1In his ‘Essay on Pastoral’, written in 1713, Alexander Pope explains that authors ‘must use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd’s life, and in concealing its miseries’ (Pope 120). This version of pastoral seems to have pervaded the whole tradition and the pastoral mode, through its idealised and nostalgic depictions of rural life, has always been known to be anything but realist. However, the mode is, to a certain extent, concerned with the daily lives of farmers and, as such, it can encompass some of the problems that affect them.
2This is what Sarah Hall illustrates in her debut novel, Haweswater, published in 2002. The narrative recounts the dispossession of a farming community as the valley of Mardale has to be flooded to provide water to the cities of northern England. Farmers have to relocate, with their stocks and their crops, in order to make room for the reservoir that will stand in their place. In the midst of this ordeal, presented as a tragedy, a tumultuous love story unfolds between two star-crossed lovers: the daughter of a farming family, Janet Lightburn, and Jack Liggett, the representative of the company that will flood the valley and who oversees the project on a local scale. Haweswater bears explicit resemblance to pastoral texts as it embodies several of its main conventions: a protagonist who retreats in nature, an elegiac tone transcribing an incommensurable loss and a specific attention paid to the landscape. Yet, the novel uses central features of realism, which might seem to be at odds with the pastoral ethos detailed by Pope. Indeed, if realism is defined along the lines of Aristotle’s mimesis, then it seems that pastoral cannot possibly be realistic. This article’s view of realism will rest upon Philippe Hamon’s contention that studying realism goes beyond answering the question ‘how does literature imitate reality?’, but rather asks ‘how does literature make us believe it mimics reality?’ (Hamon 1982, 132).
3In Hall’s novel, pastoral and realism are tied through a third concept, which is that of materiality. Indeed, according to Emilie Walezak, the materialist turn in environmental and literary studies has impacted realism: ‘the realist novel today reinvents modes of knowing and of describing reality by representing the empirical experiences of embodied subjects’ (Walezak 6). In Haweswater, subjects are embodied and materially embedded, and I argue that Hall offers a form of a realism that is both pastoral and material. My contention is that Hall presents a material realist tale that bridges the gap between pastoralism and realism. On the one hand, pastoral has evolved and is now defined by what Deborah Lilley calls ‘new pastorals’, which she describes as texts that ‘grapple with situations that call into question the very relationships on which pastoral is built’ (Lilley 19). By putting the pastoral into a new context, these texts draw critically and self-reflexively upon its conventions. New pastorals account for contemporary crises—climate change and its consequences being the most prevalent.
4In Haweswater, pastoralism and realism seem to go hand in hand in order to chronicle the demise of the human subject through the lens of material bodies, whether they are human or non-human. Using the archetypal narrative device of the flood, and drawing on historical material through the fictional retelling of the Haweswater Act of 1921, the novel implements emblematic realist narrative devices in a traditionally pastoral setting while expressing a post-pastoral ethos. What I aim to demonstrate is that Sarah Hall’s Haweswater brings to the fore a contemporary version of realism: one that inventories species, people, and matter, one that showcases the role of embeddings and entanglements, one that highlights the ethical gesture of paying attention (Ganteau 166) to the details of reality on several scales. By blending post-pastoral and material realism, Hall’s novel sheds light on another form of empiricism (Bernard 17), underlining the vulnerability of human subjects and the necessity to represent the contact zones and entanglements they harbour with other species. It appears that the loss of the material reality of nature redefines the connection between pastoral writing and reality in three different aspects. Firstly, the loss of nature is conveyed through an overlap between history and story, thereby adding a layer of historical realism to the pastoral. Secondly, Hall explores the various ways in which the land is perceived and uses material realism to re-think the way narratives give access to reality. Finally, Hall’s material realism is concerned with biology on a microscopic scale, allowing the novel to reassess what it means to be human.
