Joyce Carol Oates:
The writer's resistance to Nature:
It has no sense of humor: in its beauty, as in its ugliness, or its neutrality, there is no laughter.
It lacks a moral purpose.
It lacks a satirical dimension, registers no irony.
Its pleasures lack resonance, being accidental; its horrors, even when premeditated, are equally perfunctory, "red in tooth and claw," et cetera.
It lacks a symbolic subtext - excepting that provided by man.
It has no (verbal) language.
It has no interest in ours.
It inspires a painfully limited set of responses in 'nature writers' -
REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.
It eludes us even as it prepares to swallow us up, books and all.
3 comments:
ah yes, "Against Nature"
presumably HDT, with his memory of hedgehogs, might beg to differ?
while regarding those named Barry, or Berry, one might agree?
or perhaps, ultimately it's not a statement against nature at all (so much as against "Nature", or bad nature-writers, of which there have always been, well plenty)
It's we humans who make the connections and look for meanings. No other agent as far as we know has the same preoccupation.
The Oates essay on "Against Nature" has always both provoked and bothered me. Thanks for taking this one up, Mark. The logic is difficult to dispute, but something seems to be amiss in a writer who does not love the earth.
--Roy
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