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Transcript of talk.docx · Web view“Ecocriticism,” Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, 1/29/10....
“Ecocriticism,” Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Institute, 1/29/10
It’s an honor to speak at this MEMSI lecture. MEMSI through
Prof. Cohen’s work has become a place of real national stature and
beyond. Like Groucho Marx I must question how I was admitted. But
for a long time there have not been many people working in
ecocriticism in medieval studies. Now that’s changing and I
unworthily need to work harder. So I’d like to start with a brief
introduction to ecocriticism or environmental literary studies,
followed by examples hopefully suggesting how it can be applied to
early English poetry, ending with thoughts about the value of a new
field in ecocriticism called ecosemiotics.
Lawrence Buell defines ecocriticism, which first emerged in the
1970s, as in effect foregrounding the background of textual narrative.
In other words, he said, if you take a simplified Artistotelian view of
literary study as examining plot, character, theme and setting,
ecocriticism focuses on setting, which often has been the most
neglected element in modern Western literary interpretation. Buell
defines a text that encourages an ecologically centered reading in four
ways: It is one that first features a “nonhuman environment” as a
presence that suggests “human history is implicated in natural
history,” and second does so in a setting in which “the human interest
is not understood to be the only legitimate interest,” while third
1
“human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical
orientation,” and fourth, does so with “some sense of the environment
as a process rather than as a constant.” I’m going to expand on Buell’s
definition today in relation to the new field of ecosemiotics, or the
study of the relation of culture and nature through signs. I’ll try to
suggest that even though Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may not seem
to us much like an environmental text today—not a Walden Pond or
Monkeywrench Gang or Avatar—it does offer entry into an important
culture of nature in the archipelago that we today tend to call the
British Isles, a culture of nature that I’ll call an environmental
semiosphere.
First, it’s easy to see how reading for setting can be extended to
context, in terms of cultural landscape. In fact, the text can be seen
itself as a type of landscape or map, when turned inside-out in
ecocritical reading. In such reading the premodern text as cultural
landscape can engage both social and physical environments more
easily. When Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their 2004
polemic The Death of Environmentalism concluded that
“environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-
making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy
proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to
be,” they could have been issuing a manifesto for medieval
ecocriticism. Much of my work has involved texts associated with the
2
environment of the early Irish Sea, and a different way of seeing the
British Isles and its early literatures together environmentally as an
archipelago with a dynamic interplay of water, land and atmosphere
at its center, rather than with just London as its social focus or the
Continent off-stage as its foundation. For this I’m in debt to Prof.
Cohen’s work in developing archipelagic studies.
Let’s take up a familiar example from The Canterbury Tales,
namely its opening:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures sooteThe droghte of March hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veine in swich licourOf which vertu engendred is the flour,Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breethInspired hath in every holt and heethThe tender croppes, and the yonge sonneHath in the Ram his halve course yronne,And smale foweles maken melodye,That slepen al the night with open eye,So priketh hem nature in hir corages,Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,To ferne halwes, kouthe in sundry londes;And specially from every shires endeOf Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,The holy blissful martyr for to sekeThat hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Now, here we have nature in motion and a text that is a map of
a journey. Yet it is very different from the motion and journey of that
other great medieval pilgrimage poem, Dante’s Commedia, written a
few generations earlier in Italy. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the
landscape is less allegorical and less virtual, and also, taking the work
as a whole, seemingly incomplete, ever in process. It is nonetheless an
3
overlay landscape draped across the physical geography of
countryside from commercial London to a supposedly spiritual
Canterbury that however is never reached, the journey ending,
apparently, in the Parson’s Tale and perhaps Chaucer’s retraction. We
can trace the route of the pilgrims along an old Roman road that goes
from the center of English metropolitan commerce in the waning days
of the Anglo-Norman feudal regime, into a province and provincial
seat whose names derive from an old Celtic British people, the Cantii
who left their name to Kent and Canterbury, to which the papal
mission from St. Gregory the Dialogist came in the days before the
Norman Conquest and found remnants of earlier British Christianity.
There is already an anti-colonial movement celebratory of natural
landscape and language implicit in the map of the story, added to its
invocation of Thomas Beckett as an icon of the claims of the spiritual
against the state. And the landscape, unlike that of Dante’s great
work, is not all about Chaucer. Rather it is about a rollicking muti-
logue of many voices, including the non-human, in which Chaucer’s
persona is one among many to be parodied for the foolishness of
subjectivity.
