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E-226 Literature and Nature
In this essay I will look at the use of language and imagery in literary works where naturewriting is found. I will examine how authors like Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville,John Muir and Emily Dickinson describe nature and how they relate to nature in their works, more specifically if they describe it accurately in a representational way or metaphorically. In my discussion I will apply concepts of Laurence Buell and his “dualaccountability” in order to explain the paradoxes found in nature writing. In this essay mymain focus will be how the accuracy of nature writing is achieved in different ways. Inaddition, I will look at how this creates alienation
or 
familiarization, distance
or 
closeness between the reader and nature through the use of anthropomorphisms, personification,gendering and “naturalization”.
Nature’s inexpressibility
“Nature” is a very vague concept and is widely used in many contexts, from human natureto brute nature. What is natural and what is unnatural? Herman Melville tried to be very precise in his depiction of nature, more specifically the marine nature, nature at sea, in hismonumental
Moby Dick 
. Not only did he attempt to describe sea life in specific detail, butalso the whole nature of whaling did he venture to describe in meticulous detail. Thisattempt to represent nature as truthfully as possible is a problematic one as seen in thefollowing passage from the novel, which could also be regarded as a metaphor for themysterious feelings we have for nature. It is a relationship with mixed feelings of admiration and hesitant fear of the unknown:Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at thewondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. Avast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay
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E-226 Literature and Nature
floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curlingand twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless objectwithin reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,chance-like apparition of life.
(Melville,
Moby Dick 
, “Squid”, 261)
In this passage Melville tries to describe a sea creature identified as a gigantic squid.Interestingly he makes use of words and phrases like “the secret seas”, “innumerable”, “no perceptible face”, “blindly” and “unearthly”. Nature is almost portrayed as something thatcannot be described. The “secret seas” possess creatures with no human feature, no firm body but “a vast pulpy mass” with no face and “no conceivable token of either sensationor instinct”. Moreover it seems like this creature of the depths is a “chance-like apparitionof life”, it is part of the unpredictability of nature. In its extreme paradoxical sense itappears to be almost “unnatural”, which complicates even further the conception of whatnature really is.Henry David Thoreau also finds it difficult to portray nature at Walden Pondaccurately to his readers in
Walden
, although he depicts nature as truthfully as he canthroughout. Nevertheless he makes use of anthropomorphisms and religious imagery inorder to communicate the beauty of nature to the reader: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature” (
Walden
, Chapter 9: “The Ponds”, 1866). Thoreaumakes use of anthropomorphic imagery to express the inexpressible. The inexpressibility of nature and the impotency of language are expressed in someof Emily Dickinson’s poems. Language is impotent in describing nature accurately to thereader because of the cultural constructs that bind language. Emily Dickinson arrives at
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E-226 Literature and Nature
this conclusion in her poem “668”: “Nature is what we know/Yet have no art to say/Soimpotent Our Wisdom is/To Her Simplicity”.Dickinson’s poem expresses frustration because we cannot use language todescribe nature in perfect detail due to its insufficient means of representation. Her attempt to make nature familiar through language fails. She can only experience natureaccurately through her senses, or intuition. To some extent we can say that nature, or themeaning of it, is inexpressible. Melville and Thoreau would both perhaps agree to this.
The Idea of Accuracy
 Nevertheless, nature writers do try to communicate their experience with nature in their respective works. Thoreau does it in his detailed description of Walden Pond and Melvillethrough Ishmael in
Moby Dick 
. Melville becomes almost scientific when he lets Ishmaelexplains the tail of the whale:The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it, andyou find that three distinct strata compose it: - upper, middle, and lower. The fibresin the upper and lower layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle one, veryshort, and running crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, asmuch as anything else, imparts power to the tail.
(Melville,
Moby Dick 
, “The Tail”, 347)
Almost like a marine biologist Melville lets Ishmael cut through the sinews and skin of thewhale with words as his tools with a clinical precision in this passage. The accuracy isextreme and Melville makes every layer of the tail “visible” to the reader without using anymetaphoric language of any kind. With the precision of a doctor he cuts through the skinin an attempt to portray the workings of the tail, as a pathologist would show how a
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