Submerging the imperial eye: Affective narration as environmentalist intervention in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide

Abstract

In Richard Flanagan’s novel, Death of a River Guide, the narrator, river guide Aljaz Cosini, occupies an unusual position; throughout the novel, he remains underwater, drowning in Tasmania’s Franklin River. Bringing postcolonial analyses of the novel form into conversation with ecofeminist critiques of rationalist constructions of the human, I contend that Flanagan uses the position of his narrator to deliver a critique of the imperial eye and the rationalist construction of the human that it manifests, revealing their complicity in reinforcing an illusion of human separation from non-human nature that has destructive environmental consequences. Affect scholarship provides a framework for studying the alternative model that Flanagan provides as he narrates Aljaz’s “visions” in ways that force a rethinking of the human in non-reductive, non-binary terms that preserve the relationality between mind and body, human and non-human nature. Attending to Flanagan’s narrative strategies in the context of Tasmanian environmental history and Flanagan’s environmental activism, I contend that his novel constitutes an environmentalist intervention that demands increased attention to the role that constructions of the human play in our relationships with non-human nature and to the role that novels can play in perpetuating or challenging destructive understandings of the human.

For more than thirty years, a battle has been raging over old-growth forest in Tasmania, Australia. ¹ In September 2010, the logging corporation at the centre of this battle, Gunns Ltd., conceded that they would stop clear cutting old-growth forests. ² Speaking to the press about this decision, the company’s new chief executive Greg L’Estrange admitted that the corporation had been outmanoeuvred by environmentalists. L’Estrange observed that environmentalists “had used three key leverage points to win broad community support – public emotion, multi-level government involvement and market action”, which he opposed to the company’s tactics of relying on scientific logic: “in response, the industry maintained a stance that science will prevail” (Vowles, 2010: np). As L’Estrange contrasted emotional connection and communal action to scientific and legal constructions of human relation to the land, he began to disclose the differing conceptions of human relation to the non-human environment embraced by the opposing parties in this conflict. Read symptomatically, his comments help to reveal that the battle that has been raging in Tasmania is not simply about whether or not or how to log old-growth forests. The different tactics that each group brought to bear also served to mobilize different conceptions of the human, showing that beneath the battle about how to interact with the forest lies a conflict between understandings of the human, understandings that might be categorized as affective conceptions that value interdependencies between body and mind, human and non-human nature, and rationalist conceptions which reinforce binary divisions in order to justify the instrumentalist treatment of non-human nature.

This struggle over how to define the human and understand human relationship with the non-human world also emerges in Richard Flanagan’s first novel, Death of a River Guide (1994). ³ Published in Australia in 1994 while the forestry battle was in full force, Flanagan’s novel demonstrates one way that he has participated in environmental debates. Trained as a historian, Flanagan previously published histories of the Gordon River country and Tasmania’s Green movement, issues that gained widespread attention during the 1980s campaign that prevented the damming of the Gordon River. Throughout the 2000s, as his reputation grew, Flanagan used the opportunity that his literary celebrity provided to call attention to the logging of Tasmania’s forests, initiating a boycott of the Tasmanian literary prize he helped to establish and writing articles about the destruction of Tasmania’s forests for the Australian, British and American press. ⁴ Locating Death of a River Guide in this context suggests that the novel constitutes one aspect of Flanagan’s broader environmental activism, and my essay explores how in addition to environmental content, narrative strategies and the form of a novel can constitute environmentalist interventions. I contend that Flanagan’s novel issues a challenge to environmentalists as well as loggers and developers; it demands that environmentalist discourse not only challenge specific, localized threats to the non-human world, but that it also examine dominant conceptions of the human that create justification for such threats in the first place.

