What We Talk About When We Talk About Ecocriticism

by Ralph W. Black

Not long ago I saw King Lear again. Olivier's Lear. I marveled as usual at Lear's deep rage and deeper sadness, and I cried as usual as he carried Cordelia's body across the stage at the end. But I was struck even more by the beginning: A map of the kingdom is unrolled. It is painted across the tanned hides of a small herd of royal deer. The old Sovereign uses his sword to symbolically divide his domain among his daughters. Even before the daughters have spoken, or refused to speak the trajectory of their love, there is this transgression: the commodified landscape is sliced up and parceled out to the highest rhetorical bidder. For a moment I wonder about my understanding of the tragedy, about what hubristic act instigates Lear's fall, about the significance of the natural world in the play, the moments of clarity that all seem to take place outside--in a storm, on the moors, at the seashore.

William Cronon has recently written about his work as an environmental historian, saying that "human acts occur within a network of relationships, processes, and systems that are as ecological as they are cultural." He is speaking of histories of the Great Plains, but we, invested as we are in the natural world and its literary representation, might use it to talk about Colonel Sutpen, Natty Bumppo, or King Lear.

Lear is one of the last books I would put on an environmental literature reading list, but surely there is room enough, and reason, for exploring the relationship between the human and natural worlds in the play. And even if I use such an interpretive act only to bolster a reading of, say, The Tempest, I hope I am making some headway toward furthering and, some might say, legitimizing the work of ecocriticism.

Saying that, I wonder if I don't mean that we need to test our ecocritical tenets on "real books"--that is to say, books other than those by Abbey or Thoreau or Silko or Cooper, those books, as one of Norman Maclean's more insightful readers famously pointed out, that have trees in them. If ecocriticism's territory is the interplay of the human and the nonhuman in literary texts, there are few wider. Cather's prairie or Van Dyke's desert are as crucial to and as formative of their respective characters as the cityscapes of Don Passos, James, or Baldwin. Ecocriticism gives us a vocabulary to find a common ground among books that might otherwise seem to have very little in common. This is the envelope's edge that I want to push.

I'm speaking here both as a city-dweller and as a teacher of city-dwellers. The "out there" that's out here is, visually and ecologically speaking, a long way from Abbey's slickrock canyons. I'd trade up in a Lower Eastsider's second, and yet the issues of representation in a Baldwin story and the political, social and environmental implications behind that representation could hardly be more vital. The term "endangered species" has been used in recent years to describe young black urban males and two-parent "inner city" families as well as spotted owls and red wolves. The interplay among characters, species, and ecosystems in a literary text often demands an interdisciplinary approach to thoroughly parse. Part of my own agenda as a teacher is to use this interdisciplinarity to interpret not just our relations to a text, but to the physical (if not always "natural") world in which that text (and its reader) exists. This is where it can get political: the ecosystemic relationships within a literary text will often reach out and implicate us in its web. That's what reading does--when we're lucky. Then we, devious organisms that we are, can turn and insinuate that relationship, changed now, more complex, on our environments. Call it "A reader grows in Brooklyn." Perhaps we all can learn to sing along with Father Hopkins: Let there be left,/ O let there be left, wildness and wet;/ Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Ralph W. Black, New York University [now at Wake Forest University]