SOURCE: Sanders, Scott Russell. “Speaking a Word for Nature.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, pp. 182‐95. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Sanders laments that recent American fiction does not turn outward to acknowledge nature.]

Why is so much recent American fiction so barren? Putting the question more honestly, why do I find myself reading fewer contemporary novels and stories each year, and why do I so often feel that the work most celebrated by literary mavens (both avant‐garde and establishment) is the shallowest? What is missing? Clearly there is no lack of verbal skill, nor of ingenuity in the use of forms. And there is no shortage of writers: if you pause in the checkout line at the supermarket the clerk is likely to drag his manuscript from under the counter and ask your opinion. It is as though we had an ever‐growing corps of wizards concocting weaker and weaker spells.

To suggest what is missing, I begin with a passage from D. H. Lawrence's essay about Thomas Hardy. Lawrence argued that the controlling element in The Return of the Native is not the human action, but the setting where that action takes place, the wasteland of Egdon Heath: “What is the real stuff of tragedy in the book? It is the Heath. It is the primitive, primal earth, where the instinctive life heaves up. … Here is the deep, black source from whence all these little contents of lives are drawn.” Lawrence went on to generalize:

This is a constant revelation in Hardy's novels: that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. Against the background of dark, passionate Egdon, of the leafy, sappy passion and sentiment of the woodlands, of the unfathomed stars, is drawn the lesser scheme of lives. … The vast, unexplored morality of life itself, what we call the immorality of nature, surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility, and in its midst goes on the little human morality play, … seriously, portentously, till some one of the protagonists chances to look out of the charmed circle … into the wilderness raging around.¹

All fiction is a drawing of charmed circles, since we can write about only a piece of the world. Within that circle, language shines meaning onto every whisper, every gesture and object. All the while, beyond that circle, the universe cycles on. Much contemporary fiction seems to me barren in part because it draws such tiny, cautious circles, in part because it pretends that nothing lies beyond its timid boundaries. Such fiction treats some “little human morality play” as the whole of reality, and never turns outward to acknowledge the “wilderness raging round.” And by wilderness I mean quite literally the untrammeled being of nature, which might include—depending on where you look—a woods, a river, an alien planet, the genetic code, a cloud of subatomic particles, or a cluster of galaxies. What is missing from much recent fiction, I feel, is any sense of nature, any acknowledgment of a nonhuman context.

While Lawrence's account seems to me largely true of Hardy, it does not apply to the mainstream of British fiction. In the work of British novelists from Defoe and Fielding through Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf, up to contemporaries such as Margaret Drabble and Anthony Powell, the social realm—the human morality play—is a far more powerful presence than nature. What Lawrence wrote about Hardy applies more widely and deeply, in fact, to American literature. Hardy glimpsed “the primitive, primal earth” in Dorset, and Wordsworth searched for it in the Lake District, and Lawrence himself found remnants of it amid the coal fields of the industrial Midlands. But these were pockets of wildness surrounded by a domesticated landscape. In America, by contrast, until well into this century—and even, in some desert and mountainous places, still today—writers have not had to hunt for wildness. For over three centuries, from the time of William Bradford in Plymouth Plantation, to William Faulkner in Mississippi, when our writers looked outward from the circle of human activity, they could not help but see “the wilderness raging round.” Our feelings toward this wild arena have shifted back and forth between a sense of revulsion as in Bradford and a sense of reverence as in Faulkner; but what has been constant through all except the last few decades of our history is the potent fact of the wilderness itself. Again and again in the great works of American literature, the human world is set against the overarching background of nature. As in Hardy's novels, this landscape is no mere scenery, no flimsy stage set, but rather the energizing medium from which human lives emerge and by which those lives are bounded and measured.

Soon after writing his essay on Hardy, Lawrence undertook a study of American literature, attracted by the same quality he had identified in The Return of the Native. In the works of Melville, Cooper, Hawthorne, Crevecoeur, and Thoreau he found a divided consciousness: on the surface they were concerned with the human world, with towns and ships and cultivated land, with households and the spiderwebs of families; but underneath they were haunted by nature. Thus Melville seemed to Lawrence “more spell‐bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do.” Cooper sentimentalized the New York frontier in his Leatherstocking tales, yet wildness kept breaking through. This divided consciousness arose, Lawrence argued, because in America “there is too much menace in the landscape.”²

