The Example of Hwa Yol Jung
INTRODUCING THE TRANSNATIONAL
At the end of the previous chapter I used the phrase, transnational ecocritical theory. By that I do not mean a single, unifying theory for ecocritical literary practice around the world. Rather, I mean a theory that would transect, that is, cut across, the limitations of national perspectives and boundaries. It would do so both in terms of the theories, concepts, and beliefs on which it would draw for developing critical approaches and methods and in terms of the kinds of literary and cultural texts that it would compare, analyze, and appreciate. Although, not always treating examples beyond a particular national literature, practitioners of such theory would always seek an awareness of different practices and possibilities for literary production. For example, a transnational theorist would not assume that a particularly culturally entrenched form of theorizing represented the correct way for ecocritics in other places to theorize in order to generate fruitful interpretations or even to orient readers toward a nationally defined particular reception of a text. In like manner, a transnational theorist would not assume that the most popular literary genre for writing about nature in his country or in a particular century ought to be a genre practiced elsewhere or even a genre to be promoted as the “nature writing” for any specific time or place.
Avoiding parochialism does not mean practicing universalism, but it also does not mean abandoning the idea that ecocriticism in whatever varied forms it may take is a crucial, relevant, and necessary literary and cultural practice to be promoted worldwide. A transnational approach can be based on recognition of and support for diversity, and healthy borrowing, adapting, and adopting. Rather than generating claims about a transnational ecocritical theory at a level of generality that would probably prove unproductive, I want to demonstrate what I mean through the discussion of one individual’s critical work that exemplifies such an approach, Hwa Yol Jung. I have chosen Professor Jung because of our interaction over the years, because of our mutual interests and concerns, and because of the ways that his life and scholarship demonstrate the best that transections can offer. He is, on the one hand, a Korean émigré teaching at an American college, founded on the basis of the beliefs of a distinct religious sect. On the other hand, he is a phenomenologist focused on Eastern philosophy teaching in a political science department.
THINKING SYNCRETISM AND THE I-THOU
On the cover of Gary Snyder’s first volume of prose, Earth House Hold, one sees the photograph of a bisected nautilus shell with its numerous chambers. This cover reminds me of Hwa Yol Jung for two reasons. One, our mutual interest in Gary Snyder as an ecological poet and environmental activist led to our first meeting nearly twenty years ago. Two, the many chambers of the nautilus provide a symbol for Jung’s accretive, continuous, and maturing search for an engaged, sustainable ethics adequate for our world’s ecological crisis. With each new advance in his thinking, each additional theorist he adapts or corrects in his quest, another chamber is added to what has become a highly promising and sophisticated ecological ethic for responsible human action. I want to elaborate on that second reason and explain how it represents a transnational ecocritical theory.
Only two years after the first Earth Day, Jung published in the Bucknell Review a crucial starting point for an environmental ethic. In “The Ecological Crisis: A Philosophic Perspective, East and West,” he builds on José Ortega y Gasset’s recognition of modern humanity’s one dimensionality and cogently observes that “What is more important than the physical development of modern society in industry, commerce, transportation, and communication is technology’s impact on the psychological making of modern man” (Jung 1972a, 29). We see here the parallel in this point with numerous literary works that had been published prior to and shortly after the first Earth Day in which various technologically produced disasters, particularly nuclear war, signaled the destruction of human civilization, if not of the entire species, and resulted from social inability to grasp the limitations of technology. Jung’s point is helpful in understanding the systemic critique of such novels as George R. Stewart’s The Earth Abides (1949), Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971).
These novels and others like them critique the mind-set of those who believe that technology will alleviate or resolve crises created by previous technology. Jung quite clearly recognizes, in contrast, that the master’s tools cannot tear down the master’s house. In response Jung calls for the “cultivation of an aesthetic and reverential ethos toward nature” (1972a, 33) at the very same time that on campuses across the country there blossomed English department and interdisciplinary courses devoted to “nature writing” and “environmental literature,” with such works as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire; the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder; and, as soon as it was published in 1974, Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, central to many course syllabi. Invariably the works chosen for study included ones with a strong devotional, humble, and often spiritual approach to human engagement with nature, sometimes containing a rejection of technology and at other times less stridently calling for a retreat from its ubiquitous presence in daily life.
Jung’s syncretic effort to blend Eastern metaphysics and Western philosophy also helps readers to understand better the melding of ecology and spirituality in the poetry and prose of such Beat writers as Allen Ginsberg, Diane diPrima, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch, all of whom to varying degrees practiced different forms of Buddhism and studied East and South Asian cultures. It comes as no surprise then when one finds Jung linking Thoreau, D. T. Suzuki, and Rachel Carson. Likewise, in looking back over his body of work, we find in this early essay Jung linking spirituality, carnality, and nature phenomenologically, thus preparing the ground for the development of an ethic that will lose sight of none of these three poles at any time.
In that same year, 1972, Jung published the article “Ecology, Zen, and Western Religious Thought” in The Christian Century as part of an ongoing effort to bring Zen and other forms of Buddhism to the serious attention of Christian thinkers. He followed that with “The Splendor of the Wild: Zen and Aldo Leopold” in 1974 in the Atlantic Naturalist, reaching out to an audience of conservationists. In finding connections between Zen and Leopold, Jung again emphasizes carnality and the ways that Leopold’s land ethic forms a component of a wider movement to emphasize an “I-Thou” rather than “I-It” relation between human beings and the other aspects of the natural world. The use of the language of Martin Buber here displays an anticipation of the Bakthinian dialogics that Jung will find helpful in later years. We also find the advancing of the aesthetic dimension of the environmental ethic in his emphasis on “appreciation” versus “appropriation.” Here we see, however, the limitations of the argument at this point in time, in that this polarity, although fundamentally sound theoretically, does not address a possible middle way, one which must be found for human beings to act in the world rather than limit themselves to passive observation of natural phenomena. The challenge of that middle way between appreciation and appropriation is the one taken up by many environmental agrarian writers, such as Wendell Berry, Jane Brox, Wes Jackson, David Mas Masumoto, and numerous others, throughout the 1960s and into the present.
The problems of sustainability and stewardship that Berry addresses in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction require practical and practiced responses and actions. Often, in this respect, the poets, novelists, and nonacademic essayists offer concrete and detailed visions, as well as working through actual, specific problems that philosophers tend to treat in the abstract. The enactment of Leopold’s land ethic requires patience, hard labor, and finesse on a farm, on a ranch, or in a fish camp by means of which people must support themselves. In addition to the works of Wendell Berry, particularly the nonfiction prose, the writings of Linda Hasselstrom on ranching and Nancy Lord on small scale commercial fishing, just to provide a few examples, help literary critics and philosophers see the complexities of realizing a change in thinking and action that can challenge the technological juggernaut at the same time that individuals and families earn a living within a capitalist economy. But these remarks do not fault Hwa Yol Jung, since most of the authors I have mentioned have only brought their ideas into publication in the past decade. Likewise, a fairly recent development in nature writing that will provide grist for Jung’s philosophic mill comprises books written about restoration biology, such as Stephanie Mills’s In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land and a book I have already discussed, Freeman House’s Totem Salmon.
In 1974, publishing “The Paradox of Man and Nature: Reflections on Man’s Ecological Predicament” in The Centennial Review, a predominantly literary journal, Jung expands his discussion of the I-Thou relationship in terms of the phenomenological and comparative religion insights of Mircea Eliade and provides a critique of both Marxism and capitalism as two sides of the technological, instrumentalist reasoning developed out of the Enlightenment. In particular he dismantles the mind-body dualism of Descartes that justifies the arrogant belief that human beings can successfully dominate nature through science and technology without destroying themselves in the process. Technocentrism comes under a withering critique as Jung turns toward poetry to demonstrate an “aesthetic appreciation of nature” that embodies the I-Thou of biocentrism. First, the British Romantics, Blake and Wordsworth, are discussed by Jung; but, as always, he does not remain in Western realms. Even as he links the philosophies of East and West, so too the poetry, adding Shiki and Rabindranath Tagore to the discussion. As in other essays, he makes a surprising leap, connecting these poets from vastly different national cultures to the thinking of Rachel Carson, quoting her own poetic remark that “there is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.” Just as he crosses cultural traditions and philosophical schools, Jung here crosses intellectual genres, linking science writing and poetry, to demonstrate the necessary unity of aesthetics and ethics.
Two years later, Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, his wife, teamed up to produce a manifesto published in the German journal Man and World: An International Philosophical Review, “Toward a New Humanism: The Politics of Civility in a ‘No-Growth’ Society.” They announce as their goal nothing less than “to outline a phenomenology of ecological conscience.” Here we find the introduction of the ethics of “care” into the discussion and an increased attention to the insights of anthropology and the widespread interest in indigenous and so-called primitive societies. In furthering the critique of the Enlightenment project of instrumental reason, the Jungs here work especially with the corrective insights provided by Taoism and Confucianism, the Sinitic perspective. But from a literary critical viewpoint, I am particularly interested in the attention not only to classical cultures and their philosophies but also the embodied philosophies of indigenous peoples because this attention parallels the interest of American poets at this very time and a tremendous out-pouring and publishing of Native American and First Nation poetry and prose. Snyder had already broached this subject in several of the prose pieces in Earth House Hold, in particular “Poetry and the Primitive.” In the year following the publication of the Jungs’ essay, Snyder published The Old Ways, which contains among other writings, “The Politics of Ethnopoetics,” “Reinhabitation,” and “The Incredible Survival of Coyote.” At the same time Jerome Rothenberg and others were strenuously engaged in efforts to recover, reproduce, and disseminate a new oral poetics that built on the preliterate arts of the Americas. Native American and First Nation writers had already been introducing the North American public to new stories, poems, and songs, that embodied and revitalized the oral poetics of their tribal heritages, such as Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, and M. Scott Momaday.
TURNING TO SNYDER AND ECOPIETY
I now want to jump ahead a little more than a decade to 1989 and 1990, the years in which Hwa Yol Jung began publishing a group of essays focused on the concept of “ecopiety.” Although building on his earlier work regarding the aesthetics of environmental ethics, the ethics of care, and the need for a spiritual attunement with nature in opposition to technological manipulation, this work represents a major growth node in his thinking. Three essays can be discussed together here: “The Way of Ecopiety: A Philosophic Minuet for Ecological Ethics” and two essays coauthored with Petee Jung, “The Way of Ecopiety: Holistic Education for Ecological Ethics” and “Gary Snyder’s Ecopiety.”
Jung begins “A Philosophic Minuet” in a celebratory mood citing Snyder’s remark about the earth as “our dancing place” and reminding readers of the classical linkage of music, dance, drama, and oral poetry. Jung is working with the imagery of music, including as it relates to both dance and poetry, in emphasizing the categories of “harmony and mood”: “While harmony refers to the outer landscape of cosmic reality as social process, mood describes the inner landscape of the human condition. Mood is the tonality of human existence as being-in-the-world, the way of attuning oneself to the environing or surrounding world” (1989, 84–85). The year 1990 is also the one in which Hwa Yol Jung and I met at a conference on postmodern spirituality held at Cambridge.
There I presented a paper titled “Pivots Instead of Centers” that treated the “postmodern spirituality of Gary Snyder and Ursula K. Le Guin” by focusing on the poetry of each writer. I claimed then that “these two writers develop philosophical pivots rather than idealist centers on which to base a nondualistic, nondichotomous process of being-in-the-world, which is very much an ecological perspective” (Murphy 1995, 111). Pointing out that Snyder had named a recent collection of poetry No Nature and that Le Guin had titled a collection of essays Dancing at the Edge of the World, I concluded by hoping that “we can adaptively learn from these two poets—although, of course, not from them alone—how to dance with this world at the edge of no nature” (Murphy 1995, 121). In all of our cases, poets and critics alike, I think this emphasis on dancing represented a maturation of thought and practice that backed away from the gloom-and-doom attitudes initially attendant upon the widespread recognition of ecological crisis. Coming through the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, many people in our generations felt at various times a sense of impending apocalypse, an attitude toward time and process that itself arises from technophilia and the frenetic pace of technological innovation and consumer goods production.
The turning toward or deepening of a commitment to ecology as a social movement reframes an individual’s perspective as best represented by Joseph Meeker’s argument that “comedy grows from the biological circumstances of life” and that “Comedy demonstrates that man is durable even though he may be weak, stupid, and undignified,” and, finally, “Comedy illustrates that survival depends upon man’s ability to change himself rather than his environment, and upon his ability to accept limitations rather than to curse fate for limiting him” (1996, 158, 168–69). Dance, laughter, and play support the comic orientation of a mature environmental ethic. It comes as no surprise, then, that Hwa Yol Jung finds himself turning toward the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin not only for the dialogic method, which itself comprises a pivotal orientation toward life as process, but also for the appreciation of carnality and carnivalization. Dance here needs to be understood as not merely metaphorical but also as literal and metonymic. As Jung notes, “The ecological crisis as we know it today points to the loss of man’s sense of touch or intimacy (Stim-mung) with nature or earth” (1989, 88). That word “intimacy” reminds us that the quest for ecological balance cannot be undertaken in isolation or in the mode of American individualism, which really stands for the illusion of exceptionalism. Although individuals may retreat from society, as a pause in order to adjust their ear and gain a new sense of tonality, the mood of which Jung writes can only be achieved by reimmersion in human community. That distinction marks the clear limitation of Thoreau’s foray to Walden Pond, which Jung criticizes in a much more recent essay (see my discussion in chapter 2).
The Jungs’ definition of “ecopiety” in “The Way of Ecopiety: Holistic Education for Ecological Ethics” would serve Charles Siebert quite well to help him understand what his character has accomplished in Wickerby. The Jungs emphasize the holistic character of the concept: “By ecopiety, we wish to convey a deeply abiding sense of care and reverence for coexistence among all beings and things, whether they be human or not” (1989, 33). This simple definition sheds significant light on certain kinds of poems written by a variety of authors, such as Ortiz and Snyder, Hogan, Pat Mora, and numerous others, who seek to break down the distance that one tends to find in a significant amount of Romantic poetry, wherein the speaker/viewer stands back from the natural environment, which is rendered as sublime in part due to its magnitude and its difference from the daily environment in which the speaker lives. Rather, these contemporary poets move into the realm of “communionism,” an engaged spiritual relationship often rendered in poems that take the form of prayers and songs. They are joined by a host of essayists and fiction writers. For example, one finds this distinction running throughout the writing collected in The Soul Unearthed: Celebrating Wildness and Personal Renewal through Nature, edited by Cass Adams. In that volume, much of the writing focuses on places and environments, whereas another collection emphasizes the relationships between human beings and other animals, Intimate Nature: The Bond between Women and Animals, edited by Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson. A single volume of prose that perhaps best embodies the concept as defined by the Jungs would be Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. Ecopiety proves a crucial concept for understanding and explaining what these writers set out to do in an age of ecological crisis that complements but nevertheless remains quite different from the nature appreciation of the Romantics.
Recognizing the role of poets in embodying this concept of ecopiety, the Jungs published “Gary Snyder’s Ecopiety.” Here they discuss for the first time deep ecology, the philosophical orientation developed by Arne Naess, and link it with aesthetics. As with “A Philosophical Minuet,” Snyder’s poetry leads them to emphasize the celebratory and playful aspects of ecopiety as most clearly realized in the poems of Regarding Wave. It should be noted that the “Regarding Wave” series in this collection constitutes an epithalamion suite in which Snyder celebrates his marriage to Masa Uehara and later the birth of their first son. Thus, these poems synchronistically unite home and family in an ecological relationship participating in the larger planetary and universal processes of molecular and cosmic activity. But, as the Jungs rightly note, Snyder does not allow for escapism or a retreat into wilderness without dealing with the ecological crisis and the problems of civilization.
Connecting this volume of poetry with Snyder’s first prose collection, published the following year, Earth House Hold, and then looking at the 1974 poetry volume, Turtle Island, requires the Jungs to take up the issues of economics and politics in relation to ecopiety and a larger environmental ethic in ways that they had not previously done. After Snyder, politics cannot be perceived as exclusively the realm of the human, nor can economics be understood from the limited perspective of exchange value and use value. The aesthetic demands attention to intrinsic value, on the one hand, and synchronicity and holism demand that economics take into account the integrity of the environment and the psychological orientation of humanity, on the other hand. While the Jungs have emphasized the concept of the “primitive” in much of their discussion here and elsewhere on Snyder, they rightly turn in their epilogue to the concept of “postcivilization.” This distinction is crucial so that readers understand that the attention to the primitive is not a nostalgic looking backward, but rather a comparative analysis of indigenous and non-indigenous societies for the development of a philosophy of reinhabitation. Although Snyder had already broached reinhabitation in The Old Ways, he develops the concept much further in the prose writings of the late 1980s and 1990s included in A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds.
DEVELOPING CRITIQUE AND CONSIDERING SIMPLICITY
Two essays published in 1991 find Hwa Yol Jung writing to two very different audiences. “Marxism and Deep Ecology in Postmodernity” published inthe Australian journal Thesis Eleven, which is devoted to critical theory and historical sociology, speaks to theorists oriented toward Marxist and post-Marxist theories who may not be ecologically literate. “The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective,” published in the British journal Asian Philosophy presumes an audience familiar with Taoism and Confucianism but likely to know little, if anything, about deep ecology. Both of these demonstrate the value and necessity of a transnational ecocritical theory that also attends to diverse and conflicted audiences. Besides providing an attack on individualism, Jung educates his Marxist/post-Marxist audience about geopiety. Invoking the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák, Jung promotes the concept of geopiety and the need “to recover first the moral sense of nature” in an I-Thou relationship (Jung 1991b, 89). Gregory Cajete in Look to the Mountain takes this orientation a step farther, or at least a step in a different direction, when he writes about “geopsyche,” his term for the way that the land, the environment imprints itself not only on the consciousness of an individual, where geopiety might be said to reside, but also on the very neurological structure of the human brain (a theory reinforced by the neurological research of Gerald M. Edelman).
To return to the notion of dance and the need to reinstate a tactile relationship and perception of the natural world, I want to link geopiety and geopsyche and to suggest that many writers try precisely to invoke in their readers a sense of geopiety or ecopiety through sharing not only their emotional interactions with particular places, especially but not exclusively wild places, but also their fundamental perception of the world based on the environments in which they have either been raised or have settled as adults. This literary communication arises most frequently in the form of memoir, but sometimes also in fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences provides an excellent example of the fiction, while such memoirs as Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of Morning, Susan Hanson’s Icons of Loss and Grace, Teresa Jordan’s Riding the White Horse Home, Lisa Dale Norton’s Hawk Flies Above, Dan O’Brien’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart, and Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood demonstrate the diversity of the nonfiction writing. Women writers are particularly well represented in this vein of non-fiction, perhaps because they show more attention to the shaping influences of home and upbringing than many male writers who emphasize adventures and travels away from home as their primary encounters with the natural world.
Also, as one might expect in an essay oriented toward Marxist and post-Marxist theory, Jung addresses the subject of economics more so here than in previous essays. Alluding to E. F. Schumacher, and seeking to reunite economics and ecology based on their etymological roots, Jung provides a single closing italicized injunction: “to ecologize is to economize and share scarce resources, to live the life of simplicity and frugality” (1991b, 95; emphasis in original). That key word, “simplicity,” of course takes us into the terrain of another type of environmental writing that has increased in frequency in recent years, as I discussed in chapter 2.
But in addition to the works considered in that chapter, there exists another category of simplicity writing that proves somewhat more problematic. These works of fiction promote simplicity through cautionary tales predicated upon some kind of ecological disaster. One example will suffice. Based on scientific understanding of the potential for global warming to genererate a greenhouse effect, Arthur Herzog depicts in Heat a sudden onset of catastrophic global warming that largely takes the world by surprise. Published in 1977, it was certainly ahead of its time in terms of public awareness of this disastrous possibility. While Herzog has technology provide a way to drain off excess solar radiation to reverse global warming, he nevertheless makes it clear in the novel that the American consumerist lifestyle cannot continue unchecked in the short run or the long run, as immense sacrifices are required to reduce energy consumption in the near term and to free up capital, equipment, and material to build the necessary solar radiators. Herzog poses the question in Heat of whether or not Americans would be willing to sacrifice today for the welfare of future generations and concludes that they are not and will only make such sacrifices in the face of imminent disaster and self-apparent crisis. Bill McKibben expresses a similarly pessimistic viewpoint in his nonfiction work, The End of Nature.
Herzog’s position raises significant philosophical and political questions about the ability of environmentalists and ecologists to persuade the American public to practice self-restraint and to rethink its fundamental economic foundations in a period of human history where we seemingly have averted the greatest threats to continued human existence. Is there a way to realign human priorities prior to a disaster of such magnitude and lasting impact that it creates the kind of crisis conditions that earthquakes and hurricanes generate to alter daily habitual practices? While Hwa Yol Jung has been working diligently to provide the alternative ethic, clearly we need others to work on providing the how of implementation. Many of the literary works that I mention in this essay do contribute to answering the how and do so not only by their specific thought experiments, scenarios, and personal testaments, but also through making environmental issues a regular part of the public reading experience and thereby elevating the general level of public consciousness. Again, a transnational eco-critical theory can provide new avenues for thinking theoretically about how to develop an alternative ethic to American consumerism and new examples of literary and cultural works that embody such avenues.
CULTIVATING DIFFERENCE
In the second of the two 1991 essays, the one published in Asian Philosophy, readers can see another node developing in Jung’s ethical quest: the node of difference, gender, and cultural multiplicity. Although gender issues and feminist insights have appeared previously in his writing and in the coauthored essays, in the 1990s it became an increasingly crucial component, particularly through the writings of Luce Irigaray. Here readers see Jung working in this direction by first returning to the concept of harmony and identifying three components of it: the universe is pluralistic; all elements of this pluralistic world are synchronistic; pluralistic phenomena are differentiated and linked through the “logic of correlation, not the logic of identity” (Jung 1991b, 129). The implications of this new node in his environmental ethic develop in a distinctly postmodern direction a few years later with the publication of three essays in 1995 and 1996.
“The Tao of Transversality,” the first of these three, takes the concepts of carnality and carnival in a distinctly postmodern direction when Jung invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of the “rhizome” (Jung 1995, 12). From a promotion of the concepts of “difference” and “correlation” in opposition to the bankrupt notion of enlightenment universality, Jung now promotes “multiversity” and “transversal movement.” Twenty years earlier, two authors hailing from the American southwest had actually represented the kind of rhizomatic political action that Deleuze and Guattari theorize and that Jung is here able to link with key Sinitic and Western environmental ethical concepts. One of these novels, The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, was not treated so much as a novel in the years immediately following its publication as a manifesto and a bible by the organizers and followers of Earth First!, Greenpeace, and other direct action environmentalist organizations. Networks of activists participating in a horizontal organization of affiliation with minimal ideological prerequisites—complete counterpoints to Marxist and New Left parties with their rigid hierarchies and democratic centralist orthodoxies—these groups spiked trees, unfurled banners on offshore oil rigs and company headquarters, vandalized corporate operations, and disrupted the routes of whaling ships and nuclear-powered navy vessels. With many of their actions highly theatrical they practiced both rhizomatic organization and carnivalized demonstrations. Abbey’s novel explicitly envisioned such political activism.
The other novel of the day was John Nichols’s The Milagro Beanfield War, which introduced people of color into the equation of environmental activism. Significantly different in orientation from Abbey’s monkeywrenching and the wilderness protection of Earth First!, Nichols’s novel focuses on the political activism of minority people seeking to protect local knowledge and local agricultural practices in the face of eradication by multinational corporations. Ana Castillo takes up the issue in an equally “magic realist” style in her novel, So Far from God, which promotes community based cooperatives while critiquing industrial pollution along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The most detailed and developed literary investigation of the promise and problems of rhizomatic political organization for environmental ethical action, however, can probably be found in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, published in the same years Jung is making his turn overtly toward postmodernist philosophy. This science fiction trilogy, running to some 2,000 small print pages, explores human settlement of Mars and all of the environmental problems attendant upon that, as well as the environmental crises and steps toward redress on Earth. Perhaps though for all of the various environmental issues the trilogy addresses, Robinson’s most important scientific point is that space colonization can do absolutely nothing in itself to alleviate either population or environmental issues on this planet. A list of other novels appearing around the same time as Jung’s essay that also tie into the rhizomatic principle and direct environmental action would have to include Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues, which addresses environmental conditions in Hawai’i particularly in relation to the native people, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, which foresaw Mexico’s Chiapas rebellion, and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, which treats Native American and First Nation resistance to the monumentally destructive actions of Hydro Quebec’s James Bay project that has flooded thousands of square miles of First Nation lands. Toward the end of his essay, Jung raises the issue of the “fitting response,” quoting Calvin Schrag’s Communicative Praxis. All of the novels I have mentioned in this paragraph address precisely this concept, and do so by having their responses come clearly from a variety of “decentered subjects” (Jung 1995, 18–19). Thus, what these authors were working out in imaginative fiction to demonstrate fitting responses to the environmental crisis, Hwa Yol Jung was working out theoretically to enable the conscious linkage of philosophy and literature to help individual readers determine their own appropriate action as socially decentered individual subjects seeking to become ecologically centered interbeings.
ADVANCING PHENOMENOLOGY AND DIALOGICS
In two 1996 essays, “Phenomenology and Body Politics” and “Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics,” Jung works on a synthesis of the thought of Immanuel Levinas and Bakthin. And while Jung is certainly correct in contending that much in Levinas provides a corrective to Derrida, there is an aspect of Levinas’s remarks that Jung does not challenge at this time, but does move beyond in 1999 in “Difference and Responsibility,” where he emphasizes “relationality,” “interbeing,” and “interdividuality,” turning to Thich Nat Hanh, René Girard, and Bakhtin to criticize Levinas for ignoring the nonhuman world. These terms of Jung all work to combine key concepts from East Asian and European philosophy.
Levinas errs when he contends that to understand and embrace radical alterity, we must accept “the absolute otherness of the Other” (quoted in Jung 1996a, 8). The recognition of the dialogic construction of the social being and the Buddhist recognition of interbeing directly challenge that notion of “absolute.” Rather, as I think Julia Kristeva suggests in Strangers to Ourselves, we need to emphasize the relational difference of human beings, a recognition that accepts alterity on a heterarchical plane rather than along a hierarchical axis of power, control, and expropriation. For such a relational difference among beings of the same species and even among beings of varying species, we need to incorporate the concept of Another, the other that is proximate and made familiar through recognition and dialogue (Murphy 1995, 114–15). Such a concept can be traced back to the two different words in Russian for the English word “other” as discussed by Bakhtin’s translator, Caryl Emerson, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin 1984, 294, 302n15; see also Murphy 1995, 35).
This Another frequently becomes the antagonist of alien encounters in ecologically sensitive science fiction novels. Amy Thomson in three of her novels, The Color of Distance, Storyteller, and Through Alien Eyes, provides the best example of the working out of the Other and the Self as both Anothers in the alien contact experiences on which these novels focus. At the same time that The Color of Distance, for example, educates readers about the possibility of sustainable inhabitation of a rain forest bioregion, it also shows the psychological process of translating the initially perceived Other into the appreciated Another, and the reciprocal experience of coming to see oneself through the eyes of another.
EMBRACING HETERONOMY AND CONTINUATION
Finally, I want to mention one more essay published by Hwa Yol Jung in 2002. “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other” finds Jung focusing on “heteronomy, which cultivates difference and plurality rather than identity and homogeneity” (2002, 298). This position brings Jung into proximity of the large body of literature, most of it nonfiction, being generated by the bioregionalist and indigenous movements in the United States and around the globe. I see here the fruitful potential for dialogue between Jung’s theorizing and the debates about the future, or lack of it, for the green nation-state, particularly since those thinkers find themselves critiquing the same people that Jung takes to task, such as Jürgen Habermas, as in the case of Robyn Eckersley’s The Green State (see chapter 3).
The envisioning of allonational formations—alternatives to the nation-state—in imaginative literature provides an important arena for debating and conceptualizing green alternatives to the modern corporate state. Such work precisely fulfills the action that Jung calls for when he states that “The reclamation of truth must come by way of planetary (or cosmopolitan) thinking which is no longer Eurocentric but the result of correlating laterally the multiple sociocultural life-worlds as the decentered sites of truth” (2002, 303). As I hope that I have shown by my various suggestions for future reading, we need also to undertake a fruitful lateral correlation of the insights, thought experiments, and representations of experience occurring in both philosophy and literature, in tandem and often synchronistically. And such lateral correlation, as exemplified by Hwa Yol Jung’s publications, precisely demonstrates what I mean by developing a transnational ecocritical theory.