Post-Pastoral in John Fowles’s Daniel Martin

Abstract

Narrative has been present in human society for many thousands of years. Lawrence Buell asseverates in the introduction to his recent book Writing for an Endangered Word, "The success of all environmentalist efforts finally hinges not on 'some highly developed technology, or some arcane new science' but on 'a state of mind': on attitudes, feelings, images, narratives" (Beck & Payne, as quoted by Buell, 2001, p. 1). I agree with Buell that narratives are central to our state of mind and thus are central to the manner in which we come to treat the natural world. The pattern of narrative that encompasses humans living on the land is known as pastoral, and it is a genre with a written lineage stretching back at least as far as the Alexandrian poet Theocritus from the 3rd century B.C. At the beginning of the 21st century, an era of widely acknowledged ecocrisis, we would do well to interrogate the place pastoral might, or might not, legitimately have among our cultural constructions of nature. As Greg Garrad (2004) writes of pastoral, "No other trope is so deeply entrenched in Western culture, or so deeply problematic for environmentalism" (p. 33). Might a narrative structure that has held sway on urban imaginations for many hundreds of years have led us down the wrong garden path? Of course we could reject pastoral. For a long time, there has existed dissatisfaction with pastoral narratives, which has resulted in the writing of anti-pastorals (a term I will explicate presently). However, if we are to give up on the genre altogether, then, it is my contention, we will be letting go of a potentially valuable piece of cultural equipment in our journey toward sustainability.John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a London suburb, in 1926 and currently resides in rural Dorset. He is well known as the author of six novels, including The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Despite the fact that the natural world has an important place in much of his fiction and is the subject of more than a third of his reflective nonfiction, Fowles has rarely been mentioned in the nascent field of ecocriticism. During the Second World War, Fowles worked on a farm when he was on holiday from boarding school. Eventually, he built these early experiences from the 1940s into key passages of his 1977 novel, Daniel Martin. An important aspect of ecocriticism is a reevaluation of literature of the past from an ecological perspective. This last major novel by Fowles depicts a complex human ecology, and it has suffered overly from critical neglect. If we attend to the narrative of Daniel Martin, we discover that pastoral, after having undergone profound transformation, may still lead us forward as readers to future accommodation in the biosphere.In the essay "Land," written to accompany a book of photographs by Fay Godwin (1985), Fowles praises the British artist Thomas Bewick for his honesty in painting the English countryside: