ECOLITERATURE

Norton's Anthology of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature essays are reference books to be used to help you write your individual research papers on this topic.

 

Get a fresh perspective on the creation of the world with Alan Lightman's new book Mr. G. 

1) Comparison/contrast pairs: American naturalistic style. Industrial development versus nature and indigenous Native American culture. Oil versus Gardens in the Dune.
2) Akhenaten and The Plague. Northern Africa. Social collapse.
3) The Sand Child and God Dies by the Nile and The Desert: Egyptian and Moroccan feminism and desert culture.
4) Snow, Hiroshima, mon Amour, and How to Survive as an Adjunct Professor by Wrestling: Turkish versus American approaches to terrorism, relationship of nature to political violence
5) The Waves and Black Water: Early and late twentieth century. modernist versus post-modernist styles. Clean versus polluted water. Distortion of time.
6) Soul Mountain, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Heart of Darkness, and Things Fall Apart: Climb every mountain, ford every stream. Chinese cultural revolution. White European early twentieth century imperialism versus African nationalism. Back to man conquers nature--or not.
7) South American poetry of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda.
8) Compare Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, D. H. Laurence's collection of nature poetry to new Directions' anthology Birds, Beasts, and Seas.

As we continue to build high tech cities over these precious elements of nature, let’s return to the wilderness, not only to hike literally and enjoy the fresh air and exercise, but to savor the words of great writers who put their stories in these places and let their styles be molded by their movements. I left out rock. I am currently working on a Roc

k Trilogy, the first tome is called Huguenot St, which is the oldest street in American in New Paltz. The books are narrated by rock, and the style will shift depending on whether I am talking about the crust, crunching along present time, the fiery mantle that causes plate tectonics and vitriolic arguments, the gooey mantle that holds things together with social customs, habits, rituals, and long, complex, compound sentences, the liquid center that flows out of the subconscious uncensored, or the solid core that has a rhyme or an answer to everything, no matter how crazy. To write this book, I study geology, and go on field trips all over New York State.

 

Fracking is the number one issue facing NY State now especially since the Feds want energy independence, anything to strengthen the economy, and lower gas prices. Yet NY State is one of the most beautiful in the world with millions of acres of protected land for recreation and farming and a watershed that supplies the most delicious water in the world. Upstate people occasionally complain about lack of jobs and the Natural Gas Alliance is reading and raving to wreck havoc on the defenseless shale of the Marcellus and Utica regions with hydro fracking, horizontal drilling that uses and/or releases carcinogens, wastes millions of gallons of precious drinking water, and fractures a living bedrock in an unpredictable way that allows toxins to seep into groundwater, streams, and water for cattle and other animals, as well as cause seismic eruptions by destabilizing our crust. Although Manhattan has been "developed," our relatively good air and great water are due to the somewhat pristine wilderness up the Hudson, including Harriman State Park, Fahnestock, the East Hudson Highlands, Schennemunk, the Shawangunks of New Paltz, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks. Although Pataki was Republican, he defended this wilderness but Patterson and now Cuomo have been successfully courted by the gas companies. There is pressure on Cuomo to close nuclear Indian Point which provides NYC with 25% of its energy and the national agenda includes the development and export of natural gas. The Spectra pipeline is being built through the West Village to deliver radon-laden, fracked gas to all our boilers in spite of protests and activism. Objective scientists have warned against fracking but the gas companies tell politicians they just have to improve their techniques and it will be the gold rush of the 21st  Century. To learn more, go to Sane Energy and Sierra Club events and then study the opposition on the Chesapeake and other gas sites. Mitt Romney's first objective on his five-point plan is to ensure energy independence with fracking everywhere, more off-shore drilling, and even the continuation of coal plants, opening up as much Federal and preserved land as possible. I guess he's rich enough to get away to his own island to breathe fresh air. But Obama isn't a truly green President either.

In ecoliterature Major 20 we see how Joseph Conrad documented the rapacious ivory hunters' attempt to conquer nature and the natives, an attitude towards nature in Heart of Darkness that is not only anthropocentric but racist. Yet it built the British Empire and America. This greed was often coated in missionary zeal, something that Chinua Achebe describes in Heart of Darkness Upton Sinclair wrote about the greedy oil tycoons in his book Oil made into the film There Will be Blood. Leslie Marmon Silko shows us other possibilities when she describes how the Native Americans lived off the land. But we can't go back to that time nor do we want to set up a Green fascist state like the "Brave New Gardeners" in Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood.  In her last tome of MaddAddam humans are forced to cross-breed with Crakers and collaborate with pigoons. Sometimes authors personify nature and sometimes they eco-ify people saying "her legs are as solid and strong as tree trunks." Poets like Mary Oliver do not see humans on top of the nature pyramid and yet, ironically, she is one of the most loved poets by people. Chinese Nobel Prize winner, Gao Xi Jiang, found his soul on Soul Mountain during a long hike after a cancer scare and reprieve, where he went back into Chinese Buddhist past as well as nature, deconstructing his self into 4 different pronouns, he, she, you, and I, an Asian spatial version of Freud's deconstruction into ego, superego, and id. How often do we retreat to the forest to find ourselves, to calm down, to exult in the beauty of untarnished life? And yet so much of our nature is destroyed. In Naguib Mahfouz' Adrift on the Nile, normally religious and law-abiding Muslims retreat to the polluted Nile to live on houseboats where they can practice adultery, take drugs, and drink alcohol, simmering in sin as they sail along the cesspool of the river.

The Hudson River school of poets and painters can help us appreciate the beauty of this nature. I know some of you have country houses upstate while others have visited it. But this should be part of the show. Romantic nature poets like Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge often describe a nature that is idyllic. To be safe, I no longer hike in blinding rain or t-storms although they are beautiful to look at form inside. Orhan Pamuk describes the terror of Turkish earthquakes in Other Colors. We may have a conditional love of nature but we need it. These trees and rivers are the lungs of the city without which we would have industrial air pouring into our somewhat polluted city. Politicians claim that wind and solar don't have enough density and are unreliable. Yet some corporations are working on wind farms with smaller turbines that don't kill birds and are improving on the solar photovoltaic panels. There are many ways of delivering solar energy including windows, roads, panels, and sheets. Sealed Passive Houses are popular in Germany but people get stuck in their places forever here and it would be hard to retrofit all these historic townhouses and badly designed skyscrapers. Nevertheless, Green Design and LEED certified development, Bloomberg's PLAN NYC, (we must get him) and a number of other initiatives and tax rebates will hopefully insure a Greener future for New York  (ProfessorDi Caprio will talk about Green Design and Biomimicry) unless we get fracked which may look good in the beginning because natural gas burns cleaner than coal. However, if you add up the pollution from drilling, development, casements, toxins, and waste water, you may have more pollution than coal and earthquakes.

 

I have been working on a trilogy of novels narrated in the voices of sedimentary rock (Huguenot St), metamorphic rock (New York City), and igneous rock (the Palisades, Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun and the apocalypse) and have had to study geology in depth.

It's not easy to personify this rock but rock has a life, history, and even fluidity that surpasses ours.

Joyce Carol Oates (born in 1938) had a working-class upbringing in upstate New York, attended Syracuse and the University of Wisconsin, taught in Canada where she began a prolific and highly successful writing career, culminating in her appointment at Princeton University as the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities. The ballad-like BLACK WATER (1992) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It reimagines the events of Chappaquiddick (1969) and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne through the victim's eyes. Inspired by the interior monologues in Joyce's ULYSSES and other stream-of-consciousness techniques, Oates draws us into 26 year old Kelly Kelleher's distorted and damaged consciousness as she is caught in the slow, repetitious, haunting labyrinth of death. We are inundated with water at every turn and on every level, giving us a unique understanding of the process of dying with all its associated memories, fears and sensuality.hat there are masculine and feminine modes or kinds of invasion—invasion is the master motif of the novella, but it takes both forms. There is the bluntly assertive invasiveness of The Senator, who forces his thick tongue into Kelly's mouth when he kisses her, an event recalled many times over in Kelly's recollection. The Senator's driving—crude turns and erratic accelerations that ultimately force the car into the water—is also an extended invasion of night and space and nature.

The feminine mode of invasion is represented by the obvious formal connection between the way Kelly's narrated recollections lap at and eventually immerse her consciousness and the way the water she enters laps at and eventually immerses her body. Oates creates tides, ripples, waves, breakers, swells, currents, undertows of thought—the metaphors can only really be obvious, so tight is the connection between thought and water. After all, don't we call it stream-of-consciousness?

To say that this form of invasion is feminine is no doubt both tenuous and tendentious, but it is a tendency I think Oates backs up consistently. There is little doubt that she has chosen a politician as her main male character because politics is precisely the stereotypically male form of invasiveness: the politician must make himself a part of your life, must thrust himself into your existence in order to claim your attention and your support.

There is even a playful exchange between Kelly and The Senator on this subject, after The Senator refers to man as "the political animal":

It was unlike her to be so bold, so flirtatious. Asking The Senator archly, "'Man'—and not woman? Isn't 'woman' a political animal too?"

"Some women. Sometimes. We know that. But, most of the time, women find politics boring. The power-play of male egos. Like war. Eh? Boring in its monotony, beneath all the turmoil?"

But Kelly was not to be led. As if this were a seminar, and Kelly Kelleher one of the stars, she said frowning, "Women can't afford to think of politics as 'boring'! Not at this point in history. The Supreme Court, abortion—"

The Senator concludes this seminar by kissing Kelly forcefully: "how swiftly this was happening, how swiftly after all, yet as he kissed her after the first moment she stood her ground firmly, hells dug into the crusty sand, she leaned to the man taking the kiss as if it were her due, a natural and inevitable and desired development of their conversation. And bold too, giddy too, parrying his tongue with her teeth."

The two instances of the word 'bold' so close together here—both times referring to Kelly's unusually assertive behavior—are belied by the obviously greater assertiveness of The Senator: Kelly takes the kiss "as if it were her due"—she is being invaded and is trying to act as if the invasion were natural.

Yet if Kelly is not usually so bold, what is she? Oates writes minutely to create an exact model of her mind, dilating almost compulsively upon the same fragmentary thoughts, the same micro-sensations, returning again and again to the ephemerality of all the tiny thoughts that anticipated Kelly's death. Kelly is being acted upon, invaded just as surely by Oates (and by the reader) as she was by The Senator. In this case too, Kelly is positioned as if this invasion were natural—this is the reading experience, after all, for so many novels—yet as Oates continues her repeated probings into Kelly's mind, that common reading experience is made uncomfortable, unpleasant, like realizing you've been staring at someone on the subway only when they look up at you.

Early in the novel, Oates acknowledges this invasiveness; she takes a step back from her submersion in Kelly's mind to describe a limit for the novelist's ability to enter the mind of her character:

In the subsequent hours, Kelly was to radically revise her opinion of The Senator.
It could not be said that in those six hours Kelly Kelleher had fallen in love with The Senator, nor could it be said that The Senator had fallen in love with her, for such matters are private and

unknowable; and what the future may have brought (in contrast to what the events of that night did in fact bring) will forever remain unknowable.
Except: Kelly certainly revised her opinion.
Thinking how instructive, how purifying for the soul (smiling into a mirror of the guest room that was hers at Buffy's would have been hers again for the night of the Fourth had she not decided so precipitously to accompany The Senator back to the mainland) to learn that you are fallible, to be proven wrong.
Even if it's merely interior, private proof.
Even if the one you've so carelessly misjudged never knows.

The unexplained arbitrariness of Oates's distinction between what is "private and unknowable" and what is accessible to the novelist (even though it's "interior, private") suggests an intentional anxiety about the invasiveness of the novelist in prying into the character's thoughts. Where can this line be drawn? And why does the novelist herself draw it?

I don't think this form of invasion is as clearly gendered as The Senator's, but its clear opposition to the masculine mode of invasion is fairly clear. And there is a tendency to associate the intense novelistic depiction of consciousness with femininity—Richardson's heroines and Austen, with her "free indirect discourse, but more significantly Woolf and Joyce's Penelope section of Ulysses, perhaps the ne plus ultra of stream-of-consciousness.

The question comes about when one weighs these modes of invasion against one another: bluntly, which is worse? The novel does seem to ask this question, as the issue of blame is so inextricably linked to its subject matter, the Chappaquiddick incident. Oates doesn't unequivocally reach the same conclusion so many Americans did at the time of Chappaquiddick: that The Senator did it. Kelly Kelleher in many moments almost blames herself, blames her instant dependence on The Senator.

 

How do blame and guilt work in The Patience Stone? 

 

Contrast Woolf's modernist to Oates' postmodern technique. How are they similar and how do they differ? How does the role and theme of water change?

Latin American Nature Poetry

 While Latin America was initially a country of natural marvels, tropical paradise, lush rainforests, gorgeous mountains, it was also marred by industrial development, poverty, and war. Its poetry combines descriptions of nature with surreal and magical realist techniques.

In a first epoch the influence of the surrealist movement in poetry upon the Latin-American poets of the 1920’s was exiguous as it is witnessed by the reaction of the mature poets Vicente Huiodobro and Cesar Vallejo then living in the Surrealist Paris. Huidobro opposed Surrealism on the grounds that the surrealists in their pursue for the total lack of control of the mind in writing, converted poetry in a spiritist trick. He argued also that poetry is created more than ever by the poet with all the strength of his awaken senses. The poet has not a passive but an active role in the management and gadget of the poem otherwise-addressing- the surrealists ‘if we follow your theories we pave the way for the improvisers’. Poetry in this way becomes a banal indulgence. No, poetry according to Huidobro, exudes either from a superconscience or has its pedigree in the inner life of the poet who is caught by a poetical delirium. He also opposes the view that every one is little bit mad and little bit a poet of which the surrealists made a solid ground for the creativity of the poet. The Chilean poet does deny that the controlling reason, that is not evident in surrealist poetry making, is of a controlling nature but that it lies in the same level than that of imagination. Against all other ‘isms’ Huidobro opposes his own one, ‘creationism’ which -in a paraphrases- stands for the projection of creativity to the foreground in every act of writing poetry, assisted by a superconscious mind without a all pervading reason but that one levelled with imagination.

As with Neruda’s Tentativa where he abandoned the incursion into surrealist literary paraphernalia, Vallejo with his Trilce experienced a quite similar saga. Vallejo published Trilce the same year he departed for Paris, 1922 -the first Surrealist manifest was published in 1925. Comparing Vallejo’s previous work, for example Los Heraldos Negros one can see a big difference in style with Trilce. These difference shows that Vallejo was already very much acquainted with the literary tools of the French avant-garde that served as substratum for the Surrealist movement.

Cesar Vallejo, although having instituted friendship with the majority of the surrealists, did not agree in the most of their postulates. A difference from Huidobro, Vallejo impugns surrealism more from the social vantage view than formally. About the devise most widely associated with surrealism, automatic writing, Vallejo refers it as ‘abracadabra method’. He acknowledges nevertheless that at certain point, surrealism was sympathetic to the proletarian revolution, which was lovable from the humanist view that is imbedded in art.

Cesar Vallejo’s compatriots Xavier Abril, Cesar Moro and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen promoted with enthusiasm the surrealist mode in Perú. Apparently the influence came either from the Spanish version of surrealism or from particular surrealists as Breton or Éluard.

The poetry of Xavier Abril Dificil Trabajo (1935) is characterised by his daredevil images, the avant-garde rhetoric and the surrealist hermetism. Cesar Moro was one of the few Latin-American writers of this period that published surrealist poems in French and in Spanish. Moro went to Paris in 1925, joined the surrealist movement and collaborated in the magazine Le surrealism au Service de la Revolution. Along with Emilo Adolfo Westphalen and Moreno Jimeno funded the surrealist magazine El uso de la palabra in 1933. Moro moved to Mexico. In 1940 and along with André Bretón and Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico too they organised an international exhibition of Surrealist Art.

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen also followed the prescribed rules of Surrealism. The poems of his first book Insulas extranñas (1933) characterises by the use of psychic automatism. These poems lack syntactic structure and are deprived of images and punctuation. Abolición de la muerte (1935) is more legible and contains themes as time, existence and the beyond.

Buenos Aires was another centre of surrealist influence. Argentinean poetry before cultivator of gauchesque themes and modernist ones endured a complete transformation when Jorge Luis Borges came back form Madrid in 1921. Borges introduced Ultraism that was the Spanish version of Huidobro’s Creationism.

