosmology, created the human race, “its flesh, blood and sustenance” (Florescano 2000, 16). Corn is indeed an important element in Natalia’s poetry, as beautifully proclaimed in one of her verses “on the surface of the earth, corn grains we are.” Her poetry offers as well, an extremely rich tapestry of taste, smell, and tactile impressions emanating from Zapotec traditional cooking and weaving, which

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not only are very relevant to community life, but also connect them to the natural world. Particularly, Toledo’s love for the ongoing cycle of life is manifest in a unique and sensuous imagery in which the boundaries between food and sex are often crossed erotically. Stunningly, in Toledo’s poetry, the autopoietic recurring circle of life occurs in the ritual of cooking as much as in sex: both represent acts of perpetuation of life by crafting food and crafting people, and in both the body appears as a symbol of fertility, as in her poem “Chocolate chilli pepper”: “Yellow and green cornhusks open/filled with light./You open your legs wide/when you sit down in the hammock/so that the chocolate chili of your man/may enter your calabash/and stir up the cocoa beans/browned on the comal of your desire” (Toledo “The Comal of Your Desire,” 63). Erotic references are more than evident here: food and genitalia become part of the same life-generating process that perpetuates individual and communal life. But the richness of Natalia Toledo’s verse expands into highly sensuous recycling of Mayan creation myths weaved into the text. For instance, in “The Black Flower,” Natalia offers an animated universe of sentient elements that recreate Zapotec myths of creation: “The world darkened/a jug spilled over, seas and rivers flowed,/a yellow sun came out, erasing men’s eyes,/the earth drank water from flowers and plants,/there was a tremor and from its fissures/ the first man sprouted” (Toledo, lines 34–39). As in Ak’abal’s poem, man is both product and process of a concatenation of events that transform matter into life in an ever-opening process of self-formation where rain becomes rivers and seas absorbed by plants and filtered into the Earth from which man “sprouts” like a plant. As Lela Brown beautifully claims, “[T]hese stories of a lost intimacy with animals and plants offer listeners a reason to respect the lives of other beings, and to strive to understand the wisdom embedded in the landscape” (Brown, para. 5). Toledo’s stunning imagery sets a powerful example of how indigenous poetry can contribute to the survival of indigenous Zapotec culture at a time when the very existence of this culture is threatened by transgenic seeds from multinational companies lurking after the extremely lucrative business of patenting corn seeds. All these poems show how oral values in the poetry in question is recycled into the text and how the concept of autopoiesis helps us understand this biocultural process in a more precise fashion. Now it is time to understand the poetic act as a self-forming creative process. THE POEMS: CREATIVE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES But in what ways can the oral creative process underpinning animistic imagery be considered as a form of recycling? And how can dynamic creative processes of engagement with the environment that produce them be read as relational, open ended, ever-mutating, and autopoietic complex systems? As

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I have mentioned before, animism is a form of engagement with environment that endows nature with sentience. For the last thirty or forty years, advances in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1980; Turner 1996; Stockwell 2002) open new dimensions to the mental process underpinning animism because they are based on the interrelation between mind, body, and word, an embodied epistemology that also underpins indigenous cosmologies. Particularly, it is possible to understand animism as a cognitive process called conceptual blending, whereby properties of various fields/domains are mapped onto each other creating a new, and hybrid entity. The proponents of Blending Theory (Mark Turner, George Lakoff, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner) conceive of metaphor as a four-space model which consists of a cross-space mapping, a generic space, a blend and a resulting emergent structure not available from the inputs. This four-space model explains the readers’ intuitions and thus requires their participation in the reading task (Fauconnier and Turner 2003). In other words, conceptual blending is like metaphor, the properties of two or more elements are held together to produce a new emergent entity. Therefore, if the creative process underpinning conceptual blending is the result of interaction with the environment from which a new blended entity emerges, it is possible to suggest conceptual blending operates like a recycling process. Thus, like in the nutrient cycle, conceptual blending is a creative process whereby various elements of the physical environment are perceived and processed through the body and mind’s sensorimotor apparatus back to the physical environment. In this last stage, the blended entity is returned to the environment as a renewed act of perceiving and acting in the world. At this point, the rhizomatic convergence of my methodological framework with Joni Adamson’s talk “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections in Native American Writings” is revealing: Blending Theory helps us understand the cognitive process that enacts animistic imagery, which, as Adamson claims, is now the focus of research in the field of interspecies ethnography (Adamson 2016). My poetic analysis might precisely be interpreted as a tentative answer to Adamson’s question about “how we give presence to an entangled myriad of temporalities and spatialities” (Adamson 2016) found in these transformational beings. This blending process occurs as an autopoietic feedback loop which mirrors what occurs in the recycling process, that is, the process in which the perceiver and the perceived world are coupled onto each other like “processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitute it as a unity,” as Maturana and Varela claim (Maturana and Varela 1980, 80). The similarity between the categorization processes that construes conceptual blending, and autopoiesis is supported by recent research in biosemiotic studies, as Professor Kalevi Kull suggests: “The process which organises a set (or

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system) of recognising structures should be a self-organising, autopoietic process. Due to its similarity (or certain isomorphism) to categorial perception, we may call it a process of categorisation” (Kull 1998, 101). The same kind of autopoietic principle can also be found in the nutrient cycle, which is nature’s own system of ecological recycling. The nutrient cycle operates through nutrients moving “from the physical environment into living organisms, and subsequently are recycled back to the physical environment”; moreover “[t]his circular movement of nutrients is essential to any given ecosystem, and it must be balanced and stable for the system to be maintained.” (Martin 2010, para. 1). Likewise, according to Peter Utting, “cultural perceptions of the Mayan-Quiche Indians also played an important role in the system of forest protection” (Utting 2003, 63). In “Born on the Skin of the Earth,” Ak’abal and nature are so enmeshed, so interwoven that they become extensions of each other, a sort of “interspecies breed,” to use Adamson’s terminology: “our ancestors prayed/in the language of our roots. My mother’s singing/in the language of trees . . ./the language that tinged my blood/and coloured my skin./I learnt to speak to water/and air gave me breath.” As extensions of each other, nature (the songs of trees) literally runs through the poet’s body becoming his blood and pigmentation, just as air fill his lungs with oxygen in a process that might very well resemble that of autopoiesis, that is, the ability of organisms to self-produce by engaging with the domains in which they operate. In this sense, autopoiesis seems to echo indigenous circular conceptions of life in that the poet imagines herself as part of a circular process of renewal. Indeed, poet and nature are coupled onto each other in a process of biophysical coevolution in which matter (the trees, the air, the earth) is transformed into life (the life of the poet) and conversely, life is transformed back into matter when the poet dies. Thus, a very perceptive and sensitive evocation of an animistic conception of life reminds us of humbler and more respectful forms of engagement with nature because she has treated as “you” not as an “it,” and the natural cycles of life are recognized as shared, reciprocal natural processes in which humans and nature coproduce each other. Now I am going to analyze the conceptual blend found in “our ancestors prayed/in the language of our roots.” In the interplay between the poet and the world that inspires him, the tree is selected as a perceptual correlative of the poet himself. Adopting a delayed categorization type of reading that allows readers to explore the semiconscious information evoked in the image, it is possible to understand the preconscious, creative process underpinning this metaphor: 1. Input Space 1: - Ancestors.  - Ancestors preserve and pass cultural information that allows future generations to continue life.

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2. Input space 2:

- Ancestors anchor generations to origins. - Roots. - Roots absorb and stores water and inorganic nutrients allowing tree to grow and renewal of life. - Roots anchor plants to the ground. 3. Generic Space:   - Ancestors communicate with new generations through orality. - Roots communicate between them and with the tree through nutrient networks. 4. Blended Space:      - Ancestors have roots and roots nurture the renewal of life.  - Language and prayer nurture communication between humans and nature (trees). Two mental spaces can be observed, ancestors and roots, both with salient features: the passing of information, the origins, and the storing and nurturing function of roots. These two mental spaces share a larger schematic space in the generic space, where the salient properties are matched through the concept of communication: just like ancestors pass orality into their offspring renewing the cycle of cultural, and biological life too, so do the roots with trees. Indeed, they store nutrients and pass them on into the nutrient cycle of the tree, perpetuating the cycle of life. Here, we can observe the autopoietic process more clearly because, as Evan Thompson claims, “enactive cognitive science focuses on self-organizing, dynamical systems, but it takes the further step of emphasizing how cognition emerges from the reciprocal interactions of the brain, the body, and the environment” (Thompson 1999, para. 10 in section 2). In the blended space, we have ancestors that have roots and speaking trees. At this stage, readers are offered several possibilities for interaction with the writer’s indigenous perspectives both at a conceptual and sensory level. Conceptually, readers might perform the emergent imagery of the blend as an image that is neither an ancestor nor a root, but has elements of both, or the image of a speaking tree. Also, the salient properties of both ancestors and roots might be enacted through their sensuous properties. The reader might wish to evoke the tactile qualities of both ancestors and roots as they share the roughness of bark and skin, which evokes the values of experience and resilience, both of them crucial for indigenous communal life. Likewise, these tactile qualities might evoke a sense of shelter and protection offered by ancestors and trees, or perhaps fears of disobeying ancestor’s advice. In the same way, readers might evoke the writer’s skillful sound alignment with the natural phenomena. In indigenous cultures, and especially in Mayan, acoustic attuning to the land is a crucial element of survival. This image opens

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an acoustic space that readers might perform by evoking the voice of the tree that maybe “speaking” with the rustling of leaves caressed by the wind, or “speaking” to the community through the parallelisms derived from the shared biological features of both trees and ancestors. This metaphor is the result of a process embedded in practical life and close observation of natural phenomena that have been passed into the poet as the indigenous cultural legacy of Mayans, this is what has been learnt from cognitive linguistics: “We understand our experience directly when we see it as being structured coherently in terms of gestalts that have emerged directly from interaction with and in our environment” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 230). Like in a recycling process, mind and matter, poet and environment, ancestors and roots form an organic unity that enacts each other in a process of constant renewal and regeneration. From an autopoietic perspective, the textual creative process cannot be divorced from the poet that creates it and the environment to which the poet is perceptually attuned and in which the three co-emerge. Thus, the creative energy unfolded by the animistic imagery can be likened to life’s capacity for self-organization because animism exists not so much as a mystical abstraction, but as a practical tool that fosters empathy, respect toward, and communication with the natural world. Humanizing the tree makes the poet part of this vital process of renewal just like the tree benefits from this humanization as respect grants ecological balance. (R)EVOLUTION IN LATIN AMERICAN INDIGENOUS POETRY The last and failing stage of neoliberal capitalism atomizes and fragments the delicate fabric of human and nonhuman life on Earth. My analysis of the three Latin American poets proposes an evolutionary perspective that endows Latin American indigenous poetry with the practical and aesthetic respect it deserves. If art is, above all, part of human’s software to share experiences, and to better attune our neural network to a complex world to operate more successfully in it, the writers’ orally influenced poetry can play an important role in this revitalization, especially considering the enormous challenges posed by the disastrous consequences of climate change now and in the future. This essay highlights the evolutionary spirit of Latin American indigenous poetry displayed in the autopoietic cycle of life embraced by indigenous worldviews. In a sort of biophysical coevolution, matter (bodies) goes back to life (flowers, grasslands etc.), and conversely, life is transformed into biodegradable matter in a recycling process of feedback loops. There are many lessons to be learned from the indigenous poetry presented in this chapter but

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two of them need not be missed: the indivisible thread of life connecting biology, art, and culture, and the possibility of articulating an emancipatory epistemology through the dialogue between indigenous worldviews and Western scientific perspectives. Recent developments in neuroscience prove that indigenous peoples were right all along: you cannot topple the fragile balance of nature. Therefore, the work of the three indigenous Latin American poets testifies to the aesthetic and evolutionary values of poetic creativity. Oral poetry has existed since the dawn of times not merely as a recreational, aesthetic tool, but also, and more importantly, as a survival strategy, as claimed by scholar Paul Hernadi: Since prehistoric times literature has been serving two complementary functions: to expand the cognitive, emotive, and volitional horizons of human awareness and to integrate our beliefs, feelings, and desires within the fluid mentality required for survival in the complex social environments of human organisms. Frequent participation in protoliterary transactions may have made some early humans more astute planners, more sensitive mind readers, and more reliable cooperators than their conspecific rivals, thereby increasing their chances to become the ancestors of contemporary men and women. Such a view of literature’s role in the coevolution of human nature and cultures helps explain its worldwide presence and perhaps even some of its shared characteristics across cultural divides. (Hernadi 2002, 21)

If we use Hernadi’s words to frame our understanding of the indigenous poems, their relevance for human survival in the Anthropocene becomes apparent. Indeed, the rich metaphors analyzed in this chapter expand the “cognitive, emotive and volitional horizons of human awareness” because they might offer pathways for living sustainably on the planet to (principally western) readers. Similarly, I have shown how animistic strategies are “integrated within the mentality required for survival” because, as the poems show, animism prompts a respectful and caring attitude toward the environment. In other words, we have seen how Blending Theory reveals the salient, evolutionary aspects of Latin American indigenous poetry because, as Turner and Fauconnier succinctly claim, “the construction of meaning is like the evolution of species. It has coherent principles that operate all the time in an extremely rich mental and cultural world” (2003, 61). The biocentric sensitivity shaping the poetic fragments analyzed in this paper testifies to the need of indigenous inclusiveness and recognition, especially in Latin America, where this consciousness is gaining force, after centuries of oppression, utter discrimination, and blatant racism that continue to this day. And more importantly, the liminal experiences, the rotund affirmation of interconnected existence woven within this Latin American poetry reminds

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us of the false metonymic assumption underpinning current notions of the Anthropocene: that is, humanity as such, not a particular kind of ideology, group of people, is to blame for the current ecological disaster. While it is undeniable that all humans, indigenous and non-indigenous, have altered and shaped the environment to make it habitable, not all of them have done so in the destructive scale of western civilization and its driving economic force, capitalism. Therefore, Donna Haraway’s notion of “Capitalocene” comes in handy at this point of the discussion. In her article “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” Haraway summarizes her objections to the use of the term “Anthropocene” claiming that this term is “most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples” (Haraway 2016, para. 25). Taking Haraway’s reference to the inadequacy of the term “Anthropocene” in relation to indigenous peoples a bit further, I would like to share with the reader a question about the nature of the Anthropocene that these Latin American poets pose in my mind: can we act effectively on reversing the human consequences of the Anthropocene, loading this concept with the religious ideological connotations that carry within and perpetuate the myth of the original sin, the myth employed by Spanish conquistadores to subjugate, enslave and commit genocide on American indigenous cultures? I see the writers’ diverse poetic interests and sociocultural backgrounds rhizomatically converge in the need to generate a poetic imagination that contributes to move toward a possible postcapitalist scenario, which might and will possibly be the continuation of this paper. According to renowned Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar, this postcapitalist scenario already exists “in struggles for the defence of seeds, commons, mountains, forests, wetlands, lakes, and rivers; in actions against white/mestizo and patriarchal rule; in urban experiments with art, digital technologies, neoshamanic movements, urban gardens, alternative energy, and so forth” (2018, 16). Yet, equally important for this poetry is the need to overcome the liberal traps of multiculturalism, whose initial, powerful emancipatory impulse has ended up diluting the genuine emancipatory force of indigenous local struggles in LA, in favor of a politics of difference based on a regionalized conception of space that reinforces what Ernesto Laclau in his book Emancipations terms the “logics of pure difference” of indigenous identities. What is more, the crucial, environmental task of our time is to reconnect indigenous struggles to the spirit of early anticolonial intellectuals like Aimé Césaire or Jean-Paul Sartre, who called for the creation of a universal consciousness against global oppression. In this regard, I concur with philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour when he warns against the perils of a naïve notion of Eurocentric universalism that excludes the nonhuman. For Latour, the construction of a

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successful cosmopolitanism needs to “embrace, literally, everything—including all the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act” (Latour 2004, 454). And it is in this epistemological juncture that the indigenous perspectives projected in the poems reveal their true destabilizing force against the destructive inertia of late-capitalism: if both western and non-western indigenous perspectives can join around a shared epistemological horizon that embraces the right of human and nonhuman cultures to live without oppression and enslavement, then part of the way is already paved. The question now is: is it possible then to reenchant the Earth without a strong global and environmental consciousness? The poem analyses presented here can be extended to spawn the creation of articulating the writers’ embodied experiences emerging from the poems. The result is a common, empowering counter-hegemonic discourse against the dangers of reckless environmental exploitation. In this discourse, differences and commonalities must be held in creative tension, as suggested by David Slater, reinforcing, or self-shaping each other in empathetic, reciprocal relationships just like animistic and recycling processes are generated by autopoietic reciprocal dynamics. These narrative encounters between human and nonhuman actors might generate new political projects that, according to Stacy Alaimo, “resist the ideological forces of disconnection” (2010, 142), something crucial for any human and nonhuman project of survival in the age of Capitalocene. In this sense, this analysis of the poetic imagery of humans “blending” with the environment powerfully resonates with Joni Adamson’s description of “persons or transformational beings who move in a cosmic realm” that, in line with my own proposal of political articulation of struggles, “are associated with a hope for the future that is termed ‘cosmovisions’ a thousand of years in the making” (Adamson 2016). Such cosmovisions must be sustained in a “coalitional politics” amply supported, according to Adamson, by indigenous-led meetings, cultural theorists, anthropologists, ecocritics, and multispecies ethnographers. The cosmovisions evoked in the poetry of Toledo, Ak’abal, and Vicuna are poetic stars in a constellation of political discourses threading imagined, alternative universes that will hopefully guide us in the darkness of the Capitalocene era.

NOTES 1. Joni Adamson. “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections in Native American Writings.” Keynote address at the Perpignan Ecopoetics Conference, June 2016 accessed December 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=8al​​​bhk60​​ww4 2. Wendy Harding. “Aesthetic Choices for the Anthropocene Era.” Keynote address at the Perpignan Ecopoetics Conference, June 2016, accessed January 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=WDt​​​v4​-D5​​FqY

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3. Scott Slovic. “Enchanting the Earth’s Data with Meaning: Information and Emotion Channelled through Environmental Literature and Art.” Keynote address at the Perpignan Ecopoetics Conference, June 2016, accessed January 2018, https​:/​/ww​​ w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=nsn​​​cpzVc​​YsE

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Fauconnier, G., and Mark Turner. 2003. “Conceptual Blending, Form and Meaning.” Recherches en Communication 19: 57–86. Accessed January 6, 2016. http:​/​/tec​​fa​ .un​​ige​.c​​h​/tec​​fa​/ma​​ltt​/c​​ofor-​​1​/tex​​tes​/F​​aucon​​nie​r-​​Turne​​r03​.p​​df. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Florescano, Enrique. 2000. “La visión del cosmos de los indígenas actuales.” Desacatos: Revista de Antropología Social 5: 15–29. Accessed February 2, 2016. http:​/​/www​​.reda​​lyc​.o​​rg​/pd​​f​/139​​/1390​​​0502.​​pdf. Francis, Judith Z. 2005. Cultural Politics in Colonial Tehuantepec: Community and the State Among the Isthmus Zapotec, 1500–1750. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Gómez Haro, Germaine. 2007. “El Maíz es nuestra vida.” La Jornada Semanal, October 14. Accessed February 22, 2016. http:​/​/www​​.jorn​​ada​.u​​nam​.m​​x​/200​​7​/10/​​ 14​/se​​m​​-har​​o​.htm​​l. Haraway, Donna. 2016. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E-flux Journal#75, September. Accessed September 12, 2018. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.e​-f​​l ux​.c​​om​/jo​​urnal​​/75​/6​​7125/​​tenta​​cular​​-thin​​king-​​anthr​​opoce​​ne​-ca​​pital​​​ ocene​​-chth​​uluce​​ne/. Haraway, Donna J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Harding, Wendy. 2016. “Aesthetic Choices for the Anthropocene Era.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Ecopoetics, Perpignan, June 22–25. Hernadi, Paul. 2002. “Why Is Literature: A Coevolutionary Perspective on Imaginative Worldmaking.” Poetics Today 23 (1): 21–42. Accessed May 22, 2015. http:​/​/poe​​ ticst​​oday.​​dukej​​ourna​​ls​.or​​g​/con​​tent/​​23​/1/​​21​.fu​​​ll​.pd​​f​+htm​​l. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Kull, Kalevi. 1998. “Organism as a Self-Reading Text: Anticipation and Semiosis.” International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems 1: 93–104. Accessed October 22, 2015. http://www​.zbi​.ee/​~kalevi​/textorg​.htm. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipation(s). London and New York: Verso. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: London: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck.” Common Knowledge 10 (3). Accessed September 13, 2018. http:​/​/www​​.brun​​o​-lat​​our​.f​​r​/sit​​es​/de​​fault​​/file​​s​/92-​​​BECK_​​GB​.pd​​f. Leigh, David. 2016. “The Sensuality of Sustenance: The Embodiment of Food, Life, and Sex in Natalia Toledo’s Black Flower.” The Zamani Reader. A History Blog from an American History Student, May 18. Accessed January 7, 2016. https​:/​/th​​ ezama​​nirea​​der​.c​​om​/20​​16​/05​​/18​/t​​he​-se​​nsual​​ity​-o​​f​-sus​​tenan​​ce​-th​​e​-emb​​odime​​nt​-of​​ -food​​-life​​-and-​​sex​-i​​n​-nat​​​alie-​​toled​​os​-bl​​ack​-f​​l ower​/. Lucas Chris. 2001. “Autopoiesis and Evolution.” Accessed May 2014. www​.calresco​ .org​/lucas​/auto​.htm.

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Chapter 16

Shadows of Enchantment in Indian Forest Fiction Mahasweta Devi’s “The Hunt” and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey Alan Johnson

SHADOW OF NARRATIVE: BEYOND ENCHANTMENT/DISENCHANTMENT? Linda Hogan reminds us that there are indigenous modes of being which she describes as a “dusky space between us [moderns] and others,” and a “time between times” (1996, 40), that elude the historicizing gaze of reason. Modernity prefers to treat such worldviews as excessively irrational or innocent, grounded in myths that derive their force from nature. This chapter focuses on two works of fiction about tribal groups in northern India to argue that the authors’ fictional characters, and to some degree their readers, dwell in environments that have always been enchanted, and that therefore demand profound existential choices. This is not to say that the relationship between a tribal woman and her environment in northern India is identical to that of a metropolitan reader. This is far from the case, as we will see; indeed, writers of tribal forest fictions like Mahasweta Devi (1974) and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar (2014),1 on whom I focus, document the erosion of particular indigenous environments and cultures at the hands of modern industry. But just as a tribal woman today must confront the entwinement of her mythopoetic worldview with that of modernity, so is a reader compelled to see how such a worldview challenges the common sense of late modernity, including first-person fictional narration itself. I take as my premise historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s point that modern narrative, including the two texts I examine here, are unavoidably part of a 277

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“mode of being in the world which is aligned with the principle of ‘disenchantment of the universe’ that underlies knowledge in the social sciences” (1998, 26). In light of this conference collection’s timely theme of reenchanting the earth, I find it especially revealing that writers like Hogan and Chakrabarty, who eloquently articulate other ways of knowing, frequently reach for the word “shadow” to characterize these alternatives to the postenlightenment worldview, and that these shadowy worlds are grounded in nature. Robert Pogue Harrison titles his compelling essay on forest symbolism “the shadow of civilization” (1992, passim); Hogan speaks of our usually ignored and therefore “shady” connection to the earth (1996, 40); and Chakrabarty describes the “penumbra of shadow” that haunts history as such (1998, 24). We are therefore obliged to read and reflect on narratives that, although still reliant on modern discourse, especially its inescapable sense of historical irony, nonetheless reveal other times and spaces. As Jane Bennett puts it, “Enchantment never really left the world but only changed its forms.”2 Rather than romanticize their subjects, the fictional works on which I focus present us with characters, especially tribal women, who break down the false dichotomy of enchantment and disenchantment. SHADOW OF NATURE: IRONY, TRANSLATION, AND THE SUPERNATURAL Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s 2014 novel The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, written in English, and Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali short story “The Hunt,” written in 1974 and translated into English in 1990, focus on forestdwelling tribals in what is now (since 2000) the northern state of Jharkhand. On a broad level, these fictions dramatize the “organic interrelatedness” (Meillon 2016) between human and nonhuman worlds that interweaves this conference collection. They do so by demonstrating that despite the dominant narrative of global disenchantment, there are in fact countless enchantments (or reenchantments) of more localized worlds, whether distinctively “modern” or not.3 This is because enchantment is not a singular, transhistorical ideal or outlook separable from everyday life, but is instead made up of innumerable “moments” in our “contemporary world” (Bennett 2016, 8), somewhat like that of Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s eponymous modernist classic of the same name (1925). More specifically, these texts present us with what Chakrabarty describes as “subject positions and configurations of memory that challenge and undermine the subject that speaks in the name of history” (Chakrabarty 2000, 37; my emphasis). By “history,” Chakrabarty means a hyperreal “Europe” that shadows all other

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modern narratives as well as our severance from nature. The attitude to nature—especially, in the works I examine, trees and forests4—is crucial to an understanding of modernity, and so of disenchantment, precisely because these have been made to seem “natural.” In modern5 literature, as Harrison has observed, this regard for nature, such as in the English Romantic poets, is unavoidably ironic because it is the very awareness of natural depletion at the hands of humans that prompts this kind of “nostalgic” writing (1992, 155–164). While this ironic, disenchanted outlook also infuses modern postcolonial fictions, including by Shekhar and, to a lesser degree, I suggest that these texts’ particular cultural contexts and stylistic sensibilities nevertheless turn the ironic gaze back upon the reader. They do so in two ways: first, by self-critically accenting the gap between the attempt to bring the lives of dispossessed individuals into the light of reason and the limits of their own reasonable rhetoric, and second, by embracing that very gap by leaving in place—leaving untranslated—certain features of their characters’ worldviews, whether these untranslated words are transliterations of the local vernacular or modern English terms incorporated into that vernacular. Significantly, as we will see, the irony in these texts is not (or not only) the self-reflexive kind we usually associate with a modern narrator (Kaviraj 2000, passim); the latter form of irony depends, after all, on some combination of knowing subject, or interpreter, and her target (Hutcheon 1994, 17, 31). Instead, Devi’s and Shekhar’s works display an irony that targets the reader as well as the historical context being described. For example, the dramatic irony that seems, on first glance, to pervade Shekhar’s novel breaks down when we confront the untranslated expressions in the local Santali language, which in the English version are transliterated in Romanized script. Is it the reader being ironized here, rather than the situation being described? Both, I would say, which makes the text potently doubleedged. Shekhar’s style, setting, and plot undermine the conventionally reified perceptions of enchanted and disenchanted spaces that characterize modernity. Significantly, because his non-translated words depend for their meaning on natural settings, the reader is disoriented not only linguistically, but geographically as well. The naturalistic, spirit-filled setting of Shekhar’s novel, together with his refusal to gloss local Santali words, estrange his reader in a way that is comparable to the estrangement his tribal characters experience each day as they navigate a changing world. Devi similarly ironizes her narratives by juxtaposing the modern English-language terms of policing, law, and industry, especially commercial forestry, that have been incorporated into local vernaculars, with tribal terms that are replete with natural and local-cultural imagery.

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This subject of linguistic and cultural translation is vital to our reading of these texts, including the nonhuman and supernatural environments they describe, which the texts do not question.6 If modern subjectivity depends on a self-consciousness that regards nature as distinct from itself, “set aside from the rest of creation” (Hogan 1996, 39), then the counterclaim of recent material ecocriticism that we must “reenchant” nature by acknowledging its own subjectivity and its relatedness to humans would appear to undermine the claim to modern consciousness (see Iovino and Oppermann 2014, x, xii). As Wendy Wheeler observes, the positivist, ostensibly tolerant and disinterested scientific worldview whose dominance we need to resist itself relies on a dogmatic resistance to any narrative that does not comport with its presuppositions (Wheeler 2014, 69).7 But rather than try to “undermine” entirely the “subject that speaks in the name of history,” as Chakrabarty has it (2000, 37), Shekhar’s and Devi’s texts represent the kind of “active zone of tension between society and nature” that Michael Dove ascribes to the historical construction of the jungle in South Asia (2000, 27). The texts convey Hogan’s insight, expressed in her interview with Bénédicte Meillon, that “in our global world there are not only many different ways of knowing, but also different kinds of science.” Hogan discerningly concludes, echoing Jane Bennett in my epigraph: “It is not that we are trying to re-enchant the world. It is already there. It is that we are trying to keep our own selves in touch with that” (2016). The supernatural in these texts is exactly the kind of non-positivist semiotic that science decries, one that coexists in tension with the unavoidably modern sensibility of the author and the genre, and in which “gods and spirits” must be treated as “existentially coeval with the human” (Chakrabarty 2000, 16). For this reason, as we will see, stylistic irony in these works coexists with reverence for the supernatural to question their own conventional modes of representation. Such features obviously invite us to consider Devi’s and Shekhar’s works as examples of magic realism. On one level, they certainly are, inasmuch as they naturalize the supernatural in the context of realist, often historicized narrative. However, in expressing their tribal characters’ predicament of having to contend with the incursive power of the postcolonial state, Devi and Shekhar do not simply speak for so-called non-western modes of being. They also call into question the very conventions that figure world regions in terms of an east/west dichotomy, and highlight the impossibility of speaking of a monolithic “postcolonial world” (Faris 2002, 113). They remind us that the state’s discourse of modernity, like that of the British before India’s 1947 independence, casts what is effectively a magical spell over its agents and its citizens, in the sense that modernity assumes a powerfully mythologized mode of being.

