by Stefan Ekman
Other orders of reality are integral parts of fantasy worlds; the possible can be extended, geographically at least, into the impossible. Fantasy stories make use of, or even center on, the thresholds between the possible and impossible, turning the domains into some of the genre’s most notable settings. There are other domains as well, domains that are not geographical areas but are certainly governed by very different rules from each other. The next chapter investigates one such set of domains: that of nature and culture.
4 : Nature and Culture
One of the most intriguing divisions that fantasy literature enables us to rethink is that between the domains of nature and culture. Many scholars maintain that the principal cause of today’s many environmental problems, from ozone depletion to the proliferation of genetically manipulated organisms, is the way in which Western society perceives there to be a difference between nature and culture.1 While nature and culture are terms that are both well-known and slippery to define, our cultural relationship with nature is dominated by problems of delimitation as well as of conflicting traditions: Where exactly do we draw the line between nature and culture? Is there even a line to be drawn? Are we not of natural origin and therefore part of nature ourselves? In that case, how can things we do be anything but natural? In the actual world, these questions have become relevant parts of the debate about how to deal with environmental issues; and through the fantasy genre, they may be approached from any number of new directions.
Cities may seem a typically cultural phenomenon, but they are actually among the most interesting, and certainly the most distinct, interfaces between nature and culture. They provide a limit or boundary that is or is not transgressed or permeated, a locus where both sides of the relation can be studied. This is just as true of cities in fantasy fiction. There may well be, as Brian Attebery claims, some “archetypal green world that underlies all fairyland”;2 but generally speaking, the city in fantasy is neither connected to fairyland nor to any archetypal green world. Its magic is of a different kind, less predictable and straightforward. By investigating the relationship between nature and culture, it is possible to understand what function that relationship has in the imaginary cities, but also to see what fantasy cities can tell us about alternative ways of exploring this important and familiar yet complex duality.
TWO SLIPPERY TERMS
Defining “nature” is an undertaking fraught with complications. In Thinking about Nature, Andrew Brennan reflects that given the variety of ways in which the term nature is used, a case could even be made for dropping it from descriptions.3 Kate Soper, in What Is Nature?, remarks that the term is “at once both very familiar and extremely elusive.”4 A quick glance in the Oxford English Dictionary shows us a term that has accumulated a considerable number of only vaguely related meanings. Nature can, for instance, mean “[a] malleable state of iron” and “[a] class or size of guns or shot” (both meanings now obsolete). It is a word that can denote anything from bodily functions in need of a handy euphemism (related to, for example, excrement, urine, semen, and menstrual discharge) to the characteristic disposition of a person. It can even mean the entire cosmos.5
For the purpose of discussing the relation between nature and culture, the most suitable definition in the OED is that of nature as “[t]he phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.”6 The last clause brings to mind Soper’s point of departure, namely that “[i]n its commonest and most fundamental sense, the term ‘nature’ refers to everything which is not human and distinguished from the work of humanity.”7 It is further helpful to consider Brennan’s outline of the distinction between broad and narrow (or absolute and relative) notions of “the natural.” The basis for his broader notion is that human behavior is natural insofar as we find the same behavior naturally in other animals (particularly higher mammals), and that human management, production, and interference make events and products unnatural.8 Brennan and Soper are in general agreement with philosopher Keekok Lee, who starts off her list of seven senses of “nature” with what she terms naturenh (non-human). She defines naturenh as opposed to culture, which “involves human agency and its products.”9
“Culture” can have almost as many meanings as the word nature. Depending on which discipline we turn to, definitions will vary. It has, for instance, been suggested that “culture” is “a class of phenomena conceptualized by anthropologists in order to deal with questions they are trying to answer.”10 In their 1952 investigation of literature in (mainly) the social sciences, anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn include nearly three hundred different definitions of the term.11 In “Classic Conceptions of Culture,” Peter Worsley describes the two main ways in which “culture” is used outside of the natural sciences. The first, oldest, and here least relevant way is to use the term more or less synonymously with “the fine arts.” The second usage “is the idea of ‘culture’ as a way of life” which at the broadest level may refer to “almost anything that distinguishes human beings from animals.”12 This is obviously the usage that primarily opposes Lee’s naturenh as well as Brennan’s and Soper’s views of nature and the natural. Daniel G. Bates attempts to define culture in slightly more detail. According to him, culture is the “system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors and material objects that the members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another,”13 a definition that is useful for my discussion.
