AVISO DE PRÁCTICAS DE PRIVACIDAD DE HIPAA

This chapter continues the theme of liminality raised by the discussion in chapter three but within the context of nature rather than gender. In continuing to explore how modern desert writing reveals much about the land left behind (the third of the research areas posited in the introduction of this thesis), the work of desert scientists, captured in moments of sublime contemplation of the natural world, is examined for the commentary it offers about the human place within nature. In identifying the artificial nature of boundaries between disciplines (for example, between scientific documentation and travel literature) that has become a feature of exploration narratives since the 1950s, this chapter employs ecocriticism to show how modern desert texts often reach towards a more equitable definition of the human relationship with the environment.

In The Desert and the Sown (1907), in a passage that runs against the grain of the familiar trope of empty desert, Gertrude Bell refreshingly slips behind the gaze of those she travels with to identify a different desert narrative to the one normally associated with Western travel in Arabia. Identifying that ‘Arabs do not speak of desert or wilderness as we do’, she writes:

Why should they? To them it is neither desert nor wilderness, but a land of which they know every feature, a mother country whose smallest product has a use sufficient for their needs. They know … how to rejoice in the great spaces and how to honour the rush of the storm.1

Bell’s association of the desert inhabitant with a deep understanding of nature is in itself a familiar trope suggestive of an Eden lost to urban societies, but it also hints at a moment of empathy within her own experience. The rejoicing in ‘great spaces’ the honouring of the ‘rush of the storm’ suggests that Bell is able to perceive the connection between Arab and desert because she shares a similar respect towards the ‘mother country’. This connection could be read in two ways. If read through the familiar Western travel perspective of the desert as a zone of masculine posturing through quest, exploration and exploitation (often conflated as science), Bell’s landscape, as the provider of the ‘smallest product’ for human sustenance, may appear feminised, domesticated or tamed for human need. A different reading, however, is the one that Bell posits as an Arab perspective: ‘to

1 _{Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown: Travels in Palestine and Syria [Heinemann, 1907] (Mineola,}

New York: Dover Publications, 2008), p.60. For a biography of Bell, see Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (London: Phoenix Giant, 1997).

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them’ this desert is comprised of a more harmonious balance between the human being and his or her place within the environment. Nature in this passage, then, is not mere scenery staged for a human story, it is represented as architect of its own space, and timekeeper of its own rhythms. With the human story reduced to only one small constituent part amid the ‘great spaces’, this passage can be read as sharing less of the colonising preoccupations of Bell’s own era while anticipating more of the postcolonial sensibilities of the end of the twentieth century. Within a passage that appears to move desert as mother country into centre stage, there is a response to nature that not only runs contrary to the dominant discourse of Bell’s day but also prefigures the ecocritical concerns of our own.

This chapter probes the familiar tropes of Arabian desert representation and considers to what extent they collapse into more nuanced constructions of the desert space under an ecocritical reading. Thus far, in a thesis that argues that the desert is often used as a tabla rasa upon which to project fundamentally Western preoccupations, the landscape has formed only the backdrop for human endeavour. The desert featured as the zone of historical re-enactment in footstep travel in chapter one and as an extreme otherness for heroic quest and endeavour. The desert as locus of human nostalgia for presumed lost innocence, and observed vicariously through the lives of the Bedu was discussed in chapter two; the desert also functioned here as a periphery, as an other in its own right, hovering beyond the urban, helping to define the metropolitan, and as an inconvenience to be crossed en route between human settlements. More positively, in chapter three, the desert context was posited as an opportunity to redeem marginalised voices, in particular, of women, written out of the dominant discourse; by extension, and perhaps less positively, the desert was explored as a gendered space awaiting human penetration to become fully real or present. In each case, the desert retreats into the background as the focus falls on narratives that concentrate on various human interests – on presentations of self, other and gender. This chapter, in contrast, considers modern scientific works where the desert is moved into the foreground. This requires an ecocritical approach which, as Robert Kern suggests, ‘becomes most interesting and useful … when it aims to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere’.2

