In “Nature’s Personhood” Buell
explores the concept of “kinship between the nonhuman and human” (180) from the
Romantics to the Modernists. If we look to the lyric alone, we may be tempted
to conclude that as poets sought “an increased commitment to literal fidelity
as an issue of aesthetic ethics,” (188), any sense of kinship was strained, or
perhaps even severed. Buell locates this nadir in the modernist period, with
Wallace Stevens as the primary critical imagination. Yet, Buell also frames
Stevens’ resistance as a form of anxiety revealing doubts about the efficacy of
such a rhetorical stance. This stance is further troubled by the way nature
essayists and other writers remained deeply engaged (some might say entangled)
in that very notion of kinship. Buell traces how these two tendencies emerged,
and looks at how a relational emphasis has continued to manifest itself.
Even as a materializing
Judeo-Christian consciousness insisted on the separation between humankind and
the environment, “classicism had kept alive the imagination of an interanimate
cosmos” (183). This fed the neoclassical emphasis on treacly anthropomorphism,
which, however, led to the Romantic project of “the dignification of the
overlooked” (184). Concurrent with Blake’s “pietistic sentimentalism” (186) was
“the route of natural history,” (186) whose materialist aims were often
complicated by anthropomorphic tendencies. As later Romantic poets engaged the
natural world, they sought to correct the excess of the neoclassicists.
Darwin’s close discoveries, rather than widen the schism between the nonhuman
and human, in some ways lessened it, and this Romantic/scientific ferment was
the gestalt for the Victorian nature essay as practiced by Burroughs and Muir.
Burroughs sought to express a love
of nature via empirical means—he diagnosed himself intellectually modern,
emotionally retrograde. Muir “never considered the ‘pathetic fallacy’ might be
fallacious” (192). His material experience was
spiritual. Second-wave nature writers post Burroughs and Muir tended toward
anthropomorphism in part because they were often writing toward
turn-of-the-century concerns that resulted in perceptions of nature being used
to explore various “social codes.” As mentioned, the Modernist lyric increased
the “separation of mind from nature” (199), but did so anxiously, and
coincident nature writing was in some ways erasing that same divide with “an
incipient ecocentric ethics” (199). Ecology, according to Donald Worster is
“‘inescapably a relational discipline speaking a relational language’” (200).
This continued relational emphasis
is embodied in Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, the recognition of scientific myths
of representation, and the rise of legislation that allows non-humans legal
rights or protections, which continue to muddy the waters. Scientific knowledge
has not destroyed our inclination to see or construct affinities with the
nonhuman world. How has this situation influenced the literature? One effect
has been to move the human to the periphery or, correlatively, to explore the
natural world’s affective possibilities in relation to humankind.
Questions
On page 190, Buell quotes Burroughs: “Nature works ‘always
in a blind, hesitating, experimental kind of fashion,’” which, he suggested, is
opposite the method of science. To what extent do you find this juxtaposition
problematic? How does our understanding of creative processes also relate to
this idea?
As I was writing this summary, I kept thinking about the
idea of domesticity, which made me think of theories that propose that some
plants or dogs, for example, domesticated humans as much as humans domesticated
them. Is it interesting or fruitful to think about this affinity for kinship in
the same way?
On page 200, Buell says that both creative and empirical
voices want a “properly demythologized myth of kinship” and that “‘ecology’ has
supplied that myth.” Do you think such a myth-free myth is possible?
The passage we read concludes with two excerpts that Buell
uses to show how literature may intersect with more contemporary notions of
interconnectedness. What are your thoughts on these examples? Do they confirm
or resist your expectations? Do you find them good choices?
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