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SHADOWS OF TIME AND SPACE: HISTORICAL TIME, MYTHIC TIME, AND PSYCHIC DISORDER The “tension between society and nature” that Dove describes belongs to a long tradition in both European and non-European texts of infusing forests with contradictory elements of dream-like mystery and danger, magic, and awe. Harrison recalls that Dante begins his epic poem “lost” in “a dark forest”; the Brothers Grimm render forests as the site of a “lost [Germanic] unity”; and the outlaw Robin Hood hides in Sherwood Forest not in order to break away from society but, on the contrary, to redeem it (Harrison 1992, 80, 110, 169). These tales, as Harrison observes, reflect the broader story of humans’ interactions with the natural environment, ranging from Gilgamesh’s epic urge to control it (by killing the forest’s guardian and then cutting it down) in an effort to transcend mortality to the post-Cartesian “mastery” of it, reflected in Descartes’ ironic use of Dante’s trope to insist on the “straight” path out of the “forest” of tradition by means of rational “method” (Harrison 1992, 110). But if modernity’s “demystification” and “[scientific] control of nature” usher in the disenchantment of the world, modernity also creates its own enchantments, including violence (Dube 2002, 729; Bennett 2016, 7). As Saurabh Dube, Jane Bennett, and others have noted, and as this essay argues, the Weberian version of modernity thus sets up the false dichotomy of a modern, rational, disenchanted world cut off from natural life rhythms (Bennett 2016, 7). I follow Dube’s and Bennett’s lead in arguing that we should instead be thinking of modernities and be mindful, as Bruno Latour has argued, that the idea of nature as sacred and set apart from us may be an equally enchanted view (Latour 1993, passim). Indeed, the reified terms themselves perpetuate certain enchantments. A corollary of this notion, I suggest, is that to say that modern disenchantments are purely western products and experiences ironically risks precisely the kind of privileging that ecocritical practice aims to dispel. Devi’s and Shekhar’s fictions illustrate these points in several ways. On the one hand, they show that despite India’s frenzied race to achieve a vaguely imagined postindustrial society, some groups have maintained a respect for the natural world that derives from both mainstream religious epics, such as the Ramayana, and local folk traditions. Indeed, Annu Jalais, in her anthropological study of the Sundarbans (mangrove forestland) in West Bengal, reports that for indigenous peoples there, “the forest [is] a kind of commons to which all have equal access” (Jalais 2009, 72). On the other hand, Devi and Shekhar are clear that these peoples and their environments do not exist in an innocent world cut off from India’s various modernities. They show that tribal cultures, however non-normative their views may be, harbor their

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own blind spots, and that these intersect with modern sensibilities to produce unexpected outcomes. The onus is firmly on the dominant culture, and so on the texts’ metropolitan readers, to safeguard tribal habitats. Rather than presume to “speak for” the subjects whose cultures they try to depict, Devi and Shekhar make plain, through both narrative style and paratextual commentary (such as interviews, essays, and acknowledgments), their roles as imperfect mediums between metropolitan and indigenous societies.8 They recognize, in any case, that writing can never be an unadulterated representation of a subject; after all, as Hogan observes, writing is “all about enchantment” (2016). One especially valuable insight I take from this is that regardless of where we live, we must, as Greg Garrard says about ecopoetics, “reflect [. . .] upon what it might mean to dwell with”—that is, to be involved with, rather than remain apart from—“the earth” (2007, 373). The concept of dwelling speaks to Devi’s and Shekhar’s understanding of a healthy Earth as one that is intimately involved with human presence, not bereft of it, as some environmental policies seem to assume. As Naomi Klein reminds us, “green” policies that do not account for indigenous inhabitance can amount to a neocolonial “ranking [of] the relative value of humans” (2016). Devi’s and Shekhar’s fictions do not presume to offer solutions to these the dilemmas facing tribal communities. They do, however, provide alternative frames for how we make sense of contradictions on the ground, by focusing on marginalized communities and landscapes that enable to see both environmental and representational crises anew. Without romanticizing their subjects, these fictions show us that what Timothy Clark calls the Anthropocene’s “psychic disorder” is not new (2015, 140); it has been long familiar to indigenous peoples, whose natural dwelling places have been colonized. They are painfully aware that their traditional perceptions of, and relations to, time and space are often incompatible with a modernizing world, one that, ironically, offers them the very tools, especially education, needed to counter it. MAHASWETA DEVI’S “THE HUNT”: FORESTS, REENCHANTMENT, AND THE TIME OF VIOLENCE Sudipta Kaviraj has described how nationalists, many of them novelists and poets, in nineteenth-century Bengal not surprisingly succumbed to the European scientism that instigated a “disenchantment” with the natural world (2003, 548). While these earlier writers’ focus on historicizing Indian culture in the interests of a nascent Indian state is understandable, later narratives, as Alex Tickell reminds us, have critiqued this tendency by turning, for example, to the traditions of purana (traditional local lore) and itihas (history) that

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Raja Rao famously espoused in his 1938 novel Kanthapura (Tickell 2015, 240–41). Yet even these non-European narrative traditions often overlook the marginalized lives and worldviews of tribals and other disenfranchised peoples. Rumina Sethi’s discussion of Rao’s use of the puranic tradition to evoke a localized oral culture and its natural environment is instructive here. Despite Rao’s brilliant evocation of narrative voice in the person of an elderly woman from the titular village, he presupposes a “universalism” and nationalist “oneness between ‘indians’” (sic), thereby “creating the impression of joint resistance” to colonial rule and “common suffering” (Sethi 1999, 67). This universalist presumption, Sethi observes, is understandable given both the Gandhian-nationalist context in which Rao wrote and the determinants of the novel form (65, 68–69). The dominant Hindu-nationalist logic of Rao’s novel, in other words, frames and detracts from its otherwise powerfully localized voice. We can thus detect in Rao’s novel the kind of universalist logic Chakrabarty cautions us about (and which Sethi, following other historians, calls a “syntheciz[ing]” logic [184]), and also see how Devi’s and Shekhar’s narratives differ from it. To cite one salient example, the use of the phrase “Once upon a time” by the illiterate protagonist-narrator may “situate events in a hoary past,” but are ultimately subsumed into the “linear timeconsciousness” of an “eventful” national history (Sethi 1999, 64, 69). The narrator’s storytelling phrase in the service of nation differs, as we will see, from Devi’s use of it to differentiate tribal culture from the national project. The considerable challenge, then, is to depict these worlds within the historical frame of the nation-state. This is why Devi, who famously fought the state’s appropriation of forestland and its “dispossessed” inhabitants, nevertheless wished to see a “general” tribal identity that “belong[s] to the rest of India” (Devi 1995a, xi, xvii). Like her tribal protagonists, she does not wish for the state’s demise (since that is effectively impossible) but, instead, its transformation. Her stories describe the state in its current form as one that finds tribals to be “easy [target]” for its own ends. The “system hunts them” as uncivilized “prey” (Devi 1995a, xix)—a designation that undergirds the state’s master–slave rationale and self-styled superiority. Devi’s story “The Hunt,” translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, illustrates many of the points I’ve been making, not least in its ironic, doubleentendre title. The protagonist is Mary Oraon, the half-tribal, half-white product of a white Australian whose father had been a colonial planter. Her ethnicity makes her doubly marginalized: from mainstream society, because a tribal; and from her own Oraon people due to her ethnic heritage. At the same time, she “has countless admirers” among men of all communities because of her exotic beauty (3). The world she and her people inhabit is a disenchanted one, in the sense that outsiders have long exploited the tribals and their forestland. Modernity is signaled, in part, by transliterated English words, which

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in Spivak’s translation appear in italics, words like train, station, coal halt, and junction. These words signify the Oraons’ exploitation, of which they’re well aware but feel powerless to halt. Thus, “Sal [tree] logs” from the forest “are split in sawmills and sent in every direction.” While “silence” reigns over Mary’s village of Kuruda, the nearby junction town is “bustl[ing]” with trains, trucks, and buses (2). Once modern industry has transformed a local landscape and economy, this bustle, ironically, though not surprisingly, promises jobs for those whose land it takes.9 Mary’s marginal ethnic status, which I take to be, on one level, a representation of Indians’ perception of tribals as a whole, has the advantage of instilling within her a rare defiance toward outsiders, all of whom are men. Variously seen as alluring and fearsome, Mary plays this to her advantage. “Everyone is afraid of Mary,” we are told (5). She daringly “picks the fruit of the . . . mahua trees on the . . . property” of her employers, the highercaste Prasads (4), and presides at her market stall “like a queen” (3). All of these tags and associations—arboreal, royal, exotic—highlight their thematic interconnection. Thus, in a rare moment of ironic levity that reveals both Mary’s physical difference and the contrast between tribal and state worldviews, Singh, the government representative, tries to compliment Mary for her beauty by comparing her to a famous Hindi film actress. “You look like Hema Malini,” he says. To which Mary responds with a “What?” (10), for the name means nothing to her.10 Mary’s association with trees is equally revealing of her intimacy with the Oraons’ forested environment and the dynamics of a predator–prey world ushered in by outside business interests, which are the “real beneficiaries” (2) of the modern logging industry. Singh, the local Tehsildar, or government revenue collector, tellingly equates “the [profitable] business of felling trees in the forest” with sexually “profitable” liaisons with tribal women (9). Mary’s defiant attitude, exoticism, and Oraon identity provide the potent mix that, as we see by the story’s conclusion, both catalyzes her deadly act and encapsulates the story’s themes. When, therefore, we are told that “[t] he felling goes on” throughout the year, the double meaning is clear, both to us and to Mary (12). When the Tehsildar “caught Mary’s hand one day,” she immediately sees that “The timing was good. No hunt for the men this year” (13). She sees, in other words, that the once-in-twelve-years hunt for women that is about to begin is her chance to reenchant her world through a violence learned from these outside antagonists. But “enchant” in what way? One possible reading is that Mary wishes to maintain, or shore up, the natural enchantment that outside forces have been eroding. Devi does, after all, make clear that the Oraon world is both ecological and cultural, since for them there can be no division between the two. However, the narrative also makes clear that Mary reflects on this conflation in a way that appropriates her assailant’s modus operandi, which

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is predicated on exploitative capitalism, as his use of English business terms illustrates: investment, virgin area, felling monopoly, and so on (7). In other words, Mary’s social motivation to participate in the ritual hunt coexists with her individual, self-conscious motivation to harm this representative of modern violence, whose target is her physical person as well as her culture. Reenchantment in this case does not, therefore, mean a return to a pristine natural past, but rather the uneven combination of individual and social motivations by using the conceptual tools—in Mary’s case, the conflation of individual and ritual violence—at hand. Mary, wielding her machete to join in the ritual Oraon hunt, lures the Tehsildar into the forest—and, once there, sees him as species of animal prey. “A-ni-mal,” she tells herself—and “smile[s]” (13). The story builds to a climax with the Tehsildar panting after Mary, as we listen in on her thoughts. “Today,” she feels, “a small thing cannot please her. She wants to hunt the big beast!” (16) As you might guess, the Tehsildar does not come to a good end. I find the language Devi uses to describe the scene revealing: the man’s face “begin[s] to look like a hunted animal’s,” and she “caresses” it (16). He, of course, thinks this is foreplay; for Mary, it’s a prelude to his death, but one that’s done ritualistically, as her machete “lowers . . ., lifts, lowers” (16), ironically echoing the sexualized rhythm11 of the tribal women’s trance-like refrain at the onset of the hunt (15). By ritualistic I mean that her killing of the man is of a piece with the hunt’s killing of animals, implying not a singular event but its repetition, as well as a recognition of their (human and animal) shared corporeality. A few lines before this, Mary spots a hedgehog, and we are told that “If it hadn’t been today Mary would have killed it, eaten its flesh” (16). The description of her plan contextualizes its spontaneity, for it is framed by the natural world: the gitginda vines, its yellow flower, the seemingly “bottomless” ravine, in which she later “throws” the man’s body (16–17). This natural frame is figuratively homologous with the narrative frame, which accords her real-time, present-tense act a measure of planning and prediction by virtue of appearing in a printed, rereadable format.12 The act becomes, in effect, an historical artifact, which arguably allows Devi to preserve the simultaneity of Mary’s individual as well as social motivations along with the act’s spontaneity. Her act is simultaneously spontaneous and planned, individually self-conscious and socially linked with the ritual hunting of other Oraon women that night— much as Mary herself is simultaneously non-Oraon (by virtue of her halfEnglish blood) and very much Oraon. We can therefore say, by one reading, that Mary reclaims a sense of enchantment by redressing a wrong, a move the story plainly endorses. Her murderous act can be said to be violent (or just or wrong) only in the context of a rigid juridical generality. For here, the violence shades unexpectedly

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into erotic pleasure. This pleasure appears, too, to derive from her exultant feeling of being free of the evil Tehsildar, and to then shade into an almost spiritual awakening. The finite time of justice that we recognize in Mary’s act thus coexists, to the modern, secularist reader’s discomfort, with a mythic timelessness. When, after Mary has “bath[ed] naked in the cut,” it’s “[a] s if she has been infinitely satisfied in a sexual embrace.” This infinitude has been presaged by her sense, just after the murder, that a “few million moons [have] pass[ed]” (17). This timelessness is nothing like the proverbial modern-colonialist view of indigenous peoples as lacking history, but instead an enchanted time-space in which Mary is fully alive and “fears no animal” (17). As the author says in an interview with Spivak, the real-life model for Mary “resurrected the real meaning of the animal hunting festival day by dealing out justice for a crime committed against the entire tribal society” (1995a, xviii). She does so not by pretending the modern world does not exist, but by incorporating it into her own. This is signaled, in part, by her use of English words (appearing in italics) at the end of the story. She decides she will “walk seven miles tonight” to be with her lover, Jalim, and then take one of the “buses” or “trucks” to go with him “somewhere.” The final paragraph finds her walking at night by “watching the railway line” (17). The motif of ritual sacrifice also, then, recasts the more familiar structure of mythic narrative, in which “magical flight” plays the key role (Burkert 1998, 44). Walter Burkert summarizes the basic format: “the heroine or hero or both flee from the dominion of a witch . . . or other unpleasant company, the powerful and swift adversary realizes they have escaped and takes up pursuit. There is just one way to stop him: the fleeing person must throw things behind that will grow into barriers to halt the pursuer at least for a while, until a decisive point is passed and safety is regained. Throw a comb, and it will grow into a forest or into a mountain range” (1998, 44). Burkert reads this as a version of “that biological trick for survival to distract the attention of the pursuer by abandoning, by throwing,” which among animals (including us, it seems) is the abandonment of “young or feeble quarry” (1998, 46). Mary, in Devi’s story, revises this by leaving behind not just her predator’s body, but also his “wallet, cigarettes, his handkerchief” (17; original emphasis). Given that Mary’s pursuer is dead, these talismans of his modernity are ironic counterparts to the magical obstacles that characters encounter in mythic narrative. A possible reading of this is that Devi has Mary enact a conventional trope only to mock it, thereby signaling a refusal to play by the usual narrative rules. However, rather than stop at Burkert’s insightful but somewhat reductive notion of the magical, I believe it’s important to notice that Devi does not mock this or any other storytelling tropes. She makes Mary credible to us not by a rational explanation of her motivations and actions, which would presume the kind of secular historicity that Chakrabarty rightly

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views as one-sided, but by presenting Mary’s (and other tribals’) mythic outlook as simultaneously, if not fully, modern. Her act is simultaneously a claim to justice in real time, for both social and individual wrongs, and one that cannot be subsumed within the grand narrative, or the “generalizing impulse” of secular historical time (Chakrabarty 2000, 83). This denouement is an ironic counterpoint to the phrase “Once upon a time” that appears twice at the start of the story, implying that what ensues will be mere fairy tale, one that modern readers associate with quaint tribal beliefs. The upending of this trope by the conclusion of the story allows us to retrospectively perceive the terrible, very real cost of what’s identified in the rest of the sentence: “Once upon a time, whites had timber plantations” in the area (2; original emphasis). Having read the story’s conclusion, we are better able to understand the contextual irony of the italicized English phrase. This is not, in my reading, the irony of historical disenchantment, which is predicated on the supposed “rupture” between traditional and modern worldviews,13 but rather an irony that critiques the very notion of rupture. This suggests that Mary’s elation at the end of the story does not mean she has learned to balance mythic and modern times, as I used to think. She instead suspends, for the time being at least, the colonial and postcolonial timescapes (the plantation capital) of which she is a product.14 Her (and the author’s) celebration of a particular non-modern time and space cannot be relegated to a linear timeline in which it is generally styled as “primordial” or “pre-modern” and therefore irrational. It’s the story’s modern representatives, such as the Tehsildar, who view her through this generalizing, disenchanted template. Thus, while it’s true, as Kavita Daiya observes, that Devi’s stories of forest tribal dwellers, especially women, expose how their “bodies are snared in circuits of . . . capitalist modernity” (Daiya 2015, 233) it’s also true that her stories show us that modernity is not merely an “external force,” for it is no longer separable from her protagonists’ forest homes. In another story, “Douloti the Bountiful,” Devi depicts a tribal woman, her body ravaged by disease caused by sexual servitude, falling upon and covering a map of India drawn in chalk, in a schoolyard, to celebrate Independence Day (1995b). The image subverts the iconic nationalist one of Mother India that was inaugurated in Bankimcandra Chatterji’s 1882 Bengali novel Anandamath, and that the women in Rao’s novel exemplify (see Sethi 1999, 137–138). Mother India is unsurprisingly linked directly to the natural environment, both local and national (especially visible in the oft-reproduced image of the Mother India goddess superimposed over a map of India).15 Devi’s depiction of Douloti on the Indian map thus disenchants customary symbolic and territorial boundaries, and reenchants her protagonists’ worlds. Another way to gloss her stories is to say that they belie the supposed break between enchanted pasts and a disenchanted, modern present by demonstrating that these terms have never

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been fixed, but are instead remnants of a rhetorical move fashioned in Europe and inherited, for better or worse, by modern India. The consequences are stark, for, in staking a purely utilitarian claim to forestland, modern states displace the land’s inhabitants and their cultures. The paradox, of course, is that states mystify their origins by locating them in precisely these forested (or once-forested) spaces. It should not be surprising, then, to see tribal activists, obligated to enter the discourse of modern politics, reach for the very same Mother-as-nature image in their multimedia advocacy of indigenous motherland (Toppo 2016). HANSDA SOWVENDRA SHEKHAR’S THE MYSTERIOUS AILMENT OF RUPI BASKEY: DOMESTICITY, WITCHCRAFT, AND INDIGENOUS AGENCY Shekhar’s 2014 novel The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, like Devi’s story, focuses on tribals in northern India, in this case the Santhals. Also like Devi’s fiction, the narrative is at once allegorical and realist, and straightforwardly presents the tribals’ beliefs about, and relationship to, nature. As previously mentioned, these works exhibit some of the salient features of magic realism, and thus challenge the very viability of realism to adequately represent characters who do not presuppose a division between the natural and supernatural, or between allegory and the material world’s ostensible literalism. Devi and Shekhar, in straightforwardly couching supernatural features in realist narrative, do highlight the “contradiction” between two different worldviews that Wendy Faris has observed as a key dimension of magic realism (2016, 106). In this way, they underscore the absurdities of the dominant culture’s (and the state’s) ostensibly rational discourse. What is distinct about Devi’s and Shekhar’s narratives even within the context of Indian fiction and the umbrella of magic realism, however, is their deft juggling of not just the “opposing” worldviews of European empiricism and Indian culture’s more openly fabulist one, but also of a fabulist world that does not assume, as does a Hindu-dominant one, a world that is governed by the idea that epic is itihas, usually translated as “history.” In other words, very little has changed for tribals since India’s independence: modernity’s logic still obtains. Even their stories, which a source of imaginative succor amid change, are, as Devi’s and Shekhar’s fiction shows us, increasingly beholden to dominant narratives. As Julius Lipner observes, despite numerous local, and often oral, versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Sanskrit versions of the epics “retain a hegemonic hold in the symbolism of the forest.” This means that viewing the forest in these epics as the appropriate “liminal,” or “threshold,” setting for a hero’s moral transformation, while

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entirely correct in the context of the epic, ignores the fact that the forest is someone’s home, not the “wild landscape,” or “classic locus of liminality,” conducive to self-perception (Lipner 2005, 55–56). This is not to say that Shekhar’s novel, for instance, romanticizes the Santhals, far from it. Shekhar does not, for instance, sugarcoat the maleordered society’s repercussions for women or the community’s own frequently oppressive practices. But simply by taking the Santhals at face value, as fully human, the author, himself a Santhal, grants them a measure of their own voice.16 More specifically, as we will see, Shekhar, in choosing to document social disruption in terms of tribal women’s responses to their natural surroundings, rather than in terms of the more obvious political turmoil that has plagued the state of Jharkhand, undermines conventional notions of domesticity that are predicated on an inside/outside dichotomy. Of course, a work written in English, however sympathetic to its subject, is inevitably far removed from the world it depicts. Yet this assured novel, like Devi’s fiction, communicates some important features of tribal cultures and landscapes that are usually invisible to metropolitan readers. This can go a long way toward defamiliarizing metropolitan readers’ own contradictory relationship to disenchanted environments. The text also shows us, on a broad level, that perceived disenchantments—again, the plural is important—are not solely modern western experiences, but afflict non-metropolitan individuals and their varied communities in different ways. The story describes how Rupi Baskey, “once the strongest woman in Kadamdihi” village (1), is debilitated by the titular “mysterious ailment” that is thought to be the result of another woman’s curse. The ailment is also clearly an allegorical sickness that afflicts the entire extended family into which she has married, one whose former high status crumbles as a result, to the delight of their neighbors. More than this, the affliction in many ways besets Rupi’s entire Santhal village as it struggles to adjust to changes initiated by an outer world that increasingly encroaches upon its space. As Shekhar points out in an interview, elucidating the novel’s statement that “few villages” in the region “had electricity” (93): “Power projects located in other states take their [energy] from Jharkhand . . . but people in Jharkhand do not have electricity. I find this terribly unfair” (Shekhar 2014a).17 Rupi’s everyday life, however, is far from such political tumult, which includes the travails of tribal groups—or, as they are collectively known, Adivasis—as they struggle to carve out a separate state for themselves, which would eventually result in the creation of Jharkhand. Rupi, like other women in the novel, instead struggle to establish a greater measure of agency for themselves in the unequal domestic arrangements on offer by both tribal and dominant societies. Rupi’s inability to do so and her refusal to engage in witchcraft, which is one of the few avenues for self-determination, result in

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her seemingly incurable “ailment.” As we will see, her rejection of witchcraft is, in fact, an enabling decision that is based on her perception of its own inherently exclusionary logic. As one would expect of its focus, the novel associates Santhals with their natural environment, a focus that is, on one level, perfectly consonant with their forest surroundings, even if these forests have been considerably reduced. For instance, arboreal tropes characterize many of the story’s ailing or manipulative women. Before falling sick, Rupi herself is “always drawn” to her adoptive village’s “cluster of trees,” which her natal village lacks (19). And when she blushes, it is “like a joba-kusum in full bloom” (19). This romantic imagery soon withers away, however. After moving to her husband’s village, “[h] er body isn’t the sturdy banyan of old, it is the diseased eucalyptus” (6)—a telling image given that eucalypti are an invasive species introduced by the British, whereas banyans are native to South Asia. Similarly, Rupi’s frequent retreats to “the dogor tree” near the village well, as well as her later urge to lie under dogor and trees (171, 174, 183), speaks of her desperate need for a natural, private place of her own. Having been transplanted to a new village after her marriage, with a husband who, like other young men, leaves for long periods of work in towns, she yearns for both imaginative and physical domains in which to assert herself. Even her visions, however—the village’s “unseen [things]”—are known by “everyone” (134). Rupi’s life-long search for spaces that are at once natural and private importantly fuses the story’s several themes, including the tension between Santhal culture and an intrusive, modernizing world. Shekhar conveys this tension by frequently transliterating the local Santhali tongue, but without providing translations, as we are accustomed to finding in other postcolonial novels.18 For example, the whisperings of a midwife, or “dhai-budhi,” into a woman’s (Older Somai-budhi’s) ear appear without comment: “Jeevee ketej taam, baahu” (24). The unmediated words preserve the intimacy of this women-only sphere, in which the midwife’s words seem to comfort the young woman’s during premature delivery. The woman (who will become Rupi’s mother-in-law) “drifted off into a deep, undisturbed sleep” (24). The inside–outside tension derives both from the scene’s very public description in a (modern) novel and from the contrasting line that immediately follows: “The routine of Older Somai-budhi’s [i.e., the young woman’s] life was disturbed after a few years when she discovered she was pregnant again” (24; my emphasis). This and other allusions to the troubled domestic lives of women underscore the “mysterious” afflictions that beset tribal families and villages (see 76, 111, 121). Significantly, these female maladies are believed by the community to spread from family to family and village to village, making them at once individual, familial, and social. The novel’s titular “ailment,” in

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other words, would seem to be both very real (as in the young woman’s case) and, in the context of the Adivasis’ historical struggle against the prejudices of a dominant culture, allegorical.19 The efforts of Rupi’s family to find a “cure” for her particular idiopathic illness, efforts described throughout the novel, are thus a reflection of the apparently incurable debility of Santhal livelihood and culture in the face of modernizing, disrupting changes. I say “apparently” because if half the battle in any recovery is knowing the cause of a sickness, the narrative provides an answer in pointing to the twin causes of both Rupi’s and her community’s ailments: dislocation and modern life. This coupling of allegory and history provides the vital frame for us to understand the novel’s environmental emphasis and its implications for a more enriched understanding of (dis) enchantment. Shekhar, as I’ve said, paints a deromanticized picture of Santhal society as it contends with disruptive change. He does so by recounting the life of an ordinary Santhal woman, beginning with Rupi’s birthing pains, moving through her chronic sickness and her children’s troubled lives, and concluding with her eventual, partial “cure.” Arguably the most noteworthy motif in this fictional biography is witchcraft, for it encapsulates several interconnected themes that impinge directly on the concerns of this conference collection and this paper: environmental degradation as a result of neocolonial industrial abuse; the consequent disintegration of indigenous societies; the need for indigenous agency; and the ways in which literature records this damage. In my reading, Shekhar’s focus on women’s lives and the social context of witchcraft is especially brave and fruitful, given the national-political ramifications of the violent contestations that afflict his home state of Jharkhand. Witchcraft is, first of all, gendered, and so offers a window onto Santhal men’s perceived emasculation in vexed times and the projection of this anxiety onto women.20 Witchcraft is also, as the most “mysterious” type of behavior in Santhal society, unknowable (mostly to men) and therefore threatening. Finally, and most importantly for our topic, the novel shows this female behavior to be intimately associated with natural settings that bespeak secrecy and danger, notably groves and forests. The context of witchcraft helps us understand the significance of the aforementioned woman’s “undisturbed sleep” following stillbirth. Immediately following this scene is a description of Santhal religious practices in which “women’s bodies are not considered appropriate vessels to receive gods” (25). The husband of Older Somai-budhi, the woman who miscarries, is the chief priest, and so must ritually purify himself each morning, after a night spent with his wife, by bathing in the village “stream every day,” “wash[ing] his clothes,” and then praying at “the shrine of Marang-Baru,” the village god, “and his consort Jaher-Ayo” (24). The jaher, or “place where the sacrifices are made” (25), is at this point in time, before Rupi Baskey’s birth,

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“surrounded by four tall sarjom trees” (25). It is, in other words, an enchanted place that keeps a natural order (the four planted trees) and is framed by “five more shrines,” two of which are dedicated, respectively, to “feminine power” and “masculine power” (25). One of these, however, is “set apart from the others” on a small, “plain patch of earth,” a “mysterious” shrine dedicated to a non-gendered deity, Sima-Bonga. This deity “symbolizes the negative forces” that cause “disease, infirmity, poverty, doom, and . . . death,” requiring the chief priest, or naikay, to offer it “obeisance along with the other deities” (26). The space given to this description reflects the shrines’ importance to the Santhals. Immediately following this relatively long section, the narrative resumes the account of Older Somai-budhi, the young woman. This is particularly revealing because the roles of belief and ritual, like the village’s natural setting, suffer as a result of outside intrusion, so that much later in the novel, by the time Rupi’s sons have grown up, Kadamdihi “wasn’t the village it once was” (179). Not only have villagers “stopped worshipping their gods,” but the “jaher had turned into a jungle” (179). The shrines have ceded their place to the “copper factory,” “railway power substation,” “wireless tower” (86), uranium mine (89), and other signs of modern industry. In a lengthy diegetic scene that illuminates a number of important themes, the novel provides us with Rupi’s acutely felt perception—a term that proves to be an especially vital motif—of the effects of this infrastructural development. The occasion is a journey by train and bus to her husband Sido’s place of work, which will be their new home. Rupi is initially mesmerized by the infrastructure: “It was very beautiful, with trees on both sides of the road, eucalypti mostly. The road was good, too, well-maintained and tarred” (89). To her, the multi-storied houses are “unlike anything she had ever seen” (89). This area, Sido explains, is where the “[uranium] mine workers live” (89). As the bus “rolled out of the township and entered a wooded stretch,” Rupi notices that the road here is “not as well kept” (89). It leads to a copper mine in another town, and then runs “along the [town’s] long boundary wall” (90). She sees that “[t] he wall was cracking . . . and the drain between the wall and the road was overgrown with cacti plants and putus shrubs” (90). Despite this area’s dilapidation, it at least has, to her relief, “people on the road,” “[o] n foot” and “on bicycles” (89), in contrast to the previous town’s forbidding urban aspect. As they approach Sido’s work town of Nitra, the “forests,” a sight familiar, and presumably pleasing, to Rupi, given her love of trees and forested home village, nonetheless occupy an “unfamiliar place” (90). There are two especially noteworthy features of this scene that illustrate my argument, and which center on the motif of seeing, in the double sense of ocular and psychic perception. It is noteworthy, to begin with, that signs of industry in this landscape have already become, in the couple of decades

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since Older Somai-budhi’s youth, naturalized parts of the countryside. For example, the narrative relates how Rupi, on her journey to Nitra, “looked at passing trees, cows, fields and forests; at the ruins of the huge aerodrome which the Allied Forces had built in the forest outside Chakuliya; at the wireless tower,” and so on (86), the string of dependent clauses effectively sutures natural and industrial sights. For Sido, not surprisingly, these sights have become mundane, ignorable. He only points out those things which he knows are part of “a new world” for Rupi (87)—the mines, for instance. But the reader shares Rupi’s perspective, both of the newness of this world and the recognition of its artificial coherence, in which factories are naturalized. Here, Shekhar correctly relies on his metropolitan reader’s expectations. But why should this be so? Why, that is, should a sight that is so mundane in our modern world also seem to us, as it does to Rupi, “new” and “alien” (91)? We are able to share this view because of the aforementioned motif of perception, which characterizes not only this but numerous scenes throughout the book. There are, for example, several “first” sightings for Rupi: the “first time” she sees the important memorial (84), the “first time on the way to her husband’s house” (84), her first look at a tarred road (89). She is also perpetually observing, “Looking out of . . . window[s]” (84, 85, 90), “see[ing]” and “staring” at everything that’s new (85, 90). Ironically, however, she also cannot see many things. She does not, for instance, see a rice factory that Sido says “is right in front of your eyes” (86). When Sido tries to point out a “famous” temple, “her view was blocked by a man standing in the aisle” of the bus (89). And when they pass the location of another temple, Sido says, “You can’t see it now” (90). Yet Rupi can, ironically, see the ghosts that visit her dreams, just as she detects an ominous power in some women’s, such as her sister-in-law’s, unnervingly restless “eyes” (95). We (Shekhar’s readers) naturally view these apparitions in accordance with classic narrative depictions of ghosts, even as we can understand something of what Rupi, and especially Della (Putki’s childhood friend who is now, in the diegetic present, old), apprehend when they see bhoot (ghosts). For them, and indeed for Shekhar’s text, this is no mere gothic entity, but instead a very real being to whom characters relate on individual terms. Like Rupi, we (metropolitan readers) dissociate our own perception from Rupi’s and Della’s, unwilling or unable to see what is “right in front of [our] eyes.” Shekhar is not making a case for either the presence or absence of ghosts. What matters, as his straightforward style indicates, is that the characters believe they see and hear the ghosts, and experience this not in a gothic or supernatural realm, but in the modern present. This ghostly ontology adds a new, disruptive layer to the “civilized/uncivilized” duality on which universalist history-making is based. If this duality presupposes a concept of the “human,” along with all that does not constitute the human—the animal, the supernatural, Nature—then

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to disrupt the duality is to invalidate the very notion of “human.” As Giorgio Agamben has it, when the concept of “animal”—that is, the nonhuman—is “an existing, real thing,” as it is for Rupi and Della, then it “has gone beyond the difference between being and beings” (2004, 92). Such a “beyond” is, from the modern perspective, a terrifying prospect, which the reader glimpses and which is comparable to Rupi’s impression of the strange world beyond her village. For this reason, the motif of perception in the novel also, as we might expect, denotes the theme of knowing—specifically, different ways of knowing, whether through spiritual communion (visions, witchcraft), modern education (Sido’s role as a teacher), or innate perspicuity. When Rupi for the first time sees wireless towers and mines, we acutely feel the situation’s dramatic irony, for we know more than Rupi, at least for now.21 As readers of this particular narrative, we have, for instance, been given ominous hints of what is to come and glimpses of witchcraft, just as we are given hints of industrial and religious changes. We also, as metropolitan readers, understand the disjunctive world Rupi sees in ways she does not, even as the narrative grants us her perspective. The novel arguably allows us, in this way, to hold both ways of seeing, of knowing, in mind simultaneously. We can thus see better how the changing world is revealed not only through the stark presence of industry, but also cultural habit. When, for instance, Sido “raised his right hand and touched his forehead and chest” as a means of “paying obeisance to an invisible deity” as they enter his village, Rupi is puzzled. “‘Oh! It’s that temple,’ he said, pointing to a tall hill . . . ‘A Shiva temple.’” Though they “‘can’t see it’” from here, he has “‘see [n] others bowing their heads. So I too got into this habit’” (90). Sido has, in other words, incorporated a common Hindu, non-Santhal expression of belief into his everyday life. This is not a troublesome issue in itself; the gesture does no harm and, indeed, exemplifies India’s oft-cited religious syncretism. What is more troublesome, when this is read in the context of the novel, is that Sido’s adopted habit signals his (and many Santhals’) acceptance of a different religious outlook, much as they have adapted to the presence of industrial transformation. The demise of native beliefs and surrender of shrines to the jungle is coupled with the rise of “a cult” that has been “founded by” a former “cleaner of trucks,” and that uses the powerful new (for the Santhals) medium of advertising to attract many tribal followers (179–180). The new cult, together with the Shiva temple and surrounding industries, are part of the new “home” to which Sido introduces Rupi (91). The irony doubles in this regard, for Rupi is asked to be at home in a place whose loss of recognizable features makes it seem “alien,” even as Sido, as we are told at the start of the novel, “mostly, isn’t home” (97). This close reading affords us a better means of interpreting the role of women amid this upheaval, in particular how their ostensibly nefarious

