Hunting and Vision in RPW’s Audubon

In order to focus on discussion of Hunting Narratives this week, I’d like to consider Audubon the primary text. If you are pressed for time, please read Audubon first, then the Smith essays on Audubon. It would be nice if we could draw on Roosevelt and Smith’s poems for sake of comparison. In Audubon, overall, in which parts are we dealing with hunting narrative? What does “hunting” consist of in Audubon and how can we apply ecocritical lens to it? In order to allow for the broadest possible interpretations of “hunting” in this poem, I will often not distinguish between hunting, murder, and other acts of or implied violence. The following is a LONG list of questions and thoughts…do with them what you will….

Hunting and Human/Non-human
· How does hunting alter or affect the distinction between our typical binary distinction between human and non-human (animal/natural)?
· How are the often distinct states of “sight” and “thought” (body/mind; senses/reason) either working against each other or unified during acts of hunting/violence? Also, there often seems to be a tendency to acquire a certain degree of narrative distance in acts of violence, where the subject is removed as the agent of the action taking place.
· What is the relationship between eating, hunting, murdering, thinking and seeing (“saw”) in part 2?
· How does hunting stimulate, in the predator’s/hunter’s conscience, a reordering process? In other words, how do the senses, given that present moment—that moment right before killing, reprioritize what is observed by the hunter? (i.e. The teeth are more importantly white / Than has ever been imagined…)
· Does Audubon lead us to believe that hunting is simply a metaphor or that the act of hunting, shooting, killing, actually allows one to transcend human limits of knowledge (Unless. Unless what?)
· When Audubon first sees the Indian’s face (II.D), he sees one eye only, the other eye is his mouth: “From one eye only, the other / An aperture below which blood and mucus hang, thickening slow.” RPW employs a strange synesthesia, mixing up the sites of the senses and their functions. Furthermore, what the eye sees is often more indication of the eye itself, the observer’s consciousness, than the object observed. Aside from lust and hunger, what can we make of the mouth-eye as it relates to hunting? I wonder if this relates in any way to how fuel stems from food and shelter in Thoreau’s economy….Or perhaps we can read hunting, here, as a return to the most primitive mode of being, which although animalistic, might be conceived of as return to nature? Certainly a return to nature in the first-wave sense, however, without any regard for social justice.

The Gun and Present Tense
· What is the role of the gun in Audubon? How is RP Warren using it as a prop? A voice? A motif? How might the Gun be used as mediator, and hunting an act of mediation between human and natural world (I am thinking of Thoreau’s hunters who “stitched the ground in places” where it would otherwise be unstitched…)
· Hunting seems to gain much of its appeal and poignancy from the way it anchors the hunter in the present moment. Yet, hunting narratives are often told in past tense, rather than present tense and that “moment” of killing and death as it occurred physically can only be retold by creating the very context that the moment of hunting—the shot—vanquishes. Hunting moments in Audubon, where he holds or leans on or looks through his gun—where the shot is potential—are told in the present tense. Most all others are not. Verb tense is never more evident that in the second section of Audubon, where A-J is the only section of the poem told in present tense, because it leads up to the “affair.” The act of violence/murder looming keeps Audubon in the present moment, keeps us enclosed in his mind, where there exists a clarity of mind—a “now”—that is in other sections fragmented, dreamed. Section K marks the transition back to the past tense. The omniscient eye previously set in Audubon’s mind, zooms out to see the affair in the context of the larger world. Here, it is only after the implied murder that the reader is given access to context, gravity—the greater ramifications of the narrative. In some ways the act of violence is prerequisite to “coming to” or awareness. We, the audience, can only see afterward, what the man and woman see in the present moment (“and the face / Is, he suddenly sees, beautiful as stone, and / so becomes aware…). Furthermore, when we do see it, we see it much differently (“the affair was not tidy…”).
· While acts of violence may give us context, and divert our attention outward, the gun shot also triggers memory and causes Audubon (and RPW) to turn inward. What does Audubon’s story/Penn warren’s narrative suggest about the relationship between memory (nostalgia) and hunting? See IV where the shot in A brings to life another world recalled in section B. How is the world of memory different from the world (i.e. “Tell me the name of the world”)

