Tory Ecological Materialism

A critique of D.M.R. Bentley's "'Along the Line of Smoky Hills': Further Steps towards an Ecological Poetics"

This essay is borne out an ongoing “research project” on eco-Marxism, ecocriticism, and Canadian literature. It should be read primarily, as most of the essays on this Substack should, as a sort of writing exercise. The article I will be critiquing was published in 1990, so the stakes of my assault on this article are relatively low. I do think, however, that there are important clarifying questions that arise out of this 33-year-old essay regarding the politics of ecocriticism today, and the stakes of what it means to practice “ecological poetics” and embody a commitment to “materialism” in reaction to world capitalism and the ecological crisis it has brought forth.

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D.M.R. Bentley’s article “'Along the Line of Smoky Hills': Further Steps towards an Ecological Poetics" appeared in volume 26 of the journal Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. I came across it in the 2013 edited collection Greening the Maple (eds. Ella Soper & Nicholas Bradley), which serves as a sort of collection of “canonical” essays on Canadian ecocriticism. Included in the section on “the emergence of ecocriticism in Canada,” Bentley’s article positions itself as providing a method of critical reading that “confirm[s] or assist[s] the reintegration of humanity and nature and the rehabilitation of emotion”¹ in the wake of the devastating effects of “the heady combination of scientific rationalism, Protestantism, and capitalism that is known today as modernity” which resulted in the view of nature as “alien, insensible, despiritualized: fodder for subjugation and commodification.”² Bentley argues that we are living in a time where modernity’s stranglehold on conceptions of humanity’s relationship to nature are beginning to fall apart — while he does not explicitly call it this, it is clear he is referring to an age of postmodernity, where the grand narratives of the modernist age no longer hold sway over us. In this moment of opportunity, Bentley says that we must develop a method that brings humans back in touch with nature, both revealing our interconnectedness and instilling a respect and awe for nature at the emotional level that facilitates harmonious living with nature.

Despite its emphasis on the need to attend to the material and sensual in poetry, on the need to re-activate a certain emotionally moving ethical stance towards nature, Bentley’s method is ultimately a conservative idealism that fails to address the material in any meaningful, historical way. This uncritical embrace of the sensual and emotional belies a politics that attempts to address core structural issues at the heart of the climate crisis through appeals to a pre-critical moralism and a turning away from abstraction that cannot truly think the climate crisis.

The Conservative Underpinnings of Bentley’s Ecological Poetics

So what exactly is Bentley’s method? It is a reading for particular forms of “ecological poetics.” I will allow him to describe its core underpinnings:

“The answer proposed here can be described as an ecological poetics – a poetics, that is, which elaborates on two key ecological assumptions – the assumption that man and nature are a ‘community of interdependent parts’ and the assumption that ‘diversity’ in the human and natural world must be safeguarded and fostered – to generate a method of reading which diminishes the gaps among people, their world, and their feelings while also emphasizing the uniqueness of all things, be they people or plants or poems, in face of the forces that would grind them down into a denatured uniformity.”³

On its face, I have no qualms with Bentley’s concept. He is proposing reading texts for a poetics that allows us to foster a sense of a unity of difference between not just people, but between humans and the natural world. Such a method, at first glance, is directly counterposed to modernity’s impulse to conceive of land and nature as inert resources, separate from the “human world,” upon which we exert our mastery and harness to our own gain. It appears to work against the commodifying logic of capitalism, which subsumes meaningful difference through the value form, making everything fungible. However, Bentley’s method does not, in reality, adhere to such a conception:

“Since its aims are preservative and restorative, an ecological poetics unites conservation and conservatism in a search for manifestations in Canadian poetry of the feelings of responsibility, respect, duty, and interdependence that constitute the core of any bonded community worth imagining, from the feudal society of Coleridge and his fellow Romantic Tories to the Gaian world of J. E. Lovelock and other contemporary ecologists.”⁴

