Abstract
In Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination, Kelly Sultzbach examines representations of the human and nonhuman world in the works of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden. Weaving together a range of ecocritical concerns and frameworks—from the pastoral to postcolonial ecocriticism to ecophenomenology to ecomaterialsim to queer ecocriticism—Sultzbach traces how Forster, Woolf, and Auden’s “representations of environmental forces and nonhuman characters inflect a wide array of recognized modernist themes, including interiority instability, and concerns of empire” (10). Sultzbach surveys several literary works to better understand Modernism’s complicated relationships to the nonhuman world and to awaken an environmental consciousness in readers: Literature records the voices that are often lost in mainstream stories. It witnesses our ongoing struggle to let Nature speak for itself in its cacophony of voices and ruminates on ethical values that might yet compete with industry, economy, and greed. As a result, the kinds of reevaluations that literature can provoke are fundamental to persuading readers to feel themselves as embedded within a thriving net of interacting, pulsating, worldly flesh. Ultimately, the measure of our literary words may be the first impetus for putting the natural world first. (192)
In unpacking these environmental concerns, Sultzbach is careful to neither present Forster, Woolf, and Auden as “nature writers,” nor to present them as writers offering ideal “green” practices; instead, she calls attention to the “literary contradictions and the philosophical sinkholes” (7). Sultzbach’s interest in these green gaps recalls Joshua Schuster’s claim, in The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (2015), that “Modernism was never very green” and that American modernism is “keenly attentive to environs but ambivalent about environmentalism” (3). Rejecting projects that aim to “green” Modernism in redemptive ways, Sultzbach and Schuster share a common goal of presenting modernist ecology as full of “the very conflicted reactions to environmental relationships and human responsibility that make them so productively messy,” like “solipsism, racism, and desire for escapism” (Sultzbach 6). While Sultzbach does not mention Schuster (likely because of their projects’ continental differences and contemporaneity), she does engage a host of modernist scholars and their ecocritical studies of Modernism: Phillip Armstrong’s What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (2008), Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2009), Christina Alt’s Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (2010), Bonnie Kime Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Uses of Nature (2012).
Sultzbach’s first chapter, “Passage from Pastoral,” rescues Forster from a mischaracterization as a “liberal humanist,” which suggests that his thought only centers on human communities. To nuance these previous readings, Sultzbach suggests that Forster should be better understood as what Timothy Clark calls a “romantic humanist,” defining humanity by “confronting what it means to be a creature in a larger environmental habitat that informs so-called human qualities” (25). To better understand Forster’s environmental context, then, Sultzbach examines the place of the pastoral (and eventually the anti- and post-pastoral) in Forster’s work. Reading the pastoral influence of Theocritus and Virgil on Forster’s “The Story of Panic” and “The Other Kingdom,” Sultzbach argues that these early stories advocate forms of stewardship and “clearly critique the perspective of white, upper-class narrators” (37). Still, the “tendency of these narratives to change lower-class characters of nonEnglish race into objects—even if those objects are idealized organic trees—replicates troubling treatments of nonwhite ‘peasant folk’ as somehow less than civilized” (37).
Next, Sultzbach considers how Forster’s use of the anti-pastoral in “The Machine Stops,” Howards End, “Arthur Snatchfold,” and Maurice seems to depict the working poor as “blithely happy figures,” even as Forster calls attention to the “politics of class and mobility to reveal the precarious position of the lower class” (46). The final section of this chapter surveys Forster’s development from the pastoral to the anti-pastoral in A Passage to India, a work in which Forster relies heavily on modernist techniques. Indeed, this novel privileges embodied awareness and nonhuman voices because “an ethical understanding of our relationship with the more-than-human world requires an openness to new forms and an acceptance of uncertainty” (73). In this manner, A Passage from India calls attention to similarities of human and nonhuman animals without constructing a “singular comforting identity” (75). The novel values “multiplicity,” a thriving network of nonhuman beings, as well as a range from humans from different races, classes, religions, and nationalities.
