New International Voices in Ecocriticism Ecocritical Theory and Practice Douglas A

New International Voices in Ecocriticism Ecocritical Theory and Practice Douglas A. Vakoch, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA

Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists. Works that explore environmental issues through literatures, oral traditions, and cultural/media practices around the world are welcome. The series features books by established ecocritics that examine the intersection of theory and practice, including both monographs and edited volumes. Proposals are invited in the range of topics relevant to ecocriticism, including but not limited to works informed by cross-cultural and transnational approaches; postcolonialism; posthumanism; ecofeminism; ecospirituality, ecotheology, and religious studies; film/media and visual cultural studies; environmental aesthetics and arts; ecopoetics; ecophenomenology; ecopsycholo- gy; animal studies; and pedagogy.

Recent Titles

New International Voices in Ecocriticism, by Serpil Oppermann Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism, edited by Scott Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran Transversal Ecocritical Praxis: Theoretical Arguments, Literary Analysis, and Cultural Critique, by Patrick D. Murphy Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contempo- rary Culture, by Christopher Schliephake New International Voices in Ecocriticism

Edited by Serpil Oppermann Foreword by Scott Slovic Afterword by Greta Gaard

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New international voices in ecocriticism / [edited by] Serpil Oppermann. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4985-0147-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-1-4985-0148-4 (electronic)—ISBN 978-1- 4985-0149-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ecocriticism. I. Oppermann, Serpil, editor. PN98.E36N49 2014 809'.9336—dc23 2014029652

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Printed in the United States of America Contents

Foreword vii Scott Slovic Acknowledgments ix Introduction: New International Voices in Ecocriticism 1 Serpil Oppermann

I: New Ecocritical Trends 25 1 Selves at the Fringes: Expanding Material Ecocriticism 27 Kyle Bladow 2 Global Subcultural Bohemianism: The Prospect of Postlocal Ecocriticism in Tim Winton’s Breath 41 William V. Lombardi 3 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?”: Northern Exposure’s Sustainable Feeling 55 Sylvan Goldberg 4 Bang Your Head and Save the Planet: Gothic Ecocriticism 71 Başak Ağın Dönmez

II: Nature and Human Experience 85 5 Un-natural Ecopoetics: Natural/Cultural Intersections in Poetic Language and Form 87 Sarah Nolan 6 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’”: Susanna Moodie, Shelter Writing, and Dwelling on the Earth 101 Elise Mitchell

v vi Contents

7 Against Ecological Kitsch: Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Project 117 Guangchen Chen 8 Neo-Aranyakas: An Enquiry into Mahasweta Devi’s Forest Fiction 133 Anu T. Asokan 9 Ecoerotic Imaginations in Early Modernity and Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure 147 Abdulhamit Arvas

III: Human-Nonhuman Relations 159 10 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape 161 Christina Caupert 11 Familiar Animals: The Question of Human-Animal Relationships in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City 177 Elzette Steenkamp 12 Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s Eva 187 Diana Villanueva Romero

Afterword 201 Greta Gaard Index 203 Contributors 215 Foreword

Scott Slovic

At the beginning of a new academic year, I enter the classrooms expecting to be surprised and unsettled by fresh perspectives presented to me by my students. This happens year after year, even more so now that the gap between my generation and the youth of my students has yawned rather wide. And each time I’m startled by student insights that come across as personal challenges, I tell myself: “This is a good thing. This is how our field—and society—will make progress.” About two years ago, my friend Serpil Oppermann and her graduate students at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, had the bright idea of turning this commonplace encounter between teachers and their up-and-coming students into an opportunity—an opportunity to share some of the boldest new ideas in the field of ecocriticism, ideas born of the special vigor of graduate students working to carve their professional niches by reaching into terra incognita, with a vast world of readers. Though I was initially uncertain about the plausibility of such a volume, I am blown away by the range and passion of these articles. I shouldn’t be surprised, as four of these contributors are my own former students—superstars all—and I’ve had the chance to meet and learn from many of the others during visits to Ankara, Augsburg, Beijing, Madrid, and Chennai. This is simply a powerhouse lineup of current graduate students from Asia, Europe, and North America, offering samples of their best, edge-pushing work, which is itself a sample of the brilliant work graduate students in literature and environment are doing in many other parts of the world. I have been working in this field since I was a first-year Ph.D. student in 1984—I’m sure many of the contributors to this book had not even been born yet when I stumbled across John Muir’s Wlderness Essays in the university library and thought to myself, “This is the type of writer who should be

vii viii Foreword getting more attention from literary scholars!” That ah-hah moment has now lasted for three decades. The field has evolved dramatically during this time. Those who subscribe to the “wave model” of ecocritical development have marked four waves up to now: the first wave with its focus on wilderness, Anglo-American nonfiction, and discursive ecofeminism; the more interna- tionally inclusive second wave, with its turn toward urban experience and acknowledgment of environmental justice and postcolonial concerns across a wide swath of literary genres; the comparative and self-critical tendencies of the third wave; and more recently the emergence of a distinctive fourth wave, with a vigorous application of New Materialist vocabulary and thinking to environmental aesthetics and a dedication to making the environmental humanities count for something as humanity grapples with challenges of sustainability in a warming world. I love how the contributors to the current volume ask Big Questions and self-consciously—I mean, intentionally—press themselves to “boldly go where no ecocritic has gone before” (to borrow from the famous motto of Star Trek—a television series that pre-dates most of the scholars in this book). There is an urge here to “expand” upon the material tendencies that have so newly emerged in ecocriticism—to erase the national boundaries that have constrained the field’s focus until the recent comparative trend hit its stride—to go beyond nature even and seek ecocritical applications in “un- natural” contexts— and to ask “what we are” and “dismantle ‘conceptual straitjackets’.” Those who wish to take the pulse of contemporary ecocriticism could hardly do better than to open this book and savor the international, multi- generic, and theoretically edgy perspectives of twelve contributors, coached and supported by Professor Oppermann. This is an unusual project in that all of the main contributors have yet to attain the Ph.D. degree—but this is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the field of ecocriticism, I think, which privileges intellectual energy and commitment to the cause of understanding the relationship between culture and nature rather than rank, tenure, or institutional affiliation. I take heart in this beautiful new “ecobook,” which reminds me so strongly of my own hopeful entry into ecocriticism before the field even had a name. That young scholars across the globe now devote themselves to this enterprise is cause for celebration.

Scott Slovic University of Idaho, USA Acknowledgments

The idea of this book originated at the University of Nevada, Reno during my six-month visit (September 2011–February 2012) as a Fulbright professor. The exciting journey of this book started there with a warm welcome from my academic host, distinguished professor Scott Slovic who joined me in in the early phase of this journey. I am immensely grateful to him for extending invaluable support in the preparation of its main outline, and later in the journey bestowing the honor of contributing with his Foreword. I extend special gratitude to Greta Gaard for supporting this project with her eloquent Afterword. Special mention must be made of the invaluable assistance of Simon C. Estok, who has helped me with his meticulous editing of many essays. I thank him for giving skillful attention to details and for his important feedback. To Serenella Iovino I send heartfelt gratitude for her precious insights and comments as I worked with the contributing authors. Her positive energies accompanied me at every stage of this book's development. Special thanks go to the contributors themselves, who have been admir- ably punctual, collegial, and self-disciplined during the long process of revi- sions. I thank the Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series editor Douglas Vakoch for supporting this project, and extend my deep appreciation to assistant acquisitions editor Lindsey R. Porambo and to the editorial team at Lexington Books. My final thanks go to the anonymous readers for their helpful feedback and invaluable suggestions.

Introduction

New International Voices in Ecocriticism

Serpil Oppermann

Ecocriticism is by nature transnational, multicultural, interdisciplinary, and pluriform. From its inception in the early 1990s, it has taken a rhizomatic path with multiple theoretical methods and international alliances that have fundamentally contributed to the exponential growth of the field into a worldwide movement without boundaries. A cursory survey of ecocritical anthologies and edited collections would testify to this development. 1 As anticipated by Cheryll Glotfelty in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader in 1996, “a diversity of voices”2 has become the present constituency of ecocriticism. In fact, Glotfelty’s words have proven to be highly prophetic: “In the future we can expect to see ecocritical scholarship becoming ever more interdisciplinary, multicultural, and international.”3 Following Glotfelty and Fromm’s foundational volume, many other ecocritical collections of essays have been influential in fostering the ecological critique of literary studies in the face of growing environmental problems, such as Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment (1998) edited by Michael Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic; Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Lit- erature (1998) edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammell; and Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (2000) edited by John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington. The explosion of ecocritical articles in scholarly journals since 1996 also indicates how the field of humanities was being increasingly characterized by an ecological turn. Its proponents were urgent to formulate ecologically informed critical and intellectual tools for the interpretation of literary and cultural texts, to challenge the boundaries between nature and culture, and above all to respond to the pressing issues of 1 2 Introduction globalism as well as to the local socio-cultural problems which are closely linked to the increasing pressure of the environmental challenges. This background has significantly moved ecocritical scholarship beyond nature writing, as evidenced by the publication of Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriti- cism (2001). The main objective of this collection was to demonstrate the importance of expanding the generic and the disciplinary boundaries of ecocriticism. In order to display the field’s “true range,” the editors in their introduction to the volume stated that, “Beyond Nature Writing is our attempt to help ensure that ecocriticism does not get sidelined as yet another interesting but ultimately insubstantial subfield within English departments. The contributors . . . share our belief that ecocriticism offers a critical perspective that can enliven any literary and theoretical field.”4 Rooted in the environmental justice movement and its questions of race, gender, and class in environmental contexts, The Environmental Justice Reader (2002) edited by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein, signals the field’s first serious response to the connections between social issues and environmental degradation. This book in its entirety can be compared to a prism through which we can understand how the discourses of ecocriticism can contribute to our environmental problems. Such connections are not a new discovery for feminist ecocritics. As a noteworthy example, Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World (1996) provides an in-depth analysis of the interrelations between the environment and race, gender, and class. Another feminist ecocritic, Patrick D. Murphy, developed a further argument on the implications of the patriarchal association of women and nature. In his chapter entitled, “‘The Women Are Speaking’: Contemporary Literature as Theoretical Critique,” in the 1998 anthology he edited with Greta Gaard, Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, Mur- phy conceptualized the “ecological” in relation, first, to the metonymic and the metaphoric functions of the ecosystem “for a set of necessary human-land relationships,” and second, as “components of cultural heritage and continuity.”5 Murphy’s exemplification of the ways in which cultural practices relate to the environmental effects did contribute to the much-needed critique of the environmental Others. Needless to say, the work of Val Plumwood, Karen Warren, Marti Kheel, Lori Gruen, Noël Sturgeon, Greta Gaard, Catriona Sandilands, Rachel Stein, Gay Bradshaw, Carol Adams, Simon C. Estok, among many others, has been influential in creating an “intersectional analysis of nature, gender, race, class, species, and sexuality”6 in eco/feminist and ecocritical scholarship. Another influential pathway that opened with the publication of Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s edited volume, Material Feminisms (2008), points to the significance of the “emerging models of materiality in feminist theory.” The editors suggest that “thinking through co-constitutive material- Introduction 3 ity of human corporeality and nonhuman natures offers possibilities for transforming environmentalism itself.”7 Material feminists have provided conceptual frameworks—such as Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality and Nancy Tua- na’s viscous porosity—for the paradigmatic expansion of ecocriticism into the ideological domains of bio-socio-cultural and science studies. Focused on the posthumanist reconfigurings of subjectivity, material agency, and corporeality, their theorizing not only helped initiate the material turn in the environmental humanities, but also launched revolutionary perceptions of agency, ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Material feminism’s theoretical position accounts for nature’s agency, suggesting that nature “acts, and those actions have consequences for both the human and nonhuman world.”8 While material feminisms offered a larger environmental perspective on the entanglements of human and nonhuman bodies, natures, and culture, another perspective that considers human relations with the nonhuman world (on a local scale) is offered by bioregionalism, as proposed by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster in their co-edited volume, The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology and Place (2012). Although different from material feminist theorization of human interchanges with the nonhuman environments, bioregional thought also considers the significance of intertwined environments, both cultural and natural, as constitutive features of human identity. In other words, bioregionalism explores human identity “in a larger community of natural beings—our local bioregion.”9 The works of these scholars epitomize how ecocriticism has produced what Ursula K. Heise calls an “expanding matrix of coexisting projects,” which, according to her, “explains the theoretical diversity it has attained in a mere dozen years.”10 This diversity in ecocriticism’s broad framework has two consequences. The first is that with its methodological and theoretical eclecticism, as Steven Rosendale had pointed out in his anthology The Greening of Literary Scholarship (2001), ecocriticism has generated trans- disciplinary perspectives that are inherently global in nature, incorporating a wide variety of international viewpoints that also underline the influence of the local in the interpretations of the world. The second consequence of this eclecticism is the provisional formulation of fragmentary methods and theories that presents an openness to theorize the field. As a worldwide network of sometimes conflicting views, ecocritical enterprise has an academic standing that, unlike other critical discourses in the humanities, disseminates in all directions, resistant to being framed or fixed in a field-defining methodology. Referring to the environmental turn in literary studies as “a concourse of discrepant practices”11 in The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), Lawrence Buell claims quite rightly that “the progress of environmental criticism in the field of literary studies has been on the whole encouraging but mixed.”12 Ecocriticism’s procession on several fronts indicates what John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington had anticipated earlier when they 4 Introduction observed that “ecocriticism is really less a method than an attitude, an angle of vision, and a mode of critique.”13 Ecocriticism, to quote their words, still “remains open, flexible, capacious, and . . . capable of supporting the most diverse and sophisticated researches without spinning off into obscurantism or idiosyncracy.”14 Scott Slovic’s similar assessment in his essay, “Ecocriti- cism: Containing Multitudes,” in Laurence Coupe’s edited volume, The Green Studies Reader (2000), explains that “ecocriticism has no central, dominant doctrine or theoretical apparatus—rather, it is being re-defined daily by the actual practice of thousands of literary scholars around the world.”15 Since ecocriticism is, as David Mazel also convincingly notes, “less a singular approach or method than a constellation of approaches having little more in common than a shared concern with the environment,”16 and since its expansion is seen as “potentially rewarding,”17 it has turned into an interesting rhizomatic activity with the rhizome serving as the model that “provides the best explanation for the current multiple trajectory of ecocriticism.18 By transitioning “into a field of diverse specialities and methodologies,”19 ecocriticism has become a complex area of study in the humanities, with the largest developments in recent years reflecting ASLE’s (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) international growth and its influence in developing ecocritical scholarship across North America, Eu- rope, Asia, Australia, Africa, New Zealand, and Latin America. 20 In “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism,” Scott Slovic defines this development as “The impulse to study human experience in relation to the more-than-human world and to compare human experience across cultures.”21 In this international context, ecocriticism also “enables us to identify . . . texts that . . . offer us needed perspectives on the relations between the human and the nonhuman.”22 Incorporating ecology into culture and environmentalism into literary studies, ecocriticism has effectively challenged and subverted the anthropocentric visions of the world instigated by master narratives of domination and exploitation, and offered ethically and ecologically accountable readings of nonhuman others, as well as of place, race, gender, identity, and the body, the latter more specifically addressed by feminist and postcolonial ecocritics. Ecocriticism, writes Stacy Alaimo, “must continually engage in discursive critique, tracing not only how various conceptions of nature have implications for environmentalism, but how they have been bound up with perni- cious notions of gender, race, sexuality and class,”23 and must foreground, as Greta Gaard compellingly argues, “the gender/species/ecology connections that are so relevant to ecocriticism.”24 Benefiting from posthumanism and feminist animal studies alike, contemporary ecocriticism also fundamentally unsettles the liberal humanist conception of the human subject as the only intelligent agent with the ability to control nonhuman others. It is in this climate of critical reflection that ecocritics have come to consider more seriously the interaction of ideas and the environment. “Most Introduction 5 of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas,” wrote Richard Ker- ridge, “in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis.”25 Since ideas condition our responses to the physical world, many ecocritics today focus on exploring how ideas fashion our explanations of the world, and consequently how ideas can bring about a change in the way people behave toward the natural environments. We know that the best way to change the way people behave is to change the way they think. The question of how our perceptions of the world are culturally shaped, then, constitutes the general outline of ecocritical inquiry. Today’s ecocritics offer a more material grounding for the ethical commitments ecocriticism has maintained from its early beginnings. Another implication is that by stepping beyond its complicity with mimesis and the U.S. nature writing tradition, ecocriticism has become more theoretically grounded. It is important to note here, however, that the earlier modes of ecocriticism still continue to be important today, as the new theoretical approaches join the early phases of ecocriticism, rather than leaving them behind. Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007) and The Eco- logical Thought (2010), Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010), Axel Good- body and Kate Rigby’s edited volume Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (2011), Timo Müller and Michael Sauter’s collection Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism (2012), and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s edited collection, Material Ecocriticism (2014), are primary examples of the new theoretically engaged ecocritical pathways that have joined the conversations initiated by earlier phases of ecocriticism. In this matrix of expansion as Ursula K. Heise would say, ecocriticism has no single distinctive method, but it is today a distinctive field of critical inquiry across the disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences, using models from molecular biology, ecology, quantum physics, geography, soci- ology, ethics, politics, and philosophy. Although such connections, especially to the hard sciences, remain “extraordinarily ambivalent”26 and contested, one can nevertheless say, as Helena Feder has put it, “Ecocriticism is a good faith experiment in two cultures,”27 and claim with confidence that this partly explains the increasingly diverse methodologies of the discourses of ecocriticism to help generate a rather hybrid environmental-literary-cultural constituency. The work of ecocritics such as Timothy Morton, Ursula K. Heise, Stacy Alaimo, Serenella Iovino, Jeffrey J. Cohen, Catriona Sandilands, Joni Adamson, and Scott Slovic, among others, exemplifies “the broadening of the generic horizon of ecocriticism.”28 As Serenella Iovino concedes, “the literary works and cultural objects analyzed by ecocriticism are not necessarily part of an ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ genre nor strictly connected with Anglo-American studies.”29 Iovino is “convinced that outstripping the borders of these genres—something which is becoming more and more frequent—reinforces ecocriticism.”30 Evidently, the project of ecocriticism le- 6 Introduction gitimates not only the transgression of borders and divides, conceptual and ontological, but also goes beyond the bounds of the simple notion of “nature” as pure, untouchable, ideal, or sacred, as Timothy Morton has also argued. The disconcerting contemporary reality, in this view, as projected by dark ecology that “includes ugliness and horror,”31 is part of present ecocritical inquiry. Today, noteworthy ecocritical discussions explore the relationship between the body, disability, and social justice in terms of the concept of disempowered ecological other. Sarah Jaquette Ray’s The Ecological Other (2013) instantiates aspects of this orientation, reflecting on how the disabled body “is the consummate ecological other, forming the corporeal basis for other expressions of environmental exclusion.”32 There are also discussions of dirt, human health, food, and toxicity: for example, Heather Sullivan suggests “dirt theory” to bridge the gap between “green thinking” and the human sphere. She proposes it as “an antidote to nostalgic views rendering nature a far-away and ‘clean’ site . . . to suggest that there is no ultimate boundary between us and nature.”33 The Japanese ecocritic Masami Yuki discusses the diseases that have exploded due to “eating contaminated sea food”34 in Mi- namata in southern Japan. Regarding food safety, the Korean ecocritic Won- Chung Kim calls attention to “the sporadic threats of foot-and-mouth-disease, avian influenza, mad cow disease, the melanin scandal in China, and the recent radioactive contamination in Japan.”35 Knowing that there is no safe ground on which to stand, these ecocritics have compelling arguments about the interconnectedness of ecological and human health, a point which Greg Garrard perceptively underlines in his essay, “Nature Cures? Or How to Police Analogies of Personal and Ecological Health”: “when our health deserts us, we can’t know positively, what it is, since it is likewise an entanglement of physiological fact and cultural value.”36 One thing is certain: ecocriticism is well aware of “how ecological health,” to quote Serenella Iovino, “is strictly connected to political, social, and ethical issues.”37 It is, therefore, not surprising that these entangled topics of toxic-related diseases, pollution, health, and their cultural, social, and ethical dimensions feature strongly in ecocriticism, and in a highly self-conscious fashion in international contexts.

INTERNATIONAL INFLECTIONS

Ecocriticism is widely open to transatlantic dialogues, as spotlighted by Ca- trin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer’s Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (2006), and Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim’s East Asian Ecocriticism: A Critical Reader (2012). The last statement of the introduction in Gersdorf and Mayer’s volume con- Introduction 7 firms the “vitality of the ongoing ecocritical exchange”38 among ecocritics from many different countries: “As an ecologically inspired approach to literary and cultural studies, ecocriticism can participate in such a project, one that needs to be . . . a transatlantic, transnational endeavor.”39 As an immediate response to Gersdorf and Mayer’s call, additional volumes emerged, developing ecocriticism’s international conversations: The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (2011) edited by Serpil Oppermann et al.; Joni Adamson and Kimberley N. Ruffin’s collection American Studies, Eco- criticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons (2013); Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann’s edited volume International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (2013); and Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran’s Ecoam- biguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (2014). These publications underscore the significance of building what Ser- enella Iovino calls “non-anthropocentric humanism” or “a culture of co- presence.”40 But, more crucially, this development represents third-wave ecocriticism as Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson have defined it in their guest editors’ introduction to the special issue of MELUS (2009): “This special issue of MELUS starts from the premise that there has long been ‘a diversity of voices’ contributing to the understanding of the human relationship to the planet, both within the United States and throughout the world.”41 This has been one of the primary motivations in recent ecocritical enterprise, as the field is more and more engaged with international contacts. As I have stated elsewhere, “by placing a concerted emphasis on the diverse relations between the local sense of place and its reconceptualization as translocality, ecocriticism visibly signals the unfolding process of transnationalization in the field,” opening “a dialogue between and among literatures and cultures.”42 The transition of ecocriticism into a field of transnational (in the sense of transcending borders) environmental horizons is still an ongoing process, and the incorporation of emerging new voices, as they appear in this collection, to the plurality and diversity of approaches and methodologies prompts ecocriticism to attain a more visible sense of academic egalitarianism. What comes out of this diversity and plurality is the fact that ecocriticism is now developing more complex ways of understanding the entangled relationships between socio-cultural practices and local and global ecosystems, and especially human-nonhuman relationships. What are these ways? One specific caveat here is the way in which the animal question has been addressed by ecocritics in terms of interspecies ethics, or contextualized from perspectives that reveal “deep human conflicts, inconsistencies, and constructed boundaries.”43 Regarding interspecies care in the Taiwanese context, Chia-ju Chang and Iris Ralph provide interesting examples of the interspecies relations between “gou mama women” and “the plight of abandoned dogs”;44 and in the 8 Introduction western context Greta Gaard observes how cruelly “animals [are] used in laboratories to prove the toxicity of fireworks’ heavy metals,”45 which is but one among countless examples of cruelty exercised on animals worldwide, cited to make a call for interspecies justice. From an ecocritical perspective, this is a global justice issue just as significant as deforestation, climate change, habitat destruction, and radioactive waste.

PAST-PRESENT CONTINUUM

Integrating the earlier modes of ecocriticism with emerging new approaches, and co-mingling the older roots and past voices with the present ones help broaden ecocriticism’s discursive frames. In fact, this continuum is sub- tended by an engagement in dismantling the anthropocentrism built into the very fabric of human discourses—literary, cultural, or scientific—in order to move beyond their disruptive limits toward less anthropogenic ecological visions. Jeffrey J. Cohen’s Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (2013) is one such attempt. The essays collected in this volume not only fundamentally challenge anthropocentric discourses, but also go beyond the standardized discourses of green ecology to bridge “like and unlike, culture and nature, promise and indifference, human and inhuman.”46 With such publications a significant ecocritical dimension is elicited: Environmental imagination in its myriad interconnected threads has produced such alliances between old and new ecocritical perspectives that any separation of the past and present ecocritical inquiry becomes rather permeable, if not highly problematic. The emerging hybrid scholarship reinforces a kind of enduring conjunc- ture, a truly activist intellectual endeavor to make a change. In this context, the particular theories in circulation today—neo-bioregionalism, eco-cosmopolitanism, eco-mimesis, postcolonial ecocritiques, prismatic ecology, and material ecocriticism—are hybrid forms with different but also interrelated ecocritical approaches. One cannot theorize, for example, matter’s liveliness without recourse to toxic landscapes, bodies, and things, or speak about nonhuman plight, ecological justice, and exploitation (in the international context) without considering what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” and its implications in the developing world, which he labels “environmentalism of the poor.”47 In addressing pressing environmental problems one cannot remain inattentive, as Nixon quite rightly contends, “to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devestation.”48 In a way, to use Patrick D. Murphy’s words, “the search for better ecologically ethical understanding”49 is what really frames ecocritical scholarship in general. In this search, ecocritics, in the eco-cosmopolitan context, “attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ Introduction 9 of both human and nonhuman kinds.”50 Such an approach fosters a more capacious mindset to think outside our familiar boxes. Ecocriticism’s deepening espousal, especially with critical theory, and postcolonial, feminist, cultural, and science studies, clearly indicates this standpoint. Various branches of ecocriticism not only point to the field’s continual development, but also offer valuable insights to guide this development, such as postcolonial ecocriticism, urban ecocriticism, environmental justice ecocriticism, early modern ecocriticism, postmodern ecocriticism, feminist ecocriticism, and material ecocriticism, the last representing the third and the fourth stages of its evolution. Briefly defined, material ecocriticism considers “matter’s ‘narrative’ power of creating configurations of meanings and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co-emerging interactions”; and takes matter as “a site of narrativity, a storied matter, embodying its own narratives in the minds of human agents and in the very structure of its own self-constructive forces.”51 In New International Voices in Ecocriticism, there are new branches of ecocriticism offered as possible inroads, or developing streams of thought, such as gothic ecocriticism, affective ecocriticism, and postlocal ecocriticism that will also play a part in responding to the growing interest in these areas of concern. By opening the field to new international voices, I have sought in principle to open new vistas in “cross-pollination of ecocritical . . . scholarship.”52 Like many ecocritical collections, the twelve original essays in this collection represent the internationalizing trend in ecocriticism, and are, therefore, a valuable contribution to an increasingly global conversation within the field of environmental humanities. But, different from other collections, the essays here are written by the field’s emerging scholars from around the world. Analyzing various literary genres and other cultural and visual texts, they address the increasingly urgent calls from within the field itself for broadening the range of input to discussions of our shared environmental problems. Part of the goal in compiling this collection was to challenge the boundaries between senior scholars of ecocriticism and new voices: the voices of these younger scholars need to be heard. To date, no other book on ecocriticism has given priority solely to emerging scholars, except for Ekoeleştiri: Çevre ve Edebiyat (Ecocriticism: Environment and Literature, 2012), the Turkish volume I edited, and I have proceeded on the assumption that the work of these nascent ecocritics is important enough to warrant this volume. New International Voices in Ecocriticism offers an international collection of scholarship that includes ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecoeroticism, literary and eco-cultural analyses, postcolonial and posthuman approaches, new materialisms, and other critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, as well as new considerations of self, place, dwelling, affect, ecophobia, music, 10 Introduction surfing, and gardening. It covers novels, drama, autobiography, song lyrics, and poetry; so it has a varied scope, mixing subcultures and more traditional artifacts. It is international in terms of its authors, their subjects, and the specific texts they use. The contributors are from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, and South Africa. They bring a diversity of perspectives in terms of gender and nationality, as well as academic standing. In this regard, this volume is a collection about borders, border transgression, border permeability, and rethinking the manner in which we construct territory, either bodily, nationally, or aesthetically. The human-nonhuman connection also figures prominently in some essays, as noted by subjects as various as agency and interspecies relations. These can be read as attempts to reframe or redefine boundaries, and this is done in an effort toward inclusion, social justice, and/or eco-social justice. Perhaps the best term that characterizes this book is hybridity. Especially the justice component is what forwards the analysis of hybridity in these pieces and makes it fresh. There is another current joining these pieces; that of popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries—how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. This collection is intended to merge the fringes, not in the geographical sense, but in the true spirit of congenial international collaborations, with the mainstream ecocritical scholarship represented by more established ecocritics. To the readers, who will notice that the essays here are heterogeneous and thus the volume lacks a visible unity, I will say that as such it represents the diversity and heterogeneity that, in fact, is the defining feature of ecocriticism. By offering a diversity of approaches to affirm the continuing contributions, relevance, and necessity of international perspectives in environmental literature and culture, this book offers unique responses to environmental problems that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars. It also paves the way for future scholarship where more international ecocritics will find an outlet to express their ideas freely and be able to contribute to the field. The volume has three sections organized in accordance to the topics the essays particularly emphasize. Entitled “New Ecocritical Trends,” the first section explores the most recent intellectual engagement of ecocriticism with the new theoretical developments in the environmental humanities, such as the new materialist paradigm and material ecocriticism, eco-globalism, eco-cosmopolitanism, affect theory, and the gothic ecocritical approach. In “Selves at the Fringes: Expanding Material Ecocriticism,” Kyle Bladow joins conversations developing around material ecocriticism, a field that advances ecocritical projects using concepts emerging from the new materialist paradigm, by asking what material ecocriticism might contribute to conceptions of identity. Identity, Introduction 11

Bladow maintains, matters to individuals and groups who speak out against environmental degradation, and the analysis of identity formation and politics enriches ecocritical studies of environmental justice and activism. Draw- ing inspiration from Vicki Kirby, this chapter engages Derrida’s notion of khôra to furnish a material-discursive understanding of identity. Bladow argues that, like language, identity formation can be read as a process of differentiation, producing a more mutable, khôra-like understanding that comprehends the fluidity of twenty-first-century grassroots activism, often promoted through social networking. Contemporary literature illustrates these ideas about identity; in particular, Bladow examines Richard Powers’s novel The Echo Maker alongside Pattiann Rogers’s poem “A Statement of Certainty.” The advent of material ecocriticism also invites an opportunity to compare the longstanding preoccupations with ecology and with the nature/ culture divide in ecocriticism to the ways the new materialisms influence these topics. In the second chapter of this section, “Global Subcultural Bohemianism”: Postlocal Ecocriticism and Tim Winton’s Breath,” William V. Lombardi develops what he calls “postlocal ecocriticism.” By taking the breaking wave as a provocative, material emblem of global influence on local places in the postnational era, Lombardi investigates the ecocritical implications of this deterritorialized sense of place in Australian author Tim Winton’s surf novel Breath (2008), which tells the story of an international competitor turned “soul surfer” who has settled near a secluded local break in Western Austra- lia. He first demonstrates how surfing in particular, and the medium of what has become known as extreme sports in general, highlights the tension of local/global exchange; second, he shows how this reading problematizes the role of local knowledge, complicating its inherent epistemologies of territory and authenticity; and lastly, he explores how such “global subcultural bohemianism” might facilitate webs of resistance against homogeneity and enhance the potential for localized environmental activism. Lombardi’s approach contributes to an expanded definition of Ursula K. Heise’s notion of “eco-cosmopolitanism,” and it confronts the often problematic traditional sense of fixity in regional literature more generally, promoting a more open, rhizomatic conception of the ways in which regional literatures are produced and maintained. Sylvan Goldberg’s chapter, “What is it about you . . . that so irritates me?:” Northern Exposure’s Sustainable Feeling,” focuses on the affective structures that mediate the majority of our day-to-day encounters with place: low-level affects that can drive environmental awareness even as their politics remain ambivalent and equivocal. According to Goldberg, ecocriticism has increasingly tried to articulate our complex affective relationships to place, but it has kept its sights trained primarily on large-scale, recognizably political affects, such as grief, love, and anger. In so doing, he claims, eco- 12 Introduction critics have failed to account for the affective structures. Goldberg urges for ecocriticism’s more rigorous engagement with the field of affect theory, which offers insights that can help us to understand the way in which particular affective experiences can draw our attention to the natural world, making what is proximate more present. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s discussion of irritation, which, for Ngai, negotiates a relationship between interior states of mind and external surroundings, Goldberg reads the 1990s sitcom Northern Exposure for its articulation of irritation as a means by which individuals can come to gain an affection for the local environments they inhabit. Northern Exposure follows Dr. Joel Fleischman’s relocation from New York City to rural Alaska, where he initially feels a sense of displacement and discomfort amidst a natural world that continually erupts into his sensory fields. By drawing a parallel between Fleischman’s irritation at this disruptive environment and the irritation at the heart of his relationship with his romantic foil, Maggie O’Connell, the show uses the generic conventions of romantic comedy to signal that Joel’s irritation in both of these relationships is heading toward a more positive resolution, sliding toward affection. Thus, environmentally oriented irritation’s complex temporality implies an ongoing relationship to a place more quotidian than that to which much ecocritical scholarship attends, and yet one perhaps better able to account for the emotional ways we inhabit place. Başak Ağın Dönmez’s chapter, “Bang Your Head and Save the Planet: Gothic Ecocriticism,” where she discusses the environmental relevance of Heavy Metal songs for ecocriticism, completes this section. Proceeding from Robert Walser’s idea that “social and musical criticism are inseparable,” Ağın Dönmez argues that any music that derives from social resistance can fall into the scope of ecocriticism for three main reasons. Firstly, ecocriticism and social and cultural studies go hand in hand in the sense that human behavior toward the environment is the key factor that ecocriticism focuses its attention on. Secondly, ecocriticism is a form of social resistance that strives for giving voice to the nonhuman others, in an attempt to erase the understanding that creates hierarchical boundaries between the human (as the center) and the others (as the margin). Finally, it is by the study of culturally popular material that ecocriticism can reach larger audiences, bringing the non-academic material into the academic world so that the theory can be put into practice. Considering these three points, the author introduces the term “gothic ecocriticism,” which concentrates on the reading of environmentally aware Heavy Metal songs as part of popular culture from the dark ecological perspective. While some bands such as Gammacide and Agathocles take an extremely vulgar stance, reversing the relationship between the human and the nonhuman as the predator and the prey, certain other bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Gojira openly claim that they are environmentalists. Despite the notoriety of the Heavy Metal genre as the music of violence and Introduction 13 bloodshed, the bands included in her discussion, the author claims, certainly aim to raise awareness and lead people to take action in environmental matters. Ağın Dönmez’s conclusion is that gothic ecocriticism may help the spread of ecocriticism through a combination of theory and practice. The second section of the volume, “Nature and Human Experience,” begins with Sarah Nolan’s “Un-Natural Ecopoetics: Natural/Cultural Inter- sections in Poetic Language and Form.” Nolan claims that early landmark studies in ecopoetics, including John Elder’s Imagining the Earth, Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, and Leonard Scigaj’s Sustainable Poetry primarily define ecopoetry by its attention to the natural world. While these encounters with nature range from the lone weed along the city sidewalk or the soiled air of an urban space to the seemingly unadulterated wilderness, poems that are read through the lens of ecopoetics, unlike recent ecocritical studies in postcolonial ecocriticism and material ecocriticism more generally, are typically acknowledged for their natural elements and rarely consider the ways in which nature and culture intermingle. Yet, environment is not only the “biological” aspects of a space but also the many cultural elements that compose it. While early ecopoetic studies rise from developing ecocritical ideas that work to distinguish nature as something valuable but separate from human ideas, today ecocriticism embraces new theories like the new materialisms, queer theory and ecologies, and social and environmental justice that complicate the boundaries of the human and thus the nature/culture binary inherent in earlier studies. Nolan discusses how ecopoetry differs from nature poetry in order to allow this critical concept to be applied to poems that might otherwise remain outside the scope of ecocriticism. Following two recent projects in ecopoetic theory that begin to problematize the ways in which nature and culture intersect—Brenda Iijima’s The Ecolanguage Read- er and Scott Knickerbocker’s Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Na- ture of Language—she builds upon these recent theoretical developments by considering the ecopoetics of un-natural poetry, or, put another way, poetry that either does not overtly engage with nature or does not consider nature at all. Although the expansion toward un-natural environments has occurred widely in other areas of ecocriticism, it is only recently that such trends are reaching ecopoetics. The second chapter, “There’s No Place like ‘Home:’” Susanna Moodie, Shelter Writing, and Dwelling on the Earth,” is written by Elise Mitchell. Discussing the Canadian writer Susanna Moodie’s work in terms of “shelter writing,” which she borrows from Susan Fraiman, Mitchell claims that Moo- die’s work is integral to the formation of a Canadian ecological consciousness. Though shelter writing is not in itself ecocritical, the author states, it does share values that are significant in ecocriticism, particularly deliberate holding in tension of essentialized concepts and a concern with marginality. Shelter writing seeks to reclaim domesticity for any vulnerable or marginal 14 Introduction person, but in so doing, it emphasizes the need for these individuals to construct and reconstruct homes to protect themselves from external pressure. Because shelters are unstable and vulnerable, and must be constantly re- established and re-written, they underscore both human presumption and vulnerability and, as such, situate humankind in a realistic, tenuous position in relation to the nonhuman. Reading Moodie’s autobiographical work as shelter writing provides new perspective on sense of place, dis-placement, and dwelling. Written by Guangchen Chen, the third chapter in this section is entitled “Against Ecological Kitsch: Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Project.” Ac- cording to Chen, certain environmentalist criticisms of human beings’ excessively destructive activities against nature are based on the idea that nature is an originally undisturbed, balanced, well-organized and hence ideal state. Human activities deviate from this state, and a return to it should be called for as a solution. Such an assumption about nature has been challenged by some theorists, who argue that nature as such is simply a discursive construct, an ideology, a distortion that misinterprets the real state of things and covers their inner discontent. It can even be misappropriated to become a means of manipulation. Concepts like ecology and nature thus become a comfort zone for those who find the reality too disturbing and decide to turn a blind eye to ecological issues. Chen claims that these critics, ruthless as they are, risk falling into the trap of creating an unsettlingly severe ideology and a vocabulary of artistic representation that potentially serve the purpose of another kind of manipulation. This chapter deals with this twofold problem of the artistic representation of ecological catastrophe by defining both approaches as aspects of “ecological kitsch.” It analyzes certain characteristics of kitsch as an aesthetic (and originally exclusively human) category, and by transferring it onto the sphere of ecology, demonstrates how it can also (mis)represent aspects of nature in the way it does human experiences, so as to fulfill ideological agendas. At the core of the problem is the treatment of the ecological abject in art. To exemplify, Chen discusses the British film director and artist Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Garden Project. In the fourth chapter, “Neo-Aranyakas: An Enquiry into Mahasweta Devi’s Forest Fictions,” Anu Asokan takes up the subject of a postcolonial nation state like India which confronts various issues ranging from poverty, overpopulation, marginalization of the displaced and the dispossessed, uneven distribution of natural resources, and environmental degradation. In this context, Asokan analyzes the works of Mahasweta Devi, a well-known activist writer, that reveal the need for a passionate understanding of the indigenous people and their environment. She argues that forests, one of the abundant but threatened natural resources, have become a site of exploitation, conflict, and marginalization with the development and intrusion of predominant power structures. Devi’s works, the author suggests, can be categorized Introduction 15 as “forest fictions,” where forests embody the sacred space of tribals, epito- mizing their ecological, cultural, and social values. Mahasweta Devi’s stories, read as Neo-Aranyakas, offer a poignant commentary on what the forest spaces signify in contemporary Indian society. Asokan explores the Neo- Aranyakas in the framework of environmental justice ecocriticism. Devi’s Aranyer Adhikhar (1977), she claims, establishes the theme of environmental justice ecocriticism by probing into the bearings of ecological imperialism imposed by colonial rule and mainstream discourses of power. The final chapter of this section, “Ecoerotic Imaginations in the Early Modernity and Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure,” is written by Abdul- hamit Arvas. Arvas traces the intricate relationship between nature and transgressive sexual desire and acts in early modern artistic imagination by a close reading of Margaret Cavendish’s pastoral play, The Convent of Pleasure. Following Theocritus and Virgil, many early modern writers use pastoral genre as a means to address “the love that dare not speak its name.” While same-sex male homoeroticism pervades most early modern pastorals, it is female homoeroticism, claims Arvas, that is central to Cavendish’s pastoral play. According to the author, same-sex female desire in this play evinces that homoeroticism in pastoral is not simply an imitative mode, but more interconnected with the contemporary sexual concerns in early modern Eng- land. Arvas suggests that Cavendish challenges the heteronormative discourse regarding procreative sex as the natural by situating most perverse relations in the depth of nature that is the green world itself. He argues, Cavendish’s use of nature signifies an independent space, a fearsome wilderness that is othered alongside certain sexual acts. In his view, the othered spaces and sexual practices in the play help us uncover discourses related to the institutionalization of heterosexualization and procreation, and conjointly, to the destruction of nature in the seventeenth century. Generating resistance to early modern conceptualizations of nature and sexuality, the play is, the author maintains, an exemplary work of what he calls, “ecoeroticism”— an imagined and eroticized queer resistance counteracting sexual homogeneity and spatialized in the very depth of green world. Queer ecology as a recent scholarly endeavor has mostly focused on the post-nineteenth century texts to influentially blur the distinction between nature and sex, human and inhuman, and to reveal the intimacy between nature and queer. Yet, tracing queer ecologies under historical inquiry and reading early modern queer ecologies promises to historicize the queer/nature interconnectedness, locate the paradigm shifts in the formation of discourses regarding sexuality and nature, and, consequently, to contribute to the current scholarship in queer ecology—and ecocriticism in general. The final section of the volume is focused on “Human-Nonhuman Rela- tions.” In the first chapter, “What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape,” Christina Caupert tackles the question of why 16 Introduction ecocritical work on theater and drama has been sparse. She considers the implications of our animality that open up a host of questions, such as: Are we just bundles of biochemical processes? Does accepting our animality amount to condemning ourselves to the status of helpless, passive objects of the relentless laws of nature? Should all differences between humans and other animals be regarded as mere ideological constructions? Is humanism an obsolete doctrine to be discarded? Caupert takes these questions on the basis of a modern classic of American drama, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922), and claims that the play stages the realization of human animality as the cause of a deep crisis, which, however, opens up chances of consciously questioning one’s self-image, cultural convictions, and ethical responsibilities. She argues that the dramatic form, which so far has received compara- tively little attention from ecocritics, is well suited as a framework in which these issues can be discussed. Due to its connections to theatrical performance, drama places special emphasis on the human body as both a manifestation of physical materiality and as a site of cultural inscriptions. It thus makes tangible that there are indeed no stable boundaries between the human and other animals—and that, out of respect for both sides, we still have to avoid postulating simple sameness. In the second chapter, “Familiar Animals: The question of Human-Ani- mal Relationships in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City,” Elzette Steenkamp explores the representation of human-animal relations in South African author Lauren Beukes’s speculative novel, Zoo City. With its cast of characters who are mysteriously linked (both physically and psychically) to “spirit” animal familiars, Steenkamp suggests, Zoo City collapses the boundaries between human and non-human, and challenges the categories and distinctions that continue to serve as justification for human domination over animal others. It also addresses various human social injustices in South Africa, such as poverty, xenophobia and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Drawing on approaches to postcolonial ecocriticism that emphasize the interrelatedness of social and environmental concerns, Steenkamp’s chapter focuses particularly on what this kind of intersectional attitude toward environmentalism could mean for a South African context. Through a close reading of the novel, she explores the ways in which Zoo City attempts to negotiate the tension between the impulse to foreground human need and the ethical impetus for recognizing the intrinsic value of animal others. The third chapter, “Dismantling ‘Conceptual Straitjackets’ in Peter Dick- inson’s Eva,” written by Diana Villanueva Romero, completes this section. Here Dickinson’s novel is analyzed as a work which functions as a warning against human arrogance and that, by depicting a dystopian future where humans are substituted by a new “race” of chimpanzees mothered by a human-animal hybrid, highlights the need to find alternative ways of inhabiting Earth and to embrace our own animality. Eva (1988) is an ecotopian novel Introduction 17 that tells the story of a young girl who has to come to terms with her new self after an operation where her neuron memory is transferred to the body of a female chimpanzee, Kelly. Eva’s transformation into a human-animal hybrid sets in motion her questioning of the barriers imposed on her by science, her parents, and consumerist society, and turns her, eventually, into the only hope for a dying planet. Villanueva Romero analyzes the ways in which Dickinson constructs Eva’s transformation into a fully integrated being where the aforementioned binaries are dismantled. She argues that Dickin- son, in order to call attention to the need to operate a change of paradigm in Western society, creates a novel that can be read as a revision of the Judeo- Christian myth of Adam and Eve as well as a response to androcentric theories of evolution. In this sense, the author claims, Eva can be interpreted in light of ecocriticism’s call for cultural regeneration. It pays close attention to issues—overpopulation, species extinction, consumerism, and animal experimentation—that feature today at the core of current ecocritical analysis on the dangers of anthropocentrism. Throughout the novel, Eva has to redefine herself in relationship with four fundamental binaries: human/animal, mind/body, culture/nature, and man/woman. Her own survival and that of the planet will come to depend on her full integration as girl chimpanzee. Eva will ultimately embrace difference and cross the gap between the human and the nonhuman animal becoming thus a bridge between the two. As these twelve essays show, diverse approaches in ecocritical thought offered by scholars from different countries espouse ecocriticism’s foundational premise that environmental concerns are also globally shared concerns of young generations in academia. And metaphorically speaking, they offer new naturalcultural plants to flourish in ecocritical soils. This volume, therefore, distinguishes itself by its contributors who wanted to re-think boundaries, sociocultural differences, ecological conditions, and ecocritical approaches in a productive fusion of international horizons. In a way, their work consolidates the creativity of ecocritical scholarship, bridging the gap between the established and the emergent.

NOTES

1. The most immediate international examples would include: Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, & Rachel Stein, ed. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy (2002); Sylvia Mayer, ed. Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on African American Environmental Imagination (2003); Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005); Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Nature in Literary and Cultural Stud- ies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (2006); Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLough- rey, eds. “Special Cluster on Postcolonial Ecocriticism.” ISLE 14.1 (2007): 71–159; the Spring 2008 and Summer 2009 issues of MELUS; Elizabeth DeLaughrey and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011); Serpil Oppermann, Ufuk Özdağ, Nevin Özkan, and Scott Slovic, eds. The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (2011), 18 Introduction

CA. Cranston and Robert Zeller, eds. The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers (2007); Greg Garrard, ed. Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (2012); and Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (2012). Publications in languages other than English would include Ecocriticas: Literatura y medio ambiente (2010), edited by Carmen Flys Junquera, Jose Manuel Marrero Henriques, and Julia Barella Vigal, in Spanish; the Taiwanese journal from Tamkang University, The Ecohumanist (in English or Chinese); the Finnish volume, Äänekäs Kevät: Ekocriittinen Kirjallisuudentutki- mus, edited by Lahtinen, Toni, and Markku Lehtimäki (2008); Eco-Crítica, “Crítica Verde”: La Naturaleza y el Medioambiente en el Discurso Cultural Anglófono, in Spanish edited by Mirian Carballo, and Maria Elena Aguirre, from Argentina (2010); Hubert Zapf’s edited collection, Kulturökologie und Literatur: Beiträge zu einem trandsdisziplinären Paradigma der Li- teraturwissenschaft (2008) from Germany; and Serpil Oppermann’s edited volume in Turkish, Ekoeleştiri:Çevre ve Edebiyat (2012). In addition, other international publications, in English, such as Selvamony, Nirmal, Nirmaldasan, and Rayson K. Alex, eds. Essays in Ecocriticism (2007) from India, and Louw, Pat, and Travis V. Mason, eds. Alternation: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa. Special issue on “Birds in and out of Literature.” 16.2 (2009), are examples of important studies appearing recently throughout the world. (Special thanks to Scott Slovic for informing me of these publications.) 2. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology,” eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xxv. 3. Ibid., xxv. 4. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, “Introduction: Why Go Beyond Nature Writing, and Where to Go?” in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriti- cism, eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 3–4. 5. Patrick Murphy, “‘The Women Are Speaking’: Contemporary Literature as Theoretical Critique,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, eds. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 27. 6. Greta Gaard, “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriti- cism,” ISLE 17, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 643–665, at 659. 7. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Blooming- ton: Indiana UP, 2008), 9. 8. Ibid., 5. 9. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, “Introduction,” in The Bioregion- al Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, eds. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 4. 10. Ursula K. Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” PMLA 121, no.2 (March 2006): 503–16, at 505–506. 11. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 11. 12. Ibid., 128. 13. Henry Harrington and John Tallmage, “Introduction,” in Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, eds. John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), ix. 14. Ibid., xv. 15. Scott Slovic, “Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes, Practising Doctrine,” in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (New York: Rout- ledge, 2000), 161. 16. David Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 2. 17. Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Char- lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 5. Introduction 19

18. Serpil Oppermann, “The Rhizomatic Trajectory of Ecocriticism,” Ecozon@ 1. no.1 (2010): 17–21, at 18. 19. Ursula K. Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” PMLA 121, no.2 (March 2006): 503–16, at 505. 20. For ecocriticism’s development, see Michael B. Cohen, “Blues in the Green: Ecocriti- cism” (2004); Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005); Ursula K. Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism” (2006); Loretta Johnson, “Greening the Li- brary: The Fundamentals and Future of Ecocriticism” (2009); Scott Slovic, “The Third-Wave of Ecocriticism: North American reflections on the Current Phase of the Discipline” (2010); Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment” (2011); Timothy Clark The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011); and Michelle Baley, “The Formation of a Field: Ecocriticism in America—An Interview with Cheryll Glotfelty” (2012). 21. Scott Slovic, “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism: North American Reflections on the Current Phase of the Disicipline,” Ecozon@ 1, no.1 (2010): 4–10, at 4. 22. Paula Willoquet-Marcondi, “Introduction: From Literary to Cinematic Ecocriticism,” in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, ed. Paula Willoquet-Marcondi (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 3. 23. Stacy Alaimo, “Material Engagements: Science Studies and the Environmental Human- ities,” Ecozon@ 1, no.1 (2010): 69–74, at 70. 24. Gaard, “New Directions for Ecofeminism,” 645. 25. Richard Kerridge,”Introduction,” in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Litera- ture, eds. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London: Zed Books), 5. 26. Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 417–40, at 422. 27. Helena Feder, “Rethinking Multiculturalism: Theory and Nonhuman Cultures,” Special Forum on Ecocriticism and Theory, ISLE 17, no.4 (Autumn 2010): 775–77, at 775. 28. Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” 523. 29. Serenella Iovino, “Ecocriticism and a Non-Anthropocentric Humanism: Reflections on Local Natures and Global Responsibilities,” in Local Natures, Global Responsibilites: Ecocrit- ical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, eds. Laurenz Volkmann, Nancy Grimm, Ines Detmers, and Katrin Thompson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 43. 30. Ibid., 44. 31. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 17. 32. Sarah Jacquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Cul- ture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 6. 33. Heather Sullivan, “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism,” ISLE. Spec. cluster on Mate- rial Ecocriticism, eds. Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips. 19, no.3 (Summer 2012): 515–31, at 515. 34. Masami Yuki, “Why Eat Toxic Food? Mercury Poisoning, Minamata, and Literary Resistance to Risk of Food,” ISLE. Spec. cluster on Food and East Asian Literature, ed. Simon C. Estok. 19, no.4 (Autumn 2012): 494–514, at 739. 35. Kim Won-Chung, “A World in a Rice Bowl: Chiha Kim and Emerging Korean Food Ethic,” ISLE. Spec. cluster on Food and East Asian Literature, ed. Simon C. Estok. 19, no.4 (Autumn 2012): 706–18, at 707. 36. Greg Garrard, “Nature Cures? Or How to Police Analogies of Personal and Ecological Health.” ISLE. Spec. issue on Material Ecocriticism, eds. Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips. 19, no.3 (Summer 2012): 494–514, at 497. 37. Serenela Iovino, “Pollution” in Keywords for Environmental Studies, eds. Joni Adam- son, William Gleason, and David N. Pellow (Forthcoming from New York University Press, 2014), n.p. 38. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, “Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Defining the Subject of Ecocriticism—An Introduction,” in Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (Amster- dam: Rodopi, 2006), 10. 20 Introduction

39. Ibid.,19. 40. Iovino, “Ecocriticism and a Non-Anthropocentric Humanism,” 31. 41. Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism,” MELUS 34, no.2 (Summer 2009): 5–24, at 6. 42. Serpil Oppermann, “Transnationalization of Ecocriticism,” Anglia 130, no.3 (2012): 401–19, at 408. 43. Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II., “Introduction,” in Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species, eds. Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 7. 44. Chia-Ju Chang and Iris Ralph, “Women and Interspecies Care: Dog Mothers in Tai- wan,” in International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, eds. Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann (New York: Routledge, 2013), 154. 45. Greta Gaard, “In(ter)dependence Day: A Feminist Ecocritical Perspective on Fire- works,” in International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, eds. Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann (New York: Routledge, 2013), 269. 46. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Ecology’s Rainbow,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green,” ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xxx. 47. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 2011), 5. 48. Ibid., 6. 49. Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 33. 50. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 61. 51. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity,” Ecozon@ 3, no.1 (2012): 75–91, at 79, 83. 52. Buell, Heise, and Thornber, “Literature and Environment,” 417.

