Text and Trail: Ecocriticism, Textual Criticism, and William Bartram’s Travels

Long ago, Cheryll Glotfelty defined ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (xviii). Ecocriticism, she wrote, emphasizes “relationships between things . . . between human culture and the physical world” (xx). In recent years, Glen Love has promoted a more practical ecocriticism, which he describes as “a discourse that aims to test its ideas against the workings of physical reality” (7). Today, this faith in the physical world continues to fuel ecocritical scholarship, inspiring the same old song: we need a more empirical methodology, a new interdisciplinary approach. As a result, ecocritics often retreat into the refuge of science, a discipline that digs down to the bedrock, embraces the natural facts, and promises the catharsis of contact. In this article, I’d like to suggest that an empirical methodology has long been within reach of literary critics. We don’t need to walk across campus to find it. It often lives right at home in our English departments, holed up in an archive, or secluded in a basement office. It goes by many names—textual editing, book history, bibliography, textual criticism—and it conducts some practical fieldwork of its own, collecting data, checking facts, and going to the source of literary production.

This article has two parts. First, from a theoretical standpoint, I consider the relationship between ecocriticism and textual criticism. In the process, I expand on Michael Branch’s article “Saving All the Pieces” (2001), and his edition of early American nature writing, Reading the Roots (2004), both of which encourage ecocritics to recognize the value of textual editing. Branch defines textual editing as the scholarly work of discovering, recovering, and presenting previously unknown or unavailable documents. According to Branch, ecocritics have been slow to tackle editorial projects because we focus too narrowly on post-Thoreauvian nature writing, we overlook early and obscure texts, and we lack the requisite training. Branch envisions textual editing as a practical tool for broadening the canon of nature writing and legitimizing ecocritical discourse. Unlike Branch, I focus on the theoretical similarities between ecocriticism and textual editing, and I use the term textual criticism to refer more broadly to the arena of book history, bibliography, editorial procedure, and textual theory. Further, while Branch insists on the value of textual editing, he does not consider specific methodologies, whereas I propose a hybrid methodology that merges ecocritical reading practices with the physical act of textual editing. By grafting these approaches together, I move toward a theory of ecotextual criticism.

Second, I shift from theory to praxis by telling the story of a particular work, William Bartram’s Travels (1791), and the editorial project that inspired both the Naturalist’s Edition of 1958 and the rediscovery of the Bartram Trail. In the process, I consider what happens when a scientist enters the field of textual editing. During more than twenty years of fieldwork, the biologist Francis Harper carried Bartram’s book into the woods and wetlands, tracking down its plants and places, in order to establish a link between the text and the physical world. Harper studied the place as part of the archive—its pretext, context, and paratext—and the book became his field guide; it brought him back to the land, even as he brought the land into the textual apparatus.¹ Thus, Harper employed a practical, interdisciplinary methodology well before the invention of ecocriticism. To conclude, I argue that going to the source of literary production, physically tracking the events of a text, has long been a viable, promising, and necessary endeavor. Let us hope that it remains so.

From Black Riders to Green Trackers

Like ecocritics, textual critics—editors, bibliographers, and book historians—value the material world. They study the physical book, its printing and production, its transmission and dissemination. While ecocritics debate the relationship between text, author, and the physical world, textual critics ponder the relationship between text, author, and the physical document. Textual critics ask ecological questions; they identify and catalog specimens; they think about evolution. Their lexicon resembles ecocritical par-lance: production and reproduction, adaptation and evolution, index and appendix, genetic text. For textual critics, the book itself is a physical space; its production is ecological; it evolves; it rots and decays. But the book is also a human construct, a capitalist commodity, a material fetish. We often think of the book—especially a work of nature writing—as an ecotone, a marginal zone between author and environment, reader and place, culture and nature. Like ecocritics, textual critics are often accused of author worship; they belong to author societies; they go on pilgrimage to the source of authorial experience. Despite these similarities, few textual critics have extended the study of the book beyond the boundaries of human culture to consider its ecological context, its environmental history. Meanwhile, few ecocritics have conducted studies of the physical book.²

