Utopias and the Environment

Geoffrey Berry

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317383680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Utopias and the Environment explores the way in which the kind of 'dreaming', or re-visioning, known as the 'utopian imaginary' takes environmental concerns into account. This kind of creative intervention is increasingly important in an era of ecological crisis, as we witness the failure of governments worldwide to significantly change industrial civilization from a path of 'business as usual.'

In this context, it is up to the artists – in this case authors – to imagine new ways of being that respond to this imperative and immediate global issue. Concurrently, it is also up to critics, readers, and thinkers everywhere to appraise these narratives of possibility for their complexities and internal conflicts, as well as for their promise, as we enter this new era of rapid change and adaptation. Because creative and critical thinkers must work together towards this goal, the idea of the critical utopia, coined by Tom Moylan in response to the fiction of the 1970s, is now ingrained in the common argot and is one of the key ideas discussed in this book. This development in the genre, which combines self-reflexivity and multiple perspectives within its dreaming, represents the postmodern spirit in its most regenerative aspect. This book is testament to such hopes and potential realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters.

Utopias, miniature worlds and global networks in modern Scottish island poetry

Garry MacKenzie

School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK

This article considers the extent to which modern Scottish island poetry constructs a utopian landscape. The relative isolation of islands makes them suited to utopian narratives: poetry about the remote St Kilda can both highlight and subvert its utopian potential as a model of a pre-modern ecological society. I discuss how these themes emerge in St Kilda poems by Douglas Dunn and Robin Robertson. I then situate the contemporary Shetland of Jen Hadfield’s poetry in relation to the notion that Scottish islands retain elements of a pastoral ‘Golden Age’, as is suggested by the tourism industry. Finally, I discuss how debates within ecocriticism about the significance of place and the interconnections facilitated by globalisation can be informed by Robert Alan Jamieson’s non-insular Shetlandic poetry, which is written in local dialect but retains an unapologetically global perspective.

The literary utopia, argues Tom Moylan in Demand the Impossible, is a form which is particularly suited to periods of rapid social change and uncertainty. It enables the reader to consider ‘what is and what is not yet achieved’, by envisioning an alternative society distant from the author’s own in time or space (Moylan 1986, 3). Moylan suggests that such utopias may be other worlds, past or future societies or, as in the case of Thomas More’s Utopia, remote islands (3). The locations Moylan proposes are all closed spaces, impermeable to external influences which would potentially dilute their difference, and so these locations remain ‘elsewhere’, if not quite the ‘nowhere’ that the name of More’s fictional island implies. In the globalised and postmodern contemporary world which, as Fredric Jameson points out, it is difficult for any individual to comprehend in its totality and locate their position within (1991, 34–35), the appeal of these bounded, easily-defined, alternative territories may be particularly strong. Given the complexity of factors affecting climate change, the utopian appeal of a small and clearly defined place may increase even further if its society can suggest a more environmentally friendly model for interactions between humans and their environment. However, as predictions of the effects of climate change make the future appear increasingly bleak, the temptation is to locate this utopia in the pastoral past.

Islands lend themselves to utopian narratives because they can be portrayed as miniature versions of the mainland or, indeed, of the world. In On Longing, her work on the aesthetics of the miniature and the gigantic, Susan Stewart writes that any miniature has to be an island, in that it is cut off by sealed borders (1993, 68). This creates a manageable, diminutive version of experience; we can know all of a miniature object, whereas we can only ever ascertain part of something gigantic (71). The small object increases in symbolic significance because we can observe the spatial closure of a perfect form, a particularised object that comes to stand for other instances of its occurrence. Hence, the miniature has the capacity to inspire reverie, transporting the observer to an apparently permanent world (47–48). Whereas Stewart uses the island as a metaphor for enclosure (an idea which is not wholly accurate given that islands are not impermeable), the concept of the miniature can be applied to islands themselves; in the limited space of the island, details acquire more significance. This is not just an aesthetic argument – as biogeographers have shown, islands offer simplified models of the world’s ecological complexity, enabling study of population dynamics, migration and extinction and the development of theories that can be applied to continental landmasses where species populations are increasingly fragmented by human development (Whittaker 1998, 1,4).

