Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Frank Stewart, "Narrative Scholarship"

The model for the kind of writing I'm interested in, as for many nature writers, is drawn from Henry David Thoreau. His genius, as you know, was a literary way of seeing and talking about the world that synthesized phenomena and feeling, fact and imagination, matter and transcendence--and, we must remember, the rhetorical conventions of fiction, poetry, autobiography, science, and so forth. But at the same time his literary project was an experiment. He felt deeply that his experiment might founder, and this awareness of its provisional successes colored his work; Walden's complex tone combines and synthesizes optimis, with despair, new dawnings with old darknesses. And Thoreau never failed to covet his experimental narrative strategies as much as he coveted his amateur status as a naturalist.

Many of us working within the lines drawn by Thoreau, or writing critical commentaries about others involved in this line of business, hope to retain the freedom bestowed by Thoreau's experimentation (some of us even want to retain an amateur status). And indeed it was important for me, in my discussion of Thoreau in A Natural History of Nature Writing (along with my discussions of others who worked in the same experimental ways), not to betray the spirit in which Thoreau wrote. We can hardly profess to admire Thoreau (or to understand him) and then commit the kinds of literary and perceptual sins that appalled him. Or, to put it positively, it is difficult to demonstrate an understanding of his spirit without attempting to incorporate the elements that he transformed into literary art--such as the presence of a first-hand narrator with first-hand experience of nature and the out-of-doors. And most importantly it is helpful, as he showed, to understand and make use of parable. I hope a discussion will follow in the conference about the nature of parable, but most importantly about the ways in which parabolic stories can free us from worn-out and reductive modes of criticism, and move us closer to the direct forms of knowledge that Thoreau pursued.

Frank Stewart, University of Hawai'i