Wolverines and the Poetics of Reverie

I think that Magda's earlier post has established that whatever the creature Christoph saw on his now infamous 1 am excursion was, it was probably not a wolverine.  The controversy and teasing that his disclosure of this sighting provoked, however, brings to mind an aspect of the human encounter with nature that we have not discussed at much length in class, but that I think is very relevant to our discussions of what is at stake in our imaginings of the natural world: the big fish tale.

In order to avoid the tall-tale connotations that "the big fish tale" might conjure, I'll explain what I mean through personal anecdote.  I was an avid fisherman as a teenager, and I hooked something huge one day while fishing off my boat on Lake Wawasee.  I battled that fish for a long time, long enough to get it pretty close to the boat, and close enough that it resorted to jumping out of the water in its struggles, since the line was too short for it to get far by diving.  Over the course of my encounter with that fish, I got several glimpses of its length, shape, and coloration, but it broke the line before I could net it.  Still, I was sure it was a gar.  I was told later that the chances of hooking a gar in deep, open water were very slim.  They prefer the warm, calm water back in the channels and marshes.  I was told later that it must have been a northern pike, and while I was and remain convinced of the explanation, after two decades I still have to correct myself when I recollect that encounter in my imagination.  This exciting  glimpse of a creature that takes on a life of its own in the imagination is what I mean by the "big fish tale."

Christoph's wolverine and my gar (and I imagine that nearly everybody in the class has a similarly magical though implausible encounter in their imaginations) are interesting artifacts of fleeting encounters with the natural world that are more interesting in some ways than the encounters that we can verify.  They seem to live longer in our imaginations; the mind won't let go of that first impression of the encounter despite convincing counter-evidence.  It becomes a poetic image, "independent of causality," as Bachelard might say.  

 Bary Lopez writes in Arctic Dreams about the necessity of embellishing non-fiction in order to achieve the effect of being there in person; fictional flourishes, for Lopez, function to make the reading experience more real.  Buell's second wave look at works of literature as environments seems to do the same thing.  John Tallmadge set out into the Sierras to prove that Clarence King exaggerated (did he have something else to prove as well?) and came back with an appreciation for the difference between what a landscape looks like and how it is experienced.  I wonder if the imaginary encounter in reality, the big fish tale that was unreal when it actually happened, might be a phenomena worth exploring in ecocriticism.  Bachelardian phenomenology might be the most productive way of examining those fleeting, misinterpreted-yet-magical encounters with the natural world, but I wonder if the phenomena might also have interesting theoretical ramifications for the ecocritical texts we've read. 

Thoughts?

John Gast’s American Progress: Columbia stringing telegraph wires

I was reminded of this painting when I saw Ben’s posting of the macabre map. Here we have a vision of wires being strung not across the Atlantic but across the continent, in a clearly “civilizing” mission – hence the title, American Progress. The Native Americans and the buffalo and bears are on the run. What I think is interesting about this painting is that it’s not the railroad or the settlers with their guns that lead the westward expansion, but rather Columbia with her wires. The technological expansion goes hand in hand with economical expansion: on the lands taken over by the settlers we see hunting and farming activities. The spiritual aspect is covered as well I think, with Columbia herself looking like a guarding angel or the soul of the enterprise, bringing to mind Whitman’s “O my brave soul! / O farther, farther sail!” Or in this case, float.

Human Body/North America Map, etc.

Here is the map I was talking about in class... pretty macabre. Here is a link to the website I found it on... http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ Beware, however, this blog is addicting.

I wanted to add a few things that I was thinking about after class in terms of the connections Chris made between the telegraph and capitalism, as well as the shrinking of space and time in terms of whiteness. I mentioned a connection between the telegraph and Anderson's concept of print capitalism in Imagined Communities. Basically, his argument was that the printing press, specifically the newspaper in the New World was one of the fundamental tools for establishing a feeling of simultaneity across a wide expanse of space. So in terms of the Eastern Seaboard, newspapers would print not only local news, but also recent news to the north and south, and occasionally news from across the Atlantic. So someone living in Boston would be relatively up to date about what was going on in Charleston, allowing them to not only speculate on shipping, etc. but also giving a sense that the people who lived in Charleston were in the same community as the people living in Boston. This, among other things, gives rise to the nacent concept of the nation. As far as the telegraph is concerned, we mentioned that it simply speeds up the process. However, I think we might be able to say a little more about the concept of speed connecting time and space. In Italy during the 1930s saw the development of Futurism, an art movement which was extremely interested in the notion of speed and acceleration (they were a precursor to Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" and cubism). In the 40s, however, this group became the main source of propoganda posters under Mussolini and were strong proponents of fascist ideals. Is there a connection between fascism and speed? Or between fascism and the breakdown of time and distance?
In another one of my classes this semester, we read an article by Kathleen Biddick on mapping, the astrolabe, travel literature and antisemitism in the late middle ages. One of Biddick's arguments is that medieval Christians thought about time typologically (a statement which is hard to disagree with). So for them the Old Testament and the Jews were prefigurations of the New Testament and Christianity, where Christ is both modeled on and supercedes what came before (in this case the Israelite prophets). You can see this in any medieval commentary on the Bible, where scenes from the New Testament are shown to be similar to and a fulfillment of scenes in the Old Testament. This may seem a topic far afield from our own class, but bear with me. In this Christian typological view, then, the Jews live in the past. Biddick talks about when the Victorines were translating the Hebrew Bible in Paris during the 1100s and 1200s they were in constant contact with Parisian rabbis... for the Victorines, consulting with these rabbis was like "placing a long distance call to the Old Testament." We might read this as a form of cosmopolitanism if we wanted to be optimists, but the truth is that these same Victorines were involved in associating the Jews with Gog and Magog in John's Revelation, a highly anti-semitic move which persisted well into the renaissance and beyond. In actuality what is going on with the Victorines is a move which places the Jews in the past as a superceded people, a move which denies them what Biddick calls "coevalness." So what ends up happening to the Jews of Europe is a result of this denial: either they must be exterminated, as happens in the widespread pogroms of the 1400s, or they must be converted and integrated into Christian society. They cannot remain a separate, coeval entity as that would imply that Christ did not supercede them.
I see the same thing going in the Whitman poem we read for today. When he talks about India he is always placing it not only in the distance which is about to be overcome, but also in a mythologized past. The people of India are not simultaneous with him, do not share anything with him, and it is only in the abolition of time and space, in the spiritual realm, that any sameness might occur. We see the same image of typology in the first stanza, where he talks about the connection with the past, "for what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past?" India is tied to "the primitive fables" which Whitman likens to "ye facts of modern science," where science is equal to (but also later and therefore superceding) the myths of the "East." Perhaps the most telling lines are his encomium to the engineers and sailors who are taking the passage to India: "You, not for trade or transportation only, / But for God's sake..."
I don't think it is too far of a jump to start talking here about Western corporate interests in the East, and the rise of British capitalism vis a vis India, nor the "white man's burden" of civilising Africa by enslaving africans to work in the mines and teaching them about Christ. This all seems sort of part and parcel of the Victorian project. Whitman also rides roughshod over the history of the American railroad itself, built largely by the labor and brutal subjection of Chinese immigrants to California and other western states. No, for him the point is the bringing together of all points in space through technology,
The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,
The people to become brothers and sisters,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
Again, we might read this as Whitman being cosmopolitan, attempting to erase the differences between lands and peoples. But what is really being erased, and who are these people who will "become brothers and sisters"? Are they not already brothers and sisters? Must they be transformed, even eliminated? What is the true nature of the rapturous messianic immanence in this poem that we talked about in class? It is definitely an erasure of time and space in some kind of mystical union, but what else is being erased in this moment? It doesn't help his case that the figures he uses to talk about cultural encounter are Vasco de Gama and Columbus... two men who were not exactly friendly with the "natives."
In the same class in which we read Biddick we have been talking alot about universalism, and I think some of the language we have developed there might be useful here. Basically, we might define two kinds of universalism: 1. All people are fit into a single pre-existing category. In this situation, "others" must be transformed or eliminated in order to create the perfect unity of mankind. So for Christians, all people must become Christians and recognize universal truth. Or, in the case of our own world, all people must be converted to democracy and capitalism. But there is another way of thinking about universalism. 2. Categories themselves are "superceded" by a meta-category which allows local difference but a global identification, such as the fact that we are all humans. This seems utopian, and it is. The main problem with it is that efforts to usher in the second kind of universalism almost always fall back into the first kind. A good example is St. Paul, who argued that all people, men and women, Jew and Greek, could break bread together and coexist as children in the truth of a resurrected Christ, the event which for him changed history and remapped all social boundaries (I'm channeling Badiou here). Over time, however, and particularly with the election of Christianity as the Roman state religion, to be a Christian was once more a category of self and other... we are the Christians, the others need to be converted. The second problem with this form of universalism comes from Derrida: in defining a category of universal humankind, we necessarily exclude the non-human and create the "animot." It is in the very action of claiming universal human brotherhood that we dispossess either other humans or other forms of life in general.
For the telegraph and the railroad, I might point out that their developments are contemporary with the massacre and deportation of Native American populations, as well as the wholesale destruction of buffalo, passenger pigeon and other animal life we talked about in relation to Audubon and the hunting narratives. Like India in Whitman's poem, America's Indians were a symbol of the landscape's past, the people who prefigured and were superceded by the white settlers, and as such either had to be converted to European culture or destroyed. The native species of America also had to be superceded by European species.
Just as speed was connected to fascism and the extermination of European Jews during the 1940s with the Futurists, the acceleration of communication and travel in 19th century America is connected to the erasure of peoples. The Native Americans either had to be "brought up to speed" or die in the process.
All of this seems very much in line with second wave ecocriticism. But I think we may need first wave ecocriticism to solve the problem (if it can be solved at all). Maybe we need a meta-meta-category encompassing all life, the de-anthropomorphized view which acts as the fetish of all first wave ecocriticism, in order to step out of these typological circles of violence. And maybe this is only possible in the moments when we step outside of language, when we can see the landscape and everything outside of our heads not as trees and rocks and animals and other people (i.e. as concepts), but as something undefinable. Something perceptible, but not conceptual, not an object of knowledge or discourse. What the mystics might call union with the mind of God.