Asserting that Flanagan’s narrative strategies constitute an environmentalist intervention, I am building on the work of scholars such as Jennifer Wenzel, who argues that “the texts we read make their interventions not as empirical evidence of ecological crisis or as ready-made blue-prints for action…but rather through their particularly literary mediation” (2011: 151). Postcolonial ecocritics have explored how deforestation figures as “a thematic strand” in national literatures (Paravisini-Gebert, 2011: 108), but investigating the “particularly literary mediation” novels perform also demands attention to narrative strategies and narrative imbrication with the epistemological and the ontological, as evidenced in the scholarship of Mukherjee (2010) and Huggan and Tiffin (2010). Theorizing a green postcolonialism, Huggan and Tiffin contend that formulating a postcolonial environmental ethic demands “ontological and epistemological revision” of anthropocentric conceptions of the human (2007: 7). My essay proposes that Flanagan’s novel advances this project of revision first by highlighting connections between colonizing ontology, overseeing narration and environmental exploitation, and second by developing an affective narration that reflects human immersion in co-constitutive relationships with the non-human world.

Critiquing the imperial eye

Arguing that rationalist conceptions of the human have damaging consequences for human/nature relationships, I am drawing on the extensive critique of rationalism formulated by Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood. Plumwood explains: “Rationalism and human/nature dualism are linked through the narrative which maps the supremacy of reason onto human supremacy via the identification of humanity with active mind and reason and of non-humans with passive, tradeable bodies” (2002: 4). She also clarifies that “we should not mistake rationalism for reason – rather it is a cult of reason that elevates to supremacy a particular, narrow form of reason and correspondingly devalues the contrasted and reduced sphere of nature and embodiment” (2002: 4). Rationalism, then, relies on interlocking dualisms that elevate reason and denigrate the body, defining the human in ways that displace the devalued qualities onto women, colonized peoples, and nature and justify their exploitation by figuring them as passive resources. Plumwood acknowledges that narrative practices can support such instrumentalist understandings of human and non-human others through “a perceptual politics of what is worth noticing, what can be acknowledged or foregrounded and what is relegated to the background” (2004: 57). Thus, hyper-separation between mind and body, human and nature, is accomplished in part through narratives that “marginalize the non-human as narrative subject and push the more-than-human sphere into a background role as mere context for human thought and life” (2004: 66). Reflecting on such connections between the material and discursive colonization of non-human nature, DeLoughrey and Handley propose that one of the keys tasks of postcolonial ecocriticism is to theorize how nature might be represented “in a narrative mode that does not privilege dualist thought or naturalize hierarchies between the human and nonhuman” (2011: 25). Flanagan’s novel offers an opportunity to conduct this investigation into narrative modes with particular attention to how the positioning of the narrative eye challenges or perpetuates binaristic notions of the human.

DeLoughrey and Handley argue that postcolonial ecocritics are well positioned to investigate such questions because postcolonial scholarship provides a strong foundation of critiques of rationalist binaries and the roles they have played in justifying colonial exploitation (2011: 24-25). Of particular relevance for my concentration on the narrative eye is Mary Louise Pratt’s study of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century travel narratives, Imperial Eyes (1992). Pratt argues that overseeing narration has its epistemological roots in natural history’s transformation of visual practices; influenced by natural history’s classificatory thinking, travel writers imposed order on landscapes by verbally mapping, labelling, and fixing what their “imperial eyes passively look at and possess” from their panoptic position (1992: 7). ⁵ Pratt coins the term “monarch-of-all-I-survey” to describe this overseeing eye, and similar to Plumwood’s theorization of the perceptual politics of backgrounding, Pratt’s monarch solidifies power by dividing land into background and foreground, deciding what is worth noticing. Then, the monarch uses dense prose (a preponderance of adjectives, especially those derived from nouns) to make the landscape appear familiar and manageable (1992: 204-205). Acknowledging only a single viewing position and presenting a static landscape, the monarch-of-all-I-survey asserts his distance from and mastery over the land, reinforcing the hyper-separation that Plumwood identifies as characteristic of rationalist understandings of the human and initiating a narrative practice that enables colonial domination by making the dynamic interdependencies between human and non-human nature invisible.

