This semester my writing students and I have been exploring in a class I’ve called “Representations of Nature.” Part of our task has been to study how writers past and present have represented their relationship with or cultural perspective of nature via essays, poetry, almanacs, and fiction. Along the way we have our own weekly assignments where they interact with nature and write about it, all low-stakes and creative, so they begin to develop a relationship with the subjects we’re studying. As they create their longer informative and persuasive submissions (essay-like pieces and oral presentations) I continue to remind them that just as the contexts of these pieces influenced how these texts represent nature, so too do their pieces.
Our most recent reading is from an excerpt of Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, our Enlightenment representative. As so much of the texts we’ve been reading have an unusual perspective on nature to what my students are used to (nature as something alive and spirited?), I thought it would be interesting to explore a familiar message of nature: something lifeless and unchanging, something to be tamed, something to control.
Johnson was a genteel Englishman familiar with sculpted landscape. Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire in 1709, he was the son of a bookseller and briefly attended Oxford before running out of money. He compiled a dictionary, entitled “Dictionary of the English Language.” The welcoming message on the website for his house-made-museum is: “…when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”
(image credit: Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
As I’ve prepared for my introduction to Samuel Johnson, I’ve come to question the title of my class: “Representations of Nature.” As I chatted with my husband (who wrote his philosophy PhD dissertation on the 17th century sublime, among other things) about the Enlightenment concept of “imagination,” he pointed out that the scientific endeavor is to “represent” nature in the sense of utterly defining it, pinning it down, understanding it completely (e.g., now that I know the daffodils in my yard are Narcissus pseudonarcissus I’ve determined all there is to know about them) whereas a sublime encounter with nature understands there will always be an element of the unknown, and so rather than “represent” something we “present” something. Louise Gluck “presents” in her poem “Snowdrop” which offers only one aspect of an infinite amount of snowdrop aspects we could encounter. To attempt to capture the snowdrop through scientific names and explanations—Galanthus nivalis—hubristically fails to account for a spirit that rouses from winter death into first spring light.
The following extremely brief description hardly conveys the subtle nuances of the period, and only accounts for a slim geographical perspective when, keep in mind, there’s the rest of the world also acting and thinking in many ways:
The Enlightenment period of Western Culture—Europe and North America, but I’m mainly focusing on England—, about the 1600 -1800’s, was a time when people sought to understand the natural world through rational, rather than magical/irrational/superstitious means (not that magic disappeared). The Reformation was a kind of precursor to it. The Enlightenment was, in one sense, a return to the Classical emphasis of the powers of human reason (Greek and Roman philosophies) that had already been embraced in some Catholic circles; but it was also a step into explaining the phenomenon of the world through increasing understanding of nature via scientific means. Apply reason to anything and it could be explained, or figured out. An effect of this was an overall fear or anxiety of the wild and untamed spaces of nature, spaces that resisted human reasoning.
The “imagination” in the Enlightenment, according to my husband, if I understood him correctly, is not at all like we understand it now where it’s associated with creativity. Rather, imagination was a faculty of the senses, and the Enlightenment sensibility was largely stimulated by neatly-choreographed and orchestrated landscapes. Gardens became popular during this period, which were an excellent way to demonstrate their love of nature, in one way, for “natural” was how they measured what was good (as a contrast from “supernatural”). Manicured gardens also contrasted with untamed nature, which people feared. Untamed nature was equivalent to immoral and uncivilized behavior, whereas a garden was the epitome of the “natural” civilized, well-groomed genteel person. Imagination and knowledge could not be gained in wild places, but it could be found among the carefully crafted but “natural” looking gardens.
When Johnson went out to explore the Scottish Western Isles, his imagination was not stoked. As he and his companions stop to rest among the heath near mountains, he describes it thus:
“An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation.
It will very readily occur that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveler; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive of rocks and heath and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, which neither impregnate the imagination, nor enlarge the understanding.” (612 of Samuel Johnson’s The Major Works Oxford World Classics, from the section titled “Anoch.”)
(image of Hebrides, https://photoeverywhere.co.uk/britain/westernisles/slides/02-06hebvista2.htm)
He makes a further point that the more we see, the more “we become possessed of…certainties, and consequently gain more principles of reasoning, and found a wider basis of analogy.” The more he sees of this rugged and uncivilized landscape, the more certain he is of its unstimulating energy. “The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness” (613).
Anne-Louise Sommer quotes W.J.T. Mitchell saying, “Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture.” (Sommer, quoting W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, (2nd ed., Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 5.) This landscape to which Mitchell is referring is the Enlightenment one. The ideal Enlightenment garden gave “the impression of a place untouched by human hands” and yet be “masterly orchestrated” (Sommer). Furthermore, there was use to be had among the gardens and spaces that allowed for growing food, while the wild regions were not useful. And that he sees this landscape as “left in its original state” suggests anything not curated or educated is wrong.
The way that I am presenting the Enlightenment here is only a sliver of its beauty and its danger. We are the dismal inheritors of its narrow perspective on what we live inside of, something far vaster than we could ever fathom. Even recognizing my poor choices of titles for a class (“representation” instead of “presentation”) reminds me to remain humble to all that I don’t know, all that I can never know, all that I have yet to learn.
As a balm to Johnson’s repulsed certainty, my class will also read the “March” portion of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, which offers an excellent example of post-Enlightenment, and/or pre-Enlightenment humility to all the mystery of the world we’ll never know. Here he describes the migration of geese in spring contrasted with their opposite movement in fall, both times of which the geese make “daily trips to corn.” He says, “It is a conspicuous fact that the corn stubbles selected by geese for feeding are usually those occupying former prairies. No man knows whether this bias for prairie corn reflects some superior nutritional value, or some ancestral tradition transmitted from generation to generation since the prairie days. Perhaps it reflects the simpler fact that prairie cornfields tend to be large. If I could understand the thunderous debates that precede and follow these daily excursions to corn, I might soon learn the reason for the prairie bias. But I cannot, and am well content that it should remain a mystery. What a dull world if we knew all about geese!” (pp. 21-22).
I’ve learned a little about the Enlightenment, a little about Samuel Johnson, English gardens, Scottish mountains, geese, and the imagination. I have so much more to learn. But wouldn’t it be dull if I thought I learned all there was to learn of them? If I thought I could represent them utterly and completely?
(image of a blooming tree in my back yard)