Some scattered thoughts on the Telegraph and Ecocriticism

What do we do with the telegraph?

As Picker and Carey separately demonstrate, its environmental consequences were fairly wide-ranging. For Picker, Victorians were “insulated” from the environmental/material devastation necessary to produce the medium that provided a figure for collapsing geographical difference. Although Carey doesn’t frame it in specifically ecocritical terms, the communications revolution he claims telegraphy inaugurates—essentially by detaching communication from physical transportation—is responsible for the rapid acceleration of the global capitalism underwriting our current environmental crisis.

But how do we think of the telegraphs effects from a literary ecocritical standpoint?

Carey’s claim that “The telegraph brought about changes in the nature of language, or ordinary knowledge, of the very structures of awareness” (202) is provocative, though not satisfyingly fleshed out. The rhetoric of global unity, the annhiliation of space and time, etc,--though ubiquitous utopian sentiments of the time-- seem easily explained away as examples of “false-consciousness.” A number of contemporary literary critics have managed to say some interesting things about the way the telegraph impacts literary forms. Richard Menke has linked Victorian realism to the type of social connectivity promoted by the telegraph. Paul Gilmore has recently made a convincing case that popular notions of electricity (fostered chiefly by the telegraph) result in new ways of thinking of the relations between aesthetics and sympathy. But none of this work takes on an explicitly ecocritical task.

“Social ecocriticism” seems the most promising angle of approach, but we are left with a number of the tensions that Buell discusses. For instance, although the “universal humanity” that the telegraph is supposed to produce is often code for a white, Anglophone “humanity” (something Gilmore argues), the same techno-optimism was important to abolitionists and other social progressives. On one hand, we can see the desire for the collapse of space and time as a good thing—universal humanity through improved technology, the improved manipulation of nature through technology, promise the end of slavery. Being fastened too much to the “local” can result in ethically dubious concepts, such as the 19th century “environmental” theories of race.

Buell’s discussion of the ambiguities surrounding the concept of “place” might be one way to approach the problems presented by the ideological changes that come with the telegraph. (Incidentally, Buell describes these “intractable ambiguities” in electric terms---e.g., as a matter of how “the circuits and loops of place tie nature and culture together”). He lists three major ambiguities:

1. “the fraught relation between environment and emplacement”
2. “the nested quality of place – the disparate modes of attachment that the term implies. What counts as a place can be as small as a corner of your kitchen or as big as the planet”
3. the possibility that “ ‘non-places are the real measure of our time,’ as anthropological theorist Marc Augé has claimed” (Buell 69).

To add to the list, another ambiguity may be that any “place” involves, to some degree, the annhilation of space and time—to the extent that by defining boundaries and instituting tradition it necessarily closes open, abstract space. The collapse of space and time that the telegraph brings about—at least in imaginary terms—is one in which the abstract “space” of thought and language reduces interpersonal and geographical differences. Although an ethics of place-attachment would hope to avoid this type of homogenization, to coordinate any substantial movement towards local attachment requires that we think in global terms.
In this respect, it is interesting to consider that certain strains of our current ecological vision may be caught up in a loop that the telegraph is, in some ways, responsible for. Consider Carey’s claim that “The telegraph permitted the development, in the favorite metaphor of the day, of a thoroughly encephalated social nervous system in which signaling was divorced from musculature. It was the telegraph and the railroad—the actual, painful construction of an integrated system—that provided the entrance gate for the organic metaphors that dominated nineteenth-century thought. Although German romanticism had… [its] place, it is less to the world of ideas and more to the world of actual practice that we need to look when trying to figure out why the nineteenth- century was obsessed with organicism” (215-16). Though I’m a bit skeptical about this simple materialist explanation of organicism, I think it is interesting not only in comparison with the dialectics and ambiguities involved in our own environmental thinking, but to the ambiguities presented in 19th century environmental thinking. I have chosen Whitman’s “Passage to India” as (hopefully) providing some good examples of this type of ambiguity.

