- 1 Just to mention a few outstanding conferences organised under her supervision: "Mountains in Image (...)
1This collection of articles is, by and large, the fruits of 2016 conference organised by the research centre CAS (Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes) of Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, "Les rencontres de l'humain et du non-humain dans la literature de montagne et d'exploration Anglophone / Anglophone Mountain and Exploration Writing: Meetings Between the Human and Nonhuman." It is worth acknowledging here Françoise Besson for her efforts in providing lasting fora and enthusiasm which have helped in the move towards establishing travel and nature writing in Franco-British literary and cultural studies on the whole1 and in the organisation of this conference in particular.
2We would like to thank the CAS and its head Nathalie Cochoy, the English Department (DEMA), the Conseil Régional d'Occitanie, the SELVA, the IRPALL, the GREC and "Connaître le Canada" for their generous support to make the conference possible. A very special gratitude goes to Toulouse Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions and Letters for its help since a part of the conference took place at the Hôtel d'Assézat. Among all those who made the conference possible through their work, energy and creativity, we are sincerely thankful to Hanane Serjaouane, and Benoît Colas. Our deepest thanks go to those who provided us with a precious logistic help and particularly, Françoise and Albert Poyet.
- 2 David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, New York: Pantheon Books, 2010, 173.
3Anglophone Travel and Exploration Writing: Meetings Between the Human and Nonhuman is not the first volume of this kind, nor is it likely to be the last. The seventeen articles collected here expand scholarly conversation that surrounds the process of ecocritical engagement by coming into contact with the human and nonhuman environment. To provide a more accurate material-semiotic network of human and nonhuman agents, we argue that "nonhuman" here denotes "a community of expressive presences"2 (Abram 173), including not only sentient animals or other biological mechanisms, but also impersonal agents, ranging from water to hurricanes, from mineral to bacteria, from mountains to information networks. Seen in this light, all living creatures, from humans to fungi, tell evolutionary stories of coexistence, interdependence, adaptation and hybridization, extinction and survival. Whether perceived or interpreted by the human mind or not, these stories shape trajectories that have a formative, enactive power.
- 3 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007; Donna J. Harawa (...)
- 4 Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le Nouveau Régime Climatique, France: Éditions La D (...)
4Witness Donna Haraway, the eminent feminist theorist and historian of science, who noted that the nonhuman world is a dialogic, co-productive participant in human social relationships.3 Whether it was she or Bruno Latour,4 human beings and nonhuman animals and things, in their capacity to affect and to be affected, were conceptualized relationally. Concepts of mutual articulation, encounters, intra-action and natural cultural contact zones, all implicit and/or explicit in the arguments of the authors above, unformed an understanding of "becoming with" (Haraway 2007, 3) rather than simply being in the world. "Partners do not precede the meeting," Haraway writes, for "species of all kinds, living or not, are consequent on a subject–and object–shaping dance of encounters" (Haraway 2007, 4), that conjoin events across indefinite time and space.
5This tension between the human and nonhuman is part of a philosophical dilemma that ecologists and writers face alike. Critical and theoretical arguments continue to rage as to whether travel writing re-invents itself in our modern, postcolonial era, or whether it merely re-inscribes (neo)colonial privilege in new ways. Yet there is little argument about travel writing's ongoing importance as a vital medium of cross-cultural contact and exchange, and as a form which profoundly reflects human and nonhuman encounters and vice versa. Many travel writers speak on behalf of the Earth or its creatures precisely because they feel that humanity is turning a blind eye to environmental destruction.
6Travel writing about these encounters is inherently interdisciplinary and rich with agencies in various forms, human and nonhuman. Our collection of fiction, exploration and travel strives to expand this sense of "agency", re-thinking the traditional subject–object delineation and the simple association of "will" or "rationality" as primary drivers in earthly actions. It also links to the much older, as well as non-Western, discussions of an animated world as vitalism or animism, in which things, animals, and human beings are all active forces. In our attempt to organize such an endeavour, we have chosen four broad themes that we believe reflect some of the most promising directions in the study of literature and environment: the aesthetics of exploration, travel, fiction and environmental culture as well as several case studies which broadly focus on the agency of mountains.
