Contemporary Literary Landscapes

The Poetics of Experience

Daniel Weston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317160748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Writing landscapes inevitably occurs in dialogue with a long textual and pictorial tradition, but first-hand experience also provides key stimuli to many writers' accounts. This monograph employs a comparative lens to offer an intervention in debates between literary scholars who focus on genre and those cultural geographers who are concerned that self-perpetuating literary tropes marginalize practical engagements. Suggesting that representation and experience are not competing paradigms for landscape, Daniel Weston argues that in the hands of contemporary writers they are complementary forces building composite articulations of place. In five case studies, Weston matches a writer to a mode of apprehending place - W.G. Sebald with picturing, Ciaran Carson with mapping, Iain Sinclair with walking, Robert Macfarlane with engaging, Kathleen Jamie with noticing. Drawing out a range of sites at which representation and experience interact, Weston's argument is twofold: first, interaction between traditions of landscape writing and direct experience of landscapes are mutually influential; and second, writers increasingly deploy style, form, and descriptive aesthetics to recover the experience of place in the poetics of the text itself. As Weston shows, emergent landscape writing shuttles across generic boundaries, reflecting the fact that the landscapes traversed are built out of a combination of real and imaginary sources.

Chapter 1
Picturing: W.G. Sebald

This chapter opens with a traveller's account of a landscape. When he visited the Lake District in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote:

On the rudest surface of the English earth, there is seen the effect of centuries of civilization, so that you do not quite get at naked Nature anywhere. And then every point of beauty is so well known, and has been described so much, that one must needs look through other people's eyes, and feel as if he were seeing a picture rather than looking at a reality. (Qtd. in Drabble 7)

This passage formulates key issues for consideration in a reading of W.G. Sebald's writing on landscape. Sebald shares with Hawthorne a mode of engaging with place that reads historical narratives in topography. Indeed, for both writers, history is ubiquitous even where its marks might be supposed to be least obviously present. Just as Hawthorne finds 'the effect of centuries of civilization' to be unavoidable even in the 'rudest' (that is. most rural and least industrialized or perhaps even least modern) region Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, a semi-fictionalized account of a walking tour of coastal Suffolk, finds that history's 'traces' are everywhere 'even in that remote place' (3). The second comment that Hawthorne makes also resonates in Sebald's landscape writing. The landscape, though experienced firsthand and for the first time, has been 'described so much' that this experience is mediated 'through other people's eyes'. This mediation is. in fact, a substantial part of the experience. Glossing this passage from Hawthorne. Margaret Drabble finds that it is impossible not to 'see certain landscapes through the eyes of the writers that discovered them', and suggests that' [k]nowingly or unknowingly, we have all been influenced by the writers who went before us' (7). Though the notion of writers 'discovering' landscapes requires interrogation, the unavoidability of reference to previous artistic visitation certainly plays a large part in Sebald's work: his writing of the experience of place is extremely attentive to this process of picturing. Whilst Drabble silently converts the pictorial tradition that Hawthorne actually refers to ('a picture rather than a reality') into a literary one ('the writers who went before us'). Sebald's texts. I argue here, are invested in unpacking the relationship between the painterly and the textual, as well as the role of the visual in both. 'Landscape' is a term freighted with these representational connotations. Its investments, limits, and possibilities require some preliminary commentary here.

The role played by prior representations in the formulation of landscape has often been the issue on which interdisciplinary dialogue in this area has foundered. Simon Schama, in Landscape and Memory, found that '[b]efore it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock' (6-7). Allowance is made for a degree of mutuality between memory and materiality in the determination of place here, but after the turn towards performance in landscape studies the primacy awarded to anterior representations in this vein has become problematic. Interest in embodiment has led many to demur from statements, such as Schama's, affirming that 'it is culture, convention, and cognition' that 'invests a retinal impression' with the qualities we ascribe to a landscape (12). The same problems might be said to persist in more recent constructions. For example, Bertrand Westphal. discussing what he calls 'the saturation of a place by the text', writes that literature 'anticipate^] geography', and that '[t]he text precedes the place, and sometimes seems to anticipate its discovery' (154-5. 158). For some, this anteriority restricts present experience.

