By Alissa MacMillan
Q: I’ve only read a few novels that really deal with the environmental crisis, but was curious to know about how literature is contending with climate worries at the moment.
A: To answer your great question, I spoke with Dr. Eoin Flannery, Associate Professor of English Literature at Mary Immaculate College at University of Limerick, whose research and teaching focus on literature and the climate crisis. He describes an evolving picture of writers responding to the landscape and our place in it, in particular, a difference in approach between the Romantics, from around the 18th to the middle of the 19th centuries, and more contemporary writers.
Flannery points us back to British and Irish Romantic writing, where the individual takes center stage.
“It’s very ego-centric, how the writer feels when they are confronted with nature, how they feel when they’re on a mountain top and see a waterfall and view people who live in that landscape.” You’ll find a glorification of the individual and nature and, at the same time, a dismissing of nature as somehow lesser in value.
“German romanticism has a lot to answer for,” Flannery says. Think of the famous painting by the German romantic, Casper David Friedrich, ‘The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,’ the wide, dark back of a man looking out on a wild, mountainous, stormy landscape, a god-like figure above and outside of nature.
“Even the British romantics like William Wordsworth has this reaction to the industrial revolution,” Flannery explains. Repelled by the pollution of London, Wordsworth goes to the Scottish Highlands to cure himself, penning poetry “where he is looking at people who live in the highlands, marveling at their labour, saying wow, that’s great,” but objectifying nature and the real “in order to make himself feel better.”
In the Irish context, Yeats inherits this to a certain extent, Flannery adds, his ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ set in the west of Ireland, a “beautiful 12-line poem about that place, how perfect it is, how he grows beans, builds a cabin,” all of it a means of romantic escapism and not a real place. “It is an abstraction of nature for the purpose of the poet’s feelings.”
WAITING FOR A RESPONSE
In more recent times this approach to nature has moved “away from an ego-centric look or view of nature, away from a distinction between nature and culture,” Flannery explains. “The binary has effectively collapsed, the sense that the nature of out there is different, is not us, that’s a complete fallacy.” For example, with floods, “we are beginning to realise that sense of implication, of mutuality and co-responsibility.”
More contemporary writing integrates this realisation that there is no separation between nature and culture – “that was a false dichotomy.” And as writing and “the way we think about that is how we develop what we call culture,” there has been a move away from nature being objectified and, as a result, devalued, to seeing a mutuality between the human and non-human.
To write on the ecological is also to write of other aspects of a culture, Flannery adds. “Economic decisions, political decisions, have huge ecological impact, as we see with the floods or with any number of housing issues, all related to economy and ecology,” the Celtic Tiger “talked of as economic but it was an ecological disaster.” Seeing ghost estates and considering of the anti-environmental temperament that drove it, “it’s still there,” Flannery adds. “The value of land is transformed into something commercial or commodified or land as obstacle,” or it’s something “to be overcome.”
And all of this is yet to really be processed. The pandemic, the Celtic Tiger, the ecological emergency, we are “waiting for a cultural poetic response.”
“We haven’t seen a post-pandemic literature yet,” he says. “That was an experience that showed us that we might think of our bodies as isolated and discrete, but we are all permeable, we may see this down the line.”
Poetry is “trying to voice the non-human or more than human, trying to have an ethical approach to that which is not human,” he adds, and to see us as part of a “deeper timescale,” not just the present. He points to Mary O’Malley or Jane Robinson, how “writers impress on us that we are of the sea, we are part of the hydrological cycle, we depend on it, it’s part of our bodies,” drawing on natural images and “trying to illicit some responsibility, an empathetic response,” done thematically and structurally.
‘Dart,’ by Alice Oswald, is a 50-page poem about a river that flows into the English Channel. ‘Swarm,’ a poem by Jessica Traynor, is about the disappearance of insect life, a poem written in couplets that symbolise the relationship between human and non-human: “without one part of the human-bee relationship, we won’t thrive; there is a necessary coupling of human and non-human.”
The writer Kevin Barry’s extended short story, ‘The Fjord at Killary,’ doesn’t mention ecology, but is set in a pub where people are trapped and the tide is rising, with “an awareness that we have our backs turned to something very very important, the story has almost a domestic feel to it, but the waters symbolise something much grander.”
The language of poetry, of imagination, desire, and emotion, it’s “a way of contesting, maybe speaking back to more functional or practical ways of thinking about the world.”
Literature can also be well ahead of the curve, Flannery notes, pointing to the often-prophetic utopian, dystopian, and science fiction genres from the 1960s and ‘70s, work from writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, dismissed at the time “but those sorts of visions are imagining the world we are marching towards.”
“With great writers, we are always learning to be their contemporaries,” he adds.
As an island, Irish literature often gives attention to the coastline and sea, many also looking at the Irish language and the deeper history of places, connected to an ecological awareness. Tim Robinson, an English mathematician turned artist, cartographer, and environmentalist who moved to the Aran Islands to learn Irish, walked the landscape and hand drew maps, discovering stories of the origin of place names.
“If people read about the depth of knowledge and history of places in Connemara, they might turn their attention to places outside their front door. There is an ethic, an orientation that Robinson’s work might impart on people,” he says. It reflects how “we have to think in a utopian, hopeful way,” all landscapes saturated with history, myth, and meaning, a mutuality between the human and non-human.
