Natural Environments in Narrative Contexts: Cross-Pollinating Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory

Natural Environments in Narrative Contexts: Cross-PollinatingEcocriticism and Narrative Theory

Markku Lehtimäki

StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, Volume 5, 2013, pp. 119-141(Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

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Natural Environments in Narrative ContextsCross- Pollinating Ecocriticism and Narrative Th eory

Markku Lehtimäki

Narratology has in recent years become a context- oriented, functional, interpretative, evaluative, and dynamic mode of inquiry into narratives as part of hu-man life. At the same time, its focus has shift ed from canonical literature to forms of storytelling across a variety of modes, genres, and media. Despite these recent developments, the narratological mainstream still tends to foreground fi ctional minds and imagi-nary storyworlds. In this article I suggest how en-gaging with ecocritical perspectives can broaden the scope of narrative inquiry, not only by suggesting the relevance of environmental issues for research on fi c-tional and other narratives but also by highlighting the ecocritical signifi cance of tools developed by scholars of narrative— tools that can be used to explore how cultural practices pertain to the natural ecologies with which they are interwoven.

storyworlds volume 5 2013120

Interestingly, in her infl uential book Towards a “Natural” Narratol-ogy (1996), Monika Fludernik characterizes fi ctional accounts of envi-ronments or ecologies as non- natural, since those accounts denaturalize what Fludernik terms the natural frames of storytelling, which rely in turn on human experientiality. Yet ecocriticism aff ords new perspec-tives on fi ctional as well as nonfi ctional ecologies; working to decenter human frames of reference, ecocritical perspectives insist on and aim to explore the interconnections between textual practices and the larger physical world. In fact, ecocriticism is oft en too preoccupied with the domain of nature to linger on the specifi c aff ordances that fi ctional nar-ratives provide when it comes to imagining and situating oneself within suprahuman ecologies.

In this article, using Barbara Kingsolver’s 2009 novel Th e Lacuna as a primary case study, I outline strategies for integrating narratological and ecocritical research, with a view to promoting more cross- fertilization between these fi elds. In turn, in developing an approach to the novel that combines narratological and ecocritical insights, I leverage recent functional and contextualist accounts of narrative itself. Kingsolver’s novel tells a story of a young man’s adventures and experiences as he journeys from the watery worlds surrounding a coastal island in Mexi-co to the mass- media- fi ltered realities of Cold War America. As part of my inquiry into the reciprocal relationship between conceptions of na-ture and modes of storytelling, I will focus on the interaction of the hu-man mind with the physical world as it is fi gured in Kingsolver’s novel. As I go on to discuss, the novel suggests that human beings are no more removed from nature when they experience urban cityscapes than they are wholly immersed in nature when they dive into undersea caves.1

To capture these aspects of Kingsolver’s text, however, I must revisit some of the grounding assumptions of narrative theory itself. Narratol-ogy in its structuralist phase focused on fi ctional worlds as autonomous entities, thus severing their links to the pragmatics of writing and read-ing literature in real- world contexts. Richard Walsh, one of the foremost advocates of a pragmatic view of fi ction, argues by contrast that “read-ers cannot be content merely to construct fi ctional worlds, as if this in itself were endlessly satisfying; they must also be concerned to evaluate them, to bring them into relation with the larger context or their own

Lehtimäki: Natural Environments in Narrative Contexts 121

experience and understanding” (2007: 43). David Herman similarly draws attention to the role of narratives in the wider discursive context: “narratives do not merely evoke worlds but also intervene in a fi eld of discourses, a range of representational strategies, a constellation of ways of seeing— and sometimes a set of competing narratives” (Herman et al. 2012: 17). Along similar lines, Meir Sternberg (2010) has objected to “objectivist paradigms” in narratology and proposed to replace such paradigms with a functionalist approach. Sternberg suggests that the prevailing humanist and anthropomorphic defi nitions of narrativity are too limited, and he consequently speaks of the “restrictive anthropocen-tric bias” in recent narrative theories (646). Sternberg further suggests that the naturalness of narrativity, “ultimately grounded in the ongo-ing survival value of observing, plotting, telling, foretelling, inferring event lines,” should be contrasted with Fludernik’s “natural” narratol-ogy, “where ‘nature’ is itself already culture- bound” (646). Indeed, Flud-ernik (1996) argues that “the natural [. . .] corresponds to the human” (19); elsewhere she asks: “what is more ‘natural’ than spontaneous con-versational narrative?” (2012: 365). As Sternberg’s discussion of “natu-ralness” implies, however, investigating the relationship between natu-ral environments and narrative practices can ultimately lead us back to broader narratological questions concerning the nature of narrative— that is, questions concerning the pragmatic and cognitive signifi cance of narrative in culture, whether viewed from a diachronic, evolution-ary perspective or from a synchronic perspective that compares the role of narrative sense making across diff erent cultural contexts. As I go on to discuss, Kingsolver’s Th e Lacuna underscores the relevance of these questions, dramatizing not only how narratives aff ord access to the natural world but also how storytelling practices themselves fi nd their place in broader ecologies of action and interaction.