By the time his Studies in Classic American Literature appeared, Lawrence had moved to a ranch in New Mexico, and he could write from direct experience that, “when one comes to America, one finds … there is always a certain slightly devilish resistance in the … landscape.”³ In St. Mawr (1925), a short novel written during his American stay, the heroine flees from England, where every scrap of country has been “humanized, occupied by the human claim”; and she settles as Lawrence did on a mountain overlooking the desert. Here she “felt a certain latent holiness in the very atmosphere, … such as she had never felt in Europe, or in the East. … The landscape lived, and lived as the world of the gods, unsullied and unconcerned. … Man did not exist for it.”⁴ Something like Lawrence's awestruck encounter with the American landscape has been recorded time and again in our literature. By sampling this tradition, we can see more vividly the sort of nature‐awareness that has largely disappeared from contemporary fiction.

Lawrence's response to the land as holy, as a source of meaning and energy, while it is an ancient view among Indians, is a fairly recent view for white people. The earliest responses to the wilderness were typically those of horror and revulsion. Here, for example, is William Bradford, writing sometime after 1620 about the Pilgrims' first impression of their new land:

[W]hat could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men. … [W]hich way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. … [A]ll things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.⁵

One feels that in Bradford's devout eyes the wilderness was, if anything, more certain a presence than heaven itself. Merely because a writer is overwhelmingly aware of the American landscape, however, is no guarantee that he or she will know what to make of it. None of the intellectual gear that Bradford had carried with him from “the civil parts of the world,” least of all his Puritan theology, had equipped him to see this New World with any clarity. Like many who followed in his religious tradition, including Hawthorne two centuries later, Bradford looked at the wilderness and saw the unholy, the disordered. It was all a menacing blur.

Since the time of Bradford, many of our writers—reluctant or unable to invent a fresh language of nature—have tried to squeeze American landscape into a European frame. Washington Irving, for example, taking a tour of the prairies in 1835 shortly after his return from a stay in Europe, described the Oklahoma frontier in terms of classical mythology, royal gardens, and French and Dutch painting. He laid out the countryside as if on canvas, with dark bands of trees or prairie in the foreground, lighter river valley or hills in the middle ground, and hazy sky in the distance, the whole suffused, as he remarked at one point, with “the golden tone of one of the landscapes of Claude Lorraine.” The western forests reminded him of Gothic cathedrals, “those vast and venerable piles, and the sound of the wind sweeping through them supplie[d] the deep breathings of the organ.” Later in his account of the frontier expedition, Irving made his Old World frame explicit:

The prairies bordering on the rivers are always varied in this way with woodland, so beautifully interspersed as to appear to have been laid out by the hand of taste; and they only want here and there a village spire, the battlements of a castle, or the turrets of an old family mansion rising from among the trees, to rival the most ornamented scenery of Europe.⁶

The “hand of taste” is evident here and throughout A Tour on the Prairies, rearranging the rude Oklahoma countryside to make it more nearly conform to the landscape of England or France.

Irving was only one in a long line of American writers who gazed at the wild countryside and regretted the absence of human “ornament.” Even so keen an observer of our landscape as Thomas Cole voiced a complaint similar to Irving's after returning (in 1832) from his own European sojourn: “Although American scenery is often so fine, we feel the want of associations such as cling to scenes in the old world. Simple nature is not quite sufficient. We want human interest, incident and action to render the effect of landscape complete.”⁷ Half a century later, in a notorious essay on Hawthorne, Henry James listed all the ornaments that were missing from the American scene. It is a long list, including castles and kings. By comparison with the Old World, the New had little to offer except raw nature. And James had no more idea than Bradford what to make of a wild landscape. He felt at ease only in Europe, where nature had long since been cut into a human quilt. Still today, although young writers may no longer feel compelled to live in Paris or London, most who grow up in the backwoods or on the prairies—in Oklahoma, say, or Indiana—eventually pack their bags and head for the cities of the East Coast or the West, as if the land in between were too poor to support crops of fiction.

While some writers were trying to squeeze New World landscapes into Old World frames, others tried to discover a fresh way of seeing the “primitive, primal earth” that was laid bare in America. One of the earliest inventors of this homegrown vision was William Bartram, the vagabond naturalist, who gazed at the American countryside on the eve of the Revolution. Here is Bartram, camped in a Florida swamp:

The verges and islets of the lagoon were elegantly embellished with flowering plants and shrubs; the laughing coots with wings half spread were tripping over the little coves, and hiding themselves in the tufts of grass; young broods of the painted summer teal, skimming the surface of the waters, and following the watchful parent unconscious of danger, were frequently surprised by the voracious trout; and he, in turn, as often by the subtle greedy alligator. Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder.⁸

Darwin would not have had much to teach this intrepid naturalist on the subject of violence in nature. Despite these dragon‐like alligators with their smoking nostrils, Bartram stuck around long enough to explore the swamps. Everywhere on his travels he learned what he could of the Indians, plants, soil, and beasts. He was helping, in fact, to invent scientific observation, a way of seeing and speaking of nature as separate, orderly, obeying its own laws. He treated the lagoons and rivers and forests through which he traveled as a sequence of habitats, although of course he did not use that newfangled word.

