Landscape Metaphysics: Narrative Architecture and the Focalisation of the Environment

ABSTRACT

In this article I situate the concept of “landscape” at the crossroads of narrative theory and ecocriticism. In particular, I argue that landscape description has an ekphrastic status in narrative that goes beyond simply “setting the scene” within which a story plays out. Instead, I suggest that landscape denotes the peculiar way in which narrative description focalises the mere fact of setting into a total context of meaning—a virtual world organised around a particular subject. I thus argue that landscape description may play a more complex role in a narrative than narrative scholars and ecocritics currently recognise, as the former tend to subordinate spatial concerns to temporal ones, whereas the latter tend to extol the virtues of place-based description rather than belabour the limits of representation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Bachelard, xxxvi.

2 In “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization” Monika Fludernik insists that “problems proliferate” every time narratologists seek finer distinctions, and she warns narratologists against the “danger of drowning in the theoretical waves that they have provoked” (130).

3 Bortolussi and Dixon, 186.

4 Herman et al., 102.

5 For a discussion of standpoint epistemology and focalisation, see Herman et al., 97.

6 Bortolussi and Dixon, 186.

7 The “who sees”/”who speaks” distinction is Genette’s.

8 This is obviously different in, say, novels where a character within the storyworld speaks directly, or in epistolary and diaristic novels. However, such novels—Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes provides but one example—generate their own gaps and inconsistencies of focalisation that present the narratologist with additional complications I cannot address here.

9 Bortolussi and Dixon, 174.

10 Yacobi, 335, my emphasis.

11 Ibid (original emphasis).

12 Stilgoe, x.

13 Cather, Willa Cather on Writing, 31.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 31–2.

16 Cather, The Professor’s House, 3. I give further references to this work parenthetically in the main text.

17 Fryer, 190–1.

18 Eliade, 32.

19 Veracini, 81.

20 Ibid., 93.

21 In particular, see works by Ammons; Fischer; and Westling.

22 Steinhagen, 64.

23 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 143.

24 Steinhagen, 79.

25 Ibid., 65.

26 As my argument above should suggest, St Peter in fact becomes more firmly entrenched in landscape.

27 Steinhagen, 65.

28 This image has been variously contested. See, for example, Krech.

29 Steinhagen, 77.

30 Ibid., 78.

31 So-called “second-wave ecocriticism” has issued such cautions more persistently. See, for example, Dana Phillips’s critique of Buell in The Truth of Ecology and Timothy Morton’s critique of nature writing in Ecology without Nature.

32 Glotfelty, “A Guided Tour,” 30.

33 Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xviii.