The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature

Louise Economides

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137477507
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book traces the aesthetic of wonder from the romantic period through contemporary philosophy and literature, arguing for its relevance to ecological consciousness. Most ecocritical scholarship tends to overshadow discussions of wonder with the sublime, failing to treat these two aesthetic categories as distinct. As a result, contemporary scholarship has conflated wonder and the sublime and ultimately lost the nuances that these two concepts conjure for readers and thinkers. Economides illuminates important differences between these aesthetics, particularly their negotiation of issues relevant to gender-based and environmental politics. In turn, readers can utilize the concept of wonder as an open-ended, non-violent framework in contrast to the ethos of domination that often surrounds the sublime.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Louise EconomidesThe Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern LiteratureLiteratures, Cultures, and the Environment10.1057/978-1-137-47750-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Wonder, Ecocriticism, and Romanticism’s Forgotten Way

Louise Economides¹

(1)

University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, USA

End Abstract

To wonder is to wander. To not only tolerate uncertainty in the Keatsian sense of “negative capability,” but also welcome it as a gateway to new possibilities. To not stay put. Even a poet like John Clare, who is celebrated for his rootedness in place, knew this. His Northborough sonnet about “November” explores the relationship between wandering in the dark and wondering at the world, drawing an extraordinary conclusion about how such experiences shape our experiences of place:

The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell

& the old dog for his night journey stares

The path leads somewhere but they cannot tell

& neighbour meets with neighbour unawares

The maiden passes close beside her cow

& wonders on & think her far away…

The maidens shout & wonder where they go

So dull & dark are the november days

The lazy mist high up the evening curled

& now the morn quite hides in smokey haze

The place we occupy seems all the world (page 67)

On a literal level, sensory deprivation provokes both wandering and wondering here, captured in comic figures such a “maiden” who “passes close” by her cow in the gloom but does not see it, instead “wonder[ing] on” because she believes her charge is “far away.” In “Keeping Nature at Bay: John Clare’s Poetry of Wonder,” Erica McAlpine notes the strange slippage between wondering and wandering at work in the notion that a maid might “wonder” through the dark, rather than “wandering” without a compass. Rather than chalking this up to Clare’s unconventional spelling as a self-educated, working-class poet, McAlpine suggests that the conflation is a deliberate one for an artist “whose very sense of seeing is defined by the wonderment of that act” (98). In McAlpine’s account, Clare is “a primarily visual poet who usually keeps subjectivity out of his poems,” relying instead on “his wandering eye to describe and reorient nature.” In order to “wonder” (find an outlet to express his curiosity about nature), McAlpine asserts that Clare “must wander (and vice versa).” As the title of her essay suggests, McAlpine claims that Clare’s wonder is something that establishes a certain distance between his subjective identity and natural phenomena he describes with objective fidelity, representing a “compromise between knowing” nature and a state of “total separation” (97) from it. Hence, she reads the remarkable concluding line of Clare’s November poem as a “melancholy” recognition of the way that language—specifically the oikos of the poem in a Heideggerian sense—becomes a substitute for the pathless disorientation of earthly places:

It would hardly do justice to the searching melancholy of this poem if “the world” …

simply refers to nature itself. Rather, “the world” must be one in which nature has been

wondered at, wandered through, reoriented, replaced. Clare locates his own experience

… within lyric bounds: the poem, rather than nature, is the place we occupy—it

becomes the world. (98)

In suggesting that Clare’s linguistic turn is the natural outcome of his wondering/wandering, McAlpine rehearses a narrative normally associated with the romantic sublime: the tormented artist escapes from the terrible uncertainty of material/historical existence by establishing an idealized “dwelling place” in the domain of poesy. This story has been told many times in romantic studies, whether the escape is lauded (as in Geoffrey Hartman’s work on transcendent imagination) or critiqued (as in Jerome McGann’s characterization of sublimity as a flight from history). Indeed, for McAlpine, Clare’s disorienting wonder and tendency to create compensatory textual “heterocosms” significantly qualifies his critical reception as an “ecopoet” keenly attuned to the material specificities of place.