In 'Landscape and the Obliteration of Practice', Tim Cresswell identifies some of the problematic aspects of this idea of landscape for contemporary cultural geographers. The term 'does not have much space for temporality, for movement and flux and mundane practice. It is too much about the already accomplished and not enough about the processes of everyday life' (269). The titular emphasis of 'landscape' in the present book is a conscious effort to rehabilitate the term in the face of charges such as Cresswell's, and is indicative of a desire to suggest the performativity of representation. For Cresswell, the gulf between landscape and practice is at the heart of the problem:

Landscape, on the one hand, appears to encapsulate the notion of fixity — of a text already written — of the production of meaning and the creation of dominating power. Landscape is solid. Practice, on the other hand, is about fluidity, flow and repetition. It is about the negotiation between continuity and change. (270)

To overcome this impasse, Cresswell suggests, we need to establish dialogues between the two terms and think of vision, associated primarily with landscape, as a practice. 'Landscape' can thus be thought of as 'a practised environment', and is subject to 'an injection of temporality and movement into the static' (277, 280). Others have also called for a rethinking of these terms. David Crouch has suggested that 'landscape and space might be conceptualized relationally', that is, landscape theory might profit from conceptions of space as process, thus opening up 'possible ways in which landscape can be recognized as dynamic and processual through the consideration of representations relationally with the character of life and its practices' (6, 14). Much of the impetus for these attempts to incorporate process into landscape has come from the opening of dialogues with performance studies. In particular. Mike Pearson's work has insisted that landscape 'is not something to be looked at but something to be lived in', a revision accompanied by a concomitant 'shift from the optic to the haptic in the apprehension of landscape' (11). Moreover, in Process: Landscape and Text, Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra testify that process is now an integral part of configuring 'the relationship between our surroundings and our imaginings', and offers a juncture for the meeting of representational and non-representational models of interpreting landscape (20). In their introduction to a special issue of Geoforum entitled 'Enacting geographies', Dewsbury et al, record that for those engaging with non-representational theory, despite an avowed focus on 'processual registers of experience', representations are not to be discarded but instead 'apprehended as performative in themselves; as doings' (437-8). Conceived thus, representations of place are not fixed or reified.

The relationship between practice and text or image has also undergone revision in this refocusing of the term 'landscape'. Proceeding from the principle that literary texts 'are not transparent accounts of a sense of place'. Mike Crang considers that '[l]literary landscapes are best thought of as a combination of literature and landscape, not with literature as a separate lens or mirror reflecting or distorting an outside world' (46. 57). John Wylie's account of the configurations of self and landscape produced by walking, whilst focused primarily on the affects and percepts of sensory engagement, acknowledges that 'attunement' to a history of cultural meanings and sensibilities (including a literary 'romantic inheritance') 'remain[s] the precondition and the milieu of contemporary countryside walking in England'. As a result, walking in a landscape 'does not in any straightforward way constitute an "embodied" connection or immersion that is foreign or resistant to the knowledges produced by gazing, contemplating or navigating' ('A single day's walking' 235, 237, 240). In short, the turn towards considering landscape in relation to practice has not (for everyone) involved turning away from landscape as represented in text and image. Rather, it has led towards a recognition of the entwining of the two: the practice of producing representations of landscape, and the embedding of practical engagements with landscape within a history of representation. In the reading of Sebald to follow, the optic is not so much replaced with the haptic; but instead, the process of picturing – the combination of experience with references made to previous representations, and the inclusion of photographic pictures and other images in Sebald's texts – is dealt with at length.

