Honors Theses
Environmental Humanities
Spring 2015
Body-Writing: The Search for an Embodied
Ecopoetics
Sierra Davis Dickey
Penrose Library, Whitman College
Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10349/20151084
This thesis has been deposited to Arminda @ Whitman College by the author(s) as part of their
degree program. All rights are retained by the author(s) and they are responsible for the content.
Body-Writing: The Search for an Embodied Ecopoetics
by
Sierra Davis Dickey
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for graduation with Honors in Environmental Humanities.
Whitman College
2015
Certificate of Approval
This is to certify that the accompanying thesis by Sierra Davis Dickey has been accepted in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Environmental Humanities.
________________________
Emily Jones
Whitman College
May 13, 2015
ii
Acknowledgements
When Emily Jones first stated to our small group of seniors that the thesis was an
“iterative process,” I had no idea how right she was and how much my topic with all of its intraacting agents would come to resemble the style of this procedure. I guess that now I can say that
I truly know the definition of iterative: a gradual shared becoming. My experience with this
project was so meaningful and challenging and validating and mind-opening because of how
much my advisors shared with me. I cannot say how truly thankful I am to Emily for your
investment in me and my work, and for challenging me early on to never participate (by hedging
or however else) in the prejudices I seek to confront. As I leave Whitman, I will keep you and
your extraordinary ways of thinking and working close. Thank you also to Don and Lydia for
laboring enthusiastically with me-- for sharing in this work’s becoming. I know there were many
false starts. Or were they false?
I must also pay heed to the 2015 class of Environmental Humanities seniors. I have loved
getting to know you all more closely over the course of this undertaking, and I will certainly miss
the food, discussion, and general animistic atmosphere of our potlucks. Our melee has done more
for my future ambitions than any other more kosher kind of “career help” could ever dream of.
And now to explicitly mimic an Oscar’s speech: thank you to Mom and Dad for reading
to me every night, for putting me through Whitman, and for giving me unending chances to
engage with such people on a project like this.
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Introduction
“Small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power: of Naming the name
of a quality: spindly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied. Say them aloud always.
Make them irrefutable.” (Plath 285)
In the body, everything is both material and aesthetic. Your flesh and bones are made of
physical and finite stuffs, which together form a visible external-- your aesthetic image. In the
body, everything is also both natural and cultural. The ceaseless fluctuation of your fluids and
the daily exercises of your organs are ruled as much by biology as by a culture that seeks to
mediate them. The division of cells makes your hair grow, and the deliberations of culture will
have you cut it. No matter where or how you live, your physical body as given in part by
evolution and genetics will always “interact” with a culture, and this culture will end up
changing your body perhaps even down to the most microscopic layers (Bordo 16). What your
flesh writes for itself will weave into the tales assigned to you. You are abuzz with stories.
In this light, the body appears as the most literary of all things. Your physical person is a
convergence zone between material existence and human narrative, and therefore the perfect
place to glimpse the possibility that nature and culture are not fundamentally opposed. Knowing
that we are constituted by such confluences, our own bodies can lead us to seek out more
meetings and intersections instead of hewing to partitions and bifurcations. On this path there
arises a trestle between human foreground and natural background. There are new tunnels being
dug in the old city of language.
Reading into matter in this way, and moving with the ecocritical direction to reveal the
physical underpinnings of a work, an ecopoetics somehow must also uncover our physical
underpinnings. Our bodily stories can induce us to attend to other narratives, and so a practice
that seeks to aerate the human sphere must engage them. The bounded and yet porous
arrangements of flesh that we inhabit retain us as part and parcel of this world. And so, this
literary pursuit bothers with the body. I postulate that revisiting the sites of our individual beings
can provide more direct access to the material foundations from which our bodies come. I insist
that embodiment is equalizing. Remembering that we too are organisms bound in time and
vulnerable flesh is not bio-reductionism, but a crucial reconceptualization of humanness that
results in reverence.
And so, how can ecopoetics use the body in its attempts to make space for more
contributors in language? What does an ecopoetical stance insist about the indivisibility of
human and nature, culture and the crude? These questions guide my exploration of a few texts
not typically counted in the canon of nature writing. In Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
I examine the power of matter to shatter symbols. In the journals of Sylvia Plath I experience a
burgeoning author’s desire to instantiate the world in text through her body. And in a few poems
by Katharine Larson I witness ecopoetic saturation in practice. Cumulatively, I spend time in
works where the body and the environment in which it is embedded have risen onto the page.
Ecopoetics: What is it?
Though ecopoetics might not have yet earned the moniker of “school” it is certainly a
field in which writers can be located, or at least an organizing principle around which writers can
be said to have orbited. Like most terms for schools of literary thought, it is more the product of
the literary critic’s observations and formulations than of the working authors. And so, I use
“ecopoetics” here in reference to a kind of writing that I wish to speak of. This kind of writing is
found amongst many genres and is not restricted to poetry. What this kind of writing looks like,
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the thoughts it is founded on, and its specific usefulness to feminists and environmentalists as
two specific sects of humanity will be discussed below.
However, ecopoetics must also be recognized as an element of creative process and is
therefore far more epistemological than those initial parameters would suggest. Susan Griffin, a
philosopher, and Robert Bringhurst, a linguist and poet, have led me to base my understanding of
ecopoetics away from the “superstructure” of human products and instead on the bottom1 of
culture and life in being (Bringhurst 169). In this work I often make reference to an ecopoetical
“impulse”-- something in the action or intention of an author that seeks ecopoetical attunement.
Bringhurst and Griffin help most fundamentally to understand what kind of attunement this is
and to what frequency the work may be attuned.
For Bringhurst, ecopoetics is a result of a much more fundamental realization. For
starters, his “poetry” is much more than a literary genre. “Poetry” is the word he uses for the
inevitable “ways” of nature: “the way of the grizzly is to eat berries and fish in the summer and
to hibernate in winter” (170). Poetry is Bringhurst’s term for something that many disciplines
know something about although they always call it something else (Bringhurst 170).
Bringhurst’s “poetry” could be the laws of thermodynamics to a physicist, the organs of a cell to
a microbiologist, or the mating grebe’s ballet to an ornithologist. All of these “ways” together
form nature’s “culture,” or, the “literature of what is” (170). One might wonder why Bringhurst
elects mostly literary analogies to describe a fundamentally epistemological and
phenomenological world-view. But for Bringhurst there is no analogy. Poetry is what nature
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I use this spatial image of verticality in order to redress the spatial iambics that tradition has situated nature in. By
posturing that humans are apart from nature and more than matter, the heritage of Western civilization has attempted
to place humans above the ground. In The Eros of Everyday Life, Susan Griffin writes that “through custom, law,
habit, and language, theory is layered over the body, as over the body of earth”(44). This layering-over is
administered from above since both nature and woman are seen as “ground of being rather than being” (44).
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does, and some poetic verse is the closest human analogue to the ways of nature. Moreover,
literature and its various expressions are ancient and are developed (like humans) out of nature.
The finest, and truest poetry in his estimation participates in the way or culture of nature; humans
can only ever be co-authors. And so, real poetry for Bringhurst is honest mimesis. It is not a
human construction, representation, or substitution. And this kind of poetry does not require a
certain kind of composition, but is instead seen at large as a philosophical act-- a joining-in on
the artful thinking that is happening all around. When this engagement happens and you chance
to write it down, it is poetry for Bringhurst, and you have recorded words, or: “the tracks left by
the breath of the mind as it intersects with the breath of the lungs” and a million other things
(170).
The ephemeral “joining” in the image of words as intersections between two breaths
evokes Susan Griffin’s parameters for poetics. Her view of nature and the fundamentals of
existence share an active quality with Bringhurst. In The Eros of Everyday Life, Griffin is struck
by the “idea of a world creating itself through small chores” (149). For her, the poetry of the
universe is the unending symphony of matter in motion: all those entrances, exits, fusions,
replications, differentiations, separations, and resolutions (149). This focus on motion balances
her epistemology between dichotomous extremes. Instead of forcing herself to choose between
the holistic view (that everything is one-- we are nature and nature is us), and the fragmentary
view (humans are separate from nature, individuals are separate from humanity), she divines a
hybrid which reconciles the two poles through its unrelenting motion. To Griffin, existence
consists of a never-ending sequence of “meetings” between separate bodies: “everything I
encounter permeates me, washes in and out, leaving a tracery, placing me in that beautiful
paradox of being by which I am both a solitary creature and everyone, everything” (150). When
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this kind of motion makes up the universe, boundaries exist, but they are permeable. Wholeness
happens when substances commune, but it is not the permanent state of all things. Individuals
and communities, wholes and parts exist in Griffin’s recurring intersections. Her philosophy is
neither duality nor non-duality but perches in between and in its vacillations pulls gently on each
side.
Griffin’s understanding of nature and the fundamentals of existence don’t mention
literature as immediately as Bringhurst’s does, but rather language and poetry are qualified by
her broader beliefs in the ways of matter and motion. For her too there is no fundamental
difference between a human art-maker and her natural subject. Language is not required to be a
symbol or a description, but is its own experience and its own meaning altogether (191). Toying
with traditional assumptions about poetry as opposed to prose, Griffin writes: “poetry is quite
rational” because it “ignores the boundaries we accept as real” and is therefore far more
compatible with “the real nature of the mind” (189). In this way, Griffin views words as “units of
meanings” that are themselves an experience, and of course to her, all experience is always
moving. The genre of poetry in particular “gives” her “this motion in language” more directly
than any other (192). In a statement that dissolves the idea of reflective difference or symbolic
separation being inherent to human creation, she concludes: “my experience is not described or
explained by language; it is language” (192). This is a highly sensuous idea as it takes words to
be part of reality, capable of being felt and produced by the human as a whole instead of existing
beyond and mediating from a place apart.
And so, Bringhurst and Griffin lay a foundation for language and life that slips between
the stone walls of any nature/culture dichotomy. Humans are extensions of nature, and nature has
its own culture which is constantly in process, and available to witness. When we make art that
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resonates with these understandings, art that witnesses and “testifies,” we are creating
ecopoetically (Bringhurst 170). Our products are not symbols or descriptions, but continuations
of-- and elaborations on-- a concomitant thread. Reverencing what human tradition has
previously made “other” (nature’s culture as displayed in and inferred from phenomenology)
puts humanity back into community, and restores the requirement of interrelated existence that is
fundamental to life in ecological understandings.
The problem with ecopoetics is that it is unacceptable to the world in its current structure,
just as much of language is designed to deny body-knowledges. This is why Bringhurst and
Griffin have to produce such nimble arguments away from the human/nature dichotomy-because our reality is shaped by dichotomous assumptions. In their most radical distillation,
Griffin and Bringhurst’s thought paradigms seek to provide an alternative to the established
belief that there is a legitimate “hierarchy that places human consciousness above nature”
(Griffin 36). With this context, it becomes necessary to talk about ecopoetics as it stands within
the dichotomous frame. When placed within the thought framework that it seeks to dislodge and
expand, ecopoetics reappears as a study and practice fraught with tensions. Its basis in language
becomes its problem. How can something seek to reconcile language and nature if language is
always human artifice?
Historically, within the field of literary studies ecopoetics comes in part from the
longstanding tradition of poetics-- those ideas that titled Aristotle’s tome and what scholars from
then on have been discussing as a part of the literary discourse. According to Todorov, poetics is
a specific method for studying and analyzing literature that places itself somewhere between
“interpretation and science in the field of literary studies" (6). So placed, poetics aims to
accumulate and articulate “a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each
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work," and is therefore “an approach to literature at once 'abstract' and 'internal'” (6). If poetics in
general (not Bringhurst’s specific theory) concerns itself with how literature is able to make
meaning, ecopoetics (when viewed as a subset of this traditional poetics) is centrally concerned
with how the environment, nature or ecological forces contribute to those meanings. Because of
this self-conscious combination of lexical and non-lexical entities, a material ecocritical lens
becomes indispensable to my understanding of ecopoetics: I want to look at language without
dispensing with matter—I want to seek their meeting points. Overall, this project understands
ecopoetics as a field of study and analysis as well as a practice employed by working authors.
The two different employments of the term will be made clear by the context in which they are
mentioned.
A Few Tensions
When ecopoetics is discussed in practice, Bringhurst and Griffin’s visions of a universe
in motion and the very specific quality of a human’s participation in that movement rarely
surfaces.When grasping for a pithy way to explain the ecopoetical project, most authors focus on
how there is always human language working for or with a non-human entity. All of these
statements strike the typical reader as juxtapositions, like Linda Russo’s example: "The thought
is weighted equally with the physical presence; neither is more complex than the other" (7).
While some commentators talk about this as a stymieing tension between nature (the physical
presences) and cultural artifice (the poet’s thoughts and wordplay), Marcella Durand, in her
essay “Spatial Interpretations” instead celebrates this double requirement as a freedom that few
disciplines have: “Most other disciplines, such as biology, oceanography, mathematics are
usually obliged to separate their data and observations into discrete topics” (124). According to
Durand, an ecopoetic project instead gets to do just the opposite: it conjoins the data of acute
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sensory perception with the observations of a language-bound and culturally immersed creator in
the person of the human author. Scott Knickerbocker shares this celebratory – or rather
optimistic—understanding of ecopoetics, and in introducing the subjects of his book Ecopoetics:
The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language, he writes:
Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems, to make them seem more
natural and thus supposedly closer to nature, the poets in this book unapologetically
embrace artifice—not for its own sake but in order to perform and enact the natural
world. Indeed, for them, artifice is natural. (2)
Notice how both Durand and Knickerbocker assume that the reader is coming from a place of
dichotomous thinking. According to these scholars, nature and culture need not be so mutually
exclusive; they define their subject first within dichotomy in order to guide one out of it. They
eventually arrive at the same conclusions as Griffin and Bringhurst that began this chapter, but
their process starts from within and then moves outside until the traverse from internal to
external effaces the boundary surfaces all together. Indeed, at its very core the idea of an
ecopoetics proposes that the natural can indeed be transposed through the cultural, and likewise
that the cultural is capable of doing this without fundamentally compromising the naturalness it
elects to represent. But the tensions will always be there because so much of the reading world
expects them. For resourceful writers, the tension becomes a useful problem to either diffuse or
pressurize. My examination of Winterson and other primary texts will trace the mechanisms by
which the authors attempt this controversial project. But, first, I have to make a critical visit to
modern language in order to understand how and why these dichotomous tensions persist.
The Language Problem
As Tiiu Speek writes in her summary of ecocritic Lawrence Buell’s “dual accountability”
theory, “interconnections between institutions and writing have become commonplaces of
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critical thinking” (160). In other words, language itself is a problem for humanity, and much of
literary criticism indeed circulates around this token of self-consciousness. Moreover, language
is one of the key precepts of Western Civilization, the foundation for every epistemology, and in
all of that, a potent tool for hegemonic enforcement, be it social, natural, political, or economic.
One of the divisions it enforces is the very one that ecopoetics defies: nature and culture are
irreconcilable. Many have shown how language and its communicative hegemonies have
politically and philosophically subjugated women and nature, the two primary focuses of
feminist and environmental discourses. To put it colloquially, these two groups each have a dog
in the fight.
