"An Infected Carrier of the Past": Modernist Nature as the Ground of Anti-Realism

Abstract

Nature as a concept has a history as an exceptional cipher, one that has often been supposed to give unique access to some interior, or even transcendental, meaning. At the same time, nature—in this case, defined as the external reality—has been posited as the ground of mimesis; aesthetic realism characterizes the artwork as a meaningful reproduction of external being, and founds its dynamism on a protagonist's exchanges within a more or less autonomous ecosystem. The tension inevitable in producing meaning simultaneously from both the visible and invisible has contributed to complex and sophisticated artistic movements, such as British Romanticism, and nature writing as a genre is marked by its anxious alternation between the two positions described above—between access to transcendence and encounter with immanence. In short, nature's status as a symbolic cultural fact has received extraordinary social endorsement through its representations in artworks immemorially. As such, it comes within the crosshairs of modernist critical and ironic sharpshooters. While nature's status as a cultural keyword has produced endlessly mutating conventions of writing and figural representation, it is nature's traditional promise of a direct entrance to ens vere existens as well as its alleged imitability1 that made nature a strange attractor in the early twentieth-century modernist milieu of epistemological doubt. This essay argues that we may derive new patterns of usage around the complex category called nature in a select grouping of modernist texts; taken together, these usages deserve to be treated as a coherent project that protracts the lifespan of a tradition of nature writing not usually credited as an important influence on literary modernism outside of the United States, while deliberately altering that inherited praxis. The essay concludes by inferring a modernist hope to assimilate the world in a new form of encounter—not mimetic and not transcendent—to achieve some solid footing on the earth as propaedeutic (and perhaps prophylactic) to the “invisible forces” of the new physics.