Masculinity and Other intersections
· What is to be made of Masculinity and Hunting (“he cannot think what guilt unmans him”) and is it fair to say that the “manly state” = hunter/predatory state in section 2?
· What is to be made of the primitive / uncivilized communication and speech patterns by both Audubon and the woman. Audubon never speaks aloud to the woman, though she speaks to him. He only thinks, or perhaps his thoughts are in dialogue with the Indian he sees in the cabin. What can we make of the Indian—where does he come from, what is he to Audubon, and why is he present in this scene? Is he at all responsible for the murder? Furthermore, how does the Indian and the presence of “manliness”—the societal standards outside the world of the poem—effect Audubon’s actions? (see 2.H)

Hunting and Murder
· How does the description of the murder in II. K compare to hunting narratives? What is more or less “humane” about the murder? How can we use ecocritical perspectives toward the description of murder as a “new dimension of beauty”? How would this relate to romantic notions of beauty and transcendence via nature/primitive modes of being?
· Audubon finds “a new dimension of beauty” in death and killing, and to some extent this beauty is derived from the realization of “the present moment” along with the limits and sufficiency of the self—that by enacting death, one faces and subverts one’s own death. Thus, beauty is an end in itself, an aesthetics that is not necessary congruent with or continuous with ecocritical perspectives?
· To what extent can we read hunting/murder in Audubon as a self-referential act or as metaphor for objectification of the other done for one’s own joy/beauty? See 2.J-L, where in J: “she is what she is”; objectified in K: “the face, like a plum”; self-referential turn in L:”what has been denied me?”

Narrative/Structure/Poetics
· In many sections of the poem, RPW develops a reactionary dynamic where Audubon focuses on and observes an object, and is thereby propelled into “thought” and self-dialogue. Rarely do we see Audubon reacting through actual speech, but rather through interiority/ “thought”, or else, by quiet acts of violence that might or might not take place outside of his mind. To what extent can we treat hunting (and murder) scenes/references in Audubon as narrative, as opposed to metaphor? I wonder how our answer to this question is affected by the poem’s biographical foundation—that the poem asks us to begin our reading with a real man who is already, before our reading, a construction in our minds. It seems we could talk exhaustively about this poem without the first reference to hunting, on the other hand, we might read the entire poem (perhaps beginning with the first instance of the word “saw” in the second stanza) as one long hunting narrative constructed by Penn Warren. In the first page of “Warren’s Ventriloquist”, Smith catalogues a number of different critical approaches to Warren’s poetic form in Audubon. For Smith, Audubon is “a poem of lyric voice performing narrative tasks” (61). What on earth does this mean? I think, in some ways, Buell’s world-making applies here. Penn Warren seems to be primarily concerned with rendering a world unbound by temporal and spatial constraints, and certainly not dependent on the “true story” of a man for whom there is no such thing. In some regards, Audubon is perhaps a logical alibi for Penn Warren to tell his own personal narrative without the highly unfashionable personal pronoun. In any case, if we think of the story as a created environment, it seems there might be something in common with how RPW uses Audubon, Poe uses Pym, and Thoreau uses Walden, Bachelard uses nests and shells. Perhaps one way to apply ecocriticism to these “environments” is to first ask whether it is a means to understanding or connecting the self and “other” realms, or whether it is a rubber stamp, whereby objectification, abstraction, anthropomorphism apply. In Poe, we talked a lot about how nature often seemed to be simply a backdrop—a means to heighten interiority—Poe’s primary environment. More extreme, perhaps, is Bachelard, who certainly extracts shells and nests from nature for the sake of metaphor and the higher meanings he attaches to them as his own intellectual property. In Thoreau, it might be said that Walden is very much a necessary means to and an integral part of his intellectual journey rather than a convenient vehicle for his metaphor (certainly, one could argue against this too). What happens in a poem where the primary environment is Audubon? Can a person’s life (biographical info/art/myth, etc…) be the environment for a text, and to what extent can the author’s handling of this environment—his “vision” be viewed ecocritically? How is “Audubon” by Robert Penn Warren or “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” by Poe—by their very titles and premises—like anthropomorphizing of nature—one man assuming the voice of a thing he cannot speak for?