Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Glen Love, "Errant Thoughts on Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism"

After some thirty-five years in college teaching and the attendant publishing of criticism, I included, last year, in an introduction to a novel by Vancouver Island writer Roderick Haig-Brown, my first piece of what I now understand to be "narrative scholarship." It was an autobiographical incident about going to Campbell River as a teen-ager to meet Haig-Brown, my model outdoorsman, and then getting cold feet, fearing to knock at the great man's door, and returning home, defeated, to Seattle. Perhaps similarly inhibited, perhaps even now a captive of my early training in the New Criticism, schooled to accept the sanctity of authors' texts, I still consider the inclusion of that anecdote in an introduction to Haig-Brown's book, something of a D-double-daring act. (And here I am at it again!)

Despite my timidity, I can, on reflection, justify, with a necessary qualification, the integration of stories and scholarship, especially when the subject is nature writing:

Justification #1: Heraclitus wrote, "The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own." Nature writing, it seems to me, invites us, as does realism, to address the common world. (Is it only coincidental that the the massive assaults to the environment have occurred during the last few decades, when realism has been in literary disfavor?) Though storytelling could easily lead us toward romance and fantasy--the dreamer's private world--the emphasis in nature writing, as in realism, is necessarily upon the common world, shared experience, the system that works, wherein the stories of the critic may complement and enhance those of the author. For me, in the best nature writing eco outweighs ego, though both are present. For me, nature writing and ecocriticism are never far from the common world, the real world. (And, yes, there is a real world.)

Justication #2: Since natural history (in the form of systematic or scientific observation) and personal response (in the form of autobiographical record) form the alternating rhythm of most nature writing, and since the discourse of both of these activities is essentially narrative, it is not surprising that narrative might makes its way into much of the related ecocriticism. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Why would we spend our time on the works of Thoreau, Dillard, Haig-Brown, except that we love them, and wish others, through our praiseful attention to them, to do the same?

Qualification: But why do we love them? Because their stories are better than most, almost certainly better than ours. Their stories have won their way in the world; ours have not. However emboldened we may be by the reader-response theorists, a respectful attentiveness as to who is who, and who has done what, would seem to me to be a prerequisite to the practice of narrative scholarship. Most of us would prefer to be artists, rather than critics. (Was it Mencken who defined a historian as a failed novelist?) Some few make the transition from critic to artist. In our field, I think of Joseph Wood Krutch and Norman Maclean, both of whom began as professional readers--critics--of literature, and who went on to become artists whose works we now study. But they made their way on their own hook, on the strength of their own stories. Others of us may do the same, but the odds are long.

Glen Love, University of Oregon