Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature [1. ed.] 1856494292, 1856494306

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Ecocriticisim

& LDiteratince

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH LIBRARIES

About the editors

Richard Kerridge is Lecturer in English and Course Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Bath College of Higher Education. He is the co-author (with N. H. Reeve) of Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of 7. H. Prynne (Liverpool University Press, 1996) and has published widely on contemporary poetry and fiction. He has twice received the BBC Award for Nature Writing, in 1990 and 1991. Neil Sammells is Dean of Humanities and Reader in English at Bath College of Higher Education. He is author of Tom Stoppard: the Artist as Critic (Macmillan, 1988) and has edited (with Paul Hyland) two collections of essays: Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (Macmillan, 1990) and Writing and Censorship in Britain (Routledge, 1992). He is the co-editor (also with Paul Hyland) of the quarterly journal Irish Studies Review.

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Writing the Environment: E.cocriticism and literature Edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells

@ Zed Books Ltd LONDON

& NEW

YORK

Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and literature was first published by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London Ni gjF, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, Ny rooro, USA in 1998. Distributed exclusively in the usA by St Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, Ny 10010, USA.

Copyright © the editors and individual contributors, 1998 Cover designed by Andrew Corbett Set in Monotype Baskerville and Univers by Ewan Smith Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn

The right of the editors and contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library us cP has been applied for from the Library of Congress ISBN ISBN

1 85649 429 2 cased 1 85649 430 6 limp

Contents

Acknowledgements

vil

List of contributors

vlil

Introduction

I

RICHARD

KERRIDGE

Part One

Ecocritical Theory

Magpie

13

SUEELLEN

CAMPBELL

The (im)possibility of ecocriticism DOMINIC

II

27

HEAD

Anotherness and inhabitation in recent multicultural

American literature PATRICK

D.

MURPHY

Poetry and biodiversity JONATHAN BATE Body politics in American nature writing. ‘Who may contest for what the body of nature will be?’ GRETCHEN

Part Two

40

53

71

LEGLER

Ecocritical History

Acts of God: providence, the Jeremiad and environmental crisis BARBARA WHITE

Crabbe’s disorderly nature JOHN LUCAS

89

gI

110

vi

Contents

124

8 Wilde nature NEIL

SAMMELLS

Feathered women: W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions Neo-w. REEVE 16)

‘Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?’: Silent Spring and Sylvia Plath TRACY BRAIN Part Three

II

12

134

Contemporary

Writing

Heidegger, Heaney and the problem of dwelling GREG GARRARD Small rooms and the ecosystem: environmentalism and DeLillo’s White Nozse RIGHARD KERRIDGE

182

We) Ecopolitics and the literature of the borderlands: the frontiers of environmental justice in Latina and Native American writing M.

JIMMIE

JAGQUELINE

KILLINGSWORTH 8S.

AND

PALMER

Je Children’s literature and the environment KARIN

2)

208

LESNIK-OBERSTEIN

Creating the world we must save: the paradox of television nature documentaries KARLA ARMBRUSTER

218

Index

239

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Louise Murray of Zed Books for her enthusiastic and patient backing of this project; Julian Hosie and Ewan Smith for their work on the book’s production; Margaret Tremeer for assistance with the manuscript; Bath Spa University College for financial and institutional support. Among the friends and colleagues who have helped this book in different ways are: Chris Nicholson, for his always stimulating and challenging thoughts about culture and environmentalism; Tracy Brain, Paul Edwards, Terry Gifford, Philip Gross, Cicely Palser Havely, Alan Holland, Jeremy Hooker, Patrick D. Murphy and Neil Reeve for valuable discussion; Karla Armbruster and Barbara Hill Rigney for this and for introducing us to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE); all participants in the ASLE e-mail discussion group (website: http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/ ~djp2n/asle.html) for a constant supply of debate and information; students on the “Writing and the Environmental Crisis’ module at Bath Spa University College (formerly Bath College for Higher Education) since 1992; Jeffrey Rodman for drawing our attention to the work of Slavoj Zizek. We have asked all contributors to keep their use of quotations within ‘fair dealing’ conventions. For specific permissions, we are grateful to the following: Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc. for quotations from Seamus Heaney; Faber and Faber Ltd and Harper Collins Publishers for quotations from Sylvia Plath; Land Rover Group for permission to reproduce an advertisement; Les A. Murray, Carcanet Press Ltd, Margaret Connolly and Associates PTY Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Grioux Inc. for quotations from Les A. Murray; the Observer for a quotation from Neal Ascherson; Oxford University Press for quotations from Edward Thomas and Basil Bunting. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells

vil

Contributors

KARLA ARMBRUSTER teaches American Studies in the Sewall Residential Academic Prograrn at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1996 she received her PhD from Ohio State University for her dissertation on ‘Speaking for Nature: The Politics and Practice of Environmental Advocacy in American Literature and Culture’. Her research and teaching interests include ecocriticism, American literature and culture,

and feminism and women’s studies. JONATHAN BATE is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of numerous books and articles on ecocriticism, Romantic literature and thought, and Shakespeare. His Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (Routledge, 1991) was an inaugural work for ecocriticism. Among his recent books are Shakespeare and Ovid (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993); The Romantics on Shakespeare (ed.) (Penguin, 1992); and an edition of Titus Andronicus for the Arden Shakespeare series (Routledge, 1995). TRACY BRAIN is a lecturer in English at Bath Spa University College. She has published articles on twentieth-century women’s writing, on writing and eating disorders and on writing for children. She is currently writing a book on Sylvia Plath which shifts the emphasis from biographical criticism, to be published by Longman in 1999. SUEELLEN CAMPBELL teaches in the English Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. She has published widely and influentially on ecocriticism, American nature writing, and twentieth-century literature. Her most recent book is Bringing the Mountain Home (University of Arizona Press, 1996), a book of nature writing.

GREG GARRARD is a lecturer in English at Bath Spa University College. He organized an international conference on ‘Literature and the Natural Environment’ at University of Wales, Swansea, in 1997. He is completing a PhD thesis on ecocriticism at University of Wales, Swansea, and writing a book on this subject. Vill

Contributors

~— ax

DOMINIC HEAD is a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Central England. He has published widely on ecocriticism, postcolonial writing, and modern fiction. He is the author of The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Nadine Gordimer (Cambridge University Press, 1994); and a forthcoming book on J. M. Coetzee. RICHARD KERRIDGE is senior lecturer in English and course director, MA in Creative Writing, at Bath Spa University College. He is coauthor, with N. H. Reeve, of Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne (Liverpool University Press, 1995). He has published articles on writing and environmentalism, contemporary fiction and poetry, and the novels of Thomas Hardy. He received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing in 1990 and 1991. He is currently working on a book about ecocriticism in Britain. M. JIMMIE KILLINGSWORTH is professor of English at Texas A&M University. He has written books and articles on rhetoric, American literature, and technical communication. Recent publications include Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (with Jacqueline S. Palmer: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992); Signs, Genres and Communities in Technical Communication (with Michael Gilbertson: Baywood, 1992); and The Growth of Leaves of Grass: The Organic Tradition in Whitman Studies (Gamden House, 1993). GRETCHEN LEGLER is an assistant professor in the Department of English and programme in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she also co-directs the programme in Women’s Studies. Her first book of non-fiction essays, All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, was published in 1995 by Seal Press. Her creative non-fiction and short stories have appeared in Uncommon Waters: Women Write About Fishing, A Dofferent Angle: Flyfishing Stories by Women; Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women; Orion; The House

on Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Aborad; and Grain. She has published numerous scholarly articles and reviews. KARIN LESNIK-OBERSTEIN is a lecturer in English at the University of Reading. She is the author of Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994) and has published widely on literature for children.

JOHN LUGAS is research professor of English at Nottingham Trent University, and was formerly professor of English at Loughborough University. Among his recent books are Flying to Romania: A Sequence in Verse and Prose (Sow’s Ear Press, 1992), and Writing and Racialism (ed.) (Longman, 1996). He is publisher of Shoestring Press.

Contributors

x

PATRICK D. MURPHY is professor of English, teaching in the Graduate Program in Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is currently editing The Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook for Fitzroy Dearborn. He is the author of Literature, Nature, Other and Understanding Gary Snyder, and editor/co-editor of seven other books. He is co-editor, with Greta Gaard, of the forthcoming Ecofeminist Literary Criticism. JACQUELINE 8S. PALMER is a researcher and trainer with the Southwest Education Development Laboratory in Austin, Texas. She has written articles on science and environmental education and communication,

and is co-author (with M. Jimmie Killingsworth) of Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Southern Illinois University Press, 1992). N. H. REEVE is a lecturer in English at University of Wales, Swansea. He was founding editor of The Swansea Review. He is the author of The Novels of Rex Warner (Macmillan, 1989), co-author (with Richard Kerridge) of Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne (Liverpool University Press, 1995) and editor of Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments (Macmillan, 1997). He has edited D H. Lawrence’s The Women Who Rode Away and Other Stories (Penguin, 1996). He has published widely on twentieth-century poetry and fiction, and is currently writing a book on D. H. Lawrence’s late fiction. NEIL SAMMELLS is dean of humanities at Bath Spa University College and co-editor of Jnsh Studies Review. He has published widely on modern drama and Irish writing, and co-edited (with Paul Hyland) two collections of essays: Insh Writing: Exile and Subversion and Writing and Censorship in Britain. His book on Tom Stoppard was published in 1988; he is currently writing a book on Oscar Wilde. BARBARA WHITE is a historian and director of studies with an American undergraduate programme. She has taught at the universities of Middlesex and Hull, and for the Open University. She has published several articles on early modern sermon literature. She is currently coediting (with Ceri Sullivan) Writing and Fantasy, to be published by Longman in 1998.

Introduction Richard Kerridge

At the time of the Chernobyl London. One evening, about watching a by-election report entatives was debating various of them

was

the Liberal

disaster, I was teaching in a school in two weeks after the explosion, I was on television. A panel of party repres‘issues’ while waiting for the result. One

leader David

Steel; I don’t remember

the

others. The presenter hushed them, listened to his earpiece and said, ‘lve just heard a report from Chernobyl. They say engineers are trying to tunnel under the reactor.’ Steel said, ‘Oh. If that’s true, it’s very serious, isn’t it?’

I think someone said yes. There was a silence. Then they started discussing something else. Or so I remember. I could be exaggerating that silence. I now fantasize this as a moment when a mask slipped. Next morning the newspapers were full of terrifying possibilities. The molten core was sinking through the floor of the reactor, and would contaminate the European water-table. A second explosion was about to happen, releasing a cloud which ‘would make the first one seem like air-freshener’. I went into school. During the morning coffee-break, I heard a woman in the queue say, ‘It’s the end, isn’t it? This is actually it; Pve dreamt about it. I'll have a sausage roll.’ I walked out of that room and went to the car-park, to listen to the news on my car-radio. There was nothing at all about Chernobyl on the news. That made me really frightened. Then, after all, nothing happened. The tunnelling had succeeded, we were told. The reactor had been brought under control and ‘entombed in concrete’. Everything went back to normal.

The environmental crisis is elusive like this. Much of it is solidly quantified in statistical reports of pollution levels, global-warming projections, I

Writing the environment

Oe

data about health, records of deforestation and lists of endangered species, but the meanings of these items are much less stable. They can grow in significance until they overshadow everything else; they can shrink until they are almost forgotten. Notoriously, environmental issues come and go in public consciousness, at least in affluent countries (in many poorer places, environmental questions are clearly not in a separate, abstract category, but are questions of food supply, distribution of wealth and political freedom). At British elections ‘the environment’ usually disappears, pushed out by what seem to be more immediate, bread-and-butter concerns, such as taxes, public services and jobs. Environmental questions are large-scale and long-term. They are usually rumours, things scientists disagree over; things happening elsewhere, or very locally; disasters we hear about once they have happened. For those who are not activists, it is hard to make ‘the environment’ real or tangible in daily life. Environmentalism seems to be about contemplating the vast and infinite. The only changes that might make a difference seem to be changes to the way we live so huge as to sound fanciful. To envisage these changes, to step back and think about them, requires space and respite from immediate emotional and financial problems. Environmentalism gets pushed into the space we call ‘leisure’, in between the things that pressure us and exist on a scale we can cope with. Unlike feminism, with which it otherwise has points in common, environmentalism has difficulty in being a politics of personal liberation or social mobility. Environmental issues take on the role of a ‘repressed’, which is frequently pushed out of sight and which always returns. Deferment alternates with occasional rushes of panic. Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian reader of popular culture, gives a psychoanalytical account of our difficulty in placing these issues: The radical character of the ecological crisis is not to be underestimated. The crisis is radical not only because of its effective danger, i-e., it is not just that what is at stake is the very survival of humankind. What is at stake is our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our everyday understanding of ‘nature’ as a regular, rhythmic process ... Hence our unwillingness to take the ecological crisis completely seriously; hence the fact that the typical, predominant reaction to it consists in a variation on the famous disavowal, ‘I know very well (that things are deadly serious ... ), but just the same ... (I don’t really believe it, I’m not really prepared to integrate it into my symbolic universe, and that is why I continue to act as if ecology is of no lasting consequence for my everyday life).’!

Zizek finds two other common responses. One is obsessional: the response of the committed activist, incessantly driven by the sense of crisis or last-minute panic which for most comes only occasionally. The

Introduction

“Sg

emergency says that if we can all do this, then, just maybe, there is still time to save the life we know. Like Christa Wolf’s Cassandra,” the

activist has to maintain an effective good humour while feeling maddened by the inattention of others; their failure to perceive the emergency; their stubborn normality (‘I'll have a sausage roll’). The activist is unable to leave off, because perhaps one more effort, this time, will achieve the breakthrough and force people to take notice. The third reaction noted by Zizek is to interpret the crisis as a message or ‘answer of the real’. It becomes the completing term of an equation, a moral consequence which reveals the world, after all, despite the claims of postmodernists, to be a coherent totality. Ecological

disaster, from this viewpoint, is a punishment for human transgression;

the necessary consequence of going too far, tampering with nature, usurping the place of divine providence. Often this perception leads to the idea that the consequences will worsen until humanity is forced to return to a more ‘natural’ way of life. Zizek regards all three reactions as hindrances to a response which engages with the reality of the crisis: For, if we grasp the ecological crisis as a traumatic kernel to be kept at a distance by obsessive activity, or as the bearer of a message, a call to find new roots in nature, we blind ourselves in both cases to the irreducible gap separating the real from its modes of symbolization. ‘The only proper attitude is that which fully asumes this gap ... without endeavouring to suspend it through fetishistic disavowal, to keep it concealed through obsessive activity, or to reduce the gap between the real and the symbolic by projecting a (symbolic) message into the real.’

By ‘the real’, Zizek means that which defies, and is not contained by, representation. It is a ‘non-symbolic kernel that makes a sudden appearance in the symbolic order, in the form of traumatic “returns” and “answers”.’* The real is that which disrupts representation. The radioactive particles released by the Chernobyl explosion are particularly suggestive of this ‘real’, because they are invisible and largely unrepresentable. They are everywhere — in the air, in water, in grass, in meat, in our bodies — and nowhere, hard to locate in one place rather than another. In this respect they symbolize the whole ecological crisis. This may seem a technical, over-academic point. But consider one of the most eloquent reports in the British national press as Chernobyl neared its denouement. Neal Ascherson, in the Observer of 18 May 1986, wrote: We know now that, in the horror of Chernobyl, scientists at the other reactors on the site stayed at their posts. It also came out that technicians from all over the Soviet Union have been entering the intense radiation of

Writing the environment A a cena

a

ee

20a

4

the stricken Chernobyl IV to fight the fire and secure the controls ... A few Western newspapers and broadcasts speculated on the awful courage of these men (and possibly women) and on what could be happening to their bodies ... Blame Soviet paranoia and secrecy, blame Cold War opportunism in the West: for both reasons, the chance that their acts might make Chernobyl something to unite rather than divide was lost. All the same, the invisible thing they fight, as it comes out of the reactor, is the mortal enemy of us all, not just of the Soviet Union. So was that other enemy in 1941. And — then as now — if they lose, we lose.°

Ascherson was writing at a time of heightened Cold War hostility, in which some Western commentators had already seized on the disaster as an opportunity to denounce the old enemy. His invocation of 1941, and the sacrifices made by Russians to defeat Nazism, had therefore a particular context. But this comparison also points to a larger problem of representation. To compare the radioactivity leaking out of Chernobyl with the Nazi invaders of 1941, or by implication with some creeping essence of Nazism, is to invoke a narrative which finally reassures. This is a narrative of already established heroism (even if the West needed a lot of reminding) and of a successful outcome. That narrative is endlessly replayed, in various forms, in Western culture. The

Second

World

War, from

the Battle

of Britain

to Stalingrad,

functions as a narrative of close-run victory against terrible odds. Initial disaster, which gives the story its tension, is followed by the necessary victory of the moral protagonist. The relative suppression, in the West, throughout the Cold War years,of the part played by Russia, simplified that narrative, since Russia had always been an ambivalent term in the equation. The underlying message is of a natural providence ensuring final victory. This is also the message of most crime thrillers. Ascherson quickly follows his recognition of the difficulty of representing Chernobyl (‘the invisible thing’) with an imposed solution. He clothes Chernobyl in the familiar Second World War narrative. In doing so, even as he issues a brave rallying-call, he anticipates a successful outcome and a narrative closure. It seems that our dominant narratives can’t do without this. Environmental problems cannot easily provide it. The real, material ecological crisis, then, is also a cultural crisis, a crisis

of representation. The inability of political cultures to address environmentalism is in part a failure of narrative. Yet these concerns will not be kept out of narrative. Environmental preoccupations are registering, now, across a wide range of texts and discourses, some of them not obviously concerned with ecology or ‘nature’. We have ecology in advertising, in Hollywood thrillers, in Disney, in tourism, in books for

children; more obviously, we have it in nature writing and television

Introduction

ee

nature programmes. Writing the Environment is a book which sets out to examine this diversity: to see what old narrative forms make of environmentalism, and whether new ones are emerging. And, since narrative operates by seduction and pleasure, Writing the Environment aims to explore the pleasures of a cultural environmentalism which not only encompasses restrictions and limits, but also desire, sensation, release.

The book also aims to introduce ecocriticism: the new environmentalist cultural criticism: environmentalism’s overdue move beyond science, geography and social science into ‘the humanities’. The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often partconcealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis. The starting-point for the ecocritic is that there really is an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and that this crisis poses some of the great political and cultural questions of our time. In addition to global warming, and all the concerns aroused by atmospheric, oceanic and radioactive pollution, the crisis encompasses a variety of health issues. In Britain, there is the still unresolved BSE (‘mad cow disease’) crisis, which throws up as many problems of narrative as Chernobyl: the prion protein, currently identified as the most likely agent of infection, is invisible, invasive and virtually indestructible like the radioactive contamination, while the presence of beef products and derivatives in countless unsuspected foods begins to suggest beef itself as another circulating, all-penetrating substance, nowhere and everywhere.° More locally, there are battles about new roads and developments, and the actual or threatened loss of landscapes, places and animals which have come to matter to people. World-wide, there are questions about cancers, new viruses, fertility and reproductive health; and questions of what to feel, or do, about the extinction of animal and plant species, or

about the cruelty of farming methods. Environmental disputes are bound up with questions of neo-colonialism, the political power of multinational corporations and the industrialization of countries, as shown recently by the pressure put on Shell over oceanic disposal of waste from oil extraction processes, and by the arrest and execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa for leading the Ogoni resistance to the ruinous effects of oil extraction. Most of these concerns do not belong readily to the conventional domain of ‘literature’, so much as to ‘science’ or ‘politics’. Literature, like the other arts, has been positioned in British education as one of the ‘humanities’, a humanizing sphere, a refuge from the harsher, depersonalized cultures of technology and business. Sometimes this can be too neat a separation, consigning literature to a part of life

6

Writing the environment

called ‘leisure’, from which it has little influence on ‘real life’. There

are similarities between this treatment of literature and the construction of ‘nature’, in pastoral, as a separate space, a place of refuge from the

urban

and the modern.

Often, literature, especially narrative, is re-

garded as the cultural space reserved for the ‘personal’ viewpoint, as opposed to an impersonal or highly informed one. This notion of the personal tends to exclude the large-scale perspectives, political generalities,

narrative

environmental literature

time-scales

debate.

is this: show

and

scientific

vocabularies

So the challenge environmentalism how

it feels, here

and

now.

used

in

poses to

Dramatize

the

occurrence of large events in individual lives. Make contact between the public and the personal, in accordance with the Green maxim: ‘Think globally, act locally’. This slogan is similar to the feminist principle that ‘the personal is political’. Each challenges a dominant ideology which draws boundaries and declares things to be separate. But environmentalism has a political weakness in comparison with feminism: it is much harder for environmentalists to make the connection between global threats and individual lives. Green politics cannot easily be, like feminism, a politics of personal liberation and empowerment. Often it seems to be the reverse: a politics insisting on restraint and self-denial, the curbing of consumption and pleasure. Nevertheless, there is an important body of thought in feminism which argues that the beliefs and institutions which oppress women are largely those which cause environmental damage, and that feminism and ecology can make common cause under the heading ‘ecofeminism’. To personify humanity, using the pronoun ‘we’, as the perpetrator of environmental damage, is to mask important differences. ‘We’ — men, women, different cultures, rich and poor — are

not all in the same way responsible for ecological damage. Feminist ecologists have looked critically at the male tradition of identifying women with nature; the dualistic tradition which positions man as rational subject and woman as object and other. This opposition between man and woman lines up with the oppositions between rationality and emotion, and culture and nature. Nature is gendered female, while women, from the male viewpoint, are territory for adventure, wildness

to be tamed,

owned

and controlled.

While

some

feminists

have rejected the pairing of women with nature, demanding access to the traditionally male domains of scientific rationality, ecofeminists such as Carolyn Merchant, Susan Griffin and Vandana Shiva have explored its history and the advantages that might lie in retaining it, turning a negative to a positive. Environmentalism brings rationalist science and technological capitalism under intense questioning, and demands a revaluation of qualities traditionally associated with both ‘nature’ and women.

Introduction

a

Women, world-wide, are likely to have more experience of the effects of ecological damage, because of their relative poverty and because of the special vulnerability of children. Women are therefore likely to have an authoritative perspective on ecological questions. But the risk, emphasized particularly by Janet Biehl, is that ecofeminists will accept too much of the patriarchal definition of female territory, and will collude with their own exclusion from scientific vantage-points which have become more vital than ever with the need to monitor ecological events. In answer, ecofeminists need only point to the extraordinary work of women ecologists, from Rachel Carson to Donna Haraway, in redirecting science towards different priorities, but the dilemma remains a powerful one in ecocritical discussions of representations of women and nature. Environmentalism has been seen as the basis and rallying-point for a new politics of the Left, and as the new ideological antagonist for a capitalism which has triumphed over all its old enemies. Like feminism, environmentalism is both assertively new, in its effort to make a great point of departure, and proudly old, in its work of recovering suppressed voices from the past. ‘Green’ history is tricky terrain. Whereas Carolyn Merchant has retrieved a benign environmentalism from the past, in preenlightenment, pre-mechanistic conceptions of Nature, Anna Bramwell, Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, and Richard H. Grove’ are among those who have found the ‘green’ tradition much more ambiguous, demonstrating that environmentalism has had fascist and colonialist forms, as well as radical and humanitarian. But most urgently, above these debates, the claim of contemporary environmentalism is that the present crisis is different, unprecedented. Never before has so much scientific argument been assembled to support the perception of a global ecosystem, and its difference is profound; the contemporary movement, from Rachel Carson onwards, expresses a new perception of the relationship between human practices and the material world. An ecological perspective strives to see how all things are interdependent, even those apparently most separate. Nothing may be discarded or buried without consequences. Literature is not leisure, not separate from science or politics, any more than ‘nature’ can be separate from human life, or someone’s backyard be immune from pollution. There are local ecosystems, but all are subject to the global ecosystem, a totality which excludes nothing and can be rid of nothing. This makes environmentalism a vital testing-ground for relations between post-colonial pluralism and new ‘globalization’. In some of its versions, environmentalism is undoubtedly in conflict with postmodernism’s hostility to grand narratives and insistence on pluralism, irony and the

autonomy of small narratives.®

8

Writing the environment

Se

As an academic movement, ecocriticism is emerging particularly in the USA: the first conference of ‘The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’ (ASLE), at Colorado State University in June 1995, featured more than 200 academic papers, while the American ecocritical journal Isle (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) is now in its fourth year. Developments in Britain have been slower, but in 1996 and 1997 three conferences, at Warwick, Lancaster and Swansea

universities, were

devoted to ecocriticism in

literary and historical studies. Courses and modules teaching literature and environmentalism are beginning to appear. Writing the Environment gives a cross-section of work in this field, some samples of what ecocritics do, and a guide to the most important ecocritical debates. Five of the fifteen essays are by American contributors. Since ecocriticism first took shape in the USA, and since the weight of ecocritical writing published so far is American, we wanted to give readers elsewhere a substantial sample of American work. Naturally, American approaches and debates reflect particular American conditions, such as the persistence of various forms of frontier and pioneer ideology; the presence of Native American cultures possessing strong continuities with the pre-industrial, pre-colonial past and unimplicated, because of exclusion, in industrial capitalism and therefore functioning as a possible and historical alternative; the absence of a strong socialist party and the resulting prominence, since the 1960s, of new forms of radicalism;

and, not least, the survival of large areas of land which can be called ‘wilderness’. Against this, a British perspective has to accommodate the densely populated and suburban character of most of the British countryside, and, most importantly, the historical meanings assigned to ‘nature’ in Britain, particularly the identification of rural life with feudalist traditions and hierarchies, in opposition to urban capitalism and its forms of social mobility (an opposition which has both reactionary and Marxist versions). We aim, with the combination of articles in Writing the Environment, to initiate a dialogue between British and American perspectives, showing the divergences and points in common. The collection is grouped into sections on ecocritical theory, ecocritical history and contemporary writing. In keeping with environmentalism’s recognition that all boundaries are likely to be crossed, however, all the theoretical chapters include readings of texts, and all the others make reference to theory; at times the placing of a chapter in one section or another was almost arbitrary. SueEllen Campbell’s essay ‘Magpie’ (given as an opening plenary lecture at the first ASLE conference) about the eclecticism and boundary-crossing of ecocriticism gives a pointer here. Dominic Head, M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, and Patrick D. Murphy (founder and first editor of Isle) offer theoretical debate culminating in close reading of con-

Introduction

==9

temporary writing, while Greg Garrard, challenging environmentalists to acknowledge the problems raised by Heidegger’s presence in ‘green’ philosophy, demonstrates his case with a reading of Seamus Heaney. Jonathan Bate, whose Romantic Ecology (1991) inaugurated the new British ecocriticism, reads contemporary poetry against contemporary biology; indeed, one of the pleasures of editing this book has been the variety of references, from Kingzett’s Chemical Encyclopaedia to The Decay of Lying; from Powers of Horror to Culpeper’s Complete Herbal; from Silent Spring to Ai’t Ia Woman; from Dent Open-Air Library to Boston South End Press. Barbara White examines the historical roots and contemporary persistence of the Jeremiad, a key form in environmentalist rhetoric, as, in an American

context,

Scott Slovic has recently shown.’ John

Lucas, in exploring concerns with nature and botany in John Clare and George Crabbe, touches upon the politics of land-ownership and enclosure, and the scarcely less raw politics of scientific classification. Tracy Brain uncovers an eloquent environmentalism in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Gretchen Legler asks challenging questions about ecology in relation to race and gender. Finally, Karin Lesnik-Oberstein and Karla Armbruster analyse two of the cultural spaces where environmentalism has been most visible: writing for children and television nature documentaries. The voices are as diverse as the topics. We hope that they none the less constitute a dialogue, and one that will become more and more inclusive and receive more and more attention, as ecocriticism develops. Notes 1. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Gambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 35. 2. Christa Wolf, Cassandra, trans. J. van Heurck (London: Virago, 1984). 3. Zizek, Looking Awry, pp. 35-6. Aa Ibid ps 395. Observer, 18 May 1986, p. 7. 6. Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef (London: HarperCollins, 1992), tells the story of beef as, more or less, the story of the whole world.

7. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995); Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8. David Harvey offers an ambitious cultural and physical geography of relations between environmentalism and cultural and economic globalization, in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996). g. See Scott Slovic, ‘Epistemology and Politics in American Nature Writing: Embedded Rhetoric and Discrete Rhetoric’, in Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown (eds), Green Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 82-110.

Part One

Ecocritical ‘Theory

1. Magpie SueEllen Campbell

Magpies are striking birds, bright patches of white setting off an elegant _ black iridescence of bronzes, greens, blues, reds, purples. Inquisitive, curious and talkative, they are skilled in discovering things that have been concealed. ‘Usually nonchalant and absurdly dignified,’ writes one observer, they ‘at times assume the utmost interest in their occupation, and dart with surprising speed here and there.”! They make their living as generalists. They forage, hunt and gather; they are opportunists and scavengers, quick to snatch tasty morsels and stash their treasure. By reputation (though apparently not in fact), they have a keen eye for bright objects such as jewellery. They build amazing nests: huge, spherical, layered, intricately woven, incorporating hundreds of miscellaneous pieces. These nests are messy but strong; other birds and even small mammals such as foxes use them for years. Though they prefer partly open country in temperate regions (scrub, forest edges, riparian woodlands), they inhabit a wide range of habitats. They may, in fact, have lived in close association with human settlements for thousands of years. In the western US, they are as likely to be found in a city park as in a wild stretch of grassland or foothills; in England, where their populations have grown dramatically in recent years, they are at home in urban wastelands and parklands, suburbs and farms. They thrive in margins and borders, in the spaces that link human territories with wild spaces.” Magpies,

I think, make

good role-models for critics, teachers and

students in the ways they embody the advantages of being inquisitive, of foraging, of building something new out of apparently unrelated scraps. They may make particularly good models for ecological writers and critics. Seeking to inhabit similarly marginal spaces between human and wild, in our explorations of new critical territory we too might well thrive on an eclectic and improvisatory appetite. 13

14

Ecocritical theory

Magpies, we might say, ask lots of wonderful tool for thinking. I ask them and writing, and I show my students construct huge nests of questions; how

questions, and questions are a of myself when I’m researching how to do the same — how to to question their premises, their

main terms, their personal involvement,

their own

questions; how to

juggle several competing lines; how to sort research from thinking questions and fresh meat from rusty metal; how to ask about silences, impervious surfaces, and things that seem ‘simple’ or ‘natural’; how to follow tangents and also keep close enough to the material, drawing connections and distinctions, then questioning both; how to be limber,

creative and rigorous; how to keep asking ‘so what?’ and deferring answers; how to enjoy open ends, loose ends, unravelled threads, complicated tangles. In my classes, we keep our questions focused on the material we’ve all read. Alone, I forage much further. I talk to friends; browse through

junk mail, magazines, bookstores; poke around in subjects I don’t know; read literary theory; go hiking and travelling. I try to keep my peripheral vision sharp, since it’s usually the glint of what I’m not looking for that raises the best questions, and I guard my status as amateur and sampler. I collect shiny tidbits and bring them home to my study, where I weave them into my nest of feathers and books, seashells and snapshots, snippets of paper and sage. I want to demonstrate all this with a magpie’s nest of questions about Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, a book I like very much and teach often but have never focused on as a critic. It’s as close as we come in modern American nature and environmental literature to a classic, or perhaps more accurately an icon — a book so engaging, influential and well-written that it tends to collect admiration and deflect critical questioning. It also raises many of the most interesting and complex issues in this field, not least those having to do with the genre of wilderness narratives and the sometimes invisible cultural ideas about wilderness these narratives embody. Based mainly on a couple of summers Abbey spent working as a park ranger in the late 1950s, Desert Solitaire is centred in Arches National Monument (now National Park), just north of the small Mormon town of Moab,

Utah, then a uranium

mining boom

town, now

booming

again with tourism (especially mountain biking and rafting), in the north-east corner of the arid Colorado Plateau. The book’s organization is chronological (April to September) but also digressive, with chapters on local plants and animals, moving cattle with a local rancher, the tourist industry, searching for a dead man, side trips into the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon and the nearby mountains, the allure and mystery of the desert, and more. Abbey’s tonal range is equally broad,

Magpie

45

encompassing invective and lyricism with equal skill. It has been very widely read (both in and out of academia) and correspondingly influential. When I teach nature-writing classes to students who are not literature majors and often not really readers, this is one book most of them have already read and loved; many of them want to be Edward Abbey. In his very quirky but intriguing book America, Jean Baudrillard writes that deserts ‘are outside the sphere and circumference of desire’. Yet every time I read Desert Solitaire, ’'m swamped with desire for that landscape. Is this Abbey’s doing? What kinds of desire does he mention or evoke, using what language, in what contexts? I find dozens of intriguing passages. Most

of them

invoke

sex. We

hear about the bee and the ‘soft,

lovely, sweet, desirable’ cactus flower (p. 25);' the list of things ‘we need’ that links ‘the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves’ (p. xiii); the dancing gopher snakes whose ‘passion’ turns Abbey into ‘a shameless voyeur’ (p. 20). There’s the amazing description of a day floating down the river in Glen Canyon with a male friend, in which, ‘enjoying a very intimate relation with the river: only a layer of fabric between our bodies and the water’, he feels ‘a sense of cradlelike security, of achievement and a joy, a pleasure almost equivalent to that first entrance — from the outside — into the neck of the womb’ and remembers Mark ‘Twain and the ‘erotic dreams of adolescence’ (p. 154). Here I think first of Leslie Fiedler’s elucidation of the implied homosexuality in much American literature, and then of Eve Sedgwick’s more recent theory of male homosocial relations, in which the bonds between men are forged over the body of a woman.° There’s an almost laughably Freudian description of the land as ‘lovely and wild, with a virginal sweetness ... [where] all is exposed and naked, dominated by the monolithic formations of sandstone which stand above the surface of the ground’ (p. 10). And perhaps most memorably, there’s Abbey’s response to his first daylight view of Arches: ‘Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a

beautiful woman’ (p. 5). This last passage follows by just one page his often quoted naming of what he sees as his own: ‘I put on a coat and step outside. Into the center of the world, God’s navel, Abbey’s country, the red wasteland’ (p. 4). Of course, all this raises a lot of feminist questions, so familiar is this linking of desire, sex, women and landscape. In a class I might start with some of the big ones: just what is Desert Solitaire’s relationship to this patriarchal tradition? Or: why is it that none of the book’s

human characters is female? Does something important depend on their absence? What really interests me these days, though, is how touchy this subject is. My female students are usually intensely annoyed by Abbey’s comments about women (‘same old wife every night’ [p. 155]). My male students, like many male critics, react defensively, explaining how each individual passage is normal and thus unproblematic. A joke, they might say, is just a joke. What’s at stake here? Why not just admit that, yes, he had some sexist views, but nothing unusual for the time? At a conference a few years ago I heard someone ask a question about Abbey’s literary treatment of women and be told, in answer, that he loved his mother. As one of my friends said, so did Norman Bates. This, of course, brings us to Freud. Is Abbey’s loving his mother after all not irrelevant, the mother always the true object of desire? Which mother? I think of Donna Haraway’s discussion of the intricate symbolic and political implications of a T-shirt showing that familiar photo of the earth floating in space with the caption ‘Love Your Mother’.® And what about the Land Rover ad I came across in The New Yorker just before Mother’s Day, set in Abbey’s country and beginning, ‘It costs $29,950 to bring a child into the world’, and ending, ‘So why not call 1-800-FINE4WD for the dealer nearest you? And get to know the most bountiful mother of all. Nature.’ If we were to explore these images, what connections to Abbey would we find? Or — a further tangent, more sticks for my growing nest — why have car ads so often been set in this landscape? What connects desire, consumption and deserts? Consider the car chase and conclusion of that great road movie Thelma and Louise, supposedly set at the Grand Canyon, but filmed around Arches. Is the desert the mother in that film? For Baudrillard, the desert and speed are kin, and the goal is to reach the ‘point of no return’.’ Thelma and Louise do this; does Abbey? What if Ranger Abbey, not the dope-smoking Rasta mountain biker, had happened by the policeman trapped in his car-boot? And what about those mountain bikes: are they so popular in the Utah desert because they consume more miles, more slickrock? How many Moab fat-tyre fans are also Abbey fans? What else could we ask about Abbey’s desire to ‘possess’ the landscape? He himself connects it to greed for money and uranium. Consider, in this tangle, the long (and clearly fictional) story in ‘Rocks’ about the uranium speculator Graham and his murder of his hapless miner-partner Husk, and Graham’s affair with Husk’s wife, who sits by a canyon spring ‘half undressed’ (p. 71). How different is Abbey’s greedy desire from a speculator’s or a miner’s? What complications are added when, at the book’s very end, Abbey calls the desert’s inhabitants his ‘children’ and says, as he leaves, that he ‘surrenders’ the ‘sweet virginal

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18

Ecocritical theory

primitive land’, his ‘by right of possession, possession by right of love’ (p. 267)? There are other forms of desire in this book as well: for a ‘true home’, for the ‘womb’ of wilderness (p. 166). Could we look at all of them in loosely Lacanian terms, as versions of the same yearning for something we can never have, because its absence is central to our identity? As Abbey says: Even after years of intimate contact and search this quality of strangeness in the desert remains undiminished. Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, it lures a man on and on, from the redwalled canyons to the smoke-blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise. Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted.

‘Where

is the heart of the desert?’ he asks, and answers:

‘I am

convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness’ (pp. 242-3). Could we say that Abbey’s desert is an image of pure desire? If so, is it tied to the construction

of the self? Would

the

concept from film theory of suture be relevant? Am I somehow stitched into the book as a participant in Abbey’s desire? And is this desire linked, as in Lacan, to language? This passage continues: ‘One whiff of juniper smoke, a few careless words, one reckless and foolish poem —

The

Wasteland,

for instance

— and

I become

as restive, irritable,

brooding and dangerous as a wolf in a cage’ (p. 243). On my first backpacking trip in Canyonlands, years before I read Desert Solitaire, I too found myself chanting lines from The Wasteland (though then it was as a litany of misery; it was August). Now both Eliot and Abbey make me want to return. How much of our desire is language? And so — with language and a missing centre — we arrive at deconstruction and post-structuralism. I often find myself reading and teaching Derrida and Abbey back to back, and so I’ve seen how saturated Desert Solitaire is with passages about the power of writing, matched with passages repudiating that power. His is ‘a world of words’ (p. xii); “Through naming comes knowing; we grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name . . . And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds’ (p. 257); yet books and words are ‘a sort of mental smog that keeps getting between a man and the world, obscuring vision’ (p. 184). Quotations and references to some 100 different writers, philosophers and musicians pepper the book (the poets alone include Eliot, Lawrence, Housman, Rilke, Jeffers, Baudelaire, Whitman, Burns,

Magpie

19:

Nashe, Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Marvell, Raleigh and Donne), making it an intensely literary book, a very textual text; and yet he

hopes that ‘Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English’ will hate it (p. xii). Just as he yearns for the desert’s absent heart, Abbey desires a direct connection with the real. How are we to understand this pervasive pattern of self-contradiction? Like a magpie, I’m drawn to a few glinting tangents. One takes off through anthropology. If the desert has no heart, no centre, then what serves Abbey as a functional centre? Talking about the way ethnographers contain the cultures they are studying, James Clifford focuses on the ‘powerful localizing strategy’ of the observer’s tent — pitched next to the chief’s home in the village — and the larger, ‘complementary localization’ of ‘the field’. Does Abbey represent his dwelling place as the power-holding centre of his field? Clifford wonders about the image of the tent — ‘its mobility, thin flaps, providing an “inside” where notebooks, special foods, a typewriter, could be kept,

a base of operations minimally separated from “the action”’ — and I wonder about Abbey’s small metal trailer and juniper-branch ramada where he, too, cooks and writes. (He hangs a red bandana, his ‘private

flag’, from the ramada poles [p. 96].) Could we also identify something like the ethnographer’s ‘chief’, ‘informants’ or ‘culture’? What would we see if we read Abbey’s book as an ethnography? Or what about the postmodern possibilities? Abbey calls language ‘a mighty loose net’ (p. xii); how is his book like the Internet, like the purely textual Abbey Web? What happens to the desert’s ‘reality’ when it becomes ‘virtual’? “The desert’, Baudrillard says, ‘is an ecstatic form

of disappearance’.® Foucault went to Death Valley’s Zabriskie Point to take acid — to a place that had already been textualized by Antonioni’s film — and was, apparently, rendered speechless by the beauty of the sky. Do any of Abbey’s actions resemble Foucault’s quests for limit experiences? What about his most physecal moments: his misery herding cattle in the heat of June, his solitary brush with death when he strands himself in Havasu Canyon? Are these points of disappearance or intensity, ecstasy or abjection? Is this where we see the body being disciplined? If so, into what, and why? (I'd love to follow this tangent — wilderness travel as Foucauldian discipline. Last autumn when I made myself miserable portaging through cold rain largely for the sake of an essay, what was the discipline? Where was text, where body? What did my bruises mean?) Abbey tells his readers to ‘crawl ... over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not’ (p. xiv). What links blood, land, writing, vision? Baudrillard again: ‘The acceleration of molecules

in the heat contributes to a barely perceptible evaporation of meaning.’!” What

happens when Abbey is hottest? Here we could look at his obsessive but futile pursuit of Moon-Eye, a horse who cries out for interpretation: he’s solitary and independent (he has lived alone in a distant canyon for years), but he’s also branded (written on, owned, possessed), he’s feral (not wild), and he’s gelded (one of many details that makes me wonder about the book’s construction — or deconstruction — of masculinity). Abbey wonders if perhaps only the tracks of the horse exist; says he looks ‘like the idea — without the substance — of a horse’; describes him

in varying ways as hollow; and, at the end, throwing his hackamore at the horse in defeat, says, ‘to Moon-Eye it must have looked as if I were pulling out my intestines’ (pp. 142-50). What if we put this image next to the earlier ‘center of the world, God’s navel, Abbey’s country, the

red wasteland’ (p. 4)? And what about this hackamore throwing? Is there any connection to the book’s notorious rock-throwing scenes? There are three interesting ones. First Abbey calls his book a ‘tombstone’, a ‘bloody rock’, and commands the reader: ‘Don’t drop it on your foot — throw it at something big and glassy’ (p. xiv). Then he throws a rock at a rabbit and kills it, in what he interprets as an experiment turned initiation into the world of predator and prey (p. 34). And then he proposes his version of Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Bishop Berkeley: “To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he’s a liar’ (p. 97). We might also consider two chapters: ‘Rocks’, the one about Graham, Husk and the destructive allure of uranium; and “The Heat of Noon:

Rock and Tree and Cloud’, the book’s mid-point, which closes with this disappearing passage: Through half-closed eyes, for the light would otherwise be overpowering, I consider the tree, the lonely cloud, the sandstone bedrock of this part of the

world and pray — in my fashion — for a vision of truth. I listen for signals from the sun — but that distant music is too high and pure for the human ear. I gaze at the tree and receive no response. I scrape my bare feet against the sand and rock under the table and am comforted by their solidity and resistance. I look at the cloud. (p. 136)

So a rock here is a book full of words; a predator’s weapon; a radioactive sign of greed and violence; a symbol of realism; and an image of solidity that dissolves, as we read it, into sand and then cloud.

Just how solid are these rocks? Remember where we are: in the country of erosion, sedimentation, more erusion, and of arches — rocks with no centre, hollow rocks. Abbey knows this perfectly well: he says

he strides away from his dead rabbit through ‘melting sandstone’ and

jokes about

using hairspray or Elmer’s

glue as preservatives.

And,

sounding like Baudrillard again, who describes nearby Monument

Magpie

23

Valley as ‘blocks of language suddenly rising high, then subjected to a pitiless erosion’,'! Abbey says Delicate Arch (now probably the most photographed part of Arches and the emblem on some Utah licence plates) can be seen as ‘a symbol, a sign, a fact, a thing without meaning or a meaning which includes all things’ (pp. 34-6). We have a world of words here, even when it’s about rocks, and if

his part of Utah is now in some real way ‘Abbey’s country’, it isn’t because he possessed or loved it but because he wrote about it. Still, if Abbey were to throw a rock at my head, I’d duck. So how else can we look at this intersection between text and real? Let’s collect some sticks from culture and history. What kind of landscape does Abbey represent? Clearly, it’s a ‘wilderness’ and a disappearing Eden. Since I’ve been reading environmental history, I'll take it as given that ‘wilderness’ is nearly as much a cultural expression of desire as ‘Eden’. What’s left out of these constructs? A quick list of traces remaining in this book would include mining, ranching, Mormon

settlers, tourists, the feral Moon-Eye,

and the US

government — the salaried Abbey, whose fantasy of the perfect winter depends on unemployment cheques, the National Park Service, Atomic Energy Commission, Air Force, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Public

Roads,

Wildlife

Service,

BIA,

BLM,

Forest

Service,

and

no

doubt others — a lot of signs this wilderness isn’t pristine. What could we learn about how all these land-users have shaped Abbey’s landscape? And then, to quote Abbey, ‘What about the Indians?’ He says: ‘There are no Indians in the Arches country now; they all left seven hundred years ago and won't be back for a long time’ (p. 99). Now this is what I’d call a suspicious statement. One of the best books I read recently was Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, part of which traces the construction of Yosemite as a wilderness Eden through the killing and driving out of its native people.’? Did anything like this happen in ‘Abbey’s country’? All my recent reading tells me that it must have. Are there any traces of this in Desert Solitarre? Let’s start with the Anasazi, about whom Abbey talks quite a bit, though always in the context of their disappearance which, of course, helps legitimate the concept of wilderness. They also seem to serve as images of desire: Abbey calls them ‘naked’ and ‘indolent’, the same things he calls himself at his most blissful moments. And how about the drawings of petroglyphs that open every chapter in my edition? (The copyright page says they are ‘based on the author’s copies of prehistoric Indian petroglyphs and pictographs found in various parts of southern Utah and northern Arizona’.) Are these drawings evidence that the Anasazi have been reduced to art? Do they represent a strategy

22

Ecocritical theory

of marginalization, leaving space only around the text’s edges? Do they signal the return of the repressed? What if we think about marginalization in physical terms? What’s on the margins of Arches and Canyonlands? Well, among other things, several large Indian reservations. Abbey does devote seven pages to the Navajo people, whose land is to the south, admiring their ‘poorly developed acquisitive instinct’ and their ‘successful exploitation’ of timber, oil, gas, coal and uranium, and then criticizing their ‘uncontrolled population growth’ and consequent overgrazing, ecological degradation, poverty, drug and alcohol use, broken families and so on in a stunning oversimplification and falsification. For one thing, as Richard White points out in The Roots of Dependency, between 1860 and 1930, while the Navajo population quadrupled, Arizona’s total population grew by a factor of 67, New Mexico’s by a factor of 7, while nobody ‘argued that Anglos or Chicanos... had a problem of overpopulation’.’” Is there some explanation for Abbey’s myopia other than laziness, carelessness or casual racism? For his sense of his wilderness landscape, must the Navajos be seen as negligible or blameworthy? Think about his story of the car crash just outside Arches that left two dead men and the debris of alcohol, Marlboro cigarettes and cowboy

shirts, but no

eagle feathers,

buffalo

robes, bows,

arrows,

medicine pouches or drums; a story that Abbey ends, ‘Some Indians’ (p. 109). Why doesn’t he know or seem to care whether the young men were, as he puts it, ‘Navajos? Apaches? Beardless Utes?’ Without their eagle feathers and medicine pouches, are these men as comfortably anonymous,

even invisible, as the Anasazi?

I was even more troubled to realize that there are only two places in this book where Abbey even mentions the Utes, here and when he admires their name for a mountain. Nowhere does he say that he’s surrounded also by three Ute reservations, one large one immediately to his north, or that a lot of what he calls hzs country was not long ago Ute country. (Indeed, I’ve been told, during Abbey’s years at Arches, many Utes and Navajos still lived all around the area, ranching and farming — something you would never guess from reading the book.) What can we make of such a stunning omission? Could he not have thought about this? Did he think it didn’t matter? Is this something else he found it necessary to repress? How many of Abbey’s central premises are built upon this silence? How many of our culture’s? What other big silences are there here, and how might they matter? What else happened between Abbey’s first summer in Arches and the writing and publication of the book some ten years later? The book says nothing about the civil rights movement; close to nothing about the war in Vietnam; almost nothing about the Cold War. There is only a tiny bit more about the atomic age, most of it about

Magp ie

: "29

the economics of Moab’s uranium boom. He mentions the long-term hazards from radiation that the miners face but says they’re happy partly because they need not doubt their manhood (p. 65); he compares his knowledge of the impending Glen Canyon Dam to ‘strontium in the marrow of our bones’ (p. 185) (this is a specific reference to the way fallout from nuclear tests polluted milk in the late 1950s and early 1960s); and he offers this amazing conclusion: Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelop the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas — the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again ... I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico ... already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. (pp. 267-8)

(What bizarre implications of intertextuality might emerge if we also remember that the Trinity site was named after a poem by John Donne?) What values underlie this statement of faith, with its biblical echoes? The ‘Love Your Mother’ T-shirt Haraway talks about was from a relatively recent Mother’s Day protest at the Nevada test site; would those activists have agreed with Abbey’s affirmation? Again it was Solnit’s book that alerted me to these passages — or the loud silences surrounding them — with its talk of the atomic tests in Nevada, and my interest has been sharpened by Carole Gallagher’s American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War. One woman told Gallagher about camping in Arches at about Abbey’s time: ‘We pitched our tent in a rather primitive area, and there were stakes all around us with little cans on them — they were uranium claims. They were all through the park ... everywhere ... The next year all of those claims were denied ... what they were picking up with their geiger counters, was fallout.’'* During his summers in Utah, Abbey was almost certainly downwind from more than a few above-ground nuclear test explosions. He had to have known this, and about the dangers of fallout. (I asked my mother what she knew about this at the time, when she was raising small children in Denver; her answer boiled down to ‘A lot more than

Abbey admits to knowing’.) What reason — conscious or subconscious — would he have had to repress this knowledge in his book? (This might be the place to ask about the strange shift into fiction with the story about the uranium miners in ‘Rocks’. Surely this is a distancing move. And the fate of Husk’s son Billy-Joe: what anxieties about fallout are displaced into the hallucinatory effects of sunstroke, severe sunburn [one of the immediate symptoms of fallout exposure] and datura?) Are the atomic tests the desert’s secret heart? What kind of wilderness

Ecocritical theory

24

Eden is blanketed in nuclear fallout? For how many of our wilderness places is some similar denial necessary? It is increasingly clear to me that environmental literature in general, and Abbey’s book as an example, works partly by shutting out social and cultural complexities — an omission that’s probably one source of the desire they embody and evoke. Mary Louise Pratt writes about the ways ethnographers use their arrival scenes to define their stance: in her terms, Abbey portrays himself as a ‘castaway’, a strategy for idealizing the role of participant-observer and obscuring all the ways both observer and observed are tied to the larger world.'!? Echoing Thoreau’s ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life’,'° Abbey says, ‘I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental’ (p. 6). ’m starting to wonder about this balance between what is confronted and what is evaded, and what assumptions lie beneath it. What notion of the elemental ignores nuclear fallout? Why think it’s necessary to leave society to find reality? What’s lost by opposing wilderness and culture? I happened to be rereading this book when the bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, and several of Abbey’s ideological statements leapt into the spotlight, especially his argument that ‘the wilderness should be preserved ... as a refuge from authoritarian government’. He explains how to impose ‘a dictatorial regime’: raze the wilderness, concentrate everyone (especially independent types) in big cities, encourage population growth, and control guns (pp. 130-1). What I once heard as cranky Ed Abbey and a prototype for the radical ecoactivist group Earth First! now also sounds to me like the ultra-right-wing militias, the source of that bomb. What could explain these echoes? Could there be any connection to Abbey’s evasion or repression of so many important social events and issues? Are we seeing here — in his anarchistic politics, his forgetting of the Utes and Navajos, his ignoring of the nuclear tests —a case of what Michael Rogin calls ‘political amnesia’ which, he says, ‘points to a cultural structure of motivated disavowal’?!” I wonder about Abbey’s constant emphasis on individualism — his title, his central solitude, his pervasive vision of the desert as a space of individuals: ‘each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem

of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate’ (p. 99). His sense of unity, in contrast, is tightly limited, either to the food-chain or to something mystical; when he talks about confronting ‘the bare bones of existence’, he continues, ‘I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in

which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate’ (p. 6). Rogin points out that one characteristic of American political culture is that it ‘linked freedom

Magpie

S95

to expansion in nature rather than to social solidarity, to violent conquest of the racial other rather than peaceful coexistence’.!® Is there any room in Abbey’s country for community, for ecological and human networks, for people living together, not always busy defending private space, perhaps even held together by government, taxes, laws? Is there room for a vision not of separation but of connection? With the magpie’s tricks of foraging and inquisitiveness, it’s easy to build big nests; messy but sturdy enough that if one branch falls out, others will hold the shape. One ornithologist deconstructed a very large magpie nest and found 1,573 sticks.'* I won’t count the pieces in mine. Instead, I'll end with a few snippets about magpies, and leave the analogies and the questions to you. First, their name. One theory (which Abbey might have liked for reasons different from mine) says it refers to talkative women. Another is that it comes from the birds’ habit of picking maggots out of the wounds of animals, especially those wounds caused by human mistreatment. Second: many American ranchers and English sport hunters and gamekeepers have no use for them. In 1989, one member of the House of Lords advocated ‘capital punishment for the thieving and murderous magpie’.”” Third: when a female is feeding her nestlings, she calls to them; if they don’t respond, she taps their heads and pries open their bills. Given this emphatic coaching, the young soon become ‘a set of inquisitive chattering marauders’.”’ And last: Abbey speaks of the magpies’ ‘handsome academic dress’ (p. 31) — but then, we know what he thought about academics. Notes 1. Arthur Cleveland Bent, Life Histories of North American Jays, Crows and Titmice (New York: Dover, 1964; reprint of 1946 Smithsonian Institute Bulletin 191), vol. 1, . 145. ;

ey On

magpies,

I consulted:

Bent, Life Histories, Tim

Birkhead,

The Magpies

(London: T. and A. D. Poyser, 1991); Derek Goodwin, Crows of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); the Revd C. A. Johns, British Birds in thew Haunts (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1862); Richard Kerridge, correspondence, 31 August 1995; and Robert Michael Pyle, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland (Boston and New York: Houghton Miflin, 1993).

3. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. C. Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 63. 4. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968). 5. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966); and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 6. Donna J. Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in L. Grossberg, G. Nelson and PA. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 295~337-

Ecocritical theory

26

7. Baudrillard, America, p. 10. 8. James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 98. g. Baudrillard, America, p. 5.

10. Ibid., p. 9. 11. Ibid., p. 4. 12. Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994). 13. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p- 31. 14. Carole Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 267-8. 15. Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Fieldwork in Common Places’, in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986), p. 38. 16. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Ciwil Disobedience (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1983), Pp. 13517. Michael Rogin, ‘““Make My Day!”: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism Reader (London and New York: Rout-

ledge, 1994), p. 23518. 19. 20. 21.

Ibid., p. 239. Birkhead, The Magpies, p. 140. Ibid., p. 221. Johns, British Birds in their Haunts, p. 261.

2. Ihe (im)possibility of ecocriticism Dominic

Head

The agnosticism of my title is intended to signal difficulties that should not be avoided: how can the premises of ecological thinking be accommodated within an increasingly rarefied discipline (literary study)? Is the object of this study (‘literature’) compromised as a vehicle for Green ideas? Is the discipline itself — professionalized literary criticism and theory — not an imprisoned manifestation of late capitalism; and so, from an ecological perspective, part of the problem not part of the solution? My answers to these questions acknowledge the partial validity of these complaints, even while trying to establish the grounds for progressing beyond them. The consequent remit of this chapter is to offer a comparison of, and to stage a mutual interrogation between, ecological thinking and literary study. To nail my colours to the mast at the outset, they are shades of dark Green: I am more inspired by the calls for fundamental social restructuring associated with deep ecology than by the shallow concern for limiting environmental damage. Thus, following Andrew Dobson’s distinction, I identify with ‘ecologism’ as a political ideology in its own right rather than with ‘environmentalism’ as a provisional management

strategy.' Even so, my training as a specialist in literary studies, in the era of post-structuralism, obliges. me to question a perceived drive towards fundamentalism in deep ecology. It is unclear whether or not a dark Green or ecocentric agenda can be fully accommodated within contemporary literary studies. Here I am touching on a question already adumbrated in a lucid essay by SueEllen Campbell: how does the specialist, versed in literary theory, articulate the confrontation between deep ecology and poststructuralism? In this investigation into the problems of being ‘poststructuralist and ecological at the same time’, Campbell (using ‘theory’ 27

Ecocritical theory

28

/) and ‘ecology’ as shorthand) locates a basic problem in ‘theory’s stress "on textuality, set against ecology’s call to action’. I shall return to this.

But Campbell also notes suggestive affinities between theory and ecology, particularly in a shared stress on effacing a traditional ‘authoritative center of value or meaning’. It is this point of contact that I wish to develop as the first principle in favour of ecocriticism. I am following here a familiar argument in defence of postmodernism: that the rejection of metanarrative and grand theory in ‘ postmodernist expression is accompanied by a more egalitarian combination of discourses, a mode of expression which creates the possibility of a grass-roots micropolitics in which previously marginalized voices can be heard. This process stems from the procedures of post-structuralist thinking, and supplies the ethical content of a variety of postmodernist expression (post-colonial literature and theory are exemplary in this connection). The process itself is characterized by a paradoxical combination of decentring and recentring: traditional given hierarchies are overturned — the assumptions on which they are based —) decentred — and a new, provisional platform of judgement is installed in a qualified recentring. A particular construction of ecological thinking can be shown to be based on this same paradoxical combination. This is important because it is easy to assume that a new ecological grand theory — the planet as limit — must provoke the postmodernist’s incredulity. But of course there is nothing new about this limit (you would have to be on another planet, quite literally, not to accept it). Moreover, prescriptions for the best action, from an ecological perspective, are necessarily provisional, continually refashioned as the \ scientific ideas on which they are based are contested and transformed. The Green movement in general is predicated on a typically «postmodernist deprivileging of the human subject. In post-colonial studies this decentring of the subject is a relative matter, where the colonizer and his discourses are decentred in relation to the colonized (now no longer marginalized). In some post-colonial texts (this includes critical works) there is a transitional dynamic in which the traces of decolonization remain visible. This, in a sense, is a qualified recentring

where the Other is unable (yet) to reclaim its history. Thus, in South Africa, white novelists like Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee have articulated both their own complicities and the need to provide the circumstances in which the racially repressed black Other can speak. Apparently, the dynamic of political ecology is less equivocal since the displacement of the exploitative subject (colonizing mankind) is accompanied by a privileging of the Object (the planet). The broader Green movement does, of course, embrace ideas which seem to assume

that this reversal is total (ecocentric groups such as Earth First!, for example). However, the construction of political ecology I am working

The (im)possibility of ecocriticism

~29

with depends upon a recentring of the enlightened subject, as instigator and agent of change (in ideology and in policy). Here I draw once more on Andrew Dobson’s construction of ecologism, as a human-authored political programme which, necessarily, qualifies the purity/mysticism of a entirely planet-centred philosophy. By this means, a rationale of value is established which is not merely exploitation — a utilitarian anthropocentrism — not a free-floating conception of inherent value in nature. In his discussion of this problem of value Dobson distinguishes between two types of anthropocentrism: a strong kind, such as the Marxist human-instrumental attitude to nature, and a weak kind which is merely human-centred. The idea of this weak anthropocentrism is that we can take ourselves seriously only by viewing the arena of our activities, and its requirements, seriously. Human self-realization is dependent upon an identification with the non-human world, not because of the benefits that can be gained, but because human activity of any kind has no meaning without such an identification. As Dobson puts it: ‘anthropocentrism in the weak sense is an unavoidable feature of the human condition’. This rationale of value is a prerequisite of political activity. In contrast to the notion of inherent value in nature, weak anthropocentrism ‘reintroduces the human onto the agenda — a necessary condition for there to be such a thing as politics’.* A position of informed recentring, then, is common to different branches of postmodernism, such as post-colonialism and ecologism. But in this model what particular position might the ecocritic inhabit? The issue here is how a meaningful path through literary theory can be found, how the insights of theory can be put to useful service in reinforcing ecological understanding. A fundamental problem is a per- ~ ceived emphasis on textuality in literary theory, and (notionally) a consequent gap between text and referent in the knowledge produced | by literary studies. Wendell Berry’s essay “Standing by Words’ embodies this criticism in equating a post--structuralist view of language with a diseased contemporary consciousness, inimical to community. Berry laments our ‘linguistic no-man’s land in which words and things, words and deeds, words and people’ fail ‘to stand in reliable connection or fidelity to one another’.* The instant response of the literary specialist, of course, is that a knowledge of how a language is structured is an essential tool in exposing damaging ideologies; but the underlying implication — and the charge that resonates for me ~ is that the process of developing specialized thinking about language and literature may be self-serving, channelled in the direction of a contained professionalism. Modern artistic movements in general have also come in for this kind of disapprobation. For Denys Trussell a trend through modernism

e a.

ha

30

Ecocritical theory

and postmodernism towards a stress on technique, a concern ‘with the means rather than the ends of art’ , Supplies disastrous confirmation of a bleak prognosis: ‘aesthetic narcissism is inevitable in an age of social and ecological breakdown’. This complaint, in the pages of The Ecologist, is an updated version of Georg Lukacs’ attack on modernism as a eoelally retrograde move away from the achievements of literary realism.® It is also a charge which takes its place within a broader Green critique of the discourses of modernity.’ Marxism is a particular target, condemned for a perceived human-instrumental attitude to nature.® A similar critique lies behind some of the pioneering books of ecocriticism.

Karl Kroeber

follows Jonathan

Bate, for example,

in a

distrust of the politicized readings of Romanticism in the 1980s, or ‘cold war criticism’ as it is termed.? While allowing for a necessary redressing of the balance in a particular field, the more general observation I wish to make is that one branch of ecocriticism appears to turn its back on current politicized theory.— This

is also, I think,

an

evasion

of the difficulties

of cultural

responses to postmodernity, a refusal to address Fredric Jameson’s (for yme) axiomatic point that ‘we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally ' facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt’.'? It may be that in fields of literary study other than Romanticism, ecocriticism can legitimately respond more directly to the theoretical implications of postmodernity, through a differently conceived reorientation, or informed recentring of human activity. The focus of this reorientation (which is how I recast Jameson’s double-bind) will need to be a feappraisal of textuality and its perception.

If postmodernism-is marked by anintensified stress on textuality — on the representation of world as text — its keynote ideas are exemplified by Charles Jencks’ work on postmodern architecture: on buildings as texts. For Jencks, postmodernism in architecture is characterized by a ‘double-coding’, a combination of modernist and other earlier codes in an historical and critical rereading of modernism.!' We can, perhaps,

see the same impulse in the weak anthropocentrism of ecologism, especially if it is defined as a post-Marxist double-coding, involving a combination of the central socialist code of modernity with earlier codes, such as the model of decentralized pre-industrial society, and the Romantic challenge to industrial progress. In this connection it seems significant that those recent book-length works of ecocriticism by Bate and Kroeber have focused on literary Romanticism. The aesthetic of Jencks, however, would need developing were it to supply the model for an ecocritical perception of textuality. In reading buildings as texts, Jencks’ method is to detect and interpret the signs, the cultural codes embedded in the design of different buildings. The

The (im)possibility of ecocriticism

31

basic impetus of the method avoids the implications of how urban space is appropriated and used up. Would an ecocritical model supplement Jencks in this way, following postmodernist geography? Qr might it be possible to refocus the initial approach to textuality? A different approach to architectural texts is offered by Brenda and Robert Vale who place emphasis on different principles: the environmental impact of materials used; the energy efficiency of designs; the recyclability of a building; the encouragement of environmentally-sound behaviour (all of which can be read off from the building as text).!2 The idea of Green architecture in this survey is underpinned by a properly Green materialist-aesthetic, and this may point the way to an appropriate ecocritical conception of textual value. The differing approaches of Jencks and the Vales to Ton Alberts’ NMB Bank outside Amsterdam are revealing. In his reading, Jencks acknowledges the stress on ‘ecological sense’ in the design, which betrays ‘all sorts of human qualities’. Yet the overall appearance — the ‘odd animal and organic metaphors’ together with ‘too many “Dutch” bricks (3.5 million of them)’ — causes Jencks to conclude that the bank is ‘not notable as high architecture’ despite being ‘popular and sensible’.!? By contrast, the Vales consider Alberts’ NMB Bank to be a prime example of Green architecture. While acknowledging that a vast office development of this kind may not have a role ‘in a future “Green” world’, they show, nevertheless, how every aspect of its design and construction — from the full consultation of employees to the avoidance of polluting materials — was planned following ecological principles. This excavation of context and background contrasts with Jencks’ concentration on surface codes and references, and results in a very different perception of aesthetic value. For the Vales those 3.5 million Dutch bricks are a key feature of the building’s Green credentials. The manufacture of these bricks requires relatively low amounts of energy, and their use is seen as an exemplary instance of building with local materials (even if they impose a uniformity which reduces the kind of varied allusion that Jencks seeks).'* The Vales’ reading of the NMB Bank represents a pointed ecocritical double-coding in that an arena associated with the efficiency of modernity — a locus of accumulation — is redesigned to incorporate individual as well as environmental needs. The redesign is a critique of the capitalist logic it also apparently serves, since the privileging of environmental needs is not a cost-effective principle. This model for the evaluation of Green architecture may offer a blueprint for the operations of ecocriticism. It is a double-coding in its demonstration of how a contemporary theoretical orientation, characterized by a focus on textuality, can be usefully supplemented by a simultaneous pursuit of ecological issues. A point to stress is that the

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model, though sketched here in simple outline, is more than a method, an empty form, into which a particular content (which here happens to be Green) can be poured. The method itself already reveals an ecological materiality since the uncovering impetus is predicated on the need to evaluate the ecological usefulness of the text under consideration. If this is the blueprint I would wish it to be, how can it be imported into literary analysis, and how flexible will it prove? This brings me to a fundamental question concerning the possibility of ecocriticism: | whether or not all literary genres can be approached in the same way. 4| Ecocritics have made worthwhile attempts to explicate poetry and (more 7 usually) non-fictional nature writing, but narrative fiction would seem to be peculiarly resistant to the operations of ecocriticism. The important test case, here, concerns whether or not the novel — currently the dominant mode of Western literary expression — can be a useful - vehicle for generating Green ideas, or whether this genre, this ‘triumph’ of industrialized society, is too much a product of its social moment to __ruminate usefully on the route to the post-industrial world. Lawrence Buell’s recent work, The Environmental Imagination, suggests a possible answer to this question. Buell, in a work that is likely to become a landmark in the field of ecocriticism, is much exercised by the question of textuality.'° He is concerned by the de-emphasis on mimesis in literary studies (a defining feature of postmodernism generally, as we have seen). This, fairly obviously, reduces the immediacy of environmental representation; or, rather, produces a misconceived notion of how environmental representation functions. In Buell’s account, this misconception has been produced by an emphasis on fictive genres, with a consequent emphasis on ‘setting’ as something which ‘deprecates what it denotes, implying that the physical environment serves for artistic purposes merely as backdrop, ancillary to the main event’.'° Buell’s project, to retheorize non-fiction, might appear to have a deeply conservative dynamic, which installs a particular conception of nature writing as the proper object of ecocritical attention, and which denigrates explicitly fictive modes (drama even more clearly than narrative fiction) on account of their failure to privilege the environment. Yet Buell is not entirely at odds with work on other critical genres

“in arguing that ‘the claims of realism’ need to be revived in such a way as to bring out ‘a dual accountability’ in textual representations to both discursivity and materiality. This may be an area in which ecocriticism highlights — or recuperates — an already existing textual process which should be more self-evident than it is. Buell situates the need for this dual accountability directly within an understanding of the environmental crisis and the false consciousness that sustains it: yj

}

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The (im)possibility of ecocriticism

~33

The impression that human affairs are not in fundamental ways subject to regulation by the environment is created by our ostensible success at regulating it. This blindness to the environment produces unintended destabilizing consequences like skin lesions from the ozone hole, owing partly to the products of cooling technologies that have insulated us from confronting the scandal of our environmental dependence. The situation is the obverse of _Marxist reification theory. According to that theory, the bourgeoisie succumbs “to a falsei impression of the givenness of the environment that has actually \been created by the efforts of humankind... But there is also a fallacy of derealization: the bourgeoisie’s false Eteaniptign that environmental interventions in its planned existence are nothing more than fortuitous occasional events. The notion of art (and other cultural practices) as discursive functions carried on within social ‘spaces’ reinforces this mentality no less efficiently than air-conditioning."

I quote this passage at length because it distils, very effectively, some key arguments for ecocriticism, while suggesting the shortcomings of existing literary studies. Buell, in this chain of association, makes important links. Initially, he links the question of the material impact of environmental degradation with the problem of false consciousness (the arena of campaigning and hands-on politics). He then explains the grounds of that false consciousness by reappropriating Marxist reification theory for an ecocentric perspective (a theoretical doublecoding); and, finally, he suggests this false ideology is reproduced through an overemphasis on discursive practices, which have an alienating function analogous to the artificial spaces of late capitalism. The principal effect of the exhortation I detect here is to make criticism ecologically accountable by projecting its social function in a way which is connected to material concerns. But Buell’s championing of non-fiction does appear to delimit the kind of text that can be seen to meet ecocritical requirements. Since (as in the above passage) Buell’s critical procedures are based on the interdependence of human and non-human, he is interested-in texts that demonstrate this interdependence, and this may involve a distinct narrowing of the ‘literary’: ‘What sort of literature remains possible if we relinquish the myth of human apartness? It must be a literature that abandons, or at least questions, what would seem to be literature’s most basic foci: character, persona, narrative consciousness. What literature can survive under these conditions?’'® Based on an ecocentrism of this kind, Buell’s conception of the literary involves an ‘aesthetic of relinquishment’ which ‘fits environmental non-fiction better than lyric poetry and prose fiction’, which rely on ‘the most basic aesthetic pleasures of homocentrism: plot, characterization, lyric pathos, dialogue, intersocial events, and so on’.'? This relinquishment involves the need to imagine ‘nonhuman agents as bona fide partners’, an epparent mysticism which may actually Ney at WALI.

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Ecocritical theory

34

be another instance of weak anthropocentrism, with a precedent in environmental law, where legal machinations on behalf of the environment deliberately evoke a fictive identity assigned to places under threat.”” In a similar way, criticism may well be able to adjust itself to the prescribed new orientation. Indeed, Patrick D. Murphy’s bold attempt to unite ecofeminism and dialogics leads inevitably into a consideration be theorized. of how ‘the nonhuman as speaking subject’ might that might tools theoretical finds study, preliminary this in Murphy, facilitate this paradigm shift.2! However, the corpus of ecological texts that may lend themselves to this kind of ecocritical analysis may be very limited. If a new paradigm is defined in this way it may mount a challenge to existing practices from a self-designated margin. This may be problematic if ecocriticism is perceived as the study of ‘lesser’ genres and authors. Even so, if ecological literature and ecocriticism are articulated as a joint attempt to give voice to the nonhuman subject, then they do represent a radical challenge to existing practices, especially in the fields of novel production and reception; consequently, a new margin may be a necessary locus from which the challenge can be mounted. But I am not convinced that the machinations of postmodernity can be properly scrutinized from this new ghetto and, before retiring to it, it may be worth investigating the ecocritical propensity of texts deemed to be ‘mainstream’ in other fields. The text I have chosen as sample brings together the various trends I have assembled under the banner of postmodernism.J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (1983) reorients the politics of post-colonialism from an ecological perspective, and suggests a connection, as well as a parallel, between post-colonialism and ecologism. It is also one of those postmodernist novels which requires us to revisit the effects of textuality. This challenge is suggested in the very title which alludes directly to a tradition of thinking about individual identity in relation to history (“The Life and Times’) which is represented in a variety of genres, including the historical novel, the Bildungsroman, as well as non-

fictional modes such as the political memoir. Coetzee’s novel announces itself as having an involvement with this tradition in which the a individual life is held to interact intimately with social and political ~development. The challenge is that the novel ironically undermines the association by presenting the life of an anti-hero who resists all obvious contact with the social and political milieu. What the novel does is reinvent the model of social interaction as a myth of ecological ethics. The story of Michael K is the story of a simple, non-white South African suffering the indignities and deprivations of apartheid, hardships intensified by the social disintegration of civil war. K resigns

The (im)possibility of ecocriticism

me

Sm

from his position as a gardener working for the City of Cape Town (he is to be laid off anyway) and sets off on a quest, with his ailing mother, Anna, to find the farm near Prince Albert where she grew up. K eventually arrives at a farm in the Prince Albert district, which may be the one his mother described. Here he buries the ashes of his mother (now dead), and begins to cultivate some patches of land, making this. deserted white man’s farm his own, in a minimal way. Michael K’s symbolic proprietorship of the white man’s farm is disturbed: he is picked up by the authorities and taken to a labour pool internment camp. K escapes and returns to the Prince Albert farm to cultivate a new crop of pumpkins and melons. This time his task of cultivation is disrupted by the arrival of a small revolutionary force from the mountains, though K remains undetected. The idyll is finally destroyed by the arrival of soldiers in pursuit of the revolutionaries: they apprehend K as a suspected collaborator, and blow up the farmhouse, bearing K away with his plundered crop. K is now interned in another camp, and section two of the novel is narrated from the perspective of the camp’s medical officer who is driven to try to interpret the elusive Michael K, to make him ‘yield’ his significance, in a metafictional gesture which implicates both author and reader. In the final, very brief, section K, having escaped once more, returns to the Cape, and his mother’s former residence at Sea Point. He encounters a group of survivors — two prostitutes and their pimp — whose philosophy of self-help in the scene of civil breakdown is set against K’s solicitousness of his packet of seeds, his affirmation of his identity as gardener, and his minimalist philosophy of survival, which is summarized in a lyrical close, narrated from K’s perspective. This is a geopolitical novel which explicitly disappoints conceptions of the political from which ecology is omitted. For Derek Wright, | Coetzee is concerned ‘to found a new myth of the land’ with Michael K ‘less a man than a spirit of ecological endurance’. In this reading Coetzee creates a myth which is ‘primarily ecological, not political’, because ‘the mythological drift of the novel — although it is problematic for a white writer to use a black figure to say it — is that the land is to

be returned not to the blacks but to itself’. In an earlier version of this article, less critical of the novel, Wright puts the case differently, suggesting that ‘a mystical-ecological meaning exists alongside, perhaps _ even emerges from the political one: the land is to be returned not \ ” only to the blacks but to itself, and these two things could conte

be the same’.”*

|

The fact that a critic can present the same idea in opposed ways is intriguing, and suggests the difficulties associated with thinking about ecology in relation to literature. We are in the habit of seeing evocations of the natural as divorced from the social world. This means that ideas

Ecocritical theory

f \

36

about nature can have intrinsic value but without any necessary connection to political questions. It is in this spirit that David Attwell acknowledges an ethical significance in the presentation of gardening as cultivation, but wonders also if Coetzee uses gardening ‘as merely the convenient, structural opposite of power’.”* It seems to me, however, that Wright was initially correct in suggesting that the ecological meaning emerges from the political. A decisive scene in this connection is the one in which K decides not to make himself known to the guerrillas camping on the farm: it is a choice between joining in the war, or staying where he is and tending his crop. K chooses the latter, and has his own political justification for doing so: K knew that he would not crawl out and stand up and cross from darkness into firelight to announce himself. He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children.”

This rationale implies that K affiliates himself with the guerrillas. It is not that K is explicitly thinking of producing supplies for the revolutionary forces, but that his gardening work is seen as of a piece with their efforts. The significance of K as cultivator has also a more general significance, since the idea of gardening is associated with human subsistence generally, and with a notion of human community based —* on reciprocity with the land. If this is ecological mysticism, it has also a political foundation with a specific meaning (a challenge to the Afrikaner rural idyll) as well as the generalized one. Set against gardening, incarceration is the novel’s counter-motif, the exercise of discipline through institutions. K’s life as a cultivator, indeed, is only possible when he escapes the camps. Coetzee is careful to associate, very much in the tradition of Michel Foucault, the identifica-

tion between different kinds of institution in the process of socialization. As the novel closes there is an extended passage in which K articulates his situation. His own first-person monologue effectively takes over the narrative, in this passage which makes the camps a focus of Michael K’s story.” And this narrative gesture invites us to think of certain kinds of textual construction as imprisoning. In escaping the Kenilworth camp of the novel’s second section, K escapes also from the projected control of the medical officer attempting to make K yield his meaning. In partially implicating himself in this (condemned) attempt at textual colonization, Coetzee is partly absolved. But the narrative stance in other sections is yalso problematic. There is a principle of what Coetzee has termed ‘limited omniscience’, a third-person narrative in which the extent of “the narrator’s knowledge about Michael K’s story is unclear.”’ In fact, an

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The (im)possibility of ecocriticism

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ate ct

kay |

important impetus of the novel is to raise doubts about this knowledge; but there is still a convention of realism in the novel which suggests appropriation in the narrative mediation. Arguably, Coetzee’s attempt to speak for a non-white protagonist is problematic: the lingering realism of Michael K goes hand in hand with a paternal ethnocentrism.” But Michael K is transitional in making use of a ‘tainted’ vantagepoint (and the narrative mode that can be associated with it) as a staging-post for an (as yet undefined) post-colonialism. What Coetzee does in Michael Kis attempt to retain something of this vantage-point while simultaneously questioning its validity, and this self-conscious double-stance may offer a more precise description of the novel’s ‘lingering realism’. This formal provisionality is typical of post-colonial literature con-ceived as transitional. As Helen Tiffin suggests, this ‘decolonization is process not arrival; it invokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them’.”’ It is a provisional recentring which supplies the appropriate vehicle for K’s ecological myth of endurance in a period of political transition, and the issue of endurance and elusiveness presents a challenge to both the actual political marginalization of ecology, and to the dangers of overtextualization. An idea of the literal — the business of gardening — is kept constantly in view through these metafictional operations. This is a text which replicates the angst, the self-critique, the provisionality and the informed understanding of textual function, which I see emerging from the ecocritical project. It should be acknowledged that this construction of ecocriticism — as an integral part of postmodernity rather than a reaction against it — may depend too much on human agency to be deemed properly ecocentric in many quarters. My model of the ecological text, and ecocritical operation, recentres the human subject (as in Michael kK), and this falls short of existing ecocritical calls for a creative practice and a critical methodology which can give ‘voice’ to the natural world. ~ In this connection Buell’s checklist of the ingredients of ‘an environ- ~ mentally oriented work’ is instructive. The first (and most evidently ecocentric) of Buell’s four requirements is that ‘the nonhuman environment_», as present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest’

that human history is implicated in natural history’.*” One can think of very few novels in which this principle is sustained throughout, and the logic of this requirement may contradict the novel’s role as a social medium. Raymond Williams’s unfinished trilogy People of the Black , Mountains (in which narrative continuity is supplied by place fathers than character) is a major experiment in support of the ecocentric principle, but it is hard to conceive of the novel as a genre reinventing itself in this way.

38

Ecocritical theory

Perhaps this is to suggest that different kinds of ecocriticism are necessary and desirable. The logic of Buell’s categories suggests an /approach which is selective in designating the environmentally-oriented \work (in nature writing and poetry), an approach in which text and critic are shown to share the same broad agenda, the same beneficent ideology. From the margin of literary studies this may be a usefully dissenting voice. But it is less clear whether or not this relatively undialectical critical orientation has sufficient edge to promote the

dissent.*! Buell himself suggests that ecocriticism should not be used as a prescriptive term, but as a way of designating ‘a multiform inquiry extending to a variety of environmentally focused perspectives’. In this sense my formulation takes its place among many others in a broad-based movement. But I am convinced that ecocriticism can intervene only in current debates about literary studies through a direct response to the implications of postmodernity; and such a response would seem to necessitate a compromise on ecocentric values. This, essentially, is why I think ecocriticism is (im)possible, a (deliberately provocative) designation which effectively places ecocriticism under erasure, as a practice which is necessary, yet not accurate or coherent. The contradictory nature of this formulation may be an appropriately provisional one for the era of postmodernity, and for enabling the critical uncovering of the incoherences and contradictions that are always involved in the designation and interpretation of ‘literature’. Notes

1. Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 13. 2. SueEllen Campbell, “he Land and Launguage of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet’, Western American Literature, 24 (1989), pp. 199-211. 3. Dobson, Green Political Thought, pp. 53-67. 4. Wendell Berry, Standing on Earth (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1991), pp. 99135. 5. Denys Trussell, “The Arts and Planetary Survival’, The Ecologist, 19 (1989), pp. 170-6. 6. See, for example, Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1979). 7. With insufficient space to discuss ‘modernity’ here, I should indicate that I am drawing on works such as Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983); and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1g90). The essential idea is to locate a dual development resulting from industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: on the one hand a sense of rapid and liberating change (social, economic, political); and on the other a sense of imprisonment and dehumanization in the machine age, together with a sense of psychological disruption. If modernism is the artistic response to these features of modernity, postmodernism responds to the intensifications and developments of modernity through postmodernity.

The (im)possibility of ecocriticism

39

8. An example of an ‘eco-socialist’ attempt to unite the insights of Marxism and ecologism is David Pepper, Eco-socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1993). g. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 10. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 62. 11. For an overview of Jencks’ aesthetic see Margaret A. Rose, The Post-modern and the Post-industrial: A Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp- 101-49. 12. Brenda and Robert Vale, Green Architecture: Design for a Sustainable Future (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991). 13. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 6th edn (London: Academy Editions, 1991), p. 182. 14. Vale and Vale, Green Architecture, pp. 156-68. 15. Buell’s larger project, in an ecocritical reading of Thoreau, is ‘to re-theorize nonfiction as Gérard Genette reformulated narrative discourse using Marcel Proust as his central exhibit’. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2. 16. Ibid., pp. 84-5. 17. Ibid.; pp: 92, 110-11. 18. Ibid., p. 145. 1g. Ibid., p. 168. Ne aff 20. Ibid., pp. 179; 202-3. | 21. Patrick D. Murphy, ‘Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics’, in D. M. Bauer and S. J. McKinstry (eds), Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 39-596. 22. Derek Wright, ‘Black Earth, White Myth: Coetzee’s Michael K°, Modern Fiction Studies, 38 (1992), pp. 435-4423. Derek Wright, ‘Chthonic Man: Landscape, History and Myth in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael kK’, New Literature Review, 21 (Summer 1991), pp. I-15. 24. David Attwell, 7 M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 96-7. 25. J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael k (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 109. 26. Ibid., p. 182. 27. See Dick Penner, Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of 7. M. Coetzee (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 94. 28. D. Wright, ‘Black Earth, White Myth’, p. 443. 29.

Helen Tiffin, ‘Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse’, in B. Ashcroft,

G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge,

1995), PP: 95-8.

Rg

30. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, pp. 7-8. 31. A different ecocritical approach, which draws on cultural studies, is suggested in Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991). 32. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, p. 430.

9. Anotherness and inhabitation in recent multicultural American literature Patrick D. Murphy

The concept of the ‘Other’ has proven to be a valuable tool in psychoanalytic and feminist literary theory and criticism. It has been interpreted in various ways to provide stunning critiques of patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, metaphysical linguistics and Freudianism. This Absolute ‘Other’, founded upon notions of permanent incompleteness and prematurity, communicative incommensurability and binary constructs, 1s, however, largely an illusion. And its continued acceptance is

a dangerous reification that protects much of the Western dominant hierarchical power relations that its use has been designed to dismantle. Ecology and ecocriticism indicate that it is time to move towards a relational model of ‘anotherness’ and the conceptualization of difference in terms of ‘I’ and ‘another’, ‘one’ and ‘another’, and ‘I-as-

another’. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Mikhail Bakhtin claims three basic architectonic moments of human existence: ‘I-for-myself, the other-forme, and I-for-the-other’.' Later, in writing Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,

he would demonstrate a clear distinction between two types of ‘other’. As Caryl Emerson notes: ‘Russian distinguishes between drugoi (another, other person) and chuzhoi (alien, strange; also, the other). The English pair “I/other”, with its intonation of alienation and opposition, has specifically been avoided here. The another Bakhtin has in mind is not hostile to the / but a necessary component of it.” We need to introduce into English the concept of ‘another’ as noun rather than adjective or pronoun. We can also employ Bakhtinian dialogics as an analytical method for conceptualizing anotherness and evaluating the relational character of individual existence. 40

Anotherness and inhabitation

=

4I

In both of his early texts, Toward a Philosophy of the Act and Art and Answerability, Bakhtin is concerned with ‘answerability’, the responsibility of a participative thinker: ‘to live from within oneself does not mean to live for oneself, but means to be an answerable participant from within oneself, to affirm one’s compellent, actual non-alibi in Being.” An ethics of answerability presupposes a relationship of difference, a recognition of reciprocity across contradictions and dissimilarities, including positionality within an ecosystem in relation to its conservation or destruction. Nothing human is intrinsically ‘strange’, but rather needs to be recognized as ‘strange-to-me’; that is to say, a difference of perspective or degree of recognition and identification rather than a condition of being. Constructions of the alienated, absolute Other and the modern consignment of otherness to a category of psychoanalysis ignore the lived reality of world diversity from the multiculturality of an urban metropolis to the mutation of viruses. Historically, one finds the self/other dichotomy being translated into the mind/body, male/female and humanity/nature dichotomies, with woman and nature both embodied as the antithesis of spirit, mind and culture.* These paired terms are not even actually dichotomous or dyadic but only indicate idealized polarities within a multiplicitous field, such as that of planet, thought, sex/gender, perception and mind. These terms have never adequately expressed the range of human practices for working through human—nature relationships. These range from seeing humanity outside of nature, seeing humanity as part of nature, and seeing humanity in a superordinate participatory position. What we find repeatedly is the construct of alienated Other being used to repress or suppress the relationship, the anotherness, between groups in order to objectify and distance one group or culture from another in the service of some form of domination. The changing depictions of Native Americans by European invaders, whether the ‘noble savage’ or the ‘bloodthirsty savage’, were designed to suppress the common humanity initially recognized. In order to steal someone’s land or overthrow their. form of government, it must be established that they are not equally human. I think it is unnecessary to detail the constitution of various sexual orientations as absolute others, except to highlight the degree to which certain segments of the population want to continue to depict AIDS as a homosexual disease. In this case, absolute constructions of otherness turn relatives into aliens. Bakhtin claims that ‘an indifferent or hostile reaction is always a reaction that impoverishes and decomposes its object: it seeks to pass

over the object in all its manifoldness, to ignore it or to overcome it’.° Such a reaction is precisely the practice in colonial discourses, of which the ‘taming of the West’ in the United States was one. The threat of

42

Ecocritical theory

the indigenous, of other people living in relation to a particular place rather than re-creating it as some edenic, idyllic or previously familiar “space, is precisely that such inhabitants remind the invading colonizers that they are actually the geopolitical outsider. The colonizers must invert ideologically this relationship of inhabitants and invaders, and suppress any recognition of relational, and therefore possibly nonhierarchical, difference and potential community. As a result, they can allow the subalterns to be viewed with familiarity and recognition only when depicted as exotics and primitwes. In opposition to what was perceived as Freudian psychoanalysis, V.N. Voloshinov’s Freudianism, which many believe was written by Bakhtin, presents dialogical conceptions of the self, the psyche and the ‘content of consciousness’. His analysis initiates the recognition of the individual as a social/self construct developing within given social, economic, political, historical and environmental parameters of space and time, who does not create his or her own

‘self’ ex nihilo, nor is

given it intact in a transcendental soul. I participate in the formation of my self and others through such multiple subject positions as being a teacher,

parent,

spouse,

neighbour

and

inhabitant,

while

others

participate in the formation of my self as also being a son, ex-husband, stranger and tourist. Voloshinov claims that ‘outside society and, consequently, outside objective socioeconomic conditions, there is no such thing as a human being’. Holmes Rolston III extends this point to the human as biological, and not just cultural, entity: ‘kept in its environmental context, our humanity is not absolutely “in” us, but is rather “in” our world dialogue.’ ‘That is to say, in order to be fully human, we need to have a healthy geopsyche. Or, according to Gregory Cajete in Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education: “There is an interaction between the people’s inner and outer realities that comes into play as we live in a place for an extended time. Our physical make-up and the nature of our psyche are formed in direct ways by the distinct climate, soil, geography, and living things of a place.”® A dialogical orientation towards the human/non-human interanimation of both the human psyche and inhabited space will reinforce the ecofeminist recognition of interdependence and the natural necessity of diversity. Such an orientation would require a rethinking of the concepts of ‘other’ and ‘otherness’. If the possibility of the condition of ‘anotherness’,

being another

for others,

is recognized,

then

the

ecological processes of interanimation — the ways in which humans and other entities develop, change and learn through mutually influencing each other day to day — can be emphasized in constructing models of viable human/rest-of-nature interaction. Inhabitation as a dominant feature of much nature writing might, then, be emphasized over travelling through, visiting or ‘going-out-to-experience-nature’

Anotherness and inhabitation

“S43

approaches. Thoreau, for example, did not inhabit Walden Pond the way that Mary Austin lived in the California desert or the way that Simon Ortiz hails from Deetseyamah. Likewise, the walking tour as source of engagement with nature in nineteenth-century England might be rethought against what Terry Gifford has called the ‘anti-pastoral tradition’ of poets like Patrick Kavanagh.° The notion of anotherness has significant implications for the teaching of multicultural and environmental literature. To begin with, the notion of anotherness calls for a cross-cultural comparative analysis, rather than a comparative cultural analysis from the traditional centre— margin orientation in which a tradition or canon, or national literary style, is used as the base against which to compare the other literature. Also, anotherness calls for close attention to the ways in which relationships and relational differences are portrayed or ignored in environmental literature, to the ways in which an author situates herself in relation to other entities. It would, for instance, provide the basis for a thorough critique of the mystique of the non-participant observer that we sometimes encounter in naturalist essays. Concepts of relational difference flow from and reinforce critical strategies of non-dualist and multiplicitous subject constructions. These strategies in turn encourage the hearing of other speaking subjects and voicings, literary and critical, human

and otherwise,

of the silenced and the suppressed,

whether

those voicings come from the anothers in the world that many of us are just learning to recognize or from the anothers within our own selves. My main concern is to argue not for the preceding theoretical constructions in the abstract or on the basis of their intrinsic value, but

rather for their utility in facilitating the generation of a different paradigm for conceptualizing environmental writing that focuses on relational inhabitation as a fundamental world-view by which to analyse the efficacy of literary works. Existing paradigms do not seem to encompass the range of environmental literature that has been written and is being written today, nor for critiquing the diversity of expressions of human—non-human relationships, of the generation of geopsyche, or of the ecosystemic situatedness to be found in contemporary literature. Nature writing as a category of literary production is one thing; the evaluation of literature as environmental or ecological is quite another. I also think that the notion of anotherness, with its attendant

emphasis on relational difference, provides a significant mechanism for rendering ecocriticism a much more multicultural enterprise than has been the case to date.

Let me now turn to exploring the implications of anotherness and inhabitation through brief readings of some literary non-fiction, poetry

Ecocritical theory

44

and novels. I shall begin this section with a discussion of two works of non-fiction. The first is a collection by the Chicana poet Pat Mora, and the second is a full-length prose journey—meditation by the white Mormon author, Terry Tempest Williams. Pat Mora in Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle recognizes natural and cultural diversity as integral threads of the lifeweb labelled humanity, one thread of the larger lifeweb labelled Earth. Mora warns that cultural diversity is crucial to human survival, since it actually helps to maintain diversity in general (p. 36).'° Human diversity can be maintained only by means of cultural conservation being practised by the marginalized and subordinated groups who defend and recover their heritages in order to generate their futures, and thereby resist being labelled as Other. Part of such recovery of heritage requires retelling of the old tales and untelling of the old interpretations by others of one’s own culture. For south-western Latinos, one such untelling involves embracing the Indian heritage of the mestizo/a in opposition to the imposition of the ‘Spanish’ heritage as the primary cultural determinant. Another part of such recovery consists of reaffirming the situatedness of culture; the relationship of values, beliefs, practices and character to place. As Mora

notes, ‘many Mexican American women from the Southwest are desert women’ (p. 53). This is not merely anecdotal, but a delineation of identity and a claim about historical residence. A third part of recovery of heritage is ‘to question and ponder what values and customs we wish to incorporate into our lives, to continue our individual and our collective evolution’ (p. 53). Inhabitation is a process that requires the conservation of the old stories and ways but also new stories and ways of living in response to changes in environment and circumstance. In the chapter ‘Poet as Curandera’, Mora links her own artistry to a traditional, nature-based form of healing, which is both environmentally responsible and explicitly situated within an inhabitory framework: ‘learned wisdom, ritual, solutions springing from the land. All are essential to curanderas, who listen to voices from the past and the present, who evolve from their culture’ (p. 126). In “The Border: A Glare of Truth’, Mora defines the origin of her being as poet—curandera: When I lived on the border ... I daily saw the native land of my grandparents. I grew up in the Chihuahua desert, as did they, only we grew up on different sides of the Rio Grande. That desert — its firmness, resilience, and fierceness, its whispered chants and tempestuous dance, its wisdom and majesty — shaped us as geography always shapes its inhabitants. The desert persists in me, both inspiring and compelling me to sing about her and her people, their roots and blooms and thorns. (p. 13)

The Chihuahua desert and the lifestyles of the peoples who have lived

Anotherness and inhabitation

~ 45

there have mutually evolved over time. They were divided in an instant by a border, but their roots remain a tapestry woven beneath the surface, criss-crossing the Rio Grande. Mora opposes any national monoculture in the USA and elsewhere because there exists an implicit ecological sensibility of multiculturality within her concerns for the cultural conservation of Latina heritage. In labelling Mora’s sensibility an ecological multiculturality, I conceptualize ‘ecological’ here in two related ways. One, I see it in terms of ecosystem as metonym and metaphor for a set of necessary human-land relationships. As Mora contends: ‘because humans are part of this natural world, we need to ensure that our unique expressions on this earth, whether art forms or languages, be a greater part of our national and international conservation effort’ (p. 25). Two, environment is a component of cultural heritage and continuity. In Nepantla Mora refers to la mestiza, by which she means a cultural melding occurring in a specific region that need not efface differences between peoples, but recognizes multiplicity within the individual, the community and the communities of the region. Pat Mora speaks as an insider championing cultural conservation as an ecological practice. In Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland, Terry Tempest Williams speaks as an outsider championing cultural conservation because it enables a recognition of anotherness among humans themselves and between humans and other creatures in the world. In the Prologue Williams draws out the similarities between the Navajos and the Mormons. But she also notes that ‘there are major differences, primarily in the stories we tell and the way in which we walk upon the earth’ (p. 3).'' And this book will be primarily about what Williams has learned and wishes to bring home from the Navajo. She seems very aware of the dangers of cultural imperialism, and so she warns her readers: “Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples ... We must create and find our own stories, our own myths, with symbols that will bind us to the world as we see it today’ (p. 5). That is to say, her journey is part of a process of learning about ecologically sustainable inhabitation, a way of living that requires knowing intimately the place one calls home, and then inviting others to hear the stories in order to learn their own ways, to find their own trails. Throughout, Williams interweaves a series of voices, letting inhabitants and visitors speak of place. Her own voice is quite distinct in the beginning, but gradually begins to blend with the voices of others who live in Navajoland. Mythic stories and geological history become interwoven, until myth is recognized as an interpretation of a reality, and reality is an experience shaped by the myths of the people who inhabit it. ‘The Navajo faith in the cyclic nature of things’, Williams

Ecocritical theory

46

observes, ‘has come to them through their direct interaction with their physical environment’ (p. 44), which is to say that myth and spirituality are components of the geopsyche of a people. As Williams learns, one participates in a place about which one tells stories, rather than merely observing it passively or domineeringly. Williams labels the penultimate chapter of Pieces of White Shell ‘Storyteller’. She not only defines the purpose of storytelling but also its existence as an act of responsibility (p. 130). In the ecological framework of the place-based subject construction of Navajo stories and their tellers, Williams defines herself as one who acts as ‘I-foranother’ for the earth, in telling stories of its sacredness and preservation, and as ‘I-for-another’ for the reader: ‘Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another’ (p. 130). But Williams has learned that that ‘one another’ is much more than human multiculturality. It is also ecological diversity: ‘community in the Native American sense encompasses all life-forms: people, land, and creatures’ (p. 135). Through immersion in difference, Williams becomes another teller of tales about

the possibility of inhabitation. She does so, first, in terms of promoting the mind of cultural conservation of indigenous ways of life that renders her work akin to Mora’s; and she does so, second, in terms of

the kind of cultural regeneration that might enable exotics to become locals: ‘We have the power to rethink our existence, our time in earth’s embrace, and step forward with compassionate intelligence’ (p. 136). In the United States, poetry is the other literary genre most closely associated with nature writing, after the non-fiction essay. What one notices in much contemporary poetry concerned with nature and environmental issues is the high degree of narrative structure, even in poems of lyric length, and, concomitantly, a strong resistance to solipsism and confession. Connection with other elements of the natural,

particularly the wild, world predominate. But what seems as yet rarely recognized is the multicultural character of such poetry. Here I have space to look at only two poets: Gary Snyder, the most widely acclaimed living white male ecological poet in the USA, and Simon Ortiz, a major Native American poet, frequently cited by other environmental writers, such as Terry Tempest Williams, but not yet widely recognized among readers for his ecological vision. In 1992 Snyder brought out No Nature: New and Selected Poems,'2 which reprints a generous portion of Snyder’s previous collections and includes fifteen new poems. Of these, ‘Kusiwoqqobi’, ‘Off the Trail’, ‘Word Basket Woman’, ‘At Tower Peak’ and ‘Ripples on the Surface’ are of the most interest from an ecological perspective. They also demonstrate his sense of the necessity of an international recognition of multiculturality as part of an ecological practice. These poems repeat established philosophical positions and human-nature relationships

Anotherness and inhabitation

~=47

found in Snyder’s earlier poetry. ‘Kusiwoqqobi’ and ‘Word Basket Woman’ link contemporary inhabitory practice with a history of indigenous peoples and a history of one of Snyder’s own ancestors. ‘Off the Trail’ opens with the line, ‘We are free to find our own way’, and later alludes to the Dao De Jing axiom that ‘the trail’s not the way. This poem can be read in conjunction with Terry Tempest Williams’s warning to European immigrants to the USA not to attempt to imitate its First Nation peoples. Rather, we must learn to construct new stories and myths that contribute to new forms of inhabitation, ones which will nurture the continuance of indigenous inhabitation as well. In ‘At Tower Peak’, Snyder contrasts the rejuvenating experience of mountain climbing with the increasingly urbanized world where ‘Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing’. But he does not let the poem sink into the kind of individualistic escapism that permeates American popular culture by ending with the illusion of the individual being able to separate himself from the rest of humanity through ascetic retreat to some pure, wild place. As he observes near the poem’s end,

‘It’s just one

world’,

and

the contradictions

must

be worked

through and from within. Snyder reinforces this one world image in the final poem of the volume, ‘Ripples on the Surface’. He opens it with a quotation distinguishing different kinds of water ripples, and in mid-poem remarks: ‘Nature not a book, but a performance, a / high old culture’. He concludes by deconstructing the dichotomies of house and wild, of human and non-human, announcing: ‘No nature / Both together, one big empty house’. The final line echoes the Buddhist image of the world as illusion. Or, in the words of The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text very important

in Snyder’s Zen training: ‘As to any Truth-declaring system, Truth is undeclarable; so “an enunciation of Truth” is just the name given to it.!3 Stories are not experience, but constructions of experience that shape the attitudes that people carry with them when they walk outside their houses and apartments. Like Mora and Williams, Snyder is concerned that his readers should understand the importance, and feel the sense of responsibility, of listening to the stories in order to learn how to contribute to the development of a more natured, more related culture than the one in which they probably live. Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo poet, published Woven Stone, which reprints three volumes of his poetry, in 1992.'* This volume elucidates an indigenous world-view that needs to become a key aesthetic text in the project ‘to Indigenize contemporary western education’, in the process of helping Second Americans become, like the First Americans, inhabitory peoples. Ortiz not only develops his world-view through narration and imagery but also indicates, through example and conception, methods by which a people can retain and recover their specific

Ecocritical theory es

a

eel

ee

err

48

cultural constructions and balanced human relations to the rest of nature. ‘Toward Spider Springs’, one poem in the first section of the volume, begins: ‘I was amazed / at the wall of stones / by the roadside’. The second stanza expresses the difficulty of the family that comprises the ‘we’ of the poem: ‘We were trying to find / a place to start all over / but couldn’t’. And as a result of this apparent failure they trudge by the walls again and the teller remarks that “The stones had no mortar; / they were just stones/ balancing against the sky’.'° A fundamental part of Spider Woman’s wisdom is the knowledge of balance, which is often represented through images of weaving. The stones of these walls are not cemented together but, near Spider Springs, balance in a woven pattern, which provides a lesson. The stones that are presently balancing require ongoing human participation. Rather than starting fresh somewhere else — the paradigm of European colonization — the members of this family need to learn to continue and renew their relationship in their place. Ortiz speaks throughout Woven Stone of a foundation based on situated knowledges and the determination of understanding experience. Patricia Clark Smith makes the point that

through

the surface of the world has altered desperately and a person can feel overwhelmed by the loss of a vital culture, of the native Coyote-self. But despite appearances, Ortiz in his poetry ... is saying that the old stories are more than cultural artifacts and childhood memories ... In remembering what is old, one can deal with what is new.'”

A case in point is the poem, “The Significance of a Veteran’s Day’, in which he refines the power of remembrance and acknowledgement of the earth: ‘we contemplated / ... / the continuance of the universe, / the traveling, not the progress, / but the humility of our being here’. And Ortiz concludes the poem: ‘I am talking about how we have been able / to survive insignificance’.'® The insight that significance arises from partnership (that is, being one part of a relationship) and relationship is based on reciprocity is repeated throughout Woven Stone, and often as part of a storytelling poem, such as ‘Canyon de Chelly’. Here, Ortiz writes about taking his very young son to the canyon, and the boy, touching an ancient root, looks to his father ‘for information’. Ortiz responds: ‘wood, an old root, / and around it, the earth, ourselves’.'!? Rather than treating the root as an object of naturalist attention and the scene as if devoid of human involvement, Ortiz locates root, place and people in a single unifying context of mutual, interpenetrating existence. While Ortiz’s philosophy of ‘continuance’ may sound simple, it must be terribly complex and difficult, or why else would contemporary

Anotherness and inhabitation

~~ 49

American culture have so much difficulty with such simple things as respect, reciprocity and humility? Woven Stone is both a retrospective and a visionary text, providing stories and images of a way of life that Ortiz is helping to recover and continue, through representing its values and critiquing the destructive forces arrayed against it. When

one utters the term ‘ecofiction’, the texts that most often are

named are those like Wallace Stegner’s Angle of The Land of Little Rain, or Wendell Berry’s A Place the mode of traditional realism. The appeal of certainly its reinforcement of reader expectations this fiction is about life in the world rather than

Repose, Mary Austin’s on Earth, all written in traditional realism is of referentiality, that the life of the mind. Yet, while traditional realism remains a mainstay of ecofiction, it is not the only mode for environmental writing in this genre. Here I want to discuss two novels that practise different modes of representation: Marnie Mueller’s Green Fires and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God. The first is written in the mode of first-person traditional realism, the second in the Latino mode of virtual realism. Green Fires, Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest,”° chronicles the return to Ecuador in late 1969 of an American woman who had been a Peace Corps volunteer six years earlier. The crisis of the novel is generated by her and her husband’s discovery that the government, with the complicity of various US agencies, is bombing the villages of indigenous tribes to clear the way for multinational oil exploration within the rainforest. The novel details the indigenous way of life and clearly asserts a position in support of the continuity of that life’s cultural practices, while emphasizing their degree of difference from the cultures of the other characters. It focuses its thematic attention, however, on the human—human relationships of the various characters and the cultures they represent, rather than on the human— nature relationships, since these latter relationships are imperilled by the former ones. Responsibility and the embodiment of its implications become the key issue to be resolved, and Mueller allows different characters, each of whom has a different cultural distance or proximity to the indigenous peoples, to present conflicting interpretations of their responsibilities. Mueller shows that all too often these interpretations make the indigenous people an object of attention, either for protection or exploitation, rather than a mutually speaking sulyect. The

dilemma

is not resolved

as the novel ends, and readers

are

encouraged to recognize that the events of 196g are not past history but part of an ongoing process that continues to unfold as deforestation of the Amazon and displacement of its indigenous inhabitants continues. The importance and the difficulty of establishing a sense of anotherness is highlighted as Ana attempts to avoid the pitfalls of both assuming too much similarity with the indigenous peoples and experiencing too great

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a sense of difference to see relatedness. Like Ortiz and Mora, Mueller

emphasizes that recognition of the subordinated indigenous peoples is key to working towards new cultural formations that will discontinue global ecocide. And like Williams, she understands the significance of remembering one’s position as an outsider even in the process of establishing relationships. Mueller never lets the reader forget that the wild jungle she describes is already well inhabited. She also indicates a significant dimension of the reader’s responsibility towards others by having the main character realize that her assuming the role of ‘I-foranother’ means returning home rather than remaining in the jungle. Ana Castillo shares with Pat Mora a concern about the conservation of her Chicana heritage. In So Far from God*! she addresses the threat to that conservation posed by environmental racism, and the struggle against that threat as part of a world-wide struggle for environmental justice. One of the aesthetic devices she employs to emphasize the difference of the native and Chicano communities of the south-western USA from the dominant Anglo culture is to write in a mode of representation best defined as ‘virtual realism’. Kamala Platt notes that ‘Castillo situates environmental justice issues within the larger field of race, class and gender justice, thereby embracing the “virtual realities” encountered by a Nuevo Mexicano community’; and, ‘Castillo’s texts are therefore more adequately described as “virtual realism”: a realism

that virtually encompasses lived experience, and propels it into postmodern fiction, avoiding the depoliticization common in “magical realism”.’”? Part of this virtual realism consists of the depiction of miraculous and mythic events as part of the daily lived reality of the inhabitants of the community. Castillo thus structures the realism of the text on the basis of the spiritual perceptions and practices of the people who are her subjects, rather than on the basis of the rationalistic reality promulgated by the dominant US culture. A significant component of this community reality is a deeply spiritual and physical bond to the land in which these people live. As a result, So Far from God shares much in common in terms of an ecological sensibility with Ortiz’s Woven Stone. At the same time, like Ortiz but with greater emphasis, Castillo depicts the ways in which environmental pollution and racial exploitation of people of colour destroy not only the natural environment of the region but its cultural environment and human inhabitants as well. Unlike Mueller, however, Castillo does not

stop with the presentation of a litany of grievances and outrages, but also depicts the development of community resistance to the environmental and racial injustices perpetrated against them. Since their relationship to the land is ongoing, the people of the community that Castillo portrays are able to develop alternatives to employment in plants that force workers to use toxic chemicals that not only pollute

Anotherness and inhabitation

“S351

the larger environment but also their individual bodies. The nature that concerns Castillo, then, is not a wilderness refuge or uninhabited

sanctuary that one visits in solitude, but is an inhabitable place in which humans need to, and can, work out a balanced relationship. Like Mueller, Castillo foregrounds human—human relationships before human-nature relationships, but throughout So Far from God the possibility of healthy human—human relationships is predicated upon healthy human-nature relationships. Also, Castillo does not only pit the cultures of south-western US people of colour against the dominant culture of white America in a battle of self against other, but also shows the melding and productive interchange of the diverse native and Chicano cultures working out relationships based on mutual respect for one another. The discussion here of just six literary texts can only highlight my argument for the use of inhabitation as a criterion for evaluating the efficacy of literature concerned with the environment and human relationship to the rest of nature. Even so, these texts do indicate the existence of a multicultural approach to environmental writing and the development of a corpus of ecologically sensitive literature. At the same time, this discussion has demonstrated the benefits of a Bakhtinian

approach to environmental literature, particularly in terms of the self, other and another triad and the issue of responsibility. For each of these writers, and a substantially larger body of US writing, anotherness is a position of recognition and responsibility that many authors are attempting to gain and to depict. Anotherness also serves as an orientation for recognizing and distinguishing the diversity of environmental writing and its modes of representation beyond traditional realism and the naturalist essay. Notes 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunoy, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), ‘ oe Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 302, n. 15.

3. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, p. 49. 4. See, for example, Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ in M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 67-87. 5. Ibid., p. 64. 6. V.N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I. R. Titunik, ed. I. R. Titunik and Neal H. Bruss (New York: Academic Press, 1976), p. 157. Holmes Rolston III, Philosophy Gone Wild: Essays in Environmental Ethics (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), p. 59-

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8. Gregory Cajete, Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (Durango: Kivaki Press, 1994), p. 84. g. Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 55~7!10. Pat Mora, Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). u1. Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). 12. Gary Snyder, No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992). 13. Ibid., p. 60. 14. Simon J. Ortiz, Woven Stone (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 15. Cajete, Look to the Mountain, p. 68. 16. Ortiz, Woven Stone, p. 63. 17. Patricia Clark Smith, ‘Coyote Ortiz: Canis latrans Iatrans in the Poetry of Simon Ortiz’, in P. Gunn Allen (ed.), Studies in American Indian Literature (New York: MLA, 1983), p. 209. 18.

Ortiz, Woven Stone, p. 108.

1g. Ibid., p. 202. 20.

Marnie Mueller, Green Fires, Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest

(Willimantic: Curbstone, 1994). 21. Ana Castillo, So Far from God (New York: Norton, 1992). 22.

Kamala Platt, ‘Ecocritical Chicana Literature: Ana Castillo’s “Virtual Real-

ism”, Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 3. 1 (Summer 1996, pp. 67-96).

4. Poetry and biodiversity Jonathan

Bate

Home

‘The ultimate irony of organic evolution’, writes the biologist Edward O. Wilson, is that ‘in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations’.'! Late

twentieth-century homo sapiens is unique among species not only in its knowledge of evolution but also in the degree and the speed with which it is able to alter the course of evolution. Indeed, these two powers are closely interrelated: the human claim to understand nature has led to Western humankind’s understanding of itself as apart from nature and therefore able to use and reshape nature at will. All species influence their ecosystems; only our species has a conception of ecosystems and that conception includes the capacity to destroy whole ecosystems. By rewriting Darwinian evolution at the level of the gene, modern biology has come close to answering the question of how we and the rest of the living world came to be as we are. Having moved inwards from the species to the gene, biologists are now moving outwards from the species to the environment, considering how evolution operates at the level of the ecosystem. The key to the continuation of life in any ecosystem is biodiversity: “Life in a local site struck down by a passing storm springs back quickly because enough diversity still exists. Opportunistic species evolved for just such an occasion rush in to fill the spaces.”? When the sea otter was hunted to near-extinction off the Pacific coast of North America, sea urchins — the otters’ prey — went unchecked and overconsumed the marine kelp forest, rendering barren large stretches of the ocean floor. When conservationists reintroduced the sea otter, the kelp forest duly grew again and the barren sea was reanimated, reinhabited by a full range of aquatic life from plankton to whale. The point of this story is that if you don’t have what Edward Wilson calls ‘keystone species’, such as the sea otter, a site once destroyed may remain barren. One cannot know which will be the 53

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keystone species in any particular environment, so nature has evolved a profligate diversity. Among every multitude of apparently expendable species, there is one which will be the keystone on which new ecosystems will be built. Biodiversity means that for most of the time the number of species on earth expands; the fossil record suggests that the normal ‘background’ extinction rate is one species per million each year. At a conservative estimate, the current extinction rate in the tropical rainforests alone is at least a thousand species a year.’ The order of this is akin to that of the catastrophic extinction spasms of the palaeozoic, mesozoic and cenozoic eras, the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs. In his recent book, The Diversity of Life, Wilson argues with extraordinary eloquence for the beauty as well as the necessity of biodiversity. He has sufficient faith in humankind to believe that if we can be made to understand the importance of biodiversity, we might do something to slow down the rate at which we are eroding it. One key idea he invokes is that of the bzoregion. Common ecosystems may be thought of as united into bioregions which are bounded by great rivers and mountain ranges. A bioregion is a place that has its own distinctive natural economy. A map divided according to bioregions will look very different from one bounded according to nation-states, and that is why politicians, who think in terms of national interest, do not think bioregionally. One of the questions I wish to ask here is: what might it mean to think bioregionally? For 100 years ecology has been both a biological science and a politico-economic value system. There are environmental ethics as well as environmental data. A scientific ecologist will describe a bioregion; a political ecologist will ask what it is to live in a bioregion, how advanced human society can accommodate itself to bioregional rhythms. A bioregion is by definition unique unto itself; it is a selfsustaining, self-sufficient natural ozkos. From seeing this, one does not have to travel far to reach the ‘small is beautiful’ economics of E. F Schumacher: to see that bioregions may adapt to intermediate technology but, again by definition, are singularly resistant to multiregional capitalism. Here is Kirkpatrick Sale in a Schumacher Lecture: To become ‘dwellers in the land’ ... to come to know the earth, fully and honestly, the crucial and perhaps only and all-encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate, specific place, where we live: ‘In the question of how we treat the land’, as Schumacher says, ‘our entire way of life is involved’. We must somehow live as close to it as possible, be in touch with its particular soils, its waters, its winds; we must learn its ways, its capacities, its limits; we must make its rhythms our patterns, its laws our guide, its fruit our bounty. That, in essence, is bioregionalism.*

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To understand the place: a describer of interlocking ecosystems such as Wilson gives us one set of terms with which to do so, but few are the scientists with his power to engage the non-specialist reader in their descriptions. Through his use of words like ‘beauty’, through the quasi-poetic power of his description of a storm in a tropical rainforest, through his resort to actual poetry (the sentence with which I began is immediately preceded by Virgil’s lines on the descent to Avernus), Wilson implicitly yokes the scientific to the aesthetic and recognizes that poets are also there to help us understand the place, to come to know the earth. ‘What are Poets for?’ ((Wozu Dichter?’), asked Martin Heidegger, as the title of a lecture delivered on the twentieth anniversary of Rilke’s death. At the centre of that lecture is an attack on technology which has made Heidegger an iconic figure for deep ecologists: “The formless formations of technological production interpose themselves before the Open of the pure draft. Things that once grew now wither quickly away.” The later Heidegger meditated deeply and obsessively on what it might mean to become a dweller in the land. ‘ ... Poetically Man Dwells ... ’ (‘dichterisch wohnet der Mensch’): dwelling occurs only when poetry comes to pass and is present ... as taking a measure for all measuring. This measure-taking is itself an authentic measure-taking, no mere gauging with ready-made measuring-rods for the making of maps. Nor is poetry building in the sense of raising and fitting buildings. But poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building. Poetry first of all admits man’s dwelling into its very nature, its presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling.®

What, then, for Heidegger is dwelling? It is the term he used in his later philosophy for that authentic form of Being which he set against what he took to be the false ontologies of Cartesian dualism and subjective idealism. We achieve Being not when we represent the world, not in Vorstellung, but when we stand in a:site, open to its Being, when we are thrown or called; the site is then gathered into a whole for which we take on an insistent care (Besorgung): Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.’

For Heidegger poetry is the original admission of dwelling because it is a presencing not a representation, a form of being not of mapping. What he offers us might be described as a post-phenomenological

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inflection of high Romantic poetics; his late essays are growings from readings in the German Romantic and post-Romantic tradition, readings of Holderlin,

Trakl, Rilke.

Like the peasant farmhouse

in the

Black Forest, the poem gathers the fourfold of mortals, gods, earth and heaven into its still site in simple oneness; it orders the house of our lives; by bethinging us it makes us care for things. It overrides dualism and idealism; it grounds us; it enables us to dwell. ‘Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky’; ‘Mortals dwell in that they save the

earth ... Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.”* Such a poetic might be redescribed as ecological. Home

Often I had gone this way before: But now it seemed I never could be And never had been anywhere else; ‘Twas home; one nationality We had, I and the birds that sang, One memory. They welcomed me. I had come back That eve somehow from somewhere far: The April mist, the chill, the calm, Meant the same thing familiar And pleasant to us, and strange too, Yet with no bar.

The thrush on the oak top in the lane Sang his last song, or last but one; And as he ended, on the elm

Another had but just begun His last; they knew no more than I The day was done. Then past his dark white cottage front A labourer went along, his tread Slow, half with weariness half with ease; And, through the silence, from his shed The sound of sawing rounded all That silence said.°

There are few philosophers more German than Heidegger; there are few poets more English than Edward Thomas. Thomas died in the first war against Germany; Heidegger’s allegiance to Germany in the second war is notorious. And yet it seems to me that this very English poem is called to be read through Heidegger’s ecological poetics. A home is a house in which one does not live but dwells. It is a place to which one comes; on arriving you know that you have always

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57

been travelling there and that you can rest. Home is the place from where Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is estranged: In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.'°

Home and dwelling matter to humans because we also know homelessness and alienation. Other species dwell perpetually, are always at home in their ecosystem, their territory; those which migrate do not, as far as we are aware, have any consciousness of estrangement from their other home. The poem I have quoted is the second which Thomas called ‘Home’; the first is about the difficulty of finding home. It is restless, looking to past and future: to then and now, to there and here, to going back (but ‘I cannot go back, / And would not if I could’) and looking forward (the possibility that home is Hamlet’s undiscovered country found only in the hereafter:

“That land,

/ My home,

I have never

seen; / No

traveller tells of it, However far he has been’).'' Thomas can only write a poem of dwelling, such as ‘Home [2]’, because so many of his poems are about not-dwelling, about roads not homes, about going out in the dark not in to the rest that seems ‘the sweetest thing under a roof’ (‘The Owl). ‘But now it seemed I never could be / And never had been anywhere else’: the verb ‘to be’ takes on a full, a Heideggerian, weight here; home is the place of authentic being. The birds welcome the poet; they and he have one memory. The April mist welcomes him: he is gathered into the place. His house is ordered because he has entered into the simple oneness of things. There is ‘no bar’ between the mind and nature, the self and the environment. The voice of the poem is a hearing as well as a speaking; the song is passed from thrush to thrush. ‘They knew no more than I / The day was done’: the negative form of the statement, very characteristic of ‘Thomas’s style, is a way of making the knowledge an acceptance, not a striving. The rhythms of the sky seem to be known naturally, not quested for: ‘Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a

harassed unrest.” Both dark and white, the cottage is a dwelling not a house. The labourer’s work has made him weary, but given him ease. We may say, as Heidegger does of the Black Forest peasant’s home, ‘A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things,

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built the farmhouse.’ The wood sawn in the shed will be crafted well. What kind of sawing is this? Humans must build to live; they must saw wood for their houses, chop it for their fires. Organic matter must be consumed, destroyed. But humans who dwell take only from their own bioregion; they know that if they uproot, they must also plant. ‘The sound of sawing’ is not that of a sawmill, of mass consumption and destruction, of the formless formation of advanced technology interposing itself. The silence speaks of the oneness into which the poem, the home, is gathered; that silence is not broken but ‘rounded’

by the sawing. The sawing is thus of the same order of sound as the birdsong. ‘Sawing’ is also a word for thrushsong; and a thrush, like a labourer, takes wood to make its dwelling. The poem is a clearing in that it is an opening to the nature of being, a making clear of the nature of dwelling. But such a clearing can be achieved only through a dividing and a destroying. The labourer may be like the thrush, but the poet is not. When we hear the poem properly, so that even the silence speaks, we participate in the gathering. But when we reflect upon the poem, when (as here) we interpret it rather than dwell in it, we cannot escape a Cartesian dualism. The experience evoked by the poem is that of feeling at home, being gathered into oneness with the surrounding environment. But the experience itself is what Shelley in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ called an evanescent visitation of thought and feeling, its footsteps ‘like those of a wind over a sea, which

the coming calm erases, and whose

traces

remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it’.'* Thomas attempts to erase that erasure in his notebook entry of 12 April 1915: ‘Evening of misty stillness after drizzly day — last thrushes on oaks — then man goes by a dark white cottage front to thatched wood lodge and presently began sawing and birds were all still.”'> He then attempts to reanimate and disseminate the experience in the poem. But the material process of dissemination effects clearings of its own: it can occur only through technology (the manufacture of paper and print, the commerce and consumerism which make the sale and reading of poetry possible). And the reanimation is displaced from its bioregional origin in deep England. The primary experience belongs to Steep in Hampshire, a few miles down the road from Gilbert White’s Selborne and Jane Austen’s Chawton; the reanimation occurs in the human

mind, the environment

of

the imagination. The ontology of the poetic is more divided than Heidegger supposed: his ecopoetic proposes that the presence of the poem is an overcoming of the Cartesian division between thinking mind (res cogitans) and embodied substance (res extensa), but, as the Romantics knew, it cannot really be that. The poetic articulates both presence and absence: it is both the imaginary re-creation and the trace on the sand which is all that remains of the wind itself.

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The poetic is divided because it may be thought of as ecological in two senses: it is either (both?) a language (logos) that restores us to our home (orkos) or (and?) a melancholy recognizing that our only home (ockos) is language (logos).'° In the closing words of Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests, the seminal eco-literary-critical book of our

time:

Precisely because finitude is given over to us in language, we lose the instinctive knowledge of dying. Nature knows how to die, but human beings know mostly how to kill as a way of failing to become their ecology. Because we alone inhabit the logos, we alone must learn the lesson of dying time and time again. Yet we alone fail in the learning. And in the final analysis only this much seems certain: that when we do not speak our death to the world we speak death to the world. And when we speak death to the world, the forest’s legend falls silent.'” North

There are other problems. Most drastically, we could start reflecting upon Heidegger’s Black Forest peasant. What words might we hear in that reflection? Perhaps: blood, soil, Volk, belonging, fatherland. Crudely we may say: it’s all very well for the Black Forest peasant dwelling in his farmhouse, but if proper living means dwelling, means remaining in one’s own bioregion, what do we do with aliens, with those who migrate, who have no home, no fatherland? What, we might ask, Heidegger, would you have had done with, say, gypsies and Jews? In books on Hitler’s agricultural minister, Richard Walther Darré, and on the political history of ecological thinking in the twentieth century, Anna Bramwell has argued with considerable cogency that the connections between ‘deep’ Green thinking and fascism have been anything but accidental.!® Those connections may be traced well back into the nineteenth century: to Social Darwinism, to Haeckel (the originator of the word ‘ecology’), to the co-presence in Ruskin of a prescient ecological awareness and an atavistic neo-feudalism. The quieter voice of Thomas does not elicit shivers of this order, but nagging doubts remain. To have the same memory as the birds is all very well, but ‘one nationality / We had, I and the birds that sang’ seems wrong. The bioregion, as I have said, is not coextensive with the nation. As a poet of Anglo-Welsh origin, of country/city migration and of mobile class sympathy (children sent to liberal middle-class Bedales, but sympathy with ‘Dad’ Uzzell the poacher), Thomas negotiated his nationhood tentatively. His uniquely diffident war poetry is our gift from that negotiation (as in, for example, the third of his poems entitled ‘Home’, where the soldier’s homesickness is the means

of meditating upon questions of belonging). But ‘nationality’ grates in

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‘Home [2]’ because the thrush cannot speak for all of England, let alone Britain. Thomas is at his best when he is at his most provincial: the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire in ‘Adlestrop’ are heard in a bioregional circle; they do not sing of the nation. I think that ‘nationality’ in ‘Home’ can be redeemed only if we take it as an appropriation of the term, a deliberate distancing from the associations of flags and identity-documents: to share a nationality with the thrushes is to declare allegiance to the species of a bioregion, not the institutions of a state. It is an appropriation of this kind that I want to develop now. For the purposes of this argument, I shall set aside Heidegger’s links with the Nazis, shall say nothing of the possible relationship between the ideology of dwelling and the practice of genocide. I suggested at the outset that multinational capitalism is not conducive to dwelling. If we ask what political systems are so conducive, and someone like Anna Bramwell replies, ‘Fascism and neo-Feudalism’, we won’t actually get anywhere. Fascism and neo-feudalism are unacceptable ideologies for other reasons, but, if we accept that a notion approximating to dwelling is our only way of, to use Harrison’s phrase, ‘not speaking death to the world’, we can’t follow Bramwell into her implicit dismissal of deep Green thinking as A Bad Thing. So, to what other system can we turn? Given the centrality to Green thinking of the notion of conservation, one answer might be Burkean conservatism. What strikes one about the vignette in Thomas’s ‘Home’ is its immemorial quality. Such evenings, such birdsong, such returning labourers, seem always to have been there. It could be the eclogueworld of Theocritus or Virgil; it could be Gray’s Elegy; it could be now and (diminishing parts of) England. The National Trust has in fact been quite cunning in harnessing itself to the heritage industry as a way of furthering its conservationist aims. The way to save the earth for the future, the proposition goes, is to remind us that it is our inheritance from the past. The argument at the core of Burke’s Reflecttons asks to be quoted at length: This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission ... By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course

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and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body of transient parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or

young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.'°

The ‘philosophic analogy’ according to which this argument works is Heideggerian in so far as it is anti-Enlightenment. For the Burke of 1790, the Enlightenment elevation of reason led to the framing of innovative constitutions which answered to the systems of the human mind and not the truth of nature. True wisdom is a kind of wise passiveness, a following of nature broadly akin to Heideggerian openness to being. Where Burke differs most signally from Heidegger is in the directness of his move from his perception of the order of nature to his ideal for the order of the state. Like Constantin-Francois Volney’s contemporaneous Ruins, or Meditation on the Revolutions of Empvres, but from the opposing end of the ideological spectrum, the Reflections translate into the realm of politics and history the language of the new geology of the late eighteenth century which was suggesting that the earth ‘moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression’. Where Volney links geological catastrophe theory to revolution,” Burke uses the earth’s perpetual decay and renovation as an argument for an evolutionary conduct of state affairs. There is surely a lot to be said for an ordering of constitutions according to the order of nature. Historically, such an ordering has been a principal bulwark of hierarchical societies and conservative ideologies. From the Politics of Aristotle to the Tudor conception of ‘degree’ to Burke, the argument from nature has been used to support a model of society as a pyramid. But the argument has always been highly selective: a patriarchal image of the family (which comes across very strongly in Burke’s invocation of the domestic) has been grounded in observation of male dominance in other species, whereas the hierarchical structure of the bee community has been used to support monarchy, not matriarchy. So I want to suggest that Burke is right to

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look to ‘the pattern of nature’, to seek a political system which has ‘a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world’, but that he draws the wrong conclusions from this principle. At the centre of his argument is the view that ‘we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives’. That government should be transmitted as life is transmitted makes good evolutionary sense: our communities survive in the same way that organisms survive, the individual decaying and dying, the species regenerating and perpetuating. But Burke smuggles another element into his analogy from nature: ‘we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives.’ There is no such thing as property in nature. A species inhabits its ecosystem, it does not possess it. Dwelling is not owning; you may legally own a house without it being a home; you may find a dwellingplace which you do not legally own. Think back to Thomas’s labourer: his cottage would surely have been a tied one, not a freehold. The poet who finds his home in a specific environment has an imaginative not a legal interest in it; his poem is an affirmation of dwelling, not a deed of title. The whole thrust of the Reflections is a defence of property; the argument from nature boils down to an apology for ‘the natural landed interest’.?! But a landed interest is not natural: ecosystems thrive on competition, but they do not have interests in Burke’s sense. Burke’s great philosophical opposite, Rousseau, was nearer the truth on this matter, with his argument in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that the innovation of property marked the exact moment at which humankind ceased to live according to the economy of nature. If biodiversity is the principle according to which nature is ordered, then what kind of constitutional system will be correspondent to that order? The answer can only be a plurality of systems, with the only proviso that each is appropriate to its particular bioregion. Hence the Schumacherian manifesto laid out by Kirkpatrick Sale, which I quoted earlier; hence the Green Party’s emphasis on devolved structures and ‘grass-roots’ (a good metaphor) government. There-is no place in this vision for the nation-state. Recent cultural analysis has made much of the role of literature in

the ideological state apparatus and the construction of literary canons in furtherance of ideologies of nationhood. Historically, it has certainly been the case that literature has been central to the formation of national identity; one thinks of Augustan Rome, Elizabethan England and early nineteenth-century Germany. In the twentieth century this pattern has begun to break down. Institutionally, our structures of literary study remain largely bound by the nation-state — English Literature, French Literature, Russian Literature, American Literature — but we now recognize that a movement such as high modernism was

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profoundly, indeed intrinsically, cosmopolitan. One might even argue that as the nineteenth-century canon was wedded indissolubly to the nineteenth-century notion of (imperial) nation, so the modernist canon is wedded indissolubly to twentieth-century multinational capitalism. The free-floating modernist found him- or herself in those cities in which stock markets and currency exchanges fuelled international capital accumulation:

New

York, London,

Paris, Zurich. Notoriously

deracinated, the high modernist is the very antithesis of the bioregionally grounded poet. Could this be one reason why Basil Bunting has been excluded from the high modernist canon, even though Pound championed him as much as he did Eliot? I suggest that it is because Bunting at his best was a bioregional poet that we need to reclaim him now. If a government answerable to the order of nature is one devolved to regional level, so the literary tradition in our language needs to be opened up to regional diversity. The canon has been controlled for too long by those whom Bunting called Southrons, by metropolitan interests, literary London (Bloomsbury), Oxford and Cambridge. Bunting’s bioregion, by contrast, is resolutely northern: ‘““Did you always think that you would return to Northumbria and write a specifically Northumbrian poem?” Bunting: “Yes.”’?? Brigg flatts is a poem which speaks its regional dwelling in dialect (“The spuggies are fledged’), place-name (Rawthey, Garsdale, Hawes, Stainmore), local myth and history (Bloodaxe, Lindisfarne). It is a deeply Wordsworthian autobiographical meditation on loss and recovery in which identity is forged in place. The narrator awakens into identity through a childhood sexual encounter; the girl he lies with is, like Wordsworth’s Lucy, an embodiment of the land. His departure from her is, as Bunting’s best critic, Peter Makin, writes, ‘the abandon-

ing of the North for the South, which is also the abandoning of a hard field for an easy one’.** The poem tracks a return to the north; it traces the complex web of relations between things in ‘an ecology of fox, slow-worm, rat, blow-fly, and weed; sheepdogs and pregnant sheep; light on water and foam on rock: things seen’.** I take its climax to be the following lines from the fourth section: Columba, Columbanus, as the soil shifts its vest,

Aidan and Cuthbert put on daylight, wires of sharp western metal entangled in its soft web, many shuttles as midges darting; not for bodily welfare nor pauper theorems but splendour to splendour, excepting nothing that is. Let the fox have his fill, patient leech and weevil, cattle refer the rising of Sirius to their hedge horizon, runts murder the sacred calves of the sea by rule

64

Ecocritical theory heedless of herring gull, surf and the text carved by waves on the skerry. Can you trace shuttles thrown like drops from a fountain, spray, mist of spiderlines bearing the rainbow, quoits round the draped moon; shuttles like random dust desert whirlwinds hoy at their tormenting sun? Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing.”

The author himself offers a valuable gloss in a letter of 18 May 1965, close to the time of composition: I have been talking of the Anglo-Celtic saints who ‘put on daylight’, represented as a brocade in which wires of ‘western metal’ are woven ... Now the brocade is woven by shuttles, woven with extreme intricacy, for indeed it is nothing less than the whole universe: shuttles like midges darting, like drops from a fountain, like the dust of the little whirlwinds which continually form in the desert. It bears the rainbow and the moon’s halo, things beautiful but hard to define, and it opposes the sharp sun that wants all things to be chained to the dictionary or the multiplication table. It gives, not so much tolerance as enthusiastic acceptance of a world in which things are not measured by their usefulness to man.”

The movement thus proceeds from the intricacy of Anglo-Celtic metalwork — metonymic of the poet’s own art — to the weaving of the material universe. ‘Nature’ is an interpenetration of organic and inorganic forms, not all of them the traditional matter of poetry; ‘nothing that is’ can be excepted from the dance, neither midge nor ‘patient leech and weevil’. The passage promulgates Bunting’s version of the Wordsworthian ‘one life’, the motion and the spirit ‘that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things’.”” But Briggflatts resists the Wordsworthian attempt explicitly to unify all things, to go beyond the things themselves towards a transcendental signified, whether that signified be the great spirit of the universe or the poet’s own unifying imagination. Bunting stands somewhere between the Wilson of biodiversity and the Heidegger of dwelling. Like Wilson

he celebrates

the diversity of fox, leech

and weevil,

enthusiastically accepting a world — like that of the tropical rainforest — in which things need not necessarily be ‘measured by their usefulness to man’. Unlike Wilson, he is not interested in the scientific description of biodiversity; to use the language of enumeration (say by calculating the number of species in a single patch of rainforest) is to be ‘chained to the dictionary or the multiplication table’. ‘Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing’: or rather, you may re-present, but you will not dwell. To dwell you must be content to listen, to hear the music of the shuttle. Briggflatts begins by inviting a ‘sweet tenor bull’ to ‘descant’ on the ‘madrigal’ of a place as ‘A mason times his mallet / to a lark’s

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twitter’: the poem’s essential lexis is aural. There is a distinctive sound to every bioregion, whether Bunting’s Northumbria, with its herring gull and running beck, or Wilson’s rainforest, with its honking leptodactylid frog and echoing howler monkey. But there is also an undersound, a melody heard perhaps only by the poet, which harmonizes the whole ecosystem. Let us listen for a moment to the seashore ecology of the fifth section of Briggflatts: Conger skimped at the ebb lobster, neither will I take, nor troll

roe of its like for salmon. Let bass sleep, gentles brisk, skim-grey, group a nosegay jostling on cast flesh, frisk and compose decay to side shot with flame,

unresting bluebottle wing. Sing, strewing the notes on the air as ripples skip in a shallow. Go bare, the shore is adorned

with pungent weed loudly filtering sand and sea.”*

Again we must pause. These lines are far removed from any actual Northumbrian ecology. That phrase in section four, ‘the text carved by waves / on the skerry’, reminds us of Shelley’s knowledge that the poet can give us only a trace, not the thing itself. Locked in the prisonhouse of language, dwelling in the logos not the ozkos, we know only the text, not the land. Unless, that is, we could come

to understand that

every piece of land is itself a text with its own syntax and signifying potential. Or one should say: come to understand once again, as our ancestors did. For the idea that the earth itself is a text is a very old one. And there used to be an agreed answer about who the author is. Strine Shinto

In his essay ‘Some Religious Stuff I Know about Australia’, the poet Les A. Murray writes: In the native religion of Japan, deity (kami), sometimes individualised into deities of a polytheistic sort, is held to be present in all sorts of existing objects, in certain mirrors, wells, rocks, swords, mountains, in special shrines and the like. These bearers of immanent divinity are called shinta: (‘godbodies’) or mitamashiro (‘divine-soul-objects’) ... It appears to be a formalisation, surviving surprisingly long in a developed form, of a pretty widespread

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early response of man to intimations of the Spirit’s presence. In the West, Wordsworthian romanticism, the ‘sense of something far more deeply interfused’ in things is a modern analogue.”

Murray suggests that the vastness and untamability of Australia mean that the peculiar power and sacredness of that land may still be sensed. He christens this religious sense ‘Strine Shinto’. Our sceptical, postEnlightenment, postmodern world is unlikely to recover the ancient idea that nature is the book in which a transcendent God writes his presence. It is possible, however, that the environmental ethic might find the grounding it needs if we recover some kind of secular Shinto. Murray heartily dislikes critics who hitch poets to the bandwagon of politics and causes, but there is a case for viewing him as the major ecological poet currently writing in the English language. That he is Australian provides a bioregional emphasis. He and his schoolmates didn’t like poetry, he says, because it ‘was for us a remote and unreal form of writing which referred to the seasons and flora and classecology of an archipelago off the north-west coast of Europe’.*” To interpose his antipodean voice into the English literary canon is to force awareness of biodiversity upon us: for a reader accustomed to Keats’s autumn or the shepherds’ calendars of Edmund Spenser and John Clare, it is a peculiar and peculiarly liberating experience to read ‘The Idyll Wheel: Cycle of a Year at Bunyah, New South Wales, April 1986—April 1987’ and discover spring coming in September. But what is most important about Murray is his yoking of the religious sense to the sense of place. Poems such as “The Returnees’ and “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ are loving celebrations of Australian people in Australian places. Like Bunting, Murray hears the undersound of ecosystems — ‘wild sound’, he calls it, ‘that low, aggregate susurrus which emanates

from living landscape”! — but his human agents do not stand in a state of Heideggerian thrownness. They are robustly active. In the ‘Holiday Song Cycle’ urban trippers enjoying the great outdoors jostle with insects and ibis, sharing the land. The mosquito may be a pest, but it is also to be wondered at, to be recognized as the life-blood of the place: Forests and State Forests, all down off the steeper country; mosquitoes are always living in there: they float about like dust motes and sink down, at the places of the Stinging iiree;

and of the Staghorn Fern; the males feed on plant-stem fluid, absorbing that watery ichor; the females meter the air, feeling for the warm-blooded smell, needing

blood for their eggs.

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They find the dingo in his sleeping-place, they find his underbelly and his anus; they find the possum’s face, they drift up the ponderous pleats of the fig tree, way up into its rigging, the high camp of the fruit bats; they feed on the membranes and ears of bats; tired wings cuff air at them;

their eggs burning inside them, they alight on the muzzles of cattle, the half-wild bush cattle, there at the place of the Sleeper Dump, at the place of the Tallowwoods. The males move about among growth tips; ingesting solutions, they crouch intently; the females sing, needing blood to breed their young; their singing is in the scrub country; their tune comes to the name-bearing humans, who dance to it and irritably grin at it.”

These are lines which wonderfully combine biological accuracy with a joyfulness that glories in all creation. Mosquito and human share the same dance. That fruit-bat, with its tired wings cuffing air at the mosquito, is a species for which Murray has a particular sympathy: Both Coolongolook River and the red-headed fruit bat are important sponsors of my writing. It was while sitting in the now-vanished timber mill at Coolongolook and contemplating the river, one evening in the mid-fifties, that I first realised that I was going to be a writer; rivers in my work often have a lot of Coolongolook water in them. The metaphoric appropriateness of the flying fox, a nocturnal creature who sleeps upside down during the day and flies out for miles at night in search of ‘grown and native fruit’, to the general situation of poets in this country has a compelling force for me. I examined this in a poem written in 1974 and entitled “he Flying-Fox Dreaming, Wingham Brush, NSW’. That poem connects the metaphor with the ancient ritual and economic significance of the flying fox in my country. Along the Manning in pre-white days, there seems to have been a seasonal ecology of native figs, flying foxes and Aborigines. The fruit bats are very nearly my ‘dreaming’, in the half-serious, half-joking way that Douglas Stewart identified his totem animal as the bandicoot while claiming David Campbell’s was a big red fox.”

Like his fruit-bat, Murray often inhabits a ‘high camp’, but I think that he is more than half serious about the idea of this nocturnal creature as his ‘dreaming’, his totemic ancestor. The major statement of his recent work, Presence: Translations from the Natural World (1992), is a series of dreamings of a huge diversity of living things from ‘Cell DNA’ to ‘Cockspur Bush’ to ‘Mollusc’ to ‘Eagle Pair’ to “The Octave of Elephants’.2 34 Strine Shinto draws strength from the Aboriginal creation myth of

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the beings who walked the dreaming-tracks, singing animals, birds, plants, rocks and pools into existence. Most British readers first learned of that myth from Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines: the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning ‘creation’. No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went ‘Walkabout’ was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor’s stanzas without changing a word or note — and so recreated the Creation.”

In one sense, Murray is this kind of creator or re-creator. But he is also a worldly-wise poet, who recognizes that the land is now marked not only by songlines but by property boundaries, mappings of territorial possession. Consider, to close, his sonnet “Thinking About Aboriginal

Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit’: Watching from the barn the seedlight and nearly-all-down currents of a spring day, I see the only lines bearing consistent strain are the straight ones: fence, house corner,

outermost furrows. The drifts of grass coming and canes are whorled and sod-bunching, are issuant, with dusts.

The wind-lap outlines of lagoons are pollen-concurred and the light rising out of them stretches in figments and wings. The ambient day-tides contain every mouldering and oil that the bush would need to come back right this day, not suddenly, but all down the farm slopes, the polished shell barks fiaking, leaves noon-thin, with shale stones and orchids at foot and the creek a hung gallery again, and the bee trees unrobbed. By sundown it is dense dusk, all the tracks closing in. I go into the earth near the feed shed for thousands of years.*°

The regimented demarcations of property are broken down by the grass and pollen that drift in on the wind, a motion enacted in the flow of the syntax across the lines of the metrical structure. The bush will eventually repossess the place. The poet is thus disinherited, as the Aborigine has been. The land rights question became a public issue as a result of a classic liberal concern for social justice, but it developed into something else: a rediscovery of the Aborigine’s sacral relationship with the land. Seeing this, the speaker of the poem recognizes that dwelling in the land is not a matter of putting up a sign saying ‘Murray’s Farm’, of legally inheriting it. By letting the ‘ambient daytides’ drift over him, he lets the place absorb him. He becomes the farm’s dreaming. Long ago, that dreaming ‘went into the earth near the feed shed for thousands of years’. The poem sings it back to life until at dusk he returns it into the earth. Whether the dreaming will

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emerge again thousands of years in the future will depend on whether the bush is humming with undersound or silent with extinction. The task of the poet, I suggest, is to show the next few generations that they have the power to determine which it will be. Notes

: Ss Edward

O. Wilson,

The Diversity of Life (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1994),

2. Ibid., p. 13. 3. Ibid., p. 268. 4. Kirkpatrick Sale, “Mother of All’, in S. Kumar (ed.), The Schumacher Lectures Vol. 2 (London: Abacus, 1984), p. 224. 5. Martin Heidegger,‘What are Poets for?’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1971; repr. 1975), p. 113. For Heidegger and deep ecology, see Michael E. Zimmerman, “Toward a Heideggerean Ethos for Radical Environmentalism’, Environmental Ethics, 5 (1983), pp. 99-131; and ‘Implications of Heidegger’s Thought for Deep Ecology’, Modern Schoolman, 64 (1986),

PP

Oe 43. 6. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 227. 7. Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in ibid., p. 160. 8. Ibid., p. 150. g. E. Thomas, ‘Home [2]’, in R. G. Thomas (ed.), The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978; repr. 1981), p. 59. 10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, marginal gloss to “The moving Moon’ stanza in ‘The Ancient Mariner’, part IV. 11. E. Thomas, ‘Home [1]’, in R. G. Thomas (ed.), Collected Poems, p. 39. 12. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 150. 13. Ibid., p. 160. 14. P. B. Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York and London: Norton, 1977), p. 504. 15. R. G. Thomas (ed.), Collected Poems, p. 144. 16. I am indebted to Greg Garrard’s Ph D thesis in progress for clarification of these alternative etymological perspectives. 17. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 249. 18. Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ (Bourne End, Bucks: Kensal, 1985) and Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 19. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 119-20. 20. Volney began developing his theory of the decay of empires in his Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte (Paris: Volland et Desenne, 1787), four years before Les ruines; when travelling in Egypt and Asia, he made a close study of geology, an interest developed when he visited America — his Tableau du climat et sol des Etats Unis (1803) was the first comprehensive geological and climatological survey of the United States. On climatology and the politics of Romantic culture, see further my ‘Stormy Weather: Romantic Poetry and Climatic Change’, forthcoming in Studies m Romanticism. a1. Burke, Reflections, p. 132.

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22. P. Craven and M. Heyward, ‘An Interview with Basil Bunting’, Scripsz, 1 (1982), 1) ue 23. Peter Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), P- 13424. Ibid., p. 16. 25. Basil Bunting, The Complete Poems, associate ed. Richard Caddel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 57. 26. Quoted in Makin, Bunting, p. 146. 27. William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey’ (lines 101-3), Complete Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new edn, Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 164-5. 28. Bunting, The Complete Poems, p. 60. 29. Les A. Murray, Persistence in Folly (London, Sydney and Melbourne: Angus and Robertson, 1984), p. 112. 30. Ibid., p. 168. 31. Ibid., p. 21. 32. Les A. Murray, “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’, Section 8, Collected Poems (London and North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1991), p. 126. 33. “The Human-Hair Thread’, Murray’s important essay on the aboriginal influence on his work, in Murray, Persistence in Folly, p. 16. 34. Les A. Murray, Presence: Translations from the Natural World (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993). 35. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Picador, 1987; repr. 1988), p. 16. 36. Murray, Collected Poems, p. 83. See the discussion of this poem in “The HumanHair Thread’, in Murray, Persistence in Folly, p. 17.

5. Body politics in American nature writing. ‘Who may contest for what the body of nature will be?’ Gretchen

Legler

How are love, power and science intertwined in the construction of nature in the late twentieth century? ... How do the terrible marks of gender and race enable and constrain love and knowledge in particular cultural traditions ... Who may contest for what the body of nature will be? Donna Haraway, Primate Visions!

In her provocative essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto? Donna Haraway concludes by saying she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” She argues for a potent, ironic postmodern image to represent nature for ‘late industrial peoples’. For Haraway the cyborg is a body that is representative of a new way of conceiving of nature and human relationships with the natural world. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of technology and the natural, a body in which borders are confused and transgressed. The image of the cyborg radically disrupts traditional Western ways of thinking about the body and the world. It is an image that breaks down the boundaries between well-known dualisms such as culture/nature and organic/technological. ‘The cyborg isn’t ‘man-made’ and it isn’t ‘natural’ either. Its origin is unclear. In her cyborg myth, Haraway writes: “The certainty of what counts as nature —a source of insight and promise of innocence — is undermined, probably fatally.’® This, she argues, and I agree, is a good thing. If we are to make any progress in the reading and analysis of nature writing, if we are to make any progress in understanding ‘nature’ itself in any other context besides the nostalgic and romantic, those two nearly useless positions which serve largely to freeze aesthetic and intellectual progress, then we must divest ourselves of the notion of nature as a ‘source of insight and promise of innocence’, and instead 71

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entertain the idea that nature itself is not only the whole playing table of history and politics, but a player itself. Haraway opposes the myth of the cyborg, this potent border creature, to the myth of the goddess, an image of resistance in some feminist discourse which, she argues, dangerously reinscribes notions of original innocence and unity. While the cyborg myth and image subverts organic wholes, the goddess myth and image romanticizes an original connection to nature and calls for a return to that edenic state before language, before culture, before Man. While the cyborg image depends upon the politicization of bodies, the recognition of the ‘marks’ of gender, race, sexuality and class, the goddess image erases difference in an attempt to unify. Haraway’s distinction between goddesses and cyborgs serves as a useful frame for thinking about the body politics of American nature writing. Most contemporary nature writing can easily be identified as depending on the myth of an original union with nature. The production and consumption of writing about nature, in fact, depends on this very thing: nostalgia for a better-than-present world, a looking backward to a place and time not spoiled or polluted or industrialized. Most American nature writing serves to strengthen boundaries between nature and culture, the self and the non-self, in direct contradiction to

Haraway’s cyborg myth. In addition, most American nature writing simply is not selfconscious of body politics. As Peter Fritzell has pointed out, most American

nature

writers

do write their bodies — their desires, their

sexuality, their experience, their race — into the landscape. But instead of paying attention to the political specificity of their being in the natural world, the vast majority of American nature writers ‘have tended to generalize (and even abstract) the “personal” and the “subjective” in their engagements with nonhuman nature, to render themselves and their environments soundly customary, scientifically and aesthetically clean, and most often morally pure’.* Fritzell argues that most American nature writers simply pretend not to have bodies at all: “They appear solely as disinterested (and, in a technical sense, “innocent”) recorders of information, or as enthusiastic (and right-minded) appreciators — in short, as almost anything other than active, interested human organisms.’ In most American nature writing, the politically potent raced, classed and sexed body is erased along with the marked body of the author/ writer. The nature that is constructed by this unmarked body becomes innocent and unpoliticized — it is raceless (white), genderless (male), sexless (heterosexual) and classless (middle class).° In this chapter I explore the ways in which three contemporary American woman poets write nature from the specificity of their raced,

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gendered and sexed bodies. Their stories about their relationships to nature are stories about ‘the power to signify’,° the power to contest not only for what the body of nature will be, but also the power to contest for the place of their own marked bodies in nature. Making race, class, gender and sexuality explicit — making the body explicit — in American nature writing is a radical move. It is in this sense, I argue, that Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo and Lucille Clifton can be read as cyborg writers. For those who have been marked as other, as non-white, as not-male, as non-heterosexual, cyborg writing is a mode of resistance. For those who have been marked as other, Haraway argues, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the

world that marked them as other.”’ The tools that these writers seize are stories about nature. Retelling stories, Haraway writes, is a cyborg practice. Retold stories become ‘versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities’. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors ‘subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture’. The central myth of origin that Oliver’s, Harjo’s, and Clifton’s stories subvert is the myth that only the unmarked white male body belongs in nature and that only the unmarked white male author can write the body of nature. At the same time that these writers call attention to the cultural constructedness of their position in relation to the natural world, they also stress that they do indeed have real material bodies and desires — they yearn for a connection to the natural world that has been symbolically and literally denied them. They yearn for the unity that the cyborg myth disrupts. Harjo, Oliver and Clifton simultaneously celebrate the desire for unity with the natural world and point to the fiction of the myth of unity as we currently experience it in American nature writing. They successfully invoke, I argue, both the goddess and cyborg myths. Naming

nature as body politics

Haraway suggests in the quotation that opens this essay that the practice of science, the practice of naming nature, is body politics; the politics of naming and exerting control over both non-human and human bodies. As the premier science of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, natural science was a discourse that was explicitly about expanding knowledge about the natural world, and was implicitly about the fixing of racial, class and gender stereotypes in the service of European colonial expansion.’ The extent to which the cultural construction of nature is linked with the construction of difference and the policing of marked bodies is illustrated in the following story from Londa Schiebinger’s work. She

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argues that the ordering of nature and the use of nature for social control over bodies was crucial in the work of Carl Linnaeus, the great taxonomist, who coined the term Mammalia (meaning ‘of the breast’) in 1758. Linnaeus’s veneration of the breast coincided with a time during which doctors and politicians alike worked to discourage wetnursing and encourage more of Europe’s middle- and upper-class white women to stay at home and nurse their own babies. High infant mortality rates among those infants sent to the country to be nursed moved governments to enact laws forbidding wet-nursing. “Naturalizing’ breast feeding — suggesting that the best mothers of the animal world nursed their young themselves, and categorizing this activity as the unique activity of the highest class of animals — coincided with the naturalization of a certain role for women as mothers and dwellers in the domestic sphere.’° In addition to gender, race also became a significant factor in the search among eighteenth-century European natural scientists for what it meant to be human. European natural scientists were preoccupied with charting the differences between white Europeans, apes and Africans in order to construct a coherent origin story for (white) Man. Scientists looked to nature for the answer to the question of who should and who should not be included in the polis. It is in this way that the unmarked white male body became not only the unrepresented knower of nature, but the unrepresented natural/authentic/original body. Haraway points out that the construction of museums during the early part of the twentieth century, particularly the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was an attempt at naming and organizing nature in a way that also naturalized specific class, race and gender organizations.'! Telling the truth about nature and the natural body of man involved the collection of ‘perfect’, or ‘typical’ specimens of African animals, especially apes. The quintessential example Haraway points to is the African Hall of the museum, opened in 1936, the crowning achievement of explorer and naturalist- Carl Akeley, ‘the biographer of Africa’. The Giant of Karisimbi, a silverback gorilla Akeley shot in 1921, is the focal point of the exhibit. Nature in this way, Haraway suggests, became the raw material for the construction of the white male body and of a stable body politic. Primates were the human body (the white male body) in its natural state. Akeley’s collection of specimens for the African Hall was about the search for what it meant to be human in some primal, authentic and original sense. It was the search for an origin story that would put humans on the map, so to speak; an origin story that would reveal the true relationships between races, genders and classes; an origin story that would place humans in the right relationship to nature.

Body politics in American nature writing

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95

The story the museum displays told, Haraway might argue, is a goddess story, not a cyborg story, a story without dissonance; and the result of that story is the erasure of any marked body from any legitimate place in nature. The body we get instead is the naturalized unmarked body of whiteness and maleness. The irony of this is compelling. At the same time that this white masculine body is the only one not made a part of nature, it is the only body that has a legitimate place in the natural landscape. The marked raced, classed and sexed bodies become ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ in a nature that is constructed as white, middle-class and male; hence the radical quality of, say, a hypothetical narrative of the first African American woman to trek to the North Pole. The radicalness of such a narrative comes from the fact that we are unaccustomed to think of this marked body as appropriate for the polar (white, masculine, European) landscape. Such a narrative might seem as ‘monstrous’ or ‘unnatural’ as, say, the image of Victor Frankenstein’s monster galloping about in the Alps, or speeding across the ice in a dog-sled."” For an example of this ironical relationship, I want to take a brief look at the work of Henry David Thoreau, whose writing has been staggeringly influential in the birth and growth not only of a peculiarly American voice and style in American literature in general, but in

nature writing in particular.’ Thoreau’s naming of nature is a specific story about human bodies and natural landscapes that served the politics of capitalism, democracy and industrial expansion in nineteenth-century America — stories in part about expanding space for the white man in the new world, full of the rhetoric of self, individualism and progress. Thoreau typically tells this story without being seen; he represents without being represented. His white, male body, in other words, remains unmarked, but claims the power to ‘mythically inscribe all the marked bodies’.'* Thoreau was in part constructing a certain white, masculine aesthetic of the body in nature, a disembodied body that transcends its own materiality. Nature in Thoreau’s work is constructed as a place that nurtures this white masculine aesthetic and as a place that is not suitable for the nurturance of other bodies — the bodies of Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants and white women — although, ironically, these bodies are ‘closer to nature’ than the white, masculine, civilized

body. The aesthetic that Thoreau develops is most evident in Walden.'° In the essays that make up this work, it becomes clear that ‘Thoreau regards the body as a site for battle between purity and danger. He argues that to have a relationship with the landscape, one has to transcend one’s body. His writing reflects this disdain for the messiness of nature, his disgust with his own bodily needs and desires, including

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Ecocritical theory hunger, thirst, fatigue and loneliness.

‘Nature

is hard to overcome’,

writes Thoreau in ‘Higher Laws’, ‘but she must be overcome’ (p. 150).

In ‘The Ponds’, Thoreau insists that nature itself is sullied, dirtied, by any contact with humans and their needs, other than his own need for solitude and for the unchanging purity of Walden Pond. The labouring bodies of woodchoppers and Irish farmers, he suggests, don’t have a place in his vision of nature, don’t have a mght to the pond. He writes: ‘Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged’ (p. 174). He also criticizes the ‘unclean and stupid farmer’ for naming Flint’s Pond after himself (p. 135). Naming the landscape, Thoreau suggests, should be reserved for others, ‘the noblest and worthiest men alone’, not poor farmers (p. 136). These passages suggest strongly that Thoreau’s nature is a place for escape, appreciation and simple, manly living; a rarefied space for a particular privileged subject — the white, Euro-American, middle-class male. One of the most evocative passages in Walden is in ‘Spring’. Here Thoreau is appalled by the ‘excrementitious’ character of a thawing railroad cutbank (p. 275). He is appalled by the fecundity, the messiness of nature in spring. What this suggests to me, again, is that the human body in Thoreau is not a politicized, historical, raced, classed and sexed body but, again, a disembodied body that transcends its own materiality. Thoreau’s aesthetic is that of a ‘clean’ body, an independent body, a firmly structured self, a ‘strong’ body. Where Thoreau treats other bodies, the Irish in Walden and Cape Cod, his Indian guide in The Maine Woods, or the ‘ideal maiden’ in ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers’, these raced and classed and sexed bodies are at the same time ironically ‘naturalized’ and removed from nature; they don’t occupy the same privileged space in the landscape that Thoreau does because of his whiteness and his maleness.'® In Cape Cod, for instance, Thoreau suggests that the bloated bodies of hundreds of Irish immigrants, washed up on shore after a shipwreck, simultaneously spoil his walk along the beach and enhance the beauty of the beach, making his experience ‘rarer and sublimer’. He asks, “Why care for these dead bodies?’ and replies by saying that bodies — real, material bodies — don’t matter, but spirit

does." In this passage, the dead bodies of the Irish become a part of the landscape that Thoreau is viewing. The Irish become nature because their bodies are a part of the landscape, while Thoreau is able to have a relationship with landscape, or nature, because he is apart from it. Thoreau’s body, meanwhile, remains unmarked and therefore his political relationships with the raced and gendered and classed bodies of the Irish immigrants, the native guide and the ideal maiden, remain obscured.

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Investing those other bodies with political significance would create a dissonance so remarkable that it would completely ruin the nostalgic and Romantic vision of nature that Thoreau’s work, and so much other nineteenth- and twentieth-century American nature writing, strives to produce. This is one reason we don’t often read beyond the canon in American nature writing, limiting ourselves instead to those authors who, as Fritzell has suggested, erase their own bodies from their work rather than put their marked bodies forward; limiting ourselves to those authors who offer us nature not as a zone of contested meaning but as a site of authentic insight and innocence. Unlike such writers, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo and Lucille Clifton write their raced, classed and gendered bodies into and on to the landscape of the natural world, developing a self-conscious body politics that at least implicitly exposes and critiques a dominant construction of nature that erases their marked bodies. Mary Oliver’s ‘Honey Poems’

There is in Mary Oliver’s work a distinct rhetoric of wholeness and unity. The cover of American Primitive,'* which won her a Pulitzer prize, valorizes the way Oliver’s poems unify the human body and the landscape.’ In my analysis of Oliver’s ‘Honey Poems,’ however, I want to look beyond the way Oliver is popularly understood, to the way she constructs a version of female and lesbian sexuality in the landscape. I place her construction in the context of late twentieth-century white American feminist and lesbian feminist efforts to valorize the difference of the female body and also to construct a female self that can free itself from patriarchal control. The French feminist notion of écriture féminine, or writing the body, is useful, albeit controversial, in looking at the way Oliver writes her sexuality into and along with the body of nature.” Ecriture feminine suggests that the female body is written (constructed through language) and can be rewritten. Ecriture féminine is often critiqued for being an essentialist idea, but I argue that écriture féminine is not a plea for a ‘real’ body prior to language or an essential female body, but instead a ‘specific’ body, a written or constructed body, in context. Ecriture feminine displaces the male economy of desire that has shaped and constrained women’s bodies (and the body of nature) as objects and mirrors of male desire, and replaces it with a female economy of pleasure or jJouissance. Ecriture féminine reveals that the female body is in excess of phallocentric constructions of it — it resists the colonizing effect of the origin story of male desire for the female.” The female body Oliver writes into her landscape is a lesbian body and the sexuality she writes into the landscape is lesbian sexuality.

