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Residencia en la Tierra
by Michael Berberich
Copyright 1998
Part I: Panorama
In the acknowledgments preceding his novel A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean recalls one publisher who
rejected the manuscript saying, "These stories have trees in them" (xi). Perhaps the publisher, drawing upon an
education steeped in the classics of the Western Tradition, was recalling Socrates' statement in the Phaedrus, ". . . I'm a
lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town do"(Plato 25 [230 D]).
Both quotes bespeak of an attitude that Christopher Manes probably overstates in his essay "Nature and Silence,"
claiming, "Nature is silent in our culture (and in literate societies generally) in the sense that the status of being a
speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative" (15). However, a culture whose canon
includes Emerson's Nature, Thoreau's Walden, and Melville's Moby Dick can hardly be said to have been inattent to the
matter. Manes, among numerous others, takes us closer to the mark in noting, "Many primal groups have no word for
wilderness and do not make a clear distinction between wild and domesticated life, since the tension between nature
and culture never becomes acute enough to raise the problem" (18). Indeed, much of American literature does adopt
this clear delineation between the landscapes of the natural world and the cityscaped communities that comprise the
"civilized world." This well-documented line of demarcation runs an unbroken course from William Bradford's
reference in 1620 to "A hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men" (95) through the
aforementioned rejection of Maclean's novel and stories because "[they] have trees in them." The distinction between
wild and domesticated life and the tension between nature and culture remain an enduring constant in the American
tradition.
It is within such a context that Emerson and Thoreau begin efforts to rethink this dominant view of the wilderness.
The countermovement or recodification begun by Emerson and Thoreau was followed by the likes of Clarence King,
John Muir, and in the next generation, Mary Austin, each of whom published works in widely read magazines of the
day such as The Atlantic Monthly and, out of San Francisco, The Overland Monthly. While these writers offered
sympathetic treatments of the land and natural phenomena, it is essential to remember that their treatments ran counter
to the prevailing view of the value of the land as offered--often in the very same leading journals of the day--by the
likes of John C. Fremont and Mark Twain. These latter writers highlighted the tensions between wild and domesticated
life, seeing virtually all of the wilderness as a thing best domesticated or trapped or clear cut or mined. Thus, the
American imagination has been tugged from both ends of the rope, at least since the time of Emerson and Thoreau.
Jumping forward to the present era, the hard pull towards the sympathetic treatment of the natural world has been aided
in no small part by writers such as Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich and
Barry Lopez. Significantly, each of these writers' most notable works has been in the form of the essay, with only
Abbey and Lopez having published much in the way of fiction. In fact, it was at the urging of his publisher that Abbey
began in earnest writing nonfiction precisely because his first three novels had been such commercial failures (Scheese
305). And Lopez's fiction, it is safe to say, has never really come close to approaching the commercial success of his
nonfiction, with the nonfiction books Of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams both becoming best sellers while often as
not his fiction gets published by university and small presses or in the low circulation literary journals.
At this juncture, some quick general points need to be addressed and then set aside as beyond the scope of this study. I
have said nothing of the American romantic and pastoral traditions. They have been written about extensively, of
course; however, I think it is safe to say that in general both conceived of natural landscapes and phenomena as "out
there," as places to go to. Thus, while treating nature sympathetically, both those movements maintained the
distinction between wilderness and culture. And while some of the earliest of the writers I mentioned held such a
distinction as well, they did not celebrate the difference so much as they worked to narrow the distance between
wilderness and culture. The more contemporary writers have interrogated these distinctions even further still, seeking
to reduce the imaginative distance even more.
On another front, one sees sympathetic treatments of landscapes and natural phenomena in American poetry from the
very start. In fact, I would not argue against a thesis that held that the countermovement or recodification has always
been present in and advanced by the poets, from Anne Bradstreet's "Contemplations (1650) through William Stafford's
"Traveling Through the Dark" and Gary Snyder's Turtle Island. Then, as now, however, the other forms of printed
discourse held sway; in America, poetry has never been the primary or dominant mode of literary edification for the
masses.