My next section explores how recent developments in ecocriticism and narratology present opportunities but also challenges when it comes to bringing these two domains of inquiry into closer dialogue. I then turn to a more detailed examination of my case study, exploring the storyworld of Th e Lacuna as well as its textual construction. I aim to show that despite Kingsolver’s reputation as an “ecological” writer, ul-timately her novel is as much about human nature and culture as it is about the nonhuman world.


Ecocriticism and Narratology: Toward a Cross- Fertilization

Cheryll Glotfelty (1996) defi nes ecocriticism as “the study of the rela-tionship between literature and the physical environment”; more spe-cifi cally, it is “an earth- centered approach to literary studies” (xviii). For his part, in a classic study of ecocriticism Lawrence Buell (1995) sug-gests that a focus on what he describes as the environmental imagina-tion will ultimately bring about a change in what we consider to be the basic tenets of literary theory (2, 3), such that issues of character, plot, and point of view come to be superseded by the way texts relate to the broader natural ecologies in which their creators and interpreters par-ticipate. Dominic Head (1998), by contrast, argues that narrative fi ction remains peculiarly resistant to any sort of ecocritical evacuation of con-cepts such as character and plot (32). As suggested by Head’s discussion of the intertextual and metafi ctional strategies used in J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life and Times of Michael K, it is diffi cult to imagine a novel without human action and human consciousness, and in most novels the theme of nature and environment remains linked to the questions of human life and human society. Th e important issue, for Head, is wheth-er or not the novel can be a useful vehicle for generating green ideas.

Barbara Kingsolver is a writer who explicitly focuses on ecological issues, opening up in her fi ctional and nonfi ctional texts beautiful vis-tas of the natural world and at the same time drawing attention to hu-man culture and technology, which threaten to dominate, pollute, and destroy that world. According to one apt description, Kingsolver writes semi- theoretical fi ction with two basic themes: “[A]n appreciation of the natural world that not only celebrates its nurturing beauty but also explores it as a biological system, and an appreciation of human diversity that considers how people of diff erent backgrounds and per-spectives can learn from each other” (Leder 2010: 1). Similarly, Scott Slovic (2008) highlights the ecological themes in Kingsolver’s texts, us-ing them as examples of “environmental writing” that we humans need “in order to live well and sustainably on the planet” (3– 5, 93). For these commentators, Kingsolver’s poetic practice can be placed on a par with ecocritical theory, according to which reading literature must not be a


goal in itself but should lead to engagement, commitment, responsibil-ity, and action in the real world.2

For example, in Th e Lacuna the arrival of an American called Mr. Produce Cash eventually leads the novel’s young protagonist to real-ize the harsh realities of colonialism and capitalism and their eff ects on his lifeworld. In sections like these, we hear the rhetorical voice of the environmentally interested author fi ltered through the protagonist’s perception:

Th e oil men said the sooner the Mexican oil industry collapses, the better, so they can take it over and make it run straight. One told his theory about why America is forward and Mexico is backward: when the English arrived in the New World, they saw no good use for Indians, and killed them. But the Spaniards discovered a native populace long accustomed to serving masters (Azteca), so the empire yoked these willing servants to its plows to create New Spain. He said that was their mistake, allowing native blood to mingle with their own to make a contaminated race. (79)

Passages such as this one underscore the relevance of the political and referential interpretations— for instance, interpretations combining postcolonial theory and ecocriticism— that have become increasingly prominent in Kingsolver scholarship (see Narduzzi 2008; Leder 2009; Meire 2010). But here a key question remains to be resolved: how can a focus on Kingsolver’s exploration of ecological issues be complemented with a closer look at narrative designs by means of which she engages with those issues in the fi rst place?

Here a question formulated by Buell (1995)— “Must literature always lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?” (11)— provides a useful reference point for any attempt to reconcile or rather cross- pollinate ecocritical and narratological perspectives. Buell’s central claim is that ecocriticism should focus on recovering a sense of the experiential or referential aspects of literature. Yet his theoretical ap-proach as well as his reading of literary texts is based on a rather limited conception of mimesis— as recent work in the domain of narrative the-ory suggests. In particular, Richard Walsh (2007) understands mimesis as confi guration, as the making of plot and overall construction of the


narrative, instead of in narrower terms of reference and representation (48– 49). Meir Sternberg (2010) also criticizes a narrow conception of mimesis, according to which the mimetic is understood to be “normal, ordinary, verisimilar, more or less interchangeable with ‘realist’” (517). In Fludernik’s (1996) “natural” narratology, for instance, realism in-volves a “mimetic evocation of reality” (37). Th us, whereas some pro-ponents of what has come to be called “unnatural narratology” employ realist readings of impossible storyworlds in order to come to terms with— or naturalize— their strangeness (see Alber et al. 2010; cf. Flud-ernik 2012), the present article makes the opposite move: it insists on a theoretically informed close reading of seemingly realistic texts— such as Th e Lacuna— to suggest how such texts reveal their strangeness and diffi culty when they are examined up close.