Among the ecocritical scholars concerned with the written institution are authors Max
Oelschlaeger and Christopher Manes. These two are wearily circumspect about what they call
“Euro-language,” because of the “Euro-culture” that it is a part of (Oelschlaeger 273). For
Oelschlaeger, “Euro-culture” is synonymous with the “human project” of modernism that is
always anxiously laboring to sublimate itself into a realm beyond the physical (272). “Eurolanguage” originates from this project and becomes one of its key tools--a technology by which
humans “created a space in which humankind dwells”—a space “enframed” by androcentrism,
anthropocentrism, and a “Judeo-Christian, Baconian-Cartesian perspective” (275). Because
“Euro-language” thus enframes the mind, it becomes a great impediment between humans and
the natural world, and deepens the chasm that supposedly hangs between elemental wilderness
and civilization. Having created a kingdom, males and monadic gods then rule the space within
this frame. Granted, this “Euro-language” stands for many idioms but not all.2 Manes and
2
I will use this coinage of Oelschlaeger’s from here on to refer to English language as understood in its cultural
context that demands a divide between humans and nature and reinforces that divide through hegemonic practices.
Surely other languages outside of the Germanic also collude in similar cultural projects but I do not have sufficient
expertise to make any claims along those lines.
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Oelschlaeger indict this language specifically because of the enframing it achieves on behalf of
its parent culture. Of course, “Euro-language” can be used in other ways: to subvert its heritage
and destabilize the frame. As Cixous declares, even from within this bracketing, “words
diverge,” and “meanings flow” (ix).
For those who dwell in Euro-language, ecopoetics arises amidst but also challenges the
supposed division between elemental wilderness (or pure nature) and civilization and its cultural
products. As a literary practice embedded in this cultural context, the field must comport itself
somehow in relation to this dichotomy that understands humans as fundamentally different and
separate (in a way that connotes supremacy) from the rest of the phenomenological world. But
ecopoetics is responding to the problems of language with more and different language. For
these and other reasons, we must disobey Euro-language’s instructions and instead understand
nature and culture here not as diametrically opposed, but as mutually incorporated. Material
ecocritic Wendy Wheeler renders them this way in her approach to biosemiotics. In “Natural
Play, Natural Metaphor, and Natural Stories,” she states that the purview of biosemiotics puts
“humans and human poiesis and techne back in nature where they belong as evolutionary
developments” (69). All in all, it is crucial that my discussion of language’s relationships with
nature and human women present both the commonly held dichotomy and the increasingly more
common rejections of that dichotomy-- especially since I will be working heavily with the
material ecocritical approaches of which Wheeler is a strong advocate.
So, language as poesis and techne is not an independently human creation, and neither are
humans autonomous beings. But the way we use language and construct our humanity today
begs otherwise. Enframed as we are in the “human project,” we make every attempt to deny or
transcend our indivisibility. Whether this language (of the predominantly Western written
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institution) has gotten too old and abstracted over the centuries or whether it was unfit to include
nature’s sovereignty in the first place, it is now certainly a distancer. According to the work of
Oelschlaeger and Manes, our words withhold from us their natural origins and support our
chasm-deepening project of ironic distancing. Words ensure that mind and matter remain apart,
and that nothing transgressive gets textually embodied, but embodied they are in Winterson’s
novel.
This may not sound so revolutionary, and as Buell notes, “to most lay readers, nothing
seems more obvious than the proposition that literature… portrays ‘reality’ imperfectly” (Speek
167). Indeed, this is an understanding that even most millennials grasped as children exiting the
Harry Potter series when we ceased waiting for the letters from Hogwarts that never came. And
yet what was transformative for me as a student of environmental literature was not the notion
that books weren’t absolute, but instead my intuition of the proposal by Manes, Oelschlaeger,
and others that a huge element of the dislocation between man and nature lay in language itself:
in the words for things, in the amassed textual authority of the “discourse,” in the structures of
sentences, and in the very fragments of the alphabet. Having arrived at this core understanding,
language takes on deeper shades of meaning and agency, while literature—as its outgrowth—
becomes also necessarily implicated. Examining language as the common building block here
illuminates the medium’s own architectural essence. Why have we come to locate so much
authority in these etchings? In a figurative sense, language too is built up, extricated, and
abstracted from the physical world then configured into complex metaphysical scaffolding that
the human consciousness hangs from, floating above the ground. Since we live through
language, we live from a perch on these flivvers—our communicative paradigm inherently at
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odds with the ground below it, and warding off any sense of meaning from the world beyond
words.
This ecocritical thesis on words as restrictive tools active in our dislocation is shared as
well by a sizeable contingent of feminist theorists, authors, and critics also discuss words and
language as tools used by patriarchal Western culture (“The Bible, the Father, the Quester”) to
reinforce the “symbolic legal fiction” of the “Father’s word” which necessarily denies both the
female other and the natural other (Shiffer). One such scholar, Celia Shiffer, aligns female desire
with “the Thing, the buried, or the prelinguistic,” a list of prehistorical entities which one would
almost certainly find in the pages of Manes and Oelschlaeger (Shiffer 37). In the end, Eurolanguage’s inherent practice of abstraction and loyalty to the discourse of Western culture makes
it problematic for both ecocritics and literary or linguistic feminists as well as the more
obviously designated “ecofeminists.” Some historical bases for language’s penchant for denial
are henceforth elaborated.
In Manes’ mind, language is not inherently exclusive and self-serving, but rather it just
became so recently in Western history when “medieval hermeneutics and Renaissance
humanism” collaborated to break down animism (17). As it stands now, Euro-language is thus
tainted by its most recent cultural gestalt, but it is still redeemable if we understand the
implications of an evacuated animism. In “Nature and Silence,” Manes portrays how medieval
Christianity’s reorientation of language through exegesis engendered the epistemological shift
that now facilitates the nature/civilization tension with which we are currently entrenched.
Specifically, Euro-language, as we have employed it since, is a tool by which we separate
ourselves from the phenomenal world while still living in it (18). Language, then, as “alphabetic
writing,” changes the ‘nature of the representations of the world,’ because it allows humans to
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lay out discourse and ‘examine it in a more abstract, generalized and ‘rational’ way” (Manes 18).
Everything becomes less immediate when we have a word to exchange it for. And yet, we divine
words for things in many cases because we care about them and they help us make meaning. All
in all, language is not all bad but there are hostile tendencies that reside within it. How one
employs Euro-language matters more than if one uses it at all.
According to Manes humans have used language to separate their institutions from the
natural world and then facilitate a further repression: “scrutiny encouraged the epistemological
inference, apparently impossible in oral cultures where language exists only as evanescent
utterances, that meaning somehow resides in human speech, not in the phenomenal world”
(Manes 18). In this differentiation, human language is taken as the singular conveyance of
meaning, and the species endows itself with all the designative and communicative powers in the
universe. Susann Cokal recounts the tenets of standard English similarly: “systems of spelling
and grammar governed the orderly production of meaning, and sentences made sense when
subjects, verbs, and objects were positioned in appropriate order” (Cokal, 18). It is on this level-that of the individual words rather than letters of syllables-- that we will discuss Euro-language
here. How do our vocabulary and the way we choose to employ it both distance us from, and
provide a link with, the phenomenal world?
By one example, the “proper” positioning of subjects and objects often creates an
unavoidable sense of passivity. Referents (the living or given objects) are first caged within
nouns or their signs (the words chosen to represent them) and then submitted to the powerful
influence of verbs. These kinds of hierarchical syntactical relationships, with which Eurolanguage is replete, fosters (again, through the discourse and its epistemology) equally repressive
living relationships off the page. In this particular way and many others, language becomes the
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tool by which we have subsequently “compressed the entire buzzing, howling, gurgling
biosphere into the narrow vocabulary of epistemology” (Manes 15). Oelschlaeger provides a
particularly detailed example of this so-called “compression” while borrowing from Thoreau.
According to Oelschlaeger, Thoreau understood that the new “Anglo-Saxon designations” for
natural features of New England concealed other genuine or primitive presences that the
corresponding Native American words did not (Oelschlaeger 277). Thoreau posited that Native
American words were actually natural presences made articulate-- the natural features embodied
in language. By his logic, the word “Musketaquid” for a river in Massachusetts maintains an
organic, living element and is therefore representationally closer to the river. The name
“Concord” for the same river denies that element and places the word farther from the water
(277). This may strike one as primitivism, and the possible racial implications are certainly
problematic, but in my estimation Thoreau did not seek to essentialize the Algonquian people
and their language but instead he looked upon their words with a great reverence and small hint
of jealousy as they were wholly disconnected from institutional English and the epistemological
vocabulary of New England enterprise which he so deplored.
Ecopoetically, “Concord” becomes a “compression” (to steal Manes’ verb) of the water
body, while “Musketaquid” is instead understood more as an expansion; it allows the full volume
of the river to come forth with its representation rather than contracting it within a foreign and
“inorganic” designation. While the Native American name for the river is certainly more
“endemic” and “original” it still cannot be assumed to be more authentic within the languagecritical framework I follow. Language, whether the King’s English or Algonquian, is still very
human even if it is at base a product of natural evolution. To my understanding, no language is
fully outside or above nature (although plenty have attempted to take it there), but some words or
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names are heavier with cultural accumulation and transcendent tension than others. Keeping with
the river example, “Concord” is a transposition of another place, another system of meanings,
and the associated amounts of mileage and time onto a river in Nashawtuc Hill-- a section of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony struck upon by European settlers (Concord Library History). To put it
plainly, the word “Concord” did not originate in the “New World” where the physical river had
been flowing since a glacier gouged its path (Concord Library). Thus, cultural accumulation
causes an imbalance between the materials and the meanings that must combine in the makeup
of metaphysical language. This imbalance has serious repercussions. The weight of this
accumulation is what compresses word, and “distances” them from their material points of
origin. Of course, not all of our expressions have concrete or traceable material points of origin,
but the language of ecopoetics deals heavily in terms that do. Later, I will discuss how these
compressions of vocabulary actually dehydrate the objects behind the words just as they make
them denser through epitomizing them in a single epistemology. In this light, ecopoetics
becomes an effort to re-balance (or shift the balance between) the matter and the meaning
necessary to language, and thus a way of communicating that is actively pushing the boundaries
of human ontology and perpetually challenging the “assumed” Cartesian distinction.
Aspirations
With the burden of language in the rearview, an ecopoetic task becomes both more
difficult and more important--it becomes an aspirational charge. If you begin within, like Durand
and Knickerboxer, ecopoetics is seen as an aspirational framework for literature because of what
it proposes to meld together: nature and culture. Or, what it attempts to demonstrate as already
irrefutably melded. In a bodily sense, ecopoetics also has to do with aspiration because it wants,
or makes motions, to draw breath into words: it aspirates, it inhales, and in so doing expands the
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compressed space within a word and within a wider language-- allowing for life to reenter. Or,
with Bringhurst in mind, it allows words to breathe along with life in ecopoetic entrainment.
As I noted in my discussion of the language problem, it is common to imagine culture
and nature as standing at odds with one another on either side of a great abyss. Ecopoetics
attempts to build a bridge—or, even more holistically-- to fill the abyss with a certain loam:
producing a land bridge and eliminating the schism altogether. The authors and thinkers like
Griffin and Bringhurst whose writing preemptively rejects this impediment altogether employ
the thinking tool of what one could call non-duality. But arguments and divisions among
ecopoetical authors still hinge on dualities. Some retain the division-by-abyss as a given and
write only as if to send up emergency flares from the human encampment. The less pyrotechnic
are rather masonic and pursue bridge building, which --while productive-- reinforces the
configuration of the divide. And then the writers of the loamy variety disbelieve in the abyss
altogether and go about filling in their land bridge with ecopoetical works merely as an
educational gesture to the rest of the world. In other words, some ecopoetical authors come from
a place structured by the false dichotomy between nature and culture and other authors come
from a place that outrightly rejects this division altogether. These various starting points
influence ecopoetical writing in different ways and produce a broad spectrum of works.
However, the aspiration behind their labor is all the same: to slip the reader between the
boundaries of a hierarchy that places “human consciousness above nature” (Griffin 36).
There are many ways to induce this kind of deeper breathing. One author whose
particular ecopoetical working methods inform this project is Linda Russo. In her article
“Writing Within: Notes on Ecopoetics as Spatial Practice,” she examines her own “emplaced”
writing practice along with those of poets Lorine Niedecker and Joanne Kyger to show an
16
ecopoetics in praxis: a certain kind of “listening” and the specific application of these sensory
perceptions through poetry. Of course, in ecopoetics the philosophical and the practical are often
one and the same, as the tools and tricks of the trade result in perceptive works that further a
variety of goals. In the end, accessing the kind of ecopoetical understandings intimated by
Griffin and Bringhurst would require a fair amount of practice for anyone alive today, as our
society is certainly not explicitly trained in thinking poetry. But the necessity to enhance access
to these understandings does not result in artifice. When poets and others make conscious efforts
to reach another layer of the world they have not created a new and fraudulent world—they are
still moving within ours.
While the discrete goals of a work depend on the author’s philosophical home turf (abyss
or loam) a number of commonly held goals for ecopoetics have been articulated. The field of
material ecocriticism is especially useful in understanding such goals as its own are similar and
more centrally located. In their surveying introduction to Material Ecocriticism, Iovino and
Oppermann articulate a common motivator: "resisting the emphasis on linguistic constructions of
the world, formulated by some trends of postmodern thought, the new materialist paradigm is
premised on the integral ways of thinking language and reality, meaning and matter together"
(4). This harkens back to my prior mention of the tension between nature and artifice understood
here with more acute focus as “meaning and matter.” One powerful goal of an ecopoetic writing
practice is certainly this: to reinstate natural matter in the realm of human meaning. As I
suggested with the example of Thoreau, the constituents in a word or poem can be rebalanced.
And if ecopoetics slips language between dichotomous frames, it also slips the body back into
literature, grounding words by their physical origins or the physical origins of their speakers.
17
Rather than a relocation, this grounding is a swelling of textual dimensions and helps to
instantiate the human body in a sphere of storied flesh.
In a theoretical frame, the aspirational motives inherent to ecopoetics arise from a critical
analysis of the written institution, and, specifically in the case of this project, the European
cultural heritage with which this comes. But what does it mean to place meaning and matter
together whether in thought or in a piece of writing, and how is this aspirational? An aspiration
lies in the attempt to rejuvenate language by returning its attention to the stark natural presences
all around. By relocating the attentions of culture, and replacing the units of communicative
meaning in context with the phenomenological world, ecopoetics reestablishes human culture in
a broader life community. When human culture is repositioned as level with and internal to
nature rather than above or outside, it is no longer imposing, penetrating, or alone on a rock of its
own making. Ecopoetics wagers that it’s possible to bring the mind of language gently down
from its scaffolding and to rest back in its body on the ground.
Conceptual Connections: The Body, The Environment, and Ecopoetics
As a way of studying the natural and ecological entities that allow literature and language
to be meaningful, ecopoetics brings the body and the environment to light more concretely. For
the purposes of this project, the environment is the entire physical world and all of its
phenomena together: cultural artifacts and technological megaliths are thrown in with the cliff
swallow, the tides, and the biogeography of mountain ranges. Nature, a part of this great
surround (a sphere within a sphere perhaps), is made up of human organisms and the “morethan-human” organisms, objects, forces, and elements rather than less-than-human or other-thanhuman ones. In this way, portions of the environment might not be “natural” but they are still
legitimate and undeniable pieces of the environment. However, this does not excuse various
18
human inventions (nuclear weapons, toxic sludge, the interstate highway system) as natural and
thus ecologically acceptable. Furthermore, “natural” here is understood on a continuum and
attempts to work without overly heavy moral connotations. And though I do not moralize, there
is still a hierarchy at work here between natural and non. In later chapters this appears mostly as
a directional orientation with man and culture above woman and nature where words hover at
altitude with man. As a thinker I do not subscribe to this vertical power structure; it is the
thought system that I and the authors I profile exist within and are responding to.
