I might remark here that this claim might appear overly contentious to both critics of Enlightenment thought and those who study regionalism as a genre, which, by consensus, seems to have arisen at a distinct period in the nineteenth century, in the writing of Sarah Orne Jewett, Twain, Stowe, Chesnutt, and others.14 Yet, these writers are by no means the first to deploy the locale in the manners that I have outlined above.
Nor are they even the first to compose literature that deals with specific, bounded regions in detail. Leo Marx, for instance, has traced the “pastoral strain” in American literature
14 See Place in Literature, 27-28.
back to Vergil’s Eclogues owing to its “symbolic landscape, a delicate blend of myth and reality” that proved relevant to the “American experience” (19).15 Even so, Marx acknowledges that a “fully articulated” pastoral idea did not arise in the United States until the end of the eighteenth century.16 This is attributable in large part to “the great revolution in science and technology we associate with Sir Isaac Newton,” which in turn led to “a massive shift in prevailing ideas about man’s relations to nature” (74). Later critics would pinpoint the Enlightenment as the era in which, as Greg Garrard theorizes, ideas of “the organic universe” and the planet’s role as “nurturing mother” to the human race were abandoned in favor of “a universe reducible to an assemblage of parts”
(Garrard 61-62). Indeed, the opposition between broad scientific and fetishized local systems of knowledge is a remarkably persistent idea, one that steadfastly refuses to vanish from critical discourse. Scott Romine finds in the rhetoric of the Southern Agrarians the notion that “scientific representation of the South amounted to, in effect, an apostasy against their theory of mythic emergence,” while the editors of Caribbean
15 Marx’s use of the term “pastoral” is idiosynchratic, and differs significantly from the pastoral ideal that I shall mention in passing later in this paper, as a regenerative return to a romantic, idealized landscape. Marx’s primary subject, as the passage here indicates, is not so much the American “version” of the same pastoralism that concerned, for example, Spencer, but rather the development of a collective idea of the human place in nature in “American” literature. In this sense, it is reasonable to discuss Marx’s pastoralism alongside my own conceptions of regionalism, though comparing that regionalism to historical poetic deployments of the term raises certain issues, as I shall note later.
16 The Machine in the Garden, 73. Marx’s comment on a 1787 letter from Thomas Jefferson to an associate are instructive in this regard; Marx states that Jefferson’s belief that a ploughman will give a better answer to a moral question than a professor relies on
“a somewhat obscure metaphysical link with ‘nature’” that is similar to the fetishization of place I have already discussed. What is more intriguing, however, is Marx’s observation of how the “unspoiled American landscape” is “peculiarly conducive to the nurture of the ‘moral sense’” (130-31). This suggests that morality stems from the land’s relationship to its inhabitants, not the other way around.
Literature and the Environment lamented that “the systemization of natural history”
during the eighteenth century “contributed to the erasure of indigenous knowledges”
(South to a New Place, 29-30; DeLoughray 7). Humanity gained natural science during the Enlightenment but lost something else, these authors imply; something intangible and perhaps only accessible through poetry and other humanistic arts. It is easy to surmise how, with the dominance of language and formulae designed to encompass and demystify the natural world, the brand of regionalism that Marx discusses could sink into what he calls a “decadent convention.”
There has thus been no shortage of critical synchronisms between the rise of Enlightenment scientific discourse and the decline of ideas of natural spirituality. Yet, I would like to suggest, the scientific revolution did not destroy the “old pastoralism” and its idyllic, if outlandish, visions of lackadaisical Edens, but merely redirected it into new channels. An early indication of this was the reimagining of nature as the domain of the sublime, those “other aspects of Nature, with which physical science does not deal,” and the poet as “the highest, best, and truest interpreter” of that sublimity, as Alfred Austin wrote in an 1877 piece in the Contemporary Review (Mazel 55). The rise of the sublime, William Cronon suggests, allowed for an interpretation of nature in which “the supernatural lay just beneath the surface,” not a place of “satanic temptation” but a
“sacred temple” (Cronon 73, 76). Yet, this temple was not devoted to a particular god, as I have already suggested in regards to regionalism’s emphasis on unspecified spirituality.
The sublime, at least in the Kantian sense (purposiveness without purpose) provided an attractive target for post-Enlightenment fetishizations of the locale insofar as it provided for symbolic and mystical valences outside the bailiwick of pervasive natural sciences
without insisting on direct affiliation of those symbols with individual religious systems.17 François Pitavy, for example, suggests that the idea of the U.S. frontier created a “sublime space,” represented in literature in general and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses in particular as “a myth divested of religious meaning but not of the sense of the sacred—a secularized version of the Old Testament God” (Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, 90, emphasis in original). The land may be symbolic or metaphorical, but the tenor of its metaphors is fundamentally obscure.
With the advent of the idea of nature as an immense, interconnected system, able to be quantified, observed, and altered according to static rules, the door to a symbolic conception of the region was opened. The land itself had “moral,” “metaphorical,” or even “spiritual” significance; these effects were not conveyed to it by a higher power, or by visible spirits. These significances appear in Marx’s account of the “poetic metaphors” of the New World, “imaginative constructions which heighten meaning far beyond the limits of fact” as well as in David Jordan’s description of United States regions during the 19th century as “symbolic ground upon which forces of conquest were rationalized” (43, New World Regionalism 5).18 Thus the rise of science encouraged the
17 Kant stated, in Critique of Judgment (1790), that fine art possesses qualities that are not capable of being subsumed within the greater “meaning” or “purpose” of the art-object, but rather operate in mysterious ways that suggest such a unitary explanation. I read his statement, in the context of the sublime, as suggesting meanings that elide singular exegetic systems; the art-object functions in ways that are not strictly apprehensible by science or other holistic interpretive schemes.
18 Michael Kowalski has taken this argument one step further in claiming that “until the middle of the nineteenth century, the central dilemma of American literature was how to divine and adequately honor the spirit of places whites ostensibly owned more and more of, but did not yet imaginatively possess” (Regionalism Reconsidered, 35). Such an argument underscores the colonial undertone of U.S. regionalism, but such Frostian contemplation of the dictates of imperialism forges an unsteady relationship between the nation and region. Leigh Ann Duck has somewhat more flexibly cast the problem as “a
birth of the region as it would persist in literature: not as evidential of divine forces or the uncertain epistemological home of supernatural entities but as the locus for the play of symbolic properties.
It seems clear, then, that the ideological roots of regionalism are in the mid and late 18th century, when organized natural science impinged upon earlier pastoral conceptions of divine landscapes. Yet, regionalism did not simply arise as a reactionary counterpoint to these new discourses. On the contrary, the Enlightenment provided not only an idea against which regionalism could argue, but an ideological germ for conceptions of fundamentally mystical relationships between individuals and the land. I am thinking in particular of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), specifically Books 17 and 18, in which the author studies the relationship between climate and government and agriculture and government, respectively.19 The central contention of these two chapters can be adumbrated by the author’s claim that “the effeminacy of the people in hot climates has almost always rendered them slaves; and that the bravery of those in cold climates has enabled them to maintain their liberties.” Montesquieu’s analysis is, as one might expect, highly deterministic, taking as given the fact that
determined effort to produce a coherent spatial identity” which in turn produces
“aestheticized representations of a national landscape imbued with intimately felt group meaning” (29). For more on this subject, see Cecelia Tichi’s Embodiment of a Nation (2001) and Myra Jehlen’s American Incarnation (1989).
19 “How the Laws of Political Servitude Relate to the Climate,” and “Of Laws in the Relation They Bear to the Nature of the Soil.” http://www.constitution.org/cm/sol.txt, accessed 17 March 2009. Montesquieu is perhaps the most well-known, yet hardly the first, writer to posit a correlation between climate and politics; Eduardo Cadava, in Emerson and The Climates of History (1997), for one, has traced the idea back to Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. However, despite these early instances and the examples offered by multiple sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers, he states that these theories
“blossom most fully in eighteenth century writers” and “perhaps most importantly” in Montesquieu’s work (20).
“political servitude does not less depend on the nature of the climate than that which is civil and domestic” and that the fertility of the soil naturally encourages “subjection and dependence.” The fundamental assumptions under which such statements operate are, perhaps, not worth investigating in much detail. More intriguing is Montesquieu’s statement that the presence of slavery (or liberty) is “an effect which springs from a natural cause.” Though such musings do reflect, as Loriggio terms it, a “rigid positivist determinism,” in which individual action and effort is determined by the conditions under which the subject lives, they can also indicate “a more loose and more complex interactive symbiosis between individual and ecosystem” (Regionalism Reconsidered 14). In other words, though Enlightenment climatological discourse outlined a perhaps unsatisfactory one-to-one correspondence between natural causes and political effects, the concept that the land acted in manifold and often mysterious ways upon the ideals of its people in an unquantifiable manner proved remarkably persistent. Certainly, it appeared prominently in such 20th-century political regionalist texts as Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (1902) and C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938). In fact, in the first half of the twentieth century, it was still to some extent acceptable to attribute the literary portraits of particular regions and their inhabitants to the contours of those regions’ geographies, as Melvin J. Vincent claimed in a 1936 article, stating that regionalism was in part “the resultant product” of a particular regional society as that society has been “influenced by the physical environment of that region” (Mazel 336).20 Or, more bluntly, Mary Hunter Austin’s 1932 essay, in English Journal, decrying “the general American inability” to conceive of subjective identity as largely “arising, as
20 Certainly the concept of geographical determinism played some role in the functioning of Agrarian and Neo-Agrarian thought during this period as well.
people truly and rudely say, in our ‘guts,’ the seat of life and breath and heartbeats”
(Mazel 263).
Such arguments would seem commensurate with the culmination of 19th-century ethnological sciences, or at least with the twilight of U.S. naturalism, and as such, in some capacity, seem relics of less complex knowledge schemes. Yet, these grounds for future discussions of fetishized means of relation between the individual and his or her environment have proved useful for more recent criticism as well. As recently as 2002, in South to a New Place, Scott Romine has noted that “traditional” conceptions of regionalism imply “a kind of geographical determinism; a regional text is assumed to display certain characteristics deriving from place” (27). While Romine is hardly a neo- determinist himself, I might remark that his contention seems less to insist upon the obsolescence of direct geographical correlates for social behaviors than to suggest that those same behaviors still carry some weight, dialogically created as they may be. The persistence of determinism is even more strongly felt in Caribbean studies, which has long labored to recollect, as Handley and DeLoughray write, a “human history” buried by the “tremendous tropical indifference of the Caribbean environment” (Caribbean Literature and the Environment 3).
More than virtually any region, in fact, the Caribbean has labored to banish, or else redeploy, the onus of climatological determinism, while simultaneously (and paradoxically) lending credence to the same.21 In almost the same breath that Handley and DeLoughray enunciate the tension between the turmoil of history and its backdrop of
21 This conflict persists in the touristic mass-market rhetoric surrounding Caribbean locales, which portray each of the islands (seemingly without discrimination) as defined by a leisure that the climate seems to naturally encourage. See Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place.
perpetual effacement, they decry the contention of Enlightenment-era thinkers that “the fertility of the tropics ‘retards the progress of nations towards civilization’ and degenerates ‘intellectual faculties,’” calling such concepts denigrating “colonial hierarchies” (7). No less troublesome are Walcott’s repeated references to the same determinisms, his comments that “tropical islands, of course, have one climate and should produce a common temperament in their people,” and that Caribbean poetics constitute “an aesthetic based on vegetation,” producing, like the South, “convoluted,”
“Baroque” literary works owing to its “thick and rich” soil (Caribbean Literature and the Environment 54, Baer 91-92). Admittedly, Walcott’s words certainly carry some ironic (not to say self-deprecating) tones, as when, in Omeros, he suggests that: “a climate / as monotonous as this one could only produce / from its unvarying vegetation flashes / of a primal insight like those red-pronged lilies / that shot from the verge, that their dried calabashes / of fake African masks for a fake Achilles” (Omeros 229).22 Whether ironic or sincere, however, it seems clear that the Enlightenment discourses to which I have alluded continue to exert influence over the manner in which the region is imagined.
The first regionalist texts thus dealt either with the myriad (and, often, nebulous) ways in which the region “cultivated” its inhabitants or how it transformed, again in ways that were not always easily definable, its immigrants, visitors, and tourists. Witness Robinson Crusoe, who metamorphoses from a faithless, befuddled layabout to an exemplary man of reason and religion as a result of his island years. Less overt but no less invested in the same paradigm were the later Romantic discourses on the locus mundi
22 Lance Callahan has also noted Walcott’s belief that, to some extent, “cultures are originated ‘by the force of natural surroundings’” (In the Shadows of Divine Perfection 54). Callahan is citing Walcott’s essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (1974).
and, still later, the conflict in the naturalistic works of Norris, Dreiser, and London, among others, who placed their characters in a delicate balance between instinctual and rational impulses. Yet, even Norris stated that his interest in San Francisco stemmed not from a fascination to catalogue local materials or to expose the manifold corruptions he found there but from “the desire to capture what he described as an ‘indefinable air’ that gave San Francisco a distinct character” (Regionalism Reconsidered x). Even if, in these works, the subject is wholly the product of his or her environment (although this is seldom the case), the process by which they have become that product is fundamentally mystified.