So the psychology of the poem also arguably projects an
environmental experience, out-of-text and into multiple contexts. A.
Kent Hieatt some time ago wrote of what he called Chaucer’s
mythopoesis, of the poet’s use of fable to experientially engage or
4
entrap the reader in a kind of empathy aimed against objectification of
others or of one’s self. We see this in the following rogue’s gallery of
figures in the General Prologue and their tales. But I would argue that
The Canterbury Tales as experiential landscape can also be read as
ecopoesis, as a shaping of environment that enables a transpersonal
engagement of the human with the physical environment, an empathy
in line with current work in mind science on the way human beings
develop more ecologically than in a unitary discreet individual way.
Let us consider the world as described in these opening lines.
We have the cycle of seasons and stars, the time of nature. We have
the social time and cycles of mortality and festival of human beings.
We have the created eternity of the saints. And we have in the
pricking of corages by Nature an intimation poetically of the
movement of theophanies and divine energies or manifestations in the
physical world that are everlasting and beyond even eternity, as in a
familiar example to medievals of how the hearts of Jesus’ students
burned within them when taught by His unknown resurrected person
on the road to Emmaus. For Chaucer, as mentioned in the Parlement
of Fowles, Nature is the vicar of the Almightie Lord, a figure whom
Spenser developed in emulation of Chaucer in The Faerie Queene as
shining forth divine energies, perhaps also influenced as Harold
Weatherby suggests by Spenser’s patristic studies at Cambridge. One
modern translation in fact renders “so priketh hem nature in hir
5
corages,” as “thus nature sparkles in them so,” reminiscent of the
Romanian scholar Dimitru Staniloaeu’s description of the divine
energies in nature in non-Augustinian Christian theology as the
sparkle of creation. It is notable that modern editors have so
misunderstood the cosmology behind this line that, as Sarah Stanbury
has noted, until recently that particular phrase in the prologue tended
to be placed in parentheses in many editions and translations,
because modern scholars assumed and wanted to apply it more to the
birds in particular than to the overall moving landscape of beings in
the Prologue as a whole.
Here poetically we have the four modes of time and non-time of
patristic asceticism, embodied in early literary monasticism around
the Irish Sea, in league with indigenous non-Christian traditions,
rather than the eternal present of Augustinian-derived Scholasticism
seen in Dante’s work. All of these modes are entwined in the
landscape of the text on the road to Canterbury, in a cloud of
overlapping stories and voices ending in ascetic repentance with The
Parson’s Tale, not a singular and triumphal completed passage from
hell to heaven.
In this the pilgrimage to Canterbury, a journey that never
reaches the interior of a cathedral nor the cosmic interiorized
consummation of Dante’s flight, in the energy of its very overlay of
imaginative Otherworld and familiar deeply layered physical
6
geography, rejects the strongly hierarchical and abstracted sense of
environment of the Scholasticism of the high Middle Ages and the
feudalism that attended it. And it does so interestingly by reaching
back to adapt traditions deeply entwined with an archipelagic
perspective of life, traditions familiar from the early Irish Sea zone,
rejecting ultimately the monumentality of the metropolitan center,
whether of London, mainland Europe or the high-medieval church.
Chaucer’s reference to Nature in the opening lines here again
evokes the figure of Nature in his Parlement of Fowles, negotiating
the comic cacophanies of Valentine lover birds in a spring beyond
hierarchies, echoed back by Chaucer’s greatest fan Spenser in the
latter’s figure of Nature shining in sparkling energies in the
Mutabilitie Cantos that climax the overlay landscape of his likewise
dynamically incomplete Faerie Queene, in what by then had become a
tradition of green-world literature in English. The landscape tradition
that Chaucer’s work navigates itself became known as fairyland, even
as it draws on what scholars much later would call the earlier Celtic
Otherworld, to which Chaucer makes specific reference in The
Canterbury Tales and draws on through its very structure, to form a
literary landscape or world entwined with geography and the life of
the earth. We also see those earlier traditions re-emerge in early
English in a famous contemporary poem to The Canterbury Tales, the
anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in a different type of
7
story to some extent but arguably with a similar sense of overlay
landscape. In that poem, Sir Gawain’s travels are across a mapped
geography of Britain, into Wales and ultimately to a Green Chapel that
scholars link to folklore about locations near the poet’s probable
location in the Chester area, and so we also have this overlay of
imaginative fantasy with actual terrain and an accompanying
subversion of idealized individuality, in the case of the Gawain poet in
terms of the deconstruction of Gawain’s knightly character in dialogue
with the Otherworld.