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Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Murphy, Patrick D. “‘The Women Are Speaking’: Contemporary Literature as Theoretical Critique.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, 23–48. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. ———. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields. New York: Lexington Books, 2009. Müller, Timo, and Michael Sauter, eds. Literature Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriti- cism. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag WINTER, 2012. Nagy, Kelsi, and Phillip David Johnson II. “Introduction.” In Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species, edited by Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II., 1-27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ———, eds. Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Un- wanted Species. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Nirmaldasan, Nirmal Selvamony, and Rayson K. Alex, eds. Essays in Ecocriticism. New Delhi: OSLE India and Sarup and Sons, 2007. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence: Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Oppermann, Serpil. “The Rhizomatic Trajectory of Ecocriticism.” Ecozon@ 1, no.1 (2010): 17–21. ———. “Transnationalization of Ecocriticism.” Anglia 130, no.3 (2012): 401–19. Oppermann, Serpil, Ufuk Özdağ, Nevin Özkan, and Scott Slovic, eds. The Future of Ecocriti- cism: New Horizons. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Ray, Sarah Jacquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Rosendale, Steven, ed. The Greening of Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Slovic, Scott. “Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes, Practising Doctrine.” In The Green Stud- ies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, edited by Laurence Coupe, 160–62. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism: North American Reflections on the Current Phase of the Disicipline.” Ecozon@ 1, no.1 (2010): 4–10. Sullivan, Heather. “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism.” ISLE. Spec. cluster on Material Ecocriticism, edited by Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips, 19, no.3 (Summer 2012): 515–31. Volkmann, Laurenz, Nancy Grimm, Ines Detmers, and Katrin Thompson, eds. Local Natures, Global Responsibilites: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures. Amster- dam: Rodopi, 2008. Wallace, Kathleen R. and Karla Armbruster. “Introduction: Why Go Beyond Nature Writing, and Where To?” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, 1–25. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. ———, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottes- ville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Westling, Louise H. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Willoquet-Marcondi, Paula. “Introduction: From Literary to Cinematic Ecocriticism.” In Fram- ing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, edited by Paula Willoquet-Marcondi, 1–22. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. ———, Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville: Univer- sity of Virginia Press, 2010. Won-Chung, Kim. “A World in a Rice Bowl: Chiha Kim and Emerging Korean Food Ethic.” ISLE. Spec. cluster on Food and East Asian Literature, edited by Simon C. Estok. 19, no.4 (Autumn 2012): 706–18. 24 Introduction

Yuki, Masami. “Why Eat Toxic Food? Mercury Poisoning, Minamata, and Literary Resistance to Risk of Food.” ISLE. Spec. cluster on Food and East Asian Literature, edited by Simon C. Estok. 19, no.4 (Autumn 2012): 494–514. Zapf, Hubert, ed. Kulturökologie und Literatur: Beiträge zu einem trandsdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag WINTER, 2008. I

New Ecocritical Trends

Chapter One

Selves at the Fringes

Expanding Material Ecocriticism

Kyle Bladow

Having emerged in only the past few years, material ecocriticism has moved front and center in ecocritical discussions. A survey of the 2013 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference program reveals thirty-two paper titles referencing the new materialisms. At the same time, one can trace conceptions and concerns related to this area in some of ecocriticism’s earliest writers; these include approaches to matter and materiality thought to be off-limits by prevailing theory since the linguistic turn, considerations of interrelatedness, interdisciplinary discussions with the sciences, and persistent reformulations and destabilizations of the nature/culture binary. The prominence of material ecocriticism has even rendered it the hallmark of a new wave of ecocriticism. Scott Slovic writes, “It now seems to me, as we near the end of 2012, that the material turn in ecocriticism is broadening to the extent that it may well represent a new ‘fourth wave of ecocriticism.’”1 This statement comes after the 2009 proposal of a third wave that “recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries; this third wave explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint.”2 This capacious definition leaves little aside for a fourth wave, which might be for the best. Although helpful in sketching the trajectories of ecocriticism, the wave metaphor can promote a false sense of succession, since many scholars continue to work with topics characterizing preceding waves. Other metaphors better handle moments where the wave metaphor strains, including Lawrence Buell’s “palimpsest”3 and Serpil Oppermann’s “rhizome.” This latter metaphor, adopted from De- leuze’s postmodern philosophy, fits nicely not only because of its botanical 27 28 Selves at the Fringes and ecological connotations, but because, as Oppermann writes, it “opens ups a new cultural and literary space for theorizing the developments in ecocriticism as a multi-faceted discursive formation, allowing its polyphonic nature to be seen not as a manifestation of a disciplinary crisis, but as a cultivated kind of rhizomatic activity.”4 Imagining ecocriticism as a rhizome further presents its scholarly endeavors as simultaneous and allied rather than sequential and competitive. The rhizome accounts for the diversity of projects and their varied theoretical underpinnings. Like the larger field, material ecocriticism has a robust and varied background with its own kind of rhizomatic activity. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann present these trajectories and foreground the field’s major concerns in their introduction to the collection Material Ecocriticism. Emphasiz- ing the new materialist assertion that matter is not comprised of inert, discrete objects but rather of dynamic, vital phenomena exhibiting agency, they draw these philosophical perspectives into ecocriticism by affirming that these agencies “can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories.”5 As storytelling requires tellers and listeners, attending to these meaning- making agencies inevitably alludes to identity formation. Identity matters in a field closely tied to environmental activism and engagement: how we identify with others and with our environments, how we align ourselves with other political groups, and how we assemble for action and change, all depend on notions of identity. Material ecocriticism has made great strides in pointing out the narrative agencies of matter, but what about (post)human narrators? What remains of the self, what are our material identities, as the world becomes ever more alive and agential, speaking and flowing through “us”? I approach these questions by turning to Vicki Kirby’s materialist readings of Derrida and applying them to ecocritical readings of texts and environmental activism. Derrida might seem a strange place to begin with an inquiry into material identity. For instance, speculative realism, another movement belonging to the material turn and akin to the new materialisms, often positions Derrida near the end of the legacy of correlationism inaugurated by Kant (i.e., before its refutation by Deleuze). Derrida and deconstruction get relegated to a closed system of language and dismissed for the inability to address reality beyond that system. Yet in the spirit of retaining poststructuralist developments in the material turn, deconstruction needn’t be construed as anti-materialist but should rather be considered alongside advancements in natural sciences and critical theory. Derrida’s work serves as a useful locus for considering new materialist explorations of identity, especially for material ecocritics, who analyze texts and language. Given how theories of identity stress difference, Derrida’s insistence on différance, his interest in the impossible, and his consideration of khôra can assist our comprehension of identity. Bringing deconstruction to join the interdisciplinary play of the new Kyle Bladow 29 materialisms enriches discussions of language and matter beyond representationalism. Linguistic theories have long figured language as a realm removed from the world, cordoned off by correlationism and representationalism. It is thus of little surprise, given his engagement with language, that Derrida would be readily figured as working within a bounded field. But a closer reading of his work does not uphold these distinctions as easily. By formulating the operation of language upon a différance not bound to such limited definitions of language as an enclosed system, his philosophy allows for an opening attention to unfinalizable, uncontainable otherness. While other new materialist scholars prefer the immanent, affirmative philosophy of Deleuze, Vicki Kirby is one of the first to extensively draw on Derrida. Kirby’s project is to reassert the applicability of Derrida’s thought to the natural sciences by reinterpreting Derrida’s famous maxim “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“there is no outside of text”) to align it with nature:

My justification for wanting to naturalize language and its productive energies rests on considering how strange this “inside” of language might be. It could be likened to the way physicists negotiate the spatial demarcation of what is inside or outside the universe. . . . [T]he provocation I am offering . . . might be to interpret “there is no outside of language” as “there is no outside of Nature.” What do I forfeit in doing this, and more importantly, what might I gain? 6

One answer to Kirby’s questions is that such assertions assist our investigations of identity. Even as our most empirical scientific experiments today serve to undermine the very notions of empiricism and positivism that once emerged from them—such as quantum eraser experiments that support Bohr’s complementarity and confound traditional causality—so too can we use the insights of what might seem thoroughly humanist philosophy belonging exclusively to the realm of “culture” to observe nature’s operations. We can study material identity using deconstruction by asking how, like language, identity is “the brain-twisting suggestion of difference itself; not the difference between one thing and another, but a process that gives rise to the perception of an event as a divided phenomenon.”7 To extend this idea about difference and how its non-being constructs identity, I would include an aspect of Derrida’s thought not addressed by Kirby: his explorations of khôra. Derrida’s essay “Khôra,” published in On the Name and examining “an exemplary aporia” in Plato’s Timaeus,8 offers in its analysis some ways to apprehend identity not fixed to static categories, but which reveals its affinities with flux, becoming, and openness. Derrida warns us not to confuse khôra with such terms as “chaos” or “abyss,” all of which “consist in giving form to it by determining it, it which, however, can ‘offer itself’ . . . only by removing itself from any determination.”9 In speaking of khôra, we must 30 Selves at the Fringes furthermore be careful “not to confuse it in a generality by properly attributing to it properties which would still be those of a determinate existent.”10 Certainly no simple task. John D. Caputo offers the metaphor of an infinite play of reflections or of “containers containing containers.”11 Beyond this mise en abyme, what other figurations might be made to advance an understanding of material identity? Derrida uses khôra to account for the differential spacing between categories like “either this or that” as well as “both this and that.” In On the Name, he notes his interest in the oscillation between these “two types of oscillation” and wants to move beyond genres of logic and myth to consider a “third genre” of discourse.12 This approach contributes to identity theorization by suggesting a move beyond both exclusionary identities (“I’m this because I’m not that”) and inclusionary identities (e.g., hybridity) to khôra-like conceptions of identity, which receive reflections, but are not them: identity that recedes from determination. Thinking of khôra helps define identity as a radical process of becoming rather than one of determination, a conception of identity open to the future—what would be in French not futur (determinable future events) but l’avenir (à-venir, the “to-come”). This conception helps “us” to better place “ourselves” within a world that the new materialist thinking describes as a radical ongoing intra-action of phenomena. 13 Deconstruc- tion, far from employing a logic of entrapment, helps us glimpse language at play in the new materialisms, language that is profoundly natural, co-creating identities in the non-space of khôra, identities which themselves operate like khôra.14 This presentation of identity seems in keeping with the work that poststructuralist and postmodernist thought has done to present the self as more fragmented and interpenetrated—at least, in terms of culture—and it now finds a parallel in such new materialist thought as Stacy Alaimo’s trans- corporeality. This can be a threatening idea, as we realize our greater vulnerability to environmental toxins and dangers, but it need not be exclusively threatening, no more than the fragmented postmodern self need foster only a nihilistic or pessimistic outlook. Endless deferment, change, and interpenetrated being doesn’t signal the fracturing of some preexisting whole, but instead the enactment of the ongoing becoming of the world. We are not lost in fragmentation, but more connected and enmeshed in the world, responsive to it and responsible toward it, as it. Bringing identity into our discussions of material ecocriticism is a helpful way to stay attentive to the nature/culture binary that we so often try to dissolve yet frequently find ourselves stuck to. The advent of material ecocriticism intensifies the complexity of the nature/culture discussions integral to ecocriticism since its beginning. The foundational Ecocriticism Reader repeatedly demonstrates concern with this binary. The opening section of the collection seeks “to raise some fundamental questions about the relationship Kyle Bladow 31 between nature and culture.”15 Central to that relationship is the human (including the many prefixes it amasses). Of course, raising and responding to the questions as proposed here by this “relationship” retains the categories that allow the binary to function. Even so, it is remarkable how the contributors to the Reader anticipate current new materialist developments through their recurrent mention of interconnection, that prevailing if easily targeted ecological maxim. Neil Evernden, for instance, writes, “The really subversive element in Ecology rests . . . upon its basic premise: inter-related- ness. . . . But what is actually involved is a genuine intermingling of parts of the system. There are no discrete entities.”16 While Evernden’s “intermingling” doesn’t quite define Karen Barad’s notion of “intra-action,” it does approximate it, especially the emphasis on entanglement. Meanwhile, SueEl- len Campbell notices, “I could speculate about those suggestive similarities [between critical theory and ecology] to quantum mechanics and relativity theory . . . I’ve seen illustrations of these ideas everywhere since I started thinking about them—in what may be the most common experience of the world as a web of networks.”17 It is tempting to imagine how Campbell’s speculations might have aligned with those of recent material ecocritics informed by similar interdisciplinary investigations. As a final example, Mi- chael J. McDowell’s chapter associates Bakhtin with ecological perspectives and laments the humanities’ slowness in adopting advancements in scientific theory. He writes, “We’ve begun to realize that an entity is largely created and undergoes change by its interaction with other entities,”18 adding that “Bakhtin’s theories might be seen as the literary equivalent of ecology, the science of relationships”19 and that “human life is ‘conjoined’ with the life of nature.”20 This again shows how ecological insights, if imperfectly understood, helped scholars pursue interconnected thinking. These examples from The Ecocriticism Reader suggest the receptiveness that ecocriticism would exhibit toward the new materialisms; the questions these earlier essays raised are similar, sometimes precisely those that material ecocritics are beginning to consider. The ensuing generation of ecocritics have extended this attention to ecological interrelatedness. For instance, Stacy Alaimo focuses on material subjects to develop these notions of ecological interrelation and how they complicate framing or deconstructing the nature/culture binary. In Bodily Na- tures, Alaimo depicts a material self comprised of and embedded in the coinciding social and biological conditions of surrounding environments, rather than separating these conditions out into discrete realms of nature and culture. Alaimo’s trans-corporeality21 thus shows the kinds of interconnectedness previous scholars proposed; however, her presentation of the human subject departs from these ideas by destabilizing the preexisting coherence of entities (assumed in the very term “interconnectedness”) and by the enmeshment of the cultural and natural as mutually constitutive rather than operating 32 Selves at the Fringes within separate if interconnected spheres. Alaimo’s theory shows influences of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway by promoting material-discursive practices that reframe nature/culture as natureculture, fostering a “posthuman environmental ethics denying separation.”22 This newer subjectivity is stranger than preceding kinds of interconnection, since “the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial.”23 Trans-corporeality insists that all entities are always already implicated in each other’s becoming. Alaimo’s readings of material memoirs help define (post)human identity. Even the most familiar matter, that composing our bodies, becomes strange in this new view, requiring “the specialized knowledges of science.”24 Estrangement intensifies as “the very substance of the self is interconnected with vast biological, economic, and industrial systems that can never be entirely mapped or understood.”25 Trans-corporeality thus presents us with a materiality that is profoundly intimate, but something we never fully know. The complexity of identity becomes even more unknow- able as supposedly stable, foundational matter shows itself to be more dynamic and engaged with supposedly nonmaterial, cultural categories. These observations align with Derrida’s own hesitancy to use the term “matter” for fear that it would reinforce logocentrism via faith in a foundational presence. As Pheng Cheah notes, “As long as matter is not defined as ‘absolute exterior or radical heterogeneity,’ materialism is complicit with idealism. Both fall back on a transcendental signified.”26 This strange material-discursive world is us, with trans-corporeality taking us further into it than the interconnections posited by articles in The Ecocriticism Reader. Vicki Kirby’s suggestions about language as nature seem affiliated with Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, because both accord materiality a more agential and intra-active role with discourse. Here we might read Alaimo as shifting the issue from nature/culture to naturecultures while Kirby further eschews the binary by asserting a pervasive nature. Material ecocritics can use these new developments to emphasize expressions of material identity that reflect these insights from both the new materialisms and from Derrida’s differential spacing of khôra. Investigating identity is equally important for investigating narrative agencies of matter, since these agencies belong not only to “objects” but to “humans” also engaged in becoming and meaning making. These theoretical insights portray posthuman identity not as a separation from nature, nor as a determinate category, but as an identity that offers itself (like khôra) by continually giving way. Two brief examples of khôra-like identity come from Richard Powers’s novel The Echo Maker and from Pattiann Rogers’s poem “A Statement of Certainty.” One interest to ecocritics here should be the acute environmental awareness these emergent identities effect. Kyle Bladow 33

In a later scene in The Echo Maker, neurologist Gerald Weber makes one of his characteristic remarks about human subjectivity. “The self was a mob,” he thinks, “a drifting, improvised posse” instead of a coherent individual entity.27 The sentiment repeats throughout the book; in addition to crowd metaphors, subjectivities are imagined as conflicted committees or hastily drafted compositions. Weber notes that neurological processes mask this underlying chaos, consolidating various systems and perceptions into one self; however, Weber’s growth in the novel, along with the other major characters, involves an acknowledgement that individual, distinct subjectivity is a fiction. For characters on this quest, adopting a more accurate sense of being demands facing the instability of selfhood: delving into the committees’ deliberations, reading older drafts of the compositions, and perceiving the shifting nature of thought and identity. These stories are captured in the novel’s epigraph, taken from A. R. Luria: “To find the soul, it is necessary to lose it.” Just as the self is a tangled web, other characters and events in the novel partake in complex intersections with one another. The novel’s narrative form additionally emphasizes this idea by shuffling its focalization between a set of characters with the effect that a reader might need to pause to confirm who is speaking. Intersection is a prevailing theme in Powers’s work, as he admits in interviews. Citing John Muir’s statement, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,”28 Powers claims it is “the hitch that [his] fiction wants to discover.”29 This motive puts Powers in league with the critical developments of trans-corporeality. His depictions of subjectivity also suit khôra-like identity that recedes from determination as characters confront the fiction of their subjectivities. The fragmented self that results from this interconnection and intro- spection is not necessarily detrimental to the characters, but puts them into greater connection with each other and the environments they inhabit. The Echo Maker provides a more optimistic response to the postmodern condition and to trans-corporeality that resists cynicism and holds room for wonder and appreciation. In a similar tone, Pattiann Rogers’s poem “A Statement of Certainty” describes life on Earth in three stanzas of free verse, beginning “Here we are, all of us now.”30 Rogers offers a long, labyrinthine catalogue of polychro- matic animal descriptors, relying on repetition to drive the pace of the poem as well as loop it together; the opening, “Here we are,” repeats with a difference at the end, becoming “we are here.”31 The use of the plural first person obscures the identity of both speaker and reader, so that either or both could be included as members of this diverse community of scaled, furred, shelled, and clawed creatures. Rogers presents her biologically diverse world with a playful use of the declarative, a definite “statement of certainty” that ultimately provokes more 34 Selves at the Fringes questioning and wonder than it does closure. Her dazzling, multileveled lists suggest baroque biodiversity and reproduce the sense of teeming, abundant life contained only by the opening and the closing assertion that it exists collectively. To this repetition Rogers generously adds assonance and alliter- ation—”obsidian, or inside whorled,” “spotted spindle shells,” and “wick of water-swept seeds”—hovering just above a tongue-twister as a way of emphasizing a playful aspect to this diversity. Although Rogers’s speaker emphasizes a close-up view of life through the lists of parts of these beings, the overall effect is the sense of encompassing the wide variety of life on the planet (and perhaps beyond). The sense of wonder produced by the poem is most explicitly stated midway through, where the speaker says the awareness that this life com- prises beings both named and unnamed grants knowledge of twin “attrib- ute[s] of god.” The unknown resides precisely within or emerges from the vibrant, measurable materiality of these beings; in all its exuberant cataloguing, “A Statement of Certainty” does not fail to include among the living a reference to the mystery reverberating through the resounding hum of “we are here.” The cataloguing doesn’t so much delimit the identities of these independent beings but suggests the differential becoming necessary for all identity. These two examples from Powers and Rogers show the kind of posthumanist identity that khôra intimates. But what do we do with an ever-shifting, khôra-like identity, a posthuman identity of dynamic, agential matter? How can such a seemingly abstract, diffuse sense of self be relevant to literary and political endeavors that address environmental degradation? Such an envisioning of identity might preclude any hope of coherent or reliable narrators, let alone suit urgently needed environmental coalitions or activism. As Alaimo admits, “there are no guarantees that emerging models of materiality will cultivate environmentalism.”32 Nevertheless, the thrust of the posthuman environmental ethics she advocates shows that these models of materiality can be amenable to environmentalist aims. In particular, recognizing trans-corporeality advances an environmentalism that “builds connections rather than boundaries and that undertakes ethical actions from within global systems, interchanges, and flows.”33 This trans-corporeal environmentalism thus comprehends the deep affinities between political activism and personal healing from toxin-induced illness, and it reaffirms our interdependence with others, which “[h]umanism, capitalist individualism, transcendent religions, and utilitarian conceptions of nature have labored to deny.”34 As Alaimo considers the environmentalist potential for the trans-corporeal awareness demonstrated in material memoirs and fiction, Rosi Braidotti celebrates the change that an accelerating, interconnected world offers, noting that “far from being merely a ‘crisis’ of values, this historical situation presents us with new opportunities.”35 Our interpenetrating bodies needn’t be Kyle Bladow 35 construed only in terms of risk or vulnerability. Similarly, khôra-like identity needn’t always be negatively conceived. Postmodernism readily depicts the fragmentation or dissolution of self as an enfeebling loss, but it can also be generative and powerful. A key value here might be the supple way it allows identities to assemble and coalesce. 36 When Judith Butler spoke at Occupy Wall Street in Liberty Park (Man- hattan’s Zuccotti Park) on October 23, 2011, she notably did not refer to herself in terms of being a woman, an academic, an American, or any other readymade category. Nor did she address the assembled crowd along identar- ian lines. Rather, she said, “We are coming together as bodies in alliance . . . we’re standing here together making democracy, enacting the phrase, ‘We the People’.”37 Here the biopolitical emphasis on the materiality of breathing bodies supersedes identity categories, a sentiment further actualized through Butler’s use of the People’s Mic, a technique in which the assembled bodies repeated her phrase by phrase in order to amplify her words and relay them through the crowd.38 Butler’s speech exemplifies the kinds of political engagements and identities espoused by the new materialist theories that emphasize assemblages, intra-actions, and movements more than they do delim- ited categories, inherent rights, and stable temporalities. Her words also demonstrate how, as Coole and Frost point out in the introduction to the collection New Materialisms, “[t]he sheer materiality and mass of bodies . . . is becoming a key dimension of political analysis and intervention.”39 It may well be that nascent material theories’ reformulations of identity do not have much to offer politics, because their ontological interventions have transformed or troubled the presuppositions upon which politics depends. Pheng Cheah, for instance, notes that “perhaps the better question to ask is not that of the relevance of these new materialisms to political thought and their implications for concrete politics but how they radically put into question the fundamental categories of political theory including the concept of the political itself.”40 Similarly, Mitch Rose praises non-representational theories for opening up new avenues of thought, but he questions its political applicability given that “[t]o be political is to choose and to choose is to represent. . . . We need representation not only to have a vision of the future but to have an ‘I’ for choosing that vision.”41 Indeed, if individuals foster illusions of a phenomenal or conscious self, as Thomas Metzinger claims, political engagement may also require illusory vantage points, individual and collective, from which to operate. New materialist identity politics may thus seem an oxymoron, another paradox of impossible being, a Möbius twist or even khôra itself, receding and resisting (while giving place for) definition, like the narrators in Powers’s novel or the named and unnamed beings in Rogers’s poem. Yet the radical assertions of the new materialisms have not exhausted their potential to impact the political. If representational, identity, or “classical” politics are required for democracy, it may well be that the 36 Selves at the Fringes emergent theories here apply to the Derridean démocratie à venir, the democracy to come. Current reappraisals of how material and discursive conditions jointly inform identity help to open the concept beyond oppositional/ exclusionary or intersectional/inclusionary identities and toward more affirmative political ends, including environmentalism. Formulations of material identity should combine the advances of the new materialisms with the pragmatic understanding that the material-discursive complexity of the world includes identity categories and dichotomies, however repellent they might be. 42 One kind of identity thus need not exclude others as ecocritics apply them to textual analysis of literature or environmental movements, and tracing these identities can be a profound way of showing matter exhibiting narrative agency by producing “configurations of meanings and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co- emerging interactions.”43 Material ecocriticism’s considerations of narrative agencies—agencies, it must be stressed, of human actors as much as nonhuman things—serve to extend narrative’s purview beyond whatever particular subject or object is said to be narrating, offering new assemblages and routes of interpretation beyond static and bounded if intermingled entities: to explore how any one narration is hitched to the rest of the universe. Ecocritical examinations of identity and its manifestations in narrative and environmental activism reveal khôralitions of posthuman matter vying for a better world, who work on the infinite fringes that comprise an accelerating globe. These examinations further promise ecocriticism’s rhizomatic trajectory will be “capable of remodeling and modifying the multipolar horizons of contemporary thought.”44 Advancing renewed understandings of ourselves through variegated new materialist thought helps us prepare for whatever comes next, helping us to stand with/as the others threaded through what we take to be ourselves, working, as Rosi Braidotti’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s amor fati puts it, “to be worthy of whatever happens to us and rework it within an ethics of relation.”45 What are we, as beings among a plenitude of vital matter, if not always giving way to allow ourselves to come through, as much a process of difference as language itself? A more contingent, more mutable, more khôra-like identity arrives to embody these kinds of actions and practices as identities readily assemble, coalesce, and expand in scale. This is precisely the kind of fluidity of emergent grassroots environmental activism, demonstrating at once the networked strength of a rhizome and the temporary potency of a massive wave (to borrow ecocriticism’s reigning structural analogies). One is reminded of the natural phenomenon called a murmuration, in which thousands of starlings flock together. In late 2011, a video of such a murmuration went viral online.46 This short clip captures the swarming dynamism of an assembly of sparrows moving so fluidly and seamlessly as to give the illusion of their becoming a super-organism. What is identity here? It is both an assemblage Kyle Bladow 37 or multiplicity and a non-being. The self is not one, not any, which is also to say, the self is not one, but many.

NOTES

1. Scott Slovic, “Editor’s Note,” ISLE 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 619. 2. Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 34, no.2 (Summer 2009): 6–7. 3. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 17. 4. Serpil Oppermann, “The Rhizomatic Trajectory of Ecocriticism,” Ecozon@ 1, no.1 (2010):17–21, at 19. 5. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Stories Come to Matter,” in Material Ecocriti- cism, eds. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1. 6. Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 83. 7. Ibid., 127. 8. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), xv. 9. Ibid., 94. 10. Ibid., 97. 11. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derri- da (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 91. 12. Derrida, On the Name, 90. 13. Karen Barad’s agential realism uses “intra-action” to explain the entangling of phenomena that produces the world. Barad works language and materiality together in a way that refuses separation: “Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another; rather the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity.” Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 140. 14. Studies of subjectivity in contemporary neurobiology offer complementary observations to those raised by these linguistic explorations of material identity. Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One examines the “fiction” that the brain produces of a coherent phenomenal self. His conclusion waxes philosophical, with a closing line that echoes Kirby’s materialist understanding of language as nature’s way of observing itself: “There is no one whose illusion the conscious self could be, no one who is confusing herself with anything. As soon as the basic point has been grasped . . . one can start talking back to Mother Nature, elevating her self- conversation to a new level.” Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003, rpt. Boston: MIT Press, 2004), 634. 15. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literature, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xxvii. 16. Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy,” in Ecocriticism Reader, 93. 17. SueEllen Campbell, “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post- Structuralism Meet,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, 135. 18. Michael J. McDowell, “The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, 371. 19. Ibid., 372. 20. Ibid., 379. 21. In addition to signifying the enmeshment of the human with the more-than-human world, Alaimo writes that “[t]rans-corporeality, as a theoretical site, is where corporeal theo- 38 Selves at the Fringes ries, environmental theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways. Further- more, the movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.” Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 3. 22. Ibid., 24. 23. Ibid., 20. 24. Ibid., 87. 25. Ibid., 95. 26. Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 72. 27. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (New York: Picador, 2006), 358. 28. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 211. 29. Richard Powers, “Making the Rounds,” in Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, eds. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 309. 30. Pattiann Rogers, “A Statement of Certainty,” in Generations (New York: Penguin, 2004), 105. 31. Ibid., 106. 32. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 9. 33. Ibid., 111. 34. Ibid., 156. 35. Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” in New Material- isms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 206. 36. Braidotti often posits her affirmative nomadic philosophy in ways that counter Derrida, who she finds part of a tradition problematic for its emphasis on loss. Still, applying Derrida’s khôra to material identity brings the latter closer to Braidotti’s own formulations on non- unitary identity. 37. “Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street,” YouTube video, 3:39, posted by “smabiner,” October 23, 2011. http://youtu.be/JVpoOdz1AKQ (accessed February 7, 2014). 38. An interesting juxtaposition to this speech is Butler’s extended musing on “we” in “Finishing/Starting,” afterword to Derrida and the Time of the Political. Butler seems to describe khôra-like identity where she asserts that “‘we’ . . . is not simple pluralistic heterogeneity . . . or intersectionality.” She also writes, “The différance that rifts the ‘we’ and proves its impossibility as a unity without difference is at once the différance by which the ‘we’ is constituted, its very condition of possibility, and there is no way around this double bind.” Butler, “Finishing/Starting,” Afterword to Derrida and the Time of the Political, eds. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 296–297. 39. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 24. 40. Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialisms,” 89. 41. Mitch Rose, “Envisioning the Future: Ontology, Time and the Politics of Non-Represen- tation,” in Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, eds. Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 357. 42. Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty advance postpositive realism, which insists on the relevance of identity politics even while acknowledging the postmodernist critique that identity categories are “indelibly marked by the oppressive conditions that created them in the first place.” This abandonment of identity seems similar to the linguistic turn’s banishment of materiality; if “the social movements of the twenty-first century require a new language of liberation,” new materialist concepts of language as part of a communicative, meaningful nature aids this call. Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, eds. Linda Martín Alcoff et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 3. 43. Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism,” 79. 44. Oppermann, “Rhizomatic Trajectory,” 20. Kyle Bladow 39

45. Braidotti, “Politics,” 214. 46. Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, “Murmuration,” Vimeo video, 2:03, October 26, 2011. http://vimeo.com/31158841 (Accessed February 7, 2014).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adamson, Joni and Scott Slovic. “Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism,” edited by Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 5–24. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Alcoff, Linda Martín, and Satya P. Mohanty. “Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduc- tion.” Introduction to Identity Politics Reconsidered, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff, Mi- chael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya, 1–9. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Braidotti, Rosi. “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 201–218. Dur- ham: Duke University Press, 2010. Butler, Judith. “Finishing/Starting.” Afterword to Derrida and the Time of the Political, edited by Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, 291–306. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. ———. “Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street.” YouTube video, 3:39. Posted by “smabiner,” October 23, 2011. http://youtu.be/JVpoOdz1AKQ (accessed February 7, 2014). Campbell, SueEllen. “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post- Structuralism Meet.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literature, edited by Che- ryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 124-136. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Caputo, John D., ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Cheah, Pheng. “Non-Dialectical Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 70-91. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Clive, Sophie Windsor and Liberty Smith. “Murmuration.” Vimeo video, 2:03. October 26, 2011. http://vimeo.com/31158841 (accessed February 7, 2014). Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms." In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–41. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literature, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 92–104. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literature, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, xv–xxxvii. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. “Stories Come to Matter.” Introduction to Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 1–17. Bloomington: Indi- ana University Press, 2014. Kirby, Vicki. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 40 Selves at the Fringes

Metzinger, Thomas. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. 2003. Boston: MIT Press, 2004. Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. Oppermann, Serpil. “The Rhizomatic Trajectory of Ecocriticism.” Ecozon@ 1, no.1 (2010): 17–21. Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Picador, 2006. ———. “Making the Rounds.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 305-310. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. Rogers, Pattiann. “A Statement of Certainty.” In Generations, 105–106. New York: Penguin, 2004. Rose, Mitch. “Envisioning the Future: Ontology, Time and the Politics of Non-Representa- tion.” In Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, edited by Ben An- derson and Paul Harrison, 341-362. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. Slovic, Scott. “Editor’s Note.” ISLE 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 619. Chapter Two

Global Subcultural Bohemianism

The Prospect of Postlocal Ecocriticism in Tim Winton’s Breath

William V. Lombardi

Thinking about littoral zones metaphorically, the breaking wave is a provocative, material emblem of the give-and-take between global influence and local places in an era often characterized as post-national. The oceanic swell, in contact with all points at once, is given form variously by particular shore breaks, even as its constant battering reshapes local coastlines, bringing to mind a fluid, physical nature and a globally networked culture that redefine the meaning of locale. The wave, then, characterizes a condition that I call postlocal: the experience of immediate, immanent placement that is nevertheless globally connected. Across the disciplines, leading scholarship pur- ports that places should not be considered “fixed,” but rather that their cultures are better understood as dynamic systems of flow and disjuncture between local and global,1 that borders and boundaries are socially produced and reproduced, and in fact, that “Every local activity or event, whether associated with production or consumption or exchange or leisure time choices is in some sense not just local, but global as well.”2 With this “open and dynamic relationship” of global and regional cultural exchange in mind, 3 I propose an ecological critical regionalism, or postlocal ecocriticism, in response to a major confluence in contemporary trends in criticism gaining traction among regional studies scholars and ecocritics, the foremost being the development of an imagination of the global and, in particular, a dedication either to interrogating what sociologist John Tomlinson calls the “complex connectivity” of postnational global and local spaces, 4 or the “organic interconnectedness” of worldwide ecological systems,5 or both. A postlocal

41 42 Global Subcultural Bohemianism ecocriticism would balance critical regionalism––which in its many varieties analyzes but is not limited to the discursive production, accommodation, resistance, and flow of cultural imaginaries, artifacts, and spaces––with ecocriticism’s attention to the study of culturally produced artifacts and the environment. It has become increasingly necessary to interrogate the postlocal as it is expressed in everyday lifeways globally. By extending Neil Campbell’s critical regionalist study of “the radical potential of region” to its utmost,6 it is possible to uncover the way the western U.S. regional imaginary, its “West- ness”––predicated on the traditional mythology and iconography of the U.S. West––has been inscribed in other national literatures, and how this traveling imaginary responds to ecocritical interpretation. The aim is to expose the routes of Westness through the mirror of its globally circulated guises. In this vein, Australian author Tim Winton’s surf novel Breath (2008) is steeped in frontier metaphors and intimations of globalization. At once Winton’s novel underscores the allegorical and the material potentialities of the wave in matters of emplacement by expressing networked and bodily place-making. Breath, then, provides a potentially rich opportunity to examine the ecocritical activist potential of surf culture as antithetical to deterritorialization 7 established by Krista Comer in Surfer Girls in the New World Order (2010). Comer acknowledges surf culture as a prime example of the relational understanding of place, surfing as an extension of frontier epistemology, and surfing’s potential for the preservation of local places. 8 Comer claims that surfing provides a “language for imagining contemporary global mobility”9 even as it represents a site for local environmental accountability; as such, conflating Winton’s novel Breath with Westness and situating it in a postlocal context forwards a productive way to imagine a system of ecosocial resistance to deterritorialization in the lives of banal cosmopolitans. Put another way, in a time of convenient institutional, if not quotidian, detachment from global environmental responsibility, thinking and acting postlocally pro- motes an open, local-global environmental ethic. Perhaps the most compelling example to date of an ecological critical regionalism is Ursula K. Heise’s concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism,” which she defines as “environmental world citizenship,” and which she developed in response to what she perceives to be environmentalists’ “excessive investment in the local.”10 Heise admits a “conceptual impasse”11 arrived at through critiques and counter-critiques of globalization that attempt to separate the principal importance of locale from a less polarized epistemology. In so doing, she points to such contradictions as possible starting points for the development of categories that instead might encourage specific case studies such as mine.12 Indeed, Tomlinson before her asserts that globalization theorists must acknowledge the different modalities of complex connectivity and “interpret its implications across the various spheres of social existence.”13 William V. Lombardi 43

Arjun Appadurai, too, draws attention to these “various spheres,” acknowledging that “globalization is characterized by disjunctive flows” which “pre- cipitate various kinds of problems and frictions in different local situations.”14 He argues that in response to this unevenness, scholars need to consider forms of “grassroots globalization, or globalization from below”15 which counteract the flattening or homogenizing effects of global capital. In the spirit of Appadurai’s “from below” advocacy and Tomlinson’s “modalities,” postlocal ecocriticism does the specific interpretive work of eco-cosmopolitanism as it is expressed in the everyday practice of that majority of people Ulrich Beck calls “banal cosmopolitans.” Beck contends that banal cosmopolitans—the vast majority of us—experience a latent, unconscious, passive, and often unwanted cosmopolitanism as the result of globalization’s interconnectivities.16 Through our latency, we persist in an immanent sense of place that runs counter to the actual, disembedded, delocalized condition of global citizenship today. For this reason, postlocal ecocriticism, unlike eco-cosmopolitanism, does not hail the end of sense-of-place-localism. 17 It addresses the scales of localism in the broader context of unconscious global- ity, putting the concept of deterritorialization in tension with the embodied practice and proximal, everyday experience of banal cosmopolitans. In this way, in practice, “postlocal” shadows eco-cosmopolitanism even as “postlocal” functions as a cohesive term with which to define the contemporary condition of life in place. Whereas exegeses of “deterritorialization” often lead to Mark Auge’s sense of “non-place,” “postlocal” does not assume such a result is necessarily so. To say “postlocal” is to approach a given text with an enmeshed understanding of local/regional/global always in mind, but also to suggest that places retain a resilient “thickness” in everyday life. To practice “postlocal ecocriticicism,” then, is to always imagine the routed or rhizomatic character of culture without losing sight of localized environmental contexts. Postlocalism in Breath responds to the problematics of place-attachment as outlined by Lawrence Buell. In that modern lives are vastly connected to a web of places rather than to a single place, the primary obstacle confronting a global environmental imagination is how to conceptualize scale and distance. Buell alludes to the fact that rather than concentric circles of care emanating outward from a single, subjective viewpoint that grow fainter as they grow wider, the affinities of a contemporary sense of place might look more like archipelagos of care linking the many places to which we are connected. 18 This condition reflects what Lucy Lippard has referred to as a “multicentered society.”19 Considering contemporary place-attachment as an archipelago, both Buell and Lippard suggest, might surmount the problem of environmental affect and distance, while an “ecoglobalist affect”20 adhering to concentric circles of care more easily falls prey to the sheltering invisibility that geographic distance affords environmental exploitation. At issue is the rela- 44 Global Subcultural Bohemianism tivity of place-attachment: on one hand, locale signifies officially and materially as a networked space; while on the other, by the immediacy of proximity alone, it resonates in everyday experience as insular from the global systems supporting it and which it supports. That is, locale-as-event in quotidian experience has remained imaginatively concentric in its system of care if not practically disconnected from the reciprocal economic processes by which it is sustained. Postlocalism, by contrast, challenges the problematic claims to a rooted authenticity that have troubled earlier studies of implaced meaning- making, but retains a localized biocentric, and potentially local-activist, perspective.21 Postlocal ecocriticism attempts to articulate a condition and perspective predicated on bodily meaning-making formulated on the ground, within the limitations and invisibilities of everyday lifeways, however globally networked. Ensconced within the supposed insularity of the banal cosmopolitan’s position, however truncated and provincial such a worldview may appear, is the promise of archipelagos of environmental care that subtend routes of capitalism. For example, Appadurai forwards the “from below” institutional advocacy of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational advocacy networks (TANs) that bring together disparate people and places. 22 Comer’s Surfer Girls in turn extends grassroots activist connectivity to include surfing subculture that, through its now global devotion to local breaks, has developed what she regards as “global subcultural microeconomies” that follow, but exist apart from, the work of larger affiliate organizations in their efforts at counter-globalization. 23 So too, Comer sketches a burgeoning community of subcultural activists surrounding particular sports representative of disjuncture in economic flows. The key term, then, is “subcultural.” These clusters of bohemian sport act like imagined communities cohering into a legible form quite similar to Buell’s archipelagos of care. These bohemian Others and their cohorts follow––and sometimes create or confirm––routes of globalization, yet their ethos and ideologies contradict and at their best countermand the flattening aspects of globalization. In other words, through the appropriation of global routes, locales separated by vast distances are made proximal by an ethics of care aligned to the sports with which they are associated. As disorganized and rhizomatic as such subcultural connections may sometimes be, they point toward additional cultural pathways that express the possibility of an ever widening system of affective archipelagos of care from which environmental accountability might proceed. For instance, routes of global subcultural bohemianism originating in Southern California to points in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawai’i appear in Bruce Brown’s epic surf film The Endless Summer. Tom Wolfe’s “The Pumphouse Gang” likewise illuminates an axis of subculture sport material- izing in Southern California during the 1960s that included surfing, the less environmentally mindful sports of short track racing and motocross, catama- William V. Lombardi 45 ran sailing, and skateboarding. Additionally, Daniel Duane’s memoir Caught Inside adds skateboarding, rock-climbing, and mountaineering to an expanding list of subcultural sport that is growing more globally networked. River- running and fly-fishing should also be included in this list. Most of these pursuits have galvanized ongoing local environmental activism and wa- tershed protection. Breath, written forty years after Brown’s film and Wolfe’s chronicle and set in the early 1970s in Australia, introduces Winton’s characters Eva and the soul-surfer guru Sando, expatriates living in an iconic surf shack within walking distance of a remote, local break. Eva, a U.S.-American, was once a freestyle downhill skier, and is now emotionally troubled and physically broken by the sport. Originally from Utah, Eva met Sando on Oahu and shortly thereafter went with him to San Francisco and then to Malibu during the “statuspheric” days Wolfe describes. We learn that Sando, in tune with the era’s zeitgeist, surfed on the professional circuit until he became disillusioned by its commercialism and dropped out, though he still receives boards and packages from around the world, and he still travels to Indonesia to ride breaks there when the urge strikes him. Though ostensibly prototypical drop- outs, Eva and Sando are nonetheless cosmopolitan bohemians of the kind emerging during this period. Indeed, through Eva, Winton adds extreme skiing to the list of iconoclastic subculture sports nascent in the 1960s, and in the process he appends additional locations to the constellation of places Brown, Wolfe, and later, Duane, incorporate. Through these texts and many others an axis of subcultural sport materializes around which recent activist efforts have rallied and whose global routes follow, but tend to subvert the intended use of, those routes created by and for neoliberal capital. An ultimately mature form of “play,” in effect, has undercut the officially conceived routes of “business.” Though on the surface Winton’s novel recounts the botched bildungsro- man of Bruce Pike, known to his mentor Sando as “Pikelet,” its narrative gains emotional force through Pikelet’s haunting memories of his early encounters with erotic asphyxiation. The novel works backward from its opening scene when Pikelet, a disenfranchised middle-aged man working as an emergency medical technician, is called to retrieve the body of a teenage boy who has died after a failed auto-erotic breath deprivation episode. Reminded of his own brush with the uncanny pleasures of asphyxiation, which he learned first as a child diving into the deep waters of the local river, and then as a novice big-wave rider, Pikelet recounts his introduction to erotic asphyxiation as an adolescent by Sando’s girlfriend, Eva, during Sando’s surfari to Indonesia. Conflating the thrill-seeking of the big-wave pursuit with a trou- bling eroticism, Pikelet’s life thereafter is subsumed by bouts with his con- science and an overwhelming need for adrenaline. 46 Global Subcultural Bohemianism

Stepping back from the lurking pathological pall that insinuates itself throughout Breath, however, Winton’s novel is coded with lessons of environmentalism in which breathing-as-being situates body and landscape as coextensive, a kind of natureculture. Pikelet, in essence, learns new lifeways through bodily practice of the type that ultimately destabilizes his banal cosmopolitan’s sense of place. Breath tells the story of a provincial Austra- lian boy learning to surf by coming into contact with highly mobile subcultural U.S.-Americans, and it confronts the impact of global networks on local places through an archipelago of “transnational athletic play.”24 Set in the early stages of this cultural moment, Breath depicts the growing pains of a bohemian sense of play that first disrupted, but finally learned to protect, local cultures and landscapes. The first time Pikelet saw the regional surf crew riding the waves of the bay, he recalls, “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant.” Struck by the utter difference between them and the men of his hometown of Sawyer who only ever did “solid, practical things, mostly with their hands,” he realizes “there wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men.”25 Implied in the sheer aesthetic difference Pikelet encounters is the promise of something transcendent of the imaginative life of his homeplace. This scene also depicts a sense of the fate to which he is doomed if he participates in provincial society. Later, as he begins surfing with his friend Loonie, an acute awareness of the finite cultural possibilities of Sawyer wash over him as contempt, so that he sees “how tiny and static and insignificant it really was.”26 In this scene, not only is local/regional/global difference a matter of aesthetics, it represents an ethical change, so that “useless beauty”27 is valued more than utility, and play replaces work as a cultural touchstone. Prying Pikelet from his provincialism, Winton’s bildung is one of impending globalization even in the world’s remotest places. The agent of change is a poetic image outside of the scope of local practice. More precisely, this passage articulates a generational gulf between work-for-work’s-sake and work as a means to an end. Pikelet and Loonie, for example, chop firewood for local businesses so that they can afford better surfboards, but they don’t self-identify as “woodcutters.” On the other hand, the working men of Sawyer are defined by the extractive work of global capitalism, and their understanding of the world and their place in it extends only as far as the parameters their jobs proscribe, while the emerging surf subculture refuses to participate, and in fact celebrates the liberal cultural borrowing indicative of the postlocal condition. Surfing diaspora, or “play,” certainly causes a rupture in the cultural identity of Sawyer, which had served an earlier extractive model of imperialism. In contrast, it is not Sawyer that Pikelet's mentor Sando calls home, but the physical landscape. For Sando, the town of Sawyer doesn't signify a wealth of raw materials, but rather he values its intrinsic natural wealth. Returning to Sawyer years later, William V. Lombardi 47

Pikelet remarks that the mill has shut down and Sando and Eva have moved to Utah. Significantly, the work of the mill has marked the forests in the region indefinitely, while Sando’s play has left no trace. Pikelet is captivated by the beauty of wave riding more so than by the ordinary workworld of mill life at the heart of Sawyer. The same scenario by this time had begun to play itself out worldwide, as Comer notes in “New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest,” where she posits a regional subcultural shift predicated on the global generational upheavals of 1968 when older cultural and political systems were being called into question. 28 As Pikelet and Loonie begin to spend more time with Sando, they learn new ways of seeing that were not available to them before. Winton, through Pikelet, points to the spirit of the era allusively as it pertains to new ways of seeing by dictating the contents of Sando’s beach hut library. A combination of “Jack London, Conrad, Melville, Hans Hass, Cousteau, Lao Tzu [and] Carlos Castenada,”29 it reflects the staggering sense of movement conveyed in all surfing literature and reveals the easy hipster accord reached imaginatively between colonial antecedents and counter-cultural heroes while still forming a break in everyday life with dominant culture. In fact, Sando’s library articulates the early stages of subversion the colonial/capitalist routes of globalization were undergoing as the result of subcultural foment. There- fore, Pikelet’s contempt for the “tiny, static, and insignificant,” is not simply the result of the aesthetic alternative surfing has allowed him to glimpse, but is due in part as well to the fact that surfing is itself linked to a globally routed subcultural bricolage—one attributable to Sando’s hippy vibe, that is vested in a commingling of bodily and aesthetically conceived environmentalism. Together in the water, Sando tells the boys: “But it’s not even about us. . . . It’s about you. You and the sea, you and the planet.”30 Although Loonie calls this “hippy shit,” Pikelet, in retrospect, reconsiders the change in paradigm this moment entails: “We didn’t know it yet, but we’d already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society.”31 Unbeknownst to Pikelet, the society he imagines had already mingled with and been informed by––to offer a few possible examples––the performance broadsides of the Diggers in San Francisco, bioregionalism in urban and rural California, the spiritualism of seekers back from India, and social justice movements around the globe; in other words, an entire array of loosely affiliated counter-culture factions. Indeed, Pikelet here registers a sense of culture beyond the merely local by positioning himself within the imagined community of global surf culture rather than “ordinary” provincialism, even if his is only a received mobility. Without having experienced Malibu, Indonesia, or Hawai’i first- hand, he has been transformed into a local participant in a global sport, and in the process upended the social values of his homeplace. Yet it is upon a rather unconditionally physical local emplacement that ecosocial activism in 48 Global Subcultural Bohemianism global subcultural sport would later take hold, emerging from latency to transform aesthetic difference into an ecosocial ideology. In the postlocal moment, Pikelet, Loonie, and Sando are both/and local- global. The point break they are surfing in this particular scene resists categorization as a “non-place,” and their experience is not dislocating, or dis- orienting. If anything, their postlocal condition brings them closer to the temporal and bodily immediacy of their homeplace by allowing them to experience the ocean in a new and exciting way that none of the local men ever had the inclination to enjoy, and which the boys, too, might have otherwise missed. Although Breath lacks any explicit activist component, its intimate portrait of the act of surfing offers a basis for counter-narrative in two ways. The first comes from Pikelet’s initial reaction to surfing as something that is strange, beautiful, and pointless, to which Winton very deliberately returns in the final lines of the novel and which I have discussed above. 32 The second stems from the metaphoric way in which breath signifies the internalization of one’s environment, and, conversely, by the peril of an environment capable of inscribing itself onto a person by scarring and the possibility of death, which also figures into the novel’s dénouement. In this second mode, the land inscribes the human instead of the human inscribing the land in a rarified form of environmental determinism. For example, in the following, earlier passage, Pikelet tries to catch a wave that is beyond his abilities and fails:

I sprawled down the hard, unyielding face [of the wave] . . . which collapsed on me and shot me skyward before snatching me down again so its rubble-spill might drive me headlong across the reef, rattling and wracking me all the way. I bounced and pinged and shot, winded and half-blind . . . I knew not to fight it, but I was nearly gone when the sea let me go. (98)

A struggle such as Pikelet’s, in which he is at the mercy of the elements, shows that place-sense is deeply entrenched in the land’s raw power over the human form. It reminds one of human dependence and interdependence beyond theoretical or political arguments. The above passage expresses a body that is permeable in the same way critical regionalism suggests places are, yet it also presents a form that is mutable when confronted by natural forces. Far less dramatic than an apocalyptic “risk” narrative like the one that drives Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism, experiential understanding of a wave’s power, and practical knowledge of specific breaks, may be the key to inciting environmental activism in some surfers. Play can be, and has been, parleyed into serious social change along the routes of surf culture. In the touching final line of the above passage, Pikelet refuses to fight the brutality of the wave and it finally releases him. At the mercy of the water, he knows it is supreme. William V. Lombardi 49

And yet, intimately entrenched in immanent placement as the experiences both scenes described here may have been, Pikelet still recalls that surfing the break that day “was something from a magazine and we were in it.”33 It would seem that the exteriorizing point of view of his gaze––placing the local break imaginatively within a globally circulating image––has in fact defamiliarized his home break; instead, in the simultaneous combination of physical immediacy and global perspective this scene entails, the within-and- without of place dissolves, and neither the global subcultural aesthetic nor the central position of local landscape is diminished. The familiar and distant are co-present, a rare occurrence in the consciousness of banal cosmopolitans. In this we see the rudiments of a globally aware worldview within the subtext of a harmony between immanence and complex connectivity. Al- though the boys simply revel in “the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful,”34 the “outlaw feeling” that Pikelet gets might mark a necessary precondition of postlocal consciousness that precipitates an ecosocial commitment. The break that Sando, Pikelet, and Loonie surf in the above scene is called “Barney’s” after the fourteen–foot great white shark that prowls in the area. It is an untouched break described as “primeval” in the parlance of the U.S.-American West.35 Hiking in to Barney’s there were “no huts or jet- ties…nothing to suggest that people came by at all, and it was obvious that none of this country had ever been logged.” Reaching the coast, Pikelet remarks that there was “still no sign of habitation, no footprints in the sand, not even a vehicle track in the hills beyond.”36 The amalgamation of wilderness and danger and the primeval landscape as proving ground for young men in Pikelet’s depiction of Barney’s has played itself out innumerably in western literature. So while Campbell acknowledges the U.S.-American West as diasporic, constituted of many cultures and co-presences, 37 the West in diaspora clarifies the vastness of the web of connectivities that inform any one region. The Westness emplotted on the Australian landscape maintains the essential tropes of U.S.-American frontier narratives but conforms to the specific geography of northwest Australia. In doing so, Westness in Australia swaps North American megafauna––such as the grizzly bear––for the locally resonant great white shark, and the unknown country west of the Mississippi for trackless beaches, and upholds the image of ancient forests untouched by the axe. Comer calls global/local surf culture “a postcolonial conundrum”38 because of “the subculture’s renovation of white masculinity,” and the “privileged forms of whiteness” that persist within it even as it has grown in sympathy and “openness to alternative lifeways.”39 Still, narrative holds surf subculture together, despite this paradox. It originates in two enduring traditions: “the endless summer motif and the big wave pursuit.”40 These two customs fuel the routes around the globe outlined above. In the first tradition, 50 Global Subcultural Bohemianism as Wolfe suggests, the surfer is esoteric, an “existentialist wanderer con- sumed by angst,” literally created by the film The Endless Summer.41 In the second, he is “a modern day mountain man like the legendary characters of the Rockies during the days of the Wild West.”42 In either case, waves are regularly perceived as frontiers by the soul-surfer and mountain man alike. Comer argues the roots of these traditions, notwithstanding surfing’s Polyne- sian genesis, trade on a single thematic, the western U.S.-American trope:

[T]here would be no glamour or cultural power to rhetorics of surfing without the simultaneous western American meaning that has attached to surfing in the United States and without the historical ability of “America’s West” to signal a colonial discourse about Western civilization . . . surfing’s status as a metaphor depends on a renewable western American regional identity. (Surfer, 18)

Comer’s use of “renewable” here implies a durable but mutable sense of West-ness beyond its geographical limits. Indeed, Duane concurs; in general he regards it as “. . . a very Pacific Rim version of frontier manhood.”43 In these readings, surf narrative in both its forms complicates formerly held beliefs about territory, authenticity, and pioneer imagery and the way regional cultures migrate and influence local places. Clearly, the frontier motif is at the heart of surf narrative’s “conundrum,” doggedly problematizing any environmentally minded archipelago of global citizenship. The postcolonial conundrum presents an ecocritical challenge because the principal difficulty of the rhetorics of surf narrative discussed above under- write the routes associated with the subculture. Global variations of a mono- lithic frontier theme framing the interpersonal exchanges occurring along this circuit are inculcated in a manner that is counterproductive to an environmental imagination of the global. Indeed, this reading of surf narrative supports cultural critic Hsuan L. Hsu’s claim that “global scenarios of commerce and migration often, and paradoxically, contribute to the formation of regional identifications on the part of narrators, characters, and presumed readers,”44 suggesting that there is no originary sense of place located in physical geography, that construction lies solely within narrative inscription, and that local narratives are easily overwritten by nationalist or globalist master narratives. The challenge to postlocal ecocritical readings of Breath lies not within the reconceptualization of what it means to be local entirely, but in the ability to identify those environmentally sustainable habits of local emplacement enmeshed in the surf narrative and to apply them on a global scale. After all, the “blank slate” paradigm adapted to the surf narrative that drives the “Bar- ney’s” episode above is the very same ideological construction that enabled environmental exploitation and the destruction of indigenous peoples on the American continent. Through the lens of global bohemianism, sympathetic to revisionist histories, the U.S.-American West becomes instead a narrative William V. Lombardi 51 pivot point in transnational, global cultural flow: the West whose traditional master narrative is a story of colonial conquest, nonetheless birthed newer traditions of resistance that ultimately include the from below iconoclastic axis of sport listed earlier. The significance of Sando’s influence, culled from hipster havens around the globe, lies in its subversive nature. As their mentor, he turns the boys against their parents and pushes them toward a culture of pleasure and adrenaline instead of work, and, in turn, away from the environmental exploitation in which their fathers’ work participated. By teaching Pikelet and Loonie that riding waves is better than contributing to the machine of global capitalism or the lifeways of the dominant local culture of Sawyer linked to neoliberal interests, Sando’s lessons also offered an antidote, however misguided, to provincialism. Winton’s novel marks an era when aesthetic difference was transforming itself from the superficial basis for a subcultural scene into an ideology with more far-reaching ecosocial potential. However, neither Pike- let nor Loonie ultimately escapes the early binds of their provincialism. They become two of the many casualties of the age that lost themselves to the perils of the subculture as well as to the social inequities of globalization. Yet, however imprudent it was, the era of personal and cultural transformation that preceded the sad flood of deterritorialization in the region remains an inspiration to Pikelet, despite his emotional scars. The point I want to make is that the emotional significance of learning to surf and the very bodily connection to the water and the landscape learned through the act of surfing, by novel’s end, has been parleyed into threads of nostalgia and critique that are at once ambivalent and provocative––the very essence of counter culture cache, and, therefore, an elemental site for a more engaged emplacement. A subcultural narrative that enables ecosocial consciousness in the wake of neoliberal exploitation is ultimately useful to ecocriticism striving toward a global imaginary. It reminds us that ecosocial resistance subtending the institutionalized exploitation of natural resources and local cultures might eventually unseat the many presumed inevitabilities of globalization through constant, though gradual, ecosocial intercessions. An archipelago of subcultures traveling transnational routes might create a web of environmentally sound practice operating in the vernacular landscapes hidden beneath master regional and global narratives. Though this is a problematic assumption that is ultimately not borne out in Breath, and is perhaps an idealistic oversim- plification of the complex connectivity by which global systems operate, the transnational circuits defined by surf culture and expressed in Winton’s novel acquire the complex aspect of place-attachment as surfers and subcultural Others worldwide learn to care for and protect their own favorite breaks, rivers, and climbing routes. Indeed, place-sense of this kind is highly localized and radically decentered. 52 Global Subcultural Bohemianism

Thinking of everyday practice as postlocal helps to situate the condition of banal cosmopolitanism. As a “from below,” grassroots practice, postlocal ecocriticism can exist alongside eco-cosmopolitanism, which seems to be more invested in a global environmental imaginary that works within traditional institutional channels rather than in exploring those practices that subvert the routes of globalization. When we remember that the modern environmental movement first took hold most powerfully in the U.S.-American West, and we recognize that it was precipitated by, and in turn reinforced, global subcultures in a truly rhizomatic accumulation of outsider ontologies, we begin to see the real ecosocial results of alliances that offer alternate histories and strategies of engagement with dominant culture.

NOTES

1. Ansi Paasi, “The Changing Discourses on Political Boundaries: Mapping the Back- grounds, Contexts, and Contents,” in B/Ordering Space, ed. Hank van Houtum, Olivier Kramsch, and Wolfgang Ziefhofer. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 25; Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” in Globalization, eds. Arjun Appa- durai. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 5. 2. Edward W. Soja, “Borders Unbound: Globalization, Regionalism, and the Postmetropol- itan Transition,” in B/Ordering Space, eds. Hank van Houtum, Olivier Krasch, and Wolfgang Ziefhofer. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 34; 40. 3. Phillip Joseph, American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age (Baton Rouge: Louisia- na State University Press, 2007), 7. 4. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–2. 5. Daniel Kemmis, Foreword, in Bioregionalism, ed. Michael Vincent McGinnis (London: Routledge, 1999), xvii. 6. Neil Campbell, The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transna- tional, Global, Media Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 54–5. 7. I derive my sense of this term from Tomlinson’s general use of the word: He takes it to mean, after Garcia Canclini, “‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories,’” so that our experience of place, due to the deepening effects of globalization, is now one of a disembedded experience of place (106–7). 8. Krista Comer, Surfer Girls in the New World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 18–20, at 78. 9. Ibid.,7. 10. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, 2. 14. Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization,” 6. 15. Ibid.,16. 16. Ulrich Beck, “Cosmopolitanism,” Ulrich Beck Online. Ulrich Beck, 2007. Web. 7 July 2012, n.p. 17. I realize this is a contentious claim: Scott Slovic is quick to point to Heise’s use of “and” in her title Sense of Place and Sense of Planet; yet, I agree with Cheryll Glotfelty’s opinion that there is rather an implied “or” in Heise’s claims. See Lynch, Glotfelty, and Armbruster's The Bioregional Imagination and Glotfelty's “Reclaiming NIMBY” in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century for brief, thoughtful rejoinders to Heise's argument. William V. Lombardi 53

18. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and the Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 72. 19. Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. (New York: New Press, 1997), 5. 20. Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affect: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagina- tion on a Planetary Scale," in Shades of Planet: American Literature as World Literature, eds. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 232. 21. In this sense I favor Peter Berg’s “planetarianism” and Mitchell Thomashow’s “bioregional cosmopolitanism” as clearer forms of ecological planetary belonging. Berg and Tho- mashow both exhibit early examples of postlocal consciousness, though they do not refer to it as such. Here I use Edward Casey's spelling of “implacement,” meaning immanent or “immediate placement,” rather than the traditional spelling in order to underscore a sense of place as process, rather than place as a static conception (xiii). 22. Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization,” 17. 23. Comer, Surfer Girls, 216. 24. Ibid., 1. 25. Tim Winton, Breath (New York: Picador, 2008), 25. 26. Ibid., 38. 27. Ibid., 25. 28. Krista Comer, “New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest,” in A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. Nicolas S. Witschi (Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011), 246. In this article Comer points to a shift in the western imaginary from country to city, but the linkage here still applies. At the same time the western imaginary shifted to urban environments in the United States, the foment that initiated the shift was part of a global current of disjuncture between old and new cultural practices. 29. Winton, Breath, 60. 30. Ibid., 77. 31. Ibid., 78. 32. Ibid., 218. 33. Ibid., 75. 34. Ibid., 26. 35. Ibid., 71. 36. Ibid., 72. 37. Campbell, Rhizomatic West, 5–6. 38. Comer, Surfer Girls, 20. 39. Ibid., 21. 40. Daniel Duane, Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast (New York: North Point Press, 1996), 193. 41. Ibid., 140. 42. Ibid., 193. 43. Ibid., 152. 44. Hsuan Hsu, “Literature and Regional Production,” American Literary History 17, no.1 (2005): 37.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” In Globalization, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 1–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Beck, Ulrich. “Cosmopolitanism.” Ulrich Beck Online. Ulrich Beck, 2007. 7 July 2012. Buell, Lawrence. “Ecoglobalist Affect: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale.” In Shades of Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 227–248. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ———. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and the Literary Imagi- nation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 54 Global Subcultural Bohemianism

Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place- World. 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Comer, Krista. “New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest.” In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, edited by Nicolas S. Witschi, 244–260. Mal- den, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. ———. Surfer Girls in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Duane, Daniel. Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast. New York: North Point Press, 1996. The Endless Summer. Directed by Bruce Brown. Bruce Brown Films, 1966. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hsu, Hsuan. “Literature and Regional Production.” American Literary History 17, no. 1 (2005): 36–69. Joseph, Phillip. American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Kemmis, Daniel. “Foreword.” In Bioregionalism, edited by Michael Vincent McGinnis, i-xvii. London: Routledge, 1999. Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: New Press, 1997. Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Paasi, Ansi. “The Changing Discourses on Political Boundaries: Mapping the Backgrounds, Contexts, and Contents.” In B/Ordering Space, edited by Hank van Houtum, Olivier Kramsch, and Wolfgang Ziefhofer, 17-32. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Soja, Edward W. “Borders Unbound: Globalization, Regionalism, and the Postmetropolitan Transition.” In B/Ordering Space, edited by Hank van Houtum, Olivier Krasch, and Wolf- gang Ziefhofer, 33-46. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Winton, Tim. Breath. New York: Picador, 2008. Wolfe, Tom. The Pumphouse Gang. 1968. New York: Random House, 1999. Chapter Three

“What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?”

