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Notes
Kate Rigby
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
Monash University
PO Box 11A Monash, Vic 3800
Australia
E‐mail: [email protected]
The present essay is adapted from the second chapter of my forthcoming book Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P). Reprinted with permission of the University of Virginia Press.
Edward Casey, Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997) 285.
In Topographies of the Sacred, I argue that the “rediscovery of place” in Romantic literature and thought is premised upon a proto‐ecological reconceptualization of the more‐than‐human natural world, the contours of which are outlined in my first chapter, “The Rebirth of Nature.”
Jeffrey E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 1.
See, for example, E.C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); Yi‐Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1974); David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, Dwelling, Place and Environment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1985); David Seamon, Dwelling, Seeing, Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology (Albany: State U of New York P, 1993); Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place‐World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993); Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995); Bruce Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1995); Michael Vincent McGinnis (ed.), Bioregionalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
The concept of “ecstatic dwelling” that I elaborate towards the end of this chapter is taken from Michael Haar, Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being (1986), trans. R. Lilly, foreword J. Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) 139–40.
John Dyer, Poems 1761 (Menston: Scolar, 1971) 9–16.
Coleridge, in a letter to Southey of 10 Septem‐ber 1802, criticizes earlier landscape writers for their “perpetual trick of moralizing everything.” “Nature,” he continues, “has her own proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, & that we are all one Life.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71) vol. 2, 459.
See Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2004).
Clare, Early Poems 1804–1822, eds. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) vol. 1, 228–34.
“Nay I as well as he am griev'd / For oh I hop'd of thee / That hadst thou stay'd as I believed / Thou wouldst have griev'd for me” (145–48).
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, eds. J. Butler and K. Green (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992) 220.
This is how Clare recalls in his “Autobiography” the experience of getting lost on a walk as a child, in Clare, Prose of John Clare, eds. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951) 13. Jonathan Bate's suggestion that “The Lamentations of Round‐Oak Waters” can be read as embodying a sense that the land itself might experience and express pain, such as that found traditionally among Australian Aborigines, finds support in Clare's need to be recognized by the land. See also his letter to his publisher Taylor from early 1832 with reference to his imminent move to Northborough: “I have had some difficulties to leave the woods & heaths & favourite spots that have known me so long for the very molehills on the heath & the old trees in the hedges seem bidding me farewell,” in Clare, The Letters of John Clare, eds. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951) 258. Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000) 165–66). The idea that the land knows its own traditional owners, but will not recognize strangers to the place, is integral to the Aboriginal understanding of “country” as the particular area of land, with all its inhabitants, human and otherwise, living and ancestral, to which one belongs and towards which one has a duty of care. See Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996).
John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972) 188.
Casey, The Fate of Place xii.
David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More‐than‐Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997) 99–102.
Casey, The Fate of Place 201.
Robert Payne Knight, The Landscape, a Didactic Poem in Three Books, 2nd ed. (London: Bulmer, 1795; reprint Westmead, Hants.: Gregg International, 1972) 21–23.
The gendered nature of this mode of landscape aesthetics is foregrounded by Jacqueline Labbé in Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1998).
Gilpin quoted in Barrell, The Idea of Landscape 11–12.
See Bate, The Song of the Earth 133–36.
The first major study to explore this connection was Barrell, The Idea of Landscape. For a more recent study, also centred on Clare, see Timothy Brownlow, John Clare and the Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983).
Brownlow, John Clare and the Picturesque Landscape 22.
Young edited and contributed to the influential periodical The Annals of Agriculture from 1784 to 1809. His Tour of Ireland appeared in 1780 and his Travels in France in 1792. Barrell discusses complicity, but also the tension, between the discourse of improvement and that of the picturesque in The Idea of Landscape 60–79.
W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape [1955], intro. and commentary C. Taylor (London: Hodder, 1988) 140–66.
Barrell, The Idea of Landscape 96.
The classic study of this process is J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832: A Study of England before the Reform Bill (London and New York: Longman, 1978), first published in 1948, but some of the Hammonds' findings have since been revised. For a more recent view, see J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993); and Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Economic Change 1750–1850 (London and New York: Longman, 1999).
“I'm swordy well a piece of land / Thats fell upon the town / Who worked me till I couldn't stand / And crush me now Im down” (21–24). “Lament of Swordy Well” in Clare, Poems of the Middle Period 1822–1837, eds. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996–98) vol. 5, 105–14.
Neeson, Commoners 259–93; and Morgan, Birth of Industrial Britain 26–27.
Morgan, Birth of Industrial Britain 17.