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intimacy with nature (32) is perceived to be the cause of the tribal group’s perplexing maladies, both physical and social. In the same way that Older Somai-budhi clung to the space of an untroubled sleep following her miscarriage, several Santhal women embrace their labeling as witches, whether or not they actively sought out the dark art. A sociological reading suggests that this occurs, as it did in medieval Europe, whenever women are seen to be a threat to male power, but that once labeled as witches, many women find in it a relatively greater degree of agency (see Willis 1995). Witches among the Santhals, as in other cultures, are often blamed for illnesses that are interpreted as the result of envious or vengeful curses. Witchcraft, Shekhar makes clear, long precedes tribal contact with other societies, and there is no indication that its incidence rises following modern intrusion. What is clear is that the novel, as mentioned, allegorizes the Santhals’ predicament by detailing a variety of illnesses among them, and that Santhal men, befuddled by new, indistinct roles (such as Rupi’s son Jaipal, who is lured to urban nightlife), transfer their frustration onto their wives and mothers. In such circumstances, in a culture in which a man can assert, “My wife’s health is no one’s business” (153), it’s no wonder women like Gurubari, Rupi’s sister-in-law, finds in her rumored witchcraft a measure of power. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the association of witches with groves and forests. We are told that “So many women . . . possessed the knowledge” of “dark practices” that even pairs of men walking from one village to another at night are terrified by monstrous “women who fed on the hearts and livers” of people (32–33). It is the shrubland, the very namesake of their dreamed-of state of Jharkhand (variously translated as “shrubland,” “forest home,” “land of jungles,” and “bushland”22), that is especially fearsome, harboring not only “bandits and robbers”—who, by comparison, are a known and therefore less worrisome threat—but also, more frighteningly, the kind of “women” who “gamboled naked” in the river, “utterly unconcerned about who was watching them” (33–34). The silver-haired, dead “aunt” who haunts Rupi Baskey’s dreams is said to have had “magic . . . in her voice” and become an “evil” mentor to Rupi’s sister-in-law, Gurubari (135). She was rumored to have “[led] other women to the copse of sarjom trees outside the village” where “they would all dance in the silent ecstasy that arose from the worship of their gods” (135–136). Despite the relative innocuousness of such scenes, witchcraft does, in effect, sometimes lead to negative consequences, as we see in Gurubari’s increasing control over Rupi’s person. We are told at the beginning of the novel, as flashback, how Gurubari “came into her life like a friend but twined around her like the golden vine which latches on to the trunk of a healthy, green tree, sends its roots deep into its heart and, robbing the host of all nutrition, leaves it an empty shell” (6). The analogy to locally known vegetation

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conveys the affective potency of Rupi’s condition. On one level, we have a clear allusion to invasive tree species, such as the aforementioned eucalyptus, as signifiers of the change described later in the novel. On another level, the use of active, rapacious verbs to describe Gurubari’s mysterious hold over Rupi—“sucked,” “latches,” “twined,” “robbing”—makes us experience something of the enervating mental and physical helplessness Rupi endures. The description also de-romanticizes dominant cultures’ conventional association of natural imagery with seemingly innocent, nature-loving tribal peoples—a move that usually enables the modern world to contrastively assert its supposed sophistication. But just as Santhals themselves see this alakjari vine “glisten” benignly and miss its parasitic nature, so the narrative defamiliarizes for its reader these romanticized naturalistic tropes. Given Gurubari’s insidious manipulation of Rupi, the old aunt’s frequent appearances to her in dreams, the rumored promise of witchcraft’s comparatively greater power for women, and Rupi’s childhood attraction to trees, it may seem surprising that she should reject this prospect. She “understood,” for instance, her younger sister-in-law Dulari’s “predicament” in having to live among spiteful, domineering family members (162). She empathizes with Dulari because she, too, has endured this. Gurubari understands this as well, just as she appreciates her role as a reputed witch. Wishing to keep this status to herself, therefore, she tells Rupi that talk of witchcraft is “rubbish” and that if she, Rupi, did not stop reporting visions of the ghostly aunt, people “may even accuse you of knowing things you aren’t supposed to know.” Hearing this, Rupi “would shake with fear” (152). I believe that Rupi’s rejection of witchcraft and its associational power is a vital clue to the novel’s critique of the logic of enchantment and disenchantment. Rupi rejects becoming a witch less because she worries about negative effects than because she understands that a fuller subjective agency, for which she yearns, requires her to reject the Santhals’ own dichotomizing logic, one in which “it is taboo for women to become mediums” (172) or assume other authoritative roles.23 She intuits how, to cite a work on Shakespeare’s England, witchcraft “beliefs encode [male] fantasies of maternal persecution” (Willis 1995, 6).24 Although tempted by the prospect of “appropriating for herself an agency usually restricted to men” (Willis 1995, 6)—in Shekhar’s novel, the male privileges of mobility, education, outside employment, and religious power25—Rupi understands that this is ultimately an agency determined by men. She echoes in this particular way the long-ago behavior of her mother-in-law Putki’s friend, Della, who refuses to follow the “witchery” of her mother, but is nevertheless able to “behave like a man” by “[speaking] her mind” (55). (Not surprisingly, the metaphor of vision-as-perception reappears in this case when Della’s father angrily scolds her for confronting a bhoot (ghost), and she stubbornly retorts, “I am not to be stared at’”

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[59].) Complicating this outlook is the fact that Santhal men’s own agency is circumscribed by dominant society, a reality the entire community acutely perceives. An additional thematic irony is that even the groves in which so-called witches occasionally congregate are being rapidly displaced by modern industry. Toward the end of the novel, Rupi feels, in a kind of unspoken, inverse declaration of rights, “tired of lying about like corpse, . . . tired of being dependent on others, . . . tired of not having her husband and firstborn with her, . . . tired of knowing what ailed her but not its cure. She was tired of her disease” (184). Rupi’s innate stubbornness and emotional exhaustion enable her to finally recognize the insidious logic behind these beliefs, most of which dispossess women. We can read in Rupi’s reflections the historical and rhetorical ironies that color modern interpretations of tribal cultures. Just as European colonialism viewed its non-European cultures in the dualistic terms of tradition/modernity, enchanted/disenchanted, and so on, a perspective both western and postcolonial states have inherited, so does the Santhal culture as described by Shekhar perpetuate its purity/pollution outlook. Rupi recognizes that a “cure” for these afflictions, whether allopathic, ayurvedic, or homeopathic (she has tried all three), cannot come from either outside or inside, but must instead be crafted from a range of cultural possibilities. It’s no wonder, therefore, that the novel returns again and again to the theme of knowing, which provides a kind of connective tissue that integrates Rupi’s ailment, the natural setting, and the social-historical context. When we hear Rupi’s kind-hearted neighbor Romola insist that Rupi hear the story of how Gurubari learned her “magic” (“If she doesn’t know, she will die” [134]), we gain an understanding of several things at once. We perceive, to begin with, that Rupi’s health depends as much on her connection to the land as it does on medical or herbal remedies. Her love of trees, and indeed her personification as a tree around which Gurubari twines herself like a deadly vine, attest to this. We also see, for this reason, that Rupi’s identification with landscape is inseparable from her health. In the face of industrial pollution and deforestation, she suffers, as if embodying her community’s pain. We understand, finally, that the totems of modern life her children and grandchildren start to bring home do not exert the mystifying or awe-inspiring hold over the family that we might expect. The catalyst for a renewed, balanced understanding of life in these changed times seems to be Rupali, the new wife of Rupi’s youngest, and most loyal, son Bishu. Rupali’s name is a version of Rupi’s, and she in fact mirrors her motherin-law’s youth in many ways: “healthy and strong, and as fair as Rupi had been” (203), she is called “the next Rupi of Kadamdihi” (203). She is able to enact what Rupi had only dreamed about. Whereas circumstances compelled Rupi to be always on the margins, both literally and figuratively—she comes from

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a village “on the border of Jharkhand and West Bengal” (18),26 and she stands on the “edge” of a memorial platform during a storm while two of her young sons occupy its “centre” (169–170)—Rupali, by contrast, simply chooses to re-shape her own familial-spatial inhabitance. She determines that she and Bishu will “build [more rooms] outside the house” (206)—an unprecedented decision by a lowly young daughter-in-law. When Rupali’s “aunt-in-law” tries to needle her by asking if she got this radical idea from a witch, Rupali simply answers that her idea “is common sense” (206). “Will you,” she asks, “deny” the family women “to live in a bigger space?” Rupi is “impressed” and tells her daughter-in-law to “go build your house” (206). Rupali thus fearlessly and straightforwardly stakes her claim to her rightful place in the household. Her “common sense” guides her determination to be on equal spatial footing with those many “place[s]” associated with the older family members that she “was shown” after her arrival in order to make clear her perch on the domestic ladder (205). In effect, she forges a new family myth by incorporating herself, along with her desires, into it. Her bold revision of this arrangement parallels—and arguably instigates—Rupi’s renewed health. Rupali’s innate common sense, the two women’s identification with one another, and Rupi’s resulting “cure” of sorts are by implication the necessary responses to both the modern state’s and the local culture’s bifurcated social constructs. Rupi, like her daughter-in-law, has finally gained a self-awareness sufficient to the challenges, both home-grown and external, she and her family face. She now sees behind the mask of the village’s male shaman, or ojha, who not long before had declared that Rupi’s “‘sufferings” were “coming from . . . the outside’” (192). (The ojha’s wish to preserve male authority is exposed when the narrator reveals his private view of Rupi and Sido: “He thought, Here is a man who has been completely taken over by a woman who is out to ruin his home. . .” [193].) This new awareness means that the “mysterious” groves (76) near Santhal villages and the region’s “strange and frightening happenings” attributed to women (31), like Rupi’s former hauntings, no longer hold sway over her. This is why, I think, the concluding lines of the novel, which describe Rupi’s dream following all “the changes in her life” (207), is unlike any dream she has had. Rather than ghosts and eerie utterings, Rupi finds herself “enter[ing] the [family] house through the front door” and seeing a scene of simple domestic contentment: Her late father-in-law “sits in one corner, . . . sipping tea,” and her still-living mother-in-law “leads [her] behind the house, to the dogor tree” (208). The scene is surprisingly close to her present reality, suggesting that dreams no longer signify the sense of loss they once did, and that reality itself has been renewed. This ending returns us to the topic of textual meaning and its relationship to the natural world that I alluded to in my introduction. For if Rupi’s final dream (which hints at her death, in as much as “her body [is] free of

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suffering” [208]) is more easily translatable—if, that is, it is readily intelligible to both Rupi and the reader—it may be because she has learned to incorporate several worldviews into her particular social and corporeal optics. But why, we might ask, does this realistic, seemingly factually-grounded scene “need” to be rendered as a dream at all? Why does Shekhar not simply present it as straightforward narration, as he has been doing? I interpret this as the author’s attempt to retain the scene’s confluence as dream and reality. The narrative resists, as does Rupi, the generic predilection for clear boundaries,27 and thereby calls into question the presumed transparency that governs the oppositions of enchantment and disenchantment, myth and history. To adapt Chakrabarty’s characterization of his own historiographic goals, Shekhar’s novel, as Rupi’s dream suggests, has strived to communicate “the partly opaque relationship [between dominant and dominating forms of knowledge] [that] we call ‘difference’” (2000, 17). It is important to note in the context of readability and interpretation that Shekhar cannot rely on his Indian readers to understand untranslated terms any more than he can on non-Indian readers. This is because Santhali is an Austroasiatic language that, despite loan words from and intermixing with Bengali and Hindi, is not widely spoken outside the community. These untranslated words therefore effect a form of estrangement on the novel’s metropolitan reader, perhaps because the author wants readers to share something of the disorientation Rupi feels, and that tribals generally experience as they negotiate cultural contact zones. The untranslated dialogue also serves to characterize a culture in which spoken language continues to hold sway in a way that modern, literate language use does not, particularly in regard to nature.28 Just as Hinduism’s “belief in the cosmic power of language, and its consubstantiality with reality,” including the “ability [of words] to alter the natural world,” was forced to contend with Europeans’ belief in language’s purely “semantic function,” so do Shekhar’s Santhal characters treat language as speech acts of “ritual power” (Yelle 2013, 39–40). Ironically, the secular Indian state’s inheritance of modernity’s empirical, “linguistic ideology” has taken the place of its colonial antecedents in Jharkhand, just as Brahminical Hinduism has arguably done (see Guneratne 1999, 9; Sethi 1999, 122). My point is that the novel depicts how the Santhals’ confidence in their language’s ability to alter, or adequately interact with, nature erodes in the face of modern change. Irony in this way underscores the precariousness of Adivasi lives within the Indian nation-state. This is particularly evident when Shekhar describes the dysfunction of Adivasi political movements and the governance of Jharkhand State, such as when he summarizes strident disagreements between Adivasi groups, which include the Santhals, thus giving the lie to the idea of unity. The narrator presents this as a swift evolution from idealism to cynicism among the

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public, so that by the 1980s, when the wise old patriarch of the family, Khordaharam, dies, the town’s “morality was lost” and its “faith slipped into crisis” (158). The souring of Adivasi political fortunes parallels the story’s many individual deaths and illnesses, notably Rupi Baskey’s. Shekhar’s biting irony, though, is that this political degeneration cannot be read, as Sudipta Kaviraj argues in the context of nineteenth-century Bengali intellectuals, as a “retreat” from the “woods, to the home, to the bed” (2000, 405). Kaviraj’s words imply that this last metonym for familial domesticity, “bed,” marks the lowest moral point of social change, an escape into private life. By contrast, Shekhar presents a temporal realism alongside local mythic time. The instances of historical detail about Jharkhand are no more or less meaningful than the “mysterious” incantations that buffet the villagers. Indeed, political upheaval, as presented in the novel, seems distant and relatively meaningless when compared to the immediacy of the spirit world in which mostly women are involved. This mix of temporal realism and rhythmic, mythic time directly shapes our interpretation and provides a coda of sorts for my analysis. When we are told near the start of the book that “All of this happened more than seventy years ago,” and that Rupi Baskey’s son “is today a young man” (6), the stage seems set for a familiar family romance. And in fact, the extended family’s relationships reflect this kind of realism. We are told that because Rupi’s husband Sido “mostly isn’t home” and “has become Gurubari’s,” a development that becomes the source of painful “rumours” (7), Rupi feels utterly helpless, with events “entirely out of her control” (8). Once a strong young woman who “had grown up hunting sparrows with slingshots even as she performed the routine tasks expected of any girl” (3), Rupi is now, at the sujet’s start but the fabula’s roughly chronological midpoint, a shadow of her youthful self. All the while, the rest of the village superficially “lamented” the family’s “fate and, most of all, enjoyed the show” (9). At this point, it promises to be a story of emotional “estrangement” that fits squarely into novelistic paradigms, especially the motif of history. As Rumina Sethi reminds us, the novel genre, “with its epic intentions,” was well suited to bridging India’s deep past and modern, selfconsciously national (as in nationally unified) present (1999, 26, 137). The early adverbial signposts—“once,” “then,” “[years] ago”—are in fact borne out by not only Rupi’s condition, but also the region’s (Jharkhand’s) history, which the narrator occasionally summarizes (71, 147). Such realist foreshadowing seems to promise, in other words, a familiar linear trajectory and denouement.29 CONCLUSION As we have seen, Devi and Shekhar counter the assumptions of realism in ways that echo Hogan’s advocacy for the “dusky spaces” of our

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natural existence. As the writer and keynote presenter of the “Dwellings of Enchantment” conference Pierre-Yves Touzot remarks, his and his characters’ relationship to nature may be informed by “scientific realism,” but is conditioned by an “emotional” connection to it that “necessarily” entails “metaphysical [reflections]” (2016). Just as Hogan and Touzot navigate among different ways of knowing, so Devi’s and Shekhar’s narratives, though inescapably modern, give us glimpses of different modernities, different visions. These works do so not by presuming that tribals are changeless or innocent, but rather that they retain the understanding that “being human involves the question of being with gods and spirits,” of coexisting with unseen webs of being (Chakrabarty 2000, 16). For to feel obliged to apologize for either the existence or illusion of the unseen before commenting on human action, as academics tend to do, is to preemptively accept the rules established by European modernity.30 Ironically, even if readers rightly diagnose Rupi’s condition as a version of what we call generalized depression, this condition is every bit as diffuse and mysterious as the effects of a witch’s suppositional curse. In these ways, Devi and Shekhar enable attentive readers of their tribal-centered fictions to accept being in uncertainties, and to see beyond the boundaries inherited from colonial modernity.

NOTES 1. Mahasweta Devi, “The Hunt” (1974 in Bengali, 1990 English translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey (2014). All subsequent parenthetical page references will be from these editions. 2. Bennett (2016, 91). Bennett argues that we have generally accepted the “pervasive narrative” of disenchantment, which is premised on a teleological view of the world. She points out that Thoreau himself included human cultural “artifacts” in his concept of “the Wild” (92). 3. For more on “multiple modernities,” see Dube (2002, 2006). 4. I do not have space here to examine the large topic of forest imagery in Indian religious and literary texts, and the relationship of this term (forest) to the Hindi word, and now global concept, jungle. It’s important to note, however, that both terms have long and varied histories throughout India, with significant ideological connotations. For more on this, see for example Skaria (1999a), Jalais (2009), and Lutgendorf (2000). Lutgendorf observes that even the classical Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana depict the forest in contradictory ways, such as by infusing it with divine “transcendence” as well as with danger and the idea of exploitable raw material. He argues that this reflects the epics’ “attempt to resolve the dialectical tension between the paradigmatic realms of ‘city/kingdom’ and ‘forest’ . . . through integrative

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characters who combine elements of both.” The resulting, inescapable “tension . . . is itself often provisional or inconclusive” (280–81). 5. My understanding and use of the terms “modern” and “modernity” here are succinctly captured in Chakrabarty’s definition of “political modernity”: “the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise” that “is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe.” These concepts, he notes, include “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, [and] scientific rationality,” and are governed by an “unavoidable,” “indispensable . . . universal and secular vision of the human” (2000, 4). 6. Chakrabarty observes that the supposed transition from a pre-modern to a modern society, such as India is said to have experienced, “cannot any longer be seen simply as a sociological problem of historical transition . . . but as a problem of translation” as well. He goes on to remark on the disinclination of many Indian writers to translate every piece of vernacular speech that they transliterate, just as Devi and Shekhar do. As Chakrabarty observes, “The English-language monograph in area studies . . . was a classic embodiment of [the process of translating diverse forms, practices, and understandings of life into universalist political-theoretical categories of deeply European origin.” For this reason, “A standard . . . and least-read feature of the [area studies] monograph . . . was a section called the ‘glossary’ . . . No reader was ever seriously expected to interrupt their pleasure of reading by having to turn pages frequently to consult the glossary. The glossary reproduced a series of ‘rough translations’ of native terms, often borrowed from the colonialists themselves. These colonial translations were rough not only in being approximate (and thereby inaccurate) but also in that they were meant to fit the rough-and-ready methods of colonial rule. To challenge that model of “rough translation” is to pay critical and unrelenting attention to the very process of translation” (2000, 17). 7. Wheeler rightly cautions that following “a materialist view to the exclusion of all other perspectives is assuming the features of a dogma and is working much as . . . theological” dogma did in the past. I would simply add that religious dogma is of course still very much with us—the obverse, in a sense, of positivist doctrine. (2014, 69 and passim). See also Rigby 2014, who advocates a “materialist spirituality . . . in which contemporary forms of knowledge are . . . brought into conversation with non-modern (and frequently non-Western) religions and philosophies” (289–90). 8. For example, Shekhar, in his “Acknowledgments” at the end of the novel, thanks his editor for helping to transform “Rupi Baskey’s story from an ‘insulated fable’ into a proper novel” (2014, 210). 9. As Devi says in an interview, “the [tribal] hands that fell the tree are not the hands responsible for deforestation all over India. Big money is involved . . . The railways cooperate by carrying this illegally felled timber” (1995a, xix). 10. One can read an additional irony in this reference to Hema Malini since in the 1970s when the story was published, Malini was a superstar, particularly notable for the iconic Hindi film Sholay (1975), in which she plays a rebellious rural beauty.

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11. I thank Bénédicte Meillon for noticing the sexualized association. 12. One could argue that the reading and re-reading of the text vicariously reenacts the hunt’s ritual repetition. 13. For a summary of the debate about historical “rupture,” see Yelle 2013, 12–18. 14. For an insightful analysis of how the practice of history as such fails to account for any kind of behavior, including labor, that is entails, for instance, gods and spirits—that is, a very different “labor” than what modernity envisages—see Chakrabarty 2000, Chapter 3. 15. For a revealing study of the Mother India image, see Ramaswamy (2010). 16. I set aside here, as a complex and important paratext, continuing discussions about subaltern speech and agency, which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) inaugurated. 17. It is important to note that protests against the inequities of energy production and use occur frequently in Jharkhand, as do violent encounters between those tribals who have turned militant and the police. For example, as reported in The Hindu newspaper, “locals who gathered to protest against a power plant polluting [their] area” were fired on by police, resulting in three deaths (Chowdhury 2016). 18. Rao’s 1938 novel in English, Kanthapura, and Achebe’s 1958 Nigerian novel in English, Things Fall Apart, similarly convey the milieu of oral cultures in southern India and colonial Nigeria, but provide glosses for vernacular terms. 19. It’s well to keep in mind here that although Fredric Jameson’s much-criticized comment that “all third world texts are necessarily . . . national allegories” (original emphasis) suffers from its sweeping generalization, tribal literature, because of the current political, material and cultural exploitation of tribal communities, more visibly conflate characters’ private lives and the public affairs of the larger collectivity in which these live. See Jameson’s original essay (1986), Ahmad’s well-known critique of it (1987), and Szemon’s reconsideration (2001). 20. For an analysis of the politics of masculinity in British India, see Ashis Nandy (1983). For an example of using the term “emasculation” to describe Adivasi dispossession, see Bijoy (2007, 27). 21. Most readers of the novel, even if new to the Indian context, will be aware of tensions across the globe between mining interests and local populations. Also familiar is the importance of the tourism industry in such regions, as it is in Jharkhand. Jharkhand is especially rich in minerals, not only the copper and uranium Shekhar mentions, but also coal, bauxite, manganese and several others. Besides the expected advertisement for national park forests, two Jharkhand tourism websites bizarrely mention “Mining Tourism” as a potential draw for visitors, along with such options as “Spiritual,” “Adventure,” and “People and Culture” (see “Jharkhand Tourism” 2016). 22. The “History of Jharkhand” Wiktionary entry (2016), for instance, defines the name Jharkhand as the Land of “‘Jungles’ (forests) and ‘Jharis’ (bushes),” whereas Wikipedia’s “Jharkhand” entry (2016) translates it as “lit [erally] ‘Bushland.’” The various translations of the name illustrated by these and most other sources point to both the challenge of treating “jungle” and “forest” as identical (despite historical distinctions), and the problem of which language or dialect one translates from. Thus, a January 2016 Hindustan Times article titled “Jungle Gangs of Jharkhand”

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uses the terms interchangeably, despite the different connotations of “jungle” and “forest” in India, such as using the Hindi word “jungly” to mean “wild” (Shrivastava 2016). “Forest,” by contrast, usually suggests a more managed environment, whether for timber harvesting (which the British began in the nineteenth century), nature preserves, or reforestation, which the Indian Forest Service administers. See Rajan (2006). 23. A speech early in the novel by the seemingly “simple” Santhal, Khorda-haram (Rupi’s future father-in-law), which establishes his life-long fame, reflects this purity/ danger logic despite its brave resistance to discrimination. Staring down members of the non-tribal, Hindu Kamar community whom the Santhals had allowed to settle among them, Khorda-haram excoriates their casteism by inverting their (the Kamars’) criticisms. “’We may be dirty,’” he says, “‘but how clean are you? . . . Your mouths smell worse than our backsides’” (17). He concludes by declaring, “‘One word more against our women, children and religion, and see what happens to you all’” (17)—a statement that preserves the very stratifying logic he ostensibly decries. 24. I recognize the potential hazard of comparing witchcraft in different cultures, which risks generalizing singular events in a way that Chakrabarty critiques (2000, 75–76). But given the story’s inescapably modern context and publication, I believe such a comparison is warranted and helpful. 25. Shekhar also makes this evident by writing that tribal women like Putki who voted for the state of Jharkhand “became part of history” (71), whereas tribal men, such as the winning candidates for Legislative Assembly of the neighboring state of Bihar, “made history” (71). Women were seen to be passive participants, men the active ones. 26. The present-day narrator reveals his hand in this anachronistic description since Jharkhand became a state only in 2000. The location of Rupi’s village, not unlike that of protagonist in Manto’s classic Urdu short story “Toba Tek Singh,” proves to be partly a matter of historical clumsiness and semantics, thereby underscoring the madness and irrationality of geopolitical constructs. 27. Realist fiction typically projects meaning onto am empirical, decipherable social landscape, whereas here, as Parama Roy says of another of Devi’s stories, “the landscape confounds [the] demand for spectacle, meaning, or sentiment in terms that are intelligible” in conventional ways (Roy 2010, 131). 28. Skaria describes, for example, the Dang tribal community’s attribution of “power” to the “well told” ancestral tale (1999b, 897, 901). 29. In an examination of how Protestantism’s “language of disenchantment” influenced British attitudes in colonial India, Yelle describes how “The term ‘to foreshadow’ or ‘shadow forth’ finds its genesis in . . . typological interpretations” within the Christian telos, where Moses and other Old Testament figures are seen to be merely “symbol[s] and prefiguration[s] of” Christ’s literal “sacrifice” in the New Testament. By “demot[ing] and devalu[ing] the symbol in favor of what it symbolized,” Christianity, beginning with the Reformation, claimed that “’the clear light of the Gospel’” had “made plain” the ancient Jewish “mysteries” (Yelle 2013, 23–24). 30. Chakrabarty further reminds us that “modern European political [and social] thought” has long assumed a unitary “single and secular historical time” predicated on

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the idea of “the human as ontologically singular,” and “that gods and spirits are in the end ‘social facts.’” He maintains instead that the spirit world is “existentially coeval with the human,” so that any discussion about “being human must involve gods and spirits” (2000, 16).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Achebe, Chinua. 1994 (1958). Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books. Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ahmad, Aijaz. 1987. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text 17 (Autumn): 3–25. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bijoy, C. R. 2007. “Adivasis of India: A History of Discrimination, Conflict and Resistance.” In This Is Our Homeland: A Collection of Essays on the Betrayal of Adivasi Rights in India, edited by Aditi Chanchani, et al., 16–38. Bangalore: Equations. Burkert, Walter. 1998. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1998. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts.” Postcolonial Studies 1: 15–29. ———. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chowdhury, Manob. 2016. The Hindu, Ramgarh, August 30. “At Least 3 Killed in Police Firing in Jharkhand.” http:​/​/www​​.theh​​indu.​​com​/n​​ews​/n​​ation​​al​/ot​​her​-s​​tates​​/ poli​​ce​-fi​​ring-​​in​-jh​​arkha​​nd​/a​r​​ticle​​90497​​56​.ec​​e. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Daiya, Kavita. 2015. “Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction.” In A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Ulka Anjaria, 221–36. New York: Cambridge University Press. Devi, Mahasweta. 1995a. “The Author in Conversation.” In Imaginary Maps: Three Stories, translated and edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ix–xxii. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995b. “Douloti the Bountiful.” In Imaginary Maps, 19–93. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995c. “The Hunt.” In Imaginary Maps, 1–18. New York: Routledge. Dube, Saurabh. 2002. “Introduction: Enchantments of Modernity.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4) (Fall): 729–755. ———. 2006. “Mapping Oppositions: Mapping Enchanted Spaces and Modern Places.” In Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities, edited by Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube, 76–94. New Delhi: Social Science Press.

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Faris, Wendy B. 2002. “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism.” Janus Head 54 (2): 101–119. Garrard, Greg. 2007. “Teaching Education for Sustainable Development.” Pedagogy 7 (3) (Fall): 359–83. Ghosh, Amitav. 2006. The Hungry Tide: A Novel. New York: Mariner Books. Guneratne, Arjun. 1999. “The Shaman and the Priest: Ghosts, Death and Ritual Specialists in Tharu Society.” Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 19 (2) (Article 6): 9–20. Harrison, Robert Pogue. 1992. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hogan, Linda. 1996. “The Kill Hole.” This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, edited by Roger S. Gottlieb, 37–40. New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 1994. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York: Routledge. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. 2014. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jalais, Annu. 2009. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sunderbans. New Delhi: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.’’ Social Text 15 (Autumn): 65–88. “Jharkhand.” 2016. Wikipedia. https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Jharkhand. “Jharkhand, History of.” 2016. Wiktionary. https​:/​/en​​.wiki​​pedia​​.org/​​wiki/​​Histo​​ry​_of​​ _Jha​r​​khand​. “Jharkhand Tourism.” 2016. http://www​.jharkhandtourism​.org. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2000. “Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature.” Modern Asian Studies 34 (2) (May): 379–406. ———. 2003. “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal.” In Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, edited by Sheldon Pollack, 503–66. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klein, Naomi. 2016. “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.” London Review of Books. Edward W. Said London Lecture. LRB 38 (11) (May). http:​/​/www​​.lrb.​​co​.uk​​/v38/​​n11​/n​​aomi-​​klein​​/let-​​th​em-​​drown​. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lipner, Julius J. 2005 (1882). “Introduction.” In Anandamath, or the Sacred Brotherhood, by Bankimcandra Chatterji, translated and edited by Julius Lipner, 3–124. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lutgendorf, Philip. 2000. “City, Forest, and Cosmos: Ecological Perspectives from the Sanskrit Epics.” In Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, edited by Christopher K. Chapple, et al., 269–89. Cambridge, MA: Center for the Study of World Religions. Manto, Saadat Hasan. 2005 (1955). Toba Tek Singh. Translated by Frances W. Pritchett. http:​/​/www​​.colu​​mbia.​​edu​/i​​tc​/me​​alac/​​pritc​​hett/​​00urd​​u​/tob​​ateks​​ingh/​​tran​s​​ latio​​n​.htm​​l.

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Meillon, Bénédicte. 2015. «Call for Papers.» https​:/​/ec​​opoet​​icspe​​rpign​​an​.co​​m​/cal​​l​ -for​​-pape​​rsapp​​el​-a-​​comm​u​​nicat​​ions/​. ———. 2016. “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. Interview: https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org/2187. ———. 2016. “Lieux, écriture et réenchantement du monde: Entretien avec PierreYves Touzot.” Last Modified December 16, 2019. https://ecopoetique.hypotheses. org/3759. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajan, S. Ravi. 2006. Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800–1950. New York: Oxford University Press. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham: Duke University Press. Rao, Raja. 1967 (1938). Kanthapura. New York: New Directions. Rigby, Kate. 2014. “Spirits that Matter: Pathways Toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, 283–90. Bloomingston, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Roy, Parama. 2010. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions and the Postcolonial. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sethi, Rumina. 1999. Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation. New York: Oxford University Press. Shekhar, Hansda Sowvendra. 2014a. “Doctors See Things, Not Just Ailments.” The Hindu Sunday Interview, November 8. http:​/​/www​​.theh​​indu.​​com​/f​​eatur​​es​/ma​​ gazin​​e​/wri​​ter​-h​​ansda​​-sowv​​endra​​-shek​​ar​-ta​​lks​-t​​o​-anu​​meha-​​yada​v​​/arti​​cle65​​74437​​ .ece. ———. 2014b. The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company. Shrivastava, Kumar Sambhav. 2016. “The Jungle Gangs of Jharkhand.” Hindustan Times, January 24. http:​/​/www​​.hind​​ustan​​times​​.com/​​stati​​c​/the​​-jung​​le​-ga​​ngs​-o​​f​​-jha​​ rkhan​​d/. Skaria, Ajay. 1999a. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999b. “Some Aporias of History: Time, Truth and Play in Dangs, Gujarat.” Economic and Political Weekly 34 (15) (April 10–16): 897–904. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Szemon, Imre. 2001. “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (3) (Summer): 803–27. Tickell, Alex. 2015. “Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel.” In A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Ulka Anjaria, 237–250. New York: Cambridge University Press. Toppo, Anima Pushpa. 2010. “Jharkhand Jungle Bachao Andolan.” Tebtebba “Global Seminar-Workshop on Indigenous Women, Climate Change, and REDD+”

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presentation pdf. http:​/​/www​​.tebt​​ebba.​​org​/i​​ndex.​​php​/a​​ll​-re​​sourc​​es​/ca​​tegor​​y​/94- ​​ globa​​l​-sem​​inar-​​works​​hop​-o​​n​-cli​​mate-​​chang​​e​-in​d​​igeno​​us​-wo​​men​-a​​nd​-re​​dd. Wheeler, Wendy. 2014. “Natural Play, Natural Metaphor, and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, 67–79. Bloomingston, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Willis, Deborah. 1995. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press. Yelle, Robert A. 2013. The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 17

Anna Livia’s Glamorous Ecopoetics Rachel Nisbet

The Anna Livia chapter in Finnegans Wake can be read as an ecopoetics of enchantment, promoting environmental justice in newly postcolonial Ireland. Joyce first drafted this chapter of Finnegans Wake in 1924, two years after the Irish Free State was constituted and Ireland became a postcolonial nation. It is instructive to bear in mind Ireland’s recent partitioning when considering the narrative of housewife Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP). She is a glamorous, allegorical figure for the life-giving potential of the River Liffey’s watershed. While ALP can enchant, or “cast the glamour over one,” dressed in alluring garments that derive from her watershed, she is equally associated with the complex, multifaceted concerns of environmental justice theory.1 Her chapter, part one, chapter eight of Finnegans Wake, traces an environmental history of the Liffey watershed; it also addresses contemporary issues of overpopulation, resource consumption, and pollution in the Liffey watershed (Nisbet 2016, 24–25).2 Additionally, ALP’s chapter anticipates our current Anthropocene predicament by grappling with the Great Acceleration of these phenomena on a global scale. The term Great Acceleration describes how human populations, water use, and primary energy, to name but a few variables, have increased, often exponentially, since the 1950s (Steffen et al. 2007, 617). Anna Livia, then, personifies complex ecological relations. Personification, as Griffiths reminds us, combines two semantic domains, “conceptual relations” and “human actions,” operative in space and time (1985, 9). In this type of metaphor “nomen becomes res” (name becomes thing); thus, we can imagine a river-woman (ibid., 10). I agree with Griffiths that an “imaginative being” such as ALP has an inherent “referential instability,” since she can be collapsed into a mere acronym at any moment (ibid.). The possibility of this collapse is far more apparent in written than oral narratives where the 309

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written letters evoking personifications such as ALP can be seen as nomen. As Griffiths points out, this has philosophic implications (ibid.). ALP figures the becoming of Life; however, she can shift from representing a network of hypostatized beings within an ecosystem, to being a grammatical formulation. Such collapse is suggestive of the threat to ecosystem stability when biodiversity decreases. As a glamorous, transformational figure, who represents the wondrous life-giving potential associated with the Liffey watershed, ALP depends upon language. Indeed, grammar and glamor have the same etymological root. This river-woman is most vividly imagined when she is gossiped about by the two washerwomen that James Joyce mobilizes to tell her story. These women speak in a poetic register, rich in alliteration and rhyme, and often swayed by a dominant metrical pulse. When evoked via their discourse, ALP figures a network of human and nonhuman actants, which Bruno Latour defines as “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others,” to be dramatized in discourse (1996, 373). By associating ALP with the diverse actants that characterize the Liffey watershed and have shaped its environmental history, Joyce anticipates our current understanding of nature as arising from interconnected, autopoietic processes that need to be nurtured, so that the biodiverse ecologies that sustain human societies do not collapse. As animal and plant species are lost in the planet’s sixth mass extinction, they also revert from res to nomen, just as ALP does if we are unwilling to imagine this riverwoman as someone for whom we should care. ALP’s narrative anticipates how, as a species, we are now considered to be a geophysical force, changing the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere, and causing a rate of species extinction one hundred times higher than “normal rate” observed on geological timescales.3 While we do not fully understand how we are changing nature with our technologies, eating habits, and ever-increasing population numbers, ALP’s ecopoetics imply that thinking nature as a potentially vengeful, yet sacrosanct entity allows us to better respect, value, and care for the lives and life-giving substrates that sustain our existence as individuals and as a species. In contrast, if we imagine nature as a set of resources, we are not disposed to establish respectful relations with the nonhuman. Personification is a rhetorical device well suited to exploring complex environmental justice issues. As well as providing a philosophical model for the extinction of living beings (res becoming nomen), in evoking ALP the washerwomen’s dialogue also dramatizes how geographies of difference result from social practices.4 For example, in the early 1900s, when Ireland was still under British rule, wealthier Dubliners typically had a pastoral vision of Ireland. Living in townships beyond the city limits, often with view of the Wicklow Hills or Dublin Bay, they did not pay city rates and enjoyed

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higher living standards than their inner-city contemporaries (D’Arcy 2013, 265). Their pastoral vision was reinforced in Dublin’s print media, which the “Aeolus” chapter in Ulysses satirizes. It is worth noting that Joyce identified this chapter as treating the science of rhetoric in the schema he produced to help Carlo Linati understand Ulysses (U, 737; Ellmann 1966, 535). The “Aeolus” chapter contains a newspaper’s description of Erin where “some purling rill . . . babbles on its way . . . to the tumbling waters of Neptune’s blue domain” (U, 119). Such pastoral rhetoric is rejected by Joyce’s alter-ego, Stephen Dedelus. He refuses to title one of his own newspaper articles with a quote derived from Vergil’s Eclogues (1.6), “deus nobis haec otia fecit” (“god makes us this place of leisure,” trans. Nisbet; U, 143).5 Pastoral rhetoric is similarly rejected in the ALP chapter, in which the laboring washerwomen eschew pastoral tropes. Instead, their account of ALP’s character rather foregrounds how this river-woman is best treated with care and veneration; this stance has an affinity with the Georgic’s cultivation of nature through collective toil. The washerwomen describe ALP variously as a goddess; a river-woman clothed in garments derived from the mountains, plants, and animals in her catchment, and thus embodying the ecosystems distributed between the Wicklow Hills and Dublin Bay; a housewife; a vengeful defender of the living terrain she bodies forth, and a sultry temptress. Additionally, it is possible to view the two washerwomen and ALP as collectively figuring the Celtic Mórrígan, a war goddess who haunts battlefields with her two sisters, and who can also be witnessed in her guise as the Washer at the Ford.6 ALP, then, has a vengeful aspect, taking individual lives to sustain the healthy balance of Life within the Liffey watershed. The washerwomen narrating ALP’s story demonstrate their kinship with the environment she creates by metamorphosing into a tree and stone placed on either side of the Liffey at the chapter’s close. Clearly, this is a narrative that counters what Adorno and Horkheimer call “the extirpation of animism” (2002, 2). As J. M Bernstein reminds us, “animistic thought” is grounded in the belief that things have ends for themselves, and that in possessing a life of their own they exceed their “phenomenal appearance,” taking on affinities with other, analogical things (2001, 192–93). Bernstein clarifies how Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the epistemology of animism in Dialectic of Enlightenment, before considering the Enlightenment’s antithetical way of knowing that privileges the empirical analysis of objects (192). While dramatizing stones, trees, and rivers as being alive (animism), and giving them human characteristics (anthropomorphism), Joyce also satirizes attempts to reveal nature’s secrets; this plausibly includes his own portrayal of ALP washing her “privates” (discussed below).7 He does so by including a letter from ALP in the closing pages of the Wake. ALP writes “Well, we

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have frankly enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of natures (thanks ever for it, we humbly pray)” (FW, 615.13–15). On one level, Joyce’s self-parody implies representations of nature’s life-giving secret cannot be revealed but only fabulated or allegorized in what Lanham calls “a kind of referential thinking” (1991, 6). Thus, he obliquely acknowledges that his own representation of ALP as nurturing nature is an exercise in referential thinking. ALP’s enjoyment of nature’s secret workings also potentially alludes to her enjoyment of passages in the Wake that adopt an erotic register, while deploying poetic devices of alliteration and rhyme and gravitating toward a dominant meter. Taken in this way, her enjoyment of the Wake as a fiction acknowledges how grammatical sentences do provoke embodied responses, nomen exerting a palpable physical effect upon us (res). ALP’s enjoyment bolsters the impression that she too is a living being. As an example of one of Joyce’s erotic passages, in the ALP chapter, he writes of how the naked river-woman “greased the grove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscratch and turfentide and serpenthyme” (FW, 206.32–34). In this description, which settles into a rising line of iambic or riding meter, accumulating tension, Joyce appears to draw analogy between the female clitoris and a boat’s keel. As a life-giving figure, ALP actively and assertively fosters her pleasure in conceiving, and the above-mentioned description evidences this formally; its rising line moves as if toward a climax. We learn that ALP maintains her sexual health by coating her genitals in a lubricant whose natural ingredients include thyme, an herb known for its antifungal and antibacterial properties. Joyce sustains the extended metaphor associating ALP’s genitalia with a boat’s underside, by calling this natural lubricant an “antifouling” product (FW, 206.33). Ralph Slepon notes that antifouling paints are applied to the bottoms of boats, preventing the accumulation of barnacles and algae on their undersides (2018). This boat analogy might also invite us to consider ALP as ark-like, a figure ensuring the safe transport of Life into the future. ALP is associated with a boat’s underside within an extended description of her as a Celtic goddess as I discuss below. Associating her with an immanent divinity is one way to understand the immanent, life-giving force that she figures as a river-woman. Religion, as Guthrie contends, may be understood as “systematic anthropomorphism” (1992, 3). He observes that our world is “perceptually inchoate,” and argues that we have a cognitive tendency to interpret it as “human-like” (4–5). But can the “wiggly livvly” stream associated with ALP, which seems to be alive because it moves, evince a faith (FW, 204.14)? As they gossip, one washerwoman observes that “Fidaris,” which Slepon glosses as faith, “will find where the Doubt arises like Nieman from Nidgends found the Nihil” (FW, 202.18–19).8 The ironic proper nouns in the

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above citation (No one, Nowhere, and Nihilism) gesture toward Nietzschean philosophy. As Sam Slote points out, for Friedrich Nietzsche, knowledge does not derive from a single source but instead “comes from a multiplicity of perspectives, a multiplicity of styles that each occasion their own partial and incommensurable Weltanschaung” (worldview; 2013, 132). Echoing the argument of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, the Wake’s characters often “become the comedians,” causing us to laugh at the singular perspective of a science, a religion, a species, as they move between worlds to develop a multi-perspectival vision (GM, III §3, quoted in Slote, 133).9 Such laughter suggests there is value in thinking nature via multiple epistemes. If we are to cultivate life in its myriad of biodiverse forms, not least to sustain healthy, egalitarian human communities, we need to value the findings of ecological science. However, it is equally important to respect nature’s ability to delight and disempower us, and to this end it is useful to think of this nurturing yet potentially vengeful nature as a powerful, living being. ALP AS A FIGURE FOR THE COGNITIVE AND PSYCHODYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS In dramatizing ALP, Joyce anticipates and exemplifies Paul and Scott Slovic’s contention that scientific, quantitative discourse urgently needs to be “complimented with other modes, such as story and image, which so forcefully inspire human audiences and shape our moral compass” (2015, 9). Dublin’s socio-environmental issues, circa 1924, could be summarized using statistics to evince, for instance, high infant mortality rates due to typhoid outbreaks in inner-city Dublin. However, such numerical data would fail to represent the complex, multi-scale, socioeconomic, psychological, and environmental feedbacks operating within urban Dublin. For example, typhoid epidemics plagued inner-city Dublin because raw sewage polluted the River Liffey at its mouth and washed upstream on the tide into central Dublin (D’Arcy, 275). This sewage entered Dublin Bay from new, plumbed, flush toilets; these were trophies of socioeconomic success that glistened in homes located in Dublin’s rich suburbs (ibid.). Although quantitative analysis receives ironic treatment in the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses, in the ALP chapter of Finnegans Wake Joyce eschews rational, numerical correlations of flush toilet numbers, personal income, and infant deaths. Instead, he mobilizes Anna Livia to dramatize historic feedbacks between collective human agency and the many nonhuman actants that shape the ecologies associated with the Liffey watercourse. Since ALP personifies the life-giving potential of the Liffey watershed, one way to conceptualize her, then, is as what Deborah Rose calls the “nourishing

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terrain” of Australian aboriginal Country (1996, 7). Another way to think her is as water-khôra. Derrida understands khôra (a term used in Plato’s Timaeus) as some “half-way place” where things take form (1995, 116). ALP is synonymous with such a half-way place of potentiality; she is pre-ontological, a schema that can only be named via the associative, figurative language of poets. She is what prompts the blossoming forth of life, not a physical terrain. Turning to the research of Seymour Epstein offers a productive way to consider why Joyce arranges the ALP chapter so we imagine the Liffey waterkhôra through personification. Epstein’s psychological research undergirds Paul’s and Scott Slovic’s contention that in order to convince the public, quantitative scientific discourse needs to be communicated via modes such as allegorical narrative (Epstein 1994, quoted in Slovic and Slovic, 5). Epstein finds we parse reality using both an evidence-based, logical, “rational system,” and an “experiential system” that interprets using images, metaphors, and affect-rich narratives (ibid.). The hypothesis that we have both a “cognitive” and a “psychodynamic unconscious,” as the title of Epstein’s article proposes, recalls Vico’s cyclical model of civilization, which informs the Wake’s structure and micronarratives (1994).10 For Vico, rational, technocratic societies are preceded by societies who use poetic imagination to interpret their changing environment. Vico cautions that poetic imaginings become lost in corrupt civilizations. Their rational view of the Earth-as-resource leads to a degrading passion for material goods that precipitates a return or ricurso “from a barbarism of reflection to barbarism of sense” (Vico 1948, 381). As Fordham notes, Joyce led the first readers of the Wake to view this text (written in four parts) as a progression from a divine age characterized by a language of poetic imagination, to an age of heroes, then a human age of rational discourse, followed by an anarchic stage or return (2007, 44). But, as Fordham points out, there are also cycles within cycles (7). As an example of rational discourse and mathematical language giving way to an associative poetic (and again erotic) imagination, Jonathan McCreedy explains how Euclidian geometry is used ironically in part two, chapter two of the Wake (titled “Nightlessons”; sic) as one of ALP’s sons tricks the other into imaging their mother’s vulva as he plots an equilateral triangle with a compass (2011). In the Wake’s Viconian scheme, the fall or ricurso passages serve as a reminder that we need to retain our figurative, associative, poetic understanding of the world, including an appreciation of ALP as life-giving water-khôra within our “developed,” rational societies. When Joyce first drafted the ALP chapter in the 1920s, the view of natureas-resource was dominant in the newly independent Republic of Ireland, there were plans afoot to harness the Liffey’s hydropower to generate electricity, and environmental pollution was acute in the inner-city environment.

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This situation is dramatized in ALP’s own narrative. First, one washerwoman comments “call her calamity electrifies man,” potentially alluding to the hydroelectric plans that were being discussed in Irish parliament.11 Second, when traveling from the Wicklow Hills toward Dublin, Anna also travels from a Viconian-like stage of Celtic Goddesses to that of Men in an industrial, colonial or recently postcolonial society. Upon this journey, Anna, according to one washerwoman, gradually loses her natural color and begins to stink as a result of the city’s twentieth-century pollution. Thus, the Liffey River’s course functions as a chronotope onto which Dublin’s environmental history is mapped. On this extended temporal scale, twentieth-century Dublin becomes a place where the human and nonhuman no longer coexist to nurture their mutual, seemingly magical, flourishing. Instead, Dublin’s countryside provides material resources that are subject to taxation and revenue, and which are discussed in the language of utility that is associated with Vico’s age of men (Harrison 2009, 122–23). ALP’s chapter constitutes an attempt to reinstate the veneration of a sacred living earth, presenting it as vital to modern, urban ecologies, even if river goddesses are recognized as necessary imaginative constructs in this context. This ecopoetics draws on a Viconian model and dramatizes how the cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious needs to operate in tandem for us to establish nurturing relationships with our environment. Joyce’s ecopoetics demonstrates that imagination is a powerful force that informs our relations with the physical earth. Styling himself as a “worldright,” a neologism recorded in the Finnegans Wake Notebooks and also used to describe Joyce’s alter-ego in the Wake, Shem the Penman, he mobilizes Anna Livia to figure the vital, vibrant life-source animating the Liffey catchment (Deane et al. 2002, 86; FW, 014.19). This authorial strategy counters the popular understanding of the Liffey River as a utilitarian resource, whose waters could be dammed, piped, and sold with the profits benefiting Dublin’s wealthier citizens. To this end, Joyce arranges a brilliant, lyrical description of Anna as a swampy river goddess who scrubs her naked body, including her genitalia, with “leaf mold” (FW, 206.34). While this passage is erotic as I have discussed above, and parodies Hera’s anointment of herself with heavenly ambrosia, it also clearly dramatizes Celtic spirituality and its veneration of the earth (McHugh 2006, 207). Anna Livia is closer to the ground than Hera; her name (Eanach-Life), can be glossed as leafy “watery place—pond, lake, marsh, swamp, or fen” (O Hehir 1965, 159).12 Anna also has a kinship with the immanent Irish goddess Feis Ana, variously described as “the most ancient personification of the land itself,” “the mother of all the Irish,” and “the archetype for every [Irish] woman, for every goddess, and for the rivers and the landscape” (Gibson 2006, 49). After her ritual ablutions, ALP makes a garland, picking “meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and the

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waterweed” to crown herself; these are plants that border the upper reaches of the Liffey (FW, 203.06; 206.34; 207.02–3). Depicted thus, Anna Livia might appear to step out of a pastoral, country backdrop, to offer “a delight in the natural” (Gifford 1999, 2). However, the washerwoman’s description rather conforms to Marsilio Ficino’s Neo-Platonic doctrine where nudity symbolizes divine power (Hadot 2004, 79). This suggests she represents the immanent “soul” of the Liffey. Anna subsequently garbs herself in a glamorous attire that mainly derives from the Liffey’s natural environment. For example, her outfit includes “royal swansruff” (FW, 208.18). With such enchanting descriptions of ALP, Joyce focuses, like Kierkegaard, on “the details of our world that have been lost in the technological age” (Ryan 2013). When considering Anna Livia’s figuring of the flow of life within the Liffey watershed, it is worth noting that the washerwomen’s dialogue asserts that personifying the Liffey water-khôra as a passive female is not only wrong, but also woefully anachronistic (“You’re wrong there! . . . Tisn’t only tonight you’re anacheronistic,” sic; FW, 202.34–5; Slepon 2018).13 This comment, made by the more authoritative of the two speakers, informs her interlocutor that imagining ALP as “young thing pale shy slim slip of a thing” who lost her virginity to a “heavy lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman” is incorrect, as it adopts a historically recent personification of nature as passive and weak. Since ALP figures cyclical flow, she has no pure, unspoilt origins, and therefore cannot be associated with the virginal. Instead, the authoritative washerwoman rather develops ancient personifications of nature as a powerful female trickster-like figure to dramatize ALP. This authoritative washerwoman’s assertion that there are “right” and “wrong” personifications of nature problematizes Timothy Morton’s call for Ecology without Nature. Morton argues that “the very idea of ‘nature’” will need to give way to an “‘ecological’ state of human society” (2007, 1). He submits that conceptualizing nature as a medium in which we are embedded hampers ecological forms of politics, because nature is rather dynamic and will “keep giving writers the slip” (1–4). I agree with Morton’s emphasis on the importance of thinking ecologically; but it is also important to recognize that ALP figures the dynamic natural processes that Morton rightly argues should inform our politics and aesthetics, and that Joyce associates her with nature. The unavoidability of referential thinking about nature is dramatized in ALP’s marriage to her Norse husband, HCE, which parallels the River Liffey’s nurturing of Old Norse culture. ALP physically assimilates HCE in her bed and takes his language into her “river mouth.” For instance, in the first draft she looks out of a “windeye” to view her “country” (Groden et al. 1978, 48:3; MS 47471 b-74r; draft 1.8§1A*0; FW, 198.23 reads “windaug”). Joyce most probably encountered this anthropomorphic compound word in reading Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language (1912);

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Jespersen states that window derives from the Old Norse “vindaug,” meaning wind-eye (Deane et al. 2002, 73; VI. B.6.068g; Jespersen 1912, 73, quoted in Deane et al. 76). In the same chapter, Joyce acknowledges that ALP also sees the natural world through his own eyes by including in the description of her striking apparel a pair of thick glasses similar to his own: “owlglassy bicycles boggled her eyes” (FW, 208.09). Returning to HCE, in adopting his language, Anna Livia also interprets the world through the “window” of her husband’s beliefs and sociocultural practices. For example, already in the chapter’s first draft, 1A*0, she serves him a hybrid Danish-English breakfast of “eygs” and “fisk” (FW, 199.16).14 She also sings him songs from his native land: “High hellskirt saw ladies hensmoker lilyhung pigger” parodies the Danish Jeg elsker saaledes hine/hendes smukke lille unge piger (FW, 200.12–13; trans., “I so love those beautiful little young girls,” McHugh 2006, 200). Thus, ALP becomes the “nature” that HCE projects onto her, by supporting him in his cultural practices. The sigla HCE is linked to many names; but significantly, he is an everyman, whose nickname is “Here Comes Everybody” (FW, 32.18–19). This implies that ALP shapeshifts to become the dominant idea of what nature is for each culture that her watershed sustains. ALP’s adoption of the languages and viewpoints of those who live in her vicinity reflects how her history is the environmental history of the River Liffey catchment. ALP bodies forth life from the nourishing terrain that extends from Ireland’s Wicklow Hills to Dublin Bay; this area has nurtured human life from (at least) the Pleistocene to the early twentieth century. Of course, other species have been nurtured by the Liffey water-khôra over a much more extensive period of time. Joyce appears to have researched this topic, and HCE’s theriomorphic guise as a salmon gestures toward this fact (as I discuss further below). During her life-story as a river-woman, Anna sustains human societies, morphing from a pretechnological Pleistocene “igloo” dweller, to a modern lady, dressed in written language and technology (alphabet buttons close her coat, and a railway line and railway tunnel form its belt; FW, 207.33; 208.20–1). In personifying the environmental history of the Liffey catchment as a figure whose attire becomes progressively less glamorous as it is layered upon her (her skirt is “snuffdrab”), ALP is mobilized to relate human actions to long-term environmental change (FW, 208.25). By knowing how to “cockle her mouth,” pursing her lips to be kissed by a succession of colonial patriarchs, and filling her bay with bivalves that were an important source of protein for these successive societies, she helps us imagine the Liffey watershed on an inter-generational timescale (FW, 199.31–2). Consequently, the washerwomen gossiping about ALP dramatize a notion of Bildung that recalls Goethe’s idea of Bildung as a pedagogy promoting “harmonic wholeness” (Rau 2002).15 However, by personifying the life-giving potentiality that shapes successive civilizations’

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natural environment, ALP turns the notion of home inside out, locating ”home” in what Timothy Clark terms as a “shared atmosphere,” biosphere, and geosphere (2012, 155). Moreover ALP, in personifying the potentiality for life within the Liffey catchment, points the way toward a “harmonious balance of self and world” that Hegel claimed the Bildungsroman could not achieve (Phenomenology of Spirit, quoted in Rau 2002). ALP’s chapter implies that balance might be achieved if we acknowledge our cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious processes, which modify “her” environment, as I discuss below. ALP’s proactive response to the Liffey’s stinking waters, which are, in part, a legacy of Britain’s imperial governance of Ireland, is again narrated using the register of naturalized myth. The housewife ALP has a vengeful-goddess aspect at this juncture in her narrative; she visits a series of ills on those who pollute her. Simon Estok theorizes that when the natural environment is perceived as vengeful is gives rise to “ecophobia”; this is the notion that nature disempowers and should be feared as it threatens our “loss of agency” (17). From an ecological perspective, the benefit of ALP’s vengeful intervention is that she reduces the environmental stress associated with overpopulation by bringing ills to the city’s inhabitants. She also curbs greed by offering the gift of gout to the rich and incites the poor to rise up against them. ALP’s visit to Dublin also has an ethical dimension, not least because socio-environmental issues have psychological (as well as scientific) underpinnings. Sexual drives can lead to unplanned pregnancies, large families, poverty, marital, and environmental stress. Responding to this situation, ALP offers the condom, a “pig’s bladder balloon” (FW, 212.05). Greed, too, is influenced by biological, psychological, and sociological factors. For example, as Ryan Kreiger Balot reminds us, Aristotle finds greed is underlain by the psychological desire to simply get more, without considering others’ claims (2001, 31). In responding to the above issues, ALP’s intervention recalls the destructive agency of the Greek Keres and Celtic Mórrígan. As already mentioned, the latter figure is a Celtic war goddess and the Washer at the Ford whose laundering of bloody linen prophesies death in battle. ALP’s personification as a vengeful goddess seems designed to impel urban dwellers to reestablish sustainable relations with the agrarian and upland regions that support them. Such georgic care, the laboring to cultivate a dynamic, flourishing nature to sustain a society is different to what Reynolds describes as “engineering ecological networks exclusively to maximize a desired flow of energy,” in order to produce foodstuffs, potable water, hydropower, or biofuels (Reynolds 1997, 298–301). Rather than adopting such a performance-related model of ecosystem management, Reynolds argues that we should foster more complex energy flows through ecosystems, since biodiversity is the best way to ensure stable ecosystems (ibid.).

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The washerwoman’s retracing of the River Liffey’s physical course (and environmental history) to its life-giving mountain source supports Vico’s theory that the health of the civis depends on the “perennial springs” that support it; for Vico, these springs arise on the “mountain tops” (1948, para 629). The washerwomen seem to associate the upper reaches of Liffey watershed with the Celtic phase of her environmental history. The mountain Lugnaquilla is associated with “noblesse pickts” (Picts) and a “drove of maiden hawthorns” crowd round at the Liffey’s source. The hawthorn is a tree letter in the Celtic Ogham alphabet; Jane Gifford writes that this tree guards springs and wells (2006, 58). The washerwomen also associate the greatest species diversity with the period when the Liffey River was nurtured by the Celts. The implication being that the Celts, who revered the River Liffey as a sacred life source, were most successful in ensuring a collective flourishing of life. The clothes ALP wear incorporate fauna and flora from the upper reaches of her catchment, including the yellow gorse, green reeds, and the migrating, shimmering salmon (FW, 208.08–12). In contrast with the Celts, the English and the Norse were not “wellingtonorseher” (willing to nurse her), and they make her drab (FW, 203.07). Societies like the Celts, who conceptualize nature as being animated by gods and goddesses, interpret their environment in a poetic language that for Vico, and seemingly for Joyce, explains “what reason cannot” (1948, 9). While there is not space to expand further on this point within this paper, I suggest Joyce crafts the Wake’s strange language to evoke the structure, and process of thought of the psychodynamic unconscious. To return to the washerwomen’s discourse, this does not portray ALP as an animate body that fosters life by merely offering humans a bucolic dwelling place, however. Instead, to borrow a term from Lawrence Buell, the washerwomen’s “toxic discourse” accents their concerns for “human and social health” (1998, 640). Surprisingly, the washerwomen’s chatter echoes the rational assertion of medicine student Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. He opines that if cow’s milk were available for Ireland’s poor, “we wouldn’t have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives’ spits” (U, 14). Buck Mulligan identifies malnourishment due to lack of vitamin D as an environmental justice issue. Thus, he anticipates the washerwomen’s performance of ALP’s song, which articulates her longing to rise up against her Norse husband when her pantry runs out of milk, presumably due to their poverty. He also anticipates the “rickets and riots” predicted among Dublin’s twentiethcentury, inner-city population by one of the washerwomen (FW, 209.33). We might remember that in contrast with Buck Mulligan’s politicization of milk distribution, Stephen imagines their milk-lady as a magical crone, “crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool” (U,

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14). In this case “linguistic intensification,” a feature Jonathan Bate associates with ecopoetics, merely produces a stereotypical characterization of the Irish (2000, 75). It is the medical doctor, Mulligan, who articulates more clearly than the young Stephen how the health of Ireland’s population depends on multiple, connected actants. But Mulligan, unlike Stephen, lacks a sense of the sacredness of life and does not grieve its loss. Joyce’s nuanced personification of ALP is “good to think” how biodiversity and environmental justice are fostered; she is a thought experiment, a figure permitting what Claude Lévi-Strauss describes as “ideas and relations conceived by speculative thought on the basis of empirical observations” (1962, 89).16 In fact, ALP performs a similar liminal function to the mythical Amazonian “transformational being” Yacu-mama (mother of all waters), who is a combination of a trickster figure, an “androgynous transformational person,” and an anthropomorphic animal (Adamson 2016).17 As Joni Adamson observes, thinking the Amazon river through the person Yacu-mama enables violations against our soils, air, forests, rivers, lakes, biodiversity and the cosmos to be associated with this theriomorphic figure, who reminds us that we too are animals, entangled within the Amazon’s ecology (2016). Echoing Lévi-Strauss, Adamson proposes that Yacu-mama is “good to live with” (ibid.). Yacu-mama is symbolically central to the cosmo-political movement, which defends a cosmovision (or ecopoetics) “that is thousands of years in the making” (ibid.). A similar case can be made for ALP. She personifies the river catchment’s life-giving potentiality. ALP is also set into a time-space continuum of past, present, and future, another characteristic of transformational beings that Adamson points out lets us reflect on what we may want the future to look like, and plan what we have to do “to get there” (ibid.). JOYCE’S GEOSPHERIC IMAGINATION It is worth noting that Joyce’s environmental imagination does not only seek to revivify the River Liffey watershed; his is a geospheric imagination. Accordingly, ALP is mobilized to revise our influence on water-khôra associated with rivers across the globe. In 1924, making notes on Metchnikoff’s La Civilisation et le Grands Fleuves, Joyce writes “geosphere/hydrosphere/ atmosphere,” suggesting he may conceptualize issues of pollution, increasing population and resource consumption on a global scale (Deane et al. 2003, 120; VI. B.1. 079/e). A further feature of the ALP chapter supports this line of reasoning. Joyce, in arranging this text, acts as an “aquilex” gathering together the world’s rivers by collaging the names of thousands of them from “all ends of the earth” (Joyce 1966, 164).18 Joyce, then, seems to employ the device of the river catalogue to unite humanity on a geospheric scale.

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His river catalogue recalls the principle of Dryton’s PolyOlbion, which as Jonathan Bate notes, “holds all Albion together with a network of rivers, each with its animated genius loci” (2000, 224). Joyce’s global river catalogue creates a similar cohesion, while evoking each of the world’s rivers as being associated with a life-giving water-khôra. He does so in part by drawing on new metaphors that Alison Lacivita finds to update the notion of nature “mainly through ideas of organicism, community, symbiosis, and feedback cycles” (2015, 12). Lacivita points out, and I think rightly, that these new ecological ideas enrich the “universal history” that Joyce communicates in Finnegans Wake (ibid.) The world’s rivers pouring into ALP’s chapter suggest that she is good for thinking the complex socio-environmental interactions that have led to an exponential increase in global river pollution over the past two centuries. As such, Joyce’s river catalogue solicits our “transcalar imaginary” not only with regard to a temporal scale, but also with regard to a physical scale that connects local actions to global consequences. Visual artist Chris Jordan defines the “transcalar imaginary” as an ability to relate detailed local processes to large complex interactions (Slovic and Slovic 2015, 13). Timothy Clark rightly contends it is hard to think nonlinear scale effects, observing, “policies and concepts relating to climate change invariably seem undermined or even derided by considerations of scale” (149). Thinking nonlinear scale becomes all the more challenging if multiple organisms’ perspectives of scale or symbiotic entities’ perspectives of scale are considered. However, Joyce’s reported claim that “time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes” of the Wake supports my contention that in drafting the ALP chapter he was devising literary techniques to promote a “’transcalar imaginary” (Jolas 1963, 11–12).19 He shows the Liffey river-woman offering gifts to her one thousand and one children (Dublin’s citizens), thus implying that all the river-women of the world might do the same. Anna Livia and the washerwomen gossiping about her dramatize the vexing problem of the Great Acceleration of resource consumption, population, and pollution, and they offer us differing types of solution. In this environmental justice project, Joyce might be viewed as drawing on the vitalism of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911), the idea of an earthsystem elaborated by Leon Metchnikoff in La civilisation et les grandes fleuves historiques (1889), and the ecoanarchism of Peter Kropotkin. In his Trieste library, Joyce possessed the above-mentioned texts by Bergson and Metchnikoff, together with the following texts by Kropotkin: The Commune of Paris, La Conquista del Pane (The Conquest of Bread), Fields, Factories and Workshops, and La Granda Rivoluzione (The Great French Revolution; Ellmann 1977, 97–134).20

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In fostering geocentric thinking, the ecopoetics of ALP’s chapter grapples with the phenomenon of psychophysical numbing. This psychological effect occurs when “the value of a life decreases similarly against a backdrop of an increasing number of lives” (Slovic and Slovic, 7). Joyce counters this effect by relating the citizens of Dublin to Anna Livia, describing them several times as her 1001 children. Identifying a city’s population as a singlefamily unit, “all her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters, a thousand and one of them,” solicit the moral intuition to save one blood family, not a plethora of disparate individuals (FW, 210.04–5). Moral judgment, “the sudden appearance in consciousness of a moral judgement” is a trait very prone to “psychic numbing”: our intuitive desire to care is typically quashed as we contemplate multiple peoples under threat from disaster, or war (Haidt 2001, quoted in Slovic and Slovic, 23). Countering this tendency to stop caring about individual lives, which constitutes a significant problem in a chapter that explores the social consequences of long-term environmental pollution, one washerwoman rhythmically catalogues ALP’s children one by one. Improvising on the rhythmic formula “an [object] for [epithet or nickname],” she introduces startling personal details to suggest the historic identity of each of ALP’s offspring might be recovered if the riddle of their identity could be solved.21 For instance, there is “a rattle and wildrose cheeks for poor Piccolina Petite MacFarlane; a jigsaw puzzle of needles and pins and blankets and shins between them for Isabel, Jezabel and Llewelyn Mmarriage” (sic.; FW, 210.09–12). Rhythm and rhyme appeal to the nonrational part of the brain, while riddles invite the reader to assign identities rationally, employing hermeneutics skill, and delving into local history. Therefore, both the psychodynamic unconscious and the rational cognition are solicited in this listing of ALP’s children, repeatedly provoking the need to care, even as the reader feels overwhelmed by the sheer number of riddles to solve and individuals to identify. The task of identifying ALP’s progeny is compounded, as Joyce does not limit Anna Livia’s children to human beings. Indeed, he substitutes the word “Alveens” for “childer” or children in the first typescript of ALP’s chapter (JJA 48, 62; draft 1.8§1.3; MS 47474-128). Alveens is a rendering of “alevin,” which, as Joyce records, means baby salmon (Deane et al. 2003, VI.16.018a). As Joyce changes childer to alveen, he also changes “children’s part” to “hatchery part” (Groden et al. 1978, 48:62, draft 1.8§1.3, MS 47474-128). These substitutions associate the salmon’s annual spawning with the figures HCE and ALP: HCE often adopts the theriomorphic form of a salmon, and Anna Livia wears “salmon speckled stockings” (ibid., 11, draft 1A.*0, MS 47471 b-77-8; the stockings become “salmospotspeckled” in the final text, FW, 208.12). The above-mentioned changes reinforce the notion that ALP is an atemporal, life-giving mythical figure, who is capable of fostering a great

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plurality of lives. In the published Wake text, when the washerwoman narrating Anna Livia’s story is asked how many children ALP had, she answers at one point, “Close only knows” (FW, 201.28). The substitution of “Close only knows” for “God only knows,” in draft 1.5, completed in July 1925, seems an intentional move on Joyce’s part to allude to a narrative account of (deep) time rather than to transcendent, Christian onto-theology (JJA 48:122; draft 1.5; MS 47474-172). Moreover, “Close” may allude to the Irish geologist Maxwell Henry Close (1822–1903; McHugh, 201). This association is compelling for two reasons. First, Close’s glaciological research in the Dublin area is described in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which Joyce refers to in his Wake notebooks. Second, the Washerwomen’s dialogue implies only a geologist, like Close, could estimate how many children this watershed nourished, by considering the lives of organisms fostered by ALP in prehistoric times. JOYCE’S ECOLOGICAL CLAIRVOYANCE Although ALP brings “rickets and riots,” the condom, and abstinence to her children in an effort to remediate her despoiled watershed, her environmental activism has not been adopted by the inhabitants of her catchment. Despite ALP’s clairvoyance, there is now a dead zone at the River Liffey’s mouth (Diaz and Rosenberg 2008, 926). The coastal zone proximal to Dublin Bay currently experiences prolonged “eutrophication-induced hypoxia” (927). In other words, nutrients from fertilizers and from Dublin’s urban center run into coastal waters creating massive algal blooms (eutrophication); these blooms die and sink to the seabed, fuelling microbial respiration, which sequesters oxygen from the base of the water column (ibid.). When levels of oxygen dip below two milliliter per liter, the marine sediments become hypoxic and bottom dwelling benthic fauna (like oysters) die in massive numbers (927). This creates a dead zone, where there is no benthic fauna. Diaz and Rosenberg estimate this missing fauna not in terms of species number, but as missing biomass, expressed in mega tons (MT) of carbon. Is it valid to question whether the 400-plus dead zones currently located at river mouths would still exist if the world’s watercourses were again venerated as sacred, life-giving bodies? Children and adults frequently do regard rivers as animate (Guthrie, 53). This is probably because a river’s motion, unpredictability and ability to grow and shrink are characteristics of living things (ibid.). A river’s sounds can equally be interpreted as concrete anthropomorphism, for instance via a positing of river spirits. Anthropomorphism, as Guthrie convincingly argues, stems from “an overestimation of organisation and significance” as “we scan the world with human-like models” (62,

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90). The notion of a “sacred” river or other topographical feature appears bound up with our desire to assign human-like schema of organization and significance to natural features. Contemporary cognitive science research scholars think anthropomorphism is part of our “intuitive psychology” (Lane 2010, 1475; De Cruz and De Smedt 2015, 45). A river can be considered to have god-like omniscience or omnipotence because it has agency: it murmurs, it shrinks, it grows, and it runs over our legs if we sit in its shallows. The above literature review suggests that we each retain a sense of the world being alive, human-like and all-knowing in our psychodynamic unconscious. To conclude, it seems extremely important that environmental narratives address both our cognitive and our psychodynamic unconscious if they are to prompt us to act in ecologically responsible ways. Joyce’s personification of the Liffey’s water-khôra certainly seems designed to tap into our intuitive psychology to this end. Joyce wrote the ALP chapter of Finnegans Wake as Ireland was being divided into two nations that would both seek to capitalize on the finite natural resources of this geographic island. His personification of the river-woman Anna Livia Plurabelle represents her enchanting glamor, so members of the newly established Republic, and those further afield, might show care, and even venerate the life-giving potential of river catchments that sustain them through their daily actions. ALP remains an important figure for us today. If we are unwilling to imagine Anna Livia as a life-giving mythical figure, she collapses into an acronym, with the risk that the auto-poietic natures she figures may no longer give rise to the plants, animals, and natural environments that are able to delight us or motivate our care.

NOTES 1. Glamor is a corruption of “grammar” in Scots; it means magic or enchantment; Arthur Ramsay writes of wizards of jugglers being able to “cast glamour o’er the eyes of the spectator” (“glamour | glamor, n.” OED Online. July 2018. Oxford University Press. Accessed September 20, 2018. http:​/​/www​​.oed.​​com​/v​​iew​/E​​ntry/​​78690​​?isAd​​ vance​​d​=fal​​se​&re​​sult=​​1​​&rsk​​ey​=5G​​vbNi&​. In his survey of environmental justice theories, David Schlosberg includes those that stress the importance of allowing nature to “develop its autonomy, resilience”; he points out that this involves developing a “respect for autopoiesis” (Defining Environmental Justice, 136. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). He reviews theories by Tim Hayward (constitutional environmental rights), John Rodman (systems-based integrity), Jane Bennett (vital materialism), Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (capabilities theory applied to ecosystems; ibid., 136–52). ALP personifies the wonder of autopoiesis and militates for it to be respected. 2. My article “James Joyce’s Urban EcoAnarchism” offers close readings of several passages in the Wake’s ALP chapter to demonstrate how Joyce parodies Vico’s

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notion of cyclical history (Rachel Nisbet, Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. 7 no. 2 (2016): 10–28). I also argue that the portrayal of ALP defending her life-giving potential with a plague promotes the ecoanarchist aims Peter Kropotkin sets out in his writings. Kropotkin’s call to rise up against the monopolisers of land, and his evocation of a “law of mutual aid” resonates with a long tradition of history of Irish risings that are alluded to in the ALP chapter. Finally, I propose that these ecoanarchist aims address key factors that influence the “Great Acceleration” of environmental degradation and material consumption. 3. Gerardo Ceballos and Paul R. Ehrlich offer a helpful and concise overview of the current mass extinction in their recent letter to Science (“The Misunderstood Sixth Mass Extinction.” Science 360 no. 6396 (2018): 1080–81). 4. With this term, I allude to David Harvey’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, and its argument that space, time, place, and nature are concepts that are constituted by social practices, in relation to each other (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 5. Orgel Briskin notes Joyce’s reference to Vergil’s Eclogues in this passage (“Some New Light on ‘The Parable of the Plums.’” James Joyce Quarterly Summer (1966): 236–51), 236. Professor MacHugh, suggests the title “Deus nobis haec otia fecit” for Stephen’s proposed article, potentially because he associates the leisured life of shepherds in the Eclogues with the leisure afforded by the city. 6. James Mackillop, ed. “Mórrígan.” In A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed September 20, 2018. http:​/​/www​​.oxfo​​rdref​​erenc​​ e​.com​​/view​​/10​.1​​093​/a​​cref/​​97801​​98609​​674​.0​​01​.00​​01​/ac​​ref​-9​​​78019​​86096​​74​-e-​​3212.​ James Mackillop, ed. “Washer at the Ford.” In A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed September 20, 2018.  http:​/​/www​​.oxfo​​rdref​​erenc​​e​.com​​/view​​/10​.1​​093​/a​​cref/​​97801​​98609​​674​.0​​01​.00​​01​/ac​​ ref​-9​​​78019​​86096​​74​-e-​​3753.​ 7. Nietzsche, in his second preface to the Gay Science, writes, “One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for not showing her grounds?” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8. 8. “Nieman from Nidgends found the Nihil” might be glossed as: No one from nowhere found the Nile/Nihilism (FW, 202, 18–19). 9. The comic way, as Joseph Meeker notes, is reconciliatory; it unites different parties’ visions (The Comedy of Survival, 16. Tucson: The University of Arizona, 1997). Significantly, the Greek demigod Comus, who represents the comic way, is a fertility deity; Comus “maintains the commonplace conditions that are friendly to life,” and ensures that a diversity of lives can flourish (ibid.), 16–17. Like Comus, Anna Livia Plurabelle is a fertility deity, whose is healthiest when fostering a plurality of lives. 10. Beckett, Atherton, and Fordham have established Joyce’s debt to Vico. For instance, Samuel Beckett claims Joyce’s language is “pure Vico” (“Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce.” In Our Examination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 16, edited by Beckett et al. London: Faber and Faber, 1972: 1–22). 11. M. Maguire “Powering the Nation: A Social History of Hydro-electricity in Ireland.” In A History of Water: The World of Water, 83, edited by T. Tvedt and T. Oestigaard (London: I. B. Tauris & Co, 2006: III. 81–88).

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12. Hera’s name may mean “Protectress” according to Graves, which recalls Anna’s defense of her body (The Greek Myths, 51. London: Penguin, 1992). 13. Slepon notes that the Hadean river, the Acheron, means woe (“Acheron.” FWEET. Accessed September 20, 2018. http:​/​/www​​.fwee​​t​.org​​/cgi-​​bin​/f​​w​_gre​​p​.cgi​​ ?sr​ch​​=ache​​ron/)​. 14. “Eygs” and “fisk” also derive from Jespersen’s section “The Scandinavians” in Growth and Structure (McHugh, 99). 15. Petra Rau. “Bildungsroman.” In The Literary Encyclopedia. 2002. Accessed September 20, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lit​​encyc​​.com/​​php​/s​​topic​​s​.php​​?rec=​​tr​ue&​​UID​=1​​19. 16. In her keynote, “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections in Native American Writings,” Joni Adamson quotes Levi Straus’s observation that certain figures are “good to think.” (Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth. Perpignan. Accessed June 23, 2016. http:​/​/eco​​poeti​​csper​​pigna​​n​.com​​/watc​​h​-vid​​eos​-k​​ eynot​​es​-wr​​iters​​-a​nd-​​acade​​mics/​; Claude Lévi-Strauss. Totemism, 89. Translated by Rodney Needham. London: Merlin Press, 1991). Adamson also uses this formulation in “Why Bears are Good to Think and Theory doesn’t Have to be Murder,” noting how Barbara Babcock playfully absorbs and transforms Lévi-Strauss’s assertion in “Why Frogs are Good to Think and Dirt is Good to Reflect on” (Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 58 (1975): 167–81). 17. In her keynote, “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections in Native American Writings,” Adamson also describes totemic species as boundary crossers that take different forms and allow us to move between worlds, performing thought experiments about the cosmos (http​:/​/ec​​opoet​​icspe​​rpign​​an​.co​​m​/wat​​ch​-vi​​deos-​​keyno​​tes​-w​​riter​​s​​-and​​-acad​​emics​/). 18. This project began in earnest in draft 1.8§1.4, dating from June 1925 (Michael Groden et al. The James Joyce Archive (63 volumes), New York: Garland Publishing, vol. 48), 58. 19. Eugune Jolas. “My Friend James Joyce.” In James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, edited by Seon Givens, 3–18. New York: Vanguard, 1963. It is highly probable that ALP also supports Edward Viveiros de Castro’s philosophy of multiperspectival naturalism, since she dresses herself with swan down, potato rings, clinking pebbles, etc. (Castros 2012, quoted in Adamson, “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections”). 20. Parties can work together on contingent goals, like protecting a river, even if one party thinks of a river as a goddess, and another analyses its chemistry using lab instruments (ibid.). 21. Sometimes “children” to whom ALP offers gifts are themselves tropes. For instance, inevitable pubescent dalliance is evoked when “Jill, the spoon of a girl” is given to “Jack, the broth of a boy” (FW, 211.15).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adamson, Joni. 2016. “Ecopoetics of Interspecies Connections in Native American Writings.” Filmed June 2016 at the International Conference “Dwellings of

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Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth”, Perpignan, France. Video, 43.48. https​:/​/ec​​opoet​​icspe​​rpign​​an​.co​​m​/wat​​ch​-vi​​deos-​​keyno​​tes​-w​​riter​​s​-a​nd​​-acad​​ emics​/. Adorno, Theodor W., and Horkheimer Max. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Atherton, James. 1960. The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press. Bate, Jonathan. 2000. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador. Beckett, Samuel. 1929. “Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” In Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, edited by Samuel Beckett et al., 1–22. London: Faber and Faber. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover. Bernstein, J. M. 2001. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Briskin, Irene Orgel. 2001. “Some New Light on ‘The Parable of the Plums.’” James Joyce Quarterly 3(4): 236–251. JStor. Buell, Lawrence. 1998. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24: 639–65. Ceballos, Gerardo, and Paul R. Ehrlich. 2018. “The Misunderstood Sixth Mass Extinction.” Science 360 (6396): 1080–81. Clark, Tim. 2012. “Scale.” In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 1, edited by Tim Cohen. Michigan: Open Humanities Press. http:​//​hdl​​.hand​​le​ .ne​​t​/202​​7​/spo​​.1053​​9563.​​​0001.​​001. D’Arcy, Anne Marie. 2013. “‘Vartryville’: Dublin’s Water Supply and Joyce’s Sublation of Local Government.” In Joyce Studies Annual, 252–293. New York: Fordham University Press. De Cruz, Helen, and Johan De Smedt. 2015. A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. On the Name. Edited by Thomas Dutoit. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Diaz, Robert J., and Rutger Rosenberg. 2008/9. “Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems.” Science 321: 926–29. Ellmann, Richard. 1966. James Joyce. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977. The Consciousness of James Joyce. London: Oxford University Press. Estok, Simon. 2005 “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in King Lear.” AUMLA 103: 15–41. Fordham, Finn. 2007. Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, George Cinclair. 2005. Wake Rites: The Ancient Rituals of Finnegans Wake. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Gifford, Jane. 2006. The Celtic Wisdom of Trees: Mysteries, Magic and Medicine. London: Godsfield Press. Gifford, Terry. 2001. Pastoral. London: Routledge.

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Graves, Robert. 1992. The Greek Myths: Complete Edition. London: Penguin. Griffiths, Lavinia. 1985. Personification in Piers Ploughman. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Guthrie, Stewart Elliott. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hadot, Pierre. 2004. Le Voile d’Isis: Essai sur l’histoire de L’idée de Nature. Paris: Gallimard. Harrison, Robert Pogue. 1992. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago. Joyce, James. 1966. The Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3, edited by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1978. The James Joyce Archive, vol. 48, Manuscripts for “Finnegans Wake,” edited by Danis Rose and David Hayman. New York: Garland Publishing. ———. 2000a. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000b. Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin. ———. 2002. The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI. B.6, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout. Belgium: Brepols. ———. 2003a. The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI. B.1, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout. Belgium: Brepols. ———. 2003b. The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI. B.16, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout. Belgium: Brepols. Krieger Balot, Ryan. 2001. Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kropotkin, Peter. 1880. The Commune of Paris. N.P.: The Anarchist Library. ———. 1912. Fields, Factories and Workshops: Or Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work. London, Dublin and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons. ———. 1926. The Conquest of Bread. New York: Vanguard Press. ———. 1927. The Great French Revolution 1789–1793. Translated by N. F. Dryhurst. New York: Vanguard. Lacivita, Alison. 2015. The Ecology of ‘Finnegans Wake.’ Florida: The University Press of Florida. Lane, Jonathan D., Henry M. Wellman, and Margaret E. Evens. 2010. “Children’s Understanding of Ordinary and Extraordinary Minds.” Child Development 81: 1475–1489. Lanham, Richard A. 1991. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mackillop, James. 2004. A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCreedy, Jonathan. 2011. “‘Ocone! Ocone! ALP’s 3D Siglum and Dolph’s ‘Dainty’ Diagram.” Genetic Joyce Studies 11. http:​/​/www​​.gene​​ticjo​​ycest​​udies​​.org/​​GJS11​​/ Jona​​than%​​20McC​​reedy​​%20​GJ​​S11​.h​​tm. McHugh, Roland. 2006. Annotations to “Finnegans Wake.” Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

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Meeker, Joseph. 1997. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Metchnikoff, Léon. 1889. La Civilisation et les Grands Fleuves Historiques. Paris: Hachette. Morton, Timothy. 2009. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2008. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nisbet, Rachel. 2016. “James Joyce’s Urban Ecoanarchism.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 7 (2): 10–28. Rau, Petra. 2002. “Bildungsroman.” In The Literary Encyclopedia. http:​/​/www​​.lite​​ ncyc.​​com​/p​​hp​/st​​opics​​.php?​​rec​=t​​ru​e​&U​​ID​=11​​9. Reynolds, Colin. 1997. Vegetation Processes in the Pelagic: A Model for Ecosystem Theory, edited by O. Kinnie. Oldendorf: Ecology Institute Noredbünte. Rose, Deborah Bird. 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission. Ryan, Bartholomew. 2013. “James Joyce: Negation Kirkeyaard, Wake, and Repetition.” In Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, vol. IV: The Anglophone World, edited by Jon Stewart, 109–131. Aldershot: Ashgate. Slepon, Raphael. 2018. The Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET). http://www​.fweet​.org/. Slote, Sam. 2013. Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Slovic, Scott, and Paul Slovic, eds. 2015. Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion and Meaning in a World of Data. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature.” Ambio 36 (8): 614–21. Vico, Giambattista. 1948. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Frisch. New York: Cornell University Press.

Chapter 18

Theodore Roszak’s Glade in The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein An Ecofeminist Dwelling of Emancipation Noémie Moutel

In The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, published in 1995, Theodore Roszak engages in the retelling of what he considers to be “the modern world’s most enduring myth” (Roszak 1999, 23). His interest in narratives that might sustain a profound critique of industrial society dates back to one of his first major contributions to North-American cultural studies, The Making of a Counter Culture, Reflections on the Technocracy and its Youthful Opposition, published in 1969. His literary career was henceforth oriented toward the facilitation of personal, social, and ecological liberation from the technocratic order, which he also termed the “technological wilderness” in a subsequent publication, Sources, Useful Materials for Preserving Sanity While Braving the Great Technological Wilderness, in 1972. In the works he published in the 1970s, one sees at play the emergence of a field of study which he would later coin “ecopsychology,” in the 1990s. In Person/ Planet, The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (1978), the theme of Frankenstein was already a cornerstone of his claim that “the needs of the planet are the needs of the person. And therefore, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet” (Roszak 1978, 26). His retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818) stands as a companion reader to the original text. It highlights and explores further its feminist and ecological implications, as it shifts away from Victor Frankenstein’s point of view to that of Elizabeth Lavenza Frankenstein, Victor’s adopted sister and later fiancée. Roszak endeavors to reenchant Shelley’s text and the sociopolitical context of its creation, so as to bring back to the surface of the original narrative “an ecological picture of organic interrelatedness” (“Dwellings of 331

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Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” Conference Opening Address). Endowing Elizabeth and the female protagonists of his novel with ecopsychological practices and sensibilities, Roszak draws the contours of a prototypical ecofeminist counter-culture at work in the wake of the industrial revolution. The change in the novel’s main protagonist allows for a clearer critique of the capitalist and patriarchal ideology that framed the expansion of Western science and rationalism. Victor comes across as an individualistic and competitive scientist pursuing alone a humanistic ideal. Elizabeth observes from the standpoint of a socially inferior status. Her stepmother, Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein, and her spiritual teacher, Seraphina, also provide her with theoretical and practical tools for understanding that it is possible to develop a biocentric view of the world, rather than an anthropocentric one. Shelley’s narrative is most often studied for its depiction of the philosophical implications of the Enlightenment’s momentum toward ideals of human progress. It is rarely approached with conjoined ecological and feminist lenses. Roszak insists, however, in one of the most important and concluding volumes of his career, The Voice of the Earth, An Exploration of Ecopsychology (1992), that to bridge the dualistic opposition between nature and culture, both feminist and ecological approaches must fuse in an ecopsychology that might heal the human species’ relationship with its habitat. In the second chapter of Shelley’s novel, Victor’s narrative voice indicates how his understanding of the natural world and his adopted sister’s differed. We were brought up together; there was not quite a year difference in our ages [. . .] Elizabeth was of a calmer and more concentrated disposition, but, with all my ardour, I was capable of a more intense application, and was more deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge. [. . .] While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes. (Shelley 1992, 38)

Victor’s intrusive scientific pursuit is the central theme of Shelley’s novel, and in this excerpt, Elizabeth’s perception of reality is defined as superficial, as she is satisfied with “the magnificent appearances of things.” Yet what Roszak weaves into his retelling of the original narrative is the possibility that Elizabeth—representing all women in a subordinate position at the time of the Enlightenment—is not superficially fascinated with the beauties of nature, but instead is able to perceive an enchanted reality which does not necessitate her interference, or her dominion, to nourish her with a sense of belonging to the world. This article aims at explaining that Roszak’s reenchantment of Shelley’s myth is a direct response to the urgency of our global environmental crisis.

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Via the fictional setting originally created by Mary Shelley, Roszak engages his protagonists in a dialogue where ecofeminist and ecopsychological principles serve to probe and contest the relation to the natural environment that the industrial revolution was founded upon. The concepts of “ancestral sensibility” (Roszak 1992, 97), of “vital reciprocity” (Roszak 1978, 78) and of the “ecological unconscious” (Roszak 1992, 13) are exposed through the rituals and teachings that are shared, among women, in a glade. This dwelling of enchantment is situated on the outskirts of the Belrive mansion, the location initially chosen by Shelley for her protagonists’ upbringing, situated in the Voirons mountains, near Geneva, in Switzerland. I first describe how Roszak builds on the original spatialization of the novel, and crafts a journey of emancipation for his main protagonist, which leads her from the patriarchal and normative hearth that is the Belrive mansion to a glade in the Voirons woods nearby, where ecofeminist spirituality is practiced in secret. Secondly, I use anthropologist Victor W. Turner’s study of the liminal period in rites of passage as a basis for an ecofeminist interpretation of an initiatory ritual in which Elizabeth takes part. Thirdly, drawing on Wendy B. Faris’ article “Scheherazade’s Children, Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” I show that Roszak’s particular use of the literary mode known as magical realism allows for an ecopoetic experience where matter is infused with volition and agency. I finally argue that Roszak’s glade is an ecofeminist dwelling of emancipation from patriarchal norms and of connection to one’s ecological unconscious.

HEARTH, EDGES, FOREST, AND GLADE To show how Roszak deploys the hypothesis of a protoypical ecofeminist counter culture at the dawn of the European industrial revolution, this section focuses on the concrete and theoretical spaces where The Memoirs’ main protagonists dwell, paying close attention to the enchanted place of the glade. Upon her first visit to this part of the woods that surround Belrive, Elizabeth records in her diary: “It was a particularly secluded place, which I had never visited before” (The Memoirs 1995, 70). Using Gérard Genette’s notions of hypotext, hypertext and transtextuality, I argue that Belrive is the epicenter of both the hypotext and its rewriting. As Genette theorized in Palimpsestes, transtextuality is at the core of narratology and literary poetics: “the subject of poetics is transtextuality, or the textual transcendence of the text, which I have already defined roughly as ‘all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette 1997, 1). The relationship that binds Shelley’s Frankenstein, the

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hypotext, to its rewriting, Roszak’s Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, is an overt one, as their titles indicate. The topography that Shelley imagined situates Belrive at the heart of the Voirons woods. Belrive is the theoretical space of the home, or hearth, the space of family ties and normative, patriarchal socialization: “surrounding Father’s island of Enlightenment were the dark forests and secret glades that had been there from the beginning” (Roszak 1995, 120). In the hypotext, Victor travels abroad, to other “islands of Enlightenment,” such as Ingolstadt, Cambridge and Oxford. It is socially expected that, as a man, he will go and forge his own social status in the public sphere. In the 1818 original manuscript, a short section that Mary Shelley elected not to include in her 1831 edition indicates that Elizabeth meets Victor’s departure to the British isles with regrets. Having crafted the first creature in his Ingolstadt laboratory, he leaves Belrive again to fulfill his promise of making a second, female one. He uses the pretext of scientific research to justify his departure: “Elizabeth approved of the reasons of my departure, and only she regretted that she had not the same opportunities of enlarging her experience, and cultivating her understanding” (Shelley 1992, 235). This textual element strengthens Roszak’s fictional hypothesis that Elizabeth would have been just as eager to study and travel as her male counterpart. Confined to the space assigned to the women of her time, the domestic sphere, the places that Elizabeth has within her reach to “[enlarge] her experience and [cultivate] her understanding” (Shelley 1992, 235) are the “dark forests and secret glades” (Roszak 1995, 120) that surround Belrive. In keeping with the literary genre of the Bildungsroman, to which Shelley’s Frankenstein belongs (Counihan 2018, 39), Roszak designs a journey of emancipation for Elizabeth, whereby she learns tactics to evade the domestic sphere. Victor is the first to show Elizabeth how to reach and cross Belrive estate’s edges. As their tutor has left them alone in their private classroom, Victor points the way out: I looked up to see him signaling me to be silent. He carefully raised one of the windows and lifted me over the sill. Then he moved swiftly behind the nearest hedge and bade me to follow him as stealthily as I could. I kept close to him as he led me away from the garden and into the nearby woods. (Roszak 1995, 70, my emphasis)

Elizabeth discovers the possibility of leaving the safe hearth of Belrive by following a male protagonist, who lifts her, leads her, and directs her actions. The first instance of a type of spatial movement that I analyze as a movement of emancipation occurs with Victor as guide. He is the first one to take her from the hearth, across the edges of normative society, through a canopied

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forest where the horizon is unseen, into a glade where new reference points become visible, and empowerment is made possible. The adolescents’ first trip to the glade reflects the gendered dynamics at play in European society at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth follows Victor, and twice she obeys his demands for silence, as the clauses “signaling me to be silent,” and “Victor turned to place his finger to his lips, bidding me to be silent” underscore (Roszak 1995, 70). Even though the atmosphere of forbidden play justifies Victor’s requirement for discretion, one may also read in his gestures a metonymic expression of what patriarchal culture demands: that women remain silent, and as deprived of agentivity as any form of nonhuman life. Through Elizabeth’s narrative voice, Roszak finely details the shapes and features of the glade, as well as its effects upon the senses. This description emphasizes the contrast between the object of Victor’s pursuit—to spy on his mother and Francine Dupin, their private tutor’s wife, involved in an erotic moment of intimacy in the secrecy of the glade—and Elizabeth’s. The latter focuses all her attention on smells, the quality of the air, and sounds. She obeys another of Victor’s orders, “to lie flat upon the Earth,” and as she does, she spontaneously takes in the glade’s atmosphere: “the air within the glade was motionless and densely hot under the noonday sun. The harsh odour of the pines was thick all about us” (Roszak 1995, 70). The two young adolescents are watching the same scene, that is, Francine undressing before the Baronness Caroline, who, also naked, guides her model to the pose she wishes to paint her in. And yet, their reactions to what they observe widely differ. Elizabeth recalls Victor’s concentration as “palpably fierce,” whereas she, “torn between curiosity and shame, [blazed] with embarrassment” (Roszak 1995, 71). Again, gendered dynamics are at play in this scene, as Victor goes as far as pinching Elizabeth to force her to watch, while she had decided to bury “[her] eyes in [her] hands” (Roszak 1995, 71). Their peeping down in the glade serves as their introduction to sexuality, or rather as Victor’s attempt to acquaint Elizabeth with his particular desire. By forcing her to watch what embarrasses her, Victor is forcing upon her an erotic experience which she did not seek. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalytic theory to show how “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (Mulvey 1988, 57). Her research also suits literary works of fiction, and is particularly relevant to the analysis of the variance between Victor’s experience and Elizabeth’s. Victor’s eyes are said to be “feeding on Francine’s body,” as if it were an item that could be ingested. In Mulvey’s terms, Francine is “the image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man” (Mulvey 1988, 67). Elizabeth’s unease can read as an emotion related to the possibility of sisterhood: “my affection for

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Francine—and, no doubt, a certain womanly sympathy—persuaded me that it was treacherous to approve of his spying” (Roszak 1995, 71, my emphasis). Her emerging sense of “a certain womanly sympathy” will be nourished by her ensuing visits to the glade. Elizabeth intuitively perceives that the women observed by Victor have been deprived of their agency by the objectification produced by his gaze. As the novel unfolds, Elizabeth’s emancipation from patriarchal norms will be fostered by other women who honor and respect her moral and physical integrity. Prior to the first ceremony she is about to partake in at the heart of the glade, Caroline assures Elizabeth: “this time you shall be born in the care of women, and it will be a time for rejoicing and celebration” (Roszak 1995, 105). Throughout the text, the glade’s function consolidates. It is a place where women meet so as to transmit and experiment a countercultural repertoire of feminist and ecospiritual practices. Initiation rituals happen, as well as farewell rituals (to an unborn child, to a woman taking a journey) and celebrations. It is also a space where Seraphina, the women’s group elder, takes the adolescents once their alchemical education has begun. In the following sections, I shall focus first on Elizabeth’s initiation to “the mysteries of women” (Roszak 1995, 103), then on a specific alchemical ritual guided by Seraphina. WHERE TRANSFORMATION TAKES PLACE This section focuses on the first ritual occurring in the glade. Anthropologist Victor W. Turner’s study of the liminal period in rites of passage1 provides interpretative keys to Elizabeth’s initiatory ritual. Linking together the phases of the moon and the physiological rhythms of women’s bodies with a fictional form of ecofeminist gnosis, this ritual illustrates how ecology and feminism can activate a renewed understanding, and therefore a reenchantment, of the myriad connections between one’s physical body and the unfolding of the world. As Seraphina introduces the glade as a ritual space, she explains: “before men read from scrolls, our mothers and grandmothers read from the forests and the stars and the stones” (The Memoirs 1995, 114). She insists on an intuitive feminine connection to nature and knowledge that would predate masculine rational thought. In literary terms, the ritual deploys one of the fundamental notions on which Roszak builds his proposition for an ecopsychology, that of ancestral sensibility: “as our sense of ethical and psychological continuity with the nonhuman world deepens, we have the chance to recapture, on our own contemporary terms, some trace of the ancestral sensibility” (Roszak 1992, 97). The rituals that occur in the glade are performed by a small society of women. The cyclical rhythm honored by the first ritual is that of Elizabeth’s