7Opening by a dialogue between the prominent British mountaineer and writer Kev Reynolds and the renowned American researcher in literature and environment, Professor Scott Slovic, our Part I Travel, Exploration and Writing Mindfulness: Making Connections is an attempt to turn our cultural attention back from the specifically human realm to the wider, other-than-human, living environment. This engaged conversation explores the possibilities of different modes of knowing, engaging, teaching and storytelling, braiding the fictional and factual together to enhance our ecological awareness, sensibility and fundamental kinship with nonhuman communities in order to coevolve in local, bioregional and global ecosystem associations.
8The four essays in Part II, Exploration and Aesthetics of Travel, examine the boundaries of exploration and travel going back to the post-Romantic scientific and literary nature writing. Inspired by the first rational approach to nature, developed by Pre-Socratic philosophers like Euripides, and historians like Herodotus, several voyages of discovery rendered a surprising amount of information about different species of plants and animals, fostering natural historians' efforts to systematize such profusion. Developed by Swedish botanist Linnaeus (1674-1748), although a century later, the idea of a stable taxonomy was questioned by two leading travellers of the eighteenth century, the German geographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and the English geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875). One of the examples of re-appropriation of the nonhuman environment is American literary tradition with 'nature' and 'regional' writing, set in open landscapes of cattle ranges, mountains and rivers, including early narratives of exploration and settlement. Our collection opens with Laurence Machet who explores two natural history books: Travels (1791) by the botanist William Bartram and Alexander Wilson's nine-volume American Ornithology (1808-1814) where she traces exploitative political and economic purposes which motivated public policy, private interest and literary production. She further argues that both books, using Buffon's degeneration theory as leverage, offer descriptions of nonhuman animals that help delineate the country's political identity.
9Questioning the inclusion of exploration writings in the field of travel literature leads to the examination of the definition of this type of text. As Gaëlle Lafarge remarks, understanding exploration writings as a branch of literary travel narratives seems to depend on the reconsideration of their scientific value and objectivity. She provides a convincing example of the early nineteenth-century exploration of the Mississippi Valley, when Zebulon Pike and Zadok Cramer's writings offer a verbal depiction of the abundance among landscape descriptions. The explorers' points of views propel the reader not in a geographical space but in a literary one.
10British proto-ecocritical writing emerged from within an older literary tradition concerned with long-domesticated and densely populated landscapes, rather than with 'wilderness', or vast, unexplored regions that first ignited American imagination. The neoclassical aesthetic principles of rational order and design gradually merged with Romantic pastoralism, depicting landscapes where industry existed side by side with agriculture, and wild creatures with domestic animals. In European Sublime settings, wanderers and travellers could admire lofty crags and waterfalls by day, and rest in comfortable inns at night.
- 5 In February 1871, Charles Darwin wrote to botanist Joseph Hooker speculating that life could have e (...)
11Dwelling on the Linnean 'economy of nature' and Humboldt's description of mutually dependent communities, Charles Darwin, after a trip to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, saw nature as a web of complex relations and ecological interdependences: a grand scheme of cooperative integration. He had faith in nature as a creative, nurturing force, yet he saw no need for explanations outside the material natural order. Raphaelle Costa de Beauregard traces in Darwin's travelogue Voyage of the Beagle a vital materiality of all the nonhuman elements: plate tectonics, fossils, seeds, colours, smells, where he theorised that life began in a 'warm little pond' on early Earth.5 Making a parallel with Darwin's 'little pond' and the whole life cycle of the common newt from Romance in a Pond, one of the films of the Secrets of Nature series (1922-33), the author convincingly proves that the camera-eye was unavoidably Darwinian to the extent that it inherited the traveller's observant eye as a substitute of a microscope.
- 6 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century (...)
