Haunted Spaces in Twenty-First Century British Nature Writing

Anneke Lubkowitz

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110678642
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The peer-reviewed Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.

1 Writing Nature: A Historical Survey

Whereas a number of publications from various disciplines have been dedicated to investigating the history of ‘nature’ as an idea and as a concept,¹ I am only aware of one attempt to comprise an encompassing history of nature writing as a genre, namely Don Scheese’s study Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (2002). As the subtitle suggests, Scheese’s survey is based on literature from the United States, which ties in with the general assumption in criticism that nature writing is an American genre, founded in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. Studies of similar topics with a focus on Britain have so far only addressed fragments of this tradition, restricted to either a particular subgenre or a limited timeframe.² This chapter, in contrast, presents a concise and critical survey on nature writing focusing on Britain, which begins with ancient natural history and pastoral poetry and ends with the twenty-first century. Special attention is paid to the Romantic era and the literature of the pre- and interwar period, as these periods are important reference points of the twenty-first century authors discussed in this study. Rewriting literary tradition from the perspective of the ‘New Nature Writing’, this chapter attempts to unravel a set of threads which lead to the emergence in the twentieth century of nature writing as a genre recognized by critics. Embedding exemplary texts in the time-specific discourses on nature, this chapter highlights both continuities and ruptures in this process and outlines connections with theoretical concepts and critical assessments where necessary.

If critics have characterized nature writing as a meeting point of science and literature, observation and imagination (Scheese 2002: 6; Finch and Elder 2002: 21; Murphy 2000: 3), it is the aim of this chapter to identify particular moments of similar contact between competing epistemologies. This is, however, not a survey of nature in literature more generally, which would need to be far more extensive. Due to the perspective of nature writing, the focus is here on descriptive or nonfictional prose rather than on the novel, although references will be made to fiction and poetry where relevant to the given framework.

1.1 Idealization: Antiquity and Pastoral Poetry

As the subject of ancient natural history represented by Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, ‘nature’ figured as ‘the nature of a thing’, a sense still existent in its present meaning as “the essential quality and character of something” (Williams 2015: 184). This inner, formative principle was connected with a purpose or goal, namely the complete implementation of the being concerned, which was, in the case of animals, the adult creature with its capacities for self-preservation and reproduction. Consequently, according to this understanding, there was no external, all-encompassing law governing the interactions of things as in our present understanding of nature, but rather, inanimate objects, plants, animals and humans all followed their own internal principles, so that there was not one nature containing all living and non-living beings, but rather many natures existing side-by-side (French 1994: 13).

The system Aristotle devised to describe the relationships between different species of beings was based on their ‘sympathy’ or ‘antipathy’ and the scala naturae, a precursor of the medieval and Renaissance concept of the ‘Great Chain of Being’³. Animate and inanimate beings were imagined as arranged on a scale or ladder, ranging from the ‘lowest’ – the seemingly simplest – form of organization to the ‘highest’ – that which seemed the most complex – each class merging with the next, thus forming a continual spectrum. The idea of a continuum between all kinds of beings and the definition of nature as ‘nature-of-a-thing’ account for the fact that ancient natural histories included not only ‘natural’ phenomena in the sense understood today but also information on human anatomy and psychology, as well as history and theories of art, as Lucretius’s didactic poem De Rerum Natura illustrates. Coming closer to the universal concept of nature familiar today, Lucretius saw nature as a global principle that encompassed the partial natures, and Pliny, in his Naturalis Historia, also uses ‘nature’ to refer to the “totality of natures of things” (French 1994: 163). Natural history thus began to anticipate the definition of ‘nature’ by Enlightenment science.

The most influential template for the literary representation of nature, however, is probably the pastoral, originally a genre of poetry describing the lives of shepherds in a rural setting.⁴ Ancient Greek and Latin poetry produced the first ‘natural’ space that would become a literary topos: the idyll, or locus amoenus (Curtius 1990: 195). Theocritus, usually identified as the founder of the pastoral genre, is often regarded as a writer who still ‘knew’ the “simple rustic realities” (Fantuzzi and Papanghelis 2006: ix) and described them in unsentimental and realistic manner, in contrast to the self-conscious idealization of shepherd’s life displayed by Virgil’s Eclogues (Effe and Binder 2001: 14 – 15). More recent studies, however, have linked Theocritus too with urban sophistication and nostalgia for the countryside or a lost way of life (Fantuzzi and Papanghelis 2006: xii).

In his famous essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795 – 96) Friedrich Schiller describes this nostalgia as a main feature of what he defines as the modern, ‘sentimental’ condition: “Just as nature began gradually to disappear from human life as experience and as the (active and perceiving) subject, so we see her arise in the world of poetry as an idea and object” (Schiller 1981: 190, emphases in the original). This observation presents nature literature as inscribed, from its beginnings, with the loss of nature and its “imaginative recovery” (Bermingham 1986: 9), a topos that will return throughout this chapter in a number of variations. As Lawrence Buell observes, in the recent uses of the term as a critical concept, which is particularly salient in the context of American ecocriticism, “‘pastoral’ has become almost synonymous with the idea of the (re)turn to a less urbanized, more ‘natural’ state of existence” (Buell 1995: 31). Pastoral poetry can thus be seen as establishing the division of city and country in the tradition of nature literature, in which the country becomes an escape from the social and political conflicts represented by the city.

