While reading The White Bone, I found myself asking, "what would ecopoets think about this novel?" On the one hand, there seems to be a real attempt here, by Gowdy, to bridge the gap between human and non-human, and to assert some kind of "homology," as Scigaj puts it, between the two. I wonder, though, if we think about the paradigm of "reference" that Scigaj lays out, if The White Bone succeeds in the ecopoetic enterprise, or if it takes too many liberties with its subject.
The main source of my questioning is the prevalance in Gowdy's novel of things that are beyond the limits of what is observable in elephants, or anything non-human, for that matter. Gowdy's elephants not only live within a highly structured form of society (something scientists have observed and studied about "real" elephants), but they also care about each other, and have identity issues. Tears roll from their eyes (which is accurate -- elephants have no tear ducts) because the elephants are sad. They are also superstitious at times, and have a remarkably religious, even Christian notion of the world as fallen and in need of some hoped-for future redemption. Can these things, and the language used to describe them, have any "real-world" referents?
This is the same question that we had for Ammons's poetry, especially with the chickens who are concerned about the deficiencies in their language, and our anxiety that his idea of the mind as the mirror of reality is really only reality as a projection of the mind. Maybe all this literature about nature really does tell us more about ourselves and the human imagination than it does about actual "nature."
If that is the case, what does this literature tell us? One thing, I think, we might glean (from The White Bone, especially) is the persistence of religious and moral concerns, even when dealing with subjects that have nothing themselves to say about religion or morality. We saw this also with Thoreau's "Dispersion of Seeds," where his writing became more and more focused on scientifically accurate descriptions, and yet he could not avoid drawing moral lessons from time to time from his observations.
In The White Bone, even though it is not scientifically accurate to talk about an elephants as religious or moral creatures, Gowdy pushes her "homology" of humans with elephants to imagine them sharing those "human" characteristics. She could just as easily have avoided religion and morality altogether, and written a story about elephants (preferably also without any interiority) who cared only about survival and meeting physical needs. This might tacitly suggest that human religion and morality is exceptional, and perhaps exceptionally strange, in the context of the broader natural world. That she does the opposite, imposing on elephants a moral and religious sense, suggests the endurance of moral and religious concerns as a part of human existence, even long after the scientific revolution.
Gowdy's literary work is not concerned strictly with the science of elephants, as we have discussed in class. What she inserts as a purely imaginary part of elephantine existence, though, might not be a flaw in her literary art so much as an unavoidable characteristic of the artistic and imaginative (as opposed to scientific) use of language -- it always refers to something beyond the strictly observable and verifiable. Religion and morality cannot be spoken of in scientific terms, but neither can the feelings of elephants, the words of the wind (as Ammons tries to imagine), or even the inner motives and passions of another human being. We can speculate on these things, infer them from observations, but cannot be certain of their reality. The partial disconnect of the literary work from any "real," observable referent is, one might argue, what makes the work itself "literary" or "artistic."
Would "ecopoets" accept this definition and use of poetic language, or would they continue to insist that all signifiers must be tied back to "real" signifieds? Is Scigaj really an overzealous empiricist when it comes to language, or is he just tired (and who could blame him?) of the linguistic "pyrotechnics" of so many "postmodern" poets (p. 42)?
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I was hoping to continue this discussion on the blog, so I'm glad that you brought this up Andrew. I think that your thesis about elephantine religion and superstition reflecting what we can never know and never represent with language is particularly compelling.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to how _The White Bone_ relates to ecopoetry, I feel as if I am always going to side with the imaginative, rather than the mimetic, aspects of literature. I realize that this is a critical bias on my part and probably excludes me from the First Wave club. I readily admit that we can never "think like elephants" or "think like mountains," but I don't find this to be a problem, at least in regards to literature. Along the same lines, it seems that male writers, for example, can't really think like their female characters, or even the male characters that are not based on themselves for that matter. I would argue that the benefit of the creative exercise (and you MFA folks are probably more qualified to speak on this point) is trying on someone else's skin (or "pachyderm" I guess), and the benefit of reading the work is the same.
But, at the risk of evaluation, I think where the novel may have its shortcomings is in choosing elephants as its subject. (I think you may have also brought this up in class Andrew.) There is certainly a value in presenting sentience in order to make the case that these animals, while alien and perhaps dangerous, do not deserve to be wiped out senselessly. To paraphrase our class discussion, it may be impossible and naive to negotiate with a bear, but at the same time, the bear doesn't need to be under humanity's dominion or driven to extinction. However, in choosing elephants, it seems that most readers would already agree that poaching and killing them is wrong. Elephants are also quite large and, in our culture at least, consistently anthropomorphized to be gentle and wise. It seems Gowdy may be preaching to the choir a bit.
A novel that undertakes a similar challenge, and may perhaps be more successful, is Richard Adams's _Watership Down_. The rabbits in this novel, as in Gowdy's, have their own words for aspects of rabbit life that human beings would need no words for. Furthermore, they have their own societies, religion, tales, and songs. _WD_ also demonstrates that interesting slide that we see in _The White Bone_ between the comfortably anthropomorphic and the disturbingly alien aspects of its animal characters. The major differences, however, are numbers and size. Rabbits are pests and, if my backyard is any indication, certainly not endangered like elephants. But, with the inclusion of so many specific characters, _Watership Down_ encourages the reader to look at rabbits individually. In terms of size, rabbits are small. Almost everything in their environment, not just humans, can (and wants to) kill them. I think an elephant has a better chance of holding its own. We also see in the novel how humans are deadly because they take no notice of the rabbits. When they're not trapping or gassing them purposefully, they're hitting them with cars or paving over their holes nonchalantly. _WD_ calls attention to a secret, literally "underground," history happening all around us.