Northern Exposure’s Sustainable Feeling

Sylvan Goldberg

“[Ecology] has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion.” —Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (2010)

“I have spoken of emotions as urgent transactions with a changing environment.” —Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (2001)

Ecocriticism and affect theory seem to speak in a common tongue, but a conversation between the two fields has barely begun. If, as Silvan Tompkins has argued, “[t]he human affect system is nicely matched in complexity . . . to a broad spectrum of environmental opportunities, challenges and demands from without,” then the affective register of our bodies offers a catalogue of encounters through which to understand the interpenetration of the human and nonhuman worlds.1 “[A]ffect,” the editors of The Affect Theory Reader (2010) tell us, “is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immer- sion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms.”2 But even as ecocritics have increasingly tried to articulate our complex emotional relationships to place, most have missed opportunities to engage with a wealth of scholarship on affect and emotion 3 emerging out of philosophy, social and cultural theory, psychology, and neuroscience.4 And while these diverse branches of affect theory offer divergent—at times contradictory—approaches for an ecocriticism whose methodological ambiguities have been a source of both celebration and discomfort,5 the opportunities an affective

55 56 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?” ecocriticism offers for interdisciplinary encounter seem promising. Strains of neuroscientific affect theory in particular might answer the calls of ecocritics ranging from Glen Love (in 2003) to Gillen D’Arcy Wood (in 2012) for an ecocriticism better able to incorporate scientific specificity, though ecocritics should familiarize themselves with Ruth Leys’s recent critique of this turn within the humanities and social sciences, 6 a critique that resonates with Dana Phillips’s excoriation of ecocritical abuses of ecology. 7 As an affective ecocriticism emerges, we would do well to consider not just what sustainability feels like, but what feelings are sustainable. 8 Ecocrit- ics have grown adept at discussing what Sianne Ngai has called “the classical political passions”—feelings like anger, grief, and love—and this valuable body of critique stands to gain useful insights through a more rigorous engagement with theoretical work on affect from a range of disciplines. 9 If, for example, an aesthetic category like the sublime, which has for so long been implicated in representations of the natural world, can be called, in Philip Fisher’s words, “the aesthetics of fear,” we need to understand better the way fear operates.10 But the sublime is an instructive example: both the aesthetic category and the affect it evokes are “about the unexpected, the sudden.”11 This suddenness seems poorly suited to our contemporary moment, when atmospheric carbon has surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in millions of years, a signal occurrence in the ongoing progression of global climate change.12 Discussions of environmental affect should consider the elongated temporality of climate change’s geologic timescales or of the types of deferred environmental and health effects that Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.”13 Feelings that sustain, that stretch out beyond the flash of fear or of anger, seem better able to map onto the temporality of our current condition and the environmental awareness that accompanies it. And yet, even more than this, we need a critical vocabulary that can account for the ways we inhabit place independent of the language and feeling of crisis. For even as the world has irrevocably shifted in the Anthro- pocene as a result of human impact, our emotional engagements with the places we inhabit begin long before our awareness of that impact, and those places can stir our emotions without inspiring thoughts of climate change, or other environmental concerns, at all. In other words, we have a rich emotional life in relation to places outside of an environmental-crisis framework, and we ought to think through those relations before, or at least alongside, our feelings of crisis. Thus, while we inhabit a world increasingly ravaged by climate change, we move through one organized by more quotidian concerns, and we must attend to the more muted affective registers that mediate this day to day.14 After all, it is the daily experiences of irritation (think only of allergy sufferers, for whom the natural world is a source of seasonal snuf- fling), of boredom (“Are we there yet?” echoing out from the backseat), of envy (as we look, perhaps guiltily, from our brown lawn to our neighbor’s Sylvan Goldberg 57 brilliant green) with which we all—ecocritics, climate change deniers, and everyone else—are most intimate. The physical and mental exhaustion that so often accompanies those grander, politically enabling emotions makes building an environmental politics around unsustainable feelings that constantly elude us seem doomed to frustration. If this call for an affect of quotidian environmental encounter—a quieter range of affective engagements—seems to risk depoliticizing an affective ecocriticism, engaging with affect theory can help us to recognize that the link between politics and affect is never as straightforward as some ecocritical work would seem to assume.15 Heather Houser has argued convincingly that before we can valorize particular affects for their political efficacy, we need a more nuanced critical understanding of the steps between awareness, emotion, and action. Indeed, feelings are fluid, constantly shifting into other states. An affective ecocriticism must attend to a range of feelings, attempting to articulate with increasing specificity how and when particular affects come to be represented, and what effects these different emotions have both within and beyond their texts. As ecocritics, we likely read a greater number of texts that represent more strongly charged affective relationships to places than many others, but the field’s ability to unpack environmental representation in a wide range of texts also allows us to attend to the discourses and cultural representations with which those persons less politically invested in environmental issues engage. How do the quieter affects represented in these texts reflect and condition our responses to the places we inhabit, we value, we preserve or destroy? While the political consequences of major affects deserve critical attention, minor affects deserve as much precisely because they don’t draw that attention so noticeably. Given both the centrality of film in popular culture and the significant attention that the burgeoning field of ecocinema studies has paid to emotion, as well as the field’s increasing interest in the idea that “all films present productive ecocritical exploration,” film offers a particularly valuable site of inquiry for these day-to-day feelings of place. 16 As Adrian Ivakhiv argues, cinema “produces or discloses worlds,” offering up a vision of a simultaneously anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic world that helps viewers “learn how to see and hear” these interrelated registers.17 And yet, few ecocritics have trained their gaze on the even more quotidian cinematic medium of television.18 If film provides an exemplary site for studying the production and representation of environmental affects, television, that mun- dane medium of the everyday, offers an object of inquiry even better attuned—or perhaps simply tuned—to the type of low-level, slow-burn affects through which most of us inhabit places. Indeed, multi-season serial television, with its expanded temporal scales—both within the narrative and in relation to the audience’s viewing experience—seems an ideal medium for thinking through our ongoing relationships to places. And because television 58 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?” shows require an audience in a way that film and books do not—that is, in order to garner the ratings that will justify their continued existence, they need an ongoing viewership—they depend on managing affective experiences that, curiously, mobilize and immobilize their audiences simultaneously, helping us to diagnose the ambivalent path between affect and (in)action. That is, shows cement their viewers to their seats, even as they irritate them, in the OED’s sense of “rous[ing] (a person, etc.) to some action,” namely, viewing. Few shows seem to allegorize the medium’s affective irritation—irritation as affect—more than Northern Exposure (1990–1995), whose protagonist, Joel Fleischman, finds himself unable to leave an environment that leaves him ever at wits’ end. Fleischman, who over the show’s first season comes to seem irritation embodied, makes his first appearance as a source of irritation: The series premiere opens with a long tracking shot of the inside of an airplane, the seated passengers seeming to stand in for the at-home audience, and as the camera pans up the aisle, a whining, slightly nasally voice comes from out of the frame to compare Anchorage unfavorably to New York City. If the audience, imagining itself onboard that plane, isn’t yet irritated at the disembodied voice’s inconsiderate whinging, the passenger bearing the brunt of the monologue most certainly is—as becomes clear when the camera finally settles on the captive seatmate of Fleischman, whose voice, we learn, we have been hearing. When asked for his opinion on Alas- ka, the seatmate sighs, mutters “Good luck,” and turns his light off to end the conversation. Fleischman sits immobilized even as the plane moves him to his new home as the central figure in what Northern Exposure “[c]o-creators Joshua Brand and John Falsey often described . . . as a ‘fish out of water show.’”19 That phrase, “fish out water,” is telling, for while its etymological roots link it explicitly with the traveler, the phrase turns in the hands of evolutionary biology into an allegory for our earthly condition: We are all, from an evolutionary perspective, fish out of water. 20 Thus by setting irritation as its dominant “tone,” in Sianne Ngai’s recent articulation of that term,21 the show offers up a way of reading the more general condition by which we inhabit places as one dependent on precisely the dynamic that irritation encodes: an ambivalent affect that can mobilize and immobilize at once. Ngai’s discussion of irritation, then, is useful here for she sees irritation as located “in the uneasy zone between psychic and bodily experience [and thus] produc[ing] an oscillation between insides and outsides: ‘external’ sensations (pain, inflammation, stinging) are used to elaborate ‘internal’ or psychological states.”22 In its attention to this negotiation of internal and external, irritation seems primed for thinking through the relationship between emotions and the exterior world. If, for Ngai, irritation serves to turn the inside out by “epidermaliz[ing]” a feeling, an irritation or annoyance directed toward the natural world works in two directions at once, pulling Sylvan Goldberg 59 what is exterior back inside the body. 23 This eco-irritation draws our attention to the external world, eliciting an awareness that parallels what Scott Slovic has called “the chief preoccupation” of “Thoreau’s followers in the tradition of American nature writing.”24 And yet, it does so not by “transform[ing] the quotidian into the cataclysmic,” but rather by marking off in advance moments where what feels cataclysmic—at least in the moment of its irruption into our sensory field—will ultimately become quotidian. 25 As such, it takes some of the onus of environmental awareness off of the nature writers to which Slovic directs his attention, offering up place as the purview of even the most seemingly inattentive. Irritation forces us to notice a world we have been trying to ignore, “suggest[ing] a kind of hyperresponiveness to the subject’s external surroundings,” and yet, even as it does so, it presages a futural moment where that feeling will be defined precisely by its very lack, a moment Northern Exposure foregrounds, as we’ll see, through an account of irritation’s adherence to generic conventions.26 Eco-irritation, then, has a half-life: as we are compelled by our irritation to pay attention to the world around us, our irritation slowly wanes, manifesting in increasingly less irri- tating ways. Indeed, eco-irritation becomes inseparable from an affection it precedes. While Northern Exposure has remained off the ecocritical radar, the award-winning show is a productive site of inquiry because of its literary and environmental imaginaries.27 The show has been called “a supremely literary television series” and, in the introduction to a special issue of Critical Studies in Television devoted to the show, “the most intellectual, imaginative, challenging dramedy series of the early 1990s.”28 Robert J. Thompson has noted that the show references “works by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, de Tocqueville, Jefferson, Whitman, Baudelaire, Melville, Shakespeare, Jung, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many other authors,” and cites a television critic who called the show “a lot like reading a good book.”29 Clearly, the show prizes the literary—indeed, Frank McConnell has placed the show in the tradition of the pastoral, a genre long taken up by ecocritics, and David Zurawik has called it a “comic captivity narrative.”30 Over its six seasons, it also dealt with a number of thematic issues of direct interest for ecocritics, including wilderness tourism, land development, hunting, indigenous relationships to nature, and global warming. Perhaps the most notable plotline for ecocritics came in the fourth season with the addition of Mike Monroe, an environmental lawyer suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity. But while these explicit environmental concerns make up many of the show’s subplots, Fleischman’s environmental unawareness lies more directly at its heart. Though Fleischman seems at first blush to embody the stereotype of the neurotic New York Jew best exemplified by Woody Allen, his unfamiliarity with the natural world he encounters in his new hometown allows him to 60 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?” stand in for any urban dweller and thereby to serve a broader identificatory function for the audience.31 David Zurawik has argued that, rather than operating as a specific religious representation, Fleischman’s Judaism—he seems to be a minimally practicing Conservative Jew with a penchant for halluci- nating his New York rabbi during moments of indecision—seems more crucially to signify a secular assimilation narrative; thus Fleischman’s narrative arc necessitates his increasing comfort in his new environs. 32 The series begins with Fleischman embarking on a four-year service stint as a doctor in Alaska to pay back a loan from the state used to fund his medical schooling. Upon arrival in Anchorage, however, Fleischman learns that the position he assumed would be in the big city has been relocated to tiny Cicely, a one- street town on the edge of largely undeveloped wilderness. The show, filmed in central Washington, includes numerous shots of the heavily wooded environs, mountains looming in the distance, but it also reveals the interpenetration of the small hamlet and these surroundings: In the show’s opening credit sequence, a moose wanders through the fictional Cicely. For Fleischman, this strange new world marks a radical change from his former life in Manhattan, where the only salmon he saw were perched precariously atop his Sunday morning bagel, a far cry from fishing with Native American elders, which he ends up doing in the show’s final season. In the show’s pilot, when a patient visits Fleischman’s newly established medical practice with a sick beaver, Fleischman remarks, “yeah, I’ve seen these on PBS.” Later in the same episode, sitting in a boat with Maurice Minnifield, the town patriarch who hopes to develop the surrounding land into the “Alaskan Riviera,” as one character calls the region, Maurice asks Fleischman if he’s hunted before. “Just on the lower east side . . . for bargains,” he quips in reply. After an unsuccessful attempt to void his contract, Fleischman thus finds himself stuck in the sticks—immobilized, as it were, even as he grows increasingly agitated. Much of the humor in the show derives from the ever-frustrated reactions of Fleischman to his new environment, including both his small- town neighbors and the wilderness they inhabit. Unlike the hunting-happy backwoodsmen of Cicely, Fleischman seems to typify the figure of the “dan- dy, the intellectual, and the ‘overly civilized’ person in general” that Sianne Ngai sees as an echo of the nineteenth-century medical discourses on ner- vousness that track forward into her understanding of irritation. 33 Frank McConnell notes that Fleischman “chafes at the hyperborean eccentricities of his neighbors,” and this chafing marks the type of bodily response irritation elicits. Fleischman’s career as a doctor, and even his name, from the German for Flesh-man, calls attention to the body, and to what Ngai calls the “blur between psychic and corporeal . . . experience that ‘irritation’ produces.”34 Fleischman’s irritation, then, comes to seem an intimate element of his characterization, one that mediates his engagement with the world around him. Sylvan Goldberg 61

The irritation that is so central to Fleischman’s mode of interacting emerges in explicit form in moments where the natural world intrudes inop- portunely into his awareness. When Fleischman is dropped off at the bus stop on a rural road outside of Cicely in the series’ pilot, he looks first one way down the long, empty stretch of asphalt road, then the other, then back in the first direction; the scene fades to a shot of Fleischman from behind, again staring straight down the road that extends toward the horizon. Where Fleischman does not look is at the woods on either side of the road, even as the only sounds audible in the scene are birdcalls and the buzz of insects. But then, seated on a suitcase reading The New York Times, his bag of golf clubs leaning against the bus stop sign, Fleischman’s attention is disrupted by a woodpecker that suddenly manifests in the aural landscape. At this point, the camera cuts to a birds-eye view, aligning viewer with bird and making visible the irritation on Fleischman’s face, the annoyed shake of his head. Only when the rap of the woodpecker’s bill against the tree breaks into Fleisch- man’s concentration, then, does his gaze lift from the New York Times, and his attempt to hold fast to the place from which he has come is broken by the immediacy of the Alaskan forest. A later episode, titled “Dreams, Schemes and Putting Greens,” opens with a slow tracking shot of a near-ground mead- ow with looming mountains above it, a shot that ends on Fleischman’s face, turned away from the mountainous landscape that we, as audience, have just enjoyed. His gaze shifts lower and his brows drop in a discontented squint. When the shot cuts to a small rabbit gazing intently at Fleischman, then back to what we now see is Fleischman’s interrupted golf swing, we can read his squint as indication of his feeling: eco-irritation. In the rabbit’s irritatingly distracting gaze, we see Nature look back, irrupting into Fleischman’s awareness. The same episode sees a group of Japanese businessmen arrive in Cicely with plans to develop a golf course in the area, and in an attempt to seal the deal, Fleischman and Maurice lay out a stretch of AstroTurf to simulate a par 4 hole—not quite regulation, but close enough for the setting. Maggie O’Connell, Fleischman’s landlord and odd-couple love interest/foil, arrives while the turf is unrolled, and berates Fleischman: “You don’t see anything tacky and obnoxious about dropping a lime-green rug in a setting like this?” He does not, highlighting one potentially destructive path for the type of eco-irritation Fleischman feels. If we can’t yet read Fleischman’s eco-irritation for an affection it has not yet become, the show foregrounds its interest in the relationship between irritation and affection through Joel’s relationship with Maggie, which plays out according to the generic conventions of romantic comedy. “What is it about you, Fleischman, that so irritates me?” Maggie asks in the series’ second episode, to which he replies, “You are clearly attracted to me and it makes you incredibly uncomfortable.” Even without his parry—a parry that stands in precisely as the precursor to the (sexual) thrust we, like he, desire 62 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?” will follow—Fleischman and Maggie serve as the opposites we know must attract, allowing Maggie’s irritation to serve as a marker of incipient affection. Claire Mortimer has noted the centrality of animosity in the genre of the romantic comedy, arguing that “[t]he narrative often hinges around the central couple, who initially are antagonistic towards each other, but who come to recognise their inescapable compatibility in the face of great adversity and, often, mutual loathing,” and that these antagonisms “can prove to be a gift . . . serving to help [the central characters] attain greater self knowledge, fulfilment and happiness.”35 That we, like Fleischman, know in advance how the love story will end serves only more clearly to train the viewer to read Fleischman’s eco-irritation through the mirror image of Maggie’s interpersonal irritation.36 Indeed, the show makes this parallel between the irritation in Fleischman’s relationships with the environment and with Maggie explicit in the third episode of season one, “Soapy Sanderson.” Entering a conversation between the town’s radio DJ, Chris Stevens, and Fleischman in media res, we hear Chris muse, “It’s not about how long you stay in a place; it’s about what you do while you’re there. And when you go, is that place any better for your having been there? Am I answering your question?” When Flesichman replies, “No, not really,” Chris asks him to repeat the question. Fleischman’s response: “What am I going to say to Maggie?” Once again, the text foregrounds a conflation of place and person in Fleischman’s life, allowing Chris to voice the audience’s confusion. As is clear from the above reading, eco-irritation’s complex temporality, in which it always already forecasts its future nonexistence, implies an ongoing relationship to place in which feelings do not remain static but shift over time. Eco-irritation necessitates a sustained vision, a glance both forward and back that recalls Fleischman’s early scene at the bus stop, and though irritation seems like it would stand in for the lack that came before—you are irritated with what is around you because it is not what you previously had around you—eco-irritation, as we have seen, marks off what you will lack in the future, namely, eco-irritation. In a voice-over that opens the show’s fifth episode, Fleischman narrates this shift: “After you’ve been in a place for a while everything starts to look, I won’t say better, there’s no need to go to extremes, but your everyday life does become more familiar.” And with familiarity comes an easing of irritation, an acceptance that grows, ultimately, into affection: Fleischman comes to enjoy Alaska, and ends up proposing to Maggie. But then Northern Exposure shifts expectations. In the final season, after recognizing that a marriage with Maggie will never work, Fleisch- man goes native, heading even deeper into the Alaskan wilderness and taking up residence in a Tlingit village with no electricity or running water. 37 He seems, in other words, to choose place over person, opting for the type of reinhabitation that bioregionalists promote. 38 In so doing, his irritable nature shifts dramatically: As characters come to visit him, Joel seems uncharacter- Sylvan Goldberg 63 istically at peace. His final episode, however, provides a more ambivalent reading. Fleischman and Maggie go in search of a mythical town in the Aleutians and, when they find it, Joel sees New York City shimmering among the Alaskan trees. When he invites Maggie to follow him into it, she tells him, “That’s your place. It’s not mine.” She watches as he disappears into the forest, presumably through a mystical portal leading to . . . the Big Apple? While it’s possible to read this as an abandonment of his newfound affection for the Alaskan wilderness, it seems more complexly about our ability to hold multiple places in our minds at once. Maggie tells Fleischman that New York is “the thing [he’s] dreamt about . . . for the past five years, the one sustaining constant in [his] life,” and when the episode ends with Maggie receiving a postcard from Fleischman that reads “NEW YORK IS A STATE OF MIND,” we have a sense that there’s an Alaska in his mind now too. Place itself seems to stretch across the temporal scales of our affective encounters with it, disrupting our habits in positive ways, and lingering after we have left. What would it mean for ecocriticism to consider the environment or the natural world an irritant? I would argue that we already do. In one of the narrative sections in his critical account of southwestern literature, Xerophil- ia, Tom Lynch notes that when he first arrived in his new desert home, his wife, upon exiting their car, “started stomping her feet, cursing and slapping. Ants were scurrying across her sandaled feet, stinging in anger.”39 This seems a far cry from the xerophile—“people who love deserts”40 —that Lynch, and presumably his wife, becomes, but when read through the lens of eco-irritation, we can see this stomping and slapping for what its attention- inducing response will become: affection. Eco-irritation both calls our attention to what we perceive to be exterior to us while simultaneously, by evoking an inner state, entering us precisely at the moment we perceive its exteri- ority. And even as this awareness seems sudden, it is a suddenness that lingers, making eco-irritation such a useful analytic. What Northern Expo- sure helps us to see is the way in which irritation’s seeming boundedness exceeds itself, extending its scales both temporally and spatially, and confusing its directionality. But Northern Exposure also reveals the difficulty in mapping these shifting boundaries, for it leaves the path from irritation to affection unarticulated. We can point to moments in the show where these changes occur, and we can recognize the generic conventions that seem to anticipate its alternations, but what stands out the most is the value of time, the value of ongoing, at times forced, encounters that slowly erode our discomfort. This is a radically different engagement than one that wants to shock people into caring about the environment, whether through an aesthetic sublimity or a fear of environmental crisis. There’s nothing inherently political about irritation. Sianne Ngai has called it “the dysphoric affect least likely to play a significant role in any 64 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?” oppositional praxis or ideological struggle.”41 Its very quietude—not quite quietness, but a muted tone—lacks the vigor of the affects to which ecocritics have thus far attended, and, as we have seen, it seems as much to stall action as to necessitate it. The bodily situatedness of irritation as well, its chafing quality, risks reinvesting in the type of “ethics of proximity” Ursula K. Heise has convincingly critiqued.42 Perhaps, too, my discussion of irritation is at risk of fracturing not just on the level of the individual—for, we must ask, does irritation always track forward into affection or can its alternations lead in less positive directions?—but along lines of gender, race, sexuality, class. These are all matters for which our affective ecocriticism must account going forward. But Fleischman’s narrative seems to indicate the ways in which these smaller affects offer different modes of understanding the places we inhabit, an alternative to the heightened emotions of crisis, and one that implicates us as complexly in places as our more material entanglements. Fleischman’s vision of New York in the Alaskan forest is not an imposition of one landscape over another, not a refusal to see the forest for the city he desires, but an encounter with both at the same time, an alignment of his feelings for one with his feelings for the other. If these feelings don’t provide a roadmap to political action, that doesn’t render them less valuable for understanding how particular places come to be “a state of mind” even as they exist materially. And if those states of mind can shift in directions more positive than they seem at first, that might be the first, quiet step toward shifting their material state, too.

NOTES

I wish to thank Scott Slovic for his thoughts on an early version of this paper, as well as Simon C. Estok, Teresa Jimenez, and Serpil Oppermann, for their comments on this version. 1. Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 37. 2. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1. 3. Critics distinguish between affect and emotion in diverse ways and with varying emphasis; however, I find that distinction less helpful than those who make use of it and so, following Sianne Ngai, “I will not be theoretically leaning on [the distinction between affect and emotion] to the extent that others have—as may be apparent from the way in which I use the two terms more or less interchangeably.” Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 27. Still, it is worth noting that “[e]motion and affect are essentially interinvolved, and neither is entirely reducible to the other.” William Connolly, “I: The Complexity of Intention,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 794, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660993 (accessed May 4, 2012). One common distinction, albeit one Ruth Leys has recently critiqued (see note 6 below), situates affect on a precognitive level, located in the body, while emotion is the description after cognition steps in to locate the body’s response. 4. A list of ecocritics who discuss feeling, emotion, and affect without engaging critical theorizations of affect, either in general or regarding the particular emotions they discuss, is beyond the scope of this paper, and would overemphasize the work of individual critics against what has been a consistent and widespread gap in the field. One notable recent example, Sylvan Goldberg 65 however, is Lawrence Buell’s discussion of what he calls “ecoglobalist affect,” which he defines “in broadest terms” as “an emotion-laden preoccupation with a finite, near-at-hand physical environment defined . . . by an imagined inextricable linkage of some sort between that specific site and a context of planetary reach.” See “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 2007), 232. Buell’s primary interest in his essay, however, seems to be ecoglobalism, as his discussion of affect remains conspicuously limited. 5. Simon C. Estok, for example, has argued “that there is a need . . . for more definitive structure, methodological definition, and viable terminology.” See “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE 16, no. 2 (2009): 204. http:// isle.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/2/203.full (accessed October 19, 2010). 6. See Glen Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Char- lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); and Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “What Is Sustain- ability Studies?” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 1–15. Affect theorists who engage directly with neuroscience include, among others, Brian Massumi, whose “The Autono- my of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83-109, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354446 (accessed April 27, 2012), is a foundational essay in the field, and Connolly, whose debate with Ruth Leys sparked an ongoing conversation among a number of scholars in the pages of Critical Inquiry. That conversation began with Leys’s essay, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” in issue 37, no. 3 (2011) and continues through 38, no. 4 (2012). Leys’s critique hinges on the ways in which cultural studies scholars—her main target is Brian Massumi—have misused neuroscience to question where intentional behavior emerges from in the body. See Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–72, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.1086/659353 (accessed April 27, 2012). 7. Dana Phillips’s critique is articulated in its most sustained form in The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 8. For recent ecocritical work engaging more explicitly with already established bodies of cultural work on affect, see Sarah Ensor, “Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity,” American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012): 409–35. http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/84/2/409 (accessed June 15, 2013); Heather Houser, “Won- drous Strange: Eco-Sickness, Emotion, and The Echo Maker,” American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012): 381–408. http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/84/2/381 (accessed August 19, 2012); Alex Lockwood, “The Affective Legacy of Silent Spring,” Environmental Human- ities 1 (2012): 123–40, http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol1/EH1.8.pdf (accessed June 10, 2013); and Laurel Peacock, “SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetics of Affect,” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 85–102. http://environmentalhumanities.org/ arch/vol1/EH1.6.pdf (accessed June 10, 2013). 9. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5. 10. Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 149. For one recent discussion of fear/terror in an ecocritical context, see Simon C. Estok, “Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, no.1 (2013), http:// dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2182 (accessed August 6, 2013). Estok furthers his theorization of ecophobia’s ubiquity by locating one version of its expression in the twenty-first-century “Age of Terror” in which terrorism and climate change have placed us. See also Estok’s discussion of ecophobia in “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” particularly pp. 208–11. For recent ecocritical work engaging the sublime, see Terre Ryan, This Ecstatic Na- tion: The American Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism (Amherst: University of Mas- sachusetts Press, 2011), which tracks the trajectory of the sublime into contemporary landscape aesthetics. 11. Fisher, The Vehement Passions, 184. 12. See Justin Gillis, “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” New York Times, May 10, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level- passes-long-feared-milestone.html (accessed June 17, 2013). 13. See Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Laurel Peacock’s recent discussion of an “ecopoetics of affect” is one 66 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?” such attempt at addressing altered temporalities, and she argues that “disordered affect might be the more sensitive or appropriate response to seasonal changes that are increasingly out-of- order” (87). See also Alex Lockwood’s claim that Rachel Carson “established a template for environmental writers aiming to engender emotional responses as a means of coming to terms with local and global ecological crises” (124), and Heather Houser, who argues that “experiments with affect are integral to conceptualizing the troubled interdependence of the individual body and large-scale environmental change” (382). 14. On mutedness, see Sarah Ensor’s recent call for “a queer ecocritical mode capable of embracing a mutedness that is neither the masking nor the repression of strong emotion, and an indirectness that is neither a deflection nor an evasion of political stakes” (426). Lockwood makes a similar point in his call for attention to “everyday affects,” but the few affects he names in the section that addresses this—he seems to oppose “fascination and fear” (136) as the everyday experience that resists “sadness and fear” (137)—don’t seem all that quotidian after all. 15. For an example of the interrelation of politics and affect in recent ecocriticism, see Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, eds. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 331–58. Mortimer-Sandilands claims that “the absence of a societal and personal story of loss and grief in which to place environmental understanding” (332) fuels “a form of melancholy nature” that “incorporate[s] environmental destruction into the ongoing workings of commodity capitalism” (333). Opening a space for environmental grief would, Mortimer-Sandilands argues, potentially allow us to transcend this fetishized version of nature. 16. Stephen Rust and Salma Monani, “Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves—Defining and Situ- ating Ecocinema Studies,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Mona- ni, and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3. Sean Cubitt, whose EcoMedia (Amster- dam: Rodopi, 2005) is considered foundational in the field of ecocinema studies, notes that “[t]hough many films are predictably bound to the common ideologies of the day, including ideologies of nature, many are far richer in contradictions and more ethically, emotionally and intellectually satisfying than much of what passes for eco-politics today” (1). And on the value in looking beyond explicitly environmental films, David Ingram argues “films may promote cognitive and emotional learning about environmental issues even when they are not considered ecologically or politically ‘correct’ by some ecocritics.” See Ingram, “The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-Film Criticism,” in Rust, Monani, and Cubitt, Ecocinema Theory and Practice, 59. 17. Adrian Ivakhiv, “An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image: Cinema as Anthrobiogeo- morphic Machine,” in Rust, Monani, and Cubitt, Ecocinema Theory and Practice, 88–89. Though not yet published as of the time of this writing, Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature will no doubt be a valuable text for ecocinema scholars and affective ecocritics. 18. While some ecocritical television scholarship exists, it remains limited almost exclusively to nature programming. See, for example, Luis A. Vivanco’s discussion of Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter in “The Work of Environmentalism in an Age of Televisual Adventures,” Cultural Dynamics 16, no. 1 (2004): 5–27. http://cdy.sagepub.com/content/16/1/ 5.full.pdf+html (accessed June 17, 2013); and Sean Cubitt’s discussion of the television documentary The Blue Planet in EcoMedia. 19. David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 125. 20. The OED tracks the first usage to Samuel Purchas’s Purchas, his Pilgrimage (1613), a compilation of travel narratives, in which he writes, “The Arabians out of the desarts are as Fishes out of the Water.” 21. Ngai calls tone an “affective-aesthetic idea . . . reducible neither to the emotional response a text solicits from its reader nor to representations of feelings within the world of its story.” See Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 41, 38–88. 22. Ibid., 201. 23. Ibid., 190. Sylvan Goldberg 67

24. Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 3. 25. Ibid., 10. 26. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 190. 27. Regarding the show’s award history, Robert J. Thompson notes that “[b]y 1992, North- ern Exposure had won, as best dramatic series, an Emmy, two Golden Globes, and an Electron- ic Media Critics Poll Award. The Television Critics Association had named it their ‘Program of the Year,’ and it won the Peabody two years in a row.” Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 164. The show would go on to win a number of additional awards, including the 1993 and 1994 Golden Globe for “Best Drama Series.” 28. David Lavery, “Deconstruction at Bat: Baseball vs Critical Theory in Northern Expo- sure’s ‘The Graduate,’” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 2 (2006): 33–38, at 34. http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=40924768&site=ehost-live& scope=site (accessed April 26, 2013); David Lavery and Jimmie Cain, “Introduction,’” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 2 (2006): 2–5. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true& db=f3h&AN=40924771&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed April 26, 2013). 29. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age, 164. The New York Public Library recently posted a “‘Chris in the Morning’ Reading List” that offers up citations for some of the books read over the air by the show’s radio DJ, Chris Stevens. See Billy Parrott, “‘Chris in the Morning’ Reading List,” Biblio File, New York Public Library, March 7, 2012. http:// www.nypl.org/blog/2012/03/07/chris-morning-reading-list (accessed June 18, 2013). 30. See Frank McConnell, “Follow That Moose: Northern Exposure’s Pedigree,” Common- weal 120, no. 19 (1993): 18–20, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph& AN=9402241566&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed April 26, 2013); and Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time, 125–32. However, Zurawik offers little detail about how the show embraces and resists the genre of the captivity narrative. 31. It’s worth noting that Fleischman’s Allen-esque persona aligns him with a thematic disconnect between Jews and nature that Gerald Mast has discussed in relation to Allen’s films, which often associate non-Jewish characters with nature, while Jews remain alienated from the natural world. As he notes of Allen’s Annie Hall, “The Halls take their meal at midday, bathed in the bright light that pours in through the windows, a reminder of the outdoors and nature which surround the Hall farm. The Singers take their meal at an unspecified evening hour, enclosed in a cavelike interior tinted by the amber glow of electric light bulbs. Nature is nowhere to be seen—except perhaps on the flower-print dresses of the women.” Mast, “Woody Allen: The Neurotic Jew as American Clown,” in Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 131. 32. Zurawik notes the show’s ability “to mainstream Judaism and make Fleischman into just another member of the community, more defined by geography than religion or genetics. In that sense, Northern Exposure’s central narrative is one of assimilation” (132). 33. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 180. 34. McConnell, “Follow That Moose,” 18; Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 184. 35. Claire Mortimer, Romantic Comedy, Routledge Film Guidebooks (London: Routledge, 2010), 4, 6. It’s important to note here that while the show itself was categorized as a drama at awards shows, co-creator John Falsey claimed to “think of it, first and foremost, as a comedy with dramatic overtones . . . as opposed to a drama with comedic overtones” (qtd. in Thompson 162–63), and Maggie and Joel’s romantic plotlines follow the generic conventions of the romantic comedy. On these conventions, see Mortimer; Celestino Deleyto, The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); and Kathrina Glitre, Hol- lywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934-65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Deleyto, importantly for my argument here, notes the genre’s roots in a pastoral tradition indebted to Boccaccio. 36. Kathrina Glitre makes clear our generic expectations with a romantic comedy: “Every- one knows how Hollywood romantic comedies end: with a kiss.” Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy, 1. 68 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?”

37. Though I don’t have space to attend to it in this chapter, it’s worth noting that Fleisch- man’s narrative arc was influenced by extracinematic concerns: Rob Morrow, the actor who played the part, had had ongoing contractual disputes before leaving the show, in what turned out to be its final season, with the intention of making a shift to film. See Joe Rhodes, “Rob Morrow’s Long Goodbye to Cicely,” The Baltimore Sun, Tribune Company, November 28, 1994. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-11-28/features/1994332049_1_rob-morrow- fleisch man-maggie-oconnell (accessed June 19, 2013). 38. For a brief summary of bioregional thought, see Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, “Introduction,” in The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, eds. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster (Athens: University of Geor- gia Press, 2012), 200–11. 39. Tom Lynch, Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2008), 140. 40. Scott Slovic, “Foreword,” in Lynch, Xerophilia, xvi. 41. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 181. 42. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Heise’s discussion of the “ethics of proximity,” drawing on philosophers Hans Jonas and Zygmunt Bauman and sociologist John Tomlinson, appears most explicitly on pp. 33-34 of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, though that book is largely a critique of this concept throughout its entirety.

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Ingram, David. “The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-Film Criticism.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 43–61. New York: Routledge, 2013 Ivakhiv, Adrian. “An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image: Cinema as Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 87-105. New York: Routledge, 2013. Lavery, David. “Deconstruction at Bat: Baseball vs Critical Theory in Northern Exposure’s ‘The Graduate.’” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 2 (2006): 33–38. http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=40924768&site=ehost-live& scope=site (accessed April 26, 2013). Lavery, David and Jimmie Cain. “Introduction.’” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 2 (2006): 2–5. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=40924771& site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed April 26, 2013). Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–72. Lockwood, Alex. “The Affective Legacy of Silent Spring.” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 123–40. Love, Glen. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2008. Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster. “Introduction.” In The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, 200-11. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83–109. Mast, Gerald. “Woody Allen: The Neurotic Jew as American Clown.” In Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor, edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen, 125-40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. McConnell, Frank. “Follow That Moose: Northern Exposure’s Pedigree.” Commonweal 120, no. 19 (1993): 18–20. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph& AN=9402241566&site=ehost-live&scope=site (accessed April 26, 2013). Mortimer, Claire. Romantic Comedy. Routledge Film Guidebooks. London: Routledge, 2010. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 331–58. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2011. Northern Exposure: The Complete First and Second Seasons, DVD. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2006. Parrott, Billy. “‘Chris in the Morning’ Reading List.” In Biblio File. New York Public Library, March 7, 2012. http://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/03/07/chris-morning-reading-list (accessed June 18, 2013). Peacock, Laurel. “SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetics of Affect.” Envi- ronmental Humanities 1 (2012): 85-102. Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Rhodes, Joe. “Rob Morrow’s Long Goodbye to Cicely.” In The Baltimore Sun. Tribune Com- pany, November 28, 1994. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-11-28/features/ 1994332049_1_rob-morrow-fleischman-maggie-oconnell (accessed June 19, 2013). Rust, Stephen, and Salma Monani. “Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves—Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 1-14. New York: Routledge, 2013. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013. Ryan, Terre. This Ecstatic Nation: The American Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 70 “What Is It about You . . . That So Irritates Me?”

Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 1–25. Durham: Duke Univer- sity Press, 2010. Slovic, Scott. “Foreword.” In Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature, by Tom Lynch, xii–xviii.. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2008. ———. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Ed- ward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Thompson, Robert J. Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tompkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedg- wick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Vivanco, Luis A. “The Work of Environmentalism in an Age of Televisual Adventures.” Cultural Dynamics 16, no. 1 (2004): 5–27. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. “What Is Sustainability Studies?” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 1–15. Zurawik, David. The Jews of Prime Time. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003. Chapter Four

Bang Your Head and Save the Planet

Gothic Ecocriticism

Başak Ağın Dönmez

One of the early definitions of ecocriticism is that it is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”1 Since then, ecocriticism has broadened its scope, transcending the borders of the study of literature. It has turned its attention to the reading of culturally produced artifacts including the analysis of the media and the audio-visual texts from an environmentalist perspective. Studying cultural material is essential for ecocriticism for two main reasons. Firstly, literature and other types of cultural artifacts are inseparable. Secondly, and more importantly, contemporary cultural texts such as films, songs, and advertisements reach relatively larger audiences than literary works. Therefore, by focusing on the kind of material that addresses larger audiences ecocriticism can really make a difference in practice. In fact, as Simon C. Estok notes, “if ecocriticism is to have any effect outside of the narrow confines of academia, then it must not only define itself but also address the issue of values in ways that connect meaningfully with the non-academic world,”2 by which he highlights the importance of making connections between theory and praxis. While there are such attempts to bring the non-academic material into the academic world, as quite a few of the chapters in this book showcase, there still remain those topics that have been perhaps unintentionally neglected or ignored. They are “left by the wayside, on the margins, or buried because they are too unsettling, gothic, or bizarre.”3 For instance, not many scholars are interested in the “dark side” of ecological-literary studies, although there are few excep- tions such as Timothy Morton, who proposed the concept of “dark ecology” to express the “irony, ugliness, and horror” of nature,4 and Levi R. Bryant, whose “black ecology” has found room in Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecolo- 71 72 Bang Your Head and Save the Planet gy (2013) as a “pessimistic moment” that urges the acknowledgment that “there’s no providence or wisdom of self-regulation we can rely on” to address environmental devastation.5 However, their approaches were not fully centered on the relationship between non-academic popular art—like Heavy Metal—and ecocriticism. But, Morton must be acknowledged here since he wrote about an American Black Metal band “Wolves in the Throne Room,”6 about which Erik Davis, a music critic, also wrote, with the opening lines: “Delve far enough into heavy metal, and you’ll find environmentalists.”7 Davis was completely right in the sense that the members of Wolves in the Throne Room are environmental activists (just like their fellow Death Metal counterparts from Gojira), and Morton also related how the Wolves’ music contributed to his concept of “hyperobjects.” Many other Heavy Metal bands, however, that have spoken out loud to raise environmental awareness seem to have escaped the attention of the majority of ecocritics. While Cole- ridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), for example, has been the topic of many ecocritical studies (even by undergraduate students), Iron Maiden’s song with the same title has not received much attention in any scholarly work in the field. However, studying the topics that are on the margins is a must for ecocriticism, as ecocriticism cannot alienate itself from the non-academic world, especially if the aim is to make a difference and change the mindset to an ecological one. As Robert Walser notes, “musical and social criticism are inseparable,”8 so all genres of music that derive from social resistance can fall into the scope of ecocriticism. Social and political critiques are essential in both Heavy Metal and ecocriticism. Richard Kahn notes:

rock and other forms of popular music have widely promoted messages of environmental activism. Beginning in the 1960s, when the youth countercul- ture took to such music as a form of protest against perceived conservative standards, many rock musicians began recording songs that took up negative issues associated with environmental degradation as well as those that articulated the liberation offered by the dawning of people’s new ecological sen- sibilities and consciousness. [...] Forms of hard rock known as “heavy metal” have had environmentalist messages since the genre’s inception with groups such as Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. In the 1980s and 1990s, major metal groups like Metallica and Megadeth continued to pen notable songs about nuclear destruction and other environmental concerns. 9

Even earlier than the 1960s, rock and early metal bands took an interest in the environmental degradation, which they saw as the direct result of the profit-mindedness of mega-corporations. The Malvina Reynolds song “Free Enterprise” (1951) begins with direct criticism of the way the planet is being polluted: “The air you breathe is poison, the food you eat is worse.”10 Known as the oldest environmental song, “Free Enterprise” is “about the amoralism Başak Ağın Dönmez 73 of free market: enterprises and multinationals act and work at the expense of environment, public health, working conditions, democracy, human rights […] in favor of their profits and greed.”11 It is clear from the lyrics of the song that using liberal humanist ideals such as freedom, democracy, and human rights as neologisms for their greedy acts, multinational corporations are actually converting natural resources into profit as much as they can, exploiting, thus, both human and nonhuman beings. In fact, even using the term “natural resources” can be considered problematic as regards the context and aim of this song, because seeing nature as an endlessly exploitable resource lies at the core of the way of thinking that has brought the planet to the brink of destruction, which “Free Enterprise” is harshly criticizing. Re- ynolds’s 1969 song “DDT on My Brain” is the second case in point, which echoes Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) in that it directly tells about the environmental impacts of the indiscriminate spraying of DDT in the United States. Carson’s text opposing DDT resulted in a public outcry, leading to the ban of most uses of DDT in the United States in 1972. As Carson does in her book, Malvina Reynolds, with the song entitled “DDT on My Brain,” also questions the logic of releasing large amounts of chemicals into the environment without fully understanding their effects on the land, air, water, or human health. The lyrics of the song12 openly state that DDT poses a direct threat to wildlife, agriculture, and human life. It would not be wrong to suggest that the popularity of the song also contributed to the spread of environmental awareness as it helped develop an understanding of the importance of taking action. Similarly, Grand Funk Railroad’s album E Pluribus Funk (1971) “appealed for respect and mindful treatment of land and Earth as a whole:”13 “Spread the news across the land, and just do the best you can, / All we’ve got is just the land; take a stand, save the land.”14 In 1973, John Denver’s “Rocky Mountains Suite” also called attention to the dangers posed by touristic development, construction of concrete buildings, and the expansion of population, as well as urbanization and industrialization. The song was a warning about the dangers and threats that “the sensitive mountainous ecosystems could not withstand.”15 All these artists and bands point out potential links between ecocriticism and socio-musical criticism. Thus, leaving music (especially social resistance music) outside is a gap in ecocriticism that needs to be filled. To fill this gap with a view to bridging the divide between academia and non-academia through popular art, I believe Heavy Metal (and other genres in popular music) can be employed as a tool of combining theory and practice, which I propose as gothic ecocriticism. Calling gothic ecocriticism so does not necessarily mean the songs completely follow the gothic literary convention so much as the common themes of sublimity such as darkness and fear used in the Heavy Metal music genre, as well as a deliberate arousal of ecophobic feelings (exemplified, for instance, by Iron Maiden’s “Fear of 74 Bang Your Head and Save the Planet the Dark”). Clearly, the gothic sublime constitutes the basis for many contemporary sub-genres of Heavy Metal as well as rock songs, from which Heavy Metal derives its energy. As for the term’s use in literature, starting with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), many landmark publications in the novel genre such as Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) followed the generic patterns of the gothic convention, mainly highlighting supernatural elements from various folk tales and mythologies as well as dark and gloomy landscapes and elements of nature. Pursuing a similar line, certain bands from the Heavy Metal scene, like the Swedish symphonic metal band Ther- ion, focused on mythological creatures of Scandinavian and Greek origins, and those from the Old and the New Testament, with lyrics that created both fear and attraction in the audience. Moreover, many songs express apocalyptic visions. “Eternal Return” (which rhapsodizes about how “The world is changing / And fall apart / End of the kingdom / And of the heart”) is one such example from the band’s 2000 album, Deggial.16 As Tom J. Hillard points out, in time, similarities in gothic texts became less distinct, so “gothic” remained as an adjective to describe a mode, rather than a discrete category in which the works can be perfectly placed. 17 Such is the case with Heavy Metal songs. While there is often a gothic effect in almost all of them, it is neither accurately apposite nor totally wrong to categorize all Heavy Metal into the gothic convention. On the other hand, Fred Botting claims that the “Gothic signifies a writing of excess,” and it explores the limits and boundaries of the physical, psychological and the social. 18 Hillard typifies such limits as the extreme feelings of violence and pain, fear and anxiety, sexual aggres- sion and perversion, all of which are often abundant in most Heavy Metal lyrics. When it comes to socio-political critique and environmental concerns, the same appeal to extremity can be seen in the explicit lyrics as well. Many songs “promote violence done to oppressors of the innocent,”19 as can be clearly observed in Agathocles’s songs. The band reverses the case where the humans dominate, oppress, and slaughter animals, and thus gives a chance to animals to “write back” and take revenge for what has been done to them by their human oppressors: There is an animal With mutilated guts Caused by vivisection But now escaped and MAD Başak Ağın Dönmez 75

And this animal It is coming back To crush all companies Which support such acts20 A stronger example intended to create a sense of disgust and aversion has much more vulgar lyrics: Animal slaughter, it continues all the time The meat-industry is growing But I’ll tell you, what I’ll do you to you You, ignorant consumers!!

I’ll undo you from your skull Consume yer endoderme pus I’ll eat the maggots meal By chewing on your corpse

I’ll tear open yer thorax Wind up yer innards To feed my hungry stomach And to stop yer filthy greed.21 The song actually dethrones the humans from the central position they have long held and replaces them with animals that were once victims. By especially mentioning parts of the body and repeating bodily images, a sense of disgust is raised by the song and thus the poetic persona is identified/associated with what has been “the other.” In this regard, Heavy Metal is very much like ecological thought itself, which Timothy Morton calls “anti-syn- ethiaphobic”—neither Heavy Metal nor ecological thought is ‘allergic’ to the other.”22 Heavy Metal’s poetic persona (whose role is sometimes assumed by the band members themselves—though mostly tongue-in-cheek—in stage shows) is definitely what/who has been “the other” for the mainstream. Hence, Heavy Metal is not only “not allergic” to the other, but it is also the utmost “other.” It does not only depict the monstrous figure of the gothic mode, but it is the monster. Considering such qualities, the term “gothic” (intended to function as a descriptive adjective to refer to the effect, rather than a generic pattern that follows the pathway of the term in literature) sounds apt enough to combine with ecocriticism for the purpose of this chapter. In terms of its gothic alliance with and attraction to the dark side of nature, Heavy Metal also resonates—as regards its themes—with dark ecology, a concept introduced and developed by Timothy Morton. According to Morton, we perform or construct “nature” as something pristine and wild, and we exclude dirt and pollution from it. 23 While beauty and complexity of nature are appreciated, its dark sides are left outside. Hence, dirt and pollu- 76 Bang Your Head and Save the Planet tion are categorized as the abject-other in such an approach toward nature. Resonating with Morton’s concept of “dark ecology,” Heavy Metal does not fear intimacy with the underprivileged, the absurd, or the abject. On the whole, the notoriety of the genre regarding its alignment with violence, bloodshed, and terror as well as some sub-genres’ motive to raise a sense of disgust and shock in the audience along with the appraisal of morbidity indicate the relationship between Heavy Metal and abjection. A relatively softer example of this is a song by Gammacide, whose album entitled Victims of Science (1989) aimed to criticize humankind’s thoughtless cruelty toward the Earth and to make the audience face the fact that reality bites: Aerosol damaged ozone layer Skin cancer cases increase Human shit, AIDS tainted blood Washed up on the beach Drano snorting, your face contorting Force your body to accept more Sweating in the blood bank, selling a pint Back to the crack house to score.

Observe, and tell me what you see Turn your back, blind to reality Society condemns its own fate Wake up before it’s too fucking late

Radon gas entering your home Silent invisible death Pesticides in your lunch Nicotine on your breath Preschool junkie raped by her father By day he’s the mayor of your city A community full of back stabbing scum No friends, no love, no pity.24 With the mention of bodily fluids, defecation, use of house-cleaning chemicals for drugs, the inhalation of toxic materials, fatal diseases, child abuse, drug abuse, rape, and incest, the band is actually drawing attention to the catastrophe “that has already occurred,” to quote Morton’s words,25 through creating a sense of abjection in the audience. As discussed above, Heavy Metal is associated with “the marginalized other,” and in embracing otherness, it is, unquestionably, the music of reaction and rebellion. Ecocritical analyses of such directly abject representations of environmental conditions in music and lyrics would point to the importance of looking beyond the borders of ecocriticism’s salient topics, and thus help further examine what remains outside our attention spans, perhaps first by broadening the scope of Başak Ağın Dönmez 77 postcolonial as well as environmental justice ecocriticism, and eventually leading to the formulation of gothic ecocriticism. Using environmentally aware Heavy Metal as a way of popularizing ecocritical thought and as a tool for putting theory into practice would not require much effort, as certain ecological concepts go hand in hand with Heavy Metal’s way of looking at environmental issues. For instance, as Morton’s concept of “ecology without nature” does, Heavy Metal rejects “putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar”;26 rather its themes are centered on death, devastation and catastrophe along with nature. While some bands and songs of Heavy Metal accept the fact that ecological catastrophe has already occurred (or at least acknowledge that the planet is going through one, without hesitating to express its impact on the life forms) just as Morton does in The Ecological Thought, some examples can be elegiac in mood, lamenting the loss of a life-giving source, as Morton suggests in “The Dark Ecology of Elegy.” As “elegy appears to be a quintes- sential mode of ecological writing,”27 such is the case with certain songs from the Heavy Metal scene. In 1991, for example, Annihilator sang mourning for the irreversible loss of habitat and soil: “qualities soon to exhaust as man’s greed poisons the land / streams, once fresh, were centers of life for so many a creature / beauty without defense, polluted, never to replenish.”28 Dirty Rotten Imbeciles also followed Annihilator’s sorrow, but theirs was more of a feeling of remorse for future generations, mentioning fossil fuel fumes and aerosol sprays that cause ozone depletion, which results in cancer in human and nonhuman animals. Global warming, as the cause of ecological catastrophe, is also referred to as the direct result of the carelessness and stupidity of human beings. The band voiced their concern regarding the future generations with the lyrics: “What will they think of us with no concern / About the seas of shit and radiation burn?”29 While “Acid Rain” combined a sense of lamentation and that of abjection, Earth Crisis’s “Ecocide” was closer to Annihilator’s approach, singing about and lamenting forest fires and dying trees. They sang: “Desecrated, slashed, and burned to the ground. / In the frenzy of greed, cries of protest are drowned. / The Earth dies—Ecocide,”30 mourning for and lamenting the devastation of rainforests. Similar to “Ecocide” in terms of its strength, Tour- niquet’s song “Ark of Suffering” brought forward the cruelty toward animals with references to Noah’s Ark. The song “takes a Biblical point of view on the subject, implying how God has given man the right to dominate the creatures in the world,” but it is actually criticizing humankind for taking “God’s words wrong”:31 “You think it’s alright to destroy God’s creation / They don’t have a voice so who cares how we’re treating them here.”32 The lyrics point out several examples of animal abuse, including animal testing for medical, educational, and cosmetic purposes, vivisection, zoos and cir- cuses, and hunting for fur and leather, criticizing these acts on a religious 78 Bang Your Head and Save the Planet basis and blaming humans for misunderstanding the fact that these animals were actually created to be blessed, not to be abused. In the notes section of the album, the writer of the song, Ted Kirkpatrick, explains: “How could I convey my anger and sadness over the horrific world of animal abuse? Writ- ing ‘Ark of Suffering’ was a very cathartic experience for me. I know it has opened many people’s eyes to a part of our world that very few people get to see, much less want to see.”33 The video of the song had some limited display on television, but soon it was pulled from music channels’ screens on the grounds that it included too much violence as the video portrayed animal abuse in various forms. In fact, all these examples are suggestive of Morton’s presumption that “melancholy may provide the basis for an ecological fidel- ity to objects.”34 Offering a melancholic mood to the audience, actually, these bands ignited the flare of environmental awareness in their listeners; and through “a political process,” which Morton considers “valuably self- destructive,” or a feeling of catharsis, which, by referring to Alain Badiou, he calls a “truth process,” the audience is essentially introduced to “dark ecology.”35 Inevitably gothic, fearfully dark, politically “incorrect,” and deliberately underscoring the ecophobic, Heavy Metal resists against any sort of authority that employs liberal humanist discourses. Thus, studying Heavy Metal (as gothic ecocriticism) as part of popular culture helps ecocriticism not only to bridge the gap between the academic and the non-academic world, but also to create the missing link between different approaches like Estok’s and Mor- ton’s. While Morton rejects the exclusion of the “dark side” of nature from ecocritical studies, Estok notes that he prefers a unified and theoretical method in his article “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriti- cism and Ecophobia”: “A viable ecocriticism has little future unless it deals with the ambivalence dragged in by its wide net—needs, in other words, to begin theorizing its central matter of concern: Ecophobia.”36 He states that such an approach would lead to “heightened awareness,” it would “call for broad changes in behavior,” have “direct relevancy for environmental and green activists,” and would find support in the form of “practice from its preachers.”37 Enthused by his “ecophobia,” Tom J. Hillard, however, finds Estok’s proposal difficult to apply: “Such a focused approach to ecocriticism could indeed be productive, but to urge all ecocriticism to do so is overly proscriptive, potentially stifling, and, let’s be honest, unlikely to happen.”38 As Hillard continues his elaboration on ecophobia through a study of what he calls “Gothic Nature,” my suggestion here is to combine them all with popular culture, so as to help ecocriticism gain more media attention with in- creased chances of putting theory into practice through the support of environmentally aware Heavy Metal. As discussed above, gothic ecocriticism, which might be considered as a “supplement” to the twenty-first century ecocritical scholarship, may help Başak Ağın Dönmez 79 ecocritics to resist the obstacles when dealing with environmental problems, not only theoretically but also in practice, as Heavy Metal is the music of resistance against any sort of exploitation of human beings and the environment. In this regard, Heavy Metal also has a lot in common with postcolonial ecocriticism. Both postcolonial ecocriticism and Heavy Metal stand against any form of oppression, imperialism and colonization. As Val Plumwood argues, “the western definition of humanity depended—and still depends— on the presence of the ‘not-human’: the uncivilized, the animal and animalistic,”39 and Heavy Metal cannot tolerate the view that certain people regard some others as “not people.” In 1984, the Brazilian band Sepultura was formed by the guitarist and the vocalist Max Cavalera, whose songs indicated his belief that the destruction of nature went hand in hand with capitalism and its tools. With highly political songs about the lost cultures of Latin America, underprivileged peoples of exploited lands, and about genetically modified food, Sepultura has been heavily influenced by the ongoing social and environmental degradation. The critical attitude of Heavy Metal toward commercialization and commodification of nature is obvious in Cavalera’s words: “Your green is for money, my green is for land.”40 Yet, the importance of marketability the musical scene cannot be ignored. The album Chaos AD (1993), which featured the song entitled “Biotech is Godzilla,”41 sold in huge quantities, “entering the US Top 40 and also receiving praise for its innovative use of Brazilian tribal percussion.”42 Adding a local touch on the global message, Sepultura gained an incredible number of fans worldwide, successfully capturing the challenges posed by economic and environmental tensions that were discounted by dominant socio-political systems. Despite the viability of commercial success by certain bands like Sepultu- ra, Metallica, or Iron Maiden, the odds of an average Heavy Metal band’s being embraced by the mass media is low, though. With Sepultura being the most well-known of such bands with an environmentalist discourse, bands such as Testament and Nuclear Assault were critical of “general apathy and laziness of humankind.”43 These bands blamed human beings for not taking sufficient action to save the planet, just like Grief, a Death Metal band of the late 1990s did. Grief’s song, “Polluted” (1998), blamed the system for environmental pollution with explicit lyrics as “We’re called mankind; the Earth is fucked / Everyone’s corrupt; the system and the government SUCK.”44 The explicit lyrics, when combined with heavy guitar riffs and the already established notoriety of the genre, made conspicuous remarks about the relationship between the possibility of preventing environmental devastation and social resistance. Considering such resistant attitudes, it was not unexpected for Heavy Metal to remain on the margins of popular categories of music. As “. . . the mass commercial media seek to mediate cultural objects that are safe, undemanding, nonconfrontational, and inoffensive, [and] their aim is to carry or publish nothing that will make someone turn off or turn away from 80 Bang Your Head and Save the Planet the medium.”45 Because Heavy Metal is demanding, confrontational, and offensive, it turns out to be “the marginalized other,” challenging the norms of the mainstream. In this, it is only natural that bands like Sepultura dedicated their songs to lost cultures and lost ecosystems, anticipating postcolonial ecocritical visions. While they endeavored to save unique tribal cultures of Latin America from extinction and assimilation, the imperialist and colonialist approaches to this part of the world wished to “bring civilization” to these lands. As Plumwood argued, “European justification for invasion and colonization proceeded from this basis, understanding non-European lands and the people and animals that inhabited them as ‘spaces’, ‘unused, underused or empty’,”46 and Heavy Metal bands like Cavalera’s wanted to scream and shout that these lands were not “eligible areas for exploitation.” Considering the ecological dimension of this music, one feels compelled to ask: How can ecocriticism benefit from the “popularity” (which is in fact notoriety) of Heavy Metal? The case is in fact coincidentia oppositorum. Estok observes: “To a global audience glued before flat screens of CNN, an audience very familiar with polar ice sheets breaking off, global warming, and Katrina, we may easily see how our media daily writes nature as a hostile opponent who is responding angrily to our incursions and actions, an opponent to be feared and, with any luck, controlled.”47 When broadcast on CNN, the expression of ecophobic feelings attract large audiences, because this is the way in which the marginalized other is repeatedly reinvented, and “lucki- ly” re-defeated. Hillard agrees with Estok that US culture (obviously as the embodiment of capitalist consumer culture) loves natural disasters and he supports his point by many examples from apocalyptic Hollywood block- busters.48 He also adds that prevalent obsessions with catastrophes appear in popular literature, while the hostile image of nature is in clash with the “Mother Nature” figure.49 The same opposition can be extended to the conflict between the mainstream media (and its tool, popular music) and Heavy Metal as the devil’s advocate. On one hand, Heavy Metal is a form of popular entertainment tool, just like other “approved” genres, and on the other hand, it is the marginalized other, which is created and nurtured by the very system itself. The mainstream media needs a scapegoat to feed on and sustain its existence; it has to create an “other,” which is a “hostile opponent,” so it is only natural that humans feel attracted to the defeat of the nonhuman (or nature) as an enemy. This coincidence of opposites might well explain the reason why catastrophe stories in which a human character survives are so popular, as well as why Heavy Metal bands (when they gain the consent of the mainstream) are able to sell millions. If ecocriticism needs to pay attention to theorizing “the contempt and fear we feel for the agency of the natural environment,”50 and if Hillard expresses his intention of starting to do so51 by looking at gothic literature as the source of such contempt and fear, then this chapter might well be one step further in analyzing the gothic nature of Başak Ağın Dönmez 81

Heavy Metal, with a view to bridging the gap between academia and non- academia, finding more links within the theoretical space, and employing a tool of popular culture so as to heighten awareness. Studying Heavy Metal bands, thus, can open ecocriticism to explore “un”popular culture, and it can be quite functional in ecocriticism’s struggle to make a difference in practice. It is clear that social and ecological forms of resistance are inseparable and a study of culturally produced artifacts that are left on the margins will strengthen the impact of such resistance. Gothic ecocriticism, in this regard, can help ecocriticism effectively reach larger audiences.