5From mentioning the 1921 Haweswater Act to multiple references to the historical past of Cumbria, Haweswater is rooted in the context of British history, leading to the conflation of history and story. In his essay entitled ‘Un discours contraint’, Philippe Hamon establishes that such a conflation functions as a narrative device that strengthens realism. According to him, historical events constitute a background which makes the plot more predictable and undermines the reader’s disbelief (Hamon 1982, 137). In Hall’s novel, the narrator displays a form of historical and social realism that takes into account the pastoral ethos while making it realistic. The novel opens with a broad exposition of Mardale and its inhabitants. The narrator contextualises Janet Lightburn’s childhood by detailing the press reviews that she and the other pupils of the primary school had to work on:
Janet becomes aware of the dark figure emerging in Europe, across the icy North Sea, tightening the belts of his philosophy as he does so, purging his party of suspected traitors; this is ‘the night of long knives’, the papers announce, and the girl carefully cuts along the borders of Hitler’s rise. (Hall 20)
6This passage situates the events of the plot in the wider context of Europe in the late 1930s by describing and quoting headlines, adding a layer of verisimilitude and credibility to the events described. The historical subtext underlying the narrative strengthens is tie to reality while pre-empting readers’ expectations.
7Another historical subtext emerges when reading Haweswater. Its connection to mimesis is closely related to the national wound of industrialisation and the loss of the commons, as the novel is premised on the privation of land and a sustainable agrarian lifestyle, which constituted the foundation of most pastoral writing. Indeed, pastoral’s idealisation of the countryside is largely the result of the loss of nature through industrialisation and the enclosures policies (Williams 20). As land became fenced and farmers were dispossessed, the fantasy of an open and common land in which one could idle and find comfort became a shared and somewhat necessary, narrative. This nostalgic view of the countryside is the result of a bereaved connection to the natural world. Haweswater reframes this loss in a modern context in which industry is still impinging on the land and farmers, but steps aside from the pastoral comfort of Merrie Olde England. One step further, Hall defamiliarises the comforting refuge the countryside had once been by writing an altered pastoral elegy that, instead of providing consolation and hope (Ramazani 3), underlines the fatality of environmental destruction. Indeed, Haweswater provides neither solution nor hope to the problem that lies at its core: the farmers will have to relocate and their valley will be flooded. The pastoral retreat is also altered—only nature is retreating. The prologue is a proleptic passage that establishes the fatality that weighs on the novel as a whole. In these few pages, Samuel Lightburn goes back to the farm to retrieve a lock of hair belonging to his daughter, while looking back at the flooded ruins and the past: ‘so much of his life was gone. More than his home and his fields, more than the valley which contained his familiars. Behind him was the end of his village’ (Hall xii–xiii). The tragedy of the event is conveyed by the anaphora of the quantifier ‘more’ and the adjective ‘familiar’, both encompassing the incommensurability of the loss. The proleptic dimension of the prologue also establishes the tragedy on which the novel rests, as it suggests that the rest of the narrative constitutes an analepsis of the months that led to the flooding of the valley. The prologue announces that ‘after the flood [the farms] would cease to exist in this valley for the man, in all but memory’ (Hall xi), and the novel then proceeds to create that memory. This intricate temporal structure inscribes the event that is related in a larger history, making it all the more realistic. Such fictional historicity is described by Paul Dawson as employing a ‘proleptic voice of history to exploit the narrating instance and establish a temporal gap between modern narration and historical story’ (Dawson 153). Indeed, the use of the frequentative ‘would’ in the sentence previously quoted contains a proleptic dimension, announcing how the valley and the farms will remain a part of regional and national history.
