“Ecocriticism,” Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Institute, 1/29/10

It’s an honor to speak at this MEMSI lecture. MEMSI through

Prof. Cohen’s work has become a place of real national stature and

beyond. Like Groucho Marx I must question how I was admitted. But

for a long time there have not been many people working in

ecocriticism in medieval studies. Now that’s changing and I

unworthily need to work harder. So I’d like to start with a brief

introduction to ecocriticism or environmental literary studies,

followed by examples hopefully suggesting how it can be applied to

early English poetry, ending with thoughts about the value of a new

field in ecocriticism called ecosemiotics.

Lawrence Buell defines ecocriticism, which first emerged in the

1970s, as in effect foregrounding the background of textual narrative.

In other words, he said, if you take a simplified Artistotelian view of

literary study as examining plot, character, theme and setting,

ecocriticism focuses on setting, which often has been the most

neglected element in modern Western literary interpretation. Buell

defines a text that encourages an ecologically centered reading in four

ways: It is one that first features a “nonhuman environment” as a

presence that suggests “human history is implicated in natural

history,” and second does so in a setting in which “the human interest

is not understood to be the only legitimate interest,” while third

1

“human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical

orientation,” and fourth, does so with “some sense of the environment

as a process rather than as a constant.” I’m going to expand on Buell’s

definition today in relation to the new field of ecosemiotics, or the

study of the relation of culture and nature through signs. I’ll try to

suggest that even though Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may not seem

to us much like an environmental text today—not a Walden Pond or

Monkeywrench Gang or Avatar—it does offer entry into an important

culture of nature in the archipelago that we today tend to call the

British Isles, a culture of nature that I’ll call an environmental

semiosphere.

First, it’s easy to see how reading for setting can be extended to

context, in terms of cultural landscape. In fact, the text can be seen

itself as a type of landscape or map, when turned inside-out in

ecocritical reading. In such reading the premodern text as cultural

landscape can engage both social and physical environments more

easily. When Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their 2004

polemic The Death of Environmentalism concluded that

“environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-

making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy

proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to

be,” they could have been issuing a manifesto for medieval

ecocriticism. Much of my work has involved texts associated with the

2

environment of the early Irish Sea, and a different way of seeing the

British Isles and its early literatures together environmentally as an

archipelago with a dynamic interplay of water, land and atmosphere

at its center, rather than with just London as its social focus or the

Continent off-stage as its foundation. For this I’m in debt to Prof.

Cohen’s work in developing archipelagic studies.

Let’s take up a familiar example from The Canterbury Tales,

namely its opening:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures sooteThe droghte of March hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veine in swich licourOf which vertu engendred is the flour,Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breethInspired hath in every holt and heethThe tender croppes, and the yonge sonneHath in the Ram his halve course yronne,And smale foweles maken melodye,That slepen al the night with open eye,So priketh hem nature in hir corages,Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,To ferne halwes, kouthe in sundry londes;And specially from every shires endeOf Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,The holy blissful martyr for to sekeThat hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Now, here we have nature in motion and a text that is a map of

a journey. Yet it is very different from the motion and journey of that

other great medieval pilgrimage poem, Dante’s Commedia, written a

few generations earlier in Italy. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the

landscape is less allegorical and less virtual, and also, taking the work

as a whole, seemingly incomplete, ever in process. It is nonetheless an

3

overlay landscape draped across the physical geography of

countryside from commercial London to a supposedly spiritual

Canterbury that however is never reached, the journey ending,

apparently, in the Parson’s Tale and perhaps Chaucer’s retraction. We

can trace the route of the pilgrims along an old Roman road that goes

from the center of English metropolitan commerce in the waning days

of the Anglo-Norman feudal regime, into a province and provincial

seat whose names derive from an old Celtic British people, the Cantii

who left their name to Kent and Canterbury, to which the papal

mission from St. Gregory the Dialogist came in the days before the

Norman Conquest and found remnants of earlier British Christianity.

There is already an anti-colonial movement celebratory of natural

landscape and language implicit in the map of the story, added to its

invocation of Thomas Beckett as an icon of the claims of the spiritual

against the state. And the landscape, unlike that of Dante’s great

work, is not all about Chaucer. Rather it is about a rollicking muti-

logue of many voices, including the non-human, in which Chaucer’s

persona is one among many to be parodied for the foolishness of

subjectivity.

So the psychology of the poem also arguably projects an

environmental experience, out-of-text and into multiple contexts. A.

