“Ecocriticism,” Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, 1/29/10
It’s an honor to speak at this MEMSI lecture. MEMSI through Prof. Cohen’s work has become a place of real national stature and beyond. Like Groucho Marx I must question how I was admitted. But for a long time there have not been many people working in ecocriticism in medieval studies. Now that’s changing and I unworthily need to work harder. So I’d like to start with a brief introduction to ecocriticism or environmental literary studies, followed by examples hopefully suggesting how it can be applied to early English poetry, endingwith thoughts about the value of a new field in ecocriticism calledecosemiotics.
Lawrence Buelldefinesecocriticism, which first emerged in the 1970s, as in effect foregrounding the background of textual narrative. In other words, he said,if you take a simplified Artistotelian view of literary study as examining plot, character, theme and setting, ecocriticism focuses on setting, which often has been the most neglected element in modern Western literary interpretation.Buell definesa text that encourages an ecologically centered reading in four ways: It is one that first features a “nonhuman environment” as a presence that suggests “human history is implicated in natural history,” and second does so in a setting in which “the human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest,” whilethird “human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation,” and fourth, does so with “some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant.” I’m going to expand on Buell’s definition today in relation to the new field of ecosemiotics, or the study of the relation of culture and nature through signs. I’ll try to suggest that even though Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may not seem to us much like an environmental text today—not aWalden Pond or Monkeywrench Gang or Avatar—it does offer entry into an important culture of nature in the archipelago that we today tend to call the British Isles, a culture of nature that I’ll call an environmental semiosphere.
First, it’s easy to see how reading for setting can be extended to context, in terms of cultural landscape. In fact, the text can be seen itself as a type of landscape or map, when turned inside-out in ecocritical reading. In such reading thepremodern text as cultural landscape can engage both social and physical environments more easily. When Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their 2004 polemic The Death of Environmentalism concluded that “environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to be,” they couldhave been issuing a manifesto for medieval ecocriticism. Much of my work has involved texts associated with the environment of the early Irish Sea, and a different way of seeing the British Isles and its early literatures together environmentally as an archipelago with a dynamic interplay of water, land and atmosphere at its center, rather than with just London as its social focus or the Continent off-stage as its foundation. For this I’min debt to Prof. Cohen’s work in developing archipelagic studies.
Let’s take up a familiarexample fromThe Canterbury Tales, namely its opening:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve course yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open eye,
So priketh hem nature in hir corages,
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kouthe in sundry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martyr for to seke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Now, here we have nature in motion and a text that is a map of a journey. Yet it is very different from the motion and journey of that other great medieval pilgrimage poem, Dante’s Commedia, written a few generations earlier in Italy. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the landscape is less allegorical and less virtual, and also, taking the work as a whole, seemingly incomplete, ever in process. It is nonetheless an overlay landscapedraped across the physical geography of countryside from commercial London to a supposedly spiritual Canterbury that however is never reached, the journey ending, apparently, in the Parson’s Tale and perhaps Chaucer’s retraction. We can trace the route of the pilgrims along an old Roman road that goes from the center of English metropolitan commerce in the waning days of the Anglo-Norman feudal regime, into a province and provincial seat whose namesderive from an old Celtic British people, the Cantii who left their name to Kent and Canterbury, to which the papal mission from St. Gregory the Dialogist came in the days before the Norman Conquest and found remnants of earlier British Christianity. There is already an anti-colonial movement celebratory of natural landscape and language implicit in the map of the story, added to its invocation of Thomas Beckett as an icon of the claims of the spiritual against the state. And the landscape, unlike that of Dante’s great work, is not all about Chaucer. Rather it is about a rollicking muti-logue of many voices, including the non-human, in which Chaucer’s persona is one among many to be parodied for the foolishness of subjectivity.
So the psychology of the poem alsoarguably projects an environmental experience, out-of-text and into multiple contexts. A. Kent Hieatt some time ago wrote of what he called Chaucer’s mythopoesis, of the poet’s use of fable to experientially engage or entrap the reader in a kind of empathy aimed against objectification of others or of one’s self. We see this in the following rogue’s gallery of figures in the General Prologue and their tales. But I would argue that The Canterbury Tales as experiential landscape can also be read as ecopoesis, as a shaping of environment that enables a transpersonal engagement of the human with the physical environment, an empathy in line with current work in mind science on the way human beings develop more ecologically than in a unitary discreet individual way.
