Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Michael P. Cohen, "Narrative Scholarship"

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."
--The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Ecocriticism is, like much contemporary criticism, a form of cultural critique, interdisciplinary in its tools, and its intentions.

My most recent excursion in this direction is an experiment in nordic skiing, specifically training and racing. Questions at hand begin with the following: can skiing be understood as an activity from the inside and outside at the same time?

I might depart from an essay entitled "The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature," by Allen Borgmann, in Reinventing Nature: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction. Borgmann speaks specifically of skiing, artificial snow, and socially constructed skiing environments. He suggests that Lito Tejada Flores' version of the downhill history of downhill skiing might apply to a wider present situation. "Skiers, Tejada Flores writes, "have gone from adventure (dealing with uncertainty in a wild mountain landscape) to sport (all-out physical involvement on known terrain) to recreation (the undemanding enjoyment of simple rhythmic movements). Lito may be talking about me.

First, what is the present situation, including the relationship between our present culture and what it perceives as a "natural" environment? Second, how is skiing an interesting field in which to explore this ecology of human and natural? Third, how can we verify or discredit the history Tejada-Flores provides? The answer, I believe, is a double narrative, wherein the writer is both spectator and spectacle, part of and marginal to the activity, complicitous and disaffected; in other words a double perceiver.

Michael P. Cohen, Southern Utah University