Lastly, in American fiction there are three notable areas in which, at least often enough so as to not be a rarity, we
might find sympathetic treatments of landscapes and the natural world. The first, obviously, would be within the
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western, especially in the twentieth century. In "Western Fiction as Ecological Parable" Fred Erisman argues "much
western American literature is an implicit plan for ecological awareness and activism" (Love 230). Add to this Thomas
J. Lyon's insight that "the West's great contribution to American culture will be in codifying and directing the natural
drive toward ecological thought, a flowering of regional literature into literally worldwide attention and
relevance" (Love 230).
The second area in which sympathetic treatments of the landscape can be found is in children's literature. Here I am
simply drawing upon the insights of my friend Anne K. Phillips, Assistant Professor of English at Kansas State, whose
Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Connecticut argued that latter nineteenth century children's literature kept alive
and perpetuated the environmental values of transcendentalism within the popular arena even after transcendentalism
itself had fallen from intellectual favor.
Lastly, the third area wherein we find sympathetic treatments of the landscape and natural phenomena would be in the
diverse tales of the Native American tribes. Until recently, scarcely any of those works ever appeared in the
anthologies of American Literature read in the high schools and colleges.
It is no accident, either, that these three areas of fiction have been among the most marginalized in the American
Tradition, at least insofar as what gets taught and tenured in the American academy. These points having been made,
we are now ready to shift the focus of this essay towards some of the more theoretical concerns.
Part II: Close Up
In his utterly fascinating and provocative 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, philosopher David Abram seeks to
abolish the "otherness" of the natural world altogether, saying, "The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that
comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by
the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth" (262). Developing the point further still
and then applying it to the idea of "story," Abram asserts that a good story "must be judged according to whether it
makes sense. And ‘making sense' must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the
senses. . . . To make senseis to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking and hence
to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world" (265).
So where are our good stories? Where are those works that evoke participations between the human body and the
animate earth? Where are our stories that make sense? Taken in this context, Christopher Manes' charge that nature is
silent in our culture may not be so overstated as first thought. Put another way, the American tradition hasn't
emphasized many major fictions with sympathetic presences of trees in them.
I have a thesis about why so much of the literature that actively tries to reduce this distance between nature and culture
takes the form of poetry or essay writing, and, conversely, why so little fiction, at least until very, very recently, makes
this same attempt.
In the field of teaching Intro to Literature courses to high school and first year college students is that well-worn staple
that "There are three basic themes in literature: man vs. man, man vs. himself, and man vs. nature" (with love stories
fitting within the first category, with that other well-worn staple, the use of the word "man" understood inclusively to
refer to both genders). Now if we read the word "versus" as signifying conflict and therefore "plot," we thus have as
one of the central patterns of thought we are taught to see the world in as being "man against the vicissitudes of nature,"
be the vicissitudes mountains or snowstorms, hurricanes or heat. Consider flipping the antagonistic relationship to its
polar opposite, however, and see what happens to plot. If we have man accepting the vicissitudes of nature or man
communing with nature or man philosophically reflecting upon his place in nature we no longer have conflict, ergo,
plot gets tossed out the window. No plot = no fiction; or if one absolutely insists on writing fiction (with trees, of
course) one foregrounds nature as setting. The problem with foregrounding nature as setting, however, is that this
technique removes nature's role as a primary character and relegates it to, at best, supporting actor. Such has been the
case with even the best of western fictions, with Frank Norris' The Octopus and Walter Van Tilburn Clark's remarkably
underrated The Ox-Bow Incident coming immediately to mind. Thus writers wishing to foreground nature in any sort
of positive, nonthreatening sense, say, in a sense that would have befuddled dear William Bradford, well, such writers
might as well switch to poetry or essay writing. Without the tried and true man vs. nature conflict, what else is there
with which to drive plot forward if one still wishes to keep nature as a leading character?
When I proposed this project in class, my interest was in seeing what the central tenet in The Usable Past might reveal
when applied to the presence (or lack thereof) of the natural world and of landscapes in particular. Just as writers
invent or adapt usable histories for their fictions,so too they might invent usable pasts for the physical features of those
places wherein the human pasts take place.
