American Nature Writing

Introduction

I

This book is based on a series of lectures I gave on American literature, but the subject of these lectures is not what you would normally expect to find in lectures about literature. Literature lectures usually revolve around themes such as love, war, and death, and explore the characterization of different individual human beings. The focus of my lectures, however, is on stories of places and the spiritual connection between people and these places. For a long time, nature has been a silent player in literature, treated only as a backdrop. Mark Christopher Allister once wrote: “Nature speaks. But in our discourse nature is silent, a symbolic presence only, a mute object” (Allister 2001, p. 30). Henry David Thoreau, in his essay Walking (1862), asked: “Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?” He then declared: “I wish to speak a word for Nature” (Thoreau 2002, p. 59). What is pleasing is the fact that since the latter half of the twentieth century, especially since the 1980s, nature writing, a new force in American literature, a form of literature that tells the story of places and speaks on behalf of nature, has started to emerge. This literary form, however, is not simply a description of nature. From the earliest natural history essays to modern nature writing, American nature writing has developed a tradition, which seeks to tell the story ←1 | 2→of places and explore the connection between human spirituality and a particular place, blending natural history with the history of human development.

Thoreau’s book Walden (1854) is a true portrayal of the natural history of Walden Pond and also that of the author’s spiritual growth. Even today Thoreau’s tradition still has a profound influence, with many American professors teaching nature writing courses at university. Let us look at two American literature professors, who are not only authors of nature writing but also teach the subject. They have even incorporated their own experiences of discovering nature into their teachings. John Tallmadge1 based his book Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher’s Path (1997) on his own experiences. His book was unique in that it chronicles his exploration of the wilderness as he followed in the footsteps of prominent nature writers. He linked these exploits to his early development as a young English teacher, and the book reveals his insights and his personal experience of exploring landscapes both in the real world and within his own mind. In nature, he saw a healthy community with its members dependent upon each other, a fair and sustainable model for human society. He wanted to learn from the tree of nature and to use the book of nature to teach others. To achieve this, he told stories of places. As he saw it, teachers and storytellers are very similar. “We too need teachers and storytellers to strengthen us. …for a place is a space with a story, and by sharing the story you make the place your own” (Tallmadge, p. 170). He combined his interests in literature, exploration of nature and language teaching, and built a career encompassing all three. Tallmadge’s style of teaching and research is similar to what modern nature writers would describe as “narrative scholarship.”² Ian Marshall³ also based his book Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (1998) on his own experiences. For more than 20 years, he often went hiking on the Appalachian Trail while reading literary works about the relationship between humans and nature in this region. He explored America’s past, its landscape and its national experience, and he told ←2 | 3→vivid stories about American literature, ecological history and national identity. In the introduction to his book, he explained that he wanted to use his own experiences and writings as well as those of other people before him in order to write “a literary geo-history,” and that his book was for him “practicing what has been called ‘narrative scholarship’” (Marshall, pp. 3, 7). This genre of literature is precisely what my lectures on American nature writing tried to explore. However, this kind of literature tells not only stories about places. It seeks to answer a question at the forefront of our attention: “Does literature enable mankind to better adapt to the natural world or cause further alienation, and will reading such literature help to achieve a balanced ecology and harmonious coexistence between man and nature?” At the same time, nature writing is also a multi-disciplinary field, combining language, literature, philosophy, ecology, botany and ethics, with a broad scope for further study.

Since 1995 when I first came across American nature writing, I have witnessed its flourishing again after languishing in obscurity for some time and witnessed its growth in popularity. It has now branched out into environmental literature and ecocriticism, and the “sense of place” has given way to the “sense of planet.” The attention that this field is receiving is very exciting, and it is worth celebrating that more people are paying attention to and caring about nature. Of the many topics and fields of research relating to nature and literature, I have chosen American nature writing as the main topic of discussion for this book. This is because, despite the more recent emergence of ecocriticism, green studies, ecological literature and other new terms, almost all of them are intricately linked to nature writing. For example, when explaining “ecocriticism” in his monograph Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (2003), Glen A. Love specifically emphasized: “Nature writing, which has been the mainstay of literature-environment studies in the past, will continue to hold a central position” (p. 28).4 Besides, nature writing has a tradition, a comparatively complete system, and a large number of representative authors and works, all of which provide the reader with a sense of beauty, a communication of the spirit and a connection of minds. Thoreau famously said, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” (in Walden, ←3 | 4→[1854] 2004, p. 78)! As modern society becomes ever more complex, as technical jargons increase and become ever more incomprehensible, as the number of adjectives describing the relationship between man and nature grows in complexity, we need to go back to basics. People today want to explore the wilderness and experience nature, not because they want to find a certain elusive object, but because they are looking for a constant. As Edward Abbey (1968) said, “Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—the earth remains, slightly modified. …man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real, Rock and Sun” (1971, p. 219). Sigurd F. Olson, another American nature writer, once wrote about his hobby of building stone walls. He described how, from the rocks that had not moved for millennia, he absorbed a sense of rooted stability that was unaffected by external factors. Thus, in order to discuss literary works that describe the relationship between man and nature, we must start with the basics; only after establishing the basics can we gain the confidence to expand and grow. This approach is not unique or extraordinary. For example, Robert Finch and John Elder, the editors of The Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990), decided to include in its first edition only non-fictional essays written in prose. Their reasoning was that prose essay was one of the most important literary forms in modern American literature, and a significant number of outstanding essayists were nature writers. When the book was republished in 2002, the editors changed the title of the book to Nature Writing: The Tradition in English, and wrote in the Introduction, “But our own goal remains to celebrate a distinct and limited, yet enormously rich, literary tradition in English—one whose principal expression has been the personal narrative essay and whose flowering, for various cultural, historical, and geographical reasons, has been especially remarkable in the United States” (Finch & Elder 2002, p. 17). This is also one of the main reasons why I have chosen American Nature Writing: Thirty Lectures as the title of my book.

