Mark Shadle

Eastern Oregon State College
mshadle@eosc.osshe.edu

 

 

Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995.

 

Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning.

 

— Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

 

Lithuanian Bison protected so they could be annihilated for “sport” by Goring as an incarnation of Tacitus’s transformed “wild man” of Germania, royalist Robin Hoods masquerading as mythological Green Men, the maniacal, neo-Roman hydraulics of Renaissance fountain builders, and whole drawing-rooms of mad Englishmen climbing Mt. Blanc with a pack train of gourmet food — these are just a few of the fascinating eccentricities of Simon Schama’s latest book, Landscape and Memory. But beyond its appetizing details, this book is an intriguing example of the increasingly problematic process of writing history in postmodern times.

 

Schama’s project is a controversial one. Besides examining the complex interpenetrations of nature and culture, he considers the difficulty of placing an environmental ethic within a postmodern “autobiography of history.” He also considers the tension between the individual and the communal, and between myth and history in light of “New Historicist” perspectives. Schama begins by following his lodestone of Henry Thoreau’s notion (and Magritte’s before him) that both “the wild man” and “wilderness” are more a matter of what we carry “inside” us than an exterior reality. He argues that the cultural appropriation of landscape may not be an entirely bad thing. In fact, he argues that this should be “a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration” (9). After praising their ability to make “inanimate topography into historical agents,” and “restoring to the land and climate the kind of creative unpredictability conventionally reserved for human actors” (13), Schama dismisses environmental historians like Stephen Pyne, William Cronon, and Donald Worster for their similarly “dismal tale: of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor” (13). Schama also steers clear of environmental critics like Max Oelschlaeger, whose call for new myths Schama paraphrases as the need to “repair the damage done by our recklessly mechanical abuse of nature and to restore the balance between man and the rest of the organisms with which he shares the planet” (13). Instead, Schama describes his own book as: “a way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have, but which somehow eludes our recognition and our appreciation” (14).

 

This new book will be accompanied by five filmed BBC television programs that will air in America. Unlike Professor Schama’s previous works — including Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, and Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)— this one seeks an audience beyond historians. Ironically, though, it is this book for non-specialists which calls the nature of history most radically into question.

 

Instead of being yet another explanation of what has been lost, Schama wants his book to be an exploration of “what we may yet find” (14). Certainly he is right that old myths — and the behaviors they generate and are generated by — are still with us. But while Schama’s “range” (historically and geographically) is vast, his internal summaries and conclusions about what we “may yet find” are curiously slight and vague. Notice, for example, his way of letting Krhushchev’s response to his uneasy inheritance of the European forest drift into mystery when he says: “But although for a century or more, the rulers of Russian empires, from Tsar Nicholas I to General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, liked to show off their royal hunt, there was, at the same time, something about the heart of the forest that remained irreducibly alien; impenetrable, resistant” (53). Khrushchev, here, is a stand-in for all the heads of state who regularly exploit a “mythological bath” in nature on their way to becoming “super-natural.”

 

Schama makes it clear that this paradoxical relationship between nature and culture is a venerable one when he describes “Rome’s mixed feelings about the forest” (83). He explains it this way: “On the one hand, it [the forest] was a place which, by definition, was ‘outside’ (foris) the writ of their law and the governance of their state. On the other hand, their own founding myths were sylvan” (83). Even though the world since John Locke has extended Divine Law into a natural law that extends culture into nature, it should no longer be ironic that a “macho” politician like Khrushchev, who liked to indulge his “feral nature” in the forest, would try to subdue it with his “Virgin Lands” Project. Similarly, Donna Haraway has shown how the gun-totin’ Teddy Roosevelt both fed upon and horribly distorted nature with chauvinism and racism through the gorillas exhibited in the Natural History Museum in New York City.”¹

 

Schama’s book presents us time and again with this basic problematic, reminding us that landscape myths and memories have both “surprising endurance” and a “power to shape institutions that we still live with” (15), and that landscapes themselves “are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock” (61). Far from hoping to unravel actual nature from its mythological or ideological representations, Schama aims to show just how mutually entangled these categories really are. It should be acknowldeged, he says, “that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery” (61).