Consequently, what Buell means by the experiential or referential as-pects of literature are— quite simply— attributes associated with literary realism, or realistic narratives. As Dana Phillips (1999) notes, however, this emphasis on realism raises other issues. Specifi cally, if ecocriticism were to limit itself to reading “realistic texts realistically,” its critical vi-sion would be reduced to contemplating whether a particular descrip-tion of a pond or a tree is well made and lively (586). Phillips also re-marks that “literary realism has always been oriented more towards the human, the social, and the artifi cial than towards the natural world” (586; cf. Phillips 2003: 163– 64; Buell 2005: 32). What we have here, then, is an example how ecocriticism, as advocated by Buell, rather un-problematically associates realism with a grounding of literary texts in reality. In the words of Nancy Easterlin (2010), who also notes some of Phillips’s concerns in this connection, realism is only “one mode of response, and not necessarily one that will establish an aff ective con-nection between the reader and the nonhuman natural world” (2010: 264; cf. Easterlin 2012: 95– 100). Realism is only one convention among others; and there are also ecocritics who like to think that experimental modernist poetry can give us the voice of nonhuman nature better than realist storytelling. At the same time, from the vantage point of “eco-poetics,” M. Jimmie Killingsworth (2004) argues that in recent fi ction-al practice realism itself has developed into a more complex viewpoint


that, “while granting the complexity and diffi culty of representation, re-tains some faith in the factuality and reality of the solid earth” (7– 8).

Th us, in the wider fi eld of ecocritical literary studies, there are schol-ars who see the relationship between nature and literature as dialogical and as crucially negotiated by rhetoric. Bonnie Costello (2003) suggests that recent studies of the environment, both aesthetic and ecocritical, fi nd us embedded in a paradox: we are part of nature, and that nature is our construction. Recognizing the reciprocal relationship between nature as a dwelling place and nature as an aesthetic construction— in short, the mutually enabling interplay between natural environments and narrative contexts— Costello suggests that “the ecocritical prefer-ence for referentiality over textuality, for real world over rhetorical and aesthetic concerns, seems misguided” (14). Defending the power of po-etry, Costello argues that imagination and abstraction can draw us to-ward the natural world rather than away from it. Here, then, the ethics of Costello’s work comes close to that of Buell’s, but the aesthetics— as regards the question of textuality— is somewhat diff erent. Costello ad-vances the claim that “certainly a rhetorically oriented criticism is aware of the text (and indeed all mediating forms) less as a statement about re-ality than as a series of motivated strategies and structures, which com-municates something to an audience” (14). Here, in Costello’s focus on the rhetorical structure of storytelling acts, lies what might be described as the missing link between ecocriticism and narrative theory.

In my next section I focus on how this missing link— this emphasis on the world- shaping functions of rhetorical designs that unites ecocrit-ics and narratologists— can illuminate key aspects of Kingsolver’s Th e Lacuna. More specifi cally, I argue that coming to terms with Kingsolv-er’s portrayal of natural— both human and nonhuman— minds requires integrating ecocritical perspectives with recent narratological research on consciousness presentation. Ursula Heise (2005), one of the few the-orists to have brought ecocriticism and narratology together, argues that one of the concerns of ecocriticism has been whether literary fi ction, as a pure product of human language, can refl ect anything other than anthropomorphic views of nature (130). Th e question of anthropo-centricism especially emerges in relation to the various consciousness- presenting or point- of- view- marking techniques extensively studied in classical and postclassical narratology. Th us Lisa Zunshine (2006) sug-


gests that part of the pleasure off ered by fi ction has to do with experi-encing various mental states vicariously, including the (more or less an-thropomorphically) projected mental states of nonhuman beings or the personifi cation of landscape features (25– 27).

More generally, the concept of mind has been troublesome for eco-criticism, which is suspicious of literary works that refl ect mental pro-cesses at the expense of the larger ecologies in which individual minds are situated (Easterlin 2012: 36). But as my narratologically informed ecocritical reading of Kingsolver’s fi ction is meant to show, Th e Lacu-na is not a narrative about isolated fi ctional minds. Rather, Kingsolver’s characters are embodied consciousnesses, and the novel suggests how our mental images are fi rmly bound together with our bodily experi-ence of the world and with our physical visual perception of things. Ac-cordingly, following recent narratological studies of techniques for con-sciousness presentation (see Palmer 2010; Young 2010; Herman 2011), I will analyze how Kingsolver’s novel links the thought processes of in-dividual characters to their natural environment, situating these charac-ters’ minds in a specifi c social and physical context. In David Herman’s (2011) view, insofar as they embrace a Cartesian view of the mind as “inside” and the world as “outside,” classical theories of consciousness representation fail to take into account not only how human minds are always embedded in a particular environmental context but also how nonhuman experiences emerge from the same dynamic interplay be-tween individual organism and larger environment (7). Along similar lines, I will show in my reading of Th e Lacuna that Kingsolver experi-ments with narrative viewpoint— for example, by presenting familiar situations from alien, including nonhuman, perspectives— in ways that can generate new insights into the natural world and its role in helping to constitute human experience itself.

Nature and Narrative in The Lacuna

Th e beginning of Kingsolver’s best- known novel, Th e Poisonwood Bible (1998), employing second- person narrative, asks the reader to imagine a forest, and only aft er that puts the human characters in that natural scene:


Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened. First, picture

the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees

are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown

beyond all reason. Every space is fi lled with life: delicate, poisonous

frogs war- painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their

precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in

the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. [. . .] This forest eats itself and lives

forever.

