Revaluing Nature Writing: Toward Love and Flower Power
García Márquez, however, on December 8, 1982, stated in his Nobel lecture:
On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, ‘I decline to accept the end of man.’ I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth. 5
This speech, intended as a response to William Faulkner’s Nobel lecture, should suggest to ecocritics that perhaps place, if it is to play a role in how we treat the environment, might have to be a creation, a fiction, in order for human beings to recognize that the end of man is a simple scientific possibility. To believe in a fictional place, rather than an existing place, is a greater stretch of the imagination, and we should not dismiss magical realism as nature writing just because it is not an accurate depiction of reality. Magic has the power to transform experience; if we are willing to believe in Macondo for the duration of One Hundred Years of Solitude, then we might also be willing to believe that we, in reality, can create our own sweeping utopia of life on planet Earth—something it seems advertisers and consumers are willing to indulge.
Faulkner, of course, also created a fictional place, Yoknapatawpha County; and in his Nobel lecture, delivered on December 10, 1950, he stated:
[The] young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about. […] He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. […] Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. […] I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart. 6
In contrast to García Márquez, Faulkner uses the Nobel platform to instill in young writers an ego-consciousness, for there is no eco-consciousness, no mention of place but for the writer’s workshop, anywhere in his message. There is, however, an interesting claim that some ecocritics consider to be historically responsible for our environmental crisis: Human beings and their inexhaustible voices have, in Christopher Manes’s opinion, rendered nature “silent in our culture (and in literate societies generally) in the sense that the status of being a speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative.” 7 As Faulkner proclaimed it, our status as speaking subjects ought to be elevated to an even higher podium because we are inexhaustible speaking subjects (and although he is not considered a magical realist, he does extend the privilege of inexhaustible speech to the dead). I would add to this that nature writing must now include speaking subjects who will reveal the problems of the human heart in conflict not only with itself but with the hearts of nonhuman, non-speaking subjects.