But is McAlpine’s account of wonder’s destination, the “place” where poets like Clare arrive when they wander in the openness of uncertainty, really as necessary (or natural) as it seems? Might it not be argued that Clare’s wonder—like the wonder expressed by other romantic writers—is precisely one of the most ecologically significant dimensions of his work? Arguably, it is Clare’s uncertainty, his poetry’s capacity to suspend received notions of what it means to dwell in specific places at specific times, which opens up the question of what we mean when we speak about “place” as an ecologically relevant experience. Timothy Morton’s “Clare’s Dark Ecology” asserts that the poet’s “doubt” functions in precisely this way. Morton explores how Clare’s verse often dramatizes encounters with natural phenomena that fail to conform to his expectations (sometimes in disturbing ways), causing the poet to doubt his own subjectivity as well as the stability/reality of the place he inhabits, something that often leaves the poet depressed. But Morton argues that this doubting/depression does not compel Clare to escape from earthly things into idealized aesthetic realms. Rather, uncertainty connects the poet to such things because it reflects an ability to engage with non-human otherness in all of its strangeness, a refusal to reduce such phenomena to the comforting familiarity of place with all of its potentially sentimental trappings. Morton’s target in this “dark” reading of Clare is clearly ecocriticism which has celebrated the poet as a supreme example of place-based consciousness, a rural bard whose work illustrates the virtues of ecological embeddedness in contrast to modernity’s cosmopolitan homelessness. Such criticism, most clearly represented by Jonathan Bate’s reading of Clare in The Song of the Earth and other scholarship, implies that “place” is a feeling of being at home in a (necessarily) natural environment, an experience which is rendered with empirical fidelity in texts that celebrate the details of rural life while implicitly critiquing the evils of urban modernity. In such accounts, place is a sense of familiarity with nature so deep that it never needs to be questioned, and is (therefore) the primary mark of ecological intimacy. Morton’s reading of Clare turns this sense of place on its head, asserting that it is the poet’s doubt—not his security regarding nature—that “gives us the feeling of environment as open mind”:

This is incredibly good news for ecocriticism. Even here, at the limits of subjectivity,

we find closeness to the earth. It is quite the opposite of what we might expect: that

environment as theory, as wonder, as doubt, does not achieve escape velocity from the

earth, but, in fact, is a sinking down into it further than any wishful thinking, any naïve

concept of interconnectedness could push us. (192–193)

For Morton, Clare’s uncertainty about the more-than-human world and his place in it is “good news” because it inaugurates a questioning attitude toward the environment that may avoid the pitfalls of romantic ecocriticism, such as a rural/urban dualism which implies that an overwhelming majority of the world’s urban population today would be incapable of experiencing “place” authentically.