NOTES

1. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xviii. 2. Simon C. Estok, “Bridging the Great Divide: Ecocritical Theory and the Great Un- washed,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 31, no. 4 (2005): 197-209, at 197. 3. “Underground Ecocriticism.” http://undergroundecocriticism.blogspot.com (accessed June 22, 2013). 4. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16. 5. Levi R. Bryant, “Black Ecology: A Pessimistic Moment,” Larval Subjects, last modified March 19, 2012. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com (accessed July 21, 2013). 6. See Morton’s essay, “At the Edge of the Smoking Pool of Death: Wolves in the Throne Room,” Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory 1 (Winter 2013): 21–28. 7. Erik Davis, “Deep Eco-Metal,” last modified November 13, 2007. http:// www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2007/11/deep_ecometal.html (accessed June 22, 2013). 8. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 35. 9. Richard Kahn, “Environmental Activism in Music,” Academia.edu (accessed September 01, 2013). 10. Malvina Reynolds, “Free Enterprise,” 1951, MP3. 11. Rock & Ecology. http://rockandecology.blogspot.com.tr. (accessed July 21, 2013). 12. Some of the lyrics run as follows: “It’s in my eggs, it’s in my meat, / It kills the bugs in the apple tree, / I eat the pie and it’s killing me.” 13. Rock & Ecology. 14. Grand Funk Railroad, “Save the Land,” E Pluribus Funk, 1971, MP3. 15. Rock & Ecology. 16. Therion, “Eternal Return,” Deggial, 2000, CD. 17. Tom J. Hillard, “’Deep into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature,” ISLE 16, no.4 (2009): 687. 18. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 1. 19. Kahn, “Environmental Activism.” 20. Agathocles, “Mutilated Regurgitator,” Theatric Symbolization of Life, 1995, CD. 21. Agathocles, “Consuming Endoderme Pus,” Theatric Symbolization of Life. 22. Timothy Morton, “The Ecological Thought: Part Fifth,” Romantic Circles Blog, Last modified July 26, 2008. http://www.rc.umd.edu/blog_rc/ecological-thought-part-fifth (accessed July 21, 2013). 23. Ibid. 24. Gammacide, “Observations,” Victims of Science, 1990, CD. 25. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 17. 26. Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 82 Bang Your Head and Save the Planet

27. Morton, “The Dark Ecology of Elegy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 251. 28. Annihilator, “Stonewall,” Never Neverland, 1990, CD. 29. Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, “Acid Rain,” Definition, 1992, CD. 30. Earth Crisis, “Ecocide,” All out War, 1992, CD. 31. Rock & Ecology. 32. Tourniquet, “Ark of Suffering,” Stop the Bleeding, 1990, CD. 33. Ted Kirkpatrick, Notes, Stop the Bleeding. 34. Morton, “The Dark Ecology of Elegy,” 253. 35. Ibid., 253. 36. Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE 16, no.2 (2009): 203–25, at 211. 37. Ibid., 217. 38. Hillard, “Darkness,” 687. 39. Plumwood, quoted in Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010), 5. 40. Rock & Ecology. 41. This song was heavily critical of the impact of biotechnology on human and nonhuman life. Some of the lyrics were: “Mutations cooked in labs” and “New food + medicine? / New germs + accidents!” 42. Joel McIver, Extreme Metal II (London: Omnibus Press, 2005), 143. 43. Tom Findlay, “Environmental Issues in Metal,” last modified March 25, 2013. https:// suite101.com/a/environmental-issues-in-metal-a69323 (accessed June 23, 2013). 44. Grief, “Polluted,” Torso, 1998, CD. 45. Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2000), 146. 46. Plumwood, quoted in Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 5. 47. Estok, “Theorizing,” 209– 10. 48. Hillard, “Darkness,” 687. 49. Ibid., 688. 50. Estok, “Theorizing,” 207. 51. Hillard, “Darkness,” 688.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agathocles. “Consuming Endoderme Pus.” Theatric Symbolization of Life. 1995. CD. ———. “Mutilated Regurgitator.” In Theatric Symbolization of Life. Annihilator. “Stonewall.” Never Neverland. 1990. CD. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Bryant, Levi R. “Black Ecology: A Pessimistic Moment.” Larval Subjects. Last modified March 19, 2012. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com (accessed July 21, 2013). Davis, Erik. “Deep Eco-Metal.” Last modified November 13, 2007. http://www.slate.com/ articles/arts/music_box/2007/11/deep_ecometal.html (accessed June 22, 2013). Dirty Rotten Imbeciles. “Acid Rain.” Definition. 1992. CD. Earth Crisis. “Ecocide.” All Out War. 1992. CD. Estok, Simon C. “Bridging the Great Divide: Ecocritical Theory and the Great Unwashed.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 31, no.4 (2005): 197–209. ———. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE 16, no.2 (2009): 203–25. Findlay, Tom. “Environmental Issues in Metal.” Last modified March 25, 2013. https:// suite101.com/a/environmental-issues-in-metal-a69323 (accessed June 23, 2013). Gammacide. “Observations.” Victims of Science. 1990. CD. Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Introduction.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecolo- gy, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, xv-xxxviii. Athens: University of Geor- gia Press, 1996. Başak Ağın Dönmez 83

Grand Funk Railroad. “Save the Land.” E Pluribus Funk. 1971. MP3. Grief. “Polluted.” Torso. 1998. CD. Hillard, Tom J. “’Deep into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” ISLE 16, no.4 (2009): 685–695. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environ- ment. New York: Routledge, 2010. Kahn, Richard. “Environmental Activism in Music.” Academia.edu (accessed September 1, 2013). Kirkpatrick, Ted. Notes. In Stop the Bleeding. McIver, Joel. Extreme Metal II. London: Omnibus Press, 2005. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. “The Dark Ecology of Elegy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Elegy, edited by Karen Weisman, 251–271. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ———. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. “The Ecological Thought: Part Fifth.” Romantic Circles Blog. Last modified July 26, 2008. http://www.rc.umd.edu/blog_rc/ecological-thought-part-fifth (accessed July 21, 2013). Reynolds, Malvina. “DDT on My Brain.” 1969. MP3. ———. “Free Enterprise.” 1951. MP3. Rock & Ecology. http://rockandecology.blogspot.com.tr. (accessed July 21, 2013). Sepultura. “Biotech is Godzilla.” Chaos AD. 1993. CD. Therion. “Eternal Return.” Deggial. 2000. CD. Tourniquet. “Ark of Suffering.” Stop the Bleeding. 1990. CD. “Underground Ecocriticism.” http://undergroundecocriticism.blogspot.com (accessed June 22, 2013). Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2000.

Nature and Human Experience

Chapter Five

Un-natural Ecopoetics

Natural/Cultural Intersections in Poetic Language and Form

Sarah Nolan

Since its inception in 2000,1 the term ecopoetics has mainly been applied to poems that take nature as their subject. Landmark studies of ecopoetics such as John Elder’s Imagining the Earth, Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, Leonard Scigaj’s Sustainable Poetry, and J. Scott Bryson’s Ecopoetry primarily define ecopoetry by its attention to the natural world. While these encounters with nature range from the lone weed along the city sidewalk or the soiled air of an urban space to the seemingly unadulterated wilderness, poems that are read through the lens of ecopoetics, unlike recent ecocritical studies in postcolonial ecocriticism and material ecocriticism more generally, are typically acknowledged for their natural elements and rarely consider the ways in which nature and culture intermingle. 2 Yet, environment is not only the “biological” aspects of a space but also the many cultural elements that compose it.3 While early ecopoetic studies arise from developing ecocritical ideas that work to distinguish nature as something valuable but separate from human ideas,4 today ecocriticism embraces new theories like the new materialisms, queer theory and ecologies, and social and environmental justice that complicate the boundaries of the human and thus the nature/culture binary inherent in earlier studies. Following two recent projects in ecopoetic theory that begin to problematize the ways in which nature and culture intersect— Brenda Iijima’s The Ecolanguage Reader and Scott Knickerbocker’s Eco- poetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language5—un-natural ecopoetics builds upon these recent theoretical developments by considering poetry that either does not overtly engage with nature or does not consider

87 88 Un-natural Ecopoetics nature at all. Although the expansion toward un-natural environments has occurred widely in other areas of ecocriticism, such as postcolonial and material ecocriticism, it is only recently that such trends are reaching ecopoetics. In this shift toward the un-natural, ecopoetics becomes a theoretical lens or reading approach that studies the methods by which poets attempt to express the subjective cultural, historical, political, and natural elements of real-world environmental experience through poetic form and language. Put another way, un-natural ecopoetics investigates how poets attempt to use unique forms to capture the multiplicity and complexity of lived experience as closely as possible while simultaneously foregrounding the textual space in which such expression occurs. Rather than separating nature from other aspects of real experience, this understanding of the term ecopoetics focuses on various situations in which individual memory, personal experience, ideology, and the limitations of the senses intermingle with natural elements of experience and on how new forms and experimentation with language can work to express these facets of experience as accurately as possible. Unlike traditional forms of nature poetry, however, ecopoetics uses experimental forms and meta-poetic commentary on language itself to attempt to express the disjointed and nonlinear aspects of experience while simultaneously moving the inherent limitations of the text to the fore. As the definition of ecopoetics moves forward in this way, it expands the applicability of ecopoetic theory across literary studies. It also gains a more diverse understanding of the ways in which people from a variety of economic situations, cultures, locations, and ethnic backgrounds understand and interact with their environments. To phrase it differently, un-natural ecopoetics acknowledges the significance of bringing nature and culture in the mutuality of texts and contexts, or in the way environments are crisscrossed by poetic language. Responding to this shift away from traditional nature poetry and even traditional nature, as evidenced by the recent work of Iijima and Knicker- bocker, the field of ecopoetics has continued to develop toward considering new types of environments. To push it even further, un-natural ecopoetics involves a fusion of new materialist approaches that help us to further broaden our understanding of the types of environments that are valid sites for ecopoetic study. In doing so, we can begin to see how reading through an ecopoetic lens can enhance our understanding of how environments are understood and interacted with today. The term environment, for many people, is immediately conceived as a reference to the natural elements of a physical landscape. However, as conceptions of environment continue to develop throughout ecocriticism, environment moves beyond the “nature is over there” mentality and toward a more interconnected vision of the term. In Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Stacy Alaimo, for example, observes that “understanding the substance of one’s self as Sarah Nolan 89 interconnected with the wider environment marks a profound shift in subjectivity. As the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial, what was once the ostensibly bounded human subject finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainty.”6 Here, Alaimo points out that the human body cannot be viewed as separate from everything that surrounds it. It is always engaged with “networks” that formulate the world. In order to account for new environments brought on by technology, globalization, politics, and cultural shifts, ecopoetics must broaden its understanding of “environment” as ecocriticism has, embracing the new materialisms that integrate the human into the complicated and multidirectional networks of experience. In other words, we must view the term environment more broadly as a reference to spaces that are composed of more than just “nature” or “culture” but also subjective elements of individual memory, imagining, overlooking elements, disjointed thoughts, and ideologies, all of which are dictated by both the human and the place. Environment is not only what is outside the human body, but it is also the constant and simultaneous interplay of everything inside and outside. Conceiving of environment in this way allows ecopoetics to begin to consider not only how the physical elements of a landscape are expressed in text, but also how invisible or non- physical aspects of experience are expressed for each individual. To illustrate how this new concept of un-natural ecopoetics helps to broaden the usefulness and effectiveness of ecopoetic theory, I would like to consider a few poems that illustrate these ideas in practice. Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia, Lyn Hejinian’s Happily, and Anne Carson’s Nox7 specifically demonstrate how this new brand of ecopoetics expands the field to include readings of new environments, perspectives, and forms. The first of these poets is most overtly interested in physical environments. In “A Geology” from her collection Cascadia, Brenda Hillman integrates representations of the physical environment with those of personal revelation. For Hillman, environmental experience is largely dictated by individual perception and is intimately connected with the human perceiver. This move toward subjective experience is clear in the poem when the speaker states: Consider the faultline; with only two sides of it, how come you never thought of one of them.

A place we love, can’t see. A condition so used to becoming ***

When you were trying to quit the drug and broke in half8 90 Un-natural Ecopoetics

Initially, the poem directs the reader’s attention toward the natural environment through California’s geological history. The speaker points toward the physical structure of “the faultline” that has “two sides of it.” Yet, in the following line the speaker begins to question how that physical feature is viewed when she considers the reader’s lack of attention to one side (“you never thought of one of them”). The questioning that occurs in this stanza is intensified in the following line. The speaker posits that “[t]he place we love, can’t see,” which presents two possible readings: first, that the place itself cannot see or is lacking sight; second, that the viewer cannot see the place that he or she loves. Alternatively, based on the previous stanza’s questioning of the oversight inherent in perception, in this line the speaker questions the human perceiver’s ability to “see” the physical places with which they associate. In this sense, even as the speaker introduces the physical environment, the poem engages in a query of the human individual’s ability to perceive of the complexity of that space. In addition to the poem’s questioning of the limitations of human perception, “A Geology” implies that those perceptions of natural spaces are inherently tied to the thoughts of the human perceiver. Alongside her discussion of the “faultline,” the speaker contemplates a struggle to “quit the drug.” In Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton observes that this poem, which is “Hillman’s experiment with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, is both a montage of descriptions of Califor- nia through geologic time and an account of getting over an addiction. It is impossible to determine which layer has priority. Each layer minimizes the input of a conscious subject; by comparison with geology, addiction and withdrawal are intensely physical processes that must be endured.”9 The poem weaves discussions of the physical world with personal experiences in a way that denies priority to either element. Rather than making nature or the human figure the central focus of the poem, it moves back and forth between the two, revealing how indissolubly personal experiences and perceptions of environment are linked. This breakdown of fixed boundaries is apparent as the poem continues: A California is composed of moving toward, away, or past; a skin is not separate; a poem is

composed of all readings of it10 Here, the speaker imposes an article on the name of the state when she references “A California,” implying a sense of subjectivity in how the state itself is perceived. It is “A California” because it varies according to the perceiver. The movement “toward, away, or past” that the speaker identifies refers both to geologic scale—the movement of the plates—and to the move- Sarah Nolan 91 ment of perception “toward, away, or past” particular elements of a space or, put another way, the things that the perceiver “can’t see.” Timothy Morton argues that “[t]he form of the poem heightens the physicality by playing with typographical arrangement. There is often something going on in the margin, out of reach of our reading gaze. One metaphor blends into another in a disturbing, punning way that makes it impossible to decide which level of reality is, to use a geological figure, the bedrock.”11 Pointing to the uncertainty inherent in perception within both the poem’s content and its form, Morton draws attention to how the poem destabilizes fixed boundaries. Such destabilization is most apparent in the final lines when the speaker relates these issues of perception to the poem itself (“a poem is / composed of all readings of it”) and points out that the various ways in which a poem is read shapes it. Similarly, the way the physical world—here California’s faultline—is viewed gives shape to the place. This interconnection between the human and the place demonstrates how new materialism finds its way into ecopoetics. Like Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” the speaker here reveals that nature and culture are largely dictated by the other and thus inseparable.12 Nature and culture are most prominently intertwined later in the poem when the physical space becomes indecipherable from both human emotion and the human body: The number of faults in middle California is staggering—that is, we stagger over them till it’s difficult to follow our own. Each tremor is the nephew of a laugh— sandstone, shale, chert from the Triassic near I-Forgetville. He lined them up, they made white sense,

stretchmarks on her body like public transportation, very coastal, very Sierra traintracks that click-click down the sides of thighs13 The speaker immediately conflates the physical “faults” of “California” with the figurative faults that accompany human emotion and the gaps that are left within it. She proclaims that the “tremor[s]” emanating from the figurative faults are “the nephew of a laugh,” equating the earthquake itself with a laugh. As the speaker attributes human emotions to the fault, she makes it impossible to distinguish between the natural and the cultural. Although she begins with the physical world of California, she quickly conflates that world with the cultural realm of human emotion. Such conflation is enhanced when 92 Un-natural Ecopoetics she appears to return to the physical world of “sandstone, shale, [and] chert” but instead assigns the stones to a location “near I-Forgetville.” Reconciling California’s notorious physical transportation system of the freeway or inter- state with personal response, the speaker becomes more invested in irreversibly fusing the world of the physical with that of culture. As a result, in the stanza break she moves from the lines of physical networks of “public transportation” to “stretchmarks” on the human body. The stretchmark interstates that she creates here encapsulate the body, and mimic the real-world image of “traintracks” as they “click-click / down the sides of thighs.” The fusion of the body with the physical marks of transportation implies a sense of enmeshment between the two and reveals an un-natural ecopoetics that foregrounds not only the inescapable interconnections between the two worlds but also their profound impact upon one another. The intertwining of the human individual with the world facilitates the continued expansion of ecopoetic studies into poems that contain few, if any, overt references to nature. While Hillman does this by emphasizing how perception shapes the physical environment by noting the interchanges between the two, for many poets the interconnections between the human and the more-than-human world are thoroughly integrated and take on a more pronounced role within the form of the project. In Lyn Hejinian’s Happily, for instance, all experiences are both natural and cultural without drawing distinctions between those elements. Happily is a short book of prose poetry that investigates the word “happily” in its various forms through a series of short aphorisms that remain generally disconnected from one another. Hejin- ian approaches the environmental experience in its entirety, attempting to preserve every facet of that experience in the text. In part, this occurs through the poem’s formal structure. Since the speaker moves from one thought to the next—some personal, others linguistic, and some natural—the poem refuses to grant priority to one facet of experience over another. In “The Rejec- tion of Closure,” Hejinian comments on this when she asks: “Can form make the primary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and information, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? . . . In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.”14 Viewing form as a site in which the “unorganized impulse and information” inherent in encounters with the physical world are expressed, Hejinian emphasizes the complexity of experience. Her description of the “primary chaos” in this passage reveals that her conception of experience is largely tied up in the complex social, political, personal, and natural elements that shape it. Hejinian articulates a meta-poetic reflection on the limitations of perceiving and representing the complexity of the physical environment when she writes: “I was going to speak of doom eager to resume consecutive events Sarah Nolan 93 plowing through the space surrounding them to something now, no ellipsis, just mouth open in astonishment or closed to suck quid and quod.”15 Empha- sizing the immediacy and simultaneity of experience (“consecutive events,” “just mouth open in astonishment”), Hejinian seeks a poem with “no ellipsis,” one that presents unmitigated experience. In other words, the poet challenges the traditional selectiveness that writing demands as it includes and excludes certain facets of lived experience in order to condense it for textual expression. Hejinian recognizes the limitations of poetic form and language to express the realities of the world. Since the human perceiver always mediates environments, all experiences are inherently subjective and textual expressions of those encounters are laced with personal, historical, natural, and political conditions in which he or she perceives the space. As a result, much contemporary poetry embraces subjectivity and foregrounds the limitations of language and form. As Hejinian writes, “the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other” (“Closure” 376).16 By embracing subjective experiences in environments and foregrounding that subjectivity rather than masking it, contemporary poets like Hejinian move away from seeking accurate representations of the physical world, but instead seek to express individual experience within that world. In Happily, the speaker exemplifies this when she states that “[t]he experiences generated by sense perception come by the happenstance that is with them.”17 In this sense, the lived experience is one of simultaneous sensations. One feels, smells, touches, remembers, and even mentally wanders into other places all while experiencing one particular physical environment. The combination of this “happenstance,” as the speaker calls it, is what composes an environmental experience for the perceiver, yet it is also typically left out of literary expressions of the world. Hejinian’s project, then, re-examines the importance of this peripheral data in constructing a lived experience on the page. The speaker claims that she “write[s] with inexact straightness but into a place in place.”18 It is in the “inexact” that the poet’s writing engages un- natural ecopoetics as it includes those observations, memories, sounds, smells, and environments that do not contribute to a central narrative. In- stead, the poet attempts to preserve the chaos of experience in its multiplicity, despite its lack of coherence. It is only when she writes not without a purpose but with “inexact straightness” that she finds a “place.” The result is a project filled with confusingly disjointed aphorisms, yet it effectively exposes the artificiality in human understandings of such moments. Depicting the world not by choosing certain details to accentuate but by attempting to project all facets of that experience is profoundly ecopoetic as it attempts to fuse the natural and cultural elements of that place. The speaker reveals Hejinian’s ecopoetics throughout the book as she continually comments on the numerous facets that compose experience. The 94 Un-natural Ecopoetics speaker proclaims that “Now is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow some part of it gets accentuated And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment falls into time differently.”19 The italicized “Now” reveals the importance of the moment, including time, space, environment, mental state, and a variety of other factors that contribute to how one experiences the world. The moment is “blinding” because it is filled with endless sensations and connections to the world and to the self. The observer must choose which parts get “accentuated” simply to make sense of the scene, yet this artificial ordering does not change the fact that the moment changes with each iteration (“the emphasis of the moment falls into time differently”) or, put another way, is never the same twice. Hejinian’s ecopoetics stems from this philosophy that human experiences are more complex than our understandings of them. In other words, each moment one encounters is so “blinding” with environmental, sensory, mental, temporal, and other contextual stimulation that individuals are always selecting what to see, experience, or consider in a particular space and time. Hejinian’s ecopoetics attempts to reveal the artificiality inherent in such experiences by bringing to the fore those aspects of a moment that might otherwise be repressed. The radical formal structure that Hejinian outlines in her effort to adapt the “primary chaos” of environmental experience to text is pushed even further in Anne Carson’s Nox. Unlike Hejinian’s ecopoetics, which engages with environmental experience through unrestricted form and occasional meta-poetic commentary, Carson’s book models a less likely application of ecopoetic critique. Presented as a reaction to her brother’s death, Nox is a replica of an epitaph that the poet wrote for her brother in the form of a book. Containing photocopied pages from that notebook in an accordion-bound volume, the book’s formal structure is atypical of poetry. In fact, as a conceptual poem, much of the book’s interest lies precisely in this unusual presentation. Exhibited in a box that has the appearance of a book and appearing on a long, single-sided, but folded page, the entire book is essentially pageless. I would like to conclude my discussion with this book because in order for ecopoetics to become a useful method of reading in literary scholarship, it must be applicable beyond texts that overtly discuss nature. Nox is an ideal example because while it is seemingly absent of any connection to the natural world, it projects a lived moment in which a human perceiver constructs a textual environment with the memories, images, people, words, and places that compose the time and space of her experience. In essence, Carson’s project lies somewhere between drafting and found text. Throughout the book, she combines personal remembrances with dictionary entries, letters, photographs, drawings, and fragments of paper with phrases on them. In “Recycles: The Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poetry,” Harriet Tarlo observes that the poet’s use of found Sarah Nolan 95 text “defamiliarises and feeds back to us the language that surrounds us. [Her] lack of attribution reduces all the words [s]he uses to equal, linguistic snapshots of the culture.”20 In terms of form, then, Nox presents a level of deprioritization that is even beyond Hejinian’s. Since the book is essentially a single page folded upon itself, all of the information is presented at once. Practically speaking, a reader could lay the book down, spreading the folded pages to form a single page that could be viewed in a single moment. It would seem, in fact, that the book’s unusual form is begging the reader to do so. Carson presents all of the moments in the book simultaneously without granting one element priority over another. Interestingly, though, since Nox is housed within a box that is made to appear like a book by including a faux binding, the faux book immediately raises questions of perception. Although a reader would likely mistake the package for a book, he or she realizes that it is in fact a box forcing him or her to recognize the limits of his or her perception. This issue of perception is a resounding theme throughout Nox. As the sections jump from torn images, sometimes photographs and sometimes short messages or letters, to definitions to personal reflections, the book foregrounds multiple perspectives. In section 1.2, near the beginning of the book, the speaker writes that “[a]utopsy is a term historians use of the ‘eyewitnessing’ of data or events by the historian himself.”21 Near the end of the same section, she cites Virginia Woolf: “To be nothing—is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?”22 Her response to Woolf, however, moves the reader back to the concept of eyewitnessing. She writes, “I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of autopsy.”23 Here, the speaker associates the concept of nothingness with experience, ultimately questioning the validity or usefulness of experience. For the speaker, physical experience or “eyewitnessing” appears to be secondary to narrative. The materiality of the textual world is apparent in note 1.1 when the speaker comments: “One who asks about things—about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell—is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it.”24 In this sense, the narrative is equal to experience. By asking and hearing about an event, one has in turn experienced the event for him or herself. The speaker’s appraisal of narrative as equal or perhaps even more important than lived experience constructs her ecopoetics. By placing as much value on the text as she does on experience, the speaker explains that the textual world is a valid site for the same types of encounters that other poets have with the physical world. For Carson, her composition of Nox conveys the significance of the textual space. Taking the various documents from her life with her brother, including letters from her mother and photographs of their childhood, and fusing them with dictionary definitions and her own journal entries, the poet 96 Un-natural Ecopoetics creates a space in which the various elements of their lives are presented together but without hierarchy. Aside from the chronology of the journal entries, the documents have no apparent order and leave the reader to muddle through without direction. The lack of prioritization of one experience over another hinges upon the poet’s commentary on the multiplicity of perception, a statement that is apparent in section 2.2. 25 Unlike other moments in the book, this section from the speaker’s journal appears four times over the course of seven pages. In each iteration, section 2.2 of the journal appears in a different location on the page, sometimes in the crease and sometimes pushed off the edge. Even more importantly, though, each iteration is accompanied by a copy of a hand-written letter, which is torn and folded to make it impossible to decipher the entire conversation in the first two iterations and then unfolded to reveal an entire section of the conversation in the third. When the contents of the letter are revealed, they are exposed as a letter from the speaker’s brother. The letter, which discusses a woman’s death is directly related to the journal entry that accompanies it, an entry that emphasizes the kind of uncertainty and inquisitiveness that confronts the reader when working through the first two fragmented sections of the hand-written letter. By including four iterations of section 2.2 and accompanying each with a different section of the letter, the speaker emphasizes the various elements that compose a single moment and the important role that perception plays in how an individual experiences a particular place and time. Read through the lens of unnatural ecopoetics, Nox demonstrates that physical real-world encounters and individual perceptions and reflections are intertwined and ultimately inextricable from one another; yet, both remain equally fundamental to the experience of a particular place and time. As the new materialist ideas ask us to question where we draw the line between nature and culture and ecocritical scholars continue to embrace naturecultures, the concept of a “natural” environment becomes increasingly nebulous. Environments are revealed as all around us—ranging from our own bodies to the textual places that we construct. As ecopoetics begins to engage with these new ideas and expands its boundaries to include less traditional understandings of “environment,” it becomes more widely applicable and more inclusive of unique encounters with environments while simultaneously gaining much-needed stability. By allowing ecopoetics the flexibility to recognize a wide array of environmental expressions from un- natural poetry to prose and even visual art, ecopoetics becomes capable of considering how any poem employs and engages with the environment. In doing so, it highlights the various and often underrepresented ways in which individuals encounter and engage with their environments, thus revealing that even interactions with the most un-natural environments bring with them responsibility for both the natural and cultural elements that are irreversibly intertwined within them. Sarah Nolan 97 NOTES

1. The term “ecopoetics” first appears in Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth. 2. As I will discuss in the coming pages, however, some of these ideas are being challenged in the most recent theoretical work on ecopoetics, including Simon Estok’s “Discourses of Nation, National Ecopoetics, and Ecocriticism in the face of US: Canada and Korea as Case Studies,” and within recent collections of ecopoetry, including The Ecopoetry Anthology. In addition, elsewhere I have discussed the intersection of nature and culture in ecopoetics by considering its manifestations in both South Asia and North America; see Sarah Nolan, “Com- parative Ecopoetics: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Indian and American Ecological Poetry,” Contemporary Contemplations on Ecoliterature, ed. Suresh Frederick (New Delhi: Author- spress, 2012), 32–55. 3. According to the Oxford English Dictionary of Ecology, the environment is “the physical and biological surroundings of an organism.” It is defined as “the complete range of external conditions, physical and biological, in which an organism lives. Environment includes social, cultural, and (for humans) economic and political considerations, as well as the more usually understood features such as soil, climate and food supply.” Michael Allaby, ed., Oxford English Dictionary of Ecology, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Allaby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 143, quoted in Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 2004), 128. 4. Early ecocritical moves to distance nature from human conceptions of it are largely the result of the field’s activist vein that viewed ecocriticism’s primary purpose as promoting ecopolitical engagement or the need for such action. Defining the field in The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty argues that despite “an increasingly urban society, nature writing plays a vital role in teaching us to value the natural world” (xxiii). Just as Glotfelty points out the valuable role of learning about “nature,” Scott Slovic specifically points to the otherness of it. He observes that “[b]y confronting face-to-face the separate realm of nature, by becoming aware of its otherness, the writer implicitly becomes more deeply aware of his or her own dimensions, limitations of form and understanding, and processes of grappling with the unknown” (4). See Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992). This sentiment is reiterated in David Mazel’s American Literary Environmentalism where he observes that “nature [is] pure but physical, something increasingly rare, but when found, readily experienced in its otherness” (30). See David Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Conceptu- alizing nature as the other, early ecocritical ideas worked to distinguish it from the human realm. 5. Brenda Iijima’s collection of essays begins to move away from the nature/culture binary inherent in earlier understandings of ecopoetics as authors like Jonathan Skinner, Marcella Durand, and Jill Magi promote the application of ecopoetic theory to texts that that are set in new spaces. Marcella Durand’s essay in the book clearly gestures toward second-wave ecopoetics when she observes that ecopoetics is not “limited to those [things] traditionally marked as ‘natural’—i.e., bears, foxes, woods, mountains—but expanded to include all beings, objects, systems, and locales—water reservoirs, the insides of televisions, invasive Purple Loosestrife, Africanized bee populations, cable networks” (118). See Marcella Durand, “The Ecology of Poetry,” in The Eco Language Reader, ed. Brenda Iijima (New York: Portable Press, 2010). Similarly, Knickerbocker argues that “[eco]poems undo simple oppositions between humans and nature; sensuous poesis operates from the assumption that humans (and their tools, including language) are both distinct and inseparable from the rest of nature. Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems (to make them seem more natural and supposedly, then, closer to nature), . . . [ecopoets] unapologetically embrace artifice—not for its own sake, but as a way to relate meaningfully to the natural world. Indeed for them, artifice is natural” (2). See Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 6. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Blooming- ton, Indiana University Press, 2010), 20. 7. Nox is an unpaginated text. 98 Un-natural Ecopoetics

8. Brenda Hillman, Cascadia (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 7. 9. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 42. 10. Hillman, Cascadia, 10. 11. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 42. 12. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 13. Hillman, Cascadia 12 14. Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” in Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, eds. Dana Gioia, et al. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004), 371. 15. Lyn Hejinian, Happily (Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 2000), 21. 16. Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure, 376. 17. Hejinian, Happily, 26. 18. Ibid., 3. 19. Ibid., 27. 20. Harriet Tarlo, “Recycles: the Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poet- ry,” Journal of Ecocriticism 1, no. 2 (2009): 114-30, at 122. 21. Anne Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010). 22. Virginia Woolf, Flush (San Diego: Harcourt, 1933), PDF e-book, quoted in Carson, Nox. 23. Carson, Nox. 24. Ibid. 25. Carson, Nox.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allaby, Michael, ed. Oxford English Dictionary of Ecology. 2nd ed. 143. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Bryson, J. Scott, ed. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002. Carson, Anne. Nox. New York: New Directions, 2010. Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Durand, Marcella. “The Ecology of Poetry.” In The Eco Language Reader, edited by Brenda Iijima. 114–124. New York: Portable Press, 2010. Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Estok, Simon. “Discourses of Nation, National Ecopoetics, and Ecocriticism in the Face of the US: Canada and Korea as Case Studies.” Comparative American Studies 7, no. 2 (2009): 85–97. ———. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–225. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Fisher-Wirth, Ann and Laura-Gray Street. The Ecopoetry Anthology. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013. Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: Georgia University Press, 1996. Hejinian, Lyn. Happily. Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 2000. ———. “The Rejection of Closure.” Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, et al. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. Sarah Nolan 99

Hillman, Brenda. Cascadia. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Iijima, Brenda. The Eco Language Reader. New York: Portable Press, 2010. Knickerbocker, Scott. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Mazel, David. American Literary Environmentalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Nolan, Sarah. “Comparative Ecopoetics: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Indian and American Ecological Poetry.” In Contemporary Contemplations on Ecoliterature, edited by Suresh Frederick. 32–55. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2012. Quetchenbach, Bernard W. Back From the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992 Tarlo, Harriet. “Recycles: the Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poetry.” Journal of Ecocriticism 1, no. 2 (2009): 114-30. Woolf, Virginia. Flush. San Diego: Harcourt, 1933. http://books.google.com/ books?id=JpzoxOYFS1oC&printsec=copyright&source=gbs_pub_info_r#v=onepage&q& f=false (accessed 24 February, 2014).

Chapter Six

“There’s No Place Like ‘Home’”

Susanna Moodie, Shelter Writing, and Dwelling on the Earth

Elise Mitchell

“I have no home! The world is my home!” —Mary Mathews, in Moodie’s 1853 novel Mark Hurdlestone

“Home is the strangest place” —Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature

Susanna Moodie is a significant figure in the Canadian literary canon and a Canadian cultural touchstone. Both her work and its critical and creative interpretations have been integral to the formation of a Canadian ecological consciousness. Moodie emigrated from England to Canada in 1832. Before emigrating, she wrote poetry and moral tales for children. After her emigration, she continued to write, producing fiction, poetry, and autobiographical sketches. Her best-known work, the autobiographical Roughing It in the Bush, published in 1852, continues to be her best known and most studied text. The contrasts between Moodie’s effusive admiration, lively enjoyment, and scathing descriptions of the Canadian land and its people have generated interest since its publication, and Moodie, particularly in her relationship to the nonhuman, remains “a persistent and challenging enigma.”1 Despite the “obviously fertile ground for ecocritical study,”2 however, Canadian ecocriticism is still coming to terms with Moodie’s work. Most of the existing criticism that touches on her relationship with the nonhuman is thematic; the rest deals with the nonhuman as peripheral. Furthermore, Moo- die criticism continues to be colored by Margaret Atwood’s description of

101 102 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’” her as displaced and deeply divided, the archetypal, placeless Canadian victim of nature.3 In a recent anthology about the relationship between Canadian land and Canadian women, Moodie continues to be portrayed as malad- justed:4 “While, on the one hand, such writers as Susanna Moodie indicate that women’s sense of ‘homelessness’ in the New World actually intensified their terror, others…clearly sought to create a dwelling in the wilderness by crafting a complex intimacy with the wild nature around them.”5 The assumption here that terror is incompatible with ecological consciousness dovetails with Simon Estok’s concept of ecophobia, defined as “an aversion towards nature (sometimes pathological), an aggravated form of anthropocentrism expressed variously as fear of, hatred of, or hostility towards nature.”6 Additionally, ecophobia suggests a desire to control the nonhuman world.7 An ecocritical reading of Moodie’s work, one that is based on a more nuanced analysis of the nonhuman world, would addresses the tension between the aversion and desire for control that characterize ecophobia and a slavish, Romantic devotion to the sublime that fuels her uneasy relationship with place and space. The site of this is, perhaps somewhat counterintuitive- ly, domestic space. This is partly because, while the discussion of humankind’s place on the earth is at the root of ecocriticism, discussions of the material world and, more specifically, the built environment, are developing into a significant stream of third-wave ecocriticism. 8 More importantly, Moodie’s home spaces and their immediate vicinities are the points at which she encounters the nonhuman world. Furthermore, space is also significant because it is so frequently this aspect of Moodie’s writing that provides the foundation for an analysis rooted in essentialist thinking about the nonhuman world. Christa Zeller Thomas’s 2009 article “‘I Had Never Seen Such a Shed Called a House Before’: The Discourse of Home in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush,”9 is an excellent, and recent, example of this essen- tialism. Thomas calls Roughing It a “failed-homecoming plot.”10 Displaced by her emigration from an ideal England, which is her “source of security and fulfilment . . . the place best capable of nurturing and supporting her selfhood,”11 Moodie cannot reconstruct a home. She therefore makes husband and children the center of home for herself, which fails: “marriage and motherhood doom Susanna Moodie to a lifetime of feeling out of place.”12 This is because, Thomas asserts, Moodie was at one with the nonhuman world in England, and that “In Canada, the same intimate participation in Nature cannot be reproduced.”13 It is implicit, then, that Moodie can only integrate into her native bioregion; and since this integration is fundamental to happiness her subsequent non-integration into the Canadian environment is a catastrophic experience. Elise Mitchell 103

Thomas seeks to redeem Moodie, to a certain extent, by redefining the terms of home-making, but an unquestioning acceptance of the value of certain aspects of the nonhuman continues to render Moodie as ecophobic and escapist. This analysis seems to lean to the Romantic, the feeling that “place as a substantial “thing” with clear boundaries,”14 rather than “an independent, definable object “over there” somewhere . . . Place is caught up in a certain question.”15 Moodie questions, constructs, deconstructs, and elides place through, in part, her “lasting discomfort with the notion of home in Canada.”16 As a marginalized, peripheral human, Moodie 17 narrates the figure of home in the mode of “shelter writing.” All of Moodie’s writing is shelter in a sense. A great deal of her writing was economically motivated, and so not only is she creating a shelter through the act of writing, but also through the remuneration she received. In the case of the actual homes, however, their permeability and the pressure on them shelter, but also endanger and expose her. This emphasizes both human presumption and vulnerability, and opens discussion about Moodie’s ecological consciousness and the way in which the Canadian experience of the nonhuman can be explored and theorized. Shelter writing, a term created by Susan Fraiman, attempts “an apprecia- tive exploration of domestic order, stability, and ritual—especially from the perspective of those whose exilic status has deprived them of these very things.”18 Instead of houses and the actions that pertain to them as “inherently bourgeois and suspect,”19 shelter writing seeks to reclaim domesticity for any vulnerable or marginal person.20 The deliberate holding in tension of essentialized concepts that is fundamental to shelter writing is also the groundwork of Timothy Morton’s ecological thought, which emphasizes the need to recognize and embrace duality while looking at the space between the two extremes. For Fraiman, “home and homelessness, interior and exteri- or, feminine and masculine, manual and mental labour, queer and straight do not oppose so much as encounter and inform one another. [Shelter writing is] . . . attuned to the instability as well as utility of its binary terms.”21 Shelter writing’s common ground with ecocriticism is not confined to a similarity with Morton, but also Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard. Shelter writing echoes the most compelling elements of Heidegger’s dwelling, uncertainty and awareness—fundamental to ecocriticism—but also explicitly incorporates Bachelard’s ideas into a more inclusive version of the creation of a home. In Moodie’s autobiographical work, notably “Rachel Wilde, or Trifles from the Burthen of a Life” (1848), Roughing It in the Bush (1852), and Flora Lyndsay, Or, Passages in an Eventful Life (1854), both the seemingly idealized English “Home” and the Canadian sheds, cabins, or cottages have sheltering elements. However, not one home space is a complete, all-protecting shelter. If they are “beautiful, functional, and safe interiors,”22 they are 104 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’” frightening and inaccessible to shelter writers. If they are shelters, the borders are permeable, inciting a relationship with the uncanny and the nonhuman. Recent critical discourse,23 in which Moodie has been recognized as having “adapted” to Canada in various ways, tends to address Moodie’s “Home” in England as a monolith rather than differentiating between the varying English home spaces. In fact, Moodie’s childhood home, Reydon Hall, and the cottage in Southwold that she and her husband rented after their marriage are very different spaces. Reydon Hall is the site of Moodie’s construction of English “Home,” while the Southwold cottage is a transition point between the Hall and Canada. Reydon Hall is a finished interior rather than a shelter, in which “Paint- ings and pianos, curtains and crucifixes . . . are always already in their places,”24 as the the few interior descriptions of the “well-furnished library,”25 or the “splendidly illustrated chest”26 attest. The historical and cultural capital of the Hall is also locked up: “an old-fashioned house, large, rambling, picturesque, and cold [, it] had been built in the first year of good Queen Bess. The back part of the mansion appeared to have belonged to a period still more remote.”27 The creation of the house is already in the past and Moodie cannot contribute to or maintain it, indoors and out; because of this, in no fictional version of the Hall is the Moodie figure safe or happy indoors. She is constrained by the division of space, what Fraiman calls “domesticity that can kill.”28 There is public space, for example, the table in the kitchen, but it is insecure, controlled by adult authority figures. Private spaces, like the bedroom and the schoolroom, are hermetic spaces of confinement and punish- ment rather than the felicitious, intimate home space that Bachelard describes as ideal. In “Rachel Wilde,” Rachel attempts to appropriate first “an old fashioned cupboard,” and then a “drawer of a sideboard”29 to hide the stories she has written with her sister, but they are discovered, mocked, and destroyed. This failure of home space drives Moodie to build and inhabit enclosed spaces even outdoors: “day after day, she sought a deep dell in a beautiful grove upon the estate, to sit alone with nature.”30 This inverts Bachelard’s “hut dream,” “the taproot of the function of inhabiting,”31 in which the dreamer, as Bachelard puts it, imagines the closed-off, solitary hut in the center of the forest from the safety of his or her living room. Moodie actually creates huts because she lacks the safety to dream them. The hut dream carried outdoors mirrors the enclosed spaces Moodie looks for within Reydon Hall, despite the fairly categorical separation between inside and outside. Nobody looks out of windows, and the only movement through doors is toward the outside. This is a common pattern in Moodie’s fiction as well. In the “big houses,” country houses, of her sentimental novels, there is almost no indoor-outdoor dialectic, no organic, non-geometric relationship between inside and outside. This lack of permeability indicates a Elise Mitchell 105 separation between human and nonhuman worlds that points to the reification of the nonhuman into a Romantic ideal. The Southwold cottage32 is an inversion of this outdoor aesthetic; Flora refashions herself, in relation to the domestic space, as “angel in the home.”33 The narrative voice celebrates the confined, heavily gendered spaces that Fraiman sets up as opposing shelter writing: “Flora sighed, and wished herself safe at home, in her dear, snug, little parlour; the baby asleep in the cradle, and Lyndsay reading aloud to her as she worked, or playing on his flute.”34 Having achieved ownership, as it were, of this private space, she rarely leaves this room, travelling only on “walks to and from her mother’s house.”35 Again and again, Flora is shown ensconced within and others moving in and out, reluctant to leave the enclosed space she has reclaimed. This contrast to her outdoor “huts” at Reydon Hall indicates less a love of English “Nature” than a desire to perpetuate the hut dream from her own living room. Flora’s domestic activity is explicitly named and glorified as “A thousand little domestic duties, too numerous and too trifling to dwell upon,”36 but in fact in the cottage it is limited to sewing and childcare, 37 and only the least onerous aspects of those tasks; she has a nurse to change the baby and hang out the laundry, and she does not cook, although she does make “good coffee.”38 Flora is, according to the landlord Captain Kitson, “nervous and delicate . . . the whole blessed day is wasted in reading and writing, and coddling up the baby.”39 Therefore, while she does attempt to make the home, it is insufficient to maintain her shelter in the face of external pressure. In fact, the Southwold cottage is described in several different terms that demonstrate completion echoing those used to describe Reydon Hall: “a pretty cottage upon the sea-coast,” (9) “ready-furnished lodgings,” (10) “all ready furnished to your hand,—nothing to find of your own but plate and linen . . . The house, I say, is complete from the cellar to the garret.”40 At the same time, the house is marginal and penetrable; the Lyndsay’s conversation about moving, which was held at night, in a closed room, is already known to their landlord, Captain Kitson: “where there are servants living in the house, and walls are thin—news travels fast” (14). They are also “besieged” (69) when they advertise for a servant to go to Canada. At the end of their tenure at the cottage, the house is “a scene of bustle and confusion baffling description” (86). There are even animals in the house: “Strange dogs forced their way in after their masters, and fought and yelped in undisturbed pugnacity” (87); this presence of an unruly, animal Other foreshadows the permeability of the Canadian homes and the “wild beasts”41 that are the imaginary focus of Moodie’s ecophobia. The English “Home,” then, is a dangerous place. Moodie idealizes the space, but, both physically and financially, it is unstable. In “Rachel Wilde” Moodie discloses that her father is ruined because he is a “generous benefac- 106 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’” tor” and must “reduce his comfortable establishment,”42 while in Flora Lyndsay, the discussion that begins in the comfortable parlor is about emigration. The “Home” is also almost entirely closed, impermeable to the nonhuman world.43 As such, therefore, the space which Moodie or her avatar inhabits within Reydon Hall, and even the cottage at Southwold, is fragmented, diffuse, and insecure. This insecurity is supported by the assessment of Reydon Hall written by James Ewing Ritchie. His description, from a visit after Moodie’s father’s death, is quite different from the finished interior written by Moodie in “Rachel Wilde”: “It must have been, now I come to think of it, a dismal old house, suggestive of rats and dampness and mould, that Reydon Hall, with its scantily furnished rooms and its unused attics and its empty barns and stables, with a general air of decay all over the place.”44 There is a distinct contrast here with the finished interior that Moodie presents in “Rachel Wilde,” as well as a much greater commonality with the Canadian homes. The Southwold cottage is a similarly equivocal, transitional space; it is a finished interior in Moodie’s beloved England, but in its instability and pe- netrability, as well as the way in which Moodie situates her avatar character, Flora, it foreshadows the Canadian homes. In Canada, Moodie encounters an “eternal forest”45 that is an ideal of wild landscape, which she inhabits in relative solitude. However, despite her professed love of the forest, she does not find the equivalent of the outdoor hideaways she creates for herself in England. Instead, she finds herself in the middle of literal clearings in the bush, on the periphery of the civilized world. Her “hut dream” becomes a “hut reality,” as it were, but it subverts the imagined security of the hut. Moodie’s home life during her first years in Canada is decidedly unstable. She lives in four different Canadian homes in rural and backwoods Ontario between 1832 and 1839. Not one of them has any aspect of the finished interior; rather, each requires extensive work to become habitable. The first two homes correspond exactly to Fraiman’s shelter definition of “small, rickety, [and] rigged-up,”46 the third is dirty and infested with mice and insects, and the fourth is literally unfinished. Moo- die’s gestures of home-making, both as acts of physical labor and acts of writing, are absolutely necessary in this situation. The ultimate failure of the physical home-making does not negate the ultimate effect: Moodie, in giving thought to her homelessness, creates space for dwelling. The “miserable hut”47 in the vale is Moodie’s first home in Canada, and she is profoundly discouraged at “the disappointing reality of the colony.”48 The hut is situated in a “rocky upland clearing, partially covered with a second growth of timber, and surrounded on all sides by the dark forest.”49 When Moodie arrives, the cabin has no door, and five cows are lying on the floor. Inside, the building is “dreary. Without, pouring rain; within, a fireless hearth; a room with but one window, and that containing only one whole Elise Mitchell 107 pane of glass; not an article of furniture to be seen, save an old painted pine- wood cradle.”50 The space is open and empty, and the pressure of the outside world creates an unbearable tension between Moodie’s desire to find beauty in the land and her fear of the nonhuman. Moodie finds the door and her husband installs it, shutting out the nonhuman world. Then, what follows is almost a montage of transformation as a shelter is erected by Moodie, her husband, and her servants:

Our united efforts had effected a complete transformation in our uncouth dwelling. Sleeping-berths had been partitioned off for the men; shelves had been put up for the accommodation of books and crockery, a carpet covered the floor, and the chairs and tables we had brought from [Cobourg] gave an air of comfort to the place, which, on the first view of it, I deemed impossible. . . . The sun shone warm and bright, and the open door admitted a current of fresh air, which tempered the heat of the fire (Roughing It, 64).

The creation of this home is a collective effort, but for the creation of the next home, Moodie, like Bachelard, elides the bodies 51 that contribute to the construction of shelter—Bell, her servant, her husband, and their manservant, as well as herself—into one “I”: “In a few hours I had my new abode more comfortably arranged than the old, although its dimensions were much smaller. The location was beautiful, and I was greatly consoled by this circum- stance.”52 This elision emphasizes that Moodie’s participation in domestic creation and maintenance is, admittedly, a strongly class-inflected process. However, while the heavy work is, ideally, the province of servants, there are not always servants, or money to pay for them. Every task that John Mona- ghan, the Moodie’s hired man, performs when he is acting for the absent female servant Bell—lighting fires, milking cows, taking care of the baby, cooking dinner--Moodie performs as well.53 As in England, then, genders participate equally in the creation of the home space, 54 but in Canada, despite a great deal of writing around class division of labor, there is fluidity in the actual performance of the shelter-maintaining physical gestures. When Moodie steps back from this performance, there are consequences that endanger the house space; when she sends the servants to clean out the third residence, the farmhouse, without her, as she is ten days away from giving birth, they are able to give “an air of comfort and cleanliness to a room which, only a few hours before had been a loathsome den of filth and impurity,”55 but they are not able to make it habitable: the stench of a dead skunk in the cupboard destabilizes the space and drives everyone outside. In the newly built log house in the bush, Moodie is supervising, rather than participating in, the construction, feeling complacent; immediately after that, a neighbor nearly sets fire to the house, and the family is “nearly deprived of [their] home before [they] had taken up [their] abode in it.”56 108 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’”

These incidents emphasize the instability and permeability of the home space in Canada. The near-hermetic state of the English home does not apply; both human and nonhuman agents are able to enter Moodie’s Cana- dian homes, not only through the doors and windows, but through the chim- ney, the roof, and various fissures and cracks in the structure itself. This “enclosure in whisperingly close dialogue with exposure”57 is what brings Moodie into contact with her environment. The fragility of her shelter pushes her beyond ecophobia to encounter and negotiate boundaries with different manifestations of the nonhuman. The importance of the elements as nonhuman agents should not be under- estimated. Moodie carefully catalogues the weather and its relationship to her home. She and her family suffer both extreme heat and extreme cold indoors, and even when she feels protected and safe there, exposure is imminent. One night in the dower house, for example:

A sharp wind howled without, and drove the fine snow through the chinks in the door, almost to the hearth-stone, on which two immense blocks of maple shed forth a cheering glow, brightening the narrow window-panes, and making the blackened rafters ruddy with the heart-invigorating blaze. The toils of the day were over, the supper things cleared away, and the door closed for the night (Roughing It, 97).

The snow serves to augment the feeling of protection; its presence demonstrates the general functionality of the house as well as Moodie’s acceptance of the prevailing conditions. Bachelard states that the dialectic between indoor-outdoor is at its least challenging when there is snow, which “reduces the exterior to nothing . . . a simplified cosmos.”58 There is nothing to fear when the outdoors is muted. Snow is, therefore, more a protection than a concern, unlike fire—the Moodie home burns down not once, but twice—but the permeability of Moo- die’s home space by people and animals is a much more pressing concern in Roughing It. As many critics have pointed out, she places a high value on her private space, as her search for enclosed spaces in her English life demonstrates, and in Canada, that boundary is not respected. However, what is interesting from an ecocritical point of view is the way Moodie draws, or, rather, doesn’t draw, a distinction between human and nonhuman invaders. These categories overlap and intertwine; people are endowed with animal characteristics, animals are attributed human ones, and the strangeness of their presence manifests in more ways than the simply physical. This marks willingness on Moodie’s part to contact and accept other beings; she is open, through the cracks in her homes, to the unknown and the uncanny. In writing home space in Canada, Thomas says, Moodie “articulates key aspects of her sense of dislocation: the transience, instability, insufficiency, and often precarious nature of Moodie’s ‘homes’ in Canada also describe her Elise Mitchell 109 experience of exile.”59 As much as I disagree with Thomas’ wholesale assertions about England and “Mother Nature,” I agree with this assessment of Moodie’s use of home. Home space in Canada does challenge Moodie and, even after the period described in Roughing It in the Bush, her home remains unstable for the rest of her life. However, this tension and awareness that creating these Canadian dwellings requires allows Moodie to become aware of her homelessness, and the cyclical work of creating, maintaining, and writing shelter, “a kind of ritual necessarily repeated many times throughout a lifetime,”60 serves to help her move toward dwelling on the earth. In returning to this very Heideggerian concept, I return to the controver- sies of the first part of this chapter. Garrard critiques Heidegger’s “idealising the rootedness of rural folk in place and ancestral time.”61 Like Heidegger, Bachelard has been criticized for attempting to universalize a privileged Western viewpoint. For example, Joe Moran states that Bachelard “has inter- nalized . . . historically recent distinctions”62 such as divided rooms, privacy, and gendered space. In the spirit of ecocriticism’s “openness and theoretical ambiguity,”63 embracing the controversial elements is illuminating in the context of Susan- na Moodie’s writing of home space. Heidegger’s much-criticized Black For- est hut, Bachelard’s reification of a specific type of house as universal, and Moodie’s initial conception of home space have certain common ground. They all seem to resemble, to a certain extent, the confined, “stunted bonsai version [of environmentalism], forced to grow in a tiny iron flowerpot by a cottage in the German Black Forest”64: closed in, rigid, and essential. Moo- die has been raked over the critical coals for clinging to and perpetuating formulaic representations of “Home” and the nonhuman world, for situating England at the center of her life and either refusing or failing to become one with the Canadian environment. Heidegger’s most controversial example of dwelling, the peasant’s hut in the Black Forest, has a certain resonance in conjunction with Susanna Moo- die’s experience. His “petit bourgeois concern with ‘rootedness’ was also part of Heidegger’s notorious period of allegiance to the Nazi party in the 1930s.”65 Concerns about the way this hut is deployed as an example of belonging to the earth are numerous and, I think, justified. It is indicative of, as Timothy Clark states, “the eco-fascism latent in too hasty a rejection of enlightenment ideals of universal rationality in favour of the cultivating of a close, would-be ‘authentic’ relationship to one’s local place, traditions, and dialect.”66 The assumption of Moodie’s “authentic” relationship to England is endemic to Moodie criticism, and, as such, has had a lot of weight in forming the Canadian conception of the nonhuman world as a place to be feared or controlled. However, if England does not shelter Moodie, there is no “authentic” relationship. England may be “the left-behind home [Moodie] craves,”67 but 110 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’” the craving is not necessarily for a home, but for “Home,” a Romantic concept of “a native matrix.”68 Nevertheless, it is likely that Moodie knows, at the time of writing, that this concept is flawed and impossible, not least because the descriptions were written from Canada many years after Moodie emigrated from England.69 Rather than being permanently attached to one bioregion, then, Moodie experiences what Lawrence Buell calls an “archipelago” of places of belonging.70 Her center place moves with her, as Heather Murray suggests. 71 In Murray’s vision, a progression, city/pseudo-wilderness/wilderness would re- place the nature/culture divide and define pseudo-wilderness as an ambiguous space which “mediates between the human and non-human worlds.”72 Susanna Moodie’s backwoods experience is situated in this pseudo-wilderness, and as such, is flexible, with “a double allegiance, both to the city and to the surrounding countryside.”73 “City,” here, is also flexible: “The land continuum shifts throughout [Roughing It] with Moodie’s removals and resi- dencies, and her years there are characterized by an increasing understanding of the wilderness and numerous forays into it.”74 By the end of the novel, “the urban end of the axis shifts to Belleville [rather than England], and the continuum is contained within eastern Canada.”75 Moodie’s sense of place, therefore, is “a kind of palimpsest of serial place-experiences.”76 Her repetitive writing practices, her “penchant for recycling”77 reinforce this seriality; as she moves further from her starting point, she returns with a different gaze to her earlier work, which has both an emotional and economic effect: “Through this obsessive republication of early poems she sutured the wound of emigration. . . . . This psychic and creative economy refigured the stringencies of her domestic economy.”78 The reconfigured, rewritten, redescribed domesticity brings Moodie’s home places into focus, but it also blurs the precise lines of place. The fluid temporal structure of Roughing It in the Bush emphasizes the connection between places; Moodie moves back and forth through time, putting similar impres- sions and descriptions together, telescoping individual places into a portman- teau of “here.” As Timothy Morton points out, however,

here is strange in itself: to see a place in its strangeness is not just to see how it is permeated with otherness. . . . Appreciating strangeness is seeing the very strangeness of similarity and familiarity. To reintroduce the uncanny into the poetics of the home (oikos, ecology, ecomimesis) is a political act. Cozy ecological thinking tries to smooth over the uncanny, which is produced by a gap between being human and being a person (Ecology, 177, author’s italics).