8Another aspect of this historical dimension is made obvious in the choice of omniscience, a central feature of realist writing (Walezak 4). While omniscience has been historically associated with omnipotence and narratorial authority, Paul Dawson and Emilie Walezak reframe it as a form of community building allowing access to various individual consciousnesses (Walezak 12). In Haweswater, the narrativisation of community is certainly built through omniscience as the narrator gives access to many characters’ consciousnesses in chapters that read like vignettes therefore recreating the farming community through a mosaic of characters. This mosaic also stems from the mythical pattern that emerges in the plot of the novel. While the flood is related to a contemporary realistic context, it also relates to the biblical episode of the flood thereby inscribing the plot in mythical times. As such, situating the plot within a broader time scale allows for the emergence of narrative communities such as those evocated by Dawson and Walezak. Times seems stretched between myth and the slow and incremental temporality of the everyday, as the narrative often reads like an almanac. Indeed, chapters all start with a temporal indication emblematised through references to seasons and go on to describe the daily lives of farmers and the evolution of the weather. This form of writing creates several effects. First, it draws on the pastoral trope of the calendar, as seen in Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar for example, where the lives of farmers are described through their dependence on seasons and the matter that the land produces. In Haweswater, the almanac materialises a tragic countdown while memorialising the last inhabitants of Mardale. Secondly, the almanac also draws on what Paul Alpers calls the ‘pastoral anecdote’, which is ‘a brief and compendious rendering of a certain situation or type of life’ that has been developed in pastoral texts that resist idealising the lives of farmers (Alpers 22). Such anecdotes, recorded in a fictitious almanac, add a reality effect to the narrative while drawing on the pastoral tradition. Finally, this almanac allows for an omniscient narrator to emerge, whose role it is to record the last events of Mardale, echoing what Dawson calls the literary historian narrator:
The literary historian relies upon the authority of the historical record and the possibilities of imaginatively recovering private or occluded moments in history . . . . This mode displays a faith in the literary imagination to supplement the historical record, rather than undermine the narrative ‘truth’ of history. (Dawson 153)
9This narratorial presence is shown through the various temporal discrepancies that pervade the novel in which the present tense erupts in sentences relating past events: ‘There are times when passion can describe a random passage of its own accord . . . . Perhaps, though, there is a simpler explanation’ (Hall 114). It seems as though the narrator is commenting and nuancing the information provided elsewhere in the novel. The most emblematic example of this occurrence can be found by the end of the text, when the narrative mentions that a museum has been erected to memorialise the valley that used to exist:
The borders between fact and myth have a tendency to blur in these regions. History fogs, or becomes loose and watery. Bizarre mythologies arise. . . . The explosion at the Haweswater dam in 1937 was never fully explained. It remains largely unrecorded in the history of the reservoir. The little museum in the pumping station at Burnbanks makes no mention of it, except for a short police report, which barely describes the one fatality of the accident, and an engineer’s report stating that the damage to the dam took two months to repair. The two offer no collusion. (Hall 253)
10In this passage, the narrator reverts back to the present tense so as to give additional information and details regarding the explosion and how it remained inscribed in the region and its materiality. The ‘literary historian’ justifies the formation of myths that blend with history, thereby reinforcing the realist dimension of narrative. The use of the present in this passage establishes a general truth, asserting the authority of the narrator through a display of her encyclopaedic knowledge. Additionally, this passage is another example of how the narrator pre-empts future events through prolepses. It contains a proleptic dimension, a narrative device that is played out several times in the novel. For example, when the village is bombed, the narrator informs the reader that ‘years later, in 1979, when a severe drought would take the water levels down further than they had been since the flooding . . . the shallow skeleton of the old village would rise again’ (Hall 226). The narrative voice asserts its narratorial authority and omniscience by displaying its knowledge of the future of the region thereby assuming the role of a historian.
11The material realism of Haweswater draws on the context of rural England to defamiliarise the comforting dimension of nature played out in pastoral texts. The centrality of history in the novel functions as a feature of realistic writing allowing the narrator to assert her authority and strengthens the verisimilitude of the novel as a whole. Additionally, contextualising the loss of nature entices characters and readers alike to heed its fleeting presence.
12New pastorals use realism in order to chronicle the demise of the human subject in the face of climate change and make our experience of the world more legible. This is the case with Haweswater, in which reality is made not only more legible but also more visible. Indeed, the narrative both thoroughly describes the land on which the farmers dwell and inventories the material identities that populate it.
13Firstly, it seems that the historical framework as well as the novel’s elegiac dimension lead Hall to perform memorialisation through storytelling. Philippe Hamon theorises that descriptive discourse foregrounds realism. According to him, describing is an ostentatious narratorial gesture through which the narrator shows something to the reader and draws her attention in the process (Hamon 1993, 43). As such, describing means introducing a pause in the narrative to enable the readers to look closely and pay attention to the object(s) of the description. It allows the narrator to detail and inventory. In Haweswater, the narrator makes room for material entities through countless descriptions in which the land is inventoried:
The two roads met up at the bottom of the valley and then led as a single tarmacked highway to the village of Bampton, then on to Penrith, eighteen miles from Mardale. The western track was still frequently used, being closer to the upper fields of the farms. Along it grew hawthorn, gorse and broom. Brambles curled out on to the road in the summer, there were wild raspberries to be picked and in June sticky, thorny roses bloomed, sweetening the air. (Hall 40)
14While the passage starts with the description of the road that leads to the neighbouring hamlets, the narrator focuses on the western part of the road, before describing smaller and smaller material entities, as though the land was seen through a magnifying glass. Zooming in on the land, a catalogue of fauna and flora is drawn from this description, along with the temporality of their presence on the land. On a broader scale, the novel is brimming with catalogues and inventories of animals, plants, topographical details and various natural elements. As such, the novel asserts its post-pastoral character. Indeed, it seems that the pastoral mode fails to account for the singularity of experience and descriptive details that might be at odds with the desire to romanticise the rural experience and its emblematic dimension. Raymond Williams explains that details usually clash with the landscape aesthetics of the pastoral (Williams 56). In Haweswater, on the other hand, inventorying, cataloguing and describing means commemorating the valley that is bound to be destroyed. Material entities are recorded on the pages of the novel:
Samuel and Ella Lightburn walk to the church in the village on Sunday morning as they have done many times before, only now they know it is finite, that somewhere just out of sight on the horizon is the sharp, sudden edge of the world. Along the sides of the verges are primroses and the first bluebells of the year. . . . Three scruffy sparrows brawl and peck at each other, scuffling in the dry, dusty earth and lifting off as the couple approach, only to land hopping and scrapping again a few more feet in front of them. As if it’s all for show. (Hall 109)
15As the couple stroll along, the realisation that the valley is set to disappear promotes an acute attention to detail that is conveyed through the mention of the flowers and the birds, whose movements are anatomised. The mention of the season suggests that the characters are witnessing the last seasonal cycle that is to take place in the valley. While the flowers and the birds convey a pastoral image of beauty, the hopeless realisation of its finitude buttresses the elegiac dimension. The brief enumeration of flora is further developed in the novel: ‘along [the track] grew hawthorn, gorse and broom. Brambles curled out on to the road in the summer, there were wild raspberries to be picked and in June sticky, thorny roses bloomed, sweetening the air’ (Hall 40). In this passage, the narrator produces a catalogue of species that can be found in the Lake District, thereby showcasing the specificity of this ecosystem. This is the case of gorse, whose yellow petals have become, in Hall’s novels, an emblem of the region. Cataloguing, famously used by authors such as Robert Macfarlane or Melissa Harrison, is also a cornerstone of realism in that it allows the narrator to bring an encyclopaedic knowledge while registering it and invoking memory (Hamon 1993, 42). Hall’s foray into realism allows her to craft a record of what the valley’s fauna and flora look like before the environmental crisis proceeds to transform the ecosystem of the Lake District.
