Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands

The odd thing, in fact, about literature as an imagined territory is that there are apparently no natural limits and hence, it would seem, there are apparently no natural limits to the field of literary criticism.

Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunning ¹

I. Place and Text

Defining literature as imagined territory is an old habit among academic critics. Early mimetic theories of art distinguish world from text, with text neatly smoothing the earth’s tangle, and this distinction has long elevated human status: we think, therefore we are sovereign; we are conscious and imaginative, hence the world is our oyster to pluck, to crack, to discard, to remake. Granted dominion for two millennia, that brand of humanism has produced a world with fewer oysters, crowded freeways, global warming, and critics who say “there are apparently no natural limits to the field of literary criticism.” My purpose in this essay is to suggest that natural limits are inescapable, especially when writers use geographic metaphors or imagine physical places. I also argue that long-proclaimed distinctions between place and person, self and other, sustain the illusions known as love or reverence for nature. Nature does not need our love, but we surely need its life and health. If we accept the hard fact of natural limits, relations between terrain and imagination may turn less dominant, more respectful—bearing in mind that respect means to re-vision, or look again, which should be the purpose of critical effort.

My epigraph is from Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of Literary Studies, a book that raises “far-reaching questions about disciplinary mapping” (RTB 3), yet rarely examines its own geo-rhetoric. Scholars have long used spatial metaphors to fence the pastures of intellect: one occupies a domain, province, or field of knowledge, depending on rank and ambition. Today mapping covers a vast range of academic turf, staked with many claims about canon, period, and authorship. ² This “imagined territory” is ostensibly beyond natural limits because its basis “is not space or territory but procedure” (RTB 8). Yet procedure is spatial, since it is a series of steps, a way of performing, to move in a desired direction. If our existence is so firmly bounded by space and time, what can have no natural limits? Name any object of fantasy—a centaur, Little Nell, El Dorado—and we have fictions made of natural elements. In the view of Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, imagination is “a good horse to carry you over the ground—not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.” ³ Only those who know little of nature think imagination can surpass it. Researchers peer every day into mitochondria or galaxies, and glimpse a nature far stranger than any previous imagining.

One poet readily grasped this insight, without the benefit of radio telescopes. In 1862 Emily Dickinson sent Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an editor in Boston, some of her early poems. Baffled by their formal oddities, Higginson wrote a polite letter of praise and inquired about her background. Dickinson replied, “You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.” ⁴ Her enigmatic response mocks his query about companions, by which he meant the friends or mentors who shaped her writings. Her answer takes a new slant: my companions are not human. In the hills, sundown, and dog (a place, time, and creature) she finds associates who are “better than beings [humans], because they know, but do not tell.” This praise expresses no disregard for humans, only respect for nature’s prescience. Her silent, knowing companions “do not tell” because they have no words or numbers. Yet eloquence has many forms; hence the “noise in the pool at noon” excels her “piano,” the tunes she makes in verse. ⁵

The assertion that knowledge is not solely human has long sustained religion and philosophy. To believers, the divine or natural forces always know more, and even skeptics agree that...