Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Scott Slovic, "Ecocriticism with or without Narrative: The Language of Conscious Experience versus the Language of Freefall"

Seldom does the fallen climber tell his or her own tale. Overburdened by a backpack full of books and distracted by my role as literary critic, I recently forgot my place in the physical world, stepped off a mountain wall, and nearly lost everything. Ecocritics who ignore the worldly context of their reading, of their thinking, do so also at the peril of their lives and language. Language without context, without grounding in experience, means next to nothing. A life without context is impossible.

At the end of July, I traveled with the nature writer Rick Bass to the Shirakami Mountains in northwestern Honshu, a United Nations World Heritage Site, to do a story on wilderness protection in Japan for Audubon magazine. There were eight people in our party--all writers, editors, journalists. Our guides were the author and environmental activist Makoto Nebuka and a mountain man known as "Narita-san." For three days in the virgin beech forests of Shirakami, we sloshed through rivers in special hiking shoes called "chica tabi" with spongy rubber soles and metal spikes, ascended cascading streams, and crawled up mountainsides using scraggly trees and bamboo-like sasa, interwoven with poison ivy, as handholds. The forests were trailless, except for thicketed deer paths. I found myself preoccupied with the other writers' perceptions and with the efforts of Mike Yamashita, the Audubon photographer, to document the place and people with his cameras despite Nebuka-san's steady pace. Our expedition was a hall of mirrors, everyone photographing, interviewing, keeping a notebook. I marveled at Rick's ability to take notes on a pocket-sized pad even while wobbling across rivers or pausing on a steep slope. Occasionally, he would say something aloud like, "So many images of light. Sunlight, bright-colored frogs, light on water, light through leaves" or "The strands of the story break apart and reweave themselves--first bears, then the place, and now Nebuka-san himself is emerging as the center." My notebook reflects my impressions of Rick's experience more than my own.

At the end of our second day in the mountains, after ten hours of walking, our guides became disoriented just as it began to get dark. We clambered downhill through a dense thicket of sasa grass, following an apparent animal trail, until we found ourselves looking over the dribbling lip of a narrow waterfall--two hundred feet down. We paused there for another half-hour--Rick took notes and I took notes about his notetaking--as our guides deliberated. The guides figured we could inch our way across the top of the waterfall and along the sheer slope to one side, then climb down to a possible camp site. Back and forth they crawled, scouting out the route. I watched Rick and ate candy. Then it was my turn to go. I was the second person to follow the guides, holding slender sasa stalks and using my spiked shoes to grip the grassy lip on the side of the waterfall. Mike was right behind me. Just as I stepped out from the ledge where we had been resting, Shigeyuki Okajima, the Everest climber and environmental journalist, shouted. "Watch out, Scott! It's slippy, very slippy." Smiling at his Japanese English, I stepped out, felt the earth give way beneath my feet, and realized I was clinging to a tiny, bending tree trunk, dangling over the edge. Without a pack, I might have been able to pull myself up to safety, but I had sixty pounds strapped to my back. My hands slid towards the end of the tree. I had no clear sense of how big the drop-off was. Shige, panicked, was now shouting. "No, no, no!" I glanced silently at him. Then suddenly I was skidding down the grassy upper portion of the cliff, arms outstretched and hands digging into the dirt, clutching for handholds. I slid faster and faster, not knowing when I would sail out from the wall for the final, fatal drop through empty space. Suddenly, the noise changed and I felt my boots and legs scraping rock, my shirt sleeves ripping--and then silence and dizziness. A moment later, Mike came tumbling sideways down the same, eighty-foot section of cliff, pulled down by his camera equipment, grunting and moaning as he splashed into two feet of water, just inches away from me. Soon the water turned red, absorbing the blood from a cut somewhere beneath my jeans. We had landed on a ten-foot ledge in the middle of the narrow waterfall, barely avoiding the jagged wall below.

For ten days after the accident, I watched Rick, Mike, and Nebuka-san photograph clearcuts and roadbuilding just outside the World Heritage Site. I listened to Rick interview a bear biologist at the Historical Museum of Hokkaido, and I accompanied him and a cluster of Japanese ecocritics to the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima and to the orange shrine in the inland sea at Miyajima. And I became demoralized about my role as "literary scholar tagging along with actual nature writer." The phrase that kept coming to mind was "third wheel." I was the third wheel during our travels, and perhaps ecocritics were the third wheels of the environmental writing community. Rick had the Audubon assignment, Bruce Allen played a crucial role as translator, and I stood back and watched Rick watch the world. Nobody seemed to mind my presence, but nobody quite understood it, either. I remembered a discussion I had a year ago with Terry Tempest Williams. "So what exactly do you do as an ecocritic?" she asked. "What do you do?" It doesn't seem quite right to tell nature writers, keen to communicate as they are, "Well, I help people understand your work." Writers like Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams can communicate quite well on their own, without the help of literary scholars. So what is our role, then? Again and again. I come back to the ideas of contextualization and synthesis. Ecocritics, to do something genuinely meaningful, something beyond propping up our own careers by producing unnecessary commentaries on lucid, eloquent literary texts, must offer readers a broader, deeper, and more explicit explanation of how and what environmental literature communicates than the writers themselves, immersed in their particularized narratives, can offer. Crucial to the ecocritical process of pulling things (ideas, texts. authors) together and putting them in perspective is our awareness of who and where we are. Our awareness, literally, of where we stand in the world and why we're writing. Storytelling, combined with clear exposition, produces the most engaging and trenchant scholarly discourse. Nature writers themseIves-- Lopez, Pyle, Zwinger, etc.--realize this. Ecocritics should take a hint.

Ecocriticism without narrative is like stepping off the face of a mountain--it's the disoriented silence of freefall, the numb, blind rasp of friction descent. To the extent that our scholarship begins with our experiences in and concern for the physical world of nature, we must seek an appropriately grounded, conscious language. The Ianguage of stories, charged with emotion and sensation, may be our best bet.

Scott Slovic, University of Nevada, Reno