The Song of the Earth (review)

The Song of the Earth. By Jonathan Bate. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. xii + 335 pp.

"Ecology," Ariel Salleh observes, "reframes history." ¹ As Jonathan Bate demonstrates in The Song of the Earth, this is no less true in literary studies than it is in political and social history. Bate, best known for his work on Shakespeare and Romanticism, has emerged as Britain's preeminent proponent of "ecocriticism." ² His new book continues and deepens his ecocritical engagement with the literary traditions of the English-speaking world from Shakespeare to such contemporary poets as Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, and Les Murray. Valuably, Bate also ventures onto continental Europe, going back to Ovid's Metamorphoses and moving forward through a rereading of Rousseau to arrive, finally, at Heidegger and three central European writers in German with whom Heidegger's poetics are vitally connected: Hölderlin, Rilke, and Celan. Although Heidegger—along with his simple hut in the Black Forest and his complex alliance with one of the most barbarous political regimes of the twentieth century—enters the limelight only in the final chapter of Bate's book, he ghosts it from the start. For while Bate's hermeneutic is informed by social and environmental history and by evolutionary biology, ecology, and "chaos theory," it is also strongly phenomenological. ³ Moreover, it is above all to Heidegger that Bate owes the lineaments of what he here terms "ecopoesis." In drawing on Heidegger, Bate takes ecocriticism to a new level of theoretical sophistication, but he also has to revisit the vexed issue of the politics of ecology. ⁴ That he does so in such a courageous, clearheaded manner adds immeasurably to the significance of this eloquent, compelling call to attend to the "song of the earth," without forgetting the wrongs of history.

The term ecocriticism was coined by William Rueckert in 1978, but it was not until the 1990s that ecological perspectives began to be more widely articulated in literary studies, especially in the United States. ⁵ Today ecocriticism flourishes less as a theoretical approach than as an open field of inquiry into the relationship between "culture" and "nature." For Bate, the task of the ecocritic is to investigate the "place of creative imagining and writing in the complex set of relationships between humankind and environment, between mind and world, between thinking, being and dwelling" (72-73). To pursue this line of inquiry, it is necessary to overthrow what Michel Serres and Bruno Latour term the "modern Constitution," which sunders the social from the natural world. ⁶ In his first chapter Bate traces the emergence of this split by comparing the uses of the term culture in Austen and Hardy. Whereas in Austen culture could still be used with reference to England's mixed farmland, by the time of Hardy culture was what removed one from the land. In endeavoring to reconnect culture with nature, ecocritics should, in Bate's view, resist allying themselves with an atavistic politics of return to an idealized past. Rather, they should attempt to facilitate a change in consciousness, seeking in works of creative imagining and writing models of a different way of living on the earth.

As Bate's rereadings of familiar and not-so-familiar texts demonstrate, this means, for one thing, that literary historians can no longer confine themselves to the data of cultural, social, economic, and political life. Thus, for Bate, the key intertexts for Byron's apocalyptic vision in "Darkness" are not only biblical but meteorological. Among the conditions of possibility for the production of this text was the bad weather that Byron had experienced in the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva. That cold, wet summer was the first of three that followed the explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815, which caused the immediate deaths of about eighty thousand people, as well as failed harvests and food riots in Europe. Prompted by gray skies, Byron's poem...