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Ecotone One: Field Marks
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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31 Poetry’s landscape is an ecotone where human and natural orders meet. – John Elder, Imagining the Earth (210) FIELD MARKS Knowing, not owning: being, not having, the rags and the blisters of knowledge we have: – Robert Bringhurst, “Gloria Credo Sanctus et Oreamnos Deorum” (154) During the following half century [between 1934 and 1990] the binocular and the spotting scope have replaced the shotgun. – Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to Western Birds (5) It has become a characteristic way for him to begin the day: black coffee and a newspaper. A quietly patient routine he hopes will translate effortlessly to time spent in the field: quietly patient routine as metaphor—no, not just metaphor, but strategy—for living every day in the world. As a lifelong student of literature, a scholar, he (the birdercritic ; let’s call him BC) understands that fieldwork inheres metaphorically in the process of close reading, a process distinct from the act of theorizing critical strategies of approach and analysis. The difference between close reading and theorizing is, he will admit if asked, a difference in degree and not in kind; he is all the more aware of this distinction for having years ago shifted his research focus from the postmodern implications of Canadian historiographic metafiction to the ecological implications of Canadian poetry and poetics. The latter interest has, almost by necessity, become a compulsion to resist categorizing himself as a particular kind ecotone one 32 • Ecotone One of scholar—to being categorized, labelled, lumped in with a group of like-minded academics—by insisting on the permeability of disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. Over time, BC has come to realize the boundaries more closely resemble, not permeable cell walls, but intertidal zones, riparian buffer strips, forest-clearcut edges: what ecologists call ecotones, areas where two ecosystems meet at their edges and create a third ecosystem with both shared and distinct characteristics. Literary criticism, then, resembles fieldwork. Northrop Frye understood fieldwork’s metaphorical power when he wrote the preface to his collection of “essays on the Canadian imagination,” The Bush Garden, in 1971. For Frye, who built a reputation writing about “world literature” and addressing “an international reading public,” the annual-review essays he wrote for The University of Toronto Quarterly during the 1950s were “an essential piece of ‘field work’ to be carried on while [he] was working out a comprehensive critical theory,” namely his Anatomy of Criticism (Bush xxviii). The poetry being written in Canada while Frye was teaching at the University of Toronto became a field through which Frye could, as it were, walk; his proximity to that field, his closeness to living poets and a specific, albeit geographically diverse, place—the relatively young political entity called Canada—inflected the drift of his critical works, not to mention his reputation, thereafter. BC likes to think that Canadian poetry is to Frye’s criticism as birds are to BC’s ecocriticism: “it is with human beings as it is with birds: the creative instinct has a great deal to do with the assertion of territorial rights” (Frye Bush xxi). Moreover, it is with the study of patterns in poetry as it is with the recognition of patterns in the field: “There is order in the universe, and birds are no exception. All the minutiae of variation (appearance, behavior, occurrence, etc.) fit into predictable patterns [which with experience] coalesce into a framework of knowledge” (Sibley 10). Margaret Atwood recapitulates both Frye’s avian metaphor and the field guide author’s emphasis on pattern recognition in her foundational and controversial Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1970), which “attempts one simple thing. It outlines a number of key patterns which [Atwood] hope[s] will function like the field markings in bird-books [such as beak shape, crown stripes, and throat patches]: they will help you distinguish this species from all others, Canadian literature from the other literatures with which it is often compared or confused” (19). Pattern recognition is an important step in identifying and then talking about birds and literature. As much as BC appreciates Frye’s and Atwood’s avian references, he recognizes in them the beginnings of a [44.206.248.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:27 GMT) Field Marks • 33 pattern that literary critics in Canada were quick to dismiss as simplistic and reductive. If he is going to accomplish anything useful with his research, he will have to avoid the pitfalls of thematic criticism without...