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[N.B. Draft: Not for citation without permission ] Not for Publication or Quotation Draft of EAAASA Lecture – Final VersionTALKTALK 4/1-–1/00
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` The Pandering Landscape:
American On the the Separateness of Nature inSeparateness of Nature in AmericaIdeas of Nature ReconsideredOn the Illusory Separateness of American Nature[1]
“And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams.pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
--- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The idea of nature has always had a conspicuous place in the representation of American experience. For some three centuries, from the colonial era to the closing of the western frontier, the encounter of European settlers with wild nature was a defining theme of
American history, art, and literature. But by the 1920s most Americans were city dwellers, and as the natural world became a less immediate presence in their lives, the idea of nature acquired a disabling aura of nostalgia. Since the advent of the ecological crisis, however, the old idea -- recast in the scientifically and politically up-to-date guise of "the environment" -- has been charged with unwonted ideological significance. It is particularly fitting, then, for European practitioners of American studies scholarship to devote their meeting in the year 2000 to a reconsideration of American conceptions of nature. A few decades ago my subject – American ideas of nature – lacked many of the charged implications it has today. Until then, to be sure, it had continued to be an unavoidable if somewhat shopworn subject for historians and literary scholars in American studies. After all, the idea of nature had played an exceptionally influential role in American thought and expression. For some four centuries, from the era of exploration to the closing of the Western frontier, the encounter of European explorers, settlers, and emigrants with new world nature was a – probably the -- defining theme of American history, art, and literature. By the twentieth century, however, as the country became predominantly urban and industrial, the perceived influence of nature – both as a material entity and as an idea – markedly diminished. But then, with the advent of the ecological crisis, the whole subject of humanity’s relations with nature suddenly was charged –or perhaps I should say recharged -- with ideological significance and with seemingly unprecedented urgency.
It is particularly fitting, therefore, for a group of European Americanists to devote its meeting in the year 2000 to reassessing the American idea of nature.
But the topic, admittedly, is that task, it must be admited, isas daunting as it isas daunting as it is timely..
The idea of nature has always had a prominent role in American thought. Whether conceived as satanic or Edenic, wild or orderly, the shaping influence of American nature (the idea, the material entity) has long been taken for granted. But no longer. Since the advent of the ecological crisis a few decades ago, the prospect of nature 's disappearance -- or "death" -- or "end" -- has received more and more serious attention. That the sounding of this death knell coincided with the emergence of the environmental movement, and with an upswelling of quasi-religious, often cultist manifestions of reverence for Nature -- makes it all the more arresting. Indeed, it suggests that a reconsideration of the American idea of nature is in order. First, however, I must admit that the topic is as intimidating as it is timely. The very word "nature" is a notorious metaphysical and semantic trap. As used in common parlance nowadays, it is inherently ambiguous. W. We seldom can be sure whether it includes or excludes humanity. Raymond Williams observed that “nature” "nature" may well be the most complex word in the English language,[2] and when yoked with the ideologically freighted
The conveners of this conference hardly could have given us a more daunting task than to reassess the part played by the idea of nature in American history. Whether that assignment is wise or reckless remains to be seen, but its extreme difficulty is undeniable. The very word “nature” is a notorious semantic trap. As used in common parlance, it is inherently ambiguous. It is seldom clear whether “nature” refers to a realm independent – or inclusive – of humanity. Raymond Williams calls it the most complex word in the English language, and when its ambiguity is joined with the ideologically charged concept idea of American nationhood, as in the sly epithet Perry Miller's sly epithet, applied to a self-conception of 19th-century American society --'s sly phrase, as in Perry Miller’s sly epithet, “Nature’s Nation,,,”[3] -- its complexity is compounded by chauvinism. Cthe likelihood of vagueness or incoherence is compounded. Contemplating the nature of nature inontemplating the nature of American nature has America has led some historians -- of whom many scholars, of whom Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the "frontier theory" of American history, is the exemplar -- probably is the most illustrious, to embrace the dubious notion of " fall into one or another version of the heresy of American exceptionalism." And for understandable reasons. good reason. However wary of that vainglorious idea we that seductive notionmay be we , may be, it is foolish to is hard to deny that at one time American nature really was -- and in some waysto some extent still is has remained in some ways has remained -- exceptional. that when the idea of nature – nonhuman nature—in North America first impressed itself on the minds of Europeans, it unquestionably was exceptional. It was exceptionalIt was exceptional in its immensity, its spectacular beauty, its promise of incalculable wealth, its accessibility to European settlers from overseas, , and it was exceptional, above all, in the degreeextent of its undernderdevelopment or, in a word, its wildness. At first American nature struck most Europeans as wilderness, pure and simple. Under the circumstances, it made sense to call 19th-century America "Nature's Nation."
