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chapter 14
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THE DARK
ECOLOGY OF
ELEGY
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timothy morton
The woods are lovely dark and deep . . .
Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’
E C O - E L E G Y,
(WILL)
F LOW E R S G O N E ?
OR WHERE
ALL THE
H AV E
................................................................................................................
Pastoral is about the past, and thus foregrounds the reality that all art is about the
past—we look at what photons did to a photographic plate, we read what someone
wrote five seconds or five centuries ago. As much as this is inescapable, however,
ecological elegy is also about the future, and this future has two distinct modes. In the
first mode, there is nothing left for elegy at all. In the second, there is no end to the
work of mourning. More strangely still, each mode may appear simultaneously in
any given text.
Elegy appears to be a quintessential mode of ecological writing. One can read
books about the ravages of agribusiness on traditional farming techniques, with titles
like Epitaph for a Peach. Or consider the first sentence of the Dalai Lama’s preface to a
collection of essays on Buddhism and ecology: ‘The earth, our mother, is dying’
(1990: v). Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a criticism of the pesticide industry, uses
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ubi sunt tropes, elegiac figures that mourn the absence of things. Carson titles a
chapter on lawn pesticides after a line in Keats’s moody ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’:
‘And no birds sing’ (2002: 103–27). There are plenty of elegies for the environment. So
many are the ecological elegies within and outside the literary canon that it would be
tedious to list them and almost impossible to account for their varieties of subject
matter, tone, ideological scope, and form. Consider Percy Shelley’s laments over the
scorched earth policies of tyrants (among them, Queen Mab and ‘Ozymandias’).
Then there is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’ with its lament over those
who ‘Hack and rack the growing green’ (l. 11). Philip Larkin’s ‘The Trees’ hauntingly
evokes plant growth and decay: ‘The recent buds relax and spread, j Their greenness
is a kind of grief ’ (ll. 3–4). Moreover, humans have entered a historical moment at
which the consequences of past and present actions on the Earth are becoming
increasingly evident. Since this is the case, we might expect elegy to be a significant
mode of contemporary ecological writing.
If ecology is often elegiac, elegy is also ecological. Whether or not it is explicitly
ecological, elegy’s formal topics and tropes are environmental. When Orpheus weeps
for Eurydice, animals and trees listen. Mountains and streams echo back the tears
and cries of the protagonist or the narrator. The ‘affective fallacy’ enjoys a second
lease of life in ecological poetics (Cavell 1988: 61). But even if the earth does not reply
in kind, it may echo back our cries. Echoes are ecological in the precise sense that they
render to us a sense of the surrounding world, just as the echolocation of bats
provides them with a sense of space and distance: ‘She is walking in the meadow, j
And the woodland echo rings’ (Tennyson, ‘Maud,’ 4.37–8).
If echoes are ecological, however, they also trouble our ideas about what ‘ecology’
and ‘the environment’ mean. We usually think of these words as denoting an essential
‘nature’ that exists somewhere ‘out there’ in an authentic ‘world’ that is either
unhuman, nonhuman, or ‘more-than-human,’ or possibly even inhuman. This is
because the form of the echo gets in the way of a stable concept of what is natural.
Echoes are literally how poetry, as sheer writing or as sheer voice, carries on after our
own, or the Poet’s, or the protagonist’s, voice has died away. They are the earth of
poetry, the weeds of writing growing up out of the cracks of significance. Weeds are
flowers in the wrong place, and in this instance, the echo is a rhetorical flower in
the wrong place, making a mockery of exactly who the narrator is and exactly where
she is ‘placed’. Renaissance poetry thematizes this when echoes ironically amplify,
refute or challenge the stanza after which they come, when a syllable resounds in
sonic and graphic space, undermining the coherence of what was just said. With their
mechanical repetition, echoes trouble the idea that ecological writing has to animate
the world. So on a very basic level, poetic language is not on the side of a reified
concept of ‘life’. Consider what Walter Benjamin says about echoes and the sensuality
of sheer language (Tragic Drama 1977: 210). This sensuality impedes access to the
concept of nature as an independent thing that is decisively ‘yonder,’ ‘over there’. At
the smallest scale, the form of elegy interrupts the functioning of concepts of nature.
Ecological language might appear to be intrinsically elegiac. In a sense, nature is
the ultimate lost object. It is the never-arriving terminus of a metonymic series: birds,
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flowers, mountains . . . nature. The ecological threat, however, is quite the reverse of
elegy. In elegy, the person departs and the environment echoes our woe. In ecological
thinking, the fear is that we will go on living, while the environment disappears around
us. Ultimately, imagine the very air we breathe vanishing—we will literally not be able
to have any more elegies, because we will all be dead. It is strictly impossible for us to
mourn this absolute, radical loss. It is worse than losing our mother. It resembles the
heterosexist melancholy Judith Butler brilliantly outlines in her essay on how the
foreclosure of homosexual attachment makes it impossible to mourn for it (1997:
4, 138–40). (In another context George Haggerty (1999) has argued that elegy, with its
‘voluminous form,’ is particularly useful for staging and hiding same sex desire.)
I mention this because, as we shall see, ecological writing is often deceptive about
the affective relationships it stages between conscious beings and nature. It often
imagines those relationships as ‘natural’ in themselves, and thus paradoxically loses a
sense of the troubled and troubling intimacy that is the basis of relationship.
We cannot mourn for the environment because we are so deeply attached to it—
we are it. So ecological discourse holds out the possibility of a mourning without
end. Ecological elegy, then, must provide forms that undermine a sense of closure.
Just as for Butler ‘the “truest” gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man’ (1997:
147), so the truest ecological human is a melancholy dualist, mourning for something
we never lost because we never had it, because we are it. What seems like a poetical
analogy, even a form of kitsch (the affective fallacy), turns out to be the most radical
possible content of an elegy: the very environment that is used as a backdrop for
expressions of grief. What happens when this backdrop becomes the foreground?