While the convention of the changing seasons seen in Chaucer’s
opening is a commonplace, he as usual reworks sources, including
probably an Italian text on the Destruction of Troy, and, in structure,
Boccacio’s Decameron. But the geographic mix stands distinctively
within a storytelling mode of archipelago. He is operating within a
tradition native to his environment, so to speak, and one that in turn
helps shape that environment through story, with a kind of flat
hierarchy of energized landscape rather than Scholastic analogy.
Unlike the likely source about Troy, spring ends in Chaucer not in war
but in redemption in an actual countryside of which the audience
forms a physical part. Thus so too at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde, we move into larger contexts that triangulate between the
spiritual and physical geography of earth and the perspective of
Chaucer’s time, as Troilus as a deconstructed medieval knight looks
8
down on the plains of war and laughs, putting all in a dynamic
perspective akin to the combined punning of the dynamic Sabbaoth
Lord of hosts and Sabbath rest at the end of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
That Chaucer operates in a tradition of landscape narration
shaped by the environment of his archipelago is suggested also by his
use of a central motif of early Irish Otherworld stories, namely the
Sovereignty goddess or fairy queen of the land’s green world, in The
Wife of Bath’s Tale, which occupies a key place in the Ellesmere
manuscript as a kind of linchpin to the response of the so-called
marriage tales to both the satirized chivalry of The Knight’s Tale and
the excesses of the so-called bawdy tales. It follows The Man of Law’s
Tale in this, which itself highlights an early pre-Norman Christianity
associated with a legendary holiness of the age of saints and scholars
in islands then heavily influenced by Irish culture. The motif of a fairy
queen presiding over an overlay green world landscape emerges in
the self-satirizing Tale of Sir Thopas, and early Irish Sea traditions of
magical overlay landscape appear also in The Franklin’s Tale with its
associations with archipelago-related traditions of Brittany. Rory
McTurk in a recent study of analogues to Chaucer’s work in Celtic and
Norse language literatures, suggests that the Irish Acallach na
Senorach, with its itinerary of St. Patrick’s interactions with Fenian
heroes in the Irish landscape, derivative of earlier Otherworld
narrative structure, plausibly could have been a primary influence in
9
the framing of The Canterbury Tales, given Chaucer’s likely time in
Ulster during his years of unknown provenance as a young man in the
service of the Earl of Ulster. And of course an important anonymous
poem roughly contemporary to The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight, affords a version of this overlay landscape too,
suggesting the motif’s appeal in formative English poetry after the
Black Death and crumbling of Anglo-Norman feudalism, as an
alternative model for reimagining the nature of things in poesis
figuring itself as native.
But to get back to the General Prologue, the mention of the
zodiac in particular, the Ram in his half course, together with the
juices of spring that seem to be flowing through all, both highlight
Prof. Cohen’s comparison of medieval notions of astrology and the
bodily humors as premodern examples of “bodies without organs.”
That term, meaning non-organismic bodies, comes from the writings
of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and involves virtual realities that
embody a kind of ecological connectivity spanning physical
immanence and cultural effects, in ecocritical terms potentially a kind
of ecosystem or culture of nature. The archipelago itself could be
considered a kind of “body without organs.” In his essay “Desert
Islands,” Deleuze discusses how the geological “double movement” of
islands, both pulling away and recreating themselves, parallels human
involvement with them imaginatively. A collective cultural imagination
10
in Deleuze’s view, through rites and mythology, could produce
imaginary identity with islands in a way that “geography and the
imagination would be one.” Later he and Guattari discussed how
Europe’s Atlantic archipelago in particular involved “a plane of
immanence as a movable and moving ground… an archipelagian
world where [inhabitants] are happy to pitch their tents from island to
island and over the sea… nomadizing the old Greek earth, broken up,
fractalized, and extended to the entire universe.” In such a geo-
cultural archipelago, they said, the landscape sees, much as early
iconography reflected in the art and culture of the early Irish Sea zone
looks out on us rather than allowing us to internalize and objectify
them.
