SOURCE: Donovan, Josephine. “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, pp. 74-96. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Donovan posits that Western literary discourse has objectified and degraded nature by using inaccurate symbols (words) to displace the true meaning of the thing being described. According to Donovan, a better approach would be to direct close attention at each individual subject and to portray it in the most literal terms in order to provide a respectful description without distortion.]

There is a time for listening to the vibrations that things produce in detaching themselves [imperceptibly from] the nothing-being to which our blindness relegates them, there is a time for letting things struggling with indifference give themselves to be heard.

Il y a un temps pour écouter les vibrations que produisent les choses en se détachant imperceptiblement de l'être-rien en lequel notre aveuglement les relègue, il y a un temps pour laisser les choses en lutte avec l'indifférence, se donner à entendre.

Hélène Cixous, “Vivre l'Orange” (“To Live the Orange”)

Ecofeminist theory has provided a critique of the ontology of domination, wherein dominators are thought to be of a higher order of being than the dominated. In the modern era this ontology has been enabled by a binary epistemological mode and practice that reduces living beings to the status of objects, thereby dismissing their moral significance and permitting their exploitation, abuse, and destruction (Warren 6; Adams, Ecofeminism 1-2).

Dominative modes pervade Western practice, including the institutions of literature and literary criticism. In this essay I will explore the nature of this domination and propose the possibility of an ecofeminist literary and cultural practice whereby texts are reconceived as vehicles for the disclosure of being, rather than as mechanisms for its elision, thereby helping to reconstitute the “objects” of discourse as “subjects.” Such a reconception will restore the absent referent as a “thou” to the text.

The absent referent, an idea developed in structuralist and poststructuralist language theory, is a useful concept for analyzing the ontology of domination. It is central to the Freudian linguistics of Jacques Lacan and has been reworked for feminist and ecofeminist critical purposes by Margaret Homans and Carol J. Adams, respectively.

The absent referent refers to the real or material entity signified by the linguistic symbol, the word, which is termed the signifier. In classic structuralist theory there is, in effect, a threefold layer of signification: the elided referent, the concept that designates the referent (termed the signified), and the word that designates the concept or signified (termed the signifier). While structuralist theory originally focused on language itself as a sign system, the concepts signifier, signified, and referent are pertinent to any symbolic discourse, including art forms and cultural ideologies, which may be seen as operating like languages.

Thus, as Carol Adams brilliantly recognized, in the cultural discourse of carnivorism, meat-eating is a text in which “meat” is the signifier and “animal” is the absent referent. The animal is absent from the text; its being as a thou is elided and dominated by the signifier meat, which deadens the animal's aliveness, turning her or him into an it (Adams, Sexual 40-62). The process thus denigrates the ontological status of the animal, eliding its living subjecthood; in this way the sign (meat) dominates the referent (animal), reflecting the ontology of domination that supports carnivorism.

To further develop Adams's theory and to further refine our analysis of language as a dominative practice, let us consider the question of whether the concept animal (the signified) itself necessarily dominates the actual animal (the referent). My answer is no. The signified, that is, the concept animal, need not be dominative if respect and careful attention are paid to the actual realities of the entity being designated. Nor need the signifier animal be dominative if the referent remains present in the signified as an active presence. It is only when the signifier animal is transformed into the signifier meat that an ontology of domination is enacted. It is the signifier meat that as an interpretant transforms the concept (animal) and the referent (real animal) into objects for use or exchange in a human chain of signifiers. The living being of the actual cow is thus repressed as the signifier meat takes over, inscribing the referent as an exchange object within a symbolic commerce, which legitimizes the actual commerce of the meat market exchange.

Similarly, in other symbolic systems the text, a chain of signifiers, tends to dominate, distort, and deaden what is signified—the absent referent—commodifying it for cultural and economic exchange. An important vein in postmodernist theory—which includes ecofeminism—has critiqued the Western texts of modernism on precisely this point.¹ Thus, feminist/postmodernist critiques of science have focused on the way in which the mathematizing, universalizing texts of science and medicine have elided the anomalous, the marginal, the local, the particular, erasing them, absenting them, dominating them with a generalized signifier. Some theorists have called for a revalidation of narrative, telling the history of a particular individual, as a means of restoring the absent referent, the thou, to the texts of medicine, science, and social science (Hunter).

Such epistemological reorientations would seem to invite a reappraisal of narrative fiction as an important form of knowledge, validating, as it does, the individual stories of particular beings who are embedded in contingent social and historical contexts (I am thinking here particularly of the novel). But much literature does not remain faithful to the absent referent and its story, its reality; rather literature—like other ideological discourses—twists, cuts, distorts, and reshapes the referent to fit the requirements of the signifier, whose identity itself is determined largely by its interrelation with other signifiers in the signifying text, its exchange value. Even literary texts thus reshape, obscure, and dominate the “literal,” subduing it to the claims of the “figurative.”