The duality nature—not-nature (or culture—not-culture) has some drawbacks, however. The first, and most obvious, is that if nature is that on which human management, production, and interference—“the work of humanity”—has had no impact whatsoever, then precious little nature is left in the actual world. Through the greenhouse effect and depletion of the ozone layer, humanity has affected the entire biosphere.14 Humanity’s history is one of large-scale changes to its habitats; for millennia, entire landscapes have been artificially changed as the result of human intervention. Historian Lynn White, Jr., points out that the upper valley of the Nile would have been a swampy jungle were it not for some six millennia of irrigation; and both he and Frederick Turner remark on the deforestation and overgrazing that occurred in antiquity, which left the hills of the Mediterranean basin in the state they are in today.15 As recently as twelve hundred years ago, the first Maori settlers began the process that would soon turn the deep forests of New Zealand into today’s rolling hills of tussock grass. The second drawback is that even if there is something left to call nature once we have removed everything on which humans have had any impact (and, in fantasy literature, there might well be), the duality allows for no shades of gray. It is strictly binary. It would seem reasonable to add nuance to this duality. In De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), Marcus Tullius Cicero writes that “we sow cereals and plant trees; we irrigate our lands to fertilize them. We fortify river-banks, and straighten or divert the courses of rivers. In short, by the work of our hands we strive to create a sort of second nature within the world of nature.”16
A “second nature” created by human labor would not qualify as natural according to Lee’s naturenh or Soper’s and Brennan’s nature without human impact. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to consider Cicero’s “second nature” not only in terms of culture. A garden, for instance, could be considered to occupy a position between nature and culture.17 In a garden, apple trees, roses, and lawns grow according to natural principles, and if they were not picked, trimmed, and pruned, they would grow out of control. It is the gardener’s control that makes the garden what it is; and without control, the garden, as garden, would sooner or later cease to be. Rather than discussing nature only in terms of human impact, we can usefully look at nature in terms of human—or cultural—control as well.
Most people would agree that primary rainforest is part of nature but that shopping centers are not, and that a car is not natural but
that an ancient oak is. But when it comes to bonsai trees, wheat fields, and pedigree dogs, there is not the same certainty. The difference between the former and latter examples is that the bonsai, wheat field, and dog have been subjected to human control. Their natural behavior has, in varying ways, been checked or changed, turning them into examples of Cicero’s “second nature.” The rainforest and the ancient oak are (presumably) not culturally controlled but are what I term wild, part of a wilderness.18 Once nature comes under our control, we tame it. We force the bonsai, the field, and the dog to develop and behave in ways that fit our culture. Gardens, parks, potted plants, agriculture, and pets are all examples of tame nature, nature under culture’s control.19 If that control were to cease, their tameness would give way to another state. The bonsai would grow larger leaves and branches, other plants (“weeds”) would mix with the wheat monoculture, and the dog’s behavior, if not its appearance, would adapt to a life in the wild—and its offspring a few generations of uncontrolled breeding down the line would certainly no longer be pedigree animals. As culture’s control ceases, wildness (re)asserts itself. This shift to a state of wildness and, eventually, wilderness is not restricted to borderline cases such as the ones just mentioned; brownfield land at former industrial sites exemplifies this process, as do the continual battles between gardeners and the invading forces of moss and weeds. If tame nature is not sufficiently controlled, it will not behave according to human wishes. It will go wild. That wildness which manifests itself when nature is no longer controlled is here termed feral nature. Over a year, a decade, or a century, wilderness returns, and even though traces of human impact may remain, control is gone; nature is again wild.
The relation between nature and culture varies from society to society. In the actual world, whether the two are even opposed is open to question. According to Darwin and the theory of evolution, humans are the result of a natural process. To cut a long argument short, if we come from nature, and have developed through a natural process, then why should anything we do be unnatural? Or anything we make?20 Or is there a sliding scale between nature and culture? Are entities and behaviors more or less natural, more or less cultural? Then there is another notion, namely that humans are in some sense superior to the rest of the (natural) world. In Western society, this notion stems primarily from the Judeo-Christian tradition.21 Genesis tells us that we “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”22 The contemporary, and secular, view of Homo sapiens as standing “highest in a natural order of ‘lower life forms’” comes to us from the scriptures and from the concept of the scala naturae or “ladder of nature,” which was originally conceived by Aristotle and later brought into Christian learning.23 Two impulses thus compete in the Western view of how we and our culture are supposed to relate to nature. From a Darwinian perspective, we are a product of nature, not its masters, while religious tradition positions us above the rest of creation. This contradiction is one of the foremost reasons for our problematic relation between nature and culture.