Such a body without organs can involve in Deleuzean terms a
rhizomic or entwined grass-root sense of symbiotic eco-region and
culture-region or atmosphere, such as the archipelago itself. Indeed,
the contemporary philosopher Peter Hallward sees a theophany or
emanation of the divine in nature in Deleuze-Guattarian
geophilosophy, which he claims to be akin to the early medieval Irish
writer John Scottus Eriugena’s early Irish Sea philosophy, in which
divine energies manifest as fantasy clouds of theophany in which the
human entwines with the cosmic. In Otherworld narratives of the
early archipelago, the environmental theophany in which humans
participate looks out as a “seeing landscape,” a melding of sea, sky,
11
earth and spiritual realms, as if some elemental rewriting of Martin
Heidegger’s mystical fourfold. This landscape emerged in narratives
of desert asceticism that came to the islands in search of a desert that
was spiritual sea, an archipelago that in the post-Roman period was
constituted culturally as both deserted by Rome and a monastic
desert, and thus oddly paralleled Deleuze’s sense of desert islands as
well. Adomnán’s late-eighth-century Hiberno-Latin Vita S. Columbae,
for example, refers to a spiritual pilgrim wishing to find a desertum in
the ocean off Scotland.” Examples of such earlier melding of
geography and imagination include the Otherworld voyage story of
Immram Brain, the early Irish tropes of the colors of the winds and
colors of martyrdom, Eriugena’s image of the sea as theophanic, and
early Ireland’s de-centered social and ecclesiastical networks.
For Eriugena, Nature consisted of both being and non-being, the
hidden and the appearing. Later in Scholasticism, developing from
tendencies in Augustine and the Latin language, non-being came to be
identified with evil. As Robert Bartlett outlines, evil in Scholasticism
came to be labeled as natural but then necessarily an illusory parallel
to essential nature. So any sense of overlay landscape become
demonized, and narrative storytelling was not able to accommodate
dynamic notions of nature. The supernatural good became more and
more a separate if constrained category of reality apart from the
natural. Miracles came to be considered, in the view of Aquinas and
12
others, not results from rational occurrences, but from supernatural
archetypes in God’s essence, removed from creation. It was the
beginning of what Max Weber later called the disenchantment of
nature.
European tradition involves two prominent archipelagic
complexes of cultures. Both Greek and Atlantic islands expressed in
formative post-Roman periods an ascetic cosmology formed in the
fluid nature-cultures of the deserts of Egypt, Sinai and Palestine as
well as the rugged remote terrain of Cappadocia. In such places,
nomadic routes were like tracks in a sea in which ascetics immersed
themselves while moving through various stages of exile from the
world of empire or everyday human society. This is the type of
medieval cultural map of itineraries that David Wallace focuses on in
his project mapping connections such as the route between Mount
Athos and Muscovy. In such mapping of pilgrimages like Chaucer’s
writ large, all Europe becomes, as it actually is, an archipelago, and
indeed the whole world really is an archipelago, as highlighted by the
iconic moon photos of the late 1960s that helped stimulate late-
twentieth-century environmentalism. The itinerary or line of flight of
cosmological narrative we’re following here, linking the eastern
deserts and Europe’s biggest Atlantic island chain, influenced and was
adapted by early Irish biblical exegetes culminating in Eriugena, as
well as monastic mapping of foundational native landscapes through
13
written stories, just as Greek icons are spoken of as being written. In
physical environment this cultural overlay landscape formed what I
call an environmental semiosphere, an environmental narrative
atmosphere, which became an enduring influence and partially
appropriated element of Middle English and Elizabethan writing.
What I mean by environmental semiosphere is similar to the use
of the term culture of nature by Stanford University’s new
Environmental Humanities Project, namely a kind of environmental
atmosphere of human adaptation in symbiotic entwinement with a
physical ecosystem. This is akin to the already mentioned Deleuzean
body without organs, only complexly writ large as a regional
environmental cultural narrative tradition. The term semiosphere also
takes us into the currently evolving new fields of biosemiotics and
ecosemiotics, most actively identified with Tartu University in Estonia
and its fabled semiotics program, which is now headed by the
biologist Kalevi Kull. It was at Tartu that the semiotician Juri Lotman
coined the term semiosphere to describe a composite envelope of
individual organisms’ subjective environments that shape a
meaningful environment of life. Lotman in this was following the work
of the early 20th century Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll,
who coined the term Umwelt to describe an organism’s species-
centered atmosphere of meaning. Biosemiotics, based on such
concepts, embraces a kind of biological version of the old medieval
14
pansemiotic view of nature as a world of symbols. Biosemiotics argues
that semiosis, or the making of meaning from various kinds of signs,
defines life itself, and that human linguistics plays only a small role in
the totality of semiotics, such as flowers emitting a certain kind of
smell or color to which bees or birds respond symbiotically. Following
biosemiotics, Ecosemiotics today develops study of the semiotic
relationship of nature and culture, arguing against binarizing the two.