Ecocritical discussions of the pastoral, as exemplified by Buell, often downplay the role of artificiality in the tradition of pastoral poetry which, according to various scholars of ancient Greek and Latin literature, was actually much more concerned with art than with nature. A deeply intertextual and self-referential genre, pastoral poetry typically describes the masquerade of song contests between shepherds and can thus be seen as displaying an awareness of the fictionality of the setting and way of living it evokes. Bruno Snell was among the first to describe Virgil’s Arcadia as the realm of art, poetry and literature, occupying the terrain between myth on the one hand and reality on the other (Snell 1945: 40). On the level of the literary genre, this translates itself into the midway point between epic and didactic poetry, the latter of which includes georgic poetry as exemplified by Virgil’s Georgics, which focused on the details of agricultural life. Following a similar train of thought, Mark Payne argues that the world of Theocritus’s shepherds, peopled with nymphs, is “the first fully fictional world in Western literature” (Payne 2007: 1). What is more, musical trees, shepherds masquerading as poets and, conversely, poets as shepherds again and again dismantle nature as art. In that sense, pastoral poetry “demonstrates the operations of fictionalizing” (Iser 1993: 24). ‘Natural’ space, in other words, enters literature as a perfect example of ‘imagined’ space with no claims to referentiality.

As the pastoral was to become the prototype for nature literature, it has proven immensely influential not only for the literary tradition but for nature writing in particular. This legacy, however, is also problematic for a number of reasons. From Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia to Alexander Pope’s “Windsor Forest” and far beyond, British poets have attempted to align the pastoral with the British Isles as “England’s green and pleasant land” (Blake “Feet”: 36). This projection has played a major part in the construction of British and English national identity, and has been used as a way of justifying its superiority towards other nations (Berberich 2008: 167).⁵ Marxist critics have pointed out that the pastoral was used to romanticize the lives of less privileged groups in society and to veil social inequalities (Gifford 1999: 2). From an ecocritical perspective the pastoral may appear problematic for having established nature’s place in literature as ‘beautiful nature’ and thus fueling the idea of nature as a picture, inviting consumption rather than engagement (Morton 2007: 5).

1.2 Sacralization and Secularization: Natural Theology and Natural History

A very different variation of the topos of nature as a work of art presents itself with the rise of Christianity in the Middle Ages. While the myth of a lost Golden Age of harmony with nature, so evident in pastoral poetry, retained a central place in the Christian myth of Eden, the fall of mankind was often not only regarded as dooming human nature but also nature in general, thus justifying that human beings must lead a life characterized by privation. The influence of Christianity turned nature into God’s creation – “related to him as artefact to artist” (Lewis 1960: 39). Animals, plants and even landscapes were therefore read as signs pointing towards a divine meaning – cragged mountainsides, abysses, deserts and other features that seemed hostile to humans were perceived as “symbols of human sin” (Nicolson 1997: 83). Ancient natural history survived in medieval bestiaries in the tradition of the Physiologus, which comprised allegorical accounts of both exotic and fantastic creatures, presenting an imaginative opulence which has continued to inspire literary works up to Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary (2012). Whereas it was considered sinful to indulge in natural beauty as pure sensual pleasure, natural phenomena could be appreciated according to Christian doctrine as long as their beauty was understood to be a sign of the magnificence of their creator (Bredekamp and Trinks 2013: 59 – 60). In this way, the study of nature, and in particular the order it displayed, could be defended as a lesson of devotion (Ogilvie 2006: 101 – 102).

According to Lynn White, early Christianity tended to approach nature artistically “as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men [sic]” (White 1967: 1206), whereas late medieval thought began to attempt to read God’s intentions by tracing the functional mechanisms of nature, thus laying the foundations for science via natural theology. The idea that the regularity and order perceived in nature could be traced to the purpose of an intelligent creator has remained influential long since the Middle Ages, if one considers the creationist argument of ‘intelligent design’. This notion was at the center of natural theology or ‘physico-theology’, after William Derham’s eponymous book from 1713, a form of natural history which attempted to reveal a divine ‘design’ in nature by observation and description, proving the benevolence of the creator through the perfection of his creation. Both John Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) and William Paley’s much later Natural Theology (1802) used the famous image of a watch to illustrate an understanding of nature as an intricate mechanism or work of art which functions largely automatically, even though it has to be built and wound up by the watchmaker.

The idea of interpreting nature as expression of a divine intelligence is also present in the influential metaphor of the ‘book of nature’ as a text written by God that has to be decoded by the believer, which similarly emerged from medieval theology.⁶ “[A] powerful metaphor” (Ogilvie 2006: 16) of Renaissance natural history, the ‘book of nature’ has come to be closely associated with science as its writer rather than its reader, and it also proved inspiring for Romanticism and Transcendentalism (Harvey 2013: 80). Natural theology’s inclusion of nature in Christian worship could be seen as a significant intermediate step in the formation of Romanti...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Nature Writing noir
• 1 Writing Nature: A Historical Survey
• 2 Haunting Nature: Place, Space and Text
• 3 The Spectropoetics of Walking: Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane
• 4 De-Crypting the Gendered Outdoors with Kathleen Jamie
• 5 Unweaving Fictions of the Far North with John Burnside
• 6 Many Voices? Broadening the Vision
• Index