Anneke Lubkowitz Haunted Spaces in Twenty-First Century British Nature Writing Buchreihe der Anglia/ ANGLIA Book Series Edited by Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner Volume 69 Anneke Lubkowitz Haunted Spaces in Twenty-First Century British Nature Writing ISBN 978-3-11-067859-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-067861-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-067864-2 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931594 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements It is a truth universally acknowledged that it takes a village to write a book. I began working on this monograph in 2015 and in 2018 it was accepted as a PhD dissertation at Humboldt University Berlin. Mentioning all the people to whomI am indebted for helpful suggestions,detailed feedback and moral sup- portintheyearsbetweenandupuntilnowwouldrequireasecondpublication. Tocutalongstoryshort,HauntedSpaceswouldneverhavebeenwrittenwithout the support of Helga Schwalm who introduced me to the ‘New Nature Writing’ and became my supervisor in the earliest stages of my PhD. It was her encour- agement and her brilliantly precise feedback which helped me stay on target overtheyears.IalsowishtothankCordulaLemkeandEvelineKilianforhelpful suggestionsandreadingrecommendationsinvariousstagesofthebook’sgene- sis. I am much obliged to Jos Smith forgenerously sharinghis expertise on the ‘NewNatureWriting’withmeduringmyresearchvisittoNorwich,totheRoger DeakinArchiveattheUniversityofEastAngliaforinsightsonthebeginningsof the‘NewNatureWriting’andtoRobertMacfarlaneforthekindnessandpatience in answering my probingquestions. I am particularly grateful to my friend Sandra Dinter for her ingenious thoughts and helpful advice and – no less important – her cheerful company during long hours at the library. I enjoyed inspiring discussions with Stefanie John, Simone Schröder, Rebeca Araya, Maria Alexopoulos, Eva Jenke, Nathalia Saliba,KatharinaDeckerandRomanBartonwhoseinformedanddetailedfeed- backonthechapterstheyreadwereagreathelp.IamindebtedtoAnnieRuth- erford’s and Friederike Sachs’s wonderous improvements on the text. My work alsogreatlybenefittedfromtherewardingexperienceofteachingBritishnature writingatHumboldtUniversityandtheinquisitiveandwittyresponsesofmystu- dents.IdonotknowhowIwouldhavemanagedwithoutthepassionatediscus- sionsonliterature,placeandenvironmentwithFrankSievers,MikaelVogeland Paul Scraton, like-minded spirits in their artistic work. The completion of this book was enabled by the fincancial support of the Elsa Neumann scholarship and I am particularly grateful to Dorothea Haselow for tirelessly helping me with applications, accounts and research reports. I moreover wish to thank the editors of the Anglia Book series and Ulrike Krauß for the opportunity of publishing the book at De Gruyter, special thanks to Marco Acquafredda for his initiative and to Katja Lehming for her kind support in the publication process. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110678611-001 VI Acknowledgements Therearesimplynowordstoexpressmygratitudetomypartner,myparents andmyfriendswhonever,onthislongandwindingroad,stoppedbelievingin me. Contents Introduction: Nature Writing noir 1  Writing Nature: A Historical Survey 20 . Idealization: Antiquity and Pastoral Poetry 21 . Sacralization and Secularization: Natural Theology and Natural History 24 . Picturing Nature: Landscape Aesthetics 28 . Re-Enchantment: Romanticism 31 . Wilderness: A Brief Excursion to American Literature 38 . Faking Nature: Victorian Natural History and the Emergence of Nature Writing 40 . Back to the Land: Nature, Placeand Nation 43 . Saving Nature: Environmental Writing 48 . After Nature: Twenty-First-Century Literatureand the Anthropocene 53  Haunting Nature: Place, Space and Text 59  The Spectropoetics of Walking: Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane 77 . A Psychogeographical Outing: Haunting the Countryside with Iain Sinclair 78 . On and off the Beaten Track: Tracing “Landscape [G]hosts” with Robert Macfarlane 106  De-Crypting the Gendered Outdoors with Kathleen Jamie 134  Unweaving Fictions of the Far North with John Burnside 183  Many Voices? Broadening the Vision 227 Works Cited 251 Index 286 Introduction: Nature Writing noir HalfwayintoBetweentheActs,VirginiaWoolf’smockinghomagetotheEnglish countryside,theelderlyandslightlywhimsicalLucySwithinremarks,musingon the rural scene before her eyes: “‘That’s what makes aview so sad […]. And so beautiful. It’ll be there’, she nodded at the strip of gauze laid upon the distant fields, ‘when we’re not.’” (Woolf Between: 66).This quote – chosen somewhat randomlyandyetrepresentativeofalongliterarytradition–pinpointsapersis- tentstructureinWesternthoughtwhichlinksnature,evokedhereasruralland- scape,withstability,indestructibilityandpermanence,asopposedtowhatisim- agined as its counterpart, human