Many of the Argentinean poets arrived to surrealism under the influence of the Spanish poets of the Generación de 1927. Ultraism in Argentina was a movement that helped to prepare the terrain for surrealism. Surrealism as a formal concertation appeared in 1928 when Aldo Pellegrini founded the magazine Que (1928-30). However the first surrealists did not have a great success due to they were caught in rivalries between a group called "Boedo" and the "Martinfierrists". Twenty years later, in 1948, the Argentinean surrealists organised themselves again around the magazine Ciclo (1948-49). At this time some previous militant surealsits had abandoned the files but new blood was infused and the surrealist reorganized themselves around the magazine A partir de 0 (1952-56) directed by Enrique Molina. The surrealists also collaborated in the establishment of Letras y Lineas (1953-55)

In Chile surrealism formally started in July of 1938 with the forming of the group Mandrágora which included Braulio Arenas, Jorge Cáceres, Teófilo Gómez-Correa, Armando Gaete, Mariano Medina, Fernando Onfray, Gustavo Ossorio, Gonzalo Rojas-Pizarro, Mario Urzula y Eugenio Vidaurrazaga. The Chilean surrealist celebrated their first art exhibition in 1941 and an international organisation in 1948.Pablo Neruda’s Tentativa del Hombre Infinito antedates the publication of the first Manifest of Surrealism by two years. In this book Neruda’s suppression of capital letters, absence of punctuation, irregular verse, and telegraphic syntax resembles very much automatic writing -surrealism’s central tenet- and it is impossible to not detect Neruda’s acquaintance with the poetry of the ‘isms’ that preceded surrealism, cubism, dadaism and futurism. Apparently, influenced by them, Neruda considered unnecessary to follow their latest expression, namely surrealism. In biographical accounts Neruda tells how he knew all about the movements in literature in Europe by the time he was studying French at the College. It is impossible not to suspect that Neruda, previous to the publication of Tentativa…surely knew of the French symbolist poets and their every more distancing the cause from the effect in their construction of metaphors and also their tendency to almost total estrangement of the image, which makes it to come closer to the fantastic representation, proper of the absurdity of dreams; all these futures that entered in the surrealist terminology as automatic writing. Thus, Neruda neither opposing nor openly acclaiming surrealism could be concluded that he was not influenced by it.

Surrealism in Venezuela came to fruition till 1936 when the group Grupo Viernes was founded. The group launched a manifest in the manner of the French surrealists. Among it s members were Luis Fernando Alvarez, José Ramon Heredia, Angel Miguel Queremel, Pablo Rojas Guardia, Vicente Filardo, Rafael Olivares Figueroa and the literary critiquer Fernado Cabrices. The mentor and speaker of the group was Angel Miguel Queremel.

The different French avant–garde movements of the two first decades of the twentieth century echoed in Mexico: futurism with the name of stridentism, Dadaism and cubism. The poets that founded the magazine Contemporáneos (1928-31) directed by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano introduced surrealism. Among the most important poets of that period counts Carlos Pellicer, Xavier Villaurrutia, Jaime Torres Bodet. Jose Gorostiza y Salvador Novo. These poets embodied in their works all the techniques of the surrealist literature but they expressed the same in themes of solitude, bitterness, pessimism and death.

André Breton visited Mexico and was invirted to deliver a few talks. He became enchanted by the popularity of surrealism there. Wolfgang Paalen came to Mexico also and he organised an international surrealist exhibition in 1940. In 1942 Paalen founded the surrealist magazine Dyn (1942-44). Benjamin Perret followed his compatriots to Mexico and stayed in Mexico for five years. It is this environment that Octavio Paz grow up. It is perhaps him who most did for both the propagation and the accomplishment of the resources surrealism bequeathed to literature. In his prose books he always acknowledges his debt to surrealism. But is in his book La busqueda del comienzo he is more explicit in what surrealism meant for him and pays tribute to that legacy.

In March 1950 Breton and Perret published Almanach surréaliste du demi-siécle in which they included the name of Octavi oPaz as one of the selected ones.

In Cuba the surrealist influence is not transparent but Roberto Fernandez Retamar designates Felix Pita Rodriguez, Ramón Guirao y Lorenzo García Vega among the Cuban poets that show surrealist elements in their poetry. Apparently the cuban poets were not unaware of the avant-garde literature of the times as is witnessed by the magazine Revista de Avance (1927-30) but they were more troubled with fighting the dictatorship that plagued the Island of these days. Poets like Mario Brull has surrealist futures. The frequent use of ‘jitanjáforas’ and other onomatopoetic resources found in his poetry resembled very much the word games used by the French surrealists of the time (1930’s).

In the view of some scholars like John S. Brushwood the 1930’s is an important period of prose writing in Latin-America because the techniques of the avant-garde appear with growing regularity. He however maintains that there are exceptions in Mexico that reveal an early acceptance in fiction of their techniques. During the 1920’s the use of free association, dream-like images and the disproportionate use of time was of common use in fiction. Gilberto Owen, La llama Fria, 1925; Novela como nube, 1928; Jaime Tores Bodet, Margarita de Niebla, 1927; La educación sentimental, 1930; Salvador Novo, El joven, 1928; Xavier Icaza, Panchito Chapopote, 1928; Arqueles Vela, El café de nadie, 1926; Jose Marinez Sotomayor, La rueca de aire, 1930 and La Malahora (1923) de Mariano Azuela as he in this novel incorporates fragmented and retrospective scenes and the disproportionate use of time. Is worth mentioning that the majority of the above mentioned were members of the Stridentist movement which was the Mexican version of Futurism.

The time between 1935 and 1946 can be considered as a period of experimentation with the surrealist elements. To these dates correspond Borges’ Historia general de la infamia (1935) and concludes with Miguel Angel Asturias El señor presidente (1946).