According to a report in New Scientist from 4 July 1999, tree sparrows were estimated to be down by eighty‐nine per cent, corn buntings by eighty per cent, turtle doves by seventy‐nine per cent, bullfinches by seventy‐five per cent, reed buntings by sixty‐one per cent and linnets by forty‐nine per cent (3).
See Richard Kerridge's insightful ecocritical analysis of the impact of BSE in “BSE Stories,” Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 2 (1999): 111–21.
As Gernot Böhme remarks in his ecological reconsideration of Adorno's aesthetics, “we are now beginning to feel in our own bodies what we have done to nature: this is the core of the so‐called environmental problem.” Böhme, Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989) 24.
Wolfram Siemann, Vom Staatenbund zum Nationalstaat: Deutschland 1806–1871 (Munich: Beck, 1995) 124.
Engelbert Schramm, “Zu einer Umweltgeschichte des Bodens” in Besiegte Natur: Geschichte der Umwelt im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, eds. Franz‐Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommerspacher (Munich: Beck, 1987) 90.
Siemann, Vom Staatenbund zum Nationalstaat 132–33.
One of the implications of the development of a more individualistic concept of property is the “copyrighting” of written texts. On the implications of changing views of land and property for literary culture, see Kevin Hart, Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999).
Clare, “The Mores” in Poems of the Middle Period 1822–1837, vol. 2, 347–50.
Marwitz, quoted in Siemann, Vom Staatenbund zum Nationalstaat 127.
Barrell, The Idea of Landscape 86.
The method of smelting iron with coke to create a harder, less brittle product was developed only in the early eighteenth century, and counts as one of the preconditions for industrialization. See Morgan, Birth of Industrial Britain 49. Carlyle, quoted in Morgan 85.
Hoskins, Making of the English Landscape 35.
Ibid. 183.
Pollution from the Barnberg glass works was already eliciting protests from nearby residents in 1802, while complaints against the silver‐ore works in Freiberg led to an official inquiry, which provided the first scientific evidence for the deleterious effect of sulphur dioxide on plants and animals. Against the advice of the report by the chemist Adolph Stoeckhardt, the response was to raise the chimney stacks, which simply spread the pollution further afield. See Siemann, Vom Staatenbund zum Nationalstaat 142–45; and Arne Andersen and Franz‐Josef Brueggemeier, “Gase, Rauch und Saurer Regen” in Besiegte Natur: Geschichte der Umwelt im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, eds. Franz‐Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommerspacher (Munich: Beck, 1987) 64–66.
Hoskins, Making of the English Landscape 187.
See Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).
The environmental and art historian Tim Bonyhady has recently revealed evidence of a surprising level of environmental awareness in colonial Australia in The Colonial Earth (Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2000). Despite that, Australia today boasts the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world, along with the second highest rate of deforestation; all of our major waterways are suffering from reduced water flow due to damming and irrigation, as well as from pollution from agricultural run‐off, while ever more land is being blown away or turning to salt. Australia is also vying with the USA for the unenviable title of the highest per capita producer of greenhouse gases, and, despite being the driest inhabited continent on the planet, we also have the highest per capita level of water consumption.
J.G. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, trans., ed. and intro. Frank E. Manuel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968).
Ibid. 4–20.
Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language” in Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and History, trans. and intro. Marcia Bunge (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 64–68.
Herder, Philosophy of the History 41.
See, for example, his essays “On German Character and Art” (“Von deutscher Art und Kunst, 1773) and “Correspondence on Ossian” (“Briefwechsel über Ossian,” 1773). An extract from the latter in English translation can be found in David Simpson (ed.), Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Theory from Lessing to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 71–76. In “Yet Another Philosophy of History” (“Noch eine Philosophie der Geschichte,” 1774), Herder reflects on the possibility of a “physics of history,” which would examine the effect of “various climates and temporal circumstances” on cultural development. In Against Pure Reason 46.
In this highly influential early work of environmental determinism from the fifth century BCE, Hippocrates claims that different climates “cause differences in character; the greater the variations in climate, so much the greater will be differences in character […] the constitution and the habits of a people follow the nature of the land where they live.” Hippocratic Writings, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) 161.
See the excellent discussion of “local attachment” in Alan D. McKillop, “Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism: The Eighteenth‐Century Pattern” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick Pottle, eds. F.W. Hilles and H. Bloom (New York: Oxford UP, 1965) 191–218. On the history of environmental determinist thinking generally, see David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 9–25. Unfortunately, Arnold overlooks the key contribution of Herder to this tradition of thought.
Herder, Philosophy of History 13.
Ibid. 7.
Ibid. 31–32.
Ibid. 19.
On Humboldt and the “invention” of the Tropics, see Arnold, The Problem of Nature 146–48.
Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung [1845], ed. Hanno Beck (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993) 37.
