Landscape and Literature 1830-1914

Nature, Text, Aura

R. Ebbatson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137330437
• eBook ISBN: 9781137330444
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This study examines the vital centrality of 'readings' of nature in a variety of literary forms in the period 1830-1914. It is exploratory and original in approach, stressing the philosophical and cultural implications in a range of texts from Tennyson, Hardy, Jefferies and Thomas.

Part I

Tennysonian

1

‘The Sea-Fairies’: The Sirens and the Administered Society

Consideration of the literary textuality of nature might aptly commence with an Odyssean seascape which would prove seminal for European culture:

Slow sailed the weary mariners and saw,

Betwixt the green brink and the running foam,

Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest

To little harps of gold; and while they mused

Whispering to each other half in fear,

Shrill music reached them on the middle sea.

Whither away, whither away, whither away? fly no more.

Whither away from the high green field, and the happy blossoming shore?

Day and night to the billow the fountain calls:

Down shower the gambolling waterfalls

From wandering over the lea:

Out of the live-green heart of the dells

They freshen the silvery-crimson shells,

And thick with white bells the clover-hill swells

High over the full-toned sea;

O hither, come hither and furl your sails,

Come hither to me and to me:

Hither, come hither and frolic and play;

Here it is only the mew that wails;

We will sing to you all the day:

Mariner, mariner, furl your sails,

For here are the blissful downs and dales,

And merrily, merrily carol the gales,

And the spangle dances in bight and bay,

And the rainbow forms and flies on the land

Over the islands free;

And the rainbow lives in the curve of the sand;

Hither, come hither and see;

And the rainbow hangs on the poising wave,

And sweet is the colour of cove and cave,

And sweet shall your welcome be:

O hither, come hither, and be our lords,

For merry brides are we:

We will kiss sweet kisses, and speak sweet words:

O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten

With pleasure and love and jubilee:

O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten

When the sharp clear twang of the golden chords

Runs up the ridgèd sea.

Who can light on as happy a shore

All the world o’er, all the world o’er?

Whither away? listen and stay: mariner, mariner, fly no more.¹

In this early poem, composed in 1830 and somewhat revised in the later 1853 version, Tennyson depicts Odysseus’s ‘weary mariners’ becoming infatuated by the seductive ‘Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest/To little harps of gold’ of the Sirens (ll. 3–4) who call to the sailors with promise of erotic bliss:

O hither, come hither and furl your sails,

Come hither to me and to me:

Hither, come hither and frolic and play;

Here it is only the mew that wails;

We will sing to you all the day:

(ll. 16–20)

This somewhat overlooked text potently suggests, as A. A. Markley discerns, that ‘the situation is not as innocuous as it may seem to be to the sailors’,² and in a fertile discussion of Homer’s influence on Tennyson, John Holmes remarks that his Homeric poems ‘not only represent temptation’ but in practice ‘effect it’. That is to say, this early group of poems ‘invite us to decide whether we are to yield or to resist’.³ Holmes aptly notes how the Sirens are de-individualised so as to manifest themselves as an ensemble of ‘attractive bodily details’, and he finds the erotic element ‘frankly half-hearted’ but complemented by ‘an idyllic view of the natural world, freedom from the effort of “toil”, and poetry itself’.⁴ Noticing the multiple echoic linguistic effects Holmes suggests that, rather than exploring the ‘charms’ of the sea-fairies, ‘Tennyson’s language draws attention to itself’: ‘Whatever may tempt the weary mariners, if anything is designed to draw us into the poem it is the aural patterning of the verse’.⁵

‘The Sea-Fairies’ refers allusively to the twelfth book of The Odyssey, in which Circe warns Odysseus that any who draw near to the Sirens will be transfixed. She advises the hero,

Race past that coast! Soften some beeswax

and stop your shipmates’ ears so none can hear,

none of the crew, but if you are intent on hearing,

have them tie you hand and foot in the swift ship,

erect at the mast-block, lashed by ropes to the mast

so you can hear the Sirens’ song to your heart’s content.⁶

Odysseus goes on to recount how, passing the Sirens’ island, as the ship is becalmed he stops the ears of his crew with beeswax and instructs them to bind him to the mast in order to evade the ‘honeyed voices’:

So they sent their ravishing voices out across the air

And the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer.⁷

As an enchantress or seductive femme fatale the figure of the siren would resonate potently in Victorian culture, focusing upon the female’s imputed liminal character poised between human and animal worlds, an ambiguity explored for instance in D. G. Rossetti’s ‘A Sea Spell’:

She sinks into her spell: and when full soon

Her lips move and she soars into her song,

What creatures of the midmost main shall throng

In furrowed surf-clouds to the summoning rune:

Till he, the fated mariner, hears her cry,

And up her rock, bare-breasted, comes to die?⁸

Thackeray, in his delineation of Becky Sharp’s offstage activities, offers a witty variant on this theme, suggesting that when ‘the siren disappears and dives below, down among the dead men, the water of course grows turbid over her’. He further remarks of the sirens:

They look pretty enough when they sit upon a rock, twangling their harps and combing their hair, and sing, and beckon to you to come and hold the looking-glass; but when they sink into their native element, depend on it those mermaids are about no good, and we had better not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims.⁹

Tennyson’s ‘The Sea-Fairies’ echoes and refracts the Homeric episode, which may be construed as a crucial intertext. But whilst Tennyson’s poem harks back to classical Greece it may also be read as a portent of modernity consonant with the argument propounded in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this examination of the pervasive ‘disenchantment’ afflicting the modern world, Adorno cites the Sirens’ song as an instantiation of the allure of the aesthetic, and Odysseus’s act of self-binding as a gesture of ascetic self-preservation. Men, in this account, were compelled ‘to do fearful things to themselves before the self, the identical, purposive, and virile nature of man, was formed’. The ‘strain’ of holding together the ‘I’ is counterbalanced by the ‘temptation to lose it’ through ‘narcotic intoxication’.¹⁰ In a remarkable episode which resonates with Homeric echoes, J. M. W. Turner told an interlocutor, à propos his great painting, Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), ‘I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe [the storm]. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape’.¹¹ The ‘dread of losing the self’, Adorno argues, is assuaged by adopting a life of ‘obedience and labour’, an option ‘over which fulfilment shines forth perpetually – but only as illusive appearance’ (DE, 33). Odysseus’s satisfaction in stopping the ears of his crew prescribes the way in which ‘labourers’ are required to ‘doggedly sublimate’ their desires, whilst Odysseus, the ‘seigneur who allows the others to labour’, is enabled simply to listen to the song: ‘the greater the temptation the more he has his bonds tightened – just as later the burghers would deny themselves happiness all the more doggedly…with the growth of their own power’ (DE, 34). In the original 1830 version, the sailors are tempted:

Weary mariners, hither away,

One and all, one and all,

Weary mariners come and play;

We will sing to you all the day;

Furl the sail and the foam will fall

From the prow! One and all

Furl the sail! Drop the oar!

Leap ashore!

Know danger and trouble and toil no more.

(Poems, 255)

In Adorno’s account this temptation is ‘neutralised’, because the Sirens’ song as ‘a mere object of contemplation – becomes art’. In this way the enjoyment of art and of manual labour are separated out, ‘as the world of prehistory is left behind’ in the irreversible ‘compulsion to social domination of nature’ (DE, 34). Adorno contends that, under this process, imagination ‘atrophies’ due to the ‘restriction of thought to organisation and administration, practised by rulers from the cunning Odysseus to the naïve managing directors of today’. Under this system, the oarsmen, ‘who cannot speak to one another, are each of them yoked in the same rhythm as the modern worker in the factory’ (DE, 36).

This is a diagnosis, as Jürgen Habermas has observed, of ‘human beings shaping their identity by learning to dominate external nature at the cost of repressing their internal nature’, and it thus uncovers the ‘Janus-face’ of enlightenment: ‘the price of renunciation, of self-concealment, of interrupted communication between the ego and its own nature…is construed as a consequence of the introversion of sacrifice’.¹² Adorno notes that it is ‘impossible to hear the Sirens and not succumb to them’, and that is why Odysseus ‘does not try to defy their power’ (DE, 58). Rather, Adorno acknowledges that the hero remains subject to nature ‘if he heeds its voice’. Although ‘he wants to hear the Sirens’, as a ‘technically enlightened man’ Odysseus ‘has hit upon the arrangement by which he as subject need not be subjected to them’. That is to say, he ‘listens to the song of pleasure and thwarts it’ (DE, 59). The Odyssean journey thus draws everything into the economy of the same, the homecoming scenario ensuring that the I will never truly encounter the other. In this analysis, as David Held observes, ‘once the song of pleasure is heard the self is lost’, because, as he adds, the Sirens ‘represent one of the great temptations that threaten the “I” in all stages of development’.¹³ Survival in this scenario thus ‘depends on the suppression of a range of needs and on the frequent treatment of fellow humans as objects’.¹⁴ It is possible to discern in this Homeric pre-text an uncanny anticipation of Tennyson’s career as poet, destined to become ‘bound’ to the Laureateship with the consequent diminution of aesthetic resonance which marks his later verse. As a beginning poet, in contrast, Tennyson adopts a radical stance consonant with Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that ‘The “autonomy” of the avant-garde work of art becomes the tension between two heteronomies, between the bonds th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Shifting Landscape
• Part I Tennysonian
• Part II Hardy, Jefferies, Ruskin
• Part III The South Country
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index