In fantasy, and particularly in fantasy set in secondary worlds, neither Christian thinking nor Darwinism is a compulsory ingredient. Writers are free to construct their own relations between nature and culture. Tolkien thus uses a Christian foundation when his world, Arda, is explicitly created as the dwelling of the Children of Ilúvatar (elves and humans):
[T]he Ainur saw that [the creation] contained things which they had not thought. And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labor of their music had been busy with the preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone.24
The nature of Middle-earth is thus clearly separated from the cultures of elves and humans. In Aslan’s creation of Narnia (C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew [1955]), humans are even more external, as they come from outside the world. In both cases, a reading that sees culture as separate from nature is not only possible, it is imposed by how the worlds are created. Other works present other approaches. In David and Leigh Eddings’s The Dreamers series (2003–2006) and Terry Pratchett’s Eric (1990), the world is created by divine labor, but its life develops through evolution. The fantasy genre offers alternative ways of relating to the nature–culture duality, including not regarding it as a duality at all, just as it offers alternative ways of dealing with and relating to any other concepts. When examining the construction of this duality in fantasy literature, my point of departure for each reading was that nature and culture formed separate domains; but as the four following examples demonstrate, that is not necessarily the case.
Returning to Bates’s definition of culture, we find that he includes artifacts or “material objects.” The most palpable material object, or accumulation of material objects, that “the members of a society use to cope with their world”—that is, to control their surroundings—is the city. The division of labor developed in cities made possible the economies of specialization that led to the urban accumulation of capital (just as agriculture and food preservation allowed for a shift away from hunting and gathering), resulting in a society of specialist professions.25 In Occidental society, the city has become the locus of cultural interchange and could be considered the pinnacle of culture. The city limit is an obvious meeting point of nature and culture, of outside and inside; but it is also a boundary that, in various ways and in either direction, can be transgressed, permeated, or penetrated. It is a boundary in physical as well as nonphysical terms, and it is a boundary that confines as much as it protects.
Two points need to be made regarding the selection of the four cities discussed here: no assumptions as regards the relation between nature and culture found in them were made when they were chosen; and they were picked for their distinct differences rather than for any similarities they might have shared. It could even be argued that apart from belonging to the same literary genre, all they have in common is that they are imaginary cities. That trait is central to the discussion, however, because a study of the relation between nature and culture in works of fiction is by necessity a study of settings. If a story is set in (a version of) a city from the actual world, such as London or New York, no matter how fictionalized, the relations between nature and culture in the fantasy city could be influenced by circumstances in its actual-world counterpart. As this book aims to examine the relation in fantasy, such an admixture is undesirable. The four cities are thus all imaginary, even in the case of Newford, which is set in a primary world. Apart from that, the four cities have very little in common. Tolkien’s Minas Tirith is set in the portal–quest fantasy of The Lord of the Rings, in a culture that corresponds somewhat to early medieval Europe. Newford is a city that could well exist somewhere in today’s North America. While Charles de Lint’s many stories cover a wide range of fantasy, they are mainly of the intrusive type. New Crobuzon appears in immersive-fantasy novels, even though China Miéville’s works also contain aspects of both quest and intrusion, and the industrial city is mainly based on Victorian London. Patricia McKillip’s Ombria, finally, is a clearly immersive fantasy reminiscent of Renaissance Italy.
The quartet of cities I have selected thus demonstrates some of the many shapes and flavors that fantasy cities come in. In fantasy literature, we find cities scattered in the path of the questing hero, urban oases in the wilderness providing succor before the dangers of the road are braved again. Others are complete settings in themselves, not places to be visited but environments to be explored.26 Some are beautiful and pleasant; others are dark and oppressive. Some are empty and deserted, others are teeming with life. The vast majority are in some way perilous, threatened or threatening, and, as John Clute observes, “a city in fantasy tends to be a place where the action converges.”27 By looking at the relationship between the city a
nd nature in various texts, we can discuss the relation between nature and culture in those texts and see how the nature–culture division is presented in these places of converging action.
THE RETURN OF THE TREE: BRINGING NATURE BACK INTO MINAS TIRITH28
The people of Middle-earth live in a wide variety of dwellings, from the comfortable hobbit holes of Hobbiton to the vast underground halls of Khazad-dûm, from Bree with its friendly inn to Edoras with its goldroofed Meduseld; but very few of these dwellings are called cities. Certainly, Khazad-dûm was once a light and splendid place, the realm and city of Dwarrowdelf;29 but when the Fellowship passes through, the place has long been called Moria, the Black Chasm. It is a ruin or ghost town rather than a city, inhabited by orcs and run by a dreaded balrog. Caras Galadhon, the capital of the Galadhrim, is a city of trees and lawns, and while it does not conform to traditional ideas of urbanity, contemplating it offers some interesting insights into an alternative relation between culture and nature. The elven city is therefore briefly examined at the end of this section. Apart from Khazad-dûm and Caras Galadhon, however, most of the communities mentioned in The Lord of the Rings are villages or small towns.