Away down below now, single fi le on the path, comes a woman with

four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above

this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your

sympathies. Be careful. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy

they deserve. (5)

In her reading of Th e Poisonwood Bible, Anne Marie Austenfeld (2006) suggests that by employing innovative narrative methods in her treat-ment of a complex sociohistorical moment, Kingsolver constructs a “revelatory narrative circle,” a pseudo- oral narrative situation of several character- narrators, each fi ltering events and themes in their own ways (294). With the help of this narrative technique, Austenfeld argues, Kingsolver is able to show how a variety of individual human beings act every day in the context of rapid and diffi cult natural, social, and politi-cal changes (294). What is more, one of the novel’s character- narrators, young Adah, contemplates the rich wonders of the natural world, the absurdities and inequalities of the technological, human- made world, and the currents of language and political intrigue fl owing around her (296). In this sense the character of Adah clearly anticipates the protag-onist of Th e Lacuna and his concerns.

In my reading, Th e Lacuna dramatizes how narratives can open up new, surprising, and thought- provoking insights into the ways in which understandings of the natural world are imbricated with discourse about the environment. In this connection, I focus on the double status or role of lacunas in the text— as a feature of nature and as an aspect of narrative itself. Kingsolver explicitly addresses the meaning of the ti-tle word (la lacuna in Spanish) in her novel: “Laguna? Th e lagoon? No, lacuna. He [Leandro, the protagonist’s Mexican friend] said it means a diff erent thing from lagoon. Not a cave exactly but an opening, like


a mouth, that swallows things” (45– 46). In the novel, lacunas actually seem to mean several things. On a concrete level, the term refers to the natural formation of underwater caves; on a symbolic level, it stands for the gaps in human history; and on a self- refl exive level, it signifi es tex-tual blanks in fi ction and historiography as well as in Kingsolver’s own textual composition— that is, forms of slippage between lived, situated experiences and the narrative and other texts used to give an account of those experiences.

Th e Lacuna begins with a biblical or quasi- biblical tone, presenting evocative images and sounds of the decidedly nonhuman natural world in Isla Pixol, a coastal island in Mexico:

In the beginning were the howlers. Th ey always commenced their bellowing in the fi rst hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten. It would start with just one: his forced, rhythmic groaning, like a saw blade. Th at aroused others near him, nudging them to bawl along with his monstrous tune. Soon the maroon- throated howls would echo back from the trees, farther down the beach, until the whole jungle fi lled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning in the world. (3)

Th e novel’s opening, with its self- conscious mention of a beginning, does not make space for human minds and interpreters until the second paragraph: “Th e boy and his mother believed it was saucer- eyed devils screaming in those trees, fi ghting over the territorial right to consume human fl esh” (3). Th e meaning of the howler thus remains open and mysterious to the characters as well as to the reader.

As the narrative unfolds, we are further introduced to the human minds situated in this teeming environment. Kingsolver uses a hypo-thetical “you” to provide a sense of the fi ctional world’s ecology, with no explicit human experiencer present:

Underneath the ocean is a world without people. The sea- roof rocks

overhead as you drift among the purple trees of the coral forest,

surrounded by a heavenly body of light made of shining fi shes. The sun

comes down through the water like fl aming arrows, touching the scaly

bodies and setting every fi n to fl ame. A thousand fi shes make the school,

but they always move together: one great, bright, brittle altogetherness.


It’s a perfect world down there, except for the one of them who can’t

breathe water. (6)

We can, of course, assume that human modes of perception are implied in and by any text, because it is written and read by humans. Indeed, whereas this “you”— the “one” who cannot breathe water— may refer to the protagonist of the narrative, it may also refer to the reader; and the anthropomorphizing language— “the sun comes down through the wa-ter like fl aming arrows”— betrays a human vision while also suggesting the impossibility of nature representation without some kind of human intervention. In a sense, then, there is a tension or a dialectical relation-ship between language and nature in Kingsolver’s novel from its very fi rst pages.

Given this opening, the narrative of Th e Lacuna seems to have been born from the deep waters, thereby underscoring, in evolutionary terms, that water is the ultimate life- giving element and that we humans are mainly watery creatures ourselves.3 Aft er the fi rst chapters, with their rich and sensuous imagery of this watery ecology, the text indi-cates that these visions come from the potentially unreliable diary en-tries of Harrison William Shepherd, a young man keen on reading ad-venture stories and also experiencing adventures of his own. Later on, Shepherd reveals that he is writing “just a diary of kitchen nonsense and little stories” (185) and “drawing together a mess of notes into genuine prose” (498). It is Shepherd’s identity that constitutes one of the main gaps in the narrative; as he himself refl ects in his diary, “you can’t re-ally know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece: the birthday like an invisible piñata hanging great and silent over his head” (431). Shepherd, a son of a Mexican mother and an American father, is caught between two cultures from the very begin-ning. Th e Lacuna follows Shepherd’s story through the 1930s and 1940s, exploring his interactions not only with the natural world but also with some of the most colorful cultural characters of the era. In Mexico City, Shepherd becomes a plaster mixer for Diego Rivera, who is painting a huge mural in a public building. Aft erward he becomes a part of the household of Rivera and Frida Kahlo in their famous villa, and later still a secretary to their guest, the exiled “hero” of the Soviet Revolution,


Lev Trotsky, until Trostky’s assassination in Mexico in 1940. Subse-quently we fi nd Shepherd writing popular and exotic adventure novels set in ancient Mexico— with titles like Vassals of Majesty and Pilgrims of Chapultepec— and hoping that these novels would fi ll the historical “lacunas” of the ruined Aztec temples and their now incomprehensible hieroglyphs.