Charles Darwin quoted in Arnold, The Problem of Nature 148. For a more extended discussion of Darwin's indebtedness to Humboldt and other German Romantics, see Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002).
Frank Holl and Kai Reschke, “‘Alles ist Wechselwirkung’ – Alexander von Humboldt” in Exhibition Catalogue for Humboldt Exhibition (Berlin “Haus der Künste” 6 June – 15 Aug. 1999) 13.
Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1969).
Gernot Böhme refers to Humboldt's physiognomy as “nicht als Ausdruck, sondern als Eindruckspotential” (not as expression, but as expressive potential). Recorded lecture series on aesthetics, Darmstadt University, 1994.
Jean‐Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 52.
Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur (Nördlingen: Franz Greno, 1986) 245, 247.
Humboldt, “Einleitende Betrachtungen” in Ansichten der Natur 322.
Schelling, Von der Weltseele – Eine Hypothese der hoehern Physik zur Erklaerung des allgemeinen Organismus, in Werke, vol. I,6, ed. Joerg Jantzen (Stuttgart: Fromann‐Holzboog, 2000).
Edmund Burke, “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, eds. J.O. McLaughlin and J.T. Boulton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) vol. 1, 255, 288.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 108.
Lord Shaftesbury, The Moralists, quoted in N. Pevsner (ed.), Studies in Art, Architecture and Design (London: Thames, 1968) 82–83.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment 145.
Friedrich Schiller, “Vom Erhabenen” in Werke, ed. Julius Peterson et al. (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943–2001) vol. 20, part 1, 184.
Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) vol. 1, 116, 41–42.
Ibid. 152.
Carl Gustav Carus, Psyche: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele, foreword Friedrich Arnold (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975) 431.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters in The Works of Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12) vol. 3, 168.
Ruskin, “Lectures on Landscape” in Works, vol. 22, 12.
Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: Wiley, 1975) 48–49.
Gernot Böhme, Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989); and “An Aesthetic Theory of Nature: An Interim Report,” Thesis Eleven 32 (1992): 90–102. See also my discussion of Böhme's model of ecological aesthetics in Rigby, “Beyond the Frame: Art, Ecology and the Aesthetics of Nature,” Thesis Eleven 32 (1992): 114–28. The implications of Böhme's ecological aesthetics for a rethinking of the concept of “spirit of place” are explored further in Rigby, “Myth, Memory, Attunement: Towards a Sensuous Semiotics of Place” in Imagined Places: The Politics of Making Space, eds. Christopher Houston et al. (Bundoora: School of Sociology, Politics and Anthropology, La Trobe University, 1998) 175–82.
Böhme, “An Aesthetic Theory of Nature” 94.
William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere: First Part, First Book of The Recluse, ed. B. Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977). The concept of topophilia, or love of place, is explored by Yi‐Fu Tuan in his book of that name. See also Carl Kroeber's early ecocritical reading of Wordsworth's poem in his article “‘Home at Grasmere’: Ecological Holiness,” PMLA 89 (1974): 132–41.
Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–49) vol. 5, 5.
Wordsworth, The Thirteen‐Book Prelude [1805–06], ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1991).
These are the key terms of Jay Appleton's analysis of landscape aesthetics in The Experience of Landscape.
Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971) 149–50.
Casey, Getting Back into Place 253.
Wordsworth, Letter to the Editor of the Morning Post 9 Dec. 1844, in Peter Bicknell (ed.), The Illustrated Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, foreword Alan G. Hill (Exeter: Webbe & Bower, 1984) 191.
Ibid. 192.
Ibid. 194.
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991) 50. For a more critical analysis of Wordsworth's opposition to the railway, along with his conception of the national park, see Karen Welberry, “‘The Playground of England’: A Genealogy of the English Lakes from Nursery to National Park, 1793–1951,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, English, La Trobe University, 2000.
Bate, Romantic Ecology 102–05. Bate is referring to Schiller's famous essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung), 1796–97.
“‘Wohin aber gehen wir?’” (But where are we going?) asks Heinrich in Novalis's lyrical novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, to which his mysterious female interlocutor replies “‘Immer nach Hause’” (Always home). Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], Schriften, eds. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968) vol. 1, 325.
Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” 150.
Haar, Song of the Earth 63.
Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” in Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983) 147.
Haar, Song of the Earth 140.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977) 307–41.
Haar, Song of the Earth 139. In the third chapter of my book Topographies of the Sacred I argue that the aesthetic correlate of an “ecstatic” concept of dwelling is an ecopoetics of negativity, whereby the literature of place is valued precisely in its failure to provide an adequate response or representation of the embodied experience of which it is the trace.