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Durham E-Theses Calling Back to the Wild: Postmodernity and the Cultural History of Wilderness SPAIN, NATHANIEL,JOSEPH How to cite: SPAIN, NATHANIEL,JOSEPH (2017) Calling Back to the Wild: Postmodernity and the Cultural History of Wilderness, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12252/ Use policy This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives 3.0 (CC BY-ND) Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk CALLING BACK TO THE WILD: POSTMODERNITY AND THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF WILDERNESS NATHANIEL JOSEPH SPAIN ABSTRACT In postmodernity, wilderness still occupies a space in our cultural imagination. This is perhaps surprising considering the decline of uncontrolled natural spaces in recent history and postmodernity’s typically subversive attitude toward previous cultural ideas and narratives, of which the wilderness image – as a hallmark of religious writing, medieval romances, folklore and many other forms – is evidently a part. While this thesis will explore the possibility that postmodernity is less subversive than typically assumed, it will also uncover the fact that wilderness spaces have thematic commonalities with the intricacies of postmodern critical theory, such as Derridean deconstruction. This thesis will therefore take a comparative approach, examining a selection of postmodern texts against a wide spectrum of earlier manifestations of the wilderness theme. This will demonstrate the prevalence of the wilderness image, reveal trends and narratives concerning its significance throughout history, and explore how postmodernity preserves, critiques or otherwise responds to prior representations of wilderness spaces and the values they promote. 1 CALLING BACK TO THE WILD: POSTMODERNITY AND THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF WILDERNESS NATHANIEL JOSEPH SPAIN ENGLISH STUDIES M.A. BY RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH STUDIES, DURHAM UNIVERSITY 2017 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER 1: PARADISE AND WILDERNESS 16 The Religious Wilderness Canon 21 Religion in Postmodern Wilderness Images 30 Ballard’s New Eden in The Drowned World 35 Readdressing the Status of Animal 39 CHAPTER 2: FOLKLORE AND THE SUBVERSIVE FOREST 44 Arthurian Legend and John Boorman 48 Folk Terror 55 Fantastical Sexuality and the Romantics 61 CHAPTER 3: KNOWLEDGE AND THE PRODUCTION OF WILDERNESS 72 The Map as Reductive and Productive 73 Wilderness Knowledge Systems 84 CHAPTER 4: SELF, SOCIETY AND THE SOJOURN 98 Leaving Society 101 Identity in Postmodern Sojourns 116 CHAPTER 5: DELINEATING A NEW WILDERNESS 128 Backwoods Violence 130 Liminality and Urbanity 135 Entropy and the Apocalypse 142 CONCLUSION 150 BIBLIOGRAPHY 155 3 INTRODUCTION Wilderness and postmodernity are temporally discordant. Wilderness embodies what is ‘wild’ as a physical space: the untamed, the unpredictable, and perhaps uncontrollable. Postmodernism, as an aesthetic form characterised by elements such as irony and self-consciousness, or postmodernity, as an epoch featuring amongst other things the insertion of capitalism into many spheres of cultural life, is generally considered to cover a period from the late 1950s or early 60s to the present day.1 As this time has already seen mass industrialisation and domestication, with global exploration and colonisation leading toward satellite mapping and worldwide electronic and digital infrastructure, this kind of wilderness becomes difficult to situate within lived experience. This is particularly the case in more economically developed countries, but the proposed geological epoch of the Anthropocene refutes that any part of the world lies outside humanity’s influence. Suggested by Paul Crutzen in 2000 and awaiting verification as part of the official Geological Time Scale, the Anthropocene is a term founded upon the idea that human presence has a significant and measurable impact on Earth as a global system.2 In this case even remote 1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), xix-xx. Whether postmodernity continues to the present day will be discussed later in this section. Patricia Waugh further disseminates the nature of postmodernism in Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992): postmodernism can be described ‘firstly as a mood or style of thought which privileges aesthetic modes over those of logic or method; secondly as an aesthetic practice with an accompanying body of commentary upon it; and thirdly as a concept designating a cultural epoch which has facilitated the rise to prominence of such theoretical and aesthetic styles and which may or may not constitute a break with previous structures of modernity’, 7. Its preoccupations range from merging high culture with the low to anti-humanism and ‘a pervasive cynicism about the progressivist ideals of modernity’, 4-5. 2 Clive Hamilton et al, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 1-2. The most obvious example of this is manmade climate change through carbon emissions, but this concept may also extend to urbanisation, manipulating, distributing and eliminating plant and animal species, and mining, to name but a few. In August 2016, experts recommended to the International Geological Congress that it should be officially adopted. Damian Carrington, ‘The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age’, Guardian (2016), <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological- congress-human-impact-earth> [accessed 08/09/16]. 4 wildernesses such as the Arctic and Antarctic are subject to human influence, particularly considering that our impact extends into the atmosphere. In addition to this practical issue, wilderness is semantically problematic within the theoretical developments of recent intellectual and cultural history. The word itself is arbitrary; to use the language of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work provides a foundation for the postmodern or post-structuralist approach to meaning, wilderness as a concept (or sign) is composed of an essential value for which the written or spoken word is a signifier indicating this idea.3 We can go further in saying its perceived essential value is also arbitrary. Primarily ‘wilderness’ is culturally understood as ‘wild or uncultivated land’, stemming from ‘wilddeor’ meaning ‘wild deer’, therefore a place inhabited by such undomesticated creatures.4 In the Oxford English Dictionary, the foremost use of ‘wild’ is to describe a creature that is ‘Living in a state of nature; not tame, not domesticated’.5 In definitively being not part of the human world, this idea of wilderness relies upon a binary opposition of wild/domestic in which the concepts only gain meaning through the counterpoint of another term, thereby having no independent validity. If wilderness can only be defined through the existence of a civilisation with which it is to be contrasted, its status as a space inherently opposed to human control is undermined. We may therefore argue from a purely logical standpoint that wilderness has never existed. This approach is in keeping with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive technique, characterised by ‘an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system’.6 In this 3 Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘from Course in General Linguistics (1916)’ in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, 2nd edition (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), 6-7. 4 ‘Wilderness’, definition 1. a., Oxford English Dictionary Online, <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/229003> [accessed 03/02/2016]. 5 ‘Wild’, definition A. I. 1., Oxford English Dictionary Online, <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/228988> [accessed 03/02/2016]. 6 Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’ in Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, ed. by Barry Stocker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 132. 5 case, this involves understanding that wilderness is arbitrarily in opposition to domesticated nature, the latter having been generally hierarchically favoured throughout history, and instead of only substituting a new opposition (which may subversively be that domestication is bad, wilderness is good) we must question and undermine the reason why these oppositions occur in the system of produced meaning. As the wilderness concept is produced in this way, its meaning is influenced through social discourse; the way ideas are discussed and claimed to be understood within communities, institutions, and society in general. As what is believed to be known is culturally relative, discourse is inter-subjective. Michel Foucault works to reveal ‘historically how truth-effects are produced inside discourses which are not in themselves either true or false’; that is, not simply establishing how beliefs within specific time periods are wrong, as that would also be temporally subjective, but how and why ideas of correctness are produced and what this reveals about the societies producing them.7 Foucault suggests this is due to ‘relations of power’; society not only represses thought but creates it, that ‘it induces pleasure, it forms knowledge… it