I have just finished reading Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths. It's some book. I don't often react to books the way I reacted to this book.
Superficially, in terms of subject matter, Wild is an account of Griffith's search for 'wildness' in various of the Earth's jungles, seas, mountains and deserts, although really it's about Griffith's struggle to find wildness and freedom in her own head (and body, it should be added: many of Griffith's metaphors and turns of phrase are calculatedly carnal); or possibly, coming at it from a slightly different angle, it's really about Griffith's efforts to find healing for her depression, which she thinks of as a deep soul-wound, in the wild places of the world.
But we've lately had plenty of memoirs about depression; one could easily tire of reading about the attempts of various writers to write themselves out from underneath the deep shade of the noon-day demon. What is remarkable about Griffith's book is not, then, so much the impulse that led to its creation, nor even the subject-matter, but the tone in which it is written and the artistry with which it is crafted. The tone is vatic, ecstatic: the book is, literally, inspired, in the old sense of that word. But the energy of this inspiration is channelled along the conduits of a very craft-minded consciousness. Wild is a crafted book, full of crafted prose; prose, moreover, that aspires to and often achieves the status of poetry, a book-length poem in prose, in which the words often take off in flights of onomatopoeic, synaesthetic, and neologistic joy. ('Take off'; 'flights': I do not use these words errantly--Wild is full of birds and if it is true that all art aspires to the condition of music, then Wild specifically aspires to the condition of bird song.)
What is also remarkable about Wild is that its artistry, its craft, arises out of her awareness of belonging to a tradition. The book very consciously (self-consciously even) comes out of the Romantic English tradition of poetic non-conformism: Bunyan, Milton, Blake, Shelley, etc. In many ways, Wild--especially in in its life-affirming if problematic coda (more on this below)--strikes me as being nothing so less as a modern attempt to complete Shelley's poetic fragmentThe Triumph of Life. This fragment, which Shelley left unfinished at his death, paints Life as an inexorable agent grinding down all human hopes, dreams and aspirations, but, since the poem started in Hell in imitation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, one could argue that it would have ended in imitation of Dante too, with a Heavenly reconciliation of Life to Man and Man to Life.
Wild, then, is the ghost of the Paradiso Shelley might have written, channelled through Griffiths for the benefit of the twenty-first century.
Is this too much? It's very rapturous, I know, but then, as I hinted above, I did react very rapturously to Wild: it generated in me that tingly energy I get in my belly when I come across art that is great and true. And yet, for all that it inspired me, it also infuriated me in almost equal measure--sometimes within the space of a single page; sometimes even within the space of a single paragraph!
Why? Simply because for all that the book is formally and poetically a work of 'Romanticism', it is philosophically a work of eco-feminism, which I have never--despite the many very fine poetic arguments made for it by such writers as Susan Griffin, Vandana Shiva, and Riane Eisler, etc.--found even remotely convincing.
The trouble with eco-feminism, as I see it, is the recourse it has to essentialism in its account both of nature and of women. The funny thing with eco-feminism is that it does not reject--as you might expect it to--the binary divisions so beloved of patriarchy (male/female, light/dark, heaven/hell, tame/wild, civilised/savage, etc.) but simply reverses them in order to offer a matriarchal mirror-image, substituting one set of essences for another, only with the order of marginalisation reversed so that what was bad is now good--wild better than tame, dark better than light, feminine better than masculine, and so on. It amounts to the enfranchisement of those who are currently disenfranchised, and the disenfranchisement of those currently in power, which makes for a nice revenge fantasy but is arguably not the best possible future one could imagine for the human race.
Nor does it tell a very convincing story about humanity's history. Since eco-feminists hold the feminine essences to be essentially (!) superior to the masculine they can only account for the suppression and marginalisation of the former through recourse to conspiracy theories. It woz the Xtian God wot done it, they argue, or His Priests; or maybe the Puritans, or almost certainly the Capitalists. It woz--needless to say--the Men, which is hardly the most sophisticated account of history you'll ever come across; it's more attuned to fable than actuality (though of course my penchant for seriousness is obviously a symptom of patriarchal sympathies, a sign that I wish to repress the fabular feminine).
Regrettably, there's a lot--an awful lot--of this sort of sloppy thinking in Wild, which accounts for my frustration with it. Given the post-structuralist turn in philosophy--no, scratch that, given the existentialist turn in philosophy--the notion that politics and history, not to mention individual identity, can be accounted for in terms of stable, static, and timeless binary categories is hopelessly outdated, the result of cleaving to a satisfying but simplistic model of Reality that occludes the contingency and complexity of the way things actually are.
Funnily thing is, I half suspect that Griffiths knows this; and although she never admits it to herself or to the reader, it's indisputably there (though perhaps only at an unconscious or intuitive level) in her idea of the wild as that which is self-willed. This formula ('wildness = self-willing') is the only gesture towards a definition of wildness that Griffith offers, but it is a hugely significant gesture, being more of an existentialist than an essentialist gesticulation.
Existentialism has as one of its core propositions the idea that existence precedes essence, which is to say that the essence of an individual existence can only be determined after the individual's death, if even then, and only according to the actions the individual performed in his or her life (rather than according to the abstract categories assigned to the individual by his or her society).
To put it aphoristically, existentialism rejects what Being is for what Being does.
The consequences of this proposition for individual and political action are profound because, if true, it makes us each responsibility for who we become. Our individual 'essence' is not given to us at our birth according to some binary and Platonic schema (our 'isness') but is, rather, something we create through our the action (the 'doing') of our self-will.
Given this, I find it very interesting that Griffiths should see in wildness the very essence--the quintessence--of self-will, both because (a) it offers a new way of thinking about existentialism in an environmental context and because (b) it calls into question the anthropocentric existentialist distinction between being-in-itself (being which is not free and cannot change its essence, including the being of animals) and being-for-itself (being which is free and can change its essence; i.e., human 'being'). Since I only finished the book a few nights ago I'm not yet anywhere near working out the implications of this manoeuvre, but the idea of the wild as a site (perhaps even the site?) of existential self-willing environmentalism is a very exciting, if as yet nebulous, notion.
And yet Griffiths, having raised the idea, then completely ignores it and fails to (or even resists) incorporating it into her actual argument.
Take her symptomatic final chapter, 'Wild Mind,' in which she tries to persuade us that the concepts of freedom/self-willing/the wild can be equated with Comedy--can be equated with a comedic, Dionysian sense of life--and that patriarchy, conversely, is burdened with an essentially (that word again) tragic or Apollonian disposition. It's not, for me at least, a terribly successful argument, and Griffiths doesn't help her case by bringing in Shakespeare as her exemplar, claiming him as essentially (bored now...) a comedic writer.
She might have chosen a better example. To claim Shakespeare as essentially or primarily a comedic or carnivalesque writer is to ignore what most people would claim as the greatest fruits of his genius, namely the four tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth). And it is also ignore the fact that Shakespeare never hewed very closely to the classical lineaments of dramatic form; indeed, his final plays are often called, to the dismay of categorising academics, tragi-historical-comedies because they really do seem to contain all human life--the high, the low, the tragic, the bawdy, all paradoxically jostling together.
It's the same with the wild, with wilderness; wild mind will never generated by those in hock to binaries, but only by those who are willing to accept that existence is a mash-up of tragedy and comedy and morality play and history play with a little bit of soap opera too, and maybe even some genuinely operatic melodrama thrown only if you're in any way passionate.
Read on...