I began by reflecting upon the notion that many writers who emphasize natural features are basically writing natural
history; they impose history on landscapes and engage our interest as readers by telling us the stories of physical places
in such a way that they create what are essentially narratives of physical place, narratives of the land itself. Generally
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such narratives are either plotless, hence the profusion of the essay as the form of choice, or the plot that drives such
narratives focuses upon nature resisting man, as a variation of the man vs. nature theme. John McPhee and Annie
Dillard are, to my mind, the best writers in the field. McPhee's Basin and Range and The Control of Nature and
Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are exemplars of the genre.
What struck me, though, was how little effort there was in adult American fiction to reduce the distance between wild
and domesticated life and to help us reperceive natural phenomena not as an opposition to humankind and culture but
as an integrated part or element of culture. The environmental movement has certainly been at the forefront of this
reperception in the culture at large, and, as noted, essayists and poets have been at the forefront of the literary arts.
American fiction, I contend, has been a laggard. It has done little to diminish the "otherness" or "out thereness" of
natural phenomena. Of course, for one group of us that started grad school in another era, no paper would be complete
without citing Northrop Frye, and Frye does have an absolutely perfect phrasing of what's at issue here, for Frye notes
that metaphor itself may reveal "a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside
it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in
part . . . we are also a part of what we know" (Evernden 101).
If what I am saying about the vast panoply of the American tradition in fiction is true, then the observation
immediately brings to mind the question of how such a connection might be made within fictions, of how such a
recodification might be accomplished, of how fiction writers might enable us to see more of our natural landscape in
inclusive ways by bringing the natural world into our interior lives. In what ways might American fictions help us to,
as David Abram put it, "make sense . . . [to] rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world"?
Earlier I noted that most fiction writers who wanted to treat nature sympathetically solved the man vs. nature problem
by relegating natural phenomena to setting. I wondered about what ways there might be for sympathetically reinstating
nature and landscapes back into more prominent character roles in fictions. I noted that there are some techniques of
characterization that are regularly, if not exactly commonly, used by the essay writers that are little used by writers of
fiction, at least as applied to landscapes and natural phenomena. Some of these strategies we have seen employed by
writers in the texts we have looked at in class. Naturally, I will draw upon them and supplement them with works from
other writers I am familiar with.
The first strategy comes from the use of point of view. A writer may or may not present the third person point of view
of other characters in a story. Essayists not infrequently will present such points of view as imagined from a nonhuman
or inanimate stance; seldom, to my knowledge, do we see in fiction a third person point of view from nonhuman
creatures or inanimate realities, from an animal or from the land itself, for example. In her collection of essays, The
Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin begins the second chapter, "Water Trails of the Ceriso" as follows:
By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Ceriso are worn to a white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out
faint and fanwise toward the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel. But however faint to man-sight, they are
sufficiently plain to the furred and feathered folk who travel them. Getting down to the eye level of rat and squirrel
kind, one perceives what might easily be wide and winding roads to us if they occurred in thick plantations of trees
three times the height of a man. (17)
Aside from Austin's use of the terms "rat and squirrel kind" (an admittedly unsavory kinship to some), Austin simply
takes our eye level to the ground and has us imagine ourselves viewing the scene as the gopher, rat, and ground squirrel
do.
Perhaps no piece of fiction uses this same technique as effortlessly as Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It.
Early in the novel when the two primary characters decide to go fishing, we are told, "it is the river we knew best. . . .
We regarded it as a family river, as a part of us" (14). Shortly thereafter the brothers are fishing. The first person
narrator renders a third person account:
. . . it is human enough to spend a moment before casting in trying to imagine what a fish is thinking, even if one of its
eggs is as big as its brain and even if, when you're swimming underwater, it is hard to imagine that a fish has anything
to think about. . . . I imagined the fish with the black back lying cool in the carbonated water full of bubbles from the
waterfalls. He was looking downriver and watching the foam with food in it backing upstream like a floating cafeteria
coming to wait on its customers. And he was probably imagining that speckled foam was eggnog with nutmeg
sprinkled on it . . . (20-21)
At another point in the story we are told of a master fly-tieing craftsman who "had a glass tank in his backyard which
he filled with water. Then he would lie under it and study the insect he was going to imitate floating on top where it
doesn't look like an insect anywhere else" (67). Weaving such moments in and out of the story, Maclean reduces the
distance between the fish's life and our own by requiring us to see the world from that fish-eye point of view.