Before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald produced four extended prose narratives — Vertigo (originally published in German 1990, translated 1999), The Emigrants (1992, 1996), The Rings of Saturn (1995, 1998), and Austerlitz (2001, 2001) – alongside shorter pieces and an academic output at the University of East Anglia.¹ Amongst these texts, The Rings of Saturn is taken in this chapter as a platform from which to offer a critique of current understandings of landscape from a perspective that looks to assimilate the findings of cultural geography and lite ran criticism. Sebald's texts defy certain classification (encompassing aspects of fiction, history. biography, and travelogue), and employ a mixed modality on the page (supplementing text with photographs and images). These factors have combined to draw critical responses from a wide range of existing academic disciplines as well as constituting paradigmatic case studies in the initiation of others (memory studies being chief amongst this latter grouping). It is the aim of my reading to situate itself at the contact zone between two specific academic disciplines invested in reading Sebald's texts – between their spatial aspects as found by cultural geographers, and a focus upon history and historiography in literary critical responses. A composite mode of reading may point towards ways of overcoming the 'different critical literacies' to which the introduction to this book has already drawn attention (Philips and McCracken 9). Indeed, it also suggests ways in which an awareness of and literacy in ideas of textuality and narrative have been productively introduced to our understanding and theorization of landscape.

Wylie has written of the importance of Sebald's texts to contemporary cultural geography. Sebald's work, he claims, 'has been a specific source of inspiration for recent geographical engagements with landscape writing', and 'has come to stand as something of a model for contemporary cultural geographies of landscape' (Landscape 207). Wylie's book Landscape, in which these remarks occur, charts the development of cultural geography's engagement with landscape and concludes with a focus upon Sebald's writing as a field in which the future prospects of the discipline might be explored. In an approach to these unclassifiable texts, an opportunity 'to develop newly critical and creative means of expressing relationships between biography, history, culture and landscape' emerges (206). Whilst this discipline's interest in Sebald is predicated on his spatial representations, critical responses from those engaged in literary criticism have tended to offer a more sustained focus on renderings of history in the same texts. In the preface to their aptly titled collection of essays, W.G. Sebald and the Writing of History (2007), Anne Fuchs and J.J. Long find that Sebald's 'writings relay a Zeitgeist' of the modern age because they display his 'sensibility for the individual's traumatic experience of history' (7). The Rings of Saturn is certainly invested in recalling the history of the places it reports on and in formulating a particular historiography. The text is replete with seemingly arcane and obscure historical matter and proceeds in antiquarian and curatorial styles themselves loaded with medieval and early modern precedents. W.G. Sebald's writings therefore offer a juncture at which these overlapping claims, made on behalf of space and place on the one hand, and historiography on the other, may be examined.

Situated Perspective

My own study draws these disciplines into dialogue. I aver that Sebald's texts describe a 'situated perspective' which reads the traces of various tropes of history and memory in the landscapes that they traverse, and thus interrogate the variant fortunes of personal and general historical narratives. As such, Sebald's work responds to the problematic 'fundamental opposition' of memory and history identified by Pierre Nora in his theorization of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory). Nora finds that we are now confronted 'with the brutal realization of the difference between real memory ... and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful societies, propelled by change, organize the past' (8). In Sebald's texts, 'memory', constructed in a complex of spatial and temporal location, provides the basis for a critique of the erasure of the individual in traditional historiography. Illustrations of the aesthetics by which Sebald's critique is undertaken will chiefly be drawn from his ambulatory record of coastal Suffolk, The Rings of Saturn.

This text is selected for extended analysis here as it speaks to these theoretical concerns most readily and comes closer than Sebald's other major texts – Vertigo, The Emigrants, Auslerlitz – to describing a specific landscape. It is geographically circumscribed and regional in a way that they are not. Whilst all four texts are characterized by spatial motifs of voyaging, The Rings of Saturn reports on a single, multi-day walking tour that is convergent rather than dispersed. Of the prose narratives. Simon Cooke finds it to be 'the most easily recognisable as a travelogue' (138). Sebald's itinerary follows a border, an edge-space, between land and sea. As such, it is the first of a variety of 'edgelands' that this book approaches, though Sebald's account traces mutability rather than offering a reified sense of interstitial space. Sebald perhaps selects the particular landscape for his journey due to the instability of the Suffolk coast and the marshy areas of this low-lying county. The coastal erosion for which these locales are famous provides a familiar model for the historiography of decline that the text inaugurates. It is within these broad parameters, themselves inaugurating a value-laden environment, that Sebald constructs a reading of place to which the mediatory role played by artistic representation is intrinsic.