In the nineteenth century Sarah Orne Jewett repeated this advice to aspiring writers: “Tell the thing!” (SOJ Letters 120). In the twentieth century several women writers have used strikingly similar language to similarly urge that writers circumvent figurative domination by remaining faithful to the literal in their writing. In an early poem Adrienne Rich explained “the thing I came for: the wreck itself and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth” (23). Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector also claimed, “I want the thing itself” (qtd. in Cixous, Reading 14). And Virginia Woolf in critiquing Kantian ontology maintained, “We are the thing itself” (Moments 72). All these statements suggest, I propose, a proto-ecofeminist desire to liberate the “thing,” the literal, the natural, the absent referent—which is conceived as a presence, a thou—from domination by falsifying, destructive signifiers.

It is important to stress that the women writers treated here clearly conceive of “reality” or physical nature as animated by a spiritual presence. “Telling the thing” means expressing the thou-character of the “objective” world. It means restoring the absent referent to the text as a living being. Instead of seeing the referent as absent, these writers posit that the referent informs the signified as a living presence, such that it holds equal ontological status with the signifier.

Conventional idealist literary criticism (whether formalist, structuralist, or poststructuralist) replicates the ontology of domination seen in conventional literary practice.² Formalists, such as the New Critics, viewed the text as an “it,” a dead body available to the vivisectionist/critic for dissection/consumption/exchange. Like dead animals in the cultural text of carnivorism, literary works are deemed significant insofar as they fit into or can circulate (as commodified “meat”) within the discourse of literary criticism. Virginia Woolf's famous Professor von X.—who “jab[s] his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote”—suggests the dominative mentality involved in this critical practice (Room 31).

Western symbolic discourses, then, often operate in this way as dominative practices. Their signifying texts take over and reshape the literal, the material, expunging in the process the living being, the thou, the subject, casting it in the passive form as a signified, while retaining agency for the dominative signifier.³ Such a mentality has enabled destructive Western dominative practices toward nature.

Ecofeminism has already provided a critique of such practices; in this essay I propose to further this critique through an analysis of the mentality of domination enacted in literature and literary criticism. First I will examine several women writers' articulation of their desire for a nondominative literary practice and then I will develop a theoretical basis for alternative, ecofeminist modes of critical response.

I begin with Margaret Homans's presentation of Dorothy Wordsworth as an exemplar of the inclination (Homans finds) of many women writers toward a “presymbolic or literal language, with its lack of gaps between signifier and referent” (14). Homans notes, “Women's place in language … is with the literal, the silent object of representation, the dead mother, the absent referent, so that within a literary text the shift from figurative to literal connotes a shift from the place of the signifier, the place of the speaking subject, to the place of the absent object” (32).

Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the more famous William, was an early nineteenth-century journal keeper. Unlike her brother, whose figurative language requires the “death of [the] nature” it is representing (Homans 49), Dorothy “invents a mode of figuration … that does not demand the distance or absence of the referent … a nonsymbolic discourse” (53). Even for her brother, Dorothy's writing came to signify a mode where “images [are] not killed into meaning” (51). In other words, Dorothy managed to write “in a language that is as literal as possible and that literalizes” (39). Her brother, on the contrary, although desirous of retaining an unmediated connection with nature, with the natural entities he treated in his poetry, nevertheless ended by imposing his own autobiomythography upon them, transforming them into signs that are significant within that myth, but which erase the literal referents, absenting them from his field of significance. Dorothy in her journals “speaks for the literal nature that is often silent within his texts” (56).

Homans provides a comparative example of the way the two treat a common subject—a journey taken by William through the Alps in 1790, treated in The Prelude (written circa 1805), and retraced in 1820; the latter trip is covered in Dorothy's Journal of a Tour of the Continent:

Skeletons of tall pine-trees beneath us in the dell, and above our heads—their stems and shattered branches as grey as the stream of the Vedro, or the crags strewn at their feet. … We sate upon the summit of a huge precipice of stone to the left of the road—the river raging below after having tumbled in a tremendous cataract down the crags in front of our station. On entering the Gallery we cross a clear torrent pent up by crags.

(Dorothy Wordsworth qtd. in Homans 61)

                                                                                                    The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
.....Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity.

(William Wordsworth, Prelude 6, ll. 624-39, qtd. in Homans 48-49)

The contrast is evident. Dorothy is clearly concerned with transcribing the reality of the gorge as faithfully as possible, remaining in touch with the literal specifics of nature, whereas William first hyperbolizes the scene with a melodramatic violence that is imposed by his own imagination and then interprets the natural world symbolically; its significance lies not on the literal level but rather as a reference for his symbolizing theory, that of transcendental idealism, where natural elements become “types and symbols of Eternity.”

Homans gives another pertinent example of Dorothy's ability to resist figuration of the literal. In her journal of 1802 she follows for several days the fates of a pair of swallows who have built a nest by her window. Instead of turning their story into a metaphor for events in her own life (which would have been easy because the episode occurred just prior to her brother's marriage, a traumatic event in her life), she is concerned only with the swallows as swallows: “she convinces us by her long and minute observations of their behavior that the swallows have their own life quite apart from hers” (55). In short, unlike her brother, Dorothy “sees before she reads” and in this way corrects his tendency (and indeed the tendency of much Western literature) “to obliterate the image in favor of meaning” (63)—to impose a symbolic order upon the literal, the natural, denying its “thouness,” killing it in order to exploit it for the signifying purposes of the author. To be interested in the swallows as swallows suggests that the swallows have a being that is valuable and worthy of attention. Such attention indicates respect; it validates the ontological status of the swallow. It acknowledges the swallow as “thou.”

In a brilliant passage in A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf envisages the writer as a seer who discloses that the “things” of ordinary life are informed with intense being, with a spiritual presence. It is the writer's job, she feels, to transmit this reality, these “moments of being,” without occluding, distorting, or dominating them with figurative interpositions:

What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. … It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. … Now the writer … has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is [her] business to find it and disclose it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

(113-14)

Woolf's use of the narrative form here enables her, as elsewhere in A Room, to explicate her ideas through concrete examples—“a daffodil in the sun”—existential details in context. As I have argued elsewhere (“Everyday Use”), Woolf uses this method throughout A Room to provide an implicit critique of the epistemology of Western science and its dominative methodology of distorting the literal through mathematizing manipulation, which, I contend here, is analogous to Wordsworth's figurative manipulation of nature.

Instead, Woolf follows a procedure that does not force reality into preconceived patterns; rather she remains faithful to the literal event, allowing it to exist in its contingent context and as a random occurrence. In A Room Woolf focuses her attention on a succession of chance events: a manx cat who happens to wander by her window and a newspaper that happens to have been left behind, for example. “I take,” she says, “only what chance has floated to my feet” (78).

Elsewhere, Woolf urges similarly that the writer should remain faithful to the literal order of occurrences. “Let us record,” she proposes, “the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (“Modern” 107). Clearly, Woolf is concerned, as was apparently Dorothy Wordsworth, to capture reality before it is transformed into an object by signifying texts. She is concerned to render it as a living, real entity, as a thou. Literature in this view is an attempt to achieve what Homans termed a “nonsymbolic language,” or indeed a “pre-symbolic or literal language, with its lack of gaps between signifier and referent” (225, 14).

A similar attempt is evident in the writings of the nineteenth-century U. S. writer Sarah Orne Jewett and the twentieth-century Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (as mediated by French theorist Hélène Cixous). Jewett came to express a kind of existentialist mysticism via the influence of the Swedish theosophist Emmanuel Swedenborg and his U. S. disciple Sampson Reed (Donovan “Jewett”).

Reed postulated an intriguing prelapsarian, preverbal world of “presymbolic language” (to use Homans's term), where “there is a language, not of words but of things”: “Everything which is, whether animal or vegetable, is full of the expression of that use for which it is designed, as of its own existence. If we did but understand its language. … [But] we are unwilling to hear … and drown the voice of nature.” Instead, he urges, “Let [us] respect the smallest blade which grows and permit it to speak for itself. Then may there be poetry which may not be written perhaps, but which may be felt as part of our being” (qtd. in Cameron 266-67).

While Swedenborgians in general did not permit nature “to speak for itself,” as Reed enjoins, but rather cast upon it heavy allegorization (their influence is seen in the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth), Jewett did seek a language and a literary style that would remain faithful to the literal. She was, not surprisingly, an admirer of Dorothy Wordsworth. For Jewett, figuration should not be imposed upon nature by the artist to explicate his or her own inner spirit nor is it a “pasteboard mask” (Herman Melville's term) that the poet strips away or deciphers to reveal a transcendent signified. Rather, the literal or the natural is itself significative; it speaks in its own language, which humans must seek to hear—not erase through their symbolic code.

In the little-known essay “A Winter Drive” Jewett explains her animist theory in connection with trees. There is, she notes approvingly, “an old doctrine called Hylozoism … the theory of the soul of the world, of a life residing in nature, and that all matter lives; the doctrine that life and matter are inseparable.” Thus, while “trees are to most people as inanimate and unconscious as rocks,” she contends that “it is impossible for one who has been a great deal among trees to resist the instinctive certainty that they have thought and purpose.” But she rejects dryadic theories that the trees' “thouness” can be explained as human spirits encased within them; she sees that as distorting the trees' reality as trees, making them “too much like people.” On the contrary, “the true nature and life of a tree [can] never be … personified” (168-70). Thus, Jewett espouses a theory of nature as a subject, a thou, which must not be distorted through personification, allegorization, or other exploitative figuration.

Jewett's theory is exemplified in her fiction. In her celebrated story “A White Heron” a tree and a bird are “persons,” or “thous,” whose moral significance weighs as greatly as those of the human characters and who are therefore important players in the unfolding of the plot, which indeed hinges on the issue of whether the white heron will be treated as an object to be used for scientific purposes or as a “thou” with rights of its own. The protagonist, a young girl named Sylvia (from the Latin for woods), aided by an old pine tree, comes to the determination to save the bird's life, to defy the ornithologist who has asked her to reveal the bird's whereabouts. Speaking of the tree, Jewett notes, “it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit creeping and climbing from higher branch to branch. Who knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to advantage this light, weak creature on her way! The old pine must have loved his new dependent. More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet-voiced thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child. And the tree stood still and held away the winds” (169).

Significantly, in her critical decision whether to disclose the bird's location to the ornithologist, Sylvia recalls the pine tree's presence: “The murmur of the pine's green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away” (171). Thus Sylvia, a nonliterate rural child, resists the dominative intrusions of scientific discourse, which would colonize her natural environment, erasing it as a subject, objectifying it for exploitative purposes.

“She must keep silence!” (170) because the language of scientific discourse cannot hear the “presymbolic language” she shares with the tree, the bird, and other creatures of the wood. They and she are constituted as subjects in a “bioregional narrative” (Cheney “Postmodern”) that the Western discourses of domination cannot hear.

In an early work, Deephaven (1877), Jewett suggested that uneducated country people, because they “are so instinctive and unreasoning … may have a more complete sympathy with Nature, and may hear voices when wiser ears are deaf” (186). Jewett does not intend “instinctive” and “unreasoning” pejoratively but rather as alternatives to the hegemonic discourses of Western “reason.” The “voices” they hear are those of nature as a subject: “the more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real” (186-87).

Jewett's literary theory, which was expressed in informal advice she gave to younger writers over the years—including Willa Cather—reflects her belief that the “inanimate” world of nature is indeed animate. “Don't write a ‘story,’” she told them, “just tell the thing!” (SOJ Letters 120). In other words, do not impose a prefabricated script upon the literal; instead remain faithful to “the atoms as they fall.” For the “thing” is itself animated with a spiritual presence; do not allow this “thou” to be silenced as an absent referent. In an early letter to a mentor Jewett said she needed “new words,” which I interpret as a “presymbolic language,” to express her sense of nature (Letter to Parsons). And in a late letter to a friend she commented on how “it is those unwritable things that [a] story holds in its heart … that makes the true soul of it” (Letters of SOJ 112).

In suggesting a hermeneutic appropriate to reading Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous suggests a similar idea: “one has to listen to what is said between the lines, to the silences, the breathing … to the living reality of the text. … A text has to be treated like a person” (Reading 99). Cixous sees Lispector as a writer who attempted to remain faithful to the literal by capturing immediate, unmediated, and sacramental encounters with the world—“moments of being.” This Cixous sees as a particularly feminine mode of writing (écriture feminine).

In a worshipful essay on Lispector, Cixous reveals that the Brazilian writer helped her overcome an apparent writer's block by showing her the possibilities of this kind of writing, where the writer enables the being of the signified to come alive, to be seen, to be attended to. In “To Live the Orange” Cixous notes that her own writing had apparently grown too abstract, too distant from the literal, when “from Brazil a voice came to return the lost orange to me” (Reading 16).

Before Lispector's influence

Mute I [had] fled the orange, my writing fled the secret voice of the orange, I withdrew from the shame of being unable to recieve the benediction of the fruit giving itself peacefully, for my hand was too lonely, and in such loneliness, my hand no longer had the strength to believe in the orange, I had in common with myself only the shame and discouragement, my hand had no more the goodness of knowing the orange's goodness, the fruit's fullness, my writing was separated from the orange, didn't write the orange, didn't go to it, didn't call it, didn't carry the juice to my lips.

(14)

But “from far away, from outside of my history, a voice came. … To save the orange” (14).

Cixous was able to reconnect with the orange by means of childhood—perhaps preverbal—experiences: “And it was a childhood that came running back to pick up the live orange and immediately celebrate it. … There was originally an intimacy between the orange and the little girl, almost a kinship” (14).

Like Dorothy Wordsworth and Jewett, Lispector attempts to reduce “the gap between … the living and the saying of the living” (118). In analyzing a meditation on rain that occurs in Lispector's story “Tanta Mansidão” (“Such Mansuetude” 1974), Cixous reflects on the following passage: “Hardly this: it rains and I am watching the rain. How simple. … The rain falls not because she needs me, and I watch the rain not because I need her. But we are as close as the water of the rain is to the rain. … I am a woman, I am a person, I am an attention, I am a body looking out the window. Thus the rain is not cognizant of not being a stone. She is a rain. Perhaps that is what one could call living being” (Lispector qtd. in L'Heure 154; my translation).

This passage is characteristic of Lispector in that it reveals the author attempting to give voice to what we generally consider an inanimate object, rainwater. The rain becomes a subject with its unique living being; the woman is also a living being, and the two “thous” are very close, but they are not the same. Cixous suggests that the writer is allowing the being of the rain to be expressed: “Maybe the text is the very writing of the rain itself” (Reading 78). She further claims that this kind of writing, which gives voice to a referent that would ordinarily be signified an “it,” is “feminine”: “It is this barely writing the rainy aspect of rain that one could call … an emanation of femininity. It is a capacity to make a nonviolent, nonexclusive difference.… The rain is so much rain that it suffices to itself as rain” (78). Of another text she remarks, “it is difficult to think, to write, to read rain” (79).

Lispector, according to Cixous, is able through a kind of meditation (L'Heure 18) to unveil, to see the “living orange before she is reveiled” (Reading 74) and to transcribe it in a mode that is “prelogical, prediscursive” (23), or what Homans termed “presymbolic.” Cixous calls this epistemological mode clariceant, or “clariseeing” (L'Heure 74-75). Lispector urges us “to call each thing ‘tu’”—the French form for thou (L'Heure 102). For Lispector “the quotidian is supernatural” (Reading 99); she asks us to “go to find the thing” (L'Heure 104).

Cixous notes that Lispector is able to operate outside the law of the symbolic, which requires that “when we name … we attribute an identity to the thing or being in such a way that it takes its place in a general classification and falls under the coup of all the laws.” But Lispector manages to name without imprisoning the designated object in a prescripted system, without dominating it by a signifying text. “Clarice names through love” (Reading 12).

“She says that God does not belong to any language” (12), meaning that God or Being exists in a predisursive, presymbolic space. “Clarice does not imprison [God]. She gives [her] a name, but she does not take [her] by the name. She does not give[her] a name in order to take[her]. She gives [her] … a name that does not belong to any language, and … is not going to capture [her]” (12).

Lispector sees animals as providing a model for the kind of seeing and writing outside the law that she is attempting. “‘An animal never substitutes one thing for another,’ says Clarice” (12). For, “substitution, the foundation of the symbolic order, also functions as repression” (12). Thus, animals’ immediate, nondominative, presymbolic awareness is what Lispector is striving for. According to Cixous, Lispector “regrets not having been born an animal” (12). Indeed, Lispector is noted for her respectful portrayal of animals in her fiction as thous (Scholtmeijer). Thus Lispector, like the other writers treated here, seems to express a desire for the restoration of the absent referent to the text, its restoration as a living being, a thou.

In this part of the essay I will attempt to provide a theoretical basis for an ecofeminist literary and cultural practice that would honor the intuitions of these writers, suggesting ways in which literary criticism may become less dominative. Several concepts help explain further the explorations initiated above. First is the concept of the I-thou relationship developed by Martin Buber. Since this idea is fairly familiar, I will concentrate mainly on Steven Kepnes's application of it to literary criticism and on Bakhtin's extension of the idea in his theorizing about dialogics (appropriated for ecofeminist critical purposes by Patrick D. Murphy). Second is the idea of attention expounded principally by Iris Murdoch. And third is what I see as an extension of this idea explored (principally) by Carol Bigwood, the notion of a critical erotics.

The idea of grounding ethical and aesthetic judgments in the I-thou relationship was first fully developed by the theologian Martin Buber. One of the most compelling examples Buber uses to illustrate the dialogical I-thou relationship is an experience he had as a boy with a horse. “When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents' estate, I used … to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapple-grey horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. … What I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other, which, however, did not remain strange … but rather let me draw near and touch it” (Between 22-23).

Buber recalls that in stroking “the mighty mane” and feeling “the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I … and yet let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me” (23).

In his important study of Buber's aesthetics, The Text as Thou (1992), Steven Kepnes notes that Buber felt that narrative was the most effective means of revealing the I-thou relationship. This is because narrative not only focuses on specific details (and the I-thou encounter is always a specific existential event between two individuals), it also shows those details in relation. In the example cited of the boy's relationship with the horse, as Kepnes notes, the details of his touching the horse's “mighty mane”—that it was “sometimes marvellously smooth-combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild” (Buber, Between 23)—are essential to comprehending the nature of the relationship (Kepnes 86). Narratives, in short, are able to “say things that concepts cannot. Narratives capture, express, ‘hold’ the complex mix of I and thou and world that cannot be clearly summed up in a philosophical concept. … Only story can hold within it the web of relationships within which the I-thou occurs” (87).

Literature and other forms of art can be a primary means of expressing or disclosing the thou, which is always revealed in concrete embodiments. Buber, indeed, presents an incarnational theory of art. The artist embodies the thou, which he or she experiences in the creative process, in form; the viewer or reader brings the thou to life in the encounter with the work of art. Buber uses the term geistige Wesenheiten to encompass creative works; while variously translated as “spiritual beings” or “forms of the spirit,” Buber suggested “spirit in phenomenal forms” as an appropriate English translation (Kepnes 23). Thus, the work of art, though an object in concrete form, becomes alive as a thou in the encounter with the viewer: “a geistige Wesenheit, a work of art or form of spirit, although an It, can ‘blaze up into presentness,’ into the status of a Thou, again” (Kepnes 24).

For this to happen, however, the reader (in the case of literature) must approach the text in a nondominative, nonviolent way. “What Buber's hermeneutic method … requires is that the integrity, the otherness, the wholeness of the text be respected and not violated by radical refashioning” (Kepnes 22). It requires special receptivity—one might say an erotic responsiveness—whereby the “interpreter must take the attitude of a ‘receptive beholder’ (empfangend Schauender) who finds himself or herself ‘bodily confronted’ by the work” (24). In short, “interpreting a form of spirit requires us to face the work as we face another being. We open our senses to it, to its particularities, to its total gestalt. We allow it to move us, to confront us, to speak to us. We try to perceive its special message and disclosure of reality” (25). Thus, unlike the I-it relationship, which Buber sees as a means of “‘conquering’ the world” (I and Thou 91), the I-thou relationship is dialogical: both terms of the relation are seen as spiritual presences that have a reality of their own to communicate, which must be respected and attended to.

Buber's dialogical theory thus provides an important base for the development of alternative nondominative ecofeminist critical practice. Elaborations by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin contribute further to the ecofeminist project. Bakhtin was in fact significantly influenced by Martin Buber—indeed the commonalities in their thought are striking (see Perlina). Bakhtin was also clearly influenced by Marx in his resistance to reification or the objectification of persons by signifying systems/ideologies.

In his early work Problems of Dostoievsky's Poetics (1929) Bakhtin valorized the Russian writer for his “struggle against the materialization of [people], and of all human values under the conditions of capitalism” (51). “In Dostoievsky's works [humans] overcome … [their] ‘thingness’” (70). Dostoievsky's work is in this way “dialogical. It is not constructed as the entirety of a single consciousness which absorbs other consciousnesses as object, but rather as the entirety of the interaction of several consciousnesses, of which no one fully becomes the object of any other one” (14).

Bakhtin analyzes, as an example, the character Devushkin in Dostoievsky's early novel Poor Folk. This character, himself a poor man, resents all attempts to fix him, to stereotype him, to objectify him as a poor person. “Already in his first work Dostoievsky shows how the hero himself revolts against literature in which the ‘little man’ is externalized and finalized without being consulted.” Devushkin is “personally deeply insulted … and outraged” by the characterization of poverty in Gogol's Overcoat; he felt that “he had been defined totally once and for all” (47). In short, Devushkin had been erased as a person, as a thou, by being designated or signified a “poor person” in someone else's text. He is thus rendered an absent referent.

Throughout his work Bakhtin resisted what he called “theoretism” or what Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson term “semiotic totalitarianism” (28), namely, generic linguistic systems that eradicate the living particularized subject, who must be understood, according to Bakhtin, in a chronotopic context, that is, a specific spatiotemporal environment (Morson and Emerson 366-69). In opposition to theoretism Bakhtin proposed an ethical and aesthetic focus he terms a prosaics, which concerns itself with “quotidian events that … elude reduction to … laws or systems” (Morson and Emerson 33). Like Iris Murdoch, Bakhtin saw the novel as “the richest form of ethical thought” because it deals with “particular, concrete cases, and not rules to be instantiated” (Morson and Emerson 366). In the novel one finds “a non-monologic, antisystemic conception of truth” (234) that provides an alternative to the dominative conceptions that have characterized, according to Bakhtin, Western philosophy and literature for centuries (234).

Historically, Bakhtin recognized, the emergence of Western nation-states had as a by-product the eradication or domination of regional dialects by official “standard” national languages. The imposition of standard English versus the affirmation of regional dialects was a central literary issue in the United States in the nineteenth century. The so-called local color schools, of which Sarah Orne Jewett was a member, were a point of resistance to the colonization of regional discourse by the centralized “standard” language. Jewett's “A White Heron” reflects this regional resistance to cultural imperialism, or, to use Morson and Emerson's term, semiotic totalitarianism: the girl Sylvia refuses to be co-opted by the ornithologist, who is a synecdoche for all homogenizing modernist discourses that disregard the anomalous, the particular, the local (see Donovan, “Breaking” 229-30). As John B. Thompson has noted, “the most striking feature [of this historical process] is the silence to which those dispossessed of the official language are condemned. … Lacking the means of legitimate expression, they do not speak but are spoken to” (46).

In pioneering articles (“Ground,” “Prolegomenon”) Patrick D. Murphy shows the potential that Bakhtin's theories have for the development of an ecofeminist literary criticism.⁴ Murphy suggests that Bakhtin's attempt to valorize deviant dialects (or idiolects) should be extended to include nonhuman “languages,” i.e., the dialects of animals and nature. While Bakhtin saw Dostoievsky as rendering human “others” as “speaking subjects,” Murphy suggests that we extend the idea of the speaking “other” to nonhuman entities such as animals, suggesting that their “language” be considered a form of dialect that must be revalidated and heard, not erased by “theoretistic” discourses that elide their subjectivity. “The point is not to speak for nature but to work to render the signification presented us by nature into a verbal depiction by means of speaking subjects” (Murphy, “Ground” 152).

Such understanding can best come through narrative, which is localized and particularized, a chronotopic narrative (such as seen in the novel), or, to use Jim Cheney's term, a bioregional narrative (“Postmodern”). As Carol Bigwood notes, “To really encounter difference on its own terms rather than on terms of the dominant faction there is a need for theories and stories that emerge from localized places and continually bend back to it so as never to fly off into fleshless abstractions and subjugating universals. Such bioregional theories and stories that relinquish their supposed timeless authority for the sake of the gifts of localities, particularities, and uncertainties would bring about profound change in our modes of being” (270).

