3 - Desert Refrains

Summary

THE CLAMOUR OF THE EARTH: ECOPOETICS AND THE REFRAIN

This chapter examines several different literary motifs of the desert, from the Romantic period onwards, in a way that brackets notions of oikos and dwelling in favour of a semiotics of deterritorialisation. The oikos is not a foundational concept but conditional upon vectors of deterritorialisation that subject it to various degrees of ungrounding. I suggest in this way that we can read the desert as a literary and conceptual topos that calls our notions of place and our aesthetics of world into question. The philosophical deployment of the desert analysed thus far has emphasised how modernity devastates the experience of the local through the production of abstract spatiality. Rather than trying to reclaim a sense of place, however, we need to concern ourselves with the force of devastation itself since the displacement of life from the oikos is an ineliminable part of the modern experience of space. The genealogy of the desert in Romantic, modernist and postmodernist literature that I offer below – although I acknowledge it is only one possible genealogy – should be seen in these terms. The desert begins to appear as an aesthetic concern in Western art and literature from the end of the eighteenth century because it resonates with a modern sense of dislocation that is inseparable from a consciousness of the planetary.

We have seen how Heidegger, from whom ecocriticism has taken some of its key conceptual coordinates, maintains that a tension between the desert and dwelling is central to understanding the modern experience of space as ‘unworlded’. The uncanniness of modern spatiality, in which near and distant collapse into one another, comes from the paradox of living under conditions in which the resources for authentic dwelling have been stripped away. He defines language as ‘the house of the truth of Being’, but under the sway of technoscientific reason language undergoes and spreads a ‘desolation’ (Verödung) as it becomes a mere means of scientific or political instrumentality. Heidegger insists that poetry is a way of counteracting this desolating instrumentalisation of language. In famous analyses of poetry by Trakl, Rilke and Hölderlin, he argues that poetic language ‘calls’ into being a world very different from the representational ‘world picture’ of the sciences.