Lawrence Buell once came close to merging the fields, but few (if any) took notice. Today, readers of The Environmental Imagination (1995), enamored of its ecocritical gospel, often overlook its debt to textual studies. Yet Buell leans heavily on the material evolution of Walden, the seven stages of the revision process as outlined in J. Lyndon Shanley’s study of the physical manuscripts. Taking his cue from Shanley, Buell argues that authorship itself is an “ecological process” (173). Similarly, in “The Book of Nature and American Nature Writing” (1997), Barton Levi St. Armand observes that the physical book has roots in the natural world. Codex, the technical term for a bound volume, comes from the Latin for “tree trunk,” and liber, as in “library,” once referred to the inner bark of a tree. Both Buell and St. Armand have faith in books; they see books as links to the natural world. Others have objected to that faith. In The Practice of the Wild (1990), Gary Snyder writes: “Metaphors of ‘nature as books’ are not only inaccurate, they are pernicious. The world may be replete with signs, but it’s not a fixed text with archives of variora” (74–75). For Snyder, the physical book privileges Western culture and fails to represent the variability of the natural world. Similarly, in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), David Abram argues that writing technology—the book itself—has historically severed the link between nature and culture. “Transfixed by our technologies,” he says, “we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain” (267). In other words, the physical book shuts down direct experience; it breaks the bond between word and world, reader and place. Abram calls on nature writers to recover that bond, to write language back into the land.³

Similar debate has occurred in textual criticism. Since the 1980s, two principal camps have contended for dominance of the field, staging their own battle within the wider theory wars. On the one side, intended text theorists (or intentionalists) such as W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, and G. Thomas Tanselle have argued for an editorial approach that rescues authorial intent from the corruptions of printers and publishers. On the other side, social text theorists (or materialists) such as Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie have challenged the romantic notion of literary authorship as solitary genius, insisting instead on the collaborative and cultural act of textual production. These camps have generally adopted competing approaches to editorial procedure. While intentionalists favor editorial discretion in order to construct an eclectic text, materialists prefer the presentation of multiple and discrete versions of a work to approximate historical reality. At times, other approaches such as geneticism have attempted to complicate the debate, but the primary conflict has remained between the intentionalists and the materialists.⁴

Within this debate, the work of Jerome McGann has been especially influential. Over the years, in three major works—A Critique of Textual Criticism (1983), Black Riders (1993), and Radiant Textuality (2001)— McGann has challenged literary critics to discard the myth of solitary authorship and embrace instead a social concept of literary authority. The meaning of a work, McGann argues, depends largely on context and the bibliographical coding of the physical book. In other words, we should expand our vision of literary interpretation beyond the narrow scope of the word—the black riders on the page—to include the world as well: the material book, its visual rhetoric and social construction. Thus, McGann taps into a basic principle of poststructuralism, that literature is a product of the discursive network, but unlike Barthes and Foucault, McGann stresses the material nature of textuality. In Cheryl Glotfelty’s words, we might say that McGann “studies relationships between things . . . between human culture and the physical world” (xx). In this way, McGann alludes to the most basic principle of ecology, that everything is connected to everything else.

McGann and his disciples are not the only textual critics who express ecological insights. In recent years, John Bryant has called for a vision of the text as fluid, shifting through space and time, never static, like a living organism. In The Fluid Text (2002), Bryant’s major work of editorial theory, he defines a literary work as “a flow of energy” and a text as the “physical manifestation of the alternating currents of individual and society over time” (61). Again, such language echoes poststructuralist thought, but Bryant works hard to distance his theory from deconstructionist claims about textual indeterminacy and free play. Bryant contends that Derrida mistakenly discusses texts in negative terms, emphasizing instability, as if we could never hold in our hands a physical document. Meanwhile, says Bryant, Barthes and Foucault have gone too far in their skepticism about authorship. Authorship may be a social process that includes an individual author, the wider culture, editors, publishers, adapters, critics, readers, and the whole discursive network, but such collaboration does not rule out individual intention. Instead of envisioning the origin of a text as an author-function siphoning cultural ideology, Bryant imagines individual writers working within and against cultural filters, sometimes accepting collaborative input, sometimes rejecting it.