A second strategy akin to the first is that of simply presenting a first person point of view, which seems an obvious
thing to do save for the fact that we're acculturated not to think of the inanimate as having a point of view. It is for this
reason that in The House of Breath, William Goyen's unannounced shifts to first person points of view spoken by the
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river or the house or the well are so disorienting to readers. More difficult yet for many readers, especially
inexperienced readers, is the fact that whole chapters might be dialogues between a human character and the first
person voice of the nonhuman character. Chapter IV weaves back and forth in first person points of view between Boy
and the River, with scarcely any signifier save for the change of style to clue readers in that in this moment it is Boy
who is speaking to the River and in another moment it is the River speaking to Boy. The effect of these shifts, aside
from giving a feature of the landscape a speaking character's voice, is that readers must reorient their own thinking so
as to follow the train of thought. Unaccustomed to such shifts, the average reader who snaps up a novel from the rack
in the grocery store check-out line is not likely to have an easy time of William Goyen. (As a related side note, a
variation of this same strategy is also seen in Julio Cortazar's short story "Axolotl," which you mentioned in The
Usable Past.)
A more subtle way of presenting the landscape of natural phenomena as sympathetic characters is for the narrator to
somehow become a participant in an action with the landscape of its feature. My favorite example of this comes from
John Muir, when in his book The Mountains of California he climbs to the top of a 100 foot pine tree in the midst of a
ferocious wind storm. In an exceptional piece of prose that is too long to quote in its entirety, Muir describes the
experience, which takes place in 1874:
In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper,
having seen others of the same species still more severely tried--bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows-without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest
from my superb outlook. The view from here must be extremely beautiful in any weather. (252)
Muir goes on for several pages describing every sensory aspect possible in the greatest of detail, finally noting, "Most
people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care to look the winds, though far more beautiful
and sublime, and though they become at times about as visible as flowing water" (255). The entire focus is not so
much on Muir as a character but on what Muir the character sees from the unique vantage point of the top of this
swirling, waving, bending tree.
One final means of working landscapes and natural phenomena as characters into the text is by simply incorporating
Native American tales into the overall narrative. Whereas most readers find it odd for a first person Anglo voice to
emerge from a Goyen story, readers are much more willing to accept such a device when coming within the context of
a Native American tale. In our class readings we saw Cather do this, as well as Erdrich, and it is one of the common
techniques used by Barry Lopez.
The reinclusion of landscapes and natural features into fictional texts has profound implications. To conclude by once
again citing the essay "Nature and Silence," Christopher Manes asserts, "To regard nature as alive and articulate has
consequences in the realm of social practices. It conditions what passes for knowledge about nature and how
institutions put that knowledge to use" (15-16).
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1997.
Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1974 (reprint of 1903
first edition).
Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, Book I, Chpt. 9. In the Norton Anthology of Literature, (Shorter Fourth
Edition) ed. Nina Baym, et al. New York: W. W. Norton,1995.
Erisman, Fred. "Western Fiction as Ecological Parable." Qtd in Glen L. Love's
"Revaluing Nature" in
The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds.
Evernden, Neil. "Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy." in The
EcoCriticism Reader,
Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds.
Frye, Northrop. From The Educated Imagination. Qtd. In Evernden.
Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in
Literary Ecology.
Athens: University of Gerogia Press, 1996.
Goyen, William. The House of Breath. New York: Random House/Bookworks, 1975.
Love, Glen A. "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism." In The Ecocriticism Reader, Glotfelty and
Fromm, eds.
Lyon, Thomas J. "The Ecological Vision of Gary Snyder" Qtd. in Love: In The Ecocriticism Reader, Glotfelty and
Fromm, eds.
Manes, Christopher. "Nature and Silence." In The Ecocriticism Reader. Glotfelty and Fromm, eds.
Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. New York: Pocket
Books, 1992 ed. (Reprint
of 1976 1st ed.)
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Muir, John. The Mountains of California. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. No date; no date of original edition, though I
know it was printed in the late 19th century.
Plato. Phaedrus. trans. R. Hackworth. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of
Cambridge Press, 1989
(repr, of 1952 ed.)
Scheese, Don. "Desert Solitaire: Counter-Friction to the Machine in the Garden." In The
Ecocriticism Reader.
Glotfelty and Fromm, eds.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997