Sermons in stones

LANDSCAPES are culture before they are nature constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock,"argues Simon Schama, perhaps not entirely convincingly, in Landscape and Memory (1995). There is, it seems, a prevailing, classical theory of landscape ever at variance with notions of landscape as a primitive, almost primeval entity. Investigating Aboriginal creation myths in his singular travelogue The Songlines (1987), led Bruce Chatwin to the realisation that here was a people confident that the Ancestors had sung the world and therefore their own landscape and history into existence.

Original writers such as the French historian, Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), and present day visionary, Tim Robinson possess a complex, anthropological overview merging geology, archaeology, folklore, culture linguistics, natural and social history which succeeds in placing landscape at the centre of inspired explorations. Both are passionately aware of man's role in the shaping of specific landscapes. In the case of Robinson, the limestone landscape he has chronicled in essays featuring the Burren and in Stones of Aran Pilgrimage (1986) and its sequel, Labyrinth (1995) is certainly surreal and geologically unique.

"In other landscapes the rounded might be equated with the natural and the right angle, with the human contribution, writes Robinson. "Here, (on Aran) though, it is as if the ground itself brings forth right angles. Because of the limestone's natural partings along its vertical fissures and horizontal stratifications, the oblong and the cuboid are the first fruits of the rock.

US journalist John McPhee's Rising From The Plains (1986) is an even more concentrated examination of a landscape exclusively explored through its geology and as Wyoming is the geological capital of the US, with a landscape dramatically shaped by wind erosion, the narrative purity of this book surpasses his previous geological studies, Basin and Range (1981) and In Suspect Terrain (1983), the two opening volumes of Annals of the Former World tetralogy which concludes with Assembling California (1993). McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder the poet, essayist and Zen environmentalist and the poet, essayist Wendell Berry along with more popularist, folksier talents Edward Hoagland and the Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard, are representative of a peculiarly American form of landscape and naturalist writing. This work may have been influenced by the fact that landscape has always been prominent in American fiction, possibly because of that, continent's vast geographical diversity.

LONDON emerged as a major character in British fiction throughout the 19th century, largely through the works of Charles Dickens, and this was maintained throughout the 20th century by writers such as Graham Greene, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Martin Amis. Interestingly, though, while landscape was a central romantic device for British 19th century writers, particularly poets and most obviously for the poet/novelist Thomas Hardy, British prose writers of this century tended, like their Irish counterparts, to look more towards the city. This makes Graham Swift's elegiac Booker contender, Waterland (1983), set in the flat Norfolk Fens landscape, even more remarkable.

But for a national fiction so given to the "Big City" novel, the urban experience and domestic realism, landscape has never fallen out of favour with American writers from Twain to Stein beck and on to Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks and Robert Olmstead. Southern writers as a group have always drawn on their lush natural habitat. From Faulkner's Mississippi, to thriller writer James Lee Burke's Louisiana, (several of his books are set in the Atchafalaya Swampland area), and on to the violent universe of the young Virginian Pickney Benedict. E. Annie Proulx chronicled the death throes of Vermont small farming in her first novel Poet cards (1992), a muscular story about a man haunted by an accidental crime.

IN HIS 1988 National Book Award winning study, Arctic Dreams, Californian Barry Lopez concedes that even the fierce beauty of the vast and remote wasteland region he is writing about has been subjected to man's behaviour "Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, the people who change nature ". Yet, despite encroaching industrialisation, the Arctic still belongs to the natural work.

"We have long regarded animals as a kind of machinery", writes Lopez band the landscapes they move through as backdrops, as paintings. In recent years this antiquated view has begun to change. Animals are understood as mysterious, within the context of sophisticated Western learning that takes into account such things as biochemistry and genetics."

In common with the novelist, travel and natural history writer, Peter Matthiessen, Lopez though a lesser prose sly list has, a philosophically inclined approach to reportage and also perceives the landscape through its" animals. Author of, Of Wolves and Men, Lopez has written extensively on wolverines, while Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard (1978) is a classic. Genres tend to overlap in this form of landscape/ natural history/travelogue report age, an observation which underlines the exactness of McPhee's writing.

There is a distinguished tradition of Irish travel writing exploding landscape and local topography, represented by William Wilde's The Beauties of the Boyne and the Black water (1849) and Lough Corrib and Lough Mask (1867) J.M Synge's outstanding reportage, The Aran Island (1907) Robert Praeger's The Way That I Went (1939) and Frank Mitchell's The Way That I Followed (1990), all of whom bring a scientific exactness to relaxed, entertaining narratives which are far more than personal accounts of travel experiences. Narrative landscape writing is neither as dominant nor as popular in this country as might be assumed, however.

Land has been, and continues to be, a central force, in Irish history and society, yet aside from Yeats's mythic celebrations, landscape is seldom celebrated as Ireland's poets and novelists frequently view the land as merely "countryside" and as a setting, often a farm, passively serving the characters as the place they are desperate to leave.

John McGahern's approach to land and/or landscape is primarily as setting. He views "landscape as a functional device serving the characters and admits to dismissing lengthy descriptions of nature as "over writing".

As Irish literature becomes increasingly urban, Heaney's memorialising of nature and its ordinary moments assumes a greater individualism, while John Montague's cautionary lines, "The whole landscape a manuscript/We had lost the skill to read, A part of our past disinherited" from A Lost Tradition" (The Rough Field, 1972), have become prophetic. Cityscapes are now more predominant in Irish writing.

THE lyric drama of Synge's and Liam O'Flaherty's island landscapes serve essentially to provide a platform for psychological tensions. One of the most outstanding and consistently unheralded Irish novels of recent years, Eugene McCabe's Hardyesque Death and Nightingales (1992) is a modern day, traditional 19th century narrative placed on a Fermanagh farm in a lake land setting. An atmosphere of moral unrest is instantly evoked through the metaphor of nature caught in a Shakespearean turmoil.

Novels such as Hardys The Return of the Native (1878) or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), confer landscape with a powerful presence. In McCarthy's violently apocalyptic, quasi Biblical odyssey across the American South West in particular, the landscape emerges as the central character in a narrative populated by a cast of largely interchangeable crazed killers. Blood red suns set over a world worthy of Bosch's imagination "They rode through regions of particoloured stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of trap rock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great slope tree boles and stones the lightening had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm .... They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing"

Nature as calm pastoral is the classical view. Since Romanticism, we want a more rugged, almost intimidating landscape. "Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery," the Victorian artist and critic, Ruskin, observed. "There are two landscapes, one outside the self and another within. Landscape is subject to how we perceive it, as well as our response, and how it in turn influences us." According to Barry Lopez, "one learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it like that between the sparrow and the twig."