The human body is a part of nature, and seen with the particular attentions of ecopoetics
emerges as a thing with many of the same elements as the environment. That is to say that both
the body and the environment are material-discursive entities. Both are hybrid natural/cultural
objects; societal meaning and physiological matter are already necessarily forced together in
them. They are “discursively produced” (as we come to know them through human discursive
practices3) and phenomenologically given—they also exist in reality when our cultural practices
do attend in their direction (Bordo 35). Jeanette Winterson’s novel provides a vivid example of
this conception when one character’s body imprints words onto that of her lover, and flesh is
engaged as both author and text. Additionally, the body and the environment are sites in which
the (human) interpreter and interpreted are one. My observations of my own physical system can
never be wholly objective. Suppose I wanted to witness the workings of my eyeballs in scientific
detail--I will never get to gaze upon those pieces of myself in isolation—there is no “exterior
observation point” to be found (Barad 146).
3
In “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter comes to Matter” Karen Barad defines
the discourse as “that which constrains and enables what can be said,” and practices that police the “field of
possibilities” (137). Borrowing from her definition, I use discourse here to emphasize how the body is both
constructed and limited by human configurations and constituted undeniably by flesh that is not produced by the
human discussion.
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The body is also the philosophical and spatial designation typically assigned to the
female object. Woman suffers far more than man from a gestalt that denigrates nature and
neglects matter because womanhood entails a more pronounced materiality.4 Likewise, the
female body is especially like the environment as a site of political and physical power struggles.
The issue of abortion, for example, is immensely physical and political as it plays out
legislatively in the halls of government and somatically in the bodies of pregnant females.
Environmentally, the issue of resource extraction is similarly simultaneously abstract and
concrete. For these and many other reasons, my project combines the complementary lenses of
material ecocriticism and feminism into one analysis.
As Susan Griffin writes in The Eros of Everyday Life, and as Wendy Wheeler explains in
her essay “Natural Play, Natural Metaphor, and Natural Stories,” the same currents of Western
history propelled by the modernist “human project” have burdened the present day with these
hierarchical distinctions. The related disregard for nature and distaste for woman now take on
new forms in a cycle of endless self-perpetuation. For instance, Griffin claims that the
fundamental dichotomy between humans and nature engenders the divide between male and
female, and in turn makes Earth “familiar and feminine, heavy with the corruption of sensual
knowledge and emotion” (34). There is no doubt that the current Western gestalt functions
according to this binary, but (like anything cultural) it has grown to be much larger than the sum
of its parts, and thus no horde of historians could dream of excavating all of its individual bones
completely. Still, one must wonder where these delineations came from and fragments of thought
remain to be interrogated. Wheeler identifies one point-source of the divisive vision in the
“nominalist doctrine” of 13th century Christianity—one of the pillars which Reformation
4
Griffin uses the example of birth to demonstrate how females are directly connected to the carnally creative and
destructive potential of our bodies (65-66).
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theology and modern science were both founded on (73). According to Wheeler, nominalist
doctrine established the basis for the “materialist modernity” with which ecopoetics must
contend, as it is “unable to account for the richly communicative world” (72). By “materialist,”
Wheeler also means nihilist, since nominalist doctrine made the world “sinfully despicable,” and
meaningless, and the human location in it “random,” and “unreliable” (73). Nominalism sets up
the material world as a mangled mass of stuffs devoid of meaning, life, and God that
discombobulated humans must then distance themselves from in order to devise any spiritual
significance for their species. Since so much of earthly matter emanates from the ground, it
makes sense that this theology would sweep upwards and away from the incoherent and
despicable, and position all things good, divine, and meaningful up in the sky.
It also makes sense that as medieval Christianity and the Enlightenment were enacted by
patriarchies, the original divisive coupling of heaven and earth elevates man towards heaven, and
leaves woman behind below. Take Genesis for example, which configures woman as
fundamentally secondary and inferior to man in the organization of creation. In that cosmology
woman becomes a subspecies within her own species. She thus also becomes the “symbol of
material existence” from which aspirational male culture is perpetually trying to extricate itself
(Griffin 24). This polarization extends along with nature/human and man/woman to the human
body as well. Our physicalities become sinfully vain and senseless just because they are material.
We can’t stand this cage of dumb flesh that equalizes us with the stuff of the world and keeps us
on beck and call to its brute needs. So, we imagine that the mind and soul must be separate from
our soma: “intellect and abstract principle were assigned to a territory of mind superior to the
material, sensual, emotional realm of the body” (Griffin 35). It is from here that the mind/body
distinction springs.
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In the fiction of Winterson (and other ecopoetical authors who traverse this vertical
distance) is a reverent return to the low and the grounded, or embedded foundations which serve
to subvert and eventually collapse the altitude so painstakingly acquired by Western Renaissance
humanism-- they reappropriate language to combat this hierarchical metaphysics. Cixous shows
that this subversion can take place in the very act of composition as well. She formulates bodywriting as the irrepressible bridging of the hierarchical distance: “As soon as you let yourself be
led beyond codes… the words diverge, you are no longer enclosed in the maps of social
constructions, you no longer walk between walls, meanings flow” (x). While Winterson’s tropes
engage with this distance from the novel’s platform, I read a refining body-writing practice in the
experimental journal passages of Sylvia Plath.
This willing descent (one could call it) back to materiality destabilizes the towering
heritage of abstracted male dominance. Griffin describes it as finding “a territory outside the old
geography. A ground reconceived” (17). Its discovery does not so much restore meaning and
power to the fleshy, female, and concrete as it recognizes and announces the profound
significances that were always there-- all told, an ecofeminist ecopoetics reveals that the
vacuuming of patriarchal nominalism was all done in vain. Whose theology is vacuous now?
Seen within Western Civilization and literary traditions, ecopoetics acts on behalf of both
the body and nature as hybrid and marginalized entities. Ecopoetics brings them meaningfully
into symbolic and abstract language without killing, silencing, or devaluing their very alive and
concrete states. Thus, any ecopoetics that seeks to reposition human ontology must maintain a
non-materialist approach to the body, and along with the environment, must be re-perceived as
“more than a passive substratum” (Wheeler 70) and instead, as “agentic partners” (Iovino and
Oppermann 6) in the project of human meaning-making. As ecopoetics in practice brings these
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two new partners in on the human project through careful and creative literature, human
ontology is flexed and stretched to allow for other beings and their own forms of knowledge. All
in all, ecopoetics is a mechanism for employing the body and the environment more
meaningfully in cultural creations and is therefore a tool for the radical alteration of our
perception. The goal of ecopoetics, as understood here, is to transition the general humanist
epistemology away from following a narrow plot to a new “emanating point of the narrative”
which is “no longer the human self, but the human-nonhuman complex of interrelated agencies”
(Iovino and Oppermann 9). Embodiment aids in the transition from narrow to expansive
narratives by equalizing humans on the material plane and introducing language and readers to
the multitude of other stories that are taking place all around oneself.
Material ecocriticism also focuses on the equalizing nature of bodies, and Louise
Hutchings Westling’s theory of the body as a facilitator to the biosphere is one powerful example
of that focus. In her article “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World,” Westling employs the
ideas of phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl to articulate Virginia
Woolf ‘s vision of “the flesh of the world.” As Westling recounts it, this vision (examined most
closely in To the Lighthouse) is in large part influenced by the ideas of the “New Physics” --with
Einstein as the figurehead-- that brought for Woolf “an exciting confirmation” of her worldview
(3). As Westling configures it, Woolf’s vision imagines the phenomenological as fleshy and
alive, and containing currents of energies. Westling describes this as “the dynamic bodily
fullness of the nonhuman world,” and once attuned to it, instead of perceiving the external
surfaces around us as inert material, we can sense that they radiate and articulate their
fullness. By recognizing that the world outside our bodies has similar qualities to our personal
corporeal bases of life, we transpose an understanding onto the environment that avoids pathetic
23
fallacy because it does not include the delivery of emotions. And yet, this way of seeing is
unhelpful if we cannot first view and experience our own bodies’ unique intelligences. In this
way, working past a materialist epistemology must begin with our own material beings.
This understanding of the body/environment symmetry crystallizes in what Westling calls
“human embeddedness” (3). As the mechanism for all of our sensory experiences, the body is
what connects us physically and otherwise to the natural world. Through this form we are
enmeshed with others, and so it is through bodily knowledge first that we know anything outside
ourselves. The fundamental realization that we are flesh leads us to see where our flesh comes
from (the earth that we eat and drink of) and that enhances our understanding of what else is
flesh. Our “living landscape” exists in continuity with the biosphere (Westling 3). We are
physically “embedded” via our corpus in the physical world. This is not to say that all
phenomenological matter is important as it somehow constitutes human flesh, but rather that
human flesh is one constituent in a larger network; we are physically a part of the greater whole.
This embedded state is evidently physical but serves as well to place us in figurative
continuity with the natural world that redefines our ontological orientation and fundamentally
alters our epistemology by denying the nature/human dichotomy. Moreover, our bodies are not
singularly incorporated-- our consciousness and intelligence are also based within them. In all of
this, an embodied state becomes requisite to participation and recognition of the natural world.
Returning to our bodies, we recall that we are synecdoche. Pay any attention to your somatic
self and you will encounter vulnerability, imperfections, and an uncertain grace that all suggest
of a hidden closeness to other less recognizable flesh.
However useful our physicality is for making this material and philosophical linkage,
much of the way the world operates today still denies its application. Our bodies’ relation to the
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earth is one of the fundamental understandings that Griffin regards as hidden under the layers of
oil paint by the huge palimpsestic “fresco” (30) of inheritances that have shaped “the modern
vision” (29). As I will argue in relation to Jeanette Winterson’s novel, the humanistic geometry
(scaffolding and its altitudes) that structures works such as medical texts actually claims to
being “disembodied, impartial, transparent,” when in fact there are always subject/object
relations at work in anything that communicates under a human paradigm (Richardson and
Harper 11). By excising the deep and often holistic knowledges of the body through the shortcircuiting of language, humanistic literature denies one aspect of our physical and
epistemological embeddedness in the natural world. Deny access to the sensorial mechanism and
you deny access to a felt recognition of the environment. What we end up communicating in
language appears in the world at a remove from our bodies and the ground. Renovate space in
language to allow for embodied knowledges and you sequentially recuperate the “‘living
landscape in which we are corporeally embedded’” (Westling 3). Ecopoetics-- as a state of
receptivity and a process of carefully innovative composition that also seeks to renovate the
geometry of humanism with which language is replete-- can make of the body an indispensable
tool.
Buoyed by the ecofeminist insights of Susan Griffin and Hélène Cixous, I read a raw
ecopoetical impulse in the journals of Sylvia Plath. Plath’s desire (and in the first place
willingness) to “body-forth” essences of the natural world is an instance of the ecopoetics of the
body and an example of language’s role in the life of the two entities (Plath 285). I will examine
the journals as a record of one artist’s attempts at ecopoetical articulation.
There are bodies in the writings of Plath and Winterson that make their texts examples of
enmeshment, and speak to the fact that our physical embeddedness in the environment through
25
our embodiment is one profound equalizing factor between us and the other communities that are
at work making lives in the biosphere. In many ways, meaningful embodiment is an early step
towards recognizing other important material agencies outside of our narrow ontology. As Linda
Russo asks as part of her ecopoetical strategy: where, and when, am I? The answers to these
questions begin in the body.
The Body’s Role in Poetic Mimesis
What does an embodied ecopoetics look like on the page, and how does one apply the
collaborative concepts of such an analysis to a piece of text? One inroad follows Bringhurst’s
mimesis and examines how acts of mimicry done by a text’s speaker contribute to an ecopoetical
rendering of the world. For according to Bringhurst, all poetry attuned to the nature of human
existence is mimetic. According to a different scholar, Vicki Graham, all poetry in general is also
mimetic not only in Bringhurst’s ideal incantatory repetitions of the ways of nature. Reviewing
Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, Graham recruits Walter Benjamin’s “mimetic faculty” to
describe the body-jumping poems in which Oliver’s speaker becomes a bear. Graham writes that
poets create similarities: “word by word, image by image, they exercise their mimetic faculties,
simulating the texture and weight of an object, the tenor and color of a feeling, the timbre of a
voice” (3). This kind of mimesis is done with the body. As Graham explains, there is a sequence
to Oliver’s body-transpositions, and they always begin with embodied contact: “evoking and
then becoming another depends on direct, sensuous contact with the other, on using the body
rather than the mind to apprehend it” (3). And using the mind and body together (in acts of
mimesis) instead of just the mind is one way to shorten the distance that the singular abstracted
mind would otherwise impose; to keep us thinking poetry, as Bringhurst would say. Altogether,
the mimetic experience is disruptive to the mind/body divide: we believe that we perceive
26
something cerebrally but our full body reacts. The idea of mimicry is a similar compromise.
Approaching Oliver’s poems, the mind need not be wholly dissolved into the body, but instead
must yield at first to the senses in order to fully acknowledge the natural other. In Graham’s
interpretation of Oliver’s mimetics, once the mind yields, the mind and body can begin to work
in tandem rather than being held tensely apart, and the newly equalized embodied subjects no
longer need relate though “otherness” but rather togetherness
While all poetry may be mimetic in one way or another, some poetry is consciously
mimetic of other beings, and thus celebrates the “ecstatic identification” involved in writing or
living with the world (Graham 3). And yet to reach this level of identification-- to think poetry-first one must yield. Katherine Larson is one poet whose works yield to the mimetic faculty, and
they manage to do so while remaining embedded within Euro-language and under the influence
of science. Larson’s Radial Symmetry was chosen by Louise Glück as the 2011 nomination to the
Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larson is both poet, field ecologist, and research scientist, and has
an MFA in creative writing. In her introduction to the collection, Gluck emphasizes how these
different backgrounds hybridize in Larson and make each of her compositions “seem a gift, an
instance of harmoniousness between consciousness and flesh, the scientist’s fastidious attention
to detail suffused with an unexpected gentleness or solicitude toward matter” (xiv). Gluck
suggests here that Larson has done the impossible: reconciled the poet’s orientation to the world
(gentleness) with the scientist’s approach to matter (fastidious). With a gentle “solicitude”
Larson approaches matter to make that first point of sensuous contact which always precedes
mimesis. Her poems consciously position the mind to yield when the time comes. Moreover, as
Gluck insists, her poetic reverence for matter is somehow (unexpectedly) enhanced rather than
dulled by her scientific background. Perhaps this is because her poetics is sensuously connected
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to the facts, for her poems suggest that formal expertise in biology is just one avenue into the
complex and fecund natural world. Retaining an embodied approach to composition mitigates
the demands of scientific training, and allows one to apply it in practice instead of as an allencompassing epistemology. Indeed, for Larson the ways of the flesh (both human and other)
frequently show themselves to be intelligent, or at least far more than science can explain to her
as she writes in the final section of “Love at Thirty-two Degrees”:
Sciencebeyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,
every time I make love for love’s sake alone,
I betray you.