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Read this way, Oliver’s ‘Honey Poems’ present an especially disruptive, ‘monstrous’ or ‘unnatural’ body in the landscape, rather than the lyrical -and nostalgic rendering suggested by her popular critics. Oliver is wresting the control of metaphors of the land and the female body from a tradition in American nature writing that has tended to genderize and sexualize landscape as female and heterosexual — the partner of man. In ‘The Honey Tree’ Oliver writes rhapsodically of a woman’s newfound desire: And so at the honey chunks of the bodies get out of

last I climbed tree, ate pure light, ate of bees that could not my way, ate

the dark hair of the leaves,

the rippling bark, the heartwood. (p. 81)

Scholars have argued that the desire in this poem is desire for honey itself, which represents a liminal substance, both raw and cooked, making it symbolic of a space between culture and nature, and that

the desire is desire for the tools to ‘write the body’ of female sexual desire, a desire for a non-phallocentric language that allows the possibility of female sexuality based on jowissance and multiplicity, not male desire.” I suggest that the honey can also be read more literally as the sexual secretions of a woman lover. The honey tree itself is a metaphor for a woman’s body, with its “dark hair’, ‘rippling bark’ and ‘heartwood’. The ‘nuzzling place’ and the ‘secret rip’ in the ‘body of the tree’ seem easily read again as metaphors for a woman’s body. As in other poems in this collection, the ‘frenzy’ or crescendo at the end of the poem,

suggested in part by the pace of the language and the exclamation marks, suggests sexual frenzy or orgasm. In ‘Honey at the Table’, the narrator of the poem is again eating honey. The poem begins languidly, then ‘grows deeper and wilder’ until the narrator finds her way to the honey tree, shuffles up it, rips the bark, and

then, Oliver writes,

‘you float into and

swallow

the

dripping combs, / bits of tree, crushed bees — a taste / composed of everything lost, in which everything is found’ (p. 57). In this poem, again, honey can be understood as a substance that is symbolic of language, the power to name female/lesbian desire, and at the same time read literally as the sweet taste of a lover’s body. Oliver takes up a conversation here that is common in much feminist thought: that alienation from the body is a particular way of controlling marked bodies, and that reconnecting with the material body, with

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sexual desire, with appetite, is a way of naming and reclaiming a colonized body. In the ‘Honey Poems’ Oliver writes about reclaiming not only female sexual desire, but female sexual desire for other women. In this way she situates her body in a landscape that is utterly outside of a tradition in which typically authors of nature writing not only don’t have bodies, but most often don’t have desiring bodies, and even

if they did, their male or female bodies would desire the ‘opposite sex,’ i.e. what is ‘natural’. Oliver subverts that tradition by suggesting that the lesbian body, and lesbian desire, also have a place in ‘nature’. Joy Harjo’s ‘Deer Poems’

In the same way that Oliver’s work about female sexuality in the landscape may be said, looking through the lens of French feminism, to subvert and replace a male economy of desire, then Creek poet Joy Harjo’s work might be said to subvert and replace a ‘white economy of desire’ — a desire for the primitive, the original union to nature — obtained through and at the expense of ‘the native body’. The programme of cultural genocide aimed at getting the simultaneously savage and noble native off the land in the early part of this century, has turned into a veneration for the primitive, an attempt to ‘learn’ from Native Americans about ways of being ‘whole’ with the land. As Gerald Vizenor has pointed out, American Indian spirituality and ways of knowing are turning into the fashionable solution to environmental crises, and a solution to late twentieth-century white identity crisis. “The current need is to see Indians as natural ecologists. This romanticism isn’t a bad thing. It’s good energy ... [but it] consumes the Indian for the dominant culture’s basic needs,’ he writes.**

Not only in nineteenth-century nature writing, but in contemporary work as well, white desire polices the bodies of Native Americans in the landscape. In much nature writing Native Americans become bodies reduced of their complexity, depoliticized and dehistoricized bodies, stereotyped and made mute or harmless by virtue of their being ‘closer to nature’, a part of the landscape, rather than subjects in relationship to landscape. In Harjo’s work the native body in the landscape is represented as complex, contradictory and multiple, in excess of the stereotyped images of the native body that come to us in white nature writing and other cultural discourses. Harjo’s ‘Deer Poems’ from In Mad Love and War’? are, like Oliver's poems, full of a rhetoric of wholeness — a yearning or desire for reconnection with nature, a yearning for a ‘way back’ to an original relationship with the natural world. Harjo’s yearnings, however, like Oliver’s, take place within the context of dissonance, within the context of an awareness of body politics. Harjo writes in ‘Grace’ that her

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yearning isn’t a simple nostalgia, isn’t for an Edenic America before the white man, but for ‘a promise of balance ... something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people’ (p. 1). The characters in Harjo’s poems are not Native Americans seeking an opportunity to return to the primitive, or Native Americans romanticizing their ‘connection’ to nature, but young political activists, mothers and loners negotiating space for themselves as Native Americans in the complex ‘natural’ and political landscapes of the late twentieth century. The body of nature and the native body are both being contested for in Harjo’s poems. One of the first things readers might notice about the landscapes in the ‘Deer Poems’ is that they aren’t ‘primitive’ wilderness, but a different kind of twentieth-century urban wilderness: highways, truckstop cafés, pow-wow grounds and Indian bars. She combines these contemporary, dissonant landscapes with an understanding of Native American history and story. These incongruous weavings are the paths by which Harjo investigates conflicts between ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ relationships with the natural world. Her ‘Deer Poems’, which include ‘Deer Dancer’, ‘Deer Ghost’ and ‘Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On’, are all,

in part, a way of situating the twentieth-century native body in a contradictory landscape, and they are poems about how bodies marked as native can survive in a landscape that is both hostile and nurturing, a landscape that demands both an allegiance to a twentieth-century ‘white’ way of thinking and acting and an allegiance to native tradition. In ‘Deer Dancer’, a woman in a stained red dress with taped heels comes into a ‘bar of misfits’, a bar full of ‘Indian ruins’ to dance naked on a table. The woman, at the same time that she is dangerous

and to be pitied, is ‘ ... the deer who / entered our dream in the white dawn, breathed mist into pine trees, her fawn a / blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left’ (p. 5). The people in the bar do not understand the woman as a symbol of deer or vice versa; they see her both as deer and as woman and as the past, present and future. Harjo writes: ‘... She / was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we / recognized, her family related to deer, if that’s who she was,

a people / accustomed them hearts’ (p. 5). The woman

to hearing songs in pine trees, and making

‘breaks’, or becomes

human, when the brother-in-law

of the poem’s narrator ‘jimmies’ up to the girl, ‘tells her magic words’, asks her, ‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’ This is what the narrator wants to know. ‘What are we all doing in a place like this?’ Native American feminist theorist Paula Gunn Allen points out in ‘Answering the Deer: Genocide and Continuance in the Poetry of American Indian Women’, that the fact of cultural genocide ‘is a pervasive feature of the consciousness of every American Indian in the

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US., and the poets are never unaware of it’.2° The transformations that take place in Harjo’s deer poems, especially ‘Deer Dancer’, are part of the way that what Allen calls the ‘tribal singer’ (the contemporary native woman poet) weaves stories that are made of the interplay of ‘our continuing awareness of imminent genocide’ and ‘the equally powerful tradition of celebrating with the past and affirming the future that is the essence of oral tradition’.’’ Allen’s point is partly that Native American relationships to landscape are fundamentally different from Euro-American relationships with landscape for an obvious reason: Euro-American colonization of Native American lands,

which forces Native Americans still to live in exile in their own country. In ‘Deer Ghost’, as in ‘Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On’, the narrator insists on the presence of a Native American subject or body that must live in more than one world. In ‘Song’, the narrator sings the song ‘Louis’ taught her, the Creek song to call the deer when hunting. The landscape, again, is the city, downtown Denver. The song works, the narrator says. The deer come into the room and are a little confused. ‘Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song / to get them back, to get all of us back, / because if it works ’'m going with them’ (p. 30). Back to what?

Not back to life before white man,

not back to a

‘goddess’ story about nature as the ‘source of insight and promise of innocence’. No, there is no innocence in Harjo’s construction of human relationships with nature. Harjo’s landscapes are entirely historical, entirely political. She is calling instead for a way back to a more responsible representation of the Native American body in the landscape. The way to ‘grace’, as Harjo puts it, is through the memory of dispossession, through a history of genocide, through ‘deer breath on icy windows’ (p. 6), through engagement of body politics. Lucille Clifton’s black earth

The erasure of African American writers.and African American bodies from the canon of American nature writing stems from the same kind of literary and cultural politics Patrick Murphy points to in his discussion of the absence of native voices from nature writing anthologies.” ‘Black bodies’ have become, in the white mind, urban bodies, bodies

that are alienated from natural landscape, and therefore have no place in the nature-writing canon — a canon that is meant to celebrate connection to land. As Evelyn White writes in ‘Black Women and Wilderness’,2? the naturalization of black bodies as urban bodies, the erasure of black bodies from the land, is a particular white form of amnesia; a disregard for the political, economic and historical factors that placed the black body in a urban environment.

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White’s article was published in Outdoor Woman, one of many contemporary magazines whose audience is mostly white middle-class females who enjoy camping, skiing, backpacking, canoeing — any number of outdoor activities that in the white middle-class mind take a person back to nature, to a place outside culture, where white bodies find solace and peace. White points out that this wilderness may be a wilderness in which a white body may find solitude, where a late twentieth-century white body can ‘labor’, ‘work’, ‘sweat’ and get dirty in a way that isn’t possible in a technologized, hygienic office. But, she says, this wilderness means something entirely different to an African American woman whose relationship to land has historically been one of forced labour and dispossession. In ‘Touching the Earth’ from Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks suggests that African Americans have a history of relation to landscape that was fundamentally altered by industrial capitalism. Even in the south, hooks writes, African Americans

had access

to land as farmers,

as

tillers of the soil. That has been forgotten. When African Americans moved to the north to escape racism and gain more access to material goods, it became even harder for them to own land. Black bodies in the landscape became, again, as in slavery, as in colonial Africa, functions, tools. hooks suggests the need to reclaim that older, forgotten relationship to the land — a move that is a post-colonial act of selfrepossession. hooks’s rhetoric is partly a rhetoric of wholeness and unity, similar to the yearning I’ve pointed to in Oliver and in Harjo. Hooks maintains that ‘collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the way of our ancestors.

When

the earth is sacred to us, our bodies

can

also be

sacred to us.”° That the ‘black self’ of the late twentieth century can be healed in re-engagement with nature echoes a trope or theme in almost all nature writing. But hooks is also talking about staking claim on a piece of land, a piece of property, even if it is just enough to grow a window garden, or a small stand of tomatoes. Ownership of land has always been part of the naturalization of rights and class, and hooks suggests not that African Americans learn to ‘commune’ with nature, but that they situate themselves historically, politically, economically, in landscape. Such a relationship to landscape runs through the work of poet Lucille Clifton. As Harjo does in her work, Clifton subverts what might be called a ‘white economy of desire’ by making explicit the relationship of African Americans to land as disenfranchised bodies — as slaves, as sharecroppers, as bodies owned and controlled by whites — but also insists upon a ‘black nature’, an African American relationship with land that is marked and powerful.

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In “The Earth is a Living Thing’ from The Book of Light,*! Clifton self-consciously constructs a ‘black nature’ that subverts the white nature that is implicit in much Euro-American nature writing. She writes: the earth is a living thing is a black shambling bear ruffling its wild back and tossing mountains into the sea is a black hawk circling ... is a fish black blind in the belly of water is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal ...

In this poem nature is imagined as a ‘black body’, with ‘kinky hair’. Clifton’s construction of nature here radically disrupts not only the notion that the white male body is the natural body, but also disrupts the notion that the knower of nature is the unmarked white male observer. In “To Ms. Ann’ and ‘Monticello’, from An Ordinary Woman,* Clifton places the bodies of black women and their relationship to landscape in the context of slavery, again historicizing African American relationships to land as being radically different from Euro-American relationships to land or nature. She writes in “To Ms. Ann’, ‘I will have to forget / your face / when you watched me breaking / in the fields, / missing my children’ (p. 16). In ‘Monticello’ she writes: (History—Sally Hemmings, slave at Monticello, bore several children with bright red hair) God declares no Independence. Here come sons from his Black Sally branded with Jefferson hair. (p. 18)

Clifton in the poems above makes explicit the alienation of black bodies in the natural landscape, and the relationship between the black labouring body and the white master and land-owner. She also, in ‘Cutting Greens’, claims a place for her body in a contemporary domestic landscape, working towards the kind of repossession of body and land that hooks argues for in “Touching the Earth’. In ‘Cutting Greens’, Clifton writes of a woman cutting collards and kale on a black cutting board, to put in a black pot, ‘and just for a minute / the greens roll black under the knife, / and the kitchen twists dark on its spine / and i taste in my natural appetite / the bond of living things everywhere’ (pp. 30-1). In this poem Clifton disrupts the tradition in American nature writing I’ve outlined in two particularly important ways: she writes nature as a ‘black nature’ from her kitchen.

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Ecocritical theory

She is firmly situated as a marked body in a domestic sphere and it is from there her construction of nature comes, not from Thoreau-like

wanderings in the woods. Finally, in ‘i went to the valley’ Clifton again insists on the ‘blackness’ or ‘Afrikanness’ of what was/is a white landscape. Whoever actually owned the land that her father farmed in Virginia, she says, the labour that tilled it, that made food grow upon it, was ‘Afrikan’. In this way she asserts her marked body on an assumed white natural world. Conclusion

In all of these marked narratives of nature there is a sense of loss and a desire for repossession of heritage, history, property, self, body. And in all of these narratives there is an insistence on some kind of an authentic relationship with nature that the marked body has been robbed of, but it is not the same kind of original unity we see being romanticized in much traditional nature writing. Oliver looks to nature to find a story about the origins of female and lesbian desire; Harjo’s stories invoke the deer as a messenger who will help her find her way back to something more than the memory of a dispossessed people; Clifton’s stories ask readers to remember the complex political relationships of African Americans to land. Rather than suggest that each of these writers is after the same end, a nostalgic reconnection with an innocent, unpoliticized, unhistoricized nature, I argue that, like Haraway’s

cyborg writer, these writers are

‘wary of holism, but needy for connection’.** A cyborg nature, Haraway writes, ‘refuses to disappear on cue ... no matter how many times a “Western” commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by Western technology’.** Like Haraway’s ‘cyborg nature’, Oliver’s, Harjo’s and Clifton’s stories suggest that their marked bodies will not disappear on cue, no matter how many times they are erased into the landscape. What could be seen as nostalgia for a simple reconnection with nature in these narratives, then, becomes a repossession of place in the

landscape. Oliver, Harjo and Clifton reclaim space for their marked bodies in the context of history, politics and economics. In all of these narratives the writer/author/knower speaks from a body that is marked by gender, race, sexuality. If one reads these narratives in this way, nature becomes itself clearly marked as non-innocent, as politically and historically determined, as a contested idea. In this way, Oliver, Harjo and Clifton contest for what the body of nature will be.

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Notes

1. DonnaJ.Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Scvence (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 1. 2. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 181. 3. Ibid., p. 153. 4. Peter Fritzell, Nature Writing and America: Essays Upon a Cultural Type (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990), p. 28. 5. When I use the term ‘marked body’ I am using it to mean what else there is besides and beyond what Haraway has called ‘the unmarked positions of Man and White’. This is the category or stance that does not need to be named; the position that is assumed, taken for granted. This unmarked body inscribes all marked bodies, names them, and has the power to see but not be seen, the power to represent, but to escape representation. 6. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 175. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. g. See Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/ Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New York: Routledge, 1990). 10. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 40-74. 11. Haraway, Primate Visions, Ch. 3, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936’. 12. Haraway, in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, suggests that the cyborg is a kind of monstrous figure and that monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. See Haraway, Szmians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 180. 13. I jump rather abruptly here from talking about the discourses of the modern natural sciences to the nature essay. The relationship of the natural history essay to the contemporary nature essay is obvious. Nature essays, another way of naming and controlling the natural world, work to naturalize cultural politics, in much the

same way as scientific discourse, or other aesthetic discourses such as landscape painting. See Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). The natural history essay, from which more contemporary forms of nature writing are evolved, grew out of the work and writing of early naturalists and literary-scientists. See also Phillip Marshall Hicks, The Development of the Natural History Essay in American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1924). 14. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 188. 15. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). See especially ‘Higher Laws’, where Thoreau writes about the impurity of the body and the need to transcend it. 16. For more on this see Leigh Kirkland, ‘Sexual Chaos at Walden Pond’, Isle 1.1 (Spring 1993), pp. 131-6; and Tim Dayton, “Thoreau and the Irish-Americans: Ethnicity, Class and Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States’, CEA Critic, 55- 1 (Fall 1992), pp. 26-38. 17. Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. III (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), pp. 446-7. 18. Mary Oliver, American Primitive (Boston: Little Brown, 1978). 19. This unsophisticated critique of Oliver’s work is telling. Consumers of nature

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writing, including critics, are ignorant of the political implications of definitions of nature. Even if they weren’t ignorant of the constructedness of nature, consumers would likely continue to treat nature writing as a healing balm, a reassuring story about the rightness of things. 20. My knowledge of French feminist theory comes from several sources including Héléne Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which ts Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). See also Arlene B. Dallery, “The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Ecriture Féminine’, in A. Jaggar and S. Bordo (eds), Gender/Body/ Knowledge (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989) pp. 52-67; and Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of VEcriture Féminine’, in E. Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 361—

77:

21. See also Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1981); and Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 22. See, especially, Patricia Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 23. See Louise Westling’s article, ‘Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich: Speaking for the Ground,’ American Nature Writing Newsletter, 5. 2 (Fall 1993), pp. 8-9. Westling notes that in her poems Harjo works to ‘shape an alternate landscape that subverts white emblems of desire’. 24. Maryann Grossman, “One of the Tribe: an Interview with Gerald Vizenor’, St. Paul Pioneer Press (22 May 1990), book section, Bro. 25. Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,

1990), Pp. I. 26. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 156. See also Paula Gunn Allen, Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989), and Patricia Clark Smith and Paula Allen,

‘Earthly

Relations,

Carnal

Knowledge:

Southwestern

American

Indian Spider Women Gunn Indian

Women Writers and Landscape’ in V. Norwood and J. Monk (eds), The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) pp. 174-96. 27. Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop, p. 155. 28. Patrick D. Murphy, ‘Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics’ in D. M. Bauer and S. J. McKinstry (eds), Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (New York: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 39-56; ‘Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice’, Hypatia 6. 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 146-61; ‘Native Americans and Nature Writing: Time to Stop Excluding the Original Inhabitants of North America’, SAIL session, American Literature Association Meeting, Washington, DC, May 1991; ‘Voicing Another Nature’, in H. Wussow and K. Hohne (eds), A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 29. Evelyn C. White, ‘Black Women and Wilderness’, Outdoor Woman (October

1991), P- 9-

30. bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery (Boston: South End Press, 1993), p- 182. See also bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (Boston: South End Press, 1981), and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984).

32. cil e Clifton, i Ordinary ae Nes York: Random oes rt Ba Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 151. 34m fbid., p2 177:

Part Two

Ecocritical History

6. Acts of God: providence, the Jeremiad and environmental crisis Barbara White

Providentialism,

the belief that the world is governed by divine will,

enjoyed its heyday in the seventeenth century when the Church of England believed itself uniquely equipped to interpret signs of divine pleasure or displeasure in the surrounding world. The ideology had been largely rejected by Enlightenment Europe since the late eighteenth century: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which 50,000 Christians perished, had led Johnson, Voltaire and others to question the fitness of God for the providential care of His creation. However, belief in the doctrine was never fully eradicated. Blair Worden made the point that there was ‘nothing peculiar to the seventeenth century about the human propensity to interpret successes and calamities as manifestations of divine intervention and divine order and divine justice’.' It is an indication of the tenacity of the ideology that it is still articulated at the end of this millennium. Twentieth-century acceptance of providentialism lies embedded within our traditions of popular belief. As G. C. Berkouwer has observed, ‘simple believers have always testified to unmistakeable and exceptional guidance in their lives’.* For example, the dying rages of Hurricane Hugo (1989) which fell upon the town of Charlotte in America were regarded by thousands of followers of the televangelist Jim Bakker, on trial for financial irregularities and on charges of immoral conduct, as a sign of God’s anger at the inhabitants of Charlotte for prosecuting His minister.’ In York, England, the fire which swept through the roof of the thirteenth-century south transept of the Minster, in 1984, destroying with it the priceless medieval stained-glass rose window of St Cuthbert, was believed by many to be an expression gI

Ecocritical history

g2

of God’s displeasure at the modern liberal theology of the Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, who, prior to his consecration, had publicly expressed his controversial disbelief in several tenets of the Anglican faith, especially the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. The Reverend John Mowll of Buglawton, Cheshire, who had interrupted the service of Consecration, was one of the first to suggest that the arsonist might have been divine: a view which was to gather momentum in the following days. As E. Arbuthnot explained in a letter to The Times on 12 July 1984: The fire at York Minster demonstrates wonderfully both the judgment and the mercy of God, or, to put it in New Testament language, both the goodness and the severity of God. We find His judgment in that He allowed, many believe, caused, lightning to strike the Minster ... and His mercy in that, having made His point, He helped the fire fighters extinguish the blaze. What could be clearer?

Providential ways of thinking are not limited to popular belief but extend to the very seat of power. In America, there are strong suggestions of a latter-day ‘Communion of Saints’ with the evangelist Jerry Falwell exhorting Americans to vote into power only ‘those leaders who will rule America justly, under divine guidance’.* In the UK, too, Prime Minister Thatcher’s government appeared to be founded on ‘Godly Rule’. In her address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh on Saturday 21 May 1988, popularly referred to as the Sermon on the Mound, she evinced a belief in good government as the execution of divine will: ‘Ideally, when Christians meet, as

Christians, to take counsel together, their purpose is not [or should not be] to ascertain what is in the mind of the majority, but what is in the mind of the Holy Spirit — something which may be quite different.” Despite this view, relations between Church and State were not good during the Thatcher premiership. As Jonathan Raban noted, ‘never since the English Revolution had there been such open acrimony between the Government and the Established Church’;’ an acrimony which found particular expression in the AIDS debate and the arguments which arose over the Falklands memorial service (1982) and Mrs Thatcher’s desire for the day to be one of thanksgiving to God for Britain’s triumphal victory over the Argentinians. Providentialism lay at the heart of these disagreements for, ironically, the Church of England hierarchy refused to embrace the ideology and had thereby alienated itself from both public opinion and government. This refusal to countenance providentialism is exemplified in the Church’s official responses to the causes of the York Minster fire. ‘The disturbing implications of those letters which somehow seek to link the fire with some remarks made by a bishop-elect on a TV discussion

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programme’ moved John Ebor of the World Council of Churches to clarify the Church of England’s position on the question of divine intervention and the natural world: I grant that if we still lived in biblical times, and if it was customary to treat thunderstorms as some kind of messengers from God, then the connection might seem inevitable. But have we learnt nothing in the intervening years about how God works in his world? Disasters may indeed be messengers, in that they force us to think about our priorities. They drive us back to God. They remind us of mistakes and failures, and they call forth reserves of energy and commitment which might otherwise remain untapped. Disasters also remind us of the fragility of life, and of our human achievements: But to interpret the effect of a thunderstorm as a direct divine punishment pushes us straight back into the kind of world from which the Christian Gospel rescued us.*

The AIDS controversy further demonstrates the Church of England’s beleaguered position in its desire for a rational and humane rather than a providential response to natural and environmental calamity. Shortly before Dr Habgood, Archbishop of York, made a heart-felt plea for compassion toward AIDS sufferers,® the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester and incoming President of the Association of Chief Police Officers, James Anderton, told its members

at an AIDS

seminar held

on 12 December 1986 that AIDS was a ‘holy judgment on a human cesspit swirling in sin’.? Anderton’s moral crusade, which had begun when he felt moved by the spirit of God to jot down some notes as he was being driven to the seminar, was given full support by Prime Minister Thatcher. She was ‘very glad that some people have spoken out’ about the spread of AIDS: ‘Some people have made their position very clear — thank goodness for that.’!° The twentieth century, therefore, has an established, clearly defined, respectable belief in providentialism and in the role of the natural world as a punitive weapon of divine displeasure either with individuals or with sections of society. With this in mind, the values of Mrs Thatcher’s era were as much Cromwellian as they were Victorian. For example, immersed in providential ways of thinking,'' Oliver Cromwell would have seen the greatest storm in living memory which raged over London in the early autumn of 1658, as he lay dying in the Palace of Whitehall, as a sign of his approaching death. When similarly severe storms lashed British shores on the night of Thursday 15 October 1987, devastating Dorset, Hampshire and the Home Counties and bringing London to a standstill, the Leader comment in The Times (‘The Great Gale of London’) for the following Saturday, 17 October, encouraged the City of London to contemplate the portentous nature of the urban storms, warning Londoners to ignore at their peril this

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natural force which was more powerful and more dangerous than the Big Bang or the lemming rush hour. Apart from its loss of Church of England support, providentialism has undergone few changes since its zenith. Most notably, the fundamentalist movement has seized the providential initiative and, along with it, a powerful tool for social manipulation and control, capable of mobilizing public opinion against targeted communities. In America, fundamentalists

have specifically aimed

at abortionists, homosexuals,

humanists, pornographers and fractured families,'* while in Britain, as we have seen, the homosexual community has been singled out: The fundamentalist conviction that everything that happened in the world belonged to a chain of cause and effect, obeying God’s plan, which they were uniquely equipped to interpret ... enabled them to seize upon the multifarious crises that have afflicted American society down to our own day, always ready with both a diagnosis and a cure — the cure of re-

demption.'*

Other changes have resulted in a higher profile for environmental issues. For example, twentieth-century judgments tend to be restricted to the sphere of natural catastrophe and war, while in the seventeenth century there were no such limitations: ‘One school suggested a natural event such as an earthquake, hurricane, death or plague; but others held to something more political such as the return of the Stuarts or of Catholicism.’'* Furthermore, although Worden questionably argues that after 1660 providence came to be more often thought of as a benevolent, rather than a punitive force, in the twentieth century divine intervention is interpreted primarily in terms of the latter, with God sending natural and climatic calamity for human chastisement. Good health, glad tidings and clement weather are enjoyed but they are not analysed for divine meaning. As a result, the prevalence of /in-de-siécle providentialism and the Church of England’s failure to curb it has had far-reaching repercussions on the Christian environmental debate. This ideology views the natural world as an agent of divine will, with the forces of nature sometimes acting outside their normal sphere, in obedience to God’s commands. In this context, environmental disasters are the punitive acts of a just God against an errant people. Chernobyl, for instance, becomes proof of God’s displeasure with the state and direction of the nuclear power industry.'!" According to providential thinking, environmental disaster is divine punishment for human sinfulness. Providentialism, therefore, adds a further dimension to Christian responsibility for the environmental crisis. Ever since Lynn White threw down the gauntlet to Christians in 1967, by condemning their anthropocentric belief in human dominion, rather than stewardship, as exploitative and damaging,

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and the primary cause of our ecological crisis today, Christians have been addressing the problem posed to theodicy by environmentalism.'® This involves a defence of God as Green, a reconsideration of the Christian role in the alienation of man from his environment, and of

the relationship they see between God, the sinfulness of man and the world in which man lives.

It is the argument of this chapter that twentieth-century Christian responses to environmentalism can be fully understood only by looking back to the seventeenth century when providentialism and the exploitation of the natural world for purposes of social control was at its height, finding no more organized or institutionalized expression than in the formulaic outpourings of Jeremiad sermons.!’ Furthermore, Christian attempts today to offer solutions to the environmental crisis are in large part hidebound by seventeenth-century attitudes to both sinfulness

and

the

natural

world,

attitudes

enshrined

within

the

Jeremiad. By examining the Jeremiad, Christians may gain a new perspective on the environmental debate. Jeremiads were usually preached on fast days designated by state proclamation as days of national humiliation during, immediately after, or on the anniversary of natural, economic and political calamities, including earthquake, fire and storm, the deaths of monarchs and defeat in war.'® Thus, Thomas Freke opened his sermon by telling his congregation that ‘we are met together this Day in Obedience to Authority’ in response to the Proclamation of Queen and Council appointing 19 January 1704 a day of religious fast.'" This ‘laudable custom’ of remembering past judgments was biblical in its authority. The Jews had commemorated their preservation from the plagues of Egypt with the Feast of Passover and their fasts were ‘observ’d for seventy Years successively, upon the very Months, and probably Days, in which these Events happen’d’.”” This may account for the fact that sermons commemorating the Great Fire of London, for example, were

still being preached some fifty years after the event,*' and that London was often referred to as Jerusalem, which, like the other Holy City,” was prone to God’s visitations. Jeremiads were not, therefore, primarily concerned with the punishment

of individual

sin, as it was

believed that individuals

could be

punished at God’s leisure by eternal damnation. They were concerned, as theologians are today, by the problems of ‘corporate’ sin.** There was believed to be an urgency in chastising errant nations for, as Thomas

Green,

Lord

Bishop

of Norwich,

argued,

God.

punished

nations more often than individuals because wicked nations could only be dealt with in this world.24 Thus, ministers found themselves dismissing the relationship between individual sin and divine punishment,

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while at the same time insisting upon just such a connection between sinful nations and God’s judgment upon them: ’Tis granted, That private Misfortunes do often happen to particular Men, and are not at all times intended for the Scourge and Punishment of Sin; ... But when a whole Kingdom is Alarm’d with the Noise and Terribleness of a mighty striving Wind ... we cannot but conclude that God is solemnly Angry, and that the Stormy Wind by his particular appointment and sufferance has fulfill’d his Word.”

The large incidence of natural disasters between 1660 and 1720 provoked the deliverance of a substantial number of Jeremiads across England, of which some 200 are extant in printed form. These surviving sermons form a valuable corpus of evidence for examining early modern relationships between the environment and establishment concerns for social control, with the genre itself owing its being to the directives of authority. There were the great rains of 1661, the Great Plague of London in 1665, and its threatened return in the 1720s. In addition, there was the Great Fire of London in 1666 and another on 13 January 1715, which followed hard upon an epidemic of murrain which killed thousands of cattle in 1714. England suffered several severe winters, especially in 1684 and 1695, and also experienced an earthquake (which had been the forerunner to Jerusalem’s destruction)”® on 8 September 1692, shortly after the devastating earthquake which struck Jamaica on 7 June 1692. England suffered further earthquakes on 8 February 1749 and, providentially, exactly a month later on 8 March. Probably the most serious judgment of all, and that which provoked the greatest number of sermons, was the Great Storm of 1703 which ‘was so dreadful and astonishing, that the like had not been seen or felt in the Memory of any person Living in the Kingdom’.?’ Jeremiads reflected the concentration of visitations heaped upon London: sermons on purely provincial environmental calamity, such as the Northampton fire of 1675,° the Oxford storm of 168279 or the Wisbech storm of 1713, have not survived. The moral lessons to be learned from the capital’s afflictions were preached nation-wide and enforced the belief that judgments on London were judgments on, and warnings to, the nation as a whole. Thus, T[homas] C[lapham]’s York sermon explained the shire’s escape from the 1703 Great Storm in the following terms: ‘It was distinguishing Goodness that consulted our unfitness for a sudden Death, and not our desert of it, when others it

may be were snatch’d away, not so much because they deserv’d it; but

because their dying in such a terrible manner would be least prejudicial

to themselves, and most awakning to others.” There was a distinct form to a good Jeremiad which necessarily contained three component parts. The sermon was largely devoted to

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an exposition of the text which had been chosen as the subject for the sermon, with the aim of explaining God’s providential power as well as drawing parallels between, and lessons from, biblical judgments and the present ones afflicting England. Certain biblical stories were especially popular with Jeremiad ministers: descriptions of the divine judgments heaped upon the sinful peoples of Ninevah and Sodom?! were regularly employed to show the close parallels between the fates of England and God’s other chosen people, the Jews. Specific natural calamities, however, called for specific texts and appropriate ones could be found to suit almost any calamitous occasion: thus Proverbs 30.422 and Isaiah 29.6* were particularly useful in times of winds, storms and tempests while Joel 1.18 was especially appropriate for mortality among

cattle.** A second feature of the sermon genre was a brief description of the present judgment upon England, with the insistence that the judgment was worse than any that had preceded it and that the increasing severity was in response to the intensifying of man’s excesses. Thus, Matthew Henry declared: ‘Never was there such a Plague in this Nation, as that in London in 1665, never such a Fire as that the Year after, never such a dreadful Storm as that about Ten Years ago, as if God were heating the Furnace Seven times hotter.” As sermons were usually preached immediately after a calamity, the preachers described the seriousness of the affliction in general and somewhat economic terms, perhaps lacking the time to gather more detailed information about the damage or loss of life. S[amuel] Doolittle was, therefore, unusual in giving such a vivid and bloody, albeit clichéd, account so soon after the event of the earthquake which struck London on Thursday 8 September: ‘Good God! What a terrible visit is this!) When here one may see a Leg, and there an arm, here a Head, and there a Trunk, here some vomiting

Blood, and yonder multitudes with their brains dash’d out.’*° It fell to the commemoration sermons to supply factual details. Benjamin Stinton’s sermon relied heavily upon Daniel Defoe and Sir William Temple for his account of the heavy damage across England inflicted by the 1703 storm.” Finally, the Jeremiad detailed those sins that had provoked God to national judgment and stressed the righteous behaviour necessary — usually, obedience to authority and a reformation of manners — to signal national repentance and secure the return of God’s favour. As Joseph Evans expressed it: ‘Providence now leads us by the late Consuming Fire to a particular Application of this general Discourse. *Tis no small part of the Duty of Ministers, to explain and second God's Voice in his Works by the Instructions of his Word.’** The sermon genre, therefore, could be exceptionally adaptable, offering a range of definitions of sinfulness and good behaviour,

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depending on the religious and political conviction of the preacher. Thus, Joseph Hussey, the Nonconformist pastor of the Congregational Church at Cambridge, threatened that the practice of ridiculing extemporary prayer would provoke God ‘to Blow down your Houses and your Churches too’.*® Similarly, another Nonconformist, Matthew Henry, used London’s fire and plague as proofs of God’s displeasure at the Ejection in 1662 of ‘a great number of the clergy who would not sin against their conscience’. He believed it was providential that the Ejection had taken place only three or four years before the Fire, and only six months after the Five Mile Act had turned the clergy out of their houses and churches. It was clear, to this Minister of the Gospel at least, that God had protected His persecuted clergy by ensuring that so many were outside London when His desolating hand set its seal on the city.*° By claiming divine displeasure at perceived sinfulness, the sermon genre could be used to settle any number of old scores, personal prejudices or mere irritants that ministers may have had. Thus, a longstanding antipathy to the stage was given divine backing when a performance of Macbeth in Drury Lane drew much criticism for offering ‘an unprecedented piece of prophaneness’ in an ‘impudent representation of a mock Tempest on the stage so soon after we had felt that dreadful one’.*! As elsewhere,” the formulaic nature of the Jeremiad overrode both the individuality of its preachers and advances in knowledge — in this case, of both science and the natural world — to create a conformist

genre which harnessed the natural world to a traditional and biblically literal interpretation. The preachers of Jeremiads inherited a view of the world which accepted that God, as the first cause, had created a mechanistic world which was hierarchically ordered, fixed, complete

and which He maintained by General Providence. While this ensured that useful parallels could be made between God’s creation and the creation as a model for the social and political structure of England, it suggested a morally inert universe with the works of nature left ‘without a Director, [suffered] to produce whatever strange Effects blind Chance might bring about by them’,** where winds, to use Joseph Hussey’s example, ‘hath no Will, or Supreme Power, and Pleasure of its own: This being the Property of a Contriving Mind, of a Governing Power, and in both, of a Personal, Designing Agent’.“ In similar vein, Thomas Manningham felt that: ‘Men would be tempted to think that the World were nothing but a Complicated Machine, left to its own Natural Motions, and not subjected to any wise and provident Power.’ To Jeremiad ministers, struggling to coerce sinners into good behaviour, the ideology of a mathematical world governed by general providence was ineffective. It was the motivating moral force of special providence with its interventionalist quality and immediacy of divine punishment in the

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cause of righteousness which lent a moral coherence to the operations of the world. This was the central and codifying motif of the Jeremiad in its battle against what ministers saw as the ever rising tide of sinfulness. Ironically, the environmental implications of this moral coherence — the natural world as a weapon of divine coercion — meant a greater dislocation between man and his environment. ‘Tho’ the Establish’d Laws of Nature are the Circle of his ordinary Providence, yet He that rideth upon the Heaven, can slacken, or accelerate his Chariot-wheels, can give such a Check, or such an impetus to Natural

Causes, as may serve the Designs of some extraordinary Appearance of the Divine Majesty.’ Although discourses surrounding general and particular providence have been well rehearsed,*’ it is in the genre of the Jeremiad that the strengths and weaknesses of the ideology of special providence have been most fully delineated. Pivotal to the Jeremiad’s power as a force for social control was the belief that the natural forces of the world were under God’s command in the swift dispensation of justice and punishment. Jeremiads, therefore, teem with examples of the power of God’s Special Providence in using the natural world to assist human justice in the struggle against evil.** Fallen man was deemed powerless to control fully his environment or to stem the mounting tide of sinfulness without God’s intervention: The Meanest and most contemptible creature has its proper post, and its peculiar office allotted and assigned and is capable of considerable Execution against the strongest enemies, at the Direction of the Lord of Hosts. He can easily raise the dust of the earth, arm flies and lice, make a formidable Host of Frogs and Locusts: He can give commission to the winds.”

It was essential that the redemptive power and moral purpose of such judgments should distinguish God’s judgments from the Devil’s arbitrary malevolence. Time and again, therefore, ministers sought to prove that chance played no part in the afflicting calamities, and that godly punishments were recognizable by the divine mark of moral purpose they bore. Benjamin Camfield warned: Not to attribute these notable Effects of God’s Providence to Chance or Blind Fortune; nor yet so to ascribe them to any natural Causes, as to leave God out of our Philosophy. ’Tis certainly preposterous, vain and wicked so to do; for all Second Causes necessarily suppose the First, and depend upon him in all their motions. The whole link of Nature’s Chain of Causes and Operations is bound to his Throne.”

This moral purpose could be seen in the way the elements sometimes acted contrary to natural law in the execution of divine will. Most notably, the divine and miraculous nature of the Fire of London lay in

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the fact that the fire ‘spread it self both with and against the wind’: ‘Who can avoid the conviction of a Deity, when elements do sometime step out of their ordinary course to serve the ends of Government in punishing great sinners?’ God’s authorship was also apparent in the spiritual meaning of the afflictions He sent. Thus, the loss of so many cattle in the epidemic of 1714 had a literal meaning in that man would have nothing to eat or wear, but the preacher of this particular sermon also pointed to a metaphysical or spiritual dimension in arguing that the cattle groaned for the sinful and that their groans would awaken the sinners’ guilt.°? Similarly, Samuel Doolittle saw in the earthquake of 1692 a metaphorical portent denoting the ‘commotions and overturnings’ in Church and State,** while Matthew Henry interpreted the Great Fire of London as a metaphor for the divisions and heats afflicting England.* Despite these powerful images of God’s righteous and judgmental strength, the Jeremiad contained inherent weaknesses and contradictions. Indeed, the very structure of the sermon contributed significantly to its own emasculation. For example, preachers of Jeremiads insisted that there was no abatement in the growth of sinfulness and, from the point of view of dramatic effect, God’s punishments had to be seen to have a cumulative effect in severity and devastation. While this might be intended to instil fear into God-fearing men and coerce them to good behaviour, the effect was to point to the inability of the Jeremiad genre to effect change and the impotence, or unwillingness, of God to control man’s excesses. Apart from the Fire (1666), Plague (1665) and Storm (1704), few judgments matched the increasing sinfulness which preachers saw, or to which the establishment of the Society for the Reformation of Manners attested. Continued vehement harangues against sinfulness, sometimes decades after the original judgment, did much to discredit the genre. There were other weaknesses too. The frenetic activity to differentiate between those environmental disasters which bore the divine mark upon them and those that did not proves God could appear unpredictable in His judgmental targets and make the work of interpreting His judgments difficult, if not embarrassing, for preachers. The extract from T[homas] C[lapham]’s York sermon above unwittingly highlighted that God seemed arbitrary in His judgments, killing the deserving and undeserving alike. Thus, the Great Storm of 1703 may have been a judgment on a sinful people but it also destroyed with it the Bishop of Bath and Wells,°° and in Bristol ‘the Churches in particular felt the fury of the Storm’.® This seeming arbitrariness has led some theologians today’’ to see such catastrophes as proof that there can be no direct link between natural disaster and individual wickedness, quoting as their evidence Luke 13.4, where Jesus denied

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that survivors of the collapsed Tower of Siloam were less guilty than those that died. Such explanations — that there is no direct connection between natural disaster and human wickedness — were unthinkable to Jeremiad ministers, even when, to the untutored eye, God’s righteous punishments looked uncannily like the malevolent work of the Devil. Ministers were therefore at pains to show that God’s judgments differed intrinsically from the malevolent and promiscuously anarchic exploits of Satan, although outwardly they may have appeared the same, precisely because of the moral purpose of God’s visitations. The Devil was portrayed as an arbitrary and mischievous destroyer who, nevertheless, could work as God’s agent: ‘The Devil can cause no Hurricane, nor raise any Tempest, except God first give him Liberty.’* Thus, “God rules the whole armory of Nature; whatever can be dreadful lies under his Management’.® Ministers distinguished very clearly between “Divine Judgments [which] are principally intended for the Reformation of that People upon whom they are sent’? and the Devil’s work which was purely destructive with no moral or spiritual purpose.°! The distinction must have been a moot one for those caught up in London’s visitations. It is ironic, however, that, in the last analysis, a genre which came

into being to exploit natural disaster for purposes of social control should have promoted, by its very structure, the breakdown in order it laboured so hard to avoid. The many calls for compassion on those who lay under God’s judgment is evidence that unruly gangs took divine law into their own hands to lend their voice, and fists, in support of God’s punishment

of the wicked.

There is, therefore, a very real

connection between the natural world, providentialism and the fear of mob rule. John Evans is one of many who warned against victimizing those afflicted by the hand of God ‘lest we offend against Charity and boldly intrude into the Divine Secrets’ by judging men’s state and character by their outward circumstance.” However, the greatest threat to the Jeremiad lay not from its internal contradictions but from the fact that the Jeremiad genre was harnessed to, and dependent upon, an ideology which was to become increasingly outmoded during the later seventeenth century. This may account in part for George Walls’s dismay that ‘alas we live in an Age that is Judgment proof’,® where men had become so hardened in their sinfulness that they neither heeded or needed God and His judgments. Advances in knowledge of natural history as well as rational rather than divine explanations for natural phenomena were instrumental in secularizing the natural world. As Keith Thomas has shown: In place of a natural world redolent with human analogy and symbolic meaning, and sensitive to man’s behaviour, [the naturalists] constructed a

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detached natural scene to be viewed and studied by the observer from the outside, as if by peering through a window, in the secure knowledge that the objects of contemplation inhabited a separate realm, offering no omens or signs, without human meaning or significance.”

Jeremiad ministers were unable to meet the challenge of such changing attitudes simply because any compromise on the nature of special providence would discredit the Jeremiad genre. Indeed, if Jeremiad ministers accepted rational rather than divine or metaphoric explanations for natural occurrences, or denied the relationship between the natural world and man’s behaviour, then the Jeremiad as a genre was dead. As a result, most ministers simply ignored scientific advances and continued to enforce the Jeremaic world picture. There is evidence of the new knowledge informing the sermons of a small number of preachers. Benjamin Stinton, for example, utilized geological facts, such as the earth containing 260,000 million miles of solid matter, to astound

with the power of the Creator. Others, like William Harris, gave detailed and exact descriptions of the properties and workings of wind, fire and earthquake but did not question God’s primacy or judgmental control over them. One sermon has survived which, in its subversion of the Jeremiad form, indirectly exposed the superstitious ignorance of Jeremiad preachers and shows how the Jeremiad was to become a spent ideological force for social control. This crucial sermon was preached by the baptist preacher Joseph Burroughs on the occasion of the total eclipse of the sun which took place on 20 April 1715. His aim was to use the sermon to attack those (presumably Jacobites) who had interpreted the eclipse as foreboding ‘Mischief to our Excellent Sovereign and his Illustrious Family’. In attempting to prove Jacobites seditious and ignorant — they ‘pretend to shew their Learning and Piety, by vain Predictions concerning dreadful Events portended by the late Eclipse’® — Burroughs inadvertently drew unmistakable parallels with the Jeremiad sermon genre. His sermon began by listing reactions to the eclipse which would have delighted Jeremiad preachers: ‘Many ... were struck with Amazement, and with a dreadful expectation of being suddenly call’d to Judgment, others were possess’d with a superstitious Fear of great Miseries and Calamities portended to the Nation.’ Burroughs was quick to assuage such fears, pointing out that God governed His rational creatures by righteous laws and not by signs.® Eclipses, he explained, were no more than the ‘Interposition of the Moon

between

the Sun and the Earth, or of the Earth between

the

Sun and the Moon’. Those dismayed by the signs of heaven were dismissed by Burroughs as at best idolaters and at worst superstitious. Furthermore,

such dread, he argued, had a ‘pernicious Tendency’,

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‘tend[ing] to shake the Foundations of our Trust in God, to make us doubt of his Wisdom, and Power, and Righteousness’.”° As damning as this may appear to the Jeremiad genre, Burroughs himself had not completely shaken off belief in the relationship between human behaviour and divinely controlled natural occurrences. In offering reassurance that eclipses were ‘far from being certain Signs of Calamity and Distress to the Places where they appear’, he argued that they were often followed by happy events and pressed into service the two eclipses of 1688 as signs of a ‘happy Revolution [when] our Religion and Liberty were rescu’d from the Jaws of Arbitrary Power’.”! The Jeremiad, therefore, has a significant contribution to make to understanding the relationship between past climatic changes and their effects on human activity and historical development.” At the heart of this lies the relationship between man and the world in which he lived and between providentialism and establishment attempts at social control. Such attempts were doomed to failure because of deeply imbued beliefs in the innate sinfulness and unruliness of man and this in turn had telling repercussions on the natural world. Man, in his fallen state, was believed to be always in rebellion against God and therefore alienated from his environment. The Jeremiads show an establishment attempting to maintain social control by clinging to an old order which made sense of the world through signs, parallels and metaphoric meanings. By ignoring changing attitudes to, and knowledge of, the natural world, the Church and State were eventually left with an ineffectual genre and a paranoid fear of the excesses to which man’s sinful and unbridled nature would lead. In addition, Jeremiads have an obvious relevance, and warning, to today’s providentialists. The latter may argue that Jeremiad preachers were right to rail against the dangers of man’s excesses, in the light of so much ecological damage. However, a mere reworking for modern consumption of the relationship between sinfulness and the natural world will result in solutions which are as moribund and outmoded as the Jeremiad itself. The Jeremiad legacy, with its concomitant sense of fatalistic submission to the will of God, is unmistakable in certain contemporary Green theologies. For example, Lawrence Osborn’s view is that ‘the present environmental crisis may be regarded as a contemporary expression of the disruption of our relationship with the environment brought about by human disobedience’.” Ron Elsdon supports this belief that sin corrupts the relationship between humanity and the natural world: ‘it has sometimes been said that one of the most important insights that Christianity can contribute to the environmental debate is its understanding of sin.’”” Other Green theologies have faltered on Lynn White’s sin of

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anthropocentrism, seeing the environmental debate primarily in terms of the light it sheds on man’s attempts to understand himself. Chris Park, for example, has argued that the environmental crisis is as much a crisis of values and motives as a crisis of science and damage.” For Park, secular changes in science, politics and economics, to safeguard the environment, are of secondary importance. He argues that the Christian response to the environmental crisis should be to regard it, first and foremost, as a spiritual problem, requiring the spiritual solution of repentance and reconciliation with God. Each new ecological disaster has brought renewed Christian attempts to understand man’s dislocation from the natural world, even creating a new science of chaology, dedicated to unravelling the seemingly random disorder which lies at the heart of all matter.’” Chernobyl, for instance, has nurtured a theology of accident which rejects the judgmental view in favour of a quest for a Christ-like ‘self-offering,

open and self-risking approach’ to natural disaster.”” Other theologians have rejected the Jeremiad legacy to offer Christians different perspectives on the ecological debate. Ian Bradley, in particular, is certain that today’s environmental damage is independent of a relationship between divine judgment and human sin. He argues that ecological disasters are not divine punishments on man, since volcanoes and earthquakes were in existence long before homo sapiens stalked the earth. He offers a doctrine of continuous theology as an explanation of our dislocation from the natural world.” In this theology, man is regarded as being in a general state of imperfection and moving towards, rather than away from, the Garden of Eden, the symbol of God’s intentions towards all His creatures. While this introduces Christian hope for the environment, it also has the hollow ring of Candide’s symbolic journeyings towards a solution to the problems of providentialism. In the end, Candide retired to work in his own Garden of Eden, submissive to the whims of Providence. Such fatalism leads to

one inescapable truth, that if harmony between man and the natural world is to be restored, man must act and man must change. Notes 1.

Blair Worden,

‘Providence

and Politics in Cromwellian

England’, Past and

Present, 109 (1985), p. 58. 2. G. C. Berkouwer, The Providence of God (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1952), p. 162. 3. G. Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World, trans A. Braley (London: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 100-1. 4. Ibid., p. 15. 5. Jonathan Raban, God, Man and Mrs Thatcher: A Critique of Mrs Thatcher’s Address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), p. 18.

