Holistic Vision and Fictional Form in Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga

Holistic Vision and Fictional Form in Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga Richard F. Patteson Mississippi State University Since World War II, and increasingly during the past fifteen years, a significant alteration in human perspective has occurred, the effects of which are beginning to be felt in both politics and literature. This change in our way of perceiving the world has been variously defined. But all attempts at definition involve a recognition that man is part of, and dependent upon, an interconnected system greater than himself. Gregory Bateson, in his recent book Mind and Nature, sees this recognition as only the most recent manifestation of a deep-seated intuitive response to nature: "We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these ideas into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are."1 The relationship between man and nature, of course, has always been an object of human contemplation. But a "holistic and 'organic' view of nature" — forced upon us by quantum mechanics and relativity theory and expressed politically in the environmental movement — is a comparatively new development, and it has found its most striking literary articulation in the work of Peter Matthiessen.2 Matthiessen's position as both naturalist3 and novelist makes him an ideal exponent of the ecological awareness 1.Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979), p. 18. 2.The quotation is from Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (Boulder: Shambhala, 1975), p. 54. Both Capra and Matthiessen, in The Snow Leopard (New York: Bantam, 1979), pp. 63-66, discuss the similarities between the world view of oriental religions and that being developed by modern physics. Matthiessen has long been interested in oriental thought, an interest that has found its fullest and most personal expression in The Snow Leopard. Subsequent page references to The Snow Leopard are to the Bantam edition. Where necessary for clarity, I have used the abbreviation SL. 3.Matthiessen's credentials as an environmentalist are unimpeachable. In addition to his five novels, his books include Wildlife in America (New York: Viking, 1959); Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (New York: Viking, 1962); Oomingmak: The Expedition to the Musk Ox Island in the Richard F. Patteson71 that is gradually shaping our consciousness, and his novel Far Tortuga (1975) is his most ambitious attempt to cast the holistic vision in a fictional narrative. The casual reader opening Far Tortuga for the first time can readily see that the novel contains certain eccentricities: snatches of dialogue without the usual narrative transitions; brief, stark descriptive passages, again with a minimum degree of authorial presence; and white*spaces — many of them — lying between dialogue and description. These formal elements are crucial to the book's meaning and effect, but their function can be understood only in relation to deeper, less obvious structural patterns. The plot involves a series of dualities or oppositions grounded largely in conflict between a presumably idyllic past and an unacceptable present. The cast of characters — Caribbean turtlemen — divides along these lines; some long for "de back time," while others are content to dwell in the present or look forward to a more promising future. The turtlers' concerns are personal and political. They talk incessantly about days when turtle fishing was better, before tourism and American economic hegemony made turtling a vanishing way of life. But Matthiessen's own viewpoint is broader than this, and the novel is more than an indictment of human and environmental waste. Not until we look at the greater oppositions in the novel — those scarcely articulated by the characters themselves — do we see what Matthiessen is really about. The island of Far Tortuga, which may or may not have existed (tortuga in Spanish means "turtle"), comes to be identified with the Edenic past that figures so prominently in American literature. For Matthiessen, however, the significant event in the Eden story is not original sin so much as expulsion from the garden: man's separation from nature. The ultimate "back time" is the...