This chapter assumes melancholy to be an irreducible element of subjectivity, a
primordial relationship to objects rather than one emotion among others. We thus
part company with current revisionist approaches to melancholy that situate it
within a broad history of affect precisely as just another emotion. Before psychoanalysis, humoral theory viewed melancholy, produced by black bile, as the humor
that brought humans closest to the earth (Benjamin 1977: 153). This proximity
suggests that melancholy may provide the basis for an ecological fidelity to objects,
a political project that may be self-destructive—valuably so—precisely because it is a
moment in the unfolding of what Alain Badiou calls a truth process, a rigorous
and relentless distinction of the subject from its identifications (2001: 40–57). This
ecological fidelity is the core of what I call dark ecology (see Morton 2007: 140–205).
Environmental elegy is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Normally, the natural
world provides a sounding board, an echo chamber for the narrator’s cries of loss.
Scholarship has asserted that the reverberation of nature is the way in which elegy
imagines how grief is brought into language. Nature becomes an analogue for the
objectifying process of writing, which detaches our grief from us and makes it
bearable by negating it (Sacks 1985: 24–5). What happens, however, when this
sounding board itself becomes the object of lamentation? There is no ‘objective
correlative’ for this loss, since the elegiac convention is that the scenery is itself the
analogue for what has been lost (p. 83). We have lost the objective correlative for loss
itself, and have slipped away from mourning, which finds an appropriate way of
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symbolising loss, back into melancholia, which has no way of redressing woe. We
have moved from the work of mourning to the work of sheer suffering, the Trauerspiel (literally, the German baroque lamentation play) that Benjamin described as
‘neither tragic revelation nor consolatory grace but rather an image of hopeless, yet
dogged, endurance . . . it is as though the lamentation play were a landscape in which
each character is a stranded fragment or ruin’ (Sacks 1985: 79).
We touched on the contemporary relevance of ecological elegy at the beginning of
the chapter. An elegiac mode is appropriate, given the loss of species, of habitats, of
old forms of life—‘old’ here standing in for anything that happened earlier than last
week. All that is solid, as Karl Marx said of capitalism, melts into air; the very
literariness of his Shakespearean allusion has an elegiac ring (Marx and Engels
1977: 224). Environmental language, however, speaks elegies for an incomplete
process, elegies about events that have not yet (fully) happened. The essays that
appear in British newspapers such as the Guardian and Independent on the subject of
global warming are a case in point (see Monbiot 2004). They fuse elegy and
prophecy, becoming elegies for the future.
In ecological elegy, something strange happens to elegy’s usual organization of
time. Ecological elegy asks us to mourn for something that has not completely
passed, that perhaps has not even passed yet. Consider the Dalai Lama’s words:
‘the earth is dying’. Traditionally, elegies weep for that which has already passed.
Ecological elegy weeps for that which will have passed given a continuation of the
current state of affairs. The future perfect hollows out time. As readers of ecological
elegy, we have to occupy two places at once: projecting through imagination into the
future, looking back on the present; and reading the elegy, in the time of reading, the
‘here and now’. The double position reproduces dualism, as we look back upon
ourselves from the vantage point of the imagined future perfect. From this imaginary
vantage point, ecological rhetoric struggles to posit the ecological crisis as an event—
since things only happen when one looks back at them having happened (see
Koselleck 1985: 105–15). Thus the elegy, weeping for a lost Edenic oneness between
humanity and nature, undermines this weeping at the very moment of weeping itself.
Ecological apocalypticism warns against either total destruction, or against (or
perversely, in favor of) life going on without us: against total death, or the death of
us. In both instances, consciousness goes on—we always imagine total destruction
from some impossible imaginary vantage point, a future anterior. Ecological apocalypticism is like what Marxists call triumphalism. It puts the reader in a decidedly unecological subject position, sitting back and letting the other take care of business.
The content may be lamentation, but the subject position is passive enjoyment. The
fundamentalist, deep green idea goes even further, putting this radical loss in the
past, asserting that humans have already lost the connection with Mother Earth, a
time when there was no Cartesian subject-object distinction, something resembling
what Schiller says about naı̈ve poetry. Leo Marx asserted a long time ago that elegies
for the lost garden were predicated on the age of the machine, just as, for Martin
Heidegger, poetry reveals the earth (his technical term for the ontic essence of things)
through technological openings of language, much as a digging machine reveals the
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earth by cutting into it (Leo Marx 1964; Heidegger 1971: 46–9). Just like Lewis
Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter, our love of nature is based on a capacity for
devouring it.
Deep green elegy, then, faces a dilemma at the formal level, precisely because it
presupposes the very loss it wants to prevent. Its form actually busies itself with
‘getting rid of ’ nature before full destruction occurs. It is not hard to detect in it the
sadism of the elegiac mode. The reader confronts the paradox that ecological writing
kills nature for a second time, before it has fully happened for the first time. A radical
loss is too hastily mourned. Since according to this rhetoric we have lost both
Innenweltand Umwelt, in Husserlian language, there remains no environment in
which we can wonder whether we have lost anything or not. This narcissistic panic
fails fully to account for the actual loss of actually existing species and environments,
coral reefs (70 per cent are gone), as if we were in the midst of a slow motion nuclear
explosion. This is not meant to suggest that there are not beings who are dying, right
now. But the unseemly rhetorical rush is at best unhelpfully paradoxical, and at worst
implicated in the aggression towards the biosphere with which its content tries to
frighten us.
There is something, then, about the form of nature poetry that resembles what
Freud says about mourning and melancholia. Perhaps the future of ecological poetry
is that it will cease to play with the idea of nature. Since ecology is, philosophically,
thinking how all beings are interconnected, in as deep a way as possible, the idea of
nature, something ‘over there,’ the ultimate lost object as this chapter claims, will not
cut it. We will lose nature, but gain ecology. Ecological poetry must thus transcend
the elegiac mode.