For Bryant, a fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. Bryant acknowledges that versions do not necessarily involve authorial decisions; they may result from collaboration, expurgation, abridgement, or even adaptation. Importantly, however, each distinct version must demonstrate a revision strategy or direction. The goal of fluid-text editing is to present these versions at the same time in a single venue, laying them one atop another (with critical commentary) in order to illuminate the writing process. Similarly, in Securing the Past (2009), Paul Eggert sets out to redefine the concept of a literary work. Unlike Bryant, however, Eggert takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of textuality. He considers several scenarios in art, architecture, and literature in which editors and curators have attempted to conserve, preserve, or restore particular authorial works—from Sister Carrie to the Sistine Chapel. Eggert envisions such works as fluid yet physical phenomena. A work is neither entirely an object created by an author nor a construct invented by society, but rather a process. Authors, editors, and audiences do not work upon the work, but rather within it; they enter into a relationship with it; they participate in it. Ultimately, Eggert promotes the concept of a “production-consumption spectrum,” wherein authorial intention, and meaning itself, changes shape depending on proximity to the writing process, the physical act. Thus, both Bryant and Eggert deal in concepts close to the heart of ecocriticism: fluidity, process, relationship, conservation, preservation, and restoration.

Let us return briefly to the objections raised earlier by Gary Snyder and David Abram. Given our insight into textual criticism, how might we respond to their anxiety about the physical book? Can we reconcile their interest in ecology, phenomenology, and spoken language with the work of textual criticism? I think we can. Imagine, for example, how a conversation might sound between Snyder, Abram, and the textual critics. What would they say to each other?

To begin, Snyder might share a few lines from The Practice of the Wild: “A text is information stored through time. The stratigraphy of rocks, layers of pollen in a swamp, the outward expanding circles in the trunk of a tree, can be seen as texts. The calligraphy of rivers winding back and forth over the land leaving layer upon layer of traces of previous riverbeds is a text” (71). “Yes,” McGann might respond, “that’s what I’ve been saying all along. We need to expand our concept of the text beyond the black riders on the page. But you’re going even further. In addition to bibliographical coding, you want us to think about ecological coding. Now that’s expansive!” Here, Paul Eggert might speak up: “You know, Gary, you’re right to emphasize time. In my book Securing the Past, I develop a diachronic theory of the text, suggesting that both agency and chronology contribute to the production of meaning. I argue that meaning evolves out of the relationship between a text and those who participate in it.” No doubt such a theory of participation would invite a response from Abram. “A living language is continually being made and remade,” he might observe. “Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topo-graphical matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience” (84). “Hmmm,” John Bryant might say, “that sounds a lot like my digital edition of Melville’s Typee.”

As the conversation progressed, Snyder and Abram would likely insist on the difference between spoken language, sensory experience, and written texts. Snyder might even renew his objection about the book of nature: “The overattachment to the bookish model travels along with the assumption that nothing of much interest happened before the beginning of written history” (74–75). Here, Bryant would offer a rebuttal: “Well, Gary, I can’t speak for nature, but a book is certainly not a fixed text. I prefer to think of it as a ‘flow of energy.’ Your buddy David would like that. In fact, you guys should read The Fluid Text. In the afterword, I even write about a landscape, the New York City skyline, and how it changed after 9/11, how it underwent a process of revision. I talk a lot about place in that chapter.” At this word, Snyder would lift his eyebrows and begin to stare off wistfully toward the west. “I’d also point out,” Eggert might say, “that distinctions between written, visual, and verbal works are too rigid and reductive. I see both textual editing and oral recitation as acts of restoration.” “After all,” Bryant would persist, “in The Practice of the Wild, you argued that place has ‘a kind of fluidity.’ You said place ‘passes through space and time.’ You called it a ‘palimpsest’ and a ‘mosaic.’ You said, ‘The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of the swirl of forces.’ Don’t we agree?” (29). “Fair enough,” Snyder might concede. “But we can’t read a place from an office or an archive. We’ve got to follow the text back into the land. We’ve got to move beyond the black riders and become green trackers.” At this directive, Bryant would remove his glasses and begin wiping them with his handkerchief. McGann would check his BlackBerry. Eggert would tie his shoes. Finally, they’d all join hands and head out to look at some petroglyphs. “This is what I meant,” Abram would conclude, “when I wrote that ‘the written word carries a pivotal magic.’ We can’t just burn the book, or put it all online. ‘Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land’” (273).

In the end, it appears that ecocritics and textual critics have some common ground. They ask similar questions and express similar anxieties. Many have hunkered down against the storm of poststructuralism and countered deconstruction by grounding their work in the physical world. Others have accepted the claims of theory and responded by searching for a basic compatibility between text, author, and the physical world. Just as textual critics like John Bryant and Paul Eggert imagine authorship surviving amid the discursive network, the ecocritic SueEllen Campbell posits a relationship between deep ecology and post-structuralism. “Theory is right,” Campbell argues, “that what we are depends on all kinds of influences outside ourselves, that we are part of vast networks, texts written by larger and stronger forces. But surely one of the most important of these forces is the rest of the natural world.” Campbell calls for a theory that recognizes “the role the land itself has played in what we might call the writing of our textuality” (134). Thus, both ecocritics and textual critics have worked to recover a correspondence between text and place, text and author, text and document. As Abram puts it, they write language back into the land. In what follows, I shift to consider a case in which a naturalist, Francis Harper, took up the written word of William Bartram and edited the text back into the trail.

Trailing the Text

Few travelers enter the backcountry without preparation and expectation, pretext and context. When William Bartram wandered through the American South on his epic botanical excursion from 1773 to 1776, he carried a heavy load of baggage. Physically, he lugged along the obligatory camping gear, a canvas tent, cooking pots, a fishing pole, and his trusty flintlock. He brought a trunk full of drawing supplies, several letters of introduction, and a copy of the Bible. Intellectually, he shouldered a ragbag of philosophy, an incipient Romanticism combining elements of deism, Quaker theology, and the aesthetic of the sublime. Emotionally, Bartram bore the burden of personal failure, both as a plantation owner and a son. A decade earlier, he had traveled the same trail with his father, the colonial botanist John Bartram, but now his father disapproved of his “wild notion” to tramp through a landscape increasingly hostile to colonial exploits. Nevertheless, on that first trip Bartram had learned the value of a field journal, and this time he began writing while still in the woods, drafting both personal notes and a professional report. On furlough from the backcountry, Bartram visited Charleston, where he consulted a dictionary and the twelfth edition of Linnaeus’s Systemae Naturae (1766–1768). He corrected his spelling and added Latin names to his manuscript to enhance its authority. Thus, Bartram filtered the trail through a textual medium.⁵

In January 1777, amid the commotion of the Revolution, Bartram returned north to Philadelphia, to his father’s home at Kingsessing on the banks of the Schuylkill River, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Fifteen years later, he worked his experiences into a book, a roving excursion narrative known in shorthand as the Travels, now a classic of American nature writing.⁶ Although Bartram’s original field journals have vanished, enough evidence remains to suggest that the Travels underwent an elaborate writing-and-revision process. As early as 1773, Bartram recorded observations that would later evolve into portions of the book. While still in Florida, he drafted a manuscript describing the Alachua Savanna, and before returning home, he wrote at least two field reports to his patron and employer, John Fothergill of London. In 1786, the publisher Enoch Story issued an advertisement seeking subscriptions for an early edition of the Travels, promising to include a catalog of trees and shrubs, but the edition never materialized. In the late 1780s, the botanist Benjamin Smith Barton encouraged Bartram to publish an edition abroad, but Bartram declined. Not until 1791 did the Philadelphia publishers Joseph James and Benjamin Johnson print the first official edition. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams all purchased copies, which were priced at two Spanish milled dollars, with less than a thousand printed and sold. The following decade, new editions appeared in London, Berlin, Vienna, Dublin, Haarlem, and Paris. No new American edition occurred until 1928, when Mark Van Doren wrote the introduction for the publisher Macy-Masius. Dover reprinted that edition in 1955, and Francis Harper’s Naturalist’s Edition appeared just three years later, in 1958, from Yale University Press.⁷

Bartram’s most recent biographer, Thomas Slaughter, describes the Travels as the culmination of a threefold textual evolution. First, Bartram wrote a series of field journals, now lost with the exception of his manuscript about the Alachua Savanna; he revised those field journals into his “Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773–1774: A Report to Dr. John Fothergill”; finally, he drafted the manuscript for the Travels by combining elements of the field journals and the “Report,” along with substantially new material, events rendered from memory, religious rhetoric, philosophical arguments, poetic descriptions, and aesthetic flourishes. Along the way, Bartram also wrote an account of the Creek and Cherokee Indians (1789) prefiguring Part 4 of the eventual Travels. Slaughter summarizes the revision process as follows:

The principal variations from the manuscript chapters to the book are an editing for style, grammar, spelling, syntax, and tone, a shortening of the most rhapsodic commentaries about landscape, and deletion of some prayerful references to God. The revisions are toward a more secular, less romantic text that he hoped would be a more authoritative one. The changes consistently aim for scientific credibility, greater precision in naming, measuring, and counting than his methods of observation actually supplied.

(190)

According to Slaughter, Bartram’s first draft tended toward the emotional and aesthetic rather than the scientific and empirical. Only later did he infuse his text with a more practical connection to the physical world. In other words, depending on the draft stage, his voice oscillated between that of a spiritual pilgrim and that of an expert naturalist.

Building on Slaughter’s observations, both Stephanie Volmer and Nancy Hoffman have conducted impressive textual studies of the Travels and its earlier incarnations. Hoffman’s dissertation reconstructs the Travels through a genetic text, and more recently (in William Bartram, the Search for Nature’s Design) she has presented a clear-text transcription of Bartram’s draft manuscript. Hoffman identifies two “avant texts” for the Travels: the “Report to Dr. Fothergill” and a collection of three notebook journals that constitute the earliest manuscript draft of the eventual book. More than the “Report” and the Travels, Hoffman argues, these journals exhibit a tone of nostalgia that suggests a deep desire to return to the moment of direct experience. Similarly, Volmer insists that Bartram’s “Report” is closer to the moment of experience, more raw and empirical than the Travels, and therefore more accurate. Because the “Report” functioned as a textual companion to the physical specimens Bartram shipped to London, it corresponds more closely to the material world. “Bartram’s mode of writing and Fothergill’s mode of reading,” says Volmer, “dramatize the dynamic between text and object that was fundamental to natural investigations—a dynamic that was subordinated with the published Travels which would have been read by many without the benefit of accompanying specimen sheets” (74). When Francis Harper assembled his edition of the Travels, he sought to reproduce those specimen sheets in his editorial apparatus, thus reviving the material nature of the earliest versions of the text.⁸