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first menstruation, combined with that of the moon, which needs to be at “the eve of its fullness” (Roszak 1995, 105). Elizabeth’s puberty signifies that she is ready to be introduced to the possibility of a shared sisterhood among women of various social status, ages, and paths. These elements concur with Victor W. Turner’s research on rites of passage. In “Betwixt and Between: the Liminal Period in Rites of Passage,” he explains that: “Rites de passage are found in all societies but tend to reach their maximal expression in small-scale, relatively stable and cyclical societies, where change is bound up with biological and meteorological rhythms and recurrences, rather than with technological innovations” (Turner 1979, 234). In accordance with Arnold van Gennep’s work, who conceives of rituals as divided in three phases—separation, margin, and aggregation—Turner chooses to focus on what he calls the liminal period, that is, the marginal phase identified by van Gennep. Turner’s notion of liminality offers an adequate theoretical tool for the exploration of the process of transformation undergone by Elizabeth. It also fits with the distinction I propose to draw between Belrive, as the space of patriarchal norms, and the glade, as an ecofeminist dwelling of emancipation. In anthropological terms, the liminal period refers to the time between the separation of the neophyte from the group and her aggregation to the group, as a being who has been transformed by the ritual: “the arcane knowledge, or gnosis, obtained in the liminal period is felt to change the inmost nature of the neophyte, impressing [her] as a seal impresses wax, with the characteristics of her new state” (Turner 1979, 239). Elizabeth is first separated from the rest of the household, and then led into the woods at night to partake in the ritual. She is then acknowledged as a woman by other women, and thus freshly joins in a sisterhood she did not formerly belong to. Applied to Elizabeth’s journey, Turner’s notion of the liminal period covers the timespan starting when Elizabeth leaves Belrive, accompanied by women, to her return to the hearth. The gnosis, or arcane knowledge, is transmitted to Elizabeth during the liminal period. Her receptivity to what is meant to deeply transform her relation to herself is sharpened by the first phase—separation—where she is left alone in her room, without supper, and without explanations on what to expect. She has to ponder by herself what might happen next: Though puzzled, I did as I was told, and I spent the waiting hours at the window, gazing at the rising moon which covered the garden and the fields beyond with a veil of shadowed silver. I had not noticed until then the strangeness of this light, which is both frigid and molten, how it pours a mercurial sheen over all it touches. Things are blanched of their colours and take on uncanny shapes, as if they were the ghosts of themselves. (Roszak 1995, 106, my emphasis)

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The separation stage prepares Elizabeth to observe reality from a different point of view, as illustrated by Roszak’s description of how the moonlight reveals previously unseen shapes in a familiar landscape. Elizabeth is purposefully disoriented by the women conducting the ritual, so that she may be reoriented toward a new understanding of reality. Once led into the glade, she watches and hears Celeste, Belrive’s cook, intoning “a recitation of names, at first strange and ancient, then names I could recognize as those of women, first name and last, names French, Italian, German, English, Spanish” (Roszak 1995, 111). Elizabeth is impressed by the way Celeste recites theses names by heart, and later learns what these women are remembered for: The names of the wise women are entered there [. . .] Many of those who are named have suffered greatly for the craft [. . .] Above the names of some you will see a jagged line like this; these were burnt alive at the stake. Beneath the names of others, you will see a wavy line like this; these were drowned. The names of others are circled; these were hanged. And all were tortured and violated before they were allowed to find their peace. (Roszak 1995, 127)

Thus the gnosis she becomes privy to is the history of women of knowledge, burnt as witches and otherwise silenced by a patriarchal system that denied them the right to travel, to study, to heal, and to teach. In the glade, a lanthorn’s light shines on the faces that surround Elizabeth. She recognizes the game-keeper’s wife, the magistrate’s wife, the boatman’s, the vineyard tender’s daughters and chambermaids from the château. Hidden beneath night’s cloak, “they [become] a society of equals, where one [can] not tell which [is] a woman of quality and which a woman of the meaner orders” (Roszak 1995, 109). The secluded meeting-ground of the glade sustains the possibility for women of bonding beyond the constraints of social hierarchy. In the liminal space of the glade’s ritual, all participants become elements of an ancestral choreography of symbols. Their organization is horizontal; they tread the same paths as their ancestors. Seraphina confirms: “this very ground you stand upon has been trodden by sisters—yours and mine—since time out of mind” (Roszak 1995, 114). The actions and gestures that materialize the ritual are reminiscent of Christian symbolism, however adapted to a women’s ceremony. Yet, these elements possess a subversive dimension—potentially an ecofeminist reclaiming of pagan beliefs and rituals related to the cult of the Goddess. A crown of flowers is placed upon Elizabeth’s head. She is invited to bite into an apple, and to drink wine from a cup. Her body is anointed with a crimson liquid: it is applied onto her brow to bless her thoughts, onto her lips to bless her words, onto her breast to bless her love, onto her navel to bless her children,

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and onto both feet to bless the paths she will tread. Rather than a stigmatization of corporeal incarnation as the source of sin, Elizabeth’s body is anointed with a red tincture that renders her actions, emotions, and body sacred. The possible evocation of the blood that poured from Christ’s wounds becomes an acknowledgement of the sanctity of a woman’s body. In “Consciousness, Magic and Politics,” ecofeminist writer and activist Starhawk explains: “The Grail appears to the court of King Arthur in a mythic tale the meaning of which has been given a Christian veneer, but its underlying Pagan structure remains clear: the Grail is the cup of the Goddess, Her breast, Her nurturing milk, spilling through the world, healing its hurts, restoring the Waste Land to fertility and life” (Starhawk 1982, 181). Organizing themselves outside of dominant monotheisms, and acting as priestesses of a forbidden cult, the women give the Scriptures an interpretation that frees them, rather than confines them. The gnosis, or arcane knowledge, transmitted to Elizabeth by means of actions and words is, according to Turner, “the heart of the liminal matter,” its cultural complexity, which he also calls sacra. The sacra that Roszak’s female protagonists mobilize is inspired by ecofeminist approaches to the natural world, an input that Roszak deems necessary to the development of an ecopsychology: “ecopsychology draws significantly on some (not all) of the insights of ecofeminism and Feminist Spirituality with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes” (Roszak 1992, 321). In The Politics of Women's Spirituality (1982), Charlene Spretnak edited essays that explore aspects of what Paul Reid-Bowen conceptualized into a “philosophical thealogy” in Goddess as Nature: Towards a Philosophical Thealogy (2007). These theoretical approaches converge with Turner’s analysis of a ritual’s liminal phase, and its treatment in The Memoirs of Elizabeth of Frankenstein. Turner explains that the neophytes “are also taught the main outlines of the theogony, cosmogony and mythical history of their society, or cults, usually with reference to the sacra exhibited” (Turner 1979, 242). The theological teachings passed on to Elizabeth by Seraphina, the group’s elder, display a number of ecofeminist arguments that would associate this imaginary cult’s sacra with a women’s movement for the preservation of the earth. Indeed, as Seraphina offers Elizabeth a silver knife and a dark one, tools used by contemporary Wiccan witches and known as athames, she explains how they both commit her to standing and speaking for nonhuman life-forms. The silver athame links her to: The Moon you see above. The moon is the woman's star; it governs the tides of our blood as it does the tides of the sea. Men have nothing like this to tell them of true order. So they think they can make up their own order of things; but they cannot. We must remind them of that. (Roszak 1995, 215)

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The dark athame shall remind her that: The Earth is a woman, as we are. She bears children as we do. She makes the trees and crops and beasts out of Her flesh. We know of this power in our very bodies. Men have nothing like this to bind them to the Earth; their ignorance gives rise to strange fantasies. They rend the Earth and reshape Her and dig into Her. They steal the gems and metals she hides in Her womb. They would move the mountains if they could, and turn the rivers round in their natural course. They think they can make what they would of the world. They are wrong. We must remind them of that. (Roszak 1995, 215)

Roszak here implicitly relies on Carolyn Merchant’s study of the Mother Earth metaphor in preindustrial cultures, published in The Death of Nature, in 1980. Merchant delves into the restraining power of that controlling imagery when it comes to plundering the womb of Mother Earth (Merchant 1980, 2–4). The rituals performed in the glade materialize and symbolize ontological queries and responses that are concerned with the nature of existence. The glade’s activity and purpose mirrors a reversed image of the emptiness and dislocation of Victor’s laboratory. In the process of making the creature, Victor dis-members corpses and dissociates even himself from his corporeal incarnation: “my cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement [. . .] my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature” (Shelley 1992, 55–56, my emphasis). On the contrary, as it will be explained in the following section, what occurs in the glade is a reconnection with both physicality and a nonhuman environment that are revered and respected as forms of life holding their own power and intelligence. Instead of becoming blind to “the charms of nature,” the women meet in the glade to bask in its surroundings, and to share strength and spiritual nourishment. LIMINALITY AND THE ECOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS Wendy B. Faris’ article “Scheherazade’s Children. Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction” offers a description of the type of ecopoetic experience that magical realism can produce. Her terms also adequately describe the particular interplay that binds Shelley’s original narrative to Roszak’s retelling: “we experience the closeness or near-merging of two realms, two worlds. The magical realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions” (Faris 1995, 172).

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Combining Faris’s view with Gerard Genette’s notions of hypotext, transtextuality, and hypertextuality helps clarify how the two novels under study, each containing supernatural elements, frame a double-sided mirror at the intersection of which the reader observes the unfolding of a magical story. Seraphina’s recommendation for adjusting one’s gaze to the requirements of the alchemical work also fits the special kind of attention required to perceive magical realism, as well as the interplay between the hypotext and its rewriting: “let your eyes be soft and welcoming” (The Memoirs 1995, 213). For a reader acquainted with both texts, the hypertextuality that connects them is obvious, yet unpredictable, as Roszak has crafted for Elizabeth an initiatory journey that does not appear in the hypotext. That reader is therefore placed in a liminal zone where the original narrative becomes “a ghost of itself,” while the retelling is shaped with new symbols, meaning, and possibilities. The hypertextuality that links both texts is invested by Roszak with his concept of the ecological unconscious. What the women practice in the glade, and what Victor and Elizabeth are taught by Seraphina, are spiritual exercises meant to educate one’s senses and one’s intellect to the ethical and ontological relation that human beings, via their ecological unconscious, need to maintain with the nonhuman world. Birds, salamanders, joyful nakedness, and meditations on the nature of matter are some of the textual elements added by Roszak to the hypotext. These will serve as examples of how he has adapted Shelley's narrative to what he deems to be the needs of the times, namely a widespread, personal, and subjective reconnection of individuals to their ecological unconscious: “the core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society; open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity” (Roszak 1992, 320). The way the women imitate bird calls to locate one another and pass unnoticed as they converge to the glade is an instance of their ability to call forth skills and sensibilities that unite them with their natural environment. They utter “owl-like wails” and “eery hoo-hooings” (Roszak 1995, 107) to protect themselves from being noticed by male authorities and prevented from carrying out their meetings. They behave like outlaws, defying the conventions of the normative hearth so as to reach the dwelling of enchantment that the glade represents: “we stole through the sleeping house as silently as thieves and made our way out the kitchen door” (Roszak 1995, 106, my emphasis). The birdsongs they utter to safely rally is an ecopoetic language that literally en-chants the women's relationship to birds, while highlighting their cooperation with each other. The birdcalls used by the women prepare Elizabeth for her encounter with Al Ussa, Seraphina’s “particular friend” (Roszak 1995, 114). Roszak has Seraphina refer to the bird—who is called Alu throughout the novel—with female possessive pronouns: “she has come to meet you.

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She will make up her own mind about your qualities” (Roszak 1995, 114, my emphasis). Alu is immediately perceived as a character in Roszak’s novel, endowed in the first description of her with a clear sense of agency. She has chosen to meet Elizabeth and is able to assess her qualities. Here at play are ecofeminist and ecopsychological principles, whereby a nonhuman language connects members of the human species to other species, and where “compulsively ‘masculine character traits that permeate our structures of political power and which drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm [are re-evaluated]” (Roszak 1992, 321). Elizabeth’s description of Alu conveys astonishment and awe: “I had never seen such a bird before, it was as large as a raven, but its colouring was an iridescent purple and its hooked yellow beak was larger than its head” (Roszak 1995, 114). However, the fact that Seraphina whispers “at the bird’s ear,” in “a language she did not understand,” is not related as a surprising phenomenon. It is as if the birdcalls uttered by the women had prepared Elizabeth for the possibility that all living beings might in fact possess the ability to communicate. The notion of “vital reciprocity,” which Roszak also coins “environmental reciprocity,” is at work in the women’s interactions with the birds, and this further emphasizes the correlations between what occurs in and near the glade, and Roszak’s ecopsychological project: “the goal of ecopsychogy is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious” (Roszak 1992, 320, my emphasis)—a proposition that might be said to encompass ecopetics too. Women play music in the glade, which seems to heighten their sense of belonging to a common, planetary body. Drums, rattles, tambourines initiated a rhythm; and circling high above them the voice of a flute embroidered a sinuous melody. It was the music of some other world, or of another age far gone; it beat with the rhythm of the blood and breath; the body longed to move with the elemental flowing of it. (Roszak 1995, 107)

The flute’s melody is said to be “circling high,” as if the instrument was another means of communicating with the bird realm, or another evocation of a bird language. The rhythm of the music and that of blood and breath harmonize. Pulses, inspirations and expirations synchronize as a holistic experience becomes possible. The determiner “the” that precedes “body” in the last segment of the above excerpt highlights how the participants have become one body longing to “move with the elemental flowing” of the music. The material and spiritual qualities of elements is a central aspect of the alchemical education provided by Seraphina. In teaching the two adolescents the difference between what she deems “the lesser work” and the “Great

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Work,” Seraphina endeavors to convey the idea that “gross substances”— such as mercury, sulfur, and lead—only become powerful healing elements when they are also perceived as living forces: “for each chymical process she taught us the prayers and incantations that guide the elements through their odyssey of change” (Roszak 1995, 220–21). The purpose of the alchemical training is to reach beyond matter to become acquainted with the forces of regeneration that lie at the core of each form of life: “we study the foundations of life [. . .] Life and the higher life that hides all about us in the world” (Roszak 1995, 165). In the course of their training, Seraphina requires Victor’s sperm and Elizabeth’s menstrual blood to be mixed and observed in their decantation. They meet for that ritual “in the glade under a clear, chill sky strewn with stars” (Roszak 1995, 197). As the ritual begins, Seraphina explains to Elizabeth that the exposure to menstrual blood is meant to initiate Victor to the mysteries of fertility and to help him establish in himself a respect for the female body: “our Work cannot continue unless he knows something of our mysteries, and not merely what he can learn from words” (Roszak 1995, 197). In this prototypical ecofeminist context, the acceptance of the physical reality of the self, and of the regenerative capacities of all living entities, asserts the political potency of spiritualized matter. As Victor cringes at the task of “[gathering] the blood,” Seraphina scolds him with provocative questions: “what will you know of life if you find the woman’s blood unclean? Or do you perhaps know of some better, cleaner kind of life, that does not come of blood and seed?” (The Memoirs, 199). These sharp comments point directly at what the young scientist will succeed in creating in his Ingolstadt laboratory. They also contain Roszak’s contention that the making of such a creature comes as the consequence of a profound disconnection between Victor and his ecological unconscious. On the contrary, once the process of the contemplation of the degradation of menstrual blood mixed with semen begins, Elizabeth is able to focus her attention on physical reactions which she does not control. This meditative exercise is meant to lead the young alchemists to the vision of the mystic salamander. Such a sight would constitute the confirmation that the fusion of elements and of one’s own pure intention to partake in their transformation has come to fruition. After several nights, my eye remains steady; it does not flinch or blur. And I plainly see: A creature! A lizard [. . .] I lose sight of the creature, it melts into the brightness. I stare until my eyes become dry and warm. “Easy, child” Seraphina cautions me. “Let your eyes be soft and welcoming. Ask this thing to show itself.” I do as I am told. Instead of reaching out to seize the sight, I make a small prayer, inviting the thing in the jar to let itself be seen. Slowly,

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the lizard returns, its scaly hide now ablaze; it wears the fire like a garment. (Roszak 1995, 213)

The strenuous and repeated contemplation of decomposing organic matter, protected by the seclusion of the glade, and by Seraphina’s presence, leads Elizabeth to a new way of seeing, softening her gaze to invite new perceptions. The way the salamander grows out of Elizabeth’s focus on decomposing matter stands as a distinct trope of magical realism, performing in the midst of fiction what Wendy B. Faris theoretically exposed as the main articulation of magical realism: “magical realism combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed” (Faris 1995, 163). The mystical salamander grows out of common bodily fluids. The meditative state that places Elizabeth midway between waking reality and a dreamlike awareness proves unattainable for Victor: “though he stares fiercely into the vase, he sees only the dark residue that moulders at the bottom” (Roszak 1995, 213). Wendy B. Faris argues that “the reader’s primary doubt in most cases is between understanding an event as a character's hallucination or as a miracle” (Faris 1995, 171). Elizabeth’ vision of the salamander opens up a space in the reader’s apprehension of the novels realism. In the hesitation between hallucination and miracle, the possibility of connecting to one’s ecological unconscious, and to the magic of living forces, has bloomed. THE SUBVERSIVE POWER OF METAPHOR Roszak offers a starkly ecofeminist counterpoint to Victor’s endeavor, as told in Shelley’s novel. In his Ingolstadt laboratory, Victor cuts himself off from the voice of the earth—that nonverbal language emanating from each and everyone’s unconscious, and linking humans to the fate of the planet— as much as he cuts himself off from Elizabeth. The young scientist’s drive to create life out of dismembered limbs and electricity might have sprung from an unknown or unhealed rupture with women’s part in the procreative process, notably due to his privileged status within a patriarchal social and scientific framework. In opposition to that numbing of one’s senses, the character of Elizabeth provides an example of how one may be receptive to her belonging to an “ecological continuity.” The liminality of her experiences, in relation to spirituality, corporeality, autonomy, and ritualistic practices enable her to connect to her ecological unconscious. In her 1974 article “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner takes a broad approach to the question of why patriarchal systems appear to be a constant social form of organization: “what could there

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be in the generalized structure and condition of existence [. . .] that would lead every culture to place a lower value upon women?” (Ortner 1974, 72). Ortner observes that men are generally assigned to the production of political, technological, and intellectual contents, while women are assigned to procreative, educative, and domestic activities. She thus brings forth the argument that men are identified with culture, and women with nature, and that those associations influence qualitatively how these two social groups are perceived. To clarify her proposition, she uses a metaphor where, as in Roszak’s novel, spatial areas serve to illustrate theoretical relationships of power and domination: “we may envision culture [. . .] as a small clearing within the forest of the larger natural system. From this point of view, that which is intermediate between culture and nature is located on the continuous periphery of culture’s clearing” (Ortner 1974, 85). In The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, Theodore Roszak subverts the historical limitations placed upon women in European societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by recounting their tactics of evasion and emancipation. In Ortner’s metaphor of masculine dominance, the clearing of patriarchy is surrounded by a natural system, and women live in a liminal zone, “an intermediate position between culture and nature” (Ortner 1974, 85). In Roszak’s fictional setting, Ortner’s metaphor is reversed so as to reenchant one’s understanding of femininity, wilderness, ecology, and gender dynamics. In her introduction to the collection of translated essays, Reclaim, French ecofeminist philosopher Emilie Hache explains the distinctive approach that ecofeminists engage with in regard to the notions of women and nature. Ecofeminists step out of the identification of women and nature in its patriarchal and dualist signification. [. . .] They proceed in this way to an “inversion of the stigma”, except it is in this case a double stigmata dealing with both women and nature [. . .] by finding again a conception of nature that is not diminished, nor naturalized, a version that we could call an ecological conception of nature, intelligent, sensitive, so that it becomes possible to return to the relation between women and nature rather than to reject it. (Hache 2016, 22, my translation)

Emilie Hache’s analysis of the philosophical task undertaken by ecofeminists adequately describes what Theodore Roszak achieves from the standpoint of ethics, feminism, and ecology through his retelling of the Frankenstein myth, and his exploration of ecopsychology. NOTE 1. I am indebted to Bénédicte Meillon and her article “Ecopoétique du regard et de la liminalité” for bringing Victor Turner’s works on rituals and their liminal phases to my awareness.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Channa, Newman, and Doubinsky, Claude. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Counihan, Erin. 2018. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Bildungsroman and the Search for Self.” In Ethics: Science, Philosophy and the Self, edited by James W. Garson, 39–51. Houston: University of Houston. Faris, Wendy B. 1995. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 163–90. Durham: Duke University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [1982]. Trans. Channa, Newman, and Doubinsky, Claude. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Hache, Emilie. 2016. Reclaim: Recueil de Textes Ecoféministes. Paris: Cambourakis. Hogan, Linda. 2007. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World [1995]. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Meillon, Bénédicte. 2016. «Ecopoétique du regard et de la liminalité: entrelacs des formes du vivant dans la fiction de Linda Hogan.» In Caliban, French Journal of English Studies, n°55. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Woman, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Mulvey, Laura. 1988. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley, 57–68. New York: Routledge. Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” In Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, 68–87. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Reid-Bowen, Paul. 2016. Goddess as Nature: Towards a Philosophical Thealogy [2007]. London: Routledge. Roszak, Theodore. 1968. The Making of a Counter Culture. New York: Anchor Books. ———. 1977. Person/Planet. New York: Granada Publishing. ———. 1992. The Voice of the Earth. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press. ———. 1995. The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. New York: Random House. ———. 1999. The Gendered Atom. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press. Shelley, Mary. 1992. Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus [1818]. London: Penguin Classics. Spretnak, Charlene. 1982. The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Power Within the Feminist Movement. New York: Anchor Books. Starhawk. 1982. “Consciousness, Politics and Magic.” In The Politics of Women’s Spirituality. Essays on the Rise of Power Within the Feminist Movement, edited by Charlene Spretnak, 172–84. New York: Anchor Books. Turner, Victor W. 1979. «Betwixt and Between; the Liminal Period in Rites of Passage» [1964]. In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt. 4th edition. New York: Harper & Row.

Part V

WRITERS’ CORNER AN ESSAY BY CHICKASAW WRITER AND POET LINDA HOGAN

Chapter 19

Ways of the Cranes Linda Hogan

When the red sun sinks behind the mist in the evening, the Sandhill cranes begin to arrive. Long-legged, wings open wide, they come first sparely, two watchers, then in scatterings and finally in great numbers, lines of them cross the sky to land before us hidden humans. The great birds fly across the mist, through it, necks lengthened, legs stretched out behind them, then landing, their sound an uproar. It has been noted through history that they look like writing across the sky, that they fly like words and sentences. I know a message is given above us, one of mystery and animal dignity. They have their inner maps, the memory of constellations, and a magnetic pull to place that must feel something like a passion; it is a deep pilgrimage home. As sun passes, water is blue vein and the world currents of heartbeat of this river are even felt by the human in this flat land of golden grasses. They land and congregate one with another until they become the world. Soon no water is seen. More fly directly over us and with such beauty there is not even a word to describe it. They have been to many places and when they leave they will fly to other worlds, waters we do not know, so many, with the last light of evening flashing on their hundred thousand wings that speak the language of feather light, air-filled bones. They are driven by what is hidden to most of us, understood in aboriginal remembrance of traveling the causeways of land and water shine, as we recall the eroded passages of time where we, too, as Indian people who have come together for this sojourn, journeyed, seeking survival for all time. They come to this place, now a soft gray field of birds, almost a cloud, except that they stand crowded in the water and talk, noisy, loud, and yet I find it comforting. It is night where all this life takes place, when they return 349

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to the narrowing braid of waters that was once a great, crashing river, now sandbars and only a few inches deep. Above, as they continue to arrive, the wind shows the clouds moving with the curve of earth and the birds look darker than they are, in the turning night, all looking like water. They appear as they have done forever, along the River, half a million in number, and continue to land for many nights, the voice of earth history crying out, calling, even slightly roaring as humans try to sleep. Tree branches are still without leaves and yet the pulse of the ground sends the fluids skyward, all attention there. It is the first evening of spring in all its chaos. Sprouts rise from the ground. A volcano erupts in Alaska. The whole earth is filled with motion and new life. The birds are this American sky. They are the sand and water, all the elements, even fire, in their desire to travel the river, braided together in strand. Tribes have told stories about them, told stories to them, for centuries, and they have told the tribes the stories of their own entwined journeys. More than the mind or imagination or even the spirit can hold, they fly in, black strings of movement across the night sky, still coming when we leave to walk toward them in darkness, walking bent, single file, trying to be Crane, the life that was here before humans. About five years ago, being a rock hound, I found an old bone of an ancient sea turtle near here. Ossified. I was searching for a round river stone to take home with me. I always hope to collect even a small one from every place I visit, but instead I found a bit of the ancient world that lived here, along with the ancestors of these cranes. Those great turtles are now gone from the nearby inland waters, but the cranes still arrive. They have flown over fences, international boundary lines from Mexico, over cut golden stalks, wetlands, and the each night becomes one special language, each bird joining with the others in our human silence, listening, watching. Although the true dance takes place in the fields, some rise up, wings open, and then come back down in motions elegant as the dances of Asian theater. The ones they create for possible partners are dances of stylized seduction and enchantment and it works. I am seduced, enchantment for certain, their songs and stories, cantos, the way they know a private world and language, ancient and separate from ours, yet part of the same and they are telling something important. We desire to understand that telling. It seems they are sharing stories as the whales do when they congregate in the depths of ocean to speak and, with the whales, when they leave their joined destination, it has been noted by experts that their language is different. It has changed. Writers would say, they tell a new story. For some of the younger cranes, theirs is an elaborate dance of mating. They open wings and move in great arcs and curves to attract to themselves a

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lifetime partner, one who will call out to return their calls, in unison, the same words and the same sounds establishing the union. One night a driving storm shakes the world. Thunder breaks open sky and for the first time all is silent for a while, as if they take in the larger voice, and then it begins again, the constant talk, the convergence of languages from the four corners of the world, where they have all been. I hear them all night and I think, They are the soul of this land. In the morning, I go outside to watch them leave in a roar of wing beats, traveling to near fields to eat the leftover harvests, gleaning corn and wheat, crickets, and other insects, to stretch and dance. They need a certain amount of calcium and I wonder if nutrition is what plays a part in the dwindling of the Whooping cranes who come to this same place, only small in number, larger in size. These sand hills were was once a savannah, a world of tall plants and grasses. Now it is changed by farmlands and highways. Once, there was a roaring river. It was called by some of the tribes a place of healing waters. Cranes have a fossil map, four and a half million years old. Other research says nine million years. The bones of Sandhill cranes have been used by ancient peoples in beads and medicine bundles. Also, the crane leads a line of animals connected with humans in a pictograph that was once thought of as a story, then used as an old Chippewa land claim in court and it held up as legal. Writer Allison Hedge-Coke says that the Chippewa call the cranes keepers of language. Not unlike their writing in the sky, or even the tracks in sandy mud, I can understand this of these birds with long black legs, the red top of head and eye, the softly colored feathers and bend of neck. They are animals of dignity, meaning, and a history we only try to imagine, even as we recognize them on ancient pottery designs. They have to do, in the human being, with divinity. Still, we are always tracking, keeping numbers, measuring that which is without measure, trying to either categorize or to make sense even of meaning or beauty in this world. In our new times, we track most often to help the survival of other lives, and yet the world all around us is changing, growing smaller moment by moment. We must encircle that with our knowledge, our intuition, with what we do not yet have, the learning of an entirety, a wholeness, or an expanded vision that takes in not just the study of one but the knowledge and understanding of an all. We might track ourselves, our true histories, even truth, constantly forgotten, ignored, and denied. We are not at peace, even among ourselves, what can we say of the rest of the human world, but that it all breaks my heart day after day and I wish to fly away with the cranes and be one of them, in the gleaning field by day, legs down when I come to the water flying by night, going afar with my clan, returning each year to reaches in the right place in the sky and water, alive with the moon inside me.

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There was something I once read in one of the great mythologies and stories of cranes. Here is what I remember of it: Goddess There was a woman they called Crane because of her dance. Graceful of leg, she always wore the color of feathers, downy white, gray-tipped, red paint across her eyes. She enchanted men and they believed they loved her. Following her at night, they walked through marshes and dried grasses, over fallen trees, into snow, cold, and through the brush, only to find themselves winged and standing among others like spirits taken away to other worlds calling out all night in a new language searching for that one lost among the many. LH

There they go now, early morning, leaving, the red sun on them. They are fires flying red through sky, living winged embers, loud, the whoosh of wings like the sound of a train. The bringing together of feather, perfectly groomed. Droves of them travel. When there is more clear light. At the top, perhaps it is only the sun, the white of their wings visible in light, but mostly they are soft gray, cloud gray. Many tribes have watched these elegant birds, many tribes, even those in the north, and for many years. In Mississippi, Tennessee, where we are from, the cranes have gathered in the deep green of water, the blue of it, the sand of it, and remained, never leaving, as if they are The Ones Who Hid and Remained, while the rest of us, my people, were forced to leave our country and walk to Indian Territory. These birds of Nebraska’s Platte River come through that territory as well, to the red lands and thick trees, to the shallow rivers. Red People, Red Land, it means. Oklahoma. Red Waters. I have seen them, the red feathers across or above the eye we sometimes used to design with red paint as we danced. In their congress of wing and beak and claw, gathering all in one place, crowded, they are a tribe surrounded by stalks and grasses leaning in the

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wind, winding through a bend in the sky, clouds of the cranes, wings closing and opening, their voices telling us what we need to hear, that we are never going to know what they do, that we are never going to reach the mystery we seek, that we are always going to be children here until we find new ways of knowing and of belonging.