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Ibid., p. 21. The Times, 12 July 1984, ‘Letters to the Editor’, p. 15. bade The Times, 31 December 1986, p. 3. 9. The Times, 20 December 1986, p. 2. 10. The Times, 24 January 1987, p. 1. 1. J. C. Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, in J. Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1990), p. 200. 12. Kepel, The Revenge of God, p. 118. 13. Ibid., p. 107. 14. ‘T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform’, Literature and History, 3 (1976), p. 52. The question of war needs to be addressed here. Certainly, seventeenthcentury ministers regarded war as a divine judgment. See, for example, J. Shower, A Fast-Sermon ‘on the Account of the Present War’ (2nd edn 1705). However, in the late twentieth century, it is rarely argued that God sends war; attempts by the British government to suggest that God was on Britain’s side during the Falklands conflict were denounced by the Church of England. Prime Minister Thatcher was said to be ‘hopping mad’ that Archbishop Runcie had turned the Falklands War Thanksgiving Service into a call for Christian peace and reconciliation and a lecture on ‘those who dare to interpret God’s will (that they) must never claim Him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another’ (The Times, 27 July 1982, p. 12). See H. Clark, The Church Under Thatcher (London: SPCK, 1993), esp. p. 10. 15. See M. Tucker, ‘Accident and Creation’, Crucible (Oct.—Dec. 1987), pp. 15360. 16. Lynn White, Jr, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’, Science, 155

(1967), pp. 1203-7. 17. The term ‘Jeremiad’ was attributed to the genre in the late eighteenth century. During the seventeenth century, they were generally referred to as ‘sermons of Fast and Humiliation’. I am grateful to D. J. Napthine for his comments and for permitting me to use his unpublished thesis, “he Jeremiad in Seventeenth Century England’, Polytechnic of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (1983). 18. Jeremiads are distinct from fast-day sermons, sermons for the Society for the Reformation of Manners, and certain sermons delivered upon days appointed for National Humiliation. Although these genres normally contained strong elements of Jeremiad thought, linking natural disaster to divine will, Jeremiads themselves were preached exclusively in response to specific environmental or political calamity. 19. ‘I. Freke, A Sermon ‘preach’d on Wednesday, January XIX, 1703/4. Being the Fast-Day, appointed by Authority, for the Humbling our selves before Almighty GOD, in a deep Sense of his Heavy Displeasure, shew’d forth in the late Dreadful Tempest. As also, For the Imploring of a Blessing on Her Majesty and Allies, Engag’d in the present War’ (1704), p. 3. This sermon also contains a copy of the Queen’s Proclamation, pp. 3-4. See also, B. Gravener, ‘A discourse occasion’d by the Late Dreadfull Storm and accommodated to the design of the Publick Fast. January rgth 1703/4’ (1704), p. 2. 20. B. Stinton, A Sermon ‘preach’d the 27th of November, 1713. In Commemoration of the Great and Dreadful Storm in November 1703. In which some Account is given of the Damages sustain’d; And the Advantages of calling it again to Remembrance’ grd edn (1713), p. 4. This sermon includes the Queen’s Proclamation, dated 12 December 1703, of Humiliation for the Storm, pp. 21-2. at. M. Henry, A Memorial of the Fire of the Lord, ‘in a sermon preach’d September

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and 1713. Being the Day of the Commemoration of the Burning of London in 1666. At Mr. Reynolds’s Meeting-place near the Monument’ (1713). 22. §. Doolittle, A Sermon ‘occasion’d by the Late earthquake which happen’d in London and other places on the eighth of September, 1692, preached to a congregation in Reading’ (1692). See also, W. Harris, A Sermon ‘preached on the Publick Fast Appointed by Authority, January 19th 1703/4 with a special reference to the

Late Dreadful Storm and Tempest’ (1704), pp. 11, 24, 30. 23. R. Elsdon, Greenhouse Theology: Biblical Perspectives on Caring for the Creation (Tunbridge Wells: Monarch, 1992), p. 89. 24. T. Green, The End and Design of God’s Judgments. ‘A sermon preach’d before the House of Lords, at the Abbey-Church in Westminster on Friday, December 8th 1721. Being the Day appointed for a General Fast, for obtaining the Pardon of our Sins, and averting those heavy Judgments we have most justly deserved; and particularly the Plague, with which several other Countries are at this time visited’ (1721), p. 525. W. Offley, The Power and Providence of God Consider’d and Asserted. ‘In a Sermon preach’d in the Parish-Church of Middleton-Stoney, in the County of Oxford, on Wednesday the 19th of January 1703/4. Being the Fast-Day Appointed by Proclamation to be observed in a most Solemn and Devout Manner’ (1704), pp. 6-7. 26. S. Doolittle, A Sermon ‘occasion’d by the Late earthquake’, p. 20. 27. G. Walls, A Sermon ‘preach’d At the Cathedral Church in Worcester, on Wednesday January the 19th, 1703/4. Being the Fast-Day for Imploring the Blessing of Almighty God upon Her Majesty and Her Allies engaged in the Present War. As also For the Humbling our selves before Him in a deep Sense of the Judgment of the late dreadful Tempest’ (1704), p. 20. 28. A True and Faithful Relation of the late Dreadful Fire at Northampton, ‘Beginning On Munday the 20th of this Instant September, about g. of the Clock, and continuing till the next morning Six a Clock, in which time the greatest part of the Town, with the Church of St. Allhallows and the Market-Cross, were consumed to Ashes, to-

gether with most of the Inhabitant goods lodg’d in the Church, and near the said Cross’ (1675). 29. A Strange Relation of the Suddain and Violent Tempest Which happened at Oxford May 31. Anno Domini 1682. “Together With an Enquiry into the probable Cause and usual consequents of such like Tempests and Storms’ (Oxford, 1682). 30. T. C[lapham], A Sermon ‘preach’d in the City of York, on Wednesday, January XIX 1703/4. Being the Fast-Day Appointed for the late Dreadful Storm’ (1704), p- 21. See also, O. Blackall, A Sermon ‘preach’d before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London, at the Cathedral-Church of St. Paul, January the 1gth 1703/4. Being the Fast-Day Appointed by Her Majesty’s Proclamation, upon Occasion of the Late Dreadful Storm and Tempest; And to Implore the Blessing of God, upon Her Majesty, and Her Allies, in the Present War’ (1704), p. 23. 31. See, for example, J. Bates, A Fast Sermon ‘Preach’d at Hackney, November the 3rd 1714. Upon Account of the present Mortality of the Cattle’ (1714), p. 15. 32. See, for example, TI. Bradbury, God’s Empire Over the Winds. ‘Considered in a Sermon on the Fast-Day, January rgth 1704’ (1704): ‘... who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth?’ 33.

Harris, A Sermon ‘preached on the Publick Fast’; Doolittle,

A Sermon ‘occasion’d

by the Late earthquake’: “Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder,

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and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.’ 34. ‘I: Simmons, A Lesson from the Beasts, Or Instructions from the Herds of Cattle. ‘A sermon On Occasion of the present Mortality among the Cattle. Preach’d in LimeStreet, November 28th 1714’ (1714): ‘How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed because they have no pasture ... ’ 35. Henry, A Memorial of the Fire of the Lord, p. 9. 36.

Doolittle, A Sermon ‘occasion’d by the Late earthquake’, p. 16. See also, Harris,

A Sermon ‘preached on the Publick Fast’, p. 34; and R. Chapman, The Necessity of Repentance Asserted: In order to Avert Those Judgements which the present war and Strange Unseasonableness of the Weather At Present, seem to threaten this Nation with. In a sermon preached on Wednesday the 26th of May, 1703. Being the Fast-Day Appointed by Her Majesty’s Proclamation’ (1703), pp. 16-17. 37. Stinton, A Sermon ‘preached the 27th of November, 1713’. See also, Henry, A Memorial of the Fire of the Lord, esp. p. 10. 38. J. Evans, A Sermon ‘Preach’d in London January 16th 1714/15 On Occasion of the Dreadful Fire Which began in Thames-Street on Thursday January 13th’ (1715), p- 5. 39. J. Hussey, A Warning from the Winds. ‘A Sermon preach’d Upon Wednesday, January XIX. 1703/4. Being the Day of Publick Humiliation, For the late Terrible, and Awakning Storm of Wind, Sent in Great Rebuke upon this Kingdom, November XXVI, XXVIL. 1703. And now set Forth in some Ground of it, to have been Inflicted as a Punishment of that General Contempt, in England under Gospel-Light, Cast upon the Work of the Holy Ghost, the Third Person in the Blessed Trinity, as to His Divine Breathings upon the Souls of Men’ (1704), p. 32. 40. Henry, A Memorial of the Fire of the Lord, p. 16. 41. Bradbury, God’s Empire Over the Winds, pp. iv—-v. See also, Walls, A Sermon ‘preach’d At the Cathedral Church in Worcester’, pp. 20-1 and Hussey, A Warning Jrom the Winds, p. 54. 42. See B. White, ‘““Those who else would turn all upside-down”: Censorship and the Assize Sermon, 1660-1720’, in P. Hyland and N. Sammells (eds), Writing and Censorship in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 36-45. 43. Stinton, A Sermon ‘preach’d the 27th of November, 1713’, p. 12. 44. Hussey, A Warning from the Winds, p. 4. 45. T. Manningham, A Sermon ‘Upon the Late Dreadful Storm: preach’d in the Parish Church of St. Andrew’s Holborn, November 28th, 1704’ (1704), p. 8. 46. C{lapham], A Sermon ‘preach’d in the City of York’, p. 6. 47. For a discussion of general and particular providence, see B. Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, pp. 60-1. 48. An interesting reference to the power of special providence in assisting human justice is H. Fielding, Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder. Containing, Above thirty cases, in which this dreadful Crome has been brought to Light, in the most extraordinary and miraculous Manner; collected from various authors, ancient and modern. With an Introduction and Conclusion, Both written by HF Esq (1752). 49. Harris, A Sermon ‘preached on the Publick Fast’, p. 10. 50. B. Camfield, Of God Alnighty’s Providence Both in the Sending and Dissolving Great Snows and Frosts, And The Improvement, we ought to make, of it. ‘A Sermon Occasioned by the Late Extreme Cold Weather, Preached in It to his Neigbours, and now thought fit to be made more Public, for the Common Good’ (1684) p. 10. See also, J. Davy, God’s Government of the Wind: Or God’s voice to, and by, the Wind. ‘Considered in two

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sermons preach’d at Croydon November 28th 1703 occasion’d by the terrible stormy wind on the 26th and 27th Instant’ (1704), p. 23; Evans, A Sermon ‘Preach’d in London January 16th 1714/15’, p. 18; and Walls, A Sermon ‘preach’d At the Cathedral Church in Worcester’, p. 12. 51. E. Stillingfleet, A Sermon ‘preached before the Honourable House of Commons, at St. Margarets Westminster October roth. being the Fast-day appointed for the late Dreadfull Fire in the City of London’ (1666), p. 12. I am grateful to D. J. Napthine for this reference. 52. Simmons, A Lesson from the Beasts, pp. 13-14. See also, B. Camfield, Of God Almighty’s Providence, p. 16; and Hussey, A Warning from the Winds, pp. 10, 13. 53. Doolittle, A Sermon ‘occasion’d by the Late earthquake’, p. 11. 54. Henry, A Memorial of the Fire of the Lord, p. 24. 55. Stinton, A Sermon ‘preach’d the 27th of November, 1713’, p. 23. 56. D. Defoe, The Storm: Or, A Collection Of the most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters

Which happen’d in the Late dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land (1704), p. 176. 57. See, for example, C. A. Russell, The Earth, Humanity and God: The Templeton Lectures (London: UCL Press, 1994), esp. p- 49, and I. Bradley, God is Green: Christianity and the Environment (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), p. 63. 58. W. Offley, The Power and Providence of God, p. 18. 59. Bradbury, God’s Empire over the Wind, p. 10. 60. E. Massey, The Signs of the Times. ‘A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord-Mayor And Court of Aldermen at the Cathedral of St. Paul, on Friday 8th of December, 1721. Being the Day appointed for a General Fast for the Prevention of the Plague’ (1722), p. 7. 61.

Walls, A Sermon ‘preach’d At the Cathedral Church in Worcester’, p. 12.

62. Evans, A Sermon “Preach’d in London January 16th 1714/15’, p. 31. See also Blackall, A Sermon ‘preach’d before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor’, pp. 20— 1; Green, The End and Design of God’s Judgments, pp. 4-5, and J. Norman, Seasonable Advice to a Sinful Nation. ‘A Sermon preach’d at Portsmouth, December 16th 1720. Being the Day appointed by His Majesty for a General Fast and Humiliation; for Obtaining the Pardon of our Sins, and Averting those Heavy Judgments, which they have justly deserved: And particularly for beseeching God to preserve us from the Plague, with which several other Places are visited’ (1721), p. 18. 63. Walls, A Sermon ‘preach’d At the Cathedral Church in Worcester’, p. 19. 64. K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), p. 89. 65. Stinton, A Sermon ‘preach’d the 27th of November, 1713’, p. 8. 66. J. Burroughs, A Sermon “‘Occasion’d by the Total Eclipse of the Sun, Upon April the 22nd, 1715” (1715), p. 20.

67. Ibid., p. 4. 68. Ibid., p. 22. 69. Ibid., p. 13. 70. Ibid., p. 20. Giseel bid. p= 15 72. See H. H. Lamb and M. J. Ingram, ‘Report on the International Conference on “Climate and History”’, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, 8— 14 July 1979, Past and Present, 88 (August 1980), pp. 136-41. 73. L. Osborn, Guardians of Creation: Nature in Theology and the Christian Life (Leicester: Apollos, 1993), p. 89. 74. Elsdon, Greenhouse Theology, p. go.

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75. C. C. Park, Caring for Creation: A Chnstian Way Forward (London: Marshall Pickering, 1991), pp. 31-40. See also, R. Grove-White, “Human Identity and the Environmental Crisis’, in I. Ball, M. Goodall, F. C. Palmer and J. Reader (eds), The Earth Beneath: A Critical Guide to Green Theology (London: SPCK, 1992), esp. p. 31. 76. Bradley, God is Green, p. 63. 77. Tucker, ‘Accident and Creation’, pp. 153-60. 78. Bradley, God is Green, p. 63.

7. Crabbe’s disorderly nature John

Lucas

Clare did not approve of Crabbe. ‘Whats he know of the distresses of the poor musing over a snug coal fire in his parsonage box’, he protested to his publisher in a letter of 1820. Two years later he remarked to the same correspondent that Crabbe’s poetry amounted to little more than ‘tedious prosing over trifles’.! This is doubly unfair. Crabbe’s lines on the plight of the workhouse poor in The Village are close in sympathetic observation and indeed indignation to Clare’s account of the humiliations of the indigent poor in The Parish.2 And Clare’s love of ‘little things’ is anticipated by Crabbe’s absorption in the fauna and more especially flora of his native East Anglia. Yet to say this is not to imply that the two poets are closely aligned in their writings about the natural world. Though Clare overstates the case, he is right to sense a difference between his unabashed ardour for ‘weed and blossom’ and Crabbe’s more ambiguous attitude. And it is this difference which forms the subject of my chapter. In his deeply affectionate Life of George Crabbe, the poet’s son quotes some lines from one of his father’s early Notebooks, in which Crabbe records how he and his fiancée ‘pluck’d the wild blossoms that blush’d in the grass, / And I taught my dear maid of their species and class’.* Whether Sarah Elmy was grateful for these lessons isn’t reported. Crabbe’s concern is anyway not so much with educating her as with establishing his own credentials. We are to understand that he knows about Linnaeus. Keith Thomas says that the Linnaean system developed from 1735 and was ‘accepted in this country in the early 1760s’. It was, he adds, an artificial system, ‘based, as far as plants were concerned, on

the number, situation and proportion of the parts of fructification, the stamens and pistils; and its heavy sexual emphasis excited many prudish objections to its supposedly “licentious” character.’ Botany therefore seemed ‘a doubtful recreation for young ladies when it involved so close a scrutiny of the “private parts” of wild flowers’. Thomas quotes 110

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Ruskin on the ‘obscene processes and prurient apparitions’ of the Linnaean approach. Crabbe, made of sturdier stuff, enjoyed writing about the erotic life of plants: he did so both in The Library (1781) and

later in “The Flowers’.°

There is no space here to speculate on why the Linnaean system came to dominate botanical studies in the latter half of the eighteenth century, beyond remarking that it clearly ministers to that love of order which is part of the Enlightenment view of the world. The system testifies to the order in variety of the harmonious universe which Pope had celebrated when he affirmed that ‘though all things differ, all agree’. It also insists on parallels between what Thomas calls ‘the descending categories of scientific taxonomy and the diminishing units of human society’.° But agreement and parallel are fully accessible only to those who, in using Linnaeus, have enough Latin at their command to provide the supposedly correct scientific, ‘objective’ names to all plants. Roman Law now finds its echo in botanical ‘law’. In teaching Sarah of the ‘species and class’ of the wild blossoms, Crabbe is laying down the law. He is, we might say, behaving as an exemplary, paid-up member of the Enlightenment. This is still the familiar image of Crabbe. He is ‘Pope in worsted stockings’. In so far as anyone bothers to write about him at all it is usually in the context of late Augustanism. Crabbe is a last upholder of values which find their most pugnacious champion in Dr Johnson, to whom Crabbe’s patron Edmund Burke had famously introduced the young, despairing poet, and who, equally famously, had contributed four lines to The Village. Everyone who knows anything about Crabbe, or about Johnson, knows that. But not everyone knows that Crabbe burnt a botanical

treatise, in consequence,

his son believes, ‘of the

remonstrances of the late Mr Davies, vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, with whom he had become casually acquainted, and who,

though little tinged with academic peculiarities, could not stomach the degrading such a science by treating it in a modern language’.’ Nor may they have come across or registered the significance of George Crabbe junior’s recollection that in the ‘insatiable ardour’ with which his father cultivated his study of botany, grasses held a special place in his affections. It is a significance which is further highlighted in the following passage of the Life, where, remarking on Crabbe’s researches into Natural History, the son says: There was, perhaps, no one of its departments to which he did not, at some time or other, turn with peculiar ardour; but, generally speaking, I should be inclined to say, that those usually considered as the least inviting had the highest attractions for him. In botany, grasses, the most useful, but the least ornamental, were his favourites; in minerals, the earths and sands; in entomo-

logy, the minuter insects. His devotion to these pursuits appeared to proceed

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purely from the love of science and the increase of knowledge — at all events, he never seemed to be captivated with the mere beauty of natural objects, or even to catch any taste for the arrangement of his own specimens. Within the house was a kind of scientific confusion; in the garden, the usual showy

foreigners gave place to the most scarce flowers, and especially to the rarer weeds, of Britain: and these were scattered here and there only for preservation. In fact, he neither loved order for its own sake, nor had any very high opinion of that in others.

Crabbe junior then quotes a passage from one of the Tales in Verse, ‘The Learned Boy’, in which Crabbe says that although a love of order may show ‘a clear mind and a clean’, such love is equally likely to be found in ‘the cold miser of all change afraid, / In pompous men in public seats obeyed, / In humble placemen, heralds, solemn drones,

/ Fanciers of flowers ... ** This is very revealing. Fanciers of flowers must in this context be thought of as adhering to Linnaean principles of classification and as such are to be linked with jobsworths, with others who deny all generosity of spirit, and with those who look to maintain the social order — the men of public office. Between them, these lovers of order embody the killing letter of the law. On the strength of this it seems clear that Crabbe can hardly be recruited for the cause of the Enlightenment or the Augustan values he is supposed to cherish. To understand why this is so we need do no more than consider what Crabbe tells us about Dinah, the rich prudent maid of one of his greatest poems, ‘Procrastination’. Dinah’s orderliness is to be read in her love of possessions: Within a costly case of varnished wood, In level rows, her polished volumes stood; Shown as a favour to a chosen few, To prove what beauty for a book could do: ... Above her head, all gorgeous to behold, A time-piece stood on feet of burnished gold; A stag’s-head crest adorned the pictured casé, Through the pure crystal shone the enamelled face; And while on brilliants moved the hands of steel, It clicked from prayer, from meal to meal.°

Dinah’s orderliness is inseparable from her distaste for the dreck of most people’s lives, including that of her former lover, whom she comes to reject as ‘beneath’ her. Crabbe weighs the cost of her decision to live by order. As he says, all her possessions ‘implied both cost and care’. The ultimate cost is that in choosing to live by prudential values she withers into sterile rectitude. We can get some measure of the depth of Crabbe’s insight into what this means if we set beside his

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writing about Dinah, Dickens’s presentation of Mr Dombey. The account of Dombey waiting in his library to receive guests to his son’s christening undoubtedly owes a good deal to Crabbe, whom we know Dickens had read; and Hablot Browne’s illustration exactly catches the deadly joylessness of the occasion, its ‘cost and care’. By contrast, Browne’s illustration of the Toodle family at home, all higgledy-piggledy and any old how, testifies to their indifference to order which is as joyous as it is (and because it is) anti-hierarchical. The Toodles are a family of love. We catch a glimpse of another such a family in the following sonnet: Well honest John how fare you now at home The spring is come and birds are building nests The old cock robin to the stye is come With olive feathers and its ruddy breast And the old cock with wattles and red comb Struts with the hens and seems to like some best Then crows and looks about for little crumbs Swept out bye little folks an hour ago The pigs sleep in the sty the bookman comes The little boys lets home close nesting go And pockets tops and taws where daiseys bloom To look at the new number just laid down With lots of pictures and good stories too And Jack the jiant killers high renown.

“To John Clare’, composed in Northampton Asylum in 1860, is one of the last poems Clare is known to have written. He may have been addressing his son but I incline to think that he’s imagining himself at home and that his mind’s eye roves here and there about a loved scene. John Barrell has definitively shown how Clare’s landscape poems undo the picturesque orderliness of late eighteenth-century painterly and poetic conventions; and “To John Clare’ is late evidence of what I choose to call the poet’s wandering eye. I have argued elsewhere that during the period when both Crabbe and Clare were writing, the verb ‘to wander’ began to develop political overtones. It implied a refusal to keep to bounds. It was an assertion of the right to the land. The land ought to be held in common.'? Wandering, like the later rambling, became a transgressive act against enclosed land, but only because the land had been taken away from people. The enclosing of land around Helpstone was for Clare the most traumatic event in a life that was not lacking in misfortune and sadness. For all his dreams of being what he called ‘a man of independence’, Clare was in nearly all senses one of the dispossessed. Crabbe, on the other hand, was taken up by the gentry. For a while he acted as chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, who in the final decades of the eighteenth

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century was busily enclosing land throughout the vale of Belvoir and beyond. What then could Crabbe expect to know or admit to knowing ‘of the distresses of the poor’? Well, consider the following passage, which comes from the first part of The Village. Crabbe has been noting the ‘toilsome’ life of the ‘poor laborious natives’ of the land behind Aldeburgh, that ‘frowning coast, / Which can no groves nor happy valleys boast’. Now he goes on: Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o’er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor; From thence a length of burning sand appears, Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears;

Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o’er the land and rob the blighted rye: There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infant threaten war; There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil, There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil; Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf,

The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf; O’er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, And the wild tare clings round the sickly blade; With the mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, And a sad splendour vainly shines around. (lines 63-78)

Here is an almost emblematic scene of disorderly, slovenly nature, typified by the ‘rank weeds’; a wilderness that sprawls around and takes dominion everywhere. Lawless outcasts with their own terrorist organization, the weeds ‘reign o’er the land and rob the blighted rye’. This is the case for weed control, for the well-tilled lands of enclosure. Yet for all Crabbe’s protest against nature’s disorderliness, and despite the implicit recommendation for a firm directing hand, the lines have about them a counter-current of feeling. It isn’t that Crabbe is on the side of the weeds exactly; but some ambiguous, almost guilty, feeling of pleasure comes through in his detailed account of their anarchic power, their ability to defy all art and care. In his Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson provides no fewer than seventeen different usages of ‘rank’, some of which threaten to contradict others. Rank is ‘high growing; strong, luxuriant’. It is also ‘strong scented; rancid’. Johnson quotes as example of this latter usage Swift’s couplet: ‘Hircina, rank with sweat presumes / To censure Phillis for perfumes’. Sweat is associated with work, of course: more particularly, clings to those who work with the sweat of their brow. Crabbe does not accuse the village labourers of being rank in this sense: instead, he describes them as toiling with “dewy temples’. And this is in accord with James Thomson’s idealized account of such labour in The Seasons.'! It belongs to the

Crabbe’s disorderly nature

“HHS

Georgian convention of ‘pleasant’ toil. The weeds, however, are rank;

they are the great unwashed. Johnson also defines rank as ‘rampant’, with the implication of overreaching. Here, he gives as an example Prospero’s rebuke to his brother, and Prospero’s readiness to ‘forgive / Thy rankest faults’, where the word puns on Antonio’s desire to usurp Prospero’s rank as duke. Rank in this sense means ‘class; order’. Rank is also, Johnson

points out, used to mean

‘gross; coarse’,

and it is

further used to indicate a line of men placed abreast, a potentially threatening line of troops or warriors. Many of these meanings contend within Crabbe’s ‘rank weeds’. They carry the charge of being a threat to well-ordered nature. They are like raggle-taggle gypsies: rank outsiders. Crabbe did not like gypsies, and this also marks him off from Clare; he would almost certainly have agreed with Johnson’s definition of weed as ‘an herb noxious or useless’. Yet when he comes to a detailed account of the weeds, the pejorative meanings of rank drop away from his mention of poppies, bugloss, mallow, charlock and tare (vetch). Only the bugloss is identified by the colour of its flower, but Crabbe is clearly familiar with the look of the others, has studied

them, even

seems

near to

liking them. At all events, if they pose a threat to orderly tillage, their rampant, luxuriant growth may have its own uses. For Crabbe would have known of the plants’ curative powers. Before he became a poet he studied to become an apothecary and would therefore have been aware that the mallow, whether common or marsh, is ‘owned by Venus’,

and that, according to Culpeper, the leaves ‘and roots boiled in wine and water, or in broth with parsley or fennel roots, open the body, and are very convenient in agues, or other distempers of the body ... [it] easeth the pains of the belly’. As to the poppy, quite apart from its juice becoming opium and therefore able ‘to stay catarrhs and defluctions of thin rheums from the head into the stomach and lungs’, and,

of course, ‘procure rest and sleep’, it has several other medicinal uses.'? The bugloss Crabbe mentions is most probably viper’s bugloss, so called because it was said both to cure and to prevent snake bite. It was also regularly prescribed ‘to increase the flow of mother’s milk and ease lumbago’, and a syrup of viper’s bugloss ‘was considered effectual against sadness and melancholy’. Even charlock, which Geoffrey Grigson in his Englishman’s Flora calls ‘a plant with a rat’s individuality and lack of charm’, because it is such a vicious pest to arable farming, is not, he admits, of entirely evil record. ‘Forcing itself into notice in the crops, it was once boiled and eaten.’ He quotes a commentator of 1727 noting that the charlock is used ‘for boiled sallet’. ‘On the island fringes’, Grigson adds, ‘this vegetable use endured still later.”*” None of this is to say that the poet of The Village writes with sympathetic ardour about his rank weeds. His attitude is very different

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from that of Clare’s in ‘The Flitting’. There, Clare fondly recalls his native home where ‘Every weed and blossom too / Was looking upward in my face / With friendships welcome “how do ye do”’. Crabbe could never write like that. Yet it must be obvious that in the passage from The Village to which I have been attending Crabbe was under no obligation to name the plants, nor to describe them in as much detail as he chooses to do. Given the apparent purpose of the lines, which is to rebuke the sentimental pastoralism of those ‘simple souls who dream of rural ease’, he could have called the plants weeds and have left it at that. There was, indeed, every reason to do so. For Burke showed The Village to Dr Johnson, hoping for his approval, and Crabbe could hardly have been unaware of Johnson’s belief that it was not the poet’s task to ‘number the streaks on the tulip’ (the famous words from Rasselas are spoken by Imlac, but he is very plainly Johnson’s mouthpiece). Quite what Johnson made of Crabbe’s detailed numberings I do not know, but as he contributed four of his own to The Village he presumably didn’t feel that they damned the poem. Nor do they. Yet accounting for their appeal is, so I find, difficult, if only because it is far from easy to gauge Crabbe’s tone. Crabbe is partly responding to and partly resisting Enlightenment imperatives. He is at once for and against well-managed, ‘useful’ estates, repelled by and attracted to the outcast world of weeds. And of course while for the new ‘improved’ agriculture, weeds undoubtedly threatened war to healthy crops, for an older ‘oeconomy’ their curative power made them anything but outsiders. There is a concealed, almost guilty, knowledge in Crabbe’s detailed accounts of his ‘rank weeds’. Such knowledge is inseparable from the compulsions which brought it into being, requirements of attentiveness that are not to be gainsaid. It is nevertheless impossible to imagine Crabbe concurring with something Clare says in his Third Letter on Natural History: I love to look on nature with a poetic feeling which magnifys the pleasure I love to see the nightingale in its hazel retreat & the cuckoo hiding in its solitudes of oaken foliage & not to examine their carcasses in glass cases yet naturalists & botanists seem to have no taste for this poetical feeling they merely make collections of dryd specimens classing them after Leanius into tribes & familys & there they delight to show them as a sort of ambitious fame.'*

As has already been noted, Crabbe not only burnt his botanical treatise because it wasn’t sufficiently aware of the demands of ‘ambitious fame’, but he instructed his fiancée in the Linnaean modes of classification. Moreover, for Clare ‘poetic feeling’ is instinctively, so it must feel, attached to a posture of withdrawal, of secrecy, of what Hopkins called a ‘heart in hiding’: the nightingale in its ‘hazel retreat’, the cuckoo in

=Te

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its ‘solitudes of oaken foliage’. By the time he wrote those words Clare was coming to distrust the London literati and fame’s fickle fancies. Crabbe, on the other hand, wanted to take his place in the world of

letters and did so. To be publicly and early admired by Burke and Johnson, and by Byron and Rogers later, made for the possibility of self-esteem. Clare at first received and enjoyed public praise. But by 1824, when he began his Natural History Letters, his brief moment of fame was already in the past. This realization reawoke his sense of a deeper insecurity: of just where, with whom and to what he belonged. He was at once a London-made poet and a Helpstone ‘peasant’. As Margaret Grainger has remarked in her invaluable edition of Clare’s Natural History Prose Writings, Clare was partly induced to write his Letters in response to a book which his publishers Taylor and Hessey brought out in 1823, a copy of which they presented to him, ‘with the Publishers kind regards’. The book in question was Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica or The Portable Flower Garden, in the preface to which Kent notes: ‘None have better understood the language of flowers than the simple-minded peasant-poet, Clare, whose volumes are like a beautiful country, diversified with woods, heaths, and flower gardens.’ Wordsworth might grouse in a letter to Rogers that ‘nineteen out of twenty of Crabbe’s Pictures are mere matters of fact; with which the muses have as much to do as they do with a collection of medical, or law cases’, and in one of his lectures Hazlitt would give Crabbe what Keats called ‘an unmerciful licking’. But he was at least spared the indignity of being praised as a simple-minded peasant—poet, simpleminded because a peasant. What is odd is that none of his detractors criticized him for his perversity. For though Crabbe is a kind of official moralist for the via media, for moderation and good sense — not for nothing did Jane Austen imagine herself the second Mrs Crabbe — he is again and again drawn to that which lies beyond the pale of decorum, of the acceptable. And this leads him into unbounded territory, into the territory of rank weeds. I think, for example, of the great passage in ‘Peter Grimes’, describing Peter’s absorption with the ‘dull views’ of the lonely mud-flats, where, an outcast from his village, he goes to be alone. The entire passage, which runs from lines 171 to 204, is too long to quote, but anyone coming to it is likely to feel that never have dull views seemed less dull, whether Crabbe is drawing attention to The sun-burnt Tar that blisters on the Planks, And bank-side Stakes in their uneven ranks;

Heaps of entangled Weeds that slowly float, As the tide rolls by the impeded Boat

or whether he reports on

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Ecocritical history Where gaping Mussels, left upon the Mud, Slope their slow passage to the fallen Flood or listens to the water birds: the tuneless cry Of fishing Gull or clanging Golden-eye: What time the sea-birds to the Marsh would come, And the loud Bittern, from the Bull-rush home,

Gave the Salt-ditch side the bellowing Boom ...

In his lecture on Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’, Seamus Heaney offers a compelling gloss on Keats’s famous requirement of the best poetry that it should surprise with a fine excess. Keats, Heaney remarks, did not wish merely to recommend ‘a sensuous overabundance of description. What he also had in mind was a general gift for outstripping the reader’s expectation, an inventiveness that cannot settle for the conventional notion that enough is enough, but always wants to extend the vocabulary of emotional and technical expression.’!® The words apply with perfect appropriateness to Crabbe’s lines. Grimes is drawn to the dull views because time lies heavy on his hands. He becomes obsessively preoccupied with the minutiae of the apparently characterless coastline. Grimes’ condition is therefore not the excuse but the proper occasion for Crabbe’s own absorbed attentiveness to such minutiae. Hence, the molossus formed by the three-stressed phrase, as where ‘the tide rolls by the impeded boat’. The line here is dragged almost to a stand-still, its shuggish movement a variation on sonic effects of the previous line, with its repeated,

entangled weeds ungainliness of passage to the injunction that

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vowels:

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that slowly float’. Or there is the almost comic, rhythmic the account of the mussels as they ‘Slope their slow fallen Flood’, which even dares to ignore Johnson’s the second foot of a decasyllabic line ought never to

employ reversed stress. At the end of the passage, to be sure, Crabbe recalls himself to a more orthodox stance. These dull views, he says, ‘Oppressed the soul with Misery, Grief and Fear’. Peter’s inner torment is not so much projected on to the ‘dull views’ as confirmed by them. But that this should be so owes less to any pat moralizing about ‘fallen nature’ which might be attributed to a parson—poet than to Crabbe’s extraordinary acuity as a poet of psychological extremes, of discarded as well as disorderly nature. In this sense, too, he extends the vocabulary of emotional and technical expression. But he can do it only by pushing well beyond the bounds of poetic orthodoxy. And this requires him to report on a scene that is itself off limits, out of bounds.

Crabbe extends these bounds still further when he comes to write

Crabbe’s disorderly nature

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11. Heidegger, Heaney and the problem of dwelling Greg Garrard

Dwelling Enough will have been gained if dwelling and building have become worthy of questioning and thus have remained worthy of thought.'

Two main ideas of ‘dwelling’ exist in environmental thought, one parochial and the other international. We are to ‘think globally, act locally’, a slogan which simultaneously reveals the enormous contrast between the scope of ecological thought and its actual influence over realpolitik, and attempts to reconcile these two ideas. I will be dealing only with the parochial strain, which I will call ‘geophilosophical’, to distinguish it from the political internationalism which appears to have a distinct

historical

source:

old Left internationalism,

rather

than

anarchistic or agrarian localism. Geophilosophy is, I would say, profoundly at odds with the supra-national legislation and enforcement required by global environmentalism, and may legitimately be discussed in isolation from it. Time will tell whether this theoretical distinction is borne out by real factional disagreements, although international groups such as Greenpeace have so far proved very successful in exploiting the defensive localism known as NIMBYism. Even within ‘geophilosophy’ there is quite a range of views, from the moderate claims of E. F Schumacher regarding scale and decentralization, to the radical bioregionalism of Kirkpatrick Sale and the sociobiological reductionism of Garrett Hardin. Schumacher claims that: ‘It is ... obvious that men organized in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomaniac governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry.” I would claim that what these various ecologisms have in common is their goal of a 167

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naturalization of political identity in an idealized community (Gemeinschaft) rooted in a particular place. This is opposed to the ‘anonymity’ and dispersal of rootless modernity, and may be imagined as a spiritual correspondence (on the model of ‘primal peoples’) or biological relationship (revealed in sociobiologists’ use of terms like ‘carrying capacity’). Ecotheologian S. R. L. Clark gives this account of European geophilosophy: “The proper mode of thought, if only we can recover it, is that of peasants deeply rooted in the soil (and therefore unable even to recognize that so they are).’* There are, however, politically dangerous aspects to this apparently harmless (if implausible) project, which are highlighted by its association with the ‘blood and soil’ (Blud und Boden) ideology of National Socialism. Volksgemeinschaft was the Nazi name for the perfect relation of people (Volk) to place through community, and Anna Bramwell has argued that in this and other ways the pre-war Nazi Party looks a lot like the first and only ‘green’ party of government.’ So the question of dwelling zs worthy of thought, but thinking leads us to the question of the mythologized relation of community to place exemplified — but not exhausted — by the Nazi ideal of Volksgemeinshaft: what is the price of dwelling? The most problematic and important example of the hypostatization of ‘community’ in the Volk° is that of Martin Heidegger. He has been identified as a predecessor of ‘deep ecology’, and the figure of the ‘Green Heidegger’ is a familiar one in readers on his philosophy. In their seminal book Deep Ecology, Bill Devall and George Sessions have written that ‘Heidegger called us to dwell authentically on this Earth, parallel to our call to dwell in our bioregion and to dwell with alertness to the natural processes’.° Even Terry Eagleton, a relatively hostile critic, responding to Heidegger’s notion of a ‘releasement’ of things (Gelassenhert) by which they are ‘let be’ rather than ‘challenged-forth’ (Herausfordern), concedes that ‘for all his sententious ruralism [Heidegger’s] sense of a meditative “being-with” things, attending responsively, non-masteringly to their shapes and textures, finds a valuable echo in some contemporary feminist and ecological politics’.’ The problem is that Heidegger was also a Nazi. He was not just a collaborator, but, at first anyway, an active and enthusiastic participant in the National Socialist revolution, responsible for ‘denouncing political undesirables to the Nazi authorities, inciting students against “reactionary” (i.e. non-Nazi) professors, and enthusiastically transforming the university [of Freiburg, where he was Rector] along the lines of the Nazi “leadership principle” or “Fuhrerprinzip’’.? Moreover, the scandal was compounded by the philosopher’s almost total silence on the subject of the Nazi tyranny after 1945; his few remarks were either evasive or downright insulting.” The price of the space of dwelling (the Nazi Lebensraum) was too high to be grasped by ethics or imagination, and

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yet remained too low, or too lowly, to be thought by the thinker of dwelling himself. To turn from Heidegger to Seamus Heaney, therefore, may bring us some relief. Heaney is not a fascist of any kind. Indeed, his 1995 Nobel prize was obviously meant to recognize both the peace process then underway in Ireland and Heaney’s role as a conciliatory voice in the twenty-five-year conflict that preceded it. Twenty years ago, however, he was found (by critics in the North, especially) to be too imbricated in the republican mythology of the conflict, and compromised by his desire to speak to his time. Edna Longley claimed that ‘[b]y plucking out the heart of his mystery and serving it up as a quasi-political mystique, he temporarily succumb[ed] to the goddess’ and thereby did a disservice both to poetry and politics.'° In response I will suggest that, in North, Heaney attempts to count, and account for, the cost of

dwelling, through a mythopoeic technique that risks collusion in its bid to expose disturbing tendencies in the republican mythology of the ‘motherland’. Poetry The poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling. But man is capable of poetry at any time only to the degree to which his being is appropriate to that which itself has a liking for man and therefore needs his presence. Poetry is authentic or inauthentic according to the degree of this appropriation."'

For Heidegger, ‘dwelling’ means much more than living somewhere. Here we see how he relates Poetry (the real thing, of course) to dwelling, and claims that it can be written only when humans are ‘attuned’ to Being. It is not a case of going looking for Being; rather, we must be appropriate, or open to it, and it (though it is not itself a thing of any kind) will then appropriate us. How, then, can we get to it? Heidegger insists that even when Being seems far away and forgotten, it is really near. We can look to familiar language and dig into its past to recover its primordial meanings, as in the lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking’. Speaking to architects about the rebuilding of Germany after the Second World War, Heidegger excavated certain key words to discover their ‘essences’, and to see whether this physical rebuilding would address the fundamental ‘dwelling plight’ of man. Bauen, to build, was traced back to Old High German buan, which means to dwell, to remain, to stay in one place. This certainly sounds amenable to ecological thought: ‘to build, is really to dwell.’’” But there is more: Bauen and its variants are also the root of ich bin, du bist (I am, you are), thus to be is properly to dwell: “The old word bauen ... also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically

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to till the soil, to cultivate the vine.’ Thus, the character of dwelling is revealed as ‘sparing and preserving’, and authentic being lies in dwelling. This is obviously a fine conclusion for our purpose, especially as poetry has been revealed as ‘the basic capacity for human dwelling’. Heaney has always been attentive to dwelling as a call to poetry. In Romantic Ecology, Jonathan Bate situates Heaney in a tradition of ‘ecolectal’ poetry that speaks to and out of an experience of a particular beloved place: Wordsworth’s Lake District, Hardy’s Wessex and Heaney’s Derry.'* However, the contested nature of geography in Northern Ireland soon makes place-naming poems such as ‘Anahorish’ and ‘Broagh’ irredeemably problematic,’ and Heaney’s poetic topography gives way to an archaeological quest, or archaeography. “Bogland’ first signals this, in its move away from the ‘horizontal’ speaking of landscape towards a vertical excavation of it, and it is in the series of ‘bog poems’ that we find a deep interrogation of the matter and mythology of Ireland. Wilderness has figured largely in the American literary imagination, but the Irish have no such resource: ‘our unfenced country / is

bog’,'® and it is in the open country of peat bogland that Heaney’s geopoetics find its ground, or Grund.'’ As S. R. L. Clark says, repeating a common theme in ecophilosophy and anthropology, ‘[t]he land is a mnemonic. By this I mean ... that we are reminded of personal, tribal memories by features of the landscape.’!® In Heaney’s early topographical poems, places and landscapes supplied this mnemotechnical function. But this land has the special feature of exceeding representation (the land as memorative text), in that the past is actually preserved: “Butter sunk under / More than a hundred years / Was recovered salty and white’.'? For the poet, the question of dwelling authentically in relation to this Grund is heightened and rendered more problematic by the nature of the artefacts it (like other sphagnum peat bogs in Denmark) yields up — especially the preserved human bodies. The landscape is not only a provocation to memory, but operates as memory itself, thus assuming a remarkable literal—figural role. As Neil Corcoran says, ‘the bog acts as the memory of the landscape, just as the unconscious in Jung’s psychology is the archetypal memory of the race’.?° The bog is the physical memorial of the dwellers in the land, offering a potent symbol of (and resource for) poetic and tribal memory. Heidegger says that ‘[p]oetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling’?! But for Heaney, that ‘belonging’ has a political meaning and a human cost, that finally puts in question both dwelling and the poetry that gives it. In other words, ‘authentic’ poetry deconstructs itself as it reveals its own terrible conditions of possibility. In ‘Kinship’, published in North (1975), the bog is a text striving for

Heidegger, Heaney and the problem of dwelling

TaI

the articulation of the ‘love and terror’ its mythology inspires, and the poet is caught in contradictory webs of relatedness. He says ‘I love this turf-face’” while also claiming kinship with the victims it includes. The bog has all the paradoxical nearness and farness of Being (‘outback of my mind’) as well as its uncanny reciprocity. The poem seems involuted, self-generating and yet dreams of its total connectedness. The poet says: I grew out of all this like a weeping willow inclined to the appetites of gravity.

There is in this passage a rich seam of ambiguity, an image of circularity conflicting with another of a struggle for supersession. The poet mocks his own high seriousness, in a context where the necessity for it soon becomes apparent. The last two sections dramatize the conflict between tribal and wider identifications, calling first upon the memory of a virtual household god (the ‘hearth-feeder’), then the imperial observer Tacitus. The real joy of dwelling, of work on the land, confronts the terrible price of the mythology that dwelling generates. Cathleen ni Houlihan (Caitlin Ni hUllachdin), the personification of the republican myth of the ‘motherland’, meets her match in a powerful indictment of ‘holy nationalism’: Our mother ground is sour with the blood of her faithful,

they lie gargling in her sacred heart as the legions stare from the ramparts.

This poetry may not address the practicalities of politics or economics, but Heaney claims that ‘it is not remote from the psychology of the Irishmen and Ulstermen who do the killing, and not remote from the bankrupt psychology and mythologies implicit in the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant’.?* Moreover, it is clear that, so long as the goddess holds sway, the answer to Yeats’s question in ‘Easter 1916° is clear: ‘nothing will suffice’ and the desolate Pax Britannicus will persist. 4 The poet must endure the tribal ‘mythologies’,”* invest in their bankruptcy, but in the end beware of them. He must portray ‘memory incubating the spilled blood’, the bloody mnemonic of the bogland, while keeping his ‘eye clear / as the bleb of the icicle’.” Where Heaney

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is alert to his responsibilities, his kinship with both ‘faithful’ and victim, Heidegger could see only that the hoped-for return home (Heimkehr) of ‘the German people to their promised land had failed, that Nazism had missed its very own vocation. He could not see, could not think, the

threat in the promise itself, and his responsibility for it through the mythology of Being that he ‘heard’ and proclaimed as the unique destiny (Geschick) of the German Volk. Where Heaney’s poetry thinks dwelling through to the truth of its ambiguity, Heideggerian Thought calls for a Poetry of the pure ‘yes’ — without a thought for the terror dwelling within the love. Burial

You will probably not know where you are to be buried. If ever our ‘dwelling plight’ had a singular sign and symptom, this is it. Therefore let us now listen, in a Heideggerian mood, to what language has to tell us about burial. The pursuit of dwelling, let us say provisionally, is prepolitical: ‘polis’ says to us now ‘city-state’, but this word is itself cognate with the Indo-European root ‘phu’ meaning ‘citadel’ or defensive clearing, setting man over against his world in a posture of fear or refusal. However, the Latin analogue of ‘politekos’ is ‘cis’ meaning ‘citizen’, and this derives from Indo-European ‘kev’, ‘to lie or settle down’, which is also the root of the Greek ‘koimeterion’ and thence the English ‘cemetery’. The essence of civilization is, by the etymological—

metonymical method, burial, and through it dwelling is made possible. Heideggerian ecocritic Robert Pogue Harrison has written: To be human means to dwell in the openness of time, in defiance of the oblivion of nature, and hence to be governed by memory, which maintains the temporal coherence between past and future. By committing the dead to the ground, burial consigns the ancestors to the past and ceremoniously assures that they will live on in the memory of tradition, whose authority governs society and commands reverence from the quick.”

In ‘Funeral Rites’,”” also from North, the rite of passage into manhood is a ritual of burial. In Part I, the form is given by the Catholic faith, which sees the corpse ‘shackled in rosary beads’, but an allusion in the word ‘suffice’ to Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ precedes a general rejection of this format, as the poern seeks a non-sectarian solution to the problem of dwelling-in-burial. Heidegger unearthed the old meaning of bauen (to dwell) in the German word for ‘neighbour’: ‘The Nachbar is the

Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller.’* Heaney’s poem provides a decisive disruption to this ‘recovery’, in the oxymoron ‘neighbourly murder’, which in turn leads the people to ‘pine for ceremony’. The yearning for dwelling, for tradition, is occasioned and rendered

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unfulfillable by the crisis in the dwelling-community itself. When the Nachbar is an assassin it is clear that the actual community cannot provide precisely what it desperately needs, and the poet is forced into a search for ritual resources which culminates in the regressive appeal to Icelandic myth in Part III. Even the demand for ‘customary rhythms’ serves to highlight the exclusions of ‘custom’: in ‘Orange Drums, ‘Tyrone, 1966’,”” one such rhythm is the sound of the lambeg, a great drum carried by the marching bands of the radical Protestant Orange Orders. In summer 1995, during the ceasefire, much unrest surrounded the movements of these marches. In ‘Funeral Rites’, the mythopoeic regression is signalled and justified by the allusion to ‘Strang and Carling fjords’ (Strangford and Carlingford) and the Celtic graves of ‘the great chambers of Boyne’. These provide Irish pre-sectarian points of reference. He calls upon the imaginative resource of the hero Gunnar of Njal’s Saga: who lay beautiful inside his burial mound, though dead by violence

and unavenged.

The enjambment across the stanza break enacts a breathless pause of expectation that is met in the negative. However, the conciliatory hope is qualified, if not entirely undermined, by the fact that Gunnar’s attempt failed, his own egoism prompting a renewal of the cycle of internecine violence.*° Moreover, the regression itself threatens another kind of failure, since Ulster Protestants are unlikely to feel much more kinship with these ancient Celtic and Icelandic rituals than with more conventional nationalist mythology. Burial here represents a condition of impossibility of dwelling, in the very moment that a yearning for it is provoked. Etymology

My purpose is to show how a Thoughtful Poet, in Heideggerian terms, can attune without assenting; in a poetry which is, without mere contradiction, always a thought against the kind of monogenesis and mystification which gives the thought of Being its radiance and its scandal. The genealogy of burial, above, was in a sense a provocation of that method, a reductio of the etymo/logic itself. Heidegger is obviously worried by the charge that ‘instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary’.*! His strategy is typical: rather than meet the charge by showing the other hermeneut-

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ical resources available at work, he subverts it by claiming that there is an ‘essence’ of etymology that remains unthought by the charge, and which vindicates his approach: ‘etymology has the standing mandate to first give thought to the essential content in what dictionary words, as words, denote by implication.”* This cheerfully question-begging circularity is obviously beyond ordinary discursive strategies. Fortunately, Heaney also finds a certain truth/root in words, opening out the prospect of a different retort. ‘Belderg’, in North, provides an excellent example of the mnemonic of landscape in its Irish bogland form: A landscape fossilized, Its stone-wall patternings Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo.”

The conversation on ‘persistence’ with the archaeologist interlocutor Seamus Caulfield develops into a discussion of etymology parallel to Heidegger’s joining of dwelling-philosophy and etymo/logic: ‘So I talked of Mossbawn, / A bogland name’. Whereas poems such as ‘Traditions’ figure linguistic imperialism as the rape of Ireland’s ‘guttural muse’ by England’s ‘alliterative tradition’, such dualism is preempted in ‘Belderg’. The very name of ‘home’ has a ‘foundation ... as mutable as sound’. This instability does not mark the possibility of a hermeneutical essentialism that exploits ambiguity in the interest of a metonymical substitution, but rather shows the structural and historical impossibility of monogenealogy.. The poet can make the sign of home unhemlich (strange or foreign) by reading ‘moss’ as a Scottish planter term for ‘bog’ (itself an Irish Gaelic term, one of the few to cross into English), and ‘bawn’ as an English fort. But he can also, on a whim, as it were, ‘think of it as Irish’, taking the Gaelic ban (meaning ‘white’) as one possible reading of ‘bawn’.** This finding of ‘a forked root’ was provoked by the archaeologist, who ‘crossed my old home’s music / With older strains of Norse’. The musical metaphor masks a eugenic one; there is marked here an essential alien-ation, a miscegenation. This recognition is, perhaps, to submit to an infinite regress of identity, always already constituted as an identity of the other, of, in this case, the historical oppressors. Once more, the provocation of Heidegger’s Thought, that certifies etymology as having privileged access to the ‘essence’ of things, produces a challenge to itself. Specifically, the poetics and politics of the heimkehr — which is one way of representing the call for ‘dwelling in the land’ — are opened up to the rupture of identity at their centre: to différence a sot as their very principle.

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The victim

Jewgreek means Auschwitz, and every other name of ignominy and suffering, all the Auschwitzes, the victims of all the Nazisms, wherever they are found, in pom oiiiea or the Bronx, in El Salvador or Northern Ireland or on the West Bank.*

This is the basis of a call to read Heidegger against himself, to pose jewgreek thinking — alert to exclusion and partial to ‘otherness’ — against the Greco-German axis of the destiny of Being, and to open the Thought of dwelling to its unThought victims — ‘otherwise than Being’.*° There are Greeks other than Heidegger’s Greeks, and there is far more to history than the forgetting of Being. ‘Kinship’ begins: Kinned by hieroglyphic Peat on a spreadfield to the strangled victim, the love-nest in the bracken ...

The land is a text that eludes lucid understanding; there is no simple, natural relation available, for those who seek to ‘dwell’ cannot ‘inhabit’.

The poet identifies with the ‘victim’ whose voice is beyond recall, and seeks to realize his kinship by proceeding through ‘origins’ — that is, ‘via’ but also ‘beyond’. This qualified identification marks this out as ‘jewgreek’ poetry in the sense outlined above; capable, I would claim, of ‘disrupting the myth of Being with the myth of Justice, of disturbing the power, glory and prestige of Being with the poverty, invisibility and humility of Justice’.*’ The bog poems reveal the inner fatality of ‘dwelling’. Excavation throws up, not the dwelling citizens buried in accordance with the demands of tradition in the struggle with transience, but rather the pharmakoi of those dwellers.** That is to say, the scapegoats excluded from the community, like Oedipus Tyrannos, as the guarantee of its health, at once poison and cure. Ironically, only the victims have ‘survived’, as constituents of the land, to test our modern mythologies. ‘Punishment’, one of the most powerful poems in North, marks the apotheosis and crisis of the mythopoeic technique in its treatment of the Windeby bog-girl and the women punished by ‘tarring-andfeathering’ in the 1970s for consorting with British soldiers. ‘The poem risks a close identification with the girl — ‘I can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck ... °° — then moves away to the position of observer. There is a play of perspectives (by which I don’t mean anything ludic), which shifts from erotic through biblical to forensic with terrible ease, tracing the modulations of guilt, outrage and complicity:

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The allusions here are unmistakable, and along with phrases such as ‘artful voyeur’ serve to indict the poet: his ‘love’ implicates him in the offence for which she was punished, while his poem takes advantage of her ‘numbered bones’ to perfect its art. Her figure, her mythos, brings him back to his present and the victims of a mythic repetition. The ‘betraying sisters’ stand under a double rejection, cruelly punished by their own community and kept outside the ‘railings’ of the army bases. A compromised ‘civilized outrage’ meets the deep ‘understanding’ of the ‘tribal, intimate revenge’. In this poem, and in ‘Strange Fruit’, the poet who would ‘speak for’ the silenced victims of the bog land seems destined to appropriate the subjects his poetry encounters, as objects. The point to make here is that Thought — the poetizing of dwelling — is opened up to the victim, and especially to the victim of Thought itself. For Heidegger, by contrast, dwelling has no cost, or not one that can appear on the level of Thought; the great Greek beginning has no slaves or women, and Nazism failed in terms of Being’s destined call to the German Volk rather than in its barbaric elimination of those understood as alien to that privileged people. This is what I mean by a poetry that exceeds the Poetry it (also) is: Heaney’s is a Poetry that thinks the Heideggerian problematic — as poetic thinking is the highest in that schema — until it exceeds the Poetry that is called for by that Thought. Love and things Inconspicuously compliant is the thing: the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow. But tree and pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its own way. Things, each thinging from time to time in its own way, are heron and roe, deer, horse and bull. Things, each thinging and each staying in its own way, are mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown and cross.*?

First, we should note that Heidegger’s ‘things’ are all o/d things, rural things; there are no machines of any complexity, and there is a general agrarian flavour prevailing (although ‘crown’ seems anomalous here) that also predominates in Heaney’s early poems. To Heidegger, modern technology demands a total disclosure of things on the basis of a pragmatic, productionist metaphysics. This is to say that instead of the radiant, unprovoked presence of things (their ‘thinging’) characteristic of the pre-Socratic metaphysical epoch, things are ‘challenged-forth’,

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taken as resources in a ruthless instrumentality that reveals the whole world as ‘on call’, a ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand, a forestry term) for the demands of industry. To his credit, Heidegger can see the human dimension of this epoch — man, too, is disclosed as ‘standing-reserve™"! — but even so, there is a sense in which the real lament is for ‘things’, especially where they are supplanted by the products of the new productionism: In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. The hydro-electric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station.”