In other words, Larson has been able to withstand a materialist orientation to the world and her
body despite her scientific training. She has in some ways disobeyed.
Gluck’s introduction insists on Larson as a hybrid humanist-empiricist and aligns the
harmony between mind and body in her poems with the synthesis of science and art, or
“fastidious attention,” and gentle “solicitude” (xiv). And despite all claims of “suffusion,” these
two different postures would clearly result in radically different treatments of material
phenomena: fastidious attention imposes demands on its subject while a gentle solicitude seems
to sidle up to a thing asking only to abide alongside of it. Any kind of fastidiousness also comes
with a slightly hostile heritage. The Latin “fastidium” is recorded as “loathing” (OED). Today,
fastidiousness means accuracy, cleanliness, and the meticulous employment of a certain method.
But in all those manners of action there is still an underlying distaste for matter (science’s
abiding subject) which etymology betrays. In Gluck’s differentiation of these two impulses in
Larson is another depiction of the tensions between an embodied ecopoetics and the demanding,
hegemonic aspects of Euro-language. Writing with the body ensures that a practitioner like
Larson can still be permeated by what she observes.
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The moving collection of images in Larson’s poem “Crypsis and Mimicry” amplifies the
vision that suffuses her title: Radial Symmetry. In this poem, minute and massive human actions
(from stroking a lover’s body to discovering radium) are contextualized within the larger
universal realm: “certain small truths disappear against/ a larger truth” (12). In the end,
everything that falls within the radius of Earth forms part of a symmetry that is also radiant. The
body’s role in poetic mimesis within the two biologically-identified behavior patterns of crypsis
and mimicry, as we see in the poem, is also an enactment of such symmetry.
Susan Griffin would insist that these patterns of “behavior,” or motion, are found in all
matter as well -- even outside biologic forms. Crypsis and mimicry, as words and as the images
that Larson gives to them, are examples of the “ecstatic identification” Graham locates in Mary
Oliver’s miming. Further, the acts that make “crypsis” and those that make “mimicry” can serve
as illustrations of Bringhurst’s “deep tautology” (178) and Griffin’s “chores” of the world.
Bringhursts’s “deep tautology” has a twofold meaning. First, the fact that to him we are “grown
out of the world” means that humans are a reiteration of nature-- the same thing as Earth just writ
into being in different words, and in our culture saying the same things as nature’s culture
but just restated slightly and translated differently through the diversity of our media (178).
Second, this is also a logical tautology to him: it is a formula that proves true in every possible
interpretation by nature of its own form. To identify ecstatically, as Graham sees Oliver doing
when she writes poems from the perspective of a bear up to various chores in the woods, is to
recognize oneself in tautology, or as a reiteration, and to revel in it. Larson’s poems too are
revelries in tautology, and in “Crypsis and Mimicry” specifically, she builds the poem by
stacking up different bricks, juxtaposing the human and the non-human one after the other until
the distinctions blur, radial geometry recaptures us, and we too recognize that each is just a
29
reiteration of the other in a different medium. A woman performs crypsis with a peach stone,
and a fish enacts crypsis with its scales all in concert with the wider mimetic symphony around
them.
The humans in this poem take part in the same moving patterns as biota, but indirectly.
They are joining in the “ways” of nature, and in recounting these convergences by mimicking
them on the page in her own medium-- Larson’s verses join in as well. Crypsis and mimicry are
two of Bringhurst’s many “ways” of nature -- patterns of behavior or currents of matter that take
place inevitably. In this poem, persons, peach seeds, autumn, and birds are all together engaging
in acts of dissolution and emergence that echo Griffin’s “meetings” (149). In these recurring
convergences, Griffin visualizes the world creating itself by “small chores” (149). In these
meetings, people and things all travel “from union to diaspora and back again,” their currents
creating our experiences and holding everything “between fusion and a solitary direction” (150).
The habits of crypsis and mimicry move in that same balance between solo and
accompaniment.
The poem begins with “crypsis” and moves to images and instances of mimicry in a
concerted swoop from concealment to exhibition. The first seventeen of the twenty-seven lines
define crypsis: “A fusion of the senses./So autumn slips into the swamplands/with glossy
alligator eyes” (12). During the seasonal transformation of a swamp is also the dissolution of an
entire season’s changes into the two dark eyes of a reptile. The swamp dissolves into autumn,
autumn into the swamp, and the entire scene into the alligator’s oculars. All of this is crypsis,
and, a visualization of what Griffin rendered in the back and forth motions of all matter: things
come together to briefly make a whole until they pull apart again, and that whole disintegrates
along with autumn into the bayou. Or, does dissolution happen in the convergence when two
30
things briefly become one and their individual outlines dissolve? Either way, dissolution is part
of the recurring ways of motion.
Next comes a more human image of crypsis in an anecdote: “How her grandmother
crushed peach seeds with stones/ to draw dirt to the bottom of a pail of bayou water:/ a speckled
fish could flatten itself against those/ sediments and simply fade away”(12). Dirt dissolves in
water, a speckled fish camouflages itself away, and the grandmother has depended on the way of
crypsis to have a drink. By seeding her water for filtration, is this grandmother enacting crypsis,
or mimicking it? Does crypsis take place only by the peach seed or by all of the material agents
involved? Indeed, the logical sequences of this crypsis aren’t itemized here, and the way Larson
shows her human figures entrained and correlating in the same moving patterns as biota would
not to a scientist prove causation. Perhaps what’s most important is for Larson’s reader to feel
crypsis-- to imagine the taste of water purified by a peach seed.
Larson’s mercurial disciplines make it harder to examine the logic of her poems. As
Glück comments in the introduction, “Larson trained as a biologist, but these poems do not seem
(at least to a layman) a scientists’ work. They prize sensation over analytic scrutiny, the
individual example over the category” (xiii). In order to qualify Larson as a literary artist, and to
legitimate her poet’s sensitivity, Gluck paints her as a scientist who has fallen into language’s
subjective, emotional, and obfuscating ways. According to this description, Larson cannot be
accepted as a poet without conceding to Gluck’s ideal literature and disregarding the imposing
approach (analytic scrutiny) that science taught her. However, for all of Gluck’s dependence on
the binary between these two human pursuits, she trusts neither wholeheartedly to give us an
approach to the world. In the very beginning of her foreword she contemplates the failure of all
kinds of human intellectual study (science and literature included) to ascertain beauty: “what
31
transpires in the presence of beauty occurs in a mind initially mesmerized or stunned” (xi).
Perhaps the mix of science and poetics, and the preserved tension between Euro-language and an
embodied approach to writing gets far closer to beauty in its contradictions than one alone ever
could.
In the final ten lines, Larson shows humans who act as biota do without explanation, and
renders in the image of “shining” the fierce beauty that is the poetic testimony. Moving out of
concealment towards exhibition, like a crane leaping from crouch to flight, we arrive at mimicry.
“Mimicry is different. It’s you stroking my throat/as if I’m a bird. It’s me pretending in your
arms to be a bird” (12). Here, the speaker in tender touch with another person pretends to be a
bird, miming her way into another ontological state. This miming movement is an act of poetic
testimony (a kind of radiant shining), and the following image is one of luminosity: “I remember
reading how the Curies’ laboratory/would glow at night; Marie wrote/of the enchantment of
those luminous silhouettes” (12). The glowing radium in the Curie laboratory --“those luminous
silhouettes”-- anticipate the second-to-last line: “The way I can see you when you are shining”
(12). Larson’s image pattern moves from element to lover in a juxtaposition of human and non as
it did earlier with bird and lover, and even earlier with grandmother and speckled fish. These
pieces stack up into a whole with all beings together, ending: “Our roots crypsis, our wings
mimicry” (12).
In this poem, crypsis (a slipping-into) and mimicry (a stroking in evocation of) represent
our fundamental nature (in Griffin’s pattern of “meetings”) and the way by which we enact that
nature. To perform or enact the artful labor of these chores of being is to use the body in concert
with, or in incantatory imitation of, another body, be it bird or elemental metal. Through these
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careful movements we testify on our place in the symmetry where our bodies align with all the
others.
Jeanette Winterson’s Ecopoetics in Written on the Body
Katherine Larson’s ethereal, and even eerie, ecopoetial orientation is far easier to
recognize within the frames of Griffin and Bringhurst I set out above. Jeanette Winterson,
however, is full of British cheek and likes to be less polite with her textual bodies, but she is up
to ecopoetical tricks nonetheless. Whereas Larson’s birds and speckled fish demonstrate mimesis
with a kind of permeable grace, Winterson’s bodily fluids burst up through words to impose
upon the reader’s attention.
In her novel Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson drops the reader immediately into
the deep end of an affair between the narrator and their lover Louise. The narrator is also the
only protagonist, and the fact that they are both unnamed and genderless caused “much fuss”
when the novel was published (D’Erasmo). Many critics resented Winterson’s move with the
narrator as a postmodern “conceit”: reading the character as a high wire statement on the
complete social fabrication of gender (D’Erasmo). And yet, as D’Erasmo writes, “this person is
not so much gender-less as gender-ful; each love story s/he tells can be read at least two ways,
depending on what gender the reader assigns him/her” (D’Erasmo). While the narrator goes
unsexed, other characters and realms in the book are highly gendered and very traditionally so.
But overall, the narrator does manage to destabilize readers with their anonymousness and
androgyny5. Since the sex of a person undoubtedly determines much of how they experience
their own bodies, and how their bodies are policed or otherwise treated by society, this lack of
5
In order to maintain the anonymous effect created by the lack of a gender pronoun, I will refer to the narrator as
they/themselves/themselves/their from here on.
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gender is significant for a novel that dives into the body. Additionally, Winterson’s genderless
narrator presents as an example of the body as an “abiological” being, a production that Stacy
Alaimo might worry casts the body as “passive, plastic matter” (Alaimo and Hekman 237). But
even with an amorphous main character, Written on the Body is still profoundly feminist and
employs an embodied ecopoetics to examine Euro-language and actualize new possibilities
within it.
The first time we are introduced to this pair they are swimming. From this moment on,
love has a distinctly material presence in the novel, and is rendered as a permeating fluid:
rushing like a river, leaking onto fabrics, and filling the bodies of grapes with musky
juice. Love’s fluidity in this novel is intricately related to language. Before embarking on the tale
of the affair, Winterson establishes the potency of love as a force. Love, she writes, “will break
out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid ” (9). Love as a
liquid presence requires us to consider where and how love resides. “Love demands expression.
It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in
tongues of praise” (9). Love is related to the fluid held in a glass beaker, the juice produced by
ripe grapes, the frenetic energy in a disobedient child. In all of these cases, there is a current of
matter held in an encasement. Love is the liberating force that allows these liquids (conjured as
such) to break free of their borders, to chafe at the restrictions of their containers. There are
many material energies in the novel that resist their external boundaries, and smashing the glass
to spill the liquid is what the novel does with the stodgy and parched language of 21st century
romance.
For this reason and more, material ecocriticism is a useful frame for viewing and
discussing Winterson. Winterson’s novel is replete with human and nonhuman material agencies
34
(indeed, we will encounter vengeful feces), so much so that her prose almost necessitates a
criticism that’s intimately comfortable with matter both delicate and dross. Further, as Celia
Shiffer writes, Winterson is an author who insists “that the experience of living is inseparable
from bodily knowledge” (Shiffer 32). But since our modern language would have it that civilized
life is divorced from bodily knowledge, Winterson must labor to bring the body right onto the
page along with the less romantic functions and undeniable finitude that make it a key natural
substance. Material ecocriticism, also concerned with bodies, their living knowledges, and how
these as concepts can help us overcome the “dichotomous ontology” of nature versus culture, is
thus extremely helpful to my task of viewing how Winterson reconciles the life of the body with
the requirements of language.
Love’s liquidity is just one example of Winterson’s ecopoetics. At large, her work uses
the body and other natural entities as interpolators on the human narrative. The love story that
drives Written on the Body is both a piece of visceral sex writing in a feminist tradition, and a
microcosm for the natural world’s fierce challenges to an ignorant and entrenched human
ontology. In the latter way, Winterson can be compared to Virginia Woolf -- another British
feminist author-- who, according to Laura Doyle, resisted “the traditional urge to sweep upward
toward spirit, toward objective law, or toward Stephen Dedalus’s ‘father artificer’ in order to
generate narrative and triumph over time,” and instead recognized “random inanimate and
nonhuman phenomena as alternative grounds of human narrative and temporality” (Doyle 46). In
an article that builds on Doyle’s arguments, Louise Hutchings Westling makes another statement
about Woolf that brings her into symmetry with Winterson: “Woolf was acutely attuned to the
dynamic bodily fullness of the nonhuman world” (Westling 3). Thus, Winterson’s own
ecopoetical and visceral-feminist qualities are drawn forth in part by the tradition of female
35
authors she proceeds from. Her attention to the body is comparable to Woolf’s and Cixous’
downward-oriented attention to animate and inanimate phenomena. Like Woolf, Winterson’s
narrative uses matter to resist any masculine sweeping “upward” that is the same impulse that
abstracts humankind out of its environment and depraves the female as meaningless.
Winterson is a demonstrably feminist author and self-identified lesbian. Her books both
privilege and disparage the body in a radical reclamation of the traditional philosophical female
position. As bodies come to wield power over words (reversing the patriarchal hegemonic power
of language in Western Civilization), the archetypal female designation overtakes the male
oppressor in an upsurge of distinctly material strength. By Winterson’s feminist ecopoetics, the
phenomenological comes to re-assert its crucial position in the epistemological. In other words,
Written on the Body is a successful example of a test “descended.”
Winterson’s resistance to the patriarchal and materialist traditions of literature becomes
clearer when her fiction works are viewed together. In concert, her books form a kind of
ecofeminist discourse all their own. Many of her books -- take Art and Lies for example-- feature
characters, events, or at the least names that lampoon Western Civilization’s traditional discourse
in one way or another. The characters of Art and Lies are named Sappho, Handel, and Napoleon
to name a few. Written on the Body, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit are both replete with
biblical imagery and/or explicit discussion of religion that always denigrates and teases. In this
way, what I am calling Winterson’s ecopoetic tendencies is also what many others have called
her feminism: the collective scrutiny and up-ending of stodgy old white patriarchy and its
cultural achievements. It is important for us to distinguish here between the language and the
“discourse” that Manes mentions. The language is the collected units of meaning we use in
various arrangements to communicate. The discourse, in a linguistic sense, is what Winterson
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takes down—the accumulated works and bodies of thought that uphold the traditions and carry
the heritage of medieval Renaissance humanism. Manes, Oelschlaeger, and Cokal all assert that
language can still be used without reinforcing the discourse it has belonged to for centuries, and
Winterson’s unwieldy interlopers are one example of this.
Winterson’s ecopoetics comes forth in the beings, substances, and forces that appear to
weigh upon or influence her composition, the “narrational posture” (Doyle 46) of the novel that
is tempered by other timelines and modes of being, the explicit and implicit implication of
language as hegemonic and just one of many media, and the orders of physicality, temporality,
and spatiality that act upon the human drama and the author’s language itself.
By claiming that an ecopoetics is evident in Written on the Body, I am asserting that
ecological, natural, or environmental things can be shown to bear strongly on the creation or
composition of her book. So, what kind of “eco” shows up in her poetics? In Written on the
Body, nature is represented by concrete objects or substances in uncomfortable spaces. So, unlike
Woolf --whose ecopoetics has been said to be distinctly ecological and holistic-- Winterson
employs individual objects and portions of substances that come from nature and serve to
represent it in the chamber of the human narrative drama. And yet, her use of dislocated
fragments does not reinforce the “habit of mind” that bifurcates existence along
human/nonhuman lines. This “representation” is really more akin to interruption. The objects and
substances are instantiated to disrupt the continuous line of human plot and the somewhat
ignorant course of human emotional toil. In other words, Euro-language has a tight controlling
grasp on the narrative and the characters of the novel, and it becomes an impediment to precise
emotional relating and the expression of true passion. But this hold is necessarily present in order
for Winterson to be able to chafe against it. Her natural objects and substances (whether feces,
37
cows, ducks, or unruly stomachs) are material agents, and they enter the novel in a manner
similar to the tactic of “bird-dogging” employed by political activists. Coined and employed with
the most general success by HIV and AIDS activists, to “bird-dog” is to insert yourself at a
public event put on by an official in power or one on the campaign trail. Bird-dogging is
disruptive in that it forces an answer out of the official and breaks the ideal behavior pattern for
attendees at these events. The “bird-dogger” represents a political space somewhat outside of the
one maintained by the official who’s campaigning, and in “bird-dogging,” inserts the
interrogator’s realm into the one at hand, causing a disruption that instantiates the bird-dogger as
powerful. This unexpected and often unwanted presence makes Winterson’s interpolators
(breasts, shit, vomit, and more of which will be discussed later) into powerful material agents.
Winterson’s natural objects and substances “bird-dog,” interrupt, and interpolate; the
instance of vengeful feces is one good example of these tendencies. In the aftermath of a
breakup, the narrator has their flat destroyed by the jilted lover and she leaves a particularly
poignant mark on the bathroom door for the narrator to discover: “Staring blearily back at the
bathroom door I saw it had SHIT daubed across it. The word and the matter. That explained the
smell” (70). The word “shit” becomes ever more dirty and angry when written in literal shit.
Here, a material substance lends language a hand. Indeed, her ex-lover’s language is so specific
that it is not only language, it is the word and the matter—a representation rejoined with its
object. As the representation and the matter are reunited here, the realm of the material is
powerfully re-instantiated in the field of the lexical. Like the “bird-dogger” the physical/ natural
entity forces their realm onto the recognition of the group with the established power.
Hence, many critics interpret Winterson’s goals in these rhetorical exercises to be the
reunification of word and matter. In the words of Laura Reed-Morrisson, Written on the Body is
38
an experiment testing whether or not language can “be redeemed from its tenuous relation to
reality, and be forced into meaning, into materiality, into wholeness through the body?” (103). In
this sense, Winterson is in fact attempting what Iovino and Opperman set as one of the hopeful
banners for Material Ecocriticism: to think “language and reality, meaning and matter
together"(4). I classify these attempts at reunification as kinds of interpolation or interruption
(using a more ecopoetical focus) in reference to what they do for the epistemological conception
of nature in the novel. That said, these two different ways of articulating Winterson’s ecopoetic
methods are not at odds. I agree that she reunifies the word and the matter in her use of
concretions, and this reunited entity is precisely what makes the interruption or does the birddogging. As physical “shit” reclaims its signifier, so does the activist assert his or her self as an
outside force in the established political domain. For this project, Winterson’s reunifications as
interrupters are a key part of her ecopoetics and a lens to the novel’s broader conceptions of
nature. The idea of any matter getting reunified with a word is in itself disruptive to the ontology
that seeks to keep them separate and man abstracted away.
However, this treatment of natural objects and substances must require that nature’s
remove from the human sphere (assumed Cartesian distinction) is given, correct? And given it is
for Winterson’s readers. Written on the Body must initially maintain a typical cultural conception
of nature-culture dualism since Winterson writes to interrupt that very thing. In a feminist
repurposing of intrusive methods (like the vivisecting terminology of Western medicine), the
novel’s natural forces poke holes into the narrator’s internal dialogue and dramatic romance plot,
thus opening it up to other beings and storytellers. The puncturing of this self-contained and
problematically self-centered human ontology by dint of natural things like shit, vomit, and
cows, can stand for a decidedly ecopoetical enterprise. The human narrative is disrupted so it can
39
be aerated and recover its propensity to transmit more than the navel-gazing of its own species.
In this way, Winterson’s novel contributes to the wider ecopoetical project of replacing humans
and our cultural products as fundamental concomitants to the natural world. In-depth
examinations of this project through the ideas of relationships, the unruly woman, clichés, and
clinical language follow.
Relationships, Creative Desire, and Body-writing
In Written on the Body, the narrator’s relationships are interpersonal experiments
conducted with words and thus highly dependent on communicative tools. The two main affairs
are interrogations of language and harsh appraisals of its disappointing role in modern love. With
Jacqueline, the narrator uses ignorant words to avoid confrontation and self-sedate. With Louise,
passion demands precision, and their words become more literal and life-giving. As the mode of
description changes with each relationship, so does the narrator’s orientation to the world. Thus,
Winterson demonstrates how both language and love have all-consuming effects: they mediate
the narrator’s every moment but not alone—the body also has an active role in this worldmaking.
The narrator’s relationship with Jacqueline is insincere (they are not in love), and they
must fabricate a romance. It’s through building this house of semantic cards that the narrator
comes to discover all of language as guilty. This exacerbates their self-consciousness about the
imprecision of certain words and the truths they obfuscate, while Jacqueline’s character also
indicates something about this kind of language. Upon first meeting, the only thing the narrator
notices is her ordinariness: “When she arrived, smart but not trendy, made-up but not
conspicuously, her voice flat, her spectacles clownish, I thought, I have nothing to say to this
woman” (Winterson 25). But they ended up together and so the narrator had to reassure themself:
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“’What we have is simple and ordinary. That’s why I like it. Its worth lies in its neatness. No
more sprawling life for me. This is container gardening’” (27). A few months into this
relationship, the narrator becomes “an apostle of ordinariness,” espousing the “virtues of the
humdrum” and desperately denying their own deep boredom as “the worm in the bud” of an
otherwise fine rose (27-28). The romantic emotion here – although not true love—is still
rendered in figurative language replete with natural imagery. Because this arrangement with
Jacqueline is not passionate love, it is “container gardening”: human emotions, like flowers and
parsnips, are collected together, tamped down, and contained inside a neat raised bed. Later,
when the narrator meets Louise we will encounter a love-emotion rendered in much more
sublime and unruly natural imagery.
Jacqueline’s profession also adds a tinge of meaning to the relationship. She works at a
zoo, caring for animals that live in captivity for the purpose of human entertainment, or: “she
worked with small furry things that wouldn’t be nice to visitors” (25). In other words, she
sedated creatures in legitimate existential distress. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator
uses the image of a zoo at night to demonstrate the pain they feel over the loss of love, and to
manifest their true opinions on zoo keeping:
The zoo at night is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from vivisecting eyes, the
animals cry out, species separate from one another, knowing instinctively the map of
belonging. They would choose predator and prey against this outlandish safety. Their
ears, more powerful than those of their keepers, pick up sounds of cars and last-hour
take-aways. They hear all the human noises of distress. What they don’t hear is the hum
of the undergrowth or the crack of fire. (135)
Jacqueline, through her place of employment, is associated with this kind of restriction of natural
beings: “It was Jacqueline’s job to make everything bright and shiny again” (25). In the language
of this passage is a serious and compassionate rejection of zoos. Daily, the eyes of the zoo’s
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visitors perform “vivisections”: experimenting with and cutting into the living animals,
disregarding life for the pursuit of scientific knowledge or worse, petty entertainment (Winterson
135). The bars keep the animals from going instinctively towards fellow species members or
mates, keep them from moving according to their true “map of belonging.” The “outlandish
safety” that the zoo’s contraptions place the animals into is like the “container gardening” kind
of clichéd romance that the narrator experiences with Jacqueline. But the zoo metaphor serves to
show something even worse: while the animals are held sedated and restricted in captivity,
human beings actually elect to misread the “map of belonging” and settle into their comfortable,
neat clichés in disregard for their “sprawling” instincts. In the end, like the animals, the people
are outlandishly safe, or, greatly endangered in their security. What keeps them comfortable
there is the tired language of romance that the narrator submits to with Jacqueline but later rails
against. In submitting to these weak words, the narrator has to reject their bodily knowledge.
This process is later reversed with Louise when bodily knowledge becomes the new
communicative paradigm.
Around Jacqueline, the narrator is disgusted at how awash the romance world is in
clichés, and further disgusted with themself for colluding in it. In fact, for them, the cliché might
be the most untenable aspect of modern love and its descriptive decrepitude: “It’s the clichés that
cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then
should I call it love?” (10). For the narrator, to be imprecise makes one inevitably insincere: “I
don’t like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don’t mean it then
what else am I?” (11). In the opinion of this philosopher-lothario, the words “I love you” are
betrayed and cheapened when used to obfuscate comforts (like Jacqueline) with a phlegmy film
of false romance. Instead they then become like “coins into a wishing well,” as well as “forget-
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me-nots,” and “bullets and barter” (11). While breaking up with Jacqueline, the narrator
disappoints themself by using vague terms:
I didn’t say any of that, I mumbled something about yes as usual but things had
changed. THINGS HAD CHANGED, what an arsehole comment, I had
changed things. Things don’t change, they’re not like the seasons moving on a
diurnal round. People change things. There are victims of change but not
victims of things. Why do I collude in this mis-use of language? (56-57)
“Things had changed” is a passive statement, and it sounds like an inevitability. Here, imprecise
words in their hollowness become incredibly coercive as they collude to harmful ends with the
narrator—privileging the user with power and also with a way to warp and or simplify reality.
It’s no wonder that Jacqueline responded to this passive jilting with literalizing and scrawling out
a word in feces. If such hollow words can overpower a live human agent, we can easily see how
they have forced less traditionally animated beings into submission (Manes 18-19).
With Jacqueline, the narrator is clearly self-conscious about language: they mock words
and their usages because they have used them to be facetious, and now know firsthand how they
can obfuscate, alter, and delay reality. With Jacqueline, the narrator had to be imprecise in order
to maintain the relationship without natural desire or need; they needed their murky, passive,
platitudes so they could play house for a while. In contrast, when in love with Louise, the
narrator regains reverence for words as they no longer need them for deceit and denial. In the
affair with Louise, the narrator is overtaken with passion and desire, and finally uses precise
words, demanded to as they are by the precise emotions. The way that the narrator’s relationship
with language changes between these two trysts is an example of desire’s generative power, and
grants the wants of the body an artistic legitimization that it is traditionally denied. By requiring
a substantive voice, the narrator’s desire for Louise is creative rather than destructive, sufficient
rather than lacking, and intelligent rather than venal. In fact, desire becomes an author.
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Jacqueline is clearly a foil for Louise and the two could not be more different as lovers.
With her, the narrator flees the faux romantic “container gardening,” and gets back to “sprawling
life” (27). For starters, Louise (in contrast to Jacqueline the zoo keeper) is described in figurative
imagery that can most often be termed sublime for her intense beauty that maintains a
threatening danger.6 On the day they commence their physical affair the narrator describes her
thus:
There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. I worried that the steady flame
she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene,
but beneath her control was a crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I
pass pylons… She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did
occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii. (49)
Along the nature-imagery spectrum, the narrator has gone from zoos and container gardening to
volcanoes and errant electricity. Although these two females are on opposite ends of a spectrum,
they are both rendered within a traditional frame: Jacqueline is brunette, petite, docile, and
comfortable like a pastoral countryside while Louise is redheaded, resplendent, and terrifyingly
thrilling like the sublime anti-heroines in the paintings of Frederic Leighton (see Perseus and
Andromeda for one example). The narrator is deeply in love with Louise but fictionalizes her
nonetheless, imagining her as: “a heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable
of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bag” (49). As the narrator was attracted to
Jacqueline’s mediocre safety, they are magnetized to Louise’s erratic and erotic danger. But with
Louise, there is less and less distance between word and thing, and more and more of a current
gathering in the channels of language-- this current being creative desire. As Winterson directs
potential readers in a review of John Irving’s In One Person, for the New York Times Book
6
I use “sublime” as an adjective here to describe a kind of dark magnificence. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Irish philosopher Edmund Burke includes both darkness and
magnificence as part of his list of seven aspects of the sublime. This word is also heavily weighted because of the
European tradition it comes out of (Riding and Llewellyn, 2013).
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Review: desire, “outside of the missionary position (a psychic attitude, not a physical preference)
is never an apology, nor an explanation” (Winterson 2012). I, along with Celia Shiffer, take this
alternative understanding of desire as creative rather than compensatory to be the predominant
one in the novel. Indeed, the desire in this affair is so direct that it constitutes a change of
medium and takes language and love out of the linguistic realm altogether as communication
comes to happen corporeally.
In an article on the linguistic feminism of Winterson’s fiction, Celia Shiffer uses the lens
of Cixous to argue that the desire is the force behind Winterson’s preferred “precise” words.
Necessarily a part of interpersonal passion, desire is here seen as the living, moving, enacting
part of the love-emotion. Shiffer quotes Elizabeth Grosz:
desire can instead be seen as what produces, what connects, what makes machinic
alliances. Instead of aligning desire with fantasy and opposing it to the real, instead of
seeing it as a yearning, desire is an actualization, a series of practices, bringing things
together… making reality. (Grosz, 165, Shiffer, 48)
This desire that Grosz visualizes as “making reality” is also evident in Griffin’s series of
“meetings” that form her philosophy on the “eros of everyday life” (147). Griffin too believes
that eros is a fundamentally productive force, and in her estimation it shares a similar quality of
motion to what Grosz articulates. For Griffin, eros makes the universe into “a place of constant
cooking and cleaning, merging and separation,” that results in the overarching “alliance” of
“everything dissolving into the whole and then separating, resolving into being” (149). For
Grosz, Griffin, Shiffer, and Winterson, desire is the opposite of paucity—it produces reality.
In the mediocre, clichéd relationship with Jacqueline, the narrator felt or experienced no
true desire. Therefore, imprecise words can both dampen passion and obfuscate the lack of it,
harkening back to the problem of language. On the other hand, precise words spare or even
sustain the passion, and that living part of passion which is desire. Eventually, with Louise,
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language becomes so literal for the narrator that these precise emotions come to be actual
physical inscriptions when the lexical paradigm is shifted radically, and the two lovers engage in
erotic “body-writing” (Shiffer 38). In that second relationship, the words draw nearer to the
material body for their meaning, and no longer obfuscate a lack of care.
A few weeks, and plenty of erotic encounters into their affair, the narrator shares this: “I
was holding Louise’s hand, conscious of it, but sensing too that further intimacy might begin, the
recognition of another person that is deeper than consciousness, lodged in the body more than
held in the mind” (82). Here, alternative bodily knowledge is informing the enamored narrator.
The idea that a recognition “lodged in the body” would provide a “further intimacy” suggests
that, although language is elastic, it cannot at present contain the embodied knowledge that one
lover has of another. Once again, Winterson de-privileges the Enlightenment era tropes of mind
over matter and male over female. And a few days later, during love-making, Louise performs an
act of physical inscription upon the narrator. Winterson describes the erotic power Louise
exercises here as an agentic power in writing:
Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as
branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with you
mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my
skin, tap meaning into my body (89)
However ecstatic on first reading, this image of body-writing to describe passionate sex is rather
violent and problematic in the scheme of the novel’s established position on language. “Bodywriting,” as an image and idea of the kind that Winterson renders here has a precedent within
modern feminist intellectualism, and specifically in Cixous’s work The Laugh of the Medusa. In
that piece, Cixous coins “Ecriture feminine,” or, “women’s writing” as a distinctly embodied, or
material-cultural practice. She writes: “Women must write through their bodies” (886), for their
bodies “must be heard,” and once heard, they can be reclaimed from the phallocentric discourse
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that “confiscated” them (880). Cixous contends that once women have written from their bodies,
they can “return from afar, from always: from ‘without,’ from the heath where witches are kept
alive; from below, from beyond ‘culture7’” (887). In a sense, the new tradition of “ecriture
feminine” would rescue women from the modernist project and its literary traditions where they
had been silenced and relegated to passive positions such as “the labyrinths, the ladders, the
trampled spaces" (878). To Cixous, a “woman's seizing the occasion to speak” would be “her
shattering entry into history” (880). Writing from and owning the material site that was
previously the reason for her exile, she would enact an insurrection, and assert herself as an agent
on the literary stage. Cixous is suggesting the radical reclamation of woman’s once vulnerable
and inferior material status. By insisting on the female body as a mechanism for new linguistic
expression, her clarion call requires an ecofeminist ecopoetics.
What Louise is described as doing in the aforementioned passage is certainly an act of
assertion or inscription, and it is done by a woman, with her body (as it happens during sex) but
it falls rather short of the revolutionary act that Cixous hopes for when she outlines her own
vision of body-writing. Instead of writing herself into the world with her body, Louise has
written herself into her lover’s body, and so remains written only within their coupling. In one
sense, Louise does what the phallocentric discourse has done to females for all of history
(according to Cixous) by imprinting her lover with words, “branding” the lover’s body as an
object according to her own discretion. And instead of the body being shown as inherently
meaningful, or in the material ecocritical sense as “semiotically active” (Iovino and Oppermann
7) before the addition of language, Louise is the only semiotic agent and taps meaning “into” the
narrator’s body. And yet, with body-writing Louise has breached the boundaries of herself and
7
Cixous clearly shares the image of this culture as administering from a space above. As I wrote on page four, this
idea of elevation gives Western culture and hegemonic language the space to imprint and to bore upon its female
and natural subjects.
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achieved textual power for her corpus. Perhaps this can be read as a tribute to Louise’s
archetypal and all powerful female body: she is matter and meaning both, and it is her
meaningful body that comes to activate the narrator’s. While this is not a profoundly generative
act for feminism, Louise’s inscriptions do still challenge the assumed separation between
“materiality and discursivity” (Iovino and Oppermann 9) and “sexuality and textuality” (Finney,
4).
Louise is not a history-shattering heroine in the eyes of Cixous, but she does allow
another instance in which Winterson can ecopoetically challenge the “dichotomous ontology”
between nature and culture, and exemplifies how -- once written-- the body as matter “can be
read as a text” (Iovino and Oppermann 6). This body-writing actualizes matter in the textual
realm, and serves as a literalized metaphor of linguistic hegemony—the words enter the
narrator’s flesh violently, and they become relevant only in Louise’s terms (“you referenced me
with you mark”). But in the end this serves to destabilize the hegemony that abstract language
holds over the physical world and its substances. If a body is capable of inscription then other
compounds of flesh might also be able to write and to tell rather than forever be told.
Furthering this idea of material-text, Brian Finney suggests that, in Written on the Body,
“love is and has its own language,” and as this language pursues a “life of its own,” humans
become “textual artifacts” (4). Indeed, the narrator conceives of their own physical body in this
way and tries to keep it-- like a sacred scroll-- “rolled up away from prying eyes” (89). The
human body is a living “textual artifact” for them: “Written on the body is a secret code only
visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is
so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille” (89). Seeing a human body as a textual artifact
covered in “palimpsest” encourages the reader to see other bodies as readable also. And once you
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recognize something as readable it necessarily becomes “semiotically active” (Iovino and
Oppermann 13). With this instance of body-writing and the narrator’s textual corpus, Winterson
has rendered the body as “compounds of flesh, elemental properties, and symbolic imaginaries,”
ushering it into the “middle place” between natural and cultural realms where flesh “enmeshes”
with discourse (Iovino and Oppermann 6). Seen as a secret scroll, the narrator’s body contains a
tale to perform and therefore becomes a “living text” that inevitably must recount
“naturalcultural stories” (Iovino and Oppermann 6). This key assumption within material
ecocriticism-- that all bodies, human and non-, are communicative-- understands Louise’s
writing with her body as a crucial part of Winterson’s novel and larger ecopoetics that
“insinuates new conceptions of nature, life, and materiality, but also relocates the human in a
larger material-semiotic ‘collective’” (Iovino and Oppermann 6). If Louise’s body is capable of
this figurative but clearly felt inscription, than what might other bodies be up to?
The main achievement here is that how the body comes forth as a sexual and textual
palimpsest, and thus a distinctly material idea. As we saw with the “SHIT” example, the body’s
presence in written language is potent. All in all, for the purposes of this project, Louise’s bodywriting demonstrates one body’s ability to inscribe upon another. This inscription is above all an
act of material agency in the semiotic realm, and once again (in the broader scheme of the
novel’s epistemology) serves to reinstate the thing or the flesh in line with the word. With this
realignment, Louise’s body becomes a crucial link, and a productive hinge between the
hegemonic forces of materialist language and the sensuous, vulnerable world of substances: her
character embodies the reclamation project that ecofeminism can make out of ecopoetics. If
bodies truly can write on one another, than language, discourse, and culture lose their monopoly
on meaning and agency.
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The Armchair of Clichés and Cultural Accumulation
Winterson’s ecopoetics takes its most serious aim at the linguistics of love by denigrating
clichés. By depending too heavily on stock-phrases and the platitudes of others, modern lovers
relate imprecisely and thus without true passion. These clichés have been passed down from
generation to generation, and in their ubiquity have become insignificant. Moreover, clichés are
miniature examples of the hegemony of Euro-language-- they preserve cultural norms
(heterosexuality and androcentrism) in word form, and there is little room for the desirous
agency of female subjects or homosexual lovers in these phrases. In the novel they also distract
the narrator from true, terrifying love, and instead present a “diluted” version of the emotion that
is easier to take, and that unavoidably comes with “the sloppy language, the insignificant
gestures” that all together form the “saggy armchair of clichés” (10).
This armchair may look inviting but it is more or less a trap: as I argue on the language
problem, the weight of cultural accumulation that overused or unserviceable phrases bear
overburdens the living things or phenomenological objects behind the signifiers and throws off
the balance between meaning and matter. If this accumulation causes compression, then more
direct or rejuvenated language (words as yet unburdened with histories of overuse) aims to
provide expansion. Winterson’s “saggy armchair of clichés” is a metaphor for the dilapidated
and lifeless language of modern romance, and a visualization that bespeaks the need for
ecopoetic expansion.
The armchair image also serves as the crystallization point of the narrator’s multiple
meditations on love as a psycho-cultural force. When the image first appears on page ten it
follows a litany of universal love-sayings, including, “Love makes the world go round. Love is
blind. All you need is love. Nobody ever died of a broken heart” (10). These kinds of phrases are
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what the narrator believes to be wrong with love today, and what has them “deeply distracted,”
for “It’s the cliches that cause the trouble” (10). And it’s troubling how clearly the weight of
cultural accumulation has made its mark on this piece of linguistic furniture. It seems that
millennia of humans and their platitudes have gathered here: “millions of bottoms have sat here
before me. The springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar” (10). This chair and the
multitude of words that it stands for have been overused, and now they are both dilapidated. The
springs that once supported a bottom or a lover’s intentions have lost their bounce and no longer
hold firm. In this image Winterson demonstrates how the sheer weight of cultural accumulation
(in this case born by all the previous bottoms) exhausts words and the real emotions behind
them. The wear and tear that is the damage suffered under too much weight, too much use, is
what can happen to language at large when speakers and writers cease to innovate and sink down
into this welcoming--if a bit nauseating-- pit of upholstery.
If love is sunk into this smelly armchair by clichés, what does similarly imprecise
language do to nature (another entity commonly mistreated with vagueness and stock phrases)?
The armchair cliché bookends the narrator’s experience in this novel; it appears at the beginning
and end of their story with Louise. When it appears at the end, the narrator is dangerously close
to giving in to the tide of circumstances and sinking down into that armchair. This time, the
armchair appears in the narrator’s surroundings rather than being conjured in their imagination.
In the Yorkshire cabin that they have rented to get away from London and Louise, they find the
cliché has come to life:
there was a greasy armchair by the fire, armchair shrunken inside its loose covers like an
old man in a heyday suit. Let me sit in it and never have to get up. I want to rot here,
slowly sinking into the faded pattern, invisible against the dead roses… Death’s head in
the chair, the rose chair in the stagnant garden. (107)
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The doomed chair of dead love almost captures the narrator, but they manage to stand up and spit
back at cliche once more: “I don’t want a model, I want the full-scale original. I don’t want to
reproduce, I want to make something entirely new. Fighting words but the fight’s gone out of
me” (108). This may be the closest the narrator comes to a battle cry in their long and tireless
struggle with language. They are speaking directly to cliché here when they decline the “model”
and the “reproduction” options available for self-expression. The narrator’s impetus to “make
something entirely new” is distinctly ecopoetic in its goal. The narrator is wary that when
language-users depend on models created by a previous generation to articulate, they necessarily
import traces of that generation’s epistemology with each usage. The epistemologies of Western
Renaissance humanism that include abstraction from nature and the patriarchal denial of the
female are wrapped up in the hegemonic language and its artillery of clichés, and the narrator
can’t stand to collude with them any longer.
Shiffer describes the narrator’s charge here slightly differently, contending that
Winterson’s fiction is one that refuses to fragment and dilute experiences (but those are still
goals highly relevant to an ecopoetics of the body). The novel remains loyal to body-grounded
knowledge by eschewing cliché and instead granting “immediacy” to the layers of our identities
that are “imprinted over and over with bodily experiences-- of connection, extension, and loss, in
circles overlapping” (Shiffer 42). By refusing the armchair and the clichés, and instead reading
closely their bodies pain, the narrator ensures that Louise--and their own devastating loss of her-remains immediate.
Granting immediacy to the body and physical objects is part of Winterson’s broader
linguistic strategy throughout the novel, and she goes about it in a handful of ways. One of the
manners in which her writing challenges the cultural accumulation that encumbers language is
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through concretions. She is constantly juxtaposing the word with the matter, the sign with the
signifier, and the fleshy with the disembodied or dislocated symbolic. Her antidote for cultural
heaviness is the ecopoetical rebalancing of meaning and matter: privileging a physical object as a
physical object over the typical cultural connotations of its signifier reinstantiates the material
agency and urgency of those things (this is the impetus embodied in Louise). For example, early
in the story the narrator’s fondness for an ex-girlfriend’s breasts is described in deference to any
traditional insinuations. They insist that they like Inge’s breasts for what they are physically in
the immediate world, and in the narrator’s clear-eyed description the inimitable presence of these
breasts come forth: With these unique and honest breasts (imperfect and irregular as all pairs of
breasts are) the narrator had a distinct connection:
My gypsy sisters I called them, though not to her. I had idolised them simply and
unequivocally, not as a mother substitute nor a womb trauma, but for themselves. Freud
didn’t always get it right. Sometimes a breast is a breast is a breast. (24)
In that final recitation, the narrator adamantly insists that Inge’s breasts are special to them by
the merit of their own uniqueness and not as some material collateral in a larger psycho-cultural
construction. Idolizing them “simply and unequivocally,” the narrator sustains the sovereignty of
the breasts to exist unburdened by cultural heritage and grants immediacy to their physical
actuality. If the narrator had instead desired these breasts with their cultural significance in mind,
Inge’s chest would become all women’s chests and their appearance in the novel would be
reduced to a titillating footnote on some Freudian musing. By idolizing material things like
female breasts without superimposing an allegory from the cultural heritage, Winterson keeps
the reader’s focus on the living things in front of them.
Alongside material body parts like the breasts, abstract ideas are also re-grounded in
Winterson’s concretions. After all, as Shiffer argues, the novel “deliberately sketches a theory of
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body-grounded knowledge,” and we experience even the most abstract ideas through our bodies
in one way or another (42). Towards the novel’s conclusion, the narrator grows dissatisfied with
all the mourning words available to them. In this meditation on “misery” they make the
“generalisation” into a physical place, or “the town where everyone’s nightmares come true”
(183). The abstract emotion is consecrated as a site experienceable with the body:
Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the
miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own
droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it
pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though
the days are mummified in lead. (183)
Those who live in this place are also described with a physical candor that the reader can identify
with, and they can feel the weight of the wretchedness on their own frame: “There are dead souls
in uniform ranks, spacesuits too bulky for touch, helmets too heavy for speech. The miserable
millions moving in time without hope. There are no clocks in Misery, just an endless ticking”
(183). As a town, a road, and a cadre of ghosts, “misery” is made temporal and spatial, thus
becoming more immediate and palpable. The people that live in “misery” can’t speak or touch
and they simply move in time without meaning. These are people who have lost the bodily
capacities requisite to human intimacy.
With ingredients such as breasts and materialized misery, Winterson plays linguistic
alchemist; she adjusts the proportions of meaning and matter in each word to make immediate
the natural, the physical, and the given. Her live concretions wriggle on the page, upsetting the
placid surface that heavy and over-cultured language lays upon the world. As Christopher Manes
writes, “the language we speak today… veils the processes of nature with its own cultural
obsessions, directionalities, and motifs” (15). While Winterson doesn’t set out to transpose “‘the
language of the birds’” (25) (meaning she isn’t educating us about ecological truths), her
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interpolating objects, substances, and concretized emotions give visceral voice to a few small
parts of the “entire buzzing, howling, gurgling biosphere” that Manes condemns language for
compressing into “the narrow vocabulary of epistemology” (15). Winterson’s ecopoetics is the
amplification and assertive presentation of those “other biological communities that surround us
and silently interpenetrate our existence” (Manes 25). The body is the natural other and
ecosystem she seeks vengeance for in rhetoric.
Gail Right: the personal interloper
Winterson’s interrupting substances make room for themselves in the narrow human
narrative, and perhaps the most profusive of these material interrupters in the novel is Gail Right- the narrator’s eventual boss and unwanted suitor. Gail Right’s character is an embodiment of
the unruly woman ideal. Her body transgresses the parameters and restrictions set for women by
society; she is overweight, hygienically unkempt, talkative, and a messy eater. She takes up
space usually reserved for men with her excessive flesh, her undisciplined mannerisms, and her
unapologetic speech. Her figurative role in the narrator’s life is also disruptive. With castigating
wisdom she jolts the narrator out of their self-contained misery, and as a truth-bearer, brings
them out of denial.
