Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place

Lenka Filipova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000448818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

The book is an investigation into the ways in which ideas of place are negotiated, contested and refigured in environmental writing at the turn of the twenty-first century. It focuses on the notion of place as a way of interrogating the socio-political and environmental pressures that have been seen as negatively affecting our environments since the advent of modernity, as well as the solutions that have been given as an antidote to those pressures.

Examining a selection of literary representations of place from across the globe, the book illuminates the multilayered and polyvocal ways in which literary works render local and global ecological relations of places. In this way, it problematises more traditional environmentalism and its somewhat essentialised idea of place by intersecting the largely Western discourse of environmental studies with postcolonial and Indigenous studies, thus considering the ways in which forms of emplacement can occur within displacement and dispossession, especially within societies that are dealing with the legacies of colonialism, neocolonial exploitation or international pressure to conform. As such, the work foregrounds the singular processes in which different local/global communities recognise themselves in their diverse approaches to the environment, and gestures towards an environmental politics that is based on an epistemology of contact, connection and difference, and as one, moreover, that recognises its own epistemological limits.

This book will appeal to researchers working in the fields of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies and comparative literature.

1 Small-scale farming and the ethics of proximity in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow

The small-scale or ‘family’ farm is a cornerstone of agriculture worldwide, constituting more than ninety percent of all farms worldwide and more than fifty percent of world’s food production (Graueb et al. 1). Yet, most agricultural financing is increasingly geared towards corporate farming, particularly in North America and Europe where it became the dominant form of farming in the 1990s. William H. Major points out that “government policy on most levels and in most places […] has been squarely on the side of the large, the centralized, and the corporatized” (59–60). Andrew Flachs explains that due to this economic and cultural transformation, there has been an increase in the use of fertilisers and pesticides, leading to the depletion of soil fertility, locally produced seeds have been increasingly replaced by global seed production, leading to loss of diversity and control over production, and the increase in production output in large-scale farming brought about an increase in indebtedness among farming population as well as diminishing labour requirements (2). While the aim of this development has primarily been production growth, it has also brought about weakening of rural communities and lowered food security (2). Flachs explains that “industrial agricultural production has produced more and cheaper food commodities at the expense of food security and local control over crop resources” (2). The dissolution of small-scale farming in the USA, for example, has had a destructive impact on rural communities, resulting in problems with pollution, soil degradation, debt, growing suicide rates and a handful of corporate companies now controlling the supply chain and pricing.¹

Despite these realities, large-scale agriculture remains a growing trend not only in the USA and Europe, but also in Latin America, Africa and Asia (Flachs 2). Critics of industrial farming therefore lament its destructive land use practices and the resulting environmental and social degradation of rural places. In environmental writing, questions of corporate farming are often addressed with respect to “the question of use”, as well as “care” (Major 59). While we are dependent on agricultural production, we cannot live without some form of intervention into the natural world. What needs to be questioned, therefore, is how we intervene, and what kind of environmental ethic should inform agrarian practices in order to prevent the problems outlined above.

In Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow (2000) and across his writing more generally, place is figured through the paradigm of land cultivation, farming and community membership, as well as a critique of large-scale farming. Berry’s work is therefore positioned within the broader philosophical and literary tradition of American georgic, particularly the tradition of agrarianism. This tradition valorises rural culture and the cultivation of personal and communal virtues through agricultural work, while at the same time critically addressing large-scale agricultural processes. It uses a language of place, rootedness and locality.² However, Berry’s regional perspective, which emphasises place as a locus of cultural authenticity, social order and personal commitment, puts both his work and life in contrast with some of the other representatives of agrarianism in US environmentalism with whom he is often erroneously compared. Berry has been critical of the pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, which was written by the Vanderbilt Agrarians and is considered a prominent work in the agrarian tradition celebrating the old southern way of life.³ He resists being qualified as one of them on the ground that their literary production has been conducted outside the regions about which they were writing.⁴ By contrast with the Agrarians, Berry has long balanced the various roles of writer, activist and farmer, and has written directly about the places where he lives and works.

The key term for Berry’s commitment to a small local region is ‘fidelity’. This prevents one from relocating to a more hospitable or pleasing environment just for the sake of one’s own comfort. Distancing himself from the pro-Southern Manifesto, Berry says:

I’ve never really thought of myself as a Southerner in a doctrinaire way. […] I’m much more local then they were. My work comes out of the study of one little place, really just a few square miles. In some sense, it comes out of the study of just a few hundred acres. The Southern agrarians […] were arguing Agrarianism as a policy more than as a practice. (“Interview” 40)

Berry insists on an agrarian ethic of fidelity stemming from a ‘study’ of place which is understood as just ‘a few hundred acres’, suggesting a direct, lived relation to a place and the land. He aims to represent a practical way of life based on this experience rather than a ‘policy’. Whereas the validity of a policy is necessarily only tested in the process of its implementation, practice derived from experience does not need an additional process of validation as it testifies to its validity by healthy land and sufficient production. Berry refuses approaches to agriculture without actual practice, which in another essay he calls “agrarianism without agriculture” (Harmony 63), because it cannot guarantee a responsible relationship to the land. In Berry’s writing, human experience, and more specifically the farming experience, is at the heart of any viable definition of place.