Although it is ironic that the technology involved here is sometimes seen as ‘environmentally friendly’, this complaint would find a sympathetic hearing with many ‘green’ audiences. Compare these claims, for example: A child born now will never know

a natural summer,

a natural autumn,

winter, or spring. Summer is becoming extinct, replaced by something else which will be called ‘summer’. This new summer will retain some of its relative characteristics — it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and will be the time of year when crops grow — but it will not be summer, just as even the best prosthesis is not a leg.* Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened.**

The first is Bill McKibben; the second is Heidegger. Forty years apart, they none the less share the sense that the disaster has already occurred, that the apparent problems — global warming, nuclear explosion and so on — are somehow connected with other conceptual ones. McKibben’s ‘end of nature’ resembles Heidegger’s ‘productionist metaphysics’ in its charge that the whole world is now under human sway, be it deliberate or merely clumsy and accidental (although McKibben in particular is clear that much remains to be lost). Against this, Heidegger turns to the interrelatedness of things, or things as imbricated in unique ways of life (as opposed to manufactured ‘lifestyles’). Things ‘thing’ (verbally) when meditation upon them codiscloses the Foursome (Gewer): gods, mortals, sky and earth.” I want to read Heaney’s poem ‘Sunlight’, one of ‘two poems in dedication’ at the beginning of Worth, alongside the meditation on the jug in Heidegger’s ‘The Thing’, considering bread as a ‘thing’.

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Modernity finds an epitome in sliced bread — the most novel novelty is the ‘best thing’ since its advent. But for Heidegger and Heaney, the modern loaf is no-thing; it has no advent beyond a streamlined production process. Bread, in ‘Sunlight’, is a practical matter, a work of hands. Yet the ‘works of hands’ can also be sacraments, and bread especially, taken in communion and asked for in the prayer in which it means ‘food’ and all things necessary. Heidegger says of this aspect of the jug: ‘The outpouring is the libation poured out for the immortal gods.’!” So in bread, gods of hearth and earth (far more than church)

meet mortal works and needs. ‘Earth is the building bearer’ we are told. It is here that mortals ‘take place’ — in the ‘sunlit absence’ of a peaceful farm, for instance. Earth gives wheat for flour, while sky gives sun and rain, the time of days and seasons and ‘calendar customs’. Hence, the work of mortals proceeds at a pace their own and not their own: here is a space again, the scone rising to the tick of two clocks.

All in all, we can see in this activity the ‘gathering’ in which the thing things: ‘In the gift of the outpouring dwells the simple singlefoldness of the four.’*? Likewise, in the gift of bread. Perhaps our credulity, our wish that it might be so, facilitates the way in which ‘Heidegger insinuates a preestablished harmony between essential content and homey murmuring’.*° Certainly it is easy to make it all look a bit silly, as Terry.Eagleton does: ‘“Fallenness into Gerede and a lostness proximally and for the most part in Mitsezn” might be his description of a teabreak ... The mundane is mythologized to the precise extent to which philosophy appears to climb off its pedestal.’>! In ‘Sunlight’, Mary Heaney is really making scones, which perhaps lack the portentous possibilities of bread. One look at the social histories of Germany or Ulster clinches the matter: this vision is generated within an ahistorical, counter-modernistic context that reveals its nostalgic mystification. Yet perhaps this zs essential content. Perhaps, as Greens often claim, nostalgia can be progressive. Certainly, the Romantic gesture par excellence would simply have to be surrendered to the tender mercies of Marxist critics otherwise. While there is much in modern environmentalism that escapes the ‘taint’ of this sort of mystical ruralism, geophilosophy remains a very potent (if politically marginal) force. Aside from anything else, internationalist and Promethean

environmentalisms

have so far

generated rather little imaginative literature. Ecocriticism will not flourish unless it adopts a critical stance, as opposed to seeking out supposedly ‘environmentally friendly’ literature. The philosophy and

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politics of environmentalism itself must be at stake in ecocriticism. Unlike Marxists, environmentalists have no stable ‘history’ or ‘socioeconomic reality’ to act as a measure for all things because ‘nature’, for analytical purposes, must be regarded as a construct that is under interrogation. I am deeply suspicious of the reterritorializing impulse in the ecological movement, of the dream of dwelling, and I think of the price it may exact, the people it may exclude. Heidegger’s ‘staying with things’ seems more generally positive, and attuned to the demand for an attitude of reverence towards our environment, yet to me seems to expect too much and hope for too little. Generalized reverence is both unlikely and, in a way, unhelpful when decisions need to be made. The hope — for dwelling, for staying with things, for a humane, jewgreek nostalgia of the future — lies in a word that is as alien to Heidegger as a Nintendo Gameboy; a word that is less ambitious and more optimistic,

that leaves us to distinguish between preserving sperm whales and smallpox, that finds its proper home in the poetry of a Heimkehr dedicated to ‘all of us ... our anonymities’: And here is love like a tinsmith’s scoop sunk past its gleam in the meal-bin.” Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 2nd edn, ed. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge 1993), p- 362. Key texts are: “Letter on Humanism’, “The Question Concerning Technology’, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. Also “The Turning’, “The Age of the World Picture’ in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); and “The Thing’, ‘ ... Poetically Man Dwells ..’ in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1971). An excellent introduction is provided by George Steiner, Heidegger, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1990). 2. E. E Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (London: Macdonald, 1990), p. 29. 3. S. R. L. Clark, How to Think about the Earth (London: Mowbray, 1993), P- 45The chapter ‘Blood and Soil’ is a useful adjunct to this essay, and has some fairly sympathetic remarks on Heidegger. 4. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 5. The German word means not ‘people’ but ‘a people’. Nazism gave the word a racial flavour but, as Bosnia and Northern Ireland tell us, non-racial (religious or more broadly ‘ethnic’) definitions will suffice where exclusion and oppression are the goals. In this essay, Volk will signify a dream of homogeneity, monogenesis and rootedness beyond any specific historical instance. 6. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1985), p. 98. Important statements of the ‘Green

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Heidegger’ position are Michael E. Zimmerman, ‘Rethinking the Heidegger—-Deep Ecology Relationship’, Environmental Ethics 15.3 (Fall 1993), pp- 195-224; and C. Taylor, ‘Heidegger, Language and Ecology’, in H. L. Dreyfus and H. Hall (eds), Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). 7. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), p. 310. See alsoJ.D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) pp- 34, 144-5, 183. 8. R. Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy (London: MIT Press, 1993; repr. of 1991 edn with enforced omission of Derrida essay), p. 3. This text is an essential one for students of Heidegger and Nazism, containing texts by Heidegger from the Nazi period and critical essays. g. Classic evasion may be found in a Der Spiegel interview, cited in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 91-116. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, p. 132, quotes an outrageous passage from an unpublished lecture, in which Heidegger claims that motorized agriculture and Auschwitz are ‘in essence, the same’. He has little else to say on the subject. 10. Edna Longley, ‘“North”: “Inner Emigré” or “Artful Voyeur”?’, in T. Curtis (ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1994), p. 9311. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 228. 12. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 349. 13. Ibid. 14. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991). 15. All poems may be found in Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems 1965-1975 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), or New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), or North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). 16. Heaney, New Selected Poems, p. 17; Selected Poems, p. 53. 17. The German word carries connotations of primordiality and ancient provenance. 18. Clark, How to Think about the Earth, p. 15. 19. Heaney, ‘Bogland’, Selected Poems, p. 53; New Selected Poems, p. 17. 20. Neil Corcoran, A Student’s Guide to Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 62. It is worth noting in this regard that Jung was also involved in the Nazi revolution, that his notion of ‘collective unconscious’ was developed at that time and that, on the basis of it, Jung was able to distinguish the Aryan from the Semitic unconscious. One of his important archetypes was the Earth Mother, seen behind Nerthus, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, etc. See V. Brome, Jung: Man and Myth (London:

Paladin, 1985), pp. 217-24. 21. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 218. 22. Heaney, North, pp. 40-5; Selected Poems, p. 119. 23. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 57. 24. To supplement Heaney’s poetic rendering of this geomythology see Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London: Hutchinson, 1972); or R. Kearney, ‘Myth and ‘Terror’, in M. P. Hederman and R. Kearney (eds), The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1977-1961) (Dublin: Blackwater, 1982), pp. 273-87. 25. Heaney, ‘North’, North, pp. 19-20; Selected Poems p. 106; New Selected Poems,

P- 57: 26. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadows of Civilization, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 13. 27.

Heaney, ‘Funeral Rites’, North, pp. 15-18; Selected Poems, p. 101; New Selected

Poems, p. 52.

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28. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 349. 29. Heaney, North, p. 68. 30. For elements of this discussion, I am indebted to H. Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), pp. 83-5. 31. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 174. 32. Ibid., p. 175. 33. Heaney, North, pp. 13-14. 34. Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 35. 35. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, p. 7. There is a serious danger in this kind of rhetoric — as at certain points in my own analysis — that crucial differences may be elided. For example,

internment was not extermination,

and it seems

to me

immoral (in a certain sense) to call British rule in Ulster ‘a Nazism’. On the other hand, we may need, philosophically, a ‘name’ for certain modern forms of oppression (hence the quotation), and indeed Heaney has ‘déja-vu, some film made / Of Stalag 17’ driving past an internment camp in Part IV of ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’:

Heaney, North, p. 60. 36. The term is derived from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, whose early work takes its rise from Heidegger, but attempts to think ‘otherwise’: not ontology but ethics as first philosophy, not Being but Justice as primordial. See “Time and the Other’ and ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in Sean Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994). 37. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, p. 3. 38. The Greek pharmakoi signifies (at least) scapegoat, remedy, poison, recipe or potion. The victim is a ‘dangerous supplement’ to dwelling, a partial exteriority: the disease that is and is not ‘of its host’, the traitor whose elected exclusion is the very mark of the interiority it is held to have. See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy’, in P. Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991). 39. Heaney, North, pp. 37-8; Selected Poems, p. 116; New Selected Poems, p. 71. 40. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 182. 41. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 323. 42. Ibid., p. 321. 43. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1999),

P: 52-

44. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 166. 45. I doubt that I can explain these mysterious notions here, if at all. Meditation upon Heaney poems such as ‘Sunlight’, and Heidegger texts such as “The Thing’, can give inklings. 46. Heaney, North, pp. 8-9; Selected Poems, p. 98; New Selected Poems, p. 49. 47. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 172. 48. Ibid., p. 178.

Aon Ibid. paa7s 50. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 5351. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 303. 52. Heaney, North, p. x; Selected Poems, p. 99; New Selected Poems, p. 50.

12. Small rooms and the ecosystem: environmentalism and DeLillo’s White

Nose Richard Kerridge

Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) is a celebrated satirical novel about postmodern culture, which has at its centre an environmental disaster. Halfway through the novel, Jack Gladney and his family are obliged to flee from a cloud of poisonous chemicals released by an accident in a railway goods-yard. Jack, the main character and first-person narrator, then has to face the likelihood that his body has been contaminated. This ‘airborne toxic event’ comes as a dramatic interruption and sets the characters and their culture a number of questions. I want to look at the novel’s treatment of the challenge the ecological crisis poses to some dominant forms of representation. DeLillo uses the environmental crisis to interrogate postmodernism, but does not offer the reader any route out of postmodernist self-consciousness and irony. I shall first identify the relevant features of postmodernity in White Noise which are important to this discussion; then I shall make some connections with contemporary environmentalist debate, before returning to a reading of the airborne toxic event. DeLillo, Baudrillard and the postmodern

The world inhabited by Jack Gladney, chairman of the department of Hitler Studies at a small American university, is recognizably the contemporary postmodern world as described by Jean Baudrillard.! In a culture dominated by the multiple reproduction of images and the rapid commodification of styles, referentiality and the real have been displaced by simulacra: by copies, by narratives which construct subjectivity. Material processes, of production, of the body, of the natural 182

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world, are effaced. Nothing is anchored; everything is ‘floated’ on the market and carried away from its context, becoming a signifier in someone else’s code. The optimistic, liberatory view of this condition is that everyone becomes mobile, free to reinvent themselves, not restrained by any particular context of belief, history or obedience. The definitive public space in this culture is the supermarket, with its pre-shaped, pre-packed commodities, its suppression of origin and labour, its resemblance to paradise. ‘Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished bright’ (p. 36). The word ‘sprayed’, here, may stand out for the environmentally-conscious, but Jack seems to use it innocently, and, as so often in White Noise, the reader is left wondering whether to be alarmed. An ecological perspective, of course, would return the fruit in the supermarket to the context of its production. Baudrillard says: Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory.’

This ‘age of simulation’ comes about through the disappearance of referentiality and the resulting availability of signs as floating signifiers which ‘lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra’.t So Jack Gladney is free to commodify Hitler; this is a shrewd move in the academic market-place. ‘Hitler’, as a token in this system of exchange, seems merely equivalent to any other academic topic. ‘Hitler’ is as separated from his historical context as the fruit in the supermarket is separated from its ecological context. Jack’s colleague, Murray J. Siskind, plans to establish a similar school of Elvis studies. DeLillo uses the academic world, in which ideas and names, rather than material products, are the commodities,

as a defining instance of the postmodern. So completely has Jack cornered the academic sector of the market in Hitler that Murray tells him: “You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler. You created it, you nurtured

it, you made

it your

own ... He is now your Hitler, Gladney’s Hitler. It must be deeply satisfying for you’ (p. 11). Commodification means that ‘Hitler’ has a specific value, quite apart from any political and ethical terms which might be used in relation to him.*° He has this value as “Gladney’s Hitler’, not as any other Hitler. Hence the possibility of statements which grotesquely reverse expectations. For Baudrillard, ‘the era of simulation’ is marked by ‘the interchangeability of previously contradictory or dialectically opposed terms’.® Ugly becomes beautiful. In his discussion of politics, Baudrillard places provocative emphasis on the extent to which Left and Right become interchangeable, as late capital-

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ism moves into its postmodern form and the permanent opposition is revealed to have its own structural position and market-share. In this climate of relativity and reversal, Jack can take a shy pride in his ‘invention’ of Hitler: ‘So Hitler gave me something to grow into and develop toward’ (p. 17). Of course, DeLillo’s choice of Hitler here is a Baudrillardian gesture: he chooses a case so extreme as to collapse the system he is describing and invite the return of the foundational ethical values so spectacularly absent from the narrative. Their emphatic absence is a ghostly presence. The postmodern reader is being asked how much free appropriation of signs he or she can actually take. But the effect is not simply one of irony. DeLillo has built in too many different levels of complicity for this, and the reader’s response is likely to be complicated by the other examples of floating signifiers with which the novel abounds. One of these, involving another spectacular reversal of significance, comes in Murray Siskind’s seminar on car crashes in American movies. On screen, according to Murray, the car crash becomes a convention, another sign detached from its ‘natural’ meaning: I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old ‘can-do’ spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges ... My students say, “Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs ... ’ I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. (p. 218)

This poses different problems. As with the commodification of Hitler, a connection

with death and trauma

is involved, but this is a much

more familiar example, much more representative of ‘popular culture’ (Murray’s department is ‘known officially as American environments’). Attempts to retrieve the movie car crashes as a matter of life and death become enmeshed in a more complicated cultural politics. Objections will be more vulnerable to charges of snobbery: to suggestions that defences of ‘the real’ are defences of cultural elitism. A more harmless example is Orest Mercator’s ambition to sit for a record number of days in a cage of venomous snakes: “You'll be surrounded by rare and deadly reptiles.’ “They’re the best at what they do. I want to be the best at what I do.’ (p. 207)

Death-dealing becomes simply ‘what they do’, a level of achievement to be abstracted and measured against ‘what I do’, as if the characters were talking about athletics. Indeed, sport, as DeLillo demonstrated in

an earlier novel, End Zone (1972),’ provides the type for cultural activity in postmodernism. In sport, performances within sets of arbitrary rules

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are measured against each other (as with the car crashes) and thereby gain significance. But sport is more than this. It is the ritualization of combat. It is a powerful element, historically, in popular culture and the formation of cultural communities. For individual performers it is a traditional route into wealth and social mobility. Only when such considerations disappear from view is the arbitrariness of sport foregrounded. For Baudrillard, these arguments are connected with the efforts of governments in the 1980s to create a new cultural majority, marginalizing the poor politically and ghettoizing them physically, while commodifying their lives as narratives of danger and authenticity.® This new majority is also threatening to the older middle-class elite. It is when ‘popular culture’ is not the culture of the mythical, separate poor (which is a source of authenticity), but of the socially mobile, the new wealthy of the Reagan and Thatcher years, that it is attacked, in terms of its lightness or emptiness, by conservative cultural commentators. Jack suppresses any recognition of arbitrariness when thinking about his own academic ambitions, but is amused and puzzled by Orest Mercator. Murray celebrates the movie car crash with a knowingly perverse wistfulness. Both are careful to avoid anything so uncool and self-immobilizing as the contemporary Jeremiad: the aggressive highculture conservatism of Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind,? for example, or the defensive jokiness of Paul Fussell in BAD.'° Nevertheless, Jack and Murray position themselves at some distance from popular culture. Each is an uninhibited postmodernist consumer, but each at times deploys a bemused sense of the absurdity of other people’s signifiers. For Jack: There was something touching about the fact that Murray was dressed almost totally in corduroy. I had the feeling that since the age of eleven in his crowded plot of concrete he’d associated this sturdy fabric with higher learning in some impossibly distant and tree-shaded place. (p. 11)

Jack presents himself as the more relaxed, authentic academic who can find the ingenuousness of his arriviste colleague ‘touching’. In turn, Murray, the inventor of Elvis studies, declares himself perplexed, almost Allan Bloom-style, by some of his colleagues: ‘I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us

things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes’ (p. 10). In his efforts to establish himself, Murray is not above the momentary reintroduction of traditional notions of the valuable and the trivial. Such arguments — about the instrumentality of cultural value; about how apocalyptic warnings and demands for the real themselves function as commodities — are important in connection with environmentalism. The idea that social class provides

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the motive for deeply-felt attitudes is a particularly uneasy one for environmentalists; perhaps the most damaging charge they can face is that, like cultural elitism, environmentalism is a pretext for the wealthy to deny others the right to catch up. Jack and Murray distance themselves from anyone with a practical knowledge of material processes; that is, from anyone intimately involved with the irreversibility of the material world, of machines and of the body. In the era of simulation, production has been concealed or displaced overseas. In consequence, the idea of the material world functions for Jack as a reminder of his mortality. What is repressed, in the age of simulation, is anything irreversible, anything that cannot be commodified, anything that pins the self to a particular place and time. The characters in White Noise treat the self not as a natural given but as a cultural construction, endlessly redesignable. Jack takes seriously his chancellor’s advice that to help his career he should try to become more ugly, while Murray works to develop a look of vulnerability he hopes women will find attractive. Incessantly these characters gaze at ready-made identities, cultural packages which they hope to grow into. Repeatedly they attempt to insert themselves and others into thirdperson narratives, already written, often seen on television. Jack tries to maintain, throughout, a tone of amused, slightly surprised composure: a kind of postmodern detachment, implying reserve but not criticism. The reader may sense a vulnerability held off by this composure, but Jack is not an unreliable narrator in the traditional sense, and there is no clear implied alternative to his commentaries. Rather, Jack’s presentation of himself and others, and the novel’s presentation of Jack through his narrative, seem to be examples of what Fredric Jameson calls pastiche or ‘blank parody’,'' poised indeterminately between innocent belonging and external satire. The comic beauty of DeLillo’s writing is in the disconcerting composure, the completeness of the phrases, the strange exactness of the lists. Values often come in neat packages of three: ‘Babette said she liked the series J. A. K. and didn’t think it was attention-getting in a cheap sense. To her it intimated dignity, significance and prestige’ (p. 17). These cadences give everything the air of being some sort of quotation. Jack responds to events by transforming them, in the cool glibness of his narrative, into what Baudrillard calls the ‘always already somewhere else’.!? Each new thing that happens is stabilized through its identification with an existing simulacrum. ‘Why do you have to run up steps?’ Jack asks Babette, his wife. “You’re not a professional athlete trying to rebuild a shattered knee’ (p. 301). Jack’s references to Murray’s childhood ‘in his crowded plot of concrete’, his mention of ‘squalid violence and lonely death at the shadowy fringes of society’ (p. 13): these phrases imply a knowledge already complete. This is not a knowledge from Jack’s own

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experience, but a knowledge ready-sealed in language: a socially coded, pre-packed knowledge which Jack assumes can be his like fruit in the supermarket, without his being touched and made physical and mortal. : This is the world in which the airborne toxic event suddenly

intervenes.

Nature and the environment

Along with mortality, women and the poor, the natural world is an example of the repressed Other in postmodernity, repressed most fully by its own commodification. An advert for a TV channel in White Noise goes like this:

CABLE HEALTH, NATURE. (p. 231)

CABLE

WEATHER,

CABLE

NEWS,

CABLE

‘CABLE NATURE’ undoubtedly means wildlife programmes, which, like war movies and crime thrillers, position the viewer as a ghostly onlooker where he or she could not be in reality. To be there would either be too dangerous, or the viewer’s presence would disturb the activity which makes the spectacle. To be a spectator, in this way, is to have an illusion of immateriality and therefore immortality.'’ The medium which most effectively holds up identities and narratives for emulation is television, continuously feeding out messages, often suddenly audible when the characters fall silent. Once, at such a moment, it says, “This

creature has developed a complicated stomach in keeping with its leafy diet’ (p. 95) implying, as wildlife programmes sometimes do, that animal species have somehow designed their own bodies. In White Nowse, natural phases of the year register momentarily and slightly mysteriously as background. The time of spiders comes round, and the time of dangling insects. Jack makes frequent descriptions of the weather, but always uses one of two cultural idioms: weather-reporting and romantic poetry. ‘Nature’ is commodified, paradoxically, as that which is prior to commodification, that which was there first and remains unchanging (or changes immensely slowly compared with the human world). Like the mean streets, nature appeals, in postmodernity, as a site of irreversible physical events, where a real onlooker would be subject to those events, inseparable from them. Also, the ‘natural’ commonly signifies instinctual, animal parts of the self, prior to culture; especially it means the processes of growth and decay in the body. In all these meanings, the ‘natural’ is banished by postmodernity. Dean MacCannell and Juliet Flower MacCannell have argued that postmodern culture is parasitically dependent on the codes produced by the people it marginalizes: ‘those

in the starkest of human situations’.'* White Noise shows it to be similarly

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parasitic upon nature, cast as the other in a dualistic subject—object relationship. The environmentalist essayist Bill McKibben argues, in The End of Nature (1990), that one effect of the contemporary environmental crisis is that many traditional meanings of ‘nature’ have become obstructive and untenable. The likelihood that global climate patterns are changing as a result of human activity puts an end to nature as the elemental, unpolitical Other, for which we are not responsible: The idea of nature will not survive the new global pollution — the carbon dioxide and the CFCs and the like. This new rupture with nature is not only different in scope but also in kind from salmon tins in an English stream. We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.’

McKibben’s elegy is for the passing of nature as a source of authenticity: the authenticity of things not chosen, not constructed culturally. David Pepper, in Eco-Socialism (1993), suggests that McKibben’s view is largely motivated by a dislike of people encroaching on his personal wilderness,'° and McKibben does say things which confirm this suspicion, but the conservatism in his argument is mainly in the regret for old ideologies of nature; he does not argue that this authenticity can be rediscovered. The environmental crisis, even as it calls urgently for a critique of postmodern consumerism, makes necessary a postmodernist view of nature. Survival will be possible only if Nature becomes something knowingly maintained, manipulated, designed and commodified: no longer different from other material products. An emphatic illustration of this is biotechnology, with its fast developing techniques of genetic manipulation, its patenting of newly engineered animal species. McKibben charts recent progress with a nervous jokiness, like a prototype of Jack Gladney’s Baudrillardian cool. Both styles are confessing the same powerless. spectatorship: the biotechnologist looks at organisms not as ‘discrete entities’ but as a set of instructions on the computer program that is DNA. It is impossible to have respect for such a set of instructions: they can always be rewritten. And in the view of the researchers they should be rewritten — ever improved until they reach some state of absolute efficiency ... if the people decide that it is better to have more efficient — that is, cheaper — chicken, even if it comes from a carcass hooked to a tube, then okay. We will live, eventually, in a

shopping mall, where every feature is designed for our delectation.!”

Babette says, “You know how I am. I think everything is correctible’ (p. 191). Biotechnology seems to hold out the possibility that the physical

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world will eventually catch up with culture’s state of advanced commodification and endless reversibility. While acknowledging that these techniques may turn out to be an important element in the solution, if there is one, to environmental degradation, McKibben calls this the second end of nature, which follows the first logically but is more frightening because, in potential, it represents a totalization; an absorption of all that currently remains outside the ambit of control. If one form of repressed Other to postmodernism is physical nature, which is still the domain of the irreversible, then biotechnology threatens to take possession of this domain, leaving no alternative, no possibility of escape. Ever-tightening encroachment of this kind is an established dystopian theme. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the vision of a totalitarianism sometimes seen now as the alternative modernity which late capitalism successfully averted, there seem at first to be three spaces not intimately known and controlled by the Party. One of these is Winston Smith’s mind, which the Party subsequently demonstrates its ability to invade. Another is the social life of the proles, who are most intensely represented in the novel by women whose bodies show signs of ageing and mortality. The third is pastoral nature, the bluebell-wood outside the city where Winston and Julia are able to make love, briefly removed from the eyes of the Party.'® Winston calls this ‘the Golden Country’; he and Julia watch a thrush there. Subsequently it is suggested that even this space may have been under surveillance. To

McKibben,

also, the end

of nature

means

the end

of the

possibility of local, sheltered places surviving apart from the totality of systems (to this extent he is indeed expressing distress at the invasion of his territory). He is haunted by the possibility that large-scale processes are invisibly at work, penetrating his personal world: ‘If I knew as well as a forester what sick trees looked like, I fear I would see them

everywhere. I find now that I like the woods best in winter, when it 1s harder to tell what might be dying.’'® A similar paranoia afflicts Jack, a fear of what he might discover about the origins of what he sees: Heinrich’s hairline is beginning to recede. I wonder about this. Did his mother consume some kind of gene-piercing substance when she was pregnant? Am I at fault somehow? Have I raised him, unwittingly, in the vicinity of a chemical dump site, in the path of air currents that carry industrial wastes capable of producing scalp degeneration, glorious sunsets? (People say the sunsets around here were not nearly so stunning thirty or forty years ago.) (p. 22)

If postmodernism means pluralism and the absence of grand, unifying narratives, then postmodernism’s repressed Other in the most general sense is totality: that which leaves no space for ironic difference, no

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room for a retreat to the position of naturalist or TV audience. Paranoid fears of totality are a recurrent motif in DeLillo’s work. DeLillo’s characters become obsessed with the possibility that behind the apparent incoherence and incommensurability of the world lurks a sinister totality. We cannot see things whole, but what if someone else can? This is the function of conspiracy theory in DeLillo’s novels: of all the shadowy organizations and intricate plots, the terrorist cells, rogue counter-insurgency groups, cult religions, mafia ‘families’. ‘These are the people who have never heard of indeterminacy and pluralism; they are the remaining sources of plot and coherence, after the departure of the enlightenment grand narratives. In DeLillo’s work they are teasingly half-mythical, possibly there, possibly no more than melodramatic genre-devices standing in for a more important lost totality, the material world. Repeatedly, DeLillo polarizes the private terrain of the self against the vast, untraceable networks of the world. Often characters live in

small, anonymous rooms, from which they plot and project their fantasies of totality. Lee Harvey Oswald, Win Everett and numerous other conspirators do this in Lzbra (1988), DeLillo’s novel of the Kennedy assassination.”” In Mao II (1991), a parallel is set up between a novelist recluse writing in his room in the country and a blindfolded hostage, captive for years in a room in Beirut.*! The plots of these novels hold out, continually, the tantalizing threat of convergence, of an impending moment of truth when things will cohere and be seen whole. This will be a moment of death, when the self is fixed to the materiality of the body, and the body is penetrated by the outside world. The tip of an immensely confused conspiracy, the point where it all comes together, is the bullet which enters John Kennedy’s brain. But to the reader or television viewer, who has not yet reached this moment, the assassination

becomes an image played back again and again, as singularity of meaning dissolves once more into endless possibilities. White Noise argues that this undecideability is characteristic of late capitalist culture faced with ecological catastrophe. Environmental crisis confronts postmodernity with another sort of totality, the global ecosystem, which includes and penetrates all bodies. Nothing is outside this system; it has no supplement or abject (though McKibben ends looking hopefully at the stars). Rather than a limited system of exchange, the ecosystem is a big equation, taking everything into account. Jack Gladney glimpses the meaning of this totality when he retrieves and searches through the household refuse, looking for traces of the mysterious drug Babette is taking to banish her fears of death. The term alyect, as defined by Julia Kristeva, is useful here. In Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva examines the revulsion and fascination pro-

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QI

voked by waste matter, that which has been jettisoned, that which has been expelled and lies outside the self: Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them. ... There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver.”

Abjection has its beginnings in the initial phases, in early childhood, of separation from the mother, before the intervention of the symbolic and the formation of full subjectivity. There is a preliminary, presymbolic rejection of the mother, who is identified with what is expelled anally and orally. With the mother, the subject has expelled part of itself, and the bodily functions or parts of the body most closely involved in these actions of expulsion become the abject, continuing to excite revulsion and fear even after the imposition of the symbolic order, with its rules, its grammar, its exclusion of the superfluous. The

abject is both ‘unapproachable and intimate’.* Abjection centres upon substances expelled by the body, which are both self and other, both inside and out. Abjection focuses on openings in the body, thresholds between self and world.** The child spitting out food, for example, is asserting a separate self by rejecting the nourishment of which the first source was the mother, and rejecting material continuity with the world. Involved in abjection is a horror at the materiality of a body engaged, through consumption, expulsion, growth and disintegration, in constant exchange with otherness; abjection is therefore a condition of horror at the self conceived in ecological terms. But the abject is ‘an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned’.” Abjection is connected to the death drive, the drive towards the dissolution of subjectivity. The abject comes from inside the self, but having been expelled it threatens to draw the subject after it, across the border between subject and object, inside and outside. This is what Jack sees when he opens up his sealed rubbish bags: I picked through it item by item, mass by shapeless mass, wondering why I felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets ... I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? I came across a horrible clotted mass of hair, soap, ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip-top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus and bacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills, toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food. (p. 259)

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‘Voyeurism accompanies the writing of abjection’, says Kristeva. Voyeurism ‘becomes true perversion only if there is a failure to symbolize the subject/object instability’.2° Looking into his family’s trash, Jack has the erotic sensation of discovering, or being about to discover, guilty secrets. Gazing into the abject, redundant material which culture thinks it can be rid of, he feels both fear and excitement at the thought that he is about to discover the missing parts of the plot. Rubbish is the unmanageable excess, which refuses to disappear or keep within boundaries, and thus reveals hidden relations. Rubbish is the expelled and used-up parts of the self which signify that this self is not separate and unitary, but involved in constant processes of dissolution and exchange with the world. Rubbish and litter stand as a rebuke and challenge to instrumental systems, and to subject-positions, because rubbish is what is left when the operation of the system is complete and nothing should be left. Ecological pollution is.the return of that abject, demanding notice, insisting that the system should open its boundaries and be absorbed in a greater totality. Litter is generally not shown in TV nature programes (unless nature is somehow ‘reclaiming’ it). In traditional nature-writing litter, if mentioned, tends to be viewed with distaste, because its presence disrupts the dualistic separations of viewer and spectacle, humanity and nature, subject and object. The airborne toxic event

The toxic cloud comes as a dangerous invasion of paradise by the excluded and repressed. Jack’s body is penetrated and reclaimed by the ecosystem. His contamination occurs at a moment when he is off guard, lulled by the ordinariness of the narrative he seems, even in the midst of the crisis, to be acting out. His defence-system has a window of vulnerability; he steps out of his car to fill up with petrol, and at that moment the toxic cloud arrives. This threatens at first to be a moment

of truth, but, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, it turns

out to be a warning, a brief emission rather than a final emergence of the real. Jack’s doctor advises him to resume his ordinary life. Never has Jack been more at the mercy of narratives. When he first hears of the release of chemicals, he is anxious for an official name for

the event, to reassure him that it is containable within previous definitions with their inbuilt assumptions of survival. He has always been interested in disaster footage on TV, which has given him a sense of pre-emptive confrontation with catastrophe. Now, faced with a real disaster, he is determined to remain a television viewer, in separate space, rather than a participant: I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat

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down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a quiet and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name ... I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are. (pp. 114, 117)

The irrational exactness of the detail about fish hatcheries represents, as well as Jack’s class insecurity, his bid for possession of a culturally encoded form of truth which guarantees him distance. When he and his family have none the less been forced to evacuate the house, he intensifies his efforts to stabilize the event by identifying it with a cultural model. He resorts to grander narratives, from documentary history and the authentic primitive: The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren’t sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with

chlorides, benzines, phenols, hydrocarbons or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belongings, a tragic army of the dispossessed. (p. 127)

This passage resembles the narrative commentary in Mao II, after DeLillo has confronted the reader with a real news photograph of real people dying in the Hillsborough disaster (which, a few pages later, one of the characters watches on television). A layer of mediation is abruptly removed, so that the reader is placed in a similar position to the watching character. And then the narrative alienates just when it should reassure. The picture is compared, in ornate, calm, distancing description, to ‘a religious painting’, ‘a fresco in an old dark church’.”” This device achieves the reabsorption of the terrible event into a narrative which can then continue, becoming plot, but this is achieved

only by archaic forms which leave the reader disconnected and uneasy. ‘Blank parody’, suddenly, is no longer an amusing style which confirms both narrator and reader in their possession of knowledge and leisure, but a frightening official blankness which refuses to acknowledge the reader’s anxiety. To readers in a world where reports of global warming and of events like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are similarly processed, the effect may be familiar. Like Jack, these readers are left waiting, unable to believe that life is carrying on unchanged. Jack’s final description of the toxic cloud, on its second appearance, is more contemporary. He says that, ‘In its tremendous size, its dark and bulky menace, its escorting aircraft, the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV

194.

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saturation’ (pp. 157~8). Jack clings to his ironic detachment, but this is a description which recognizes how the event will be made into simulacrum:

how, because the apocalypse is not now, not yet, such events

enter the system of exchange, always becoming signifiers of something else, never constituting end-points. At the end, we are waiting to see, like Jack, bemused and alienated by others who can apparently continue their lives unworried. White Noise positions its reader outside all the available narratives which could process environmental disaster and stabilize it, leaving an impasse, a condition of passive waiting. This novel dramatizes, more unsparingly than any other I know, the impasse between environmental consciousness and the inability of a culture to change. Notes

1. The analysis of White Noise and postmodernism here is indebted to N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, “Toxic Events: Postmodernism and DeLillo’s White Noise’, Cambridge Quarterly, 23.4 (1994), pp. 303-23; and to Richard Kerridge, ‘Class Masquerades as Nation’, in T. Hill and W. Hughes (eds), Contemporary Writing and National Identity (Bath: Sulis Press, 1995), pp. 72-80. 2. Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 1986). 3. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Selected Writings, trans. P. Foss,

P. Patton and P. Beitchman, ed. M. Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 166. 4. Ibid., p. 167. 5. DeLillo has also examined the commodification of Hitler in an earlier novel, the genre-thriller Running Dog (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), in which the characters struggle for possession of a film said to be a pornographic film made in the bunker in the last months of the war and rumoured to feature Hitler himself. In the pornography market, however, Hitler’s value is clearly determined by his association with sadism and death. In the academic market, in White Noise, Jack Gladney’s choice of Hitler is also motivated by the association with death, but this is not usually his conscious motivation and does not enter into discussions of Hitler’s commodityvalue. See also Paul A. Cantor, ‘Adolf, We Hardly Knew You’, in Frank Lentricchia

(ed.), New Essays on White Noise (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991),

pp. 39-62. 6. Baudrillard, ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’, in Selected Writings, p. 128. 7. Don DeLillo, End Zone (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986). 8. See Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. C. Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 111-13. g. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Lives of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 10. Paul Fussell, BAD or, The Dumbing of America (New York: Summit Books, 1991). 1. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 17. 12. J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. 1. Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993) p. 159.

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13. Karla Armbruster discusses the implied position of the viewers of television wildlife programmes elsewhere in this book. 14. Dean MacCannell and Juliet Flower MacCannell, ‘Social Class in Postmodernity’, in C. Rojek and B. S. Turner (eds), Forget Baudrillard? (London: Routledge,

1993), PP. 124-45. 15. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1990), p> 5416. David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 115, 148. 17. McKibben, The End of Nature, p. 153. 18. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), PD 23 530: 19. McKibben, The End of Nature, p. 195. 20. Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988). 21. 22. York: oor 24. N. H. pool: 25. 26. 27.

Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Alyection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New Columbia University Press, 1982) pp. 2-3. lioid..p.) 0: For a use of this concept in reading contemporary modernist poetry, see Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of 7. H. Prynne (LiverLiverpool University Press, 1995), pp. 117-32. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1. Ibid., p. 46. DeLillo, Mao IZ, pp. 17, 33, 34-

13. Ecopolitics and the literature of the borderlands: the frontiers of environmental justice in Latina and Native American writing M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer

To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance that comes with freedom — these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere

because

of the

frontier.’

As early as the 1960s, the environmental activist and theoretician Murray Bookchin linked social justice with environmental protection, arguing that ‘the very domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human’.? Not until 1984, however, did the sociopolitical side of ‘the pollution problem’ begin to catch the interest of the general public. In that year, over 3,000 people — mainly urban poor who had not even begun to realize the advantages of industrialization — died in the disaster at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Since then, the realization has dawned that the burden of environmental degradation, while it is felt by all, is not equally shared. Amid reports of concentrated industrial pollution in sites like Louisiana’s ‘cancer alley’, the ‘petrochemical corridor’ of southern California, and the Indian reservations poisoned by landfills and slag piles from New Mexico to North Dakota, it has become clear to activists in the United States that the places where the earth suffers 196

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the greatest insults are the very places most likely to be inhabited by African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and the working poor and dispossessed of all colours and kinds. Recognition of this inequity led to the emergence in the late 1980s

of the environmental justice movement, a loose coalition of grassroots activists operating across the USA and in Latin America. Despite increasing attention in the press and among scholars, environmental Justice has been largely neglected by mainstream environmentalists in America until recently.’ Moreover, because they treat nature as an object to be preserved or curated by human stewards, the so-called ‘deep ecologists’, supposedly the most radical environmentalists in the American movement, often overlook the needs and knowledge of the people closest to the land, and also perpetuate the mind—body/culture— nature split that led to overexploitation of resources in the first place. In the environmentalist discourse that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the blame for pollution falls all too easily on some monster of universalized humanity, some ‘we’, a rubric under which industrial transgressors are lumped together with the urban poor and with tribal and indigenous peoples who have had to suffer with the land all along. Bookchin offers a striking anecdote that illustrates the problem of this locution. He tells of going to an exhibit at the New York Museum of Natural History in the 1970s, the purpose of which was to raise environmental awareness. The last display in the exhibit featured a sign with the words “The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth’, beneath which was a big mirror that reflected the image of the human viewer. With bitter irony, Bookchin watched as a white teacher tried to explain the meaning of the display to a young black boy, a regular sufferer of urban blight.* Obviously the ‘we’ who are responsible for environmental degradation is not as inclusive as well-intentioned environmentalists sometimes imagine. When the environmentalist cause becomes associated with ethnic traditions of pre-colonial contact with the land, the picture changes dramatically; and according to the new paradigm of environmental justice, it changes productively. As Peter Matthiessen writes in his 1984 book Indian Country: ‘More often than not, the transgression of sacred ground is also an environmental transgression, which Indians — who do not share our view of the environment as something apart from ourselves — perceive as the same thing: one cannot love the Creator and desecrate Creation.’ Matthiessen goes on to argue that Native Americans are not merely the earth’s co-victims of environmental pollution, but also the bearers of a wisdom tradition that holds great promise for environmental renewal. ‘If our time on earth is to endure’, he writes, ‘we must love the earth in the strong, unsentimental way of

traditional peoples.”

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Perhaps because this close connection with the earth —- common in many tribal cultures — has been sentimentalized and trivialized by the ~ New Age wing of deep ecology (as, for example, in the work of Devall and Sessions),° activists for environmental justice have been cautious about invoking native cosmologies and prophecies as conceptual support for political action. Moreover, as Lawrence Buell notes, the old pastoral tradition, with which Native American discourse becomes inextricably linked when it passes into English, can cut both ways; it has always been conceived as ‘both a dream hostile to the standing order of civilization (decadent Europe, later hypercivilizing America) and at the same time a model for civilization in the process of being built’. The nostalgic imagination of the land’s lost beauty and fecundity in this tradition is therefore ‘simultaneously ... counterinstitutional and institutionally sponsored’.’ Preferring political clarity over ambiguity, therefore, the literature of environmental justice has tended to favour polemic and academic discourse: manifestos against ‘toxic colonialism’ and ‘green imperialism’ in the developing nations and case studies of grass-roots resistance to environmental racism in the USA.* Gradually, however, the themes of ecopolitics in general and environmental justice in particular are finding their way into the work of poets and novelists. With this development, the movement stands to gain a new appeal, a new audience and a new power, mobilizing the prophetic potential that Matthiessen among others has identified with the antiCartesian, earth-binding consciousness of traditional peoples. So far, it has been the authors of the borderland literature of the American south-west who have taken the lead in expanding the literary treatment of issues in environmental justice. Ecological themes find fertile ground in stories and poems that indict the tendency of conquering peoples to defile the earth through careless extractive technologies even as they enslave native tribes. In the literature of the United States’ southern border, the boundaries of national identity are reinscribed as cognitive maps of cultural and ethnic difference — imaginary yet fatal lines that divide First from Third World, brown people from white, haves from have-nots,

North

from

South, the land of the Maquiladoras and de-

regulated use of toxic chemicals from the relatively pampered land officially tended by the US Environmental Protection Agency and aggressively defended by American environmentalists. In the incantatory musings of the Latina writers Gloria Anzaldta and Ana Castillo and in the prophetic/satiric fiction of the Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, we discover the signs of a new ethos among borderland writers of mixed Hispanic and Indian descent, seeking the elusive figure of justice in a literary landscape where the idea of boundaries has become the predominant dimension of imaginary space. The idea that the American frontier has closed, an

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historical thesis set forth by Frederick Jackson Turner at the end of the nineteenth century and still influential in environmentalist rhetoric and ethics, is questioned by the borderland writers. For them, the settlement of the west by the white man merely displaced to the south the frontier as Turner defined it — ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization” — the zone of danger that the wilderness and its original inhabitants represented for the settlers. Now along the Mexican border, la frontera remains a site of social and political ferment and a place where nature still contends with Western civilization. Anzaldta’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Meztiza (1987)'° was perhaps the first to establish the border as the region of the impure and the hybrid, the place where the line of acceptability is drawn, but cannot hold. In defiance of the notion that things and people can be easily delimited and separated in categories of race, culture and national identity stands the formal variability of Anzaldta’s writing; its figurative effervescence, the easy flow from English to Spanish, the variation of tone from irony to earnestness, and the mixing of poetry with prose. These variations conspire to transform the borderland concept into a vast collage of excited uncertainty. Thus she writes: The U.S.—Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the normal. (p.3)

Anzaldia alternately attacks the border and defends its inhabitants, mixing manifesto with lyrical engagement of themes personal and political. She condemns the maquiladoras system of US corporations for exporting the same brand of economic blackmail that has stifled the efforts of American environmentalists to form effective coalitions with workers. And she mourns the passing of small-scale dryland farming, a scheme of production that could not withstand the industrialization of agriculture in south Texas. While asserting the alternative history of the abandoned villages that declined with the small farms, a way of life made all the more attractive by the new views of sustainable agriculture as well as environmental justice,!! Anzaldia also acknowledges the shortcomings of village life, its narrowness, xenophobia and intolerance. As a lesbian

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and a feminist, she knows that the solution to alienation and injustice does not lie in a simple recovery of the old ways or the realization of a vague and ambiguous pastoral ideal. She represents ‘the new mestiza’, not some pure embodiment of an ancient civilization returned to haunt the modern. Purification is not her work. Instead, she celebrates change,

movement, the flow of life and evolution captured in the symbol of the river, the Rio Grande, falsely taken as a line of demarcation, a line of

contention, by the modern nation-states. Indeed, Anzaldia makes the most of her alienation. Within it, she is able to discover what she understands to be the voice of the earth, the living body of the world alienated from modern consciousness. Feeling her own creative power in her poems and sayings, Anzaldtia comprehends the fluxes and forces of nature that are foolishly underestimated by the attempts of modern, masculine technology to constrain movement and purify zones of habitation. Of ‘the steel curtain — / chainlink fence crowned with rolled barbed wire — / rippling from the sea where Tijuana touches San Diego’, Anzaldta writes: This my home this thin edge of barbwire.

But the skin of the earth is seamless. The sea cannot be fenced,

el mar does not stop at borders. To show the white man what she thought of his arrogance, Yemaya blew that wire fence down. (p. 3)

Her joy in the power of the earth springs directly from her identification with the anticivilizing power of the sea and wind and with the earth’s wounds, which she takes upon herself as if in a ritual of sacrifice: 1,950 mile-long open wound dividing a pueblo, a culture, running down the length of my body, staking fence rods in my flesh, splits me splits me me raja me raja (p. 2)

Her identification with the brown earth leads Anzaldia to identify further with the Virgin of Guadalupe, the reclamation of whom for radical purposes is a key move in Anzalduia’s project.'? Originating in the ‘Mesoamerican fertility and Earth goddesses’, this new world figure of the Christian saint is for her a symbol of protection and hope. ‘Because Guadalupe took upon herself the psychological and physical devastation of the conquered and oppressed indio,’ says Anzaldta, ‘she

Ecopolitics and the literature of the borderlands ee

ee

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is our spiritual, political and psychological symbol.’ Moreover, ‘La cultura chicana identifies with the mother (Indian) rather than with the father (Spanish)’ or with the ‘male-dominated’ priesthood of the old Aztecs, who ‘drove the powerful female deities underground’ (p. 27). ‘To Mexicans on both sides of the border,’ Anzaldia contends, ‘Guadalupe

is the symbol of our rebellion against the rich, upper and middleclass; against the subjugation of the poor and the indio’ (p. 30). As a symbol of faith and hope, the dark-skinned Virgin ‘sustains and ensures [the] survival’ of the dispossessed, the woman, and the poor. Following Anzaldua, other Latina writers have sought ironically and subversively to co-opt the ritual images and forms of American Catholicism, challenging the historical complacency of the Church with a literature that verges at once on piety and sacrilege. A particularly clear example appears in Ana Castillo’s novel So Far from God (1993).'3 A Latina from Chicago, Castillo sets her novel in the borderland territory of New Mexico. In the transcendental climax of this work of ‘magic realism’, the principal characters, a collection of misfits, perfectly in character with the borderland ethos sketched by Anzaldta, join the traditional Way of the Cross Procession on Good Friday. As it turns out, this procession is far from traditional: No brother was elected to carry a life-size cross on his naked back. There was no ‘Mary’ to meet her son. Instead, some ... carried photographs of their loved ones who died due to toxic exposure hung around the necks like scapulars; and at each station along their route, the crowd stopped and prayed on the so many things that were killing their land and turning the people of those lands into an endangered species. (pp. 241-2)

At each station of the cross, the people recite or recall an instance of environmental shame that wounds the land and the people. For example, ‘When Jesus was condemned to death, the spokesperson for the committee working to protest dumping radioactive waste in the sewer addressed the crowd.’ Like Anzaldua, Castillo displays a tendency to blur genres and mix rhetorical effects in an organicism that transcends the old categories of ‘organic unity’, which (along with the political concerns of New Critical formalism) may now be viewed as a literary counterpart to ethnic purity. From her narrative base, Castillo first begins an ecopolitical sermon, then gradually slides towards the incantatory mode: Jesus met his mother, and three Navajo women talked about uranium contamination on the reservation, and the babies they gave birth to with brain damage and cancer. One of the women with such a baby in her arms told the crowd this: ‘We hear about what the environmentalists care about out there. We live on dry land but we care about saving the whales and the rain

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forests, too. Of course we do. Our people have always known about the interconnectedness of things; and the responsibility we have to “Our Mother”, and to seven generations after our own. But we, as a people, are

being eliminated from the ecosystem, too ... like the dolphins, like the eagle ... Don’t anybody care about that?’ Jesus was helped by Simon and the number of those without jobs increased each day. Veronica wiped the blood and sweat from Jesus’ face. Livestock drank and swam in contaminated canals. (p. 242)

The interlocking of the concern over endangered species with concern over oppressed peoples, and the connection with the Christian social gospel, form a complex of rhetorical identifications that, while iconoclastic, represents a rhetorical appeal of great power. It also represents a great challenge in that it refuses to accept halfway solutions — jobs for the poor (if those jobs support polluting industries) or legislation like the Environmental Protection Act (if it makes no provision for workers displaced by its enforcement). The refusal of certain environmental activists, such as Dave Foreman, the founder of Earth First!, to

allow social concerns to be mixed with the environmental cause is no doubt the result of the difficulty posed by such a challenge. If you can keep the environmental cause ‘pure’, you can focus your activist methods, he argues in Confessions of an Eco-Warrior,'* but the cost of such purity is the alienation of activists on the borders of environmentalism, the people of the borderlands literal and figurative. The recognition, by people of colour and the poor, of their identification with the tormented land, air and water, and their alienation not

only from the polluting industries but also from the most widely recognized wings of the environmental movement in the USA, signifies the inadequacy of the developmentalist and environmentalist worldviews as they developed in the 1960s and 1970s.'° The alienation of the borderland peoples and the consequences of that alienation for a revised perspective on environmental and social risk are nowhere more powerfully represented than in the austere works of Leslie Marmon Silko. In her first novel, Ceremony (1977),'° the Second World War veteran Tayo, a Laguna Indian from New Mexico, comes to grips with his war trauma only by viewing it as a form of cultural alienation and by reintegrating himself into his society. The reintegration is not a simple reacceptance of traditional Laguna ways, any more than the works of Anzalduta and Castillo represent an acceptance of Catholicism or some pastoral ideal of lost community. As Lawrence Buell notes in his reading of Ceremony as ‘a work of ecological ethnopoetics’, Tayo’s story is both ‘an intensely particularized story of a reservation lad’s retribalization and ... a case study of a sickness of global scope’. Tayo is cured by the realization of his part in ‘something larger’, a witchery that involves

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white racism (against the Japanese as well as the Native Americans) and nuclear war. As Buell notes, “This realization is forced on him not

only in his capacity as a hybrid or a world citizen but also as a Laguna: the realization that individual and social pathologies are coextensive.’!” What the Virgin of Guadalupe is for Anzaldua, the Navajo and Pueblo figure of Spider Woman becomes for Silko and her character Tayo. The mythic figure who once wove together the strands of the earth at the time of creation must be invoked again to reweave the broken pieces of individual lives and an earth shattered by world war. As Buell recognizes, Silko’s apocalyptic vision shares much with the environmentalist writers of the 1960s, notably Rachel Carson. But Silko’s latest accomplishment as a pioneer in the literary representation of ecological racism is foreshadowed in the addition of the Native American thematic to her apocalyptic tale, particularly the connection of the uranium mining on Laguna land and the development and testing of the atomic bomb in New Mexico with Tayo’s spiritual sickness at having participated in a war that ended in nuclear disaster. That war was also directed against himself, Tayo finally realizes. For Silko, as for Anzaldua, the brownness of the people is a sign of both their kinship with the earth and their difference from those in power, who are, in Silko’s view, the witches of the modern world. In

her recent novel Almanac of the Dead (1991),'° the metaphorical link between brown people and the brown earth is set against the concept of whiteness — a sign of alienation from both the land of the ‘New World’ and its original human inhabitants. Whiteness represents the failure to live in peace with the earth, while brownness signifies adjustment and assimilation to the land. Silko’s Almanac foretells the reclamation of the lost land by the tribal peoples of the Americas and their sympathizers. Set in what appears to be the near future, the novel weaves together the threads of many stories, all of which converge in a vision of justice. By the end of the novel, we see the beginnings of a politically tense but peaceful uprising of southern Mexicans led by the twin brothers El] Feo and Wacah. Those in power have mobilized to resist the uprising, but their corruption and degeneration have left them unprepared for this work. By contrast, the border people to the north eagerly await the time when they will join the brown wave from the south. These are los atravesados who have survived the centuries as a conquered people, part white and part brown, border-crossers like the novel’s other pair of twins, the half-breed sisters Zeta and Lecha. Zeta has grown rich by smuggling guns and drugs, and Lecha has prospered as a television psychic. Their Indian grandmother, before she died, entrusted the twin girls with the ancient book, the Almanac of the Dead, which contains the prophetic vision of the native people’s return to the land. The twins’ associate,

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the old smuggler Calabazos sums up the outlook of the border people: ‘We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law’ (p. 216). The words of Calabazos — ‘We know where we belong’ — and his contention that the border people cannot be touched by the law of the white man suggest that the transformative vision of Almanac of the Dead contains a strong element of environmental justice. And sure enough, as the lines of human action converge and the Indian-led uprising takes shape, the political turmoil is accompanied by a series of natural disasters: earthquakes, volcanoes and winds that shift with unexpected suddenness and force. The disasters, according to the visionary Wacah, come from ‘the angry spirits of the earth fed up with the blood of the

poor’ (p. 337).

Novelizing the old prophecies allows Silko to explore the internal conflicts of her characters as well as the ecopolitical turmoil of the uprising. For the border people, who have lived through the individualizing influences of modernity, a focus on the inner struggle is crucial. As Anzaldta says in Borderlands: The struggle is inner ... our psyches resemble the border-towns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn must come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.

(p. 87) Of the many characters whose inner states Silko explores in the Almanac of the Dead, two have a special significance for ecological criticism: the mafioso land developer Leah Blue and the mestizo insurance baron Menardo. An heiress and the wife of a mafia assassin, Leah Blue chooses to make her own way, to realize her own version of the American dream. As her husband and sons plot their drug deals and their killings, Leah uses sexual manipulation and corruption of public servants to build a real-estate empire. Her associates include a noted ecologist, known in the narrative as the ‘owl-shit expert’. Supposedly one of the ‘defenders of planet earth’, the expert is all too easily brought under the sway of the rich, attractive developer. His possible corruptibility, which is never asserted definitively, seems to represent Silko’s doubts about the motives and sincerity of mainstream environmentalists. Whatever the expert’s ultimate intentions may be, he is more or less guilty by association, for

Ecopolitics and the literature of the borderlands

ee

205 ee

eee

there can be no doubt about the destructiveness of Leah’s own broadest intentions. Her great goal is to create a designer development called Venice, Arizona. The project calls for deep wells to draw off precious ground-water for a system of fountains and canals that will attract rich customers from the east who long to escape their polluted cities. The psychology that drives Leah to re-create her native Italy in the Arizona wilderness, and to destroy the very possibility of life in the process, is illuminated by the musings of the psychic Lecha late in the novel. Lecha remembers what her grandmother had said: ‘The Europeans [have] not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard’ (p. 718). In her work as a psychic, Lecha has had more than one occasion to verify her grandmother’s observations: Affluent, educated white people, upstanding Church members, sought out Lecha in secret. They all had come to her with a deep sense that something had been lost. They had all given the loss different names: the stock market crash, lost lottery tickets, worthless junk bonds or lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss was their connection with the earth. (p. 718)

The novel shows, however, that displaced whites like Leah are not the only ones to experience the guilt, the frenetic and pointless activity, and the self-destructiveness symptomatic of this condition of loss. The mestizo businessman Menardo suffers from the same malady, though it comes upon him gradually and, ironically, as a result of his social and racial mobility. In striving to make himself a success, Menardo uses his money to attract and marry the richest and whitest woman in his town in southern Mexico. When she dies from a fall in the expensive house he has built on the edge of the jungle, Menardo reaches for the next rung on the social ladder and marries his architect, a yet whiter and more highly educated woman from the city. As the insurgents to the south gather their forces, his business prospers. He achieves his first success by insuring rich clients against natural disasters. He is known for his reliability and personal commitment to his work. He expands his services and begins to supply private armies to protect his clients against terrorists. But as the business grows and his network of operatives comes to include police chiefs, ambassadors and generals, Menardo finds he can no longer sleep without nightmares. As the terror grows within him, he increasingly thinks of the insurgents in terms of things that need to be cleaned away or exterminated: ‘human sewage’, for example, and ‘vermin’. Confronted with one group of squatters on the private land of his clients, he orders crop-dusting planes to dump insecticides and herbicides on them. His transformation is completed as he begins in this way to associate pollution not with technology, on which he depends, but with the poor

206

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and the brown, the part of himself he represses, trying with all his might to forget the stories his Indian grandfather had told him about the coming reign of the ‘Fire-Eye Macaw’, a time when the sun would burn with a deadly light and would leave the people and the creatures of the earth in a killing heat. Finally, in a confused state of constant worry, Menardo orders his Indian chauffeur to test the claims the manufacturers make about his bullet-proof vest by firing a gun at him as his friends at the country club look on. As a result of a minor technological imperfection, the bullet enters his heart, and he is killed. The chauffeur, as it turns out, is Wacaw,

the twin who fulfils the

almanac’s prophecy by receiving from the sacred Macaws the spiritual knowledge that guides the revolution. All along, he has been passing information about Menardo and his associates to the insurgents in the mountains, who refer to Menardo as the ‘monkey’ who wishes to ‘become white’. Such a feat is of course impossible for many reasons, not the least of which

is that whiteness,

blackness

and redness

are

racist categories that belie the reality of human skin tone with its various shades of brown. But the abstract lure of whiteness, the illusory purification, drives the mestizo to abandon his people and his connection with the earth. ‘Becoming white’ thus appears in Silko’s novel as the path that leads to death, the path of modernization,

whose

promise

ends not with

purification but ironically with pollution and destruction. Likewise, in Borderlands/La Frontera Anzaldia speaks of ‘the white sterility [the Anglos] have in their kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals, mortuaries and missile bases’ (p. 69). But she adds to this critique an invitation, a call for whites to recover their own brownness and connection with the earth by recognizing in the brown wave from the south the return of the repressed: Let’s all stop importing Greek myths and the Western Cartesian split ... and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent. White America has only attended to the body of the earth in order to exploit it, never to succor or to be nurtured in it. Instead of surreptitiously ripping off the vital energy of people of color and putting it to commercial use, whites could allow themselves to share and learn from us in a respectful way. (p. 68)

Such is the promise of a multicultural and truly American perspective on environmental justice, which is just another name for justice itself. What the borderland writers dramatize for us is that the story of justice can no longer be told without reference to the earth’s brown body. The land and the people have suffered together, and together they must be healed.

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Notes

1. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893), in F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 37. 2. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire, 1982), p. 1. 3- See Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview, 1990); and Robert D. Bullard (ed.), Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End, 1993). 4. Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End, 1999), p. 23. 5. Peter Matthiessen, Indian Country (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p- 13. 6. See Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1985). 7. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 50. 8. See, for example, Bullard, Dumping in Dixie and Confronting Environmental Racism; Juan de Onis, The Green Cathedral: Sustainable Development of Amazonia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Michael Redclift, Development and the Environmental Crisis: Red or Green Alternatives? (London: Methuen, 1984). g. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 3. 10. Gloria Anzaldta, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). 11. See Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture, rev. edn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). 12. See Jay Clayton, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 13. Ana Castillo, So Far from God (New York: Plume, 1994). 14. Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony, 1991). 15. For a survey, see M.Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992). 16. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Viking, 1977). 17. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, p. 286. 18. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

14. Children’s literature and the environment Karin Lesnik-Oberstein

There can be few ideas in Western culture as intimately connected and intertwined as ‘nature’ and the ‘child’. The child as the natural, the natural in the adult as the child, the child of nature, the child in nature, the nature of the child; these concepts permeate the processes

of self-definition of adults and adult society. Both the child and nature are

central

to cultural

characterizations

of selfhood

and

otherness,

identity and consciousness. Since definitions of the ‘child’ and its nature are central to definitions and characterizations of ‘children’s literature’,

the books held to constitute this category at various times reveal, both through their stylistic, thematic and narrational devices and through their shifting allocation to supposed child audiences, how concepts of the child operate. An expression of some of these ideas can be found, for instance, in the illustrator Roger Duvoisin’s claims that: ‘I have no apologies to offer for being part of a zoo of imaginary animals, geese, hippopotamuses, rabbits, lions, raccoons, bugs, crocodiles, and others ... Instead

of living in a zoo I could just as well live among fairies, dragons, dwarfs, and giants. They are just as necessary to children.”! A similar view is expressed in Stella Lees and Pam Macintyre’s conclusion that ‘the empathy which children have with animals, possibly based on mutual powerlessness, is caught in the best animal stories’.” A clear idea of how perceptions about which books are appropriate to the ‘child’ reflect the manifold connections made between the ‘child’ and ‘nature’ may be acquired upon entering any children’s bookshop.’ It would not be an exaggeration to state that, on average, at least twothirds of the books are in some form or another linked with nature and the environment, and — specifically and most importantly — with animals. From Reynard the Fox (first published in English by Caxton in 208

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1481)" and Aesop’s Fables (first printed in English by Caxton in 1484) — which were the only two texts John Locke felt able to recommend for children — to Uncle Remus (Joel Chandler Harris, 1880), Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling, 1902), The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) and Charlotte’s Web (E. B. White, 1952) to Colin Dann’s ‘The Animals of Farthing Wood’ series (1979 ff.), William Horwood’s ‘Duncton Wood’ series (1980 ff.), and Brian Jacques’s the ‘Tales of Redwall’ series (1987 ff.); from The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (Dorothy Kilner, 1783), The Adventures of a Donkey (Arabella Argus’, 1815), Black Beauty (Anna Sewell, 1877), Babar the Elephant (Jean de Brunhoff, 1899), Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter, 1901), Rupert the Bear (Mary Tourtel et al., 1920 ff.), Winnie-the-Pooh (A. A. Milne, 1926), the ‘Little Grey Rabbit’ series (Alison Uttley, 1929 ff.), A Bear Called Paddington (Michael Bond, 1958) and Watership Down (Richard Adams, 1972) to Brother Eagle, Sister Sky (Chief Seattle, illus. Susan Jeffers, 1991); from National Velvet (Enid Bagnold, 1935), A Pony for Jean (Joanna Cannan, 1936), My Friend Flicka (Mary O’Hara, 1941), Lasste-Come-Home (Eric Knight, 1940), A Dog So Small (Philippa Pearce, 1962), Run with the Hare (Linda Newbery, 1988) and Just Nuffin (Colin Dann, 1989) to over thirty volumes of “The Saddle Club’ series; from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

(Lewis Carroll, 1865), The Story of Dr Doolittle (Hugh Lofting, 1922), Stuart Little (E. B. White, 1945) and the ‘Narnia’ series (C. S. Lewis, 1950 ff.) to Tamora Pierce’s ‘Wild Magic’ series (1992 ff); and, finally, from Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719) — the only book which JeanJacques Rousseau felt able to recommend initially for ‘Emile’ in his novel-treatise of that name — The Swiss Family Robinson (Johann Wyss, 1812-13), Masterman Ready (Captain Marryat, 1841-2), The Coral Island (R. M. Ballantyne, 1857), Heidi (Johanna Spyri, 1881), The Jungle Books (Rudyard Kipling, 1894-5), The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911), Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1913), the “Swallows and Amazons’ series (Arthur Ransome, 1930 ff), the “Little House in the Big Woods’ series (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1932 ff.), Willard Price’s ‘Adventures’ series (1960s), and The Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O’Dell, 1961), to Where the Wild Things are (Maurice Sendak, 1963); children’s books powerfully reflect the idea of myriad links and overlaps between the child and the natural. It is difficult to gain any useful understanding or overview of the versions of nature in children’s books by looking merely at contemporary works. Connections between the ‘child’ and ‘nature’ go back to, and are densely intertwined with, the very origins and developments of the concept of ‘children’s books’. An analysis of this concept will be most helpful in providing a coherent account of the forms and prevalence, in children’s books, of themes to do with nature, the environment, animals

and ecology.

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The idea that first John Locke in the seventeenth century, and then Rousseau in the eighteenth century, discovered the ‘true nature’ of the child — a true nature which revealed the ‘child’ as truly natural — is one that is often stated to be well known, and is taken for granted almost as a truism. In fact, this idea ignores complexities and paradoxes with respect to the ‘child’, ‘nature’ and books, which have been little discussed.> The ‘child’ and ‘nature’ are most strongly related through their joint construction as the essential, the unconstructed, spontaneous

and uncontaminated. Both the ‘child’ and the ‘natural’ have been assigned the status of being prior to, above and beyond man, and therefore man’s language, history and culture. They are held to preserve that which is primeval, original and transcendent (whether good or bad). As such, they represent access to direct or pure experience, unmediated by language or human interpretation.® It is not surprising, therefore, that any questioning or attacking of this status is perceived as a fundamental threat. The child and the natural as concepts are protected from analysis and change. Even to speak of ‘discourses’ of the child and its books is perceived as a contradiction in terms: discussions and analyses of children’s books, as well as the books themselves, are frequently strenuously restrained within critical and fictional discourses which allocate to the child (and its books) the natural, the self-evident and the uniform. At the same time, however, these very claims are disrupted by critics’ contradictory and self-contradictory statements about the books and the ‘child’ and its identity, experience and consciousness. The ‘child’ and the ‘natural’ are maintained as that which is above interpretation: not as too complex to interpret, but as too simple to interpret; too undivided, too transparent, too purely zse/f’ The resistance is reflected typically by the unquestioned — indeed, almost unquestionable — assumption that there is an inevitable and mythical (and in the context of children’s books the ‘mythical’ is taken as yet another aspect of the inevitable: the psychologically ‘natural’) contact and communication between children and the natural environment and, again, especially between children and animals. We shall therefore reformulate the story of Locke and Rousseau’s discovery of the ‘child’ as their participation in the invention (in no way arbitrary, but interlinked with their other ideas and arguments) of the ‘child’. We can then say that both concepts, the ‘child’ and the ‘natural’, began to evolve and to accumulate the clusters of meanings which they hold for contemporary Western society, roughly during the eighteenth century. Often these two concepts developed simultaneously and interdependently, most significantly and famously in Rousseau’s Emile. (There are certainly earlier medieval and early-modern examples of definitions of the ‘child’, but these were primarily for religious purposes, and they

Children’s literature and the environment

QI

are not yet set as clearly in the context of ideas about a separate consciousness for the ‘child’ or of the linking of the ‘child’ with a ‘nature’. Before Locke and Rousseau we find developments of these themes notably in the work of the educationalist John Amos Comenius.)’ Rousseau — as the result of his wider discussion of the structures of societies and the role of individuals within them — created a nature out of the child and a child out of this nature, and while doing so also established the links between this nature, the child and reading. Recommending that the child learn from direct experience in the natural environment, devoid of the corruptions of a man-created civilization,

Rousseau retrieved only one book for his child: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). This led to an ongoing tradition of ‘Robinsonnades’, ranging from

books

to comics

and

films, but also, and

more

importantly,

initiated the paradox of the child learning from experience through the book which represents learning from experience: Without the study of books, such a memory as the child may possess is not left idle; everything he sees and hears makes an impression on him, he keeps a record of man’s sayings and doings, and his whole environment is the book from which he unconsciously enriches his memory; ... Men may be taught by fables; children require the naked truth ... Nature, not man, is his schoolmaster ... [but] since we must have books, there is one book which, to my thinking, supplies the best treatise on an education according to nature. This is the first book Emile will read; ... It is Robinson Crusoe ... This novel . will furnish Emile with material, both for work and play ... His head should be full of it, he should always be busy with his castle, his goats, his plantations. Let him learn in detail, not from books but from things, all that is necessary in such a case.*

Although Rousseau, in disapproving of fables, disagreed with Locke on the detail of the first reading material suited to children, he and Locke shared an allegiance to the idea of the child learning first from direct experience and then from texts that were seen to incorporate natural experience and learning from nature and experience. They also saw these books as being inherently pleasurable and attractive to the child because of the child’s own naturalness: If his Aesop has Pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of Knowledge with it. For such visible Objects Children hear talked of in vain, and without any satisfaction, whilst they have no Ideas of them; those Ideas being not to be had from Sounds; but from the Things themselves, or their Pictures. And therefore I think, as soon as he begins to spell, as many Pictures of Animals should be got him, as can be found, with the printed names to them, which at the same time will invite him to read, and afford him Matter of Enquiry and Knowledge. Reynard the Fox, is another Book, I think, may be made use

of to the same purpose.”

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As James Axtell, the editor of this edition of Locke, remarks in his footnote to this passage: Locke’s epistemology vividly shows itself here. To the question from whence come our ideas, the materials of reason and knowledge, Locke answered in a now-classic passage [from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding], ‘From Experience: in That, all our Knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives it self. Our Observation employ’d either about External sensible Objects; or about the Internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by our selves, 1s

that, which supplies our Understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the Fountains of Knowledge, from whence all the Jdeas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.’!°

Locke’s and Rousseau’s statements were used to develop ‘children’s books’ (as John Amos Comenius had done earlier) as texts with ‘pictures’ and ‘animals’, and lone individuals (Robinson Crusoe) surviving outside of a contaminated and contaminating human society. The participation of children’s books in a fundamental and crucial resistance to the idea of the ‘child’ and the ‘natural’ as constructed,

variable and changeable discourses, necessarily created out of, and permeated by, ideologies and purposes, also serves to camouflage their precarious balance on highly paradoxical premises: in Rousseau, as in many subsequent influential writers on childhood, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and the educationalists Froebel, Pestalozzi, Montessori and

Steiner, the book (and reading and writing) itself is in opposition (at least initially) to the natural and the child; the child’s learning should be natural, from the natural (experience). As in Rousseau’s Emile, the child, in its linking to the natural, is initially exempt from the contaminated knowledge of civilization as represented by the book. There is no more powerful repository and symbol of civilization than the book. Therefore, the only book which could be used at all was that which represented the natural, and learning from the natural. The very term ‘children’s books’ rests on an attempt to negotiate these contradictory premises: to integrate that which has been divided by its very core definitions. In short, the ‘child’ and the ‘natural’ were created out of a split in which they represented the opposition to civilization and the book. Because of this paradox, ‘children’s books’ were defined and developed, along the lines suggested by Rousseau’s choice of Robinson Crusoe, as the only books which were ‘safe’ for the child: the only books which preserved and perpetuated the natural in the child, and the natural from which the child was to learn. As the ‘child’ continued to be differentiated, defined and described

through history, so the inevitable and mythical linkage with the primitive (this term is used advisedly here), animals and the environment was maintained and portrayed in various forms. The child and the natural

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213

remained closely allied. Some children’s books (particularly eighteenthand nineteenth-century boys’ adventure stories, although there are also twentieth-century examples) maintain the ‘child’ as part of the ‘adult’ in participating in the conquering, controlling and exploiting of the natural environment. But children are increasingly differentiated, so as to become part of the natural as opposed to the civilized and civilizing ‘adult’ (in either a positive or negative sense). This is the shift, for instance, from Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812-13) to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). The complexities surrounding the fundamental status of both the ‘child’ and ‘nature’ with respect to the self-definitions of the adult and civilized society may be perceived in responses to Golding’s novel: first, for instance, in that Lord of the Flies may be interpreted as being both about children being children in their lack of civilization, and about children being adults in being used to represent allegorically the eternally uncivilized in all humans; secondly, in the questions that are raised in the book about civilization itself; and, thirdly, in the increasing allocation of the book to a supposed childreadership and child-readership response. Beyond such an example, we may also note the contemporary allocation to the child — in children’s books as well as in other media and in schools, political movements and charities — of a central role in ecological and environmental awareness and activism. The child, through its identification with the natural, and with the fulfilment of its own future as the adult it must become, has been increasingly assigned the role of the agent of its own environmental redemption. Simultaneously,

and

with

evangelical

force, the tradition

has been

invoked of the child, innocent and pure of perception, as enlightener and redeemer of the adults. Clear examples of this idea are to be found in, for instance, Lynne Cherry’s The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rainforest and Chief Seattle and Susan Jeffers’s Brother Eagle and Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle,'' among many others. Cherry’s book is a lavishly illustrated story about a woodcutter in the Amazon who goes into the forest to cut down a. tree. While he sleeps, the animals from the forest approach him and plead with him not to ruin their habitat. The last to plead, however, is ‘a child from the Yanomamo tribe who lived in the rain forest’ (p. 22), and who ‘knelt over the sleeping man. He murmured in his ear: “Senhor [sic], when you awake, please look upon us all with new eyes.” The man awoke with a start. Before

him stood the rain forest child, and all around

him, staring,

were the creatures who depended upon the great Kapok tree. What wondrous and rare animals they were!’ (p. 24). The Yanomamo child is at one with the animals, and a natural being (here doubly merging the ‘child’ and the ‘primitive’) in opposition to the man (who is literally as well as figuratively dressed in Western

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clothes). The man momentarily still threatens to cut down the tree, but after one last look at the animals and the child he ‘dropped the ax and walked out of the rain forest’ (p. 30). In Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, Susan Jeffers has set the text of a Native American chief’s letter or speech of around 1850 on preserving the environment into illustrations as lavish as those of Cherry, and this text too is marketed as a children’s book. As I have suggested, many of the texts labelled ‘children’s books’ themselves simultaneously reveal the paradoxes and maintain the denial both of the discursive nature of the ‘child’ and ‘nature’, and of the

paradoxical premises behind the idea of ‘children’s books’. A text which is a clear example of this simultaneous revelation and repression is Johan Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812-13).'? The family of the title are shipwrecked on a tropical island while on their way to Port Jackson in New South Wales because they have ‘suffered from the effects of the French Revolution of 1789 ... [the father] had lost all his property, and therefore resolved to become a missionary’ (p. 5). When they land on the island, their main source of goods for survival is the wrecked ship which has conveniently been lodged on a rock in the bay. The ship ensures the extensive provision of the goods of civilization for the family (from every tool imaginable to a full menagerie, fruit-trees, agricultural plants and books), and the island is the source of complementary natural abundance for human consumption. The Father’s knowledge, acquired from books about wildlife and plants, makes the control and exploitation of the edenic island possible. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the first words (after the bracketed introduction) in the book are: “he tempest had lasted six long and terrible days. On the seventh, far from diminishing, it seemed to redouble its fury’ (p. 5). The book and the process of the controlling and exploitation of the island mirror each other: as the island is civilized in the book in terms of being partially cultivated, animals being domesticated or hunted, and dwellings being built, the island is also turned into the book, for further instruction to the reader about the wilderness. The island is therefore intensely enclosed between the pre-text of the clergyman Father’s bookknowledge about the wilderness, and its own constitution as a text of that sort. When one of the sons, Ernest, finds an unusual animal, for

instance, the Father identifies it, saying that ‘its appearance corresponds exactly with the descriptions I have read, as well as with the pictures’ (p. 23). There is then an accompanying picture of the animal, an ‘agoiti’.'’ That the island is a text is reflected also in the fact that the island never actually poses serious threats to the family; it is never really ‘wild’. Even when animals seem threatening, an attack never actually follows, as the situation is promptly controlled by the previously available knowledge. This is particularly clear in the useful fact that the men in the family are all crack-shots from the start. The Mother says to the

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Father, ‘I now saw the advantage of your having so early taught the boys to use firearms, as our defence depended almost [while the Father and older boys were away] entirely on two boys of ten and twelve years of age’ (p. 54-5). In this sense, the family live the book of nature and create a nature from books. The situation is allegorically summed up in an episode in which an adventure is literally made into text. In Chapter 27, “The Water Boa’, the family face their most serious enemy, a snake

(what else?) of truly awesome proportions. The boa is killed by the family, but not before it has eaten their ‘ass, our useful old Grizzle’ (p. 189). After the boa has been shot, the ass is retrieved from its body and buried, and the snake is reconstructed: The process of skinning, stuffing, and sewing up again, took us several days, and was a source of great interest and delight to the boys. When this work was completed, the stuffed creature was neatly wound round a long pole in coils, the head, with the jaws wide open, being arranged to look as formidable as possible ... the serpent was placed erect, a memento of our escape from a great danger. It was so natural and lifelike that the dogs never passed it without growling. The boys attached a label to the mouth, on which was written — ‘NO ASSES ADMITTED HERE’, and the double meaning in these words was a jest that pleased us immensely. (p. 194)'*

This textualization of nature can be negotiated in many ways: while in The Swiss Family Robinson books play a central role in making nature text, the natural in Johanna Spyri’s novel Heid: (1881), for instance, is initially symbolized and maintained by Heidi’s refusal to learn reading, ostensibly because she believes the goat-herd Peter’s declaration of the impossibility of learning reading, but actually — for the text’s purposes — so that she does not read until it is made ‘safe’ for her by her conversion to Christianity through Clara’s grandmother. While Heidi is still in the Alps and unable to read, she is giving evidence of her innate goodness and unspoiltness by being open to learning from nature directly, in contrast to her embittered grandfather, who is sensitive to the environment but not redeemed by it. Heidi thrives on the beauty of the Alpine environment, which is actually described in relatively little detail, but functions primarily symbolically: a sunset represents the glory and majesty of God, while the three fir-trees by the hut are the ‘voice of nature’ with the wind sighing through them. Heidi is protected, then, from the possible corruptions of reading without appropriate internal or external guidance, until her religious enlightenment and instruction reconcile the demands of nature and civilization. We may note 4 propos of Heidi that gender is one of the most important factors which further differentiates the ‘child’ in its relationships to nature and the environment. That is clear in children’s books from Captain Marryat’s Children of the New Forest (1847) to Enid Blyton’s

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Famous Five series (1942 ff.) and present-day pony stories. The specific roles gender may play in this context are an extensive topic outside the scope of this article, but gender, class and race are among the issues which are components of definitions of the ‘child’, and which therefore influence the forms of the relationships constructed between nature and the child, and indeed the way nature and ecology are portrayed in children’s books. In Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), for instance, a novel with a female heroine, the environment of Prince Edward Island in Canada (where the book is set) is presented as a broadly Romantic reflection and projection of the various characters’ moods or fantasies. Whether the central figures are male or female, there has always been, and still is, an extensive and explicit presence of animals and the natural world in the books called ‘children’s books’, whether

in the

form of fable and fantasy or realistic and naturalistic stories. This includes an ever-increasing number of books involved specifically with ecological concerns and campaigns, including non-fictional information books and educational material. Themes of concern with the wellbeing of the natural world, and especially animals, however, have been present in many children’s books from early on. In this respect I hope I have been able to demonstrate at least that children’s literature offers one of the most extensive sources for the study of ideas about nature, the environment, ecology and the role of humans in relation to all of these, in contemporary society. Ideological, political and moral issues are asserted with concentrated force with regard to the ‘child’, and find their clearest articulation in books assigned to a child-audience in the prevalent belief (right or wrong) that those books have a unique capacity to affect, and therefore enlighten, their child-readers. The books adults produce for, or allocate to, the ‘child’ they construct have always powerfully reflected their efforts to redeem humans and the human in the present and future, spiritually, emotionally or morally. Environmental redemption is part of this ongoing narrative. Notes 1. Roger Duvoisin, ‘Children’s Book Illustration: The Pleasures and Problems’,

in S. Egoff, G. T. Stubbs and L. F. Ashley (eds), Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 361. 2. Stella Lees and Pam Macintyre, The Oxford Companion to Australian Children’s Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 27. 3. I am focusing on Anglo-American culture in this discussion. It is significant that this prevalence of animals and the natural world does not necessarily occur (to the same degree) in children’s books in every culture. 4. This relatively lengthy list of some of the most famous and/or widely marketed of children’s books (largely selected from British and American texts) is

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intended to give the reader unacquainted with children’s literature (studies) an idea

of the pervasiveness and sheer volume of the presence of ideas about the natural, nature, animals, the environment and ecology in children’s books. This list also suggests (in a necessarily crude way, with no intention or pretence to be definitive, or to suggest specific influences or links) some of the main concepts and uses of nature, animals and the environment in children’s books; the groupings within the listing very roughly divide the books into those primarily focusing on (1) forms of fables, (2) anthropomorphized animals, (3) relationships between humans and animals, (4) mixtures of fairy-tale, fantasy, or nonsense, and humans and animals, (5) humans in the wild (natural environment or animal community). All these categories have occurred from early stages in the production of children’s books, and they account for the main forms in which nature, animals, the environment and/or ecology occur in contemporary texts labelled ‘children’s books’. 5. For a more detailed version of this argument, see Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 6. Jacqueline Rose first formulated this seminal argument in her book The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984). 7. For the classic outline of the historical development of the concept of the ‘child’ see: Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973). Despite criticisms which have been made of some of the evidence Ariés uses, this book still seems to me the most methodologically sophisticated and interesting study of the field. For a more extensive defence of Ariés see Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature. 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. B. Foxley (London: Everyman’s Library, III), pp- 76, 84, 147-8.

g. John Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 259-60. 10. Ibid., p. 259. 11. Lynne Cherry, The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990); Chief Seattle and Susan Jeffers (illus.), Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle (London: Puffin, 1991). 12. Johan Rudolf Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson (London: Wordsworth, 1993). 13. I have not been able to ascertain if these, or similar, illustrations were present in every other edition. The illustration itself is not crucial to my point although it serves to emphasize it. 14. My thanks to Dr Mark Philpott for pointing out to me another source for this biblical allusion, one of the many in The Swiss Family Robinson: in this case not only the Satanic snake, but also Moses’s bronze snake that saved the lives of the Israelites from a plague when they looked upon it.

15. Creating the world we must save: the paradox of television nature documentaries Karla Armbruster

Bighorn sheep, bison, and elk are silhouetted against a setting sun as a 1994 episode of the public television series Wild America ends. ‘The voice of the narrator, Marty Stouffer, distils the lesson the viewer should take away from the preceding half-hour’s exploration of the wildlife of South Dakota Badlands National Park: ‘In a time when wildlife is all too often declining, it’s comforting to know that, given the opportunity and a little help, wildlife can make a comeback. If we can ever learn how to avoid harming these wild creatures in the first place, we will have learned the most important lesson of all.’ This message of advocacy for wild animals and their habitats is not unusual; in fact, many

of the nature documentaries

currently shown

on American public television stations, after educating the viewers about an animal or, more rarely, an ecosystem, include some fairly explicit statement advocating the conservation of the natural wonders they have just described. Though some are more polemical than others, insisting on species’ inherent value rather than dwelling on their usefulness to humans, almost all of these documentaries in some way ‘speak for’ nature, playing the role of advocate for non-human species and natural places that are threatened by human activities and seemingly cannot speak on their own behalf. Alexander Wilson has shown that environmental advocacy has not always been a goal of the wildlife/nature show genre. He identifies the ‘constricting logic’ of the Disney productions that popularized the wildlife movie in the 1950s. One element of this logic was the use of stories about nature as ‘transparent allegories of progress, paeans to the official cult of exploration, industrial development, and an ever 218

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rising standard of living’.! The growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s did affect the genre, but did not immediately radicalize it. As Wilson relates, some wildlife film-makers moved on to places like Africa and the Arctic, areas ‘that could still support narratives of exploration and domination’.? Although other creators of the nature movie ‘shifted their focus from animals to science’, Wilson emphasizes the apolitical nature of that approach, which used the dominant construction of science as quantifiable and rational to avoid the ethical questions that the films’ subjects might raise. However, as the environmental movement has progressed, it has become more obvious that, as Wilson puts it, “ecology has an ethics’. As a consequence, ‘In recent years many nature films and T'V shows have adopted [the] overtly political stance’ that we see in programmes like Wild America.’ Viewers concerned about the natural environment tend to accept that the messages of environmental advocacy conveyed by television nature documentaries are uniformly admirable and effective. If nonhuman nature is to be protected, it seems logical that someone (in other words, some human being) must persuade human society to respect the natural world’s interests. While I cannot deny that the natural world sorely needs human advocates, I also believe it is important not to assume that any act of speaking for nature is unproblematic. Recent concerns in feminist theory highlight the potential problems involved in the act of advocacy, of ‘speaking for’. In feminist debate, the focus is on women speaking for other women (especially others of a different ethnicity, race, class or sexual-orientation).* The concern is

that when Western, white, upper/middle-class feminists attempt to speak for women as a group, they often assume a shared identity among women that gives them unproblematized access to the experiences and needs of other women. By relying on such an essentialized, autonomous conception of identity, these advocates risk misrepresenting the more marginalized others for whom they speak, or appropriating a suffering and oppression that is not their own. Unfortunately, critiques of this practice that emphasize factors accounting for difference, such as race, class, ethnicity or sexual prefer-

ence, often simply lead to the censure of members of more privileged groups for presuming to understand or comment on the experiences of members of less privileged groups. This line of reasoning almost inevitably leads to each woman feeling comfortable speaking only for herself and fosters what Linda Alcoff calls ‘the retreat response’: ‘simply to retreat from all practices of speaking for and assert that one can only know one’s narrow individual experience and one’s “own truth” and can never make claims beyond this.’ She draws on post-structuralist theories of identity to point out the flawed assumptions of the retreat response, which ‘is based on an illusion, well-supported in the individualist

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ideology of the West, that a self is not constituted by multiple intersecting discourses but consists of a unified whole capable of autonomy - from others. It is an illusion that I can separate from others to such an extent that I can avoid affecting them.” While a post-structuralist conception of identity such as Alcoff’s can help create a view of women as different yet interconnected, poststructuralism can also raise difficulties for those wrestling with the problems of speaking for others.° Taken to an extreme, the poststructuralist view that subjectivity is constituted through discourse can become what Rita Felski describes as a ‘mechanistic determinism; individuals remain unconscious of and unable to reflect upon the

discursive structures through which they are positioned as subjects’.’ Because such a position denies the possibility of political agency, any attempt to speak for others is rendered pointless; the individual is seen as unable to intervene in the discursive forces determining her own and others’ identities. Ultimately, both the retreat response and the extreme post-structuralist position lead to what many feminists feel is an unacceptable avoidance of responsibility for those without the privilege of being able to speak and be heard within dominant culture. Although the position of humans who speak for non-human nature is clearly different in many ways, there is a significant parallel: both types of advocate are part of a larger group — either all women, or all of nature — that includes themselves and the others whom they represent; however, the advocates occupy a position of privilege and thus difference from the rest of the group because they are considered superior by a dominant culture. In fact, their very ability to write or speak and be read or heard is a privilege that many would argue imphes a responsibility to grapple with the difficulties inherent in the act of advocacy rather than fall back on the retreat response or invoke the impossibility of agency and leave those less privileged to their own devices. What feminist theorists can teach those who wish to speak for non-human nature — and those who listen to or view messages of environmental advocacy ~ is that it is essential to explore the constructions of self and other that organize any discourse of advocacy, in order to question how effectively that discourse works to achieve its goals. In the case of nature documentaries, the question is how effectively they move their viewers in ways that improve the standing of non-human nature within human culture. ‘True, the need for such a self-examination among those who speak for nature is less than obvious: animals or old-growth forests, unlike even very marginalized women, can’t speak for themselves using human language. However, that does not mean that we cannot conceive of nature in ways that allow us to listen to it in certain senses, to learn from it and to see it as subject rather than object.’ In addition, precisely

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because nature cannot challenge the ways we represent it in human language, it is all the more tempting to objectify and construct nature in any way we choose. However, as José Knighton has pointed out in ‘Eco-Porn and the Manipulation of Desire’, natural entities like ‘The Grand Tetons and the Grand Canyon, both stereotyped objects of idealized, romanticized desire ... are in fact living environments more vital than any single human being’.® Unfortunately, in their attempts to participate in environmental advocacy, many television nature documentaries lend themselves to representations of the natural world that can ultimately misrepresent the needs of at least certain parts of those living environments. They do so by constructing a monolithic, inaccurate representation of non-human nature that focuses on one aspect of the natural world to the exclusion of others. By decontextualizing that part of nature, they erase the differences and interdependences within the natural world. They can also erase difference within nature by constructing it as a place without room for human beings, ultimately distancing humans from the non-human nature with which they are biologically and perceptually interconnected, and reinforcing the dominant cultural ideologies responsible for environmental degradation.'® At the same time, these documentaries also sometimes contain more subversive strategies that construct humans as deeply interconnected participants in the entity we call nature. In this chapter, I shall explore a group of nature documentaries that appeared during 1994 and 1995 on three programmes commonly available on public television in the United States: National Geographic, Nature and Wild America. Wild America, created and narrated by Marty Stouffer, is a half-hour programme that focuses on the wildlife and habitats of North America. Nature is an hour-long programme with episodes ranging from in-depth examinations of one species to multi-part series, such as ‘The Nature of Sex’. National Geographic specials, covering subjects from around the globe, are the most impressive of the three in terms of camera work, scriptwriting and visual effects. While National Geographic programmes often include topics not directly related to nature or wildlife, I am only examining the episodes or segments of episodes that are overtly concerned with the observation and conservation of wild animals or their habitats. Nature programmes have, at times, made a noticeable impact on their audiences’ attitudes. In The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben cites some specific examples of ways that even older, less routinely polemical nature movies have contributed to significant alterations in our culture’s attitude and actions towards other species. He points to the 1963 film Flipper, and the spin-off television programme of the same name, as key reasons why, close to thirty years later, the

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American public cared enough about dolphins to support successful campaigns to boycott the tuna industry that was killing them." He also links Jacques Cousteau’s introduction of his television audience to the mysteries of the world’s oceans with the concurrent movement to end the commercial killing of many species of whales. However, he admits that ‘measured in the largest terms, such appeals aren’t working’. Even after viewers have been introduced to the diverse wonders of the natural world through these programmes, they are ‘still not willing to do anything very drastic to save that world’.’ Most evidence supports McKibben’s assertion. Despite the numbers of nature

and wildlife documentaries

shown world-wide,

the rate of

extinctions and habitat destruction is still increasing. Of course, these documentaries are not the only forces working to construct people’s identities and perceived relationships with non-human nature; but we must ask whether they are ‘speaking for’ nature as effectively as possible. I suspect that many viewers share the experience of Alexander Wilson, author of The Culture of Nature: ‘Wildlife movies — like realist wildlife genre paintings — promise us ... photographic intimacy with nature ... Very often nature movies can’t deliver because this restricted medium alone — and its appeal to the eye, and less so, to the ear — can’t bridge the cultural and philosophical abyss between us and what in recent years we have come to call environment.’ I would go a step further, and assert that not only do they fail to bridge our culture’s dualistic conception of nature and culture, but they all too often reinforce it. They do so by representing nature as a place that is most properly empty of human beings, thus denying the complex physical and perceptual connections that irrevocably wed humans to their natural environments. Because the perspective of the camera is restricted, both in space and in the sensory impressions it can convey, the documentary can therefore evoke and transmit only a limited sense of any natural scene. Wilson focuses on the way in which the camera separates ‘the visual from the rest of the senses. The camera, with its insistence on perspective and the narrow field, exaggerates the eye’s tendency to fragment, objectify, and estrange. Staring through a viewfinder, we experience the physical world as landscape, background — the earth as if seen

from space, or a map.’!* The nature documentary encompasses other, less inherent distortions as well. Perhaps the most widely remarked on are its tendencies to feed our culturally encouraged desire for speed and conflict, making nonhuman nature itself seem slow and uneventful by comparison. The ‘nature’ portrayed by these documentaries is seemingly overflowing with animals (often large, rare or exotic ones) and activity. Everywhere the camera turns, animals are stalking prey, mating, fighting and raising

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their young. Of course the viewer realizes that the creators of the programme have selected these scenes; as Charles Siebert notes in “The Artifice of the Natural’, the typical nature show is ‘rapid, focused, and framed, a potent distillation of someone else’s waiting designed precisely for me’.'> This ‘distillation of someone else’s waiting’, not to mention someone else’s observant eye and painstakingly gleaned knowledge, contributes to a problem that McKibben constructs in terms of how little ‘information’ these programmes actually convey, if we define information as ‘vital knowledge about who we are and where we live’.'® He points out: ‘Half the time they specialize in misinformation, undercutting their message with their pictures.’'’ In other words, even when the narrator assures us that a particular species is rare or endangered, the camera shows a large number of representatives of that species in good health. For example, in an episode of Wild America, Marty Stouffer explains that the black-footed ferret exists in such small numbers that it was once believed to be extinct, and even today is known to exist only at a research centre in Wyoming. Concurrently, we see footage of numbers of these ferrets, to the happy strains of ragtime music, busily popping in and out of holes in a prairie landscape — the very landscape Marty tells us can’t support them any longer because agriculture and ranching practices have eliminated the prairie dog, and the black-footed ferret depended upon prairie dog burrows for shelter and prairie dogs for food. Perhaps a long shot of barren, overgrazed rangeland or a prairie devoid of prairie dogs or ferrets wouldn’t attract many viewers, but, as McKibben points out, the ‘void’ that would be revealed by such an approach to nature documentaries ‘is the true revelation about an awful

lot of the world’."8 These programmes can also undercut their message of advocacy by their visual symbolism. More often than not, the end-of-the-show pleas for conservation are accompanied by an image of various animals against a setting sun, as if to warn viewers that they may be witnessing the end of the species as well as the end of the day. However, the sense that the sun’s setting is inevitable, and that it will just as inevitably rise the next morning, may give viewers a false sense that the eradication of a particular species or its habitat is only ‘natural’, in fact inevitable, and won’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things anyway. In addition to selecting the living things that most viewers would be least likely to encounter in ‘nature’, should they venture into it, these programmes also tend to focus on interactions and activities chiefly remarkable for their drama. For example, a recent thirty-year retrospective by National Geographic spent an entire half-hour on the theme of ‘eating’ in nature. The footage focuses primarily on animals eating

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other animals, with one exception: a plant eating an animal. Never once is the viewer’s attention drawn to an animal eating a plant, a practice considerably more common than the reverse, if less exciting. Another approach which heightens the drama of the natural world often occurs in programmes that are constructed as narratives. In Nature’s ‘Elephant Seals: Those Magnificent Diving Machines’, the narrator informs us that ‘Our story follows the adventures of a pup on its way to becoming the greatest diver in the ocean’. However, the ‘story’ places much more emphasis on the huge, ill-tempered adult male elephant seals, violent storms and predators that constantly threaten our protagonist’s survival than on her less dangerous and less dramatic diving exploits. Charles Siebert, in an extended critique of the ways these documentaries distort the actual experience of being in the natural world, speaks of his own ‘disappointment rooted in the disparity between the ways in which we now represent nature to ourselves and the way it actually is; between

that flitting, omniscient,

nature-show

overview

delivering me from one available, arcane wonder to the next, and the plodding, myopic bulk of me within such a mute and long-lived presence.” A fulfilling experience one-on-one with the natural world involves more than passively sitting back to be informed and entertained. You must be patient. You must be willing to engage yourself fully in a world that does not automatically offer itself up for your pleasure. You must be willing to look for the small and the unobtrusive, to note the subtle differences between members of a species or the changes that occur from day to day: these are the differences and changes that comprise the bulk of nature’s true diversity. You must be willing to put up with some degree of physical discomfort, with heat, cold, damp and dirt. You must be willing to discover the characteristics of species and areas for yourself rather than receiving an encyclopaedic gush of information

from

an

omniscient,

disembodied

narrator.

As Siebert

explains, you must be willing to experience a sense of your own insignificance, and possess ‘the daring to linger in a non-specific, unnarrated, and ongoing anonymity’. The reward of so doing is that we learn to ‘walk away from what we know toward an understanding — in both the physical and abstract senses of that word — of what surrounds

NS.2

There is a prospect perhaps even more troubling than the possibility that selection and editing may effectively substitute what James Shanahan calls ‘a simulacrum of a real environmental experience”?! for an experience that would provide us with a sense of our physical embeddedness in our natural environment. As McKibben laments: ‘The upshot of a nature education by television is a deep fondness for a

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certain species and a deep lack of understanding of systems, or of the policies that destroy those systems.’” An extreme example of this erasure of the natural and social/political systems that contain the ‘nature’ we see on the screen is Nature’s five-part series ‘The Nature of Sex’. The programme moves rapidly from one animal’s unusual reproductive method to another, sometimes so quickly that we don’t even discover what part of the world the animal inhabits. Further contextualizations, such as how the animal interacts with other parts of its ecosystem or how historical or current social forces affect it, are even less likely to be mentioned. Even programmes which move less rapidly, and spend more time on one location or ecosystem, tend to back away from political issues which might reveal the complex web of cultural and natural relationships connecting the viewer to the endangerment of a particular species or place. Programmes such as National Geographic and Nature often focus on species and areas exotic to the North American viewer. Threats to species are typically mentioned briefly, in a very generalized way, as in National Geographic's look at the African elephant. As a group of elephants finish cooling off in a waterhole and proceed across the savannah, the narrator tells us of the threats they face: ‘Poachers slaughtering them for ivory and farmers usurping their land are posing a very serious threat. Hundreds of thousands have died and the killing is still going on.’ By directing our attention to environmental problems that our behaviour affects only indirectly, the documentaries allow us to feel superior to people such as the Africans involved in elephant poaching or in farming on the land ‘usurped’ from the elephants, while we ignore our own implication in the world-wide economic forces limiting the options for survival of these people, as well as our more direct responsibility for problems in our own locales. As Alexander Wilson notes, nature programmes tend to model two roles for human beings — the destroyers of nature or its saviours — and rarely recognize that one person can occupy both roles.” Another way these documentaries can distance us is by focusing on damage done by past, unenlightened generations of Americans. For example, one episode of Nature casts as its villains the nineteenthcentury whalers who hunted the elephant seal to the edge of extinction. Contemporary people are shown only in roles that help the seals’ survival; we see scientists, and tourists attentively listening as a naturalist

informs them about the seals. While overfishing is mentioned as a possible threat to the species’ survival today, no commercial fishing rigs are shown, and the problem is downplayed. The overall effect implicitly contrasts the villains of the past with the enlightened people of today, including the viewer, who is thus exempted from responsibility for currently dwindling populations of endangered species. Possibilities for

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making explict connections between environmental questions and issues such as racism or colonialism (there is passing mention of a coral reef growing on the wreck of a nineteenth-century molasses ship in National Geographic’s ‘Jewels of the Caribbean’) are rarely explored. Alexander Wilson and John Berger place contemporary Western visual representations of nature, and of animals in particular, in the

context of the progressively waning contact, in Western societies, between humans and non-human nature. In ‘Why Look at Animals?’, Berger links this pattern to the growth of industrialism and capitalism: ‘The rgth century, in Western Europe and North America, saw the beginning of a process, today being completed by 2oth century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken.’* Wilson points specifically to the technical and industrial advances of the Second World War, which helped to produce in most North Americans a decidedly ambivalent attitude towards the natural world: In everyday material life, nature was a laboratory full of ‘things’ to be observed and increasingly managed in the name of social mobility and economic progress. Yet at the same time people persisted in inventing a kinship with a natural world understood to be in some way authentic, primeval, and immanent — as if trying to make sense where there was none.”

As diametrically opposed as these attitudes may at first seem — one an objectification of the natural as resource to be used, the other a romanticized nostalgia for the natural world as the primitive, pure location of our origins that we always long to return to but cannot — both construct nature as radically separate from human culture. And both of these attitudes persist in today’s nature documentaries. Most of these programmes avoid blatantly constructing nature as ‘resource’ in the sense of object or machine, although we can still hear echoes of Descartes’ characterization of animals as machina animata in titles like Nature’s ‘Elephant Seals: Those Magnificent Diving Machines’. However, the documentaries almost always justify focusing on a species or area by stressing ways it can be of value to humanity. Sometimes the value is constructed as the enjoyment people can gain from interacting with nature. In National Geographic’s ‘Jewels of the Caribbean’, the show’s focus on symbiotic relationships among the fish and other marine life-forms of the coral reef is ultimately extended to a hopeful model of what human relationships with nature should be. As sport divers are shown frolicking with dolphins, the narrator explains that, “They give us joy; we must provide protection against overfishing and pollution’. Even more common is the trope that we should care about and preserve nature because of what we can learn about it. The final shot

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of National Geographic’s “The African Elephant’ shows us a herd of elephants silhouetted against the setting sun as the narrator warns, ‘just as the complexity and ingenuity of the elephant is being appreciated, its future is in jeopardy. If it does not survive, we may never discover all there is to know about this magnificent animal.’ John Fowles points out that the human fixation with learning all there is to know about nature often amounts to ‘treating nature as some sort of intellectual puzzle, or game’.”” Berger argues that, because human culture has gained such control over other animals, the reciprocity that historically occurred when a human and another animal looked at each other has been lost. Now, ‘animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.’ Nowhere is this more true than in the nature documentary, where, if we encounter the animal’s gaze at all, we encounter it in a form that is safe, sanitized and, above all, offers no

possibility of the animal observing or learning anything about us. Some programmes take the position that what is most important is what

we

can

learn

from, rather

than

about,

the natural

world.

In

‘American Trickster’, an episode of Nature on the coyote, the camera dramatically flashes from a coyote running through grass to a stylized painting of a coyote staring out at the viewer, as the narrator explains that “Chis is old man Coyote, using his powers to teach us the limits of our own’. Speculating on the South Dakota Badlands, an area that settlers tried and failed to bring under human control, Marty Stouffer asserts that ‘Many lessons are hidden in these chiselled canyons: lessons from the past and lessons for the future’. This approach is more respectful, and grants nature more standing than a sense that the natural world is valuable only as an object of knowledge. And yet, by participating in what seems to be an almost obsessive focus on what humans can gain from nature, even these tributes to nature’s wisdom help to perpetuate the sense that a species or area must be of use to us if we are to value and preserve it, rather than broaching the even more radical notion that animals, plants and their habitats have an inherent worth and right to existence. Alternating, even coexisting, with this, is a romanticized conception of the natural world as an edenic realm that humans can best serve by leaving it alone. As Rosalind Coward points out in “The Sex Life of Stick Insects’, nature programmes often take as their theme ‘how tiny aspects in the life-cycle of one species are vital to the life of another species ... [how] everything fits together, perfectly’.“ In National Geographic’s special on “The African Elephant’, the narrator marvels at how well these animals have adapted to their environment, especially

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when considering their immense size. But it is an environment portrayed as untouched by, empty of, and presumably separate from human culture. The message behind most visions of nature as a complex, perfectly functioning whole is that we should leave the ‘balance of nature’ alone, as though humans play no part in it. Marty Stouffer, in an episode on the Wyoming National Elk Refuge, expresses a related point of view when he explains that, because humans have killed off the elk’s natural predators, it is necessary to allow hunting on the Refuge every year: ‘We’ve upset the natural balance and have little choice but to control herds by hunting. The more we disrupt, the more we must interfere.’ While it is true that human activities are responsible for the elk’s overpopulation, to create a sense that there can only be destructive, interfering roles for people within ‘the natural balance’ merely reaffirms the nature—culture dualism that has played a part in creating the elk’s situation. This construction of nature as a self-contained, self-regulating domain governed by the forces of evolution and instinct gains a special poignancy, however, through the pervasive sense that humans once belonged to and now are exiled from this world. And there is some validity to the idea that, within many cultures, humans

have become

increasingly distant and alienated from the natural environment that their species evolved within, sometimes to the extent of distancing themselves from and striving to dominate the body and the instincts that they see as representing the ‘animal’ side of themselves. But what we see in these documentaries is more often the price of this kind of distance: a deep nostalgia fora unity with the natural world that seems for ever lost. As Berger explains: ‘What man has to do in order to transcend the animal, to transcend the mechanical within himself, and

what his unique spirituality leads to, is often anguish. And so, by comparison and despite the model of the machine, the animal seems to him to enjoy a kind of innocence ... [which] begins to provoke in man a kind of nostalgia.’ This nostalgia — its longing for union with nature constantly countered by the sense that human culture has lost its innocence, its pre-Oedipal immersion in the flux of the rest of creation — manifests itself through the contradictory and often clumsy ways nature documentaries treat human beings when they take them as their subjects. It is in portrayals of sexual behaviour that these programmes come closest to linking humans with non-human nature. Our sexuality, our bodies and the imperatives of evolution, instinct and genetics are often constructed as forces that constrain the human and non-human equally. “The Nature of Sex’, a five-part series produced by Nature, seems to take the overall perspective that, at least in terms of the biological basis of sexuality, humans can be treated as part of the natural world.

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Each episode begins with a reference to or scene from human culture. In the first, the narrator reveals the major focus of the entire series: the primal instinct in all animals to pass on their genes. He informs us that this instinct explains why ‘men and women and other animals spend so much energy on getting together’. The third episode, ‘The Sex Contract’, begins with a scene of the type of wedding ceremony traditional within Western culture, and quickly moves to shots of various animals’ ‘courting’ behaviour, as the narrator remarks on the desire for a mate and what it can make ‘us’ do. Even such an overt assertion that humans are part of nature is soon undermined, however. “The Nature of Sex’ takes such an unrelenting, totalizing view of biological determinism that it cannot sustain the sense that humans are part of, or even much like, the rest of its subjects. Almost always, the programme explains any interesting or unusual sexual behaviour on the part of non-human animals in terms of the instinctual drive to pass on genes to the next generation. We learn that naked mole rats (in one episode) and termites (in another) live in colonies in which one female gives birth to all the offspring and the rest of the animals help care for them. The viewer is disabused of any notion that this is unselfish behaviour, however: the narrator states in

no uncertain terms that the rats and termites are all passing on their genes, albeit indirectly, through the mother’s offspring, since they are all ‘siblings’. ‘The programme applies its same rigid logic to baboons and Rhesus macaques. A male baboon who grooms a female’s infant by another father does so ‘in the hope that she’ll let him sire her next offspring’. A female Rhesus macaque who ‘sneaks off’ to mate with a male new to the group rather than with her group’s dominant male is portrayed as characteristic; while the dominant male is supposed to hold sexual rights to all the females in the group, females actually prefer ‘newcomers’. This preference is attributed to a need or desire for genetic diversity rather than to boredom, loneliness, a spirit of adventure, or any of the other motives we might imagine if the situation occurred in another species of primate, Homo Sapiens. The boundary between humans and the rest of nature is strictly reinforced at the end of every episode as well. The second episode, ‘A Time and a Place’, is typical; it ends with the narrator

musing on the ‘many

things we have in common with our fellow creatures’, such as the habits of displaying and competing for mates. However, ‘we complicate it with a search for something more — love’. When it comes to native or indigenous peoples, though, nature documentaries are even more conflicted. Perhaps their confusion results from the fact that many of these cultures sustain and perceive closer ties with the natural world than we do. When nature documentaries try to represent human relationships with or within nature, they often

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misinterpret the world-views of indigenous cultures and proceed to represent native peoples in ways that reinforce the nature—culture dualism by depositing such people on the ‘nature’ side of the boundary. In programmes that explicitly set out to draw connections between the human and the natural, like ‘The Nature of Sex’, indigenous cultures serve as an easy bridge, but the bridge is inevitably collapsed, leaving them on the side of nature. When “The Nature of Sex’ moves from the non-human to the human in its portrayals of ‘ritualized singing and dancing’ to attract mates, it shows us a tribal ritual among the Wodabi people of Sierra Leone. When it moves on to make the point that humans’ desire for love sets them apart from other animals, it shows us scenes from contemporary Western culture. Examples of polygamy and polyandry from Sierra Leone and the West Himalayas are used to demonstrate that people, like non-human animals, do not all pair up as part of the ‘sex contract’; but Western cultural norms are firmly established as typical human behaviour, as the narrator quickly reassures us that, in most societies, ‘we tend to pair up and raise a family together’. The human nostalgia and longing for wholeness and connection with nature takes another form in these programmes as well: anthropomorphism. Imposing distinctly human narratives and interpretations on to the actions of animals and plants is, after all, an assertion of

some sort of connection between humans and non-human nature. As Randall Lockwood demonstrates, anthropomorphism takes many forms and need not always misrepresent the biological realities of the natural world. He describes a type of ‘applied anthropomorphism’ that combines scientific knowledge with ‘the use of our own personal perspective on what it’s like to be a living being to suggest ideas about what it is like to be some other being of either our own or some other species’, asserting that ‘this process is a form of projection, and it is a process that makes our life on earth as social beings possible’.*° However, nature documentaries frequently indulge in forms of anthropomorphism that go far beyond imaginative speculations about what it would be like to be a member of another species. Making the point that some animals ‘will risk their lives for sex’, “The Nature of Sex’ shows a male jawfish on the ocean floor displaying his sexual availability. Next, the camera shifts to another jawfish peeking out of a crevice. We learn that it is a female, and that she ‘will have to leave

home if she wants to get a date’. In some cases, as Rosalind Coward points out, the anthropomorphic aspects of these shows serve to transfer assumptions about what is appropriate human behaviour on to nonhuman animals. In a Wild America episode on the ‘swift, carnivorous’ weasel, Marty Stouffer comments on a female weasel shown returning to her den of young: ‘Like all good mothers, she hastily returns to her

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responsibilities.’ Bridging the gap between culture and nature by this kind of excessive (and culturally normative) anthropomorphism ignores the diverse ways in which non-human nature is different from humanity. Such strategies are another form of human dominance over the nonhuman: by accepting the absorption of animals, plants and even ecosystems into the sphere of human culture, we participate in the colonizing move of turning what was other into the same, with no respect for its difference from us. Perhaps the most subtle way that these programmes undercut the goals of environmental advocacy is by ‘naturalizing’ the view they present as unconstructed. As Charles Siebert notes, in today’s nature documentaries, ‘the maker’s hands are kept out of the frame’.*! By minimizing human presence on the screen, these programmes encourage us to believe we are receiving an unmediated view of the natural world. Alexander Wilson points out: ‘Many of them don’t reveal the deep involvement with nature necessary to their making: helicopters, camera blinds, sets, telescopic lenses, remote sound, and trained animals

flown in from another part of the continent.’” Another technique used to create the illusion of an unmediated view of nature is the seamless insertion of ‘technical events’. Cultural critic Jerry Mander defines technical events as ‘alterations of the image [which] could not happen in ordinary life; they are technical alterations only possible within moving-image media: films, video, or television’. Such effects include: passages of slow motion, changes in viewpoint such as the shift from a close-up of a coyote hunting a weasel to a wider perspective that includes them both, and shots into hard-toaccess locations such as a nest of termites. For my purposes, the significance of these technical events is not that they occur, but that the documentaries so often avert the viewer’s attention from the fact that they are occurring, disguising the careful constructedness of the documentary’s perspective. For example, in a scene of red-crowned cranes ‘dancing’ in “The Nature of Sex’, I was completely unable to determine if the speed had shifted into slow motion or not. The other important question to ask about the point of view these documentaries provide is how they construct the viewer who is being asked to accept their perspective as ‘real’, as unmediated. As Kaja Silverman explains, film critics use the notion of ‘suture’ to ‘account for the means by which subjects emerge within discourse’.** She goes on to explain: “The classic cinematic organization depends upon the subject’s willingness to become absent to itself by permitting a fictional character to “stand in” for it, or by allowing a particular point of view to define what it sees. The operation of suture is successful at the moment that the viewing subject says, “Yes, that’s me,” or “That’s what I see.”’® Except in programmes that follow the adventures of a (usually

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anthropomorphized) protagonist, nature documentaries rarely offer any character — human or non-human ~ that the viewer can identify with for more than a few moments. The exception to this is the narrator, who is often disembodied, even nameless, and always full of knowledge. By identifying with the narrator, and with the perspective of the camera that so often appears to be the narrator’s eye, the viewer is constructed as omniscient and capable of penetrating the most inaccessible reaches of the natural world. Identification with the narrator produces a sense of unobtrusiveness, an assurance of innocence

of involvement in the

forces affecting the natural world the camera reveals. In Nateonal Geographic’s ‘Jewels of the Caribbean’, the presence of the camera crew and their equipment under the ocean’s waters is undercut by shots of parrotfish sleeping undisturbed. This sense of invisibility and uninvolvement is heightened by a scene of a manatee ‘nodding off ... oblivious to the tide of change sweeping away his world’. The viewer is thus promised exoneration from complicity in this tide, and is never encouraged to identify with the tourists, represented only by a far-off cruise ship on the horizon, who ‘pass this way briefly ... [unaware] of their fatal impact on the wonders all about them’. As Alexander Wilson notes, the basic contradiction of the nature documentary genre — ‘this is nature as she really is even though we’ve staged it all’ — works only ‘if the culture draws a sharp distinction between the human and the non-human. Nature is in part a human construction after all. Like a set of maps laid over the earth, our culture’s ideas about nature are already out there on the land itself as

we move around it.”*° By covering over and denying the ways that humans create the nature onscreen — both immediately, through the artistic and technical creation of the documentary, and more broadly through participation in the natural and cultural forces acting on the animals and ecosystems presented — these programmes deny our interconnections with non-human nature and establish us in fixed, dualistic relationships with the natural: viewer and viewed, self and other, subject and object. There are also more promising trends within the same programmes. Surprisingly, it is the seemingly unsophisticated Wild America that demonstrates many of these, giving a more complete picture of ‘nature’ than many other programmes. In part because of his focus on wild America, Marty Stouffer tends to highlight animals that are more common and accessible to the viewer, such as shrews, frogs, deer and coyotes. He also spends a significant amount of time on vegetation, such as oak trees or prairie grasses. In that episode about the South Dakota Badlands National Park, the viewer is even shown a dead ram

covered with flies, and Marty explains that it has probably succumbed to the harsh, dry summer weather because it was weakened by disease.

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While death is not unusual in nature programming, the sight of a rotting carcass that has been lying dead for several days, with no scenes of a predator stalking or killing its prey, gives us a picture of the cycles of nature that goes beyond rosy promises of rebirth or the drama of predation to the essential, unifying fact of decomposition. The phrase “Enjoy our wild America’ ends every episode, and several aspects of this programme may motivate viewers to experience ‘the real thing’. First, Marty is himself a presence in most episodes. We see him sitting on a boulder in the natural area he is describing, carrying orphaned wildlife home to his house, as well as in his study where he sums up the ‘lesson’ of each episode. By providing a representation of a human being actively engaged with his natural environment, he constructs this environment as one where humans can and do belong. In one episode, he even concentrates on how the average viewer can ‘provide food and shelter for birds and mammals’. By showing his brother’s family building birdhouses and buying birdseed, and by interviewing other people in various parts of the country who have provided food or habitat for local wildlife, Marty provides models of interactions with nature that are based on a sense of community with the non-human rather than on its value to humanity or its existence as a separate, pure realm. Another positive trend is a perspective that provides a rich natural context for the species highlighted. Nature’s programme on elephant seals spends little time on the ways the seals interact with other elements of their ecosystem, but it does make the point that the seals cannot survive unless their habitat is protected as well. Near the end, the narrator points out that in the nineteenth century, when the elephant seal was almost driven to extinction, ‘we killed the seals but left their

habitat untouched so they could recover’. Wild America, too, sometimes goes beyond a focus on the animals and even plants of an area. In an episode on Olympic National Park, Marty emphasizes the role of glaciation and climate in creating and maintaining the nation’s only temperate rainforest. He traces the water cycle from waterfall to stream to ocean, then explains how the ocean water rises to form the clouds that produce rain, thus completing ‘the cycle of life in the Olympics’. The programmes which provide the richest sense of natural context are usually those which focus on an ecosystem. These shows follow interactions among animals, switching narrative lines and emphasizing interconnections rather than single protagonists. Wild America’s Olympic National Park episode moves from a hawk unsuccessfully attacking a beaver, to the same hawk observing an otter, then to the otter catching a fish. Other organizational strategies include taking the migratory route of a predominant species, or moving between the different physical areas of an ecosystem. Wild America’s ‘Springtime in Shenan-

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doah National Park’ follows the changes in the area that occur as the spring progresses. Another form of context these shows occasionally provide is a sense of the viewer’s cultural implication in the historical and current forces threatening an area or species. While the viewer is not encouraged to identify with the tourists who unwittingly threaten the coral reef ecosystem in ‘Jewels of the Caribbean’, even the idea that someone from another place, like the viewer, could affect an exotic locale like the

Caribbean is progress. This same documentary features a vision of a ‘new predator’ (a fishing boat) from the underwater point of view of whales and other sea mammals who must compete with commercial fishing outfits for food, and stresses that oil rigs, while providing some habitat for undersea species, can also pose serious threats. Of course, viewers must make the connections between their own consumption of fish and gasoline and the ‘threats’ represented on the screen, but the larger cultural context is at least suggested. Though the viewer is never directly implicated, Wild America routinely pinpoints ways in which American culture has, both in the past and present, endangered wildlife and natural areas. In a move notable for its venture into the territory of linking the oppression of indigenous cultures and non-human nature, Marty Stouffer even explains that bison became extinct in the area of the South Dakota Badlands National Park because they were shot by whites not only for meat and hides but also as a part of a strategy to drive Indians on to reservations. Wild America does sometimes counter the sense that nature is a pure, separate realm best left alone by human beings. One way it does this is by presenting relationships between indigenous peoples and non-human nature. This approach not only avoids excluding Native Americans from the realm of human

culture, but also uses their world-view

to

model what Alexander Wilson has described as ‘a world in which humans and animals can once again be proximate, in a world in which all life is interrelated and yet autonomous’.*” In an episode on the courtship rituals of grouse, Marty explains how the mating ‘dance’ of the prairie chicken inspired the rituals of ‘the first humans who shared the prairie with them’, such as the prairie chicken dance of the Sioux people. Later in the episode, a Sioux describes drawings of a hunter stalking a prairie chicken. In the episode on providing food and habitat for wildlife, Marty explains that Native Americans used to hang hollowed-out gourds as homes for purple martens, which they relied on to eat insects. By presenting Native Americans as engaged in cultural activities which connect them to nature in non-destructive ways, Marty provides an example of a human relationship with nature that avoids either separating nature and culture or collapsing native peoples on to the nature side of the dualism.

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Sometimes these programmes manage to accommodate the desire to connect with non-human nature represented by anthropomorphism, without making colonialist appropriation of the sphere of the nonhuman into the human. In one Wild America episode, the viewer is shown the astounding sight of a weasel, driven by the scarcity of food brought on by winter, killing a rabbit six times its size. The struggle is long and gruesome, and the viewer is tempted to identify with a squirrel that appears to be watching the whole scene in horror and disbelief. However, Marty cautions us that categorizing ‘animals as innocent victims or as guilty killers’ is an unwarranted projection of human values on to non-human nature. ‘Nature itself makes no such judgments’, he explains as the twitching rabbit finally seems to expire. The weasel must kill to live, he goes on, and ‘by following instinct, it fulfils a vital role in maintaining the balance of nature’. While discouraging overly anthropomorphic interpretations, he sometimes invites us to imagine the perspective of wildlife. In the episode on the South Dakota Badlands, he contrasts the human perspective on the area, which led to its name, with the perspective of the animals who live and depend on this landscape: for them, there is nothing ‘bad’ about the Badlands. In a similar effort to engage the viewer with the ‘perspective’ of wildlife, a Nature episode on the coyote balances scenes of Los Angeles residents recounting stories of coyotes killing or threatening their pets with naturalists who explain that the human residents have invaded the coyote’s habitat, not vice versa. Finally, sometimes these programmes do self-consciously stress the act of viewing and the technical manipulations that make what the viewer sees possible. Wild America often includes ‘technical events’ in ways that are obvious, that make them stand out as technical manipulations of the viewer’s perspective. One of the sequence of scenes that begins each episode is instructive in this regard. A mountain landscape is shown swiftly changing from the greenery of summer to the snowblanketed guise of winter. While some critics of the nature documentary genre have criticized the technique of time-lapse photography that creates such a spectacle, I find that it foregrounds the constructed aspect of the programme. In one episode, an ermine weasel attempts to expel another from its burrow. The camera shifts back and forth from the weasel outside the burrow to the weasel inside, but the inside view

is framed by a ring of earth, highlighting the sense that the camera is intruding into the weasel’s space. In addition, Marty sometimes refers to the fact that a view being presented, such as a close-up of the intricate pattern of air-sac inflation of a sage grouse, is in slow motion, leaving no doubt in the viewer’s mind that the nature he or she is viewing has been manipulated and constructed. At times, Marty’s narration also works against the construction of

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the viewer as a floating, invisible presence innocent of any intrusive or destructive interactions with ‘nature’. Marty is frequently included as a visible presence himself; in one episode, focusing on Shenandoah National Park, he explains the unusual behaviour of a mockingbird by speculating that the bird may be uncomfortably aware of ‘our’ presence. Perhaps most telling, though, is another moment in the opening sequence, when the camera rapidly shifts from an owl seemingly looking at the viewer to Marty peering at the viewer through his binoculars. Although he quickly removes them and smiles mischievously, the gesture serves as a reminder that the viewer is looking at ‘nature’ through the aid of human technology and art. In addition, this gesture momentarily asks the viewer to imagine he or she is in the place of the animals that he or she will be observing throughout the rest of the programme. However simple some of these more positive trends may seem, they all help to stress that the view of nature presented in these programmes is constructed, partial and temporary. Thus, they allow us to imagine a multiplicity of ways we can connect or relate to non-human nature besides domination or even resource management. Paradoxically, it is when these programmes acknowledge the ways they create a particular representation of nature that they best work to save it; by foregrounding the constructed nature of what we see on television, they encourage us to move from the position of voyeur or colonizer of an alien, nonhuman nature to the position of participant in a natural world which includes a multitude of other entities fascinatingly different from, yet intimately connected to, our own species. And it is the perception of such a dynamic interconnection that can truly work against environmental degradation by transforming our old, destructive attitude of separation from and domination over nature into one of respect and cooperation. Notes 1. Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 118-19. 2) Ibid., p. 121. 3 Ibid:, pp: 144-7. 4. See Linda Alcoff, ‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’, Cultural Critique (Winter 1991~92), pp. 5-32; and Gayatri Spivak, Jn Other Worlds (London: Methuen,

1987), pp. 134-53. 5. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others’, p. 21. 6. See Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory’, Signs, 13. 3 (Spring 1988), pp. 405-36; Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts’, in T. de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/ Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) pp. 1-19.

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7. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 53. 8. For discussion of ways to see natural entities as ‘actors’ or ‘speaking subjects’, see Patrick D. Murphy, ‘Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice’, Hypatia, 6. 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 146-61; and ‘Voicing Another Nature’, in K. Hohne and H. Wussow (eds), A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); also DonnaJ. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14 (Fall 1988), pp. 557-9; and ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (London and New York: Rout-

ledge, 1992), pp. 295-337. g. José Knighton, ‘Eco-Porn and the Manipulation of Desire’, Wild Earth (Spring

1993), pp. 76-8. 10. As a number of environmental philosophers and theorists have pointed out, the cultural behaviours that have brought us to our current state of environmental degradation stem from the deeply held cultural attitude that humanity is completely separate from and superior to nature and, thus, possesses the right to dominate and use nature indiscriminately. One of the most well-known expressions of this view can be found in Lynn White Jr’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ Sctence, 155 (1967), pp. 1203-7: ‘We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis, until we reject the.Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man’ (p. 1207). Although White primarily links this attitude of separation and domination to Christianity, ecofeminist writers tend to identify it with patriarchy, while social ecologists see the social practice of hierarchy itself as primarily responsible. 11. Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (New York: Random House,

1992), PP. 72-3. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ibid., p. 74. Wilson, The Culture of Nature, p. 122. Ibid. Charles Siebert, “The Artifice of the Natural: How TV’s Nature Shows Make

All the Earth a Stage’, Harper’s Magazine (February 1993), pp. 43-51.

16. McKibben, The Age of Missing Information, p. 9. 17. Ibid., p. 74. 18. Ibid., p. 75. 19.

Siebert, “The Artifice of the Natural’, p. 50.

20. Ibid. 21. James Shanahan, ‘TV and the Cultivation of Environmental Concern: 1988— 92’, in A. Hansen (ed.), The Mass Media and Environmental Issues (New York: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 181-97; p. 195.

22. McKibben, The Age of Missing Information, p. 79. 23. Wilson, The Culture of Nature, p. 134. 24. John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. I. 25. Wilson, The Culture of Nature, p. 125. 26. John Fowles, ‘Seeing Nature Whole’, Harper's Magazine (November 1979),

p. 51. pp- 49-68;

27. Berger, About Looking, p. 14. 28. Rosalind Coward, Female Desires: How They are Sought, Bought and Packaged (New York: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 210-11. 29. Berger, About Looking, p. 10.

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30. Randall Lockwood, ‘Anthropomorphism is Not a Four-Letter Word’, in R. J. Hoage (ed.), Perceptions of Animals in American Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), p. 49. 31. Siebert, “The Artifice of the Natural’, p. 45. 32. Wilson, The Culture of Nature, p. 122. 33. Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), p. 85. 34. Kaja Silverman, ‘On Suture’, in G. Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press,

1992), PP. 199-209; P. 19935. Ibid., p. 203. 36. Wilson, The Culture of Nature, pp. 123-4. 37. Ibid., p. 151.

Index

Abbey, Edward: Desert Solitaire: A Season in the

babies, deformed, birth of, 201 Bacon, Francis, 158 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 51; Art and Answerability, 41;

Wilderness, 14-22; views of women, 16

abject, concept of, 190, 191, 192 aborigines, 67, 68 acetylene, 155 acts of God, g1—109

Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 4.0; Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 40, 41 see also Voloshinovy, V.N Bakker, Jim, 91 barbed wire fencing, invention of, 135 Barrell, John, 113 Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan, 135

advocacy, 220

Aesop’s Fables, 209, 211 African Americans: relationship with land, 84; writers, erasure of, 81

age of simulation, 183, 186

Barthes, Roland, 124, 127, 128

AIDS, 92, 93; depicted as homosexual disease,

Bate, Jonathan, 30; Romantic Ecology, 9, 151, 170

41 airborne toxic events, 192-4 Akeley, Carl, 74

Bates, Norman, 16 Baudelaire, 124, 125, 126; The Painter ofModern

Albert, Ton, 31 Alcoff, Linda, 219, 220 Allen, Paula Gunn, 80 American Indians, 21; as natural ecologists, 79; cultural genocide of, 80; reservations, 22

Baudrillard, Jean, 16, 19, 20, 182—7; America, 15 bauen, 169

Life, 127; views on fashion, 127

Beardsley, Aubrey, 128 bee community, hierarchy of, 61 bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam, 82

(poisoning of, 196) Anasazi people, 21, 22 Anderton, James, 93

Benjamin, Walter, 127 Berger, John, 227, 228; “Why Look at Animals’,

226 Berkouwer, G. C., g1 Berry, Wendell, A Place on Earth, 49; ‘Standing by Words’, 29 Biehl, Janet, 7 biodiversity: and poetry, 53-70; necessity of, 54 bioregionalism, 167 bioregions, 54, 59, 60; grounding for poetry, 63

animals: control over, 227; in children’s literature, 216

anotherness, notion of, 40-52

anthropocentrism, 29, 30, 94; weak, 29, 34 anthropomorphism, 230, 235 Anzaldua, Gloria, 198, 203; Almanac of the Dead, 203; Borlderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,

biotechnology, 188 bird song, 138, 139 bird woman: figure of, 134-45; W. H. Hudson’s wife as, 143 bison, extinction of, 234

199-201, 204, 206 Arbuthnot, E., 92 Arches National Park, 14, 16, 21, 22 Aristotle, 126 Armbruster, Karla, 9 Ascherson, Neil, 3, 4 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), 8 atravesados, 199, 203 Attwell, David, 36 Augustan culture, 122 Austen, Jane, 58, 117

Blake, William, 121 blank parody, 193 Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind,

185 Blud und Boden, 168 Blyton, Enid, Famous Five series, 215-16 boa constrictor, killing of, 215 body: African American, erasure of, 81; alienation from, 78; as site for battle

Austin, Mary, 43; The Land of Little Rain, 49 Australia, 66-9 Axtell, James, 212

between purity and danger, 75; black (alienated from nature, 81; in landscape, 82,

239

240

Writing the environment 83); clean, 76; disembodied, 76; erasure of,

72, 77; in nature, 75; made explicit, 73; marked, policing of, 73; monstrous, 78; native, 80; politicization of, 72; strong, 76; unmarked white male, 73, 74, 75, 76; writing

of, 77, 78

body politics, 71-87 bog land, 176; symbolism of, 170 Bookchin, Murray, 196, 197 borderlands, 196-207 borders, lack of deference to, 160 botany, and sexuality, 110 Botticelli, Sandro, 126 Bradley, Ian, 104

Brain, Tracy, 9 Bramwell, Anna, 7, 59, 60, 168 breast; in Melanie Klein’s view, 156-7; veneration of, 74 Brooks, Paul, 147 Browne, Hablot Knight, 113 brownness, 206; as assimilation to land, 203

Clapham, Thomas, 96, 100 Clare, John, 9, 66, 110; “The Flitting’, 116;

Natural History Letters, 116, 117; Natural History Prose Writings, 117; The Parish, 110; “To

John Clare’, 113; “To the Snipe’, 121 Clark Smith, Patricia, 48 Clark, S. R. L., 168, 170 classifying knowledge, 140 cleanliness, absolute, 152 Clifford, James, 19 Clifton, Lucille, 73, 77, 81-4; The Book of Light, 83; ‘Cutting Greens’, 83; ‘Monticello’, 83; An Ordinary Woman, 83; “To Ms. Ann’, 83 Coetzee, J. M., 28; Life and Times of Michael K., 3477 Cold War, 4; criticism during, 30 Coleridge, Samuel T., 212; “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 57, 154

colonialism, 41; European, 73; toxic, 198 colonization, 42 Comenius, John Amos, 211, 212

BSE disease, 5 Buddhism, 47 Buell, Lawrence, 33, 125, 130, 198, 202, 203; categories of, 37, 38; The Environmental Imagination, 32, 124

community, 25, 46; Gemeinschaft, 168; resistance, 50 conquistador enlightenment, 137 Conrad, Joseph, 135, 136; The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 137

Bunting, Basil, 63, 66; as bioregional poet, 63; Bnggflats, 63-5 Burke, Edmund, 61, 111, 116, 117, 122; Reflections, 60-1, 62

conservation, 60, 218, 223 consitutions, ordered according to nature, 61

Burroughs, Joseph, 102, 103 Byatt, A. S., Babel Tower, 147-8 Byron, Lord, 117

coral reefs, 234 Corcoran, Neil, 170 Cousteau, Jacques, 222 Coward, Rosalind, 230; “The Sex Life of Stick

Insects’, 227 coyotes, 227, 235

Cajete, Gregory, Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, 42 Camfield, Benjamin, 99 Campbell, David, 67 Campbell, SueEllen, 8, 27, 28 cancer, 5, 152, 196 Candide, 104. Carson, Rachel, 7, 203; The Sea Around Us, 148;

Silent Spring, 9, 146-64. Castillo, Ana, 50, 198; So Far from God, 49, 50-1,

201 Catholic church, 201

cattle disease epidemic, Britain (1714), 96, 100 Caulfield, Seamus, 174 charlock, uses of, 115 Chatwin, Bruce, The Songlines, 68 chemicals, effects of, 182, 192

Chernoby] disaster, 1, 3, 4, 94, 104, 192 Cherry, Lynne, The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rainforest, 213 Chicana culture, 50 child: construction of, 216; definitions of, 208, 210; relation to nature, 208, 209, 210, 211,

212, 214, 215 children, susceptible to chemicals, 152

children’s literature, and the environment, 9, 208-17 Christianity, 91-109; and environmentalism, 94 Church of England, 91, 93, 94

Crabbe, George, 9, 110-23; burning of botanical treatise, 111, 116, 121; “The Flowers’, 111; ‘The Learned Boy’, 112; The Library, 111;

‘The Lover’s Journey’, 118-21; ‘Procrastination’, 112; Tales in Verse, 112; The Village, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116 see also

landscape Crabbe, George, junior, 111, 122

Cromwell, Oliver, 93 Culpeper, Nicholas, 115 curandera, poet as, 44

cyborg, figure of, 71, 72, 73, 75 cyborg writers, 73, 84

Dante Alighieri, 153 Darré, Richard Walther, 59 Darwin, Charles, 141 Davies, Mr, of Trinity College, 111

DDT, 148; use of, 147

decentring of the subject, 28 decolonization, 37 deer, 80, 84; calling song, 81 Defoe, Daniel, 97; Robinson Crusoe, 211, 212 deforestation, 2; of the Amazon, 49 Delicate Arch, 21 DeLillo, Don: End Zone, 184; Libra, 190; Mao II,

190, 193; White Noise, 182-95 deprivileging of human subject, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 18

Index Descartes, René, on animals, 226 desert, 15, 19, 43, 44; absent heart of, 19; as image of desire, 16, 18; as location of car ads, 16; as space of individuals, 24;

Chihuahua, 44 desire: as language, 18; lesbian, 79, 84; male economy of, 77, 79; white economy of, 82 detergents, as contaminants of water, 152

Devall, Bill and George Sessions, Deep Ecology, 168, 198 dialogics, 34, 40, 42 The Diamond Sutra, 47 Dickens, Charles, 113 dieldrin, effects of, 156 difference, 40, 41, 77, 219; concept of, 40; construction of, 73; within nature, 221 discipline through institutions, 36 Disney wildlife movies, 218 diversity: cultural, 44; natural necessity of, 42 divine intervention, 93 Dobson, Andrew, 27, 29 domestic cleaners, poisonous nature of, 152 Donne, John, 23 Doolittle, Samuel, 97, 100 double-coding, 30, 31, 33 dreamings, 67, 68

241 Emerson, Caryl, 40 enclosure of land, 9, 114; at Helpstone, 113, 121;

of Argentine pampas, 135 Enlightenment, 61

environmental environmental environmental environmental Environmental Environmental environmental

activism, 2, 3 advocacy, 218 justice, 196-207; movement, 197 law, 34 Protection Act (US), 202 Protection Agency (US), 198 writing, 146

environmentalism, 2, 4, 7, 27, 202; colonialist forms of, 7; cultural, 5; fascist forms of, 7;

feminist, 140 Epstein, Jacob, statue of Rima, 135 erotic life of plants, 111 ethnographers, arrival scenes of, 24 ethnography, 19 Evans, John, 1o1

Evans, Joseph, 97 evolution, 53

Falklands war, memorial service, 92 fall-out shelter craze in America, 148, 149 Falwell, Jerry, 92 farming methods, cruelty of, 5

Duncan, Isadora, 154 Duvoisin, Roger, 208 dwelling, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 132, 167-81; ideology of, related to genocide, 60; international, 167; parochial, 167

femininity, 156, 160

Eagleton, Terry, 124, 127, 159, 168, 178

feminism, 2, 6, 7, 200, 219 see also ecofeminism ferrets, black-footed, 223

Earth First! organization, 24, 28, 202

earthquakes, 96, 97, 104; Lisbon, 91 eating, in nature, 223, 224.

fascism, 60 Felski, Rita, 220

feminine, 139; eternal, 134; figured as the natural, 126

Fiedler, Leslie, 15 Five Mile Act (UK), 98 Flipper, 221

Ebor, John, 93 eclipses, in Britain, 102

flower fanciers, 112

eco-porn, 221 ecocriticism, 5, 43, 151, 159, 178; American roots

Ford, Ford Madox, 136~7 Foreman, Dave, 202; Confession of an Eco-Warnor,

of, 8; and narrative fiction, 32; and poetry,

32; as part of postmodernity, 37; (im)possibility of, 27-39 ecofeminism, 6, 7,

34, 42, 146, 156, 159

ecofiction, 49

ecological crisis, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9I-109, 188, 190

ecologism, 27, 29 ecology, 31; deep, 60, 197, 198 (and fascism, 59; relation to post-structuralism, 27); ethics of, 219; origin of term, 59; political, 28; theory of, 28 ecopoetics, 58 ecopolitics, 196-207 ecosystems, 55, 233; concept of, 53; undersound of, 66

flying foxes, 67

202 Foucault, Michel, 19, 36, 124, 127

Fowles, John, 227 Freke, Thomas, 95 Fritzell, Peter, 72, 77 Froebel, Friedrich, 212 frontier, American, closure of, 198

fruit-bats, 67 Fur, Fin and Feather Folk, 134

gales in Britain (1987), 93 Gallagher, Carole, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, 23 gardening, 35, 36, 37 Garrard, Greg, 9

ecotheology, 168

gauchos, life style of, 136

écriture feminine, 77 elephants, 225, 227

Gautier, Théophile, 124 gender, in child’s relation to nature, 21 5-16 genocide, cultural, 80

Eliot, T. S., 63, 153; The Wasteland, 18 elm trees, 149, 160; death of, 150; Dutch elm

disease, 150 Elmy, Sarah, 110, 111

Elsdon, Ron, 103

geophilosophy, 167, 178 Giant of Karisimbi, 74 Gifford, Terry, 43, 159 Glen Canyon, 14, 15; Dam, 23

242

Writing the environment honey, symbolism of, 78

global warming, 1, 5, 177 globalization, 7 God, arbitrary judgment of, 100 goddess, figure of, 72, 73, 75 ' Golding, William, Lord of the Flies, 213

Hudson, William Henry: The Book of a Naturalist,

134; British Birds, 134; A Crystal Age, 142; Far Away and Long Ago, 136; Green Mansions, 134— 45; The Naturalist in La Plata, 134; Nature in Downland, 136, 14.4; “El Ombu’, 136; “Marta

Gordimer, Nadine, 28 Graham, Frank, 147

Grainger, Margaret, 117 Grand Canyon, 14, 16 grass-roots government, 62 grasses, Crabbe’s esteem for, 111

Gray, ‘Elegy’, 60 Great Fire of London (1666), 95, 96, 97, 98, 100 Great Plague of London (1665), 96, 97, 98, 100 Great Storm, Britain (1703), 96, 100 Green, Thomas, 95 Green architecture, 31 Green imperialism, 198 Green movement, ambiguous history of, 7 Green Party, 62 Green theology, 103, 104 Greenpeace, 167 Griffin, Susan, 6 Griffiths, Wainewright, Thomas, 124, Grigson, Geoffrey, Englshman’s Flora, Grove, Richard H., 7 gypsies, 59; Clare’s fellow feeling for, Crabbe’s diatribe against, 120-1;

Riquelme’, 144; ‘Pelino Viera’s Confession’, 144; A Shepherd’s Life, 136; “The Story of a Piebald Horse’, 136 Hughes, Ted, 151; The Iron Woman, 148 human/nature relationship, 51 humanity, as part of nature, 41 Hurricane Hugo, gt Hussey, Joseph, 98 Huxley, Julian, 147

identity, concept of, 220 incommunicability, 144 indifferent reaction, impoverishment of, 41

indigenous people, 47, 230; displacement of, 49; genocide of, 79; threat of, 42; viewed as

130, 131

115 121; weeds as,

115

nature, 234; viewed through nature documentaries, 229 individualism, 24, 47, 75 inhabitation, 40-52; and storytelling, 44; as

feature of nature writing, 42; ecologically sustainable, 45; relational, 43 interanimation, 42 interdependence, 42 internationalism, political, 167

Hélderlin, Johann, 56 Habgood, Dr, 93

Irish immigrants, shipwreck of, 76 Isle journal, 8

habitat destruction, 222 Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, 59 Haraway, Donna, 7, 16, 23, 72, 84, 140; ‘A

isolation: connected with death, 150;

Cyborg Manifesto’, 71 Hardin, Garrett, 167

Hardy, Thomas, 170; Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 14.0; The Well-Beloved, 149 Harjo, Joy, 73, 77, 82, 84; ‘Deer Poems’, 79-81; In Mad Love and War, 79 Harris, William, 102

Harrison, Robert Pogue, 60, 172; Forests, 59 Hazlitt, William, 117 Head, Dominic, 9

Heaney, Seamus, 9, 118, 167-81; ‘Belderg’, 174; “‘Bogland’, 170; ‘Funeral Rites’, 172, 173; ‘Kinship’, 170, 175; North, 169; ‘Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966’, 173; ‘Punishment’, 175; ‘Strange Fruit’, 176; ‘Sunlight’, 177, 178; ‘Traditions’, 174 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 55-6, 167-81; links with Nazis, 60, 168; “The Thing’, 177

Henry, Matthew, 97, 98, 100 heritage, repossession of, 84 Hillsborough disaster, 193 Hiroshima, 155 Hiroshima Mon Amour, 155 Hitler, Adolf, 182, 183, 184 Holbrook, David, 149 Holocaust, 159 home, 57; toxicity of, 152 homosexuality, 94, 131; in American literature, M8)

consequences of, 149 Jameson, Fredric, 30, 186 Jeffers, Susan, Brother Eagle and Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle, 213, 214 Jencks, Charles, 30 Jenkins, David, 92 Jeremiads, 9, 91-109; component parts of, 96-7 Jewish-Greek thinking, 175 Jews, 59, 97; deliverance from plague, 95 Johnson, Samuel, 20, gt, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118,

121, 122; Dictionary of the English Language, 114 Jouissance, 77 Kavanagh, Patrick, 43 Keats, John, 66, 118, 147

Kennedy, John F, assassination of, 190 Kent, Elizabeth, Flora Domestica or the Portable Flower Garden, 117 keystone species, 53, 54 Killingsworth, M.Jimmie, 9 Klein, Melanie, 156 Knighton, José, 221 knowledges, situated, 48, 140

Kristeva, Julia, 156, 192; Powers ofHorror, 151, 190-1 Kroeber, Karl, 30 Lacan, Jacques, 18 land: as mnemonic, 170; ownership of, 82

Index land rights, 68 landscape, 21; African Americans’ relationship with, 82; ‘Afrikanness’ of, 84; and desire, 16;

as female and heterosexual, 78; as memory, 170; black body alienated from, 81; black body in, 83; Crabbe’s account of, 119, 120;

genderizing of, 78; links with sex and women, 15; naming of, 76; Native American relationship with, 81; political, 81; possession of, 15, 16 Lees, Stella, 208

Left, new politics of, 7 Legler, Gretchen, 9

245 mosquitos, 66-7 mother’s milk, view of, 153 motherland, mythology of, 169 mountain biking, 14, 16 Mowll, John, 92 Mueller, Marnie, 51; Green Fires, Assault on Eden,

49-59

j

multiculturality, 45, 46 Murphy, Patrick D., 9, 34, 81 Murray, Les A., “Some Religious Stuff I Know about Australia’, 65-9 Museum of Natural History, USA, 197; African Hall, 74.

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin, 9 Linnaean system, 112, 121; dominance of, 111; ‘licentious’ character of, 110 Linnaeus, Carl, 74, 110

museums, 134.

literature: and formation of national identity,

naming, 144; of landscape, 76; of nature, 73, 75; of places in Northern Ireland, 170; of Rima,

62; as ‘leisure’, 6; as not leisure, 7; as part of ‘humanities’, 5; in confines of nation-state, 62

litter, in nature writing, 192 Locke, John, 210, 211, 212; An Essay Concerning

myth, 45, 50, 171, 175, 176; Greek, 206; of

original union with nature, 72

139 narrative: problem of, 4, 5; small, 8 National Geographic, 221, 223, 225; ‘Jewels of the Caribbean’, 226, 232, 234; “The African

Human Understanding, 212 Longley, Edna, 169

Elephant’, 227 nationality, 59, 60

Lucas, John, 9

Native Americans, 8, 234; activists, 80; as

Lukacs, Georg, 30 Macbeth, performed at Drury Lane, 98 MacCannell, Dean, 187 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 187 Macintyre, Pam, 208 magpies, 13, 14, 25 Makin, Peter, 63

male/female dichotomy, 41 mammalia, coining of term, 74 Mander, Jerry, 231 Manningham, Thomas, 98 Maquiladoras, 198, 199 Markey, Janice, 157-8 Marlowe, Christopher, ‘Hero and Leander’, 118 Marryat, Captain, Children of the New Forest, 215

Marsack, Robyn, 153 Marxism, 29, 30, 33, 178, 179 masculinity, 20, 155, 156, 158, 160, 200

Matthiessen, Peter, 198; Indian Country, 197 McKibben, Bill, 177, 189, 190, 222, 223, 224; The

Age of Missing Information, 221; The End of Nature, 188 Merchant, Carolyn, 6, 7, 158 messiness of nature, 110-23; disdain for, 75, 76 mestiza culture, 44, 4.5; new, 200

Michael K.., story of, 34-7 militias, right-wing, 24 Milosz, Czeslaw, ‘Advice’, 148

modernism, 30, 124, 137; cosmopolitanism of, 62 Montessori, Maria, 212 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, Anne of Green Gables, 216 Moon-Eye, a horse, 20 Mora, Pat, 50; Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle, 44-5 Mormons, 45

bearers of wisdom, 197; depiction of, 41; in nature writing, 79; relation to landscape, 81 see also American Indians natural disaster: lack of connection with human wickedness, 101; rational explanation for,

IOI, 102 nature, 7; act of viewing, 236; analysis of, 179; as

agent of divine will, 94, 99; as element unpolitical, 188; as empty of humans, 222; as nurturing mother, 158; as Other, 187, 189; as portrayed in TV documentaries, 222; as source for political systems, 62; as source of innocence, 71; as source of insight, 71; black,

82, 83; conceptions of, 7; constructed as pastoral, 6; contempt for, 124; created as style, 132; cultural construction of, 73; disorderly, 110-23; end of, 177, 189; erasure of systems, 225; gendered as female, 6; human-instrumental attitude to, 30; humanity as part of, 41; in Oscar Wilde, 12433; inaccurate representation of, 221; inherent value of, 29; meanings assigned to, in Britain, 8; naming of, 73; presence of humans in, 233; purity of, 76; real experience of, 224; relationship with, 73, 81, 84; romantic view of, 77, 144; speaking for, 220; traditional meanings of, 188; understanding of, 2, 71; union with, 72; wellordered, threats to, 115; white male writing about, 73 see also children, relation to nature nature documentaries see television nature documentaries nature writing, 32, 38, 42, 43, 46; American, 71— 87; author’s absence of body, 72; litter in, 192 nature/culture dualism, 71, 124, 128, 129, 234 Nature series, 221, 227, 235; ‘Elephant Seals ...’,

244

Writing the environment 224, 226, 233; ‘The Nature of Sex’, 225, 228-9, 230, 231

Navajo people, 22, 24, 45 Nazi Party, as green party, 168 Nazism, 168, 172, 176 neo-feudalism, 60

Nimbyism, 167 Njal’s Saga, 173 NMB Bank building, 31 non-fiction, 43; championed, 33 non-human environment, as presence, 37 non-participant observer, mystique of, 43 Northampton fire (1675), 96 nostalgia, 228, 230; progressive nature of, 178 novel, 34, 44; and Green ideas, 32; as triumph of industrialized society, 32; ecocentricity in, 37; historical, 34 nuclear culture, 22

nuclear fallout, 24, 147, 152, 177; ignoring of, 24. nuclear pollution, 5, 151; of food chain, 148, 149 nuclear power industry, 94 nuclear testing, 150, 203; in deserts, 23; polluting milk, 23 oil rigs, threat of, 234 Oliver, Mary, 73, 79, 84; American Primitive, 77; Honey Poems, 77-9 Olympic National Park, 233 omniscience, limited, 36

organic phosphates, 152, 156 Ortiz, Simon, 43, 46, 50; ‘Canyon de Chelly’, 48; ‘The Significance of a Veteran’s Day’, 48; “Towards Spider Springs’, 48; Woven

Stone, 47-9, 50

pleasure, female economy of, 77 Plumwood, Val, 156

Poe, E. A., 124; The Philosophy of Furniture, 127 poetic, 169 poetry, 33, 38, 43, 46; and biodiversity, 53~70; as admission of dwelling, 55 poets, purpose of, 55 polis, 172 political amnesia, 24, 81 polluting materials in buildings, avoidance of, 31 pollution, 50, 192, 205, 226; by industries, 202; in work of Sylvia Plath, 146; nuclear, 201; of

water, 154 see also nuclear pollution Pope, Alexander, 111; The Essay on Man, 120

post-colonialism, 28, 29, 37 post-modernism, 28 post-structuralism, 27 postmodernism, 7, 19, 29, 30, 32, 34, 66, 124, 159, 160, 182-7, 190; geography in, 31 Pound, Ezra, 63

prairie dogs, 223 Pratt, Mary Louise, 24 Prescott, Marie, 125 primitive, veneration for, 79 private space, defence of, 25 property: demarcation of, 68; in nature, 62

Prospero, 115 purity, 134, 200; obsession with, 142; of environmental cause, 202; of nature, 76

Raban, Jonathan, 92 race, in natural sciences, 74 racism, 22, 50, 82; environmental, 198 rainforests, 49, 55

Orwell, George, Nineteen Exghty-Four, 189

rains in Britain (1661), 96

Osborn, Lawrence, 103

rank, meanings of, 114, 115

other, concept of, 40, 41, 44, 137; nature as, 187, 189; women as, 144 outdoor activities, 82 Outdoor Woman, 82 Oxford storm (1682), 96 ozone layer, hole in, 33

rationalism, 50 realism: traditional, 49; virtual, 50

recentring, 28, 37 reification theory, 33 Resnais, Alain, 155

retreat response, 219-20 Reynard the Fox, 209, 211

Palmer, Jacqueline S., 9 Park, Chris, 104

Passover, feast of, 95 pastoral tradition, 6, 198 Pater, Walter, 124, 125, 126; Studies in the History

of the Renaissance, 125, 129 patriarchy, 15, 40, 61 peasantry, rootedness of, 168 Pepper, David, Eco-Socialism, 188 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 212

pesticides, 196; effects of, 146, 147, 148, 205 petroglyphs of the Anasazi, 21 Plath, Sylvia, 9; ‘Cut’, 159; ‘The Detective’, 151-3, 154; ‘Elm’, 149, 150, 153, 160; ‘Fever 103’, 153-5, 160; ‘Green Rock, Winthrop Bay’, 148; ‘New Year on Dartmoor’, 159;

‘Paralytic’, 155-7, 160; ‘Pheasant’, 157-8; ‘Poppies in July’, 160; ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, 158-9; ‘Stars Over the Dordogne’, 159; ‘Thalidomide’, 160; “The Thin People’, 155; ‘Waking in Winter’, 149

Rhine river, 177 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 56 Rima, figure of, 134-45 roads, battles over, 5

rock-throwing, in Edward Abbey, 20 Rogers, Samuel, 117 Rogin, Michael, 24 Rolston, Holmes, 42 Romantic vision, 30, 56,

58, 66, 77, 125, 130, 144, 178, 216; opposition to, 119, 125, 126

Rose, Jacqueline, 155 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, “The Woodspurge’, 141 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 211, 212; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 62; Emile, 210, 212

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 134. rubbish, as unmanageable excess, 192 rubbish bags, picking through, 191, 192 Ruskin, John, 59, 111 Rutland, Duke of, 113

Index Sale, Kirkpatrick, 54, 62, 167

245 Strother, Robert S., 147

Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 5 sawing of wood, 58 Schiebinger, Londa, 73 Schumacher, E. F, 54, 62

subjectivity, constitution of, 220

seals, elephant, 224, 226; hunted, 225

Swift, Jonathan, 114

Seattle, Chief, Brother Eagle and Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle, 213 secrecy, 144; in poetry, 116 Sedgwick, Eve, 15

Tacitus, 171 Taylor and Hessey, publishers, 117

self: constitution of, 42, 220; defining of, 131;

female, construction of, 77; multiple, 131; private terrain of, 190 sexuality, 15, 142, 228, 229; lesbian, 77, 79, 199 Shanahan, James, 224 Shell oil company, 5 Shelley, P. B., 65; ‘A Defence of Poetry’, 58 Shenandoah National Park, 236 Shiva, Vandana, 6 Shumacher, E. F,, 167 Siebert, Charles, 223, 224, 231 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 198, 204; Almanac of the Dead, 203; Ceremony, 202-6 Silverman, Kaja, 231 sin: punishment for, 93, 96, 101; understanding of, 103 slavery, 82 Slovic, Scott, 9 ‘small is beautiful’, 54 Snyder, Gary, 46; ‘At Tower Peak’, 47; “‘Kusiwoqqobi’, 47; No Nature: New and Selected

Poems, 46-7; ‘Ripples on the Surface’, 47; ‘Word Basket Woman’, 47 Social Darwinism, 59 socialism, 8

Society for the Reformation of Manners, 100 solipsism, 20, 46 solitude, 137; need for, 76, 82 Solnit, Rebecca, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, 21, 23 South Dakota Badlands National Park, 218, 227,

232, 234, 235 speaking for, 219, 220; of animals and forests, 220; of nature, 219 species: endangered, 2, 202; extinction of, 5, 222 (rates, 54; rates in tropical rainforests, 54);

newly patented, 188; overdependence, 150 see also keystone species Spenser, Edmund, 66 Spider Woman, figure of, 203 sport, as ritualization of combat, 185 Spyri, Johanna, Heidi, 215

sunsets, 215; meaning of, 223, 227; not quite right, 149

suture, 231

television nature documentaries, 9, 218-38; human presence minimized, 231; insertion of technical events, 231, 235

Tempest Williams, Terry, 4.4; Pieces of White Shell: A Journey in Navajoland, 45-6 Temple, Sir William, 97 Tennyson, In Memoriam, 143 tent, image of, 19 textuality, 31, 32, 34; emphasized in literary theory, 29, 30; of nature, 215 Thatcher, Margaret, 92, 93 The Ecologist, 30 Thelma and Louise, 16 Theocritus, 60

think globally, act locally, 6, 167 Thomas, Edward, 59, 136; ‘Home’, 56-8, 60 Thomas, Keith, 101, 110

Thomson, James, The Seasons, 114. Thoreau, Henry David, 24, 43, 75-7, 84; Cape Cod, 76; influence on nature writing, 75; The Maine Woods, 76; Walden, 75, 76; ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers’, 76 Tiffin, Helen, 37 time-lapse photography, 235 Tomalin, Ruth, 143 Toodles family, 113 Trakl, Georg, 56 transatlanticism, 160 ‘tribal singer’, figure of, 81 Trussell, Denys, 29 tuna industry, 222 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 199 Twain, Mark, 15

Union Carbide Bhopal plant, 196 uranium miners, 16

uranium mining, 14, 23 Ute people, 22, 24 Vale, Brenda, 31

Vale, Robert, 31 Van Dyne, Susan, 151 viewing, act of, 235, 236

stories: about nature, 73; contruction of new, 47

villages, abandonment of, 199 Virgil, 60 Virgin of Guadalupe, 200-1, 203 Vizenor, Gerald, 79 Volk, 168, 172, 176 Volney, Constantin-Frangois, Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, 61

storytelling, 44, 45, 46

Voloshinov, V. N., Freudianism, 42

Stouffer, Marty, 227, 228, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236

voyeurism, 192

Staundemaier, Peter, 7 Steel, David, 1

Stegner, Wallace, Angle of Repose, 49 Steiner, Rudolf, 212

Stewart, Douglas, 67 Stinton, Benjamin, 97, 102

Strine Shinto, 65-9

Voltaire, 91

246

Writing the environment Wagner, Linda, 151 walking tour, as source of engagement with nature, 43 Walls, George, 101 wanderers, rights of, 121

wilderness, 8, 23, 82, 214; as cultural expression of desire, 21; as place of cleansing, 143; as womb, 18; construction of, 21; nuclear fallout in, 24; urban, 80 wildlife movies, 222

wandering, 121; political overtones of, 113 waste matter, revulsion and fascination of, 1g1 weasel, killing of rabbit, 235

Williams, Raymond, People of the Black Mountains,

weeds, 115, 121; control of, 114

The Culture of Nature, 222 Wilson, Edward O., 53; The Dwersity of Life, 54,

wetnursing, declared illegal, 74. whales, killing of, 222 Whistler, Rex, 124 White, Barbara, 9 White, Evelyn, “Black Women and Wilderness’, 81, 82 White, Gilbert, 58

White, Lynn, 94, 104 White, Richard, The Roots of Dependency, 22 whiteness: as alienation from the land, 203; as path to death, 206 wholeness; longing for, 230; rhetoric of, 79, 82 Wild America series, 218, 219, 221, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235; ‘Springtime in Shenandoah

National Park’, 233 Wilde, Oscar: and nature, 124-33; The Critic as Artist, 128; The Decay of Lying, 9, 125, 126, 128, 130; An Ideal Husband, 131; The Importance

of Being Earnest, 130; Pen, Pencil and Poison, 130; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 128-130; The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 131, 132; taste for Japanese art, 127, 129; Vera, or the Nihilists,

125

37

Wilson, Alexander, 218-19, 225, 226, 232, 234;

55> 65

Wisbech storm (1713), 96 Wolf, Christa, 3

women: affected by ecological damage, 7; identified with nature, 6; susceptible to

chemicals, 152 Worden, Blair, 91, 94 Wordsworth, William, 117, 121, 126, 130, 151, 170, 212; condemnation of, 130; relation to

nature, 131 World War II, narrative of, 4

Wright, Derek, 35, 36 Wyoming National Elk Refuge, 228 Wyss, Johann, The Swiss Family Robinson, 213, 214 Yeats, W. B., ‘Easter 1916’, 171, 172 York Minster, fire at, g1, 92 Yosemite, constructed as wilderness, 21

Zabriskie Point, 19 Zizek, Slavoj, 2, 3 Zola, Emile, 126

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THE CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS ASKS FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS ABOUT

CULTURE.

Like other radical critiques, environmentalism cuts across academic boundaries and offers a major challenge to existing cultural and political divisions. This is the first book to draw together the rich variety of environmentalist positions — from ecofeminism to deep ecology — and theorise their contribution to critical theory, literature and popular culture. The first part of the book examines theoretical controversies in environmentalist literary criticism. A distinguished cast of contributors explore the theoretical agenda for ecocriticism, exploring a wide variety of issues including sexual politics and nature, the link between environmental and cultural degradation the influence of Heidegger on environmentalism, the problem of speaking for nature, Bakhtinian dialogics and nature writing, the degree of continuity between poststructuralist theory and ecological perspectives and the relations between multiculturalism, environmentalism and postcolonialism. Part two presents a green rereading of literary history. The contributors read establishment manipulation of natural phenomena as a vehicle of social control, ‘nature poetry’ as political intervention and fin de siecle exotic fiction for what it can tell us of the colonialist’s conception of ‘jungle country’ and Otherness in general. They also look at the connection between 20th century conceptions of nature and fascism and the politics of wilderness narratives. The book concludes by looking at contemporary culture: from poetry to children’s books, including an analysis of television nature programmes. Ultimately, our environmental crisis is seen as the limit of postmodernity. A sygnificant contribution to cultural theory and to literary and historical analysis, Writing the Environment will be an essential text ~~ for students and academics in cultural studies, environmental

studies, literature and critical theory.

ZED

BOOKS

Literary Criticism/Cultural Studies/ Environmental Studies

1 85649 429 2 Hb 1 85649 430 6 Pb

ISBN 1 85649 429 2 llUiqi| |

6 49429