Narrative and "The Environment" (Part 2 of 3)

If we tend to perceive and understand our lives in terms of narratives, and if narratives have values like beginnings, middles, and ends, points-of-view, protagonists, and themes—values which are not necessarily inherent in the raw material of reality, but which are imprinted on the world by our principle way of knowing—then perhaps we can speculate about the consequences of our cognition by looking at how an important issue, “The Environment,” is framed within a manageably sized narrative, William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.”

To begin: “environment” itself is a concept like narrative.  If we consult the OED, we find that the word environment basically originates as “the circumstances or conditions that surround us.”  “Our environment.”  How often do we hear that phrase?  Not only do conditions surround us in a way that leaves us unconnected, isolated at the center, but we own those conditions.  In my teaching of writing, I often raise the question of what the word "natural" means, and I'm frequently astounded to discover that students do not consider themselves to be natural entities.  “Nature is what’s around me.”  Nature is a beaver dam but not a cul de sac.  A burrow but not a subway.  Things animals make are natural.  Things that humans make are artificial. 

There’s a close relationship between the limitations of narrative and the limitations of environment.  Both focus too discretely on the figure at the center, and isolate that figure from the world.  “Our environment” is the setting for “our story”—it’s there as background, and it’s subject to whatever the narrator or protagonist of the story does in the story’s plot.  At best it’s a stage and at worst it’s… well… Chernobyl or the Nevada Test Site or the Gulf of Mexico.  The killing ground.  Collateral damage.   

Right now, I want to look at a famous narrative, a poem that I like a lot, that’s pretty traditionally an environmental narrative.  It’s William Stafford’s “Traveling through the Dark.”

Traveling through the Dark

by William E. Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car   

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;   

she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,   

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;   

under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;   

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—   

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Now: I love this poem.  I love its overall wisdom and the gravity with which that wisdom is delivered.  I love its moments, like the warm exhaust turning red—how resonant that image/metaphor is, how it connects the body of a car to the living bodies at the center of the poem’s drama, and to the living world that’s listening around them.  I love how the protagonist's moment of reflection is hidden but its consequences are not.  What did he think when he “thought hard for us all?”  About how many deer are struck by cars every year?  More broadly about how we travel through this world, the wake we leave behind us?  Even more broadly about the essence of mortality, human and deer alike?  I like how the content of that thinking is hidden.  But that he does it—that he stops to reflect in that moment—he acknowledges as a mistake, his "only swerving."  He needs to act: to move the deer, get it out of the road, get his own car out of the road.  At any moment another car could come barreling down the Wilson River Road and “make more dead.”  But that thinking—it’s the swerve he can’t help.  I love the human-ness of that.

In a poem like this, I believe that the narrative form offers a kind of consolation.  The story itself, obviously, is not a happy one.  Damage occurs.  Death occurs.  An unborn creature is not just killed, but is almost sacrificed to the requirements of the automobile.  But the accomplishment of the poem itself—the making of an elegant, sensible piece that begins, develops, and perhaps most crucially, ends, gives us what Frank Kermode calls “the sense of an ending,” that resolution that we have known all along will arrive—the resolution that plot itself depends upon, and that creates the terms in which we move away from the piece.  The story is over.  We don’t really have questions.  We’re somber.  We understand that our actions impact the environment.  We understand that it’s inevitable.  We will kill things, and we must bear that as we drive away.  But the way the poem achieves its beginning, middle, and end… it allows us to move away from the dead animals with a feeling of satisfaction, accomplishment, that, I think, leaves us, more or less, unchanged as readers.  Our ways are confirmed, and we move on down the road.

The environment surrounds us as stories begin and end around us, through us.  The point of satisfaction that we reach at the end of a good story is a kind of stasis—as it concludes, the narrative becomes whole.  The structure that has been unfolding, the structure that has been suspected, the structure that we have been through has become individual, indivisible, unquestionably concluded.   

Are stories bad because we’re so accustomed to their conclusiveness?  Do stories automatically make us complacent?  No: I don’t want to overstate my case, here.  Stories, of course, can help us direct our efforts in the world and will continue to be central to how we make meaning in our lives.  It’s important, though, that we recognize that the form of knowledge we call story has values, and that those values can be limiting.  It’s my belief that poetry—in the way that it embodies other ways of thinking than the discrete narrative—can help us re-imagine our position in the order of things.  If changing our relationship to quote-unquote “the environment” is going to be a top priority in the generations to come, perhaps poetry can help us find new subjectivities, new forms of meaning, new positions to occupy that are not isolated from the action.