From 1946 onwards the surrealist legacy form an integral part of the Latin-American narrative and it is hard to disengage. Corresponded to a second generation of writers to make of that heritage the honour with which the Latin-American literature has been acknowledged. Now there has been a engaging debate about the terming of the Latin-American literature from this period onwards. The purposes of this paper is not to contribute to that debate but to make a recollection of the works of the most influential writers which show influences of the techniques first systematised by the French surrealist movement.

Alejo Carpentier’s Ecué-Yamba (1933) is situated in that period of surrealist experimentation, but for its treatment of the narrative and the use of the surrealist paraphernalia can be placed within his period of maturity. El Refrom the view of the surrealist le merveilleux with which Carpentier abandons surrealism to be with his own.

Manuel Rojas from Chile with Hijo de ladrón (1951) contributes to the second generation of surrealists. This work, written mainly as a realist novel, contains numerous examples of interior monologue, counterpoint resources, and the use of non-chronological time.

Some critics consider that Ernesto Sabato’s El tunel (1948) is an existentialist novel or even Freudian for the techniques in the use of language, nevertheless in my view it is of surrealist brand.

His Sobre héroes y tumbas (1962) is a clear example of surrealist literature. The reader is submerged in the caves of the unconscious and it is written with a rich stile in metaphors, symbols and dream-like elements.

Juan Rulfo from Mexico with his Pedro Páramo (1955) undertakes one of the most intrepid experiments in the modern novel. He appears to express his own concept of ‘mexicanity’ through the creation of an infernal environment where homicide, incest despotism and lechery reveals itself in a very poetical form. Rulfo seems to pussels the reader with the use of scenes that at first sight do not seem to be connected and with the non-chronological time.

Another mexican, Juan Jose Arreola is one of the best representatives of the genre. His works are like surrealist paintings. The short stories Varia Invención (1949) y Confabulario (1952) could well be called modern fables, but of a very abstract nature. The interpretations of the symbols in his works are entangled and hard to grasp in a first attempt. One would need to approach them from various vantagepoints.ino de este mundo (1949) is already a novel which shows a more sophisticated use of these elements and therefore not considered as surrealist properly speaking. It is however Los Pasos perdidos (1953) his masterpiece, an exploration of South America

The method of ‘automatic writing’ discovered and used by the surrealist poets, Andre Breton, Benjamin Perret, Antonín Artaud among the most influential within the surrealist movement, came to the knowledge of the most representative poets of the Latin-American avant-garde soon after the publication of the first manifest of the movement. These partly because some of them like Vicente Huidobro from Chile and Cesar Vallejo from Peru were in Paris when the surrealist movement started. Others like Octavio Paz from Mexico and Pablo Neruda from Chile came into contact with Surrealism in its second wind by the mid thirties. Pablo Neruda never ascribed himself to the movement of the ‘automatic writing’ the search for the infinite and ‘insanity’ as the best way to create poetry nor criticised it either. In a few declarations scattered among his thousands of texts Neruda distanced himself from the surrealist mode although preserved a deep friendship with Eluard and Aragon based in mutual respect and admiration in view of the part the two played during the years of the Popular Front.

One of the prevalent themes of mid-century and contemporary literature is terrorism. How does geography shape the tone and story of the terrorist plot? Orhan Pamuk's Snow tells the story of a terrorist plot, an insurrection, and performance art in a small town on the eastern side of Turkey in Anatolia during a snow storm. How do the configuration of a snowflake and the theme of the novel contribute to the dramatic intensity? Compare this to Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns where Osamu and Adil plot against the Israelis and each other in a war-torn, hotter, desert climate. Does the snow make us forget more easily?

 

Contrast the spare, stark descriptions of the nuclear holocaust in Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima Mon Amour against the funny, satirical descriptions of 9/11 through the many non-human narrators in Keefer's Un-Clashing Civilizations. What are the different author objectives and reader responses? In Duras' work and in reality, the nuclear bomb devastated the entire geography while the 9/11 attacks destroyed downtown Manhattan and thousands of people but still preserved the river, the wilderness, and even Central Park. How does genre, tragedy versus satire, frame these two different stories?

How do you feel when you walk in the desert? What kind of stories are told and nurtured in the hot, dry, sunny environment? The Desert, Akhenaten, God Dies by the Nile, The Sand Child, and even Ceremony all tell tales of humans in desert climates. Some of these people are poor and struggling while others are pharaohs, mayors, and imams but the divide is usually great. How did the Nile nurture the fertile ancient Egyptian civilizations and then become the cesspool of twentieth century petromodernity and the poverty described in God Dies by the Nile?

 

The ancient pyramid of Saqqara is in the distance. How does this kind of nature provide the "home" for Egyptian civilization, sun-worship, preservation of pyramids, and even dictate the women dress? Mahfouz' Akhenaten took place hundreds of years ago but the area looks much the same. How can this be? How have humans changed and not changed? What about this kind of land where desert and mountains create sandstorms?Why are mosques designed this way in the oasis in the valley? Tahar ben Jelloun's The Sand Child and Le Clezio's The Desert take place in Northwest Africa. How does this geography differ from Egypt?How does the American Southwest differ from the African desert? How do Leslie Marmon Silko's stories of Native Americans differ from the Bedouin stories?

