“We are each tiny
parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true.” When I read a sentence like that one, from James
Rebanks’s much-praised A Shepherd’s Life,
I grow suspicious. What is it to claim
that a place, an experience, a practice, is real? As opposed to what?
Then I grow pedantic:
real as opposed to nothing, I insist. “Real” means “actual.” Brand-new suburbs are real. So are plastic trees, made-up religions,
neurotic projections and hallucinations, and every page on the internet. Every last one, an actual thing. What is so specially real about sheep that
descend from earlier sheep owned by your ancestors in the same place where you
live now?
Of course, this kind
of thinking will not get very far.
Calling something real pays it a certain kind of compliment, marks it
for distinction. And so, the same
question again: real as distinct from what?
Well, usually as
distinct from those other words that Rebanks uses: false or insincere rather
than true; insubstantial rather than solid.
Fair enough. But calling these
qualities real raises the
stakes. It draws an ontological
borderline and expels to its far side everything flimsy, fleeting,
disingenuous, and unconvincing. In
practice, what is convincing is often what is familiar: old, well-trodden, with
chthonic notes in the bouquet.
So what “feels real”
will often be an object of nostalgia, and in that respect a fantasy and flight
from the real present – which may feel oppressive and inspire flight precisely
because it really is flimsy,
fleeting, full of halfhearted work and disingenuous words. The real can be the mortal enemy of the
actual, route of an attempted escape from it.
What counts as “real”
in this sense will often be conservative.
Collective nostalgia, in particular, is likely to seek after a golden
age of real men and real women, real faith and real causes, as opposed to the
shifting and hybrid genders and compromised movements and institutions that we
live with in fact. But this is not
always true: some trans activists insist specifically on the reality of their non-traditional
genders, as opposed to the false and constraining actuality of hard binaries. Talk of reality can be revolutionary rather
than conservative, abruptly recasting all that merely is as artificial and obfuscating.
Marx did something similar in Capital
when he invited readers to follow him into capitalism’s basement workshop,
where they could envision the extraction of surplus value, which no one had
ever seen or touched, but which, he argued, was more real than all the
contracts and property rights of the marketplace.
**
“Reality” has often
had affinities with “nature” and all that is “natural.” Real food is food from the earth, whose
sources you can touch, whose taste you recognize, food for which your language
has an old and perhaps colloquial name. Real
work is work with material things, tied to the rhythms of seasons, animals, and
crops. For Americans, in particular,
wilderness, the most natural place, has often seemed the most real place, the
place to encounter both the world and one’s self unmediated and unmodified. Never mind that the places we call wilderness
are designated as such by law, and managed by federal agencies to preserve a
prescribed set of “wilderness values.”
Wild nature, as a paragon of reality, takes work to produce and
maintain. It is unavoidably artificial.
The very idea of
nature is under pressure these days, and rightly so. Scientists and humanists alike argue that the
planet has entered the Anthropocene, a geological era when humans are a force,
maybe the force, in the earth’s
development. In this time, there is no
more nature that is independent of human action: from the upper atmosphere to
the chemical composition of soil to the mix of species in an age of mass
extinction, our mark is everywhere. The
world we find can only be the world we have made. The question cannot be, as environmentalists
have often put it, how to save the world, but only what kind of world, with
limited powers and foresight, to try to shape.
The Anthropocene has
a brute empirical dimension, based in the great and growing human effect on the
world. It also has a more theoretical
dimension. The discovery that there is
no more nature comes along with the insight that “nature” has always been a way
for people to talk to – and about – one another. Nature has always been cultural and
social. So aesthetic concepts of the
beautiful and sublime have been bids for status by social groups that prized
them, and attempts to vindicate experiences that were precious to them – such
as scaling mountains to admire creation’s wild and dangerous place. So the Lockean idea that nature was made to
fulfill human needs, if only people would clear, plant, and develop it,
rationalized the displacement and expropriation of native peoples in the
settler colonies of the Americas and Oceania, entering the political and
religious culture of early United States and the law of Australia and New
Zealand. Such opposites as monarchy and
democracy, slavery and revolution, have all been celebrated as the favored
principles of nature, depending who is interpreting it, and with what purposes.
Of course, these
motivated interpretations of nature do not feel strategic to those who
undertake them: they feel natural, sincere, real. Nature has always stood for what comes before
politics and culture, is not susceptible to their judgments, and so sets their
limits. In this way, talking about the
principles of nature has been a self-concealing mode of cultural politics, a
politics premised on denying – with a pure heart – that it is a politics at
all.
Followed through,
embracing the Anthropocene would mean giving up this unearned purity of heart,
and surrendering the happy protest, “It’s just natural!” It would mean embracing the necessary
artificiality of every version of the “nature” that is a joint product of human
activity and the rest of the world. That
would require finding new and clearer ways of talking about what is precious in
the forms of halfway artificiality that have been called natural.
The same goes for the
real.
**
In
a rare interview earlier this year, the reclusive Italian novelist Elena
Ferrante told the Paris Review that
sincerity and accuracy, the hallmarks of the real, ironically falsify writing
that relies on them. She said,
“The most
urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my
material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The
more pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the
sentence, what tone best suits the things I know? … It’s not enough to say, as
we increasingly do, These events truly happened, it’s my real life, the names
are the real ones, I’m describing the real places where the events occurred. If
the writing is inadequate, it can falsify the most honest biographical truths.
Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a
police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the
plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a
matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able
to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or
cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything
to its needs.”
In
other words, we should accept that the real is an aesthetic achievement. Appreciating this point preserves the value
of accuracy, the fidelity to fact that should be the standard for a piece of
reporting or a police report. It also
preserves the real from the enervating confusion with mere accuracy. It is, instead, an achieved resonance between
expression and experience, or between subjective experience and its objective
setting, that seems to clarify and dignify both. What makes the real, in this sense, is a
circuit linking self and world in a feeling of mutual fit that seems to touch
something timeless, even as it is, itself, fleeting.
Understood
this way, the real is the antidote to a banal literary and aesthetic realism
that amounts to literalism – the kind of storytelling that wants you to know it
really happened. Making literary reality
is not unlike making Anthropocene landscapes: only the materials and certain
formal constraints are given, and the goal is an aesthetic excellence that
stems from self-consciousness about what experience one is trying to produce,
and how the materials and craft can sustain or undermine those.
This
way of praising the real leaves room to doubt it where it doesn’t belong or its
use is, as Ferrante puts it, falsifying.
For instance, in American constitutional law, the “originalists” who
insist that the constitution’s phrases must mean today what they meant in 1789 are
engaged in an aesthetic interpretive exercise that falsifies the nature of
legality. Justices such as Antonin
Scalia gather scraps of old legal text and dictionary definitions, assemble
them in the soft light of claims about the ethos of the American Revolution,
and conclude, with an air of inevitability, that the constitution guarantees
the right to own a gun, or contains no right to abortion or same-sex marriage. When it is done well, the effect can be
exhilarating: total persuasion! The
judge opens his hands, palms out to show that they are empty and innocent. Reality made me do it!
The
originalist’s achievement mystifies the ways that law should be transparently
artificial. It makes a world that was
not there before, by forming rules – such as liberty and equality – that are
pure human creations. It makes a
dwelling-place, as surely as civil engineers make a city. Its power should be lucid and open, hence
potentially democratic, or at least open to criticism at every point. Concealing its world-creating work by
cloaking it in an old “reality” mystifies the workings of power. Even when the execution is impressive, the response
should not be admiration.
**
Recognizing
reality as an aesthetic achievement can also liberate world-making as a form of
play. Think again of nature and its
landscapes. Recognizing that they are
doubly artificial – made or preserved by human power and interpreted in human
experience – need not leave them flattened and lifeless. The suspicion that this is so, that new and
palpably artificial landscapes offer nothing, is what drives people back to
familiar kinds of “real” places, places with sheep and cottages and old
paths. But creating and interpreting
those is a way of inventing the real, not finding it! And so, with that in mind, we should be able
to invent it elsewhere, and in other ways.
A week in
the Peloponnesian countryside recently showed me something about how
landscapes, stories, and the mind can play together. I thought all the time of the gods and spirits
that were supposed to have animated the peaks, forests, and streams. The history of the place invited these
thoughts, of course, but so did its shape.
The
instinct that gods live in high came alive in a terrain with steep slopes that
open up into broad terraces and generous mountaintops, level meadows shaped for
revels. Why would there not be a life up
there, inaccessible but imaginable?
It is a
place of intense microclimates. A slot
canyon rips a lush, dusky line into an arid mountainside. Surrounded by dry pines, backed against a
thousand-foot cliff, a vertical stream throws out a fan of hanging grasses,
then comes to ground at the roots of big, gnarled figs and planetrees (also
called sycamore maples). It reminded me
of Northern California, and also of the Banias, a river cleft at the base of
the Golan Heights in northern Israel, named by Roman occupiers for Pan. In the spring, cold, blue-tinted meltwater
races through a green, heavily shadowed rent in a near-desert baked in gold
Mediterranean light. Where a blade of
that gold slices between wood and leaves and strikes the water, two worlds
meet.
This kind
of anomaly is a place for spirits. It’s
a product of a place vitally unlike itself, always generating its own
exceptions and inviting imagination in its interstices. It’s a home for something of the place yet
not entirely of the world – a dryad, say, or river spirit.
In the
modern west, the aesthetics of landscape generally comes down to two
categories. One is beauty, the quality
of a restful and regular place – a lovely farming landscape, for instance. The other is sublimity, the half-frightening,
half-elevating power of huge, alien nature: a volcano, a whirlpool, the ocean
in a storm, lightning in the Sierra Nevada.
Both beauty and sublimity have been traditionally figured as emanations
of the real, emblems of a unified and given world, the product of monotheistic
creation.
The
animated landscapes I’m describing fall into a third aesthetic category: the
uncanny, the place we aren’t sure what to make of, which may or may be looking
back at us with eyes like but also unlike ours.
These are the landscapes of the
strange familiar, where we recognize ourselves but are also frightened and
baffled. They are inhabited, personal,
vital, and alien, all at once. Animist,
pagan places, they have a variegated vitality that fills me as I race and
stumble across them, trying to reach the next strange grove. That is, they invite play more than
reverence, and the reverence they elicit is only one of their moods, another
form of play. In them, the mind plays
tricks on itself by invitations – some serious tricks, some not so serious.
I would welcome a world where such
experience is more common. This does not
mean returning to the real, but it does not mean rejecting it, either. It means learning the safe ways to have
dangerous play with it.