From the very beginning, readers of the Travels evaluated the text based on its capacity to fulfill their empirical expectations. Early American reviews often complained of its poetical flourishes, its “rapturous effusions” and “exclamatory admiration,” calling for more science and less art. Likewise, Bartram’s fellow naturalists praised the Travels for its botany but scoffed at its hyperbole, dismissing his alligators and demanding more precision, more accuracy, and more accountability to the physical world. Others gave Bartram the benefit of the doubt, setting out for the South, Travels in hand, to refute or confirm his discoveries. In the 1790s, the French botanist André Michaux retraced part of Bartram’s route through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. A decade later, two of Bartram’s closest friends, Alexander Wilson and William Baldwin, took separate excursions to areas described in the text. In 1815, the British naturalist Thomas Nuttall followed Bartram’s trail through Charleston, Savannah, and Augusta; in 1830 he paddled up the Altamaha and tramped across Georgia; later he republished selections from the Travels in his popular bird manual. In 1817, the Philadelphia naturalists William Maclure, Thomas Say, George Ord, and Titian Peale set out for the South with a copy of the Travels as their field guide. A year later, Say wrote home with an update: “Our plan now is to ascend as far as convenient the river St. Johns, pursuing pretty much the track of [William] Bartram my excellent & ingenious relative.” Finally, in 1832, John James Audubon carried a copy of the Travels up the Saint Johns River in Florida with the express purpose of refuting Bartram’s description of the wood ibis.⁹

A century later, Francis Harper took up the torch of empirical substantiation when he set forth to rediscover the entirety of Bartram’s trail through the South. Apparently, Harper became obsessed with the project because he considered Bartram a kindred spirit and a prototype for his own life as a wandering naturalist. Born in Massachusetts in 1886, Harper spent most of his childhood in Georgia, where he developed a passion for southern flora and fauna that inspired his decision to study biology in college. He attended graduate school at Cornell, eventually earning a Ph.D. in zoology in 1925. During World War I, Harper served as a rodent-control officer on the front lines in France. In 1917, as a junior member of a Cornell biological survey, he visited the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, a place to which he would return frequently on both ecological and ethnographic research trips. In the mid-1930s, Harper and his wife built a cabin in the Okefenokee and began to lobby for the creation of a wilderness refuge, a campaign that finally succeeded in 1937. Throughout his career, Harper worked for various organizations as a field biologist, traveling to the Arctic, the Adirondacks, Mount Katahdin, and the Okefenokee, where he collected specimens, shipping them back to the scientific community, just as Bartram had so long ago. Occasionally, Harper earned praise for his skill as a writer and an editor; at one point an official at the Smithsonian called him “the only American zoologist who knows how to write” (Norment 72). In the 1930s, while serving on the staff of Biological Abstracts and conducting research for the John Bartram Association in Philadelphia, Harper became friends with Arthur Newlin Leeds, a botanist at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Leeds recruited the younger Harper into a circle of Bartram enthusiasts, and thus began an editorial project of impressive scope and ambition.¹⁰

On three separate trips, Harper and Leeds retraced Bartram’s route along the Altamaha River in Georgia, to the Buffalo Lick, and up the Saint Marys River. Along the way, they mapped the trail, took photographs, and collected specimens to corroborate Bartram’s discoveries. When Leeds died in 1939, Harper continued the project in the company of other scientists. With the botanist E. Perot Walker, he paddled up the Saint Johns River in Florida to the site of Bartram’s infamous alligator encounter. With his older brother, the geologist Roland Harper, he explored Bartram’s route through western Florida and Alabama. By 1944, Harper had retraced hundreds of miles of the Bartram Trail and published annotated editions of both “John Bartram’s Diary” and William Bartram’s “Report to Dr. Fothergill.” While conducting such fieldwork, Harper developed a plea for textual and ecological preservation. Describing the Alachua Savanna in 1939, he lamented the “plague of commercialization” and the “ravages of the road-builders.” He continued: “The wolves and the deer are gone, and I saw none of Bartram’s great favorite, the sand-hill crane. . . . The surface of the Sink is now hidden by masses of that beautiful introduced pest, the water-hyacinth” (“Bartram Trail” 59–61). In response to these changes, Harper set to work on a new edition of Bartram’s Travels, an editorial act of recovery and restoration to counter the crisis of ecological loss.¹¹

