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’.
An essay by
Berbeli Wanning focusses on that part of the history of the mill when it had been converted to a picturesque tavern, before
the stench from the effluent drove custom away. The place had thrived by setting itself off from the society on which it yet
depended, seeming to offer an aestheticised touchstone for supposedly ‘timeless’ preindustrial modes of life. For a time the
Pfisters lived off this idyll, in effect, marketing it: ‘the constructed idyll draws in people from the nearby town in search
of relaxation and conviviality’.
3 As if obeying an old cultural script, customers had been drawn to the mill/tavern as to some archetypal pastoral image. Eventually,
like some contemporary ‘cottage’ guest-house situated on the edge of a national park where a new road is planned, the tavern's
contradictory relation to its social context collapses as pollution of the river intensifies.
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.
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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.
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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.
In these readings of
Raabe and
Hardy the tensions at work in social and industrial modernisation are read as both producing and undermining forms of simplistic
nostalgia, even while a sense of real destruction and loss remains unplaced and unfixed. They are inarticulate wrongs still
seeking a language. Currently, if either Winterbourne or South were somehow to find themselves in a twenty-first-century Little
Hintock, one certainty is that they could not afford to live there. Madeleine Bunting writes:
The hijacking of the countryside by the middle class, who used both conservationist and environmentalist arguments to defend
their self-interest, is an untold story of the past century. They have used the planning system, and, latterly, the housing
market to create the kind of picture-book zones that cover large areas of Hampshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.
They have become gated communities in all but
name.
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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.
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