The Environmental Tradition in English Literature

John Parham, John Parham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351890656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Drawing upon the English literary tradition for new perspectives and paradigms, this collection presents a broad range of theoretical and historical approaches to ecocriticism. The first section of the volume offers different theoretical frameworks for ecocritical work, encompassing a range of socio-political, post-modern and multi-disciplinary approaches. In the second section, contributors explore the ways in which ecocriticism allows us to re-think literary history.

PART ONE

Theoretical Approaches

Chapter 1

After Organic Community’: Ecocriticism, Nature, and Human Nature¹

Martin Ryle

Tensions in ecological thinking between ‘deep green’ and ‘anthropocentric’ approaches, and between ‘red-green’ and ‘neither left nor right’ politics, make it impossible to speak as if there were a single green perspective. Is the green project primarily a cultural initiative, seeking to develop a fuller awareness of ‘nature’ in the belief that our eco-destructive ways are to be imputed to our impoverished environmental consciousness? Or is it a critique of political economy, rejecting on ecological grounds the ‘Promethean’ and productivist aspects of socialism, but arguing that a sustainable society will have to be a non-capitalist society? Green politics is the place where these two perspectives collide, and may perhaps coalesce.²

Analogous tensions arise in critical approaches to representations of the natural world. Critics may see art as a means to deepen our apprehension of ‘nature’; or they may emphasize how ‘nature’, as discursive term or as material space and place, is always implicated in social relations. The first ‘nature-endorsing’ approach will take texts at their own valuation as records of landscapes and natural processes, seeing in this their relevance for what Lawrence Buell calls ‘environmentalist praxis’.³ Critics of a more ‘nature-sceptical’ turn will interrogate the uses to which ‘nature’ is being put in the text: what kinds of social relations, what differentiations between subjects, they will ask, are being proposed here?⁴

Raymond Williams, who always foregrounded social and economic questions when he wrote of ‘nature’, may well be seen as the first British ëcocritic, given the central importance in his work of The Country and the City and the sympathy for ecopolitics evident in his late (1983) book Towards 2000 (discussed below by Dominic Head in chapter 2). Ecocritics in the United States, focused more on ‘wilderness’ than on the populated rural landscape, and indifferent or hostile to the Marxist influences that have been so important in British cultural and literary studies, may perhaps stay mainly on the ‘nature-endorsing’ path which it would seem that most of them have followed up till now.

However, no one, in Britain or in North America, will regard themselves as an ‘ecocritic’ unless they feel some sense of the power of the best writing about nature to delight and instruct. Here, I argue that ecocriticism should accommodate both this immediate response, and the more deconstructive analysis which may complicate its pleasures by locating them within a divided culture. I shall insist upon the social construction of human aesthetic sensibilities. However, this must not be taken to deny the materiality of the natural world to which we may be educated to respond. To be sure, nature can only ever be represented discursively – in art and science, philosophy and criticism – but nature writing in its various kinds is a record of what cannot be entirely reduced to the discourses of culture. We need a critical map that will respect these distinct levels: material nature, cultural discourses and interventions, and the social relations which partly determine these cultural forms. Arguing for and trying to exemplify this approach, I begin with Wordsworth, and two of his critics; I end with Hardy; in-between, I consider the Leavišite ideal of Organic community’. (My discussions are necessarily succinct and allusive, and I make no pretence of engaging with the specialist literature on any of these authors here.) My contention, in the chapter as a whole, is that ecocriticism, like green politics, must be centrally concerned with the historical development of ‘human nature’!

‘Tintern Abbey’ and the Kendal and Windermere Railway

For thou art with me, here, upon the banks

Of this fair river; thpu, my dearest friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister! ...

Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain winds be free

To blow against thee: and in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me

And these my exhortations!

(Wordsworth, from ‘Tintern Abbey’)

[A] vivid perception of romantic scenery is neither inherent in mankind, nor a necessary consequence of even a comprehensive education. It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies ... and all the ordinary varieties of rural nature, should find an easy way to the affections of all men ... But a taste beyond this, however desirable it may be that every one should possess it, is not to be implanted at once; it must be gradually developed both in nations and individuals. Rocks and mountains, torrents and wide-spread waters, and all those features of nature which go to the composition of such scenes as this part of England is distinguished for, cannot, in their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or opportunities of observation in some degree habitual.

(Wordsworth, Letter on the Kendal and Windermere Railway)⁵

Wordsworth’s poetry celebrates the power of nature to uplift, redeem, and console. His work as a whole suggests, while it also seems sometimes to deny, that a capacity to love and learn from nature is a special rather than a general disposition. In the poems, we encounter figures such as the leech gatherer of ‘Resolution and Independence’ who are seen as immanent within nature. The poet may present himself as lacking something that they possess, in their less complex and troubled being. However, his difference from such figures is what endows him with the capacity to meditate on his own responses, in terms shared with his educated readers. The distinction, as John Barrell puts it, is between ‘the language produced by a subject who remains (it is imagined) undifferentiated from nature, and the language spoken by a subject who is imagined to have achieved an identity fully differentiated from it’.⁶ In ‘Tintern Abbey’ (Barrell goes on to argue, in his rather relentlessly forensic reading), the speaker’s identity as a reflective poet is bound up with his status as a ‘polite male’: he gestures towards the idea that his sister Dorothy will move, as he has done, from ecstatic, wild-eyed pleasure to a pleasure that is deeper and more contemplative, but in fact he is reassured by her position midway below him on the ladder that leads up from ‘nature’ to ‘his own articulate and artificial language’.