William V. Spanos commends Pratt’s emphasis on the imperial nature of overseeing narration, but contests her genealogy, arguing that in order to formulate a comprehensive critique of the transcendent eye, we must pursue its roots in Roman antiquity and the tradition of metaphysical thinking. Spanos analyses the “meta” of metaphysical, demonstrating that it means both “from above” and “from the end”, as he contends that thinking metaphysically, from the perspective of the disembodied eye, is an “essentially imperial practice” that reifies the unknown and spatializes the dynamics of time in order to comprehend, to physically grasp and control it (2000: 9-10). This distant perspective enables the reduction of the dynamics of time to a beginning–middle–end structure, a disciplinary practice that Spanos links to the form of the realist novel (2000: 30). Focusing more overtly on the ontological level, Spanos suggests that like the Linnaean classificatory table that Pratt analyses, the realist novel forces every life into its proper place, reducing the dynamics of life to a manageable plot line. Drawing these ecofeminist and postcolonial critiques of the overseeing eye together demonstrates how understandings of the human that separate mind and body have consequences that manifest across the continuum that connects epistemology, ontology, politics, and aesthetics, and it creates an opportunity to explore how Flanagan works across these registers, making the far-reaching consequences of the imperial eye visible, and thus, subject to challenge.

Within the novel, Flanagan demonstrates that rationalist constructions of the human, manifested in practices of visually overseeing and ordering the non-human world, continue to limit contemporary Australians’ relationships with the land. For example, the tourists who embark on a ten-day rafting adventure on the Franklin River are described as trying to visually oversee the landscape in order to tame their fear of it. Looking back on the early days of the rafting trip, the river guide who serves as the central character and narrator, Aljaz Cosini, explains the tourists’ discomfort with wilderness and their efforts to mediate this fear: “Wherever they turn there is no escape; always more rainforest, and more of it irreducible to a camera shot. No plasterboard walls or coffee tables are to be found to act as borders, to reduce this land to its rightful role of decoration. Not that they don’t try” (1994: 20). ⁶ Studying postcolonial tourism, Anthony Carrigan notes that attempts to frame the land through a taxi window, hotel window or camera lens often characterize the viewing practices of tourists (2011: 36-37), which helps to explain the panic that Flanagan’s tourists feel in the forest, removed from framing devices such as windows and walls that could make the land comprehensible in their visual system. These tourists visit from cities expecting to encounter the packaged nature that they are accustomed to viewing on postcards and calendars. Placed within the natural world, they attempt to use the only framing devices available to them, cameras, to recover distance, to recover the comforting position of visually overseeing and controlling the landscape. The tourists respond to the unfamiliar position of immanence as a threat to be overcome, a reaction that Aljaz identifies as an effort to “reduce” the “irreducible” dynamics of the land. In these scenes, Flanagan demonstrates that colonizing attitudes toward the land have become internalized. Unlike Pratt’s travel writers or even Flanagan’s own scenes of early colonists, these tourists are not engaged in an explicit project to colonize the wilderness. However, Aljaz draws attention to their underlying orientation toward the land, revealing traces of colonial overseeing in the tourists’ compulsive and reductive photographing. Further, by emphasizing the tourists’ anxiety when faced with the forest, Flanagan displays a consequence of rationalist constructions of the human; as Plumwood explains, “by walling ourselves off from nature in order to exploit it, we also lose certain abilities to situate ourselves as part of it” (2002: 98).

Aljaz recognizes the tourists’ inability to situate themselves within nature and the dissonance that they are experiencing between the landscape they imagined and the river they are experiencing, a landscape that “brought them all of these feelings…the most terrible blackness, the most abrupt and ceaseless noises of rushing water and wind in leaves and nocturnal animals moving” (81). Carrigan addresses a related phenomenon in which the landscape becomes “illegible to an imagination saturated with…place-myths” (2011: 39). While Carrigan analyses tourists’ inability to read the socio-political landscape of tropical islands because of their saturation with postcard images of paradise, Flanagan demonstrates the rafters’ inability to interpret their own emotional and sensory experiences that do not conform to static images of the Tasmanian forest. Aljaz seeks to distance himself from the visual practices of tourists, claiming; “my ways of seeing and knowing were not those of my customers”, and clarifying that his way of relating to the river derives from

feelings and intuitions that this tree, this dacrydium franklinii was not the same as that dacrydium franklinii, that the same Linnaean specification did not denote the same spirit. That height was not the most important attribute of a tree or what had to be scaled in order to clearly see something. (121)