J.J. Long, noting that Sebald's texts are constantly 'concerned with questions of perspective', finds that a 'recurrent topos is the desire for a stable, epistemologically reliable vantage point from which the object – be it a landscape or a historical event – can be represented' (111). Whilst this desire might be said to inform these texts, it does so as an ideal possibility characterized chiefly by its remaining unattainable. It is the irreducibly multiple and irreconcilable historical tropes that form the tenable subject matter of Sebald's work. In the texts' terms of description, what I call 'situated perspective' opens an array of tools at Sebald's disposal whereby this historiographical critique might be undertaken. The figure who variously observes, takes part in, and reports upon history is, in definite ways. spatialized and his or her perspective precisely situated. In this context, 'situated' does not imply a perspective that is stable, empirical, or authoritative, but rather is used to indicate the adoption of one perspective amongst the myriad of potential perspectives available. 'Situated' here indicates the contingent intersections of time and place at any given point in Sebald's narrative. As such, being situated is, in more than one sense, taking up a position: it does not claim objectivity and fixity, but emphasizes its own subjectivity and fluidity. Neither is a situated perspective incompatible with the mobile perspective that also informs Sebald's wandering, often circuitous texts. That The Rings of Saturn reports on a walking tour is significant in this respect. Rebecca Solnit suggests that for the walker, 'landscape moves by as a gently modulated continuity' – it is at this juncture of the situated and the mobile that Sebald's writing sits (174). In The Rings of Saturn, landscape is conceived by Sebald as a repository of collective memory (as it had been he is clearly aw are, by medieval and early modern writers before him). The narrator's choice of a route through a landscape is thus an idiosyncratic curatorial act of selection. Numerous instances of 'situated perspective' take place in contradistinction to the also present omniscient position of narration, with the effect that the former undermines the claims to universal vision made by the latter. To this end. situated perspective plays off its own instability. What is especially significant here is that this interpenetration of narrative idioms takes place in space, or in a specific place. It is the potential for comparison between narratological perspectives that a spatial dimension provides and that these texts exploit in their historiographical 'turning'.

Landscape as Supplement

Cueppens has written that 'artistic perspective', as it is presented in Sebald's texts, provides 'a unique mode of access ... unattainable from any other viewpoint' (66). The Rings of Saturn exploits the potentials that this provides for landscape writing in sustained ways. Greg Bond finds the landscapes of this text to be 'imaginary' as 'they are presented in works of literature, but also because they derive from and lead into the world of the human imagination' (33). Wylie finds them to be 'both starkly real and shimmeringly dream-like'; whilst they are characterized by 'circumstantial specificity and solidity', they also encompass 'irruptions of the surreal and the phantasmagorical' ('Spectral landscapes' 173-4). These traits suggest something of the artistic prism through which the East Anglian landscape of the text and the accompanying photographs is refracted, or perhaps, of which it is constructed and curated. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, might be said to conceive of artistic representation of spaces, of landscapes, as a particular perspective, that is, as a series of spatialized positions of reportage.

The reconciliation of such facets of Sebald's writing to a phenomenological account of place grounded in practised experience is potentially problematic. Jessica Dubow has recently described Sebald's texts as embodying a 'negative phenomenology' – a 'perceptive receptivity to absences and opacity' ('Out of Place' n.p.). Any sense of the transparency of a landscape experience is clouded by layers of mediation. As a consequence of the focus on embedded histories, these texts are characterized by an 'anti-mimetic gesture' in which 'all places are somehow posthumous' and landscapes signify 'a ground in which experience cannot take root' ('Still-Life' 189). In short, for Dubow. Sebald's landscapes are made up of historical presences now ostensibly absent from the territory. This kind of reading certainly seems to run the risk of precluding other aspects of 'the broader process of knowledging' that Thrift and other non-representational theorists have looked to reassert (Thrift 8). The phenomenological terminology in which Dubow's findings are issued ('perceptive receptivity', 'perceptual capacity') might be said to go some way towards mitigating the seeming opposition between two ways of thinking about landscape and place here. The same is true of Wylie's identification of 'solidity' alongside the 'phantasmagorical'. Even with these qualifications. Sebald's texts pose difficult questions for the accommodation of experiential and rep...