culture, society and politics. The deictic “there”andthegestureofnoddingspatiallyreenactthisopposition,clearlysep- aratingviewerfromview.However,hergesturegivesheraway;Lucy’snoddingis directed at a“strip of gauze”, a thing characteristically unsubstantial and elu- sive,whichcontradicts thesenseofpersistenceoriginallyevokedandironically presents her view of nature as a dream-like fantasy. Moreover, her approach is explicitly attacked by another character, the middle-aged Giles Oliver, in whomtheruralidyllraisesanentirelydifferentimage:a“visionofEurope,bris- tlingwithguns,poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster intosmithereens” (Woolf Between: 66–67). In pronounced contrast to that of Lucy,Giles’s imagination transforms the human–nature dualism into an image of brutal intervention and change, canceling nature’s invulnerability. As Giles scorns the escapism of “old fogies, looking at views” (Woolf Between: 67), his visions of war present the rural idyll as threatened,or, haunted by human conflict. Today,thechargeofescapismissimilarlycloseathandwhenliteratureturns towards nature, as it has so prevalently done in the United Kingdom over the past two decades.This emerging literary trend has come to be associated with the term‘New Nature Writing’, as suggested by the title of a 2008 issue of the literarymagazineGranta,featuringsuchfigureheadsasRogerDeakin,Kathleen JamieandRobertMacfarlane.Thequestion“IsOurLoveofNatureWritingBour- geoisEscapism?”loomedunsettlinglylargeinthetitleofa2013articlebySteven PooleinTheGuardian,andisonewhichmanyifnotalloftherepresentativesof thisgroup of writers are likely to have askedthemselves at some point. Among thetextspublishedinthepasttenyears,atleast,thoseaccountsofnaturewhich resembleGiles’sdarkvisionofatroubledlandscapeoutnumbertheonesreach- ingtowardsLucy’sidyll.AsTimDeenotesinhisintroductiontoananthologyof twenty-first century writing of place: “Things fall apart and many of us like it that way […]. Ghost walks, haunting, landfill, the draw-down of silting tides – https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110678611-002 2 Introduction:NatureWritingnoir allhavemadeforcopiousplace-basedliterarydeposits”(Dee2018b:9).Whereas Dee’santhologyfocusesonplaceinmoregeneraltermsratherthanspecifically onnaturewriting,hisobservationcertainlyholdstrueforthetextsdiscussedin this study. TheGrantaissueonthe‘NewNatureWriting’isexemplaryhere,asitoffers an overwhelming number of contributions concerned with destruction, death andghostlyafterlives;RobertMacfarlane’sessayisentitled“GhostSpecies”,re- ferring to “a species that has been out-evolved by its environment, such that, whileitcontinuestoexist,ithaslittleprospectofavoidingextinction”(Macfar- lane “Ghost Species”:123). In Lydia Peelle’sshortstory“Phantom Pain”,whose protagonist is, tellingly, a taxidermist, a ghostly panther haunts an American town. “Pathologies” by Kathleen Jamie describes a visit to a pathology lab, whereshelooksatthesickhumanbodyfrom‘within’.Yewtrees,typicalchurch- yardtreessymbolizingeternallifeyetactually“showingreassuringsignsofmor- tality” (Mabey “Tree”: 95) are the subject of Richard Mabey’s essay. Diverse as their topics are, these contributions share a fascination with the dark and the morbidfamiliarfromGothicfiction.Intheirunconventionalapproachtonature, they resemble Giles’s replacement of the idyllic view with images of death and destruction. If escapism is tied to the idealization of nature, as the passage from Between the Acts illustrates, the Gothic elements described here can be seen to undermine it.The present study is concerned with a particular feature of this Gothic or noir moment of twenty-first century nature writing, namely the figure of haunting.¹ Whereas critics widely agree that the ‘New Nature Writing’ marks a shift in representing the natural world, the striking frequency with which spectral im- agery and references to eerie,unexplainable presences or uncannydoubles ap- pear in these predominantly nonfictional, often scientificallyoriented texts has largelybeenneglectedinpreviousworksonthistopic.Apossiblereasonforthis isthatacertaindegreeof‘hauntedness’hasalwaysbelongedtotherepertoireof natureliteratureandisthusperceivedbycriticsasapointofcontinuitybetween twenty-firstcenturywritersandthetraditionofnaturewriting,ratherthanadis- tinctive and thus noteworthy feature of the former.Yet I would suggest that the haunting which I seek to describe in this study presents both in its prevalence and in its particular form aphenomenon specific tothis set of twenty-first cen-  Myuseoftheterms‘Gothic’and‘noir’hereisheuristic.Itdoesnotimplyaclassificationof thesetextsasGothicornoirfiction.Suchclassificationwouldbeproblematic,notleastdueto thenonfictionalcharacterofmostofmyprimarytexts.Myuseoftheterm‘noir’wasinspiredby TimothyMorton’sreferencetothefilmnoirinEcologyWithoutNaturetowhichIreturnattheend ofchapter1.