2 _{Robert Kern, ‘Ecocriticism: What Is It Good For?’ in The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003, ed.}

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The selection of scientific texts (given their vintage qualities of mapping and naming) to demonstrate the foregrounding of nature may seem like an unlikely choice to advocate for nature and the wild from a non-human perspective. In recent decades, ‘scientific writing’ has become increasingly focused on the published communication of objectively observed facts for a community of peers; ‘science writing’, meanwhile, targets a broader readership and has allowed for a less technical approach. Both definitions assume a human centre, however, imposing order on a random otherness; neither generally admit to passages of lyrical prose.3 In science writing connected with the Arabian Desert it is nevertheless possible to see moments when the author’s observations are unable to be contained within their formal discipline, when the writer bursts out of the text to express a delight in the land and its occupants almost in spite of their field of study. At these moments, the scientist cross-dresses as travel writer, recording the experience, the strongly-felt emotions, of encounter with nature. In resisting categorisation according to established taxonomies, for example of physics, of entomology or of geography, the work of these scientists resists homogenisation and migrates across boundaries – in other words, it becomes ‘hybrid’, both in a taxonomical sense as being heterogenous, and in a postcolonial sense, as work that inhabits and reveals border zones. Such work mirrors the ‘magpie’ approach of ecocriticism which applies an ‘attitude of inquiry ... that neither foregrounds nor ignores [human] involvements, [but] draws equally on knowledge from the sciences, the humanities, and the arts’.4 _By applying an eclectic ecocritical perspective to these moments of transgression in late twentieth-century science writing, it is possible to identify a step towards the kind of earth-centred writing that Lawrence Buell, one of the founders of ecocriticism, recognised as expressing a ‘more even relationship of nature with culture, society, and the individual subject’.5

It is perhaps no coincidence that science writing that displays these moments of imaginative interlude appear to be a specific feature of late twentieth century desert accounts; such texts appear at the same point as the ecocritical movement becomes

3 _{See Richard Nordqist, ‘Definition and Examples of Science Writing’, Glossary of Grammatical and}

Rhetorical Terms [online], ThoughtCo (2019), available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/science- writing-1691928 [accessed 12 July 2019].

4 _{SueEllen Campbell et al, ed. The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture}

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2011), p.ix.

5 _{Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary}

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established as an independent and politically alert discipline.6 These texts share with that critical corpus a sense of the environmental concerns of the day and, in the moments in which they describe a ‘more even relationship’ with nature, become part of a general agency for change. This study’s contribution towards this agency for change is in identifying and analysing the moments when the Arabian desert is presented as a place of value in its own right and becomes part of what we might call a productive ‘greening of the desert’.7 _{As tidy as this sounds, however, the reality is obviously far more nuanced} and the discussion concludes with a broader exploration, beyond science writing, of some of the eco-critical issues surrounding wilderness representation. The Arabian desert belongs to a constructed landscape that is no more ‘politically [or] historically innocent’ than the literature and culture that describe it; the effects of this invested geography is felt even today, for example in issues of conservation and land management.8 _{To understand} the context of these modern ecocritical issues, it is important to review the prevailing historical discourses that inform wilderness writing in general, and Arabian desert writing in particular, and it is to this context that the discussion first turns.

Emergence of science writing from travelogues

If for the Bedu of Gertrude Bell’s description the desert is peopled with a series of lived and remembered connections, ‘thicker with human associations than any city’, for Europeans it remains resolutely connected, even in the main desert narratives of today, with emptiness, absence and abandonment.9 Locked in the ‘imaginative geography’ of the West, the desert is generally presented as a place of implied mental and physical privation, symbolised by the solitary desert wanderings of Biblical prophets.10 As Roderick Nash notes, in his history of the concept of wilderness, such landscape has long been ‘instinctively understood to be something alien to man – an insecure and uncomfortable environment against which civilization had waged an unceasing

6 _{William Rueckert was apparently the first person to use the term ‘ecocriticism’ in 1978, but the term}

took on its current usage as a subbranch of literary and cultural studies in the late 1980s and 1990s. See Ian Buchanan, Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory [2010] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

7 _{See Campbell, Face of the Earth, p.183 where she usefully makes the useful point that ‘language itself}

can complicate our understanding of deserts’; Campbell mentions ‘green’ is associated with ecological health, while the ‘brown’ of deserts seems ‘ecologically injured or destitute, even when they may be vibrant with healthy biodiversity’ (p.183). Desert is itself a word that connotes absence.