Aljaz’s scorn for tourists and the tourism industry, embodied in the rafting company manager who Aljaz derisively refers to as “that bastard Pig’s Breath” (13), reveals his discomfort about his complicity in the commodification of the river. Aljaz manages these qualms by stressing his difference from the tourists. However, although Aljaz displays a type of relationship with the river based on emotional and sensory exchange with distinct, living spirits that provides an alternative to the visual consumption of the river promoted by the tourist industry, he simultaneously illustrates limits on this alternative. Inverting the tourists’ inability to situate themselves within nature, Aljaz struggles to situate himself in relationships with other humans. Lacking abilities to communicate effectively with the tourists, Aljaz cannot help them translate their emotional and sensory perceptions into a new reading of the forest, and the tourists’ viewing practices remain largely unchanged by the encounter.

At this point in the novel, Aljaz cannot share his way of experiencing the forest with others, yet Flanagan dramatizes the need for this alternative to interact with dominant conceptions of the human that permeate even the thinking of those who overtly oppose environmentally destructive behaviours. While he acknowledges that the actions and motives of environmental activists differ from those of tourists and developers, Flanagan orchestrates his novel to reinforce an ontological connection between these groups and to imply that conservationists miss an opportunity to make a more effective challenge to dominant paradigms of development by failing to examine and contest rationalist constructions of the human. For instance, the narrator describes how the reductive, rationalist orientation is shared by developers and conservationists, as well as the tourists:

Then the developers came to dam it and the conservationists came to save it and word of this strange and beautiful river spread throughout the country. A great battle arose and ultimately the conservationists won. Part of their winning had been to name all the river’s features, to render them citable and documentable by those who would never know them, and in that process of splitting the whole into little bits with silly names, Aljaz felt that something of the river’s soul had been stolen away. (252)

While Aljaz admits that he respects the conservationists who took action to defend the river, something he did not do, he also realizes that the way they fought for the river was by accepting the same understanding of the human as distant observer, of the overseeing eye with the ability to fix and name, used by the developers. Spanos’s analysis of the reification performed by the overseeing eye is applicable here, as he explains: “the separation and distancing, in short, that renders the knowledge of an intrinsically unnameable and unsayable force a matter of looking at (it) justifies and enables the reduction of the differential being of being to the calculable, measurable object” (2000: 16, original emphasis). Aljaz respects the river as “an intrinsically unnameable and unsayable force”; recognizing that photographing and naming reduce the river to a “calculable, measurable object”, he suggests that lived experience of the river exceeds the separate named parts. With this opposition between the conservationists who fight for the river from a distance, dividing it into parts to make their claims documentable, and Aljaz who encounters each member of the forest community as a distinct spirit, Flanagan points to the need for environmentalists to attack paradigms of development based on conceptions of the human that can reflect the dynamic existence of the non-human world and preserve individuals’ lived experiences of interaction with it. Flanagan’s narration contributes to this goal – tackling the challenge that confounds Aljaz in his relationship with the tourists, Flanagan develops a form of expression that can communicate lived experience of emotional and sensory exchange between human and non-human nature.