What is at stake in competing interpretations of Clare is the larger question of ecocriticism’s subject matter and methodology. First-wave ecocritics tend to assume that the field’s proper object of study is a “nature” whose empirical reality precedes (and should shape) cultural constructions, a view reflected in Karl Kroeber’s assertion that ecocriticism “seeks to enhance widespread appreciation of how literary art may connect cultural experiences to natural facts” (Ecological Literary Criticism 1). The ecocritic’s role is to excavate historical examples of “literary art” which faithfully mirror so-called natural facts. The more empirically detailed and geographically specific such texts are, the more they are said to reflect an “ecological” or “proto-ecological” (Kroeber’s term) consciousness—hence, the importance of recovering a poet like Clare. Moreover, first-wave ecocriticism declares that its empiricism is a necessary antidote to socially irresponsible literary criticism that focuses upon “theory”; or, as Kroeber puts it, ecocriticism “takes a form distinct from the ‘philosophic’ essay currently popular with critics, tending toward narrative structures more responsive to the singularity of historical phenomena” (2). As more recent ecological scholarship demonstrates, however, there are potential problems with defining ecocriticism’s focus and methodology this way. For example, the assumption that “nature’s” reality is located “out there” in a material world that precedes linguistic mediation often produces a blindness to nature’s ideological meanings in first-wave ecocriticism, ways in which properly political ideas have (historically) been naturalized in order to support problematic (even reactionary) ways of thinking. Kroeber’s criticism of Napoleon as a leader “discordant with the elemental rhythms by which humans adapt to nature’s beneficence” (11) and admiration of Malthus as a thinker who “argued against social utopianists … so far as they tried to contravene fundamental laws of nature” (13) are revealing in this regard. Should human societies model themselves upon “natural facts,” and are social practices that do not obey nature’s “fundamental laws” aberrant and/or unnatural? Such views have an unsettling affinity with forms of biological determinism that have (historically) been associated with forms of political oppression, including Social Darwinism and Nazism. While I do not claim that first-wave ecocriticism overtly aligns itself with far-right politics, critics such as Kroeber often overlook potential pitfalls within the political naturalism they evoke. Arguably, what critics such as Kroeber and Bate want is for “nature” to function as a rock of certainty in modernity’s tumultuous seas, a reliable “ground” for a politics relieved of the burden of doubt. The same could be said of the quest to valorize place-based, empirically detailed consciousness as an antidote to modernity’s dis-placements. A related problem with this way of defining ecocriticism is that its anti-theoretical stance and investment in representationalism avoid the issue of linguistic instability (the gap between sign and meaning, word and world) and the question of how aesthetic communication about the more-than-human world differs significantly from scientific or “objective” description. This is why my book focuses upon wonder’s aesthetic and philosophical significance as a set of ideas with important ecological ramifications. Readers seeking scholarship modeled upon the critical investments of first-wave ecocriticism, which I have sketched here, will not find it in this book. Although I do not deny the importance of work that examines specific historical–material practices relevant to “green” issues, my work does not begin and end there. While I discuss instances of such practices (including how applied science in the nineteenth century is shaped by the technological sublime and large-scale contemporary pollution in the world’s oceans), my book seeks to open up the field of ecocritical inquiry by exploring ways in which wonder constitutes an anti-foundational, yet nevertheless ecologically vital, aesthetic.

By the same token, my study of wonder is not limited to its deconstructive dimensions. On an emotional level, wonder also has a constructive side that is overlooked by critics such as McAlpine and Morton. It is striking that both McAlpine and Morton associate wonder primarily with dark emotional states such as fear, defensiveness, and depression, when a survey of wonder in occidental thought reveals that it is more commonly associated with positive forms of affect, including awe, excitement, and pleasurable de-centering. McAlpine and Morton’s emphasis on negative affect is no doubt shaped by the biographical specificities of Clare’s chronic depression and psychiatric confinement. Yet archetypically, the subject who experiences wonder is “surprised by joy” in a Wordsworthian sense, happy to be drawn out of themselves by phenomena which do not conform to their habitual experiences of the world. Such affective engagement is not merely a form of intellectual curiosity easily exhausted by a greater knowledge of things. Rather, this “first passion of the soul” (in Descartes’s famous formulation) can signal an inexhaustible, celebratory welcoming of the “otherness” of things in their very otherness. There is no reason why the strangeness of earthly things has to be coded with dread. Indeed, as I will argue, defensive responses to otherness such as fear and melancholy have more in common with an aesthetic of sublimity than they do with wonder. In “A Philosophy of Wonder,” Howard L. Parsons sums up wonder’s deconstructive and reconstructive dimensions quite effectively. On the one hand, Parsons notes how the word “wonder” is derived from the Old English word wundor and may have etymological affinities with the German word Wunde or “wound” (85). Parsons goes on to assert that although wonder may be associated with the shock of the new (experienced as a “wound-like” puncturing of what we took to be certain and therefore as something potentially traumatic), as wound it is also an opening up of new possibilities, prompting creativity in “a number of meaning-molding activities (art, science, etc.).” As we shall see, wonder’s creative potential is of paramount importance to Romantic artists and is associated with renewal both in the ways we perceive “nature” and with political dynamism.