Cheney proposes the concept of “contextual discourse” as an epistemological mode that enables a genuine reciprocity of information sharing, where the “thing” is not elided but attended to, where, in short, one sees the orange. Unlike what he calls “totalizing language,” which “assimilate[s] the world to it,” contextual language “assimilates language to the situation, bends it, shapes it to fit” (“Postmodern” 120). Such a mode enables a kind of consensual praxis of reaching the truth of a situation, where no one's realities are ignored, where all are consulted, where all have their place in the story of the moment (see Cheney, “Eco-feminism” 132; Bigwood 286). Again it appears that literature is best suited for the conveyance of this nondominative epistemology. Knowing the thou means hearing her story.

The epistemological practice involved in hearing her story is that characterized by Iris Murdoch (following Simone Weil) as “attentive love.” As extended by Sara Ruddick, attentive love is a central theoretical component of the contemporary feminist ethic of care (119-23; Donovan, Feminist 173-78). Weil in 1942 explained it thus:

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to [her]: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen … but as [an individual]. … For this reason it is … indispensable to know how to look at [her] in a certain way.

This way of looking is first of all attentive.

(51)

Murdoch developed Weil's idea as a basis for the ethic that undergirds her moral theory of literature. Attentive love, which Murdoch defines as “a just and loving gaze upon an individual reality,” is “the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent” (Sovereignty 34). Murdoch sees attentive love as a discipline similar to that practiced by great artists and scholars (Weil originated the idea in an essay on the discipline of scholarly study); it focuses the attention without, toward others who are different, “toward the great surprising variety of the world” (66). The “ability to so direct attention is love” (66). Such a focus makes one realize that the “other” has a being with “needs and wishes” of her or his own; this awareness makes it “harder … to treat a person as a thing” (66).

Great literature, Murdoch maintains, can lead one to this kind of awareness, because great novelists are not “afraid of the contingent” (“Sublime Revisited” 257). They are able to achieve “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real” (“Sublime” 51), expressing thereby a “nonviolent apprehension of difference” (54). “Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality” (51).

In The Souls of Animals (1991) Gary Kowalski proposes an “interspecies meditation” derived from Buddhist meditative practice via Joanna Macy. It is designed to enhance one's awareness of animals as thous, and thus one's “attentive love” for them.

Look into the eyes of an animal. It might be your dog or cat. …

Pay attention to what you see: the years of living present within those eyes. …

Contemplate their shape. Notice the angles and curves of individuality that make the face of this creature a unique work of art, crafted by time and desire.

And as you look into this being's eyes, pay attention also to what you cannot see, the inwardness, the selfhood, the “I” that is as singular as its outward expression.

What you look upon is a living spirit. Greet and respect it. Appreciate it for what it is. …

Sense a solitude you can never fully enter into or understand.

(91)

Ecofeminist literary and cultural criticism can and should, I believe, encourage the development of the kind of meditative attentiveness seen in these examples and in the literary practice of writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Clarice Lispector in the hopes that such a reawakening to the reality of the literal, construed as a spiritual presence, will motivate people to treat the natural world, including animals, as a “biospiritual” reality (Kowalski 111) that merits sacramental respect. Ecofeminist criticism might also consider literature, in the fashion of Murdoch, as a means of fostering this reawakening and, with Woolf and Buber, as a vehicle for the revelation of being, not a mechanism for its domination.

In the remainder of this essay I would like to propose the idea of a critical erotics, a mode of appreciation and understanding that is radically at odds with traditional analytical critical practice, seen in Professor von X., which reduces the text to an “it” for dissection, to meat for carving.⁵ This new emotional hermeneutic engages in “contextual discourse” (Cheney, “Postmodern” 120) in which dialogue, conversation, and consensus are utilized, fostering a nonviolent apprehension of difference and a receptiveness to the living being of the “other.”

In the now-classic essay “Against Interpretation” (1964) Susan Sontag argued that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (14), which will enable us to experience an artwork directly instead of obscuring its vitality by locating it within an interpretive, signifying network. Here also it is a question of allowing the being of the signified to be, rather than erasing it by the signifier. The way to do this, according to Sontag, is to allow our senses to respond fully and immediately to the work—hence the idea of a critical erotics.

Carol Bigwood's Earth Muse (1993) is probably the most important theorizing about ecofeminist aesthetics yet to appear. In it Bigwood calls for what is essentially a critical erotics. Like Audre Lorde in her classic essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), Bigwood protests against falsely dichotomizing the erotic and the spiritual. And following the existentialist phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she argues for an epistemology and an aesthetic rooted in the living body: “This body that is sensitive and in deep communion with its environment is not the biological object body that science describes but is the ‘living body’ or the ‘phenomenological body’” (50)—the body that is experienced from within as a living presence, a thou.⁶

Bigwood thereby rejects the poststructuralist view that the world is a text, seeing that as just another Western theory that obliterates the living signified with a network of signifiers. In particular, she singles out Judith Butler's recent work, in which nature and the body are seen as a cultural construction, “a play of signifying practices inscribed on the surface of bodies” (41); for Butler “the body is not an abiding natural ground but is always a ‘cultural sign’” (42). Bigwood maintains that “if we reduce the body … to a purely awareness, which Murdoch sees as an ascetic discipline, a kind of “purification of consciousness” (193), a “cleansing the mind of selfish preoccupation” (245). One of these is through the meditative practices of Zen Buddhism (242-44). Another is through literature and art. As we have seen, Murdoch maintains that great art teaches one to see the world, the particulars of the world in all their diversity, and to respect those particulars as having a being apart from one's ego (374).