Green Fascism and Dystopias

In our efforts to be a Greener planet we are confronted with the necessity to change, a plethora of choices, and the obstacles created by people like oil tycoons, cigarette manufacturers, natural gas frackers, nuclear energy operators, and junk food makers. What do we do with these kind of people, if anything? If a "right way" is found, should it be imposed? Margaret Atwood tackles thes issues in her trilogy, especially the second tome, Year of the Flood, where Green gardeners impose their own conformist order on the rooftop roommates. But in order to be Green, why do we have to have a society like the one in Brave New World?

 

Read Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood to understand how speculative fiction envisions possibilities for our polluted planet.

When Margaret Atwood's new novel opens, her main character, Snowman, is sleeping in a tree, wrapped in a dirty bed-sheet, trying to survive in a world which has gone horribly wrong. Below him, strange animals called pigoons and wolvogs prowl, monstrous hybrids created by human beings who have all but wiped out their own species. Ruined tower blocks are visible in the nearby pleeblands and, further away, there are wrecked compounds where the elite used to live, work and play.

The climate has changed along with everything else, creating intense heat and sudden storms. Snowman's only protection from the elements consists of a pair of sunglasses with one lens missing, leaving him pathetically vulnerable to the monsters his family and friends have had a hand in making.

His name is an ironic reference to the abominable snowman, a mythic creature remembered from a long-ago North American childhood, and he has adopted it for his dealings with the Crakers, a genetically modified group of people who seem to be the only other survivors of an unexplained catastrophe.

The Crakers take their name from Crake, Snowman's childhood friend, who invented them in a secret experiment to create a new race untroubled by aggression, sexual urges or the religious impulse. They are infantile, multicoloured - racism has also been bred out - and regard Snowman as their mentor. One of their many traits from the animal kingdom is an ability to purr, sending out a vibration that cures minor infections and wounds received in the inhospitable forest that is spreading over the earth.

Dystopian fantasy is not new territory for Atwood, who has already imagined an alternative version of the future in The Handmaid's Tale. That novel described a world in which women were reduced to the status of breeders and denied the most basic human rights, a prophecy that came true not in the West, where Atwood set it, but in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

If that novel was a warning about an anti-feminist backlash, Oryx and Crake is about another set of dangers facing the human race; with its genetically modified viruses, it is particularly resonant during the current Sars outbreak.

The story of Snowman, who used to be called Jimmy, is that of a boy growing up at a time of rapid technological innovation. He comes from a privileged family, living in one of the compounds set up by immensely wealthy corporations to protect their employees from the lawless pleeblands. Jimmy's father worked for OrganInc Farms, the company that created the pigoons - pigs designed to grow human organs for transplants. These animals have escaped and run free and, at one point in the novel, Snowman is almost eaten alive by the hybrids his father created.

The novel is about hubris and humans playing god - literally, in the case of Crake, the embittered genius whose secret project is responsible for the devastation that now surrounds Snowman. The relationship between the two boys begins at school, where they play violent computer games and watch live executions on TV. In a world anaesthetised to suffering and inequality, they react with apparent stoicism to their own family tragedies - the suicide of Crake's father and the disappearance of Snowman's mother, who runs away to join an underground rebel movement.

One of the most impressive features of the novel is how fully imagined this lost world turns out to be, full of details which are at once familiar and strange. Snowman goes on holiday to the Moosonee HelthWyzer Gated Vacation Community on the western shore of Hudson's Bay, watching the gen-mod coffee wars on TV and spotting his mother in a crowd demonstrating outside the Happicuppa head office in Maryland. It is this sense of projecting current events into the future that gives the novel its power, not to mention an almost documentary feel.

At the same time, this does not entirely compensate for problems with both narrative and character. Since he is apparently the last man on earth, Snowman has no one to talk to apart from the Crakers, and his everyday existence is a monotonous but not overly arduous struggle for survival. For most of the novel, it does not suit Atwood's purpose to reveal the cause of the disaster that has overtaken the world, which emerges only when Snowman decides to return to the Paradice dome where the Crakers were created.

There is something artificial about this construction, and it is compounded by the fact that the two main characters apart from Snowman, Oryx and Crake, named after extinct species, remain two-dimensional. This is especially true of Oryx, whom Snowman first spots on the web, working as a child prostitute, only to turn up years later - if it is really her, which

even Snowman doubts - in the Paradice dome. By then, she is Crake's lover and his accomplice, visiting the Crakers and teaching them which plants are safe to eat.

Inevitably, Snowman falls in love with her, creating a classic love triangle which can only end in tragedy. It may be that Snowman's relationships with damaged people like Oryx and Crake are intended as a reflection on the stunting emotional effects of inequality, but it also means that there is an absence at the novel's heart.

Atwood has always been an uneven writer, and in this instance it soon starts to feel as though all the details - clever neologisms, freakish computer games and weird hybrids - are a substitute for something deeper.

 In Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood -- set in the same world as her
2003 novel Oryx and Crake -- we recognize some of the more repugnant aspects
of our own 21st-century society gone totally rancid.

In the future, the HelthWyzer Corporation acts as the government. Its top
researchers and their families live in a guarded and barricaded compound that
separates them from the underclass. The police have been replaced by the private
security force of HelthWyzer, the CorpSeCorps, and its storm troopers keep the
peace by simply doing away with undesirables, "terrorists" and anyone who
opposes the corporation's activities. More often than not, the victims' bodies,
usually minus some important organs, are ground up with sundry other
ingredients, some of them mammal, in the addictive SecretBurgers. The
SecretBurgers chain then employs young people desperate for work, all of whom
must wear baseball caps and T-shirts that say: "SecretBurgers! Because Everyone
Loves a Secret!"