16Making the land visible and perceptible is therefore one of the main concerns of Haweswater. The presence in the narrative of a landscape painter, Paul Levell, adds to the descriptive nature of Hall’s work. Paul Levell’s way of seeing the land informs the manners in which material realism and pastoral overlap. Firstly, pastoral is intricately linked to iconography, as the retreat is frequently named ‘idyll’. The Greek etymology of the word directly refers to a small image, implying that the pastoral idyll consists of a restricted view of the countryside. The idyll then operates on several levels: it frames the representation and thus restricts it and turns the land into a picturesque landscape. Levell’s paintings hint at these limitations:
There was an impossibility to the perspectives of his high mountains, breathtaking verticals, paths fractured up over cliffs, pulling at the stomach and suggesting rapid currents of air during a freefall down to the eye of a dark tarn. He pushed the limits of Lakeland geological existence. Stony ridges disappeared into thunderous, sudden stormclouds. Edges appeared suddenly and without regard for the safe grassy flatlands in the foreground of a picture. Humans were, without exception, banished from the bleak, natural scenes, as if unable to survive or simply not welcome in the wilderness created by Levell’s brush, save for a suggestive form in a rock, a woman’s back surfacing in a river as a stepping stone, the curled torso of a man, moulded into the spine of a barren outcrop of granite. Figures were swallowed up by the land, subsumed. (Hall 39)
17This passage exemplifies the way in which Levell’s paintings memorialise the valley’s stone and encapsulates the strong connection established between the mountains and the farmers. While picturesque paintings tended to use mountains to frame the scene and create an aesthetic landscape subsumed by the human gaze, Levell’s paintings encapsulate the abrasive yet symbiotic relationship between stone and living entities. The mountains exceed the boundaries of the frame, and the notions of background and foreground are disturbed. This ekphrasis encapsulates Hall’s material realism by rendering the complex representation of nature she offers. The perception of the land is shown to be visceral and verisimilar, straying far from the picturesque convenience of an aesthetically pleasing landscape that the pastoral usually favours.
18Chronicling the land allows Hall to experiment with other means of perception that inform the material realism of her novel. Her concern with the material is not only optical, but calls on all the senses. In so doing, Hall conveys a phenomenological representation of the land, that Merleau-Ponty defines as being mediated by the material body and the senses that inform its perceptions (Merleau-Ponty 84). In Haweswater, the reader does not only see the land, but experiences it as palpable, fragrant, flavoursome and loud: ‘There was a fresh, woody smell in the air and the red bracken was wild over the sheep paths, twisting its stems together in firm, mature knots so that his boots had to rip through it as he walked’ (Hall 146). In this excerpt, the smell of the land is given centre stage while the movement of the boots creates the illusion of hearing the snap of the branches as the protagonist is walking. The reader is not only given details, she is made to attend the scene.
19Material realism then takes on an ethical approach as it draws on ordinary language philosophy to redirect the readers’ attention to what actually matters. Cora Diamond and Sandra Laugier have written extensively on this matter, explaining that detailed descriptions enlarge the readers’ perception thereby promoting an ethical approach to reality. Jean-Michel Ganteau develops this idea and applies it to literature:
It is therefore an education in perception and an apprenticeship in attention to what is unseen that an ethics of the ordinary inspired by this branch of philosophy proposes to develop. . . . It issues warnings against generalities and abstractions in order to promote the consideration of ordinary objects in their concreteness. More precisely, it calls on the necessity to describe them and thus, beforehand, to perceive them so as to be in a position to attend to them. (Ganteau 19)
20Hall’s material realism partakes in this apprenticeship in perception and grants an ethical dimension to pastoral writing in the context of the environmental crisis. By making reality more legible, and the world more perceptible, Hall chronicles the land and the difficult integration of the human subject in its midst.
21In Haweswater, Hall uses inventories and catalogues to commemorate a dying lifestyle and an endangered natural world. In doing so, she records the land and invites the reader to experience it through reading, thus imparting narrative with an ethical function. Attending the land leads to a questioning of the place of the human subject in the natural world.