The term “writing” in “nature writing” is not used in the same way as in creative writing. It is not writing in a general sense, not the kind of general composition taught in a writing class, nor is it simply a form of writing. The connotations of the term “nature writing” are richer and more profound than what the two constituent words can convey. As mentioned before, it is steeped in a literary tradition with unique compositional characteristics, and it is itself a complete literary system, with its origins reaching back in history, and with many prominent ←4 | 5→representative authors and significant representative works of literature. From a literary historical standpoint, it is a distinct literary form. This view is briefly discussed in Chapter One, and its significance can be gleaned from the Contents page. In addition, the term “nature writing” is often interchangeable with “literature of nature” in English works. In This Incomperable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing (Lyon 1989), its editor Thomas J. Lyon wrote a chapter especially explaining the meaning and history of nature writing. In it, he used the terms “American nature literature” and “our literature of nature” in place of “nature writing” (pp. 3, 23). In the Introduction to the 2002 edition of Nature Writing: The Tradition in English, Finch and Elder recognized that “Thoreauvian inheritance continues to leaven and transform literature of nature in English” and went on to point out that “…nature writing, like other forms of literature and the arts, has been opening its doors to an increasingly diverse group of writers” (p. 17). When Rachel Carson won the 1952 John Burroughs Medal,5 she took the opportunity to define the concept of nature writing in her acceptance speech. She believed that the tradition of nature writing is “a long and honourable one,” formed during the nineteenth century or even earlier, and if we follow this tradition or its spirit, we will create “a new type of literature” (Carson 1998, pp. 93–95). She emphasized the literary value and social function of nature writing. Barry Lopez in his About This Life: Journey on the Threshold of Memory (1998, p. 14) called nature writing “a literature of hope.” Many others have referred to nature writing as literature. There is no need to list them all here.

In the Chinese classic The Analects, Confucius said, “People used to learn for the sake of improving themselves; they now learn for the sake of impressing others” (in Yang The Analects with Annotations, 1958, p. 161; “gu zhi xue zhe wei ji, jin zhi xue zhe wei ren”). When I first entered the field of nature writing, it was entirely to satisfy my own interest and I did not have any lofty ideas about my career. My experience is similar to what was described by Sigurd Olson in The Singing Wilderness (1956). He was particularly fond of red squirrels and devoted a chapter entitled “The Red Squirrel” to them. His love of red squirrels is unconnected with his academic interests and he never sought to publish any article about squirrels in an academic periodical. Therefore, zoologists would probably regard him as the least respected person in their field. Olson said that his interest ←5 | 6→in red squirrels was purely out of fondness and admiration. For him, these creatures symbolize the wilderness as he came to know it on the vast American continent. He wrote, “What better way of thinking of the ancient forests of the continent than to realize that a squirrel could have run through the tops of them from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi without having to come to earth?” (p. 156) Dr Samuel Johnson once said: “The end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.” I think, at the beginning, it was the poetic feeling of nature writing or of nature that intrigued me and led to my falling completely in love with this field. This book is only one of the unintended results of that love. Therefore, I do not want this book to be too serious, but would like to share my enjoyment with the reader through a series of stories. If the reader can be persuaded to appreciate and love nature, and become unconsciously protective of our planet, then perhaps I can be a little proud of what I have chosen to do. After all, nearly two centuries ago, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”

1

The Origin and History of American Nature Writing

Lecture 1. The Concept and Origin of Nature Writing

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, and especially since the 1980s, there has appeared a new school of literature—American nature writing. It focuses on describing nature; examining the relationship between man and nature; and presenting beautiful scenes where the two merge, to tell stories of places that have begun to fade from the collective memory. Although American nature writing is influenced by the tradition of European Romanticism, as a literary genre it has its roots in America, the “Garden of Eden” and the “New World.” Naturally, it has characteristics that are not to be found in any other country and differs from the naturalism once seen in Western literature. It is a contemporary literary genre with American characteristics, with its origins in the seventeenth century and its foundations in the nineteenth.

The Concept of American Nature Writing

In terms of structure, nature writing belongs to the category of nonfiction prose literature, and most often uses essays, diaries, autobiographies, letters and other similar forms. In terms of content, it mainly seeks to explore the relationship ←9 | 10→between humanity and nature. In short, its most typical mode of expression is first person narrative, telling real and intimate stories of the authors’ personal, physical and spiritual experiences when they leave the “civilized” world and enter a natural environment. American scholar Don Scheese, in his Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (1996, p. 143), describes the genre as a “literature of the American wilderness that blends feeling with informed observation.”