8 _{Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin-Peregrine, 1978), p.27.} 9 _{Bell, Desert and the Sown, p.60.}

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struggle’;11 _{Western pilgrims, explorers and scholars have been drawn to ‘this cruel land’} – a land, which as Wilfred Thesiger famously suggested, ‘can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match’ – and for centuries have weighed their accomplishment in terms of the challenge it represented.12 As we have seen, much recent travel writing connected with the region weighs its own accomplishment in turn against the exploits of those earlier pioneers, particularly T.E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger, whether literally in second or footstep journeys or solely through intertextual reference.13 In analysing the effect of Joseph Conrad’s work on the image of the Congo, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan write that ‘every modern travel book that features the Congo as travel zone at some level reinscribes Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness (1898)’. In the same way, almost every modern travel book on Arabia reinscribes Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, turning the desert into an equivalent ‘abject zone of extreme yet undifferentiated “otherness” within which every aspect of life – landscape, people, culture, politics – presents itself as always already wrapped in metaphor and myth’.14 _{As such, the Arabian} desert, over the centuries of its literary delineation by Western travellers, has become a textual zone, at best ‘incidentally geographical’.15

‘Incidentally geographical’, as a term used by Holland and Huggan for overinscribed places, may be a useful way of characterising the literary representation of the Arabian desert, but it should not obscure the fact that other modes of desert discourse have been ‘specifically geographical’ in their objective and that, until relatively recently, both literary and geographical content could be found operating simultaneously in desert literature. If, as Melman suggests in reference to Doughty’s work, desert narratives may be ‘superficially described as stories of the conquest of the void, or wilderness, as well as tales of risk which position the individual explorer in front of a hostile nature’, then geography has provided one of the ways in which explorers have sought to make sense of the undifferentiated otherness – one of the ways, in other words, in which the human being has attempted to rationalise or tame wilderness.16

11 _{Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind [1967] (New Haven: Yale University Press,}

2014), p.8.

12 _{Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands [1959] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), Prologue, p.15.} 13 _{See chapter one of this thesis.}

14 _{Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary}

Travel Writing [1998] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p.69.

15 _{Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, p.67.}

16 _{Billie Melman, ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “the cradle of Islam’”, in The Cambridge Companion to}

Travel Writing, ed. by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.112-119 (p.114).

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In an opening chapter of Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt identifies one of two seminal historical episodes that have impacted on travel and travel writing as the moment when, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Linnaeus introduced a comprehensive system of taxonomy. Pratt shows how the naming of things brought about a transformation in the manner in which people explored and, more to the point, wrote about their explorations. Instead of the compendiums of zoological and botanical data that formed the appendices of earlier travel tomes, the ‘observing and cataloguing of nature itself became narratable. It could constitute a sequence of events, or even produce a plot. It could form the main storyline of an entire account’.17 This is significant when transposed to the context of desert explorations in Arabia because suddenly there is something to write about in an otherwise often prop-less landscape. The eye, lacking any immediate distraction, focuses in on the detail of the minimal life in view, and becomes observant of the minutiae in a landscape of essentially unencumbered forms. It is of little surprise, then, that embedded in the exploits of each lonely traveller, copious descriptions of the natural world appear in all the major desert texts in a process that can be charted back to the eighteenth century. This is the point when travel writing in general becomes institutionalised in that it becomes sponsored by and presented to the Royal Society;18 indeed, from the eighteenth century and for much of the Victorian age, as Paul Fussell notes, travel becomes ‘something like an obligation’ upon those who were keen to contribute to the intellectual project of accumulating knowledge.19 That activity eventually becomes streamlined into new disciplines. In this context, Holland and Huggan show that travel writing joined ‘anthropology, geography, and the human sciences generally as one strand of a new regime of knowledges’ that helped to encode the region of scrutiny.20 Journal writing in the early and mid-nineteenth century became key to the accuracy of observation where precise notes on time, number and distance formed part of what Carl Thompson terms the ‘epistemological decorum’ of the day,21 and ensured that, as Fussell notes, travel writing was able to ‘share the space and borrow the authority’ of human sciences.22

