From Roost to Rookery: Environmental Memory in Mark Cocker’s Crow Country

Abstract

This article expands Lawrence Buell’s notion of environmental memory beyond its seemingly singular focus on the natural environment in relation to the human. It does so by paying close attention to the nonhuman animals that also inhabit these spaces. As our understanding of animals becomes ever more complex, it becomes clear that they each have a specific subjective relation with, and memories of, the environments they inhabit. These more-than-human memories also deserve our recognition and understanding and can help us formulate a less anthropocentric approach to memory studies. Mark Cocker’s Crow Country, a seminal piece of British New Nature Writing, consequently allows us to imagine where such a more-than-human memory can begin and what it could look like. In his book, he reflects at length on the entanglement of landscape with both human and crow memory. By reading his text alongside Jamie Lorimer’s idea of affective logics and Diana Taylor’s conception of the ephemeral repertoire, we can not only see how humans act and remember in relation to other beings, but also what the role of literature might be in these more-than-human interactions.