For Berry, the dangers of an irresponsible relationship to place lie in what he sees as an erroneous understanding of citizenship separated from any sense of responsibility to both local community and the production of staple foods. He criticises forms of nationalism and belonging which do not consider the reliance of human existence on food produced in particular places. The idea of ‘citizenship’ therefore takes different forms in Berry’s writing:

I speak from a local, some might say provincial, point of view. […] I am less than an American, less than a Kentuckian, less even than a Henry Countian, but am a man most involved with and concerned about my family, my neighbours, and the land that is daily under my feet. It is this involvement that defines my citizenship in the larger entities. (Citizenship 17)

To be a citizen is not a question of commitment to a government or devotion to a particular nationality, but rather a responsible relationship to place and its immediate community, in the sense of both its human members and the land itself. Berry’s understanding of citizenship also articulates a version of what Heise calls ‘the ethic of proximity’. His work, along with his life-long commitment to farming, is an example of this stream of environmental ethics. Berry is an ardent opponent of knowledge which is not based on direct lived experience, and of large-scale projects, such as agribusiness, that are implemented at a distance and that continue to be a problem not only in the USA but also in other parts of the world, as pointed out earlier. Advocates of the ethic of proximity suggest rather what Heise calls “a sense of place as a prerequisite for environmental awareness and activism” and link together “spatial closeness, cognitive understanding, emotional attachment, and an ethics of responsibility and ‘care’” (Heise 33). This chapter critically examines Berry’s putative return to the direct material experience of farming and cultivation of the land in order to interrogate the benefits and the limits of place-based ethics as it appears in Berry’s work, particularly in the context of the growing trend of large-scale agriculture.

Return to place

The novel Jayber Crow presents the life journey of its namesake, Jayber Crow, a young man who narrates his wanderings and life lessons from his juvenile years into adolescence and adulthood. Having lost both his parents at a very young age, Jayber spends some time with his aunt and uncle, only to be sent to an orphanage after they too pass away. Earning a scholarship to study theology, Jayber starts questioning the Bible, in particular Christian beliefs concerning the soul and the body. He realises that this is not the right occupation for him. As a young adult, he returns to the small rural settlement of Port William, powerfully drawn by his childhood memories of it. He spends his adulthood as the town’s barber. His ability to be a good listener and his work enable him to create close relationships with the town’s citizens, whose lives he retells. Because of his enduring love for Mattie Keith, a woman married to another man, he decides to commit to her despite the impossibility of marriage. Mattie’s husband, Troy Chatham, is an overtly ambitious and misguided farmer who ultimately loses Mattie’s family’s land due to irresponsible decisions. Late in life, Jayber witnesses the deterioration of Port William as mechanised and industrialised farming practices by farmers like Troy replace the more earth-friendly farming methods of the old traditional farmers.

The novel employs a first-person narrative which for Berry is not the most commonly embraced style of narration. It also features a frame story: Jayber as an elderly man living in the 1950s tells his life story from his point of view as he remembers it. He presents his recollections and meditations as a form of self-revelation, detailed in its exposition of his pain, grief and joy, and life lived in a particular place.⁵ Jayber’s voice allows the protagonist-narrator to move back and forth in time, yet occasionally reminding the reader that at the time he is writing, he is already at the end of his life. This technique provides the narrative with a sense of both self-consciousness and self-containment. Jayber narrates his story and, though he sometimes refers to himself as a character in his own work, he has control over how the narrative unfolds. At the same time, however, he never speaks about publishing his story; the story constitutes a complete narrative in and of itself, and therefore needs to be considered as a form of literary confession rather than biography or memoir.⁶ As the novel follows Jayber’s development from a child to an adult, the text also draws on the tradition of the Bildungsroman. Through its confessional self-containment, the novel primarily focuses on the life of the main character and his development of sympathy and responsibility to place through his experience.

The self-contained form of the novel is also reflected in its treatment of place. Berry’s fiction is always situated in the small country town of Port William, comprising only a handful of properties. Port William can be seen as a fictional representation of Berry’s home town of Port Royal. In an essay entitled “Imagination in Place”, Berry explains that by creating an elaborate yet small fictional town his aim was to communicate a certain sense of familiarity that he developed in the course of his life in Port Royal: “I have come to know familiarly two small country towns and about a dozen farms. That is, I have come to know them well enough at one time or another that I can shut my eyes and see them as they […] are” (Berry, “Regional” 40). The fictional place of Port William only consists of “about a hundred people” and “a few farms in its neighbourhoods” (40). Place is depicted primarily through the local relations between the town’s inhabitants.