First published in 1958, the Naturalist’s Edition attempts to reconstruct both text and trail as they existed in the eighteenth century. Harper uses the first edition of the Travels to establish his copy-text, but he does not present the text as a materialist might. Instead, he corrects punctuation, misspellings, and grammatical errors, but does not modernize the spelling. He includes a complete list of variants, emendations, and omissions, as well as bracketed numbers within the text to indicate the pagination of the first edition. In the editorial note, he describes his purpose with a penchant for scientific accuracy: “Bartram’s Travels is here republished in such form that it may be consulted, quoted, and cited with practically the same exactness as if it were the original edition” (vii). To that end, Harper reprints eight original plates, as well as facsimile images of the title page and dedication. The Naturalist’s Edition begins with a brief preface and historical introduction and concludes with a section of photographs, maps, and Bartram’s drawings. Most remarkably, however, Harper includes a massive editorial apparatus consisting of an 89-page commentary, a 240-page annotated index, and a 26-page bibliography—doubling the length of the physical book. In the preface, Harper declares his intention to serve a scientific audience:

The inadequacy of the previous dozen or so editions has been felt less by literary scholars than by devotees of the natural sciences. The former may enjoy the author’s descriptions of primitive nature without being unduly concerned with the detailed geography of the scenes portrayed or the correct nomenclature of the species mentioned; but the botanist and zoologist must have the current names of the plants and animals recorded and precise information on their distribution. . . . The geographer and the historian need to be informed of the routes pursued, on Indian traders and trading posts, on names and locations of streams and mountains, and on scores of incidental items in the colonial life of the Southeast; the ethnologist seeks authoritative knowledge of Indian village sites and tribal movements and characteristics. The aim of this naturalist’s edition of the Travels is to supply all these needs—and others—in adequate measure, as far as time and resources have permitted. (v)

To achieve this empirical mission, the commentary and annotated index painstakingly reconstruct Bartram’s ecological moment and geographic location, allowing the reader to experience the trail as an extension of the text.

Searching for correspondence between the text and the trail, Harper operates with two implicit assumptions: first, that a text can accurately represent the physical world, and second, that the Travels is one such text. Only with the requisite fieldwork, Harper suggests, can an editor establish this correspondence. In turn, he refutes Bartram’s critics by insisting that they lack the direct experience necessary to support their judgments. In the introduction to Bartram’s “Report to Dr. Fothergill,” for example, Harper presents his own experience as a foil to previous skepticism: “It is quite evident that not one of these critics had ever seen a wild Alligator bellow, and to that extent they lacked competence. After more than a century and a half, during which no zoological successor of Bartram seems to have placed on record a single word of direct visual observations on the bellowing, it was my good fortune to witness this performance on the borders of Okefinokee Swamp, and I was happy to realize that Bartram’s account was finally vindicated in every detail.” (128)

In the Naturalist’s Edition, Harper continues this effort of vindication in his editorial apparatus. As a scientist, he structures the commentary and annotated index like field reports, setting his own observations against the text in order to gauge the accuracy of Bartram’s descriptions and the ecological change occurring since the 1770s. At times, the commentary even reads like an excursion narrative, as when Harper tracks Bartram through the Nantahalas. “Late in a July afternoon,” writes Harper, hot on the trail, “I crossed an open glade on its lower course and began a steep ascent through the shady forest encompassing the little creek.” He continues: “Another quarter of a mile up the mountain and the third cascade . . . opens to view. This is obviously the ‘u[n]paralleled cascade’ . . . that so enraptured Bartram” (386–87). Thus, Harper demonstrates the value of an empirical methodology, employing direct experience and scientific analysis to bolster the credibility of his editorial project.