Complicating vision, resituating the human

While the content of the novel comments on the continued influence of rationalist conceptions of the human on contemporary Australians’ relationships with the non-human world, the form of the novel interrogates colonizing narrative strategies and works to resituate the human. In the realist colonial novel, the masculine, detached eye of the observer holds the power to survey, to measure and to name. Paralleling the imperial eye that maps the colonial landscape, the narrative eye derives power from the ability to oversee and order life from a distance. Flanagan interrogates the connection between colonizing ontology and narrative practice by locating his narrator beneath, rather than above, the land. In Death of a River Guide, the narrator, Aljaz, remains stuck against a rock, drowning throughout the novel. Rather than simply responding to the rationalist construct by reversing the binary and subordinating mind to body, reason to emotion, and human to non-human, placing the narrative eye within the river allows for attention to complex relationships between these elements. Affect scholarship provides a useful framework for analysing the dynamic, processual nature of these relationships because it reconceptualizes the human as entangled in co-constitutive relationships with human and non-human others. ⁷ Identifying what she terms an affective turn in theory, Patricia Clough argues that an emphasis on affect “throws thought back to the disavowals constitutive of Western industrial capitalist societies, bringing forth ghosted bodies and the traumatized remains of erased histories” (2007: 3). In addition to bringing attention to the devalued elements of the binary oppositions – the body and the emotions – as Clough suggests, affect scholarship refuses binaries by focusing on processes, experiences that “disclose the tangle of connections” between the aspects of the human that rationalist constructions endeavour to separate (Blackman and Venn, 2010: 11). In the foreword to Clough’s recent collection of essays, Michael Hardt clarifies: “Affects refer equally to the body and the mind…[t]he perspective of the affects, in short, forces us constantly to pose the problem of the relation between mind and body with the assumption that their powers correspond in some way” (2007: x). Analysing Flanagan’s narrative decisions in connection with affect scholarship helps to uncover Flanagan’s challenge to rationalist constructions of the human. The complicated position of Aljaz “brings forth ghosted bodies” of Australia’s present and past and “pose[s] the problem of the relation between mind and body”, investigating how and in what ways their powers correspond.

From his position within the river, Aljaz’s experience of vision allows him to occupy multiple positions and to “see” in ways that require rethinking rationalist dualisms. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau analyses spatial practices, suggesting that dwelling within a space provides knowledge of the place that remains inaccessible to the overseeing eye. De Certeau contrasts the view from the solar eye with the position of “the ordinary practitioners of the city” who “live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins” (1984: 93). The “ghosted bodies” and “erased histories” that Clough identifies are created by the surveying eye that remains blind to the details of physical and emotional experience, leaving the experiences of these bodies unrepresented in the histories it composes. Seeking to retrieve these experiences, de Certeau suggests that narrating the movement of the body on the street serves as an act of resistance against the authority of the overseeing eye. Other postcolonial novelists have effectively used this mobile narrative body; ⁸ however, Flanagan attempts something slightly different. He does not narrate the movement of Aljaz’s body to make visible the details of life that remain invisible to the overseeing eye; he challenges understandings of vision by exploring how Aljaz’s immobilized body provides access to a multiplicity of times and places through an interplay of body and mind.

Rather than simply valorizing the body and movement, Flanagan suggests that Aljaz’s body needs to be stopped; his eye needs to be submerged so that he can see in new ways. Flanagan arrests Aljaz in a liminal space and links this position to other marginal positions that Aljaz has occupied throughout his life. Aljaz reflects that he has always felt invisible, that maybe he has always been drowning (13), feelings that result from his lack of understanding of his personal and national past, from his discomfort with the unsayable difference of his hearing-impaired, mixed-race body, and from his physical and psychic rootlessness as he wanders the country first as an athlete, then as a migrant worker. By emphasizing Aljaz’s marginality throughout his life, Flanagan affirms that repositioning the narrative eye and redefining the human is not accomplished solely at the price of death; rather, relocating the narrative eye requires reclaiming a liminal viewing position and validating what is seen from its position in between. A drowning narrative eye enables Flanagan to refuse the life/death binary by narrating Aljaz’s experiences in between, and it allows Flanagan to counter the overseeing eye not with an alternative view, but with an alternative representation of vision as process.