Of course, if you're a cute and limber young woman, you might take a much
better job with SeksMart, where you could work as a "comfort girl" or perform as
a pole dancer at a club like Scales and Tails. More likely than not, you'd
probably need Bimplants with responsive nipples, and you'd definitely be wearing
a Biofilm Bodyglove -- for disease protection -- and lots of glitter and paint
and colorful feathers or iridescent scales: Fantasy is the name of the game.

But "plank work" -- no matter how soft the actual bed -- can still be brutal,
especially if Painballers drop in for a little amusement. The Painball Arena --
actually a forested no man's land full of hidden TV cameras -- pits teams of
brutish criminals against each other in a kill-or-be-killed competition. You can
watch the action on cable. The few who survive the arena are more predator than
human, as well as insane.

 

Not that life out in the so-called Sewage Lagoon is anything but nasty and
ruthless. Out of desperation, many people have turned to, or retreated into,
various cults, to the disgust of members of the "rich religions" like the Known
Fruits and the Petrobaptists:

 

"Groups of turbaned Pure-Heart Brethren Sufis might twirl past, or black-clad
Ancients of Days, or clumps of saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, tinkling and
chanting, attracting jeers and rotting vegetation from the bystanders. The Lion
Isaiahists and the Wolf Isaiahists both preached on street corners, battling
when they met: they were at odds over whether it was the lion or the wolf that
would lie down with the lamb once the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived. When there
were scuffles, the pleebrat gangs -- the brown Tex-Mexes, the pallid Lintheads,
the yellow Asian Fusions, the Blackened Redfish -- would swarm the fallen,
rooting through their draperies for anything valuable, or even just portable."

As it happens, the HelthWyzer biogeneticists have partially solved the
Isaiahist schism by creating the libam -- half lion, half lamb -- as well as
other creatures such as the rakunk (rat and skunk) and the strangely intelligent
and bloodthirsty pigoons. HelthWyzer also regularly experiments on the
unsuspecting population with new drugs, such as the super-sex pill BlyssPlus.

Little wonder that one religious group, the pacifist vegetarian Gardeners,
has long foretold the coming of a Waterless Flood that will cleanse this sordid
and polluted Earth. Against this day, the Gardeners have stockpiled food and
supplies. But the cataclysm proves more terrible than expected.

When The Year of the Flood opens, it appears that only two people have
survived a deadly pandemic: the 30-something Toby, who is holed up in the
AnooYou spa surrounded by marauding pigoons, and Ren, a befeathered trapeze
artist at Scales and Tails, who has been locked up in a sealed quarantine area

dubbed the Sticky Zone. In alternating sections, the novel traces how these two
came to be where they are. Toby's story is told in the third person, Ren's in
the first.

While with the Gardeners, Toby meets Ren, the young daughter of Lucerne, the
runaway wife of a HelthWyzer scientist, who has hooked up with the easygoing
Zeb, half biker, half eco-terrorist. In fact, Zeb is the secular arm of the
Gardeners, skilled in urban warfare and all the secret ways of the Exfernal
World. Still, Toby lives in mortal fear of the Bloat. If the tattooed sadist
finds her, she knows her fate will be far worse than a fate worse than death --
or even than death itself.

Meanwhile, little Ren grows up in the Garden, where nearly every day seems to
honor some iconic environmentalist or green pioneer. These include Saint Jacques
Cousteau, Saint Rachel Carson, Saint Karen Silkwood and Saint Dian Fossey. Adam
One usually preaches a homily on their feast days, and Atwood beautifully
captures his stately yet slightly pompous and sometimes unconsciously comic
style. Of Saint Euell Gibbons, we learn that "he sang the virtues of the wild
Onion, of the wild Asparagus, of the wild Garlic, that toil not, neither do they
spin, nor do they have pesticides sprayed upon them, if they happily grow far
enough away from agribusiness crops." Following each sermon, the Gardeners sing
a hymn, and Atwood includes these as well; they often sound like a mix of Isaac
Watts and Edward Lear. Here's a quatrain from "Oh Lord, You Know Our
Foolishness":

We fall into despondency,

And curse the hour that bore us;

We either claim You don't exist,

Or else that You ignore us.

For Ren, life in the Garden is the only childhood she knows -- until she
meets the pleebrat Amanda, who becomes her best friend. Though hardly out of
childhood, Amanda has already learned to trade her body for what she needs,
knows how to slice a man's throat with a piece of glass, and is as cynical as
Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel." Love, she tells Ren, "was useless, because
it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got
bitter and mean."

As dismal as it is, this future often seems little different from today.
Pleebrats still have cellphones and hang out in malls and play computer games
like Barbarian Stomp: "Blood and Roses was like Monopoly, only you had to corner
the genocide and atrocity market. Extinctathon was a trivia game you played with
extinct animals." Kids also go out for Happicappuchinos at the ubiquitous
Happicuppa franchises or eat at ChickieNobs. The geeks eventually go on to study
bioengineering at Watson-Crick; the losers and artsy types are cattle-carred to
Martha Graham Academy, where they take classes in Holistic Healing, Dance
Calisthenics and Dramatic Expression.

As "The Year of the Flood" advances, Atwood begins to integrate characters
and elements from "Oryx and Crake." Don't worry: Those who've read the earlier
book will appreciate various small details and ironies, but the new novel stands
perfectly well on its own. There are, however, a surprising number of
coincidences -- Jimmy, a major character in Oryx and Crake, keeps cropping up.
No matter. By its last half The Year of the Flood has turned into a
heart-pounding thriller, a desperate Painball game to the death set in an
already devastated world.