If the early telegraph’s fanfare may be dismissed as another example of eco-ignorant anthropocentrism, it may be more useful to look at how the vision of global unity supported by this technology is a new or emergent form of anthropocentrism—a dream of global consciousness that continues to inform our ways of thinking about the environment. (One thing I’ve been thinking about, especially in terms of our discussion of the animal, is whether or not anthropomorphism is anthropomorphic (if that makes any sense) in assuming the human as some sort of universal being. But, of course, the dangers of not thinking in these terms are many)

And for your pleasure, here’s an example of the telegraph being thought of as a human space insulated from—and in the midst of—a very nonhuman space, the “outer-space” of the time, the bottom of the sea:

The Deep-Sea Cables--Kipling

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar–
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world— here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat–
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth–
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

To what does "The White Bone" refer?

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)?

Wolverine?

Sited: Wolverine on High Street, Bloomington, Indiana

Probability: Highly Unlikely (please see photo of wolverine's current range in North America; top photo)

The White Bone: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide?

The White Bone: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide?

Linda Vance, from Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations

Crafting narratives that will give voice to animals and make humans care about them in appropriate ways is no easy task. We want to avoid anthropomorphizing animals even though that has proven itself an effective tactic for mobilizing public sympathy toward them. We need to be faithful to their stories, not our own. The goal is not to make us care more about animals because they are like us, but to care about them because they are themselves. (185)

Graham Huggan, from “’Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives”

- Gowdy articulates “resistance to authoritarian habits of thought and value-systems, connecting these clearly to the dominating practices of imperialist and/or neocolonialist regimes …” (701)
- The White Bone “confronts the impossible task of making animals speak without humans speaking for them … converting them from passive objects for human use into self-willed ‘ecological subjects’ (term borrowed from Dobson)” (714)


Sample Reviews (emphases mine):

Amazon.com Review
“Alas, this is a book heavy with omens and slaughter, and Gowdy makes each elephant so individual, so conscious, that their separate fates are impossible to bear ... As the devastation increases, and her characters fail, and fail again, to find the magical white bone that should lead them to safety, the novel becomes a litany of pain and death. The only success is Barbara Gowdy's, in getting so thoroughly under the skin of her elephantine protagonists.”

Publishers Weekly Review
“In this novel … [Gowdy] has chosen to inhabit the minds of a series of elephants in African desert country, and despite her great skill and the colossal effort of imaginative empathy it must have entailed, her book is hard going. For a start, as in one of those vast generational sagas … There is a great deal of interesting elephant lore, about the nature of their fabulous memory, their scenting and tracking skills, their eating, drinking and fornicating habits. Without being overly anthropomorphic, Gowdy manages to individualize a number of them as having human-scale emotions, even humor …”


Discussion Questions

1. Gowdy carefully researched African elephants for The White Bone (see the acknowledgements section, p. 329 in my edition), supposedly to make it “realistic.” But is this book really about elephants? It reads like a narrative about a tribal human society, replete with magical thinking. And often like a satire of human beliefs, behavior, vices, religion etc.

- evolution as the Descent (p. 7) ridicules the idea that “man” is the end point of the evolutionary process
- female vanity: She-Scares’ “youthful appearance” (p. 25)
- superstition and religion: “Mourning order” on page 13 (390 verses), Tall Time’s superstition (49)


2. To what extent is The White Bone a valid attempt at trying to imagine animal “subjectivity” or “interiority”? Or is it just an adult version of the “talking animal” story (Aesop's Fables, the speaking serpent from the Book of Genesis, or even contemporary children’s movies like Finding Nemo or Madagascar) in which animals are endowed with certain human characteristics (i.e. foxes are cunning, elephants never forget)? Gowdy clearly seems to rely on stereotypes.

3. We have been talking about the ecocritical concept of “the voice of nature” and the need to listen to this voice and/or express it. Does The White Bone succeed at all in expressing “the elephant voice” through what at times is pure fantasy? Is “the colossal effort of imaginative empathy” one of the reviews mentions the right approach to do this? How can we even begin to evaluate her effort? If escaping anthropocentric thought is impossible, then is creating imaginative inter-species connections the best way to express “the voice of nature”?

4. Aren’t there hidden dangers behind Gowdy’s anthropomorphism? Doesn’t it create the illusion that “a partnership” with elephants is possible, that they are just like us, only a little different? That nature is something we can fully grasp and relate to and, therefore, fully control?