There is more than a hint of both utopian and pastoral imagery associated with the rural and generally sparsely populated islands to the west and north of Scotland. Whilst I acknowledge the complexity of the pastoral tradition, I use the term ‘pastoral’ here to mean both the portrayal of the rural as a tonic to urban modernity and the oversimplification of rural life in ways that overlook environmental and social conflicts. Their separation from the British mainland means that Scottish islands are physically distant from metropolitan centres of power and influence, and this is part of their appeal; they offer an iconography that is at least slightly different from that of the rest of the United Kingdom. Lewis-born poet Kevin MacNeil, in his introduction to a recent anthology of Scottish island poetry, contends that this ‘sense of being “other” […], removed from the heart of things’ enables the islander to become an observer of mainstream British culture, able to offer critique and comment from the periphery ‘where opposites clash or converge, where creativity and danger are at their most alive’ (2011, xxi). Both islands and their people are, therefore, given utopian potential by MacNeil. While his point is primarily about legitimising alternative cultural and linguistic traditions that are marginal to (but hardly completely separate from) dominant British cultural discourse, he makes this point by appealing to the image of Scottish islands that is most potent within that discourse. The phrase ‘clash and converge’ carries the suggestion of the sublime Hebrides of the Romantic imagination, with crashing waves and towering cliffs. He also overplays marginality, since cultural differences and physical distance have been made less significant by modern communications and media as well as by migration. The problem of perspective, as so often in writing about rural Britain, emerges here – MacNeil’s argument both critiques and reinforces the notion of island peripherality.

For the visitor, the Scottish islands offer such abstractions as isolation, a slower pace of life and beautiful scenery: the website of VisitScotland, the national tourist board, promises that ‘you can experience the tranquillity of island life’ in ‘nature’s paradise’. This lure has been potent for a long time. As early as 1730, in the Autumn section of The Seasons, James Thomson praises the ‘naked melancholy Isles’ on which the ‘harmless Native [tends] his small Flock’. This ‘Shepherd’s sea-girt Reign’ is remote, sublime and (despite the typically bad weather) characterised by the simple pastoral life of its inhabitants (1981, 178–179). This perspective has long been problematic: in 1773, Boswell and Johnson toured the Scottish Highlands and Islands and had their expectations challenged by the social and environmental upheaval, brought about by changes in rural land use, that they witnessed. Johnson’s record of the trip meditates upon the material and intellectual needs of the Highland peasantry rather than celebrating their pastoral simplicity (1984, 102–103). Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, with tourists flocking to the Highlands and Islands to experience for themselves the landscape of Romantic fiction and poetry, the first cruise ships sailed to the most distant of the Outer Hebrides, St Kilda, seeking a glimpse of the life outlined by poets like Thomson.

For those whose everyday concerns are located in this landscape, talk of tranquillity and paradise can mask social and environmental concerns. In 1939, Shetland-based poet Hugh MacDiarmid bombastically declared that he was ‘all for the de-Thibetanisation [sic] of the Scottish Highlands and Islands’, meaning that these regions should not merely be preserved as retreats in which to cultivate an enlightened state of mind (18). He also argued that greater autonomy would allow the outlying islands of Britain to pursue development that was alternative to British political norms and so bring about a radical, even utopian, change (6). In the 1980s, Iain Crichton Smith, another Lewis-born poet, used his essay ‘Real People in a Real Place’ to condemn what he saw as the falsehood of the tranquil Hebridean paradise, home to Gaelic-speaking people patronised in films such as Whisky Galore as either ‘noble savage[s]’ or like ‘little children’ unsuited to the demands of the modern, urban ‘real world’ (1986, 14–15). Such patronage, he says, relies on the assumption that these ‘natives’ have never actively chosen to live where they do – otherwise they would have relocated to the ‘real world’. Instead, they ‘must be considered as having always lived in this enchanted unreal world, with its mountains and its lochs and its sunsets’ (15). Smith argues that the portrayal of the Hebrides in tourist literature and in the songs and stories of émigrés obscures the ‘difficult’ living conditions of a place which ‘may have been a home but was never an Eden’ (18). He contests the construction of the sentimental Scottish island in his poetry as well as his prose. For example, ‘Poem of Lewis’ embraces what Terry Gifford has called anti-pastoral elements: bleak island landscapes in this ‘black north’ are home to equally bleak Calvinist dogma by which poetry, compassion and gaiety are ‘like a shot bird’ unable to take flight (Smith 2011, 3). In another poem simply called ‘Lewis’, the ‘eternal whine’ of the wind is a dominant and recurring image, heard across an island where exhausted elderly people work the land in bad weather (256). To quote Gifford’s summary of Matthew Arnold’s anti-pastoralism, ‘the natural world can no longer be constructed as “a land of dreams”’ (1999, 120). Smith argues that Scottish islands should not be seen as pastoral utopias. As I will discuss below, contemporary poets such as Jen Hadfield and Robert Alan Jamieson continue to negotiate more nuanced perspectives on island life and landscape in their work.

