In a gesture which seems to completely divorce ecocriticism from literary studies, Tallmadge defines a curious new “ecological method of criticism” (282). Close reading is just not going to cut it for him because it belongs to conventional literary studies and apparently does not go far enough. As I was reading his essay, the main question on my mind was the question of audience. Who is he writing for? It seems he has in mind a new breed of literary eco-scholars, scholars – if they can even be called that - who go “far enough.”
Tallmadge’s starting point is David Abram’s argument that we have grown deaf to nature and become desensitized to it. It brings to mind Rousseau’s theory of “the natural man,” corrupted by the evils of civilization. Our natural capacity for compassion and pity has been destroyed. Enter nature writing. Enter the eco-scholar, a tutor of the land, engaging with nature through “whole-body encounter[s]” (287).
Tallmadge wants a method “to match our mountains,” a method that will force us to consider nature “in more than a casual way,” the implication being that intellectual labour itself will not carry us far enough (283). We need “fresh air,” we need “field work” (284). We need “field-based reading” (284). And our model should be natural history, a scientific practice and a literary genre all rolled into one!
Interestingly, Tallmadge’s field research project does little more than corroborate King’s account. Hardly a piece of literary scholarship, it might make an interesting contribution to autobiographical studies which are concerned with the question of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. But how is it ecocritical? Tallmadge himself admits that his escapade added “balance to interpretation,” but that’s pretty much it (291). It is not “an actual demonstration of the method” (291). Wow. I guess we are left on our own to try to envision what an actual demonstration would look like.
Despite the many problems Tallmadge’s new method might pose for literary criticism (for example, what if we are dealing with a fictional mountain? How can you have a “whole-body encounter” with a fictional mountain?), what seems to be most problematic is his questioning of intellectual inquiry. His premise is that intellectual inquiry by itself is not adequate because of its alienating effect. It alienates us from real nature, from the real world. This premise is wholly drawn from Abram’s “alphabetic literacy” argument, which assumes that there once was a golden age when we were all noble savages living in perfect harmony with nature. Even if this were true, Abram’s universalist thesis seems to conflate all human culture without taking into consideration that different peoples and different civilizations construct the nature/culture divide differently. Besides, one could easily argue that intellectual inquiry does not necessarily need to alienate us from nature or anything else for that matter (i.e. Plato’s argument that philosophy is the only road to truth).
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Well, I think Tallmadge had it coming. And yet, as he also indicates, this is a pretty representative approach now. How is it ecocritical? In the sense that it gets the real mountain into our thinking about a text, the way a knowledge of Dublin's topography would be helpful in understanding Joyce's Ulysses. You're right about the problems this approach brings with it. Chalk it up to the discomfort some scholars in the field have been feeling about business-as-usual when it comes to texts that make an argument about nature, an object of inquiry that seems to fade from our view as time goes by the way other objects (other texts, people) don't seem to vanish.... Has our intellectual labor indeed carried us far enough? Your response seems to indicate that it might and that it in fact can. But this would require proof, too, wouldn't it?--And where are we headed? What Tallmadage is proposing is that we write about texts the way Audubon writes about birds.
ReplyDeleteWhat is specious about Tallmadage's essay is the covert self-elevation his own account of hiking in the Sierra performs, along with the suggestion that it could have ended badly for him and his students, too. This introduced a kind of pseudo-masculinity and muscularity into criticism that I find deeply suspect.