by Edith Critchley
In 1995, in an Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty argued that "ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies." Over twenty years later, this critical approach seems an even more timely way in which to explore our current ecological crisis through literature. We can examine historical and contemporary texts ecocritically, considering the light they throw on the complex and evolving relationship between nature and humanity. Our era has a tendency to dismiss fiction as unserious in comparison to scientific literature, but I would argue that, while science can provide explanations, literature can offer meaning and value without which we are left unmoored.
The literature that most obviously lends itself to ecocritical investigation is early nineteenth century Romantic poetry, with its intense evocation of the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world. However, the modern ecological sensibility can be argued to have begun more recently, in 1962, and through a work of science, not literature, Rachel Carson's seminal work, Silent Spring, which raised awareness of the destructive impact of pesticides on the environment: "a strange blight crept over the area and then everything began to change." A marine biologist, Carson was writing a work of non-fiction, yet her style combines elements both pastoral and apocalyptic, evoking an elegaic sense of loss but also a powerful vision of ecological destruction. What I find so fascinating about ecocriticism is that it, too, combines the pastoral and the apocalyptic modes; it is deeply political in its engagement with both word and world.
In 1995, in an Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty argued that "ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies." Over twenty years later, this critical approach seems an even more timely way in which to explore our current ecological crisis through literature. We can examine historical and contemporary texts ecocritically, considering the light they throw on the complex and evolving relationship between nature and humanity. Our era has a tendency to dismiss fiction as unserious in comparison to scientific literature, but I would argue that, while science can provide explanations, literature can offer meaning and value without which we are left unmoored.
The literature that most obviously lends itself to ecocritical investigation is early nineteenth century Romantic poetry, with its intense evocation of the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world. However, the modern ecological sensibility can be argued to have begun more recently, in 1962, and through a work of science, not literature, Rachel Carson's seminal work, Silent Spring, which raised awareness of the destructive impact of pesticides on the environment: "a strange blight crept over the area and then everything began to change." A marine biologist, Carson was writing a work of non-fiction, yet her style combines elements both pastoral and apocalyptic, evoking an elegaic sense of loss but also a powerful vision of ecological destruction. What I find so fascinating about ecocriticism is that it, too, combines the pastoral and the apocalyptic modes; it is deeply political in its engagement with both word and world.
Two novels recently published seem to me to contain elements of apocalypse and pastoral. Richard Powers' The Overstory is ecological in its very structure, with the intertwining of its stories. Nature not only acts as the vehicle for events, but is itself perhaps the protagonist: "Joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than shimmers of beeches in a breeze." In this sense, it is truly an eco-novel.
In Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life, Andreas Eggar's whole life is at the mercy of the mountains. His involvement in modernising the land around him is in the end what isolates him from the mountains themselves. Whereas The Overstory is about connection, however, confused and uncertain, A Whole Life explores our increasing alienation from our natural environment ("everything about him was warped and crooked") and yet there are powerful moments of communion: "and in the mornings after the first snow melt, when he walked across the dew-soaked meadow outside his hut and lay down on one of the flat rocks and felt the cold stone on his back, and the first warm rays of the sun on his face, he felt like many things had not gone so badly after all.
Ecocritical readings can illuminate almost any text - from those of our earliest childhood (The Hungry Caterpillar and The Gruffalo) to the works of authors and poets from Thomas Hardy and Alice Oswald to Emily Bronte and Cormac McCarthy. In an age of ecological crisis, for all of the validity of a feminist, Marxist or post-colonial deconstruction of literature, what could be more urgent than an eco-critical interpretation?
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