The narrator’s unreasonable fear and distaste for Gail comes in part from their awareness
that she is “right” and will jerk them out of their fictionalizing revery. Winterson conflates her
physical enormity with her insight, and together they are what disturbs the narrator. When Right
visits the narrator’s cottage they describe her with stunned repugnance: when she sits, “She had a
vast bottom” (143), when she uses the bathroom, “I heard the judder judder of the water pipes
then the assault against the enamel” (146), and when she eats, “she licked the grease from her
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lower lip and where it had dripped on to her arm” (147). After wallowing a bit in disgust they ask
themself: “Why are you so horror-struck by a woman whose only fault is to like you and whose
only quality is to be larger than life?” (147). Gail horrifies the narrator because there is a
dangerous truth related to her material excesses.
In Gail Right is Winterson’s most recognizable example of physicality enmeshed with
truth (or meaning). As Reed-Morrisson observes, Winterson pairs moments of revelation with
moments of either the poetic or the grotesque and always effusive human physicality (remember
a “deeper knowledge” of Louise forming through their hand-holding). Gail’s body and its
nuisance serve to interpolate the narrator’s subjective and ideologically contained world. At this
point in the novel, Louise has been diagnosed with leukemia and the narrator--fearing that her
surgeon husband won’t treat her if they don’t end the affair-- has fled London and Louise to a
Yorkshire backwater. When the narrator shares their predicament, Right literally vomits while
making a wise assertion to the narrator: “Gail was sick down her blouse. ‘The trouble with you,’
she said wiping herself, ‘is that you want to live in a novel’ ” (160). Gail’s disruptive truths come
out in words and in puke: “‘You don’t run out on the woman you love. Especially you don’t
when you think it’s for her own good.’ She hiccupped violently and covered her skirt with halfdigested clams” (160). Right condemns the narrator for running out on Louise and addresses
their denial with this interjection. Her truthful words are facilitated by, and correlated with, her
gastrointestinal eruption. Here, unruly woman is the truth-bearer, and another example of potent
material agency in human meaning.
Potentially the most important element of this scene is how Right’s messy castigation
flies in the face of the narrator’s novelesque and tragic sense of self. The physical body takes
charge against bodiless language and undisciplined narrator. A large, drunk woman vomiting on
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herself in the passenger seat certainly doesn’t fit into the tragic withdrawal narrative that the
narrator has presumably woven. In this concretion of insight, it is Gail Right’s nasty body that
breaks down the narrator’s romanticized literary self-containment, and forces them to face reality
outside of their novelesque ruminations. At no other place in the novel do we have such a direct
rebuff of literary whimsy (and linguistic distance) than here with Right’s wise vomit. Here is
where Winterson’s preference for language over discourse becomes clear; she favors linguistic
and lyrical feats (what the words themselves can do for lived experience) far above a clichéd
love-story plot. As Cokal noted: “For her it may be the linguistic landscape against which a story
plays that gives the content its transcendence” (19). Winterson’s loyalty to the word and the
lively matter which undergirds it (as we have discussed in her concretions and denigration of
clichés) is a microcosm for her regard for language above discourse.
Another way in which Right serves the narrator is in providing perspective on Louise.
Right forces them to recognize Louise as an individual outside of their romantic fictionalization
of her. Thanks to Right, Louise finally rises into vision as she is, and with her own life. After the
narrator fails to find Louise again on their journey back to London, Gail and the narrator have
this conversation:
“Do you think she’s dead?”
“Do you?”
“I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t even get near finding her. It’s as if Louise never existed,
like a character in a book. Did I invent her?”
“No, but you tried to,” said Gail. “She wasn’t yours for the making.” (189)
This discussion forces the narrator to realize that they had neglected Louise all along. They
hadn’t reverenced her for what she was but instead for what they wanted her to be. In their head
they speak to Louise apologetically, lamenting how wrong it was “to say your name without
hearing it, to assume it is mine to call” (187). Gail Right brings the narrator forward to this new
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awareness, and thus acts as a corporeal feminist disciple; her errant flesh bespeaks emotional and
female truths which were previously inaccessible to the narrator, given the romantic literary
cocoon they had wrapped around themself. As the largest material interloper in the novel, Right
as unruly woman makes the narrator’s narrative blinders come to stand for the traditional
linguistic and humanist disengagement from phenomenological objects and their metaphysical
truths.
Even in the face of the unruly woman, one might still ask if this bodily grotesqueness can
help to reconcile language? Can the human body actually be used to destabilize our own
privileged ontological certainty and thus disrupt discourse? In this case, yes. Right’s vomit
succeeds at destabilizing the narrator, for the next morning they stop their self-pitying adherence
to plot and get on a train back to London to find Louise (Winterson 161). Cokal seems to agree
when she lauds Winterson for this very accomplishment: “she destabilizes the body and the
language used to describe it, making us question the very criteria by which we evaluate the body
and the world around us, including the normative language that usually reinforces that world”
(19). Either way, words in this novel are powerful when delivered through and tightly bound
with human corporality. As Winterson shows in the case of the narrator, these physical eruptions
interrupt our contrived world of language and narrative and sully our carefully constructed
subjectivity. The reclamation of language and the resulting destabilization of “humanistic
directionalities” (Manes 1) succeeds at least halfway when words are enjoined just so with the
body. When bound to flesh in Winterson’s ecopoetics, words are materially legitimated and no
longer can be tools for distancing.
Scientific-Romantic Compounds
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After the unruly woman has had her say, the series of epilogues that make up the final
section of the novel address the epistemology of Enlightenment positivism directly. By
lampooning scientific language and disparaging one of the key discourses of that heritage the
novel reveals how a disembodied language facilitates the narrator’s materialist approach to
Louise’s body. But as these short prose chapters weave together the sparse language of an
anatomy textbook with yearning poetic phrases they simultaneously become devoted elegies to
Louise and her cancer-ridden body. The result is both a disturbingly graphic evocation of
entrails, and a partway reclamation of anatomical language for a reverent lover’s purposes. Like
the scientist-cum-poet Katharine Larson, Winterson marries the strictures of science with a
literary sensitivity to provide a foil for body-writing, and thus to expose the tension between
living things and loathing language. As a result, Euro-language is softened from within.
Writing on the tensions between scientific and aesthetic discourses in the novel, Gregory
Rubinson postulates that the “stories scientists tell” through their clinical words are one of the
most visible examples of language’s hegemonic power. In his words, “the putative excising of
subjectivity in their language imputes an illusory purity to their work, enabling them to position
themselves as the highest authority on whatever subject they study” (Rubinson, 10). This mode
of expression is integrative to the Enlightenment’s “dream” of making science “the paradigm for
all true knowledge,” and maintaining a communicative hegemony that refuses any other-thanhuman intelligences (10). So if one needs a place to locate the language problem within a genre,
a medical text is it. But of course, this language enforces a power hegemony upon some specific
groups more harshly than others. As Rubinson writes, scientific (and especially medical)
discourses have “since the nineteenth century, at least, […] served as a crucial legitimizing basis
for the power disparities between men and women” (1). Elizabeth Grosz makes a similar
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qualification in response to the general tendency for feminist thinkers to avoid biological
analysis, for it has been “actively if unconsciously used by those with various paternalistic,
patriarchal, racist, and class commitments to rationalize their various positions” (13). It’s no
wonder that in a novel dedicated to the denigration of old and lifeless language in service to vital
material substances and desires Winterson would directly address an androcentric genre of
language responsible for deadening.
By talking back to and infusing excerpts of medical passages with specific and imagistic
poetry, Winterson’s epilogues are collages of two radically different language genres. By
employing scientific terms and phrases within a prose poem, Winterson stays loyal to the lived
experience of the body and seeks to “mitigate the alienating, depersonalized threat of scientific
postmodernity” (Rubinson 5). In these juxtapositions, Louise as the beloved and Louise as an
agency-lacking body infected with cancer come together, and Winterson demonstrates the
“inevitable failure” of medical science to “treat the individual holistically” (Rubinson 6). Instead,
as the narrator experiences it, medical science kills the individual with cool syntactical
efficiency. In the form of a love-letter, the narrator explains that the anatomy textbooks they read
obsessively allow them to hold Louise “as Death will hold you. Death that slowly pulls down the
skin’s heavy curtain to expose the bony cage behind” (Winterson 132). By encasing the idea of
their lost beloved in clinical language, the narrator is attempting to remove themself from their
viscerally painful experience of her death that would otherwise “gore” them, and to wait out the
end of her life in the safe, anesthetized, and comfortable containers of the vocabulary words
(Winterson 132). They believe they can keep the real dying Louise at bay by reading and writing
her in the coldest available discourse. This is a conscious act for the narrator, as they admit that
the terms for the bones of the face (those like frontal, palatine, nasal, lacrimal) are “my shields,
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those are my blankets, those words don’t remind me of your face” (132). In that admission lies
the strength of Winterson’s juxtapositions. By acknowledging the service that the clinical
language does for them, the narrator subverts the medical discourse and exposes it for its
distancing ideology. This sudden obsession with anatomy, their immersion in medical language,
and a few morbid visits to hospitals are all tools of the narrator’s self-induced denial. All along
they have been denying their mistake in leaving Louise, encasing themselves in the dim solitude
of their Yorkshire hermitage, and now (with the help of the textbooks) refusing to allow
emotions or bodily memories to permeate the experience of Louise’s slow disintegrating death.
This genre of language becomes what the narrator has worried it was all along: the
epistemological waterslide down into deadening denial.
If the entire novel up until this point has been an exercise in using bodies and bodygrounded knowledge to rejuvenate language, as Shiffer has argued and this paper has evidenced
in various examples, why this late turn towards the scientific which claims “an immaterial and
disembodied objectivity” (Richardson and Harper 1)? This section of prose poems suffused with
clinical words is a theatrical example of the nullifying power of language that the novel has been
arguing all along. The narrator takes to these anatomical texts because they do provide a refuge
from the visceral and emotional intensity of losing Louise. In a larger sense, this proves within
the world of the novel that language is indeed a hegemonic force with the power to abstract
human subjects up and away from the world around them. It does this by removing the place of
the body. As body-grounded knowledge is blocked from entry into linguistic expression, the
outward connection to the natural world (to any physical world) is lost. This language that the
narrator hides in --up until their face-off with Gail Right-- is capable of keeping the real Louise
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and her own errant and finite physicality (in the sense that she is dying of leukemia) at a
distance.
Ecopoetics also worries about language as a bunker. In his preface to SECOND
NATURE: Poetry of Strained Responsibility, Jack Collom writes that even in the poetry of
favorite nature writers there is a “geometry” that “liberates the shapes above the writing line
from those below it” (Collom 86). It is this geometry of abstraction that Winterson’s narrator
flees to, and it is this geometry that confines the wider phenomenological world and all of its
biological inhabitants into “space-chameleon” words like “nature” (Collom 82).
In their inanimate evocation of the material insides of the female body, these sections
also become directly accessible to corporeal feminist and material ecocritical interpretations. In a
prose poem on cavities, the narrator wonders: “I’ll store you in plastic like chicken livers.
Womb, gut, brain, neatly labeled and returned. Is that how to know another human being?”
(120). Phrases like this suggest that time spent with anatomical literature has turned the narrator
into somewhat of a necrophiliac, or as they call themselves-- an “archaeologist of (bodily)
tombs” (119). Is Winterson demonstrating that medical language requires all bodies to be treated
as already dead? Does science approach all ensembles of flesh (even in life) as “impressive
mausoleums” (119)? Is this the fatal demand that science’s fastidious attention makes of its
subjects? While these passages are surely unnerving with all their talk of exhumation, they are
also a dive into the physical substances of the body—the most material components of the
person. However, lovers do not experience one another in neat packages of flesh. With their dark
obsessiveness, the narrator illustrates how science is wrong to remove the human subjective
experience from its disseminations. Excising emotional and moral connections from writing
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reinforces the mind/body dualism, and creates the grounds for the kind of necrophilia one must
practice if they are to approach the living world as merely cells, tissues, and systems.
Although the most disturbing sections here focus on cavities, Shiffer uses Grosz to bring
the equally problematic issue of bodily “surfaces” to light. Shiffer claims that this section is a
colonization of Louise’s body that further denies her character’s agency. By using “Louise’s
dead body to make his or her own living poem,” the narrator has exploited her in an attempt to
“hold on to her” (42). Since Louise as a person in the narrative present is absent from this entire
section, the narrator’s constant rendering makes her into a passive surface upon which all of their
own emotional misery is inscribed. Since Louise was the one doing the inscription earlier in the
novel, one might read this interplay as still “mutually inscribing,” but Shiffer protests (42). In her
understanding, the narrator’s project in this section takes place under “the dualistic mode of
passivity-activity,” because they employ the clinical language as a discursive tool for accessing
Louise’s female body that negates certain possibilities. Louise is materially absent and cannot
access narrative in return. To Shiffer, this is Winterson further problematizing the idea of
“writing on the body” (42). The narrator’s descent into soma in these chapters makes bodyreading and body-writing into “a one-sided act,” because Louise is no longer there to inscribe the
narrator reciprocally. As Shiffer writes: “for body-reading and -writing to work, bodies must be
active, fluid subjects” (42). By writing on her and reading of her from a distance, the narrator
makes themself into the abstract “colonizer”-- elevating themself up into the “symbolic”-- that
imprints words upon Louise (Shiffer 42). These words from science’s vocabulary do not come
from body-grounded knowledge and are thus heavy with the weight of cultural accumulation and
the potent colonizing force.
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This section certainly complicates Louise’s agency in the plot, but in the end she is
redeemed through the unresolved closing which leaves her neither with husband Elgin nor with
the narrator, and instead, living out her death on her own. In the bigger picture, these clinical
sections and the way in which they contrast with the erotic body-writing discussed earlier are a
demonstration of “the powerful interaction between mind and body in the construction of the
subject” and what that offers for “new possibilities in language” (Shiffer 42). Louise’s
depersonalized corpse is not enough to constitute a full subject, but that is what scientific
language would like to take her as. In these sections Winterson emphasizes the need for written
communication that doesn’t excise the living body of the subject or the author. The morbid
epilogues suggest that body-writing might be the only way to ameliorate the loathing that Eurolanguage and medical discourses appear to have for life.
When read with an eye to material agencies, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
demonstrates the power of bodies in loosing the hegemonic and distancing strictures of Eurolanguage. Her gender-ambiguous occupation of the romance novel reveals how obviously
decrepit and yet all-powerful language is to modern life. The reader is awakened to the deceitful
units of meaning that pool everywhere, running all over everything in heavy accretions grown
turgid with time. This stillness is sickening until suddenly bodies and substances burst upwards
from beyond culture towards the reader’s consciousness, and upset the placid surface of
meaning. These propulsions reinvigorate language and reclaim words for subjects and objects
usually denied expression-- human language and cultural ensembles become proportional to the
calligraphy of the corporeal world. Winterson’s embodied ecopoetics (apparent in these many
forms of body-writing) re-instantiate human readers in a sphere of equally embodied beings, and
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thus disturb (with just breasts, shit, and a zoo) the “fundamental categories of Western culture”
(Alaimo and Hekman 17).
