Writing the Wild: Nature, Culture, and American Literature

This might indeed sound like rather banal a question, but I have been thinking about this quite a lot. Not only have I not really found an answer, I am also wondering if we are actually talking about what is suggested by the course title in class – that is, Writing the Wild – or if it is not rather Writing the Nature that we are looking at.

If wilderness really is one of the defining features of Americanness and the concept of America, then why does the Encyclopedia of American Studies (accessible through the UB homepage) not have an entry about wilderness? It does, though, come up with some information on nature. The article on “Nature in Literature and the Arts” begins like this:

“Ever since the arrival of the first Europeans in 1492, America has been conceived of as the embodiment of a varied and often contradictory cluster of metaphors aggregated around the term nature. To its earliest European beholders, the continent made concrete both positive and negative images associated with the notion of a virgin wilderness. “

“The notion of a virgin wilderness” – the word “virgin” here implies a lot, again this goes for the notion of being untouched by man, of being uncultivated, not touched by “civilisation” (not that I could define the latter…). Nash in “The Condition of Wilderness” speaks of wilderness as producing “a certain mood or feeling in a given individual and, as a consequence, may be assigned by that person to a specific place” (p.1). Well, to be honest, that is a bit of an easy way out, rather reminding of Saussure’s signs which did not convince everyone for the simple reason that he does not allow a diachronic view, which would be closer to the experience of life. And although Nash tries to come to terms with the concept of wilderness throughout the text, in the end he admits that there is no clear definition, that wilderness might be something inbetween the two extremes of civilised and uncultivated, that it “would be predominantly the environment of the non-human, the place of wild beasts. The presence of an occasional beer can […] would not disqualify an area but only move it slightly toward the civilized people”( p.7). But there is something that I think is missing in his “definition” as well as it was not mentioned in the discussion we had in class the other week: Is not wilderness something that (at least nowadays) does not necessarily have something to do with the “wild” nature but is rather a concept that we have for something that is unknown to us and therefore incorporates (the possibility of) danger for the simple reason that we don’t know how to handle or control it? It also offers the possibility of something better, might be a refuge – and that, too, because we don’t know it, or rather because it’s not what we know.

Nash says that “the initial image wilderness generally evokes is that of a forest primeval”(p.2) – I am not too sure about that. If talking about the US, it might rather be the snowy landscape of wintry Alaska or the Yukon territory, for instance. And even if the forest primeval might be an image of wilderness for many people, that is probably restricted to Western and urban societies. People living in villages in Egypt, for instance, who still cultivate their land with ploughs pulled by oxen would probably consider the big city as the wildest place they can imagine – again for the simple reason that they think of it as the most scary and unknown place – again, beyond their ability to control.

(picture taken from geo-reisecommunity)

Nash acknowledges this, talks about “a wilderness of streets or of ships’ masts in a crowded harbor” (p.3). This works the other way round as well, I think, city people would be completely lost and scared and would not know how to survive without its commodities (e.g. electricity, heating), be it in the wild of nature or even “only” in an environment like this:

(picture taken from Yalla e.V.)

So does this picture show what wilderness means for us? Why would we (most likely) not call it that? In both my examples there are, of course, humans living, having cultivated the places and representing some form of civilisation. Can we therefore actually consider these places to be wilderness at all? I know an Egyptian farmer who said that moving him to Cairo would be the same as placing him into the wild… But would the wilderness in the sense of untouched nature be as wild to us if we went there with a group of people, maybe even people close to us, and well-prepared, bringing tools and books on how to feed “out there”? I am really not sure, to finally come back to my starting point, if we are not talking about nature rather than wilderness when we use the latter word in class and if the “wild” of the wilderness is not in fact the “unknown”. Not in vain are people who suddenly behave strangely, in a way we don’t know or at least are not used to, said to have gone “wild”.

One last question: Does the wild become less wild if we have seen its representation somewhere? I found the following clip on youtube and wondered if, by taking pictures, the guy also took the place’s virginity in the sense of the above cited “virgin wilderness” and only left a wilderness, deflowered but desirable, i.e. known but not really.

Ok, enough said…. sorry for my chaotic thoughts… but that’s probably the “genuine” touch our lecturer was hoping for….