So how could we define in environmental literary studies the
Insular tradition of a narrative overlay landscape, exemplified in The
Canterbury Tales, as an environmental cultural atmosphere, as an
environmental semiosphere? How can we connect this twenty-first-
century approach meaningfully back to early English poetry as it
developed in the waning days of the Anglo-Norman regime, between
the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses? Let me sketch four
parameters for tracing an environmental semiosphere in early texts
such as Chaucer’s poetry, expanding on Buell’s earlier mentioned four
aspects of an ecocentric text. This process of definition is a process of
our reading today, but cued strongly by certain types of premodern
narrative traditions and their relations to the physical world.
First of the four elements is a sense of how an environmental
semiosphere like that exemplified in The Canterbury Tales articulates
a triadic or three-way structure of semiotics, or the making of
meaning through signs. The nineteenth-century semiotician Charles S.
15
Peirce articulated a relavant three-way pattern of signs, which differs
from the conventional modern Western dyadic or two-part structure
described by his more famous contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure.
Peirce’s parallel triad of sign, object, and interpretant form the basis
for the current study of biosemiotics. Following his triadic analysis,
we have text, physical geography, and imaginary overlay experience.
In effect this introduces a potential environmental component into the
unpacking of signs. By contrast Saussure, following in many ways
Augustine’s lead in emphasizing the arbitariness of signs, stressed the
internal human-centered relation of signified and signifier. The Irish
Sea Otherworld illustrates Peirce’s triad as a structure of meaning,
with a culturally imagined overlay landscape highlighting its relation
to both text and geography. In our ecocritical reading, the sign would
be The Canterbury Tales, the object the countryside of the passage to
Canterbury, and the interpretant the many-voiced atmosphere of the
imaginary cloud of stories engaging reader, characters, poet, society,
geography, and intergenerational audiences in landscape tradition.
Again this triadic style of landscape on the islands again
stretches not only back into the Otherworld of Irish Sea cultures, but
forward into the later derivative “green world” of late medieval and
Elizabethan English literature defined by Northrop Frye as putting
together two worlds (in effect the human and a naturally supernatural
earth) and making each seem real in light of the other. Frye’s
16
examples included Le Morte D’Arthur, The Faerie Queene, and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, the latter transposing Greek figures into
English countryside folklore with native roots. Frye said the Englsh
“green world” in literature exemplified a distinctive fourth type of
Western comedy, beyond Greek Old and New Comedy and the kind of
high medieval Christian comedy exemplified by Dante’s Commedia.
Going beyond Frye, we’ve seen that this was not just a discrete
English development but related to geography of the archipelago and
to early Insular tradition that itself was connected to the Eastern
Mediterranean. And in the roots of that tradition something more than
what Frye outlined is going on: the rhythmic back-and- forth
movement between worlds can make each world actually seem real by
light of the other, in the sense of realizing the place-between them in
story as a kind of ecological reality, and thus preventing
objectification of either world while encouraging an imaginative
environmental empathy.
Now the difference between this kind of triadic emphasis in
narrative landscape and
Dante’s more dyadic allegorical emphasis, which does not emphasize
a mapping relation of fantasy and physical geography, not surprisingly
reflects different medieval theological patterns of landscape and
human personhood. In the early medieval heyday of Irish Sea literary
culture articulation of the Trinity tended toward a triadic rather than
17
a dyadic structure. The Son was begotten of the Father and the Holy
Spirit proceeded from the Father. Such triadic theological emphasis
can be found in the non-Augustinian Trinity of Eriugena, the early
Irish Stowe Missal’s original text, and in ascetic practice and
cosmology of the desert fathers and the Byzantines. It integrally
relates to doctrines of the divine energies flowing through nature,
expressed in Eriugena’s cosmology and Spenser’s Nature.
The psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva described this triadic
Christian theology evident in the early Irish Sea pattern as a cosmic
semiosis or making of meaning involving what she called “the openly
sexual fusion with the Thing at the limits of the nameable.” In
Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach to semiotics, the realms of the
Real, Imaginary and the Symbolic themselves mirror in secular
contexts the symbolic triadic flow of the early Trinity. Thus the Real
can be associated with the Father, the Imaginary with the Son, and
the Symbolic with the Holy Spirit. Kristeva argued that in early
Trinitarian cosmic semiosis, the Symbolic “merges with the two other
centers and, by the same token, endows them, beyond their value as
distinct identities or authorities, with an abyssal, breathtaking, and
certainly also sexual depth, where the psychological experience of
loss and ecstasy finds its place.” Following her model, in Chaucer’s
text the Real could be thought of as the countryside on the route to
Canterbury, the Imaginary as the textual image, and the symbolic
18
interpretant or overlay cloud of entwined voices and stories and
landscape. Kristeva argues that poetic energies emerge from such
triadic semiosis, but we can also see its environmental aspects in
textual overlay landscape. In such a process the Real (or looming
larger contexts), the Imaginary (or sign), and the Symbolic (or
biosemiotic life) for Kristeva encompass and entwine what she calls
the phenotext (a work’s textual surface and geography) with genotext
(a deep structure of text constituting its overlay landscape). Triadic
“environmental semiosis” can be defined (in terms of biosemiotics at
Tartu) as involving an Umwelt or subjective environment that
functions as sign of the organism, while the organism reciprocally
functions as the sign of the Umwelt, the two being related by a third
element, a larger code or ecology preceding the organism’s existence,
also called a meaning-plan. In this scheme, the cultural experience of
the Irish Otherworld as overlay landscape can be a “meaning-plan” or
interpretation that involves a larger ecology of life incorporating a
cosmic spiritual realm. But the Otherworld involves also a sign or
symbolism of natural landscape, and, in overlay geography,
metonymically becomes identified with actual landscape as object or
environment. If the organism in this case is the ecosystem of the
countryside, it becomes a sign of the subjective environment or
Umwelt of the human audience, which in the text is the green or
Otherworld, while that Umwelt also becomes a sign of the
19
countryside.
But different cultures can shape different emphases for this
interaction. What became the dominant Trinitarian mode in the Latin
West by the time of the High Middle Ages was paradoxically a dyadic
Triity. It emerged from development of Augustine’s semiotic theology,
by which ideas in the divine Mind became juxtaposed dyadically with
arbitrary created signs or theophanies, as later reflected in Dante’s
allegorical approach. This limited any relation to the physical
environment. It also involved a sense of the Holy Spirit proceeding
from the Father and the Son together, by what was called the filioque
doctrine. The Father and Son were in effect fused, while the Holy
Spirit, prime manifester of divine symbolism in the world, became
their instrumental object. This Scholastic dyad of archetype and
analogy became the template for subject-object and mind-body
binaries of a continental-based Western European culture as it
emerged first among the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish realms and then
later in cultural terms swallowed the archipelago so to speak in the
era of the Norman Conquests, the Crusades, and the heyday of the
papacy. Chaucer and the Gawain poet at least in the wake of the Black
Death and the crumbling of the old order found it poetically beneficial
to adapt an older structure of archipelagic literatures into a new
English literary trope with its own after-life as England began to
reorient itself as an Atlantic rather than a continental empire.
20
I’ll try to be merciful here and pass more briefly over my
suggested three other parameters for reading an environmental
semiosphere. The second aspect of an environmental semiosphere
could be called, in tribute to the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, a
dialogical materialism. This involves a sense of personal dialogue with
nature inherent in a culture, in which the emphasis is placed more on
external interactions, rather than individual human interiority familiar
to us from Augustinian and Lockean models. In ecosemiotic terms,
this involves an Umwelt or subjective human reality that comes to
encompass an overlap between what Kalevi Kull calls Zero Nature or
raw physicality, and the Innenwelt or inner world of the individual.
That overlap could be called a Lebenswelt or living world, with which
what Kull calls Third Nature or virtual cultural reality becomes
identified. By contrast in other cultural systems such as that of the
mainstream modern West, Innenwelt and Umwelt in effect became
identified with one another, and Third Nature forms in opposition with
its constructed Other of the physical world.
The third element in reading an environmental semiosphere
involves tracing its metonymic structure. Following Kull’s work,
environmental Object acts upon Subject in Merkwelt or First Nature,
such as the way in which seasons affect human agricultural life, and
Subject upon the Object in Wirkwelt or Second Nature, as in the way
human engineering affects rivers, for example. A close reciprocal
21
relation between those processes suggests a metonymic symbolism.
Thus, for example, the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath,” “wind” or
“spirit,” takes on both a bodily and a transpersonal dimension at once,
or likewise early Irish uses of terms for desert mean both monastic
life and island or wilderness environments, or in early Christianity the
term logos at once means word, harmony and incarnational image of
God that is God. These kinds of metonyms involve physically intense
metaphors that suggest in rhetorical and lingustic terms the type of
structure of landscape narrative with which we’re dealing. Owen
Barfield, paralleling Ernst Cassirer, called this process a “holophrase”
of concrete meaning, encompassing a meaning beyond the sum of the
components of the metonym, rather than a dyadic analogue of
archetype and object. And of course one aspect of the metonymic is a
personalizing process of naming or in this case putting a face on the
nonhuman. Enviromental metonym suggests a dynamic life to the
physical world by its intensified contrast of matter and language. It
thus functions differently from conventional Western psychoanalytic
definitions of metonym as lack. It relates to notions of desire that in
deep ecological terms and in Deleuze-Guattarian “ecosophy” shape
semiotic structures rather than psychological universals. Thus, for
example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argued that while Western
culture has come to define desire as based on linguistic lack
(following Augustinian and Scholastic views and derivative
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psychoanalytic theory), other cultural structures such as Taoism in
particular shape desire as an energized relation creative of the real.
And behind the environmental semiosphere that we’re discussing here
in the Irish Sea lies a similar shaping of desire and metonym, I would
argue, to that which Deleuze and Guattari articulate in Taoism, but in
a Western literary context.
Finally, the fourth paramater of an eco-semiosphere is
Iconographic time. This has already been discussed in relation to the
four modes of temporality and non-temporality in patristic and early
insular traditions, reflected in the opening of the General Prologue.
Experience of multiple modes of existence at once encourages
experience of non-human perspectives and development of
environmental empathy, and involves a kind of self-emptying or
kenosis in which setting becomes relational, looking out at popping
out at us like traditional Byzantine iconography or images from the
Book of Kells.
Now to return this discussion of the parameters of
environmental semiospheres to the text at hand, I would argue that
literary insular green worlds such as The Canterbury Tales are a kind
of locally adapted equivalent to the philosophy of the ancient Greek
archipelago and to the emergence and sustenance there in medieval
times of hesychasm. Literature as eco-semiosphere has a therapeutic
function for human beings particularly in the Western world. Getting
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the mind into the heart, becoming a luminous eye as it were, the
transpersonality of deep ecology, these all can be cued by a literary
green world. In such narratives we can reach the environmental
empathy of the ecopoetic mind science described by Evan Thompson,
who argues that the human mind develops in environment and not
inside the brain, in environmental empathy. Thus Chaucer’s comedic
Tale of Sir Thopas with its fluffed-up chivalric fairy queen melds into
the redemptive forgiveness of his persona’s The Tale of Melibee. C.S.
Lewis claimed that within the greenworld effect in Spenser’s Faerie
Queene evokes “our bodily, no less than our mental, health is
refreshed by reading him.” Its therapy is related to archipelagic
landscape: “There is a real affinity between [Spenser’s] Faerie
Queene,” Lewis wrote, “a poem of quests and wanderings and
inextinguishable desires, and Ireland itself—the soft, wet air, the
loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills, the heart-rending sunsets.”
Even the Spenserian stanza for Lewis reflects a sense of the triadic
flow of experiencing overlay landscape, “labyrinthine and meditative,
turning back upon itself in the centre when the two rhymes meet, and
then pausing again, either for recapitulation, or thundering defiance,
or for a dying fall in the final alexandrine…the effect of a wave falling
on a beach.” Lewis argued that this green world resisted a growing
dualism in European culture, in which, “The world was emptied, first
of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and
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antipathies finally of her colours, smells, and tastes…..The mind, on
whose ideal constructions the whole method depended, stood over
against its object in ever sharper dissimilarity.” We see this process
described already in the longest and first of Chaucer’s stories, The
Knight’s Tale, in its account of the destruction of the grove and the
building of the amphitheatre, which relates the follies of ideal
knighthood to environmental hubris, in which a holocaust of the green
world relates to needless human death and suffering. In this, the
scene-setting story for the Tales shows affinities to Sir Gawain’s
humbling in the green world by its sovereignty goddess or figure of
Nature Morgan Le Fay, shadowing the incarnational Mother of God
associated with the earth in early Insular performance of landscape.
