Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology

I. Literary Theory and the Truth of Ecology

In his classic 1975 essay “Travels in Hyperreality,” Umberto Eco asks a question still waiting for a good answer after twenty-five years: “Where does the truth of ecology lie?” ¹ The last word of this question can mean more than one thing; but its ambiguity is scarcely coincidental, and seems very much in the Eco spirit. That spirit was strangely moved by a visit to the San Diego Zoo, famous for its animal habitats designed in accord with the strictest ecological rectitude. Of course, the Zoo is both a living museum and a theme park, where the resident grizzly bear at the time of Eco’s visit was known not as Ursus horribilis but much less dauntingly as “Chester.” The San Diego Zoo thus did nothing to disperse the atmosphere of hyperreality through which Eco made his way during his American travels. In fact, it heightened that atmosphere, and so Eco had to wonder: if in one of the nation’s shrines to ecology the truth of ecology seems obscure, then where is that truth located? And how should we react when we find ecology present but made into a lie, as seems to be the case at the San Diego Zoo, given its apparently natural yet man-made labyrinths, and its conflicted allegiance to both science and the entertainment industry? Eco suggests that the double nature of the Zoo is a definitive instance of how our desire for the real can give rise to the hyperreal, to a culture in which imitations are the dominant form of reality. As his essay makes clear, the hyperreal is not just a bad idea or the product of a lapse in taste, but a full-blown cultural condition. You cannot escape the hyperreal by wishing things could be more authentic than they are. It is too substantial to be dealt with that way.

The paradox of the hyperreal is that while it is not quite real, neither is it unreal. This paradox is particularly frustrating with regard to the truth and the potential untruth of ecology. Discovering the truth of ecology is a lot more difficult than its popularizers have led us to believe, both because of the obscuring effects of hyperreality, and for two additional reasons as well: (1) Nature is complex; (2) Nature is thoroughly implicated in culture, and culture is thoroughly implicated in nature. By virtue of my own disciplinary training, the questions all this raises for me are these: what is the truth of ecology in so far as that truth is addressed by literature? How well does literature address that truth? These questions have begun to be asked in departments of English by ecocriticism, a new variety of critical thinking which opposes the blasé attitude toward the natural world predominant in literary studies. While I share their negative feelings about this blasé attitude, I doubt whether the ecocritics’ preferred counter to it—a renewal of realism, at least where nature is concerned—is all that powerful a response, based as it is on some dubious ideas about the nature of representation and the representation of nature. I would like, then, to add a third question to the ecocritical agenda, a question inspired by Umberto Eco: does the truth of ecology lie in literature?

The nature of representation is one of the chief concerns of literary theory, but the preponderance of theory is something else ecocritics dislike about current literary studies. Many of them do not want its help. This is unfortunate, in part because complaints about literary theory and its rumored excesses were a central feature of neoconservative rhetoric during the cultural debates of the 1980s and early 1990s. Although they have been sounding the alarm over theory in a new and a different register, ecocritics also run the risk of being labeled reactionary and getting lumped with the neoconservatives. They claim to be speaking, however, not on behalf of tradition, of which they are often critical, but on behalf of nature. And unlike 1980s and 1990s neoconservatives, they are not suspicious of theory...