Can this strangeness, though, be read as a form of ecophobia? The concept does, after all, bear a certain resemblance to Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality,” in that the builder of shelter seeks to protect him or herself from the hostile outside world. However, the indoor-outdoor dialectic of shelter, the Elise Mitchell 111 dependence of the interior on the exterior, and the marginality of the shelter and its builder suggest otherwise. Susanna Moodie is, absolutely, ecophobic in her irrational fear of swamps and wild animals. However, this fear is also a recognition of the uncanny, the otherness of these entities, and thus the sovereignty of the nonhuman. As Estok himself points out, “Canadian literary yearnings to contain nature have been largely ambivalent.”79 Moodie’s images of home are intensely ambivalent: they hold her English and Canadian home places, superimposed one upon the other by memory and space, in tension and in openness. It is reminiscent of Morton’s exhortation at the end of Ecology Without Nature, which, in itself, is nearly identical to Fraiman’s desire that binary opposites “encounter and inform.”80 Morton says: “Instead of positing a nondualistic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, we could hang out in what feels like dualism. This hanging out would be a more nondual approach . . . holding our mind open for the absolutely unknown that is to come.”81 This conception acknowledges Estok’s “ecophobia” without allowing it to overtake Moodie’s fundamental joy in living and encountering the nonhuman. In Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Robert Pogue Harrison states that human space must be defined by its relationship with nonhuman space, arguing that the Western world has created itself by pushing against the boundaries of forests.82 As civilization has “advanced,” the resulting clearings have become so large that humans at the center have forgotten they are in a clearing at all; the nonhuman world becomes a terrifying external force to be avoided. Thus, it is the humans at the periphery who are, Harrison asserts, best placed to articulate human-nonhuman relationships, as they retain a sense of perspective: “the most fundamental kind of thinking is invariably provincial, in one form or another.”83 Susanna Moodie left the Ontario backwoods with her husband and children in the winter of 1840, with the conclusion that their Canadian experiment had sunk the family “into hopeless ruin.”84 And yet, she was devastated to leave her home: “Many painful and conflicting emotions agitated my mind . . . as we entered the forest path, and I looked my last upon that humble home consecrated by the memory of a thousand sorrows.”85 This ambivalence, this “success in failure”86 reflects the dis-location, but also the embodiment, of Moodie’s experience. Moodie’s experience of marginality, which is both a doubling up and a reversal of the tension between periphery and center, is profoundly provincial. As Rachel Wilde, as Flora Lyndsay, and as the “I” of Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna Moodie is often a survivor and always marginal. She is a decentered, dis-placed subject, housed uncertainly on the earth, but this uncertainty is an arguably more nuanced and realistic portrait of how we as humans live and look at ourselves. Robert Pogue Harrison states that “a house is . . . defined not so much by its walls but by its windows, its doors, its 112 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’” porch, its porous openness to the earth,” because, he affirms, “the only true shelter on earth is the earth itself.”87 As Moodie’s experience shows, any type of home is still precarious and uncertain. She is, in the words of Bache- lard, “logé partout mais enferme nulle part [sheltered everywhere but enclosed nowhere].”88 There may be no place like home, but because of this, the world is her home.

NOTES

1. Michael A. Peterman, introduction to Roughing It in the Bush, by Susanna Moodie (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), xvii. 2. D.M.R. Bentley, “The Absence of Neoconservatism and Ecocriticism in Canadian Liter- ary Studies,” Canadian Poetry 42 (1998): 5–16, at 12. 3. Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anan- si, 1972), 49. 4. That is, when Moodie is even mentioned. In one case, she is referred to only obliquely, in this case, of course, the writer who is hostile to the natural world: “Catharine Parr Traill, often treated dismissively by literary scholars and historians, nevertheless provides an interesting example of a writer who confronts the experience of preserving feminine domestic life in a difficult situation without an associated hostility for the natural world.” Melody Hessing, Re- becca Raglon, and Catriona Sandilands, eds. This Elusive Land:Women and the Canadian Environment (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 2. 5. Melody Hessing, introduction to This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environ- ment, eds. Melody Hessing, Rebecca Raglon, and Catriona Sandilands (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 2. 6. Simon C. Estok, “An Ecocritical Reading, Slightly Queer, of As for Me and My House,” Journal of Canadian Studies 44, no.3 (2010): 75–95, at 78. 7. Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE 16, no.2 (2009): 203–25, at 207. 8. See Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, (London: Rout- ledge, 2004); Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych,” ISLE 19, no.3 (2012): 448–475. 9. Christa Zeller Thomas, “‘I Had Never Seen Such a Shed Called a House Before’: The Discourse of Home in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush,” Canadian Literature 203 (Winter 2009): 105–21. 10. Thomas, “Discourse of Home,” 106. 11. Ibid., 103. 12. Ibid., 106. 13. Ibid., 114. 14. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 170. 15. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 170. Author’s italics. 16. Thomas, “Discourse of Home,” 106. 17. I acknowledge that it is somewhat fraught to refer to the person, the narrative voice, and the character in Roughing It as “Moodie,” but for simplicity I will do so. In cases where I am referring to a more fictionalized version of Moodie rather than an autobiographical “character,” I will use either the name of the character or simply “the Moodie figure.” 18. Susan Fraiman, “Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye,” New Literary History 37, no.2 (2006): 341–59, at 350. 19. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 350. 20. I bid., 344. 21. Ibid., 351. Elise Mitchell 113

22. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 349. 23. “Recent” in this case means in the last 25 years or so, since Michael Peterman’s later work, This Great Epoch of Our Lives (Toronto: ECW Press, 1996), and the publication of Lorraine McMullen’s anthology on early Canadian women’s writing, (Re)Discovering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women’s Writing (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990). 24. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 349. 25. Susanna Moodie, “Rachel Wilde, or, Trifles from the Burthen of a Life,” in Voyages: Short Narratives of Susanna Moodie, ed. John Thurston (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991), 100. 26. Moodie, “Rachel Wilde,” 147. 27. Susanna Moodie, Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life, (London: R. Clay, 1854), 154. 28. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 396. 29. Moodie, “Rachel Wilde,” 149. 30. Moodie, “Rachel Wilde,” 138. 31. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 31. 32. This cottage is a thinly fictionalized rendering of the home the Moodies rented in Southwold in 1831, and there are several references to it in Moodie’s letters at that time. In one letter, Moodie describes the cottage as “a pleasant walk from Reydon”; in another, she refers to it as “our little mansion.” Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime, eds. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 62. 33. In a gender inversion that is typical of Moodie’s writing, she refers to her husband as “the joy and sunshine of my little home” (Letters, 64), then later in the same letter to Emma Bird, “my guardian Angel” (Letters, 65). In the text, Flora calls her husband “the head-nurse” (Flora, 26), and at one point he cooks for her: “Come, Flora,” he cried, “. . . I am going to make some sandwiches for you, and you must be a good girl and eat them” (Flora, 107). See Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime, eds. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), and Susanna Moodie, Flora Lyndsay; or, Pas- sages in an Eventful Life (London: R. Clay, 1854). 34. Moodie, Flora Lyndsay, 100. 35. Ibid., 35. 36. Ibid., 48. 37. Moodie herself refers to domestic happiness several times in her letters (32, 33), but to domestic management only once, and in that case it is “Sister Sarah was with me during my anxious moments [in childbirth] and has taken the management of the house ever since.” See Moodie, Letters, 66. 38. Moodie, Flora Lyndsay, 49. 39. Ibid., 15. 40. Ibid., 9–15. 41. Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, ed. Michael A. Peterman (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 276. 42. Moodie, “Rachel Wilde,” 45. 43. There is one exception, when Rachel and Dorothea are awakened by “The first song of the birds,” and there’s a seamless transition between indoors and out. See Moodie, “Rachel Wilde,” 101. 44. Quoted in Moodie, Letters, 3–4. 45. Moodie, Roughing It, 193. 46. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 349. 47. Moodie, Roughing It, 61. 48. Thomas, “Discourse of Home,” 108. 49. Moodie, Roughing It, 61. 50. Ibid., 61. 51. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 347. 52. Moodie, Roughing It, 90. 114 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’”

53. Ibid., 99–100. 54. This is actually a constant with Moodie once she leaves Reydon Hall; there are numerous male characters, such as Mr. Kitson, Jacob, and John E., that take on domestic functions, and the latter two make regular contributions to the preservation of the home space in Canada. 55. Moodie, Roughing It, 110. 56. Moodie, Roughing It,185. 57. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 352. 58. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 40. 59. Thomas, “Discourse of Home,” 118. 60. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 354. 61. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 110. 62. Joe Moran, “Houses, Habit, and Memory,” in Our House: The Representation of Do- mestic Space in Modern Culture, eds. Gerry Smith and Jo Croft (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 29. 63. Serpil Oppermann, “Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Prac- tice,” ISLE 13, no.2 Summer (2006): 103–28, at 105. 64. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 27. 65. Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 59. 66. Clark, Literature and the Environment, 59. [emphasis added] 67. Thomas, “Discourse of Home,” 108. 68. Thomas, “Discourse of Home,” 118. 69. Moodie rarely mentions the Hall in her letters. In a letter to Mary Russell Mitford, she refers to it briefly as “our old-fashioned mansion” but spends much more time describing the “sweet woodland lanes” nearby. See Moodie, Letters, 40. 70. Buell, Future, 72. 71. According to Melody Hessing, Murray’s article is a proto-ecocritical article that belongs to “the evolution of ecofeminist writings in the 1980s. Hessing, “Introduction,” xiii. 72. Heather Murray, “Women in the Wilderness,” in A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, eds. Smaro Kamboureli and Shirley Neuman (Edmonton, AB: Longspoon/ NeWest, 1986), 75. 73. Murray, “Women in the Wilderness,” 76. 74. Ibid., 79. 75. Ibid., 79. 76. Buell, Future, 73. 77. Suzanne Bowness, “In Their Own Words: Prefaces and Other Sites of Editorial Interac- tion in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Magazines” (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2012), 227. 78. John Thurston, The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (Mon- treal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), 91. 79. Estok, “An Ecocritical Reading,” 91. 80. Fraiman, “Shelter Writing,” 351. 81. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 205. 82. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ix. 83. Harrison, Forests, 246. 84. Moodie, Roughing It, 330. 85. Moodie, Roughing It, 325. 86. Michael Peterman, This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (Toronto: ECW Press, 1996), 102. 87. Harrison, Forests, 234. 88. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 29. Elise Mitchell 115 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. Ballstadt, Carl, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman. Letters of Love and Duty: The Correspondence of Susanna and John Moodie. (1993): 360. Bentley, D.M.R. “The Absence of Neoconservatism and Ecocriticism in Canadian Literary Studies.” Canadian Poetry 42 (1998): 5–6. Bowness, Suzanne. “In Their Own Words: Prefaces and Other Sites of Editorial Interaction in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Magazines.” Ph.D diss. University of Ottawa, 2012. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Estok, Simon C. “An Ecocritical Reading, Slightly Queer, of As for Me and My House.” Journal of Canadian Studies 44, no. 3 (2010): 75–95. ———. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–25. Fraiman, Susan. “Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye.” New Literary History 37, no. 2 (2006): 341–59. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004. Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hessing, Melody, Rebecca Raglon, and Catriona Sandilands, eds. This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.” ISLE 19, no. 3 (2012): 448–75. McMullen, Lorraine, ed. Re(Dis)Covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990. Moodie, Susanna. Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life. London: R. Clay, 1854. ———. Letters of a Lifetime, edited by Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peter- man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. ———. “Rachel Wilde, or, Trifles from the Burthen of a Life.” In Voyages: Short Narratives of Susanna Moodie, edited by John Thurston, 99-150. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991. ———. Roughing It in the Bush, edited by Michael A. Peterman. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Moran, Joe. “Houses, Habit, and Memory.” In Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, edited by Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft, 27-42. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. The Ecological Thought Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Murray, Heather. “Women in the Wilderness.” In A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Shirley Neuman, 74-83. Edmonton, AB: Long- spoon/NeWest, 1986. Oppermann, Serpil. “Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice.” ISLE 13, no.2 no. Summer 2006 (2006): 103–28. Peterman, Michael A. “Introduction “ In Roughing It in the Bush, edited by Michael A. Peter- man, vii-xvii. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Peterman, Michael A. This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush. Toronto: ECW Press, 1996. Thomas, Christa Zeller. “’I Had Never Seen Such a Shed Called a House Before’: The Dis- course of Home in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush.” Canadian Literature 203 (Winter 2009): 105–21. 116 “There’s No Place Like ‘Home’”

Thurston, John. The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996. Chapter Seven

Against Ecological Kitsch

Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Project

Guangchen Chen

Certain environmental discourse bases its critique of human beings’ excessively destructive activities against nature on the idea that the latter is an inherently undisturbed, balanced, well-organized, and hence ideal state. Hu- man activities deviate from this state, and returning to it is called for as a solution of environmental problems. This basic assumption about nature has been challenged by some theorists as being purely constructed. With the slogan “ecology without nature,” Tim- othy Morton asserts that the task of ecocritique is to “thoroughly [examine] how nature is set up as a transcendental, unified, independent category. Eco- critique does not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: ‘down with nature!’”1 Žižek seems to have taken a step further, not only upholding the more radical banner “ecology against nature,” but urging us to accept what he calls “second nature” that accommodates human intervention and even the potential massive ecological catastrophe as a basis, an a priori for future discussions and actions.2 Queer ecocriticism, on the other hand, attempts to subvert any categorization that pins down the order of things. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird define it as putting an emphasis “on fluidity, über-inclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility, unthinkability, unintelligibility, meaninglessness and that which is unrepresentable is an attempt to undo normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries.”3 In Greg Garrard’s words, it “represents and encapsulates a kind of intellectual Maoism, a perpetual revolution of categories and types.”4 In a certain sense, Garrard’s formulation captures a tendency not only in queer ecocriticism, but also common in these critics. For them “nature” is a conceptualization, an ideology, or at its worst a 117 118 Against Ecological Kitsch distortion that misinterprets the real state of things and covers its own inner discontent. But this can potentially be much more than merely a misrepresen- tation of the true face of nature; it can be misappropriated to be a means of manipulation. For Žižek, the conceptualization of ecology is a form of ideology that directs our attention away from the real problem and ensures the perpetuation of nothing other than crimes against nature. 5 In this sense, concepts like ecology and nature become a comfort zone for contemporary individuals who can no longer do away with the awareness of possible ecological catastrophes. They use these concepts as an excuse for not making any real change; they use them to shield themselves not just from the academic tendency toward perpetual deconstruction, but also some uncomfortable aspects of nature. Though I do not mean to justify these conceptualizations, I do want to stress that the aversion to these aspects arises from very basic needs, and are commonsensical. That is why intellectual (and indeed any other kind of) Maoism can never be put into practice without forcing people to give up their common sense. I would like to suggest that some of these aversions can be defined as an ecological kitsch. It analyzes certain characteristics of kitsch as an aesthetic (and originally exclusively human) category, and by transferring it onto the sphere of ecology, demonstrates how it can also (mis)represent aspects of nature in the way it does to human experiences, so as to fulfill ideological agendas. I hope to show that the language of ecological kitsch mirrors tendencies in people’s attitude toward his or her own body, and that this language affects human emotions in a similar way when one positions himself or herself in today’s environmental issues. As a counterexample, I will discuss the British film director and artist Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage garden project. By analyzing his work, this chapter explains possible ways of overcoming ecological kitsch, how a more realistic image can be exposed, and how a candid but sensible, practical, and not too cruel attitude can be adopted. It also discusses the scope, affect, and limit of representation of today’s environment, its nuanced relationship with its audience against the backdrop of wider social and political issues.

KITSCH AND ABJECTION

Kitsch is a tricky concept. It belongs to a curious family of elusive aesthetic categories (other examples include camp, cursilería, and even chic). Almost any discussion of such categories has to begin with a search for definition. What exactly do we mean by kitsch? Oxford English Dictionary’s definition “art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way”6 follows the line of descriptive criticism but focuses on the inten- Guangchen Chen 119 tions involved. Hermann Broch starts with analysis of kitsch’s stylistic pre- tension but goes on to highlight its evil morality by comparing it to Anti- Christ, who “appears like Christ, acts and speaks like Christ but is nevertheless Lucifer” (“sieht wie der Christ aus, handelt und spricht wie der Christ und ist trotzdem Luzifer”).7 Theodor Adorno puts his emphasis on ideology and social function by declaring that kitsch “deceive people about their true situation, to transfigure their existence, to allow intentions that suit some powers or other to appear to them in a fairy-tale glow.”8 Many of these explanations direct us to different fields that do not always link to each other, and need at least as much explanation for themselves. The diversified ways of using the term show its exceptionally high degree of evasiveness in meaning. But people in general seem to understand what others are talking about when the term is mentioned. One seldom provides a distinct abstraction of it, but instead always enumerates endless examples that allegedly “represent” it. This fact perfectly fits into Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later theory of language and meaning: “[f]or a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. . . . And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.”9 In other words, the meaning is condi- tioned by its use. It is the signified of the name “kitsch” that shapes the meaning of the word, not the other way round. The word’s intention is constantly redefined and enlarged, the development of its meaning a dynamic response to the development of reality, instead of a static reflection of a norm. In this sense, its etymology—even if one can ever discover it at all— does not matter anymore. But one can certainly contradict this line of thinking and argue that in any case, there must be something immanent in the concept that justifies the many uses. In this paper I am restricting my use of the word to two meanings. The first one is the covering of corporeality and mortality, or a deliberate avoidance of representing the abject. The second is certain kinds of manipulation by the application not only of sensational effects, but also mechanisms that predict, control, and dictate the audience’s reactions. These two aspects might not have a coherent, logical link between themselves under the rubric of kitsch, nor are they necessarily confined to kitsch. Kitsch can still desig- nate products of consumerism, cheap miniatures of famous touristic sites, John Martin’s dramatic landscape paintings, or even Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. After all, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” The first trajectory, the abject, finds a powerful expression in Milan Kun- dera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being: here the abject is represented by an object that is both intensely immediate and highly symbolic— excretion: 120 Against Ecological Kitsch

Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good. . . . Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being. The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s--- has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner. It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. 10

Behind Kundera’s ruthless irony and cruel humor (by juxtaposing religion, metaphysics and shit) is the emphasis on human beings’ attitude toward the lower stratum of the body. By extension, the denial of shit as an aesthetic gesture basically follows the same track as the refusal to accept human mortality: “kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”11 This is an attitude James S. Hans rightly associates with Nietzsche’s statement that “[w]e possess art lest we perish of the truth,”12 whereas its opposite is the attitude to confront/embrace the unacceptable, which is again voiced by Nietzsche through the motto “amor fati.”13 Death, when bluntly displayed (as far as it can be displayed), unveils the abjectness of human existence just like excretion does; both are about corporeality and its gradual decay and ultimate decomposition. They point to a common state of human existence that one feels obliged to cover up in representation, and keep away from everyday life, so that one does not have to endure the daily reminder of his or her mortality. The “denial of shit” makes perfect sense in the context of the abject. In her reading of Dostoyevsky in Black Sun, Julia Kristeva provides another helpful clue. Both the characters in The Idiot, and Dostoyevsky himself, when viewing Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, experience a shock that leads to doubts as to Resurrection. In the writer’s own words, “[e]verything thus depends on this: does one accept saying that everything depends on one’s faith in Christ. If one believes in Christ one also believes in life eternal.”14 According to Kristeva, “[a]nd yet what forgiveness can there be, what salvation in the face of the irremediable void of the lifeless flesh, the absolute solitude of Holbein’s picture? The writer is disturbed, as he was before the corpse of his first wife in 1864.”15 In this sense, excretion, the body and death all bear the same name—the “abject”: “[t]hese body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border.”16 The corpse is unapproachable because it is sacred and at the same time in need of being separated from our everyday life. Guangchen Chen 121

In this formulation, the beliefs in Christ and life eternal, namely, what Kundera calls “categorical agreement of being,” have a fundamental incom- patibility with the body. Religious beliefs need not concern us here, but when they are transformed into an aesthetic attitude, they become kitsch. It resonates not only in artistic judgment, but also on a social and political dimension which I will discuss later in the paper. But now I would like to transfer the abject as a trope to the sphere of nature by following the common practice of comparing the ecological system to the human body. If excretion poses a challenge to the philosophical, religious, political, and aesthetic values for human beings, then by analogy the problem of trash and recycling also causes a similar challenge for the values we have read into nature. It can serve as an effective attack on what Žižek calls the “ideological investment” of ecology.17 One of the mechanisms he identifies in this investment is “the temptation of meaning.” It is a tendency to make sense of natural events that are often cruel and chaotic, defying any possible rationale conceivable by humans. By so doing, we are forcefully bringing nature into our own system of signification. Excretion is a powerful tool that helps disturb the universe of kitsch because of two reasons. First, it is devoid of meaning in any philosophical or religious system. Second, it causes a repulsive effect on us that is both physical and psychological, both having been explained by the idea of the abject. It is reminiscent of the sheer physicality and bodily decomposition. It tears an embarrassing hole in our ongoing quest for meaning. Analogously, trash can be regarded as excretion in the ecological system. Fossils that are turned into oil are themselves a result of inconceivable and meaningless natural catastrophe. Were it not because of industrialization, oil would have meant something totally different or nothing at all. Nature produces surplus and indigestible materials that do not necessarily fit into an overarching scheme sanctioned by an industrial society. Were there an agency, a perceiving subject that governs the ecological system, it may or may not have a similar “abject” aversion to these natural excretions—this we do not know. Now thanks to capitalism as a driving force behind mass human intervention in the ecological system, the definition of nature is no longer what it used to be. Now we have to take into consideration the excessive production that disturbs the pre-industrial chain of distributions in nature. Trash is indigestible excess; even with its origin in human activities, it has become part of the updated version of nature. Being part of this system, we live side by side with nature’s “excretion” as such. Looking at trash as manmade objects that were once in our everyday life and that now become residues in the environment can produce an uncomfort- ably uncanny sensation. They are both familiar and strange. They used to be so much part of our lives that we paid barely any attention to them. Now what makes them seem uncanny is their being out of context. They still retain 122 Against Ecological Kitsch their familiar appearances, but do not belong to anywhere, and cannot be assimilated by any system. Just like excretion for human beings, trash plays the embarrassing role in the environment that renders any quest for a meaning futile. It becomes the new reality of nature; thus Žižek rightly says that “[c]oming to terms with trash is our problem today.”18 Despite Žižek’s well-grounded pessimism in the unrepentant nature of capitalism, his proposal in the filmed interview Ecology might seem politically regressive. But his point is well taken in the realm of aesthetics, which does not always immediately turn to activism.

DEREK JARMAN AND HIS GARDEN

The practice of making art with ready-made objects goes back not only to Marcel Duchamp, but at least to cabinets of curiosities. More recent incarna- tions include Pop art and Bricolage. Derek Jarman’s garden sculpture is another example. What makes it especially relevant in the present discussion is its ecological awareness and its mode of expression with which Jarman manages to elude a kitsch artistic language. Jarman was born in 1942 in Northwood, Middlesex. He studied English, History, and History of Art at King’s College London, then painting and stage design at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, in the 1960s. He started making films in the 1970s, debuting with the already mature masterpiece Sebastiane. His other feature films include Jubilee (1977), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1988), War Requiem (1989), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1993) (based on a script written by Terry Eagleton but heavily revised by Jarman), and Blue (1993). Besides his career as a film director, Jarman was also a painter, designer, writer, outspoken gay rights activist, and a diligent gardener. Jarman’s brilliant career as a filmmaker and designer was impaired by illness. In December 1986, he was diagnosed as HIV positive. In 1994, at the age of 52, he died of an AIDS-related illness in London. Around the time when he became aware of his illness, he purchased the Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, England, and began to cultivate the garden. The activity was to last until his death. In the meantime, he wrote journals documenting his public life as a prominent filmmaker, as well as intimate details of his private life. The journals from January 1, 1989, to September 3, 1990, are collectively published as Modern Nature. Alongside the chronicle of the author’s painstaking efforts in building the garden was his acute and undisguised awareness of the ever developing illness and approaching death. Ill- ness seems to have forced him to be unusually attentive to his corporeality, which in turn heightens, but never distorts, his experience of nature. The Guangchen Chen 123 growth of the garden and the deterioration his health unfold themselves vis- à-vis each other, in the very same intriguing setting. Just as one can read the book as an autobiography graced with nature writing, it is equally valid to read it as nature writing with constant intervention of the author’s voice. On the other hand, he also wrote a book entitled Derek Jarman’s Garden with extensive illustrations alongside descriptions in diary style, concentrat- ing on the garden and its plants. This book is mainly an account and commentary of his gardening experience. Illness is mentioned only in passing and almost euphemistically. What heightens the ecological theme of these projects is Prospect Cot- tage’s setting. Considering the fact that he lived here for eight years until his death, he obviously regarded the place as ideal. But we can only speculate the reason why Jarman chose this unlikely location. The fact that the journals are full of humor and gentle irony, as is typical of Jarman’s style, makes it all the more ambiguous. In Jarman’s partner Keith Collins’s account, the encounter between Jar- man and Prospect Cottage was somewhat arbitrary and accidental. The account barely explains why the entire romance between the filmmaker and the garden happened at all. But the connection goes deeper than the seeming arbitrariness this narrative seems to suggest. The January 1, 1989, entry in the opening page of Modern Nature reads as follows,

There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon. In this desolate landscape the silence is only broken by the wind, and the gulls squab- bling round the fishermen bringing in the afternoon catch. The view from my kitchen at the back of the house is bounded to the left by the old Dungeness lighthouse, and the iron grey bulk of the nuclear reactor—in front of which dark green broom and gorse, bright with yellow flowers, have formed little islands in the shingle, ending in a scrubby copse of sallow and ash dwarfed and blasted by the gales. In the middle of the copse is a barren pear tree that has struggled for a century to reach ten feet . . .19

It is clear from the start that he fully acknowledged the barrenness of the land and its starkly contrasting symbolism. These passages’ opaque but objective tone, however, is somewhat in harmony with Jarman’s description of Dungeness’s environment. He tended to withhold his own opinion and feeling of the landscape. This is different from his often affectionate tone in which he talked about the plants he so carefully looked after in his garden. One could interpret such reservation and opaqueness as a well-disguised and articulated implication of ecophobia. However, he later revealed a bit more about his intention to justify his decision: 124 Against Ecological Kitsch

When I came to Dungeness in the mid-eighties, I had no thought of building a garden. It looked impossible: shingle with no soil supported a sparse vegeta- tion . . . I decided to stop there; after all, the bleakness of Prospect Cottage was what had made me fall in love with it. At the back I planted a dog rose. Then I found a curious piece of driftwood and used this, and one of the necklaces of holey stones that I hung on the wall, to stake the rose. The garden had begun. 20

Indeed, Jarman built his Arcadia on a wonderland with a strange combination that was possible only in modern time. Although seemingly barren, Dungeness is of enormous ecological significance. It has a large shingle beach, nourishing a remarkable variety of plants, birds, and insects. It is home to a diversity of plants, invertebrate communities, and birdlife. The flooded gravel pits provide an important refuge for many migratory and coastal bird species. But at the same time, the natural environment is supple- mented by an industrial transformation on a very large scale to present an almost post-apocalyptic picture. Here is the site of two nuclear power stations, two experimental military defense structures, and the world's first sub- marine oil pipelines. As the Dungeness National Nature Reserve website puts it, “Dungeness, a strange land of extremes, one of the most valuable and yet vulnerable nature conservation sites in Great Britain.”21 The location symbolizes a post-modern vision of nature. Perhaps the most ironical phenomenon in Dungeness is an area known as “the patch”: the waste hot water and sewage from the Dungeness nuclear power stations are pumped into the sea through two outfall pipes, enriching the biological pro- ductivity of the sea bed and attracting seabirds from miles around. The two nuclear power stations were built in 1965 and 1983, respectively. They are now within a wildlife reserve that is declared a “Site of Special Scientific Interest.” It was against such a setting that Prospect Cottage flourished under Jar- man’s care. The deliberateness in his choice of the location seems to indicate that he wanted to make the unfriendly environment an integral part of the garden project. As his friend Howard Sooley notes, “You can't take life for granted in Dungeness: every bloom that flowers through the shingle is a miracle, a triumph of nature. Derek knew this more than anyone.”22 And in his own words, “. . . after all, the bleakness of Prospect Cottage was what had made me fall in love with it […] I saw it as a therapy and a pharmaco- poeia.”23 Therefore, if anyone approaches Jarman’s project expecting something like a Romantic version of nature, he or she would very likely be disappointed. This was made clear by Jarman in a conversation with the sculptor Maggi Hambling, from which the book derived its title: Guangchen Chen 125

I was describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening. And said I intended to write a book about it. She said: “Oh, you’ve finally discovered nature, Derek.” “I don’t think it’s really quite like that,” I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer’s Kent. “Ah, I understand completely. You’ve discovered modern nature.”24

Jarman was ready to open up his garden to admit the larger environment into its picture, instead of taming, appropriating it, or fending it off. There is a difference between the two gardens locating in front of and behind the cottage, indicating a division of public and private life. The front garden was organized in a symmetric, formal style, while the back garden was designed in a free manner. Not having a fence, the back garden naturally fades into wilderness, including rather than excluding the nuclear power stations in its picture. This was indeed a highly realistic, albeit also symbolic, portrait of the environment in which Jarman was living. Furthermore, Jarman seemed to have taken into account the aforementioned “abjectness” of this modern version of nature. He allowed the environment to determine the style of the garden, which was by no means classical or natural, but was unashamed of displaying its artificiality. Not without a sense of irony, he took casually whatever he chanced upon in the area and turned them into art, maybe as a tribute to Nietzsche’s “amor fati.” There was no judgment passed onto whatever he came across. Instead, one only notices humor and artistic sensitivity that dismantled the brutally apocalyptic image of Dungeness:

In the Second World War they thought the Germans might land at Dungeness, so the area was mined and anti-tank fencing put up. One day I found one of the fence posts, its shaft curled into loops for threading barbed wire, with one end twisted into a giant corkscrew to penetrate the shingle. Then I began to find them all over. Turned upside-down and formed into pyramids, they make good climbing frames for the plants.25

Perhaps nothing better demonstrates how Jarman interpreted his modern nature than the sculptures in the garden. They were almost entirely made of recycled materials that he gathered from around the area. Rubbles, bricks, broken tiles were converted into garden arts. Jarman first noticed that rubble could become a friendly niche for the local plants: “[b]efore, the people who cared took their rubbish home—now it is left to blow everywhere. But the rubble and brick and broken tiles do introduce some flowers.”26 Then he began to weave them into the texture of his garden and make them an artistic whole. He collected stones of all shapes, many of which with holes, and threaded them into necklaces, or put them together with irons and woods. Christopher Lloyd notices the “[c]hains, anchors, a hook, wartime fence 126 Against Ecological Kitsch posts, with one end in a spiral for the threading of barbed wire.”27 Jarman also erected obelisk-like stones on sands, assembled garden forks in unexpected ways. In this way, he seemed to try to contain the abject, unharmoniz- able and the fragmentary aspects of the environment. These garden artifices also provided havens for all kinds of plants, which indulged themselves in occupying any possible space and flourished uninhib- itedly. It was a strange mixture of the natural and the industrial, which now formed the most up-to-date version of “nature.” These sculptures connected the garden with the landscape not only by integrating the plants that grew on it, but also through the use of objects that were almost exclusively found in the area. However, they also retained a sense of alienation in that these materials were produced, used, and then abandoned, a symptom of industrial society. They constantly reminded the viewer of the fact that nature had been irreversibly altered, and the boundary between the natural and the artificial was impossible to define, if not entirely dissolved. In this way Jarman put the plants in a dynamic dialogue to these industrial objects rather than surrender- ing one to another. To embrace the nature of modern time is to give up the binary opposition between the natural and the artificial; to acknowledge the true face of nature is to admit its very opposite—its negation. On close examination, they displayed the very uncanny character that was typical of the abject. With its objet trouvé style, they had no pretense of covering up their materiality as used objects that had not been, or could not be, recycled; they were excrements of the environment. Looking at them would be like confronting, with disgust, some memento mori from our lives, full of dirt and signs of decay, stigma of mortality of the body. What contributed most to their disturbingly uncanny effect was perhaps the fact that these used objects had now lost all frames of reference. They were outcast that could not be appropriated in any system of meaning. What made it worse was that they helplessly remained in the environment, never having any hope of getting out. Žižek talks about treating trash as an aesthetic object on an elementary level: “a true ecologist should not admire pure nature, trees and so on, which are there before we use them and that can still be part of our technological exploitative universe. The true spiritual change is to develop, if you want, a kind of emotional attachment to, or to find meaning in, useless objects.”28 The example he gives is the Romantic ruins. But Jarman’s sculptures are better examples than Žižek could have envisioned.

CURIOSITY VS. KITSCH

At the beginning of this essay I spoke of two meanings of kitsch. Now I would like to turn to the second meaning: a mechanism that aims at manipu- Guangchen Chen 127 lating the viewer’s emotional reactions. I have interpreted Jarman’s sculptures in the light of the abject. But there is a fundamental difference between the abject in itself and the artistic representation of it. The representation as such has a tendency to shock, upset, and offend the viewer. The offense can be either political or religious, and depends heavily on its context. For example, works like Piero Manzoni’s Merda d'artista that is (supposedly) made of tins filled with feces, aim at disgusting the viewer, whereas the use of human corpses and dead fetuses in artworks like Zhu Yu’s Pocket Theology is considered not only degenerate, obscene, and cruel, but also politically threatening. On the other hand, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a photograph depicting a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's urine, targets religion. All these works share the common insulting language that produces an effect very close to the aesthetic category of the sublime. It can be understood as a reaction against another category—the beautiful. In the classic formulation of these two concepts—Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beau- tiful, we learn that Burke defines the beautiful in relation to pleasure, and the sublime in relation to pain and fear. The sublime subordinates and overpow- ers the subject by a disproportionate vastness that far exceeds the subject’s grasp, and excites fear. This also plays a key role in art that conveys an environmental concern, for example, Hollywood disaster movies, or artworks that bluntly expose environmental traumas caused by irresponsible human activities. And now we can also add artworks that focus on the abjectness of the ecological system. The beautiful is the opposite. It is characterized by balanced proportion and scale between the perceiving subject and the object. The subject is in a somewhat privileged position where it can comfortably accommodate and appropriate the object within its own scale, and enjoy a familiar, homely, secure, and stable feeling. In environmental art, it comes close to that kind of touristic vignettes which reduce nature to cozy objects of commodification. But the ecological sublime or abject approach may not be a better alternative. These artworks are not only deliberately shocking and disgusting, but also carry a very strong expression that directly engages the viewer on a psychological and even physical level; both are the most private aspect of one’s experience. In this way the “appreciation” of these artworks becomes pathological. The viewer’s reaction would be inevitably predictable. This is the sublime at its most abject moment. The artist who utilizes such a language occupies a position similar to the inspection house of a panopticon. He or she can observe and predict the viewer’s feelings, then effectively direct him or her to a certain ideology; they are manipulators of feelings, inspectors of our private lives, and potentially dangerous tyrants. Kitsch is no stranger to totalitarianisms from Nazism to Communism, who are all great manipulators of this kind. And if we accept the fact that emotional manipulation is 128 Against Ecological Kitsch another facet of kitsch, then these sublime and shocking artworks, by challenging the beautiful, fall from one type of kitsch into another. A third alternative is found again in Burke’s treatise. In the opening chapter, Burke picks up “novelty” and “curiosity” as a step toward what for him are obviously the more significant aesthetic categories. But I would like to contest the valorization of the beautiful and the sublime over the curious in the context of the abject—kitsch and environmental art. In Burke’s account,

[t]he first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is Curiosity. By curiosity, I mean whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take in, novelty. […] curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually, it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and anxiety. Curiosity, from its nature, is a very active principle; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; the same things make frequent returns, and they return with less and less of any agreeable effect. In short, the occurrences of life, by the time we come to know it a little, would be incapable of affecting the mind with any other sensations than those of loathing and weariness, if many things were not adapted to affect the mind by means of other powers besides novelty in them, and of other passions besides curiosity in ourselves.29

This passage outlines some interesting characteristics of curiosity as a particular state of mind. Stumbling upon the ready-made curiosities in nature, our minds become active, exhaustive, indiscriminate, fleeting, changeable, giddy, and restless. When repeated, curious objects cease to be novel, and become their own negation. They would soon weary and ultimately numb our minds, thus exhausting its power. For Burke, curiosity is not only a preliminary step, but a primitive stage; we seek new types of curiosities for a while, but ultimately we will need to use pain or pleasure to sustain our passions. But for me curiosity is a state of in-betweenness that we do not have to leave. It is suspension, undecidedness, middle ground. It is not quite grasp- able not because of its vastness, but because of its instability and elusiveness. It can be found in nature, but it either is in constant transition, or slightly deviates from the norm that one would expect of nature, thus making itself uncanny. In terms of emotional response, curious artworks make it possible for us to avoid the perils of both the beautiful and the sublime. Here lies the significance of Jarman’s sculptures and his garden project. There is a sense of arbitrariness, playfulness, and irony in these works. They defy both traps precisely by following the vein of curiosity. There is indeed abjectness here, but no strong expression that incites pathological disgust. Guangchen Chen 129

His project suspends judgment, and helps us do the same. His approach can be regarded as a combination of abject art and curiosity. Its abjectness bluntly exposes the reality of today’s environment; but its language of curiosity eludes the temptation of emotional manipulation.

CONCLUSION: THE LIMIT OF REPRESENTATION

Art that aims at shocking the audience no longer retains the effect it used to have. A democratic, market-oriented society has picked all its thorns, and safely secured this type of art’s place within its system. Ironically, the very fact that such a challenge as Merda d'artista and Piss Christ is possible at all, that such a provocative act is not banned, but allowed to come into being so as to cause controversy and be criticized, already diminishes its power. This is especially the case in today’s democratic society: Piss Christ might indeed hurt certain people’s feelings. But it is not dangerous; it would never lead to a coup d'état or any profound and radical change, no matter socially or politically because in a society that acknowledges free speech, art takes up far less burden than in a totalitarian society. The democratic society already has an effective built-in mechanism to ensure that certain “scandalous art” exists, yet poses no threat to the system, but actually contributes to the overall impression that this system really encourages free speech. We also should not forget that such artworks have a ruthless and persistent moral imperative that requires their viewers to conceptually leave the comfort zone. And by so doing they become as cruel and unrealistic as Maoism, and will end up being highbrow, idealizing, and narcissistic solipsism. At worst, both a democratic and a totalitarian state would still be happy to make use of it for their own sake when necessary, because it always has its impacts that can help—to borrow Adorno’s formulation again—“deceive people about their true situation, to transfigure their existence, to allow intentions that suit some powers or other to appear to them in a fairy-tale glow,”30 and delay any real change in, for example, the way we deal with the environment. This is at least one of the reasons why neither touristic miniatures of nature, nor disaster movies, nor abject art manages to stage a coup and cause real changes in environmental issues. The politics of representation becomes a problem that we need to consider before proceeding to talk about what kind of art can help us bring forth changes. Jarman’s garden project certainly has not achieved this goal, either. No one would believe that his art can effect any practical change. And indeed it is highly unlikely that this was Jarman’s intention. But at least it questions, unsettles, and dismantles the status quo in a gentle way, treats the viewers as individuals, respects their individual abilities to sense rather than imposing a predetermined stimulus-response struc- 130 Against Ecological Kitsch ture, and leaves them with ample space to reflect. By refraining from manipulation, Jarman’s work reminds us that even with good intention, environmental art should not allow itself to fall victim to kitsch.

NOTES

1. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. 2. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 436. 3. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, eds. Queering the Non/Human (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 4. 4. Greg Garrard, “How Queer Is Green?” Configurations 18, no.1 (2010): 73-96. 5. Slavoj Žižek, “Ecology,” in Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Astra Taylor (New York and London: The New Press, 2009), 167. 6. “Kitsch,” in Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Angus Stevenson (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2012). http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.1093/ oi/authority.20110803100039343 (accessed July 1, 2013). 7. Hermann Broch, “Einige Bemerkungen zum Problem des Kitsches: Ein Vortrag,” in Kitsch: Texte und Theorien, eds. Ute Dettmar and Thomas Küpper (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007), 214–26. 8. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kitsch.” In Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 501–5. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Ascombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 20–21. 10. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Lon- don: Faber and Faber, 1985), 248. 11. Ibid., 253. 12. James S. Hans, “Kundera’s Laws of Beauty,” in Milan Kundera, ed. Harold Bloom (Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), 75–92. 13. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 223. 14. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), 189. 15. Ibid., 189. 16. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. 17. Žižek, “Ecology,” 157. 18. Ibid., 162. 19. Derek Jarman, Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman (London: Vintage Books, 1992), 1–2. 20. Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Garden, with Photographs by Howard Sooley (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 12. 21. “Welcome.” Dungeness National Nature Reserve. http://www.dungeness-nnr.co.uk/ (accessed July 1, 2013). 22. Howard Sooley, “Derek Jarman’s Hideaway,” The Observer 16 February 2008. http:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/feb/17/gardens (accessed July 1, 2013). 23. Jarman, Garden, 12. 24. Jarman, Modern Nature, 8. 25. Jarman, Garden, 63. 26. Ibid., 61. 27. Christopher Lloyd, “The Jarman Garden Experience,” in Derek Jarman: A Portrait, with introduction by Roger Wollen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 152. 28. Žižek, Examined Life, 163. Guangchen Chen 131

29. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1. 30. Adorno, “Kitsch,” 501–5.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. “Kitsch.” In Essays on Music, translated by Susan H. Gillespie, 501–5. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Broch, Hermann. “Einige Bemerkungen zum Problem des Kitsches: Ein Vortrag.” In Kitsch: Texte und Theorien, edited by Ute Dettmar and Thomas Küpper, 214–26. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Garrard, Greg. “How Queer Is Green?” Configurations 18, no.1 (2010): 73 –96. Giffney, Noreen and Myra J. Hird, eds. Queering the Non/Human. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Hans, James S. “Kundera’s Laws of Beauty.” In Milan Kundera, edited by Harold Bloom, 75–92. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. Jarman, Derek. Derek Jarman’s Garden, with Photographs by Howard Sooley. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009. ———. Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman. London: Vintage Books, 1992. “Kitsch.” In Oxford English Dictionary, edited by Angus Stevenson. Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2012. http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.1093/ oi/authority.20110803100039343 (accessed July 1, 2013). Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989. ———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Lloyd, Christopher. “The Jarman Garden Experience.” In Derek Jarman: A Portrait, with introduction by Roger Wollen, 147–52. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science, translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Sooley, Howard. “Derek Jarman’s Hideaway.” The Observer 16 February 2008. http:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/feb/17/gardens (accessed July 1, 2013) . Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Ascombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. “Welcome.” Dungeness National Nature Reserve. http://www.dungeness-nnr.co.uk/ (accessed July 1, 2013). Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London and New York: Verso, 2008. ———. “Ecology.” In Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Astra Taylor, 155-183. New York and London: The New Press, 2009.

Chapter Eight

Neo-Aranyakas

An Enquiry into Mahasweta Devi’s Forest Fiction

Anu T. Asokan

A postcolonial nation state like India confronts various issues ranging from poverty, overpopulation, marginalization of the displaced and the dispossessed, to uneven distribution of natural resources and environmental degradation. Forests, abundant but threatened natural resources, have become a site of exploitation, conflict, and marginalization with the development and intrusion of predominant power structures. Indian society based the bedrock of its civilization in the “forest society” or “aranyakas”; however, there was a paradigmatic shift in the model with the advent of the British colonial rule, that exploited the forests, and with the introduction of railways and roads for developmental needs, it also led to mass depletion of forests thereby affecting the holistic relationship of the adivasis, or the forest dwellers with the environment. In his book titled Environment and Empire (2007), William Beinart observes that the conservationist policies developed by the British converted forests into “contested spaces,” restricting the local people’s access to their own resources. Valuable commodities such as teak, sal, deodar, and profit-yielding trees made the forests priceless to the British Empire. Hence, the annexation of forests and their appropriation as “state property” took place on a mass scale. Large lands were enclosed for private use as part of the enclosure movement, which Robert Marzec terms the “erasure of inhabitancy.”1 Denial of entry to forest resources resulted in the ostracism of indigenous communities. This is an attempt to answer questions relating to the position occupied by the indigenous communities in the neo-aranyakas— a term I use to define Mahasweta Devi’s forest fictions. The works of Mahasweta Devi (1926–), a well-known activist writer from India, reveal the need for a passionate understanding of the indigenous peo- 133 134 Neo-Aranyakas ple and their environment. The right to conserve the environment and the indigenous population of India forms the leitmotif of her works, which can be categorized under the umbrella term of “forest fictions” where forests embody the sacral space of tribals, ecological, and socio-cultural values. Devi’s Aranyer Adhikhar2 (Rights of the Forest) (1977) is important in analyzing the predicament and precarious position of the indigenous population caused by ecological discrimination. Through this powerful work, Devi ex- pounds the repercussions of distributive injustice, which have vitiated the development of tribal population. The Aranyaka or “forest society” laid the cornerstone of the renowned Indian culture. Traditionally, Aranyakas, an important limb of the Upanishads (400 BC), corresponds to the Vanaprastha ashrama (The Forest Dwelling stage) outlined in the Hindu view of life. In this context, the forest texts were an important aid to philosophical reflection for men who retreated into the wilderness in preparation for the ultimate act of renunciation—Sanyasa. Mahasweta Devi’s works, as Neo-Aranyakas, offer a poignant commentary on what the forest spaces signify in contemporary Indian society. These Neo-Aranyakas are not wisdom texts, but volatile spaces in which texts of turbulence are written. In exploring the spaces of Neo-Aranyakas, I use the framework of environmental justice ecocriticism, a recent evolution among the sub-genres of ecocriticism, which highlights issues confronting race, class, and gender as important factors. Forests, with their connotation of wilderness, form a significant part of the ecosystem by effecting the synergy between biotic and abiotic environments. The concepts of wilderness, however, vary in the Eastern and Western contexts. Different from the Indian one, the European model of wilderness was, in fact, based on divisions, which marked a vital change in appropriation and disintegration of environmental values. In Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Philosophy (2012), Joseph Jardin devises three divisions of wilderness, namely, the Puritan model, the Lockean model, and the Romantic model. The Puritan model followed the concepts of the Bible in its portrayal of wilderness. It was ambiguous in its stance and attributed a negative va- lence to the theme of wilderness by branding it as a dreaded place. John Locke’s model of wilderness was materialistic as the concept of wilderness was depicted to be a God-given entity for the use of humankind. Forests were resources to be utilized for human needs, and the unkempt barren lands were considered wastelands. The third model, the Romantic notion of wilderness, considered forests to be an area of innocence and purity and a place for humans to escape from the corrupting effects of modern civilization. As Vandana Shiva affirms in Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India (1988): “Nature was venerated as sacred and human evolution was measured in terms of man’s capacity to merge with her rhythms and patterns intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. The forest thus nurtured an ecological civilization in the most fundamental sense of harmony with nature.”3 Anu T. Asokan 135

The emergence of environmentalism (also environmental ethics) has changed this outlook, proposing an alternative perspective. But, the practice of environmentalism varies in its aspects and representation of ideals from one country to the other. Environmentalism in the West has gained impetus as a social movement in the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). An epochal work in itself, Silent Spring was able to capture worldwide attention by presenting the apocalyptic vision of the earth due to excessive use of DDT. Emphasizing the need to preserve and conserve nature, it voiced the apprehensions of the future generations and iterated the need to enforce and regulate environmental laws. In India, Mahatma Gandhi, the national leader and an ardent follower of early environmental writers, such as Henry David Thoreau and John Ruskin, paved the way for the environmental movement. Though widely acknowledged for his principles such as Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satyagraha, he was little known for his environmental principles. Gandhi’s famous environmental ethic, “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for one person’s greed”4 (Qtd. in Guha 2000), explains his stance. Gandhi was against industrialization since he believed that India’s economic stability depended on the development and the self-sufficiency of the villages. While the upsurge of environmental movements in the West was framed by protests against the non-sustainable economic goals of mainstream society, espousing non-anthropocentric philosophical and cultural values, such as Arne Naess’s deep ecology, in India the growth of environmentalism thought took a different course. For example, Ramachandra Guha, a well-known sociologist and historian, questioned the relevance of the Deep Ecology Movement to the third world countries. Calling it a first world position, Guha criticized the need for the preservation of wilderness and restoration of de- graded areas that the Deep Ecology Movement strongly advocated. The act of preservation of wilderness is an arduous task in a developing country like India, because tribals and adivasis still reside in forests, and their displacement deprives them of their livelihood. Their eviction, however, provides easy access for the rich to the natural resources in question. But, as Guha maintains, “the function of wilderness is to provide a temporary antidote to modern civilization.”5 Hence, the enjoyment and the preservation of the wilderness areas of the third world countries is an integral part of the environmental agenda of the developed and consumer nations. The contemporary Indian scenario witnesses conflicts by the disillusioned and displaced tribal communities. The violent struggles and protests of the forest-dwelling people are termed as Maoism and Naxalism. These revolutionary parties strive to seek their long-lost freedom in the land of origins, the forests, by retaliating against the unfavourable forest governance. The Forest Regulation Act (FRA), which was first formulated in 1868 and implemented with greater impact in the year 1875, saw the marginalization of the forest 136 Neo-Aranyakas dwellers or tribes. The Act was reconstituted in the year 2006 with greater privileges given to the forest dwellers, such as the right to ownership of minor forest produce (MFP), rights over water bodies, and rights to manage community forest resources. The history of the adivasis treading the Naxal path proves that the implemented laws were mere words on paper. Recent studies imply that the successful organization and implementation of the FRA was successful in the areas of strong Naxal control, therefore highlighting the need for violent force in the exertion of forest rights. The Naxalites and the Maoists have a long history of resistance, starting with their struggle with the British, and then with the central and the state government, paramilitary forces, and multinational companies. The revolts which had earmarked themselves in Indian history for their long struggle against powerful forces had been the Ulgulan by the Mundas, Kol and Hul by the Santhals and Oraons. The Indian government has recently announced Operation Green Hunt, which tries to expedite the ambush on Maoists and Naxalites in the country. It is known that political interference by the leading parties abrogates tribal livelihood by depriving them of their traditional rights. Arundhati Roy, in her article “Walking with the Comrades” (March 21, 2010), for example, discusses this government policy of mass displacement of people, which is justified by “bringing tribals into the mainstream” or giving them “the fruits of modern development.”6 Likewise, Rob Nixon points out that the displaced tribals become the “developmental refugees”7 whenever the government engages in building major dams, enclosing land for multinational corporations, and mining rich mineral ores. Rabindra Ray classifies the Naxalites thus: “The Naxalite, however much committed to the welfare of the dispossessed, is a Naxalite on grounds of conviction having to do with intellectual proclivities and dilemmas.”8 Perceived a national threat, the Naxalites, who form the discontented urban educated class, take it upon themselves to protect the needs and demands of the poor. Mahasweta Devi was once convicted on charges of being a Naxalite and its underpinnings and her experiences are portrayed in Mother of 1084. Here she focuses on the turmoil of a mother of a Naxalite named Brati. His family disregards him for being a Naxalite and for defiling the prestige of their bureaucratic class. Devi’s experiences as a revolutionary are narrated by Sujata in the story. Sujata originally follows middle-class values, but she feels compelled to abide by the rules and regulations set up by the bureaucratic lifestyle which results in the neglect of her idealistic son Brati. Adivasis, derived from the word adim jana jati, refers to the original and early inhabitants of the land. (The Indian Constitution enlists about 437 tribal groups belonging to various states and regions.) They are different from other non-adivasi groups with regards to their natural, historical and social practices. In Indigenous Peo- ples: Responding to Human Ecology (2009), Lachman M. Khubchandani acknowledges the issue that such tribes have a strong sense of distinct iden- Anu T. Asokan 137 tity. “This is generally expressed,” he writes, “by attributing ‘in-group’ label to their members and the mother tongue spoken by them.”9 Traditionally animistic by their cultural outlook adivasis have lived in close communion with nature until their cultural framework is radically disrupted by the intrusion of the British imperialist power, resulting in the destruction of their environments. This environmental devastation has continued in post-colonial India as well. It is important to note that myopic economic development paradigms in post-independent India have ushered in the depletion of forests, and the unplanned development of commercial forestry has enabled the promotion of monocultural plantations. Forests in India are cut down in large numbers to meet the increasing demands of the developed countries and the mainstream economy in the country. The problem of deforestation gave rise to other environmental issues: the displacement of the tribal communities and the loss of forest resources, bringing great impoverishment and misery among the tribal communities. Relevant to this context is the work of Anil Agarwal (1947–2002), a prominent Indian environmentalist and founder of the NGO Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi (hereafter referred to as CSE). Agarwal and his team of researchers at CSE classify the hierarchical disparities in environmental activities as red-green environmentalism. They argue that inequalities relating to the access of the natural environment are due to political power interests. CSE aims to promote international justice based on the legislation centered on the environment. It has been conducting People’s Reports to analyze the environmental impacts of various factors. The first report came out in the year 1984 with appalling results. The Bhopal Disaster of 1984, which came into the spotlight owing to the negligence of foreign multinational companies in the developing countries, resulted in the unprecedented death of innocent humans due to a methyl isocyanide leak. The Second People’s report made a study on the large-scale construction of dams as mega-projects. Dams also known as “lethal water bombs” (after a recent successful short documentary and the film “Dam 999” directed by Sohan Roy) dislodged masses of population from their dwelling places, leading to retaliation by the poor against the powerful. This report also outlines the four highly populated or dense forest areas: the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, central part of Madhya Pradesh, and the eastern state of Assam. It draws attention to the mass depletion of forests caused by the need to satisfy the increasing desire for fuelwood, timber, and other forest products. In order to resolve issues restricting the tribal development, the Indian government has taken measures for the distribution of nevad. Originally, a part of the reserve forests, these areas contribute to the local needs of the tribal communities. Nevad, or “new field,”10 means a place cleared for cultivation. The structure of nevad recognizes the slow capture of the regional by an authoritarian landscape, allowing the domination of resources. Adivasi 138 Neo-Aranyakas resistance regarding the reclamation of land by the government was one of the reasons for the reimplementation of issues concerning nevad. Surveys enlisted Jhabua, the district of Madhya Pradesh, with the highest density of tribal population (eighty-nine percent of people belongs to Bhils and Bhilala tribal communities). Since it is one of the poor districts in India, measures are taken to return the encroached land back to tribal hands. Tribals, who practiced jhum or swidden cultivation, were the most deprived when the lands were retrieved by force and converted to forestlands. The state government’s initiative to implement the central government’s orders, however, has given the tribals an opportunity to claim their ancestral land. Though a partially successful venture, the act of repossessing nevad has enabled the tribals to assert their right in the country. This is the framework of the “environmentalism of the poor,” demonstrating the concerns of the poor over increasing inaccessibility to their environment. The term “environmentalism of the poor” appears in J. Martinez Ali- er’s report to UNRISD (United Nations Research Institute for Social Devel- opment), which reveals the truth of the poor’s need to access the environmental resources and services. This is not a system based on the economic security and livelihood, but rather an unequal distribution of ecological resources. Using and extensively discussing the term in Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon defines “the poor” as “a compendious category subject to almost infinite and local variation as well as to fracture along fault lines of ethnicity, gender, class, religion and generation.”11 The poor are victimized as a result of their isolation from the environmental assets. The inequalities perpetrated on the poor and the oppressed people are often highlighted by writers and activists, and in India Mahasweta Devi remains on the forefront for being a dynamic social and environmental activist in this regard, who has written on Birsa Munda as an exemplary case in point. Mahasweta Devi’s forest texts represent a genre of fiction which engages itself as an agent of change. She composes a historiographical representation of the early tribal rebel “Birsa Munda” to reinforce the prevailing ecological injustices through her forest fiction. The Neo-Aranyaka envisions the need to reconsider ideological concepts about the environment, chiefly the human instincts of exploitation and overuse of judicious resources. The texts vali- date the need of the hour by embedding it in valuable oral tribal history of the Mundas. They also foreground narratives of the tribals engaging in fierce battle to reclaim their means of livelihood and their homeland, the forests. These ecological texts envisage the problems of the disputed space in the age of ecological imperialism and Mahasweta Devi’s fight for justice. The Neo- Aranyakas allocate due importance to tribal culture by situating them as a vital part of history rather than rendering them as texts of wisdom. Anu T. Asokan 139