Throughout the novel, Aljaz is physically positioned within the river, where his visual perception is limited. He can see light in the distance and air bubbles darting in different directions and warns that “Like those bubbles, my thoughts seem to have no specific direction, as much as I try to fix them on one point and move them along the path it indicates” (9). With the loss of his eyesight, Aljaz loses the ability to impose a rational, linear order on events. As his physical vision fades, images of his last days on the river, the story of his life, and key moments from the lives of his ancestors pass through his mind as if he is watching a movie. Recognizing that this non-linear narration challenges expectations of rational order, Flanagan provides a variety of explanations for the visions. He includes biological explanations, allowing for the possibility that Aljaz’s visions are the hallucinations of a dying, oxygen deprived brain. Flanagan also engages narrative and spiritual traditions of visionary experience, which Marc Delrez explores in his analysis of the novel. Delrez redeems Flanagan from charges of appropriating Aboriginal culture, investigating how Flanagan demonstrates the entanglement of European and Aboriginal Australian visionary traditions; Tasmania’s settler colonial past and Aljaz’s mixed heritage bequeath him genealogies of visionary experience that include his Aboriginal ancestor, Aunt Ellie’s, ability to talk to the winds as well as his Slovenian grandmother’s psychic abilities. Delrez argues that attending to the cultural and historical specificities underlying Flanagan’s use of magical realist conventions enables recognition that Flanagan’s novel “aspires to a greater form of inclusiveness, one that will incorporate the various narrative strands constitutive of Tasmanian experience” (2007: 124). In addition to reconciling multiple experiences of Tasmania, Flanagan’s narration expands conceptions of how Tasmania is experienced, supporting an ontological revision of rationalist conceptions of the human that has environmentalist significance.

Aljaz’s visionary experience demands a re-thinking of the abilities and boundaries of the human body, as the images that Aljaz accesses are created through the relationality of Aljaz and the river. As opposed to a model of interaction between pre-exisiting and clearly bounded entities, affect scholars such as Blackman and Venn define relationality as “the conjoining of thoroughly entangled processes”, as “co-constitutive and co-evolving relationships” (2010: 10). Flanagan’s narration enacts this relationality and challenges concepts of individuality as Aljaz and the river together bring forth images that span the entire colonial and postcolonial history of Australia, permitting Aljaz to see moments he never physically witnessed. For instance, the river provides Aljaz access to an image of his father and he reports on his reaction: “I feel Harry’s hurts and sadnesses dissolve into small concerns, dwarfed by the red-hot poker that burnt into the back of his neck, the ripple of soreness that ran across his breast each pull of the oars, the ache in his arse” (43). The visions that Aljaz co-creates with the river allow Aljaz to intellectually access information about his past, but they also enable him to experience the past with his body, feeling the physical and emotional pain of his ancestors. Rather than the “I see” of the detached imperial eye, the “I feel” of Aljaz’s submerged, embodied eye allows Aljaz to “bring forth ghosted bodies” of his family, registering their embodiment and connecting it to his own. This experience of vision impacts Aljaz physically and emotionally, a process that Teresa Brennan explains in terms of the transmission of affect. Brennan contends, “sight…is the sense that renders us discrete, while transmission breaches individual boundaries” (2004: 17). She elaborates that sight is “ontologically as well as phylogenetically…critical” in supporting understandings of a self-contained individual, whereas affect serves as “a vehicle connecting individuals to one another and the environment, and for that matter connecting mind or cognition to bodily processes” (2004: 171; 19). Brennan’s concept of transmission helps to explain why, as his ability to physically see decreases, Aljaz gains the ability to reorient himself; instead of the eye enforcing borders between self and other, subject and object, his visions allow him to sense and feel himself as intimately connected to his family, to other Australians, and to his environment.