As these comments show, there is a conflict established in writing about Scottish islands between an idealised construction of social and ecological relations and reactions against it. This may be the case in all writing about rural Britain as it wrestles with its pastoral heritage. Island writing is different, however, because its subject lends itself as a microcosm for wider environmental and social concerns – whether these are utopian aspirations, biogeographical research or arguments about pastoral constructs. At the same time, the Scottish islands should not be seen as isolated ‘elsewheres’, as they remain part of the British archipelago and retain cultural connections with places across the United Kingdom and the world. Much of the poetry from and about the islands offers close observation of human and non-human ecology, but retains a resolutely outward-looking gaze. This simultaneous separation and interconnection makes them an appropriate locus for consideration in debates about whether environmental concerns should best be understood through proximity to place or through embracing global networks of communication and ideas. I will look first at the utopian potential of islands in poetry about St Kilda, before turning to work that embraces both the local and the global.

Utopian St Kilda

In some ways, the archipelago of St Kilda is the exemplar of the Scottish island group: difficult to reach, dramatically beautiful, endowed with abundant birdlife and rare sub-species and culturally distinct from metropolitan Britain. Now a dual UNESCO World Heritage Site recognised for both its ecological and cultural significance, St Kilda is a tourist destination of international importance. Like many other Scottish islands, it was an enclave for Gaelic culture and language marginalised from the British, and even Scottish, mainstream, but its small population, squeezed by emigration and changes detrimental to the sustainability of life there, requested to be evacuated and were entirely relocated to the mainland in 1930. St Kilda retains a hold on the popular imagination: books such as Tom Steel’s The Life and Death of St Kilda, Charles Maclean’s Island on the Edge of the World and Donald Gillies’ and John Randall’s The Truth about St Kilda have speculated on the decline of this island society and have been frequently reprinted.

Unsurprisingly, St Kilda is also an appealing subject for modern Scottish poetry, which either embraces or revises its romantic allure. In his poem ‘St Kilda’s Parliament: 1879–1979’, first published in 1980, Douglas Dunn imagines a photographer looking back at his 1879 picture of a gathering of islanders with the benefit of a century of hindsight (2003, 69–71). His subjects do not live a life of pastoral tranquillity – their lifestyles are determined by the environment in which they live, the ‘roaring gales’, the ‘diet of solan goose and eggs’, and ‘their companionship with rock’ (69). These factors, the photographer speculates, inform the expressions on the men’s faces as they watch the cameraman. Despite their shyness, and physical similarities arising from the small gene pool, the observer comments that ‘each is individual’: his seeming intention is to not cast each islander as a ‘type’ or to come to any firm conclusions about whether these are ‘Wise men or simpletons’ (69). In other words, his description attempts to avoid the elision of difference between rural people which Raymond Williams sees as a hallmark of pastoral poetry (1973, 257), and which is condemned in Smith’s call for literary attention to be given to the Hebrides’ ‘real people’.

