“THE LAND CREATED A BODY OF LORE” : THE GREEN STORY IN JOHN STEFFLER’S THE AFTERLIFE OF GEORGE CARTWRIGHT PETER JAEGER University of Western Ontario E c o lo g ic a l or “Green” movements in North America and Europe have been gaining increasing prominence during the last decade through positive representation in the mass media and other cultural apparatuses. Writers in numerous disciplines are also currently producing discourses that are rooted in the ethics of environmentalism. In a recent issue of Critical Inquiry, for example, Michel Serres makes a plea for a new “natural contract” between the human species and the natural world. For Serres, nature is not a passive object that is to be dominated by culture; rather, nature “behaves like a subject” in its capacity to act upon culture (9). Barry Rutland writes that the postmodern dissolution of the grands récits of Reason and Progress en ables us to discern the emergence of a new master myth: “the Green Story of environmental conservation, sustainable growth, and equitable sharing” (133).1 Still another example may be found in D.M.R. Bentley’s The Gay] Grey Moose, where Bentley analyses Canadian literature in terms of what he labels as an “ecological poetics” — that is, a critical praxis that elabo rates on two assumptions: that humanity and nature are interdependent, and that diversity in the human and natural world must be “safeguarded and fostered — to generate a method of reading which diminishes the gaps among people, their world, and their feelings” (274). Bentley surveys the presence of ecological poetics in Canadian literature and criticism from the seventeenth-century writings of Henry Kelsey, through various texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the twentieth century with a discussion of the writings of Northrop Frye, Margaret Avison, and George Bowering (among others). While it is clearly possible to trace the presence of ecological poetics in North American poetry, fiction, and criticism from the seventeenth century to the present, environmental concerns have been growing at an extremely rapid pace since the mid-1950s. In Earth House Hold (1957) Gary Snyder describes poetry as an “ecological survival technique,” and claims that the outward “equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness” (122); and in The Dharma Bums (1958) Jack Kerouac creates a character who achieves a type of mystical awareness and unity with nature while in the mountains of the 4 i American northwest. These early beat writers profoundly influenced various “counter-culture” writers of the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, Richard Brautigan’s novel In Watermelon Sugar (1968) constructs an idyllic society existing symbiotically with the physical environment, and John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972) speculates about the effects of global pollution in a not-too-distant future. In Canada the Green story has developed in a similar manner. Much of Margaret Atwood’s poetry has an ecological sub text. The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), for instance, follows Snyder’s metaphorical linking of the wilderness and the inner life: “Whether the wilderness is / real or not / depends on who lives there” (13); “at the last / judgement we will all be trees” (59). Christopher Dewdney is one of many Canadian writers2 whose current work is extremely friendly to ecological readings: [T]here is a silence turning everything in on yourself. It is August and in the wind there is a silence. In the stillness of the shallow inlet there is a silence, there is a single bird, confidential. Its song unfamiliar & beautiful. The shallow inlet. It sings in a strangely staggered series of descending fifths, ending on a note so wise and fearful your heart races in the eerie perfection of it. In the silence of it. (15) Dewdney’s interest in the physical world and in local landscape makes his writing consistent with the idea that humanity and nature are interdepen dent.3 An ecological poetics is also at the root of John Steffler’s first novel The Af terlife of George Cartwright (1992). StefHer narrates the supernatural story of an eighteenth-century adventurer who is unable to die because of his mis treatment of the land and of aboriginal peoples, and whose ghost haunts...