Chapter 2, “The Phenomenological Whole,” draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “ecophenomenology” and the work of recent ecomaterialists, like Serpil Oppermann, Serenella Iovino, and Donna Haraway to highlight the place of embodied knowledge in Woolf’s works. In the chapter’s first section, Sultzbach shows how Woolf’s collections of essays, The Common Reader and The Second Common Reader, bear a similarity to contemporary ecocritical discussions about granting agency to nonhuman animals. According to Sultzbach, Woolf sees affective engagement as more valuable than intellectual engagement for fiction: “The literary practice of allowing room for the not-fully understood in descriptions of palpable interaction with the nonhuman world—affirming it without erasing its evasiveness and honoring the uncertainty without negating its meaning—nurtures an environmental consciousness based in ethical relationships” (93).
The chapter’s second section further explores the possibility that nonhuman animals possess the capacity for human emotion, even as nonhuman animals might possess thoughts and reactions that are distinct from human responses. Woolf’s “Kew Gardens,” Flush, and “Thunder at Wembley” contain nonhuman animals who play crucial, independent roles distinct from human characters. Particularly persuasive is Sultzbach’s reading of Woolf’s embodied perception and nonverbal language as the basis for fostering empathetic connections across species. This recognition of living beings’ similarities and differences, Sultzbach argues, provides a critique of empire, the assumptions of British superiority, and the hierarchal classification that deems nonhuman animals as less valuable than humans. While Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has traditionally been read as a World War I elegy, Sultzbach, in the second chapter’s final section, reads the novel from an ecocritical lens to show how nonhuman beings live distinct lives from humans. Thus, the novel “rejects a romantic ‘oneness’—a belief that nature exists to serve humans or mirror their emotions—in favor of this kind of intertwining” (120). Sultzbach’s reading of Woolf as rejecting a “romantic ‘oneness’” brings to mind what Timothy Morton, in The Ecological Thought (2010), calls “dark ecology,” the rejection of false unity in favor of a “mesh,” which “implies separateness and difference … The mesh isn’t a background against which the strange stranger appears. It is the entanglement of all strangers” (47). Sultzbach only briefly mentions Morton’s work in her introduction, but the reading of Woolf certainly extends and exemplifies his framework of dark ecology and understanding of the “mesh.”
In her third chapter, “Brute Being and Animal Language,” Sultzbach concludes her study of ecology and Modernism with Auden’s poetry. The chapter’s first section reads “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics,” “Bestiaries Are Out,” and “Ode to Terminus” as poems that construct a lexicon of scientific systems that order “nature” in highly rigged classifications. Yet, in capturing the human tendency to classify and control “nature,” Auden’s poems “divulge more about human beings than about the ‘lesser’ animals the speaker [of “Bestiaries are Out”] claims superiority over” (163). These poems, then, reflect Auden’s suspicion toward any claims of absolute knowledge, as well as his recognition that human knowledge, both in science and literature, needs an ethical foundation.
Next, continuing earlier discussions about language and the divide between humans and nonhumans, Sultzbach reads Auden’s “Talking to Mice,” Talking to Dogs,” and “Two Bestiaries” as ecocritical commentary on human–animal community. According to Sultzbach, Auden in his essay “The Virgin and the Dynamo” calls readers to reject beliefs in the superiority of humanity and in the deification of “nature” in favor of embracing “familial, biological kinship” (171). Auden’s poems bespeak a desire to communicate with nonhuman beings and an anxiety about the potential for nonhuman language to represent meaningful communication. In Sultzbach’s reading, Auden’s concerns about language underscore the probability that “any effort to ‘talk to’ another species is always filtered through the self who imagines their end of the dialogue,” thus anticipating contemporary conversations in animal studies (178). The chapter’s final section draws from animal studies more explicitly through close readings of “natural Linguistics” and “First Things First” to argue that human language is not evidence of human superiority over “nature.” Instead, according to Sultzbach, the nonhuman world likely possesses its own language that is distinct from human language: “Human language is only one form Logos takes” (190).
Surely, Sultzbach’s strength is her ability to seamlessly weave together a wide range of recent ecocritical voices. Likewise, Sultzbach manages to strike a balance between theoretical voices and her own close readings of Forster, Woolf, and Auden. I would highly recommend Sultzbach’s book to anyone interested in Modernism and ecocriticism, especially emerging critical work on ecomaterialism. Given Pope Francis’s recent call in Laudato Si’ (2015) for greater awareness of and action on the environmental crisis facing our planet, readers of Christianity & Literature should continue to reimagine and reevaluate their relationship to Creation. Sultzbach’s Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination would help foster such reflections.