 

Schama does not seem fully to appreciate the tragedy of this “muddling,” now being learned everywhere, which is that playing out our own mortality against the immortal “image” of the forest can quickly kill nature while some subconscious human feeling of immortality for our species goes on. A redwood is not merely the hot air of metaphor, but the slow growth of actual wood and a giant ecosystem through the cool air of several millennia. No nursery of metaphor can regrow it without the soothing coastal fog of time. While Schama does not “deny the seriousness of our ecological predicament, nor . . . dismiss the urgency with which it needs repair and redress” (14), he never cites the best accounts of how nature was wrestled into submission in America (e.g. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, or Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence), nor does he discuss the most thoughtful and esoteric attempts to recycle and transform old histories and myths in order to find again or anew what Charles Olson calls, in Poetry and Truth, an “actual world of value.”² This destination/process is the central work of Olson’s three-volume set of poems to reclaim Gloucester, Massachusetts, The Maximus Poems.³

 

Schama could appreciate Olson’s careful approach to myth and history as it came out of his readings in pre-Socratic Greek culture. In The Special View of History, Olson follows out and shapes Heraclitus’s notions that “man is estranged from that which is most familiar” and that “what does not change is the will to change” (Olson). This is brilliantly elaborated by Sherman Paul:

 

One lesson [of Olson’s wanderings in Mexico] was that there were people who were not estranged from the familiar, who lived in the physical world and knew how to attend it closely, to make it a “human universe.” Another was the realization that since time does not alter the fact that they were like us, there is no “history.” In the enthusiasm of his discovery of the Mayan world, the only “history” Olson acknowledged was the “second time . . .” This does not mean that he transcends history. Instead it tells us what his preparatory poem declares: that civilizations decline when there is no will to change.⁴

 

While postmodern writers like Olson would agree with Schama that “place is a made thing,” and that language is slippery, they have worked hard to imagine an intertwined world of creatures and language “placed” not in the noun of history but in the histori/city of the only absolute we can still believe in: “Man is, He acts.”⁵ While the entanglements of myth and history can contribute stability to society, they can also close it off to certain individuals, groups , cultures.

 

To clarify this, we need to consider the recent history of history. “Postmodern history” (as opposed to histories of the contemporary or postmodern period) has inherited the tension between incremental, authorial scholarship (“our civilization”) on the one hand, and autobiography (at once “my-story/stery” and the “his/her-story” implicit in Charles Olson’s translation of Herodotus’ “istorin'” as “to find out for yourself”) on the other. The New Historicism is the most prominent example of the kind of fractured historical practice this tension has produced. In the course of displacing both traditional historiography and the intellectual history of ideas, the New Historicism has opened the practice of history to the institutional and discursive violence inherent within the discipline itself, to the ways in which historical interpretation has functioned to shut out certain stories, to shut down possibilities of negotiation and exchange. While Stanley Fish has seen the value and efficacy of New Historicists’ work as essentially limited to the classroom (where, for example, it has helped to produce a new, multicultural canon),⁶ Hayden White locates in their practice a more thoroughgoing (pronounce it Thoreau-going) and Olsonian transformation of the subjects and objects of historical knowledge:

 

What they [the New Historicists] have discovered . . . is that there is no such thing as a specifically historical approach to the study of history, but a variety of such approaches, at least as many as there are positions on the current ideological spectrum; that . . . to embrace a historical approach to the study of anything entails or implies a distinctive philosophy of history; and that . . . finally one’s philosophy of history is a function as much of the way one construes one’s own special object of scholarly interest as it is of one’s knowledge of “history” itself.⁷

 

While Schama remains in many ways a traditional historian, this book takes on something of a New Historicist cast. In the “Introduction,” he gives his account a post-structuralist frame and a feel for the kind of situational and environmental ethics that have characterized much New Historical work when he says: “My own view is necessarily . . . historical, and by that token much less confidently universal. Not all cultures embrace nature and landscape myths with equal ardor, and those that do, go through periods of greater or lesser enthusiasm” (15). Using the work of Mary Lefkowitz and Norman Manea, Schama castigates both Mircea Eliade in Europe and Joseph Campbell in America as structuralist myth-lovers and ultimately as hero worshipers impatient with democracy (133).

 

Yet there is the residue of the structuralist-idealist in Schama when he confesses that “it is clear that inherited landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics: their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we still live with. National identity, to take just the most obvious example, would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland” (15). Despite his clear recognition that this “national identity” has been the engine of such political catastrophes as Nazism, Schama seems to place himself at least partly under its peculiar spell.

 

Schama apparently wants to have it both ways. The tension between his philosophy of history and his practice of history escalates in his accounts of visiting the sites of his Jewish heritage in Poland, or his American in-laws in the redwoods of the American West. In these places Schama “re-places” himself as historian to re-incscribe landscape. Working more in the sub-tradition of American literary history epitomized by Fred Turner in The Spirit of Place, where Turner revisits the sites and communities of some famous American writers, Schama tries here to feel the effects of history.⁸Having absorbed both the need for “objectivity” from the sciences and the value of situated subjectivity from the humanities, Schama, more than many historians, finds that the garden of personal narrative presents him with a tangle of difficult choices.

