Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005
Special Issue: Literary Universals
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Rigby, Kate. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004. 322 pages. ISBN 0-8139-2274-7 (cloth), price not stated.
Reviewed by
University of Hyderabad, India
Kate Rigby’s work on European poetry moves seamlessly between philosophy, literature and the cultural politics of the period. Rigby’s focus is tripartite: the reanimation of nature, the recovery of a sense of place and the ‘repositioning of literature as inducting us into dwelling’ (13).
Rigby begins with a reading of the romantic turn toward the earth in the age of Schelling and Goethe. The Romantics, she suggests, mourned the demise of nature due to the excessive scientism of the neo-classical age. Wordsworth and company saw this scientization of nature as rendering it spiritless. Further they linked the effect of science on human subjectivity with its effect on nature. With the Romantics, Rigby suggests, a “revivification” of nature begins to be visible. A challenge to the mechanistic paradigm of the earlier age we now have the “spirit-based” reading of nature. In Romantic science and philosophy, argues Rigby, nature is treated as unified, and is troped through the identification of kinship among different species. This notion of the interrelatedness of all elements – what Rigby terms a “bioregional ecosystem” (33) – informs romantic geography, philosophy and poetry. Goethe’s novum organum and Schelling’s reaffirmation of the continuity of mind and matter, Rigby demonstrates, leads to a resacralization of the earth. This “rebirth of nature” as Rigby terms it in the very title of the chapter, proclaimed an “ethos of accommodation” (50) to natural forms and processes and on the limitations of human understanding.
The revaluation of place, Rigby proceeds to argue, led to a sense and idea of the divine as manifest in the natural world. Sacred space was no longer restricted to places made by humans and consecrated to the glory of God. This leads, Rigby demonstrates in her reading of the poetry, to the “location” of the holy in landscapes (which gives Rigby the title of her project). Rigby however is alert to the complex relation between the political economy, natural philosophy and the literary imagination of the Romantic period, in John Clare, William Wordsworth, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Edmund Burke and others. Thus the ways in which enclosure acts connected with agricultural modernization and the taste for wild landscapes get foregrounded in Rigby’s discussion (which obviously owes as much to John Barrell as Raymond Williams).
Turning to Romantic avant-gardism in Schiller, and the Schlegels, Rigby locates in Jena Romanticism (as this period was known) the first concerted ecocritical attempt to construct the relationship of art to nature. “Romanticizing the world”, in Novalis’ famous phrase, meant seeing artistic mimesis as a continuation, at least at the level of consciousness, the creativity of natura naturata (the idea that under the appearance of discrete entities in nature lies a generative principle, or nature naturing).
In the second part of her book Rigby explores various topographies – mountains, watery places (from rivers to swamps) and the city/street-forest. Deploying close textual analysis with the philosophical treatises on topographies (from Thomas Burnet’s Scared Theory of the Earth to Goethe) enables Rigby to generate ecocritical readings of Blake, Wordsworth, the visual art of Casper Friedrich, William Turner and others. Rigyb demonstrates how changing conceptions of various topographical features were rooted in the new ideas of nature, divinity and the sacred. Locating literary texts within contexts of mining, agricultural development and exploration, Rigby discusses the reworking of Christian sacramentalism in the 18th century.
Rigby points out that the German (and eventually European) re-conceptualization of nature as a dynamic, animate and self-generating organism with/in which humans are integrally linked/embedded enabled the recovery of the sense of place. Dwelling, the earth and the divine are re-thought through this new sense of place. And it is this environmental ethic, Rigby argues convincingly, that must inform contemporary thinking on nature, technology, development and the new world order.
Rigby’s book is a masterly survey of the topos of the sacred in European thought in the age when industrialization and “technologization” makes its first major intervention into human lives and the social order. Linking the political economy with the literature while rooting both within existing philosophies of the 17th and 18th century, Rigby has convincingly demonstrated how Romanticism as a movement generated its own ecocritical tradition, ethic and exegetical modes.
A surprising omission in Rigby is the Romantic concern with disease and colonization. As Alan Bewell has tellingly argued (Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge produced “depopulation narratives” that dealt with disease, deprivation and death as effects of an emergent colonial drive in England and Europe. The landscapes of the diseased other – the colony – were slowly “entering” England itself, and transformed political economy (soldiers going off or returning from colonies, for instance) and the social fabric of the countryside. Further, the early decades of the 19th century had produced vast amounts of medical geographies of various parts of the world (James Lind’s cult text, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates was first published in 1768). Such works recast notions of the globe in terms of disease distribution. This invariably crept into the discourses of Coleridge Wordsworth and other figures in the form of images of disease, displacement and “other” places and informed their conceptions of landscapes, nature and divinity.
Otherwise, a detailed, historically rooted, and imaginatively argued work, Topographies of the Sacred is a useful book in the history of ideas and Romanticism.