Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Kent Ryden, "Narrative Scholarship"

In high school composition classes--when I was doing time in high school, at any rate--students are taught never to use the word "I" in a piece of academic writing. Ideas create themselves, it seems, and are to be presented on the page in the disembodied voice of absolute, abstract Truth. The less evidence of actual human involvement with the words on the page and with the thoughts behind those words, the better. Who cares about you, anyway? Just give me the facts.

You would think that literary scholars would have gotten away from this kind of thinking with the demise of the New Criticism--you know, the belief that a literary work is a self-contained artifact, that all meaning lies within the text itself, and that any biographical, historical, or other contextual factors are irrelevant to interpretation. These days, we critics have learned to view texts within as many relevant contexts as possible--all texts, that is, except our own critical writings. How critics came to their interest in a subject, how they continue to interact with and think about that subject--in other words, how personal experience and engagement have shaped and continue to shape a scholar's thought and practice--is still seen as decidedly secondary if not irrelevant to the august work of critical exegesis. (These readers are out there. I know. While many reviewers have appreciated the way I incorporated personal reflections into my Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place, others have taken me to task for what they have seen as excessive self-indulgence if not rampaging egotism. For some readers, a little Ryden goes a very Iong way.)

As it happens, the book I wrote is about how people discover and assign meaning in their geographical surroundings and how they communicate that meaning to others. This scholarly interest grew out of a lifetime of experiencing landscapes and places (as I like to say, scholarship is a great way to legitimize your hobbies), and as I was shaping my thoughts for the book--a process which necessarily and frequently took me out of doors--I found that certain of my experiences corroborated some important themes that I wanted to develop. In short, my life was seamlessly connected to my scholarship, and it seemed artificial and unnecessary to break them apart for the sake of a book. Furthermore, my experience seemed to me to help demonstrate the truth of what I was writing about. Am I any less of a "folk," or any less legitimate a writer, than the people I was studying? Was my testimony any less valid than theirs? I felt that my experiences might help readers to recognize similar episodes in their own lives, or might at least get them to reflect on their own relationships to the places that surround them. My personal narratives, I hoped, would help make my book more persuasive, more grounded in the way people actually inhabit the earth, not weaken its impact or be a distraction.

I think it's a little disingenuous to pretend that a scholar's--any scholar's--work doesn't grow somehow out of deeply personal factors, and isn't maintained and furthered by those same factors. We poor bastards who end up as college professors don't choose our fields and specialties just for the hell of it, or because that's where the jobs are, or because we think it's a great way to make money and meet girls. We do what we do because we like it, because it fits in with what has interested us most about the world around us and about being human, because some life experience or bundle of experiences lit a fire that somehow managed not to get extinguished in graduate school. A scholar who takes the time to narrate some of that past or present experience shows us where the book or article came from, deepening its resonance and vitality, showing us how it derives from the passions and patterns of one life and inviting us to fit it somehow into our own lives. We see that the work is not just an empty academic exercise and pay close and sympathetic attention.

This is perhaps another way of saying that narrative scholarship, as we're calling it, raises and addresses issues of credibility and authenticity. Narrative scholars, we think, actually care and aren't just grinding the stuff out; they have been personally engaged with the subject at hand; they must then feel a special obligation to think and write about their topic carefully and respectfully; they are believable. Addressing these issues is perhaps more important in ecocriticism than in, say, the sciences, where it's hard to publish without actually observing something, be it a star or a cell or a rock formation. You can, on the other hand, still write intelligibly about literature and the environment simply through reading the literature. As far as I'm concerned, though, a piece of ecocritical writing is qualitatively better and richer if the writer shows evidence of actually having gone outside and become physically and emotionally engaged with the environment at some point, if he or she demonstrates some awareness that the literary work under discussion grew out of an experience of nature and can best be appreciated and understood in that same spirit. None of the above is to say that personal anecdote should replace rigorous, informed analytical thought, of course; rather, it is a suggestion that we be willing to reconnect scholarship to its experiential wellsprings, that in writing out of our lives we can write more effectively into the lives of others.

Kent Ryden, University of Southern Maine