Green Modernism & the Ecocritical

JEFFREY MATHES MCCARTHY’S BOOK, an ecocritical study of novels by Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Mary Butts, appears in Palgrave Macmillan’s series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, edited by Ursula K. Heise, which defines its focus as “new research in the Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary dimension.” “Environmental Humanities” may itself be an unfamiliar term to readers, since it has not been long in use. In the United States, its centers are the University of Utah, a program of which McCarthy is the director, and the University of California system; in the United Kingdom, study in the interdisciplinary field is available at various universities, from Leeds to Oxford to Edinburgh, which hosts the Environmental Humanities Network. The international open-access journal Environmental Humanities is published by Duke University Press.

McCarthy’s rich knowledge of ecocriticism is clear, and he works to nuance those theories by bringing them into dialogue with several British novels produced during a time period whose crises of political, economic, and national identity McCarthy takes pains to delineate throughout the monograph. A subsection in the introduction traces the “fraught” history of ecocriticism, a term the author feels has lost some clarity. Nevertheless, it is underemployed by scholars of modernism: “Until recently,” he notes, “modernist studies has largely rebuffed the insights of ecocriticism thanks to the aesthetic armor of its autonomous, urban texts.” Although he certainly overemphasizes impressionism as “a hinge point for critics of modernism,” McCarthy usefully notes that the common places of action in modernist novels—the city, the psyche—do not lend themselves to a sustained analysis of nature or the autonomous external world, and he argues that attending to nature will necessarily expand our concept of modernist aesthetics, politics, and canon. One of McCarthy’s most valuable contributions for literary scholars is the clear positioning of his ecocritical approach as part of “the materialist turn” in modernist studies, the “insistence that there is an ontic realm—a level of existence that continues to be whether we think about it or not.” He helpfully connects ecocriticism to the object theory of thinkers such as Graham Harmon and Jane Bennett. McCarthy’s somewhat painstaking negotiation of other ecocritical approaches, such as deep ecology, is likely to be of higher interest to environmentalists than modernists.

Like much interdisciplinary work, McCarthy’s book attempts to be accessible to diverse audiences, and this admirable goal may lead to one of its most significant weaknesses, which is a tendency to over-populate his own argument with the words of others in the fields. His readings are interrupted, repeated, and delayed because of excessive quotation from literary and environmental critics; this positions the book explicitly in various intellectual conversations but disrupts its fresh engagement with the novels. The problem is exacerbated by his dividing each thirty-five to forty-page chapter into six or seven subsections with separate headings, without transition. The introduction, no doubt with the good intention of opening the research to various readers, unfortunately emerges more like a disjointed literature review.

Conrad gets the most sustained analysis in the book, with individual chapters on Heart of Darkness and the lesser-known Under Western Eyes. McCarthy asserts that Heart of Darkness “dramatizes modernity’s destructive alienation from the natural world against the backdrop of the Congo’s ecological collapse” under imperialism, traceable in the strange absence of elephants despite the ubiquity of ivory. He reads the novel as following “evolution’s implications away from European exceptionalism and toward the radical position of human identification with nature.” What is framed traditionally as Kurtz’s degeneration, his “going native,” is revised here as “going nature,” Kurtz’s association with “the wild” that reveals a provisional human identity reliant on its setting for meaning. In contrast to ecological destruction, this form of humanity’s engagement with nature is, McCarthy argues, finally empowering.

Under Western Eyes is a work McCarthy wishes to recover for readers by foregrounding the essential...