When, late in his life, Wordsworth attacked the proposal to build a railway joining Kendal and Windermere, he notoriously insisted that ‘artisans, and labourers, and the humbler classes of shopkeepers’ possessed little capacity to appreciate the beauties of the Lakes. Such people should not be tempted, by the building of the proposed line, to ‘ramble to a distance’ and admire those beauties. Rather, they should stay near home, where ‘upon a holiday, or on the Sunday, after having attended divine worship, they [may] make little excursions with their wives and children among neighbouring fields’.⁷ Jonathan Bate, discussing Wordsworth’s position in Romantic Ecology, tries to counter the view that he is guilty of ‘a selfish desire to keep away artisan day trippers from Manchester’. Wordsworth’s objection, says Bate, is to what we now call ‘mass tourism’; the poet argues that if the factory owners would ‘consent to a Ten Hours’ Bill, with little or, if possible, no diminution of wages’, then ‘the mind [of the workers] will develope itself accordingly’. Rather than wishing to be ‘[packed] off ... for holiday entertainment’, these more ‘developed’ individuals would then choose their own ‘excursions’.⁸

Indeed Wordsworth does not state that there are fixed natural differences which manifest themselves in differential responses to nature. He says that a certain responsiveness to nature is acquired over time, ‘in nations and individuals’⁹: it is, as we say today, culturally formed. This accords with the Kantian view that ‘a high degree of culture is requisite to the experience of this feeling [of the sublime]. Man must have a capacity for ideas, particularly for moral ideas’.¹⁰ However, cultural tastes that may in the future be generally acquired can have, meanwhile, an exclusionary aspect; even – so Barrell suggests – a deliberately exclusionary function.¹¹ If Manchester artisans, and by implication the urban working and lower middle class generally, need a long apprenticeship before they will be able properly to value natural scenes, then for the moment, lacking due preparation, they should stay near home.

In his autobiographical poetry, however, Wordsworth generally presents his own moral and aesthetic formation as the consequence of a direct sensuous encounter with nature. Above Tintern Abbey, wonderfully evoking the memory of such an encounter, he does not record that it was doubtless the well-established reputation of the valley among middle-class ‘picturesque tourists’ which first brought him to the banks of the Wye.¹² Rather, in the poem’s unfolding, his delight in nature is presented as having developed through memory and reflection, but without any formal cultural mediation, into a ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfus’d’. In The Prelude, where the formative influences of literature are acknowledged, unmediated Nature nonetheless remains both the most potent and the most beneficent teacher. The child deprived of the ‘playthings’ provided by ‘old grandame Earth’, and educated on literary and scientific lines, is described as a ‘monster birth / Engendered by these too industrious times’, a prodigy whose precocious knowingness is ultimately ‘hollow’.¹³ One impulse from a vernal wood’, so Wordsworth declares in ‘The Tables Turned’, can be richer in moral instruction than ‘books’ and ‘sages’.¹⁴

Claims such as these, deployed rhetorically to insist on the limitations of a purely cerebral education, seem to imply that the impulses that flow from the ‘vernal wood’ have a universal educative force. However, this is inconsistent with what is said in the sober prose of the ‘Letter’. If ‘processes of culture’ are a necessary preparation for the encounter with ‘nature’, then the subject who appreciates ‘nature’ and benefits from its morally formative power is already a certain kind of subject, culturally and socially speaking. What artisans and labourers and humble shopkeepers require for the ‘development’ of their minds is, as Wordsworth acknowledges, hard-won social and economic change, rather than the ministering ‘Presences of Nature’ which presided over the aesthetic and cultural formation of the already privileged boy who was to grow into the poet.¹⁵

Locally in the Lakes and internationally in attempts to promote ‘ecotourism’, public debate is still focused, for pressing material reasons, on the themes that concerned Wordsworth in his letters: the self-defeating exploitation of scenery for commercial gain, the effects of tourism on local ecologies and economies – and the need to educate tourists. For example, John Urry concludes his recent analysis of the impact of leisure pursuits in the Lake District by doubting whether ‘much will remain of the countryside’, anywhere in England, in another hundred years.¹⁶ Yet trying to preserve beautiful places is only one, relatively manageable aspect of the environmental task facing affluent societies today. These will survive only if their future economic and social development is ‘based not on the expropriation of nature, but on its reconstruction and valorization’.¹⁷ For Europe, Romanticism is a crucial moment in the development of articulate responses to ‘nature’ as a complex material, cultural object; an object of human sentiments and needs, to be apprehended in terms that go beyond its immediate usefulness. Because the capacity to value the non-human environment aesthetically is an important cultural precondition for the development of what Bate calls ‘an ecological ethic’, the moment, therefore, of Romanticism rightly remains the focus of successive historical and critical revaluations.¹⁸ What I have wanted to suggest in my discussion so far is that the ‘processes of education’ by which an ecological ethic may or may not be diffused to ‘everyone’ have been overdetermine...