One Nature, Two Confessions: Comparing Outlooks in the Middle Ages and the Anthropocene 

by Javid Aliyev

“A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.”

                                         ─   I to Myself, Henry D. Thoreau

Halfway through Le Roman de la Rose [The Romance of the Rose] – the most popular and most influential of all Medieval romances – in a chapter titled “Nature’s Confession,” the allegorical figure of Nature weepingly confesses to the priest her lamentations over the distresses caused by the human (294) whom she scolds as being “proud, murderous thief, a cruel, covetous, miserly traitor, a desperate, scandalmongering rascal, full of hatred and contempt, suspicion and envy” (296). This poignant confession, readfrom our current vantage point, is not just a historical narrative but a stark warning of the impending damages and what is to come in the later periods of human history. The Romance, a product of the Late Middle Ages, marks the boundary where Nature ceased to be the symbol of “restraint in the face of a perfect order” and became “an emblem of human superiority over the natural world” (Manes 20).

One of the pioneers of environmental history, Lynn White Jr., conjectured this shift as the root of our ecological crisis and related it to the development of agricultural implements in the medieval period, such as power machinery, labor-saving devices, and automation. As a consequence, these developments have profoundly changed man’s relation to Nature, from being part of Nature to being an exploiter of Nature. This exploitive attitude was deeply influenced by Judeo-Christian theology, especially in Western Christianity, with its distinctive and pragmatical approach to science and technology. The ensuing scientific and technological advancements in the West were in harmony with larger intellectual patterns and, in particular, with a highly influential cosmological model through the Middle Ages, called scala naturae. [1] This model influenced the enduring concept of the ‘Great Chain of Being,’ “as a modern, largely post-Enlightenment habit of thought has historically created and reinforced perceived boundaries between human and non-human life in ways that have supported the supremacy of the few — Anglo-European, male, able-bodied, etc. — over the rest” (Lears and Bude 92).

Equally, the language we use today – a mixture of medieval hermeneutics and Renaissance humanism with its faith in reason, intellect, and progress – has created vast silences. This has led to a realm of “not saids” called Nature, obscured by sweeping claims of eternal truths about human differences, rationality, and transcendence (Manes 17). The silencing of Nature, which persisted into the twentieth century and continues today in various forms, has generated a biased and deceptive version of homo sapiens, establishing man (and this engendered formulation is intended, since the silencing of Nature has long been accompanied by the silencing of women and non-binary people) as the self-declared sole speaker of the world. This flourishing narrative of human exceptionalism of the past three centuries has led to the point that human action has extended its reach across the entire planet. As a result of their far-reaching impact, “humans have become a proper geological (rather than merely social or biological) agent akin to meteorites and volcanoes” (Vermeulen 3-4).

However, it was not until 2000 that this new planetary condition has come to be known by now familiar name of the Anthropocene, coined by Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize, and ecologist Eugene Stoermer. The Anthropocene, apart from its significant geological and ecological implications for life on planet Earth, represents a seismic shift in our fundamental understandings and beliefs about humans and other forms of life  and matter. Marek Tamm and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon argue that “the Anthropocene has opened a new situation for humanity,” a ‘new human condition,’ which “forces a radical shift in how we understand” and, as a consequence, reconsider “our past relationship to the more-than-human world” (204). This revisionist outlook has become especially pertinent in the contemporary world, bringing about a sense of rapid and radical transformations to both the human condition and the cultural and natural environment. In the face of heightened awareness about human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity, natural disasters, biopolitics, non-human rights, and extinction of species, “the Anthropocene calls for precisely for the evaluation of human life from the perspective of posthumanism” (Roelvink 136).

Since the late 1990s, after the waning of influence from two major schools of thought of the twentieth century, namely poststructuralism and postmodernism, posthumanism was informed by various tendencies that required robust criticism of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism of the previous decades. As Ewa Domanska accurately contends, posthumanism “challenges the very foundations of history understood as a specific approach to the past developed within the framework of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions with their anthropocentric (and even zoocentric) bias, Eurocentricim, geocentrism, and even exclusive human authorship of knowledge building” (337). With its anticipatory and future-oriented aspects, posthumanism encourages the exploration of unrealized potential in the past rather than futile preoccupation with the limitations of previous configurations.

Among the diverse theories and approaches posthumanism utilizes, new materialism stands out for its innovative reconceptualization of the history of our species. In broader terms, it  “reimagines our species through our relations with the multispecies world and our bodily interconnections with vital materialities,… while simultaneously dismantling human exceptionalism by claiming that we are always already more-than-human” (Oppermann 259). One particularly insightful way of understanding these interconnections is through non-human narratives and more-than-human storytelling. Therefore, in the new materialist conception, narrative extends to more-than-human entities, transcending its traditional recognition as an exclusively human practice. It now includes the stories of more-than-human entities, entanglements, and assemblages.

Taking up the new materialist assertion that we need to tell stories of human-nonhuman assemblages, I will explore Tom Comitta’s [2] recent novel, The Nature Book, which engages with “the art of noticing… the multiple, interconnected worlds comprised of different human lifeways and other species who will co-create stories of resurgence that may help us to live convivially together” (Oppermann 267). I suggest that The Nature Book transcends its literary boundaries to become an experimental exploration of non-anthropocentric historical representation and narrative forms. Drawing a parallel with Aristotle’s distinction in Poetics, favoring poets for their ability to address the universal [kathólou] while historians navigate the specific [kath’ékaston] (81), Comitta’s novel adeptly combines history and fiction, akin to his view of his work as a narrative-archive hybrid, to serve as a conduit for reforming our understanding of historical representation beyond human-centric boundaries. This intricate tapestry challenges the prevailing emphasis on plot progression, shifting the focus to nature descriptions while simultaneously questioning the conventional perception of humans as exclusive architects of historical agency.

I argue that by introducing the novel concept of a ‘literary supercut’ which they define as “texts made entirely or almost entirely of found language” (A Brief), Comitta not only pioneers a new narrative genre but also crafts a fictional realm devoid of human presence. ‘Supercut’, by the way, is to be taken literally here, as demonstrated by photographs of Comitta’s studio (which we sadly cannot reproduce here for copyright reasons, but which can be found here). In this way, it aligns with the principles of multispecies narratives, “[f]ocusing on techniques employed in [post-Darwinian] media, including the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives on events, shifts backward and forward in narrative time, the embedding of stories within stories, and others” (Herman 2). With meticulous precision, they curate natural descriptions from a vast array of 300 canonical Anglophone novels, employing an Oulipoean approach that pushes past conventional narrative confines and challenges authorial supremacy. The result of this creative endeavor is a contemplative narrative that resonates with the medieval contemplative tradition with its virtues of spareness and sobriety, and its belief in humility of expression “not merely for the individual but for man as a species” (White 13). Comitta, with their decentralized human perspectives and advocacy for non-human others emerges as a modern-day Saint Francis of Assisi, who proposed an alternative Christian view of Nature that “rested on a unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate” (ibid).

Their intent is also evident in the choice of their title, The Nature Book, avoiding the familiar formulation of the “Book of Nature,” which posits Nature as readable and interpretable like any other text. According to Christopher Manes, this understanding is also a remnant of the Middle Ages, where growing literacy and Christian exegetical tradition successfully perpetuated the idea of the Nature vs culture divide. These two main institutional technologies eroded the premedieval animistic view of Nature, now forgotten and repressed, which suggests that the natural world and all its entities, human and non-human, are alive and articulate.

Interestingly enough, Comitta’s depiction of Nature is not anthropomorphized as in The Romance; instead, their Nature confesses in the “found” and anthropomorphic language of various authors of the Anglophone canon who “have distorted, praised, belittled, anthropomorphized, projected onto, and spoken through countless animals, landforms and weather patterns” (Comitta ix). Thus, Comitta conveys Nature using the “faulty” medium of human language, “mov[ing] beyond human-centered rhetoric and embraces the ontological humility found in evolutionary theory, ecological science, and postmodern thought, even if it challenges the privileged discourse of reason” (Manes 24).

Consequently, Comitta constructs a chaotic narrative ecosystem where readers can experience Nature indifferent to their presence, excluding humans in the same way that natural descriptions in novels are often relegated to mere background elements or easily skipped parts. Instead, Comitta succeeds in creating a challenging read where readers of The Nature Book adopt the perspective of the disembodied observer over Nature, which resembles a fictional wilderness, “a place self-willed, a separate, self-sustaining narrative ecosystem with its own imperatives independent of ours” (Searching). In doing so, they reestablish and revive once more the medieval scholastic concept of natura naturans, or nature naturing, which refers to “the permanent genesis of things, nature as a process, as productivity” (Neyrat 135) within the confines of the Anthropocene writing.

References

Adams, Cara Blue. “Searching for Unfamiliar Terrain in ‘The Nature Book'”. The New Yorker, 16 March, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/searching-for-unfamiliar-terrain-in-the-nature-book [Accessed: 24.07.2024]

Aristotle. Poetics. (trans.) George Whalley. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Comitta, Tom. The Nature Book: A Novel. Minneapolis: Coffe House Press, 2023.

Comitta, Tom. “A Brief History of Citational Fiction and the Literary Supercut.” Literary Hub, 5 November, 2020. https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-citational-fiction-and-the-literary-supercut [Accessed: 17.08.2023]

Domanska, Ewa. “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies”. Historein, 10 (2010), p. 118-130.

Herman, David. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Leards, Adin E. and Bude, Tekla. “Matter and Meaning: Early English New Materialisms”, Examplaria, 35:2 (2023), p. 91-108.

Lorris, Guillaume and de Meun, Jean. The Romance of the Rose (trans.) Frances Horgan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Manes, Christopher. “Nature and Silence,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, (eds.) Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Neyrat, Frédéric. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, (trans.) Drew S. Burk. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

Oppermann, Serpil. “New Materialism and the Nonhuman Story,” in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, (eds.) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Roelvink, Gerda. “The Anthropocene,” in After the Human: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century, (ed.) Sherryl Vint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Tamm, Marek and Simon, Boldizsár Zoltán. “More-than-Human History: Philosophy of History at the Time of Anthropocene,” in Philosophy of History: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, (ed.)  Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

White, Lynn Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, (eds.) Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Vermeulen, Peter. Literature and the Anthropocene. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.

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[1] “The scala naturae, or ‘Great Chain of Being,’ a depiction of the world as a vast filigree of lower and higher forms, from zoophytes to Godhead, with humankind’s place higher than beasts and a little less than angels, as the Psalm puts it” (Manes 20).

[2] Tom Comitta’s pronouns are they/them, so I will use those pronouns throughout the text to align with their preference.

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