I just wanted to throw this novel into the discussion in case it may illuminate, or perhaps complicate, some issues or themes in _The White Bone_. But I'm very interested in your last paragraph, Andrew. I hope someone more well versed than I in linguistic theory can pick up on those questions in this thread.
I've been thinking a lot about the point Matt's made, both here on the blog and in class, about the choice of elephants for a project like The White Bone. On the one hand, of course, it's true, as far as I know (insert Wikiality reference at your leisure) that African elephants are genuinely endangered, and therefore make a better site for activist writing than, say, rabbits, which, as far as I know, aren't going anywhere as a species. And as far as raising awareness about elephants goes, I think Gowdy succeeds; the narrative simply splurgles with the pathos of sympathetic characters struggling valiantly for survival while the diabolical combined forces of human and nature climate stalk and destroy them one by one.
ReplyDeleteThinking about the way the Sign functions in a more Peircean than Sausserian way -- i.e., the referent of language is shared experience, the experience we have in common of encountering / reacting to objects (etc.) in the world and naming them / finding them named with signs -- I'd actually propose that the pathos of the novel is its most relevant feature. Most readers won't know much about elephant tear ducts or social grouping patterns -- those aren't meaningful signs -- but they will be able to recognize the experiences of loss and desperation. Arguably, a certain amount of anthropomorphism is inevitable, and necessary, to make this kind of pathos stick; the more that discourse works against the tendency (maybe innate and insuppressible?) to anthropomorphize as well as to narratize the natural world, the less awareness it's going to raise. A catalog of empirical facts doesn't generally inspire grand gestures of environmentally preservation.
But on the other hand, if Gowdy's goal is to raise awareness about elephants themselves, if the referent of the novel (or the referent of its tacit cultural complaint) is in some sense actual elephants in Africa, suffering the privations of actual droughts and actual ivory-hunters, why should that awareness require the imposition of human culture on elephants? If nature exists for itself, bearing value separate from and independent of the value humans find in it, why do we have to re-create it as human before we can make an argument for its preservation? (I have a similar concern about Ammons claiming language exists for various animal groups: those communication systems aren't language, and I wonder if he isn't begging the question a little, ultimately devaluing the non-linguistic by protesting too much that it is linguistic. If it's not language -- which, after all, it isn't -- is its communicative value less?) And this, of course, goes back to everything Matt's said about the relative ease of making elephants into sympathetic anthropomorphic characters. Could Gowdy tell this story about the mongooses or the eagle?
Which raises another problem with language and the novel: language is not only imputed to animals in this book, but distributed unevenly. Elephants are essentially given human language, while the other language-using animals are assigned a decomposed version of human language. Gowdy makes some gesture toward the defamiliarization of language with her glossary and occasional use of elephantine terms ("fly" for bird, etc.), but the inconsistency with which this is applied is problematic. She sticks to the "normal" language, the words we recognize even without her glossary, most of the time, depolying her special elephantish vocabulary mostly just for dialogue or reported thinking. The effect is to create a gap between the narrator of the story and the characters, with the narrator's language being slightly more than the elephant's are. The elephant's language, even made strange, is refamiliarized through the narrator's mediation. Effectively, she translates elephant-speak, rather than forcing us to learn it. It seems a missed opportunity to make us come to the elephants, just a bit, rather than always bringing the elephants to us.
I think the way you put the problem is appropriate, Arwen -- is the goal to inspire readers to care for the Elephants and act generously towards them, or is the goal in The White Bone to help readers better understand Elephants? My main problem with this has been that, if the goal is the latter, the novel has to fail. It might be that ecopoetry generally must fail if its goal is to provide readers access to some hidden reality in nature. We simply cannot access the minds of Elephants, or any creature, in any verifiable way. So speaking of poetry as if it could help us to understand the reality of nature better, to my mind, is nonsense.
ReplyDeleteWe can, however, use imaginative stories, poems, and so forth to create a possible world of Elephant life, and in this way help others to think about Elephants in a different way than they perhaps did before. But I think we have to remember always that this is only a possible Elephant world. It may very well be that Elephants have no notion of responsibility. In writing about Elephants in this way, we do nothing to truly approach the Elephant itself.
But again, this is the condition of all writing that "tries on someone else's skin," or which tries to imagine what is other than or lies outside of verifiable fact, which is most of literature. This only becomes a problem when we presume that, in trying on someone else's skin, we're actually coming to a more accurate understanding of them. We might create more sympathy for them, or generate a greater sense of responsibility and connectedness towards them, but it will always be a human (i.e. anthropocentric) act of the imagination making this step.
This isn't to say Gowdy couldn't have written a much better novel, and one which didn't resort to tricks like calling birds "flies" or using other strange words to defamiliarize and create the sense that the Elephants in the novel are speaking a unique Elephant language...but I don't think we can fault her for not giving us a better sense for how real Elephants really feel or being a true "voice" for nature. Unless, of course, that was her goal, in which case it was doomed from the start.