17 _{Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [1992] (London: Routledge,}

2008), Chapter 2 and p.26.

18 _{Hulme and Youngs, Cambridge Companion, p.29.}

19 _{Paul Fussell, ed., The Norton Book of Travel (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 1987), p.130.} 20 _{Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, p.92.}

21 _{Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p.46.} 22 _{Fussell ed., The Norton Book of Travel, p.130.}

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If, as these critics suggest, a literature of science and conservation grew from within travel literature it could not be contained by it and the observations of amateur gentlemen (and one or two lady) scientists over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries become less about making a record of the flora and fauna encountered at a given point in time and more about evidencing and legitimating the author’s presence within a geographical location. Desert writers during this period were cognisant of their continuing duty to record the physical nature of the earth, but largely as a reflection of the human story within it. Arabia Deserta, the work of desert explorer Charles M. Doughty, is a classic of its kind:

Of surpassing interest to those many minds, which seek after philosophical knowledge and instruction, is the Story of the Earth. Her manifold living creatures, the human generations and Her ancient rocks ... that vast mountainous labyrinthine solitude of rainless valleys.23

The many detailed, scientific observations that Doughty makes on the desert lands in Arabia, attention is always drawn ultimately to man’s (and the gender is specific here) interest in the landscape and the thoughts that it inspires about his place in the universe. This is reflected in the poetic literary tone in which the ponderous, multisyllabic words match the ‘mountainous labyrinthine solitude’ of its subject and hyperbole helps to set the description within the specific aesthetic of the Romantic Sublime. Described as ‘the Story of the Earth’, this is in fact the story of Man, striding through a femininised landscape, looking for philosophical insights imposed on the construction of place. The landscape is made performative, in other words, for human instruction.

Similar devices are used in the celebrated passages of natural description in T.E. Lawrence’s account of Wadi Rum (in Seven Pillars of Wisdom) and of al-ramlah, known as the ‘Empty Quarter’ to Western travellers, in Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix.24 Thomas, learning from the Bedu with whom he is travelling, writes that ‘the sands are a public diary, that even he who runs may read, for all living creatures go unshod ... No bird may alight, no wild beast or insect pass but needs must leave its history in the sands, and the record lasts until a rising wind bears a fine sand along to obliterate it’.25 _{Keen to} make a more permanent record than a footprint in sand, Thomas details the fennec foxes,

23 _{Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta [Cambridge: 1888] (London: Jonathan Cape and the}

Medici Society, 1926, 2 Vols), Preface to second Edition, p.ix.

24 _{See T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph [1935] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986),}

Chap. 62 and Bertram Thomas, Arabia Felix (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932) where, for example, Chapter 14 is entitled ‘A Geographical Note on Rub Al-Khali’.

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sand cats, the ‘twelve varieties of lizards, all alike endowed with pointed snouts for diving in the sands’, the scorpions that were ‘of pale green colour’ and three types of snake, ‘all of sand colour, boa, horned viper, and colubrid’.26 _{As an amateur scientist, Thomas is} identifying, classifying, noting and indeed celebrating nature for the education and enjoyment of learned society back home.27 Given the Arab context, his work, and those of fellow explorers also contributes to the academic tradition of Orientalism, ‘a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples, and civilisations’ that Said argues is a formidable part of the colonial project.28 While science lends authority to the travel account, it also lends authority to the hegemonic perspective expressed therein.