Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination

Simon Estok, Jonathan White, I-Chun Wang, Simon C. Estok, Jonathan White, I-Chun Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317327677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Written from within the best traditions of ecocritical thought, this book provides a wide-ranging account of the spatial imagination of landscape and seascape in literary and cultural contexts from many regions of the world. It brings together essays by authors writing from within diverse cultural traditions, across historical periods from ancient Egypt to the postcolonial and postmodern present, and touches on an array of divergent theoretical interventions. The volume investigates how our spatial imaginations become "wired, " looking at questions about mediation and exploring how various traditions compete for prominence in our spatial imagination. In what ways is personal experience inflected by prevailing cultural traditions of representation and interpretation? Can an individual maintain a unique and distinctive spatial imagination in the face of dominant trends in perception and interpretation? What are the environmental implications of how we see landscape? The book reviews how landscape is at once conceptual and perceptual, illuminating several important themes including the temporality of space, the mediations of place that form the response of an observer of a landscape, and the development of response in any single life from early, partial thoughts to more considered ideas in maturity. Chapters provide suggestive and culturally nuanced propositions from varying points of view on ancient and modern landscapes and seascapes and on how individuals or societies have arranged, conceptualized, or imagined circumambient space. Opening up issues of landscape, seascape, and spatiality, this volume commences a wide-ranging critical discussion that includes various approaches to literature, history and cultural studies. Bringing together research from diverse areas such as ecocriticism, landscape theory, colonial and postcolonial theory, hybridization theory, and East Asian Studies to provide a historicized and global account of our ecospatial imaginations, this book will be useful for scholars of landscape ecology, ecocriticism, physical and social geography, postcolonialism and postcolonial ecologies, comparative literary studies, and East Asian Studies.

1 Introduction

Jonathan White

DOI: 10.4324/9781315657318-1

How do our spatial imaginations become “wired”? Are our notions of landscape and seascape dominated by recollections of specific authors’ writings? What other traditions or input, apart from that which is literary and artistic, compete for prominence in our understanding? What part, for instance, does personal experience play in the formation of a spatial imagination? How early and in what ways is such personal experience inflected by prevailing cultural traditions of representation and interpretation? Can an individual maintain a unique and distinctive spatial imagination? If so, how, in the face of dominant trends in perception and interpretation? Crucially, in times of an ecological turn in history, how focused are we on the survival of not merely ourselves as individuals or as a species, but of the natural world of the planet? In his 1959 poem “Advice to a Prophet,” the ecological worth of which has not been generally recognized, Richard Wilbur enunciated our use of nature as a mirror that reflects our humanity by means of metaphor. It is, by his reckoning,

… that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love. (Wilbur 12–13)

In it we have beheld

The singing locust of the soul unshelled,

And all we mean or wish to mean. (Ibid)

The poet was clearly riffing on the biblical notion of seeing “through a glass darkly.” However, for Wilbur, the (increasing) obscurity of the mirror for our humanity traditionally furnished by the surrounding world was caused by changes directly attributable to humans. Behind Wilbur’s poem lay the Cold War threat of an eventual catastrophic thermo-nuclear conflagration. Wilbur was concerned at the prospect of drastic environmental change to landscapes and seascapes. In particular, he perceived an inability on the part of humanity to imagine disasters before they happen. In anticipating the absence of well-loved species, the poem itself constitutes the act of imagining that Wilbur saw as not taking place in the society around him. Although its rhetoric is that of trying to advise a “prophet” on how to warn humans about the huge scale of difference the environmental changes will make, in point of fact the poem itself is the prophesy, and Wilbur the prophet. It should go without saying that I believe it high time a new age of ecological activists discovered this text, published three years before the landmark environmental sciences volume Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Wilbur anticipates by a full two generations discussion of what is now termed the sixth great extinction (sometimes the holocene extinction, what we might increasingly understand as the anthropocene extinction). In questioning what we should be without “the dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,” Wilbur introduces the tragic possibility of a world in which the metaphoric mirror that nature has been for humanity through recorded and unrecorded time goes missing. This would be a world in which the animal and plant species in terms of which we have “seen ourselves and spoken” slip into extinction and eventual oblivion.

I cannot answer all of my own or Richard Wilbur’s large questions in a single Introduction. Aspects of what I write here respond to a number of them, and I hope commence an intellectual dialogue with readers. The book that follows engages from varying points of view with ancient and modern instances of landscape or seascape and with the way individuals or cultures have arranged, conceptualized, or imagined circumambient space. I will come back to the excitement of the contributors’ varying chapters towards the end of this Introduction. Let me give just a small taster early. Some chapters are premised on how cultures of the past have represented land or water and people in relation to them. Examples are gardens of Ancient Egypt, China in the great age of scroll painting, India as seen through the eyes of early modern European explorers, or Britain as figured in originary accounts of the early Middle Ages. Other contributors take their focus from points in time nearer our own; whether those of nineteenth century writers such as Edward Lear, in topographical and natural sketches accompanying his nonsense rhymes, or representations by twentieth-century authors from around the globe—Sato Haruo in dealing with Taiwan under Japanese colonialism, Édouard Glissant in theorizing the nature of islands, Gao Xingjian in remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan, or W.G. Sebald mourning the destruction visited on the world both by natural forces and by human agency.

Neither landscape nor seascape is defined univocally in our volume. Sometimes, as in Baron Kelly’s chapter, landscape is metaphorically understood, in terms of the predominantly white directors and actors chosen for work in Norwegian theater. The geography of postmodern meta-utopian spaces as explored by Mary Theis is a world away from the mainly postcolonial perspectives onto historical geography, memory, and cultural difference as represented by Jonathan Locke Hart. Rather than attempt to specify one particular theoretical framework that the contributions share, or to outline a pattern or theme woven through the volume as a whole, I aver that our volume is driven by factors of difference. The worlds of landscape, seascape, and the eco-spatial imagination are not one but many, as our volume by its design, sequencing, and sheer variety of perspectives implicitly acknowledges. Much of my own Introduction is laid out through analyses of poetry by Shakespeare and others or of prose passages from our literary inheritance so intense and filled with lyrical thinking that we might call them instances of prose poetry.

So to recap: our common topic is vast and open to an almost infinite variety of interpretation. Landscape or seascape is ever-present during the maturing of our sensibilities and throughout our adult lives. We all develop a spatial imagination in consequence of what lies before and around us. That spatial imagination is ecological to the extent that we have responded to the great planetary crisis of our times. (In imagining a world after nuclear destruction, Richard Wilbur in the aforementioned “Advice to a Prophet” asked “Whether there shall be lofty or long standing/When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close”?) I want for convenience to make something of a division between on the one hand concepts that landscape or seascape imparts to us or makes possible (hence extending and enriching our spatial imaginations) and, on the other hand, perceptions that we have of landscape or seascape, whereby those spatial imaginations become more refined.

Let me offer an initial example of a landscape that acts conceptually upon our imagination and understanding. As part of his description of descending the Simplon Pass, Wordsworth writes in Book VI of The Prelude (1850) of “the immeasurable height/Of woods decaying, never to be decayed” (lines 624–25). The two aspects of the woods—“decaying” but yet “never to be decayed”—help us to understand that our spatial imagination cannot easily be divorced from a concomitant temporal imagination. Wordsworth saw that the woods of the Alps around him were decaying, but he also knew that they would always be so, as part of an eternal life cycle of plants. Indeed, not so many lines later, after listing other things seen as he descended the Simplon, he names them all as “types and symbols of Eternity” (line 639). Conceptually, Wordsworth was pointing out that the growth and decay of the woods at a historic moment in time would go on forever. The landscape might well change in subtle detail, but certain fundamentals of the life processes at work within it—here, those of decay—would persist throughout time, as part of an eternal typology. Hence my point (his really): that the spatial and the temporal imaginations are complementary; or put in Einstein’s terms, that time really is a fourth dimension, to be thought of not separately from but as part of the same imaginative act of conceiving of the three-dimensionality of space. Put bluntly, place and landscape exist not in one instant but throughout the workings of time upon them: therefore, any spatial imagining must be wedded to temporal imagining.

Take a further example of landscape—or rather, this time, of seascape that was once landscape—acting forcibly upon our spatio-temporal imagination. It comes from the modern German writer and explorer of East Anglia in the United Kingdom (amongst other places), W.G. Sebald. In an account of what he calls in the German subtitle his “English Pilgrimage,” Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn (English Translation, 1998), looks out from an edge of the land in the county of Suffolk that, before it fell away in consequence of the ravages of the North Sea, included the highly important medieval seaport of Dunwich. As he reports, the city “reached the high point of its evolution in the thirteenth century” (157): “Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness” (159). Sebald stares out to sea from one of the easternmost points of the British landscape, which has been eroded over centuries by the furies of the North Sea. Dunwich’s urban structures, its streets and buildings, have been swallowed by water, then buried under the alluvial sand and gravel that the sea ceaselessly shifts about:

The Dunwich of the present is what remains of a town that was one of the most important ports in Europe in the Middle Ages. There were more than fifty churches, monasteries and convents, and hospitals here; there were shipyards and fortifications and a fisheries and merchant fleet of eighty vessels; and there were dozens of windmills. All of it has gone under, quite literally, and is now beside the sea, beneath alluvial sand and gravel, over an area of two or three square miles. The parish churches of St James, St Leonard, St Martin, St Bartholomew, St Michael, St Patrick, St Mary, St John, St Peter, St Nicholas and St Felix, one after the other, toppled down the steadily receding cliff-face and sank in the depths, along with the earth and stone of which the town had been built. (155)

Sebald conjures up in close details the medieval cityscape that, over the centuries, the North Sea has progressively devoured and covered over. He notes that in time past the landmasses of Britain and Europe were continuous. The North Sea is a relatively recent phenomenon in the deep time of the Earth. Conceptually, we are introduced to notions of how the past may lie beneath seascapes or, for that matter, landscapes of the present. For landscapes and seascapes are palimpsestic by nature—that is to say, we only see a top layer of the many that cover over one another. Contemplation of what lies buried below that top layer takes us on time travel back through recorded and unrecorded history, eventually into prehistory. Once again, time is the unavoidable factor binding space and memory. But so too is violence; here, the natural violence of the elements. The Earth bears witness silently, but in ways that we are driven to uncover. Many of Sebald’s writings are an indirect approach to understanding the human violence that in such a short period of history as the years of the Second World War destroyed physical landscapes and cityscapes of his German birth culture. Even when, as here, he is dwelling upon English seascapes and former (in this case medieval) cityscapes, Sebald is creating ways of imagining equivalently old German cities that were destroyed by firestorm in the closing years of the War. Nazism had sown the wind and reaped a whirlwind. Sebald needed places to contemplate, such as the extensive East Anglian medieval seaport of Dunwich, destroyed over centuries by natural ravages, as a prelude to the more difficult imagining of human destruction caused by, and then wrecked in turn upon, his native Germany. Much of Sebald’s best writing is in this form of “prelude” with consequent digression; that is to say, not a direct focus upon Nazism and the wide-scale destruction of German cities that it eventually incurred, but rather contemplation of other places and corollary issues that led us to the brink of that main topic, enabling thought about it without being that thinking in outright form.¹

We have seen that our conceptions of place involve a dual, spatio-temporal imagination that conditions understanding. What affects such imagination and understanding involves more than just space and time, however. Because we are human, we cannot discount psyche; that is to say, the mental perspectives with which we endow spaces and places. Consider how, in his first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon described the dweller of the native medina envying the place that was the colonizers’ adjacent, freshly built town. For Fanon, whose writings were so seminal to all subsequent understanding of both colonialism and postcolonialism, the separation between ville (the settler town) and medina (the native town) was from the outset nothing less than a total opposition (Manichaean in form, that is):

The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. … No conciliation is possible. … The settler’s town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. … The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners.//The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. (30)

The separation here between settler town and native town shocks and disrupts conventions of understanding that are based on a language of likeness and familiarity. Note how Fanon’s initial description of the two towns is shot through with psychic positioning. In contrast with the “brightly lit” and “easy-going” settler’s town, the native medina is a “world without spaciousness,” “hungry,” “crouching,” “wallowing” even. Fanon proceeds from this point to psychoanalyze the inhabitants of both towns. He first offers striking accounts of the defensiveness of the settler town, its citizens always ready to quell with violence the least uprising on the part of the colonized. The predominating mindset of the native town is starkly different, although violent in its turn (at least in potential). Fanon describes the colonized as possessed by a hate-filled envy of the colonizer: “The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession—all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible” (39). This is an intense instance of how place, and the way that it is imagined, is imbued with attitude. A conclusion that I draw from this (admittedly extreme) example is that, because the places that we conjure up cannot be divorced from human culture, there is what we nowadays call a psychogeography about all land and all seas. The specific psychogeography of any particular place can only be reckoned by means of detailed contextual analysis. By psychogeography, I mean an extension of the (initially urban) theory that individual charting of places can radically undermine conventional maps and cultural assumptions.

Conceptually speaking, I have conjectured why space, time, and psyche should not be over-compartmentalized when considering our common subject of landscape and seascape. Indeed, space, time, and psyche are often rolled together, sometimes metaphorically. For example, when expressing his guilt at the killing of Duncan, Macbeth asks, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand?” only to answer himself with the gloomy prognostication, “No, this my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red” (II, ii, 60–63). Macbeth’s guilt knows no end: metaphorically, that reality has been transmuted into the idea of an amount of blood on his murderous hand sufficient to alter the color of “multitudinous seas” from green to red. (Shakespeare was apparently the first to use “incarnadine” as a highly active verb. The word makes active a sixteenth-century adjective and noun that represented a distinctive pink color. Here it suggests rather the crimson of the body’s blood, with the Latin word for flesh, carno, at its heart.) Macbeth imagines his hand is too bloody for “all great Neptune’s ocean” to wash clean. There can, in other words, now be no forgiveness for his sin and no end to the process of remorse. Rather, its onward effect will be to transform the world: “This my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine” (II, ii, 59–60). We have here one example among thousands of the suggestive power of metaphorical forms of thinking in Shakespearean verse (here directly involving seascape).

Much both before and since Shakespeare has impacted upon what makes us human in the ways that we are. For purposes of this Introduction, it is important to establish from the outset (the point is relevant to chapters that follow, in their tracing of many times and societies) that our specific locations within complex evolving cultures make us into persons with spatio-temporal imaginations. Shakespeare was a special case in the conditioning of how English-language cultures think and imagine, as in the above example of metaphoric play in the dramatic poetry of Macbeth. Macbeth’s deployment of me...