12Darwin was one of the first Romantic materialists,6 but today scientific explorations of nature are increasingly reliant on genetics and microbiology, thus reaching deeper layers of organic life and achieving a better understanding of natural processes and systems. But none of this could have happened without Darwin's deceptively simple insights. Yet this is far from being a finished task. There remain deep mysteries in nature, among them a more precise understanding of the inner life of nonhuman creatures. The genus Rhododendron, a plant species of immense horticultural value, requires particular attention to understand the ecological interdependencies in the human and nonhuman world. Françoise Besson traces the textual and horticultural values of this mythical plant and its migrations between mainland Asia and the Caucasus Mountains to Australia and North America because of climatic vicissitudes and human encroachment.
13Our Part III, Human and Nonhuman Encounters in the Fiction of Travel, begins with two seemingly different themes: the human and nonhuman in literature. Our insight into these encounters confirms the realization that the line between human and nonhuman is, to a large extent, verbally and culturally constructed, questioning the very idea of an Enlightenment subject. In particular, studies of literature are confronted by their own limitations when trying to analyse their relation to beings that exist outside the very basis of the literary discipline. Even the words, structuring dichotomies of our culture, reflect most notably the separation of nature from culture and of human from nonhuman.
- 7 Cary Wolfe, "‘Human, All Too Human’: Animal Studies’ and the Humanities," PMLA 124, 2, 2009, 564–75 (...)
14Often intertwined with critical discussions of place, the figure of the animal has played an important role in its own right. Animals are evolutionarily connected more closely to humans than other parts of nature but they are also often represented as being separated from humans by a distinctive boundary. However, as Cary Wolfe argues, "animal studies, if it is to be something other than a mere thematic, fundamentally challenges the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings sustained and reproduced in the current disciplinary protocols of cultural studies" ("Human, All Too Human" 568f).7
- 8 Bernard Werber, Les Fourmis : la trilogie, Editions Poche, 2006.
15Animals confront us in the contradictory shapes of, on the one hand, the barely known and sometimes dangerous wild animal, and the domesticated animal, a product of culture as much as of nature, on the other hand. Furthermore, the relationship between people and animals is sometimes juxtaposed with or metaphorically superimposed on social relations between unequal social groups, at the service of both progressive and reactionary political thoughts. This has, for a long time, found a rich territory for investigation in the abundant literature on animals in both Western and non-Western traditions, very often with an important environmental dimension even if their principal focus lies elsewhere. From the seafaring and fishing narratives of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to the fiction and poetry of Ernest Thompson Seton, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Julia Leigh, Jiang Rong and Guo Xuebo, writers have foregrounded encounters with whales, wolves, and bears as scenes where nature and culture come simultaneously face to face and masculine and national identities are put to the test. Yet, even though literary creations remain fundamentally human, works such as the brilliant trilogy about ants by the French novelist Bernard Werber, Les Fourmis (1991), Le Jour des fourmis (1992), and La Revolution des fourmis (1996)8 show that literary imagination can go far toward envisioning how the world presents itself to beings relying mostly on smell and touch rather than vision and sound, and thereby relativizing the human perspective as one among many. Poetic and storytelling traditions around the world have tended to focus not so much on animals' difference as on their similarity to humans by featuring animals—and sometimes, plants—that possess the gift of language.
- 9 See for example, Tim Hayward, "Anthropocentrism: a misunderstood problem", Environmental Values 6, (...)
- 10 William Timberlake & Andrew R. Delamater, "Humility, science, and ethological behaviourism", Behavi (...)
16A number of the essays in this Part deals with the intricate complexity of the concepts of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism,9 i.e. the failure to consider that other animals and the non-human in general have a different world than ours.10 Lesley Lawton's analysis of the perversity of anthropocentrism and human innate cruelty towards nonhuman creatures is illustrated in the study of Robert Louis Stevenson's Travel with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). The violence towards a nonhuman animal as Stevenson portrays it, undermines the fundamental notion of humanity and places the more-than-material Modestine as the symbol of the denaturalised culturally-forced distinction between human and nonhuman to allocate identities and power that saturate our culture to this day.