Replacing the narrative eye with a feeling body immersed in a co-constitutive relationship with the river, Flanagan reintegrates vision with other human capacities for experiencing the world, rejecting rationalist divisions by narrating processual experiences that cut across them. In The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the handshake to illustrate physical experiences of simultaneity and reciprocity: “the handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching” (1969: 142). In her work Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pursues the double resonance of the words touching and feeling, concluding that this multiplicity serves to “make nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity” (2003: 14). In the novel, Aljaz is simultaneously subject and object, affecting and being affected by, touching and being touched by human and non-human others in his visions and by the river itself. He explains that as he remains in the river viewing images of his past, he is “simultaneously filmmaker, projectionist and audience” (53). As narrator, Aljaz is a passive viewer, active creator, and intermediary vehicle, sharing narrative power with the river, which has its own agency and its own methods of storytelling. “Writing its past and prophesying its future in massive gorges slicing through mountains and cliffs”, the river also inhabits multiple positions, simultaneously recording its own history and participating in Aljaz’s story, helping to create his visions that exceed the limitations of the human eye (14). ⁹ Representing a collaborative relationship in which Aljaz and the river participate in the “thoroughly entangled processes” that Blackman and Venn describe, Flanagan reveals that rationalist constructs reduce human relationships with the non-human world to simplistic and misleading oppositions of active subject and passive object. Submerging the imperial eye enables Flanagan to challenge this reductive construct and to resituate the human as member of, rather than overseer of, an entangled community of life.

Affective narration: Re-visioning human/nature relationships

Redefining the human as embodied participant within the non-human world has consequences for understandings of human relationships with non-human nature. Questions remain, though, about how a genre that developed along with the imperial eye might be reformulated to represent dynamic human partnership with the non-human world. Flanagan’s observations about his friend, Richard Wastell’s, painting exhibition begin to address these questions. Reflecting on the categorization of paintings as landscapes during his introduction to Wastell’s 2004 painting exhibition, Land that I Love, ¹⁰ Flanagan concludes that the word landscape “suggests an idea of viewing the world from a watchtower, evoking a static vista that is controlled by human aesthetics. It is a grand artistic tradition, but these paintings seem to me to evoke something different: a land that flows in and out of people, that shapes them as much as they shape it” (2004b: np). ¹¹ In Wastell’s paintings, Flanagan recognizes the experience of relationality between human and non-human nature:

In Richard’s paintings, land, plants, trees, people, fish are constantly moving in and out of each other. He has a gift for communicating what is rarely communicable in painting: the dynamic nature of our land; the way when we are within it, it moves around us and through us, passes in and out of us. Thus the painter and fish and forest all merge in High country plateau. Moss, bark, me where the painter’s coat has become at once a salmon skin and burnt out tree trunk. (2004b: np)

Here Flanagan suggests that even though painting is a visual medium, Wastell uses it to convey a dynamic experience of movement that differs from traditional landscape paintings. Stressing human presence within nature, Flanagan credits Wastell with representing multiplicity, simultaneity, and interdependence through an image that evokes at once human garment, fish, and tree. Flanagan’s comments also apply to his own novel; like Wastell, he is able to transform a genre that developed along with the imperial eye and use it to convey a dynamic experience of human/nature relationality that, to return to Spanos’s terms, preserves the “unnameable and unsayable force” of the non-human world. Kathleen Stewart theorizes that affects are “literally moving things” that “have to be mapped through different, coexisting forms of composition” (2007: 4). Flanagan is able to represent the dynamics of human relationship with a land that “moves around us and through us, passes in and out of us” by developing an affective form of narration.

Terming Flanagan’s narration affective, I borrow from postcolonial theorist R. Radhakrishnan’s analysis of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Any description of nature comes from a specific human position, making it inescapably anthropological. However, the distinction that Radhakrishnan examines in Merleau-Ponty’s thought illuminates how affective narration constitutes an environmentalist intervention. Radhakrishnan writes:

Merleau-Ponty substitutes an arrogant and life-denying cognitive anthropocentrism with an affective or lived/experiential anthropocentrism. What makes this form of anthropocentrism (I would even call it an aesthetic anthropocentrism, for the choice also has much to do with the genre in which representations are made, and perceptions validated) more ethical in some sense is that it honors its accountability to life, experience and livedness, on the one hand; and on the other hand, to the thinking subject’s being in the world. (2008: 197)

Echoing Flanagan’s emphasis on human position within the world, Radhakrishnan’s distinction between cognitive anthropocentrism and an affective model rests on “the thinking subject’s being in the world”. In light of this distinction, Flanagan’s narration of human relationship with the land might be understood as a kind of affective anthropocentrism that depicts an experiencing human as one part of a dynamic and living world.