Index

Abbey, Edward, 131 Abram, David, xii, 7, 9, 10, 14, 35, 38, 39, 45, 67–69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 193–96, 199–201, 203, 204, 205n5 Achebe, Chinua, 303n18 Adamson, J., xi, 3, 67, 80nn1–2, 209, 210, 224, 230, 234n7, 235n10, 258, 259, 265, 266, 271, 320, 326nn16– 17, 326n19, 355 Adorno, Theodor W., 311 Agamben, Giorgio, 39, 45n14, 294 Ahmad, Aijaz, 303n19 Aillaud, Gilles, 157 Ak’abal, Humberto, 15, 16, 258, 262– 64, 266, 271 Alaimo, Stacy, 3, 43, 52, 224, 230, 231, 235n12, 271 Alexander, Neal, 107 alienation, 7, 56, 58, 63n15, 88, 89, 127, 143, 252, 293, 294, 342; dissociation, 8, 293, 340; separateness, 1, 5, 7, 44, 52, 56, 89, 91, 107, 110, 113–15, 131, 142, 143, 143n2, 144n8, 159n13, 171, 172, 177, 197, 198, 201, 208, 215, 216, 223, 227, 242, 261, 263, 289, 337, 338, 350; severance, 8, 70, 94, 131 Allen, Chadwick, 213

Allen, Paula Gunn, 7, 10, 86, 88, 91, 94–96, 210, 222, 226–29, 233, 234 André, Michel, 78 animism, 1, 7, 10, 15, 17, 35, 53, 54, 69, 93, 120, 194, 226, 232, 240, 244, 246, 247, 250, 253, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263–66, 268, 269, 271, 311, 315, 319, 321, 323 animal, xi, 1, 7, 10–14, 17, 18, 33, 37, 40–42, 44, 45nn1–2, 46n15, 56, 63n15, 68–72, 74–80, 86, 88, 90, 91, 94, 115, 134, 140–42, 143n2, 147, 149–57, 158nn1–3, 158n6, 158n11, 158nn13–14, 165, 166, 177–88, 188n3, 193, 197–201, 203, 205n5, 209–13, 215, 216, 223–27, 229, 230, 232, 235n13, 245, 247, 249, 261, 262, 264, 285, 286, 293, 294, 310, 311, 320, 324, 349, 351, 357, 360; animal traces, 12, 179, 184, 357; animal tracks, 44, 178, 181, 182 Anthropocene, 4, 8, 11, 12, 15–17, 59, 63n15, 131–33, 135–39, 141–43, 143n1, 143n4, 219, 233, 239, 253, 257–59, 269, 270, 272n2, 282, 309, 360 anthropology, xii, 2–4, 7, 14, 63n16, 79, 159n13, 194, 208, 230, 234n2, 234n8, 257, 270, 271, 333, 336, 337

355

356

Index

autopoiesis, 16, 17, 241, 249, 252, 258– 62, 264–68, 271, 310, 324n1 Arigo, Christopher, 68 art, xi, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14, 24, 26, 27, 29, 35, 40–42, 50, 53, 67, 94, 95, 105, 106, 144n4, 151, 158n9, 163, 170–72, 178, 186, 215, 231, 233, 235n10, 240, 241, 243, 247, 249, 260–62, 268–70, 295, 321, 356–58, 360, 361 Ashcroft, Bill, 208, 209 Atherton, James, 325n10 attention, 1, 4, 5, 9, 11, 24, 28, 34, 52, 53, 58, 80, 81n9, 86, 87, 92, 101, 111, 114, 129n1, 136, 143, 143n4, 152, 164, 166, 177, 185–87, 196, 202, 212, 225, 241, 286, 302n6, 333, 335, 341, 343, 350, 360; awareness, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 27–30, 35–36, 39– 40, 44, 67–69, 72–73, 76, 79–80, 86, 88, 91–92, 94–95, 119–21, 124, 126, 133, 135, 138, 141, 143, 144n7, 165, 170, 197, 204, 207, 223, 224, 226, 229, 231, 233–34, 258, 260, 269–71, 279–80, 282–84, 298, 303n21, 322, 339, 344, 345n1, 350, 357 Bailly, Jean-Christophe, 13, 157, 181 Barad, Karen, 2, 4, 144n8 Bass, Rick, 9, 12, 13, 38, 41–44, 177– 88, 357, 358 Bate, Jonathan, 7, 30n5, 207, 320, 321 Beardsworth, Adam, 240 beauty, 5, 12, 39, 52, 68, 72, 73, 75, 110, 112, 124, 135, 136, 139, 141, 143, 149, 162, 165, 166, 168, 169, 173n3, 186, 187, 200, 201, 213, 222, 227, 231, 232, 234, 259–64, 283, 284, 292, 302n10, 317, 332, 349, 351, 360 Beckett, Samuel, 325n10 Beer, Randall D. 263 belonging, xiv, 6, 9, 11, 76, 91, 119–22, 124–28, 154, 163, 169, 194, 210–12, 220, 233, 239, 261, 281, 283, 332, 334, 337, 342, 344, 353

Benito, Jesús, 242 Bennett, Jane, xii, 2, 4, 10, 15, 18n1, 42, 51, 52, 54, 57, 123, 124, 244, 253, 278, 280, 281, 301n2, 324n1 Berg, Peter, 120–22 Berger, John, 197, 199 Bergson, Henri, 321 Bernstein, Charles, 12 Bernstein, J. M., 311, 312 Bichet, Yves, 156 Bijoy, C. R., 303n20 biocentric, 6, 269, 332 biodiversity, xii, 8, 15, 257, 310, 318, 320 biopolitics, 356 biosemiotics, xii, 2 Bjerre, Thomas Ærvold, 173n1 Blake, William, 30, 31n7 Blixen, Karen, 71 boundary, 2, 13, 16, 24, 45n2, 52, 55, 56, 102, 105, 107, 124, 132, 137, 142, 143, 154, 159n13, 172, 201, 209, 210, 216, 220–22, 226–30, 235n12, 239, 252, 264, 287, 292, 299, 301, 324, 326n17, 337, 350, 359 Boutin-Bloomberg, Eric, 164 Briskin, Irene Orgel, 325n5 Brown, Lela, 258, 264 Bryson, Michael, 199 Buell, Lawrence, 8, 25, 231, 235n14, 259, 319 Burgat, Florence, 155 Burke, Kenneth, 10, 50, 52–54, 59, 60, 62n14 Burkert, Walter, 286 Buti, Roland, 156 Butler, Tray, 161, 162, 174n14 Calderón, Esthela, 193 Calvino, Italo, 68 Carson, Rachel, 5, 6, 35, 56, 75, 102, 200 Carter, Paul, 26 Castellanos, Javier, 263 Castor, Laura Virginia, 234n3

Index

category, 54, 161, 164, 197, 254n2 Ceballos, Gerardo, 325n3 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 16, 277, 278, 280, 283, 286, 287, 299, 301, 302nn5–6, 303n14, 304n24, 304n30 Chamovitz, Daniel, 205n5 Chanady, Amaryll, 218, 219 Chiel, H.J., 263 Chowdhury, Manob, 303n17 Clark, Timothy, 132, 143n4, 144n7, 282, 318, 321 Clark, William, 16, 136 climate change, 8, 139, 144n7, 202, 204, 268, 321 Cocker, Mark, 24, 29 Coen, Enrico, 261, 262 Coetzee, J. M., 154 communitas, 14, 207, 220, 223, 231; community, 6, 36–39, 45n2, 45n10, 67, 89, 91, 96, 122, 128, 159n10, 161–63, 166, 169, 179, 186, 187, 198, 209, 210, 220, 221, 224, 228, 231, 233, 264, 268, 289–91, 297, 299, 304n23, 304n28, 321 compost, 15, 58, 239–54 contact, 9, 33, 34, 36, 41, 67, 94, 95, 107, 113, 115, 139, 140, 171, 222, 232, 295; contact zone, 208, 209, 212, 218, 227, 299 control, 3, 5, 37, 40, 55, 106, 111, 116, 131, 135, 141, 144n5, 184, 193, 199, 200, 226, 251, 281, 295, 300, 340, 343; mastery, 23, 96n4, 107, 281 conversation, xii, 10, 11, 14, 70, 71, 76, 79, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 203–5, 205n5, 302n7, 355 cosmovision, xiii, 259, 262, 271, 320 Counihan, Erin, 334 Cowley, Jason, 103, 104 Crépon, Marc, 154, 156 Cronon, William, 23, 38, 62n9, 132 Crutzen, Paul J., 143n1 culture, xiii, 3, 4, 6, 8, 13–16, 18, 36, 37, 52, 69, 72, 85, 89, 90, 94, 96n3, 104, 106–8, 112, 120–21, 122, 127,

357

132, 138, 149, 153–54, 162, 203, 208–9, 212, 218, 223, 231–32, 239, 240, 242, 258–64, 266–71, 277, 279– 83, 285, 288–91, 294–99, 301n2, 303n18, 303n19, 303n21, 304n24, 316, 317, 325n2, 331, 332, 335, 336, 339, 340, 344, 345, 357, 358, 360, 361; natureculture. See nature Curtis, John, 115 Cyrulnik, Boris, 77 Daiya, Kavita, 16, 287 D’Arcy, Anne Marie, 311, 313, 358 Darwin, Charles, 68 Dasmann, Raymond, 120–22 Deakin, Roger, 104, 110, 117n3 De Cruz, Helen, 324 Del Amo, Jean–Baptiste, 157 Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne, 15, 234n8, 241, 242, 244, 251, 254nn1–2 Deleuze, Gilles, 188n2, 223, 224, 230 Delteil, Joseph, 71, 81n9 Deresiewicz, William, 102 Derrida, Jacques, 42, 63n17, 229, 314 Descola, Philippe, 4, 224 De Smedt, Johan, 324 Devi, Mahasweta, 16, 277–89, 300, 301, 302n6, 302n9, 304n27 de Waal, Frans, 54 Diaz, Robert J., 323 Dickinson, Emily, 9, 24–30, 30n2, 173n10 disenchantment. See enchantment displacement, 115, 127, 210, 359 divine. See God Döblin, Alfred, 152, 153 dreaming, 14, 55, 157, 183, 196, 201, 203, 227 Dube, Saurabh, 281, 301n3 Duhamel, Georges, 151–53, 156, 157 Dunn Anderson, Carolyn, 234 Durand-Rous, Caroline, 234n2 Durix, Jean–Pierre, 215 dwelling, xi–xiv, 1–3, 5, 6, 9–14, 16–18, 24, 28, 34, 40, 43–45, 67,

358

Index

85–88, 90–95, 99, 119, 133–35, 139, 143, 149, 158n2, 164, 186, 202, 207–9, 211–13, 218, 220, 225, 226, 228, 232, 233, 240, 277, 278, 282, 287, 301, 317–19, 323, 331, 333, 337, 341, 356, 359, 360; dwellings of enchantment, xi–xiv, 3, 5, 6, 10, 16, 24, 67, 93, 99, 202, 226, 301, 341 Eagleton, Terry, 26 earth, xi–xiv, 1–3, 7–10, 13–15, 17, 18, 23–25, 27, 28, 30, 30n1, 33, 34, 36–38, 42, 44, 58, 6i, 63n18, 68, 69, 72, 73, 77, 78, 80n5, 81n6, 81n9, 86–88, 90, 92–94, 117, 120, 124, 126, 127, 131–33, 139, 140, 142, 143, 170, 181, 186, 187, 194–98, 200–205, 205nn4–5, 207–9, 211–13, 216–19, 222, 225, 227–30, 232–34, 244, 245, 247, 252, 253, 254n2, 258, 260, 262–64, 266, 268, 271, 278, 282, 292, 314, 315, 321, 335, 339, 340, 344, 350, 355, 360; earth being. See life Echevarría, Roberto Gonzáles, 234n8 echo, 17, 167 ecocriticism, xi, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15, 17, 25, 67, 102, 119, 132, 159n14, 207, 239, 241, 243–45, 252, 258, 259, 271, 280, 355–58, 360, 361 ecocide, 8 ecofeminism, xii, xiv, 1–3, 7, 13, 16–18, 191, 208, 233, 235n8, 331–33, 336– 39, 342–45, 357, 360 ecology, xii, 2, 4–6, 8, 10, 11, 16, 17, 26, 30, 30n5, 37–40, 55, 67, 69, 70, 90, 102, 104, 111, 116, 119–22, 126, 127, 132, 141, 142, 207, 208, 213, 219, 232, 233, 234n7, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 248, 251–53, 257, 259–61, 266, 268, 270, 284, 309, 310, 313, 315, 316, 318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 331–33, 336, 340–45, 355, 357–61 ecopoetics, xi, xii, 1, 2, 6, 7, 9–17, 18n1, 21, 34, 52, 80n1, 105, 119,

120, 122, 125, 129n1, 167, 173n9, 178, 207–9, 218, 228, 233, 241, 245, 251, 282, 309, 310, 315, 320, 322, 360; poiesis, 15, 241, 243, 244, 246, 248, 249, 251, 253, 258, 262, 264–66, 324n1 ecopsychology, 3, 7, 16–18, 36, 331–33, 336, 339, 341, 342, 345, 361 ecotone, 208–10, 212, 214, 220, 228, 232, 234n1 Egloff, Joël, 152, 156 Egolf, Tristan, 159n11 Ehrlich Paul R., 325n3 Eiseley, Loren, 133 element, 16, 25, 45, 52, 54, 55, 68, 70, 77, 81n6, 89, 94, 105, 128, 129n1, 135, 142, 143n2, 169, 172, 174n15, 178, 184, 188, 209, 212, 214–16, 221, 223, 224, 232, 233, 239, 241–43, 246, 249, 251, 259, 261–65, 341–44 Elgezeery, Gamal Muhammad A., 235n11 Ellmann, Richard, 311, 321 emancipation, 16, 17, 269, 270, 331, 333, 334, 336, 337, 345 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 85 enchantment, xi–xiv, 2–12, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30, 33–35, 38–40, 42, 44, 45, 49–55, 57–61, 67–69, 71, 73, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 96n4, 99, 101, 105–7, 112, 113, 119, 120, 122–25, 127, 128, 131, 134, 149, 151, 168, 177, 186, 193, 196, 200, 202–5, 207, 209, 214, 226, 232, 245, 249, 252, 253, 260, 272n3, 277–79, 281, 282, 284–86, 291, 292, 296, 297, 299, 301, 309, 316, 324, 324n1, 332, 333, 341, 350, 352, 360; disenchantment, xii, 2, 4, 10, 12, 16, 49–52, 54, 58–61, 68, 106, 149, 240, 277–79, 281–83, 287, 289, 297, 299, 301n2, 304n29; marvelous, 2, 11, 28, 30, 33–34, 49, 61, 105–6, 143, 151, 186, 220; reenchantment, xi, xii, 1,

Index

4–7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18n1, 21, 23, 24, 33, 34, 50–52, 58, 68, 90, 105–7, 132, 143, 157, 161, 162, 178, 188, 208, 232, 240, 244, 245, 247, 249, 252, 253, 257, 258, 260, 261, 271, 278, 280, 282, 284, 285, 287, 331, 333, 336, 345, 360; wonder, xi, xiv, 1, 2, 6, 7, 9–12, 14, 17, 18, 23, 24, 30, 33, 34, 39–41, 44, 45, 49–51, 59, 61, 68, 69, 72, 79, 85–87, 90, 95, 96n2, 101–7, 109–16, 122–24, 134, 141, 143, 147, 156, 161–72, 173nn7–8, 177, 187, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202–4, 207, 214, 231–32, 252– 53, 295, 297, 324n1, 356 entanglement, xii, 2, 4, 7, 17, 107, 135, 144n5, 179, 198, 224, 227, 244, 246, 249, 252, 265, 320 environment, 2, 8, 15, 29, 38, 43, 56, 89, 103–6, 110, 112, 114, 115, 131, 134, 135, 138, 141, 144n5, 150, 161–63, 181, 182, 198, 201, 203, 210, 214, 228, 233, 240–42, 244, 246, 250–52, 257, 258, 260–71, 277, 280, 281, 283, 284, 287, 289, 290, 304n22, 311, 314–16, 318, 319, 324, 333, 340, 341, 355–57, 359–61; environmental crisis, 6, 7, 55, 110, 111, 141, 163, 253, 259, 260, 271, 282, 313, 314, 318, 322, 332; environmental studies, xi, 1, 3, 4, 8, 12, 13, 115, 163, 200, 204, 234n7, 260, 272n3, 309, 310, 315, 317, 319, 355, 359–61 epistemology, 8, 10, 13, 15, 41, 44, 179, 191, 215, 234n8, 258, 262, 265, 271, 311 Escobar, Arturo, 270 Estok, Simon, 318 ethics, 2–4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 36, 39–41, 44, 45, 45n1, 50, 54, 105, 121, 150, 154, 157, 163, 169, 177–79, 185, 186, 188, 194, 208, 211, 213, 214, 234n4, 235n7, 253, 254, 318, 336, 341, 345, 357

359

ethnography, xii, 3, 18, 230, 233, 265, 271 ethnology, xiii, 77, 205 Faris, Wendy B., 13–16, 209, 214, 218, 220, 232, 235n8, 243, 244, 280, 288, 333, 340, 341, 344 farming, 12, 29, 39, 40, 103, 114, 122, 123, 140, 149, 150, 152, 154, 157, 158n2, 159n8, 164, 167, 351, 360, 361 Farr, Moira, 102 Fauconnier, Gilles, 265, 269 Fedden, Robin, 73 feeling. See sensitivity Felski, Rita, 87, 91, 92, 96n4 Felstiner, John, 63n18 Ferney, Alice, 156 fiction, 7–8, 12, 16, 43, 59–61, 63nn17– 18, 150, 157, 163, 165, 167, 169, 179, 185–88, 196, 202–3, 207–10, 212, 214–15, 220, 223–24, 226, 228– 29, 231–33, 234n1, 235n10, 239–40, 244, 251, 254n2, 277–79, 281–82, 288, 291, 301, 304n27, 312, 333–36, 340, 344–45, 357–60 Fiore Jill, M., 209, 232–33 Florescano, Enrique, 263 Flys-Junquera, Carmen, 205n4, 357 Fontenay (de), Élisabeth, 150 Forbes, Jack D., 1, 226–28 Fordham, Finn, 314, 325n10 forest, xiii, 16, 18, 52, 60, 74–76, 110, 138, 164, 179, 198–99, 204, 219, 227, 249, 257, 263, 266, 270, 277– 79, 281–82, 284–93, 295, 301n4, 303nn21–22, 320, 333–36, 345, 356, 359 Frye, Marilyn, 199 Gamerman, Ellen, 161, 165 Gander, Forrest, 30n5 Garrard, Greg., 3, 16, 282 Gauthier, Théophile, 151 Gavillon, François, 13, 186, 214

360

Index

Genette, Gérard, 333, 341 Gessner, David, 102 Ghosh, Amitav, 359 Gibson, George Cinclair, 315 Gibson, James William, 10, 86, 90, 92 Gibson-Graham J. K., 4 Gifford, Jane, 319 Gifford, Terry, 25, 30, 316 Ginzburg, Carlo, 13, 44, 179, 180 Giono, Jean, 7, 153 God, 23, 30n1, 50, 54, 71, 96n2, 199–200, 218, 222, 254n2, 262–63, 280, 287, 291–92, 295, 301, 303n14, 305n30, 311–12, 315, 318–19, 323–24, 325n9, 326n20, 338, 339, 352; divine, 50–51, 54–55, 156, 218, 301n4, 312, 314, 316, 351 Goodall, Jane, 82n24 Gordon, Lyndall, 27 Grandjeat, Yves-Charles, 9, 10, 12–13, 25–26, 29, 33, 178–79, 184, 357 Graves, Robert, 326n12 Griffiths, Lavinia, 309, 310 Guattari, Félix, 188n2, 223–24, 230 Guneratne, Arjun, 299 Guthrie, Stewart Elliott, 312, 323 Hache, Emilie, 345 Hadot, Pierre, 316 Haraway, Donna J., 2, 4, 15, 59, 60, 143, 227, 232, 258, 270 Harding, Wendy, 11, 52, 56, 61n3, 131, 137, 259, 358 Harrison, Jim, 315 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 278–79, 281 Haymond Zwinger, Ann, 69 healing, 17, 68, 88, 90–92, 95, 116, 205n4, 208, 228, 230, 233, 235n11, 332, 338–39, 343, 351 hearing. See sensitivity Heidegger, Martin, 93–94 Helmreich, Stefan, 230 Hernadi, Paul, 269 history, xii, 3–4, 10, 23, 36–37, 44, 55, 71, 73–74, 86, 88, 90, 96n2, 103–5,

107–15, 117n3, 126, 131, 134, 137, 142, 144n8, 150, 153–55, 179, 184–86, 193, 200, 202, 208, 210, 225, 232, 234n3, 235n8, 240, 259, 263, 269, 277–83, 285–88, 291, 293, 297, 299–300, 302n6, 303nn13–14, 303n22, 304nn25–26, 304n30, 309, 310, 313, 315–17, 319, 321–23, 325n2, 338–39, 345, 349–52, 356, 359 Hobsbawm, Eric, 113 Hogan, Linda, xii–xiv, 9–10, 14, 16–17, 41–42, 67, 72, 86–96, 105–6, 143n2, 144n6, 193, 195–204, 205nn4–5, 207–33, 234nn4–7, 235nn11–14, 248, 249, 277–78, 280, 282, 300, 301, 347, 349, 356, 358–60 home, xiv, 7, 10, 12, 34, 42, 86–87, 89–95, 103, 112, 115–16, 124–25, 127, 133–34, 137–40, 142–43, 149, 156, 195, 204, 207, 211, 233, 287, 289, 291–92, 294–95, 297–98, 300, 313, 318, 334, 349–50, 356; oikos, 6, 7, 155, 207, 208 hope, xii, 9, 18, 31n6, 41, 61, 81n8, 89, 96, 101, 125, 165, 211, 217, 233, 253, 271 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 167, 170, 173n10 Horkheimer, Max, 311 human, xii–xiv, 1–10, 12, 14, 16–18, 23–30, 33–36, 38–41, 43–45, 52–53, 55–56, 58, 60, 63n14, 67–73, 75–79, 81n9, 85–95, 103–5, 107–12, 115, 116, 122, 126, 131–34, 139–43, 143n2, 143n4, 144n5, 144n8, 150– 57, 158n6, 159n8, 159n13, 162, 168– 72, 177–79, 181–88, 193–98, 200– 202, 204, 208–18, 223–33, 234n5, 235n12, 235n16, 240–53, 257–59, 261–63, 266–71, 278–82, 285, 289, 293–94, 301, 301n2, 302n5, 305n30, 309–17, 319–24, 332, 341–42, 344, 349–51, 358 Hunter, Lawrence E., 244

Index

361

hurt, 61, 155, 186, 213, 227, 233, 291, 297, 300, 339 Hutcheon, Linda, 279 hybrid, xii, 11–13, 15, 142–43, 163, 169–70, 203, 208, 210–12, 214–16, 218, 232, 245, 249, 252–53, 258, 265, 317

281, 299, 321, 342; intra-action, 2, 4–5, 360 interspecies. See species intuition. See sensitivity intra-action. See interaction Iovino, Serenella, 3–5, 15, 16, 43, 243, 244, 280

identity, 11, 14, 52, 119–20, 209, 212, 214, 223, 235n12, 246, 248, 283–84, 322 illness, 88, 102, 152, 187, 194, 227, 287, 289–92, 295, 297, 300 imagination, 5, 14, 16, 26, 34, 50, 55, 58, 60, 68–69, 94–95, 103–4, 106, 108, 112, 120–21, 124–26, 129n3, 131–32, 134, 136–39, 144n5, 149–51, 154, 156–57, 159n8, 167, 178–79, 181, 183, 185, 208, 212, 240, 249, 252, 266, 270, 271, 281, 289–90, 309–10, 314–17, 319–21, 324, 334, 339–40, 350–51, 359 indigenous, xii–xiv, 1–2, 4, 7, 10–11, 13–15, 18, 29, 35, 37, 41, 67, 69, 71, 77, 85–88, 92, 94, 96n3, 96n5, 105, 115–16, 119–22, 124–28, 141–42, 153, 195, 203–4, 205n5, 208–13, 217, 219, 224, 228, 231, 233–34, 234n2, 235n7, 240, 244–47, 249, 257–60, 262–71, 277, 281, 282, 286, 288, 290–91, 294, 302n6, 317, 355–56, 358–360 individuality, xi, 57, 60, 68–69, 78, 87, 89, 91, 135, 139, 155–56, 168, 181, 208, 220, 223–24, 227–29, 233, 248, 264, 279, 285, 287, 289–90, 293, 300, 302n5, 310–11, 322, 332, 341 Ingold, Tim, 15, 144n5, 257, 258 initiation, 14, 16, 17, 208, 221, 228, 333, 336, 341 interaction, 8, 28, 36, 58, 75, 87, 94, 107, 108, 111–12, 115, 134–35, 137, 141, 143, 170, 178, 194–96, 198, 209, 223, 257, 260–63, 265, 267–68,

Jackson, Wes, 121, 122 Jalais, Annu, 281, 301n4 Jameson, Fredric, 13, 303n19 Jamie, Kathleen, 11, 101–4, 106–8, 110–15, 117n5 Jillette, Penn, 54, 62n4 Johnson, Mark, 268 Johnston, Basil, 211, 225 joy, 4, 51, 106, 170 Joyce, James, 17, 309–17, 319–24, 324n2, 325n5, 325n10 Kane, Adrian Taylor, 259 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 279, 282, 300 Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 116 King, Thomas, 239, 247–49, 251, 253 Kingsolver, Barbara, xii, 9, 14, 143n2, 144n5, 193, 195–202, 204, 205n3, 356, 360 Kinsella, John, 30n5 Kirksey, S. Eben, 230 Klein, Naomi, 16, 282 Knickerbocker, Scott, 9, 12, 43, 167, 173n10 Kobayashi, Takiji, 159n11 Koch, Kenneth, 53 Kohn, Eduardo, 4, 75, 194 Korsgaard, Christine M., 45n1 Krieger Balot, Ryan, 318 Kropotkin, Peter, 321, 325n2 Kull, Kalevi, 265, 266 La Barre, Weston, 63n16 Lacivita, Alison, 321 Laclau, Ernesto, 270 LaDuke, Winona, 214 Lakoff, George, 265, 268

362

Index

land, 2, 6–7, 11, 13, 25–26, 29, 36–40, 43–44, 45n2, 45n10, 50, 56, 61, 68, 71–72, 74, 86–92, 104, 106, 109–16, 119–27, 131, 134, 136, 140, 142, 163–64, 166–67, 195, 197, 199–203, 208–10, 212, 215–17, 219, 221, 224–26, 228, 230, 233–34, 234nn6–7, 240, 245–46, 249, 258, 261, 263, 267, 270, 284, 288, 295, 297, 303n22, 315, 317, 339, 349–52, 359–60; landscape, 10–11, 24, 29, 35, 38, 44, 52, 72–74, 88, 94, 96n5, 103–4, 107–15, 117n7, 120, 122–24, 127, 131–32, 134, 136–37, 141, 171, 187, 194, 200, 208–9, 224, 232–33, 236n16, 242, 251–52, 259–60, 282, 284, 289, 292, 297, 304n27, 315, 338, 356–57 Lane, Jonathan D., 324 language, xii, 1–2, 6–12, 17–18, 24–30, 33, 39–41, 45, 53, 61, 67–80, 80n5, 87–90, 92, 94–96, 104–6, 112–15, 121, 123, 129n1, 132, 135–36, 138, 140–41, 144n5, 156–57, 166–67, 170, 172, 174n10, 179–80, 182, 186, 194–95, 197, 201–2, 207, 215, 218, 223–26, 228, 248–49, 252, 260–63, 266–68, 278–80, 285, 299, 302n6, 303n16, 303nn22, 304n23, 304n29, 310, 314–17, 319, 326n10, 339, 341, 342, 344, 349–52, 356, 359–61; linguistics, 265, 268, 356 Lanham, Richard A., 312 Larrère, Catherine, 224 Latour, Bruno, 2, 4, 17, 131, 135, 143, 233, 270–71, 281, 310 Lefrak, Mikaela, 63n19 Leopold, Aldo, 6, 9, 28–29, 33–34, 36, 38–41, 44, 72, 102, 119, 122, 124, 128, 163, 358 Lestel, Dominique, 13, 181, 188n3 Levinas, Emmanuel, 44 Levine, George, 51–52 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 320 Lewis, Meriwether, 136

life, xi–xiii, 4–5, 8, 13–14, 17, 36, 38, 41, 45, 50–51, 53, 59–60, 67, 70, 72–76, 78, 80, 81n7, 87–88, 90, 92–95, 103, 120, 122, 125, 132–33, 139–41, 144n5, 150, 152–53, 156, 162, 166, 168–69, 173n7, 174n12, 174n16, 185–88, 193, 195, 197–99, 202, 204, 207, 209, 211, 212, 216, 218, 220, 221, 223–27, 232–33, 235n15, 245–48, 250–52, 254n2, 258, 261–64, 266–69, 278, 281, 286, 289–91, 294–95, 297–98, 300, 302n6, 304n23, 309–24, 325n2, 325n5, 325n9, 335, 339–40, 343–44, 349–50, 351, 359; earth being, 14, 213; lifeform, 2, 6, 9, 34, 36, 55, 169, 208–9, 211, 224, 226–27, 231, 242–43, 248, 253, 262, 339 Lilley, Deborah, 107 liminality, 14, 207–8, 214, 220–22, 224, 231, 239, 249, 251, 289, 337, 340, 344 linguistics. See language Lipner, Julius J., 288–89 literature, xi, xiii, xiv, 1, 4, 6–8, 11–13, 26, 29–30, 38, 50, 54, 68–69, 71, 77, 85–89, 94, 99, 102, 104, 107–8, 119–20, 131–32, 134, 136–38, 141, 143, 149–53, 155–56, 177–78, 182, 188n2, 204–5, 211–12, 214, 227, 232–33, 234n2, 240, 243, 259–60, 269, 279, 291–93, 301n4, 303n19, 321, 324, 331, 333–36, 355–61 logos, 8, 40, 226 Lopez, Barry, 104, 115, 135, 358 Lorenz, Konrad, 82n17 love, 5, 6, 12, 55, 90, 92–93, 95, 111, 127, 135–36, 163–64, 170–71, 207, 211, 216, 218, 234, 264, 292, 297, 338 Love, Glen A., 143n3 Lutgendorf, Philip, 305n4 Lynch, Tom, xiv, 11, 119, 360 Maass, Petra, 262 Maathai, Wangari, 76

Index

Mabey, Richard, 11, 101, 103–4 Macdonald, Helen, 11, 101–8, 110–15 Macé, Marielle, 13, 177 Macfarlane, Robert, 11, 28, 101–4, 106–10, 112–16 Mackillop, James, 325n6 magic, 9, 10, 12–14, 33–36, 42, 44–45, 51, 54, 58–59, 61, 69–70, 77, 86, 92, 95, 105–6, 114, 131, 134, 172, 203–5, 207, 212, 214–16, 218–19, 232, 240–43, 245–46, 248–53, 281, 295, 297, 324n1, 339, 344 magic(al) realism, 7, 10, 13–15, 54, 55, 191, 203–4, 207–9, 214–16, 218, 219, 234n8, 239, 241–46, 252–53, 254n2, 280, 288, 333, 340–41, 344, 360 Mancuso, Stefano, 205n5 Manto, Saadat Hasan, 304n26 Manzanas, Ana Ma, 242 Marder, Michael, 205n5 Martin, C., 266 marvelous. See enchantment mastery. See control material ecocriticism. See matter materiality, 4, 43, 56, 244 Mathews, Freya, 13, 193–94, 200, 203 Matignon, Karine Lou, 78–80 Matless, David, 104–7, 112 matter, 1–3, 6, 12, 14–16, 18n1, 42–43, 50–54, 59–60, 87, 117n3, 135, 144n8, 151, 157, 207, 220, 242–49, 252, 261, 264, 266, 268, 333, 339, 341, 343–44; material ecocriticism, 239, 241, 243, 245, 280; new materialism, xii, 2 Maturana, Humberto, 15, 258, 265 McCarthy, Cormac, 162, 170, 361 McCreedy, Jonathan., 314 McCullers, Carson, 163, 173n4 meaning, 2, 6, 8, 26, 27, 29, 33, 43, 50, 85, 94, 167, 172, 194, 200, 211, 213, 229, 231, 235n16, 240, 248, 260, 269, 279, 284, 286, 299, 304n27, 339, 341, 351 Meeker, Joseph, 325n9

363

Meillon, Bénédicte, xvi, xviii, 1, 18, 20, 82n16, 82n24, 97, 145, 149, 158n5, 161, 163, 166, 171, 173n9, 175, 198, 201–4, 205n3, 206, 207, 278, 280, 303n11, 307, 345n1, 346, 360 Meloy, Ellen, 11, 132, 135–38, 140–42 Merchant, Carolyn, 3, 4, 340 Méry, Fernand, 82n17 Message, Vincent, 159n8 Metchnikoff, Léon, 320, 321 modernity, xiii, 1–5, 8, 10, 12–14, 16, 18, 27, 38, 43–44, 50–51, 63n15, 70–71, 76–77, 86–87, 89, 122, 131, 142, 144n5, 159n13, 161, 171, 174n14, 191, 193, 202–3, 207, 209–10, 215–16, 218–19, 223, 226, 229, 232–33, 249, 251, 258–59, 262, 269–71, 277–301, 301n3, 302nn5–7, 303n14, 304n24, 304n30, 315, 317, 331–33, 340, 357, 359 Molson, Francis J., 27 Momaday, N. Scott, xiii, 10, 12–74, 77–78, 87–88, 208, 212, 223, 228 more-than-human. See non-human Morrison, Toni, 132, 358 Morton, Timothy, 126, 316 mountain, xiii, 28, 39, 41–42, 53, 72–73, 77, 79, 91, 101, 111, 131, 133–34, 141, 165, 168, 169, 174n16, 178, 181, 187, 235n13, 250, 253, 262, 286, 311, 319, 321, 333, 340, 355, 358–59 Muir, John, 52, 53, 131, 133–35, 356 multiculturalism, 270 multispecies. See species Mulvey, Laura, 335 Murphy, Patrick D., 214, 235n8 music, 7, 11, 17, 40, 78, 119, 129n1, 225, 226, 233, 249, 342 Mutel, Cornelia, 11, 132, 137–42 mystery, 1, 10, 14, 28, 33, 43, 90, 107, 156, 186, 207, 215, 218, 232, 241, 268, 281, 344, 349, 353 myth, xiii, 3–4, 6, 8, 13–14, 16, 17, 23, 44, 51, 71–72, 77, 179, 182, 195,