17This human potential for violence has also been criticised in Loren Eiseley's environmental ethics towards the nonhuman world. QianQian Cheng returns to the themes of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism through the essays and poems of the American anthropologist and nature writer where he questioned man's kinship with other species. Eiseley saw the cruelty of the natural world in his records of the deaths of animals; however, his observations also disclosed another form of cruelty—the unnatural violence to other life forms caused by humans. This mid-twentieth nature writer meditated on the necessity for sympathy for all living creatures and elements.
18One of the examples of the interaction between humans and the elements through the water and river journeys inspired Harry Vandervlist's essay on two different poetic works; one is an unfinished epic text by the Canadian writer and poet Jon Whyte (1987) and the other is a well-known American children's book Paddle-to-the Sea by Holling Clancy Holling (1941). The proposition that we are each collective amalgamation of the same 'matter' underlines the author's assertiveness of the interconnection between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, water, word and world. The role of genuineness and the limits of the writers' indigeneity are particular significant.
19Overcoming anthropocentrism has meant appreciating that 'Man' is not the centre of the universe or the measure of all things. But if the overcoming of anthropocentrism is to be deemed a good thing, this paradox should alert us to how it is complex. To begin with, there are some ways in which humans cannot help being human-centred. Anyone's view of the world is shaped and limited by their position and way of being within it: from the perspective of any particular being or species there are real respects in which they are at the centre of it. British traveller and writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in his travel narratives Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958) and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966) invites us, according to Isabelle Keller-Privat, to follow the writer's meditative wanderings through the Greek mountains and valleys, inhabited by the nonhumans, a place of linguistic, human and cultural migrations where humanity is re-enchanted. The discovery and knowledge of the place is conceived both as a feat, a victory upon oneself and upon hostile conditions, and as a privilege, so the place becomes the sanctuary for a new humanity where the nonhuman is given a voice of its own.
20Another anthropomorphic vision of the interaction between human and animal is traced in Céline Rolland Nabuco's exploration of three masterpieces of nature and travel writing of our time: Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard (1978), Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years (1990) and Alan Tennant's On the Wing: to the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon (2004). While comparing these three 'hunting stories' to a spiritual quest, a post-Vietnam trauma and a scientific observation of animal world, the author focuses on the porous interface between the human and nonhuman worlds and movements. In all of the above-written essays the desire of overcoming anthropocentricism is intelligible if it is understood in terms of improving knowledge about the place of humans in the worlds, and this includes improving our knowledge about what constitutes the good for nonhuman beings.
- 11 For the surviving corpus of Empedocles’s writing and its intellectual context, see M.R.Wright, Empe (...)
- 12 We also hope to evoke Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s cogent formulation of a postcolonial ‘strategic (...)
21The way material forms—bodies, things, elements, toxic substances, chemicals, organic and inorganic matter, landscapes, and biological entities—move and intra-act with each other and within the human dimension produce configurations of meanings and discourses that we interpret as stories. The cosmologist, physicist, and poet Empedocles (ca 495-435 BCE) went further, insisting that in the form of the elements, matter itself is ceaselessly productive.11 Charles Darwin himself observed of nature's biological generativity that "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (Appleman 174). His great-great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel, makes matter and movement central in her Mara Crossing (2012) through nonhuman migrations: the travels of spores, plants, seeds, viruses, parasites and animals in order to shed light on, and elicit understanding of the contemporary human migrations unfurling across the planet. Maria Tang returns to the anthropomorphic agency of Padel's linguistic and imaginative attentiveness to the material vitality and "small agencies" (Bennett) of the nonhuman, emphasising the author's 'strategic' anthropomorphism, inspired by Jane Bennett's notion of 'a touch of anthropomorphism' in Vibrant Matter (98-99).12
22Through 'strategic anthropomorphism' we can ally with all the nonhuman world and its elements, de-centering the human from its accustomed universal midpoint. Smaller than nature, larger than quarks and leptons, the elements are the perceivable foundations through which life thrives and of which words are composed. They are the agentic forces from outside, the very essence of cosmos, home, body and story and the thresholds beyond which the post-human awaits.