 

Historians can no longer easily decide which rhetorical and stylistic devices to use. Ironically, this is because we have set our “his/her-stories” aside, as something for the province of “expert” historians writing for incredibly diverse audiences, rather than as the responsibility of the more local “tribe.” What Schama’s alternately scholarly and autobiographical approach reminds us of is the call to “compose” the rough draft of any history as something personal. Out of several observations of revisited sites and serendipitously created intersections of texts, the “my-story/stery” becomes the “his/her-story,” inclining not toward the complete abstraction of some “universal” audience, but toward the scattered members of what composition scholars Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford call a new or “invoked” audience who have lived in the places/events (however metaphorically idealized or mythologized) under question.⁹Out of the seed of personal observation stem a description and analysis that will, in their greatest and final abstractions, paradoxically challenge the limits of an individualistic perspective.

 

Barry Lopez explains this process in what might have been a perfect epigraph for Schama’s book:

 

It is through the power of observation, the gifts of the eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward, it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity. For as long as our records go back, we have held these two things dear, landscape and memory. . . . Each infuses us with a different kind of life. The one feeds us, figuratively and literally. The other protects us from lies and tyranny. To keep landscapes intact and the memory of them, our history in them, alive, seems as imperative a task in modern time as finding the extent to which individual expression can be accommodated before it threatens to destroy the fabric of society.¹⁰

 

Yet the beauty of this process is accompanied by a danger which Lopez also describes:

 

The intense pressure of imagery in America, and the manipulation of images necessary to a society with specific goals, means the land will inevitably be treated like a commodity; and voices that tend to contradict the proffered image will, one way or another, be silenced or discredited by those in power.¹¹

 

The increasing resistance to this “pressure of imagery” has led in American Studies to a critical engagement with myth-symbol, as for example in Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography, where Turner argues that we Americans have substituted mythology for history.¹² Such an argument relies on the notion of a history distinct from mythology. Schama’s rather different engagement with myth-symbol, with its emphasis on the complex interweaving of myth and history in European experience, can assist Americans in better understanding their own situation. In this respect his book can be seen as extending a project that links together such diverse work as Raymond Williams’s study of the politics of ideas in The Long Revolution and Evan Connell’s tracking of a wanderlust of business in A Long Desire.¹³

 

Schama’s book demonstrates the need in America to dive back into a European past of “mythological history” and “historicized mythology,” but it also implies a need to study what we have lost of other venerable histories and mythologies around the world. Lopez, continuing his discussion of the danger of image and mythology, helps us appreciate this postmodern urge to “get behind the Greek” when he says:

 

All local geographies, as they were defined by hundreds of separate, independent native traditions, were denied in the beginning in favor of an imported and unifying vision of America’s natural history. The country, the landscape itself, was eventually defined according to dictates of Progress like Manifest Destiny, and laws like the Homestead Act which reflected a poor understanding of the physical lay of the land.¹⁴

 

Lopez’s concerns are being acted upon in America by a host of reflective, often multicultural, writers — writers who are in many cases important postmodernist historians in their own right, drawing on “folk” cultures that comprised “postmodern” knowledges and strategies long before the Modern Language Association staked out that term and territory. This work, by writers like Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor or Leslie Silko, Schama does not examine in any direct way. But there are many points of potentially fruitful contact between such work and his, since both are centrally concerned with the ways “landscape” is produced and consumed by those who would claim merely to be observing or exploring or preserving it: writers, artists, tourists, museums, governments, corporations, and of course historians.

 

Ultimately, the great value of Schama’s book would seem to lie in the urgency of the questions it raises rather than the clarity or completeness of the answers it can provide. In his admirably idiosyncratic way, Schama is wrestling with the central problem at the intersection of history and nature, the problem of how to put memory and interpretation positively to work in the natural world. Once we have deconstructed the mythological, morally-informed landscapes of the past, where are we to locate what Olson calls the “actual world of value”?

 

Notes

 

1. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City 1908-1936,” Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry Ortner (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994).

 

2. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977). Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1800 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1971).

 

3. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983).

 

4. Sherman Paul, Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent American Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978) 29.

 

5. Charles Olson, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970) 34.

 

6. Stanley Fish, “Commentary: The Young and the Restless,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Weeser (New York: Routledge, 1989)315.

 

7. Hayden White, “New Historicism: A Comment,” in Weeser, 302.

 

8. Fred Turner, The Spirit of Place: The Making of an American Literary Landscape (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989).

 

9. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” College Composition and Communication 35.2 (May, 1984)155-171.

 

10. Barry Lopez, “Losing Our Sense of Place,” Teacher Magazine (Feb., 1990) 188.

 

11. Lopez, 42.

 

12. Frederick Turner III., Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (New York: Viking Press, 1980).

 

13. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia UP, 1961). Evan Connell, A Long Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1961).

 

14. Lopez.