Such attentiveness, which Murdoch feels is exhibited by the great scholar as well as by the great artist, sees and therefore allows to come into being entities that would otherwise remain concealed (to reprise Bigwood's reworking of Heidegger), rescuing things from what Cixous called “the nothing-being to which our blindness relegates them” (L'Heure 24). Such a process requires great patience and the disciplined ability to resist imposing one's own signifying text upon them. But the patience and discipline pay off; the gods thereby arrive.

Murdoch believes it is urgent that such an epistemological and thereby spiritual reorientation be fostered in the young. Meditation practices could be taught in the schools. “Reverence for life and being, for otherness, is something which can be taught or suggested very early. ‘Don't kill the poor spider, put him out in the garden’” (Metaphysics 337).⁷ The baneful effects of television on youth should be recognized. It, like other modern technologies, impairs “our power to perceive” (377), “reduc[ing] rather than enhanc[ing] our ability to see the detail of our surroundings” (330).

The task, therefore, as I see it, for ecofeminist critics, writers, scholars, and teachers is to encourage the development of forms of attention that enhance awareness of the living environment, that foster respect for its reality as a separate, different, but knowable entity. Such a commitment entails reconceiving literature and literary criticism in the ways suggested in this essay as epistemological and moral practices that can contribute to the designed spiritual transformation, to metanoia.

One might question whether the process described in this article is too apolitical—that is, it fails to consider that all epistemological acts exist in a political context, and therefore that some I's are more powerful than the thou's and vice versa, which means a neutral existential encounter of the kind envisaged by Buber is not possible.⁸

In this essay, I assume, however, a political context. The purpose of the epistemological awakening described here is to sensitize dominators to the realities of the dominated, that is, to make the dominator-subject see/hear what has been construed as an object. It is not a matter of making the dominated sensitive to the realities of the dominator, which she generally knows only too well. But, most humans, even those who are themselves dominated because of gender or race, are dominators/exploiters of animals and other natural entities and therefore can benefit from learning the discipline of meditative awareness and the modes of contextual discourse I propose.

Notes

1. To the extent, however, that postmodernist/poststructuralist theory retains the idealist assumptions of structuralism (in particular, the notion of human knowledge as a series of culturally constructed autotelic texts that are nonreferential) it is not amenable to ecofeminism. As Carol Bigwood suggests in her ecofeminist critique of Judith Butler, this vein of poststructuralist theory continues to privilege culture over nature.

2. Terry Eagleton characterized structuralism as “one more form of philosophical idealism” (108). I borrow the term from him.

3. It is interesting that nonliterate people (according to a study of Russian peasants done by A. R. Luria in the thirties) seem to retain an alternative, narrative epistemological mode. Instead of using deductive, generalizing signifiers to identify the signified, they tend to locate the signified within a pragmatic narrative. Thus when given four terms such as hammer, saw, log, and hatchet, the nonliterate subject would not group three under the generic term tool, excluding the log, but rather would envisage an operational story that involves all four items (Ong 51).

4. Another dialogical model of literary criticism is presented in Patrocinio P. Schweickart's “Reading Ourselves,” in which she criticizes reader-response theory from a feminist point of view. Schweickart urges that we “construe the text not as an object”; however, the “thou” she identifies in the text is “the manifestation of the subjectivity of the absent author—the ‘voice’ of another woman” (47). In this Schweickart seems to be reverting to the romantic hermeneutic method of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, which has been criticized for its concern with author intentionality (see Kepnes 7-9).

5. At the turn of the nineteenth century some theorists even held the idea that the artist was a kind of “vivisector.” Willa Cather, for one, embraced it early in her career, holding that “the links between [the] sword, the dissector's knife, the surgeon's scalpel, and the writer's pen are literal as well as metaphoric” (O'Brien 148). Cather “considered technology's victory over nature analogous to the ‘virile’ writer's praiseworthy triumph over recalcitrant subject matter” (389). Cather eventually moved toward a less dominative conception of the artist. (For further discussion of Cather's evolving ideas on the subject see Donovan “Pattern” and “Everyday”).

6. For more on the fluidity of boundaries that characterizes certain women's art see Lauter and Donovan “Everyday.”

7. For a discussion of empathy or sympathy as a basis for ethical treatment of animals see Donovan “Attention.”

8. Grimshaw (239-40) criticizes Murdoch along these lines.

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