Still, the book regularly undercuts the horrific with touches of comedy --
Ren talks about her work at Scales and Tails as "the daily grind" -- and Atwood
superbly captures the voices and attitudes of the serious Adam One, the
frivolous Lucerne, the resourceful Toby and the rather simple-minded and fragile
Ren. Canada's greatest living novelist undoubtedly knows how to tell a gripping
story, as fans of The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale already know.But here there's a serious message, too: Look at what we're doing right now to
our world, to nature, to ourselves. If this goes on . . .

Kingsolver and Campbell: Climate Change in the Heartland

On November 12, 2012 a few weeks after Sandy Superstorm and the ice storm, I met Barbara Kingsolver and Mary Jo Campbell at the 92Y. These nature novelists from the heartland were in the practical fields of biology and math before becoming novelists and their naturalistic, vivid, detailed style benefits from this knowledge. Campbell describes the rivers in her native Michigan and Kingsolver the life of the sheep farmers and an adulterous heartland "Madame Bovary" who must climb a devastated mountain to have her illicit trysts.  paradoxical solution is to set her story on a sheep farm in the depressed Bible Belt. By recruiting traditional images of Heaven, Hell and sacrificial lambs to convey the impact of climate change on a community, an ecosystem and a species, the repercussions of man-made disaster lie firmly where they belong: in moral territory.

Kingsolver has been building up to this. InThe Poisonwood Bible, in which a Christian missionary sacrifices his family to his own zealotry in the Belgian Congo, her preoccupation is as much with self-delusion as it is with doctrine. InFlight Behaviour, successor to theOrange prize-winningThe Lacuna, she expands on the theme of deaf ears, blind eyes and belief-versus-evidence with the trademark human sympathy that has won her the devotion of readers worldwide.

Trapped in a loveless shotgun marriage and mother to two young children, the sharp-witted Dellarobia Turnbow is planning to bolt from her lummox of a husband Cub, when she stumbles on an inexplicable vision on a mountainside slated for logging: a lake of orange fire. The phenomenon turns out to be a vast flock of monarch butterflies, whose disrupted migration pattern has catapulted them wildly off course.

As their "discoverer", Dellarobia achieves unasked-for internet fame, but it's the arrival of a team of entomologists led by Ovid Byron – African American, and from a parallel universe of education and plenty – that delivers the life change she has craved. She is also smitten: "Every day she rose and rose to the occasion of this man." Hired as part of Ovid's team, Dellarobia gives up smoking and learns to identify and assess butterfly behaviour. In the process, she metamorphoses into the family breadwinner but becomes humiliatingly aware of the limited scope of the only world she has known.

The God-fearing, moral-majority community of Featherstone can't avoid being affected by the disrupted seasons, and refers to the current endless rainfall as "water torture". But their thought-patterns are entrenched: while weather is God's department, climate change is something people – Dellarobia included – "knew to be wary of". Slowly, alongside her serious five-year-old son Preston, Dellarobia learns that the unexpected and aberrant arrival of the butterflies is a signpost on the road to environmental hell.

"How could this be true, she thought, if no one was talking about it? People with influence. Important people made such a big deal over infinitely smaller losses." When she asks Ovid, "Is there some part of this I can actually see?" his reply devastates her. "'Your children's adulthood?' That nearly floored her of course … How dare he belt her with that one?"

The precarious paradise of the mountainside, Dellarobia realises, will be lost to her son and daughter. But there's no Tree of Knowledge involved. On the contrary, temptation is the comfort of ignorance. This comes in the form of the omnipresent feelgood news story, borne here by a door-stepping TV journalist hellbent on presenting the monarchs as a "miracle" rather than a symptom of environmental imbalance. When Ovid Byron loses his scientific cool on camera and the encounter goes triumphantly viral, Kingsolver's evocation of TV's contempt for its audiences also includes the observation that scientists are too hamstrung by their own objectivity to transmit their message effectively. As Ovid comments, with bitterness: "As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing."

Kingsolver has a sharp eye, too, for the unwitting condescension of the eco-campaigners who set up camp on the mountain. When Dellarobia is asked to sign an energy-saving pledge, she is baffled by its demands. Like anyone else hanging on by a thread, she has no need for advice on not leaving her computer on standby, cutting down on red meat, rationing her fuel use, saving electricity, buying recycled clothes and "flying less". She has never owned a computer or boarded a plane. In fact, nothing on the list applies to her: poverty has seen to that.

Dellarobia's journey from caterpillar to butterfly reaches a painful culmination in her clear-eyed refusal to lie to Preston about what the future holds for him, both in a collapsing family unit and in the wider world. "Her powerful inclination was to make up a better-days-ahead story. Nobody ever thought kids wanted the truth. And right on from there it went: the never-ending story."

Towards the close of the novel, Dellarobia finds a lamb in the snow, born unseasonably early. The only way to revive it is to swing it around by the hind legs, to kickstart the lungs and decongest the airways. With Cub's help, she saves its life. But the manoeuvre is traumatic for them both. Only a shocking, harrowing solution – a paradigm shift of radical proportions – will offer any future to the newborn, the novel seems to be saying. It's a harsh but vital message.

Kingsolver's masterly evocation of an age – ours, here, now – stumbling wilfully blind towards the abyss is an elegy not just for the endangered monarch butterfly, but for the ambitious, flawed species that conjured the mass extinction of which its loss is a part. Urgent issues demand important art. Flight Behaviour rises – with conscience and majesty – to the occasion of its time.

On February 26, 2014, Kingsolver was gracious enough to talk to NYU students via Skype from her lovely studio in the Appalachian farmhouse she writes about in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. What a wonderful venue for literary readings where we save money and time and environmental damage but not taking planes but still get to peek inside the sanctity of the writer's workspace. She talked with us for 75 minutes about her books, her process, and her future projects.