364

Index

209, 212, 217–18, 224, 228, 231–33, 261, 264, 270, 277–78, 298–99, 318, 320, 322, 331–32, 339, 345, 357–60 mythic realism, 241, 242, 254n2 Nandy, Ashis, 303n20 nature, xi, xiii, 1–3, 5, 7, 9–14, 16–17, 23–30, 37–38, 40, 45, 45n14, 49, 52–53, 55, 58, 60, 62n5, 67–70, 72–77, 82n14, 85–90, 92, 94–95, 96nn2–3, 101–7, 110–12, 114–16, 119–20, 126, 131–37, 139, 141–42, 143n2, 144n5, 152, 154–55, 161–64, 166–72, 173n7, 174n14, 177–79, 182, 186–88, 193–97, 199–204, 207, 209–10, 212, 214–15, 220, 222–24, 226, 228–31, 233, 239–48, 250–53, 254n2, 258–63, 266–70, 277–85, 287–93, 295–99, 301, 304n22, 310–19, 321, 324, 324n1, 325n4, 325n7, 332–33, 336–37, 339–42, 344–45, 356–61; naturalism, 279, 296, 326n19; natureculture, 2, 3, 11, 143, 214, 233, 258, 360 Nelson, Richard, 195 new materialism. See matter Ngenpin, Armando M. L., 261 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 313, 325n7 Nisbet, Rachel., 17, 309, 360 non-human, xiii, 2–5, 7, 8, 12, 15–17, 25, 26, 36, 38, 39, 44, 52, 53, 56, 67–73, 77–80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93–95, 107–10, 112, 131, 134, 140, 144n8, 153–55, 162, 177–79, 181– 84, 186–88, 197, 199, 201, 209, 218, 230, 231, 239–46, 248, 249, 251–53, 257, 259, 263, 268, 270, 271, 278, 280, 294, 310, 313, 315, 335, 336, 339–42; more-than-human, xiii, 1, 3, 33, 35, 36, 39, 44, 45, 56, 87, 140, 193–95, 202, 223, 225; other-thanhuman, 1, 2, 8, 132, 143, 193, 208, 224, 228, 231, 252 numbness, 8, 260, 322, 344 Novak, Barbara, 96

Oates, Joyce Carol, 28 oikos. See home Oppermann, Serpil, 3–5, 15, 16, 243, 244, 280 orality, xiii, 15, 35, 67–71, 87, 88, 94, 184, 232, 257, 259, 260, 264, 265, 267–69, 283, 288, 303n18, 309 Ortner, Sherry B., 344, 345 other-than-human. See non-human Padget, Martin, 86, 88 Pelt, Jean-Marie, 74, 75, 79 perception, 2, 4–5, 16, 29, 33–35, 39–40, 54, 80, 87, 94, 106, 132, 137, 144n8, 167, 168, 170, 181–82, 193–97, 199, 203–5, 205n5, 215, 223, 227, 252, 259–60, 266, 268, 279, 282, 284, 289, 290, 292–94, 296, 312, 332, 344 Péré, Jean-Jacques, 70, 81n8 Peterson, Brenda, 232, 234n4, 235n14, 359 phenomenology, 7, 13, 241, 263, 318 Philippon, Daniel, 102 philosophy, 3–4, 13, 18, 35, 61, 67, 69, 93, 122, 144n8, 156, 170, 193, 199, 226, 229, 231, 270, 302n7, 310, 313, 326n19, 339, 345, 361 Picq, Pascal, 79 place, xii–xiv, 1, 4–6, 10–12, 14, 16–17, 27, 30, 37–39, 42–44, 55–56, 62n7, 71, 73–74, 78, 85–86, 88–96, 99, 101–4, 106–16, 119–28, 131, 132, 134–39, 141–43, 149, 155–57, 158n2, 164–65, 169–71, 184, 186– 87, 195, 196, 199, 201–3, 207–11, 213, 215, 219–23, 226–28, 232, 233, 239, 240, 244, 246, 249, 251, 262, 279, 282, 290–92, 294, 298, 299, 311, 314–15, 319, 325n4, 333–36, 338, 344–45, 349–52, 357–59 plant, 4, 14, 18, 29, 45, 45n2, 57, 68, 69, 72–75, 80, 86, 90, 115–16, 125, 140–41, 143n2, 144n5, 198, 203, 205n5, 209, 215, 223, 227, 229–30,

Index

232, 264, 267, 292, 310, 311, 316, 324, 351 Plumwood, Val, xii, 3, 13, 17, 194–98, 200, 202, 242 poetry, xiii, 6, 9, 14–16, 26, 29, 40, 53, 61, 63n18, 77, 90, 101, 117n6, 129n1, 161, 165–67, 169, 170, 172, 173n10, 235nn11–12, 240, 249, 257– 60, 262–64, 268–71, 356, 358 poiesis. See ecopoetics postmodernism, 1, 4–5, 13–14, 16, 18, 27, 141, 171, 210, 333, 340 Porcher, Jocelyne, 157 power, xi, 1, 3–5, 7–8, 10, 17, 23, 29, 35, 37, 39, 41, 57–58, 68–69, 77, 87–91, 94, 95, 106, 110, 113, 120, 131, 134, 155, 156, 177, 185, 187, 194, 197, 199–204, 208, 215, 216, 223, 226, 230, 243, 245, 246, 248–52, 254n2, 261, 264, 270–71, 280, 283–84, 286, 289, 292–96, 299, 303n17, 304n28, 313, 315, 316, 340, 342–45, 358 Pughe, Thomas, 13, 26, 30n5, 178, 359 Rabatel, Alain, 182 Raglon, Rebecca, 29 Rajan, S. Ravi, 16, 304n22 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 303n15 Rao, Raja, 16, 283, 288, 303n18 Rash, Ron, xii, 9, 12, 23, 143n2, 144n6, 161–72, 173nn2–4, 173n7, 173nn10– 11, 360, 362 Rasula, Jed, 240 rationalism, 2, 14, 58–59, 68, 195, 215, 242, 302n5, 332; reason, 3, 36, 44, 212, 277, 279, 319 Rau, Petra, 317, 318, 326n15 Ravenscroft, Alison, 254n3 realism, 2, 4, 6–7, 10, 12–16, 18n1, 24, 27, 35, 42, 54–55, 60, 71, 74, 77, 85, 88–89, 93–95, 122–23, 132, 138, 150–51, 154, 157, 161, 184–86, 191, 202–4, 207–9, 211, 214–16, 218–20, 231, 232, 235n8, 239–48, 251–53,

365

254n2, 257, 262, 263, 280, 286–88, 291, 293, 294, 297, 299–301, 304n27, 314, 321, 332–33, 338, 340–41, 343–44, 360 Rebanks, James, 117n4 reciprocity, 12, 14, 16, 68, 72, 89, 153, 177, 183, 193–95, 197, 205n5, 210, 225, 229–30, 257, 261, 262, 266–67, 271, 333, 342 redemption, 166 reenchantment. See enchantment regard. See sensitivity Reid-Bowen, Paul, 339 relationship, 11, 30, 67, 68, 72, 85–95, 106, 109, 113, 115, 116, 121, 135, 178, 179, 185, 187, 188, 193–96, 199, 208, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 226, 229, 231, 257, 258, 261, 271, 277, 288, 289, 299, 301, 301n4, 315, 332, 333, 341, 345, 356 representation, 4, 11, 13, 29, 42–43, 59, 85, 94, 102–3, 106–10, 112–13, 121, 139, 150, 152, 154, 158n9, 163–64, 172, 177–79, 188, 209, 212, 241, 243, 245, 262–64, 280, 282, 288, 310, 312–13, 316, 324, 325n9, 332, 341, 357, 361 respect, 6, 9, 15, 23, 24, 33, 35, 41, 45, 86, 87, 90, 122, 163, 188, 202, 207, 208, 211, 213, 229, 235n13, 257, 263, 264, 268, 281, 310, 313, 325n1, 325n7, 336, 343 response, 28–30, 102, 106, 121, 133, 163, 169, 170, 195, 200, 289, 298, 312, 318, 332, 340; response-ability, 232; responsibility, 6, 30n5, 116, 143, 200, 232, 253, 259, 302n9, 324 Reynolds, Colin, 318 Ricoeur, Paul, 184, 185 Rigby, Kate, 241, 302n7 rite, 14, 16, 36, 43, 86, 90–92, 125, 195, 208, 211, 213, 220–21, 224–25, 231–32, 264, 285–86, 291–92, 299, 303n12, 315, 333, 336–40, 343–44, 345n1

366

Index

Robbins, Bruce, 10, 51, 52, 58, 59 Roh, Franz, 15, 215, 241, 251 Roorda, Randall, 10, 49, 53, 361 Rorty, Richard, 63n17 Rose, Deborah Bird, xii, 313 Rosenberg, Rutger, 323 Roszak, Theodore, 7, 16, 36, 331–45, 361 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 170, 174n12 Roy, Parama, 304n27 Ryan, Bartholomew, 316 Ryden, Kent. C., 233 sacred, 35–38, 52, 59, 62n14, 87–88, 91, 117n3, 128, 156, 164, 186, 207, 209–10, 213, 217–18, 231–33, 281, 315, 319–20, 323–24, 339 Scholtmeijer, Marian, 29 Schultermandl, Silvia, 208, 233 Schweninger, Lee, 234n4, 234n7 science, xiii, 1–6, 8, 13–15, 18, 28, 40, 42, 50, 61, 68–69, 101, 103, 196, 200, 202–3, 207, 212, 219, 223, 232, 251, 259, 262, 267, 269, 278, 280, 311, 313, 324, 325n3, 325n7, 332, 356, 359–61 sensitivity, 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 18, 23, 29, 33, 38, 56, 57, 74, 87, 90–92, 105, 119, 122–24, 134, 138, 141, 151, 158n6, 165–71, 181–82, 186–87, 196, 198, 204, 205n5, 208–9, 212, 223, 225, 227–28, 232, 242, 258, 266, 269, 286, 292, 335, 341, 344–45; feeling, 5–6, 8, 9, 18, 39, 40, 51, 53, 57, 63n19, 80n5, 92, 94, 96n4, 110, 112, 120, 124, 134, 142, 150, 151, 153, 163, 166, 167, 169, 173n10, 187, 188, 195, 196, 199–201, 213, 215, 216, 218, 226–30, 261, 269, 284–86, 294, 297, 299–301, 322, 349; hearing, 68, 76, 79, 193, 212, 220, 223–24, 296; intuition, 1, 5, 14, 17, 41, 111, 182, 196, 207, 215, 223, 225–27, 233, 265, 296, 322, 324, 336, 351; regard, 6, 10, 37, 53,

54, 81n12, 85, 163, 196, 208, 212, 229–30, 244, 279, 280, 323; seeing, 12, 30, 31n7, 173n10, 174n16, 182, 195, 196, 220–21, 233, 292, 294, 344; sight, 113, 137, 165, 197, 199, 235n14, 292, 293, 343, 359; smell, 12, 167, 172, 181–82, 196, 198, 205n3, 263, 304n23, 335; touch, 34, 80n1, 124, 167, 194, 196, 216, 227, 233, 294, 337 separateness. See alienation Serres, Michel, 1, 69, 70, 80n5, 81nn6– 7 Sethi, Rumina, 283, 287, 299–300 severance. See alienation Severin, Laura, 107 Shekhar, Hansda Sowvendra, 16, 278– 83, 288–91, 293, 295–97, 299–301, 302n6, 303n8, 303n21, 304n25 Shelley, Mary, 16, 331–34, 340–41, 344, 360 Shrivastava, Kumar Sambhav, 304n22 sight. See sensitivity Silko, Leslie Marmon, xiii, 86, 96n5, 356, 358 Simal, Begoña, 242 Simon, Anne, 12, 149, 153, 158n3, 159n12, 159n14, 361 Sinclair, Upton, 152 singing, 2, 7, 18n1, 170, 213, 247–49, 266; song, 2, 5, 7, 18, 36, 38, 52, 72, 73, 78, 88, 105, 166, 168, 203, 207, 209, 221, 225, 249, 266, 317, 319, 350 Skaria, Ajay, 301n4, 304n28 Slepon, Raphael, 312, 316, 326n13 Slote, Sam, 313 Slovic, Paul, 313–14, 321–22 Slovic, Scott, 8, 17, 18n2, 80, 135, 233, 260, 313–14, 321–22 smell. See sensitivity Smith, Jos., 107, 108 Smith, Theresa S., 209, 232, 233 Snyder, Gary, 9, 38, 41–43, 68, 89, 127, 252, 358

Index

society, 86, 120–21, 152, 158n2, 180, 193, 223, 231, 280–81, 283, 286, 289, 291, 297, 302nn5–6, 315, 316, 318, 331, 334–36, 338, 339, 341 Solnit, Rebecca, 11, 80, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140–42 Sorente, Isabelle, 150, 157 Sorman, Joy, 156 species, xi, xiii, 18, 23, 36, 38, 52, 67, 68, 71, 74, 75, 78–80, 80n1, 88, 89, 116, 125, 131, 133, 156, 157, 166– 69, 177, 180, 181, 188n3, 194, 210, 216, 217, 229–31, 257, 270, 285, 290, 296, 310, 313, 317, 319, 323, 326n17, 332, 342; interspecies, 109, 194, 204, 212, 218, 224, 225, 227, 252, 258, 265, 266; multispecies, xii, xiv, 3, 4, 14, 17, 18, 67, 212, 224, 230, 233, 271 Spill, Frédérique, 12, 161, 162, 174n16, 361 Spindler, William, 234n8 spirituality, 2–3, 5, 7, 10, 13–14, 29, 35–38, 40–41, 43, 50, 52, 54, 62n14, 70–72, 77, 86–88, 90–91, 94–95, 96n4, 106, 116, 128, 202, 207, 211, 213–16, 222, 232, 235n8, 244, 346–47, 249, 252, 261–62, 268, 270, 279–80, 286, 294, 300–301, 302n7, 303n21, 305n30, 315, 318, 323, 332–33, 336, 339–44, 350, 352, 356, 358–60 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 16, 283– 84, 286, 303n16 Spretnak, Charlene, 339 Stacks, Geoffrey, 205n4 Standing Bear, Luther, 233 Starhawk., 7, 339 Steffen, Will, 253, 309 Steinwand, Jonathan, 210, 212, 231, 235n14 Sterchi, Beat, 156 Stevens, Wallace, 63n17 Stockwell, Peter, 265

367

storytelling, 8, 67–68, 89–90, 152, 209, 213, 240, 251, 258, 283, 286 stewardship, 224, 232, 281 sublime, 95, 131–32, 141, 209 Sullivan, Robert, 11, 132, 136–37, 142 Szemon, Imre, 303n19 Tanner, Tony, 85, 95, 96n2 Taylor, Paul, 45 Tesson, Sylvain, 152 Teverson, Andrew, 254n2 Thomashow, Mitchell, 200 Thompson, Evan, 262, 267 Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 52, 74, 96n3, 102, 115, 119, 124, 133, 135, 136, 138, 165, 240, 301n2, 356, 358 Tickell, Alex, 282–83 Toby, Susan E., 263 Toledo, Natalia, 15–16, 258, 263–64, 271 Toppo, Anima Pushpa, 288 totemism, 14, 209, 211–14, 216, 219, 221, 224, 234n2, 297, 326n17 touch. See sensitivity Touzot, Pierre-Yves, 301 tradition, xiii, 11, 85–87, 89, 93, 101–3, 116, 120, 124, 126, 133, 136–37, 210, 213, 221, 223, 232–33, 249, 258, 260, 281–83, 297, 302n5, 325n2 Travis, Christopher M., 162, 259 Tredinnick, Mark, 7, 25, 119 tribe, 36–39, 72, 76, 88, 111–12, 121, 216, 350–52 Tsur, Reuven, 259 Turner, Mark, 265, 269 Turner, Victor W., 14, 208, 212, 214, 220–24, 231, 333, 336–37, 339, 345n1 Uexküll (von), Jakob, 13, 46n14, 155, 181–83 Utting, Peter, 266 Van Gelder, Leslie, 10, 86–95

368

Index

VanderMeer, Jeff, 10, 49, 50, 54–61, 62n6, 62n8, 62nnn10–11, 63n15, 63n18 Varela Francsico, 15, 258, 265 Vendler, Helen, 25 Vico, Giambattista, 314, 315, 319, 324n2, 325n10 Vicuna, Cecilia, 15, 16, 258, 260, 261, 271 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 13, 15, 257, 326n19 Vizenor, Gerald, 211, 212, 232 Warhus, Mark, 234n3 water, xiii, 17, 33, 36–38, 43, 45n2, 53, 68, 79–80, 81n6, 90, 110, 116n3, 134–35, 137–38, 140, 165, 177, 185, 193, 196–202, 208–10, 212–13, 215– 19, 221–24, 226, 228–32, 234n6, 235n9, 245–47, 250, 262, 264, 266–67, 309–11, 313–21, 323–24, 326n11, 349–52, 362 Watts, Alan, 227, 228 Webster, L. David, 263 Wharton, Thomas, 15, 239, 247, 249–52 Wheeler, Wendy, 2, 16, 280, 302n7 White, Steven, 259 wild, 7, 11, 29, 31, 39, 42–44, 52, 56, 58–60, 89, 92, 93, 101, 103–4, 108– 9, 111–12, 119, 126, 132, 152, 165, 178, 185, 187, 210, 213, 225–26, 233, 235n13, 289, 301n2, 304n22, 356, 361; wilderness, xii, 2, 17, 23, 38, 40, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, 62n7, 89, 104, 132, 133, 136, 178, 213, 222, 331, 345

Willis, Deborah, 295, 296 Wilson, E. O. 14, 133, 195, 197 Wilson, Jerry, 11, 119, 120, 122–28, 129n2 Wilson, Rawdon, 203 Wohlleben, Peter, 74 Wolfe, Linnie Marsh, 53 Wolfe, Patrick, 119 wonder. See enchantment Woolf, Virginia, 278 world, xii–xiv, 1–10, 12, 14–18, 18n1, 23, 26, 28–30, 31n7, 33–35, 39–45, 50, 51, 54, 58–60, 67–75, 77–80, 81n6, 85–95, 104–6, 108–12, 116, 122–24, 126, 131–37, 141, 142, 144n2, 153, 154, 156, 161–72, 174n10, 177–79, 181–84, 186–88, 193–204, 208–10, 212–16, 218–34, 235n9, 235n13, 239–45, 247–49, 251–53, 254n2, 257–66, 268–70, 278–90, 293, 294, 296, 298–300, 301n2, 302n5, 303n19, 305n30, 313, 314, 316–18, 320, 321, 323, 324, 326n17, 331, 332, 336, 339– 43, 349–52, 355, 356, 358, 359, 361, 362 Wright, Alexis, 15, 239, 245–49, 251, 253 Yelle, Robert A., 299, 303n13, 304n29 Zalasiewicz, Jan, 131, 143n1 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 15, 243, 244 Zapf, Hubert, 26 Zeitlin, Judith Francis, 263 zoopoetics, 7, 147, 159n14, 361

About the Contributors

Joni Adamson is a president’s professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI) at Arizona State University. She is the author and/or coeditor of American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (2001), The Environmental Justice Reader: Poetics, Politics, and Pedagogy (2002), American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Ecology: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons (2013), Keywords for Environmental Studies (2016), Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies—Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (2017), and Humanities for the Environment (2017). She lectures internationally and has published over seventy-five articles, chapters, and reviews. Her work has been supported by many awards, including most recently, the Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, United States. She is the director of the North American Observatory of the Humanities for the Environment global network, and served the largest environmental humanities organization in the world, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), as president in 2012. Françoise Besson is a professor emerita of Literatures in English at the University of Toulouse 2, Jean Jaurès, France. Her research focuses on the relationship between landscape—particularly mountains—and writing, as well as ecology and literature in English, Native American and Canadian literatures, particularly travel literature. Her most recent book is Ecology and Literatures in English: Writing to Save the Planet (2019). She also wrote and edited or coedited several books about mountains (particularly the Pyrenees) and literature. She is the author of several collections of poems, tales, and short stories. She was the editor of Caliban, French Journal of English 369

370

About the Contributors

Studies (previously Anglophonia/Caliban) from 2011 to 2019, the president of the SELVA (Société d'Etudes de la Littérature de Voyage Anglophone) from 2015 to 2019, and she has been a member of the Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions and Letters in Toulouse since 2009. Antonio Cuadrado-Fernandez (PhD, University of Est Anglia; MA, University of Barcelona) is a language teacher, IGCSE examiner at Cambridge International Examination, and also literary critic and reviewer, literary translator and ecopoetry tutor based in Ely (Cambridgeshire, UK). The scope of his academic interests ranges from Indigenous studies, cognitive linguistics and poetics, critical theory, biopolitics, and multiculturalism, to name a few. Antonio has coordinated two research projects at International Network for Alternative Academia, Global Cities and Cosmopolitan Dreams, and Re-founding Democracy. He has recently translated Mapuche poetry into English, to be published in Street Voice journal and, at present, collaborates with poet Hadaa Sendoo in the edition of the World Poetry Almanac. His research has been published in a number of journals and book chapters. Isabel Maria Fernandes Alves is an assistant professor of Anglo-American Studies at the Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (Portugal), where she teaches courses in American and British literature, ecocriticism, and English-speaking literatures. For the past few years she has been studying the relationship between literature and environment and has published on such American authors as Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry David Thoreau, Ruth Suckow, Barbara Kingsolver, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Oliver, Leslie Marmon Silko, among others. Her most recent publications include “‘To Preserve What Technology Makes Us Forget’: Nature and Wonder, in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia”; In the Country of Lost Borders: New Critical Essays on My Ántonia. Ed. Stéphanie Durrans. Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre; “‘The Wild Breath of the Forest, Fragrant with Bark and Berry’: Signs of Nature’s History, in Susan Fennimore Cooper’s Rural Hours”; In Exchanges between Literature and Science from the 1800s to the 2000s: Converging Realms. Eds. Márcia Lemos, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; “‘A Home Built by Words’, in Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World,” Anglo Saxonica, Série III, Nº 14; “‘Celebrating the Landscape,’ in John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra,” International Seminar on Art and Landscape. Eds. Carlos Ribeiro e Ricardo Nogueira Martins. Laboratório da Paisagem Guimarães, Portugal. ISBN 978-989-20-7438-2 eBook​http:​/​/ www​​.labp​​aisag​​em​.pt​​/wp​-c​​onten​​t​/upl​​oads/​​2016/​​06​/I-​​ISAL_​​Ebo​ok​​_Fina​​l​.pdf​. She is a member of ASLE and EASLCE.

About the Contributors

371

Claire Cazajous-Augé teaches English as PRAG (Professeur Agrégée) at the University of Toulouse—Jean Jaurès, France. Her PhD dissertation is entitled “À la trace: l’animal dans les nouvelles de Rick Bass.” Defended in 2017, it focuses on the representation of animals and animal traces in the short stories of the American writer Rick Bass. Her research also examines the manners in which the structure and the substance of fictional writing change our conceptions of animals, thus playing an essential role on ethical, political, and ideological levels. Carmen Flys-Junquera is an associate professor of American Literature in the Department of Modern Philology and a member of the American studies research institute “Benjamín Franklin,” both of the University of Alcalá (Spain). She has coedited several books devoted to ecocriticism (Paisajes Culturales: Herencia y Conservación // Cultural Landscapes: Heritage and Conservation, 2010; Ecocríticas. Literatura y Medio Ambiente, 2010; Sense of Place: Transatlantic Perspectives//Sentido del arraigo: Perspectivas Transatlanticas, 2016) as well as special ecocritical issues of Spanish journals (Nerter, vol. 15–16 and Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, vol. 64). She served as the president of EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment) for the 2010–2012 term. She founded and coordinates the only ecocritical research group in Spain, GIECO (www​.gieco​.es), and is the editor in chief of the journal Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment (www​.ecozona​.eu). She also directs an ecocritical book series, CLYMA, in the Franklin Collection. Most of her publications deal with contemporary ethnic American literatures and sense of place, ecocriticism, environmental justice, and ecofeminism. In 2015 she led a funded project, together with a group of fine arts, to research the synergies between visual and textual arts, and how these arts foster the development of ecological consciousness. Likewise, GIECO, under her lead, was awarded another grant to research the influence of cultural myths regarding nature on environmental attitudes. Yves-Charles Grandjeat is a professor of American Literature and American Studies at the Bordeaux Montaigne University. He has edited or coedited over fifteen volumes and published over one hundred papers on contemporary American literature. His own research first took him to write and publish on Latino cultures in the United States, notably Chicano and Chicana literatures with many papers and two books (including Aztlan: Terres volées, terre promise published by the Ecole Normale Supérieure presses in 1989 and, together with E. Benjamin-Labarthe, Ch. Lerat et S Ricard, Écritures hispaniques aux États-Unis, Presses de l’Université de Provence, 1990). He has also contributed studies of Afro-American literatures, with papers on

372

About the Contributors

a number of different authors and a book on John Edgar Wideman, Le feu et la neige, Belin, 2000). In the past fifteen years, he has turned his interest to U.S. American nature writers and ecology, notably with papers on Rick Bass, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, D’Arcy McNickle, Doug Peacock, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Snyder, and Terry Tempest Williams. Wendy Harding obtained the PhD from the University of Connecticut in 1985 and the H.D.R. from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1999. She is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Toulouse, France. She began her scholarly career in the United States as a medievalist, publishing books and articles on medieval women, Chaucer, and the Gawain poet. Since moving to France in 1990, she has published many articles on American studies, focusing in particular on questions relating to gender, race, or place, and she has edited a number of essay collections and journal issues. She has coauthored two books on American literature with Jacky Martin, A World of Difference: An Inter-Cultural Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels (1994) and Beyond Words: The Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature (2007). Since the publication of her book The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place (2014), she has been working in the field of ecocriticism. Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), faculty at Indian Arts Institute, former writer in residence for The Chickasaw Nation and a professor emerita from the University of Colorado, is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. She has written DARK. SWEET. New and Selected Poems (2014), Rounding the Human Corners (2008, Pulitzer nominee) and the well-regarded novel People of the Whale (2008). Her other books include novels Mean Spirit, a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Solar Storms, a finalist for the International Impact Award, and Power, also a finalist for the International Impact Award in Ireland. WW Norton has published her fiction. In poetry, The Book of Medicines was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry has received the Colorado Book Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an American Book Award, and a prestigious Lannan Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association. Her most recent awards have been the 2016 Thoreau Prize from PEN, and the significant Native Arts and Culture Award. Hogan’s nonfiction includes

About the Contributors

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a respected collection of essays on environment, Dwellings, A Spiritual History of the Land; and The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. In addition, she has, with Brenda Peterson, written Sightings: The Mysterious Journey of the Gray Whale for National Geographic Books, and edited several anthologies on nature and spirituality. She has written the script, “Everything Has a Spirit,” a PBS documentary on American Indian Religious Freedom. Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame in 2007 for her writing. Hogan is currently working on a new novel as well as essays about Chickasaw history, mythology, and life ways, taking a critical look at past studies of the tribal histories: Rivers and Mounds of the Heart. She has been involved for eighteen years with the Native Science Dialogues and the new Native American Academy and for many years with the SEED Graduate Institute in Albuquerque. Linda Hogan has work translated in all major languages by the U.S. Information Office, and speaks and reads her work both nationally and internationally as guest writer and keynote speaker. She continues to teach Creative Writing workshops. She now lives and works in the Colorado mountains. Charles Holdefer teaches at the University of Poitiers and is a member of the FoReLLIS research group. His recent books include Back in the Game (fiction) and George Saunders’ Pastoralia: Bookmarked (nonfiction). He also coedited, with Thomas Pughe and Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd, Poetics and Politics of Place in Pastoral, 2015. Alan Johnson is a professor of English at Idaho State University, where he teaches postcolonial literature, specializing in India, where he was raised. As a Fulbright grantee in India in 2010 and 2016–17, he focused, respectively, on globalization and literature and (for a book project) on forest images in Indian literature. He’s the author of Out of Bounds: Anglo-Indian Literature and the Geography of Displacement (2011) as well as articles on such topics as environmental literature of India, Hindi film, teaching Amitav Ghosh, and the humanities. Tom Lynch is a professor at the University of Nebraska, specializing in ecocriticism and place-conscious approaches to literature. He edits the journal Western American Literature. He is the author of Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature, and coeditor of several collections, including The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, Place (with Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster) and Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (with Susan Naramore Maher, O. Alan Weltzien, and Drucilla Wall).

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Rachel Nisbet (docteur ès sciences, doctorat ès lettres) recently completed a second PhD, From Murmuring to Muttering: Anthropocene River Narratives (1798–1800), at the University of Lausanne. Her research has been published in scientific journals including Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta and Geology, and the environmental humanities journal Ecozon@. She is currently developing a post-doctoral project, titled “Tracking Nature in Stage Adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823–2019).” Joshua Mabie is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater. His recent scholarship and essays have appeared in The Edinburgh Companion to T.S. Eliot and the Arts, Transatlantic Literary Ecologies, Christianity & Literature and Front Porch Republic. With his wife, Dr. Mabie co-owns Pied Beauty Farm, an organic farm and orchard that provides access to land and business support to immigrants and refugees. Dr. Jessica Maufort specializes in postcolonial ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and magic realism examined in Indigenous and non-Indigenous fiction from Australasia and Canada. Related research interests include trauma studies, animal studies, ecospirituality, and Pacific literature. Jessica is the Postgraduate Officer of the New Zealand Studies Association (NZSA) and an editorial assistant of Recherche littéraire/Literary Research. She has published essays in Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment and AJE: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Forthcoming publications comprise a coedited volume on postapartheid South African drama (2020). With support from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), Jessica is currently pursuing postdoctoral research at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), investigating the ecopoetics of trauma in the Anthropocene. Bénédicte Meillon is an associate professor of English studies at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia, where she has started and runs the Perpignan ecopoetics and ecocriticism research workshop as well as the https://ecopoetique​.hypotheses​.org/ website. She is on the EASLCE Advisory Board. She has written papers on the ecopoetics of Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, Linda Hogan, Ron Rash, and Ann Pancake. Some of her other work has led her to publish research on Paul Auster, Russel Banks, and Roald Dahl. Her research explores ecopoetics of reenchantment, focusing mostly on neoregionalism, on magical realism, mythopoeia, and ecofeminism, paying close attention to the intra-actions between naturecultures and the texture of ecopoetic language itself. She has coordinated two international conferences on ecopoetics of enchantment in Perpignan, the first, in 2016, on “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” and the second, in

About the Contributors

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2019, on “Reenchanting Urban Wildness: To Perceive, Think, and Live with Nature on Cities.” She has coedited a special issue in French of Crossways Journal, with Dr. Margot Lauwers, Lieux d’enchantement: approches écocritiques et écopoét(h)iques des liens entre humains et non-humains, published online in 2018. She is currently writing a monograph on an ecopoetics of reenchantment and liminal realism. Noémie Moutel is an agrégée and teaches at the University of Caen. She has completed a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies and European Philosophy and Literature at Ruskin University, England, then a master’s degree in American Cultural Studies at the University of Caen-Normandie, France. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation, From the Counter Culture to Ecocriticism: Feminism and Ecology in the Works of Theodore Roszak. She has recently published “From Ecocriticism to Ecopsychology in Theodore Roszak’s Frankenstein,” in Caliban, French Journal of English Studies (2016) and “La Métaphore du Viol de la Terre: Principes Ecoféministes,” in Essais, Revue Interdisciplinaire d'Humanités (2017). Randall Roorda teaches environmental literature, writing, and film as a professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Author of one book and a number of articles and essays, he is a past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and a former Fulbright lecturer in the Czech Republic. A research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Anne Simon belongs to the Research Center on Art and Languages where she is in charge of the zoopoetics program “Animots.” Her work focuses on the “trafficking” between philosophy and literary creation, as well as on issues related to the living world and animality. Pertaining to these subjects, she has co-organized the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone International Colloquium (San Francisco, 2011), and coedited four special issues: L’Esprit créateur (2011), Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (2012), Fixxion (2015), and Revue des Sciences Humaines (2017). She is currently writing a book on the representations of factory farming in literature, and an essay on zoopoetics. She is the author of À leur corps defendant/ Les femmes à l’épreuve du nouvel ordre moral (coauthored with C. Détrez, Seuil, 2006) and of four essays on Proust. Frédérique Spill is an associate professor-HDR of American literature; she teaches at the University of Picardie—Jules Verne in Amiens. She is the author of L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner (2009). Her publications include articles in French and in English on various twentieth and

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twenty-first century American authors (including Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Russell Banks, and so on). For the past five years her research and publications have mainly been focusing on the work of novelist, short story writer and poet Ron Rash. Her monograph, The World in a Bead of Water: The Radiance of Small Things in Ron Rash’s Writing will come out at South Carolina UP in 2019.