Simple-Minded Thoughts on Nature Writing

 Here's what I handed out in class today, sans typos:

In The Land of Little Rain, the narrator prowls along the edges of a secret that is never revealed.  This “secret” both authenticates the narrator and defines the limits of her search for knowledge.  Nature writing is not science writing.   Science writing, as the science columnist Natalie Angier phrased it in her introduction to The Best American Science Writing 2009, throws wide the door to the scientific enterprise:  “It gives you a sense entitlement.  You’ve met science, you’ve understood it, you’re ready to do it again.  Science becomes like music or art.  You may not be able to play an instrument or draw a straight line.  But you can trust your eyes and ears, and your hungry, inquiring mind.”   Nature writing, by contrast, opens the door an inch or two, not on the scientist’s work, but on nature itself, and then leaves it ajar, suggesting there are things we should want to know but also telling us that we certainly can’t and maybe won’t ever know.   Through that half-open door we see something that might heal us or kill us.  

 

Tules in California

Nature writers live close to swamps, quagmires, ponds, rivers, or springs.  They are voyeurs—suggesting that they want to “catch nature in the act,” they also know that no one has invited them to be there.  And while they indicate that anyone can join them, they really prefer to be alone, except when they retrospectively reflect on the experience:  classic American nature writing is predicated on the assumption that no one else has seen what the nature writer has seen and that in fact no one else really could:  not the same way, not in the same place, not under the same circumstances.   (Hence perhaps the nature writer’s paranoia about indigenous people and their allegedly privileged access to the truth—Caliban knows his island like no one else.  A more cheerful version of Caliban are the Mexicans of the utopian Las Uvas;  they drink, dance, and mate,  allowing us to “peek” in on their lives—a parody, really, of the life we cannot have because we are burdened with too much—eh—consciousness).  If science writing gives the reader a sense of entitlement, nature writing derives its justification—and whatever ecocritical potential it might have—from stripping the reader of whatever superiority he or she might have felt.

A key element of nature writing is the interplay between purposefulness and chance.  The nature writer's book must show elements of design (though sometimes such design is an external narrative frame--such as a journey or hike or, as in Thoreau and Cooper, the cycle of the seasons) and purposefulness (the influence of science or scientific writing), but it also must leave room for chance and surprise (an accidental discovery or encounter, a sudden insight or epiphany).  Texts in this genre are therefore--to borrow a phrase from Jessica—both willed and unwilled, although the latter quality might also have been willed (the extent to which this is obvious to the reader in part determines the quality of such writing).