How, on the other hand, are we to arrive at this stage? Is it possible to think what
I call the ecological thought right now, or must we still hang on to nature? Perhaps
we must approach this subject in a paradoxical way. Perhaps a kind of philosophical
and poetic judo is required. Instead of ‘getting over nature,’ perhaps we need to get
under it, or go through it. What would this passage look like? It would, perhaps,
look like coming out, in the language of sexual identity politics. It would seem,
hypothetically at least, to resemble admitting to the excessive contingency of desire,
the kind of desire that the word ‘nature lover’ seems almost to ignore or silence.
It might appear as a kind of absolute melancholy, a necrophilic holding on to the
corpse of nature. A Hamlet-like lingering in melancholy would be more appropriate, even more scientific, in the precise sense that it would open up a philosophical
and aesthetic space for the arrival of non-identity. It would be an attunement, an
allowing of the object to stick in our throats—an acknowledgement that ‘nature’ is
not lost. This caveat is directed not at the content of ecological rhetoric, but at
its form.
Attention to form would open a space for a politicized melancholy—a presence to
the idea that something is happening, right now, not at some impossible future date.
We could refuse to swallow the planet, metaphorically as well as literally. In a twisted
move derived from consumerism, ecological thinking could allow the object to stick
in the throat and vomit it back up. Nothing is determined yet; we are just beginning
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to include nonhuman beings in our politics. Along with the coral, another thing that
is vanishing is our habitual point of view. This habitual view is one of distance: we are
here and nature is ‘yonder’. Despite their content, this is what ecological Jeremiads
are mourning at the formal level of narrative position. The really difficult elegiac
work would consist in bringing into full consciousness the reality of human and
nonhuman interdependence, in a manner that threatens the comfortable way in
which humans appear in the foreground and everything else is in the background. To
adapt the words of Freud (‘Where id was, there shall ego be’), where nature was, there
shall ecology be. Straight after this pithy maxim, and as the final words of the lecture,
Freud himself inserts a very suggestive sentence: ‘It is a work of culture [reclamation],
not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee’ (1989: 100). Psychoanalysis itself uses an
ecological metaphor to describe the process of becoming aware of the Id. The silence
after this sentence says everything: replacing nature with ecology is disappointing,
because it brings the unconscious into consciousness, and, as a rule, in the words of
one psychoanalyst, ‘consciousness sucks’. Encoded into this drainage work, then, is a
painful work of mourning.
Elegy works as much against ecology as for it, despite the overwhelmingly environmental quality of elegiac tropes, and the predominantly contemplative mode of
its narration, eminently suitable for conveying ecological awareness. Elegy aids
mourning by weeping for the lost one on our behalf, performing the sadism that
we will need for proper digestion to work. The text kills the lost one symbolically,
burying her so that she does not come back to haunt us. Instead of providing the
poetic equivalent of canned laughter, automating mourning for us on the page,
progressive ecological elegy must mobilise some kind of choke or shudder in the
reader that causes the environmental loss to stick in her throat, undigested. Environmental elegy must hang out in melancholia and refuse to work through mourning to
the (illusory) other side.
E L E G Y A N D E N V I RO N M E N TA L E X I S T E N C E :
T H E S Y M P TO M W O R D S WO RT H
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There is a symptomatic text that will help explain many others, if only by its
extraordinarily experimental relationship with elegiac tradition: Percy Shelley’s
poem Alastor. Having considered the paradoxes and ironies of elegy and ecology,
we are ready to examine some of the extreme forms that elegiac pastoral has taken.
These extremes provide limit cases that challenge our ideas about what elegy can do,
and about what nature is. There is no definitive pastoral elegiac form, and trying to
provide a scheme that would fit everything is a Procrustean task. There are, however,
unique examples of how poetry before our age of definitive ecological panic set out
agenda from which poetics can still learn. My example appears during the Romantic
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period, at the very beginning of the moment variously defined as capitalism, modernity, and the age of industry and technology.
The principal topic of Alastor is intimacy. Intimacy is also a fundamental category of
ecological thinking. What I call the ecological thought is the thinking of the interconnectedness of all beings, in the most profound possible way. Intimacy, therefore, is a
key to this interconnectedness, and with it, the concepts we hold about sentience.
Intimacy involves closeness with beings who may or may not be sentient—and how,
finally, can we ever tell? One of the structural markers of sentience, in short, is the very
opacity that the ‘other’ presents to me: I cannot know whether she is sentient, whether
she is even a ‘she’ or an ‘it’. Alastor suggests that ‘nature writing’ must break with the
solipsism of which it is all too capable, but that this break involves a frightening,
excessive openness towards the opacity of other beings.
The elegiac occasion of Alastor could not be more strange and powerful. It is an
elegy for a fictional Poet, one who perhaps stands for a real poet. The Poet is
unmourned, unsung, unknown in both death and life (Shelley 2002: ll. 50–66). The
Poet is radically attuned to nature, a nonviolent vegetarian who wanders through the
wilderness alone, until a dream sends him on a quest deeper and deeper into nature
in a search for the ideal beloved. He is a stranger Poet: our encounter with him is an
encounter with the radically unknown. From where do we glimpse his passage and
death if not from some impossible point of view? As the stranger, the Poet stages the
fundamental ecological problem: the fact of sentient beings, of sentience itself. If
lyric, as Allen Grossman observes, is the genre of the other mind, then elegy is the
genre of mourning the radical inability to know, to be intimate with, this other mind
(Grossman and Halliday 1992: 211). Since ecology is profoundly about intimacy,
about being with other beings (sentient or not, and how can we tell for sure?),
then elegy in this sense is deeply ecological.
The Poet’s sheer existence is in play: ‘There was a Poet,’ begins the third verse
paragraph (Shelley 2002: l. 50), like Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad ‘There was a boy’ or
Coleridge’s ‘It is an Ancient Mariner’ (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 2004, l. 1).
Shelley broaches the existential isness of the Poet, the sense of what Emmanuel
Lévinas calls the ‘There is’ (il y a). What is the ‘it’ that rains in the phrase ‘It is
raining’? What is the ‘it’ or the ‘there’ that is the Ancient Mariner, the boy, the Poet?
This il y a, this opaque nothingness, will turn out to be the kernel of the poem Alastor
itself, a nothingness Lévinas imagines at its zero degree as the environmental
creepiness of the night. It is the sheer existential quality of Heideggerian Da-Sein,
the ‘there’ of ‘Being-there.’ No wonder then, that Shelley names the tomb and its
environs, right away:
There was a Poet whose untimely tomb
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o’er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness. (ll. 50–4)
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Poet and environment are imagined together as a world of death. The rest of the
poem exfoliates these dead leaves. Since flowers are traditionally tropes (the ‘flowers
of rhetoric’), then the leaves are writing, the process of accretion and erasure, adding
layer upon palimpsestic layer of sheer scrawl to the initial image, not so much
‘fleshing it out’ as extending it, in the Cartesian sense of matter and space as
extension. Like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then, Alastor becomes its subject,
this demonic opaque isness, this inertia that we mistakenly hypostasise as nature.
Since tropes are flowers, the ‘mouldering leaves’ are surely figures for figures (Shelley
elsewhere uses dead leaves as a figure for his writing). The zeugma of ‘mouldering
bones . . . mouldering leaves’ equates the corpse of the Poet with the dead letter, or
even more minimally, with the space of inscription (the ‘leaf ’ of paper rather than the
flower of rhetoric). It is as if, for a moment, we watch poetic writing itself (the Poet’s
own writing?) biodegrade, abandoned, like all ‘waste’ (recyclable or not) in a place
that is defined as ‘wild’ precisely because it is the place of abandonment. Poetry
degrades into (mere) writing, writing degrades into paper, paper degrades back into
the stuff of trees. This is an illegible archive, a library where the books and shelves
have reverted to their raw materials. And it is an unseen archive. The image of the
pyramid in the wilderness anticipates the ruined statute in the desert in ‘Ozymandias,’ an ironic statement about the nullity of tyranny. In both cases, something seems
to have gone awry, something to do with the place from which we view the
wreckage—a no man’s land. It is a fascinatingly ecological image, and a disturbing
one—as we read the poem, are we recuperating, recycling the waste, or celebrating it?
Is nature really a cycling, holistic system, or is it an infinite garbage heap?
The poem announces itself as a critical commentary on another great pastoral elegist,
William Wordsworth. In a companion poem, a sonnet addressed to Wordsworth,
Shelley laments the political and aesthetic decline from a radical avant garde of the
person he calls ‘Poet of Nature’ (l. 1). Shelley had been reading Wordsworth’s magnum
opus, The Excursion, and Mary Shelley noted that he was ‘Much disappointed.
[Wordsworth] is a slave’ (Mary Shelley 1987: 25). Alastor elaborates on the sonnet’s
claims, depicting a Poet protagonist who goes in search of an ideal vision, leaving
behind the actually existing social situation (presented in miniature as a young woman
who tends to his needs), delving further into a nature that removes him from humanity
and isolates him in a suicidal quest for the absolute. Wordsworth, says Alastor, has
reified nature, turning it into an abstract thing set apart from human relations, a mere
sounding board for a form of subjectivity that is finally nothing more than narcissism.
Alastor is thus highly suitable for close examination: it is a text that scrutinizes other
texts, finding them wanting precisely at those moments at which concepts of nature are
at stake.
Or does it? A careful reading of Wordsworth makes clear that his poetics was also
written in a critical pastoral mode, in which a single, independent, solid nature ‘out
there’ is constantly challenged by a vertiginous, spiraling, deconstructive mode of
poetic textuality that undermines all solid-seeming views of what being a subject, and
being nature, might mean. The most heightened moments of the Wordsworthian
sublime, for instance, consist in moments of elusive or even failed contact between
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the human and the nonhuman or inhuman. Is this really happening? Is this really
happening to me? What does that mean? The famous ‘spots of time’ in The Prelude,
for instance, open up these sorts of questions. Even in non-blank verse, miniature
lyrical forms, Wordsworthian nature is wonderfully evasive and anti-essential. The
closer the reader gets to it, the more it looks like a text, and an undecipherable one at
that (Morton 2004). We could claim that Shelley never read the texts from which he
might have derived a different Wordsworth. But this evades the question of the
‘Ruined Cottage’ section of The Excursion, the one passage most proximate to Alastor,
which with its double frame surely provides Shelley with something like a model for
sophisticated ecopoetic composition.
I will return to this specific theme later. For now, we are left with some troubling
questions. Wordsworth’s pastoral oeuvre challenges Shelley’s own critique of it. Is
Shelley’s Alastor thus in fact hyper-Wordsworthian, rather than anti-Wordsworthian—
furthermore, is Alastor about finishing the job Wordsworth started, or does the poem
actually fall below the mark? The way Alastor poses itself as a critique makes it startlingly
fresh, for it engages the reader in a deceptive, shifting game of interpretation and counterinterpretation to which there might be no end. It is therefore a superb poem to think
with, specifically to think the vexed relationship between elegy and ecology.
Shelley’s Preface to Alastor is either too simple, or it is deceptively simple. It cannot just
be straightforward—or can it? It has teased generations of readers. Why write the poem at
all, if a straightforward Preface would have sufficed? One feels a professional obligation to
generate new readings. But this does not exhaust one’s puzzlement. The Preface seems to
want us to think that the Poet protagonist is a miserable failure who cannot identify with
others properly: ‘Those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare
for their old age a miserable grave.’ In this, the Poet is distinguished from the common
herd by his high level of civilization (he is ‘pure and tender-hearted’), only to fall back
into the throng of the ‘morally dead’ (Shelley 2002: 73). Many have declared their distaste
for the Poet’s ignoring of his actually existing female companion in favor of a masturbatory dream, a dream that starts him on his journey (ll. 149–91). Yet in condemning the
Poet in this way, we become what we have condemned, a significant side effect in a poem
whose title is the Greek for ‘avenging demon’.
The argument seems to want us to say, ‘That Poet had it coming.’ Indeed, the Poet
is overwhelmed, not only by nature in its radical otherness, but by huge waves of
blank verse that continue to break upon the shore of the page long after he has died.
Like fingernails and hair, the poem itself goes on after its hero’s death. Unlike in most
elegies, the reader finds herself in the position not of a vengeful humanity, but the
‘impossible’ one of nature itself. There is a hint of this at the beginning, when
we glimpse the Poet as already dead, and then through the eyes of an antelope, in a
figure that narratology calls focalization—that is, the way narrative can convince us
that we are viewing a scene from the particular point of view of one of the actors in
the scene:
he would linger long
In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,
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Until the doves and squirrels would partake
From his innocuous hand his bloodless food,
Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,
And the wild antelope, that starts whene’er
The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend
Her timid steps to gaze upon a form
More graceful than her own. (98–106)
It would be an ecological commonplace to claim that Shelley is here giving us access
to a decisively nonhuman point of view. We could go further and assert that the
antelope is capable of aesthetic contemplation—of appreciation for no reason, in
Kantian terms, in other words, of one of the things, perhaps the thing, that makes
humans human (non-animal). Is it in fact the antelope who thinks something like
‘This form is more graceful than my own’? We will never know. That is the beauty of
untagged indirect speech, as Jane Austen (the pioneer) knew, for this unknowing
opens up the space of the ‘other mind’ (Grossman’s phrase 1992: 211). We glimpse the
possibility that the nonhuman world is not impersonal. It is indeed a decentering
image. The Orphic Poet—fit subject for elegy—charms the animals: he awakens in
them an innate capacity for contemplation. Something remarkably similar happens
in Rilke’s first sonnet to Orpheus:
Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,
but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,
a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind —
you built a temple deep inside their hearing. (5–14)
Orpheus enables an intimacy to open up within and around the listening animals, ‘a
temple deep inside their hearing’ (l. 14). Animals become contemplative, ‘quiet in
themselves’ (l. 8), which suggests that they have this capacity, whether or not
Orpheus’ singing induces it. This is a profound suggestion, more profound, perhaps,
than the regular ways of posing the question of animal sentience and consciousness.
Even in this position, however, we remain in touch with the Poet, who already holds a
profound ecological view. This is the view established in the first verse paragraph,
according to which nature consists in a fraternity of equal beings, a ‘beloved
brotherhood’ (l. 1). But retroactively, looking back from the end of the poem, the
very lines just quoted, exemplifying the vegetarian republican view of the other, exist
within the sadistic gaze of nature that overflows the Poet at the end. Compassion
implies asymmetry and distance, an irreducible distance that we try to get rid of at
our peril. Shelley remarkably accomplishes a critique of sensibility that leaves us with
no other option, despite its retroactive corrosion of the republican-chaste-proper
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view. Like Victor Frankenstein, a roughly contemporaneous figure in the oeuvre of
his partner Mary, Shelley’s Poet is the pinnacle of his culture. But Shelley makes it
clear that despite himself, the Poet wants something. Shelley’s genius is in seeing that
the Poet’s very abstention from desire is in fact saturated with desire.
The reader goes along with nature’s continuation, and writing’s continuation. We
identify with the Poet’s dead body, relishing the flood of gorgeous, hyperreal nature
imagery. We occupy the view of the necrophiliac narrator who oozes out of the
poem’s beginning, like a second head growing out of the apparently sober, chaste,
republican narrator who frames the story as a healthy moral lesson. Tilottama Rajan
has argued that the doubling of the narrative generates a ‘phantasmic’ quality that
suspends the truth-value of the tale (1994: 41). There are two poetic introductions
before the introduction of the Poet proper (‘There was a Poet . . . ’; see Crucefyx 1983).
Scholars generally agree that there are at least two people in the poem. I argue that
there are at least three.
It appears that there are two narrators. The first evokes the ‘universal brotherhood’
of nature in a prayer that the narrator has not sinned against natural propriety. This
narrator is chaste, ecologically fraternal, nonviolent:
Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!
If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,
With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness;
If autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood,
And winder robing with pure snow and crowns
Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs;
If spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes
Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me;
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred; then forgive
This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw
No portion of your wonted favour now! (1–17)
This is not just about nature, but about the subject position from which nature is
known and viewed. Note the modesty of the negatives: ‘If no bright bird . . . I
consciously have injured’ (ll. 13–14), ‘withdraw j No portion of your wonted favour’
(ll. 16–17). It is an exemplary imprecation. The polite voice picks up on a Wordsworthian strain: ‘grey grass,’ ‘bare boughs’. So does the second, with its ‘voice of living
beings, and woven hymns j of night and day, and the deep heart of man’ (ll. 48–9).
Oscillating between eros and philos, but always remaining within the bounds of
propriety, the opening verse paragraph is a consummate performance of ecological
awareness. There is only one somewhat ambiguous moment, when the narrator
drops eros and philos and heads for family love. The ‘dear’ quality of the ‘voluptuous
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pantings’ (ll. 11–12) just skirts the ‘right’ side of eroticism, evoking perhaps the fond
Oedipal gaze of a father and daughter by using ‘dear’ in the sense of ‘held in deep and
tender esteem’ (OED adj. 2a.). ‘Dear’ implies a chaste, almost aesthetic distance
rather than sexual involvement. Nevertheless, the incestuous charge is there in its
absence. We shall return to this in a moment.
Shelley’s sonnet to Wordsworth, which accompanies Alastor in the Alastor volume,
is a critique of the ‘Poet of Nature.’ But which poet? The second voice yearns for
incestuous contact with the corpse of mother nature, ‘Mother of this unfathomable
world!’ Shelley sets this passage off in a fresh verse paragraph. It is as if the poem is
restarting, a déjà-vu like technique reminiscent of the double frame of The Ruined
Cottage, which Shelley read in its Excursion form in preparation for Alastor (see
Morton 2007: 146–7):
Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favour my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge: . . . and, though ne’er yet
Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane,
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. (18–49)
In establishing its subject position, this passage differs dramatically from the opening. This is the poetry of presence rather than absence, of horror rather than doubt.
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The blatant address to the mother cuts across the paternal and fraternal language of
the first verse paragraph. And yet the language is no less ‘faithful’ to nature than the
first—perhaps more so, in its lurid perverse intensity. This sort of language is
precisely what we find in the rest of the poem. It speaks with the voice of a child,
and an unchaste Freudian child at that—a child with an all too human psyche,
traversed by ‘unnatural’ pre-Oedipal desires. Nature here is the infinite garbage
dump, the charnel ground hinted at in the image of the Poet covered in mouldering
leaves. The night that ‘makes a weird sound of its own stillness’ (l. 30) is an amazing
image of the incessancy of writing, and environment, which in this strange elegy,
continues even after the description of the Poet’s death, both inside and outside the
poem. The outrageous use of ‘render’ (l. 28), with its connotations of rending meat,
jars with the chaste vegetarianism of the first introduction and, later, with the Poet
himself. This narrator is both sadistic and masochistic, able to hang motionless like
an Aeolian harp, ‘long-forgotten’ in ‘some mysterious and deserted fane’ (ll. 42–4).
The narrator himself becomes a recording or monitoring device. It is as if, within the
frantic and frenetic activity of sadistic rendering and peering, there is an all too
passive being, which is perhaps even more horrifying.
Despite the consistent Wordsworthianism, we are dealing with very different
personas, and very different natures. The second narrator seethes with pre-Oedipal
violence, or with the violence of the murderous dissecting scientist. Is this second
voice latent within the first one: inside every chaste nature-lover is an incestuous
necrophiliac just waiting to burst out? Or is it entirely different? As the poem
proceeds, the necrophiliac narrator calls the rhetorical shots. Even if the first narrator
is different from the second one, he or she distinguishes himself or herself as
consciously chaste, and thus remains within the second narrator’s orbit. Or chastity
is suffused with desire. Or necrophilia is really the obscene underside of the republican view—and so on. The narrative doubling is not only phantasmatic, as Rajan
argues, but also mutagenic. In Darwinian evolution, there is no stable nature but
only a proliferation of genetic mutations and haphazard cell divisions.
It is as if the ‘restarted’ poem includes an idea of the unnatural within nature itself.
The passage is enough to make ecocriticism recoil in disgust. Notions of life permeate
ecological thinking. Vegetarianism enjoins us not to eat dead animals. Conservation
is predicated on the idea of protecting endangered species from extinction. Efforts to
avoid global warming are in effect attempts to maintain the current state of affairs—
namely, one in which humans are still alive. The realization that the narrator of
Alastor includes death, and even a sexualized desire for death, casts a shadow over
this supposedly happy view of sheer life and its preservation. That is the whole point.
Disgust is what falls out of the aesthetic dimension (Gigante 2005: 1–21). Kantian
aesthetics maintains its coherence by excluding an unassimilable substance, the
vomit into which language threatens to collapse (Derrida 1981). ‘Alastor’s’ necroecological celebration is a nightmare form of eco-vomit, suffused with sadistic
vegetarian enjoyment, alluding to a passage from Paradise Lost 11.479–90 (the
Angel Michael’s depiction of a ‘lazar house’) that was very compelling to the
vegetarian Shelley:
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—O, storm of death!
Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night:
And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still
Guiding its irresistible career
In thy devastating omnipotence,
Art king of this frail world, from the red field
Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital,
The patriot’s sacred couch, the snowy bed
Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne,
A mighty voice invokes thee. (609–18)
Yet by forcing us towards identification with the disgusting, the narrator breaks down
the aestheticization that reinforces the dualism of subject and object, and the dualism
between subject and subject, and between subject and abject (the psychic remainder
of the mother’s body; Kristeva 1982: 1–31). The verse literally humiliates us, bringing
us closer to the earth, and to the Poet. Even if animals can do it—even if it is an
animal trait, not a distinctly human one—aesthetic contemplation still presupposes
distance. Thus Alastor starts as radically ecological, then pushes even its own radical
envelope. In the same way Frankenstein, Alastor’s companion text, opens with Victor
as a republican. But his disgusting creature poses the difference between imagining
fraternity and living it. Living it has to do with coexisting with the ‘other mind’ in
extremis, with a person who might not even be a person. We are dealing here not
with the dead but with undead.
Alastor, says the Preface, allegorizes a predominant state of mind, in which we do
not love our fellow men. In contrast, the poem takes us on a perverse journey that
compels us to enjoy the Poet’s death, as a self-regarding virtuous vegetarian is killed
off by the incessancy of his search, surely an analogue for the incessant, luxuriant
blank verse that sprouts up even as he becomes a mere skeleton. This ‘sinthomic’
writing is charged with enjoyment. Our nose is rubbed in death as the writing writhes
around the Poet. This is not Wordsworth. Or if it is, it is Wordsworth left in the fridge
for too long. This is a significant way of putting it, since Shelley appears to disambiguate ‘Wordsworth’ (as the horizon of all the things his writing means, the
supposed inner life of the author) from ‘Wordsworth’ (the actual texts that bear
that signature).
In his late writing, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that the therapeutic
process was not about being cured of symptoms. Instead, it was about being cured of
the pathological subjective relationship to those symptoms—where in earlier analysis
the object was to get rid of the symptom, seen as a coded message about some kind of
subjective deadlock that the patient could overcome, in this form of analysis what is
dissolved is not the symptom but the subject for whom the symptom exists. Alastor
performs a similar operation on Wordsworth. The second narrator gets rid of the
subjective distance towards the traumatic symptom of sheer writing without end,
and achieves something like Wordsworth (as language) without the subject Wordsworth, which we could describe both as the set of ideas and beliefs about language,
nature and so on, and as the formal distance towards this content which we assume
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to be an ‘attitude’ or ‘personality’ of some kind, by filling the blanks in the text with
meaningfulness. We should recall in passing that Wordsworth’s highly metonymic
style invites this kind of filling in, while the explicitness of the second narrator
impedes it. We move from chaste, living Wordsworth to rotten, undead Wordsworth.
In so doing, we discover a new way of doing elegy.
E L E G Y A N D T H E I N H U M A N : F RO M
D E E P TO D A R K E C O LO G Y
................................................................................................................
Can we mourn for a monster? Nature is no longer unhuman but inhuman, radically
different, irreducibly strange, threatening to our need for coherence, for a background that constitutes a human foreground, or a mirror that reflects us gratifyingly.
It becomes necessary consciously to choose this mode among others, in an existential
acknowledgement of our difference from the sort of people who do not identify with
others. We thus identify with our symptom, our necrophiliac enjoyment of sheer
nature, teeming and rotting. It is not so bad for ecology after all. Even here, even in
vengeful elegy, we are able to stay with whatever is inadequately signified by ‘nature.’
Shelley introduces an analogue for it in the astonishing description of the overgrown
lawn that the Poet encounters, oozing with tendrils and roots. Only a substantial
quotation will capture the way in which this oozing poetic spreads out over the
temporal experience of eyes drifting down a page in silent reading, a poetry that is at
once ‘discourse’ (the record of a mind) as Anthony Easthope argued in his book on
blank verse (1983), and sheer stuff, writhing writing:
The meeting boughs and implicated leaves
Wove twilight o’er the Poet’s path, as, led
By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death,
He sought in Nature’s dearest haunt some bank,
Her cradle and his sepulchre. More dark
And dark the shades accumulate. The oak,
Expanding its immense and knotty arms,
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
Of the tall cedar overarching frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below,
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around
The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants’ eyes,
With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,
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These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs,
Uniting their close union; the woven leaves
Make network of the dark blue light of day
And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns
Beneath these canopies extend their swells,
Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms
Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine
A soul-dissolving odor to invite
To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell
Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades,
Like vaporous shapes half-seen; beyond, a well,
Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave,
Images all the woven boughs above,
And each depending leaf, and every speck
Of azure sky darting between their chasms;
Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves
Its portraiture, but some inconstant star,
Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair,
Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon,
Or gorgeous insect floating motionless,
Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings
Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. (426–68)
Shelley here achieves an astonishing intensification of Wordsworth, a hyperWordsworth that is mutating into something else, lurid and lugubrious—one is
tempted to say psychedelic. It is as if he discovers a threatening excess within the
chastity of Wordsworthian language. What we encounter here is not nature, at least
not pre-psychoanalytic nature, since whatever Shelley is evoking is charged with
psychic energy, disturbing rather than soothing. In psychoanalytic language, it is the
drive, the relentless pulsation of life and death, and death-in-life. It is as if in losing
the desired thing, we come close, too close, to a surging, destructive play of sheer
matter: what we have lost is in fact a distance towards this traumatic spurt of
livingness—I hesitate to use that more domesticated word, ‘life’. What the Poet is
chasing in the form of the vision is the fantasy object as what Lacan calls objet petit a,
as a ‘nonpresence’ that can only be glimpsed anamorphically. And yet, far from being
gone, the fantasy object becomes more existentially real than one had expected or
even desired. We move from objet a to !, the imaginary real, an image that is so
intense that it becomes toxic. Ironically, the more the Poet plunges through nature
qua that which is ‘never enough’ (objet petit a par excellence), the more it keeps
sprouting around him ever more violently and erotically. It is as if we have moved
from the genre of elegy to that of horror, from obliquity and absence and mourning
to full frontal flesh: from life and death to animation and reanimation—which turn
out to be the same thing.
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Love of nature is unable to maintain a chaste, cool distance. Since Alastor is part of
Shelley’s critique of Wordsworth for betraying his revolutionary principles, most
readers, including me, have assumed that the necrophilia is part of the problem and
that the militant vegetarian chastity of the first narrator and the young Poet is what
we are after (see Morton 1994: 99–110). But this chastity perversely conceals a
particular desire. This is implicit in the slavish connotation of the narrator’s following nature ‘like [a] shadow’ (l. 82): he is ‘shadowing’ nature not distantly but very
closely, intimately. The result is not assuming an ideological distance towards this
disgusting incessant enjoyment object, but stepping into it. Like many vegetarian
writers, Shelley himself was fascinated by horrific imagery of blood and gore. Alastor
is no exception. The hyperreal images of reflections are juxtaposed with images of
ultimate opacity, disgusting abject things whose abjection is essential to the formation of the subject-object dualism.
The collapse of distance dissolves barriers separating subject, object and abject. But
close up, it may not feel like that. It is as if the narrator is scratching the groove of the
work of mourning, playing it against its grain. We remain unable to slip into elegiac
mourning, since the narrator has planted love, indeed lust, for nature, right at the
point where the ideological needle slides into the next cut. There is a bump in the
record. The thought this scratching exfoliates goes like this. Truly to love nature, not
as a mirror of our mind, but as sheer otherness, would be to love what is least
subjective about it. It would be to fall in love with the dead. To be fully ethical, then, is
to admit to the perversity of our desire. Surely the Cartesian idea of a pure res extensa,
simple extension, is the most radically different one we can think of—poetically it is
‘dead matter’. This is blasphemy in most ecological discourse, but what Alastor enacts
is a kind of enlightened Cartesianism, as a form of ecological awareness.