With this additional context of the Tory underpinnings of his method, Bentley’s insistence on “harmony” between humanity and nature become much more suspect. In the main body of the text, Bentley emphasizes the sense of harmony and mutual respect implied in the Tory worldview, and how it aims at protecting the “unique, local, regional, and national characteristics” of peoples, texts, and environments. However, his footnotes clarifying what the Tory worldview entails shed light on the its more insidious elements that throw the contradictions at the heart of Bentley’s method into sharp relief.⁵ For example, he approvingly cites Samuel Coleridge’s “Romantic-Tory” definition of the ideal state, where “the integral parts, classes, or orders are so balanced, or interdependent, as to constitute, more or less, a moral unit, an organic whole.”⁶ Such a definition evokes a romantic and reactionary desire to return to a pre-modern social formation lost to us, where respect for difference was premised on everyone keeping in their “proper place” in the hierarchical cosmic order; there is no questioning of the construction of this organic whole and his historical underpinnings, its constitution through exploitative relations. Furthermore, Bentley’s “Tory conservationism,” adopted from F. Fraser Darling, positions humanity as “a biological ‘aristocrat’ with the privileges and responsibilities that accompany his position of ‘dominion over the creatures, the plant cover, and the very landscape of his planet.’”⁷ What these footnotes make clear is that Bentley’s recognition of the embeddedness of humanity in nature does not erase the hierarchal positioning of humanity over nature like he claims. According to Tory conservationism, humanity must pay respects to nature through utilizing its position of power justly, instead of using it for evil by failing to uphold the responsibility that comes with such power. The Tory conservationist worldview motivating Bentley’s critical reading practice, therefore, does not abandon the problematic division between humanity and nature at the heart of modernity, but simply displaces it and the problems it engenders into the realm of morality. Bentley’s method thus cannot actually address the foundational material and ideological violence of modernity that has facilitated exploitation and domination in a myriad of forms against both people and the natural world. Bentley’s method renders him only able to only critique modernity’s material and ideological ecological violence through recourse to a thoroughly mystified and reactionary worldview that harkens back to an imaginary state of harmony.⁸

Furthermore, Bentley states that the homogenizing forces he is attempting to combat aren’t just those of "multinational capitalism” — they are also systems like “architectural postmodernism, or deconstruction, insofar as [those] system[s] [contribute] to the homogenization of nature and its creations, be they physical or linguistic.”⁹ Bentley’s postmodern boogeyman, which operates as the conceptual amalgam “critical theory/deconstruction/postmodernism,” is a familiar one: its crime is that it “[has] stressed the importance of language to the exclusion or near-exclusion of other matters… placing [literature] in a realm remote from its physical, emotional, and moral contexts.”¹⁰ Against the abstracting and homogenizing forces of capitalism and “postmodernism," Bentley states that “an ecological approach may emphasize the physical over the verbal aspects of poetry, but, ideally, its aim is to stress and examine their interdependence.”¹¹ This means in addition to traditional motivators of literary inquiry, that we should ask materialist questions like “Where and on what kind of paper was this poem printed?”¹²

While reductive in terms of its assessments, I hold some degree of sympathy for this position; I would not say that the progenitors of the linguistic turn were necessarily this “totalizing” in their analyses, but I do find that some analyses conducted by their adherents miss something a little more “real” lurking underneath; that is, they are not particularly “materialist.”¹³ Furthermore, I agree with Bentley that, at times, "to rest in the open, the relative, the ambiguous, the indeterminate, the game-like is… to refuse to take a firm position, to deny the presence of real conflicts... It goes without saying that multinational consumer capitalism has everything to gain from such undecidedness, and the distinct social and physical environments of this country a very great deal to lose."¹⁴ However, countering uncritical subsumptions of the material to the discursive with an equally uncritical fetishization of the "physical" or "emotional" does little to solve this issue. If anything, it serves to produce an equally reified understanding of the social and natural worlds and our emotional responses to them.

Mimesis and Abstraction

All of this ideological baggage, and we have not even gotten to the practical application of Bentley’s method. The culmination of Bentley’s method, in practice, is as such:

“At the heart of the method of reading being proposed is an insistence on the mimetic and affective aspects of poetry, a resolve to examine the ways in which poems seek to recreate in the reader a sense of the world and the emotions that generated them, a conviction that many poems, especially when seen in the right light, act to bridge the gaps within and among things human and non-human that were opened by modernity.”¹⁵

The goal of Bentley’s method, quite simply, is to assess whether a text’s form is suited to its content; that is, does it mimic the natural landscape, and by extension, evoke particular emotions within the reader in order to foster a sense of connection between them and nature? If a writer is able to do this, it is a sign that they are in tune with nature and are not attempting to subsume it into any particular position. The conservatism at heart in this method is clear: a text practices “good” ecological poetics when it manages to “recreate” what we assume to be natural categories or elements, producing a sort of harmonious link between art and nature (and by extension, the organic whole and moral order at the heart of the Tory view of the social). There is no interrogation of how those categories or elements come to be; put bluntly, Bentley’s method fails to consider mimesis as an ideological process. Take, for example, this section of Bentley’s reading of “Indian Summer” by William Wilfred Campbell:

“In the opening line of ‘Indian Summer’ – ‘Along the line of smoky hills’ – the word ‘line’ itself suggests an analogy between the words on the page and the contours of the landscape. Indeed, a few moments in the presence of the line will reveal that it replicates not only the horizontality of a distant ‘line of … hills’ in, say, Ontario, but also, in the rising and falling of its lilting metre and lower and upper case letters, something of the hills’ spatial rhythms and contours…”¹⁶

Bentley praises Campbell for having the masterful ability to evoke the landscape through text, as well as his ability to “guide the reader towards feelings of gentle melancholy and wistfulness.”¹⁷ But Bentley does not interrogate the nature (no pun intended) of these particular spatial rhythms and emotions that Campbell evokes within the reader; it is enough that the poem "succeeds well in putting its readers and listeners in touch with the natural world and their emotional life."¹⁸ To conduct an effective ecological reading, in my view, we must go beyond establishing a simple moral connection to nature and posit more important questions: what are the political valences of these mimetic representations and their accompanying emotions? Do these particular representations and emotions actually place us into a new and improved ethical position with nature, and is this new ethical position enough to facilitate or entail mass ecological action?

Bentley, terrified of abstractions and their supposed totalization of the natural, refuses to engage with them. For him, it is enough to be aware of one’s connection to nature, which occurs through what Bentley calls “vital moments,” which are “record[s]… of an intense awareness of living things in which the urge to abstraction has been kept to a minimum.”¹⁹ The critic must bring light to these moments, but avoid abstracting them, keeping them as close to the real, sensuous experiences that birthed them. Bentley, running away from the dangers of modernity and its adherence to an ecologically destructive reason, has ended up all the way back at sense-certainty; in order to achieve the richest cognition of these vital moments, he must, as Hegel put it, "alter nothing in the object as it presents itself, and [he] must keep [his] conceptualizing of it apart from [his] apprehending of it."²⁰ But as Hegel says, "this certainty in fact yields the most abstract and the very poorest truth… In that certainty, neither I nor the item have the meaning of a multifaceted mediation, nor does I have the meaning of a multifaceted representing or thinking, nor does the item have the meaning of a multifaceted composition.”²¹ Bentley's thinking that mediations get between us and the "true essence" of nature to which we must reconnect is to our detriment; pretending that the social and natural mediations between humanity and nature simply "get in the way" misunderstands that these mediations are as much constitutive of humanity and nature as their status as objects “out there in the world.”

What do I mean by this? Let us turn to Marx. For Marx, humans are animals and thus part of nature; however, human societies and their reproduction are built upon elements from nature. How does one obtain these elements? Through labor. Through labor, humans appropriate natural materials to create and re-create the objects, items, and institutions needed for the reproduction of society, such as food, tools, and shelter.²² These natural materials that provide the use values required to reproduce society, however, have their own metabolic limits: nutrients in the soil essential for growing food and material crops need to be returned to the soil over time through organic decomposition; said crops need time to grow to maturity before they are harvested; and so on. Human social metabolism, or the (re)production of human society, is thus inextricably linked with nature and its limits. As Marx says:

“Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.”²³

The relationship between humanity and nature is less of human-and-nature and more of humanity-in-nature; social metabolism and natural metabolism work on each other dialectically, bringing out potentialities in each other: 

“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power.”²⁴

What defines the dialectical relationship between social metabolism and natural metabolism – the relationship between humanity and nature – is therefore the historical mode of production under which the labor process takes place, which consists not just of the type of tools used to perform labor, but the social arrangements of that labor, which shapes dominant conceptions of the ontological status of nature in relation to humans. The centrality of labor and its historical forms of organization as a mediator between the social and natural metabolisms means that we cannot discount it in our investigations into human-nature relationships, including in literature. This is why Bentley’s insistence on a sensuous reconnection with nature sans mediation is so misguided. Once again, Marx:

“The taste of porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the [metabolic] process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place, whether it is happening under the slave-owner's brutal lash or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus undertakes it in tilling his couple of acres, or a savage, when he lays low a wild beast with a stone.”²⁵

