Chapter 9 Two readings
European ecojustice

In Europe a sustained concern with protecting the environment has often been associated with a simplistically conservative or sometimes nationalist politics, defending some place or way of life as an icon of a cultural identity or as an image of once traditional ways of life. ‘Green’ critics have accordingly also felt a need to highlight issues of justice in terms of the politics of nostalgia. Comparison between two recent arguments, one on an English novelist and one on a German novelist of the 1880s, shows a striking convergence of concerns.
Wilhelm Raabe's Pfister's Mill (1884) has been called Germany's first ‘eco-novel’.1 Its basic story is simple enough, that of an honest miller and later tavern keeper who is forced out of business by the effluent from a nearby sugar beet refinery. This first clogs up the mill-stream and later ruins the mill's second life as a picturesque tavern because of its pervasive stink. The miller fights a court case against the refinery, aided by the figure of Adam Asche, a chemist and tutor of the miller's son Ebert. The case is won, but the business is doomed anyway. Ironically, Asche later uses his scientific expertise to run a dry-cleaning business in Berlin, which also pollutes its local river. The main story is told in retrospect by Ebert, now a teacher and an inhabitant of Berlin, who has chosen to spend a summer holiday with his young wife at the mill, shortly before it is to be demolished and the land further developed. During the holiday, Ebert engages in both talk and writing that romantically celebrate and idealise the old place.
This short novel eschews suspense, any very striking plot or simple moral stance. It is not a green parable. The story seems partly based on cases of industrial pollution in the Duchy of Brunschweig, where Raaabe lived, and which would see the collapse of the local water supply not long after the novel appeared.2 Yet the tone is curiously undramatic and non-judgemental, certainly compared to contemporary novels of environmental outrage. Its distinctiveness is its subtle use of the device of the limited narrator, the rather ordinary and slightly shallow Eberhard (or Ebert) Pfister, son of the last miller. Ebert's account sometimes idealises the tavern as a paradise it could never actually have been. Raabe's novel becomes a sympathetic but anti-romantic staging of the cultural politics of nostalgia, especially as it related to the rapid industrialisation in Germany after 1870. The subtitle, Ein Sommerferienheft, ‘a summer holiday note book’, already tinges the story of the lost rural idyll with the escapism of the holiday-maker, like some modern-day tourists in ‘Hardy's Dorset’.
Wanning traces two strands in the novel. The first she calls the ‘Text as Medium’. This simply conveys the facts of the destruction of the local river system through industrialisation and pollution. The destruction of the mill marks the end of a traditional relation to nature, dooming a whole way of life. Raabe's novel could also be related to the way many controversies in environmental justice concern the iniquities of treating water as just another commodity or waste product rather than as communal value and resource.4 As in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), the mill is not just a means of economic support but a defining element of family identity. The illness that takes the elder Pfister seems partly psychosomatic, inseparable from the death of place.
Wanning's second strand of reading, ‘the text as [Ebert's] project’ (199), complicates any familiar reaffirmation of preindustrial conceptions of nature. Ebert's narrative is that of someone striving to make sense of and crystallise the significance of the lost mill of his childhood. Wanning traces how Ebert's narrative, despite itself, is that of someone who no longer really believes the image of the mill as a lost natural paradise. For one thing, that image, ostensibly defended, is also undermined, especially by the form of the narrating itself. This jumps between past and present in short sections, gradually moving towards recounting Ebert's life after the mill as a Latin teacher in Berlin, contented citizen and dependent of a now industrialised Germany. Ebert's inability in writing to connect his Arcadian rural ideal to any currently credible social or economic reality demonstrates one of Raabe's most powerful points: the transformation in Germany is necessarily also a change in the subjective, inner life of its inhabitants. Nature is in fact no longer credible as a site in which a human being can project an image of unalienated consciousness. That image is now only a ‘literary construction’.5 Wanning's phrase might also link an idealised nature to a character in the novel she does not mention, the aged romantic poet, Felix Lippoldes, once famous but now a drunkard who embarrasses others with his garbled performances. All Ebert too can do is offer various images without a coherent ordering. He asks repeatedly, ‘Where do all the images go?’ This strand of the novel denies the reader any simple moral stance on the mill's destruction. In any case, the idealised scenes of childhood that possess Ebert's memory are of the mill as a lively tavern and beer garden, already, that is, as a space of semi-rural escapism in the economy of the nearby town. In Ebert's failure cogently to defend the images of his childhood past, he begins to confront the inevitability of what his wife calls ‘our actual existence now on this earth’.6 A later passage in the book depicts pleasure boats moving on the polluted river Spree in Berlin as if nothing had happened to it.
Wanning sums up the conflict between the ‘text as medium’ and the ‘text as project’. The issue is not just an idyll lost, but a fatal compromising of its very credibility. The book's ‘landscape idylls, the obvious expression of this supposed harmony [of human and nature] contradict in their form what they think to present in their content’.7 The image of the mill in newly industrialised Germany offers an icon of a lost way of life, but the subtler, more insidious point is that change has also fatally undermined that icon's credibility as the mark of a social alternative. So the mill becomes, temporarily, a place of tourist fantasy or a ‘literary construction’ only. Wanning's point that Ebert's ideal can only now exist in a ‘psycho tope limited to the aesthetic realm’ questions the political efficacy of that romantic strand of ecocriticism that takes poems ‘as imaginary parks in which we may breathe an air that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated’ (Bate).8
Richard Kerridge's ‘Ecological Hardy’ is an essay in the Beyond Nature Writing anthology (126–42). As with Wanning on Raabe, one issue is the viability of icons of romantic nostalgia, especially their problematic status as commercial commodities, even among Thomas Hardy's own readership. Kerridge quotes the following passage from The Woodlanders (1887) on the characters of the rural workers Giles Winterbourne and Marty South:
From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces when brushing through them in the dark either could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough either could in like manner name its sort far off. They knew by glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay; and by the state of its upper twigs the stratum that has been reached by its roots.9
Kerridge's concern here is the narrator of this passage, whose attitude is also that of many of Hardy's mainly urban readers, then and since. ‘To this narrator, [Marty’s and Giles's] work, hard as it is, possesses the undividedness of mind and body, self and environment, that is the object of so much romantic longing’ (137). Kerridge's interest is the implicit opposition of rural character and disembodied urban spectator/reader – the reader stands outside the book, but Giles and Marty inhabit the woods. This issue in turn raises questions of environmental ethics and historical change, the growing penetration of the market economy into more areas of Wessex life. The novel's very tribute to Wessex culture can seem aligned with Hardy's general practice of ‘commodifying the scenes of his rural childhood for a mainly urban and middle-class readership’ (127). It is perhaps as if Ebert Pfister had found a publisher for his memories of the mill.
Building on Wanning and Kerridge here, one could suggest a broader reading of a whole strand of British literature since the eighteenth century. For a great many people, the social function of literature has been to provide a cultural space analogous to Pfister's mill. Ask in Britain about the immediate associations of the phrase ‘English Literature’ and many people will answer ‘being on holiday’. The primary association of a well-known writer is now with scenic places to visit, with no less than three buildings in the Lake District associated with Wordsworth alone. There has emerged what might be named the ‘heritage school’ of pseudo-criticism, the idea – to put it satirically – that no one can discuss a text who has not traipsed through its author's house and garden and had a drink at the local pub.
Literary culture has long been an active part of the syndrome of celebrating some element or site of traditional or preindustrial society in a mode yet complicit with its demise and commodification. A founding instance of the syndrome could well be Ossian, that influential and mostly fake late eighteenth-century poem pretending to be the product of an ancient Celtic bard.10 This lament for the Gaelic culture of the Highlands made a fortune for its author James Macpherson at the time of that culture's actual destruction and assimilation into growing commercial networks, including tourism. The textual idealisation of a way of life is also its conversion into a more fluidly symbolic commodity, ready to circulate in the markets of the society that has either destroyed or threatens the original. This is a crucial and recurrent syndrome of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, though surprisingly little studied.11 Kerridge reminds us how Hardy himself encouraged this ‘heritage’ reception. His General Preface of 1912 presents the Wessex novels as a whole in topographical/realist terms, bolstering the reality of Wessex with maps that match fictional places and names with the real counterparts.
Kerridge's concern, nevertheless, is to disassociate Hardy from any stance of simplistic or opportunistic nostalgia. He draws on Donna Haraway's critique of the supposed stance of neutral spectatorship in scientific work, a stance criticised for enacting fantasies of an impartial overview often belied by the actual cultural prejudices at work in science. A writer's stance too, Kerridge argues, must be sensitive to its own cultural situatedness, qualifying any claim to final authority. Kerridge argues that Hardy's idiosyncratic narrators are ‘situated’ in that sense. The novels deploy the familiar convention of the narrator as omniscient spectator, but they also highlight clashes of perspectives. Thus in The Return of the Native (1878), a passage about the figure of Clym Yeobright cutting the furze on Egdon Heath depicts, at the same time, both an educated man returned from Paris and ‘a brown spot in a midst of an expanse of olive-green gorse and nothing more’.12 Such jumps can have a meta-contextual dimension: to see the passions of human life as if from an astronomical distance. Kerridge also relates Hardy to Lawrence Buell’s advocacy of an ‘ecocentric vision’ that would seek ‘not only to assert the value of [non-human] perspectives but also somehow to accommodate them in the human sphere in “plot”’ (‘Ecological Hardy’, 135). Other critics have traced how The Woodlanders blends incongruously elements of Darwinism and Romanticism, of both nostalgia and its demystification.13 Such changes in perspective, Kerridge argues, form a kind of ‘narrative mobility…incompatible with a simply conservative attitude to change’ (137).
Kerridge celebrates the proliferation in Hardy of different ways of seeing the same things, affirming the loosely ‘ecological’ sense of interconnection and plurality this induces. His argument is a green version of the kind of postmodern reading of Hardy instantiated by Linda Shires on Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891):
At the narrative level…Hardy relies on multiplicity and incongruity. He adopts these strategies within a general structure of tragic and ironic ambiguity. In doing so, Hardy questions the very foundations of traditional representation and belief. He wants the reader to become conditioned into thinking simultaneously in terms that are multiple and even contradictory.14
In calling such a sense of multiple viewpoints ‘ecological’, Kerridge distances himself from the relativistic view that all perspectives are of equal value as cultural options. Their very plurality is, rather, an insight into the greater objective reality of the interconnections in which any one event or character is suspended.
Kerridge also counteracts the kind of rural heritage nostalgia associated with Hardy by taking up the novelist's multiplicity of vision to speculate upon the lifestyle of a hypothetical future Winterbourne, that is, a figure who would both work in the woods, be supported by the National Health Service, have access to the Internet and would not, as in the novel, find himself homeless because of a feudal property regulation. This image, however, must remain wistfully inaccessible without detailed and protracted political work of a kind Kerridge does not describe.
The most immediate impact of Wanning and Kerridge's arguments, however, may be their challenge to elements of the culture of environmentalists themselves. By not simplifying the issues in moralistic ways and by implicating the narrators and their readers in the stakes of environmental destruction, they resist what Morton calls the culture of the ‘beautiful soul’ in some green circles, that off-putting stance of righteous indignation and blame, blind to the depth of its own complicity in what is happening to the world.16