Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Don Scheese, "Narrative Scholarship"

"Man--let me offer you a definition--is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall--or when he's about to drown--he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life."

This passage, from Graham Swift's Waterland, serves as the epigraph to William Cronon's wonderful essay "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative" (Journal of American History 78.4 [March 1992]:1347-76). To the topic of "Narrative Scholarship" a New Historicist might well respond: "What? Isn't all scholarship narrative? Isn't every explanation of how the world works or human artifacts function a story, one among many possible versions or ways of interpreting things? Isn't everything a text, isn't everyone an interpreter?" Other species may have their own stories to tell, but certainly Graham Swift reveals a fundamental truth about humans: we are a (if not the) storytelling species.

Whether we call what we do "Narrative Scholarship," "Autobiographical Criticism" (see The Chronicle of Higher Education 6 May 1992:A8-A9, "New Brand of Scholarship Mixes Experience, Expertise"), or something else, an important distinction has to do with the degree to which the "I" is foregrounded in the scholarship. Personally, I have always been drawn to scholars who reveal how they came at a particular subject, the genesis of their interest in a topic. Some, but certainly not all, of these projects can be labeled "ecocriticism": Jane Tompkins' Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (Oxford, 1985) and West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford, 1992); Michael Cohen's The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Wisconsin, 1984); Belden Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (Paulist, 1988); and, most recently, Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory (Knopf, 1995), in which he tells of the influence of one of his teachers who "always insisted on directly experiencing 'a sense of place,' of using 'the archive of the feet.'"

In my own book, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (Twayne, forthcoming 1996) I incorporate "foot notes"--stories about pilgrimages to Walden Pond, Mt. Katahdin, the Sierra, the Mojave Desert, the sand counties of Wisconsin, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks--in analyzing important works of nature writing. Of the many benefits of ecocriticism based on fieldwork (intellectual, spiritual, physical) I will mention just one: the reminder we receive while out in the predominantly nonhuman world that what we call wilderness contains a civilization other than our own.

There you have it. This is one more story, a story about telling stories based on others' (fellow nature writers' and critics') stories. Whether we return from the woods or finish a book (another kind of journey), we want to tell stories. I have just told another.

Don Scheese, Gustavus Adolphus College