Thursday, June 18, 2009
I would like to add my two-cent's worth to the Jillian/Nam chain of comments. I agree with Nam that the village is an entity that rests UPON the jungle and that the village and jungle are two separate entities. I am not sure that I agree with the suggestion, however, that the jungle somehow represents "chaos." Rather it seems to represent an ultimate order because of its impermeability--the scratching, digging, clearing, and conniving of man on its surface is miniscule in comparison to its primordial fecundity and ability to survive. It deals with the village the same way that any organism deals with an intruder--it gathers its potency around the alien entity and forces it out. It is described as "a living wall about the village, a wall which, if the axe were spared, would creep in and smother and blot out the village itself(3)" Even the animals within it are at it's mercy. Of all the characters thus far, only Silindu seems to have an understanding of this. The fact that he is not a cultivator but a hunter places him within the natural order of the jungle to a greater degree than the rest who clear their chenas and succumb to a man-made hierarchy. He is aware of the rhythms of deprivation and plenty, the rules of hunter and hunted, the mystery of something greater than himself. He becomes one with it-- "when he started for the jungle, he became a different man...he glided through the impentrable scrub with a long, slinking stride...."(10) Yet he fears it--not the animals and other attendant dangers but the immensity of the "thing" itself. While Leonard Woolf may or may not have intended the jungle to become symbolic, it certainly seems so at this point, and Silindu crosses back and forth over the line of demarcation between the two forces of nature and man.
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I really enjoyed this take on the jungle and agree with it completely. More than the operations of power I think this novel relates the collision between civilization and jungle and the compounded suffering of humans living on the fault line of primitivism and modernity.
ReplyDeleteBrandon, thanks for the response. I remain preoccupied with the question about what constitutes a modernist response to nature. Both Sherwood Anderson and Leonard Woolf infuse every part of their narratives with references to the natural world which render that world less than passive. It is so easy to see how nature is viewed during the romantic period when it is obviously objectified and invoked in all the arts as something passive and outside human activity. But within modernism,the only connections that come easily between nature and the tenets of the movement is in art and architecture. Within literary works, the depiction relies on words and the treatment of nature seems very different in Anderson and Woolf--and in my opinion, often unaligned with modernist leanings. I will research more. Any further ideas? ;-)
ReplyDeleteNope. But it interests me as well. I think Woolf's treatment of the jungle is fairly inconclusive by the end of his novel. In Anderson's case, at times, it seems to correspond with mood, as it does in V. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, where both city and nature become associative tools for recalling feelings and memories and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteThat's all I got for now. I need to retrace the Anderson though. Woolf's jungle still baffles me in some ways. I hardly believe he felt nature's defenses to be stronger than man's ability to destroy, yet that is merely a literal look at the jungle, metaphorically I think the jungle occupies a tenuous position which relies on perspective for meaning. In one sense the jungle represents home, a message resonant throughout the latter part of the novel, yet to the civilized world, the jungle represents a place of mystery, evil, and primal fear. Rather than offer grounds for liminality it seems as if the jungle swallows its inhabitants, who are unfit for survival in both the modern and primitive worlds.
In short, the portrayal of nature in Woolf seems to align itself with Crane and other literary naturalists as a force ambivalent to the suffering of mankind, with Woolf possibly noting its similarities to colonial practices which harbor the same insensitivity.