Michael Branch: Ecocriticism: The Nature of Nature in Literary Theory and Practice
In his study of primitivism in antiquity,
Arthur Lovejoy observes that "one of the strangest, most mighty and most
power elements in Western thought is the use of the term 'nature' to express
the standard of human values, the identification of the appropriate with that
which is 'natural' or 'according to nature’. There has traditionally been as
little consensus about what constitutes the "natural" as there has
been about what constitutes the "good." Considering the sixty-six
meanings of nature which Lovejoy gives as proof for the polysemous nature of
"nature", it is handy to admire the medieval notion of libri naturae,
or the e book of nature. Indeed, no different textual content has been so
broadly read, so little understood, so frequently invoked, and so successful of
sustaining the range of interpretations projected upon it by way of human want
and imagination. Each of the sixty-six meanings Lovejoy cites is each a
department in the genealogy of an idea and a second in the records of our
development of surroundings and our relationship to it. This essay is involved
generally with the sixty-seventh meaning of nature with how cutting-edge
ecophilosophy represents so vital an improvement in the evolution of our
thoughts about nature, and with how ecological recognition is coming to be
mirrored in current literary concept and practice.
Ecosophy is itself a constellation of complex
and sometimes contradictory ideas not a sixty-seventh meaning so much as an
exciting discursive climate in which a new conception of our relationship to
nature is clearly emergent. Although ecological science has flourished in the
late twentieth century, it is the metaphysical implications of ecology which
are primarily responsible for the recent, unprecedented interest in ecological
thinking. Only in the last twenty years has an awareness of such thinking
entered the popular consciousness in America. Only in the last ten years have we
begun in earnest to develop and debate philosophical and ethical implications
of ecology, and only in the last few years has literary scholarship under the
aegis of "ecocriticism “begun to explore constructions of environment in
literary texts and theoretical discourse.
Ecosophical thinking has already begun to exert
an influence upon the way literary texts are created, interpreted, and taught.
Ecosophical critiques of the humanities' relative unresponsiveness to
environmental issues are being amplified, and there is a greater acknowledgment
of the need for environmental education throughout the humanities. As
sensitivity to environmental problems continues to grow, literary theory and
criticism entrenched as they are in related social and political contexts have
increasingly come to reflect this sensitivity. As a measure of our culture's
aesthetic sensibility and as a response to the changing circumstances of our
lives, contemporary literature has also begun to demonstrate increasing
environmental concern.
There are, however, better and older reasons
for the influence of environmental awareness upon literary studies. Although
ecosophical thinking sometimes appears unprecedented, there is a strong
tradition of such thinking within the domain of literary art. First, questions
about the proper role of humans in the cosmic scheme have always engaged the
literary imagination, and concerns about maintaining or restoring a right
relationship to nature are both thematically and symbolically present in the
literature of every culture. For example, when Oedipus Rex opens with a plague
upon the land, or The Bible begins with Adam and Eve's expulsion from the
paradisiacal garden, or The Divine Comedy starts with Dante lost in the rank
wildness of the dark wood, we understand that the ethical propriety of
individual action is metaphorically conceived of in terms of the health and
balance of nature. Second, literature has always struggled with questions of
value comparable to those being asked by ecosophy. For example: should humans
be valued as creations of God, as Milton might suggest, as creations of nature,
as Rousseau might suggest, or as creations of culture, as Henry James might
suggest? Should wilderness be feared, as it was by Puritan exegetes, studied
scientifically, as it was by Enlightenment rationalists, or revered, as it was
by Romantic poets? Third, literature has always been extremely concerned with
the creation and recreation of a sense of place. For example, Frost's New
England and Faulkner's Mississippi are the subjects rather than simply the
settings of their work. Fourth, a great deal of literature has dealt explicitly
with nature, whether to speculate upon our place within it, or to explore and
express its beauty irrespective of human concerns. Both ecosophy and literature
are born of a meeting between nature and culture: both deeply explore and often
deeply question the relationships between humans and their natural
surroundings.
Historically, literature has exerted a
tremendous influence upon our changing conceptions of natural systems and our
role within them. Homer provided his age with a vision of nature as a stage
upon which gods and heroes enacted a cosmic drama. The classical ideas of
nature's plenitude and the human place in nature's hierarchical system were
formulated by Plato and Aristotle, respectively. The work of Hellenistic
authors including Virgil and Horace first introduced the notion that nature
exists as a serene retreat from the artificial environs of the city. During the
middle ages, authors from Augustine to Aquinas promulgated the orthodox
Christian view that nature was primarily significant as tangible evidence of
God's design. Renaissance and early seventeenth-century writers such as Bacon
and Descartes accelerated the emergence of the modern world view by applauding
human control over natural forces. In the eighteenth century, Robert Bruns’s
poetry and Gilbert White's natural history helped establish more congenial
attitudes toward nature during the Age of Reason. In the nineteenth century,
continental, English, and American romantic literature from Goethe to
Wordsworth to Emerson led the criticism of industrial culture's hegemonic view
of nature as mere commodity. And in the twentieth century, the most eloquent
voices for an ecologically integrative vision of nature have come from literary
artists as diverse as D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, John Muir, and Edward
Abbey.
Literature has always conditioned our
philosophical understanding of nature. Hence literary theory and practice also have
a role in shaping our cultural constructions of environment. The phrases like
the beautiful, the picturesque, the sublime, the scenic, the wild, etc. show
the aesthetic categories by which our feelings for nature are understood. For
the early Greeks, the work of art was itself the central metaphor for nature.