Why did Chaucer’s poetry in particular engage in insular
traditions of overlay landscape, and how did those traditions get
transmitted to English literature from early Irish literature, if that was
the path? To take the latter question first, John Carey’s work on the
spread of early Irish motifs to Wales and Brittany, including important
core elements of the Welsh Taliesin poems, the Mabinogi, and the
grail stories, all associated with this complex of Otherworld narratives
that morphed into the English green world, illustrate how this web of
transmission between islands and mainland worked earlier. And the
14th century marked a heyday of Welsh poetry influenced by those
earlier transmissions and embodied in the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym,
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a contemporary of Chaucer. Apparently both the Gawain poet and
Chaucer, as noted before, had some exposure to story themes
originating from the Irish Sea.
In terms of the particularities of Chaucer, his biography
suggests how he was formed in the wake of the Black Death in a
society that was undergoing great change, in which he often found
himself negotiating a middle point as a poet. Chaucer’s dominant
iambic pentameter verse in his cycle itself carries the ghost of the two
beats of older Anglo-Saxon poetry evident also in the archaic
alliterative verse of the Gawain poet, just as some linguists recently
have posited that the ghost of earlier native British Celtic language
structures reemerged literarily in Middle English. Chaucer’s own
social contexts and his adoption of a native-language poetics made the
Otherworld tradition a natural path of poetic subversion of old
hierarchies and social identities, feudal forms nonetheless linked to an
emerging commercial modernity. Such poetic response involved a
rebellion against a culture that had equated non-being with evil in
effect, and thus had constrained the meaning of both nature and being
in ways that were no longer sustainable in the wake of the Black
Death, itself a cultural-environmental catastrophe, and other social
upheavals of the late fourteenth century.
In such contexts, ecological writing in The Canterbury Tales and
many other texts can be viewed in light as a re-translation of our
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neologism ecology itself. Eco, a root from a Greek term for household,
and ology from the Greek root logos, one meaning of which can be
story. If we consider ecology as the story of home, we then perhaps
can see more clearly the operation of environmental semiospheres in
literary traditions, and how Chaucer’s cycle itself was an effort in his
time (parallel to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) to craft a new
story of home, an English-language ecopoesis if you will, from
materials at hand. In our current post-financial crash era, in which
many assumptions of capitalist globalization are in question, such a
reading of ecology itself becomes even more important. Against an
emphasis on corporate personhood evident in recent news, this sense
of ecology stands for the importance of personal human storytelling
within networks of traditions and families and specific ecosystems. It
also suggests the importance of premodern cultural studies in
recovering such a sense of ecology in our culture today. The most
successful movie of all time, Avatar, currently features what its
creator calls an environmental parable. However, it does so on
another planet and in a virtual reality of both the cinema and within
the plot, reminiscent of our contemporary scientific myths of space
colonization as the answer to environmental destruction of earth—a
reworking of old imperialistic narratives inherently associated with
environmental destruction. The ecocritic Ursula Heise makes a good
case for the importance of an ethos of cocosmopolitanism to overcome
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potential fascist tendencies in bioregionalism. But approaches such as
the environmental semiosphere also offer ecocriticism a way to
recognize both ecological particularity and the boundless
environmental dynamic of Deleuzean bodies without organs, without
perpetuating myths of global capitalism. Modern examples of such
fantasy ecology if you will, such as the landscapes of Tolkien, Lewis,
and earlier in America James Fenimore Cooper, draw on green-world
traditions and had an effect on popular imagination about the
environment.
If there’s one thing I hope to convey today, it’s that ecology is
much more than recycling or the biology of things out there. Even
more, it’s how we tell and perform stories that shape our world and
ourselves, and how those stories shape us and our relationships with
each other. The archipelagic environmental narrative tradition that I
have tried to outline is in one sense crucially relevant to our current
global environmental predicaments. It is so in terms of ultimately
helping us imaginatively and empathetically appreciate the earth as
archipelago itself, in which neither eastern Atlantic nor Greek islands,
nor any other region or particular earthly outlook, can or should be
privileged. In our global ecology air and atmosphere and signs of all
kinds in addition to water and land shape the multi-elemental
archipelago in which we are immersed. Reading this particular
narrative tradition environmentally provides us with ways to
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understand global cultural phenomena such as environmental
semiospheres, and realize how medieval Europe itself can be mapped
as a fractal archipelago comprising fluid lines of flight of
environmental imagination, such as that from deserts of the Near East
and rocky caves of Athos and Cappadocia, to great and small islands
and coasts of the east Atlantic, all entwined again with the larger
archipelagic earth.
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