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What is it Not Like to be a Skylark? Apophatic Form in Nature Writing
- SubStance
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 3, 2021 (Issue 156)
- pp. 93-114
- 10.1353/sub.2021.0030
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This article reads twentieth-century Nature Writing as an inquiry into limits of narrative in confrontations with nonhuman animals. I argue that in their nonfiction accounts of nonhuman animals, J. A. Baker and Emma Louise Turner settle on forms that express what it is like to be a peregrine falcon or a skylark. Subsequently, however, readers are given to understand the degree to which the imagined identification falters. Far from aspiring to mimetic accounts of the environment, I approach these texts as sophisticated negotiations of differential form. From this point of view, narrative is a temporary effect set apart from alternative forms. By considering ‘disnarration’ as much as narration, the incompatibility of environmental themes and narrative form emerges as an affordance in its own right.