The literary exposition of Birsa Munda provides ample (and also historical) evidence of the existence of struggle between tribal communities and other powerful forces. The rebellion forms the turbulent and intermittent struggle by tribal communities from the age of subjugation till the present day. Based on the bio-diversity of the Dombari and Sailarakeb mountains of the Chotanagpur plateau, Mahasweta Devi’s Aranyer Adhikhar (Rights of the Forest) is the fictional account of the epic tribal hero, Birsa Munda. Inspired by the anthropological unearthing of Munda history by Kumar Suresh Singh in Birsa Munda and his Movement, 1872–1901: A Study of Millenarian Movement in Chotanagpur (1983), Devi’s creative version offers a wide canvas of the Birasite cult movement and their resistance against British rule. The eighteenth century saw the decline of Munda tribal agrarian society with the invasion of the Dikus and the enhancement in the policy of conquest with the arrival of the British. Too dramatic, this led to the severe degradation of the tribal society which sought its refuge in a series of uprisings against the Dikus. Kumar Suresh Singh discusses the reasons, such as the spread of Christianity, the consolidation of land for the easy rule, and the revitalization policy that caused the Mundas’ uprising, and the consequent changes in the social and cultural identity of the Mundas. The period also saw the migration of Dikus to the fringes of Munda society. They came in as merchants and moneylenders, and eventually captured lands for private purposes. Christianity offered “civilization” to the tribes who were considered to be “savages.” But the advent of the German missions, Anglicans, and later the Roman Catholics had devastating cultural changes. The tribals were converted to Christianity with promises of food and education, and witnessed the process of detribalization of their communities. The Church maintained its statutory body by levying taxes on the local farmers for its survival. The need to revitalize or bring in the old traditional agrarian setup was one of the reasons behind tribal rebellions. The strategies adopted as a part of the development plan did not only destroy the forest cover, but also affected the efficiency and self-sufficiency of the Munda tribes. Moreover the guidelines promoted by William Dietrich Brandis, the first Governor of Forests, and B. H Baden Powell, Civil Officer of the British Empire in India, divided the vast Indian forest cover into three parts, namely, the state or the reserved forests, the protected forests, and the village forests. The rules were structured to maintain valuable resources as the property of the state. The agrarian system lost its relevance with the policies deployed by feudal lords. Feudalism enforced payment of collective tax to the feudal lord, but with British administration they reinforced the individual collection of taxes which proved catastrophic to the Munda tribal society. Irregularity and shift of authority in the hierarchy (from zamindars to the British) regarding the feudal pay, led to chaotic discord between the Mundas and the British. The arrival of Dikus (non-tribals) also disrupted the 140 Neo-Aranyakas old Munda society. The new society had the village leader identifying himself as the landlord of the region and pahan (village priest) was reduced to the role of performing village rituals. In Birsa Munda, Singh sums up the exemplary shift in the Munda society: “The agrarian and social pattern was mixed up in the Birsa movement. As agrarian strife involved social consequences, it offered not only a political but also a social solution of the problems confronting the tribe.”12 The revolt led by Munda tribal community in their fight against established order, which had demolished their ethnic identity and their relationship with the forest was called Ulgulan. The aim to promote the cultural framework and the rights to forest were interlinked with political mutiny, since tribals considered that a victory in the war would enable an access to their rights. Located at Chalkhad in Ranchi, the wilderness provided a cano- py for the tribals to retreat from the mainstream and militate against perni- cious agrarian policies, forceful conversion of tribes into Hinduism and Christianity and the indentured labor system. Hailed as Bhagwan, Birsa was killed in the eventual battle with the British. The driving force behind the great revolt of Mundas is the loss of identity, but hunger has also played a crucial role. Until these transformations that took place, the vast forests of Chalkad had sustained an entire tribal community of those who practiced khuntkatti cultivation. The early Munda tribes were nomadic and they had settled in the forests by clearing the areas required for their survival. The pahan or the tribal head, who ruled the society and was consulted in matters of rules and regulations, now had no power. When certain areas of tribal settlements became overpopulated, they went in search of new settlements and cleared forestlands for their use. The pahan would bring a new settlement into being with the practice of striking a pole into the ground. New settlements were created in the surrounding areas and these settlers were known as khuntkathidars. Infiltration caused by the avari- cious greed of Dikus and by the British devastated this livelihood of the forest-dwelling Mundas, reducing them to poverty and penury. Echoing the words of Dhani Munda, a co-rebel of the Birasite movement writes:

Uncountable numbers have registered themselves with the mission. Famished by drought the country has been torn apart. Landlords made settlements taking advantage of the situation. Mundas have leased their rights by forfeiting their fingerprints. I did the same.13

The authoritative repression caused by tenancy rights for the Mundas is the main reason for the assassination of the oppressors. Therefore, the Mun- das resorted to traditional warfare to avenge the injustice thrust upon them, although the intensity of their struggle was diluted by the conversions to Christianity. Birsa concedes the truth: “Imbibing the language of the Dikus Anu T. Asokan 141 would help in saving both land and home.”14 Though aware of the economic and survival needs of Munda community, Birsa had always reproached the Dikus for buying their homeland. During the secret funeral of Birsa’s dead body, constable Muneshwar Prasad recalls the reprimand meant for his entire community. Prasad says to his colleague Shiban:

should we sell our land? Aren’t you Dikus? They don’t understand the rules, nor do they follow court rules, and doesn’t comprehend what the judge decides. They but ask-Why? Why should we leave our land? Isn’t the forest ours?15

Indeed, the vast wilderness of Chotanagpur, Sailrakeb, and Doamboary mountain ranges met their daily needs. So why would they have to leave? But, the forced transformation of forest cover into wide spanning single plantations brought about frequent droughts and famines. Saumitra Chakra- varty states that, “The tantalizing smell of hot rice chasing the gaunt landscape of Chotanagpur plateau is a recurring image of activist writer Mahas- weta Devi.16 The representation of the loss is exceptionally well documented in the novel showing how the drought induced famine deprives the Mundas of their food. Nibai Munda, friend of Birsa’s father Suguna, comments: “We will have rice. We will have rice today. I have stolen half a kilo of rice. We will eat in plenty today.”17 During my interview with Mahasweta Devi (5th March, 2012), she, herself, reminisced about the happiness of the tribals on receiving an abundant supply of rice, their staple food. Another unfortunate development was the indentured labor system that restricted the free movement of tribals. The community faced the scarcity of water resources and to trace the existing water bodies they had to depend on water diviners like Birsa. For example, his search for water brings him to a sambar deer caught in quicksand. The sambar deer and its struggle to free itself from the quicksand is a symbol for Birsa’s futile existence and makes him aware of his crisis. Like the drowning deer, he finds himself a captive of curtailed circumstances. One liberating force behind the mental and physical ordeal which Birsa had to undergo was education. He realizes that victory can be won only by the dissemination of knowledge: “the world of learning and writing is a new way of approaching a new world. The consciousness of each word, each sound gave him immense pleasure; the contentment of learning made him feel as though he was hitting a target like an arrow.”18 Birsa acknowledges his pursuit of wisdom as being the gift granted by educational concessions of the Vaishnavites and the British, though he is conscious of his ancestry. The recognition of the slow degradation of his environment helps him to evolve to the role of the “Father” of the Birsaite Movement. He defends his role as the protector of the clan by recognizing himself to be the 142 Neo-Aranyakas beacon of light providing hope and security. He visualizes the ravaged forests as being robbed of their sacredness:

Naked, Munda woman who resembled the blue coloured Krishna—the ancient forest—was lamenting and blaming that I will remain unsatisfied. They have robbed me of my shame and honour and here I stand naked beneath the effervescent blue sky.19

The forests which molded an integral part of Birsa’s livelihood seem to urge him to release them from the clutches of their slayers. The Sarna jungle pleads for mercy, “Save me Birsa. I have to become pure, chaste and innocent once again.”20 The lament of the Mother Jungle that the lives of the Mundas have been rendered invaluable through her constant abuse by the Dikus and British, is deeply etched in the mind of the Munda. Birsa comments on the difference between the tribals and the outsiders: “My mother stands on the riverside—my mother—my mother jungle—like a little virgin Mundari girl—but this sight does not arouse lust or greed but it rather rouses grief.”21 The Munda Bhagwan, Birsa’s identification of his responsibility as the “god” of Munda tribes, entrusts him with the duty of the need to protect the community from various hindering factors. His mother bemoans the loss of her son who has now become an incarnate sacrificial being for the Munda community. Birsa then remarks:

Don’t call me Birsa, my mother! I am their God! I will not rock the Munda boys to sleep! Nor would I lay them on my lap! I will win the forest-plains- earth for them! They needed a God, I will return back as God. 22

Eventually the Doambary Mountain witness the gradual inflow of Bira- sites toward the forest for the Ulugulan formation, and Birsa places a white flag to the East and a red flag to the West, red symbolizing the blood of non- tribals—Dikus. The forest here acts as a liminal space which marks the identification of tribal rights and simultaneously denotes a turbulent space which engages in the tribal freedom struggle. Birsa commences his revolutionary agitation by introducing a two-way scheme to be followed by the Birsaites. The first step would be to frighten the Christians by shooting arrows of fire. The next ultimatum would be their rebellion Ulgulan. The ceaseless cry of the Mother Jungle evokes in Birsa the memories of the injuries inflicted due to the audacious betrayal of her resources:

“Cleanse me, dear father.” Birsa felt that this collective rebellion in which fellow Mundas were armed with bows and arrows gave him a deeper association with the earth of Chotta Nagpur, their rivers. and on their banks did the mother jungle cry for her lost sanctity.23 Anu T. Asokan 143

The Mundas believe that Birsa continued to exert his prophetic vision of a sacred earth even after his death in confinement. Birsa’s ashes were believed to have a regenerative nature and so Birsa’s friend requests Shiban, who performs the funeral rites, to return his ashes. He says:

It is believed that if you spray or disperse the ashes, the forest will be able to recognise that Birsa has not forgotten her. As the ashes descend on the earth, trees will start growing on the earth. The trees will grow, dear friend. 24

The crowning of Birsa as Bhagwan, or “Earth God,” and the Munda revolution cause uproar among the Dikus and the colonizers. Hence the efforts for capturing Mundas to fill the prisons, the attempts of the British to unleash their myriad unverified cases against the Mundas, and finally depriving them of arable land necessary for their sustenance. What follows is that the venture of the police troops into the forest enrages the Mundas leading them to use weapons against the police. The terrified officers who were maimed by the poisoned arrows describe the rebellious Mundas as uncouth human beings. Their arrows were smeared with the juice of toxic wild berries of the forests. In this turmoil, Sali, a Munda woman and accomplice of Birsa in the Ulugulan, renders the Birsaite movement her support by providing food and ammunition. She plays a pivotal role in the novel from the middle to the end. The Ulgulan, or the great Munda revolution, was launched on 23rd December, 1899. Initially lodged to dampen the spirits of the colonizers and the Christians, fire-lit arrows were shot and the forests were set ablaze. The waves of revolution, however, did not end and atrocities continued to be committed. A large number of Munda women and children were killed in the suppression instigated by the British. The Sailarakeb mountain range replete with tucked-in-cave was the perfect hideout for the Mundas. The self-sufficient forests provided them with food such as fruits, tubers, roots, and their revered mahua tree became a life-sustaining source. Yet, the persistent yearning to eat their staple food, rice, led to Birsa’s arrest, as the smoke arising from the fire to cook rice was being detected. The regiment of police and the informers followed the trail of smoke and found the tired revolutionary Birsa who became an easy victim due to his loss of health and his physical weakness. He was accused of false charges and he died in jail on the 9th of June, 1900. The history of Birsa’s struggles proves that the present- day oppressed, dispossessed, and marginalized tribes were once fierce ad- ministrators and independent proponents of their culture and forests. I will conclude with the words of Gadgil and Guha that summarize the present-day situation of Indian forests: “Environmental racism has been extended from colonial India connecting the very extended structure of independent India, and the forests have become another site of skirmish over Indian economic independence many decades after political independence 144 Neo-Aranyakas was won. Community-based systems continue to be delegitimized and the ideology of the market, not of nature venerated.”25

NOTES

1. Robert, Marzec, “Speaking Before the Environment: Modern Fiction and the Ecologi- cal.” MFS :Modern Fiction Studies (2009): 419–442, at 424. 2. The book is written in Bengali by the author. I have used the Hindi version of the same novel which is titled as Jungle ke Davedar and have translated the passages to English. 3. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India (New Delhi: Zed Press 1988), 54. 4. Anil Agarwal, “An Indian Environmentalist’s Credo.” Social Ecology, eds., Ramachan- dra Guha (New Delhi: Oxford, 1998), 346–386, at 369. 5. Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preserva- tion: A Third World Critique.” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 210–215, at 214. 6. Arundati Roy, “Walking with the Comrades.” Outlook (2010): 1–64, at 4. 7. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), at 152. 8. Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and their Ideology (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), i–xi, at xi. 9. Lachman M. Khubchandani, Indigenous People: Responding to Human Ecology. (My- sore: CIIL, 2009), 4. 10. Amita Baviskar, “Tribal Politics and Discourses of Indian Environmentalism.” Nature in the Global South, eds., Paul Greenbough, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 289–318, at 294. 11. Kumar Suresh Singh, Birsa Munda and his Movement, 1872–1901: A Study of Millenar- ian Movement in Chotanagpur (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1–10, at 7. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Mahasweta Devi, Aranyer Adhikhar (Calcutta: Karuna Prakashni, 1977), 35. 14. Ibid., 39. 15. Ibid.,21. 16. Saumitra Chakravarty, Littcrit: The World of Mahasweta Devi, eds. P.K Rajan and P.P Ajaykumar (Thiruvananthapuram: Samanuaya, 2008), 2. 17. Mahasweta Devi, Aranyer Adhikhar (Calcutta: Karuna Prakashni, 1977), 47. 18. Ibid., 63. 19. Ibid., 101. 20. Ibid., 87. 21. Ibid., 88. 22. Ibid., 92. 23. Ibid., 195. 24. Ibid., 24. 25. Madhav Gadgil, and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44–45.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agarwal, Anil. “An Indian Environmentalist’s Credo.” In Social Ecology, edited by Ramachan- dra Guha, 346–386. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Baviskar, Amita. “Tribal Politics and Discourses of Indian Environmentalism.” In Nature in the Global South, edited by Paul Greenbough, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 289–318. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004. Beinart, William and Lotte Hughes. Environment and Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Anu T. Asokan 145

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. London: Penguin, 1962. Chakravarty, Saumitra. Littcrit: The World of Mahasweta Devi, edited by P.K Rajan and P.P Ajaykumar. Thiruvananthapuram: Samanuaya. 2008. Devi, Mahasweta. “Telling History.” In Chotti Munda and his Arrow, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, x–xxviii. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2002. ———. Chotti Munda and his Arrow, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2002. ———. Aranyer Adhikhar. Calcutta: Karuna Prakashni, 1977. ———. Jungle ke Davedar. New Delhi: Radhakrishna Publications. 1998. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Guha, Ramachandra. “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 210–215. ———. Environmentalism: A Global History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Jardin, Joseph. Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Philosophy. Boston: Wadswarth, 2012. Khubchandani, Lachman M. Indigenous People: Responding to Human Ecology. Mysore: CIIL, 2009. Marzec, Robert. “Speaking Before the Environment: Modern Fiction and the Ecological.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies (2009): 419–442. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Ray, Rabindra. The Naxalites and their Ideology. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. Roy, Arundati. “Walking with the Comrades.” Outlook (2010): 1–64. Shepard, Paul. Coming Home to the Pleistocene, edited by Florence R. Shepard. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1998. Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India. New Delhi: Zed Press, 1988. Singh, Kumar Suresh. Birsa Munda and his Movement, 1872-1901: A Study of Millenarian Movement in Chotanagpur. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Tagore, Rabindranath. Tapovan. Tikamgarh : Gandhi Bhavan. 1909.

Chapter Nine

Ecoerotic Imaginations in Early Modernity and Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure

Abdulhamit Arvas

Eugénie: Oh! naturelle? Dolmancé: Oui, naturelle, je le soutiens. —La Philosophie dans le boudoir, Marquis de Sade

In Marquis de Sade’s 1795 Philosophy in the Bedroom, the libertine and sodomite educator Dolmancé introduces Eugénie to libertinism. While Eugé- nie is surprised at Dolmancé’s calling anal sex a natural fancy, Dolmancé gives a long and energetic speech explaining the relationship between nature and nonnormative sexual acts, and how nature is itself transgressive, deviant, and anti-procreative. Nature is unpredictable and destructive, he claims. Contra-naturam is, in fact, the natural. Persuaded, Eugénie excitedly cries: “Oh! mes amis, que l’on m’encule! . . Tenez, voilà mes fesses . . . je vous les offre! . . . Foutez-moi, je décharge!”1 While de Sade generates the deep nature-sexuality interrelation most explicitly in this pornographic work in post-revolutionary France, Margaret Cavendish, in England, had already pro- blematized nature-transgressive sexuality interrelations more than a century before him in her play The Convent of Pleasure (1668), and she challenged the heteronormative discourse regarding procreative sex as the natural by situating most queer relations in the depth of the green world itself. Caven- dish’s The Convent of Pleasure offers an imagery of an earthly paradise that resists the hetero-normative order of seventeenth-century England and presents early modern conceptualizations of nature. 2 It is an exemplary work of what we might call ecoeroticism, by which I refer to an imagined and eroticized queer resistance counteracting sexual homogeneity and spatialized 147 148 Ecoerotic Imaginations in Early Modernity in the very depth of green world. The queer-nature relation has a long history of interconnectedness, dating at least to the emergence of the concept contra naturam in the West to define all non-procreative sexual acts. Reading early modern queer ecologies helps historicize the current scholarship in queer ecology since we can find a genealogy of many of the contemporary arguments about the environment and environmental crisis, as well as sexual identities, in an era when the modern states emerge with their transformative power while a discourse of nature under “the man’s” mastery is brought forward.3 Reading queer sexualities with ecological lenses in their introduction to Queer Ecologies, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson define “queer ecology” as a call for “a new practice of ecological knowledges, spaces, and politics that places central attention on challenging hetero-ecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual and gender positions.”4 They argue that the discourses of sexuality are informed by the discourses of nature, and those discourses are in turn fashioned by discourses of sexuality. Thus, “they are linked, in fact, through a strongly evolutionary narrative that pits the perverse, the polluted and the degenerate against the fit, the healthy, and the natural.”5 Timothy Morton, likewise, investigates the intersection between queer theory and ecology through Darwin. Underscoring the queer essence of evolution and biology, Morton’s queer ecology seeks an intimacy with other beings, an intimacy “polymorphously perverse” (278):6 “Ecology and queer theory are intimate. It’s not that ecological thinking would benefit from an injection of queer theory from the outside. It’s that, fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecology: queer ecology” (281).7 While Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, and Morton, mainly challenge human/non-human distinction in their theorization of queer ecology with post-nineteenth century examples, Simon C. Estok focuses on “sexual minorities” and pursues queer ecology in the seventeenth century: “Queer ecocriticism situates us theoretically to understand that the commodification of nature and of sexual minorities are similar . . . in seventeenth century terms, commodification of nature and of sexual minorities means othering difference and space.”8 It is this “othering difference and space” that I focus on here—othered same-sex female sexual desire in an all female pastoral space—to trace queer ecologies under historical inquiry so as to uncover the institutionalization of heterosexualization and procreation, and conjointly, the destruction of nature in the seventeenth century. Lady Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a pastoral play about a non-conventional convent founded by Lady Happy who, as a virgin, after her father’s death decides to create “The Convent of Pleasure,” an all- female space under the rule of “Nature,” in a green world with “variety of Pleasures, which are in Nature.”9 Cavendish uses a pastoral setting as the main space of the same-sex female eroticism in the play. Early modern Abdulhamit Arvas 149 pastoral is an imaginative space in which poets imagine transgressive sexualities that would have been otherwise impossible in popular works. As Grego- ry W. Bredbeck asserts in his Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Mil- ton, “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one of [pastoral’s] primary interests is its participation in fields of sexual deviation.”10 Similarly, Ste- phen Guy-Bray notes “the ability of pastoral poetry to recreate both a bygone place and a bygone time allows for the creation of what I call homoerotic space: a safe, because carefully demarcated, zone in which homoeroticism can appear.”11 And for Bruce Smith pastoral for the early moderns is “a fantasy-world of sexual pleasure.”12 Following Theocritus and Virgil, early modern writers, from Philip Sidney to William Shakespeare, and Richard Barnfield, among others, use pastoral to address love that dare not speak its name. While same-sex male homoeroticism pervades most pastorals and critical works, it is female homoeroticism that is central to Margaret Caven- dish’s pastoral play, The Convent of Pleasure. Same-sex female desire in this play evinces that homoeroticism in pastoral is not simply an imitative mode, but more interconnected with the contemporary sexual concerns in early modern England, particularly in seventeenth century. Valerie Traub in her ground-breaking work The Renaissance of Lesbian- ism in Early Modern England explores a genealogy of modern sexual identities—lesbianism in particular—and announces the seventeenth century as a period of paradigm shift in sexual discourses with the changing social, political, and economic dynamics. In this century, Traub cogently argues, changes in the nature of property, kinship, household, and individualism, together with “domestic heterosexuality,” feminine women who loved other women—chaste femme—also started to be construed as “immoral, irrational, a threat to other women.”13 Domestic heterosexuality, as she defines it, is “a form of conjugal relation that demands the melding of love and erotic desire.”14 Erotic desire in domestic heterosexuality becomes “a requirement for the bonds between husband and wife.”15 In order to demonstrate these shifts in the artistic imagination in the period, Traub analyzes the myth of Callisto, a virgin attendee to the goddess Diana in the deep forest, and a notably popular figure for the early modern imagination. Callisto is Diana’s chaste nymph in her Convent where all virgins live happily as couples until Jupiter, searching for the destruction of the Earth, perturbs the virgin-space by cross- dressing as the virgin goddess, and clandestinely having sexual intercourse with Callisto, which deranges Callisto’s happy life in the convent of Diana. Calisto, Traub notes “provided artists with ample opportunity to depict popular pagan and Christian themes,”16 which “functioned as a crucial site of cultural negotiation about the meanings of same-gender female love.”17 Cav- endish’s play with an all-female space destroyed by a male intruder shares similarities with Callisto myths and evinces clearly how domestic heterosexuality operates in the period. Yet, mainly at stake in this chapter are why 150 Ecoerotic Imaginations in Early Modernity same-gender female love is imagined in wilderness, and how the play reveals and encourages a nature-oriented resistance to othering differences and spaces by introducing harmonious polymorphous desires in the juncture of nature and sex. Like Callisto, Lady Happy, as a virgin woman, is first the object of heterosexual desire, but after her refusal of the cross-sex relations and econo- mies, and preference for a homosocial and homoerotic pleasure in wilderness, she becomes a source of male anxiety and an object of men’s destructive plans. Yet, from her first appearance and anti-marriage discourse at the beginning of the play, Lady Happy is aware of and at the same time not bound to traditional gender and sexual roles. She protests against the roles attributed to a young woman in society; therefore, she chooses to “serve Nature” by refusing to be a trafficking woman. 18 She condemns normative practices fashioned for women by calling them unnatural, and thinks of them as the major causes of trouble and uneasiness in men’s and women’s lives. Here she not only criticizes religious discourses about gender roles but also the social performances of certain roles for both sexes by developing a counter argument on social practices. Furthermore, her actual point of inquiry and reason for developing this argument is the male repression over nature and “the natural.” The civic society built as an opposition to nature is what the Lady wants to challenge:

Or, what profit or pleasure can it be to the gods to have Men to lie uneasily on the hard ground, unless the gods and Nature were at variance, strife and wars; as if what is displeasing unto Nature, were pleasing to the gods, and to be enemies to her, were to be friends to them.19

The putatively virtuous and pious acts and moral values suggested as the means to sustain a happy life are nothing but constructed cultural practices. She points at Nature (significantly, with a capital N), opposed to these practices, as a “Mistress” to pursue for happiness: “Wherefore, if gods be cruel, I will serve Nature.”20 Lady Happy’s refusal of conventional gender roles, followed by her refusal of sexual roles, and her finding of a secure place for her queer resistance in Nature urge us to investigate closer from the lens of queer ecology the queer-nature intersection. The play implies questions about what “Nature,” “the natural,” and the “nature of desire” are. Lady Happy’s escape from the social order is intrinsically related to her own perception of nature and the natural. Her use of “Nature” signifies an independent space, a fearsome wilderness: the wilderness is othered, so too are certain sexual acts; and there are structural similarities between these otherings. In early modernity, new views on nature arise, and nature is recon- ceptualized. Nature had both moral and physical authority in medieval literary and visual culture.21 In early modern representations, however, nature is Abdulhamit Arvas 151 represented as a lactating, naked woman with many breasts. Katharine Park notes that this is a humanist practice of reconfigurating medieval images of a nature that had been personified as clothed, majestic, energetic, and crowned with great dignity.22 Park’s analyses of the reconfiguration of nature in visual representations show how the early modern culture/nature dichotomy in- spires and generates an instrumental nature with rich sources by ignoring the medieval perceptions of nature which teaches, nourishes, lectures, speaks, and corrects. Wilderness as the unknown is determined as a threat to be exploited, made use of, and eliminated. It is also, to quote Estok, the very “unpredictability” that is hidden in nature that causes fear and loathing against it. “The fear of nature’s perceived or imagined unpredictability” is a fear that Estok terms “ecophobia” resulting in an imagined antagonistic nature in the early modern imagination.23 It is important to recognize these “unpredictabilities” in early modern representations since they contradict and resist notions of “man’s” putative domination over nature. They also helped strengthen the discourses of the necessity of knowing and mastering nature. The definition of nature in culture, and the natural roles that Lady Happy must attain, are not “natural” for Lady Happy: marriage, wealth and its organization, reason, suffering, and men are all privileged in society over the erotic, pleasure, emotions, and nature. What is unnatural has been natural, and the natural has been unnatural in the play. Her decision to “serve Na- ture,”24 therefore, generates an anxiety among male characters, and this anxiety stems from anxieties against not only female sexuality but nature also. The Convent of Pleasure that Lady Happy designs as a common space for women in this context offers a space of resistance against such orders generating the human/nature binarism. Domination of men over nature reflects male domination over women and women’s desires. To break this chain of domination, Lady Happy rejects marriage as an institution and “incloisters” herself “from the World, to enjoy pleasure” and to be away from Men who are “the only troublers of Women.”25 She will not only enclose herself from the male world but will “take so many Noble Persons of my own Sex, as my Estate will plentifully maintain, such whose Births are greater than their Fortunes, and are resolv’d to live a single life, and vow Virginity: with these I mean to live incloister’d with all the delights and pleasures that are allowable and lawfull.”26 Her reaction, therefore, becomes a collective resistance by constructing an opposite social order with all same-sex female subjects, with “Women-Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries” to the already existing one—a “Pleasure’s Convent” in the green world.27 It is not “a Cloister of restraint, but a place for freedom”; nor it is a place “to vex Senses but to please them.”28 Her practice of freedom for polymorphous pleasures and desires, and challenge to the restraining sexual norms by starting a Convent in nature, whence, is a queer mode of resistance. 152 Ecoerotic Imaginations in Early Modernity

The play further reveals its queer resistance by urging the readers to question the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate desires, and procreative and non-procreative sexual acts. The ecoerotic imagination in the play, strikingly, introduces non-procreative eroticism as the most pleasing sort. Disregarding marriage through a play within the play, the play fundamentally challenges not only procreative sex and pregnancy, but also the anxieties against sodomy with an all-virgin ecoerotic space. Lady Happy designs the place according to “four seasons” of the year, with “a great Looking-Glass in each Chamber” for the Lady wishes “that we may view ourselves and take pleasure in our own Beauties, whilst they are fresh and young.”29 This all-female homosocial space legitimizes homoeroticism, implied by “all the delights and pleasures,” to an “allowable and lawfull” extent. Here the condition of “lawfull” does not mean to obey the divine or secular laws regarding the criminalization of non-procreative sex as sodomy, but to act within the extent allowable in nature and its laws. The use of “lawfull” and allowable, henceforth, challenges the concept of sodomy as unallowable, or as a crime against-nature, because as a reactionary character, Lady Happy already deconstructed the heteronormative patriarchal order in previous scenes by her strong rhetoric and investment in the Convent. Also, the use of mirrors implies autoeroticism and self-satisfaction, which is now natural in the nature of the Convent. All kinds of pleasure but penetrative cross-gender sex are allowable in this convent. As the Mediator, who “had rather be one in the Convent of Pleasure, then Empress of the whole World,” says

If you were there, you could not know all their Pleasure in a short time, for their Varieties will require a long time to know their several Changes, their Pleasures and Delights vary with the Seasons; so that what with the several Seasons, and the Varieties of every Season, it will take up a whole life’s time.30

What these pleasures are is not explained; however, the secrecy, and “varieties” signify the highly erotic nature of the Convent. The Convent, therefore, becomes a celebration of instability and metamorphosis resisting any definitive imperatives in queer nature. Nature and queer becomes “intimate,” to borrow Morton’s term, in this space and nature eliminates pre-existing distinctions between natural and unnatural, legitimate and illegitimate desires and acts. Furthermore, queer nature becomes more explicit in the play specifically when the Princess, “a Princely brave Woman truly, of a Masculine presence,” joins the community31 Never in the play are readers warned in advance that the Princess is actually a cross-dressed Prince, which forces us to read the Lady-Princess relation as a same-sex relation. The Princess asks the Abdulhamit Arvas 153

Lady to be her butch servant: “some of your Ladies do accouste Themselves in Masculine-Habits, act Lovers-parts; I desire you will give me leave to be sometimes so accousted and act the part of your loving Servant.” Happily accepting this request, she replies “More innocent Lovers never can there be, Then my most Princely Lover, that’s a She.”32 “Masculine” female lovers playing their roles are indications of the existence of erotic role-plays in the convent. The Lady, by accepting her “Princely lover” plays the role of the femme half of the femme/butch dyad. The role-playings of the feminine and the masculine women in the play further illuminate the sexual nature of the “pleasures and delights” in this homosocial and highly queer space. This is probably why no one realizes the male identity of the Prince; and although Mediator sees them kissing, she does not think of her as a man because they are not the only couples kissing, embracing, and exhausting erotic “sports” in the Convent.33 In the new natural setting, in the green world where the Lady constructed her Convent, so-called transgressive sexual acts which would have been unallowable in another space are permissible. Why is this queer space possible only within a “natural” setting? Why does Lady Happy bring up “Nature” as the ideal to generate and embrace this queerness? Why is virginity-as-resistance interlinked with nature-as-resistance? Is nature itself queer? While giving rise to these inquiries, the play opens the allegedly “natural sex” discourse up to questioning. The question of what we can call “queer” sexualities has long been embedded in the concept of nature in discourses regarding non-procreative sex, or “sodomy” which included same-sex female sexual relations as well. St. Paul’s letter to the Romans states: “women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; And likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another.”34 The term “against nature” shifts meaning, develops and changes according to social history of a given time. Nature’s role in this sin/crime is that while it is contra naturam, it is not non-natural, as Helmut Puff argues;35 that is to say, it is still foregrounded in nature. It is nature which generates these lustful desires. Thus, nature, natural environments, and gardens, or earthly paradises, are all related to unlimited and unbounded desires. The play’s use of nature to highlight the polymorphous nature of desire, and problematization of what is sexually natural and what is not is also related to the long-held link between nature and sex from the Middle Ages onwards. While nature is the embodiment of all perfections and a guide to men in medieval thought, as Puff argues, it is also a suspect of sustaining/ generating undesirable sexual behavior, because desire is the key element for procreation, and nature’s generating desire may lead to desire for everything, even for same-sex intercourse. So, procreative sex and same-sex intercourse both are generated by a desire brought up by nature; and contra naturam at this point signifies the acts originating from a destructive nature while “natu- 154 Ecoerotic Imaginations in Early Modernity ral” sort of sex is a part of an innocent, constructive nature. Similarly, Jona- than Dollimore asserts,

What can never be entirely eliminated from the concept of nature, because they remain ideologically necessary in certain contexts, are complexities verg- ing on contradictions: nature as innocence, and nature as a state of destructive bestiality; nature as essentially productive, abundant, fecund, even anarchic, and nature as that in the name of which repression, control, and discrimination occur.36

It is because of these contradictions that nature is used to repress unwanted “natural” desires. Here we should think about various “natures” used to describe the natural. Anything deviating from the norm is called unnatural, or monstrous; a sign of “erotophobia,” in Greta Gaard’s words, elucidating the linkage between heterosexism and ecological degradation, between “devalu- ation of the erotic . . . of women and of nature.”37 The women in the Con- vent, therefore, are seen as a monstrous threat to the already existing social norms by male characters, and for this reason, they want to set the Convent on fire and burn all women there to “do Nature good service.”38 Furthermore, the play reveals a nature-queer relation and queerness of nature by using pastoral as a mode to address same-sex female desire. The love story between the Lady and Princess, and other homoerotic relations are situated in and generated by a pastoral setting with a contrast to the romance tradition with cross-sex eroticism. Pastoral and nature welcome queer desires. Yet, the homoerotic pastoral setting is destroyed by heterosexual “romance” when the Princess is revealed to be the Prince, and he integrates Lady Happy into domestic heterosexuality. The ending of the play is, therefore, a reaction to the romance tradition that often produces desire to obtain and silence women, to dominate the land and the lady. It is this fallacy that brings her tragic end with marriage. I call it tragic because I am not reading the surprising end of the play as an element of comedy the way many critics do. The Lady is silent after the Prince’s identity is revealed, and there is no sign of happiness at the end. We never hear a word from Lady Happy about her reaction or joyful acceptance of marriage even when the Prince says, “I may marry this Lady; otherwise, tell them I will have her by force of Arms.”39 The Prince clearly states he would appropriate the Convent and the ladies by “force” which may be read as rape in early modern usage of the word. They are symbolically raped to be normalized, naturalized, and implemented—domesticated and heterosexualized—back in the already existing sexual economy. The play, consequently, warns its female, and all queer audiences against the potentiality of the heterosexual romance to destroy queer spaces by naturalizing what is unnatural. Pastoral space, or wilderness in the play, to sum up, is a welcoming space for ecoerotic imaginations and queer practices. It also highlights the queer- Abdulhamit Arvas 155 ness of nature and how histories of (queer) sexualities and nature thus have been intrinsically intertwined. While queer ecology mostly focuses on the post-nineteenth century literary examples to blur the distinction between nature and sex, human and nonhuman, and while libertinism in the nineteenth century uses nature to challenge the use of the natural in propagation of procreative sex, early modern examples may help us to trace a genealogy of queer/nature interconnectedness and uncover the intimacy between nature and queer. The queer/nature relation and its articulation as a form of ecoerotic imagination in early modern literary examples like Cavendish’s play ultimately exemplify a strong resistance against heteronormativity.

NOTES

1. Marquis de Sade, La Philosophie Dans Le Boudoir (1795. Paris: La Musardine, 1997), 136. 2. Studying early modern texts ecocritically has recently gained momentum in ecocriticism. For example, on pastoral as a form of nature writing elucidating environmental concerns in early modern England, see Ken Hiltner, What Else is Pastoral (2011). For ecocritical approaches to early modern literature, see Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare (2006); Robert Watson, Back to Nature (2007); Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare (2011); Todd Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature (2011); Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology (2003); Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among Animals (2002); Diane McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (2007); and Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber, eds. Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (2008). 3. I will be using the term “the man” as a referent of phallocentric patriarchal society to emphasize how the male-dominant structure of the society sees the perfect human as man who is the master of nature. Looking at statements of four philosophers of the period would suffice to see man/nature relations: Man’s centrality—as Francis Bacon asserts in The Essays, “Man, if we look to final causes, may be regarded as the center of the world” (270)—gives him an exploitative control of nature. Similarly, in his “Letter to William, Earle of Devonshire,” Thomas Hobbes asserts that Nature has to be reorganized through consent because the nature of men is to be governed through rational learning. Also it is man’s duty to transform himself as a part of the civil rule. This also brings forth a duty for men to improve nature. In the same line with Bacon, and Hobbes, John Locke, in his The Second Treatise of Government, states, “in the beginning all the World was America” (22). The New World is the wilderness to be explored and cultivated in the early modern mind. So exploiting other lands is an extension of improving one’s own land: a duty of men for the domination over nature. And in his Discourse on Method and The Meditations, Rene Descartes announces, through learning, man can become “masters and possessors of nature” (43). 4. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2010), 22. 5. Ibid., 3. 6. Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 1–19, at 278. 7. Ibid., 281. 8. Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE, 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–25, at 214. 9. Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne Sharer (1668. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 223. 10. Gregory Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 199–200. 156 Ecoerotic Imaginations in Early Modernity

11. Stephen Guy-Bray, Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 15. 12. Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chica- go: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 114. 13. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 257. 14. Ibid., 205. 15. Ibid., 265. 16. Ibid., 232. 17. Ibid., 230. 18. Cavendish, 220. For more on the concept of “trafficking women,” and how women trafficked as an object of exchange between men operates to strengthen bonds between men in early modern England, see Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women” (1975); Karen Newman, “Directing Traffic,” (1990), and Fashioning Femininity (1991); Kathleen McLuskie, Renais- sance Dramatists (1989); and Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit (1988). 19. Cavendish, 219. 20. Ibid., 220. 21. As Joan Cadden puts it, “Nature was, in many respects, the source, judge, and enforcer of right living and proper social relations in the view of both academic and social elites in the late Middle Ages” (208). 22. Katharine Park, “Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Em- blems,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston, and Fernando Vidal (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 52. 23. Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Pal- grave Macmillan, 2011), 5. 24. Cavendish, 220. 25. Ibid., 220. 26. Ibid., 220. 27. Ibid., 221. 28. Ibid., 221. 29. Ibid., 224. 30. Ibid., 226. 31. Ibid., 226. 32. Ibid., 228–29. 33. Ibid., 239–40. 34. Quoted, with my emphasis, in Helmut Puff, “Nature on Trial: ‘Against Nature’ in the Law Courts of Early Modern Germany and Switzerland” in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston, and Fernando Vidal (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 235. 35. Ibid., 245. 36. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 115. 37. Greta Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” Hypatia 12, no.1 (1997): 114–37, at 115. 38. Cavendish, 226. 39. Ibid., 244.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacon, Francis. The Essays. 1625. Edited by John Pitcher. New York: Penguin, 1986. Boehrer, Bruce. Shakespeare among Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Borlik, Todd A. Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures. New York: Routledge, 2011. Bredbeck, Gregory W. Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Abdulhamit Arvas 157

Cadden, Joan. “Trouble in the Earthly Paradise: The Regime of Nature in Late Medieval Christian Culture.” In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston, and Fernando Vidal, 207–31. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Cavendish, Margaret. The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays. 1668, rpt., edited by Anne Sharer. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and The Meditations. 1637. New York: Dover, 2003. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Cla- rendon Press, 1991. Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2006. Estok, Simon C. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–25. Gaard, Greta. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” Hypatia 12, no.1 (1997): 114–37. Guy-Bray, Stephen. Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Toron- to: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Hallock, Thomas, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber, eds. Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hiltner, Ken. What Else is Pastoral: Renaissance Literature and the Environment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. ———. Milton and Ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Locke, John. The Second Treatise on Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. 1689. New York: Dover, 2002. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Poli- tics, Desire. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. McColley, Diane Kelsey. Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. McLuskie, Kathleen. Renaissance Dramatists. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Morton, Timothy. “Queer Ecology.” PMLA 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 1–19. Newman, Karen. “Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects, and The Politics of Exchange.” Differ- ences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 41–54. ———. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1991. Park, Katharine. “Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems.” In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston, and Fernando Vidal, 50–73. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Puff, Helmut. “Nature on Trial: ‘Against Nature’ in the Law Courts of Early Modern Germany and Switzerland.” In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston, and Fernan- do Vidal, 232–53. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rose, Mary Beth. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Raya R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Re- view Press, 1975. Sade, Marquis de. La Philosophie Dans Le Boudoir. 1795. Paris: La Musardine, 1997. Smith, Bruce. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2002. Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

III

Human-Nonhuman Relations

Chapter Ten

What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

Christina Caupert

Compared to the work done in areas such as poetry and the novel, ecocritical work on theater and drama has been sparse. Illuminating contributions have, in fact, steadily been made for almost 20 years now, 1 but without really initiating a major trend.2 “What accounts for theater’s absence from ecocritical discourse, indeed from the environmental movement?” Theresa J. May, one of the most active American eco-theater scholars, wondered in 2005. 3 Part of the answer might well lie within the prevalent anthropocentric concept of Western drama itself. Starting with Aristotle, who defined drama as the representation of “persons acting and doing,”4 countless generations of scholars and playwrights have placed questions of human agency, human conflicts, human communication, human discernment, and human meaning- making at its center. In an attempt to illuminate drama from an evolutionary perspective, behavioral scientist Daniel Nettle actually ascribes its durable success primarily to its focus on “human social behavior”5 and the resulting benefits to our fitness as large-brained, social primates. Even if this finding should be taken with a pinch of salt, humanity really cannot be eliminated from the core of theater and drama. As ecocritics point out, the excessively humanist assumptions underlying the genre have been rather detrimental to the development of new, more-than-human perspectives. For example, Una Chaudhuri, one of the first theater scholars to become interested in ecocriticism, exposes “theater’s complicity with the anti-ecological humanist tradition.”6 Similarly, Theresa J. May states that efforts toward a new “green dramaturgy” are required to help theater emerge “not only [...] as a means by which to investigate the long-standing humanist question ‘who are we?’ but also the urgent ecological question ‘where are we?’”7 Topics ranging from

161 162 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape dimensions of place and space to narratives of conquest and subjugation, questions of animal presences, and issues of sustainable performance practice have indeed begun to attract the attention of a small, but growing number of drama scholars and theater people. 8 Yet while these new vantage points are undoubtedly important, it is also essential to note that ecological and humanist interests are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Chaudhuri gets to the core of the matter when she addresses “the deeply vexed problem of classification that lies at the heart of ecological philosophy: are we human beings—and our activities, such as theater—an integral part of nature, or are we somehow radically separate from it.”9 This age-old question has engaged our species for thousands of years, 10 and it opens another ecocritically relevant perspective on theater and drama. I will explore this problematic by revisiting Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922),11 a modern classic that represents the early stages of American drama as an artistic literary genre. My reading will place The Hairy Ape in the topical context of what is currently known as “posthumanism,” an emerging critical discourse premised upon displacing anthropocentric humanism, 12 which the play both enriches and complicates. While it does challenge the alleged exceptionalism of the human being, it also insists on differences between organic life and machines on the one hand, and between the human and other animals on the other. The play, in fact, raises the old humanist question of who we are, but it does so in order to test, rather than assert, the exceptional status of the human being already implied in the use of “who” as a pronoun. One of the central tenets of posthumanism is that there is no strict, clear boundary between the human and the non-human (animals, plants, non-organic matter, machines), and that both co-evolve in a process of mutual permeation and alteration. Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg in some ways epitomizes the intersection of interests in technology and in animal studies. The popularization of scientific findings about how much of our DNA we share with what we used to define ourselves against—chimpanzees: up to 99%, gorillas: 98%, fruit flies: 60%, bananas: at least 40%—has intensified the cultural awareness that, biologically speaking, to be human is not to be essentially different from other life forms. No less striking are the studies presented by ethologists: skills and qualities such as self-awareness, speech, rationality, altruism, individuality, or tool use are by no means restricted to the human species; in fact, any attempts to define essentially or uniquely human features are bound to fail. 13 Claims to an exceptional status thus seem more and more untenable: we are not the end and objective of creation; we can actually be described as “upright mammalian weeds.”14 Given that similar ideas have been around since Darwin and his forerun- ners, this might hardly seem like news. References to our animality indeed Christina Caupert 163 come easy to most of us nowadays, but are they more than casual—or even joking—lip service? As Louise Westling explains:

In a sense, everyone in Western intellectual life has been a Darwinian since the ideas published in the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man began to overwhelm resistance in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But at the same time, modern urban life and its increasing technological sophistication have allowed popular culture and much of intellectual life to continue thinking in Enlightenment terms about human superiority to all other life, and essential separation from it.15

Westling’s claim can be illustrated neatly by looking at the historical context in which The Hairy Ape was written and first produced. Darwin’s theory of evolution, notoriously contested in contemporary America, was received rather favorably by many nineteenth-century Americans, who interpreted it as a model supporting the idea of “progress” as an all-organizing principle. By the turn of the century, biological evolution had largely been established as a fact for the general public, with the exception of (ultra)conservative literal believers in a creator god. After World War I, however, the situation changed. Critics now declared that Darwinism was responsible for a growing brutalization and contempt for the weak. These critics included renowned public figures such as William Jennings Bryan, former U.S. Secretary of State and three-time presidential candidate, whose outspoken contributions to the growing debate found a large audience and attracted a great deal of attention and support. For the first time, restrictions were imposed on teaching evolution in public schools, and the famous Scopes Trial of 1925 against a high school biology teacher became a national media sensation. 16 The debates over evolutionary theory gradually turned into a veritable culture war, and the main issue was not so much evolution in general as human ancestry. In 1922, the year The Hairy Ape had its premiere, William Jennings Bryan wrote in Science:

The only part of evolution in which any considerable interest is felt is evolution applied to man. A hypothesis in regard to the rocks and plant life does not affect the philosophy upon which one’s life is built. [...] The evolution that is harmful—distinctly so—is the evolution that destroys man’s family tree as taught by the Bible and makes him a descendant of the lower forms of life. 17

For Bryan and his followers, the idea of a literal kinship between the human and other species had to be fought because it posed a serious threat to the belief in human exceptionalism. They considered “the Mosaic account of man’s creation [...] that man has no brute blood in him, but was made in God’s image by separate act and placed on earth to carry out a divine decree” (Bryan, 243), the necessary basis of civilization. The blurring of species 164 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape boundaries that was a corollary of evolutionary theory aroused apprehensions typically framed with references to apes and monkeys, which implied fears not just of a violation of human dignity, but ultimately of a regress to some infrahuman state. Hence, the “monkey trial,” as the Scopes Trial came to be called, prompted some highly defensive reactions. The contemporary song “Can’t Make a Monkey of Me” (1925) may serve as an illustration, with the song expressing the feelings of threat, humiliation and defiance that, for many people, accompanied the full import of evolutionary thought. “There’s no chimpanzee / In my pedigree,” the speaker asserts and declares that he prefers holding on to the “story of Adam and Eve.”18 The realization that evolution implies a literal consanguinity between human beings and other animals seems to have reached the broad American public around the 1920s, and it turned existential convictions into open questions. Are we special? What is our distinction? What do we actually know about ourselves? Is there any meaning and purpose to our existence? This postwar “Darwin crisis” shook the foundations of a whole train of accepted truths about humanity and created a public awareness that notions of centrality, uniqueness, and even mere self-identity, however dearly held, are precariously fragile. The Hairy Ape cannot be said to be a play “about” evolution,19 but the contemporary evolution debates are implicit in its background. The play’s protagonist, a steamship stoker known by the nickname of Yank, starts out with fervently held convictions about himself and his own elementary role in the world. He clearly belongs to the bottom of a stratified society, but this does not diminish his exuberant self-assurance. On the contrary, he despises the privileged first-class passengers, “dem slobs in de foist cabin” (44) who could never compete with his tremendous strength and stamina, as mere baggage on a ship that depends on his labor to reach its destination. For Yank, moving ahead is the purpose that orders the world, making him, the stoker, its god-like center. “I’m at de bottom, get me! Dere ain’t nothin’ foither. I’m de end! I’m de start! I start somep’n and de woild moves” (48), he proclaims to the other stokers in an ecstasy of self-aggrandizement. As his nickname shows, Yank participates in a larger cultural vision of a “manifest destiny” promising progress, hegemony, and control over nature. From the very beginning, however, his boastful self-concept is destabilized by what is actually shown on stage. Yank may feel like a kind of super-engine and identify himself with steel, express trains, and factory whistles (48), but outwardly he resembles “those pictures in which the appearance of Neander- thal Man is guessed at” (39).20 His grandiloquent speech is set in the low, cramped stokers’ quarters, where “[t]he ceiling crushes down upon the men’s heads. They cannot stand upright. This accentuates the natural stooping posture which shoveling coal and the resultant over-development of back and shoulder muscles have given them” (39). This characterization may appear somewhat paradoxical in that a natural posture is described as a result of a Christina Caupert 165 specifically cultural activity. Yet this paradox already implies that attempts to renounce the powerful fact of our animality do not liberate us from it, or lead us to any “higher” stage of development. There is no denying the natural dimension of human existence, and it is a crucial fact for an ecologically oriented theater that this dimension makes itself felt most strongly in terms of our bodies. Material, bodily presences are what characterizes the theater, but at the same time these presences are culturally encoded in multiple ways. The theater highlights the interdependence of both of these aspects. In The Hairy Ape, Yank’s initial role as a triumphant “new man” is unable to subdue his persisting corporeality, which his bulging muscles visibly accentuate. Yank himself, however, regards technological progress as a possibility of assuming control over his own biology, along with its threats of effeteness, decline, and death. He believes, in other words, in the trans-humanist idea of “humanity transcending itself in a supposed process of ever more powerful self-construction.”21 Thus he vehemently declares himself to be “livin,’” whereas he looks upon his workmate Paddy, an Irishman who rebukes him for wanting to be “a flesh and blood wheel of the engines” (47), as “dead.” Paddy is indeed old, wizened, and “extremely monkey-like” (42) and hence visually linked to all the aspects of corporeality of which Yank does not want any part. The old Irishman feels strained and exhausted by the relentless pace set by the machines, while Yank considers their unceasing pounding a challenging promise of immortality. Yet fragile old Paddy is presented as uncannily clear-sighted and, unlike all the other stokers, possesses the power to disturb Yank’s inflated self- importance. He draws his force from his dreamy memories, his emotionality and rich imagination, aspects of an inner life that Yank rejects as sources of weakness and dependency. Paddy’s lyrical reminiscences of life on the sailing ships of former days, with its rhythm of day and night, sun and wind, work and rest, make Yank fight “some queer struggle within himself” (47), because they give him an idea of the dimensions of his existence from which he has cut himself off. He reassures himself that the old man is stuck in the past and “don’t belong no more” (47), but the experiences Paddy alludes to strike an unexpected chord within him. Sometimes evoking Walt Whitman with his desire to be “sittin’ here at me ease, and drinking, and thinking, and dreaming dreams” (49),22 Paddy is heir to the romanticist belief in a potential reconciliation of soul and body, man and nature, subject and object. It is his backwards perspective that allows him to realize that the supposed heroes and promoters of progress, the stokers, are in fact “caged in by steel [...] like bloody apes in the Zoo” (47), an insight the expressionistic stage setting confirms. The concept of progress Yank champions thus paradoxically assigns humans just the kind of debased and regressive role that evolution opponents such as William Jennings Bryan must have had in mind when they felt called upon to fight against the idea of human kinship with the alleged 166 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

“lower forms” of life. Indeed, when a brazen gong calls the stokers to work, they “jump up mechanically” to report for their shift “in what is very like a prisoners’ lockstep” (49). We meet them again in the stokehole, shovelling coal “in the crouching, inhuman attitudes of chained gorillas,” “swinging as on a pivot” (55). This striking description may at first appear like an illustration of the alienation of labor. Social class is indeed the subject most extensively covered in discussions of The Hairy Ape. However, this explanation becomes less persuasive when we remember Marx’s statement that the alienated work- er “feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.”23 The opposite is true for Yank. In my reading, therefore, O’Neill’s blending of animal and machine imagery rather relates to the Car- tesian tradition of regarding the body as a mechanical thing separate from, and subordinate to, the incorporeal soul. Famously, for Descartes, the soul, as the seat of mental faculties such as thought, volition, imagination, or memory, is the hallmark of human existence. The body, on the other hand, if taken for itself, is a mere machine in Descartes’ thought—hence his notorious equation of non-human (soulless) animals with machines. In more ways than one, the human body is a grotesque, uncanny “foreign body” in this argument, a thing at odds with the core of humanity. O’Neill alludes to this tradition, but undermines some of its basic assumptions. After all, his comparison of the robotic stokers to chained gorillas gains its force from associations of deprivation and stolen dignity that are incompatible with the Carte- sian stance on animals. The focus of the play, though, is clearly on human existence. Unlike Descartes, yet much like recent ecocritical scholarship, 24 The Hairy Ape establishes the body as an integral part of being human, and as indissolubly interwoven with our mental and emotional processes. Accord- ingly, Yank’s rejection of the unwelcome facts of his physical existence— dependency, frailty, mortality—goes hand in hand with a lack of awareness and appreciation of his “soul.” He sneers at emotional commitment and is irritated by Paddy’s sensibility and rich inner life: “Tinkin’ and dreamin’, what’ll that get yuh” (49). The answer the play suggests lies in Paddy’s ability to resist mechanization and automatization; when the gong sounds, he does not join the others in their lockstep march. Experiencing the world in bodily terms (drowsiness, memories of the sun warming his skin, an aching back) does not tarnish Paddy’s mental and emotional activity, but rather seems to bring it about. “’Tis only when I’m dead to the world I’d be wishful to sing at all” (42), he says, wistfully alluding to both his drunkenness and his mortality as physical sources of inspiration. This also explains the abovementioned allusions to Whitman, who likewise underscored the interrelation- ship between body and mind, and between finiteness and creativity. This reappraisal of the body is a serious challenge not only to the idea of human singularity, but also to the (connected) idea of the human being as an Christina Caupert 167 autonomous agent. We have come to regard ourselves as beings that have bodies, as opposed to beings that are bodies,25 in order to assert a sense of agency in spite of the inexorable constraints and limitations the body imposes. As German nature philosopher Gernot Böhme maintains, up to a certain point this is a reasonable coping strategy, but it is ultimately our “self- givenness”26 —the irrefutable and compelling fact of our physicality—that allows us to have a stake in the world at all, to be affected by and participate in it. Ignoring this fact is an illusory form of self-empowerment. According to Böhme, it results in existential alienation or, in the age of technology, possibly even in the literal, ethically questionable dissolution of the self into a mind software and a cyborg body.27 Cyborgs are still unknown in The Hairy Ape, but Yank’s emphatic self- identification with technological progress points in a similar direction. Like Böhme, the play paints a critical picture of this vision of a new, free human being, presenting it as fuelling fantasies of omnipotence that are both dangerous and deceptive. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that Yank’s triumphant self-concept soon suffers irreparable damage. Yank is forced to acknowledge that he cannot permanently escape his own animal being in the wake of an unsettling encounter with Mildred, the jaded, white-clad, “anemically chaste” (54) daughter of a steel magnate. Mildred goes down to the stokehole, as it were, to play with fire. She wants to satisfy her desire to “touch life somewhere” (51), anticipating the rather harmless thrill her name (Mild-red) suggests. What actually awaits her, though, is a searing underworld of carnal roughness, with a red-hot, expressionistic “flood of terrific light and heat” (55) spurting rhythmically from the gloom. When Mildred enters, Yank is in the middle of a rampage against the engineer on duty. He revels in the fight for the same reason that he relishes his gruelling work, as a welcome opportunity to compete and come out on top. He appears to be, unwittingly, in the middle of a ritual display of domi- nance, fighting for the status of alpha male. Stripped to the waist and frenzied with rage, Yank roars abuse, snarls, growls, and pounds his chest, “gorilla- like” (58). This undiluted display of prowess is more than Mildred can bear. All her coquettish innuendoes of dark alleyways and virile seamen (54) have not prepared her for Yank’s half-naked, undisguised rawness and “abysmal brutality” (58). The sight of his animalistic outbreak and distorted “gorilla face” (58) forces her to understand that the “life energy” (50) and sexually charged vitality she has been yearning for are inextricably linked to the human being’s profound animality. Mildred realizes that to achieve a full human life, she would have to accept herself as a corporeal, impulse-driven being. She would have to acknowledge stimuli and visceral reactions that, from her point of view, turn humans into “filthy beast[s]” (58). She faints, “putting both hands up before her eyes to shut out the sight of [Yank’s] face, to protect her own” (58). 168 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

At the same time, Mildred’s horror in turn crushes Yank’s self-perception. Despite his humiliated fury, he recognizes himself in her gaze. They are both appalled to discover their own animality, yet while Mildred is too anti- septic to cope with the coarse facts of life, what Yank cannot handle is his vulnerability and limitedness. Seeing his mirror image in her eyes, he realizes that he is not actually the superman he imagined himself to be. His mindless bravado vanishes, and an unaccustomed flood of thoughts and emotions begins to overwhelm him. A new bodily posture revealingly accompanies his heightened inner activity. “He is seated [...] in the exact attitude of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’” (59), an attitude that will from now on be his trade- mark. Rodin’s statue is the image of a human being deeply engaged with his inner world, yet enormously physical. The figure is sitting on top of what looks like a roughly hewn rock, but even though man is the one to cultivate his environment, Rodin shows them to be ultimately made of the same stuff—he used the same material for man and rock alike. A similar concept of humanity is put forward in the play, in which the development of Yank’s inner potential goes hand in hand with his acknowledgement of the transient, organic materiality of his body. With its emphasis on the body, the play brings human and non-human animals closer together. This is not to say, though, that it suggests any easy, harmonizing redefinitions of the human being. Once aware of his own animal nature, Yank in fact becomes downright obsessed with all things “ape” or “monkey.” Yet he has lost his sense of purpose and belonging and feels expelled from a higher order. His prelapsarian life in the stokehole may have been hellish rather than paradisiacal, but “there [was] order in it, rhythm, a mechanical regulated recurrence, a tempo” (55). Now, by contrast, his self- identity is smashed to the point that he does not know what to answer when someone asks him for his name. He has “been just Yank for so long” (79). Who or what he is now, he does not know. Throughout the play, issues of class merge into questions about the general status of the human being. It thus makes sense that Yank’s search for people he can still relate to after his “fall” leads him to the labor union of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He learns about them in a defamato- ry newspaper article whose scathing rhetoric seems like an amplified echo of William Jennings Bryan’s anti-evolution campaign:

They plot with fire in one hand and dynamite in the other. They stop not before murder to gain their ends, nor at the outraging of defenseless womanhood. They would tear down society, put the lowest scum in the seats of the mighty, turn Almighty God’s revealed plan for the world topsy-turvy, and make of our sweet and lovely civilization a shambles, a desolation where man, God’s masterpiece, would soon degenerate back to the ape! (76–77) Christina Caupert 169

Yank hopes to find kindred spirits in this ostensible community of repro- bates. He trusts they will help him take revenge on Mildred for the humiliation she caused him, by teaching him how to blow up her father’s steel factories. What is more, he feels he has to get even with steel itself. He used to identify himself ecstatically with this epitome of contemporary technological progress: “Steel, dat stands for de whole ting! And I’m steel—steel— steel” (48). Now he realizes that his old self-image effectively made him a tradeable commodity in the hands of his antagonists, and he pins his hopes for retribution on the IWW. This organization, however, turns out to be a group of dull, perfectly harmless bureaucrats who are much more interested in their ledgers and pamphlets than in the “brainless ape” (83) knocking at their door. Hence, utterly distraught, Yank gives up on his attempts to reconnect with the human species and ends up at the zoo. He stops at the cage of a gorilla who is sitting there in much the same posture that has become characteristic of Yank, the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker. This parallelism makes visible that there is indeed a strong connection between the man and the ape. Yank seems to feel closer to the gorilla than to anyone else during the entire play. He starts talking to it “in a friendly confidential tone, half-mockingly, but with a deep undercurrent of sympathy,” and the gorilla interposes growled replies “as if he understood” (85). For directors, staging this scene is rather challenging. The presence of an actual gorilla is undesirable for reasons ranging from animal welfare to the necessity of maintaining some control over the play, so a human actor is needed to play the part. Presenting a person in an ape suit, however, involves the risk of earning unintended laughter from the theater audience (which actually happened in Peter Stein’s acclaimed 1986 production at the Berlin Schaubühne).28 In this case, readers of the play may have an advantage in that they can picture the scene in the seriousness implied by the stage directions. Yet both experiences evoke an awareness that there is literally something of the ape in the human being, just as there is something human in the ape. Erika Rundle explains, “Once a human being dons an ape costume, the qualities that are normally cited to support human exceptionalism retreat, and we are presented, instead, with continuities that showcase the proximity of one great ape to another.”29 The scene makes us remember that, as the natural sciences now demonstrate (and Darwin already argued), mental and emotional activity is not a uniquely human privilege. The human ape is different from non-human animals in degree, not in kind. For Yank, the one remaining touchstone that differentiates humans from other animals is the ability to experience alienation. He readily grants the gorilla a considerable level of consciousness and cognition, but he insists that the ape “can’t tink” (86) because real, deep thinking, in his understanding, is initiated by a feeling of lost unity, the effect of an unstable position between natural and cultural worlds that are inaccessible for all but human animals. “I 170 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape ain’t on oith and I ain’t in heaven, get me? I’m in de middle tryin’ to separate ‘em, takin’ all de woist punches from bot’ of ’em. Maybe dat’s what dey call hell, huh? But you, yuh’re at de bottom. You belong! Sure” (86). In her article “Zoo Stories,” Una Chaudhuri takes a different view when she regards zoo animals as “displaced”30 beings exposed to “permanent identity crises.”31 One may indeed wonder why, for example, behavioral disorders in pigs or chickens resulting from the horrific conditions of factory farming should be considered anything other than psychological stress-response syn- dromes. Similarly, G. A. Bradshaw has provided evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder in elephants.32 It is important to note, though, that in all of these cases, alienating experiences do not just happen to these animals. It is usually us, the human species, who inflict them on them. We do have special powers that go along with special responsibilities. Unless we acknowledge both the animal, nature-given and the cultural, self-constructed dimensions of our being, we will not only fail to respond to our own needs, we will also fall short of the ethical obligations that we have toward our Mitwelt, the world with, and as a part of which we live. Awareness of our interconnectedness and respect for our differences are therefore equally important. While Western mainstream societies tend to fall short of the former requirement, some ecocritics and animal rights activists may have neglected the latter one. Bradshaw, for instance, asserts the possibility of trans-species dialogue on the basis of “mutual language and understanding.”33 Accordingly, she presents the transcript of a dialogue between two partners discussing, and solving, a clash of priorities, to reveal subsequently that the partners involved are “not your typical anthropocentric couple. Phoebe Greene Linden (Homo sapiens) is a leading expert in long-term relationships between parrots and people, and Hawkeye (Deroptyus accipitinus) is a hawkheaded parrot who has been Phoebe’s companion since she was an egg.”34 Here is a sample of the dialogue:

Hawkeye: Could you cut the branch outside the window so I can see Henri better?

