1. The Nothing That Is

There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.

—Thoreau, Cape Cod

Is it even possible to write about nature without anthropomorphizing or humanizing it? Can the ideal of “nature writing itself” (Cameron 47) be achieved, and can “things noncommittally reveal what they are” (Cameron 79)? This section examines philosophical and critical propositions on the attempt to outflank the tendency to sentimentalize nature, to reduce it to human terms and human uses.

A powerful critical convention now reigning in literary studies argues that all experience is so mediated by culture as to be merely cultural reflex; when nature speaks to us, it tells us what we already know and wish to hear. In a bit of ventriloquism, nature is Charlie McCarthy; his lips move and the culture is Edgar Bergen speaking through them. Whether nature or anything else can be experienced without cultural and psychological prefabrication, without bouncing our own images off it, installing our own desires in it, is the question. Most contemporary philosophy would read claims of authentic representation out of court, doubting the possibility of unmediated experience of anything. Without questioning that our cultural conditioning mediates our experiences, I would argue that it does not predictably determine them. To me it seems possible to have authentic contact with the world, the real, the natural. But it isn’t easy to communicate such experience. It takes time to absorb an inhuman communication, one that is wordless and thus requires rhetorical translation. Any account of reality must be mediated by a rhetorical frame and its accompanying conventions. As T. S. Eliot’s philosopher Sweeney put it, in a brilliant anticipation of poststructuralist thinking, “I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you” (83).

Nature, capital N, is especially hard to speak. As Raymond Williams demonstrates in Keywords, “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language” (184). The word encompasses a range of differing and sometimes incommensurable meanings, though Williams nicely sorts out the major ones. Moreover, in certain usages the word “nature” becomes a singular word that denotes multiple entities or qualities. Charles Darwin, Thoreau’s contemporary, supplies a concise illustration of the latter use: “It is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us” (92). Arguably, any use of the word “nature” is a personification moving toward an allegory, especially if the use assumes agency or essence: Nature doing, Nature being, and so forth. As will be seen, the works in this study do assign agency to nature, though sometimes hedged with irony. It may be that the concept of Nature is both necessary and necessarily ambiguous. There are similar problems with the concept of a monotheistic divinity. Paganism and especially animism manage diversity more naturally.

There are philosophical positions that allow for eruptions of authentic experience, epiphanies of reality, while not denying the problem of translating such experiences into language. These positions are negative dialectics, negative theology, and the aesthetic mode of the sublime. Negative dialectics was a philosophical method developed by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Dialectic, a philosophical method of arriving at something approximating truth by way of questioning, answering, and questioning the answers, is the method of the Platonic dialogues, though Plato stacked the deck in favor of Socrates. Adorno believed that any positive, that is affirmative, philosophy was subject to being co-opted by the reigning social and political hegemony, which had an inherent tendency to define as common sense whatever advantaged the power elite. Philosophical systems especially tended toward totalistic, even totalitarian, closure, limiting possibility and change.

In his seminal work Aesthetic Theory, Adorno applied his mode of questioning to conceptions of art and nature, attacking sentimental humanizations of nature that served as reassurances of bourgeois comfort. In keeping with the provisional, antisystematic nature of his thought, Adorno, like his forebear Nietzsche, wrote in an aphoristic, sometimes orphic, style. He accused idealist philosophy of “the desiccation of everything not totally...