New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott

1. Ecology, the New World, and the "American" Adam

What you see is what you get. annie dillard chapter 1 Ecology, the New World, and the “American” Adam The New World? Of course it wasn’t new, least of all to the estimated 54 million native inhabitants in the hemisphere, nor did it prove to be younger than the Old World, as some naturalists would theorize in the wake of 1492.1 These anachronisms have resulted in understandable uneasiness or downright displeasure with this term. Edmundo O’Gorman, for example, insists that the term “New World” merely invites European settlement: “The concept of a ‘new world’ . . . refers to an entity which is a world only in so far as it is capable of transforming itself into a replica of the ‘old’ world” (Invention 140). Newness is a ruse, temporarily holding forth as a difference so as to facilitate the remaking of the world into an image of the old and familiar. Such facile dismissals of this term—and 19 there have been many—may justifiably detect its taste of Eurocentrism, but no mention is ever made of the patent anthropocentrism inherent in naming such a massive geography “new.” In the early twenty-first century we are unique in our understanding of ecosystems and of our capacity to destroy them entire, so it seems that we can no longer afford to ignore the underlying biogeographical story of the New World encounter. The Western Hemisphere is not alone on the globe in containing an ancient and deep history, both natural and human, but what we now know of this story is largely due to the modern work of anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, geologists, historians, and botanists. Although the specifics of this collective story remain incomplete and conjectural, an awareness of an underlying biogeographical reality in the hemisphere is enough to challenge our assumptions about the smooth catenation of the human narrative in the Americas. Ecological understanding suggests that a profound rupture lies at the heart of the hemisphere’s natural history, a rupture that has divorced its modern human inhabitants from an awareness of their place in the physical world. The natural sciences have taken their stripes from literary critics and historians for their complicity in the history of colonialism and for the constructed nature of many of their “objective” findings, but it would be recklessly simpleminded to dismiss the lessons of natural science as mere constructions in the face of global environmental degradation. And given the profound distrust of science that is now emerging out of religious fundamentalism, it would seem even more important for literary criticism to take science more seriously. This is for many reasons, not the least of which is the paucity of memory of such deep time in modern life. Deep time is inconvenient to modern society, as many of the best environmental thinkers have amply demonstrated, but it is also quite simply overwhelming for the limited human imagination. While we fish for analogies to help us understand the length of something like a hundred million years, our understanding of deep geological and ecological processes has been made even more difficult; we live in a hemisphere whose modern historical memory is rarely more than five hundred years old due to the violent transplantation of its peoples, plants, and animals and the intensive expansion of European settlement. The capacity to imagine deep time was hard to come by for early settlers whose historical memory was a mere few thousand years old. And until 20 | Chapter One Amerigo Vespucci named the continent for what it was (i.e., a previously unknown world, new to the European mind, at least), this brief history was believed to have transpired entirely on the other half of the globe. That is to say, while the name “New World” indicates European ignorance of the Western Hemisphere, it more importantly acknowledges that ignorance. Vespucci’s declaration was a confession of limited knowledge and of a certain regard or awe in the face of what had not been anticipated. Although an insufficient account of a new reality, this was at least preferable to collapsing the New World into already familiar Old World models of, say, Columbus’s Asia. The hemisphere’s various differences in climate, flora, fauna, and human racial complexions challenged the authority of the Bible and its Adamic story of singular human origins from the same parents. “Adam” was a symbol, in this sense, of Europe’s attempt...