Phoebe: Sure. I’ll finish cutting up the fruit for the others, then I’ll get right at it.

H: You see? That’s what I mean.

P: What do you mean ‘that’s what I mean’?

H: Last week, you promised to really listen and treat me like a partner, someone with equal rights and respect and not just override what I wanted. Christina Caupert 171

P: I’m not putting you off. I made that promise and I meant it. But I want to finish up this fruit so that the others can have breakfast, and then I’ll cut the branch right away.

H: That’s the point [...]. You want to finish the fruit first because you decide it is more important and I have to accept it because I don’t have any other choice. You’re in control and it’s you who has all the power.35

Bradshaw rightly insists that animal lives must be accorded dignity, but the presented example is somewhat problematic. After all, if we were to ask Hawkeye if the given “transcript” is adequate, we would again rely on her interpreter to understand her supposed answer. I do not at all mean to dispute the reported friendship between the quoted parties, but it seems doubtful that assuming the competence to “interpret” for animals in this way is the best approach to taking animals seriously. The example makes Hawkeye appear like an utterly transparent being whose mental world is different from that of a human being only in that it is tied up with a foreign language. In this regard, it represents a rather anthropocentric take of the human-animal relationship that tends towards making animals mere objects of human projec- tions.36 Claims to an uninterrupted translatability and comparability of the species may in the end amount to gestures of appropriation rather than humil- ity and respect. Acknowledging our difference can be just as agonizing as acknowledging our sameness. This is a point Yank also comes to realize in the last scene of The Hairy Ape. In a final attempt to arrive at a new, sustainable self-definition, he offers to shake hands with the gorilla. The ape, however, smashes his ribs “in a murderous hug” (87). He “lets the crushed body slip to the floor; stands over it uncertainly, considering; then picks it up, throws it in the cage, shuts the door” (87). Yank desperately concedes that “[e]ven him didn’t tink I belonged” (87), and dies in the gorilla cage, his long-denied animal body inexorably claiming its dues. The stage directions, referring to him as an “it” in these final lines, refuse to grant him an exceptional status. And yet, the play ends on a reconciliatory note as the reader is told that after death “perhaps, the Hairy Ape at last belongs” (88). This last sentence reminds us that mortality does not take away, but constitutes the dignity of living. As Gernot Böhme explains, it is part of what allows us to be meaningfully involved in this world.

NOTES

1. See, for example, the special section on “Theater and Ecology,” Theater 25, no.1 (1994); Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs, eds. Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Ar- bor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Gabriella Giannachi and Nigel Stewart, eds. Per- 172 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape forming Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts (Bern: Lang, 2005); Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (New York: Routledge, 2010); Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, eds. Readings in Performance and Ecology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Much project work has also been done, for example, the establishment of the recurring “Earth Matters on Stage” festival, founded in 2004 by Larry Fried and Theresa May of the University of Oregon. Initiatives outside the US include Umwelttheater.eu in Germany, the “Climate Change Action Programme” in South Africa, and a range of productions in Finland, like Tuija Kokkonen’s Memos of Time. 2. Richard Schechner’s “environmental theater,” introduced in 1968, may seem like the exception proving the rule, but Schechner did not originally have any ecological or environmentalist concerns in mind. Admittedly, though, many of his ideas (site-specific performances, interaction experiments, variable foci) tie in with basic ecocritical tenets. In a retrospective assessment from the 1990s, Schechner points out some parallels himself, stating that “environments ecological or theatrical can be imagined not only as spaces but as active players in complex systems of transformation.” See Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater, expanded ed. (New York: Applause, 1994), x. 3. Theresa J. May, “Greening the Theater: Taking Ecocriticism from Page to Stage,” Inter- disciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 7, no. 1 (2005): 84–103, at 84. 4. The root of the word “drama” is the Greek for “to do, to act.” 5. Daniel Nettle, “What Happens in Hamlet? Exploring the Psychological Foundations of Drama,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds. Jonathan Gotts- chall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 57. 6. Una Chaudhuri, “‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’: Toward an Ecological Theater,” Theater 25, no.1 (1994): 23–31, at 28. 7. May, “Greening the Theater,” 100. 8. In addition to the above-mentioned titles, see for example, Una Chaudhuri, “(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance,” The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (2007): 8–20; Theresa J. May, “Beyond Bambi: Toward a Dangerous Ecocriticism in Theatre Studies,” Theatre Topics 17, no. 2 (2007): 95-110; James B. McKernan and Marlis Schweitzer, “The Burton Auditor- ium: A Sustainable Theatre at York University,” Canadian Theatre Review 144 (2010): 29–34; Heather Phillips, “The Yellow Earth Becomes the Yellow Dragon: Eco-Consciousness in Chi- nese Theatre of the 1980s,” Asian Theatre Journal 26, no. 1 (2009): 135–147; or Nicholas Ridout, “Animal Labour in the Theatrical Economy,” Theatre Research International 29, no.1 (2004): 57–65. 9. Chaudhuri, “There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake,” 27. 10. An illuminating discussion of the persistence of this theme can be found in Louise Westling, “Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf,” Literature and Ecology. Special issue of Anglia 124, no.1 (2006): 11–43. 11. Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape: A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes, in Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill, Introduction by Joseph Wood Krutch (New York: Modern Library, 1959), 37–88. 12. Humanism and anthropocentrism do not necessarily belong together, as Serenella Iovino argues convincingly in “Ecocriticism and a Non-Anthropocentric Humanism,” in Local Na- tures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, eds. Laurenz Volkmann et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 29-53. Elzette Steenkamp takes a similar position in her contribution to this volume. 13. Ursula K. Heise, Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 115–135. 14. Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 119. 15. Westling, “Darwin in Arcadia,” 34. 16. Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1998), 52–53. 17. William Jennings Bryan, “William Jennings Bryan on Evolution,” Science New Series 55 (1922): 242–243, at 242. As several of the contributions to this volume demonstrate, biblical Christina Caupert 173 declarations on the status of the human being continue to be of central interest in contemporary discussions of human-animal relationships. See the chapters by Başak Ağın Dönmez, Elzette Steenkamp, and Diana Villanueva Romero. 18. Billy Rose and Clarence Gaskill, “Can’t Make a Monkey of Me,” American Experience: Monkey Trial, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/sfeature/pop_monkey_03.html (accessed July 30, 2013). 19. That O’Neill was generally interested in evolution-related topics seems unquestionable. Dynamo (New York: Liveright, 1929), one of his minor plays, deals with the shortcomings of both a fundamentalist belief in the Bible and a fundamentalist belief in techno-scientific progress. In the play, Ruben Light, deeply disappointed that his dogmatically religious parents have sabotaged his relationship to the neighbors’ daughter, renounces his faith and becomes a maniacal worshipper of electricity instead. Light takes his cue from Mr. Fife, his fiancée’s father, an atheist who works at a power plant. He also adopts Fife’s evolutionary convictions, but again pushes them to extremes: “We’ve got the sea in our blood still [...]—but the sea is only hydrogen and oxygen and minerals, and they’re only atoms, and atoms are only protons and electrons—even our blood and the sea are only electricity in the end!” Both fundamental- isms are shown to ultimately spring from the same source, the obsessive search for a stable order: “And think of the stars! Driving through space, round and round, just like the electrons in the atom! But there must be a center around which all this moves, mustn’t there?” (133–34). 20. As customary, all stage directions are given in italics to set them apart from dialogue parts. 21. Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 63. 22. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s persona states, at the beginning of his long flow of memories, visions, and perceptions, “I loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” See Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2004), I.4–5. Unlike Whitman, however, Paddy cannot access open nature; “caged in by steel from a sight of the sky” (Hairy Ape, 47), he has become nostalgic and bitter. 23. Karl Marx, “From The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 39. 24. Mark L. Johnson’s essay “Embodied Reason” is one of many possible examples. See Diana Villanueva Romero’s chapter for some details on Johnson’s position. 25. Non-human animals are the most obvious example of beings that are frequently considered as beings that are bodies (and nothing else), yet the same status has very frequently been assigned to racialized “others” as well. The latter issue also plays an implicit role in The Hairy Ape and is explored in great detail by Erika Rundle in her article “The Hairy Ape’s Humanist Hell: Theatricality and Evolution in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life,’” Eugene O’Neill Review 30 (2008): 48–144. The article at the same time seems to be the only major discussion of the play to consider evolution as a relevant context. 26. The term is “Selbstgegebenheit” in the German original; see Gernot Böhme, Die Natur vor uns: Naturphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Zug, Switzerland: Graue Edition, 2002), 105–109. 27. It hardly needs mentioning that Böhme takes a highly skeptical view of the cyborg concept, which for him amounts to an uncritical affirmation of technological hegemony. On the whole, I agree that distinctions between organic life and technological systems remain valid, even if no clear boundaries can be drawn. 28. See Erika Rundle, “‘The Monkey Problem’: Notes on Staging The Ape,” Eugene O’Neill Review 31 (2009): 122–49, at 141. 29. Ibid., 134. 30. Una Chaudhuri, “Zoo Stories: ‘Boundary Work’ in Theater History,” in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, eds. W. B. Worthen and Peter Holland (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 146. 31. Ibid., 144. 32. G. A. Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 174 What Are We? The Human Animal in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

33. G. A. Bradshaw, “You See Me, But Do You Hear Me? The Science and Sensibility of Trans-Species Dialogue,” Feminism & Psychology 20, no.3 (2010): 407–19, at 413. 34. Ibid., 408. 35. Ibid., 407–8. 36. Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2003), one of not so many American plays that have repeatedly been discussed from explicitly ecocritical perspectives, invites a reading focusing on just this problematic. The play tells the story of Martin, a 50-year-old who seems to have achieved everything in life until he wrecks his marriage by having an affair with a goat. Martin feels that this relationship is based on mutual love and desire because he found, when he met the goat’s eyes for the first time, that “there was a connection there—a communication—that, well . . . an epiphany, I guess comes closest, and I knew what was going to happen” (82). For a number of philosophers, most notably Levinas and Derrida, such face-to-face encounters are indeed crucial moments of ethically and epistemologically relevant contact. But is it ethically and epistemologically tenable that Martin claims to know and understand another creature through his gaze, which the animal returns but cannot explain to him? It is significant, after all, that in naming the goat Sylvia—“it just seemed right” (63)—, Martin performs an act of self-empowerment not unlike the appellation of “the animal” in the singular, famously described by Derrida. “Sylvia,” along with its cultural inscriptions of pastoral, romance, seduction, and transcendence, is ultimately a name Martin has given himself “the right and the authority to give to another living creature” (Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369–418, at 392).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albee, Edward. The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2003. Böhme, Gernot. Die Natur vor uns: Naturphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Zug, Switzer- land: Graue Edition, 2002. Bradshaw, G. A. Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. ———. “You See Me, But Do You Hear Me? The Science and Sensibility of Trans-Species Dialogue.” Feminism & Psychology 20, no. 3 (2010): 407–19. Bryan, William Jennings. “William Jennings Bryan on Evolution.” Science New Series 55 (1922): 242–243. Chaudhuri, Una. “‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’: Toward an Ecological Theater.” Theater 25, no.1 (1994): 23–31. ———. “Zoo Stories: ‘Boundary Work’ in Theater History.” In Theorizing Practice: Redefin- ing Theatre History, edited by W. B. Worthen and Peter Holland, 136–150. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369-418. Heise, Ursula K. Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur. Berlin: Suhr- kamp, 2010. May, Theresa J. “Greening the Theater: Taking Ecocriticism from Page to Stage.” Interdiscipli- nary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 7, no.1 (2005): 84–103. Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Marx, Karl. “From The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” In Karl Marx: A Reader, edited by Jon Elster, 35-46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Nettle, Daniel. “What Happens in Hamlet? Exploring the Psychological Foundations of Dra- ma.” In The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, 56–75. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005. Christina Caupert 175

Numbers, Ronald L. Darwinism Comes to America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. O’Neill, Eugene. Dynamo. New York: Liveright, 1929. ———. The Hairy Ape: A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes. Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill. Introduction by Joseph Wood Krutch, 37–88. New York: Modern Library, 1959. Rose, Billy and Clarence Gaskill. “Can’t Make a Monkey of Me.” American Experience: Monkey Trial. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/sfeature/pop_monkey_03.html (accessed July 30, 2013). Rundle, Erika. “‘The Monkey Problem’: Notes on Staging The Ape.” Eugene O’Neill Review 31 (2009): 122–49. Schechner, Richard. Environmental Theater. Expanded ed. New York: Applause, 1994. Westling, Louise. “Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilga- mesh to Virginia Woolf.” Literature and Ecology. Special issue of Anglia 124, no.1 (2006): 11–43. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin, 2004.

Chapter Eleven

Familiar Animals

The Question of Human-Animal Relationships in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Elzette Steenkamp

Recent studies in postcolonial ecocriticism foreground the relationship between social injustices and environmental exploitation 1, recognizing the ways in which “ecology can still be seen as deeply implicated in the bureau- cracies of the land-owning classes, in the ideologies protecting the material comforts which modernity is spreading with great unevenness across the planet.”2 This correspondence between racial, gendered, national, and economic inequalities and environmental problems is explored in Noël Sturgeon’s En- vironmentalism in Popular Culture, which calls for engagement in a “global feminist environmental justice analysis” as a method of addressing interrelated social inequalities and environmental problems:

If we want to create a truly sustainable future, we must think about social inequalities as much as we think about environmental problems, and we must understand their interrelations. We will be better off, I believe, working from analytical frameworks that address environmental problems and social inequalities together.3

From a South African perspective, the issue of “environmental racism” is particularly fraught, considering the country’s history of exploitative Euro- pean imperialist conservation practices, land disputes, and the violent displacement and dispossession of indigenous peoples through pass laws. For a nation still struggling to overcome the brutal legacies of colonialism and apartheid, environmentalism often emerges as yet another policy of exclu-

177 178 Familiar Animals sion, with only an elite few sheltered from the immediate effects of environmental degradation.4 In an essay titled “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction,” Anthony Vital puts forward the possibility of a “postcolonial” approach to environmentalism in South Africa that recognizes the interrelatedness of social and environmental injustices, and attempts to negotiate “the inevitable friction between the tendency to value human need and the recognition (sup- plied by ecology) that the natural world has its own value.”5 Vital cites the environmental justice movement as already exemplifying such an integrated approach to environmentalism:

This movement, perhaps more than other similar tendencies, develops an environmentalism that could be called postcolonial, asserting the need for a ‘people-centred’ interest in the environment while being alert to both South Afri- ca’s colonial legacies and its peripheral position within a globalised economy. To anyone interested in a specifically South African ecocriticism, the environmental justice movement thus offers a useful context in which to re-envisage and evaluate South African writing.6

Such a “postcolonial” approach to environmentalism calls for a delicate balance between an anthropocentric view of ecological concerns, which foregrounds human need, and the recognition of the intrinsic value of the natural world. But what does this call for a “people-centred interest in the environment” mean for human-animal relationships in South Africa? To even begin to answer this question, it is necessary to ask another, perhaps even more complex, question: How do South Africans relate to animals? Regrettably, there is a dearth of studies on human-animal relations in the South African academy. One of the few sustained contributions to the field of Animal Studies in South Africa is Wendy Woodward’s The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives, which traces the representation of animals in the literary works of Southern African authors such as J.M. Coetzee, Marlene van Niekerk, and Zakes Mda. Woodward investigates the ways in which animals have been objectified either as pets or “spectacles of beauty or wildness” and suggests that the narratives in question depict animals as richly complex individuals and moral agents, thus calling for the critical rethinking of the categories and distinctions that continue to uphold the dualism between human and nonhuman animals. 7 For many South Africans, however, concern for the conservation of wildlife and the ethical treatment of animals still bears a tainted association with white privilege and past practices of forcibly removing people from their homes to make way for pristine parks dedicated to the protection of African wildlife.8 Nearly two decades after the demise of the system of apartheid, the issue of animal rights remains a sensitive one. After all, some may argue, it is difficult to commit to a debate about the rights of animals when so many Elzette Steenkamp 179 gross human rights violations remain unaddressed in post-liberation South Africa. An example of the prevailing sentiment that animal rights should not take precedence over human rights is a recent public debate sparked by a comment made by South African President Jacob Zuma about pet ownership. President Zuma declared that keeping animals as pets is part of “white culture” and that African tradition is more focused on family. This remark resulted in a widely distributed internet meme featuring a photograph of former-president Nelson Mandela indulging in “un-African” behavior— playing with his pet Rhodesian Ridgeback. Several black South African public figures also responded to the comment by posting photographs of themselves walking their dogs. President Zuma’s office issued the following statement: “This is not to say that animals should not be loved or cared for. The message merely emphasised the need not to elevate our love for our animals above our love for other human beings.” 9 The tension between the desire to foreground human need and the imperative to heed the call to responsibility of the non-human other is evinced in South African author Lauren Beukes’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning speculative novel, Zoo City (2010). The novel represents human-animal relations through the lens of speculative fiction, an element of play that allows for hitherto unthought-of interconnections between humans and animal subjects. By proposing afresh the slipperiness of the boundaries between self (being “human”) and seemingly alien other, Zoo City not only challenges the human/animal divide, but also delivers social commentary on the legacy of racialized segregation and ongoing xenophobic violence in South Africa. Both Beukes’s Zoo City and her earlier novel, Moxyland (2008), introduce a cast of antiheroes cast adrift in a fragmented world in which relationships are often tenuous or transitory. In both novels, connections are established with animal others that are somehow genetically linked to the protago- nists, challenging the divide between human self and animal other. The notion of a genetic and psychic link between human and animal individuals is tentatively introduced in Moxyland (2008), which Beukes describes as an “allegory for a corporate apartheid state.”10 In this novel, Kendra, a “spon- sorbaby” who has been injected with nanobots in order to promote a soft drink called Ghost, experiences a frightening moment of connection with “aitos”—police dogs that have been injected with the same technology. This connection is further strengthened when Kendra is exposed to a deadly virus and is apparently “put down” by her company in the same way that defunct aitos are disposed of. Although the mysterious link between the implied death of Kendra and the death of the genetically altered aitos remains a tantalizing aside in Moxy- land, such an interchange between human and animal is more fully explored in Zoo City. This dystopic noir is set in an alternative Johannesburg in which 180 Familiar Animals criminal offenders are mysteriously “animalled.” Anyone who commits a criminal act is cursed with the sudden appearance of an animal familiar to which they are then psychically linked. The “animalled,” or “zoos,” live in fear of the inevitable approach of the Undertow, an inexplicable and deadly blackness that consumes them once their animals die. With these “spirit” animals serving as constant evidence of their criminal transgressions, the “zoos” are forced into the slums of Zoo City, a lawless urban ghetto. Beukes’s permutation of the city of Johannesburg is frighteningly familiar. The Johannesburg streets that the “animalled” protagonist, Zinzi, and her sloth familiar negotiate are filled with recognizable sights such as “Zimbab- wean vendors” selling “crates of suckers and snacks and single smokes” and “flyers advertising miracle AIDS cures, cheap abortions and prophets.”11 Even the peculiarity of “zoos” is couched in local, or at least African, belief: the “animalled” each possess a special talent known as a mashavi. The Shona people of Zimbabwe acknowledge mashavi as the wandering spirits of people who have died without any descendants. The use of a Zimbabwean mythology in order to explain the supernatural talents of those affected by the “Zoo Plague” gestures toward the novel’s interest in the plight of foreign refugees in South Africa, many of whom are Zimbabweans fleeing the tyrannical rule of Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party. Zoo City is very much concerned with “real-life” South African problems such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, global warming, racism and xenophobia, poverty, and 419 scams. Zinzi’s lover, Benoît, is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The reader’s introduction to this character in the opening paragraphs of the novel already hints at a tragic past. Benoît’s “calloused feet” are compared to “knots of driftwood.”12 Zinzi muses: “Feet like that, they tell a story. They say he walked all the way from Kinshasa with his Mongoose strapped to his chest.”13 Zinzi and Benoît’s relationship is threatened when he discovers that the wife and three children he left behind may still be alive. Benoît’s tale of loss is horrific:

The last time he saw his family, they were running into the forest, like ghosts between the trees. Then the FDLR beat him to the ground with their rifle butts, poured paraffin over him and set him alight. That was over five years ago. . . . His wife and his three little children had vanished. Presumed dead. Lost for- ever.14

Although Beukes colors her novel with elements of the fantastic, Benoît’s account of the loss of his family and his subsequent flight to South Africa is a realistic representation of the atrocities endured by people in a number of war-torn countries across Africa, and indeed the world. In an interview with Sarah Lotz included in the Bonsela edition of the novel, Lauren Beukes Elzette Steenkamp 181 confirms that Benoît’s character is based on the very real concerns around refugees in South Africa, and “inspired by the shame and horror of the xenophobic attacks in 2008.”15 Zoo City can also be read as a comment on the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa and the stigmatization of those infected and affected by the disease. It is clear from the outset of the novel that the “animalled” are forced to live as disgraced pariahs. Zinzi informs us: “The truth is we’re all criminals. Murderers, rapists, junkies. Scum of the earth. In China they execute zoos on principle. Because nothing says guilty like a spirit critter at your side.”16 The stigma associated with the “Zoo Plague” or “Acquired Aposym- biotic Familiarism” (AAF) invokes the issue of the othering of those affected by Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in present-day South Africa. In “HIV/AIDS and ‘othering’ in South Africa,” Petros et al. identify “factors contributing to the [HIV] epidemic” as “stigma, denial and active ‘othering’ of people living with HIV/AIDS.”17 “Stigma,” they assert, “has been cited as the greatest obstacle the world over in combating the epidemic.”18 The connection between AAF and HIV/AIDS is further strengthened through the novel’s inclusion of a review of a fictional documentary, The Warlord and the Penguin: The Untold Story of Dehqan Baiyat, which supposedly examines the life of Dehqan Baiyat, an Afghan warlord incorrectly identified as Patient Zero for Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism. Accord- ing to this mock review, some comparison exists between Baiyat and Gaëtan Dugas, the Canadian flight attendant alleged to be responsible for the spread of HIV in the US.19 Beukes also touches briefly on the topical issue of environmental crisis and global warming in one of Zinzi’s speculations regarding the cause of the Zoo Plague. Zinzi flippantly explains the theory of “Toxic Reincarnation”:

[Environmental awareness is] very now. Global warming, pollution, toxins, BPA from plastics leaching into the environment has disrupted the spiritual realm or whatever you want to call it, so, if you’re Hindu, and you go through some terrible trauma, part of your spirit breaks away and returns as the animal you were going to be reincarnated as.20

Although the issue of ecological degradation is not explored at length, the novel is, as previously mentioned, centered on an irrevocably intertwined theme—the relationship between human beings and their animal others. 21 Beukes’s treatment of the interconnectedness of human characters and animal familiars moves beyond Jacques Derrida’s notion, expressed in “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” of the animal as “wholly other, like the (every) other that is (every bit) other,”22 always separated from the human by an “abyssal rupture.”23 In the fantastical realm of Zoo City, the 182 Familiar Animals rupture between “being human” and “being animal” is thoroughly breached. Zinzi and her sloth are not only psychically and emotionally linked, but also share physical experiences. For example, Sloth’s distaste for alcohol requires Zinzi to remain abstemious. They cannot be separated for long periods of time, and ultimately the death of one results in the death of the other. This imaginative coupling suggests the kind of sympathetic experience that challenges the perceived divide between humans and animals that allows for the domination of the latter by the former, and it recalls a Deep Ecological view of the permeation of human-animal boundaries. In “Beyond Ecology,” Neil Evernden asks:

Where do we draw the line between one creature and another? Where does one organism stop and another begin? Is there even a boundary between you and the non-living world, or will the atoms on this page be a part of your body tomorrow? How, in short, can you make any sense out of the concept of man as a discrete entity? How can the proper study for man be man if it is impossible to exist out of context?24

The collapse of the physical and psychological boundaries that separate human from animal poses the questions: Who is admitted into the category of the human? And what are the requirements? In Zoo City, the concern regarding the “animalled” or “zoos” expressed by other characters in the novel appears to be based not so much on the fact that they are criminals, but rather the suspicion that they can no longer be considered wholly human. The fanaticism with which the animalled are rejected and stigmatized is expressed through a particularly venomous online “comment” relating to the aforementioned review of The Warlord and the Penguin. This fictional user writes:

Get it together, people, apos aren’t human. It’s right there in the name. Zoos.Animalled.Aposymbiots. Whatever PC term is flavour of the week. As in not human. As in short for ‘apocalypse’. . . . Apos are criminals They’re scum. They’re not even animals. They’re just things and will get what is [MORE] [1031 Comments]. 25

Zoo City relies on the (con)fusion of “animalled” humans and their familiars for its humor and satiric bite. The following exchange between Zinzi and a group of perplexed non-animalled acquaintances is amusing, but also points (if once again rather flippantly) to the issue of animal experimentation in the name of science and medical advancement: “‘Who knows how it works. I know I’m being antagonistic. But aren’t there tests? I thought they did a full analysis?’’ Human lab-rats!’ says Henry enthusiastically. ‘Only I guess sometimes there are actual rats, right?’ That must be confusing.’”26 The confusion here between human lab-rats, lab-rats, and familiars in the form of Elzette Steenkamp 183 rats problematizes the practice of scientific experimentation on animals. Giv- en the physical link between aposymbiots and their familiars, any injury to one will result in the injury (or death) of the other, negating the argument which locates animal experimentation as justifiable because its benefits to the human race outweighs the harm done to animal subjects in the process. Due to her biological and psychic connection with her sloth, Zinzi occupies an interstitial position and falls outside of the category of “genuine” human, thus exposing its instability. Such a collapse of the categories of the human and the animal echoes Matthew Calarco’s idea of “indistinction,” put forward in Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. If we can no longer uncritically accept the distinctions that separate “being human” from “being animal,” Calarco suggests, we find ourselves in a space of aporia in which we are called to rethink in a fundamental way not only what it means to be human, but also what it means to be animal. 27 The question at stake here is whether or not Zoo City’s effective removal of the category of the human undercuts the novel’s commitment to issues of human social justice (as explored earlier in this chapter). The narrative concludes with a return to the issue of responsibility toward human others. Zinzi’s decision to travel to Kigali to find Benoît’s family in the final moments of the novel is redemptive and absolutely responsible, as it is made from a position of uncertainty. Despite the sense of anonymity, dislocation, and detachment that prevails in Zoo City, Zinzi is ultimately driven by an unselfish responsibility toward unknown others. She is responsible for the well-being of her animal familiar, Sloth, because it is irrevocably intertwined with her own well-being. Thus, concern for the animal other does not require a response to the call of the wholly other. The merging of the human and animal psyche and biology allows for an infinite Einfuhlung, an empathy not restricted by the limits of the imagination. However, it appears that engaging the sympathetic imagination beyond oneself, from a position of indecision, is what is deemed as truly redemptive and just here. Zinzi’s concern for Benoît’s family forces her to look beyond her own comfort and desires in order to come to the aid of a wholly other. Zinzi concludes: “It’s going to be awkward. It’s going to be the best thing I’ve done with my miserable life.”28 Through this final selfless act, Zinzi arguably atones for the lapse in judgment that causes the death of her brother and results in the appearance of her sloth. One cannot help but wonder how willing a participant Sloth is in Zinzi’s potentially dangerous decision to leave Zoo City for Kigali. This anthropocentric turn in the novel gestures toward the tension between the impulse to emphasize human social injustices and the dire need (within the context of a global ecological crisis) to address the ways in which we relate to animals and the natural world. Ultimately, Zoo City negotiates the precarious balance 184 Familiar Animals between environmental need and larger humanist social concerns with some finesse. One is inclined to forgive the moments of slippage, when considering that the protagonist’s symbiotic relationship with her animal familiar is presented as the catalyst for her newfound desire to reach out to her human counterparts. The novel’s open-ended conclusion does not negate the possibility that both Sloth and Zinzi would benefit from the decision to take on a journey to Kigali. Heeding the call to responsibility for our human others and being sensitive to the agency of nonhuman others, it seems, is not mutually exclusive.

NOTES

1. See for example Graham Huggan’s “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspec- tives,” and Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. 2. Anthony Vital, “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31.no.2 (2005): 297–313. 3. Noël Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 5–6. 4. See William Slaymaker’s “Ecoing the Other(s): The Call of Global Green and Black African Responses,” PMLA 116.no. 1 (2001): 129–144. 5. Vital, “Situating Ecology,” 299. 6. Ibid., 298. 7. Wendy Woodward, The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narra- tives (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008). 8. See The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History by Jane Carruthers for an in-depth study of the role of the national park in South African history. 9. “South Africa’s Jacob Zuma in Dog Ownership Row,” BBC News.co.uk. 27 December 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20851036. (accessed 15 August 2013). 10. Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (Johannesburg: Jacana Media Ltd., 2010). 11. Ibid., 6–7. 12. Ibid., 1. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 56. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. George Petros et al., “HIV/AIDS and ‘Othering’ in South Africa: The Blame Goes On,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 8, no. 1 (January-February 2006): 67-77. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 62. 20. Ibid., 154. 21. The issue of environmental crisis is, however, is addressed in various other South African speculative novels. These include Jenny Robson’s Savannah 2116 AD, which presents a futuristic South Africa in which normal human beings or “homosaps” are forced to live in segregated camps and harvested for their organs in order to save the dwindling African wildlife; Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir, which is set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic Karoo landscape; as well as Henriëtta Rose-Innes’s short story “Poison.” 22. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no.2 (Winter 2002): 369–418, at 381. 23. Ibid., 398. Elzette Steenkamp 185

24. Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place and the Pathetic Fallacy,” in The Ecocriti- cism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty & Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 95. 25. Beukes, Zoo, 64–65. 26. Ibid., 128. 27. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 28. Beukes, Zoo, 309.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beukes, Lauren. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media Ltd., 2010. ———, Moxyland. Johannesburg: Jacana Media Ltd., 2008. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Carruthers, Jane. The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995. Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place and the Pathetic Fallacy.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 92–104. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, no.2 (Winter 2002): 369–418. Huggan, Graham. “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 701–31. Huggan, Gaham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environ- ment. London: Routledge, 2010. Petros, George, et al. “HIV/AIDS and ‘Othering’ in South Africa: The Blame Goes On.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 8, no. 1 (January-February 2006): 67–77. Robson, Jenny. Savannah 2116 AD. Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, 2004. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. “Poison.” In African Pens: New Writing from Southern Africa 2007, edited by Robin Malan. Cape Town: Spearhead, 2007. Rosenthal, Jane. Souvenir. Johannesburg: Bromponie Press, 2004. Slaymaker, William. “Ecoing the Other(s): The Call of Global Green and Black African Re- sponses.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 129–144. “South Africa’s Jacob Zuma in Dog Ownership Row.” BBC News.co.uk. 27 December 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20851036. (accessed 15 August, 2013). Sturgeon, Noël. Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Poli- tics of the Natural. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009. Vital, Anthony. “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness.” Journal of Southern African Studies 31, no. 2 (2005): 297–313. Woodward, Wendy. The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.

Chapter Twelve

Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets”1 in Peter Dickinson’s Eva

Diana Villanueva Romero

I concur with Elizabeth Ammons who in the preface to her book Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (2010) confesses her belief in the power of words to offer inspiration to imagine new and constructive ways of living on Earth.2 Peter Dickinson’s Eva (1988) is such a work. It is an ecotopian novel that describes a dystopian world where overpopulation has led to the depletion of the Earth’s resources. Besides the scarcity of arable land, the planet’s biodiversity has been reduced to a handful of species. A human invention, the “shaper,” has become their substitute. This device generates holograms, or “shapings,” of anything a human can think of: from long-lost animals to thickly forested areas. Nonetheless, there is one species in particular that has been carefully preserved: the chimpanzee. This has become the object of interest of both science and the corporate world. Its phylogenetic closeness to humans has turned it into the perfect subject for experimentation, even more so now that few nonhuman animals survive. Likewise, chimpanzees feature in some of the most popular commercials on the shaper, such as those for a soft drink called Honeybear. As a way to keep their population secure, every city has branches of the International Chimp Pool. Eva’s father, Dr. Daniel Adamson, works as Director of Primate Zoolo- gy at this institution. Eva, the novel’s protagonist, has therefore lived among chimpanzees all her life “making chimp chatter before she said her first human word,” learning to “joke with their jokes” and “feel with their feelings.”3 A serious car accident, however, will bring her closer to them than anyone could ever imagine. The novel begins at a hospital with Eva lying in bed trying to wake up and not being able to move. Although her mother is by her side, things do not feel

187 188 Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s Eva right. After the accident her body was so severely injured that Eva’s parents had to make a very difficult choice: continuing her life using a surrogate body, a chimpanzee’s body. Thanks to a state-of-the-art procedure developed by Dr. Joan Pradesh and based on a phenomenon described as “neuron memory,” Eva’s self has been transferred to the body of a young female chimpanzee, Kelly. Dickinson’s book describes the coming of age of this “girl- chimp” beginning with her awakening at the hospital, dealing later with all the conflicts her hybrid self—both human and animal—raise, and ending with Eva transformed into the mother of a new “race” of chimpanzees who will become the only hope for the salvation of the planet. According to Dickinson, the writing of Eva originated in his attempt to retell the biblical story of the Mother of humanity. He felt caught by what he saw as “a single resonant myth” with the potential for “survival and rebirth […] in everchanging forms.”4 Eva’s “becoming animal” appears in the novel as a metaphor for the change of paradigm needed in today’s world to respond to the environmental crisis. Such a change is illustrated in the novel by a dismantling of traditional binaries that crystallizes in a new story of creation where the role of the female and that of the animal are recast as that of life saviors. In so doing, Dickinson’s work not only reverses the Judeo-Christian creation myth where, as Jacques Derrida explains, the sexual and species difference begins,5 but also reminds us of the need to embrace our own animality. The novel pays close attention to issues—overpopulation, species extinction, consumerism, and animal experimentation—that feature at the core of current ecocriticism on the dangers of anthropocentrism. Since the 1970s philosophies born under the rubric of postmodernism have recognized objects of oppression such as women and nonhuman animals, among others, and have tried to dismantle the structures of oppression operating on them. These structures are based on a set of binary constructions four of which are dismantled in Eva: human/animal, mind/body, culture/nature, and man/woman. This erasure of boundaries and the reversal of Eve’s myth serve to illustrate, from a literary standpoint, a new paradigm rising from the turn of the third-millennium philosophies. In this, the practice of an ethics of difference replaces dualistic structures with multiplicity 6 leading to compassion for the other and the re-enchantment of materiality 7 through attention to the more- than-human world.

CORPOREAL ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN HUMANS AND ANIMALS

Eva spans from Eva’s cut-short human adolescence until her death at an old age as respected matriarch. After the accident that disables her human body, Diana Villanueva Romero 189 a new Eva is engineered that will epitomize the balanced integration of the human and the nonhuman animal, and in this process Eva will also embody other boundary crossings that will lead to her full realization. Eva’s operation serves to expose the contradictions inherent in science’s negotiation of the species boundary. Such contradictions are based, according to Cat Yampell, on “two basic human anxieties that maintain practices of dominion and commodification: the concern that the distinction between human-animals and animals is not as broad as human-animals would like (and need) to believe, and the fear that humanity shares more similarities and kinship with animals than differences.”8 The novel criticizes this double discourse of science. In a kind of schizophrenic acrobatics of reason, science hesitates between the use it makes of nonhuman animals’ similarity to humans and the lower status it accords to them in the chain of beings. Chimpan- zees, in Eva’s world, are one of the few surviving species on Earth due to their likeness to humans, which places them in a very dangerous position. Their phylogenetic closeness to humans means that, while still being categorized as animals and thus downplayed, they are convenient surrogates for humans in medical experimentation. They are too close to humans not to preserve them, but they are also too animal not to use them. This approach exposes what Helen Tiffin has denounced, that the species boundary is a contingent one which shifts across what is considered as human and animal for each society in each period of its history. 9 Curiously, only in Eva’s case is the experiment with “neuron memory” successful. In the rest of patients the mutual rejection between human and animal is so intense that it becomes impossible for them to coexist in the same body. Eva embraces difference and crosses the gap between the human and the nonhuman animal, becoming thus a bridge between the two. Howev- er, for patients Stefan and Sasha, this will turn out to be extremely difficult due to their refusal to accept their new animal self—Caesar and Angel. Indeed, these images of acceptance and rejection become a meaningful metaphor of the conflicting relationship humans have with their animality. So while Eva is described in terms that suggest a theriophilic sense or intelli- gence, the rest of the characters except for Grog, her animal activist friend, are portrayed as being driven by the feeling Barry Lopez has called “theriophobia” or the loathing of the animal, at the heart of which “is the fear of one’s own nature.”10 Eva is able to cross the human/animal boundary thanks to several factors. The first one is her bonding from an early age with the chimpanzees. The second element is her youth which makes it easier for her to feel close to animals. And lastly, the third factor has to do with Eva being highly empathic and compassionate to others. As Cat Yampell explains, she “is one of the few human-animals in the novel to understand that life is sacred regardless of species.”11 But she is hurting because of being forced to choose and she 190 Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s Eva manages to overcome this conflict by making peace with her two selves. This integration is expressed through two revealing literary motifs in the first part of the novel: the girl chimpanzee’s dreams and the presence of what she calls “the ghost.” Eva’s dreams serve to show a progression where the unconscious activity of Kelly’s mind is progressively intertwined with that of Eva. Hence, the more “Eva” this new human-animal becomes, the less descriptions of the trees the chimpanzee Kelly longed for there are. This change reveals the unconscious working of Eva’s human mind trying to adjust to her divided self. On the same level, although separated from her oneiric activity, is Eva’s realization of a third self that accompanies both the new Eva—a composite of Eva and Kelly—and the old one. This is Dickinson’s second motif. It responds to what Eva refers to as the “ghost,” “the one who’d come in between” the old and the new Eva after the accident. 12 She describes it as “a sort of nothing person, a sleeping mind in a smashed body.”13 This sort of ghostly Eva is the one that retains a memory of the girl Eva used to be. The “ghost” lives in Eva’s unconscious mind where lies an inborn rejection of the animal shared by all humans. It is in this “unconscious level” mentioned above where “the danger lies” because as her father explains to her “you can’t persuade it by rational means not to reject your new body, and second, because it is itself the main interface with that body. When you think, you think with a human mind. When you blink, you blink with a chimpanzee’s involuntary reaction. Your own unconscious mind lies along that border.”14

“[OPENING HER] SENSES TO THE SENSUOUS”:15 REFLECTIONS ON MIND AND BODY

The previous quotation presents the difficulties inherent in the dichotomy traditionally established between mind and body which run parallel to those of the human/animal pair. Dickinson’s work questions the fracture within the self between mind and body that separates us from the animal we are. How- ever, Eva also manages to deconstruct this opposition through her progres- sive awareness of her new body. For centuries in the Western world the body has been viewed as a slave to the dictating mind. This Cartesian approach has been questioned lately by an epistemological turn taking place in several disciplines. Some strands of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy use the very suggestive concept of the “embodied mind.” Therefore, although the Cartesian ontology defines humans as a mind encapsulated within a body—matter—which does not count as anything more than a container or recipient, phenomenologists and cognitive scientists defend that we are our bodies. Our perception of any Diana Villanueva Romero 191 given situation is mediated by the body and therefore so is our reaction to it. As philosopher Mark L. Johnson puts it:

Human beings are creatures of the flesh. What we can experience and how we make sense of what we experience depend on the kinds of bodies we have and on the ways we interact with the various environments we inhabit. It is through our embodied interactions that we inhabit a world, and it is through our bodies that we are able to understand and act within this world with varying degrees of success.16

Thus, it can be said that there is more to the body than meets the eye. The mind is profoundly connected to the body, so much that any organic alteration affects the subject’s behavior and perception as neuropsychiatrist Oliver Sacks observes in The Man Who Mistook Her Wife for a Hat (1985). By the same token, by displacing the focus of attention from the mind to the body, human-animal continuity acquires a stronger validity. The nonhuman animal has been customarily identified with the body and its myriad of urges, and the fact that now there is a wide acknowledgment of how our conduct is determined by our corporeality places elements of both pairs—mind and body, human and animal—not in space of opposition or confrontation, but in a zone of cooperation where an intricate network weaves them together. Eva’s character therefore acquires another dimension when looked at through the lens of the concept of the embodied mind, since by transcending this new frontier of the mind with the experience of her new body, Eva becomes in a literal sense animal. The expression “becoming animal” is charged with potential. It is usually associated with philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s use of it in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), but as Alain Beaulieu remarks, it had already been introduced in their book on Kafka where they explain it as follows:

To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of non-signifying signs. . . . There is no longer anything but movements, vibra- tions, thresholds in a deserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroach are distinguished only by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by the particular underground tunnel of the rhizome . . . these tunnels are underground intensities.17

Later, Deleuze and Guattari will develop this theme in A Thousand Plateaus as part of their project to overcome dualisms. In this work, they insist in making clear that becoming-animal does not consist in an imitation or an 192 Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s Eva identification with the animal, nor is it a dream or a fantasy. What matters is “the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.”18 Thus, they insist in the process itself, and not so much in the final result and by doing so, they develop a theory where, as James Urpeth contends, there is an “insistence on the priority of becoming over being, of the kinetic and verbal over the static and nominal.”19 This emphasis on process strikes a chord with the novel under analysis when dealing with the transcendence of the mind/body boundary since in Eva the crossing between mind and body occurs through Eva’s awareness of her new body. Similarly suggestive is David Abram’s own version of “becoming animal” that he describes as “a way of thinking enacted as much by the body as by the mind” thanks to which it is possible to “[become] more deeply human by acknowledging, affirming, and growing into our animality.”20 Abram’s approach to the other consists in a bodily response to its presence which ultimately leads to a spiritual experience of the sensuous and ultimately, to an epiphany of oneness. Other scholars have come to similar interpretations in their dealings with animals.21 This is so, for example, in the case of psychologist Kenneth Sha- piro. He proposes a three-pronged strategy for acquiring the perspective of the animals. This strategy is based on firstly, assessing the experience of nonhuman animals by sensing or empathizing with their bodily movement or intentions, what he calls “kinesthetic empathy”; secondly, adding to this the “social constructions,” that is, “the cultural meanings of the animal”; and thirdly, considering the “history” or biography of the specific animal as understood by the human researcher.22 Shapiro applies this model to his interaction with his dog Sabaka. He describes how, while they play, the establishment of a “kinesthetic empathy” is made possible thanks to a state where his rational mind is tuned off in favor of connecting with the “bodily moves” of Sabaka. This, according to him, implies “a leave-take of the self,” meaning not only “putting oneself in the place of the other” but for a moment, “if only focally, [forgetting oneself] and directly [sensing] what [the other is] experiencing.”23 A further enlightening experience is described by primatologist Barbara Smuts who spent two years studying a group of baboons in Kenya. She talks of her experiences with them and how these led her to develop a sense of being one with the group, as well as new insights on her relationship with the nonhuman animal world. She argues that close experiences with animals, wild or domestic, can change the human’s sense of self, erasing the species boundary and crystallizing into a spiritual awakening to the other. According to her, this process is activated through imitation of the bodily responses of the other, finally leading to merging with it. As a matter of fact, Smuts explains how this mimicking had the virtue of producing an internal change Diana Villanueva Romero 193 in her which allowed her to finely tune with the group so that, at times, she would know what needed to be done without further warning. This revealing experience led Smuts to approach her life at home with her dog in a very different way—a way where the life of the mind is enriched by that of the body, opening possibilities of synchronization with other beings. This relinquishing of the self to be one with the other is very similar to the experiences described by Abram and Shapiro. They can similarly be understood in line with Deleuze’s and Guattari statement with regard to the body and its affects:24

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.25

In Eva’s case, her new body means both challenges and possibilities. Eva finds an exhilaration in her new body that she had never experienced before. Through it she discovers “the sheer pleasure of movement, the feeling of naturalness” as well as its “rightness,” “its beauty and energy.”26 However, this chimpanzee body also carries within itself old perceptions of things that impose new patterns of behavior in the young girl. After the surgery, she complains, for instance, of having several “sudden surges of anxiety” a day, something she never experienced before. Also when faced with the kind of situations that would be suffered as stressful by a chimpanzee, she reacts like one: her pelt bristles and her mouth opens in a grin of anxiety. But, interestingly, it is precisely Eva’s transfer to a chimpanzee body that sets in motion her coming of age. This metamorphosis starts in the body and from the space of corporality ends up inundating Eva’s self in ways similar to the experiences abovementioned. In fact, it can be argued that Eva’s transformation happens in accordance with a three-stage process that begins in her body and ultimately takes hold of her whole psyche. The first phase involves a revalor- ization of physicality thanks to the use of her new body as an instrument of communication with the chimpanzees. This is exemplified in Eva’s first encounter with them after her operation. Eva starts using the chimpanzee language she knows, a combination of “grimace and gesture and touch”27 that soon will be as significant to her as, if not more than, human words. Over time Eva enters into a second phase that can be explained as a stage of empathy which begins with her own acceptance of Kelly’s body demands on her which “she [can’t] bottle away,”28 and progresses toward tuning into the needs of the chimpanzees of the Pool. Such phase culminates in a sort of mystical connection with the more-than-human world, the third and last phase of Eva’s progression into becoming animal. Thus, corporeality leads to 194 Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s Eva the development of empathy and from here there is only one step to merging with the animal group. No words are then required, only opening oneself to communion with the group. This is clearly facilitated by their successful return to nature. In what remains of the wild, more than anywhere else, Eva manages to transcend all boundaries and becomes one with the group sharing the realization of their dream, the one Kelly had passed on to Eva:

Eva sat at the edge of the group and watched them. Deliberately she lived in the moment, refusing to think about what lay ahead. She could not imagine that she would ever be so happy again, so filled with tingling, sparkling peace. Of course it was too hot for scampering around, though the spray from the stream helped, but she could feel that there was more to the stillness of the chimps than that. It was something shared, like a song, the wonder, the amaze- ment, the deep content, the sense of having come home. She did not have to guess but knew, because she could feel the awareness going to and fro among them, shared and real, that they understood what had happened. The part that mattered, anyway. All of them, wide awake, were remembering and recognizing the dream. If nothing else happened, or if everything she and Grog had planned went wrong, this hour, this noon, would have been worthwhile.29

REWRITING CREATION: FROM MAN THE HUNTER TO WOMAN THE TREE PLANTER

The last boundary crossed by Eva is that separating culture and nature. This transgression starts at home, moves to the shaper society, enters the reserve, and finishes by creating a space—the island of St. Hilaire where Eva founds her colony—where the erasure of boundaries permits the regeneration of the planet. Dickinson’s story follows the conventions of a novel of initiation where the protagonist, as a child, must set herself outside society in order to define her identity. Eva defines herself by fighting against the impositions coming from her parents, science in the guise of neuroscience and primatology, and the corporation SMI that funded her surgery and owns rights on her. Each and every one of these institutions constructs her in ways that disempower her, but she will prevail in the end and achieve her own independent identity. It is clear that Eva’s operation challenges the limits of acceptance any parent will be willing to endure. Her mother, Lil, finds it difficult to relate to a “furry creature” in whom, at first sight, she can hardly find any trace of her daughter. That is why, in an attempt to recuperate old Eva she embraces the role of acculturating force in Eva’s life, as can be inferred from her insistence on dressing her—she even makes her a pair of overalls, later branded “Eva- ralls”—her dislike for Eva’s frequent visits to the Pool, or her abhorrence to the possibility of Eva mating with a chimpanzee. Diana Villanueva Romero 195

Dr. Adamson, while also longing for the old Eva, displays a more practical reaction to her. He epitomizes the forces of culture as expressed in the practice of primatology. In contrast to his wife, he does not seem to be troubled by the girl chimpanzee. He has worked with apes all his life, and as a scientist he is intrigued by the many possibilities opened up by Dr. Pra- desh’s experiment. He regards Eva in a utilitarian way and sees the opportunity to have the perfect field researcher, someone with the ideal camouflage to be taken for a chimpanzee and the means to report on her findings due to the speaking device he has designed for her. Both parents long for the former Eva, but they try to forget about their “natural” reaction of abhorrence of the girl-chimpanzee by focusing on her reintroduction to culture. In this sense, both parents, clearly on the side of culture, override their so-called “natural” feelings as parents and by doing so oppose nature. So while Eva’s mother tries to prevent her from the realization of her new self by rejecting the possibility of crossbreeding, her father humanizes her, and so separates her from nature, by returning her human voice, stored in the “voice box,” to her. This facilitates, in principle, Eva’s reincorporation to the world of culture, of logos, so to speak, from which her construction as nonhuman animal excludes her. However, in the end, Eva, distressed by the commodification imposed on her through family, research, and economic interests, will opt for the chimpanzees who represent the potential of a better living on Earth. This will drive her to enact her friend Grog’s plan of regeneration of the planet. Grog has thought of Eva as the leader of the group of chimpanzees he aims to reintroduce to nature. In his opinion, humans are a lost cause and have doomed the planet by selfishly consuming all its resources. People have become passive pessimists who have given up on remedying the course of things. Curiously, their neglect of their home, Earth, is backfiring on them in ways that resonate with Lovelock’s theory of the revenge of Gaia which implies that in an effort to sustain life, planetary conditions might lead to human extinction. Grog knows that one of the advantages of Eva’s situation of in-betweenness is her ability to interpret the chimpanzees as well as mediate between them and the humans. With Grog's support, this role evolves with time and turns her into the voice of the animals, a function as “animal ambassador” typically found in modern animal fiction. 30 Moreover, she also comes to represent, as Millicent Lenz contends, an “Earth Mother figure.”31 This is the reason why by becoming the matriarch of the chimpanzee group (nature) and bringing back to them the survival skills (culture) they were deprived of in captivity, Eva can be interpreted as a character where culture and nature merge. Although initially hesitant, Eva will finally take a step forward and speak for the animals. This happens at a press conference organized by Grog where Dr. Pradesh’s work is put into question. Unnerved by Pradesh’s utilitarian 196 Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s Eva use of chimpanzees, Eva climbs up the desk, symbolically renounces her humanity by ripping her “evaralls,” and thus initiates her breaking away from any connection with the scientist, with the SMI, and with her family. This scene signals the climax of the tension between culture and nature that builds up in the book until Eva’s decision to stand for the animals. Such a tension is solved because she accepts to follow Grog’s plan to reinhabit the Earth with humans’ closest relatives. This choice symbolizes not a backward evolution or devolution; it represents the need to dethrone humans as hege- monic species in order to promote a new beginning now that human civilization is doomed to extinction. Interpreted in this key, Eva becomes a story of regeneration as well as the daring proposal of a new creation story for the Earth that makes us think about our responsibility with regard to the continu- ation of life on the planet. In fact, references to the Judeo-Christian myth of Adam and Eve abound in the novel and connect with this need for a new beginning. Not only is Eva named after the first woman, but her last name, Adamson, also evokes the name of the first man, Adam. Besides, still in hospital, she is described entertaining herself with an old cartoon entitled Adam and Eve. Here, Adam, whose main flaws are “arrogance and impul- siveness,” is always rescued by Eva from the traps set by the Great Snake. 32 Therefore, in order to rewrite this creation story, Dickinson provocatively rescues the archetypal Eva from her negative biblical role and reinvents her as an Earth savior.33 Eva is turned into the mother of a new race of chimpanzees, the “Inheritors,” in which lies the hope of regeneration for the planet and the means for humans to make peace with the animals by giving them back an enriched version of the “knowledge” or skills they need to live in the wild. The chimpanzees will ultimately carry within themselves in this way a trace of humanity that will get passed on from generation to generation. On a symbolic level, the chimpanzee genes represent nature while the knowledge transmitted by Eva stands for culture, and the two blend in the new race. Finally, as an extension of the culture-nature merging, Eva can also be interpreted as a symbol for the dismantling of androcentric theories of evolution and of the parallel deconstruction of the man/woman binary. This is illustrated in her method of saving animal life on Earth which is twofold. She mates to enlarge the pack, but she also functions as knowledge transmitter passing to the chimpanzees the skills needed for survival. Among these, tree planting features as basic in order to revive the island where they have found refuge. This contrasts with theories of evolution such as the hunting theory, which was dominant in the 1960s, giving way to the image of Man the Hunter.34 This theory, according to Donna Haraway, was contested a decade later by works that vindicated the role of women beyond that of mother. 35 Thus Eva not only epitomizes a new mother figure, but also, by engaging herself and the group in the planting and growing of trees, works as a hopeful metaphor for regeneration and turns the history of evolution from Man the Diana Villanueva Romero 197

Hunter to Woman the Tree Planter. In so doing, it attains the dismantling of our “conceptual straitjackets.”

NOTES

1. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 9. 2. Elizabeth Ammons, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), xi. 3. Peter Dickinson, Eva (New York: Delacorte Press, 1989), 19–20. 4. Peter Dickinson, “Masks,” Horn Book Magazine 69, no. 2 (Mar/Apr 1993): 160–70, at 164. 5. Quoted in Kelly Oliver, “Sexual Difference, Animal Difference: Derrida and Difference “Worthy of its Name,” Hypatia 24, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 54–76, at 67. 6. Ibid., 72. 7. Serpil Oppermann, “Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework,” in Literature, Ecology, Ethics, eds. Timo Müller and Michael Sauter (Heidelberg: Universitat- verlag Winter, 2012), 9. 8. Cat Yampell, “When Science Blurs the Boundaries: The Commodification of the Ani- mal in Young Adult Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 35 (2008): 207–22, at 216. 9. Helen Tiffin, “Unjust Relations: Post-Colonialism and the Species Boundary” in Com- promising Post/Colonialism(S). Challenging Narratives and Practices, eds. Greg Ratcliffe and Gery Turcotte (Sidney: Dungaroo Press, 2001), 35. 10. Barry H. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner, 1978), 140. 11. Yampell, “When Science,” 209. 12. Dickinson, Eva, 32. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 27. 15. Abram, Becoming, 3. 16. Mark L. Johnson, “Embodied Reason” in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersec- tions of Nature and Culture, eds. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999), 81. 17. Quoted in Alain Beaulieu, “The Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies, 9, no.1/2 (2011): 69–88, at 73. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988) 238. 19. James Urpeth, “Animal Becomings,” in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Con- tinental Thought, eds. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), 102. 20. Abram, Becoming, 10. 21. Of special interest on this praxis of paying attention is Traci Warkentin’s article “Inter- species Etiquette: An Ethics of Paying Attention to Animals,” Ethics and the Environment 15, no. 1 (2010): 101–21. 22. Kenneth J. Shapiro, “Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Con- struction, and History,” in Social Creatures: A Human and Animal Studies Reader, ed. Clifton P. Flynn (Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books, 2008), 42. 23. Ibid., 43. 24. The term “affect” originated in Baruch Spinoza’s work Ethics (1677) and was later used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who were inspired by Henri Bergson's use of the term. Tracing back to its origins, Patricia Ticineto Clough in the introduction to The Affective Turn defines affects as “bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, to connect” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 25. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 257. 26. Dickinson, Eva, 48. 27. Ibid., 92. 198 Dismantling “Conceptual Straitjackets” in Peter Dickinson’s Eva

28. Ibid., 79. 29. Ibid., 165. 30. Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 213. 31. Millicent Lenz, “The Twenty-First Century as Place of Choice: Peter Dickinson’s Eva,” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 172–81, at 177. 32. Dickinson, Eva, 13. 33. Carolyn Merchant in Earthcare: Women and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 1995) analyzes three archetypes that traditionally have served to identify women with nature: Gaia, Isis, and Eve. In the chapter on Eve, she comments on the negative connotations associated with the first woman in the Christian tradition and links it to the story of domination on women and nature. 34. Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York; London: Routledge, 1989), 211–17. 35. Ibid., 299.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. Ammons, Elizabeth. Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. Beaulieu, Alain. “The Status of Animality in Deleuze's Thought.” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 9, no. 1/2 (2011): 69–88. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean O'Malley Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press, 1988. Dickinson, Peter. Eva. New York, N.Y.: Delacorte Press, 1989. ———. “Masks.” Horn Book Magazine 69, no. 2 (Mar/Apr 1993): 160–70. Haraway, Donna J. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York; London: Routledge, 1989. Johnson, Mark L. “Embodied Reason.” In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, edited by Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 81–102. New York: Rout- ledge, 1999. Lenz, Millicent. “The Twenty-First Century as Place of Choice: Peter Dickinson's Eva.” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 172–81. Lopez, Barry H. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Scribner, 1978. Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Merchant, Carolyn. Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New York: Routledge, 1995. Oliver, Kelly. “Sexual Difference, Animal Difference: Derrida and Difference ‘Worthy of Its Name.’” Hypatia 24, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 54–76. Oppermann, Serpil. “Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework.” In Literature, Ecology, Ethics, edited by Timo Müller and Michael Sauter, 35–50. Heidelberg: Universitatverlag Winter, 2012. Sacks, Oliver W. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Shapiro, Kenneth J. “Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History.” In Social Creatures: A Human and Animal Studies Reader, edited by Clifton P. Flynn, 31–48. Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books, 2008. Smuts, Barbara. “Encounters with Animal Minds.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 5–7, May–July (2001): 293–309. Diana Villanueva Romero 199

Tiffin, Helen. “Unjust Relations: Post-Colonialism and the Species Boundary.” In Compromis- ing Post/Colonialism(S). Challenging Narratives and Practices, edited by Greg Ratcliffe and Gery Turcotte, 30–41. Sidney: Dangaroo Press, 2001. Urpeth, James. “Animal Becomings.” In Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, edited by Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, 101–10. London: Continuum, 2004. Warkentin, Traci. “Interspecies Etiquette: An Ethics of Paying Attention to Animals.” Ethics and the Environment 15, no. 1 (2010): 101–21. Yampell, Cat. “When Science Blurs the Boundaries: The Commodification of the Animal in Young Adult Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 35 (2008): 207–22.

Afterword

Greta Gaard

From the founding of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) in 1992, ecocriticism as a field has grown in its scope, range of scholarship, and geographical reach—but its commitment to produce scholarship that contributes to solving environmental and eco-justice problems has persisted throughout its course of development. This new volume of emerging ecocritics from around the world gives readers a sweeping snapshot of the diversity and reach of ecocritical inquiry, breaking down the boundaries of nation and nature in their exploration of human-animal-ecological interconnectedness and trans-corporeality. This expansive reach is supported by earlier ecocritical investigations, and offers potential for future developments as well: thus, each section of this volume stands on deeper ecocritical roots, and promises new branches and vines, flowers and fruits. In the first section of the volume, for example, the approaches advancing material ecocriticism, postlocal ecocriticism, eco-cosmopolitanism, and affect theory are rooted in earlier developments in linguis- tics, new materialisms, eco-poetics, and bioregionalism. These essays offer potential for developing further intersections among affect theory and material feminisms, as in Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead’s introduction to the special 2012 issue of Feminist Theory, “Affecting Feminism: Questions of feeling in feminist theory.” Another branch could explore intersections among new bioregionalisms, feminist animal studies, material feminisms, and postcolonial feminist analyses of ecotourism and globalization, such as the work in Jane Desmond’s Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Wai- kiki to Sea World (2001). The rich section on ecopoetics and shelter writing could develop with the roots offered in Lauret Savoy and Alison Deming’s The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2011), for essays such as Francisco Alarcón’s “Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming

201 202 Afterword

America,” developing a bicultural ecopoetics that inherits legacies from both conquistador and conquered indigenous standpoints, and for Louis Owens’ insight into wilderness and indigeneity in “Burning the Shelter.” Exploring the relevance of Heavy Metal songs for ecocriticism is unprecedented. This innovative ecocritical music theory can also benefit from remembering its roots in musical activism such as that of Paul Winter, who sailed aboard the Greenpeace anti-whaling expedition for three days of playing saxophone to wild gray whales off the coast of Vancouver Island, attempting to communicate with the whales: photos of his efforts spread around the world and contributed to the ultimate success of the mission against the whalers. Another “interspecies musician” who has made music with whales, David Rothenberg has brought music ecocriticism forward through works such as The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Words, Sounds, Thoughts (2009) and his more contemporary Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Music and Noise (2013). Drawing on these and other roots, music ecocritics could develop rich analyses addressing environmental justice, colonialism, interspecies community, and climate change in the songs of contemporary indigenous musicians, such as the Saami yoiks of Wimme, Mari Boine, and Nils Aslak Valkeapaa. Animal studies ecocriticism and queer ecocriticism alike can continue explorations of theater by drawing on Una Chaudhuri’s edited volume on “Animality and Performance” (TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, 2007), and by interrogating the intersecting practices of zoo-keeping and enforced heteronormativity (i.e., the policing of penguins Buddy and Pedro in the Toronto zoo, or the public responses to Roy and Silo in New York’s Central Park Zoo). The colonialist associations among queer sexuality, indigeneity, and animality can be interrogated through an emerging postcolonial queer ecocriticism, reading cultural and literary texts for the ways that these associations appear in diverse cultural, geographic, and historical locations. Questions of home, shelter, and dwelling can be enriched by animal studies perspectives on homelessness and abandoned pets (i.e., the animals trauma- tized by Hurricane Katrina, or the many unwanted horses slaughtered while U.S. breeders continue to produce new foals), bringing an ecocritical perspective to illuminate problems of sustainability and interspecies justice. As ecocritics read global literatures, producing essays on authors such as Mahasweta Devi or filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, the braided associations and devaluations among women, rural dwellers and urban poor, nonhuman animals and sexuality, indigenous communities and undomesticated nature, the first world and the two-third worlds all become undeniable—these issues coexist and intra-act with the larger context of climate injustice, and these injustices are raced, classed, and gendered. Enriching the many branches of ecocriticism with a feminist perspective, these young ecocritics will be able to carry forward the full power of ecocriticism. Index

abject, abjection, 14, 75, 76, 77, 118, Alaimo, Stacy, 2, 3, 4, 5, 18n7, 19n23, 30, 119–121, 125, 125–126, 126–128, 128, 31–32, 34, 37n21, 38n32, 88, 90, 97n6, 129 98n12. See also trans-corporeality Abram, David, 192, 193, 197n15, 197n20 Alarcón, Francisco, 201 Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism Albee, Edward, 174n36 (AAF). See “Zoo Plague” Alcoff, Linda Martín, 38n42 Adam and Eve, 16, 163, 196 Alier, Martinez J., 138 Adams, Carol, 2 Allaby, Michael, 97n3 Adamson, Joni, 1, 5, 6, 17n1, 19n37, Allen, Woody, 59, 67n31 20n41, 37n2 Ammons, Elizabeth, 187, 197n2 Adivasis (forest dwellers), 133, 135–136 Angelic Conversation, The (film). See Adorno, Theodor W., 118, 129, 130n8, Jarman, Derek 131n30 animal, 7, 15, 16, 33, 73–74, 75, 77, 78, 80, affect, 9, 10, 11, 43, 53n20, 56, 57–58, 105, 108, 110, 161–162, 163, 166, 167, 61–63, 64n2–64n4, 65n6, 65n8, 168, 169, 171, 172n17, 173n25, 65n13–66n15, 66n17, 66n21, 118, 193, 174n36, 178–180, 181, 182, 182–183, 197n24; affect theory, 10, 11, 55, 57, 183, 187–190, 190, 191–192, 193, 201. See also “ecoglobalist affect” 195–196, 201, 202; “becoming animal”, affective ecocriticism, 9, 56, 57, 63 188, 192 affective structures, 11, 57 animality, 15, 16, 162, 164, 167–168, 188, Agarwal, Anil, 137, 144n4 189, 192, 197n17 Agathocles, 12, 73, 81n20–81n21 animal studies, 202; feminist animal agency, 2, 9, 28, 36, 80, 121, 161, 166. See studies, 3 also narrative agency Annihilator, 77, 82n28 agential realism, 37n13 anthropocene, 56 Aguirre, Maria Elena, 17n1, 20n49 anthropocentrism; anthropocentric, 3, 8, Ağın Dönmez, Başak, 172n17 16, 101, 161, 162, 169, 171, 172n12, ahimsa (non-violence), 135 178, 183, 188; non-anthropocentric, 6, AIDS, 16, 76, 122, 180, 181 135 “aitos”, 179 anthropogenic, 8 Ajaykumar, P.P, 144n16 aposymbiots, 182

203 204 Index

Appadurai, Arjun, 42, 52n1 biology; biological, 5, 13, 31, 32, 33, Aranyakas. See forest society. See also 37n21, 58, 87, 97n3, 124, 148, 163, Devi, Mahasweta; Neo-Aranyakas 165, 182, 183 Aranyer Adhikhar (Rights of the Forest). bioregionalism, 2, 47, 201; neo- See Devi, Mahasweta bioregionalism, 8. See also local; Arcadia, 124 postlocal Aristotle, 161 binaries, 13, 27, 30, 31, 32, 87, 97n5, 103, Armbruster, Karla, 1, 2, 17n1, 18n4, 18n9, 111, 126, 188, 196. See also dualisms 68n38 Birsa Munda, 8.9-8.11: Birsa Munda. See Armstrong, Philip, 198n30 Singh, Kumar Suresh Arons, Wendy, 171n1 black ecology, 71, 81n5 Ascombe, G. E. M., 130n9 Black Metal, 71, 81n6 Association for the Study of Literature and Black Sabbath, 72 Environment (ASLE), 201 Bloom, Harold, 130n12 Atterton, Peter, 197n19 Blue (film). See Jarman, Derek Attraction, 73, 75 body, 3, 6, 15, 16, 45, 46, 48, 55, 58, 59, Atwood, Margaret, 101, 112n3 64n3, 65n6, 65n13, 75, 76, 88–89, 91, 118, 120–121, 126, 140, 165–166, 168, Bachelard, Gaston, 103, 104, 107, 108, 171, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 109, 111, 113n31, 114n58, 114n88 191–192, 193, 197n24 Bacon, Francis, 155n3 Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, The Badiou, Alain, 77 (painting). See Holbein, Hans Baiyat, Dehqan, 181 Boehrer, Bruce, 155n2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30 bohemianism, 11, 44, 50 Baley, Michelle, 19n20 Bohr, Niels, 29 Ballstadt, Carl, 113n32, 113n33 Boine, Mari, 202 “banal cosmopolitan (ism)”, 42, 44, 46, 49, border permeability, 9, 104 52. See also eco-cosmopolitanism border transgressions, 5, 9, 71 Barad, Karen, 30, 31, 37n13. See also Borlik, Todd A., 155n2 intra-action Botting, Fred, 73, 81n18 Barnfield, Richard, 148 Bowness, Suzanne, 114n77 Bate, Jonathan, 13, 87, 97n1 Böhme, Gernot, 166–167, 171, 173n26, Bauman, Zygmunt, 68n42 173n27 Baviskar, Amita, 144n10 boundaries, viii, 1, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, Beaulieu, Alain, 191, 197n17 27, 41, 63, 73, 87, 90, 96, 103, 108, beautiful, the (category), 126–127, 128 111, 123, 163, 173n27, 179, 181, 182, Beck, Ulrich, 42, 52n16 188, 193, 194, 201 Beinart, William, 133 Bradshaw, Gay (G.A), 2, 169, 171, Bentley, D.M.R., 112n2 173n32, 174n33 Berg, Peter, 53n21 Braidotti, Rosi, 34, 36, 38n35, 38n36, Bergson, Henri, 197n24 39n45 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 119 Branch, Michael, 1 Beukes, Lauren, 16, 179, 180, 181, Brand, Joshua, 58 184n10, 185n25, 185n28 Brandis, William Dietrich, 139 Bhagwan (Earth God), 140, 142, 143 Breath. . See Winton, Tim Bhopal disaster, 137 Bredbeck, Gregory W., 148, 155n10 Bible; biblical, 77, 134, 162, 163, 172n17, Broch, Hermann, 118, 130n7 173n19, 188, 196 Brown, Bruce, 44, 45 biodiversity, 33, 187 Bryant, Levi R., 71, 81n5 Index 205

Bryan, William Jennings, 163, 165, 168, Cohen, Jeffrey J., 5, 8, 19n20, 20n46, 71 172n17 Cohen, Michael P., 19n20 Bryson, J. Scott, 87 Cohen, Sarah Blacher, 67n31 Buell, Lawrence, 3, 18n11, 19n20, 19n26, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 71 20n52, 27, 37n3, 43, 44, 53n18, 53n20, Collins, Keith, 123 64n4, 110, 112n8, 114n70, 114n76 colonialism, 177, 202 Burke, Edmund, 127, 128, 131n29 Comer, Krista, 42, 44, 47, 49–50, 52n8, Butler, Judith, 35, 38n37–38n38 53n23, 53n28, 53n38 “complex connectivity”, 41, 42, 49, 51 Cadden, Joan, 156n21 Connolly, William E., 64n3, 65n6 Cain, Jimmie, 67n28 consumerism, 16, 119, 188 Calarco, Matthew, 183, 185n27, 197n19 Convent of Pleasure, The. See Cavendish, Callisto (nymph), 149, 150 Margaret Campbell, Neil, 42, 49, 52n6, 53n37 Coole, Diana, 35, 38n26, 38n35, 38n39 Campbell, SueEllen, 30, 37n17 corporeality, 2, 119, 120, 122, 164, 165, Canadian, ecocriticism, 101 191, 193. See also trans-corporeality Caputo, John D., 29, 37n11 correlationism, 28, 29 Caravaggio (film). See Jarman, Derek Coupe, Laurence, 3, 18n15 Carballo, Mirian, 17n1 Cranston, CA., 17n1 Carruthers, Jane, 184n8 creation (divine, human), 77, 103, 104, Carson, Anne, 89, 94–95, 98n21–98n25 107, 120, 162, 163, 188, 194, 196 Carson, Rachel, 65n8, 65n13, 72, 135 critical regionalism, 41, 48 Cartesian ontology, 190 crossbreeding, 195 Casey, Edward S., 53n21 Cubitt, Sean, 66n16, 66n17, 66n18 Caught Inside. See Duane, Daniel Culture (nature/culture), viii, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, Cavalera, Max, 78, 79 8, 10, 13, 16, 27, 29, 30, 30–31, 32, 41, Cavendish, Margaret, 147, 148–149, 154, 42, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51–52, 52n7, 78–80, 155n9, 156n18–156n19, 156n24, 87, 88, 89, 90–91, 91, 94, 96, 97n2, 156n38 97n5, 110, 133, 138, 143, 150, 163, Chakravarty, Saumitra, 141, 144n16 179, 188, 194, 195, 196; counter- Chang, Chia-ju, 7, 20n44 culture, 47, 51, 72; popular culture, 9, Chaudhuri, Una, 161, 169, 171n1, 172n6, 12, 57, 78, 80, 163, 177; surf culture, 172n8, 172n9, 173n30, 202 42, 47, 48, 49, 51. See also Cheah, Pheng, 32, 35, 38n26, 38n38, naturecultures; subculture 38n40 curiosity, 126, 128 chimpanzee, 16, 162, 163, 187, 189, cyborg, 162, 166–167, 173n27 189–190, 193, 194–196 Christ, 118, 120–121, 126, 129 dark ecology, 3, 5, 71, 75, 77, 82n27, Christianity, 139, 140 82n34 Cilano, Cara, 17n1 Darwin, Charles, 148, 162, 163, 169 civilization, 50, 79, 111, 133, 134, 135, Darwinism, 162, 163 139, 163, 168, 196 Daston, Lorraine, 156n22, 156n34 Clark, Timothy, 19n20, 109, Davis, Erik, 71, 81n7 114n65–114n66, 173n21 DDT, 72, 135 Cless, Downing, 171n1 Death Metal, 71, 79 climate change, 7, 56, 65n10, 97n3, 202 deconstruction, 28, 29, 30, 118, 196 Clive, Sophie Windsor, 39n46 deep ecology, 135 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 197n24 deforestation, 7, 137 Coetzee, J.M., 178, 184n2 206 Index

Deleuze, Gilles, 27, 28, 29, 191, 193, ecocinema studies, 57, 66n16–66n17 197n18, 197n24, 197n25 eco-cosmolopitalism, 8, 10, 11, 42, 48, 52, Deleyto, Celestino, 67n35 201 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., 17n1 ecocriticism. See “affective,” “Canadain,” Deming, Alison, 201 “environmental justice,” “feminist,” Denver, John, 72 “gothic,” “material,” “postcolonial,” Derrida, Jacques, 10, 28–29, 29–30, 32, “postlocal,” “queer,” “South-African,” 37n8, 37n12, 38n36, 174n36, 181, “underground” ecocriticisms 184n22, 188. See also khôra; différance ecoeroticism, 9, 15, 147; ecoerotic Descartes, René, 155n3, 166 imagination, 15, 152, 154 Desmond, Jane, 201 ecofeminism, vii De Sade, Marquis, 147, 155n1 ecoglobalism, 10. See also globalism Detmers, Ines, 19n29 “eco-globalist affect”, 43, 53n20, 64n4. Dettmar, Ute, 130n7 See also affect Devi, Mahasweta, 14, 133, 136, 138–139, eco-irritation, 58, 61–63 141, 144n13, 144n17. See also Neo- ecology,. See also “black,”; “dark,”; Arkanyas “deep,”; “green,”; “Prismatic,”; Diana (goddess), 149 “queer”; ecologies 3, 8, 10, 14, 30, 55, Dickinson, Peter, 16, 187–188, 190, 194, 77, 110, 117–118, 121, 148, 177, 178 196, 197n3–197n4, 197n12, 197n26, ecological catastrophe, 14, 77, 117, 118 198n32 ecological consciousness, 13, 72, 101, 103 différance, 28, 29, 38n38 ecological imperialism, 14, 138 Dimock, Wai Chee, 53n20, 64n4 ecological kitsch, 14, 118 Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, 77, 82n29 ecological thought; thinking, 75, 103, 110, discourse, 1, 3, 5, 8, 14, 15, 30, 32, 50, 57, 148 59, 78, 79, 102, 104, 117, 147, 148, Echo Maker, The. See Powers ,Richard 149, 150, 153, 161, 162, 189 ecomimesis, 8, 110 discursive, vii, 3, 8, 14, 27, 35, 37n13, ecophobia, 9, 65n10, 78, 101–102, 105, 37n21, 41. See also material-discursive 108, 110–111, 123, 150 Dollimore, Jonathan, 153, 156n36 ecopoetics, 9, 13, 87–89, 90, 91, 93–94, Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 120 95–96, 97n1–97n2, 97n5, 201 drama, 9, 15, 67n27, 67n35, 161–162, ecopoetry,, 13, 87, 97n2 172n4 ecosocial, 42, 47, 49, 51–52 dualisms, 111, 178, 189. See also binaries ecotopian novel, 16, 187 Duane, Daniel, 44, 45, 50, 53n40 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. See Gianlorenzo, Duchamp, Marcel, 122 Bernini Dugas, Gaëtan, 181 Edward II (film). See Jarman, Derek Dungeness National Nature Reserve, 124, Egan, Gabriel, 155n2 130n21 Elder, John, 13, 87 Durand, Marcella, 97n5 Elster, Jon, 173n23 dwelling, 9, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, Endless Summer, The (film). See Brown, 137, 202. See also Vanaprastha Bruce ashrama (forest dwelling); place Ensor, Sarah, 65n8, 66n14 environment, vii, 2–4, 11–13, 14, 31, 33, Eagleton, Terry, 122 41, 48, 53n28, 55, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64n4, Earth, 13, 16, 33, 72, 75, 77, 79, 102, 108, 71, 72, 78, 80, 87–89, 90, 92–94, 96, 109, 111, 135, 142–143, 149, 163, 181, 97n3, 102, 108, 109, 118, 121, 123, 187, 189, 195, 196; Earth Mother, 195 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133–134, Earth Crisis, 77, 82n30 136–137, 138, 141, 147, 153, 168, 178, Index 207

181, 188 forces (natural; social), 9, 48, 136, 139, environmental activism, 11, 28, 36, 44, 48, 195 71, 72, 78, 138 forest(s), 14, 46, 49, 61, 62, 63, 77, 104, environmental aesthetics, vii 106, 109, 111, 133–134, 135, 137, 138, environmental awareness, 11, 32, 56, 58, 139–140, 141, 142, 143 71, 72, 77, 181 “forest fiction”, 14, 133, 138, 149, 180, environmental crisis, 4, 56, 63, 147, 181, 187. See also deforestation; Devi, 184n21, 188 Mahasweta environmental degradation, 1, 10, 14, 34, Forest Regulation Act, The (FRA), 135 72, 78, 133, 177 “forest society”, 133 environmental ethics, 31, 34, 42, 135 Fraiman, Susan, 13, 103, 104, 105, 106, environmental humanities, vii, 2, 9, 10 111, 112n18–112n19, 113n22, 113n24, environmental imagination, 8, 43, 50 113n28, 113n46, 113n51, 114n57, environmental justice, vii, 1, 10, 13, 87, 114n60, 114n80 177, 178, 201, 202 Frank, Adam, 64n1 environmental justice ecocriticism, 9, 14, Frederick, Suresh, 97n2 76, 133 Fried, Larry, 171n1 environmental racism, 143, 177 Fromm, Harold, 1, 18n2, 37n15, 81n1, Erickson, Bruce, 66n15, 148, 155n4 185n24 erotophobia, 154 Frost, Samantha, 35, 38n26, 38n35, 38n39 Estok, Simon C., 2, 6, 20n44–20n45, 64, Frye, Northrop, 110 65n5, 65n10, 71, 78, 80, 81n2, 82n36, Fuchs, Elinor, 171n1 82n47, 82n50, 97n2, 101, 110–111, 112n6–112n7, 114n79, 148, 150, Gaard, Greta, 4, 6, 7, 18n5, 18n6, 19n24, 155n2, 155n8, 156n23. See also 20n44, 20n45, 154, 156n37 ecophobia Gadgil, Madhav, 143, 144n25 ethics. See environmental ethics Gaia, 195, 198n33 ethologists, 162 Gammacide, 12, 75, 81n24 Eva. See Dickinson, Peter Gandhi, Mahatma, 135 Evans, Mei Mei, 1, 17n1 Garden, The (film). See Jarman, Derek “evaralls”, 194, 195 Garrard, Greg, 6, 17n1, 19n36, 109, 112n8, Evernden, Neil, 30, 37n16, 181–182, 114n61, 117, 130n4 185n24 gender, 63, 105, 107, 109, 113n33, 133, evolution, 17, 134, 148, 161, 163–164, 138, 148, 150, 177, 202; cross-gender, 165, 168, 173n19, 173n25, 196 152; same-gendered, 149 evolutionary biology, 58 Genesis, 120 exceptionalism, 162, 163, 169 geological, 90 extinction, 16, 79, 195, 196 Gersdorf, Catrin, 6, 17n1, 19n38 ghost, 179, 180, 189–190 Falsey, John, 58, 67n35 Giannachi, Gabriella, 171n1 familiar, 16, 32, 49, 62, 80, 110, 121, 127, Giffney, Noreen, 117, 130n3 179–180, 181, 182, 183 Gillis, Justin, 65n12 Feder, Helena, 5, 19n27 Gioia, Dana, 98n14 Felstiner, John, 98 Gleason, William, 19n37 feminist ecocriticism, 2, 3, 6, 9 Glitre, Kathrina, 67n35, 67n36 Findlay, Tom, 82n43 globalism. See ecoglobalism Fisher, Philip, 56, 65n10–65n11 globalization, 42, 44, 46–47, 51–52, 52n7, Fletcher, Angus, 97n3 89, 201; counter-globalization, 44; Flynn, Clifton P., 197n22 grassroots globalization, 42 208 Index global warming, 59, 77, 80, 180, 181 68n42, 172n13. See also eco- Glotfelty, Cheryll, 1, 2, 17n1, 18n2, 18n9, cosmopolitanism 19n20, 37n15, 52n17, 68n38, 81n1, Hejinian, Lyn, 89, 92–94, 98n14–98n17 97n4, 185n24 Hekman, Susan, 2, 18n7 Gojira, 12, 71 Hessing, Melody, 112n4, 112n5, 114n71 Goodbody, Axel, 4 heteronormative, 15, 147, 152 Gosson, Renée K., 17n1 heterosexuality, 149, 154 gothic ecocriticism, 9, 12, 73, 76, 78 heterosexualization, 15, 148 gothic nature, 78, 80 Hillard, Tom J., 73, 78, 80, 81n17, 82n37, Gottschall, Jonathan, 172n5 82n48, 82n51 “Gou-mama women”, 7 Hillman, Brenda, 65n8, 89, 98n8, 98n10, Grand Funk Railroad, 72, 81n14 98n13 Greenbough, Paul, 144n10 Hiltner, Ken, 155n2 green ecology, 8 Hinduism, 140 Greenpeace, 202 Hird, Myra J., 117, 130n3 Gregg, Melissa, 64n2 HIV. See AIDS Grief, 79, 82n44 Hobbes, Thomas, 155n3 Grimm, Nancy, 19n29 Holbein, Hans, 120 Gruen, Lori, 2 holistic, 133 Guattari, Félix, 191, 193, 197n18, 197n24, Holland, Peter, 173n30 197n25 home,, 13, 46, 49, 58, 63, 76, 101, 102, Guha, Ramachandra, 135, 143, 144n4, 102–104, 104, 105–106, 107–108, 108, 144n5 109, 110–111, 111, 113n32–113n33, Guy-Bray, Stephen, 148, 156n11 114n54, 124, 125, 140, 178, 193, 194, 195, 202; homeland, 138, 140; Haber, Honi Fern, 197n16 homeplace,2.8 2.10 2.11; hometown, habitat, 7, 49, 77 46, 59; homelessness, 101, 103, 106, Hairy Ape, The. See O'Neill, Eugene 108, 202 Hallock, Thomas, 155n2 homoeroticism, 15, 148, 152 Hambling, Maggi, 124–125 homosocial, 150, 152 Handley, George B., 17n1 Hopkins, Elizabeth, 113n32, 113n33 Hans, James S., 120, 130n12 Houser, Heather, 57, 65n8, 65n13 Happily . See Hejinian, Lyn Hsu, Hsuan L., 50, 53n44 Haraway, Donna J., 31, 162, 196, 198n34. Huggan, Graham, 82n39, 82n46, 87, 88, See also cyborg 97n5, 184n1 Hard Rock, 72. See also Heavy Metal humanism, 7, 15, 162, 172n12; non- Harrington, Henry, 1, 3, 18n13 anthropocentric humanism, 6, 19n29, Harrison, Robert Pogue, 111 20n40, 135, 172n12. See also Hawkeye (parrot), 169–171. See also posthumanism Phoebe Green Linden humanist, 3, 29, 72, 78, 150, 161–162, 165, health, 6, 56, 72, 122, 143, 148 183 Heavy Metal, 7, 12, 71–72, 73, 75, 76–80, Hurricane Katrina, 202 202. See also gothic ecocriticism; “hut dream”, 104, 105, 106 gothic nature; Hard Rock hybrid; hybridity, 5, 8, 9, 16, 30, 187 Heidegger, Martin, 103, 109 Heim, Michael Henry, 130n10 identity, 2, 3, 10, 28, 29–30, 32–36, 37n14, Heise, Ursula K., 3, 5, 11, 18n10, 38n36, 38n38, 38n42, 46, 50, 139, 140, 19n19–19n20, 19n26, 19n28, 20n50, 152, 154, 163, 168, 169, 194. See also 20n52, 42, 48, 52n10, 52n17, 63, self Index 209 identity politcs, 35, 38n42 Kheel, Marti, 2 Iijima, Brenda, 13, 87, 88, 97n5 khôra , 10, 28, 29–30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, in-betweenness, 128, 195 38n36, 38n38. See also identity indigenous, 14, 50, 59, 133, 177, 201, 202 Khubchandani, Lachman M., 136, 144n9 industrial society, 121, 126 kinesthetic empathy, 190 Ingram, David, 66n16 Kirby, Vicki, 10, 28, 29, 32, 37n6, 37n14 “inheritors”, 196 Kirkpatrick, Ted, 77, 82n33 injustice, 16, 138, 140, 177, 178, 183, 202 kitsch (ecological), 118, 118–119, 120, international, viii, 1, 3, 6, 8, 9–10, 11, 17, 121, 122, 126–128, 129, 130n6 17n1, 137, 187. See also globalism; Knickerbocker, Scott, 13, 87, 88, 97n5 transnational Kokkonen, Tuija, 171n1 Interspecies, 7, 8, 9, 202 Kramsch, Olivier, 52n1 intra-action, 30, 35, 37n13 Kristeva, Julia, 120, 130n14, 130n16 Iovino, Serenella, 4, 5, 6, 19n29, 19n37, Krutch, Joseph Wood, 172n11 20n40, 20n51, 28, 37n5, 38n43, 112n8 Kundera, Milan, 119, 120, 121, 130n10 Iron Maiden, 71, 73, 79 Küpper, Thomas, 130n7 irritation. See eco-irritation Irwin, Steve, 66n18 Lahtinen, Toni, 17n1 Isis, 198n33 landscape, 8, 46, 49, 51, 61, 63, 65n10, 73, Island(s), 123, 194, 196, 202 88–89, 106, 119, 123, 126, 137, 141, Ivakhiv, Adrian, 57, 66n17 184n21 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, 90 Jardin, Joseph, 134 Last of England, The (film). See Jarman, Jarman, Derek, 14, 118, 122–126, 126, Derek 128, 129, 130n19–130n20, Lavery, David, 67n28 130n23–130n25 Led Zeppelin, 72 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 65n8 Lehtimäki, Markku, 17n1 Jimenez, Teresa, 64 Lenz, Millicent, 195, 198n31 Johnson, Loretta, 19n20 Lewis, Matthew G., 73 Johnson, Mark L., 190–191, 197n16 Leys, Ruth, 64n3, 65n6 Johnson II, Phillip David, 20n43 Lippard, Lucy, 43, 53n19 Johnson, Rochelle, 1 Lloyd, Christopher, 125, 130n27 Jonas, Hans, 68n42 local, 1, 2, 3, 6–7, 9, 11, 41–46, 47–48, 49, Joseph, Phillip, 52n3 50–51, 65n13, 78, 109, 125, 133, 137, Jubilee (film). See Jarman, Derek 138, 139, 180. See also bioregionalism; Junquera, Carmen Flys, 17n1 postlocal; translocality Jupiter, 149 Locke, John, 134, 155n3 Justice, 6, 7, 9, 47, 133, 137, 138, 177, 178, Lockwood, Alex, 65n13, 66n14 183, 202. See also environmental logocentrism, 32 justice logos, 195 Lopez, Barry H., 189, 197n10 Kafka, Franz, 191 Lotz, Sarah, 180 Kahn, Richard, 72 Louw, Pat, 17n1 Kamboureli, Smaro, 114n72 Love, Glen A., 9, 55, 65n6 Kamps, Ivo, 155n2 Lovelock, James, 195 Kaufmann, Walter Arnold, 130n13 Lynch, Tom, 68n38, 68n39–68n40 Kemmis, Daniel, 52n5 Kerridge, Richard, 1, 4, 19n25 Magi, Jill, 97n5 Kershaw, Baz, 171n1 Manzoni, Piero, 126 210 Index

Maoism, 117, 118, 129, 135 113n25–113n27, 113n29–113n30, Margulis, Lynn, 172n14 113n32–113n45, 113n47, 113n49, Marrero, Jose Manuel Henriques, 17n1 113n52, 114n54–114n56, 114n69, Marx, Karl, 38n23, 162 114n84–114n85 Marzec, Robert, 133, 144n1 Moran, Joe, 109, 114n62 mashavi (wandering spirit), 180 more-than-human world, 3, 37n21, 90, 92, Mason, Travis V., 17n1 193 Massumi, Brian,3n6 Morrow, Rob, 68n37 Mast, Gerald, 67n31 Mortimer, Claire, 67n35 matriarch, 188, 195 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. See matter, 8, 9, 27–28, 32, 34, 36, 162, 190, Sandilands, Catriona 191 Morton, Timothy, 4, 5, 19n31, 55, 71, 75, materiality, 15, 27, 32, 34, 35, 37n13, 76, 77, 77–78, 81n4, 81n22, 38n42, 95, 126, 168, 188. See also 81n25–82n27, 82n34, 90, 98n9, 98n11, material self 101, 103, 110, 111, 112n14–112n15, material-discursive, 11, 31, 32, 36 114n64, 114n81, 117, 130n1, 148, 152, material ecocriticism, 8, 9, 10, 13, 27–28, 155n6 30, 36, 87, 201 “Mother Nature (jungle)”, 80, 142, 143 material feminism, 2, 201 Moxiland. See Beukes, Lauren Maturin, Charles, 73 Mugabe, Robert, 180 May, Theresa J., 161, 171n1, 172n3, 172n8 Muir, John, vii, 33, 38n28 Mayer, Sylvia, 6, 17n1, 19n38 Munda(s), 138, 139–140, 141, 142, Mazel, David, 3, 18n16, 97n4 142–143, 143. See also Birsa Munda McColley, Diane Kelsey, 155n2 Murphy, Patrick D., 2, 8, 18n5, 20n49 McConnell, Frank, 59, 67n30, 67n34 Murray, Heather, 110, 114n71–114n73 McDowell, Michael J., 30, 37n18 Müller, Timo, 4, 197n7 McGinnis, Michael Vincent 52n5 McIver, Joel, 82n42 Naess, Arne, 135 McKernan, James B., 172n8 Nagy, Kelsi, 20n43 McLuskie, Kathleen, 156n18 Narrative, 2, 9, 28, 32, 36, 45, 48, 49, 51, McMullen, Lorraine, 113n23 57, 59, 63, 66n20, 67n30, 67n32, Mda, Zakes, 178 68n37, 93, 95, 105, 112n17, 123, 138, medical experimentation, 189 148, 161, 178, 183; narrative agency, Megadeth, 72 28, 32, 36; surf narrative,. See also surf; megafauna, 49 culture 50 Mehta, Deepa, 202 naturecultures, 31, 32, 46, 96 Merchant, Carolyn, 198n33 nature writing, 1, 4, 58, 97n4, 122, 155n2 Merda d'artista. See Manzoni, Piero naxal path, 135 Metallica, 72, 79 Neo-Aranyakas, 14, 133, 138. See also Metzinger, Thomas, 35, 37n14 Aranyer Adhikhar; Devi, Mahasweta; Mitwelt , 169 forest society Modern Nature. See Jarman, Derek neuron memory, 16, 187, 189 modernity, 15, 150, 177 neuroscience, 55, 65n6, 190, 194 Mohanty, Satya P. @ 1n42 Ngai, Sianne, 64n3, 65n9, 66n21–66n23, Monani, Salma, 66n16, 66n17 67n26, 67n33, 67n34, 68n41 monkey, 33, 163, 165 Nettle, Daniel, 161, 172n5 Moodie, Susanna, 13, 101–103, 103, 104, Neuman, Shirley, 114n72 105–108, 109–110, 110–111, 111, nevad (new field), 137 112n1, 112n4, 112n9, 112n17, Index 211 new materialisms, 9, 10, 13, 27, 28, 30, 32, Phoebe Green Linden (homo sapiens), 35–36, 87, 89, 201 169–171. See also Hawkeye (parrot) Newman, Karen, 156n18 phylogenetic, 187, 189 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 36, 59, 120, Piss Christ. See Serrano, Andres 125, 130n13 place, 3, 6, 9, 11, 13, 41–45, 46, 48, 48–49, Nirmaldasan, 17n1 50, 52n7, 53n21, 55, 56–58, 61–62, 63, Nixon, Rob, 8, 20n47, 56, 65n13, 136, 138, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 101, 102–103, 144n7 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 134, 137, 148, Noah's Ark, 77 150, 151–152, 161; place attachment, Nolan, Sarah, 97n2 43, 51; sense of, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53n21, nonhuman, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 36, 110. See also dwelling 37n21, 55, 72, 77, 80, 82n41, 101, Plato, 29 101–103, 104, 105, 106–107, 108, 109, Plumwood, Val, 2, 78, 79, 82n39, 82n46 110, 111, 154, 178, 187, 188, 188–189, Pocket Theology. See Zhu Yu 191, 192, 195, 202 post-apocalyptic, 124, 184n21 Northern Exposure (sitcom), 11, 58–63, postcolonial ecocriticism, 9, 13, 16, 17n1, 67n27, 67n28, 67n30, 67n32 78, 87, 177 Nox. See Carson, Anne postlocal ecocriticism, 9, 11, 41, 42–43, 52 Numbers, Ronald L., 172n16 Posthuman(ism), 2, 3, 9, 31, 32, 34, 36, Nussbaum, Martha, 55 162 postlocal, 41–43, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53n21 Oliver, Kelly, 197n5 postmodernism, 34, 188 O’Neill, Eugene, 15, 162, 166, 172n11, postnational, 11, 41, 201 173n19, 173n25 postpositive realism, 38n42 Oppermann, Serpil, vii, viii, 4, 6, 17n1, Powell, B. H. Baden, 139 19n18, 20n42, 20n44, 20n45, 20n51, Powers, Richard, 11, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38n27, 27, 28, 37n4, 37n5, 38n43, 38n44, 64, 38n29 112n8, 114n63, 197n7 primatology, 194, 195 otherness, 29, 76, 97n4, 110 Prismatic Ecology (Jeffrey J. Cohen), 8, Owens, Louis, 201 20n46 Özdağ, Ufuk, 17n1 Prospect Cottage Project. See Jarman, Özkan, Nevin, 17n1 Derek Puff, Helmut, 153, 156n34 Paasi, Ansi, 52n1 Purchas, Samuel, 66n20 pahan (village priest), 139, 140 panopticon, 127 quantum mechanics, 30 Park, Katharine, 150, 156n22 queer ecocriticism, 66n14, 117, 148, 202 Parrott, Billy, 67n29 queer ecology, 15, 147–148, 150, 154 pastoral, 15, 59, 67n35, 148, 154, 155n2, queer nature, 152, 153, 154 174n36 queer resistance, 15, 147, 150, 151–152 Patterson, Daniel, 1 queer sexuality, 148, 153, 154, 202 Peacock, Laurel, 65n8, 65n13 queer theory, 13, 87, 148 Pedwell, Carolyn, 201 Pellow, David N., 19n37 Raber, Karen L., 155n2 Peterman, Michael A., 112n1, 113n23, Radcliffe, Ann, 73 113n32, 113n33, 113n41, 114n86 Raglon, Rebecca, 112n4, 112n5 Petros, George, 181, 184n17 Rajan, P.K., 144n16 Phillips, Dana, 19n33, 19n36, 55, 65n7 Ralph, Iris, 7, 20n44 Phillips, Heather, 172n8 Rangarajan, Swarnalatha, 6 212 Index

Ray, Rabindra, 136, 144n8 science, 182, 187, 189, 194 Ray, Sarah Jaquette, 6 Scigaj, Leonard, 13, 87 Rayson, Alex K., 17n1 Scopes Trial, 163 Ratcliffe, Greg, 197n9 Sebastiane (film). See Jarman, Derek Reeve, Clara, 73 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 64n1 representationalism, 28–29 Seigworth, Gregory J., 64n2 resistance, 11, 12, 15, 41, 42, 50, 51, 72, self, 9, 16, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 79–80, 136, 137, 139, 149, 151, 153, 37n14, 46, 61, 77, 93, 152, 162, 163, 154, 163. See also queer resistance 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 174n36, Reynolds, Malvina, 72, 81n10 179, 183, 187, 189, 190, 192–193, 193, rhizome; rhizomatic, 1, 3, 11, 27–28, 36, 195; material self, 31–32, 88. See also 42, 44, 52, 191 identity Rhodes, Joe, 68n37 selfhood, 33, 102 Ridout, Nicholas, 172n8 Selvamony, Nirmal, 17n1 Rigby, Kate, 4 Sepultura, 78, 79 Robson, Jenny, 184n21 Serrano, Andres, 126 Rodin, 168, 169 Sexuality, 3, 15, 63, 147, 148, 150. See Rogers, Pattiann, 10, 32, 33–34, 35, 38n30 also heterosexuality; queer sexuality Romero, Diana Villanueva, 172n17 Shakespeare, William, 59, 148 Rose-Innes, Henrietta, 184n21 “shaper”, 187, 194 Rose, Mary Beth, 156n18 Shapiro, Kenneth J., 192, 193, 197n22 Rose, Mitch, 35, 38n41 Sharer, Anne, 155n9 Rosendale, Steven, 3 Shelley, Mary, 73 Rosenthal, Jane, 184n21 shelter writing, 13, 103, 105, 201 Rothenberg, David, 202 Shiva, Vandana, 134, 144n3 Roudiez, Leon S., 130n14, 130n16 Shona people, 180 Roughing It in the Bush. See Moodie, Sidney, Philip, 148 Susanna Singh, Kumar Suresh, 139 Roy, Arundathi, 136, 144n6 Skinner, Jonathan, 97n5 Roy, Sohan, 137 Slaymaker, William, 184n4 Rubin, Gayle, 156n18 Slovic, Scott, 1, 3, 5, 6, 17n1, 18n15, Ruffin, Kimberley N., 6 19n20, 19n21, 20n41, 37n1, 37n2, Rundle, Erika, 38n25, 169, 173n28 52n17, 58, 64, 67n24, 68n40, 97n4 Ruskin, John, 135 Smith, Bruce, 148, 156n12 Rust, Stephen, 66n16, 66n17 Smith, Gerry, 114n62 Ryan, Terre, 65n10 Smith, Liberty, 39n46 Smuts, Barbara, 192–193 Saami yoiks of Wimme, 202 social primate, 161 Sacks, Oliver W., 191 society, 14, 16, 43, 46, 47, 76, 97n4, 121, Sade, Marquis de, 147, 155n1 126, 129, 133, 135, 139, 140, 150, Sammell, Neil, 1, 19n25 155n3, 164, 168, 189, 194. See also Sandilands, Catriona, 2, 5, 66n15, 112n4, forest society 112n5, 148, 155n4 sodomy, 152, 153 Sarveswaran, Vidya, 6 Soja, Edward W., 52n2 Satyagraha , 135 Sooley, Howard Soul, 124, 130n22 Sauter, Michael, 4, 197n7 South-African ecocriticism, 178 Savoy, Lauret, 201 space, 13, 14, 15, 27, 30, 47, 66n15, 79, 80, Schechner, Richard, 172n2 87, 88, 89, 90, 90–91, 92, 93, 94, 95, Schweitzer, Marlis, 172n8 97n5, 102, 103, 104, 104–105, Index 213

105–106, 107–108, 108–109, 110, 111, transnational, 1, 6–7, 44, 46, 50, 51 126, 133, 138, 142, 148, 149, 150, 151, trash, 121, 126 152, 153, 154, 161, 172n2, 173n19, Traub, Valerie, 149, 156n13 183, 191, 193, 194 tree planter, 194, 196 speculative fiction, 179 tribal, 14, 78, 79, 133, 135–137, 138, speculative realism, 28 139–140, 141, 142 Spinoza, Baruch, 197n24 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 144n10 Star Trek, viii Tuana, Nancy, 2 Steenkamp, Elzette, 172n17 Turcotte, Gery, 197n9 Stein, Peter, 169 Stein, Rachel, 1, 2, 17n1 Ulgulan , 136, 140, 142, 143 Stevens, Chris, 67n29 The Unbearable Lightness of Being. See Stewart, Nigel, 171n1 Kundera, Milan Sturgeon, Noël, 2, 177, 184n3 uncanny, 45, 103, 108, 110, 121, 126, 128, subculture, 9, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52. 166 See also culture underground ecocriticism, 81n3 subjectivity, 2, 32, 33, 37n14, 88, 90, 92 United Nations Research Institute for sublime, 56, 65n10, 73, 102, 126, 127, Social Development (UNRISD), 138 127–128, 128 Upanishads , 133 Sullivan, Heather, 6, 19n33, 19n36 Urpeth, James, 191, 197n19 Surfer Girls in the New World Order. See Comer, Krista Vaishnavites, 141 Valkeapaaa, Nils Aslak, 202 Tallmadge, John, 18n13 Vanaprastha ashrama (forest dwelling), Tarlo, Harriet, 94, 98n20 133, 135, 140 television, 57, 59, 66n18, 67n27, 77, 97n5 Van Houtum, Hank, 52n1, 52n2 Tempest, The (film). See Jarman, Derek Van Niekerk, Marlene, 178 theatre, 161, 172n2, 202 Vidal, Fernando, 156n22, 156n34 Theocritus, 15, 148 Vigal, Julia Barella, 17n1 Therion, 73, 81n16 vignettes, 127 theriophilic sense, 189 violence, 12, 73, 75, 77; slow violence, 8, theriophobia, 189 56, 138; xenophobic violence, 179 Thinker. See Rodin Virgil, 148 Thomas, Christa Zeller, 102, 112n9 viscous porosity, 2 Thomashow, Mitchell, 53n21 Vital, Anthony, 178, 184n2, 184n5 Tompkins, Silvan, 55 Vivanco, Luis A., 66n18 Thompson, Katrin, 19n29 “voice box”, 195 Thompson, Robert J., 67n27, 67n28, 67n35 Volkmann, Laurenz, 19n29 Thornber, Karen, 19n20, 19n26 Thoreau, Henry David, 58, 135 Wallace, Kathleen R., 1, 18n4 Thurston, John, 113n25, 114n78 Walpole, Horace, 73 Tiffin, Helen, 82n39, 82n46, 184n1, 189, Walser, Robert, 81n8 197n9 Warkentin, Traci, 197n21 Tomkins, Silvan, 64n1 Warren, Karen, 2 Tomlinson, John, 68n42 War Requiem (film). See Jarman, Derek Tourniquet, 77, 82n32 Waste (radioactive), 7, 124 trans-corporeality, 2, 31, 32, 33, 34, 90, Watson, Robert N., 155n2 201 Weinstein, Deena, 82n45 translocality, 6. See also postlocal Weisman, Karen, 82n27 214 Index

Weiss, Gail, 197n16 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, 65n6 Westling, Louise, 2, 162, 163, 172n10 Woodward, Wendy, 178, 184n7 Whitehead, Anne, 201 Woolf, Virginia, 95, 98n22, 172n10 Whitman, Walt, 59, 165, 166, 173n22 Worthen, W. B., 173n30 wilderness, 13, 15, 49, 59, 62, 87, 101, 110, 125, 133, 134, 135, 140, 141, 149, Yampell, Cat, 189, 197n8, 197n11 150, 154, 155n3, 201 Yuki, Masami, 6, 19n34 Willoquet-Marcondi, Paula, 19n22 Wills, David, 174n36, 184n22 Zapf, Hubert, 17n1 Wilson, David Sloan, 172n5 Zeller, Robert, 17n1 Winter, Paul, 202 Zhu Yu, 126 Winton, Tim, 42, 45–47, 48, 51, 53n25, Ziefhofer, Wolfgang, 52n1, 52n2 53n29 Žižek, Slavoj, 117, 121, 121–122, 126, Witschi , Nicolas S., 53n28 130n2, 130n5, 130n17, 130n28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 118, 122, 130n9 Zoo City.. See Beukes, Lauren Wittgenstein (film). See Jarman, Derek “Zoo Plague”, 180, 181 Wollen, Roger,7n27 Zuma, Jacob (South African President), Wolfe, Tom, 44, 45, 49 179, 184n9 Wolves in the Throne Room, 12, 71 Zurawik, David, 66n19, 67n30, 67n32 Won-Chung, Kim, 6, 19n35 Contributors

Abdulhamit Arvas (Turkey) is a PhD candidate in English at Michigan State University. He specializes in early modern studies, and is currently working on his dissertation that explores early modern sexualities within a transcultural context. His research interests include early modern European and Islamicate sexualities, Anglo-Ottoman interactions, transculturalism, queer ecologies, and masculinity and body studies.

Anu T. Asokan (India) holds an M.A in English Literature. She was awarded the UGC Junior Research Fellowship in 2009. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English Literature from the Indian Institute of Technolo- gy Madras. Her broad research area focuses on the works of Mahasweta Devi, a well-known activist writer from India. Her thesis work engages with the issues of environmental justice ecocriticism in reading Mahasweta Devi’s texts.

Kyle Bladow (U.S.) is a PhD candidate in the Literature & Environment program at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches in the Core Writing and Core Humanities programs. His dissertation explores intersections of American Indian studies and material ecocriticism within contemporary environmental literature and activism. A former managing editor for ISLE, his other research interests include queer ecology and sustainable agriculture.

Christina Caupert (Germany) teaches American literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany where she is currently a PhD candidate in the Depart- ment of English and American Studies. She has published articles on ecocriticism and ecocritical theory, postmodernism, and literary canon formation.

215 216 Contributors

She is currently completing her dissertation on medieval myth as an intertex- tual, philosophical, and aesthetic source of late twentieth-century American fiction.

Guangchen Chen (China) is a PhD student in the Department of Compara- tive Literature, Harvard University. Working on Chinese, German, English, and Czech literatures, and musicology, his research interests include ecocriticism, Kitsch, Jugendstil and the Baroque, Sino-Czech cultural relations, and phenomenology of music. He is program assistant of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, and associate editor for the Beijing-based journal Poetry, Calligraphy, Painting.

Başak Ağın Dönmez (Turkey) is an instructor and an academic coordinator at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and a PhD candidate at Hacet- tepe University, Ankara, completing her dissertation entitled “Posthuman Ecologies in Animations.” Her article entitled “A Turkish Posthumanist Per- spective in Science Fiction: Özlem Ada’s Embriyogenesis” was published in Ecozon@ 2012. She is a member of EASLCE.

Sylvan Goldberg (U.S.) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Stanford University, and holds an MA in Literature and Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno. His research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, and he writes on ecocriticism, gender and sexuality studies, affect, and aesthetics. He has received the J. Golden Taylor Award from the Western Literature Association.

William V. Lombardi (U.S.) is a doctoral student in the University of Neva- da, Reno’s Literature and Environment emphasis. He studies theories and literatures of place, region, and the U.S. West. He co-authored Reading Joan Didion (2009) and has published articles and reviews in Western American Literature, ISLE, and Journal of American Studies. He is the outgoing affiliate liaison officer for ASLE and WLA, and currently serves as the graduate student representative to the executive council of WLA.

Elise Mitchell (Canada) is a PhD candidate at the University of Quebec— Chicoutimi. Her dissertation focuses on the overlapping space between home and wilderness in nineteenth-century British and Canadian women’s writing, specifically in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Susanna Moodie. Her research interests include human-nonhuman interaction, ecocritical theory, and didactic literature. Elise is also a sessional instructor at the same institution. Contributors 217

Sarah Nolan (U.S.) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry and its connections to ecopoetic theory. Her dissertation embraces new understandings of environment as it considers how developing conceptions of ecopoetics can contribute to interpretations of poems that are not often recognized as environmental.

Serpil Oppermann (Turkey) is professor of English at Hacettepe Univer- sity, Ankara, and Vice President of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (EASLCE). She is the editor of the first Turkish book of ecocritical essays, Ekoeleştiri: Çevre ve Edebiyat (2012), co-editor of The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (2011), Inter- national Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (with Greta Gaard and Simon C. Estok) (2013), and Material Ecocriticism (with Serenella Iovino) (2014).

Diana Villanueva Romero (Spain) teaches at the University of Extremadu- ra, Spain. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Alcalá, Spain. She has been involved in the development of ecocriticism in Spain from its very beginning through collaborations with Friends of Thoreau environmental program and active membership in GIECO-Research Group on Ecocriticism, both based at the Franklin Institute, University of Alcalá

Elzette Steenkamp (South Africa) recently completed a PhD in English Literature at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her dissertation deals with representations of ecological crises in South African speculative fiction, including the works of J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Lauren Beukes, and Jenny Robson. She is currently working as a Technical Author for the Alem- ba Group, a UK IT Service Management company.