A significant aspect of the farming community of Port William in Jayber Crow is that its existence is characterised by the absence of the state or any other larger governmental unit that would impose regulations on the town. Some minor characters sometimes represent a larger ‘system’, but their appearance never plays any crucial role in the development of the story. Instead, from the very beginning of the novel, Berry focuses on the depiction of intimate communal and personal scenes and details related to a variety of minor characters. Jayber, for example, tells an anecdote in which Grover Gibbs, a local car mechanic, attaches a plunger to the bald head of his co-worker, only to afterwards “innocently” walk around, drawing his face “around a small hole between his lips, […] whistling a tune” (Berry, Jayber 5). It is by retelling such local anecdotes that the narrative creates a sense of community and life in a small place where everybody knows everybody else. Another example of such an intimate personal scene is when Jayber speaks about his origins in the community by recalling his fond early memories of his mother singing and his father running his blacksmith shop (12). Rather than presenting general information about Port William, such as its official history or geographical location, the narrative introduces the town through such personal moments. As the narrator explains:

Port William has always been pretty much an unofficial place. It has, really, nothing of its own but itself. It has no newspaper, no resident government, no municipal property. Once it owned and maintained the part of the road that passed through it, two dug wells with pumps, and a stout-walled, windowless jail in which one malefactor had spent one night. These were all of its public domain. For the supervision of these things and the keeping of the peace, there was a town board, a mayor, and a constable. […] But all of that was long time ago, Port William would remember bits of it occasionally, but mostly it forgot. (300)

The novel does not present Port William as a community understood as a politically designated area. The passage indicates that there is no need for public ordinance; there was one malefactor but that was long ago. By indicating that the town has no government, the passage suggests that it works ‘naturally’, that is as a form of an organic community. While governments and newspapers are all human constructions and impositions on human interaction, Port William does not need them. It exists as an organic community connected to the natural world. The depiction of Port William as an “unofficial” place is underscored when the town’s history is repeatedly figured as “its ways, its habits, its feelings, its familiarity with itself” (300), rather than as an official account. The sense of community as depicted in Berry’s novel is only accessible to those characters who live in Port William and who learn about its unofficial history and present in the process.

The sense of place that Berry recreates in his narrative requires one to become directly involved in the life of place through direct, bodily relationship to it. The significance of the body for becoming attached to place is dramatised in the narrative through Jayber’s struggle with the dualistic division of body and mind established by the religious doctrine. During his brief training for the clergy, Jayber repeatedly has considerable scepticism about accepting what he perceives as a deeply disturbing prioritisation of the mind over the body:

Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little that I saw it the other way round. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul. But these preachers […] all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body. (Berry, Jayber 49)

This quote is not just critical of this conventional doctrine’s interpretation of Christian philosophy as a set of dogmas, one of them being condemnation of the body and absolution of the soul. According to the religious logic, the soul or the mind is the source of all that is good. Conversely, the body, which is used as a conceptual metaphor for the material reality at large – “the flesh and the world” – is seen as evil, that is as contrary to “good”, or the will of God in religious terminology. As Nancy Bartha-Smith points out, “Berry turns our cultural assumptions on their heads here, associating behaviours such as greed and lust with rationality and the abuse of things for our own sake” (51). Jayber sees the separation of body and mind as a major fault of the religious doctrine presented and practised in the seminary because it speaks against his experience of life and his interaction with others. This ultimately leads him to leave the ministerial school and to settle down in Port William as a local barber.

Rather than teaching the doctrine of religious texts, in his life as a barber, Jayber foregrounds direct physical contact with and care for others. This shifts the focus in the novel from one that can be described as the dissemination of moral codes to one that can be described as an ethics of care through proximity. This is apparent, for example, from how Jayber, as the local barber, gradually builds up relationships with members of the Port William community. Jayber says that through his work, he “came to feel a tenderness for them all. This was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces” (Berry, Jayber 127). The description is intensely visceral when Jayber comes to feel “tenderness for them all” and wants to “touch them”, and when the faces of his customers are described as “weather-toughened”. This indicates that it is not his carefully constructed plans that finally make Jayber feel a closeness to and a need to take care of the community members; rather, it is his work and the call of the community, in this case the bodies of his customers that produce his responsiveness which is evident in Jayber’s need to touch, to help and to shave.

The bodily relationship to place is occasionally emphasised by bodies merging with place, such as when Jayber comments on the local farmers’ weathered...