In Dunn’s poem there is, however, a tension between this aim and its success: the islanders are still repeatedly referred to as a group, as ‘they’ and ‘them’. Verbs such as ‘look’ and ‘stare’ dominate over more intimate forms of connection. None of the islanders speak in the poem, but watch the camera silently ‘like everybody’s ancestors’, thus becoming an image of archetypal humans, representatives of the race (70). The speaker is not one of the St Kildans, nor can he speak for them: he admits that he cannot understand their Gaelic speech and can only speculate as to what their expressions mean. Their intimate knowledge of their islands’ ecology, from the huge gannetries the community relied upon for food to the indigenous sub-species of the tiny ‘St Kilda mouse and St Kilda wren’, is doomed to ‘fall into the texts of specialists’ (71). There is a great deal of distancing going on in the poem, and this effect is furthered by the overall conceit: the speaker is looking at a photograph, not the place itself, and is looking from a century away.

Such distance befits the elegiac tone of a poem about an isolated community which has ceased to exist except in old photographs. Distance, however, also gives this poem its utopian feel. Although poverty is shown to afflict the islanders, Dunn still depicts a society uncorrupted by class inequalities that are reinforced by indicators of education and refinement, by ‘Hierarchies of cuisine and literacy’ (70). Instead of economic growth, the speaker argues that these late nineteenth-century people desire only to maintain their ‘eternal/Casual husbandry’, their long-established subsistence economy developed in sympathy with their fragile and demanding environment (70). The speaker juxtaposes this minute island civilisation with atrocities elsewhere, from the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 to the destruction of European cities in twentieth-century wars (71). The implication is that St Kilda offered an alternative, more egalitarian, environmentally sustainable model for society, or at least represents the potential for that society to be realised. The title of the poem, referring to the daily gathering of workers to decide the day’s work, also suggests devolved regional government and alludes to the Scottish devolution referendum of 1979. The speaker in the poem uses St Kilda as an elsewhere from which to critique a century of western civilisation, and in particular contrasts its apparent ideals with the poet’s contemporary British society.

Other more recent poetic accounts of St Kilda are less utopian in outlook. As Edna Longley (2010, 151) notes, Don Paterson’s ‘St Bride’s: Sea-Mail’ can be read as a ‘dystopian riposte’ to Dunn’s St Kilda, in which islanders over-exploit their environment by using bird carcasses for sport until the population on which they depend is wiped out (Paterson 2003, 2–3). In a similar vein, Robin Robertson’s ‘Law of the Island’ describes the sadistic punishment enacted by another St Kilda-like community. A man is bound and floated in the sea, weighted down so that all but his head is submerged. Live mackerel are tied in front of his eyes, and the islanders wait on the shore for a gannet to dive from high above and spear the fish (2010, 33). An admittedly eco-friendly death penalty, this image subverts any idea that islanders live in a paradisal utopia.

It is, however, another of Robertson’s poems that offers the least fanciful vision of St Kilda, one which suggests a human ecology based on familiarity and intense locality. In ‘Leaving St Kilda’, the speaker is watching the archipelago as he departs in the 1930 evacuation (2010, 25–29). There is no history or analysis in the poem, except what is contained in the place names and physical description of the island, which are both incredibly rich. Every cleft and rise in the landscape seems to be named, either in Gaelic, English or both, and these names signify something of the natural and human history of the place. In a moving litany, the speaker names many such landmarks, including ‘Stack of the Guillemot’, ‘Cleft of the Seals’ and ‘Conachair the Roarer’ (25). Another place, ‘Ruaival’, is translated as ‘the Red Fell, pink with thrift’, the coastal wildflower whose name may also be alluding here to the necessary frugality of life in St Kilda (27). An almost erotic familiarity with his environment is demonstrated in the speaker’s naming, a sensation enhanced by the fact that several geographical features are named after parts of the body – the ‘Mouth of the Cleft’, ‘The Heel’, the ‘Dale of the Breast’ (26, 27). Many of the names convey information about which animals, birds...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Utopias, miniature worlds and global networks in modern Scottish island poetry
• 2. (Mis)Reading Hardy: ‘Wessex’ as green imaginary
• 3. Utopian Zionist development in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland
• 4. ‘The Republic of Arborea’: trees and the perfect society
• 5. Hope of a hopeless world: eco-teleology in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
• 6. Genre, utopia, and ecological crisis: world-multiplication in Le Guin’s fantasy
• 7. The Biologisation of Ecofeminism? On Science and Power in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time
• 8. Afterword: the utopian dreaming of modernity and its ecological cost
• Index