Th e phrase “hideous wilderness” encapsulates the early settlers’ awe at the prospect of an indeterminate period of living in the shadow of—and in dangerously unstable relations with – the immense, resistant, threatening, seductive, fertile, and provocatively unfathomable domain of biophysical nature. It is not far-fetched, under the circumstances, to call America “Nature’s Nation.”
It would be hard to find a more compelling tribute to the special role of the idea of nature in forming
One of the most One of the mtributestributesI can think of no more compelling role of nature part played by the idea of nature tribute to the decisive role of the idea of nature in a distinctive American mentality than shaping the outlook of Americans is is than Nick Carraway’s Nick Carraway's famous vision at the end of poignant lament at the end of The Great Gatsby. By now, alas, it may be too famous. It so often has been quoted out of context, and it has been subjected to so much highflown exegesis, that its familiarity as a rhetorical set piece deflects attention from its plain meaning. But its efficacy as the novel's coda derives from a simple but singularly cogent historical insight. To appreciate that fact it may help, I think, to know something about the way Fitzgerald himself came to appreciate the full explanatory power of the vision he had attributed to his narrator. It did not occur to him until a critical stage in the composition of the novel late in the summer of 1924, though we know that he initially had composed the passage -- a substantial part of it at least, including the key sentences I use as my epigraph -- as the conclusion of the opening chapter he had written several months earlier.[4] There it served chiefly to convey Nick's first middle-of-the-night impression of his next door neighbor, a "Mr. Gatsby," whom he has not yet met but takes to be the shadowy figure he sees standing on the lawn next door, head thrown back, staring upward at the stars. It is this affecting sight that touches off the first version of Nick's historical revery beginning: "...and as the moon rose higher..."
Two or three months later, Fitzgerald came to the end of the first full draft of the handwritten manuscript. He had written all that he needed to write about the events of the hot New York summer of 1922 and their gory climax -- all, that is, but the conclusion. Gatsby was dead and buried, Nick had had that last unsettling talk with Tom Buchanan, and his trunks were packed for the return trip to the mid-West. But to have stopped there, with an ending suited to a merely circumstantial, localized, 1920s account of Gatsby's rise and fall, was of course out of the question. It was then, almost certainly, that Fitzgerald decided to transfer the crucial passage -- copying it almost verbatim -- from the first to the last chapter. Only with all of Gatsby's life in view had the latent meaning of Nick's retrospective vision become evident. Now Fitzgerald recognized that Gatsby's illusory conception of Daisy was an instance of an enduring American propensity of mind.
Thus Nick, looking out across Long Island Sound as the moon rises and the "inessential houses" vanish from view, imagines how that scene first struck the eyes of Henry Hudson's sailors in 1607. In his fanciful account, they saw no houses, no people, nor any other sign of a human presence. For a transitory moment, America consisted of nothing but nature -- pure, unmodified, nonhuman nature. The sight of that virginal terrain, Nick surmises -- its beauty and its promise of incomparable wealth -- filled the excited sailors with wonder and desire. It summoned hallucinatory erotic images, the landscape mutating into the body of a recumbent woman.
After Fitzgerald had copied the sentences he would delete from Chapter I and insert on the last page of the novel, he elucidated Nick's ideas about the origin of Gatsby's suicidal illusions by adding this:
admittedly, however, thethe historical historical insight embodied in import of deservedly singular famou has been made almost inaccessible is obscured critical misuse and over-its Like any famous passage that has been repeatedly quoted out of context, and made the subject of many It so frequently has been quoted out of context, or made the subject of explications commentary it has come to seem irremediably hackneyed -- almost impossible to read without the many readers think of it as an sment invariably provoked bys rhetorically inflated set pieces. ( I think of the sound bite of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech ingly inflated rhetorical set p Consider the literary circumstances. Fitzgerald is making his final revisions. He has one last chance to compose a meaningful conclusion for the story of Jay Gatsby’s rise and fall. He has written all that needs to be written about the actual events of the hot New York summer of 1922 and their gory climax. Yet that merely circumstantial, localized, twentieth-century account evidently struck him as inconclusive. It did not adequately explain Gatsby’s enigmatic behavior. It did not locate his life in a more ample historical setting, nor did it invest it with anything like a universal significance. At this point Fitzgerald makes the unusual decision that lifts his jazz age romance to another level, and one that incidentally has endeared him to students of the American past: he improbably endows his narrator with an historical imagination of singular reach and acuity. He decides to use Nick’s vision of the New World landscape, a passage he originally had placed at the end of the first chapter, and had later relocated at a midpoint in the narrative, as the conclusion of the novel. (As the manuscript at Princeton invitest us to infer, Fitzgerald kept rediscovering the latent meaning of the passage at successive stages in the novel’s composition, and it was only at the final stage that he fully grasped its unmatched explanatory power.) It made Gatsby’s self-destructive illusion an example of a widely shared American propensity of mind – one with a history traceable to the moment when arriving Europeans first caught sight of the fresh green landscape of North America.