22The new-materialist turn in contemporary narratives and in realism begs the question of human subjectivity. In Haweswater, attending materiality through inventories and descriptions leads to a reassessment of what it means to be human and showcases the anthropocentric destruction of ecosystems. Marco Caracciolo tackles this issue in Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality:
What narrative can do . . . is build on the conceptual tensions and contradictions that traverse the spectrum of materiality. Narrative transforms this conceptual space into an affectively and imaginatively rich experience for audiences: within the storyworlds of fiction . . . the tensions and contradictions of materiality are embedded in a concrete—if imaginary—context of interaction and interwoven with broader concerns that circulate in contemporary culture. Through these spatial frames, materiality is brought into productive tension with definitions of human subjectivity, the possibilities and limitations of human knowledge, as well as notions of anthropocentric mastery and human or more-than-human community. (Caracciolo 191)
23While contemporary narrative allows the reader to experience ecosystems, material realism partakes in a larger reflection on anthropocentrism. Melanie Ebdon identifies a ‘biological continuum of the human animal’ (Ebdon 31) in Hall’s fiction. This biological continuum is displayed through a form of biological realism operating on a microscopic scale. Donna Haraway details what this continuum entails in her Companion Species Manifesto, in which she states that material entities are constituted with and by each other:
Similarly, human gut tissue cannot develop normally without colonization by its bacterial flora. The diversity of earth’s animal forms emerged in the oceans’ salty bacterial soup. All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out. Developmental patterns of complex life forms are likely to show the history of these adaptations, once scientists figure out how to look for the evidence. Earth’s beings are prehensile, opportunistic, ready to yoke unlikely partners into something new, something symbiogenetic. Co-constitutive companion species and co-evolution are the rule, not the exception. (Haraway 32)
24Hall’s fiction conveys Haraway’s theory of co-constitutiveness. Indeed, Haweswater displays a form of pastoral material realism in the way it represents human and non-human entities. As such, the novel partakes in reconfigurations of the pastoral mode such as defined in Gifford’s post-pastoral as ‘a new term to refer to literature that is aware of the anti-pastoral and of the conventional illusions upon which Arcadia is premised, but which finds a language to outflank those dangers with a vision of accommodated humans’ (Gifford 149). Haweswater displays characters that are ‘accommodated’ by the necessities of their agrarian labour. Living with and by the seasons is not the result of pastoral artifice. The intimate knowledge of the land that the agriculturists have gathered is inscribed in their bodies and their materiality to the point where they seem to blend with the natural elements they exist with. Janet, for example, is profoundly embedded in the materiality of the valley:
Her knowledge of the place is as unconscious and simple as the mechanisms of breathing. The seasons of the farming community have structured her knowledge so that a margin of fell or common land does not exist without agricultural references. She is surrounded by an intricate union. . . . Her body chemistry alters as the terrain decomposes, turns, begins again. . . . She would have her ashes scattered to the open face of the scar. She has given herself over to this saturated strip of Westmorland. (Hall 112)
25Janet’s knowledge of her region is felt in the materiality of her body and results in the attunement (Felski 60) of her senses. The land is then inscribed in her flesh, and in what the narrator terms ‘body chemistry’. Janet attends to the land not only as a farmer, who reads the land in order to live off it, but also as a living entity fully immersed in it. This passage shows the extent to which Janet is materially embedded in her environment. The mention of her ashes, foreboding her tragic fate, showcases the material union between humans and non-humans through death, something that is mentioned several times in the novel as the farmers have to relocate their dead: ‘The decomposed flesh of the oldest corpses would always remain part of the land, supplying it with nutrients’ (Hall 187). This reference to compost is emblematic of Hall’s outlook on materiality, which seems to take into account what Jane Bennett calls the ‘vibrancy’ of matter:
The capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due. (Bennett viii)
26According to Bennett, matter is endowed with agency, vibrancy and vitality, allowing it to form complex assemblages: ‘assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations’ (Bennett 23). Janet’s symbiotic connection with the land, or the microscopic entanglements forming between the human remains and the soil, are prime examples of assemblages. Not only does such an emphasis on materiality confirm Hall’s affinity with the post-pastoral, it also ties in with recent conceptions of realism. Indeed, Emilie Walezak theorises how the realist novel takes stock of a changing epistemological paradigm that ultimately modifies the ontological relationships between characters and settings, humans and non-humans, causes and consequences, temporality and spatiality (Walezak 113). One step further, Hall displays a form of biological realism by showing the intricacies of the various entanglements that connect humans to other natural entities. Matter does not only interact but ‘intra-act’, in the words of Karen Barad. ‘Intra-action’ abolishes the distinction between outer and inner, and means interacting from the inside of ecosystems (Barad 294).