Representing dynamic exchanges, Flanagan’s affective narration constitutes an environmentalist intervention that reinterprets Australia’s colonial past and reorients debates about Australia’s future in terms of human/nature co-constitution. For example, as Aljaz watches visions of his own trip down the river leading up to his accident, he witnesses himself in the forest:

Wet and pungent comes the smell of the damp black earth to my nostrils; of the forest dying to be reborn as fecund rot and fungi, small and waxy, large and luminous; to be reborn as moss and myrtle seedlings, miniscule and myriad; as Huon pine sprigs, forcing their way through the damp decay, forked and knowing as a water diviner’s stick; as the celery top saplings, looking as if a market gardener had planted them there; as the small hardwater ferns and old scrubbing-brush-topped pandanni. (79)

To revisit Flanagan’s analysis of Wastell’s paintings, rather than composing “a static vista”, Flangan’s novel represents the forest as a living force, “flowing in and out of people” as the scent of the damp earth enters Aljaz’s nostrils. Even in this single moment of description, the forest is in motion, a motion invisible to the human eye, but experienced through the body and through an imagination attuned to the forest’s growth over time. Flanagan narrates this motion, using one long sentence with clauses divided by semi-colons to characterize each individual fungus and plant according to its own qualities and to represent the way that individual parts join together to form a larger identity. The accumulation of clauses reinforces an understanding of the forest as engaged in continual processes of change and renewal; parts of the forest die, which is not an end to the forest, but rebirth in a different form. In contrast to the monarch-of-all-I-survey who uses a dense accumulation of adjectives derived from nouns to domesticate the land, this affective narration relies heavily on verbs and verbals (infinitives and participles) to emphasize the agency and vitality of the forest. Presenting human life as one part of this complex, interdependent system whose dynamic interconnections and evolutionary time frame exceed the reductive vision of the colonizing eye, Flanagan’s affective narration “honors its accountability to life”, all life. This narration counters instrumentalist understandings of human/nature relationships that figure nature as resource with a model of dynamic partnership, demonstrating how the postcolonial novel can support an ontological shift that serves environmentalist goals.

With the content of Death of a River Guide, Flanagan depicts the resistance that prevented the damming of the Franklin River. With his non-fiction essays, he attacks forestry policies and a political culture that permits the destruction of old-growth forests. However, confining understandings of his environmental activism to these overt political statements would underestimate the full range of Flanagan’s environmental engagement and diminish postcolonial ecocritical analysis. In addition to addressing environmental issues at the political level, Flanagan demands that ecocritics attend to the continuum that connects literature and politics. Exploring foundations for postcolonial ecocritical practice, Huggan and Tiffin argue that “both postcolonialism and ecocriticism are, at least in part, utopian discourses aimed at providing conceptual possibilities for a material transformation of the world” (2007: 9, original emphasis). Similarly, Flanagan’s attention to the continuum that connects epistemology, ontology, narrative, and politics provides conceptual possibilities, enabling recognition of the neglected persistence of imperial ontology in narrative strategies, even within postcolonial and environmental writing. Attending to the ontological register, Flanagan creates an opportunity to develop oppositional discourse and practice that draws strength from reconceptualizations of human entanglement, rather than continuing to work within the limits set by reductive binaries. Flanagan’s reformulation of the human creates a foundation for ethics and action based on understandings of human co-constitution with the non-human world, it creates possibilities for the material transformation of the world, but it is also worth appreciating as a “particularly literary mediation” and a particularly literary accomplishment.