Let us consider the world as described in these opening lines. We have the cycle of seasons and stars, the time of nature. We have the social time and cycles of mortality and festival of human beings. We have the created eternity of the saints. And we have in the pricking of corages by Nature an intimation poetically of the movement of theophanies and divine energies or manifestations in the physical world that are everlasting and beyond even eternity, as in a familiar example to medievals of how the hearts of Jesus’ students burned within them when taught by His unknown resurrected person on the road to Emmaus. For Chaucer, as mentioned in the Parlement of Fowles, Nature is the vicar of the Almightie Lord, a figure whom Spenser developed in emulation of Chaucer in The Faerie Queene as shining forth divine energies, perhaps also influenced as Harold Weatherby suggests by Spenser’s patristic studies at Cambridge. One modern translation in fact renders “so priketh hem nature in hir corages,” as “thus nature sparkles in them so,” reminiscent of the Romanian scholar Dimitru Staniloaeu’s description of the divine energies in nature in non-Augustinian Christian theology as the sparkle of creation. It is notable that modern editors have so misunderstood the cosmology behind this line that, as Sarah Stanbury has noted, until recently that particular phrase in the prologue tended to be placed in parentheses in many editions and translations, because modern scholars assumed and wanted to apply it more to the birds in particular than to the overall moving landscape of beings in the Prologue as a whole.
Here poetically we have the four modes of time and non-time of patristic asceticism,embodied in early literary monasticism around the Irish Sea,in league with indigenous non-Christian traditions, rather than the eternal present of Augustinian-derived Scholasticism seen in Dante’s work. All of these modes are entwined in the landscape of the text on the road to Canterbury, in a cloud of overlapping stories and voices ending in ascetic repentance with The Parson’s Tale, not a singular and triumphal completed passage from hell to heaven.
In this the pilgrimage to Canterbury, a journey that never reaches the interior of a cathedral nor the cosmic interiorized consummation of Dante’s flight, in the energy of its very overlay of imaginative Otherworld and familiar deeply layered physical geography, rejects the strongly hierarchical and abstracted sense of environment of the Scholasticism of the high Middle Ages and the feudalism that attended it. And it does so interestingly by reaching back to adapt traditions deeply entwined with an archipelagic perspective of life, traditions familiar from the early Irish Sea zone, rejecting ultimately the monumentality of the metropolitan center, whether of London, mainland Europe or the high-medieval church.
Chaucer’s reference to Nature in the opening lines here again evokes the figure of Nature in his Parlement of Fowles, negotiating the comic cacophanies of Valentine lover birds in a spring beyondhierarchies, echoed back by Chaucer’s greatest fan Spenser in the latter’s figure of Nature shining in sparkling energies in the Mutabilitie Cantos that climax the overlay landscape of his likewise dynamically incomplete Faerie Queene, in what by then had become a tradition of green-world literature in English. The landscape tradition that Chaucer’s work navigates itself became known as fairyland, even as it draws on what scholars much later would call the earlier Celtic Otherworld, to which Chaucer makes specific reference in The Canterbury Tales and draws on through its very structure, to form a literary landscape or world entwined with geography and the life of the earth. We also see those earlier traditions re-emerge in early English in a famous contemporary poem to The Canterbury Tales, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in a different type of story to some extent but arguably with a similar sense of overlay landscape. In that poem, Sir Gawain’s travels are across a mapped geography of Britain, into Wales and ultimately to a Green Chapel that scholars link to folklore about locations near the poet’s probable location in the Chester area, and so we also have this overlay of imaginative fantasy with actual terrain and an accompanying subversion of idealized individuality, in the case of the Gawain poet in terms of the deconstruction of Gawain’s knightly character in dialogue with the Otherworld.
While the convention of the changing seasons seen in Chaucer’s opening is a commonplace,he as usual reworks sources, including probably an Italian text on the Destruction of Troy, and, in structure,Boccacio’s Decameron. But the geographic mix stands distinctively within a storytelling mode of archipelago. He is operating within a tradition native to his environment, so to speak, and one that in turn helps shape that environment through story, with a kind of flat hierarchy of energized landscape rather than Scholastic analogy. Unlike the likely source about Troy, spring ends in Chaucer not in war but in redemption in an actual countryside of which the audience forms a physical part. Thus so too at the end of Chaucer’sTroilus and Criseyde, we move into larger contexts that triangulate between the spiritual and physical geography of earth and the perspective of Chaucer’s time, as Troilus as a deconstructed medieval knight looks down on the plains of war and laughs, putting all in a dynamic perspective akin to the combined punning of the dynamic Sabbaoth Lord of hosts and Sabbath rest at the end of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
That Chaucer operates ina tradition of landscape narration shaped by the environment of his archipelago is suggested also by his use of a central motif of early Irish Otherworld stories, namely the Sovereignty goddess or fairy queen of the land’s green world, in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, which occupies a key place in the Ellesmere manuscript as a kind of linchpin to the response of the so-called marriage tales to both the satirized chivalry of The Knight’s Tale and the excesses of the so-called bawdy tales.It follows The Man of Law’s Tale in this, which itself highlights an early pre-Norman Christianity associated with a legendary holiness of the age of saints and scholars in islands then heavily influenced by Irish culture. The motif of a fairy queen presiding over an overlay green world landscape emerges in the self-satirizingTale of Sir Thopas, and early Irish Sea traditions of magical overlay landscape appear also in The Franklin’s Tale with its associations with archipelago-related traditions of Brittany.Rory McTurk in a recent study of analogues to Chaucer’s work in Celtic and Norse language literatures, suggests that the IrishAcallach na Senorach, with its itinerary of St. Patrick’s interactions with Fenian heroes in the Irish landscape, derivative of earlier Otherworld narrative structure, plausibly could have been a primary influence in the framing of The Canterbury Tales, given Chaucer’s likely time in Ulster during his years of unknown provenance as a young man in the service of the Earl of Ulster. And of course an important anonymous poem roughly contemporary to The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, affords a version of this overlay landscape too, suggesting the motif’s appeal in formative English poetry after the Black Death and crumbling of Anglo-Norman feudalism, as analternative model for reimagining the nature of things in poesisfiguring itself as native.