Reading Th e Lacuna with a view to analyzing its overall narrative de-sign as well as its strategies for engaging with the (fi ctionalized) natural world, one can see the novel itself as a kind of painting in progress, not unlike the mural that is being painted by Diego Rivera in the text. Con-sider the following passage, where the landscape fi rst morphs into ink, then back into a landscape that reemerges as a painting in color: “Spiked maguey plants reach out of the ground like hands. A great clawed crea-ture trapped underground. At evening, the light drained and the land went from brown to umber, then dried blood, then ink. In the morning the pigments reversed, the same colors rising out of a broad, fl at land that looks like a mural” (109). Indeed, Kingsolver refracts the natural environment through a painterly lens at several points in the novel, as in the following passage: “Th e leaves were crimson, auburn, jade, and gold, lying together in patchwork against the mountainsides. [. . .] But it looked as if God had turned over the job to a Mexican muralist” (441). Here the text suggests how a perception of the natural world— made possible by humans’ visual capabilities— becomes mediated through cultural and in this case artistic frames of reference. On the other hand, in its rich stylistic variety— the novel is a collage or pastiche of report-age, diary chapters, letters, telegrams, actual historical newspaper clip-pings, interviews, book reviews, and fi ctions inside fi ction— the novel pays homage to American naturalism and the social- documentary im-pulses of the 1930s, as exemplifi ed particularly in the work of Dos Pas-sos. Th e Lacuna is teeming, in an almost self- destructive way, with nu-merous textual practices (“Who would want to read all this?” [455]), rather romantically implying that journalistic or political discourse is bleak and empty when compared to the interweaving of narrative modes made possible by literary art.

Literary and textual self- consciousness therefore repeatedly break


the mimetic surface of the storyworld in Th e Lacuna, as when King-solver writes: “Here is the end of Mexico, end of the world and Chap-ter One” (110). Th is passage is just one example of the way the novel engages in postmodernist play. As mentioned previously, the very title of the novel connotes both a natural phenomenon, the undersea caves the protagonist is searching for, and some fundamental break or gap in the narrative and in the world it tries to depict. Th is double or triple meaning produces both epistemological and ontological hesitation in the narrative and its storyworld (cf. Doležel 2010: 3– 5, 87– 89). It simul-taneously refers to the mysteries of nonhuman nature and the mysteries of human life, to untold histories, and to narrative structures, implying that all these elements are inextricably linked. Th e connection is made explicit in the following passage:

It took hours to explore everything. Some of the broken blocks of the ruin had designs carved on them, a script of lines and circles or perhaps the portraits of gods. One looked like a skeleton, its arms fl ung open, the skull smiling wide. A water snake slipped off the rock and made a sliding S shape across the top of the water. Th e jungle vines were tangled like fi shing nets. It was the type of forest with a watery fl oor, and no good way to walk out of there. And no good way to swim back out of that cave, either. No way back from this story, it seemed. (57– 58)

Here Kingsolver suggests that the undersea caves hide the things from the past, forgotten or unknown aspects of human history, so that the caves and the water become stories in their own right, with scripts, de-signs, and lines; hence even natural formations and shapes are seen as linguistic signs (a snake forming the letter S). Th e lacuna, or the cave, turns out to designate both a story and a place, and the protagonist fi nds himself immersed in both: in nature as well as (or therefore) narrative.

Th e next section builds on my preliminary ecoritical reading of Kingsolver’s text with a view to showing how engaging with texts like Th e Lacuna can open up a broader ecological- evolutionary approach to literature and art. Th is approach examines how storytelling prac-tices like Kingsolver’s can be brought into dialogue with research on ways in which the human perceptual system may have evolved over the centuries— to enhance humans’ chance of survival in the real world.


The Deep Waters of Literary Theme

It can be argued that narratives are a central means of making sense and surviving in the natural environment, and some literary texts power-fully simulate this idea. In some narratives the abstract journey to spiri-tuality is presented to us in the form of a physical journey through for-ests, meadows, and villages— or, in the case of Th e Lacuna, through the experience of watery worlds. Kingsolver’s novel accordingly dramatizes the fact that the human mind is itself part of the natural world (cf. Pol-ger 2004: 1– 2). But as Lisa Zunshine (2011) shrewdly notes, “fi ctional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations” (167). As I have suggested above, in the organic fl ow and growth of Kingsolver’s narrative, a certain natural phenomenon— the formation of the lacuna— provides a physical touch-stone for the themes of identity, history, and textuality. In this way, the text suggests how the human capabilities of using our imagination and making stories both ground and are grounded in our physical experi-ence of natural environments.