Applying the ecosophical literary theory, a literary text might actually be
likened to an ecosystem: it is a functional whole whose purposes are
accomplished through integration of constituent elements. We continuously
search it for knowledge of who we are and how to live in the world. Literature
has so often provided the nexus between the interlocking contexts of nature and
culture. Ecosophy’s new ideas about our relationship to the environment have
begun to influence our critical approaches to literary texts.
Ecosophy and Poststructuralist Literary Theory.
Both theorists find similarity in the use of
the word- ‘intertextuality’. Ecosophers locate value in natural wholes, and in
the interrelationships, which comprise them. Similarly, poststructuralists such
as Stanley Fish locate meaning within the context of a particular discourse
community, and deny that it may exist independently of such a context. When
Saussure maintains that the meaning of words exists only as a function of their
differences from other words, he reinforces ecologist Paul Shepard’s contention
that the relationships among things are as real as the things. When Derrida
asserts that signification is achieved relationally through a play of
signifiers, he anticipates ecosophist Neil Evernden’s claim that the self is
created by a system of natural signifiers that “there is no such thing as an
individual, only an individual-in-context. Whether in a linguistic or an
ecosystemic context, no individual element may be understood in isolation from
the generative and defining context of the systemic whole.
In post structuralist theory, emphasis upon
contexted discourse insists that all readings are situated in a variety of
interpenetrating contexts, that our interpretations of literary texts are
relationally constructed rather than hermeneutically revealed. According to
poststructuralists, the locus of literary meaning resides neither in the reader
nor in the text, but resides indeterminately in the contextual interpenetration
of the two.
Ecosophy challenges the assumption of
objectivity by which human readers have interpreted the text of nature. It
points to tree as an example. In addition to providing the paper which is the
physical medium of this article, a tree is also a bird’s way of securing
shelter, the soil’s way of preventing its being washed to the sea. If we
interpret the tree to mean only dollars or furniture or firewood, we have
misread the tree by ignoring the variety of other contexts which define its
meaning and value. Thus, ecophilosophy mirrors literary theory in calling for
an acknowledgment that meaning and value are determined through negotiated
patterns of interrelationship rather than claims of objectivity.
Both post structuralist theory and ecosophy
object to a certain kind of authority. Post structuralist theory argues that
this unjust authority stems from a kind of “presence”, while ecosophy holds
that it has its source in anthropocentrism. Post structuralist theory wishes to
replace privileged discourse of all kinds with a concept of contextual
discourse which better represents a plurality of voices. A comparable impulse
is clearly visible in ecosophy’s wish to replace anthropocentricism with an
affirmation of the value of ecosystemic wholes. It views the decentering of the
human subject as an affirmation and as a liberation of life which results in a
sense of interrelationship rather than a pattern of domination.
Ecologizing Literary Studies
Eco critic Cheryll Glotfelty offers that ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between human culture and the material world, between the human and the nonhuman. Ecological literary criticism focuses specifically upon the cultural elements, language and literature and their relationship to the environment.
Many Eco critics have catalyzed the
“ecologizing” of literary studies by exploring the merits of the American
nature writing tradition. The term “nature writing” now refers to the rich
corpus of literature which takes nature, or the relationship between human and non-human
nature, as its primary focus. As a discipline in the humanities, literary
studies have traditionally been informed by a variety of anthropocentric
assumptions about the centrality of humans in the enactment and authorization
of literary texts. Under the influence of ecosophical thinking which is now
entering the academy through numerous disciplines, literary scholars are
presently using nature writing to question the very assumptions which have
resulted in its critical neglect.
Peter Fritzell’s ‘Nature Writing and America,
Essays on a Cultural Type’ (1990) argues that writing must be seen as an
organic activity, as an artifact of the psychobiotic needs of the human
organism.
Scott Slovic’s ‘Seeking Awareness in American
Nature Writing’ (1992) employs environmental psychology to examine
environmental consciousness and the ways in which nature writers attempt to
inspire this consciousness among their readers.
Critics Karen Warren, Patrick Murphy and Jim
Cheney have suggested provocative ways in which ecofeminist critical
perspectives can enhance the ecosophical sensitivity of literary studies
generally.
Scott Slovic and Terrell Dixon have recently
edited a reader for the undergraduate composition courses, entitled ‘Being in
the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers, and many teachers are
documenting successful experiments using environmental writing in composition
as well as literature courses.
The recent formation of ‘The Association for
the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) further suggests that the
ecosophical thinking which is already on the threshold of literary studies has
begun to influence the way literature sees the environment and the way we as
critics see the environment in and of literature.
Ecocriticism shifts critical focus from social
relations toward natural relationships, and views the individual as a member of
ecosystemic as well as human patterns of organization. Ecocriticism values
highly the literary “sense of place”, not as a setting but as an essential
expression of bonding with or alienation from a specific natural context. It
looks to literature to provide speculation upon the relationship between human
and nonhuman nature, and to suggest ways in which that relationship might be
reinterpreted or reformed. It wishes to demonstrate how elements of literary
texts work together, rather than how they may be taken apart. Ecocritics take
seriously both the spiritual consequences of nature and the moral consequences of
its violation.
Ecocriticism exists in constellation with and
often in tremulous suspension between the post-modern intellectual movements of
post structuralist literary theory and contemporary ecophilosophy. In order for
ecocriticism to provide a meaningful framework for students of literature and
the environment, ecocritics must wrestle with a simple paradox, which might be
stated this simple way: “nature” is both a cultural construct and a grounding
reality.
When Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine and Darwin
wrote of “nature’, they meant very different things by the term; and as current
political battles over land use constantly remind us, there is no consensus
about the definition of nature even within our own historical moment. As a 67th
interpretation of nature in text and theoretical discourse, ecosophical
criticism must attempt to chart a course away from our culture’s destructive
and self- destructive relationship with the natural world.
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