Plath’s Desire and Sensuous Connections
Like the unruly matter in Written on the Body Sylvia Plath’s journals transform the
nature/mankind duality by writing into a sphere of embodiment. And like Winterson’s bodywriting Plath’s journals are a hallowed hall for witnessing how the mind and body interact to
construct the subject. Her private pages were both a repository for experience and a training
ground for how to re-live those experiences through writing. As Griffin writes in The Eros of
Everyday Life, there is a “crucial difference between a form which closes off experience and a
form which evokes and opens it” (49). In many ways, Sylvia Plath used her journals to reach this
latter form, or to build and enrich her poetic sensibility. Today, looking back on Plath with
knowledge about her life achievements, reading the journals is like sweeping up the littered floor
of a master artist’s studio-- or crawling through a corner of the “cultural floor” that to Bringhurst
is a “killing floor” covered with “smithereens” (169). In the fragments, sagas, lists, and tirades
her published journals contain appears a woman eager and determined to radically open herself
and her “form” to sensuous experiences of all kinds. As her journal writing testifies, Plath sought
to live in a bravely permeable state and is forever hungry for new sights, sounds, sensations, and
the emotional depths that encompass them. Through all the interpersonal dramas and extreme
emotional vacillations, Plath’s creeds of craft sustain themselves; she writes just as lucidly in the
depths of suicidal depression as she does as a rosy-cheeked Smithie. In other words, her
connection (and articulation of that connection) to the immediate world of the sensuous--while
not overt on every page-- is an overarching project that appears again and again. It was not a
youthful phase or a temporary stylistic fancy. Her journals demonstrate that she approached her
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art first through sensuous experience, setting the foundation for openness in order to be able to
“body-forth” the world in her writing (285). These patches of text flood the lacuna left by
woman’s material absence from other literatures—Plath’s body is a convector between the text
and the material world. Her journal is one example of Cixous’ “ecriture feminine,” as well as a
demonstration on how the human compounds of flesh can empower the female and aerate the
human narrative.
It might be wrong to use the tired phrase “a lust for life” when writing on Sylvia Plath,
but it is a statement one could make about her that ambles nicely along with my analysis. Her
trenchant dedication to living in the asphyxiating depths and electrifying highs of life is related
as much to her history of emotional instability as to her expectations for herself as a writer and
creator-- and these artistic longings more often than not get conflated with her proudly virile
sexual desires. For instance, Plath speculates repeatedly on whether marrying and having
children (“settling down” in a colloquial sense) will sap her creative propensity:
Suddenly I wonder: am I afraid that the sensuous haze of marriage will kill the desire to
write? Of course-- in past pages I have repeated and repeated that fear. Now I am
beginning to see why! I am afraid that the physical sensuousness of marriage will lull and
soothe to inactive lethargy my desire to work outside the realm of my mate… (100)
Here, Plath’s desire to work and her human desire for a suitable sexual mate and companion are
symmetrical. And neither are forms of lack: her desire to create literature would result in
publication and her desire for a mate would result in marriage. But more importantly, both drives
originate in the body; otherwise they wouldn’t be seen as competing for the same life energy.
About a year previously Plath had already worked this equation out for herself:
I suppose I’ll get used to the idea of marriage and children. If only it doesn’t swallow up
my desires to express myself in a smug, sensuous haze. Sure, marriage is self expression,
but if only my art, my writing, isn’t just a mere sublimation of my sexual desires which
will run dry once I get married. (21)
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There are clearly quite a few outdated cultural mores working on Plath here, but most important
to this project are Plath’s stated desires for “smug,” and “sensuous” self-expression. These
writerly ambitions are so clearly housed in her body that she frequently conflates them with her
sexual lusts--writing and creating were responses to actual physical needs. Plath seems to
perceive her desires to write, create, and experience all of life coming from the same locus as her
bodily-bound erotic drives. This multifaceted and productive configuration of desire challenges
the conception of writing as a predominantly cerebral activity, and seriously upsets the
mind/body dualism.
In The Tree of Meaning, Robert Bringhurst outlines his fundamental beliefs about poetics
and paints a lively epistemology out of them. There he explains that our cultivated “sensuous
connections to the facts” is what keeps us within “this tissue of interrelations,” which is another
name for that biotic community which other ecopoetical scholars have referenced (178). This
kind of connection between the material and metaphysical facts of life is exactly what Plath
maintains and practices in her journaling, and it is highly sensual. Plath’s body becomes one of
her most important artistic tools, and she is fully conscious of this. It is through her corporeality
that she finds the “best” and most vibrant language (Plath 87). Beyond that, there are moments
that Plath writes so sensually and with such recognizable material truths that the reader indulging
herself in her personal papers can barely stand to keep on. These passages almost overburden the
reader with their private viscerality. In one example, Plath spends an entire page describing the
delight she takes in picking her nose. The common peruser of her journals is not used to the
presence of the unsanitized female body being writ so forcibly onto the page. While plenty may
have dismissed her visceral writing as what she herself feared to be “feminine burbling” (165), I
read Plath’s body-endowed prose as a translation of her acknowledged status in the material
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community. Granted, there are positive and negative elements to this status, and Plath both
celebrates it and resents it in equal turn.
Griffin’s theory on “collaborative intelligence” that seeks to reconcile the human intellect
abstracted from the earth with a new reverence for “the intelligence of material existence” speaks
to my claim, and to the power of Plath’s writing from the body: why not begin the project of
assuming new material intelligences into our epistemology with our own primary centers of
those intelligences? After all, for Griffin and for many concerned with ecopoetics and
ecofeminism, it is “in and through existence (that) one enters community” (39) and so material
existence must be reevaluated, and attended to with care. In her journals, Plath celebrates the
bodily existence that emplaces her in community with matter and energy, and that perforce
provides her with endless sensorial data that enlivens her work.
Furthermore, by saturating her words with delicate and crude bodily experiences Plath
recuperates for her reader the sensory mechanism. In her journals the body is never written away
into its crypt “below” culture, but is dredged up into her pen and onto the page—actions that
share a similar directionality with those of Winterson and Cixous. As Griffin insists, the body is
crucial to the “practice” of existing “in a state of communion,” with nature and all of its
constituent phenomena (150). In this light, Plath’s body is continually performing communion
through its convergences with other matter, and her dossiers are ecopoetic because they make
constant efforts to record these encounters.
Outside of her journals, Plath was hyperconscious of how other beings were also
embodied, and her poems are especially rife with the flesh of things. In her 1962 poem “Stings”
from the Ariel collection, Plath installs a bee box and humbly confronts the insects as “winged,
unmiraculous women” (214). She imagines the queen in winter to be in a similar state as herself:
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“Her wings torn shawls, her long body/ Rubbed of its plush--/ Poor and bare and unqueenly and
even shameful” (214). At first the speaker rejects this haplessness she recognizes in the bees and
then concedes: “Honey drudgers./ I am no drudge/ Though for years I have eaten dust/ And dried
plates with my dense hair” (214). Plath aligns her physicality with those of the industrious bees
who keep the hive with their bodies just as Plath has labored to keep a house and done dishes
seemingly with her “dense hair.” Elsewhere, in the 1959 “Poem for a Birthday” the speaker is
somehow underground but instead of a void of dirt they encounter that realm as wholly alive and
can sense: “Pebble smells, turnip chambers./ Small nostrils are breathing./” finally concluding:
“It is warm and tolerable/ In the bowel of the root” (133). In these examples, soil breathes and
turnips have bowels just like humans while bees are made similar to a worn woman. Plath’s
poems are awake to all kinds of bodies and their material livelihoods, and her fleshy and earthy
re-imaginings draw humans into symmetry with the rest of the world.
Additionally, Plath’s writing makes her bodily experience inherent to her emotional
experiences. Her journaling allowed her to navigate out of the separation between mind and body
arranged by culture’s folding screens. Indeed, Plath more than once meditates on the functions of
the nervous system and how they give a “hidden chiaroscuro” to otherwise usual events and
moments (Griffin 27). On one of her last days at home before leaving for Smith, a phone call
from a boy inspires this: “How complex and intricate are the workings of the nervous system.
The electric shrill of the phone sends a tingle of expectancy along the uterine walls; the sound of
his voice, rough, brash and intimate across the wire tightens the intestinal tract” (21). If she were
a more routine or cerebral diarist, Plath could have noted this moment in a far less evocative
shorthand (Bob called me today-- I lusted). But thankfully for posterity, her bodily awareness
(even the illicit and deeply internal sexual and intestinal) insists upon being recognized in her
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journaling, and her journaling equally insists on including it. Her bodily sensitivity is also her
writerly sensitivity.
All in all, this sensitivity brings far more instances of discomfort and frustration onto the
page than it does reverie, but still these darker examples are highly sensuous. During one tough
summer as a babysitter Plath feels emotionally and creatively stifled and describes it as “a time
when all your outlets are blocked, as with wax” (84). When her body isn’t functioning in
community or able to flow freely from all of its permeable surfaces, her creative functions are
also stilled, and an excess of anxious energy builds: “one word, one gesture, and all that is pent
up in you-- festered resentments, gangrenous jealousies, superfluous desires--unfulfilled--all that
will burst out of you” (85). These medicalized emotions are a revealing example of how Plath
configured the body in larger life as well: a repository for emotions that must eventually burst
out and leave the internal cavities of the body. This is another rejection of the dualism--Plath’s
thoughts and feelings reside in the body and not above it or elsewhere. In these moments and
more, Plath continually conflates her creativity with her saturated awareness of her body. It
becomes clear that creating was a sensuous act for her; one that not only came into being greatly
supported by her rich body-knowledges but that also in its process was sensorial.
In another sense, the undeniable presence of Plath’s physicality in so many of her
recounted experiences is the first step towards the eventual recuperation of the natural world in
which her and all bodies are embedded. Here again the human body becomes a crucial link both
literally, and figuratively, to the physical world around us and all of its material subtleties and
stories. As Bringhurst writes, “The world is us, and we are little replicas and pieces of the world”
(178). Take this passage on sleep for an example. Here, Plath writes material detritus into the
experience of slumber and in the image levels her unconscious body with those other “bodies”
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one might find in a spurned compost heap: “... Some sleep is like a pile of garbage, with egg
shells jagged, and vermin swarming over lurid orange peels, coffee grounds and sick wan lettuce
leaves; that is the sleep of nightmare fragments” (49). To experience a poor night’s sleep like a
roll in a trash pile one must have corporeal insight as well as a talent for figurative imagery.
Plath’s “garbage” sleep imagines for the reader the human body as limp, languid, and dejected in
its resting place as food waste is on the trash pile. In a moment of exhaustion and disgust with
herself Plath positions her body in a wider material community. Although this comes from a dark
place, it still destabilizes the single human agent in favor of a multiplicity of players. In one way,
a sleeping human shares the same bodily stance as do “egg shells” and “sick wan lettuce,” and
those bits of trash end up having a readable story just like Plath’s slumbering body.
This kind of sensuous writing and the materially detailed recording of quotidian events
were an acknowledged method of Plath’s journaling practice. Considering the moon one
evening, Plath reflects: “I am at my best in illogical, sensuous description” (87). She was aware
that these passages of embodied prose and jottings often sickly saturated in soma brought
something unique and vital to her writing. And, since she continued to write this way until her
death, she must have also understood that the sensuous was not illogical but instead followed a
different kind of logic.
Plath does not write this way to forge a personal stylistic flair only-- her bodily prose is
more deeply connected to her epistemology than that. Her connection to “the sensuous facts”
enriched her writing and her sensitivity to the world at large. She also obviously lived an
embodied life, one that was constantly sensitive to the conditions of matter. Because of all of
this, her journals access layers of daily existence that are seldom reached. For example, in this
passage the female evening ritual takes on an almost mythic air attributable to Plath’s intense
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attention to the material details of the process and their affective qualities. In this excerpt as well
are a swarm of the “meetings” that Griffin describes as “permeating” and indicative of our lives
that are “held in common” or “exchange” (150). Plath’s evening scene begins: “Upstairs, in the
bright, white, sterile cubicle of the bathroom, smelling of warm flesh and toothpaste, I bent over
the washbowl in unthinking ritual,” and continues as her actions combine into a “worshipping of
the glittering chromium” (17). Parts of this prayer-like sequence include litanies: “cleanliness
coming in smooth scented green bars; hairs in thin, penciled lines… the hard, glassed-in jars”
(17). And then, once all of the prescribed motions are complete: “then to bed, in the same
potentially fertile air, scented of lavendar, lace curtains and the warm feline odor like musk,
waiting to assimilate you- - - everywhere the pallid waiting. And you are the moving epitome of
all this” (17). One could say that in this passage Plath consciously enters into tautology and
becomes the “moving” continuation of the material community. She is the feline musk in human
form, the embodied “epitome” of the material details of the scene: fertile air, lace, and lavender.
At the end, she is “assimilated” or dissolved into oneness through the meetings between herself
and the chores of the bathroom as it creates itself to bring her “cleanliness.” In the recording of
this moment she finds herself to be one moving piece in the expansive community of objects and
currents. In this way, her journals emplace her in the material community, and this is her
ecopoetics: writing from the body into mutuality.
Conducted as they are by her body, Plath’s journals and poetry achieve feats of
ecofeminist ecopoetics. Her carnal suffusions restore her embeddedness and simultaneously
embed language with material currents. Like the character of Louise in Winterson, the dalliances
of Mary Oliver in the woods, the reality of caresses exposed in Griffin, and the juxtaposing
layers of Katherine Larson’s poetry, Sylvia Plath enacts a kind of writing from the body that
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Cixous would appreciate. Her fierce literary ambitions lead not towards a modernist sublimation
of the finite world, but towards mutuality with the material world, and this says something
redeeming about language. In the example of Plath is an instance of language as reality. Words
to her were not ephemeral mists gassed out by the cerebrum nor mere marks on paper. Moreover,
her journals are (perhaps anachronistically) materially feminist: she doesn’t divide between
language and reality nor does she eschew the often perturbing life in flesh. Language was a
physical and highly sensuous phenomenon that bespoke the crucial commonality between nature
and culture—all things with bodies have a story.
Conclusion
“If I tasted anything, it was the stuff of speech,” Hélène Cixous writes in “Coming to
Writing” (20). Every once in a while, when you hear certain words, you are being fed. Humans
whose ears are thirsty can be fed by words, and so can our bodies feed our texts, and our speech.
Writing from the body, as Winterson does with fluid substances, and as Plath does to make
herself irrefutable, nourishes language and results in a network of significances that one doesn’t
need “to enter,” a network that welcomes embodiment because it can’t be without it (Cixous 21).
This network—this other iteration of language—doesn’t need to be entered from
elsewhere and can’t be disembodied because it “surges” from the writer, as the writer gives
herself away (Cixous 21). This is still language, its words are not coinages nor neoplasms, but
rather the boards of the same old house just now re-inhabited by other agents. Instead of coming
in the front door to the enclosure of the kitchen, the writer and her essence have built this
dwelling themselves, they are the words spelled out. Together they have crafted this house
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carefully. Piece by piece, and shingle by shingle they annulled the notion of “mastery” that
culture incurs under a certain tendency of thought.
This is a new architecture, and desirous potentialities guide its end design. Here, words
accrue as cartilages between substances and schemes. Translations of flesh link the bodies of
humans and non. An itinerant subject in this sphere, woman reclaims her corpus from an
essentializing discourse.
And so, an ecopoetics of the body builds with its blueprints deeded by the logic of poetry.
This logic takes in and puts out, meets and retreats, and is forever answering nature in its own
incantatory inflections on a common theme. This resulting house of language embedded as it is
with bodily nourishment and the motions of matter in turn embeds us in the world where we
finally slip in and are ensconced in the radial symmetry.
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