Caught in the landscape

Caught in the landscape

JONATHAN TAYLOR

Roger Ebbatson

LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE, 1830–1914

Nature, text, aura
221pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £50 (US $90).
978 1 137 33043 7

J. B. Bullen

THOMAS HARDY

The world of his novels
256pp. Frances Lincoln. £20 (US $29.95).
978 0 7112 3275 4

Roger Wardale

ARTHUR RANSOME ON THE BROADS

96pp. Amberley. Paperback, £14.99 (US $24.95).
978 1 4456 1152 5

Stephen Bailey and Chris Nottingham

HEARTLANDS

A guide to D. H. Lawrence's Midlands roots
168pp. Matador. Paperback, £9.75.
978 1 78306 057 3

In The Primacy of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty states that "the world is all around me, not in front of me". The landscape, for the philosopher, is something lived "from the inside", so that the observing self is subjectively "caught in the fabric of the world", rather than merely looking on it. In his sophisticated and ambitious book, Landscape and Literature, 1830–1914, Roger Ebbatson cites Merleau-Ponty and the critic Tim Ingold as theoretical touchstones for his own discussion of literary landscapes:

The landscape . . . is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand, taking up a point of view on our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement in the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it. For the landscape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as the "homeland" for our thoughts.

This notion of a "homeland" is also shared with Martin Heidegger, for whom people "must ever learn to dwell" in their landscape. The self is then "caught in the fabric of the world" – rather than observing, and hence exploiting, that world from an outside and privileged position – and for Heidegger it is poetry that lets us do this. Poetry is a "transcendent mode" of responding to nature, allowing the reader to experience the landscape from within, whereas landscape painting – arguably – presents the observer with a flat, impermeable surface. All of the literature Ebbatson discusses, including work by Tennyson, Hardy, Ruskin and Edward Thomas, seems to induce in its readers this feeling of "dwelling", of "being-in-the-world".

In Hardy's case, the feeling would seem to be particularly acute, at least according to J. B. Bullen, in the beautifully produced Thomas Hardy: The world of his novels. "Above all", Bullen writes, "Hardy's stories take us out into the landscape", sometimes not only fictionally speaking, but literally, too – to the point that a minor tourist industry has built up around the perceived overlap between real-world places and Hardy's fictionalized Wessex. "Hardy, beyond any other English novelist", Bullen writes, "has been powerfully identified with a single region", so that "scores of writers, photographers and artists, amateur and professional, have gone off in search of more and more accurate details, hoping to pin down the topography of Wessex."

Of course, Bullen's own book is testament to this ongoing fascination – a fascination which is "much more than simple curiosity", he argues. Rather, it is bound up with Hardy's dynamic conceptualization of the two-way relationship between human subjects and landscape. By "being there", readers can take the place of the fictional characters in this distinctive landscape, and become part of an "expressive relationship" between human beings and nature. For Bullen, Hardy's peculiar power as a landscape writer inheres in this "expressive relationship" – in, that is, the ways in which human subjects affect the landscape and, crucially, vice versa.

To illustrate this point, Bullen gives the example of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, which is interpreted, he says, in human terms: in the long description that opens the novel, Egdon is personified, and "given a human face". Conversely, many of the characters in the novel are also interpreted in terms of Egdon, such as Clym Yeobright, who is "so interwoven with the heath in his boyhood" that "he was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with its odours". In the figure of Clym, heath and character, the landscape and the human, overlap. In Hardy's world, landscape interacts with character to generate drama. As Bullen writes, Hardy "categorised his most popular works as 'Novels of Character and Environment'"; here, the "villages, buildings, woods and fields play an active part in the plot".

The same might well be said of Arthur Ransome, the subject of Roger Wardale's lavishly illustrated Arthur Ransome on the Broads. Discussing, in particular, the settings for Ransome's popular children's novels Coot Club and The Big Six, Wardale demonstrates how the plots of these books grew out of the conjunction of fictional characters and real-life landscape. The "first hint" of Coot Club, for example, came in a letter in which Ransome stated that his next book would be "placed on the Broads, with all those rivers and hiding places in the dykes and little stretches of open water". At this early stage, he also had "five youthful characters" in mind "and one old lady". Out of the interaction of these two basic elements – characters and setting – the plot developed.