By erasing the difference between consciousness and the world, or between subject
and object, deep ecology hopes that it will make ecological social practices inevitable.
But like Alice trying to get away from the Looking Glass House, the more we try to
escape the dreaded Cartesian dualism (bugbear of ecological thought), the more we
find ourselves back where we started. Furthermore, the more we try to vivify matter,
the less regard we pay to it as matter—that is, as inorganic form. We need to live up
to the truth of our desire to animate the dead. Deep ecology is not deep enough,
because it eschews the dead in favor of the living. Remaining with the dying in the
present moment, and accepting the fact of our own death, are echoed in the choice to
maintain the painful awareness of being alive—of having a mind that differs from
our body and from itself. Melancholia (letting the dead stick in our throat) is more
ethically refined than mourning (allowing them to be digested).
Rather than reading the Poet’s journey into death in the Caucasus as an allegory of
failure, we might decide, somewhat perversely, not to do to the Poet what the Preface
states is the cause of his woes—exclude him. While waves of iambic pentameter wash
over the Poet’s corpse, the reader delights in death even while eschewing it—a double
view that powerfully encapsulates the compassionate–sadistic identifications of the
vegetarian Shelley.
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We are caught in a bind. To read the poem ‘ecologically,’ we must enjoy killing off
the Poet. Some scholars have sometimes approved of this (see for example Roberts
1997: 150–3). ‘I hate that stupid Poet, he deserved to die, I am superior to him’—is
this what we are supposed to be walking away with? A Nietzschean mastery that
would spell death to nature? How to overcome Nietzsche? If we keep thinking like
that, we will always fall back down. Instead of trying to read to win, how about we
read like losers (see Bull 2000)? It gets worse. Once we have decided that despising the
Poet maintains the sadistic distance, we are empowered to feel superior all over again,
thus reproducing the sadistic distance. Metasadism is sadism. We cannot get out. The
poem does not achieve escape velocity from an earth that is also bound up with a
certain sadism (the mother we are sucking); instead we fall further and further into
its gravitational field.
Alastor is a poem with which we can rethink ecological poetics. Alastor offers the
possibility of a noir ecology, in which we admit to the contingency of our desire
rather than chastening it into invisibility. By realizing our implication in the phenomenal world, we do not abolish the difference between subject and object too
quickly. In fact, any ‘really deep’ ecological approach would linger with this difference
for as long as possible. Alastor is about how to relate to the fact of narcissism—the
utopian edge of which are the oceanic poetics of absorption into Nature beloved by
ecological thinking; and whose dystopian qualities include letting other beings suffer
while soothing background music bathes us in an ambient aquarium of sound.
Like Frankenstein, Alastor enjoins us to love people even if they are not people.
Shelley’s poem astonishingly enriches and problematises the idea of loving people
established in its Preface. To love the earth properly would entail acknowledging the
very artificiality and otherness which ecological discourse tries to negate. So we
return to Descartes, and the so-called ‘Cartesian dualism,’ the whipping boy of all
ecological discourse. Percy and Mary Shelley were both sensitive to the way in which
melancholic aloneness could inspire feelings of connectedness, feelings that they both
associated with the ecological thought—the idea of interconnectedness in all its
ramifications. So committed was Percy Shelley to this idea, he wrote in the essay
‘On Love’ that:
in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they
sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of
the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our
heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind and a melody in the flowing brooks and the
rustling of the reeds beside them which by their inconceivable relation to something within
the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious
tenderness to the eyes like the enthusiasm of patriotic success or the voice of one beloved
singing to you alone. Sterne says that if he were in a desart he would love some cypress. . . . So
soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet
survives is the mere husk of what once he was. (2002: 504)
Even separation induces a feeling of connection. Notice, incidentally, the Wordsworthian language: ‘blue air,’ ‘enthusiasm’. Notice, however, the stranger, almost
disturbing quality, a chiastic logic according to which the ‘flowing brooks and the
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rustling of the reeds beside them’ appear to assume almost like sentience. The
uncertainty of this quasi-sentience is precisely what disturbs, for it implies darkecologically, that what unites humans and other beings is not a common sense of life,
but the fact that consciousness itself depends upon some kind of machinic, wave-like
process. This process exhibits something like the zero degree of language we glimpsed
in the necrophiliac narrator’s delight in murmuring sound: the rustle of language.
What if ‘man’ was already a kind of ‘living sepulchre,’ an empty tomb, a ‘mere husk’
like the seeds of the rustling reeds? It is finally our intimacy with that which is the
deepest and the darkest. Under these circumstances, elegy would perform the
melancholy knowingness that we are machines.
There is an obvious fit between ecology and elegy, and a less obvious asymmetry.
Elegy mourns absolute loss and is preoccupied with bringing to life and killing—the
work of sadism and the transcendence of sadism. With its view of impermanence and
the cycles of life and death, the rhetoric of ecology appears opposite. It might be
possible to bring elegy and ecology together by thinking through the properly
ecological thought, that is, the radical intimacy with radical strangers that the idea
of the interrelatedness of all things implies, at its extreme. Dark ecology chooses not
to digest the phobic-disgusting object. Instead it decides to remain with it in all its
meaningless inconsistency (Žižek 1992: 35–9). Dark ecology is the ultimate reverse of
deep ecology. The most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their artificiality,
rather than seeking their naturalness and authenticity. Dark ecology refuses to digest
plants and animals and humans into ideal forms. Cheering yourself up too fast will
only make things more depressing. ‘Linger long’ (Alastor, l. 98) in the darkness of a
dying world.
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