In his original experience of the natural lacuna, Shepherd discovers that he can swim through the cave and surface in the center of the jun-gle, in the midst of an ancient site of human sacrifi ces:

At the end of the tunnel the cave opens up to light, a small saltwater pool in the jungle. Almost perfectly round, as big across as this bedchamber, with sky straight up, dappled and bright through the branches. Amate trees stood in a circle around the water hole like curious men, gaping because a boy from another world had suddenly arrived in their pool. Th e pombo trees squatted for a close look, with their knobbly wooden knees poking up out of the water. A tiger heron stood one- legged on a rock, cocking an unfriendly eye at the intruder. [. . .] Th e light through the trees was shadowy at midday, but the water was clear. Belly- dragged up on a fl at stone, sitting at the edge looking back in, it was plain to see the bottom of the cave dropped down to make a sort of room down there, huge and deep. Stones were piled like a sand castle underwater, with bits of shining things mixed into the pile. Maybe yellow leaves, or gold coins. It was like coming up inside of a


storybook. An ancient temple in the forest, a pirates cave down below. (56– 57)

Th is passage exemplifi es how the protagonist’s fi rst memoir employs cultural schemata and literary frames— especially those coming from the adventure stories of his youth— in order to narrativize and natural-ize the strangeness of the historical gap (the ancient ruin) in the midst of the natural phenomena of the lacuna and the jungle. In a similar vein, Fludernik (1996) draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s anecdote about a national park to argue that what we call “natural” oft en “displays it-self as a mere representation of the real thing”— a representation that, in its autonomous extratextual existence, “continues to haunt the quester’s imagination and eludes the grasp of the explorer” (3). Later on in the novel it becomes clear that Shepherd’s underwater quest and exploration— which, we may note, is written down and thus narrativ-ized only much later— signifi cantly infl uences his own subsequent work as a novelist. Th is aspect of the novel’s plot and progression interestingly resonates with what Brian Boyd (2009) terms an “evocritical” approach to narrative art. According to Boyd, since the universal human need to narrate nature developed from the basic need to survive, as ancient cave paintings may suggest, stories were from the start designed to appeal to “the eyes and minds of the artists and others” (8).

In my analysis of Th e Lacuna so far, I have sought to outline an ap-proach to the study of narrative fi ction that is consistent with Boyd’s account. Th us my approach, too, might be described as evocritical, in that it emphasizes the connection between narrative viewed as part of humans’ biocultural evolution and its (past as well as current) uses as a means for creative expression. As theorists such as Boyd (2009) and Easterlin (2012) argue, a biocultural (or, in Boyd’s terms, evocritical) lit-erary theory reveals how art, fi ction, and narrative are distinctively hu-man adaptations and developments with a natural and biological origin. Boyd argues that “without a biocultural perspective we cannot appreci-ate how deeply surprising fi ction is, and how deeply natural” (3). For her part, Easterlin (2010) writes that “narrative thinking” is based on our eff orts to survive in varied physical surroundings and that narrative art, as its most sophisticated form, is a way of knowing and coping with the world (264; see also Easterlin 2012: 43). Along similar lines, H. Por-


ter Abbott (2008) argues that “narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time” and that while there are natural, non- narrative ways of organizing time— via the movements of the sun, the seasons of the year, and so forth— it is narrative that gives specifi c shape and human meaningfulness to these natural events (3– 6).

As Kingsolver’s novel progresses, it leaves the lacunas of Mexico to explore the cityscape of Washington dc. In portraying the urban envi-ronment, the text employs some of the same vocabulary used for the wild landscape of Shepherd’s youth, signifying how the human mind is enveloped by— even as it helps shape— a surrounding ecology. Im-agery of the lacuna also returns when Shepherd witnesses an infamous historical event in Washington dc, in 1932, as the demonstrators— unemployed and starving veterans of World War I and their families— are attacked by General MacArthur’s armed forces:

People came into the alley with hands over their faces, coming from the direction of the river. What followed was the sight of blindness itself coming on, and a feeling exactly like trying to breathe saltwater. Like swimming into the cave, the longest possible held breath. Every gulp of air tasted like poison. (141)

Here again the natural formation of the cave or lacuna also structures Shepherd’s perception of the scene. Indeed, this passage fi gures the in-verse of the situation described in my previous section, where the cave itself starts to seem like a textual or linguistic design. Now, by contrast, the physical formation of the lacuna structures Shepherd’s attempt to narrativize his experience of the tear- gas attack against the demonstrat-ing veterans. Being not just a witness but also a participant in the scene, Shepherd himself feels as though he is swimming into the cave and try-ing to breathe saltwater. Th e text thereby suggests how Shepherd’s past experiences lead to his fi nding a fundamental parallelism across natu-ral and built environments: Shepherd has to hold his breath to avoid breathing in tear gas, just as he would have to hold his breath to avoid taking in salt water under the sea.