Kent Hieatt some time ago wrote of what he called Chaucer’s

mythopoesis, of the poet’s use of fable to experientially engage or

4

entrap the reader in a kind of empathy aimed against objectification of

others or of one’s self. We see this in the following rogue’s gallery of

figures in the General Prologue and their tales. But I would argue that

The Canterbury Tales as experiential landscape can also be read as

ecopoesis, as a shaping of environment that enables a transpersonal

engagement of the human with the physical environment, an empathy

in line with current work in mind science on the way human beings

develop more ecologically than in a unitary discreet individual way.

Let us consider the world as described in these opening lines.

We have the cycle of seasons and stars, the time of nature. We have

the social time and cycles of mortality and festival of human beings.

We have the created eternity of the saints. And we have in the

pricking of corages by Nature an intimation poetically of the

movement of theophanies and divine energies or manifestations in the

physical world that are everlasting and beyond even eternity, as in a

familiar example to medievals of how the hearts of Jesus’ students

burned within them when taught by His unknown resurrected person

on the road to Emmaus. For Chaucer, as mentioned in the Parlement

of Fowles, Nature is the vicar of the Almightie Lord, a figure whom

Spenser developed in emulation of Chaucer in The Faerie Queene as

shining forth divine energies, perhaps also influenced as Harold

Weatherby suggests by Spenser’s patristic studies at Cambridge. One

modern translation in fact renders “so priketh hem nature in hir

5

corages,” as “thus nature sparkles in them so,” reminiscent of the

Romanian scholar Dimitru Staniloaeu’s description of the divine

energies in nature in non-Augustinian Christian theology as the

sparkle of creation. It is notable that modern editors have so

misunderstood the cosmology behind this line that, as Sarah Stanbury

has noted, until recently that particular phrase in the prologue tended

to be placed in parentheses in many editions and translations,

because modern scholars assumed and wanted to apply it more to the

birds in particular than to the overall moving landscape of beings in

the Prologue as a whole.

Here poetically we have the four modes of time and non-time of

patristic asceticism, embodied in early literary monasticism around

the Irish Sea, in league with indigenous non-Christian traditions,

rather than the eternal present of Augustinian-derived Scholasticism

seen in Dante’s work. All of these modes are entwined in the

landscape of the text on the road to Canterbury, in a cloud of

overlapping stories and voices ending in ascetic repentance with The

Parson’s Tale, not a singular and triumphal completed passage from

hell to heaven.

In this the pilgrimage to Canterbury, a journey that never

reaches the interior of a cathedral nor the cosmic interiorized

consummation of Dante’s flight, in the energy of its very overlay of

imaginative Otherworld and familiar deeply layered physical

6

geography, rejects the strongly hierarchical and abstracted sense of

environment of the Scholasticism of the high Middle Ages and the

feudalism that attended it. And it does so interestingly by reaching

back to adapt traditions deeply entwined with an archipelagic

perspective of life, traditions familiar from the early Irish Sea zone,

rejecting ultimately the monumentality of the metropolitan center,

whether of London, mainland Europe or the high-medieval church.

Chaucer’s reference to Nature in the opening lines here again

evokes the figure of Nature in his Parlement of Fowles, negotiating

the comic cacophanies of Valentine lover birds in a spring beyond

hierarchies, echoed back by Chaucer’s greatest fan Spenser in the

latter’s figure of Nature shining in sparkling energies in the

Mutabilitie Cantos that climax the overlay landscape of his likewise

dynamically incomplete Faerie Queene, in what by then had become a

tradition of green-world literature in English. The landscape tradition

that Chaucer’s work navigates itself became known as fairyland, even

as it draws on what scholars much later would call the earlier Celtic

Otherworld, to which Chaucer makes specific reference in The

Canterbury Tales and draws on through its very structure, to form a

literary landscape or world entwined with geography and the life of

the earth. We also see those earlier traditions re-emerge in early

English in a famous contemporary poem to The Canterbury Tales, the

anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in a different type of

7

story to some extent but arguably with a similar sense of overlay

landscape. In that poem, Sir Gawain’s travels are across a mapped

geography of Britain, into Wales and ultimately to a Green Chapel that

scholars link to folklore about locations near the poet’s probable

location in the Chester area, and so we also have this overlay of

imaginative fantasy with actual terrain and an accompanying

subversion of idealized individuality, in the case of the Gawain poet in

terms of the deconstruction of Gawain’s knightly character in dialogue

with the Otherworld.

While the convention of the changing seasons seen in Chaucer’s

opening is a commonplace, he as usual reworks sources, including

probably an Italian text on the Destruction of Troy, and, in structure,

Boccacio’s Decameron. But the geographic mix stands distinctively

within a storytelling mode of archipelago. He is operating within a

tradition native to his environment, so to speak, and one that in turn

helps shape that environment through story, with a kind of flat

hierarchy of energized landscape rather than Scholastic analogy.

Unlike the likely source about Troy, spring ends in Chaucer not in war

but in redemption in an actual countryside of which the audience

forms a physical part. Thus so too at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and

Criseyde, we move into larger contexts that triangulate between the

spiritual and physical geography of earth and the perspective of

Chaucer’s time, as Troilus as a deconstructed medieval knight looks

8

down on the plains of war and laughs, putting all in a dynamic

perspective akin to the combined punning of the dynamic Sabbaoth

Lord of hosts and Sabbath rest at the end of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

That Chaucer operates in a tradition of landscape narration

shaped by the environment of his archipelago is suggested also by his

use of a central motif of early Irish Otherworld stories, namely the

Sovereignty goddess or fairy queen of the land’s green world, in The

Wife of Bath’s Tale, which occupies a key place in the Ellesmere

manuscript as a kind of linchpin to the response of the so-called

marriage tales to both the satirized chivalry of The Knight’s Tale and

the excesses of the so-called bawdy tales. It follows The Man of Law’s

Tale in this, which itself highlights an early pre-Norman Christianity

associated with a legendary holiness of the age of saints and scholars

in islands then heavily influenced by Irish culture. The motif of a fairy

queen presiding over an overlay green world landscape emerges in

the self-satirizing Tale of Sir Thopas, and early Irish Sea traditions of

magical overlay landscape appear also in The Franklin’s Tale with its

associations with archipelago-related traditions of Brittany. Rory

McTurk in a recent study of analogues to Chaucer’s work in Celtic and

Norse language literatures, suggests that the Irish Acallach na

Senorach, with its itinerary of St. Patrick’s interactions with Fenian

heroes in the Irish landscape, derivative of earlier Otherworld

narrative structure, plausibly could have been a primary influence in

9

the framing of The Canterbury Tales, given Chaucer’s likely time in

Ulster during his years of unknown provenance as a young man in the

service of the Earl of Ulster. And of course an important anonymous

poem roughly contemporary to The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and

the Green Knight, affords a version of this overlay landscape too,

suggesting the motif’s appeal in formative English poetry after the

Black Death and crumbling of Anglo-Norman feudalism, as an

alternative model for reimagining the nature of things in poesis

figuring itself as native.

But to get back to the General Prologue, the mention of the

zodiac in particular, the Ram in his half course, together with the

juices of spring that seem to be flowing through all, both highlight

Prof. Cohen’s comparison of medieval notions of astrology and the

bodily humors as premodern examples of “bodies without organs.”

That term, meaning non-organismic bodies, comes from the writings

of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and involves virtual realities that

embody a kind of ecological connectivity spanning physical

immanence and cultural effects, in ecocritical terms potentially a kind

of ecosystem or culture of nature. The archipelago itself could be

considered a kind of “body without organs.” In his essay “Desert

Islands,” Deleuze discusses how the geological “double movement” of

islands, both pulling away and recreating themselves, parallels human

involvement with them imaginatively. A collective cultural imagination

10

in Deleuze’s view, through rites and mythology, could produce

imaginary identity with islands in a way that “geography and the

imagination would be one.” Later he and Guattari discussed how

Europe’s Atlantic archipelago in particular involved “a plane of

immanence as a movable and moving ground… an archipelagian

world where [inhabitants] are happy to pitch their tents from island to

island and over the sea… nomadizing the old Greek earth, broken up,

fractalized, and extended to the entire universe.” In such a geo-

cultural archipelago, they said, the landscape sees, much as early

iconography reflected in the art and culture of the early Irish Sea zone

looks out on us rather than allowing us to internalize and objectify

them.

Such a body without organs can involve in Deleuzean terms a

rhizomic or entwined grass-root sense of symbiotic eco-region and

culture-region or atmosphere, such as the archipelago itself. Indeed,

the contemporary philosopher Peter Hallward sees a theophany or

emanation of the divine in nature in Deleuze-Guattarian

geophilosophy, which he claims to be akin to the early medieval Irish

writer John Scottus Eriugena’s early Irish Sea philosophy, in which

divine energies manifest as fantasy clouds of theophany in which the

human entwines with the cosmic. In Otherworld narratives of the

early archipelago, the environmental theophany in which humans

participate looks out as a “seeing landscape,” a melding of sea, sky,

11

earth and spiritual realms, as if some elemental rewriting of Martin

Heidegger’s mystical fourfold. This landscape emerged in narratives

of desert asceticism that came to the islands in search of a desert that

was spiritual sea, an archipelago that in the post-Roman period was

constituted culturally as both deserted by Rome and a monastic

desert, and thus oddly paralleled Deleuze’s sense of desert islands as

well. Adomnán’s late-eighth-century Hiberno-Latin Vita S. Columbae,

for example, refers to a spiritual pilgrim wishing to find a desertum in

the ocean off Scotland.” Examples of such earlier melding of

geography and imagination include the Otherworld voyage story of

Immram Brain, the early Irish tropes of the colors of the winds and

colors of martyrdom, Eriugena’s image of the sea as theophanic, and

early Ireland’s de-centered social and ecclesiastical networks.

For Eriugena, Nature consisted of both being and non-being, the

hidden and the appearing. Later in Scholasticism, developing from

tendencies in Augustine and the Latin language, non-being came to be

identified with evil. As Robert Bartlett outlines, evil in Scholasticism

came to be labeled as natural but then necessarily an illusory parallel

to essential nature. So any sense of overlay landscape become

demonized, and narrative storytelling was not able to accommodate

dynamic notions of nature. The supernatural good became more and

more a separate if constrained category of reality apart from the

natural. Miracles came to be considered, in the view of Aquinas and

12

others, not results from rational occurrences, but from supernatural

archetypes in God’s essence, removed from creation. It was the

beginning of what Max Weber later called the disenchantment of

nature.

European tradition involves two prominent archipelagic

complexes of cultures. Both Greek and Atlantic islands expressed in

formative post-Roman periods an ascetic cosmology formed in the

fluid nature-cultures of the deserts of Egypt, Sinai and Palestine as

well as the rugged remote terrain of Cappadocia. In such places,

nomadic routes were like tracks in a sea in which ascetics immersed

themselves while moving through various stages of exile from the

world of empire or everyday human society. This is the type of

medieval cultural map of itineraries that David Wallace focuses on in

his project mapping connections such as the route between Mount

Athos and Muscovy. In such mapping of pilgrimages like Chaucer’s

writ large, all Europe becomes, as it actually is, an archipelago, and

indeed the whole world really is an archipelago, as highlighted by the

iconic moon photos of the late 1960s that helped stimulate late-

twentieth-century environmentalism. The itinerary or line of flight of

cosmological narrative we’re following here, linking the eastern

deserts and Europe’s biggest Atlantic island chain, influenced and was

adapted by early Irish biblical exegetes culminating in Eriugena, as

well as monastic mapping of foundational native landscapes through

13

written stories, just as Greek icons are spoken of as being written. In

physical environment this cultural overlay landscape formed what I

call an environmental semiosphere, an environmental narrative

atmosphere, which became an enduring influence and partially

appropriated element of Middle English and Elizabethan writing.

What I mean by environmental semiosphere is similar to the use

of the term culture of nature by Stanford University’s new

Environmental Humanities Project, namely a kind of environmental

atmosphere of human adaptation in symbiotic entwinement with a

physical ecosystem. This is akin to the already mentioned Deleuzean

body without organs, only complexly writ large as a regional

environmental cultural narrative tradition. The term semiosphere also

takes us into the currently evolving new fields of biosemiotics and

ecosemiotics, most actively identified with Tartu University in Estonia

and its fabled semiotics program, which is now headed by the

biologist Kalevi Kull. It was at Tartu that the semiotician Juri Lotman

coined the term semiosphere to describe a composite envelope of

individual organisms’ subjective environments that shape a

meaningful environment of life. Lotman in this was following the work

of the early 20th century Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll,

who coined the term Umwelt to describe an organism’s species-

centered atmosphere of meaning. Biosemiotics, based on such

concepts, embraces a kind of biological version of the old medieval

14

pansemiotic view of nature as a world of symbols. Biosemiotics argues

that semiosis, or the making of meaning from various kinds of signs,

defines life itself, and that human linguistics plays only a small role in

the totality of semiotics, such as flowers emitting a certain kind of

smell or color to which bees or birds respond symbiotically. Following

biosemiotics, Ecosemiotics today develops study of the semiotic

relationship of nature and culture, arguing against binarizing the two.

So how could we define in environmental literary studies the

Insular tradition of a narrative overlay landscape, exemplified in The

Canterbury Tales, as an environmental cultural atmosphere, as an

environmental semiosphere? How can we connect this twenty-first-

century approach meaningfully back to early English poetry as it

developed in the waning days of the Anglo-Norman regime, between

the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses? Let me sketch four

parameters for tracing an environmental semiosphere in early texts

such as Chaucer’s poetry, expanding on Buell’s earlier mentioned four

aspects of an ecocentric text. This process of definition is a process of

our reading today, but cued strongly by certain types of premodern

narrative traditions and their relations to the physical world.

First of the four elements is a sense of how an environmental

semiosphere like that exemplified in The Canterbury Tales articulates

a triadic or three-way structure of semiotics, or the making of

meaning through signs. The nineteenth-century semiotician Charles S.

15

Peirce articulated a relavant three-way pattern of signs, which differs

from the conventional modern Western dyadic or two-part structure

described by his more famous contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure.

Peirce’s parallel triad of sign, object, and interpretant form the basis

for the current study of biosemiotics. Following his triadic analysis,

we have text, physical geography, and imaginary overlay experience.

In effect this introduces a potential environmental component into the

unpacking of signs. By contrast Saussure, following in many ways

Augustine’s lead in emphasizing the arbitariness of signs, stressed the

internal human-centered relation of signified and signifier. The Irish

Sea Otherworld illustrates Peirce’s triad as a structure of meaning,

with a culturally imagined overlay landscape highlighting its relation

to both text and geography. In our ecocritical reading, the sign would

be The Canterbury Tales, the object the countryside of the passage to

Canterbury, and the interpretant the many-voiced atmosphere of the

imaginary cloud of stories engaging reader, characters, poet, society,

geography, and intergenerational audiences in landscape tradition.

Again this triadic style of landscape on the islands again

stretches not only back into the Otherworld of Irish Sea cultures, but

forward into the later derivative “green world” of late medieval and

Elizabethan English literature defined by Northrop Frye as putting

together two worlds (in effect the human and a naturally supernatural

earth) and making each seem real in light of the other. Frye’s

16

examples included Le Morte D’Arthur, The Faerie Queene, and A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, the latter transposing Greek figures into

English countryside folklore with native roots. Frye said the Englsh

“green world” in literature exemplified a distinctive fourth type of

Western comedy, beyond Greek Old and New Comedy and the kind of

high medieval Christian comedy exemplified by Dante’s Commedia.

Going beyond Frye, we’ve seen that this was not just a discrete

English development but related to geography of the archipelago and

to early Insular tradition that itself was connected to the Eastern

Mediterranean. And in the roots of that tradition something more than

what Frye outlined is going on: the rhythmic back-and- forth

movement between worlds can make each world actually seem real by

light of the other, in the sense of realizing the place-between them in

story as a kind of ecological reality, and thus preventing

objectification of either world while encouraging an imaginative

environmental empathy.

Now the difference between this kind of triadic emphasis in

narrative landscape and

Dante’s more dyadic allegorical emphasis, which does not emphasize

a mapping relation of fantasy and physical geography, not surprisingly

reflects different medieval theological patterns of landscape and

human personhood. In the early medieval heyday of Irish Sea literary

culture articulation of the Trinity tended toward a triadic rather than

17

a dyadic structure. The Son was begotten of the Father and the Holy

Spirit proceeded from the Father. Such triadic theological emphasis

can be found in the non-Augustinian Trinity of Eriugena, the early

Irish Stowe Missal’s original text, and in ascetic practice and

cosmology of the desert fathers and the Byzantines. It integrally

relates to doctrines of the divine energies flowing through nature,

expressed in Eriugena’s cosmology and Spenser’s Nature.

The psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva described this triadic

Christian theology evident in the early Irish Sea pattern as a cosmic

semiosis or making of meaning involving what she called “the openly

sexual fusion with the Thing at the limits of the nameable.” In

Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach to semiotics, the realms of the

Real, Imaginary and the Symbolic themselves mirror in secular

contexts the symbolic triadic flow of the early Trinity. Thus the Real

can be associated with the Father, the Imaginary with the Son, and

the Symbolic with the Holy Spirit. Kristeva argued that in early

Trinitarian cosmic semiosis, the Symbolic “merges with the two other

centers and, by the same token, endows them, beyond their value as

distinct identities or authorities, with an abyssal, breathtaking, and

certainly also sexual depth, where the psychological experience of

loss and ecstasy finds its place.” Following her model, in Chaucer’s

text the Real could be thought of as the countryside on the route to

Canterbury, the Imaginary as the textual image, and the symbolic

18

interpretant or overlay cloud of entwined voices and stories and

landscape. Kristeva argues that poetic energies emerge from such

triadic semiosis, but we can also see its environmental aspects in

textual overlay landscape. In such a process the Real (or looming

larger contexts), the Imaginary (or sign), and the Symbolic (or

biosemiotic life) for Kristeva encompass and entwine what she calls

the phenotext (a work’s textual surface and geography) with genotext

(a deep structure of text constituting its overlay landscape). Triadic

“environmental semiosis” can be defined (in terms of biosemiotics at

Tartu) as involving an Umwelt or subjective environment that

functions as sign of the organism, while the organism reciprocally

functions as the sign of the Umwelt, the two being related by a third

element, a larger code or ecology preceding the organism’s existence,

also called a meaning-plan. In this scheme, the cultural experience of

the Irish Otherworld as overlay landscape can be a “meaning-plan” or

interpretation that involves a larger ecology of life incorporating a

cosmic spiritual realm. But the Otherworld involves also a sign or

symbolism of natural landscape, and, in overlay geography,

metonymically becomes identified with actual landscape as object or

environment. If the organism in this case is the ecosystem of the

countryside, it becomes a sign of the subjective environment or

Umwelt of the human audience, which in the text is the green or

Otherworld, while that Umwelt also becomes a sign of the

19

countryside.

But different cultures can shape different emphases for this

interaction. What became the dominant Trinitarian mode in the Latin

West by the time of the High Middle Ages was paradoxically a dyadic

Triity. It emerged from development of Augustine’s semiotic theology,

by which ideas in the divine Mind became juxtaposed dyadically with

arbitrary created signs or theophanies, as later reflected in Dante’s

allegorical approach. This limited any relation to the physical

environment. It also involved a sense of the Holy Spirit proceeding

from the Father and the Son together, by what was called the filioque

doctrine. The Father and Son were in effect fused, while the Holy

Spirit, prime manifester of divine symbolism in the world, became

their instrumental object. This Scholastic dyad of archetype and

analogy became the template for subject-object and mind-body

binaries of a continental-based Western European culture as it

emerged first among the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish realms and then

later in cultural terms swallowed the archipelago so to speak in the

era of the Norman Conquests, the Crusades, and the heyday of the

papacy. Chaucer and the Gawain poet at least in the wake of the Black

Death and the crumbling of the old order found it poetically beneficial

to adapt an older structure of archipelagic literatures into a new

English literary trope with its own after-life as England began to

reorient itself as an Atlantic rather than a continental empire.

20

I’ll try to be merciful here and pass more briefly over my

suggested three other parameters for reading an environmental

semiosphere. The second aspect of an environmental semiosphere

could be called, in tribute to the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, a

dialogical materialism. This involves a sense of personal dialogue with

nature inherent in a culture, in which the emphasis is placed more on

external interactions, rather than individual human interiority familiar

to us from Augustinian and Lockean models. In ecosemiotic terms,

this involves an Umwelt or subjective human reality that comes to

encompass an overlap between what Kalevi Kull calls Zero Nature or

raw physicality, and the Innenwelt or inner world of the individual.

That overlap could be called a Lebenswelt or living world, with which

what Kull calls Third Nature or virtual cultural reality becomes

identified. By contrast in other cultural systems such as that of the

mainstream modern West, Innenwelt and Umwelt in effect became

identified with one another, and Third Nature forms in opposition with

its constructed Other of the physical world.

The third element in reading an environmental semiosphere

involves tracing its metonymic structure. Following Kull’s work,

environmental Object acts upon Subject in Merkwelt or First Nature,

such as the way in which seasons affect human agricultural life, and

Subject upon the Object in Wirkwelt or Second Nature, as in the way

human engineering affects rivers, for example. A close reciprocal

21

relation between those processes suggests a metonymic symbolism.

Thus, for example, the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath,” “wind” or

“spirit,” takes on both a bodily and a transpersonal dimension at once,

or likewise early Irish uses of terms for desert mean both monastic

life and island or wilderness environments, or in early Christianity the

term logos at once means word, harmony and incarnational image of

God that is God. These kinds of metonyms involve physically intense

metaphors that suggest in rhetorical and lingustic terms the type of

structure of landscape narrative with which we’re dealing. Owen

Barfield, paralleling Ernst Cassirer, called this process a “holophrase”

of concrete meaning, encompassing a meaning beyond the sum of the

components of the metonym, rather than a dyadic analogue of

archetype and object. And of course one aspect of the metonymic is a

personalizing process of naming or in this case putting a face on the

nonhuman. Enviromental metonym suggests a dynamic life to the

physical world by its intensified contrast of matter and language. It

thus functions differently from conventional Western psychoanalytic

definitions of metonym as lack. It relates to notions of desire that in

deep ecological terms and in Deleuze-Guattarian “ecosophy” shape

semiotic structures rather than psychological universals. Thus, for

example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argued that while Western

culture has come to define desire as based on linguistic lack

(following Augustinian and Scholastic views and derivative

22

psychoanalytic theory), other cultural structures such as Taoism in

particular shape desire as an energized relation creative of the real.

And behind the environmental semiosphere that we’re discussing here

in the Irish Sea lies a similar shaping of desire and metonym, I would

argue, to that which Deleuze and Guattari articulate in Taoism, but in

a Western literary context.

Finally, the fourth paramater of an eco-semiosphere is

Iconographic time. This has already been discussed in relation to the

four modes of temporality and non-temporality in patristic and early

insular traditions, reflected in the opening of the General Prologue.

Experience of multiple modes of existence at once encourages

experience of non-human perspectives and development of

environmental empathy, and involves a kind of self-emptying or

kenosis in which setting becomes relational, looking out at popping

out at us like traditional Byzantine iconography or images from the

Book of Kells.

Now to return this discussion of the parameters of

environmental semiospheres to the text at hand, I would argue that

literary insular green worlds such as The Canterbury Tales are a kind

of locally adapted equivalent to the philosophy of the ancient Greek

archipelago and to the emergence and sustenance there in medieval

times of hesychasm. Literature as eco-semiosphere has a therapeutic

function for human beings particularly in the Western world. Getting

23

the mind into the heart, becoming a luminous eye as it were, the

transpersonality of deep ecology, these all can be cued by a literary

green world. In such narratives we can reach the environmental

empathy of the ecopoetic mind science described by Evan Thompson,

who argues that the human mind develops in environment and not

inside the brain, in environmental empathy. Thus Chaucer’s comedic

Tale of Sir Thopas with its fluffed-up chivalric fairy queen melds into

the redemptive forgiveness of his persona’s The Tale of Melibee. C.S.

Lewis claimed that within the greenworld effect in Spenser’s Faerie

Queene evokes “our bodily, no less than our mental, health is

refreshed by reading him.” Its therapy is related to archipelagic

landscape: “There is a real affinity between [Spenser’s] Faerie

Queene,” Lewis wrote, “a poem of quests and wanderings and

inextinguishable desires, and Ireland itself—the soft, wet air, the

loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills, the heart-rending sunsets.”

Even the Spenserian stanza for Lewis reflects a sense of the triadic

flow of experiencing overlay landscape, “labyrinthine and meditative,

turning back upon itself in the centre when the two rhymes meet, and

then pausing again, either for recapitulation, or thundering defiance,

or for a dying fall in the final alexandrine…the effect of a wave falling

on a beach.” Lewis argued that this green world resisted a growing

dualism in European culture, in which, “The world was emptied, first

of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and

24

antipathies finally of her colours, smells, and tastes…..The mind, on

whose ideal constructions the whole method depended, stood over

against its object in ever sharper dissimilarity.” We see this process

described already in the longest and first of Chaucer’s stories, The

Knight’s Tale, in its account of the destruction of the grove and the

building of the amphitheatre, which relates the follies of ideal

knighthood to environmental hubris, in which a holocaust of the green

world relates to needless human death and suffering. In this, the

scene-setting story for the Tales shows affinities to Sir Gawain’s

humbling in the green world by its sovereignty goddess or figure of

Nature Morgan Le Fay, shadowing the incarnational Mother of God

associated with the earth in early Insular performance of landscape.

Why did Chaucer’s poetry in particular engage in insular

traditions of overlay landscape, and how did those traditions get

transmitted to English literature from early Irish literature, if that was

the path? To take the latter question first, John Carey’s work on the

spread of early Irish motifs to Wales and Brittany, including important

core elements of the Welsh Taliesin poems, the Mabinogi, and the

grail stories, all associated with this complex of Otherworld narratives

that morphed into the English green world, illustrate how this web of

transmission between islands and mainland worked earlier. And the

14th century marked a heyday of Welsh poetry influenced by those

earlier transmissions and embodied in the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym,

25

a contemporary of Chaucer. Apparently both the Gawain poet and

Chaucer, as noted before, had some exposure to story themes

originating from the Irish Sea.

In terms of the particularities of Chaucer, his biography

suggests how he was formed in the wake of the Black Death in a

society that was undergoing great change, in which he often found

himself negotiating a middle point as a poet. Chaucer’s dominant

iambic pentameter verse in his cycle itself carries the ghost of the two

beats of older Anglo-Saxon poetry evident also in the archaic

alliterative verse of the Gawain poet, just as some linguists recently

have posited that the ghost of earlier native British Celtic language

structures reemerged literarily in Middle English. Chaucer’s own

social contexts and his adoption of a native-language poetics made the

Otherworld tradition a natural path of poetic subversion of old

hierarchies and social identities, feudal forms nonetheless linked to an

emerging commercial modernity. Such poetic response involved a

rebellion against a culture that had equated non-being with evil in

effect, and thus had constrained the meaning of both nature and being

in ways that were no longer sustainable in the wake of the Black

Death, itself a cultural-environmental catastrophe, and other social

upheavals of the late fourteenth century.

In such contexts, ecological writing in The Canterbury Tales and

many other texts can be viewed in light as a re-translation of our

26

neologism ecology itself. Eco, a root from a Greek term for household,

and ology from the Greek root logos, one meaning of which can be

story. If we consider ecology as the story of home, we then perhaps

can see more clearly the operation of environmental semiospheres in

literary traditions, and how Chaucer’s cycle itself was an effort in his

time (parallel to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) to craft a new

story of home, an English-language ecopoesis if you will, from

materials at hand. In our current post-financial crash era, in which

many assumptions of capitalist globalization are in question, such a

reading of ecology itself becomes even more important. Against an

emphasis on corporate personhood evident in recent news, this sense

of ecology stands for the importance of personal human storytelling

within networks of traditions and families and specific ecosystems. It

also suggests the importance of premodern cultural studies in

recovering such a sense of ecology in our culture today. The most

successful movie of all time, Avatar, currently features what its

creator calls an environmental parable. However, it does so on

another planet and in a virtual reality of both the cinema and within

the plot, reminiscent of our contemporary scientific myths of space

colonization as the answer to environmental destruction of earth—a

reworking of old imperialistic narratives inherently associated with

environmental destruction. The ecocritic Ursula Heise makes a good

case for the importance of an ethos of cocosmopolitanism to overcome

27

potential fascist tendencies in bioregionalism. But approaches such as

the environmental semiosphere also offer ecocriticism a way to

recognize both ecological particularity and the boundless

environmental dynamic of Deleuzean bodies without organs, without

perpetuating myths of global capitalism. Modern examples of such

fantasy ecology if you will, such as the landscapes of Tolkien, Lewis,

and earlier in America James Fenimore Cooper, draw on green-world

traditions and had an effect on popular imagination about the

environment.

If there’s one thing I hope to convey today, it’s that ecology is

much more than recycling or the biology of things out there. Even

more, it’s how we tell and perform stories that shape our world and

ourselves, and how those stories shape us and our relationships with

each other. The archipelagic environmental narrative tradition that I

have tried to outline is in one sense crucially relevant to our current

global environmental predicaments. It is so in terms of ultimately

helping us imaginatively and empathetically appreciate the earth as

archipelago itself, in which neither eastern Atlantic nor Greek islands,

nor any other region or particular earthly outlook, can or should be

privileged. In our global ecology air and atmosphere and signs of all

kinds in addition to water and land shape the multi-elemental

archipelago in which we are immersed. Reading this particular

narrative tradition environmentally provides us with ways to

28

understand global cultural phenomena such as environmental

semiospheres, and realize how medieval Europe itself can be mapped

as a fractal archipelago comprising fluid lines of flight of

environmental imagination, such as that from deserts of the Near East

and rocky caves of Athos and Cappadocia, to great and small islands

and coasts of the east Atlantic, all entwined again with the larger

archipelagic earth.

29