The works of Bartram circulated widely in Europe, where a new generation of writers, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Chateaubriand, feeling encumbered by civilization, were eager for these glimpses of wild and wondrous territory. What often happened to American literary landscapes when they were transported across the ocean may be suggested by looking at Chateaubriand's New World romance, Atala (1801). Unlike most European Romantics, Chateaubriand actually traveled to America, spending the winter of 1791‐2 in upstate New York. Not content to write about the landscape he had actually seen, however, he borrowed heavily from Bartram's Travels and from his own fancy to produce descriptions such as this one, of the Mississippi River:

[W]hile the middle current sweeps the dead pines and oaks to the sea, one can see, on the side currents, floating isles of pistia and water lilies, whose pinkish yellow flowers, rising like little banners, are carried along the river banks. Green serpents, blue herons, pink flamingoes, young crocodiles sail like passengers on the flower‐ships, and the colony, unfolding its golden sails to the wind, lazily drifts into some hidden bend of the river.⁹

The bend must have been very well hidden, since no other traveler on the Mississippi has ever discovered a scene remotely like that one. Along those fabulous shores, the Frenchman noted mountains, Indian pyramids, caribou, bears drunk on grapes, and snakes that disguised themselves as vines to catch birds. While Bartram was given to exaggeration, especially in the vicinity of alligators, he always checked his enthusiasm against what his eyes were telling him; Chateaubriand suffered no such inhibitions.

Like Lawrence and many other European writers, Chateaubriand was lured to America by the very qualities in our landscape that drove Cooper, Irving, and James to Europe. This contrary movement has been going on now for two centuries. I imagine that right this minute, in the air over the Atlantic, jumbo jets are crossing paths, the eastbound ones carrying Americans to Europe in search of castles and gravestones, the westbound ones carrying Europeans to America in search of redwoods and waterfalls.

Emerson had a look at landscapes on both sides of the ocean, and decided that the native variety was the one best suited to his imagination. His Nature (1836) seems to me still the most eloquent manifesto for a way of seeing appropriate to the New World setting. In the essay he urged American writers to cast off the conventions of thought inherited from Europe, that stuffy old wardrobe of hand‐me‐down ideas, and “to look at the world with new eyes.” But how? By turning away from “the artificial and curtailed life of cities” and going back to the source of all thought and language, to nature itself:

Hundreds of writers may be found in every long‐civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.¹⁰

This advice is easier to accept than to apply, as Emerson's own verbal landscapes demonstrate. In Nature itself, whenever he began to fasten words onto visible things—seeing, for instance, “The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost,”—he interrupted himself to ask a question or to drag in some of that discarded European baggage: “What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not re‐form for me in words?”¹¹ Listening for what nature had to say, Emerson was always a little too eager to hear the cultural mutterings of his own well‐stocked mind, and thus his landscapes are less substantial than those drawn by many of the writers who followed his precepts—including, most famously, Thoreau.

However much we might quarrel about who belongs on the short list of primary writers—those who renew our language and vision by fastening words to nature—I hope we would agree to include the name of Thoreau. His descriptions of the Concord River, the Maine woods, Cape Cod, and Walden Pond are among the most vigorous and penetrating accounts of our landscape ever written. One of his prime motives for undertaking the experiment in living beside Walden Pond was to train himself to see: “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.” In passage after passage of Walden, Thoreau portrayed a dynamic nature—frozen sand melting and sliding down the railroad embankment, ice breaking up on the pond, geese circling overhead and muskrats burrowing underfoot. Watching this energetic landscape was his chief business:

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.¹²

Thoreau situated himself within nature, and drew upon all the senses—he devoted an entire chapter to sounds, for example—to convey what was going on around him in the green world. The forces at work in pond and forest he found also at work in himself. An entry in his journal catches this feeling memorably: “A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.”¹³

In Thoreau we find no conflict between the scientist's method of close, reasoned observation and the poet's free play of imagination. Since Thoreau's time, however, as the products of reason have come to dominate and efface the natural landscape, writers have found it more and more difficult to combine these two ways of seeing. In Life on the Mississippi (1883), for example, Samuel Clemens wrote about having to learn every mile of the shifting river by heart. He studied hard, and eventually became a professor of the river, but at a price:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!¹⁴

However, we can see from Huckleberry Finn (1885), published two years after Life on the Mississippi, that he was in fact able to fuse an adult's rational knowledge and a child's fresh emotion in his vision of the river. Here is Huck, for example, watching the sun rise over the Mississippi:

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; … and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods … ; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; … and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song‐birds just going it!¹⁵

To sustain this vision of nature unsullied, Clemens had to push his narrative back into the time of his own childhood, some forty years earlier. …

And thus we come, by way of a far too‐sketchy history, to our own time. In an age of strip mines, nuclear plants, urban sprawl, interstate highways, factory farms, chemical dumps, mass extinction of plant and animal species, oil spills, and “development” of the few remaining scraps of wilderness, many of us have come to view our situation in a manner exactly contrary to that of William Bradford. The landscapes that we ourselves have fashioned often appear “hideous and desolate.” We can no longer cut ourselves off from the “civil parts of the world,” however much we might wish to. …

However accurately it reflects the surface of our times, fiction that never looks beyond the human realm is profoundly false, and therefore pathological. No matter how urban our experience, no matter how oblivious we may be toward nature, we are nonetheless animals, two‐legged sacks of meat and blood and bone dependent on the whole living planet for our survival. Our outbreathings still flow through the pores of trees, our food still grows in dirt, our bodies decay. Of course, of course: we all nod our heads in agreement. The gospel of ecology has become an intellectual commonplace. But it is not yet an emotional one. For most of us, most of the time, nature appears framed in a window or a video screen or inside the borders of a photograph. We do not feel the organic web passing through our guts, as it truly does. While our theories of nature have become wiser, our experience of nature has become shallower. And true fiction operates at a level deeper than shared intellectual slogans. Thus, any writer who sees the world in ecological perspective faces a hard problem: how, despite the perfection of our technological boxes, to make us feel the ache and tug of that organic web passing through us, how to situate the lives of characters—and therefore of readers—in nature.

How we inhabit the planet is intimately connected to how we imagine the land and its creatures. In the history of American writing about landscape, we read in brief the history of our thinking about nature and our place in the natural order. Time and again, inherited ways of seeing have given way before the powerful influence of the New World landscape. If such a revolution in vision is to occur in our time, writers will have to free themselves from human enclosures, and go outside to study the green world. It may seem quaint, in the age of megalopolis, to write about wilderness or about life on farms and in small towns; and it may seem escapist to write about distant planets where the environment shapes every human gesture; but such writing seems to me the most engaged and forward‐looking we have. If we are to survive, we must look outward from the charmed circle of our own works, to the stupendous theatre where our tiny, brief play goes on.

Notes

1. “Study of Thomas Hardy,” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1936) 415, 419.

2. Studies in Classic American Literature (1924; reprinted London: Mercury Books, 1965) 138, 48.

3. Studies in Classic American Literature 52‐53.

4. St. Mawr (1925; reprinted and bound with The Virgin and the Gypsy, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1950) 109, 147.

5. Of Plymouth Plantation, Book 1, Ch. 9 (written 1630‐50; first published 1856; reprinted in Sculley Bradley et al., eds., The American Tradition in Literature, Vol. 1, third edition; New York: Norton, 1967) 19.

6. A Tour on the Prairies (1835), in William Kelly, ed., Selected Writings of Washington Irving (New York: Modern Library, 1984) 462, 436, 495.

7. Quoted in Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (rev. ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) 80.

8. Travels of William Bartram (1791), ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: Dover, n.d.) 115.

9. Atala (1801), trans. Walter J. Cobb (New York: New American Library, 1961) 16.

10. Nature (1836; reprinted in Sculley Bradley et al., eds., The American Tradition in Literature, Vol. 1, third edition; New York: Norton, 1967) 1075‐76.

11. Nature 1069‐70.

12. Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) 90, 111.

13. H. D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal, ed. Laurence Stapleton (New York: Dover, 1960) 66.

14. Life on the Mississippi, in Guy Cardwell, ed., Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (New York: Library of America, 1982) 740‐41.

15. Huckleberry Finn, in Guy Cardwell, ed. Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (New York: Library of America, 1982) 740‐41.