23Compared to the gendered agency of water, mountains are frequently conceptualized as impressive yet static, inert barriers or mineral deposits forcing humans into either submission or dominance. At best they offer sites of spiritual enlightenment, and serve as a vehicle for a Romantic sublime experience. However, in our final Part IV, Agentic Mountains in Nature and Travel Writing, they reveal a surprising fluidity and dynamism and a more general understanding of entangled agentic geologic forces. Gilles Duval, in his essay on the Pyrenean mountaineer, explorer, traveller and philanthropist Count Russel-Killough, shows that the snowy mountain peaks symbolized for him everything that is pure and noble. Russell was so in love with wildness and natural beauty that he would spend weeks at a time living on the summits of the highest Pyrenean peaks, immersing himself in the rhythms and dramas of that upper world. His attitude to the mountains was very different to many of his nineteenth-century mountain-climbing peers in its spiritual reverence for the landscape. Most akin to Eastern traditions of thought which he showed in his well-known Souvenirs d'un montagnard (1888), Russell sensed that the natural world could not be dominated or beaten, or treated as an enemy, but must be approached with modesty and wonder. For another mountaineer, a great British philosopher and traveller, Samuel Butler, the Alps represented the most salient form of relief on earth. Samia Ounoughi analyses Samuel Butler's compilation of travels Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont & the Canton Ticino (1881) through details which concern the lives of the Alp dwellers, but also Alpine fauna and flora thus passing from macroscopy to microscopy of the agentic mountains.
24The mountains compel because there the frozen dead and living beings gather for warmth and shelter merely a stone's throw away. Fanny Robles lingers on the moment halfway through Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857), when the location of the story shifts to Switzerland where a group of travellers on their way up the ancient Great St. Bernard Pass shelter for the night at the convent of the Great St Bernard Hospice. The passing of the human in front of the nonhuman recalls the transformation of the human into the nonhuman, in the in-between space of the mountain wilderness.
- 13 Chistopher Hitt, "Toward an Ecological Sublime", New Literary History 30:3, 1999, 603-623.
25The nonhuman world of the mountains can be also a background for human encounters as in John Drummond Hay's travelogue Western Barbary (1844). Khalid Chaouch traces the travels of the nineteenth-century British diplomat in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains at the moment when Morocco was still associated with wild animals. The technique of frame narrative permits the traveller to make a clear separation between the real history of the lion's hunt and the order of human relations within it. Agentic mountains have always been associated with the Sublime, an eighteenth-century aesthetic principle of Romanticism, where a violent confrontation with mountains' otherness provokes a powerful self-apotheosis.13 Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill in her article about the Pamir Mountains exploration by the Victorians underlines how unmediated and powerful this confrontation can be. Even if this Roof of the World became a useful British imperial short-circuit to forge a durable identity for themselves and their nation, some of these mountaineers were sincerely moved by the force of nonhuman active agents in the shaping of the world.
- 14 Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet, London: Sage Publications, 2011.
26When reading all these texts through the lens of current theories on nonhuman agency, we can distinguish emerging ideas about agentic natural forces, allowing for a re-conception of nineteenth-century natural history, travel and exploration. In sum, human agency appears in these texts as part of the broader spectrum of nonhuman agencies. Today the so-called 'Anthropocene', or the epoch of accelerated and global human impact throughout the Earth's biosphere, poses many challenges to the humanities, particularly in terms of human and nonhuman agency.14
27By configuring a close interconnection and interdependence between the various entities engaged in intra-actions, our collection tries to evoke and re-define forms of Anthropocene discourse. None of this could have happened without the deceptively simple insights provided by Darwin. Yet this is far from being a finished task and there remain deep mysteries in nature. Reconnecting with it promises the vibrant future for those who attend to and extol the beauty and fragility of the nonhuman world.