27Haweswater depicts a crisis by which humans are dispossessed of their land and non-human counterparts in general. As such, the farmers have to disentangle and uproot themselves from the land. This is made obvious through the transcorporeality that links the characters and the minerals of the valley. People are repeatedly said to be made of ‘kept stone’ (Hall 184), which materialises the strong ‘intra-action’ between them and the mountains they are surrounded with. When an elderly man dies in the valley, his body is camouflaged by the rocks that surround him:
When Samuel found Nathaniel’s body it was purely by accident. His eyes might even have happened across the old man twice, three times or more, there on the mountain, before recognizing his camouflaged form. . . . The rock became a man, an old friend, grey with the cold and death, as grey as the background of scree. (Hall 184)
28The figure of the man blends with that of the rock and displays a reciprocal connection between human and mineral. Samuel’s eyes struggle to tell background from foreground, referencing Levell’s representations of humans blended with stone. Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality informs the representation of the farming community to show that ‘the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment’ (Alaimo 2). The ‘geological transcoporeality’ (Pompié n.p.) displayed in the novel highlights an intricate weaving between geological, animal, vegetal and climatic forces. In particular, Janet is the one that seems to be most embedded in the land as she is described as ‘a statue of rain’ (136), ‘a lynx’ (28), and is said to have been ‘pressed between two vast mountain ranges’ (12). Similarly, her brother spends so much time immersed in the icy waters of the Lake District that he is granted aquatic features: ‘a very pale’ (56) skin, ‘a glowing white chest’ (56), ‘a smudge of watery grey to his eyes’ (56) and ‘an air of dampness about him’ (77). The little boy ‘should have been a fish’ (77). Reciprocally, the land is granted a body. The hills have ‘veins’ (Hall 87) and water seems to be endowed with a voice:
The sound of the water slipping through the wooden spokes of the cartwheels was like a slow, soft-washing hum. . . . This water had once been only a gentle, tumbling river. . . . The rise and fall of the water’s tensile voice. Its sound was unusual, a continuance of text in a land of broken fluid, of forced rock. . . . Somatic music that fills in space and time. A corrugated harp of orchestral rivers. (Hall x)
29This description of the flood materialises the water through the sounds it makes. The multiple alliterations pervading this excerpt make the reader hear the sound of water and endow the liquid with material consistency (‘somatic’). Samuel’s body is up against the water’s soma, not as two distinct entities but as two bodies seeping into each other. Hall’s insistence on transcorporeality and material embeddedness serves two purposes. Firstly, it abides by the post-pastoral ethos whereby texts should display an awe and attention to the natural world and the recognition that there can be not inner or outer human nature in a world in crisis (Gifford 155). Secondly, it restates the necessity to rethink the place of the human subject in ecosystems, not as sovereign but as an agent partaking in multiple intra-actions (Barad 364) on a par with its non-human partners. As such, Hall’s display of biological realism allows a new understanding of the human subject in the light of the environmental crisis, whereby humans and non-humans share a material body.
30‘They were conscious of their landscape in a way that led them to live by it and from it’ (Hall 29), says the narrator of Haweswater about the farmers. Living by and from the land suggests attending to ecosystems, heeding its signs and observing its slight variations. Sarah Hall describes a symbiotic connection between farmers and the land that is devoid of romanticism but rather delves into the raw viscerality of materiality. As such, she uses realism to chronicle the demise of the human subject through what we might term ‘material pastoralism’. Haweswater goes beyond the contradiction between pastoral and realism. Drawing on the historical context of rural England, Hall establishes a realist framework in the midst of a post-pastoral tale of dispossession. By reflexively referencing the foundation of the pastoral ethos and asserting a trustworthy account of historical events, Hall infuses realism in pastoral writing. In doing so, she uses the narrative form to offer a fictionalised recording of what the fauna and flora look(ed) like, reinstating the realist premise of the novel while promoting an ethical stance. Making the land visible is not enough, one has to experience its materiality and attend the commonplace events of biological life. That is what Haweswater accounts for: a form of biological realism which takes into account humans and non-humans alike, and highlights the importance of vital entanglements. In Haweswater, it seems that the real tragedy lies in the forced disentanglement of the inhabitants from their non-human counterparts, a process that is ever increasing as the environmental crisis progresses.
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