But to get back to the General Prologue, the mention of the zodiac in particular, the Ram in his half course, together with the juices of spring that seem to be flowing through all, bothhighlightProf. Cohen’s comparison of medieval notions of astrology and the bodily humors as premodern examples of “bodies without organs.” That term, meaning non-organismic bodies, comes from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and involves virtual realities that embody a kind of ecological connectivity spanningphysical immanence and cultural effects, in ecocritical terms potentially a kind of ecosystem or culture of nature. The archipelago itself could be considered a kind of “body without organs.”In his essay “Desert Islands,”Deleuze discusses how the geological “double movement” of islands, both pulling away and recreating themselves, parallels human involvement with them imaginatively. A collective cultural imagination in Deleuze’s view, through rites and mythology, could produce imaginary identity with islands in a way that “geography and the imagination would be one.” Later he and Guattaridiscussed how Europe’s Atlantic archipelago in particular involved“a plane of immanence as a movable and moving ground… an archipelagian world where [inhabitants] are happy to pitch their tents from island to island and over the sea… nomadizing the old Greek earth, broken up, fractalized, and extended to the entire universe.” In such a geo-cultural archipelago, they said, the landscape sees, much as early iconography reflected in the art and culture of the early Irish Sea zone looks out on us rather than allowing us to internalize and objectify them.
Such a body without organs can involve in Deleuzean terms a rhizomic or entwined grass-root sense of symbiotic eco-region and culture-region or atmosphere, such as the archipelago itself. Indeed, the contemporary philosopher Peter Hallward sees a theophany or emanation of the divine in nature in Deleuze-Guattarian geophilosophy, which he claims to be akin to the early medieval Irish writer John Scottus Eriugena’s early Irish Sea philosophy, in which divine energies manifest as fantasy clouds of theophany in which the human entwines with the cosmic. In Otherworld narratives of the early archipelago, the environmental theophany in which humans participate looks out as a “seeing landscape,” a melding of sea, sky, earth and spiritual realms, as if some elemental rewriting of Martin Heidegger’s mystical fourfold. This landscape emerged in narratives of desert asceticism that came to the islands in search of a desert that was spiritual sea, an archipelago that in the post-Roman period was constituted culturally as both deserted by Rome and a monastic desert, and thus oddly paralleled Deleuze’s sense of desert islands as well. Adomnán’s late-eighth-century Hiberno-Latin Vita S. Columbae, for example, refers to a spiritual pilgrim wishing to find a desertum in the ocean off Scotland.” Examples of such earlier melding of geography and imagination include the Otherworld voyage story of Immram Brain, the early Irish tropes of the colors of the winds and colors of martyrdom, Eriugena’s image of the sea as theophanic, and early Ireland’s de-centered social and ecclesiastical networks.
For Eriugena, Nature consisted of both being and non-being, the hidden and the appearing. Later in Scholasticism, developing from tendencies in Augustine and the Latin language, non-being came to be identified with evil. As Robert Bartlett outlines, evil in Scholasticism came to be labeled as natural but then necessarily an illusory parallel to essential nature. So any sense of overlay landscape become demonized, and narrative storytelling was not able to accommodate dynamic notions of nature. The supernatural good became more and more a separate if constrained category of reality apart from the natural. Miracles came to be considered, in the view of Aquinas and others,not results from rational occurrences, but from supernatural archetypes in God’s essence, removed from creation. It was the beginning of what Max Weber later called the disenchantment of nature.