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Chapter Two: Naming
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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15 Chapter Two Naming “Must we study Roger [Tory] Peterson’s bird books in order to read literature?” I am tempted to reply: Yes, that would be a very good thing indeed, and not just for nonfiction but for fictive genres as well. – Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (97) [O]ne should never construct sentences with “the animal” as the subject. [Oskar] Heinroth used to interrupt such sentences with the mild and friendly interjection: “Are you referring to an amoeba or a chimpanzee?” – Konrad Lorenz, The Natural Science of the Human Species (260) Afocus on naming serves to recognize the empirical scientific paradigm that has dominated Western cultures since the Enlightenment. Carolus Linnaeus is a key figure both in the history of ecology—he was a botanist whose system of binomial naming, devised three centuries ago, continues to serve “the field ecologist as a generally satisfactory system of organizing ecological information”(Keller and Golley 33)—and in McKay’s avian poetics. Naming also enables a closer study of McKay’s metaphorical language—his naming and renaming in pursuit of precision and proximity —alongside a consideration of the paradoxical role of language as straightforward, communicative, denotative medium and as problematic, metaphorical, connotative medium. While such a discussion of the dual role language plays acknowledges differences between scientific and poetic writing, it also informs the ornithological desires of my title.When language breaks down in its attempts to name the world—as when a car breaks down or a computer’s hard drive fails—we often, according to McKay, “sense the enormous, unnameable wilderness beyond” the breakdown, “a wilderness we both long for and fear” (V 64). Like all desire, this species of longing 16 • Chapter Two requires the potential for unattainability in order to qualify as desire. The desire to attain knowledge of the world inheres in the human practice of naming. Naming simultaneously succeeds in providing common frames of reference for communities of like-minded people and fails, often, to describe or define satisfactorily what is named. Though neither scientists nor poets are capable of naming with complete accuracy, I argue that attention to species specificity and ecological accuracy—which reflects the desire for a common frame of reference, for creating a community of science and literature scholars—compels readers and critics to get closer to the birds about which McKay writes. Knowing the names for things does not replace other, more intimate, ways of knowing,1 nor does it constitute scientific knowing in and of itself. But knowing names “embeds uncommon courtesy and an alertness for the store of information in an inanimate source” (Ricou Salal 32). In the absence of (and/or alongside) experience, oral histories, and stories that name the world and its relations, science has become the largest, most accessible“store of information”we can look to. Challenges arise once ecocritics begin examining the ways in which such information is produced, disseminated, and interpreted. To continue naming in the face of our limitations is to grasp at specificity on the verge of inaccuracy: no name can express the totality of a thing. But naming can express relations between things named, and McKay often employs naming in his poetry to engage an ecological view that includes cultural as well as natural phenomena. In“Twinflower”(A 4–5), McKay provides a more concise version of Adam’s task reimagined than appears in the essay“The Bushtits’ Nest”(V 79–106). The moment sees Adam pause in the midst of fulfilling his father’s request of getting“some names / stuck on these critters” (4). The character of Adam resembles the McKavian speaker who names skeptically, who gets easily engrossed in the gestures of nonhuman beings. Recognizing the damaging set of cultural values inspired by historical divisions between pre- and post-lapsarian worlds, McKay postulates a pre-lapsarian world full of post-lapsarian anxieties. For McKay, labelling the world has always been an unsettling project.2 After recounting Adam’s thoughtful pause, McKay’s speaker in “Twinflower” walks “accompanied by [his] binoculars and field guides,”able to identify the flower when he sees it, which he does when he least expects to; suddenly,“there they are, and maybe have been / all along, covering the forest floor: a creeper, a shy / hoister of flags, a tiny lamp to read by, one / word at a time” (5). The litany of names the speaker attaches to the twinflower upon seeing it...