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ECOMYSTICISM: MATERIALISM and MYSTICISM in AMERICAN NATURE WRITING by DAVID TAGNANI a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfill

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ECOMYSTICISM: MATERIALISM and MYSTICISM in AMERICAN NATURE WRITING by DAVID TAGNANI a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfill ECOMYSTICISM: MATERIALISM AND MYSTICISM IN AMERICAN NATURE WRITING By DAVID TAGNANI A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of English MAY 2015 © Copyright by DAVID TAGNANI, 2015 All Rights Reserved © Copyright by DAVID TAGNANI, 2015 All Rights Reserved ii To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of DAVID TAGNANI find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. ___________________________________________ Christopher Arigo, Ph.D., Chair ___________________________________________ Donna Campbell, Ph.D. ___________________________________________ Jon Hegglund, Ph.D. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my committee members for their hard work guiding and encouraging this project. Chris Arigo’s passion for the subject and familiarity with arcane source material were invaluable in pushing me forward. Donna Campbell’s challenging questions and encyclopedic knowledge helped shore up weak points throughout. Jon Hegglund has my gratitude for agreeing to join this committee at the last minute. Former committee member Augusta Rohrbach also deserves acknowledgement, as her hard work led to significant restructuring and important theoretical insights. Finally, this project would have been impossible without my wife Angela, who worked hard to ensure I had the time and space to complete this project. iv ECOMYSTICISM: MATERIALISM AND MYSTICISM IN AMERICAN NATURE WRITING Abstract by David Tagnani, Ph.D. Washington State University May 2015 Chair: Christopher Arigo This dissertation investigates the ways in which a theory of material mysticism can help us understand and synthesize two important trends in the American nature writing—mysticism and materialism. Material mysticism—what I term ecomysticism —has been an important current running through the American literary engagement with the natural world. Ecomysticism is a lens through which we can tease out the materialism that defines much of even the most “mystical” nature writing. This material mysticism is often a significant factor in authors’ engagements with the natural world, as it proves to be a foundational experience that motivates authors’ ethical and political perspectives. After an introductory chapter detailing the philosophical and scientific underpinnings for my theory of ecomysticism, four chapters examine a wide array of literary figures through the lens of ecomysticism. Chapter 1 examines three authors who were writing around the turn-of- the-century: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Austin, and Stephen Crane. This chapter examines how their regionalism and naturalism are indebted, in large part, to ecomystical experiences. I examine the ways in which the ecomystical experiences depicted in their writing challenge some scholars’ charges of anthropocentrism and dualism and offer us a new perspective on these v literary schools. Chapter 2 focuses on Robinson Jeffers, a seminal figure in American ecopoetics. Ecomysticism offers a counterweight to some interpretations that see in his work a supernatural religiosity. I demonstrate how recent philosophical advances in materialism can be marshaled to establish an entirely material basis for his religious and prophetic language. Chapter 3 uses Edward Abbey as a test case to determine the extent to which ecomysticism affects not only ontology and epistemology, but ethics as well. I investigate how Abbey’s ecomystical experiences form the foundation of an ethical orientation that came to define him as an artist and an activist. Finally, Chapter 4 centers on the most influential ecopoet of the late 20th century: Gary Snyder. Employing both his poetry and his essays, I show how ecomysticism is a significant determinant of his aesthetics as well as his politics. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. iv INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1. SACRED PLACES: ECOMYSTICISM AND (BIO)REGIONALISM ...................... 30 2. ROBINSON JEFFERS ................................................................................................ 79 3. EDWARD ABBEY ................................................................................................... 112 4. GARY SNYDER ....................................................................................................... 140 5. CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 165 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................ 169 1 INTRODUCTION “Ecological thinking . requires a kind of vision across boundaries.” Paul Shepard Ecology and mysticism: they exist at the edges of their respective fields, subversive. Yet both are also foundational, the fundamental forces running through those fields. Ecology is to the life sciences as mysticism is to religion and spirituality. They cross boundaries, violate borders. Ecology unites the life sciences and underlies the process of evolution. Mysticism is the common experiential component of the countless disparate religions of the world, the numinous heart of spiritualism. Both ecology and mysticism apprehend the subtle, hidden connections and intersections among otherwise disparate elements of the universe. Both ecology and mysticism posit an underlying unity that binds every extant thing into one whole. Ecological knowledge and mystical insights often reinforce one another, ecology’s empiricism “proving” what had long been a mystical intuition. And yet mysticism is typically regarded as the misty, eccentric fringe of religion, the dreamy supernaturalism that the mainstream faithful—and often the religious authorities— cannot accept. Indeed, the word “mystical” is often used pejoratively to indicate something suspiciously irrational, unsupported by facts and empirically unprovable. Mysticism connotes madness. Ecology, on the other hand, is primarily identified as a “hard” science, a form of knowledge forged through observation and experimentation, with reproducible results, falsifiable claims, and concrete, material explanations. Ecology and mysticism: the material and the immaterial, hard science and fringe spiritualism. A strange pair, to be sure, but the amalgamation of ecology and mysticism marks an important convergence in American intellectual life and in American Literature more specifically. 2 In 2012, ISLE published an issue dedicated to exploring the “material turn” in ecocriticism. This turn, driven in large part by the new materialism in political and feminist theory, involves scholarship that is open and attentive to the ways in which the material, non- human world expresses agency in the lives of humans. Usually, this agency manifests in obviously physical ways, as the label “material” would suggest. For instance, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter uses the vast North American black-out of 2003 to investigate the power grid as a heterogeneous assemblage wherein the various objects and subjects that comprise the grid (human, animal, mineral, environmental, etc.) manifest a distributed agency that frustrates our desire for clear causality and hence control. Similarly, Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures explores a “trans-corporeality” that foregrounds the physical interpenetration of bodies whereby the notion of a “bounded, coherent” subject is challenged (23). Theresa Brennan undertook a related project in The Transmission of Affect , which focused on how our evolving understanding of the ways in which the biological and the social intermingle and affect one another explicitly challenges Western notions of self-contained individuality. Much recent work, especially in ecofeminist and political theory, has followed this general trend. This material turn has almost by definition ignored the spiritual, the sacred, and the mystical. This is understandable if you accept the traditional supernatural, immaterial connotations that such concepts evoke. But if we are to take materiality seriously, shouldn’t we consider the possibility of materiality where there is seemingly none? Shouldn’t we consider the materiality of the mystical? The concept of ecomysticism invites us to contemplate the particular ways in which the material, non-human world affects human consciousness—not unlike the myriad other works of the new materialists. But ecomysticism considers the role of the material 3 world in inculcating mystical states in human subjects in an attempt to attribute even the most immaterial of phenomena—transcendence, spirituality—to material agency. Why, then, is this worth thinking about? It has become a bit of a truism among ecologically-minded thinkers and artists that our ecological problems are not primarily legal, political, or scientific problems, but problems of consciousness. Fritjof Capra has written that the major problems of our time—war, poverty, environmental devastation—all stem from one single crisis, “a crisis of perception” (19). Perception is our consciousness organizing and interpreting sensory information, so Capra locates the cause of our problems at this
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