The mimetic evocation of the contours of a hill in the fall, and its stirrings of melancholy within us, does not tell us why it is so compelling to us. It does not tell us the historical process of the socio-historical construction of such a mimetic representation and how it might reinforce modernity’s ontological humanity-nature divide even while making us feel connected to it in one instance²⁶. This is particularly important given that Marx saw capitalism as a mode of production which instituted a “metabolic rift” – that is, through its transformation of labor power into a commodity and the subsumption of all labor to the extraction of surplus value at all costs, capitalism shifted the social metabolism into overdrive, pushing beyond the natural metabolic limits of the earth by reducing the earth to a commodity to be exploited akin to workers. The result of such a rift is ecological destruction: 

“Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.”²⁷

“...all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility… Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the worker.”²⁸

The role of the metabolic rift in the development of the ontological separation of humanity and nature that Bentley wishes to eliminate must be taken into consideration as part of an ecological poetics. We cannot just elevate any old sense of emotional connection to nature in our reading: we must read depictions of nature as part of any number of structures of feeling: that is, we must read these mimetic depictions and the emotions they evoke “as inalienable elements of a social material process”²⁹; as part of “a specific structure of particular linkages, particular emphasis and suppressions”³⁰ that emerges through class conflict within a mode of production. Not all mimetic depictions of nature per se are inherently “modernist” in the sense that they reinforce the ontological gap between humanity and nature, but there are certainly some that do reinforce said gap, and Bentley’s Tory-inflected ecological poetics fails to account for this, especially in its retreat from abstraction. The goal should be to read abstraction critically, not to run away from it forever.

A Critical Ecological Poetics

By way of conclusion, let’s demonstrate what a more critical ecological poetics might look like through a quick reading of “The Lonely Land” by Canadian modernist poet A.J.M. Smith. Bentley makes a quick aside during his discussion of the McGill Movement to mention Smith’s “skillful recreation of the call of a ‘wild duck’,”³¹ but does not discuss in further detail the effects or valences of this recreation. Let’s examine this wild duck call:

A wild duck calls
to her mate,
and the ragged
and passionate tones
stagger and fall,
and recover,
and stagger and fall,
on these stones —
are lost
in the lapping of water
on smooth, flat stones.
This is a beauty
of dissonance,
this resonance
of stony strand,
this smoky cry
curled over a black pine
like a broken
and wind-battered branch
when the wind
bends the tops of the pines
and curdles the sky
from the north.

What Bentley is likely referring to, when he refers to Smith’s “skillful recreation,” is the disjointed metre of the poem reflecting the “stagger and fall and recover” of the “ragged and passionate tones” of the duck call. What does this image of a staggering and falling and recovering call suggest about nature itself, especially in relation to the rest of the imagery in the poem? It seems to point to this “beauty of dissonance,” where the elements of nature are actively in violent tension with each other, “broken and wind-battered.” The first stanza of the poem contains similar violence: 

Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
and cloud-piled sky;
and in the bay
blown spume and windrift
and thin, bitter spray
snap
at the whirling sky;
and the pine trees
lean one way.

This representation of a violent landscape, its various elements turned against itself, animated by the wind of a storm, is for Smith “the beauty / of strength / broken by strength / and still strong.” It stands in stark contrast to the beauty of Romantic landscapes, where each natural element slots together neatly like puzzle pieces and produces a passive, harmonious whole. Allow me to leap to conclusions here: Smith’s lonely land is a landscape of resilience in the face of an oppressive, external force; it is evocative of a settler-colonial structure feeling wherein settlers saw Canadian nature as an alienating, violent landscape, yet an articulation of that structure that attempts to understand such violence and disunity as beautiful. Perhaps this is because it mirrors what settlers perceive(d) as their own struggle to survive in and against what they considered a violent natural landscape (one that I should mention appears terra nullius and thus empty of very clear human civilizations living in Turtle Island). It is also a poem that through its emphasis on the alien otherness of nature upholds the gap between humans and nature. It is therefore evocative of a “thoroughly modern” structure of feeling; its mimetic qualities therefore do not necessarily provide us with the ethical or moral position required of us to close the human-nature gap opened by modernity. This is what a practice of critical ecological poetics looks like: it interrogates the affects and forms of literature in relation to the historical development of these forms alongside the mode of production. 

One final remark before I close this essay. At the end of his essay, Bentley says this: 

“What has been urged here is not a new way of theorizing poems away into abstraction. It is not one more mill for grinding Canadian poetry and Canadian trees into the pulp upon which essays and articles are written and printed. It is instead a personal and ‘sub-theoretical’ attempt to reintegrate literature, criticism, and the world by examining a few poems in their environments and from a perspective born of ecological awareness.”³²

Bentley’s shirking of abstraction as a sort of intellectually humble response to the supposed violences of the abstractions of poststructuralism does not make his method more effective; in fact, it robs it of any useful critical capacity in its assessment of representations of the human-nature relationship. As Crane puts it,

“...the commonplace intellectual virtues of ‘humility' and ‘modesty’ are an expression of pride, pride in our unwillingness to address the concrete in its complexity. Out of cloying concern for the integrity of the ‘finite’, we insist on its ultimacy against the dialectical process from which it arose and to which it will return. Out of pious deference to a transcendent infinite, we deny ourselves contact with any reality beyond our own egos. Out of craven avoidance of self-critical reflection, we reduce what’s at stake in thinking to the false choice between doctrines rooted in the substance of experience and the anemia of scholastic disputation.” 

Who thinks abstractly? Bentley does. But he does not know it. 

1. Bentley, “Ecological Poetics,” Greening the Maple, pg. 86.

2. Ibid, pg. 86. It should be noted that Bentley does not provide any historical explanation as to why this “heady combination” arose beyond alluding to its nascent origins in the Renaissance with the Cartesian subject. His footnote citing the entirety of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, among a few other texts, for context does not solve this problem.

3. Ibid, pg. 87.

4. Ibid, pg. 87.

5. Having such clarifications about his position hidden away in footnotes, outside the body of the main text, allows Bentley to skirt some of the more contradictory elements of his method, as well as avoid discussing its political implications.

6. Quoted in Bentley, pg. 106.

7. Bentley, pg. 106.

8. It should be noted that the Gaia hypothesis, which Bentley also draws from, even in its weakest forms posits a harmony akin to the Tory conservationist worldview: that the Earth’s interdependent systems balance themselves in order to maintain optimal conditions for life, and are therefore always oriented towards an inherent harmony. From an earth systems perspective, this is simply just not the case; while there are indeed outer limits of habitability that serve as constraints for the life of particular organisms, these limits do not regulate the environment to make it perfectly comfortable and safe for all life. As James W. Kirchner puts it in his article “The Gaia Hypothesis: Conjectures and Refutations,” “ …while a biologically mediated positive feedback cannot push environmental conditions beyond the range that is habitable for the organisms responsible for it, it can push conditions outside the habitable range for other organisms, and thus drive them to extinction” (pg. 29). There is no organic, perfectly harmonious ecological whole where each element plays its part to foster all life; there are, of course, still certainly ways of life and social reproduction that are less ecologically damaging and do not trigger these feedback mechanisms.

9. Bentley, pg. 87.

10. Ibid, pg. 88.

11. Ibid, pg. 88.

12. Ibid, pg. 89. Bentley never addresses this particularly important and interesting question in his essay.

13. I am thinking in particular of the complete collapse of the analytical distinction between the material and symbolic/semiotic performed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: “every object is constituted as an object of discourse, insofar as no object is given outside every discursive condition of emergence; and… any distinction between what are usually called the linguistic and behavioural aspects of a social practice, is either an incorrect distinction or ought to find its place as a differentiation within the social production of meaning, which is structured under the form of discursive totalities.” (pg. 93).

14. Bentley, pg. 98.

15. Ibid, pg. 87.

16. Ibid, pg. 92.

17. Ibid, pg. 92.

18. Ibid, pg. 92.

19. Ibid, pg. 91.

20. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. Terry Pinkard), pg. 60.

21. Ibid, pg. 60.

22. While I do not have the space to discuss this in deep detail, one major issue with Marx’s discussion of the labor process is his erasure of nature as subject in this process, with the ability to dialectically affect human species-being during the metabolic process. It is not simply human power transforming nature that changes humans, but nature itself, with its own active powers and abilities, that change humans. For more on this, see Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Vanessa Watts’ “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).”

23. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (trans. Ben Fowkes), pg. 133.

24. Ibid, pg. 283.

25. Ibid, pg. 291.

26. For example, national parks, given their distance away from urban centers and special regulations regarding certain actions you can take within them, reinforce a sense of distance between “humanity” (who lives in the urban away from nature) and “nature” (somewhere where human intervention needs to be kept at a minimum or completely eliminated for the non-human to thrive). We still feel connection to these spaces through varied aesthetic contemplations of the landscape (i.e. we appreciate the beauty of a lake or the sense of melancholy a loon call might evoke in us), but not in a way that particularly points to humanity’s place within the natural world.

27. Marx, pg. 376.

28. Ibid, pg. 638.

29. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, pg. 133.

30. Ibid, pg. 134.

31. Bentley, pg. 93

32. Ibid, pg. 103.