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[89], chapter six Rick Bass’s Fiber as a Post-Pastoral Georgic In chapter 3 Muir’s preference for the essay was seen as the most appropriate form for his purposes, although he knew that books would also be needed. Of course, his essays emerged from letters and journals, just as his books emerged from his essays. Muir’s play with forms, and with discourses within those forms, resulted from his facing the challenge of mediating multiple ways of knowing place. His rejection of the conventional discourse of the professional scientists and his integration of several discourses to encompass a complex way of knowing while appealing to and influencing a popular readership were at the heart of his interventionist strategy on behalf of, first, the land he passionately loved, and later, the nation’s forest reserves. But his ultimate concern was for the future relationship between economic pressures, from, say, loggers, and the ability of the American people to find a healthy way to be at home in, and not just on, their land. In the preceding chapters of this book I argue that Muir has been inventive in his use of discourse and form in the conduct of what I have called a post-pastoral practice. This chapter considers a remarkably original short work by a contemporary writer whose agenda has much in common with the later Muir’s: how to use most effectively for political intervention the available modes of writing in the service of campaigning for a forested mountain landscape. I want to argue that Rick Bass’s little book Fiber constitutes nothing less than a new literary form—the post-pastoral georgic. I am not sure that I fully understand all of the twists and turns of Bass’s short text. Its final sentences in particular still leave me slightly confused in their puzzling shifts of tone. But this very device—sudden shifts of tone—has been the strength of a daring narrative, told by an unreliable narrator, that achieves what I have come to think of as a slightly flawed masterpiece. That it continues to make me think hard is a tribute to the triumph of art over criticism, of mystery over explanation, of the complexity of the text over any reductive 89 90 rick bass’s fiber [90], attempt to categorize it. Yet I still want to claim Fiber as a new literary form because it might help to demonstrate how this book is a turning point, in my view, away from the current cul-de-sac of American nature writing, of which Muir, in many ways, was a founder. By “cul-de-sac” I refer to an awestruck, earnest, and ultimately predictable discourse that lies behind the worst of American nature writing, as it does (and I write, of course, from a uk perspective) behind the weakest British writing about the countryside. Michael Cohen has recently published a critique of ecocriticism in which his reservations about “narrative scholarship” are really directed at a broad tendency in American nature writing to be sermonizing about “the kind of life worth living” in the manner of a religious testimonial to place (Cohen 2004, 22). Even more brutal has been Dana Phillips in his accusation that much American nature writing has actually been “writing about a response to nature” (Phillips 2003, 210) in a pious evocation of “mystical oneness.” His problem is that in throwing out the “mystical” he’s in danger of also losing the important search for connection that is often expressed as a yearning for “oneness.” In the final sentences of Fiber the discourse of complacent, cozy, fire-lit, indoor engagement with an environment’s urgent crisis seems suspect because it appears to evoke the discourse of escapist pastoral. Yet, for me, it is in the way that Fiber, as a whole, outflanks the pastoral that the originality of its achievement lies. In the United States, pastoral literature has an honorable tradition that the Thoreauvian critic Lawrence Buell has described as “counterinstitutional” (Buell 1995, 50) in its positive effects. Certainly Rick Bass’s writing has always featured the classic impulse of the European tradition of pastoral to retreat into nature and return with insights that have moral implications for a mostly urbanized society. The danger has always been that pastoral literature might sometimes fail to seek or achieve such redeeming insights and become Leo Marx’s “sentimental pastoral” discourse of rural escapism. As discussed in chapter 2, it was the American critic...

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