Wardale's book provides the reader with a fascinating and detailed insight into Ransome's writing process in this respect, demonstrating how a writer's "almost poetic response to landscape" can provide the germ for everything that comes after. Indeed, in this sense, it is not just the addition of fictional characters to setting which produces the plot, but, even before that, the author's own response to the landscape which can generate powerful landscape fiction. In Coot Club, for instance, Ransome was "set on turning his [own] Broads cruising experiences into fiction, and he seemed to . . . relish . . . the challenge of using a completely true-to-life setting and real-life incidents".

As with Hardy, many of Ransome's readers since seem to have wanted to experience that "true-to-life setting" themselves. One of those readers is Wardale himself. He talks about his experience of visiting the village of Horning after first reading about it in The Big Six: "When I first visited the village of Horning in the 1950s, it felt almost as if I were returning to a place that I knew well. I suspect that many have been drawn to Horning village, as I was, after reading the first page of The Big Six". Wardale's literary guidebook will delight his fellow Norfolk-bound "Ransome enthusiasts".

A similar literary guidebook – though to a very different kind of landscape – is Heartlands: A guide to D. H. Lawrence's Midlands roots by Stephen Bailey and Chris Nottingham. The book is "intended as a practical guide to the district in which . . . Lawrence grew up", specifically, that is, "the region around Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, where he grew up and lived until the age of twenty-three" – an area which he "famously christened 'The Country of my Heart'". As with Bullen's book, Heartlands argues that "visiting the sites of [the novels'] . . . creation can intensify [their] . . . impact". Bailey and Nottingham describe their book as "an invitation to approach Lawrence through his Eastwood roots, to walk with him in his 'Heartland'" – and they attempt to reconstruct Lawrence's own walks in the Eastwood district, as well as those described in Sons and Lovers and other novels. "A walk with him", Aldous Huxley said, "was a walk through that marvellously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of all his novels." By tracing a five-mile route taken by Lawrence himself, for example, alongside another taken by Paul Morel and his mother, between Eastwood and the railway station at Kimberley, Bailey and Nottingham discover fascinating and sometimes unexpected resonances, connections and disjunctions between Lawrence's "teenage schoolday routine", the fictionalization of that routine in Sons and Lovers, and contemporary Nottinghamshire, with its IKEAs, takeaways and boarded-up old breweries. This is criticism-as-walking: not only is the original writer interacting with or "dwelling within" the landscape, but so are his contemporary critics.

Heidegger suggested that people had forgotten how to "dwell" – that "homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world". Clearly, as Ebbatson points out, there is an ecological subtext here: "Notions of land and presence . . . are rendered increasingly impermanent", which ultimately results in a modern sense of "placelessness". This progressive destruction of place and home haunts not only Heidegger, but Hardy, Lawrence, Ransome and others. Bullen refers to Hardy's "poetics of loss", and how his work stands as a "memorial to the continuity of rural culture where human labour moved to the rhythm of the seasons", a vanishing culture which "involves concordances and subtle reciprocities between the animate world and the inanimate one". Similarly, Bailey and Nottingham suggest that Lawrence felt acutely the changes "in the relationship of the people with the countryside", and they quote him to that effect – "When I was a boy, the whole population lived very much more with the country. Now . . . they never seem to touch the reality of the countryside" – while Wardale remarks that "Ransome championed the environmental cause at a time when only a handful of naturalists were aware of what was happening to the area". His work is a kind of "social history" which captured "the essence of the Broads" and "a vanishing way of life" before much of it was destroyed by the "overuse, ignorance and complacency" of a burgeoning tourist industry (albeit one that has derived some of its allure from Ransome's fiction).

No longer enthralled by landscape, no longer "dwelling" in it, modern human beings, it would seem, stand homelessly apart from it. What writers like Hardy, Ransome and Lawrence manage to do, as Heidegger might expect, is to reconnect their readers with the earlier, more transcendent response to nature; through their writings, readers re-learn how to dwell.