From this reconstructive vantage point, we can read Clare’s wonder at the qualitative uniqueness of flora and fauna in areas such as Helpston and Northborough as a celebratory welcoming of more-than-human otherness, not merely as a reflection of his own defensiveness or depression. Moreover, this welcoming takes on a political valence when we consider how the poet links a capacity to respond to the surprising “call” of natural things with a state of freedom (or wildness)¹ that is threatened by sociohistorical practices such as enclosure. Consider, for example, the poet’s celebration of bird flight as rapturous transport in his Northborough Sonnets:

The wild duck startles like a sudden thought

& heron slow as if it might be caught

The flopping crows on weary wing go bye

& grey beard jackdaws noising as they flye

The crowds of starnels wiz & hurry bye

& darken like a cloud the evening sky

The larks like thunder rise & suthy round

Then drop & nestle in the stubble ground (69)

Here, as in poems about birds’ nests admired by Bate for their capacity to evoke “child-like wonder” (Song 158), there is a sense of Clare’s pleasurable excitement in being “startled” by the “sudden” appearance of his avian neighbors. But in this text, the poet’s wonder is allied to the birds’ freedom—their surprising line of flight (to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation)—rather than their capacity to roost or to create what Bate characterizes as the nest’s fragile shelter in the face of existential “vulnerability.” The “wild” duck’s sudden departure is mirrored by that of a heron, whose graceful gait, though “slow,” equally flees the prospect of being “caught” (trapped, contained)—even as its impressive form captures the speaker’s attention. Likewise, crows and starnels are depicted as flying “bye,” punning both their spatial distance from the speaker and the way in which their flight represents a “statement” of departure. Collectively, the birds’ wild flight creates both wonder and a feeling of sensory dissonance in the speaker (both sonic and visual) as he struggles to gather his perceptions into meaningful form. The jackdaws’ “noising” and larks’ “thunder” are sonic analogues to the visually obscuring effect of starnels that “darken” the “evening sky.” Despite the birds’ capacity to disorientate the speaker in these ways, there is little evidence he finds such displacement disturbing. On the contrary, the cumulative effect of the poem’s precise, yet unpredictable, tracing of the varieties of bird flight is exhilarating and liberating. Here is a landscape so crowded with biodiversity that it continually surprises the speaker in novel ways.

Clare’s depiction of enclosure’s effects upon rural landscapes in The Village Minstrel reflects how this practice dramatically reduces such diversity and imperils the freedom of movement he associates with wondrous ecology. In a representative stanza, Clare depicts the rustic poet Lubin (an alter-ego of himself) responding with horror to efforts to “improve” the land by hemming it in, portioning it out to large landowners for commercial profit, and displacing its working-class and avian residents alike:

There once were days, the woodsman knows it well,

When shades e’en echoed with the singing thrush;

There once were hours, the ploughman’s tale can tell,

Where morning’s beauty wore its earliest blush;

How woodlarks carol’d from each stumpy bush;

Lubin himself has mark’d them soar and sing:

The thorns are gone, the woodlark’s song is hush,

Spring more resembles winter now than spring,

The shades are banish’d all—the birds have took to wing. (49)

Enclosure here marks not only what John Barrell characterizes as the imposition of a linear grid onto the parish’s “circular” topography,² but also a fundamental restriction and emptying of what was once “open” in biologically diverse common lands. Ironically, it is the clearing of “shaded” habitats within the landscape (dark “woods” and “thorny” brambles) that reduces this openness in the name of “improvement.” As in Clare’s “November” sonnet, this text associates “shaded” obscurity with the freedom to wander and wonder. The former (wandering) is an activity enjoyed not only by the speaker, but also by non-human inhabitants of “shaded” places. In stark contrast to the wild cacophony which accompanies the wondrous appearance of birds in Clare’s “wild...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Wonder, Ecocriticism, and Romanticism’s Forgotten Way
• 2. Wonder and Romantic Ecology
• 3. Romanticism, Scientific Wonders, and the Technological Sublime
• 4. The Environmental Sublime and Ecological Melancholy
• 5. Wonder and Technē in an Age of Ecological Risk
• Backmatter