Looking across Long Island Sound as the moon rises and the trees and the “inessential houses” vanish from view, Nick Carraway imagines how that terrain first struck the eyes of Henry Hudson’s crew when they first saw it in 1607. In Fitzgerald’s fanciful account, they saw no houses, no people, nor any other signs of humanity’s presence. For a transitory enchanted moment, America seemed to consist of nothing but nature – pure, unmodified nonhuman nature. The sight of that virginal landscape, he surmises – its beauty and its promise of incomparable wealth – filled the excited sailors with wonder and desire. It summoned hallucinatory erotic images. The landscape seemed to mutateAnd as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
into the body of a recumbant woman. In this recounting, Nick now establishes a striking analogy between the two epiphanies -- the one that Jay Gatsby experienced when he first met -- and fell in love with -- Daisy, and the one the Dutch sailors had experienced four centuries before. It was an epiphany not unlike the one Jay Gatsby would experience some three centuries later, when he first saw – and fell in love with—Daisy Buchanan. Each conjures an illusory image Each epiphany had as its object an illusory image of natural beauty -- an image , but it is a beauty worthy, – in its capacity for deceit, deceitful efficacy—of a panderer, literally one who or a pimp, one who ministers to base passions. Judging by the behavior of Fitzgerald's cast of characters,, thus each epiphany haddeplorable – not to say fatal – consequences. As the behavior of Fitzgerald’s characters attest, the base passions s to which the American landscape chiefly pandered were chiefly pandered were greed and lust. But by virtue of its illusory character its presumed emptiness-- —ththe e seeming absence, as Nick Carraway notes, of humanity and its works people and “inessential houses-- ”—it it also pandered to the seductive idea of identifying America with nature itself. It is an idea, namely, the identification of America with naturenature conceived as a a separate, virtually pristine, nonhuman entity, and – a potentially the potential all-purpose Other. In the end this audacious image of a four-hundred-year-trajectory of the diminishing scope and power of new world nature completes Fitzgerald's transformation of his jazz age romance into a fable of American moral fallibility.
Nick Carraway's lament anticipates those scholarly announcements of the demise of nature that have become commonplace in recent years.
Fitzgerald’s audacious figure, historical conceit, an historical trajectory of images of nature that beginnings with the “old island that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes” and culminatinges with Jay Gatsby’s fatal fixation on Daisy and and the green light, prefigures a ebbingdecline in the scope and power – the intellectual substance -- of American the ideas of nature in America over three centuries. the course of the transformation of landscape landscape . (Landscape images surely are America’s favorite icons of nature.) . Where else in literature landscape images the transformation of landscape --probably our most popular icon of nature -- like comparable historical has a writer invested an image of landscape – nature’s chief icon—with comparable importance? Beginning at a time when America was widely perceived as consisting only of nature—nothing but nature--–—weNick Carraway’s lament we can traces the idea’s continuing if intermittent loss of meaning and power to pervasive intensifying late-impending eclipse doom its virtual disappearance in the final decades of the twentieth century. By now, indeed, scholarly announcements of the demise of nature – as a material entity and as an idea – have become commonplace. Indeed, by now (the year 2000), scholarly announcements of nature’s demise have become commonplace. Thus Fredric Jameson, a leading exponent of postmodern theory, regards believes doctrine, doctrine, impliesargues in an influential 1984 essay, that nature’s disappearance was a salient precondition for the emergence of the postmodern thoughtworld view.thought. “Postmodernism is what you have,” he writes in an influential 1984 essay, “when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”[5] Caroline Merchant, also has suggested that the idea of nature is moribund,contends that the idea of nature has become moribund, but she argues – in The Death of Nature (1980) -- that the authentic, biologically-rooted concept of organic nature actually washad beeneffectively supplanted – though perhaps only temporarily – by the mechanistic, Newtonian-Cartesian philosophy that accompanied came in with introduced by world view that came in with the 17th-c great 17th-century scientific revolution.[6] Among the many recent obituaries for nature, however, the most telling, I think, revealing to my mind is Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989). He arguesthinks that nature came to an end, both as a discrete biophysical entity and as a reliable meaningful concept, when the earth’s atmospheric envelope recently was penetrated -- d—and its filtering capacities damaged --—b by greenhouse gases and other manufactured chemicals. By now, he plausibly suggestsargues, humanity’s manufactured artifacts have contaminated all of Earth’s space, so that no wholly unadulterated segment of nonhuman nature – no parcel of true “wilderness" -- ”—any longer exists on the planet. “We have killed off nature,” he Mc Kibben writes, “-- —that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society.”[7][My emphasis.]