Despite its merit, however, Harper’s scientific approach to textual editing often overreaches, resulting in some ridiculous moments. He frantically pursues Bartram’s trail and occasionally panics when he cannot discover a particular location. When the text lacks scientific accuracy, Harper supplies it. When Bartram makes a mistake, Harper freaks out: “This is but one of several instances in the Travels where events are related out of their proper chronological sequence. Bartram suffered either from a faulty memory or from an indifference to dates—if not from both!” (346). Elsewhere, Harper repeatedly defends Bartram’s observations, even when dubious. Regarding the alligator attack, Harper writes, “There is every reason to believe that Alligators, before they had become cowed by firearms, were given to just such attacks on human beings as our author describes” (355). Likewise, Harper qualifies Bartram’s description of the rattlesnake: “It will be noted that Bartram offers no personal observations on the alleged power of snakes to fascinate their victims. This myth is still believed in by many poorly informed persons” (376). Ultimately, Harper resists any degree of uncertainty. Like the early naturalists, he demands accountability to biological reality, and like an ecocritic, he seeks to recover a fundamental relationship between the written word and the physical world.

In the end, the Naturalist’s Edition of Bartram’s Travels might serve as a working model for an ecocritical editorial procedure. A monumental achievement, it reveals the possibility of an interdisciplinary approach. Harper enhances his textual labor with scientific expertise, and his training in empirical fieldwork allows him to bridge the gap between Bartram’s text and the terrain of the trail. Yet ecocritical editors should beware of falling into Harper’s obsessively empirical traps. Trained in literary criticism, ecocritics ought to accept a certain degree of uncertainty even while searching for a correspondence between the word and the world. There will always be slippage, and part of the critical task is to investigate that slippage. Nevertheless, certain works seem to cry out for something more than a conventional editorial approach. How should textual editors present works of scientific significance like Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology (1808–29) and John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography (1831–39), or geographic excursion narratives like John Lawson’s New Voyage to Carolina (1709) and John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)? With their own interdisciplinary methodology, ecocritics should be prepared to tackle such textual projects and, perhaps, in time, produce more practical, place-based editions. Harper has blazed a trail; we should begin to follow it.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have worked to establish a relationship between ecocriticism and textual criticism by discussing both theoretical similarities and practical applications. In the process, I have attempted to address a fundamental anxiety within ecocritical discourse—that written texts (and especially textual theories) threaten to distance humans from the natural world. Highlighting Harper’s editorial project, I have suggested that certain books and certain ways of reading can lead us back to nature, back to the land. In recent years, ecocritics like John Elder and Ian Marshall have employed such a reading practice in their works of narrative scholarship, but others, like Michael Cohen and Dana Phillips, have treated their work as a form of lightweight literary journalism.¹² Not only does this critique enforce an artificial boundary between literature and criticism, it fails to recognize the value of empirical fieldwork and narrative presentation. By merging critical analysis with direct experience, narrative scholars practice what John Tallmadge calls “a natural history of reading.” According to Tallmadge, because ecocriticism embraces the primacy of the physical world, it demands a methodology that follows in the footsteps of the natural history tradition—a tradition that includes both William Bartram and Francis Harper.

Ecocritics have long recognized the importance of reading practices. How we read conditions how we act, and so does what we read. Certain books might promote a land ethic or an ecocentric philosophy, others might lead us into apocalyptic despair, and still others might foster a narcissistic egoism or a postmodern malaise. Ecocritics often debate which books to read, but rarely which editions. Yet more than literary critics— whose work rarely reaches the general public—textual editors possess the power to structure an audience’s reading experience. The Naturalist’s Edition of Bartram’s Travels represents an especially compelling example because Harper has produced an edition that readers across the disciplines will encounter. The very nature of the book makes a profound argument about the connection between the written word and the physical world. Ultimately, by going to the source of literary production, tracking down Bartram’s route through the South, Harper employs a methodology strikingly similar to narrative scholarship, and thus his editorial procedure maps a trail for ecocritics seeking to set forth on editorial excursions of their own.