Later on, as the fbi is pursuing Shepherd for his allegedly un- American activities, he burns the part of his diary covering this trouble-some period of the Great Depression— thus producing another of the


many gaps in the story. As readers of Kingsolver’s novel, we are also conscious of Shepherd’s diary- writing and its possible fi ctionalizations and distortions; in other words, the scenes are also overtly marked as products of Shepherd’s mind and imagination. Shepherd, a young man who resembles a writer- adventurer in the style of Jack London or Ste-phen Crane, obviously aims to be a “serious” writer in a cultural envi-ronment increasingly dominated by stereotypical fi ctions of romance and adventure and, more generally, by a mass culture bent on distort-ing some of the most unpleasant sociopolitical realities of the time (cf. Mariani 1992: 2). Relevant in this context, too, is the “Archivist’s Note” written by Shepherd’s secretary Violet Brown, who gives an account of his textual practice. Noting that Shepherd oft en omits crucial informa-tion, especially concerning his own history and personality, the secre-tary writes: “People who make a study of old documents have a name for his very kind of thing, a missing piece. A lacuna, it’s called. Th e hole in the story” (146; cf. 475).

As the passage about the veterans’ demonstration suggests, however, it’s not just that Shepherd leaves holes in his stories in order to conceal aspects of his past. More than this, Shepherd seems to have internalized the experience of the cave- shaped lacuna he encountered in the sea, with this feature of the natural environment guiding the strategies he uses to narrate his subsequent life experiences, as can be seen in the fol-lowing passage: “Th is is what it means to be alone: everyone is connect-ed to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life fl owing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten” (243).

Th e novel concludes with Shepherd, accused of treason, diving once more into the lacuna and vanishing forever, leaving only a mysterious gap in history. Th e natural phenomenon of the lacuna thus not only corresponds to or symbolizes but also produces textual gaps and blanks to be fi lled by the reader in the process of interpretation. Th ese are “the deep waters of literary theme” (417), a phrase used by reviewers to de-scribe Shepherd’s own narrative practice. According to reviews of Shep-herd’s seemingly mainstream yet very personal and engaging fi ction, “many themes [. . .] might be missed by the average reader, such as Man Against Nature and Man Against Himself ” (415); readers might also fail


to notice that “the novel’s tender theme is a longing for home” (402). Insofar as that home is the sea, the novel emphasizes the interconnect-edness of natural structures as well as cultural practices that emerged from a common evolutionary heritage— a heritage represented by the sea viewed as “one great, bright, brittle altogetherness” (6).

In considering these thematic aspects of Th e Lacuna, however, it is important to recall Walsh’s (2007) argument that whereas “metafi c-tions invite particular attention to fi ction’s imaginative scope for wide- ranging purposes,” analysts should avoid collapsing self- refl exive texts “into homogeneity by a reductive thematic” (42). In other words, the “how” and the “what” aspects of the narrative text— its rhetorical de-signs and its thematic emphases— should be recognized as more or less autonomous, and equally important, dimensions of its structure. It is thus all the more crucial for analysts seeking to develop an ecocritical— or evocritical— approach to story to avoid becoming so preoccupied with realistic descriptions of nature that they fail to analyze how nar-ratives use rhetorical designs to stage specifi c modes of encounter be-tween experiencing minds and natural worlds.4

Concluding Remarks

In this article I have sought to outline strategies for integrating narrato-logical and ecocritical research in a broadly evocritical approach to nar-rative art. To date, most ecocritical readings have focused on realistic texts— and especially on environmental nonfi ction and nature poetry— that deal with some natural phenomena: forests, rivers, animals, pollu-tion, and the impacts of technology on nature. Many ecocritical read-ings have a clear political agenda; they have been less interested in the formal specifi city of works of narrative fi ction, partly because the novel as a genre is historically linked with depicting human actions and rep-resenting the workings of human consciousness. As a result, narrative fi ction poses certain challenges that ecocritics have not, by and large, been able to meet. But if ecocriticism is right in its contention that we humans are natural beings, immersed in our natural world and dwelling in our natural environment, then it must be that narrative fi ctions are always also the product of human engagements with the natural world,


even though a certain novel or short story does not contain minute de-scriptions of trees, rocks, and rivers.

By providing new tools for analyzing textual designs, narrative the-orists can extend the reach of ecocritical methods. Specifi cally, schol-ars of story can explore how attending to narrative forms may reveal new modes of interconnection between textual practices and natural ecologies. Conversely, ecocritics can provide narrative theorists with new questions to address when it comes to the study of narrative forms: How might an author’s concern with a particular kind of ecology mo-tivate the use of specifi c forms? How can techniques for consciousness presentation, for example, be leveraged to suggest how characters’ ex-periences both shape and are shaped by their engagement with aspects of the natural world? How does narrative itself, viewed as a cultural technology, relate to the various technologies that have been used in at-tempts to control nature or to harness its power?

In Kingsolver’s novel, the formation of the lacuna operates at mul-tiple levels of narrative structure and meaning; consequently, the novel goes beyond off ering a realistic description of undersea caves in Mexi-co or critiquing the eff ects of industrial capitalism on the natural land-scape. Th ese aspects are, to be sure, a pivotal part of Kingsolver’s “repre-sentational rhetoric” (cf. Walsh 2007: 77), but coming to terms with the full complexity of the novel’s engagement with natural environments requires other analytic resources. Describing his rhetorical approach to narrative, James Phelan (2007) maintains that the mimetic compo-nent involves an audience’s interest in the characters as possible peo-ple and in the narrative world as like our own; the thematic component involves an interest in the ideational function of the characters and in the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by the narrative; and the synthetic component involves our close atten-tion to the characters and events and to the larger narrative as artifi cial constructs (5– 6). As I have tried to suggest in my discussion of King-solver’s novel, ecocritics should complement their focus on the mimetic and thematic dimensions of narratives with a focus on their synthet-ic dimension, that is, the self- conscious, artifi cial design of the text— whereas narratologists, in turn, would do well to consider the cultural, ideological, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of textual designs


that focus attention on natural environments. Th us, while the novel im-merses the reader in its (meta)fi ctional storyworld, it can also be read as a call to engagement and conscience beyond the world of the narrative, that is, in the world in which Kingsolver’s text seeks to make its own, distinctively aesthetic kind of intervention.

Literature is inherently part of the real world, but in literature and art, the sometimes messy realm of nature is given a certain design, a polished form. In Th e Lacuna, the lush and colorful descriptions of nature— the ocean, the forests, plants, animals, and so on— decidedly are not recordings of actual things themselves but rather very self- consciously arranged elements in the larger “painting” or mural whose creation corresponds with the unfolding of the narrative itself. As I have suggested, in a biocultural or evocritical approach, art, fi ction, and nar-rative are understood as human adaptations with a natural origin. Anal-ogously, aft er surviving the undersea caves and discovering the buried past of ancient cultures, Kingsolver’s protagonist devotes his life to fi c-tion and imagination, which might give pleasure to other solitary souls. In this respect, Shepherd’s narrational activities correspond to those of Barbara Kingsolver, who likewise designed a work of fi ction, a self- conscious literary mural, to illuminate the inextricable interconnection between natural environments and narrative contexts. By the same to-ken, both Shepherd’s and Kingsolver’s storytelling practices point up the advantages of working toward a cross- pollination of ecocritical and nar-ratological perspectives.

Notes

1. Compare Nichols (2011: xiii). Nancy Easterlin (2010) rightly argues that hu-man beings are in and of nature and that “nonhuman nature, the environment, or whatever we wish to call it, can never be known in an other- than- human sense” (259). Consequently, she does not accept some of the most radical tenets of ecocriticism, according to which nature and the environment are realms of the nonhuman. But compare a view from the side of “ecopoetics”: “Modern defi nitions of nature, despite the troubled survival of a concept like ‘human nature,’ begin from a point of difference, nature being designated as the nonhu-man realm, the environment” (Killingsworth 2004: 48). A passage from Th e Lacuna seems to weigh in on this thorny question: “it took a moment for the eye to adjust to the increments of dust, discerning the human from nonhuman

elements” (Kingsolver 2009: 255).


2. In this context, it is interesting to observe that even ecocriticism is infl uenced

by those textual theories it wants to discard; ecocriticism remains very much

informed by trends in cultural studies— one relevant trend is called green cul-

tural studies— that see the world as text and discourse. Yet Brian Boyd (2009),

for one, does not believe that reading literature “well” (or from a given posi-

tion) would make the world better. Rather, he points out that “there is a world

outside language, and that world does call out for substantial social change”

(27).

3. Appealing to a mythic tradition, Margaret Anne Doody (1996) emphasizes “the

novel’s prosaic attention to the familiar, particularized details of the physical

world” and argues that “it is the goddess Demeter, the goddess of earth,” who

“inspires and informs the novel” as a genre (461– 62). Also note, in this context,

Margaret Cohen’s (2010) interesting study of the interconnections between

narrative and the sea. While Cohen’s focus is on sea adventure fi ction, on a

more general theoretical level she asks critics “to revise the dominant narrative

about the rise of the novel” and suggests that this revision would involve “the

need to move beyond our long- standing prejudice” according to which the pro-

cesses and events defi ning the modern novel “occur on land” (13).

4. In this connection, it is symptomatic that Buell (1995) aims to downplay pre-

cisely those concepts— character, plot, and point of view— that are regarded

as essential to the very nature of narrative. It is part of Buell’s way of reading

literature to seek for adequate representations of nature, so that there is no

real barrier between the word and the thing. By contrast, Dana Phillips (1999)

argues that “ecocriticism may benefi t from a strong dose of formalism” (589–

90). Buell’s stance seems to refl ect a more widespread suspicion of narrative

concepts and theories among ecocritics. Some ecocritics even go so far as to

suggest that while nature poetry can make us see the natural world around us

in fresh ways and with new eyes, “at best, [Adrienne] Rich may encourage us

to put down her book and go out- of- doors into a real fi eld” (Gilcrest 2002:

139). Or, in the words of another ecocritic, the primary function of ecopoetry

is to “point us outward, toward that infi nitely less limited referential reality of

nature” (Scigaj 1999: 38). There is perhaps something slightly odd about be-

ing advised by a literary scholar to stop reading nature poetry and to enjoy the

reality of nature instead.

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Documents

Natural Environments in Narrative Contexts: Cross-Pollinating Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory