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Scottish Literature, Borders and the
Environmental Imagination
Environmental Cultures Series
Series Editors:
Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia, Canada
Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University, UK
Editorial Board:
Frances Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Mandy Bloomeld, Plymouth University, UK
Lily Chen, Shanghai Normal University, China
Christa Grewe-Volpp, University of Mannheim, Germany
Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon, USA
Timothy Morton, Rice University, USA
Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick, UK
Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series makes available to students and
scholars at all levels the latest cutting-edge research on the diverse ways in which
culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis. Publishing ambitious
and innovative literary ecocriticism that crosses disciplines, national boundaries,
and media, books in the series explore and test the challenges of ecocriticism to
conventional forms of cultural study.
Titles available:
Anthropocene Realism, John ieme
Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis
Cities and Wetlands, Rod Giblett
Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895–1941,
John Claborn
Climate Change Scepticism, Greg Garrard, George Handley, Axel Goodbody
and Stephanie Posthumus
Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel, Astrid Bracke
Cognitive Ecopoetics, Sharon Lattig
Colonialism, Culture, Whales, Graham Huggan
Concrete and Plastic, Kylie Crane
Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty, Marco Caracciolo
Digital Vision and Ecological Aesthetic, Lisa FitzGerald
Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts, David P. Rando
Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction, Sarah E. McFarland
Ecocriticism and Italy, Serenella Iovino
Ecocriticism and Turkey, Meliz Ergin
Ecospectrality, Laura A. White
Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe, Anna Barcz
Fuel, Heidi C. M. Scott
Imagining the Plains of Latin America, Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz
Literature as Cultural Ecology, Hubert Zapf
Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis,
Soa Ahlberg
Reading Underwater Wreckage, Killian Quigley
e Living World, Samantha Walton
Nerd Ecology, Anthony Lioi
e New Nature Writing, Jos Smith
e New Poetics of Climate Change, Matthew Griths
Radical Animism, Jemma Deer
Reclaiming Romanticism, Kate Rigby
Teaching Environmental Writing, Isabel Galleymore
is Contentious Storm, Jennifer Mae Hamilton
e Tree Climbing Cure, Andy Brown
Weathering Shakespeare, Evelyn O’Malley
iv
Scottish Literature, Borders and the
Environmental Imagination
Julia Ditter
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Names: Ditter, Julia, author.
Title: Scottish literature, borders and the environmental imagination / Julia Ditter.
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. |
Series: Environmental cultures ; vol 34 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024026846 | ISBN 9781350431027 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781350431065 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350431034 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781350431041 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature–Scottish authors–History and criticism. |
Scottish literature–History and criticism. | Borderlands in literature. | Ecocriticism. |
Scottish Borders (Scotland)–In literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PR8511 .D58 2024 | DDC 820.9/9411–dc23/eng/20240621
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024026846
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9781350431027_txt_print.indd 6 13-08-2024 16:29:47
List of gures ix
Acknowledgements x
1 Introduction 1
Structure of this book 3
2 Conversations across disciplinary boundaries 7
Border studies and ecocriticism: challenges and potential 7
New formalism as an interdisciplinary method 13
e Scottish situation: predicament or aordance? 20
Borders and the environmental imagination in Scottishliterature 24
3 Littoral 29
Borders in the littoral imagination: rhythmic and material
recongurations 29
e littoral in the Scottish literary imagination 35
‘We’re only separate like waves rising out of the one sea’:
Willa Muir’s aqueous materialism 47
4 Planetarity 69
Writing the earth: planetarity as a literary form 69
Planetarity in the Scottish literary imagination 78
Borders ‘dissolved in light’: Nan Shepherd’s planetary poetics 98
5 Territory 123
B/ordering the surface of the earth: reconceptualizing territory
throughthe imagination 123
Territory in the Scottish literary imagination 130
Land ownership, adventure and the non-human:
challenging territory with John Buchan 145
Contents
1 Photograph showing a section of Kathleen Jamie’s poem ‘Here Lies Our
Land’, engraved on the oak beams of the rotunda on the site of the Battle
of Bannockburn, with the Robert the Bruce statue in the background.
© all rights reserved Doug Houghton 137
2 Map of the Highland setting of the novel. From ‘Map to Illustrate the
Doings of John Macnab’ (1925). Reproduced with the permission of
theNational Library of Scotland 160
Figures
is book would not have been possible without the generous support and
assistance of my friends, family and colleagues. It began as a PhD project for
which I was lucky enough to receive the generous funding of Northumbria
University’s Researcher Development Fund. e open access publication of
this monograph was made possible by the generous funding of the Centre of
Cultural Inquiry and the Zukunskolleg of the University of Konstanz. My
interest in Scottish literature was sparked during an Erasmus exchange at the
University of Aberdeen in 2015 where Timothy Baker, who, seven years later,
would serve as external examiner on my viva, rst introduced me to the topic.
I am grateful to have had this opportunity and to have been able to keep up
and strengthen my interest in Scottish literature throughout the years through
conversations with colleagues and dear friends at the University of Freiburg and
the Scottish Universities’ Summer School. Much of the credit for this work goes
to my PhD supervisor David for his unfailing support during a time of Covid
lockdowns marked by recurring health issues. His constant encouragement and
extraordinary kindness kept me going and convinced me of the value of this
project. e support of my family, who fostered my love of books from early on
and who have always supported and believed in me, was vital during this time.
Finally, I am eternally grateful to Alex and Anne, whose constant companionship
has given me more than I could express in words. I could not have done this
without either of you.
Acknowledgements
9781350431027_txt_print.indd 10 13-08-2024 16:29:47
1
Introduction
In the UK as elsewhere, the 2020 Covid-19 crisis threw into relief pre-existing
social, cultural and political fault lines, and created new ones. Not only did
the virus rapidly and easily cross national borders, but the subsequent border
closures all over Europe served to remind even the most privileged individuals
that national borders never disappeared but may be (re)activated at any time.1
e Covid-19 crisis overlapped with the transition period of the UK’s withdrawal
from the European Union which ended in January 2021, aer which the full
eect of Britain’s reinforced borders, including its inner-British borders, could
be felt. e pandemic exacerbated a pre-existent sense of dissatisfaction with
political leadership in Britain. As Dan Haverty and Amy McKinnon argue, the
mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic by the Conservative government
in Westminster gave ‘further impetus to the Scottish independence and Irish
unication movements’ (2020). When Nicola Sturgeon announced that she
would consider quarantining visitors to Scotland, Boris Johnson’s response
that ‘there is no such thing as a border between England and Scotland’ was not
received well in Scotland, where the possibility of holding another Independence
Referendum was consequently heatedly debated.2 e acute presence of borders
is continually brought back to our attention by events such as these which
highlight the dierential vulnerabilities of human and non-human bodies
and the violence involved in border regulations. At the same time, the world
is facing an environmental crisis of unprecedented proportions, a crisis that is
not independent of but intricately connected to border politics as the eects
of climate change will forcefully turn ever more people into migrants.3 At a
time when we are simultaneously facing a multifaceted crisis of borders and
an environmental crisis, the intricate connections between which have been
illuminated starkly through the Covid-19 pandemic, the examination of the
interdependencies between bordering processes and environmental concerns
deserves urgent attention.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination2
e large output of creative works in the rst few months of the pandemic
demonstrates how important literature and the arts are in providing narratives
through which we can understand and cope with crises.4 Understanding the
connections between borders and the environment is equally a matter not only
of politics but of the imagination. According to Johan Schimanski and Stephen
Wolfe, theories and practices of border crossing reveal ‘borders as zones of
instability in which ethical, political, cultural and national questions are
negotiated’ (2007, 9). Literary texts have the potential to explore these questions
creatively through imaginative border crossings and the creation of textual
zones of instability. Creative works from late 2010s and early 2020s, such as
Sarah Hall’s e Wolf Border (2015), John Lanchester’s e Wall (2019) and Ali
Smith’s Spring (2019), not only displayed the vital connection between borders
and the environment but also highlighted the special aordances oered by the
inclusion of a Scottish context for thinkingthrough the correlation between
borders and the environment. e crossing of the Anglo-Scottish border by
the wolves around which the plot of e Wolf Border revolves is one of the
key moments in the novel and, according to Timothy Baker, achieves the
elimination of borders by oering ‘a new form of political thinking based
not on parties and policies, but on a rejection of categorisations’ (2016, 264).
Lanchester’s e Wall, set at dierent sections of a gigantic wall built to save
mainland Britain from rising sea levels, imagines Scotland as a ‘site of border
mobility’, the only location ‘where the institutionalized boundaries of the
nation-state are temporarily undermined’ in the novel (Sandrock 2020, 173).
Ali Smith’s Spring (2019) is the third instalment of her seasonal quartet which,
as a whole, is attuned to the correlation between borders and the environment
and its manifold layers. It is the only novel of the quartet partly set in Scotland
and the elusive Anglo-Scottish border takes on a symbolic signicance. Not
only can the refugee girl Florence not see the border, but she can also cross
it without consequence, which leads her to muse on the idea of borders as
contact zones that connect rather than divide places. While Britain/England
is hostile to migrants and would prefer to wall itself in, Scotland is presented
as a friendlier and more welcoming place. It is in the Cairngorms that the
protagonists of the novel come to meet, and it is in Scotland that refugees
receive help and assistance from an organization calling themselves the Auld
Alliance.
As exemplied by these works, Scotland oers a distinct focus to approach
the correlation between borders and the environment from a contemporary
point of view. Historically, too, both concerns have long been considered as
Introduction 3
entrenched in Scottish identity, literature and culture. roughout this book,
I examine the potential vantage points and trajectories Scottish literature can
oer for a revaluation of the dominant frameworks underlying the relationship
between borders and the environment. Focusing on Scottish literary responses
to borders and environmental discourses from 1800 to the present day, I explore
how literary texts are able to shi the dominant parameters used to dene both
bordering processes and the environment by thinking them through Scotland.
I will suggest that looking at borders and the environment as forms articulated
in literary works that think through Scotland rather than from or about Scotland
oers a new practice of reading that can shed light on the complex relationship
between borders, the environment and literature. e creative possibilities
of literature and the specic aordances of a Scottish context enable Scottish
literary works to play through and imagine the manifold interdependencies
between bordering processes and environmental concerns. Henk van Houtum
proposes that ‘[m]aking a border, demarcating a line in space is a collaborative
act’ and that ‘[t]he interpretation and meaning of borders is always open for
reforms and transforms’ (2011, 60). Literary texts, similarly, are collaborative
and communal: they create meaning by entering into dialogue with their
readers and with one another. By looking at three dierent literary forms
mobilized by writers, the littoral, planetarity and territory, I explore how writers
from the nineteenth century to the present draw on Scotland’s geographical,
environmental and political situation to shed light on how borders function
and suggest how they might be remade. e literary texts selected probe
dominant bordering structures by entering into conversation with the Scottish
environment and provide multifaceted perspectives on borders that recognize
both the opportunities and the limitations of reading them environmentally.
ey consider borders as constructs built on our visions of the world which can
consequently be remade, rst and foremost through a shared imagination.
Structure of this book
I begin this book by outlining how a dialogue between border studies and
ecocriticism can be established through a new formalist methodology which will
provide the basis for my argument that Scottish literature can vitally contribute
to disentangling theoretical challenges and deadlocks related to the study of the
relationship between borders and the environment. For this purpose, Chapter
2 will provide an overview of these theoretical elds, their main concepts and
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination4
methodologies, and suggest how they can be made to productively inform one
another. Here I particularly consider potential pitfalls and challenges that come
with considering borders and the environment in their relation, specically
in the context of essentialist conceptions of Nature. Not only can the study of
borders benet from the premises of deconstructive ecocriticism which calls
into question more abstract borders such as those between human and non-
human while also valuing the indispensability of borders as contact zones, but a
more thorough understanding of bordering processes may also shed new light
on some of the theoretical problems raised by deconstructive ecocriticism by
addressing the multifarious functions, imaginations and orderings that are at
work in all forms of borders, including those of interest to ecological thought.
Integrating the interdisciplinary approaches of border studies and current
ecocritical theory reveals how border narratives and their conceptualizations of
power and ethics may be of interest to environmental studies. It also highlights
the ability of the environment to underwrite and reinforce or to contest and
subvert the representation of the border. Following these paths and highlighting
theoretical impasses and challenges will allow me to demonstrate how literary
studies, and Scottish literary works, provide a productive avenue to prompt
a questioning of the basic premises and paradigms underlying present cross-
disciplinary understandings of borders and Nature. Building on this overview,
the chapter highlights the potential of using Caroline Levine’s (2015) new
formalist methodology to establish a productive interdisciplinary dialogue and
nally considers the unique aordances of Scottish literature for examining the
relationship between borders and the environment.
e three analysis chapters that follow identify three central ‘ancillary’ literary
forms mobilized by writers to address the relationship between borders and the
environment by thinking them through Scotland, the littoral, planetarity and
territory, and detail their respective aordances. is organization into chapters
is to be understood as a make-shi arrangement to allow me to address each
form in detail rather than a clear-cut conceptual division between the literary
forms in question. As will become clear by the end of this book, literary forms,
despite their ordering function, resist such clear b/orderings in actual narratives
in which they continually overlap, collide, clash or ow into one another.
Each analysis chapter begins by outlining current theoretical debates to assess
the role that literary form might play and to open a dialogue between theory
and literature. Aer dening each ancillary form, the specic aordances of
thinking these forms through Scotland are addressed through what I call critical
Introduction 5
vignettes: short discussions of literary texts that mobilize the forms in question
from a decidedly Scottish context. e selection of texts for these vignettes is not
exhaustive but merely serves to indicate certain trends in Scottish literature and
to encourage readers to draw connections with additional texts that they have
read in the form of an open-ended process. By examining texts from dierent
periods in the vignettes, I do not want to suggest a teleological development
of these forms across time so much as I want to examine how these forms
resonate with writers in dierent periods and may occur in a variety of textual
congurations.
Chapter 3 focuses on a littoral form of writing that is characterized by an
amphibious aesthetic which captures the materiality of the transitional zone
between water and land. In this chapter, I examine the literary aordances of
Scotland’s littoral zones for an environmental reimagination of borders of all
kinds, from the national, to the cultural, to the borders of the human body. In
Scotland, the intersection between political borders and littoral zones enables
a special engagement with the littoral in the context of borders and allows
writers to reimagine them through an engagement with terraqueous materiality.
Drawing on the ontological instability of littoral zones allows the literary works
discussed in this chapter to explore and transform borders by highlighting them
as conceptually and geographically unstable and shiing constructs, even as
they address their very real political eects.
In Chapter 4, I explore planetarity as an aesthetic form that captures the
challenges of the Anthropocene by embracing the contradictory, irresolvable
and sometimes unsettling aspects of planetary realities that resist being
ordered into neat categories. e writers discussed in this chapter can be seen
to think planetarity from within. Treating the notion of Scotland as peripheral
and parochial as an aordance, rather than a limitation, their literary works
show that the planetary should always be considered in conjunction with the
local. By accessing the planetary through their local ecological, cultural and
temporal contexts, they explore the role of human bordering in light of the
incommensurability of thinking along planetary lines.
Finally, Chapter 5 looks at the form of territory, a form that has been regarded
as fundamental to any understanding of human borders. e idea of land, both
in an environmental and a political sense, is a historically complicated one in
Scotland which makes Scotland an ideal context in which to explore the form of
territory. By exploring territory both discursively and formally, the writers in this
chapter probe at the ideational foundations of territory as a literary, material and
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination6
socio-political form. By rethinking territory from an environmental perspective,
they develop a new understanding of territory, one of the most fundamental
bordering concepts of human spatial practice. Rather than idealistically
presenting a borderless world, they critically engage with territory by presenting
an alternative vision that takes into account the enmeshment of territorial
practices in more-than-human realities.
2
Conversations across disciplinary boundaries
Border studies and ecocriticism: challenges and potential
David Newman argues that border studies experienced a ‘renaissance’ in the nal
decade of the twentieth century, providing a counter-discourse to the notion of
a borderless world which emerged in the light of postmodern and globalization
theories (2006, 1). ese new border studies, according to van Houtum, have
adopted postmodern strategies of reading borders from a perspective that is
decidedly ‘anti-deterministic, anti-essentialistic and not focused on the line
per se’ (2005, 673). A central element in this new interest has been a move
away from problematic distinctions drawn between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’
borders, which, according to van Houtum, were conventionally mapped onto an
ethical hierarchy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ borders (2005, 675). As a result, the
notion of the natural border has been contested and borders today are no longer
categorized according to an assumed stability or ‘naturalness’ but are instead
seen as complex, multidimensional and dynamic constructs that are not limited
to territorial demarcation practices.1 Along these lines, border studies not only
started to focus on bordering practices by reading the border as verb (see van
Houtum 2005, 672) but they have also moved away from an exclusively state-
centred view in which the national border is the primary object of interest. As
Newman argues, borders have a fundamental inuence in structuring our daily
lives even outside the political arena (2006, 14). Border studies, even more so
aer the introduction of the ‘lines in the sand agenda’ of critical border studies
(see Parker and Vaughan Williams 2009), can be seen to extend their interests
towards multiple levels of ‘b/ordering’ (see van Houtum, Kramsch and Zierhofer
2005), and to take into consideration the intersection between territorial,
political, social, temporal and other boundaries. While the move away from
nature in the context of border studies has been a necessary move, it has also
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination8
meant a rejection of investigations into the correlations between bordering
processes and environmental concerns.
When Newman praises the increasing interdisciplinarity of border studies
in 2006, environmental studies, ecocriticism, literary and cultural studies are
not among the list of involved disciplines. Since then, critical border studies
has emerged as a distinctive approach within border research that examines
borders beyond their territorial location. is new direction of border research
pays attention to how borders shi over time, the representations that govern
their construction, and highlights ethical considerations of bordering processes
and border regimes (see Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009; Brambilla
2015; Cooper 2020).2 Similarly, considerations of environmental factors in
bordering processes have gained more attention along several axes of analyses,
including the eects of borders on animal migration (Tautz and Rothhaar 2012;
Oppermann 2017; Ullrich and Middelho 2021), the need to rethink borders
in the context of climate change (Casey 2020), and to reconceptualize ‘natural
borders’ in relation to environmental conservation (Fall 2002, 2011). At the same
time, anthropocentric distinctions between nature and culture are so deeply
ingrained in scholarly practice that they frequently prove hard to overcome.
In their introductory text to borders, Diener and Hagen describe nature ‘as the
most pervasive of border crossers’ (2012, 84) and argue that ‘even the most
rigid of borders are regularly traversed by seasonal migrations of animals or
by seeds and insects dispersed through wind and water’ (2012, 86). However,
as Serpil Opperman’s study of non-human climate refugees demonstrates,
animals cannot escape material bordering eects completely even though
they have been excluded from wider discourses of migration (2017, 3). Even
though Diener and Hagen take care to highlight that the dividing line between
species and natural phenomena is ‘rarely, if ever, clear and absolute’ (2012, 86;
19–20), their discussion of territoriality re-establishes a stable dividing line
by oversimplifying animal territoriality, eclipsing non-human agency and
presenting human territoriality as supposedly more sophisticated. e clear
distinction between human bordering and animal territories or bioregions
that forms the basis of this argument is especially striking because it runs
counter to the general tenet of their work which presents human borders as
dynamic constructs that are themselves anything but ‘clear and absolute’. e
contradictions that arise in Diener and Hagen’s discussion of the connection
between borders and the environment are representative of the challenges
inherent in developing an environmental theory of borders when bordering
has traditionally been treated as a practice exclusively relevant to the realm of
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 9
culture and the human experience. e fact that anthropocentric assumptions
continue to inuence border studies’ conceptions of bordering practices
highlights the necessity of thinking about new ways of theorizing borders by
entering into productive dialogue with the environmental humanities.
While the inuence of bordering on the environment has been acknowledged
more widely in scholarship and public debate, especially with regard to wildlife,
the reverse, that is the inuence of the environment on bordering processes,
nds a more limited recognition. According to van Houtum, the move away
from discourses of ‘natural’ borders is grounded in an understanding of the
‘horric consequences an extreme politicisation of the naturalistic and/or
organic view on borders can have on humanity’ (2005, 675). For Diener and
Hagen, borders are always human-made and ‘every geographic boundary is a
symbolic representation and practical embodiment of human territoriality’
(2012, 23–4). ey describe how ‘natural borders’ such as rivers, mountains or
deserts have been specically selected by nation-states to support geopolitical
expansion in declaring them as the only ‘natural’ national limit to justify
conquests and annexations (2012, 42–4). ese types of borders have been
naturalized over the course of history and are in many cases still maintained
today, such as the Rhine border between France and southern Germany (Diener
and Hagen 2012, 33) or the Río Grande border section between Mexico and
the United States (Casey 2020). Similarly, the Highland line in Scotland
correlates with the major geologic fault zone of the Highland Boundary Fault,
which, though elusive because it does not constitute a physical border on the
ground, separates two physiographic terrains with distinct topographies, a
division that is mapped onto a cultural distinction between Lowlanders and
Highlanders. In environmental activism and international nature conservation,
Juliet Fall shows, the idea of ‘natural boundaries’ is seeing a surprising revival
in the context of decisions around protected conservation areas, which in
some cases leads to renewed advocacy for bioregional redenitions of political
borders along environmental features (2002, 243). Even purportedly natural
boundaries employed to distinguish areas in the context of environmental
protection and natural resource management such as bioregions, biodiversity
hotspots or ecoregions, though considered neutral by conservation literature,
are, however, actually political, a fact frequently disregarded by international
organizations, as Fall outlines (2011, 629). Such views, Fall argues further, are
ultimately incompatible with the current academic debate which is trying to
overcome the culture–nature duality (2002, 243). Paulina Ochoa Espejo locates
the root of this problem in identity-based approaches to borders and argues that
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination10
we need to undo the ‘conceptual entanglement with collective identity’ inherent
in dominant models of the border to build an environmentally and socially just
society (2020, ix). As an alternative, Ochoa Espejo proposes ‘a watershed model
of territorial politics grounded on place, rather than identity’ which centres on
geographical and environmental relations as the basis for a reconguration of
borders. Instead of assuming that borders are created ‘naturally’, Ochoa Espejo
takes watersheds as the basis for a new model of borders that ‘sees territory
emerging from located socio-natural relations, obligations, and institutions’
(2020, 19). is model ‘takes the environment seriously’ (3) by considering
humans and human politics as enmeshed in the world, avoiding the separation
between culture and nature that Fall identies as the problem of conservation
organizations.
Along similar lines, ecocriticism has increasingly come to question the
vocabulary used to talk about its subject which has variously been called
nature, landscape, ecology, the environment, the non-human world and the
material world. Timothy Morton is the most outspoken critic of the concept
and terminology of capitalized Nature which they expose and deconstruct as
essentialism responsible for the destruction of the very thing it seeks to describe:
‘e trouble with Nature is that it doesn’t exist – yet its fantasies grip our minds
with hope and fear, imprisoning them in the status quo’ (2014, 302). Nature,
for Morton and Clark, is at once a term whose meaning is impossible to grasp
and a concept that has been employed for contradictory purposes (2007, 18–19;
Clark 2011, 5–8). is leads them to conclude that nature is no more than ‘an
arbitrary binary rhetorical construct, empty of independent, genuine existence’
that ecocriticism should move away from (2007, 21). As a viable alternative,
Morton suggests open-ended ecological thought as the basis for ecocritical
research:
‘Ecology without nature’ could mean ‘ecology without a concept of the natural.’
inking, when it becomes ideological, tends to xate on concepts rather
than doing what is ‘natural’ to thought, namely, dissolving what has taken
form. Ecological thinking that was not xated, that did not stop at a particular
concretization of its object, would thus be ‘without nature’.
(2007, 24)
An interdisciplinary approach that considers environmental scholarship
alongside border studies tackles and deconstructs the problematic associations
connected to the ‘natural’ borders debate by deconstructing both traditional
notions of xed borders and the conception of the natural. Border poetics scholars
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 11
Rosello and Saunders mobilize the concept of ecology in a deconstructive vein
to address the relationship between ‘imagined borders and imagined nature’
(2017, 25). Outlining the aordances and limitations of Bruno Latour’s concept
of political ecology, however, they remain dissatised by the approach which
they argue falls short of addressing the complex power dynamics of the border
and risks being misappropriated for the re-establishment of hierarchies of power
(2017, 41–5). As a result, Rosello and Saunders conclude that an ecological
approach to borders ‘remains at best an aspiration’ that cannot yet be translated
into a truly democratic practice (2017, 46). Despite the understandable caution
exercised by Rosello and Saunders, however, the aordances of an ecological/
environmental approach to borders should not be dismissed too hastily.
Deconstructive ecocriticism indeed productively navigates the challenges of
ecological approaches that are endorsed by various ecocritical scholars and
outlined in detail by Timothy Morton (2007, 2010, 2014). According to Morton:
inking of ecosystems involves thinking without thin, rigid boundaries
between inside and outside, because in order to exist at all, the ecosystem must
exchange with circumambient phenomena. Indeed, thinking in systems theory
seems remarkably close to thinking in deconstruction.
(2014, 298)
Systems theory is crucially indebted to the notions of the rhizome,
deterritorialization and reterritorialization developed by Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari (1987). In outlining their theory of deterritorialization and lines of
ight, Deleuze and Guattari warn their readers of the limits of a deconstructive
approach. As Jhan Hochman argues, their notion of reterritorialization relies on
‘temporary and strategic xities’ rather than doing away with borders altogether
which means that they remain aware of the potential advantages of borders:
‘eir view of becoming-in-the-world, in contrast to a xed being-in-the-world,
merges structuralism (boundaries, limits, identities) and poststructuralism
(transgressions, joyous confusions, protean uctuations) into a shape-shiing
multiplex postmodernism’ (1998, 15). eir model thus complements the
uidity of rhizomatic networks with an adherence to ‘a minimum of strata, a
minimum of forms and functions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 270).
Building on the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Jacques Derrida, deconstructive
ecocriticism, also called eco-deconstruction, thus oers a productive framework
through which this correlation can be approached in a way that goes beyond a
simplistic return to ‘nature’ and the essentialisms connected to it.3 As Timothy
Clark argues, studies of the environment can no longer limit themselves to just
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination12
one disciplinary eld but rather need to branch out to meet the demands posed by
the concept of the Anthropocene (2011, 203). Criticism of its cultural politics has
prompted ecocriticism to expand the scope of texts that come into consideration
beyond environmentalist texts,4 and brought about ‘a striking turn to issues of
environmental justice’ (88) and interdisciplinarity that connect ‘literary analysis
[…] with issues that are simultaneously but obscurely matters of science, morality,
politics and aesthetics’ (8). inking through a variety of disciplinary elds,
deconstructive ecocriticism seeks to explore new waysoftackling environmental
questions in and through literature by ‘nurtur[ing] contradictions and promot[ing]
methodological open-endedness’ (Clark and Lynes 2023, 6). ough the primary
concern with borders in ecocriticism lies in the conceptual and physical borders
between culture and nature, self and environment, human and non-human, these
borderings are thus shown to overlap with the social and political borders of
interest to border studies scholars as intersectionality and environmental justice
are becoming indispensable elements of ecocritical enquiries.
While border studies can thus benet from a more nuanced understanding of
‘nature’ from the perspective of ecology, ecocriticism would gain new perspectives
by considering scholarship in border studies which intersects environmental
questions in a number of ways, including the notion of deterritorialized (eco)
cosmopolitan identities that think across geopolitical borders, an increasing
interest in matters of climate justice between the Global North and South, or how
bordering practices enable or constrict the movement of climate refugees. Clark
nds that, as political allegiances and national borders continue to exert their
power and undermine the feasibility of a borderless world, the Anthropocene
reveals the diculties inherent in thinking across borders and the power of
the ordering structures they create: ‘e planetary scale of the Anthropocene
compels us to think and act as if already citizens of a world polity, even while
it increasingly undermines the conditions of co-operation for any would-
be cosmopolitan citizenship’ (2015, 10). Ecocriticism, besides examining the
intricate enmeshment of human and non-human histories, more generally seeks a
balance between acknowledging the material world in its own right, emphasizing
its radical alterity, and pointing towards the various ways in which it has been
culturally constructed and the role literary and artistic representations have
played in reinforcing or contesting these constructions. e detailed questioning
of the most fundamental categories urged by Clark, connected to the radical
concern of deconstructing the borders between nature and culture, human and
non-human, while acknowledging and valuing unbreachable dierences, may
bring valuable insights for the study of borders more broadly. At the same time,
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 13
an understanding of the orderings, and the material and social eects of the
borders which are the main focus of border studies may demonstrate correlations
with the borders interesting to ecological thought and reveal the multiple layers
in which borders are imagined, organized and made to function.
e complex interrelation of borders and the environment, though producing
various ideological and conceptual complications, is more complex than it
rst seems and deserves renewed attention. A number of critics have already
taken up the challenge by developing the eld of animal geography (Philo and
Wilbert 2000), expanding geocriticism through an integration of ecocritical
approaches (Tally and Battista 2016), shiing the focus of anthropology
towards non-human agents (Frank and Heinzer 2019), outlining environmental
philosophies of borders (Casey 2020), and proposing environmental, place-
based models of political borders (Ochoa-Espejo 2020). In literary and cultural
studies,archipelagic criticism has contributed signicant insights on the role of
literary and cultural works in proposing ways of reading borders environmentally.5
My work is indebted to the pioneering attempts at understanding borders
through the environment and vice versa that I have outlined here. In adapting,
mobilizing and drawing on strategies and concepts developed in border
studies, ecocriticism and literary studies, I want to highlight the contribution
that literature can maketo these critical debates. Because of their imaginative
power, literary works may serve as testing grounds in which the ideas set out by
theory can be played out experimentally and their value for an environmental
rethinking of borders may be explored. While debates about borders and the
environment are frequently dominated by theoretical and political discourses,
literature invites us to adopt experiential and creative perspectives that can shed
new light on how borders and the environment converge at dierent levels of
our lives. Drawing on the strategic formalist methodology proposed by Caroline
Levine (2006, 2015) and the postcritical reading practices of Rita Felski (2015),
I propose that looking at how borders and the environment are articulated
through literary forms provides a more nuanced perspective on their complex
relationship than framing them purely through theory.
New formalism as an interdisciplinary method
According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene ‘has brought into view
certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no
intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities’
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination14
and that need to be taken into account in order to understand and tackle the
climate crisis (2009, 217). ese conditions, Chakrabarty argues, are linked to
the interdependencies of life-forms inhabiting our planet: the developments
of human history are made possible and/or restricted through non-human
phenomena and life while humanity simultaneously gures as a geological
agent inuencing these other life-forms and phenomena (2009, 217–18).
Complementing theoretical approaches, literary works are able to imaginatively
explore how these new conditions could play out, oering alternative views of
the borders we draw around not only political entities and social categories but
also the category of the human more broadly.
Acknowledging the critical value of aesthetic negotiation of borders, critical
border studies scholars Brambilla and colleagues argue for an integration between
border theory, concerned with the metaphorical and conceptual meanings
ofborders, and border studies, which focuses on localized social experiences, in
order to combine politics and aesthetics for a more comprehensive understanding
of bordering processes between experience, representation and theory (2015, 3).
Following from the same impetus, Mireille Rosello and Stephen Wolfe develop
a methodology of border aesthetics which posits that ‘aesthetics is essential
whenever we need to recognize and appreciate the criteria that dene borders’
(2017, 4–5). Examining border narratives and their aesthetic congurations,
they argue, ‘will help us recognize new borders and new narratives’ and
acknowledge in what ways ‘border ctions change dominant conceptualizations
of who inhabits and can speak for the border’ (2017, 13). While border studies
show a renewed interest in aesthetic congurations, Marco Caracciolo nds that
a large amount of research centres on literary texts and genres concerned with
the environment on a thematic level and formal inquiries frequently get side-
lined in favour of a focus on environmental politics (2021, 19). When literary
works come to be seen only as conduits for political views negotiated elsewhere,
however, their contribution to the discussion is overshadowed. Coming to
the same conclusion, Pieter Vermeulen argues that ‘an emphasis on form can
help us make a case for the enduring relevance of literature in debates over the
environment’ (2020, 47) and foster interdisciplinary conversations:
Literary form can enrich interdisciplinary discussions by providing patterns,
connections, structures, and descriptions that other kinds of knowledge
production are less free to generate, if only because their protocols don’t allow
the blend of imaginative, speculative, and descriptive elements that makes up
literary form.
(2020, 47)
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 15
For the purpose of this interdisciplinary project, literary form is thus of central
importance and new formalist methodologies are key in making visible the
patterns, connections and structures of literary form and thereby unlocking
the contribution Scottish literature can make to critical theoretical debates on
borders and the environment.
New formalism productively bridges the gap between aesthetics and
politics. In her denition of form, Levine moves beyond an exclusively
aesthetic understanding of form, extending the term to include ‘all shapes and
congurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and dierence’
(2015, 3). Politics is, in fact, not possible without form, just as form is not possible
without politics (2015, 3). Forms, for Levine, are simultaneously social, political,
aesthetic, discursive and material, and Levine’s methodology ‘involves reading
particular, historically specic collisions among generalizing political, cultural,
and social forms’ (2006, 632). In considering the collisions between forms,
Levine takes care to mention that even though colliding forms may compete
and reroute one another, their encounter follows an anti-hierarchical, relational
structure in which no one form dominates over another (2015, 16). Central to
Levine’s conception of form are ve major principles according to which forms
operate: they are ‘containing, plural, overlapping, portable, and situated’ (2015,
6). ey contain because they impose controls and constraints, they dier,
overlap and intersect on dierent scales, they travel across time periods and
cultures as well as aesthetic and social material, and they emerge out of and do
political work in situated contexts (2015, 4–5). Drawing on this denition, I will
be treating both borders and the environment as forms and identify how they
overlap and/or collide ‘to produce surprising and unintentional political eects’
(Levine 2006, 627).
According to Levine, ‘[t]he form that best captures the experience of colliding
forms is narrative’ because narratives, rather than tracing causalities, present the
experience and outcome of formal collisions relationally (2015, 19). Comparing
how forms are articulated in dierent narratives allows a reading of how forms
‘cooperate, come into conict, and overlap’ outside of causal relations (2015, 19).
In order to prevent a reading of form for its causes and intentions, and to explain
the contradictory and complex workings of forms as ‘both political and aesthetic,
both containing and plural, both situated and portable’, Levine employs the
concept of aordance. Borrowing from design theory, Levine denes aordance
as ‘the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs’ which forms
carry with them as they move (2015, 6). ese potentialities limit what formscan
do, as much as they create possibilities. At the same time, specic forms may
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination16
‘be put to use in unexpected ways’ that go beyond an initial understanding of
their aordances (2015, 6). e focus of new formalism, or, as Levine terms it,
‘strategic formalism’ (2006, 627), is neither to trace the intentions of writers, nor
to simply make a set of historical claims about literary form or determine what
forms are. Rather, strategic formalism seeks to consider ‘what potentialities lie
latent – though not always obvious – in aesthetic and social arrangements’ (2015,
6–7). No form exists in isolation, and within each encounter many dierent
organizing principles come into play which ‘may activate latent aordances or
foreclose otherwise dominant ones’ (2015, 7).
Even though the focus of this book will be on examining narrative
manifestations of the forms of the border and the environment, these will
necessarily resonate, interact with and inform social, political and cultural
manifestations of these forms. For Levine, there are four major forms that are
particularly common and pervade the ordering of society and literature alike:
[B]ounded wholes, from domestic walls to national boundaries; temporal
rhythms, from the repetitions of industrial labor to the enduring patterns of
institutions over time; powerful hierarchies, including gender, race, class, and
bureaucracy; and networks that link people and objects, including multinational
trade, terrorism, and transportation.
(2015, 21)
e form of the border I will discuss here overlaps with all of these forms but
is, in contrast to what Levine suggests, not synonymous with any of them. e
border contributes to the shape and functioning of the bounded whole through
its aordance to enforce ‘restrictive containers and boundaries’ (Levine 2015, 3),
to establish hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, to impose a temporal regime
around bordering practices, controls or repair works, and to create circulating
networks of communication and transportation of goods and people. Even
though Levine reads walls and national borders as bounded wholes, and they are
indeed tied up in the production and maintenance of such wholes, the border
should be treated as a form in its own right with its own aordances. Literary
representations of the border may focus on its aordance to construct bounded
wholes that create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion which, if upheld, serve
to keep the whole intact by defending it against invasions from the outside. is
is the case in John Lanchester’s e Wa l l (2019) where Defenders are protecting
the wall against Others who are trying to enter the country. e Defenders’
routine includes long stretches of immobility and waiting for potential threats,
which highlights the peculiar temporality eected by the wall and its protection.
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 17
e detailing of the networks of workers and transportation of goods that keep
the wall intact highlights the networking aordances of the border. At the same
time, borders may take up a dierent function and produce dierent political
eects depending on their formal conguration in any given literary text.
e form of the environment is more dicult to grasp and can best be read
as a set of aesthetic mediations of the material environment. In referring to
the environment as a literary form, I refer to how the environment manifests
itself and is articulated in the literary texts that I am examining. From a holistic
perspective, the environment has been read as the ultimate containing form, a
bounded whole par excellence. Recent ecocritical research has largely rejected
holism in favour of reading the environment as a rhizomatic network, or mesh,
in which, according to Morton, ‘the whole is always less than the sum of its parts’
(2019, 102). I do not claim to provide a comprehensive history of the form of the
environment or an overview of how it has been conceptualized and employed in
other, non-literary contexts. Nor do I aim to understand what exactly the form
of the environment is in any objective or indisputable way. e literary works
discussed here highlight their enmeshment in the world and while they provide
multiple possible ways of reading the environment, they do not attempt to x its
meaning. In the same way, I am less interested in hermeneutically determining
the forms I discuss than in how they are used and to what eect.
e formal arrangements articulated in literary texts are oen more
contradictory and complex than they may seem at rst, especially when the
forms of the border and the environment collide with each other and produce
unexpected results. In order to investigate the interface where borders and
environments overlap, I will be concentrating on moments when they are
connected through what I will describe as ancillary forms. Ancillary forms
areforms which, in overlapping with two other forms, in this case the form of
the border and the form of the environment, take on a connecting function and
catalyse the political eects that are produced at their intersection. ese ancillary
forms retain their autonomy while also functioning as connecting elements that
allow an articulation of borders and the environment in relation. By catalysing
the political eects emerging at their collision, the ancillary form highlights the
ways in which the two forms may work together, reinforce one another, and/or
undermine one another (Levine 2006, 651). Each analysis chapter discusses one
specic ancillary form and its aordances: the littoral, planetarity and territory.
ese are, of course, not the only forms that could function in this way. e
forms of the archipelago, mobility or temporality might be other examples on
which an analysis of ancillary forms could focus. e selection I have decided
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination18
on appears to me most pertinent in its political eects and wide enough to cover
a range of temporally portable congurations. ese serve to provide insights
into borders as processes and constructs and suggest ways in which they may be
recongured in connection with the environment.
Each examination of an ancillary form begins with an overview of relevant
critical theoretical debates which are then put in dialogue with a range of
Scottish literary texts. To demonstrate the versatility and portability of the
forms, what follows is a combination of shorter discussions of a set of literary
works written and published from the nineteenth century to the present which
I call critical vignettes, and a detailed case study of one particular writer or text
from the 1920s and 1930s, the very middle of the period covered here. Choosing
literary works set in the middle of the period covered by this book for the case
studies allows the case studies not only to enter into productive dialogue with
one another, but also to serve as nodes of connection between the vignettes
that make visible the formal patterns that I am tracing. What emerges from the
combination of case studies and vignettes is a sense of how the literary works
discussed as case studies respond to literary traditions of, for example, the
romance adventure or the historical novel, but also how they themselves become
formative for the writers that come aer them. At the same time, I do not want
to create a literary genealogy of the forms I am discussing. Rather, I want to
show how they can operate outside of national literary histories. In focusing
on form rather than individual authors or literary histories, I want to show
how the ancillary forms I look at have resonated with writers across time and
howthey mobilize them in ways that make use of the aordances of Scotland
for reimagining borders through the environment. e time period covered by
the critical vignettes amounts to roughly two hundred years and reaches from
the early nineteenth century, with the earliest work I discuss published in 1822,
to the twenty-rst century, with the most recent literary text covered published
in 2020. Focusingon the formal qualities of the literary texts discussed here
allows me to consider them beyond their situatedness within history, culture,
or literary tradition. Instead of outlining the dierences between these works by
reading them through the lens of specic national literary histories, a focus on
form reveals instead what these literary works have in common. By considering
literary form beyond historical contexts, a strategic formalist approach highlights
how they might help us as readers and scholars to make sense of, and encourage
us to rethink, the relationship between borders and the environment for our
own contemporary moment.
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 19
Literary critics have provided useful frames for approaching both historically
situated formal analyses and their wider transtemporal implications beyond
national (literary) histories. Levine’s strategic formalism, striking a balance
between situatedness and portability, engages with local and national literatures
while at the same time moving and thinking beyond them. It oers a way to
identify the potentialities that may emerge from an approach that moves beyond
periodizing according to national literary history. I agree with Michaela Bronstein
who argues that literary forms ‘are oen precisely the most useful things about
the texts of the past for the readers of the future’ when they are regarded outside
of those contexts and put to new uses (2018, 8). Reading forms within as well
as beyond their socio-historical contexts, Bronstein and Levine employ what
Rita Felski terms postcritical reading practices (2015, 2017). Postcritical reading,
as opposed to suspicious reading, Felski explains, is not about ‘looking behind
the text – for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives’
but rather places the critic ‘in front of the text’, asking them to reect on the
text’s aordances, that is on what it ‘unfurls, calls forth, makes possible’ (2015,
12). Rather than applying either theory or history to the works I look at, I am
more interested in the critical intervention that literature can make in current
theoretical discussions. By reading postcritically, we allow forms to produce new
ways of thinking about borders and the environment beyond the frameworks of
history and the nation. Postcritical reading practices encourage literary forms
to take centre stage, assert their agency and guide our reading in sometimes
unexpected directions.
For Susan Stanford Friedman, transhistorical and transnational approaches
move beyond the limitations of linear approaches to time while keeping aware
of the local and the specic, and therefore call forth new ways of approaching
literary history ‘that engage with the nonhuman, the planetary, even the
interstellar’ (2019, 398). As I show in the remainder of chapter, in order to fully
understand the aordances of Scotland for rethinking the relationship between
borders and the environment, we need to think outside of the historicist and
nationalist framework that has long dominated Scottish literary studies. Paying
attention to literary form, rather than national history, highlights how Scottish
literary works develop environmental perspectives on borders that cannot
be captured through a periodizing lens. is approach allows literary works
to produce new conceptual worlds beyond national and historical meaning-
making and can help us rethink the categories we use to b/order not just our
world but also our discipline.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination20
e Scottish situation: predicament or aordance?
What is Scottish literature? In a booklet of this title, Alan Riach begins his
exploration of this question with the natural imagery depicted in the poetry of the
twentieth-century writer John Cunningham as characteristic of an understanding
of Scotland for which nature and its symbolism are central (2009b, 3). To gain
a comprehensive view of what constitutes Scottish literature, Riach argues, this
understanding of Scotland through landscape must be complemented by a
historical reading of Scottish national identity. is leads him towards a detailed
rendering of the recongurations of Scotland’s national borders over time
and the signicance of these changes for a Scottish nationalidentity, and, by
extension, for the denition of Scottish literature (2009b, 3–4). Riach’s reading
is representative of a long tradition of reading Scottish literature through a
national lens. In the following, I want to propose alternative ways of reading the
connection between Scotland’s borders and environment beyond the national.
As Eleanor Bell contends, Scottish studies, in responding to post-Union
Scotland’s status as a stateless nation and the perceived lack of an organic literary
tradition, has been overly dependent on cultural nationalist readings, privileging
and overemphasizing concerns of national culture in the process (2004, 2). e
overdetermination of national characteristics in denitions of a Scottish literary
tradition limits its possibilities and pathologizes Scottish literature under the
header of what Edwin Muir, in 1936, termed ‘the predicament of the Scottish
writer’.6 For Berthold Schoene, any attempt undertaken by Scottish critics to
locate an authentic Scottish literary tradition within essentialist concepts of
organic nationhood is fraught by its insistence on homogeneity and autonomy
that neglects both Scotland’s internal heterogeneity and the inuence of cross-
cultural ows of ideas (2007, 9). In nationalist readings, Scottish culture and
literature appear ‘doomed to failure by history, geography, by ideology – all of
which conspire to produce a cultural waste land’ (Craig 1999, 17). For Cairns
Craig (1999), the modern Scottish novel is tied up with nation-building processes
and thereby engages in bordering work. e failure of Scotland to produce a
coherent literary tradition and a unied sense of nationhood, by extension,
signies to Craig a failure of the Scottish novel as an instrument of the modern
nation-state (1999, 14). Cultural nationalist readings thus tend to focus on
Scotland’s lack of an organic, continuous literary tradition, undermined further
by the controversy around the authenticity of the Ossian poems, published by
James Macpherson in 1760, whose foundational claims to a national tradition
of writing eventually turned out to be fabricated. In the eighteenth century,
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 21
when other European countries were dening themselves as nation-states with
an organic folk tradition, Scotland not only lost its autonomy through the Act
of Union but was thereby also subject to mockery for the invention of a false
literary tradition on which nationhood could be based in an otherwise ethnically,
religiously and linguistically fragmented national landscape. Not being able to
dene Scotland through shared linguistic, cultural or literary heritage, state-
power or geopolitical borders, modern Scottish critics in the twentieth century
tried to nd unity in a shared pathological condition.
What would happen if instead of reading Scottish literature and culture as
inherently awed and unsettling, we concentrated on the alternative perspectives
and trajectories that the special situation of Scotland might engender? What
happens if we turn the presumed predicament of Scottish literature into an
aordance that allows a rethinking of the conventional understanding of borders
and the environment and how they structure society, literature and history?
Carla Sassi demonstrates that the contradictions bemoaned by modern critics
dene Scottish literature as anomalous, characterized by the lack of condence
of Scotland as a country that has been marginalized for centuries by England as
the dominant cultural centre, a country that can neither dene itself as nation-
state nor as a minority culture, and whose postcolonial status remains conicted
(2005, 2–6). For Sassi, however, this anomaly, instead of signifying a predicament,
rather serves as a blessing ‘in the light of the disastrous outcome of the rise of
nationalist movements in the period between the wars’ and suggests the desire
to follow the cultural model of the nation-state to be the true problem (2005,
7–8). e special aordances of Scottish literature lie, for Sassi, in its anomaly: in
Scotland’s exible and uncertain relationship to national identity. Consequently,
Sassi urges us to treat the study of Scottish literature and culture as a task ‘of
checking globalisation and of resisting assimilation to the falsely multicultural,
“united colours” ideal promoted by glossy magazines on one side, and, on the
other, the pull towards a closed national model (which seems to be dangerously
gaining ground again), based on exclusivity and intolerance’ (2005, 12). is
view is supported by Schoene, who argues that, from a twenty-rst-century
viewpoint, when national unity and the proliferation of borders are increasingly
questioned, the ‘apparent centuries-old shortcoming’ of Scottish culture to
dene an organic literary tradition and unied national culture ‘would reveal
itself as thoroughly advantageous’ (2007, 9). Aer the paradigm shi away from
traditions of cultural nationalist criticism, Schoene argues, adaptability and
discontinuity are now praised as the positive results of Scotland’s geopolitical
situation and ‘no longer signify lack and inferiority, but harbour a resourceful
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination22
exibility’ (2007, 9). Rather than conducting another ‘suspicious reading’
(Felski 2015), I will follow the assessments by Schoene and Sassi and propose
to read the predicament of Scottish literature as a unique aordance that turns
it into an interesting arena for exploring alternative visions of borders and the
environment.
Moving beyond cultural nationalist readings of Scotland, archipelagic
approaches have fostered an understanding of Scotland as a collection of islands
in ways that acknowledge the value of its internal heterogeneity, decentre
traditional nationhood and the borders that come with it, and connect Scotland
with the wider world by looking outwards along and beyond its coastal edges
rather than inwards. As Bell points out, Scottish literature invites such a reading
in that, in contrast to critical accounts dening Scottish literature and culture
through lack, literary works have long displayed Scotland’s dispositions as
aordances and continue to do so (2004, 5). According to Baker, contemporary
Scottish speculative ctions, for example, ‘emphasise the missing, the abnormal,
and the failure, all as a way to reach towards potential and possibility’ (2016,
263) and treat ‘the novel as a form of unlimited possibility’ (2016, 266). Rather
than imagining Scotland’s political future as a nation-state with clearly dened
borders, the writings Baker considers make use of the aordances of the Scottish
situation in order to dissolve borders and envision Scotland as ‘textually-located,
uid, and essentially democratic’ (2016, 265).
In an attempt to shi Scottish criticism into a similar direction, Schoene
argues that the crucial task of the contemporary critic lies in assessing the value
of critical invocations of Scottishness and determining whether Scottishness
remains a viable category to dene or employ (2007, 8). Trying to nd a
solution to this question, Sassi suggests we adopt new strategies of reading
that nd a balance between isolating a discipline focused on national literary
history and dissolving the discipline altogether (2014). Such reading practices,
Sassi contends, would simultaneously attend to and defamiliarize the local ‘by
questioning and problematising, both the national literature paradigm and
the cosmopolitan agenda of the “new” World literature studies’ (2014). Sassi
builds on the theoretical work of Susan Stanford Friedman whose questions
about the temporalities oered by transnational literary research serve as a
useful framework for a revaluation of Scottish literature beyond geopolitical or
temporal containers:
Instead of falling back all too easily into periods of literary history as markers
of a national literary history, can we develop what have been variously called
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 23
transnational, global, or planetary approaches without giving up the rigorous
historical and geographic contextualisation of points of production and
reception?
(2019, 395)
While Ursula Heise suggests a type of multiscalar reading practice that moves
beyond the local (and national) to develop a sense of planet (2008), Timothy
Clark criticizes the limitations of historicist approaches and methodological
nationalism in the context of the Anthropocene:
e focus [of critique] is on the specic time-honoured notion that to
understand a text is to reconstruct its context. Yet ‘putting it back in context’ is
something that must become more problematic when we are forced to consider
issues which, in however minute a way, require both planetary and even futural
contexts.
(2015, 22)
What is needed, Clark argues, is a methodology that takes the environmental
crisis as a prompt to question the basic conceptions of the human, the social and
the cultural (2015, 20). Clark’s multiscalar reading practice moves away from
suspicious reading ‘with the critic being particularly attentive in retrospect to
the destructive eects of modes of hierarchy, exclusion and exploitation’ (2015,
50) and turns towards the aordances of texts. Rather than conning texts to
singular meanings or determining and evaluating their environmentalist value,
Clark’s reading practice suggests ‘a way of enriching, singularizing and yet also
creatively deranging the text by embedding it in multiple and even contradictory
frames at the same time’ (2015, 108). is turn towards aordances, creative
derangements and the collision of contradictory frames aligns Clark’s
environmental methodology with the literary methodologies of Levine, Felski
and Friedman which inform me in this book.
What I am interested in here is how the forms and models developed by Scottish
literary works may speak across geographic and temporal boundaries and work
both within and outwith their geopolitical and historical contexts. ‘Literature
[…] never comes without borders’, Hollier and Bloch caution in the midst of
emerging transnational and world literature approaches to reading literature
(1994, xxi). It would indeed be naïve to deny the material eects of borders and
how bordering processes inuence the production of works of literature whether
they locate themselves within a national tradition or outside of it. Nevertheless,
it is crucial to problematize these borders, because, as Bell argues, ‘if nations
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination24
are now potentially subject to reconguration then, similarly, the notion of
national traditions can no longer be uncritically assumed’ (2004, 4). is study
is therefore not a critical invocation of ‘Scottishness’ (Schoene 2007, 8), and I
am not interested in examining how far the authors or the themes with which
they concern themselves can be normatively pigeon-holed into the category of
‘Scottishness’. Rather, my interest lies in how writers past and present, within
and outside of Scotland, employ the special aordances oered by the political,
historical and cultural situation of the geographical area of Scotland to explore
questions about bordering processes and the environment through specic
forms. For Glenda Norquay, the metaphorical uses of debatable lands, nomadic
literatures and recongurations of borders suggest a move away from monolithic
literary traditions which, by extension, opens alternative avenues of investigating
the relationship between bordering practices and identities, and suggests an
understanding of ‘Scottishness’ as an open-ended and lived experience rather
than as an inherited essence (2012, 112–15). When I employ the term Scottish,
Scottishness or Scottish literature, I am referring to such an open-ended and
nomadic implication of these terms. e aordances I see in Scottish literature
are not rooted in any form of national consciousness perceived or exercised by
the writers themselves but arise in the context of a practice of thinking through
Scotland in terms of an awareness of its geographical, environmental and socio-
political situation. e practice of thinking through Scotland is pertinent for
an understanding of the situated Scottish context while also moving beyond
this rather narrow scope by identifying formal arrangements and developing
models that may fruitfully be transposed into other contexts and complemented
by comparative approaches.
Borders and the environmental imagination in
Scottishliterature
Robert Crawford convincingly outlines how the idea of the border as a dynamic
zone rather than an inexible line, concurrent with current understandings of
the border in critical border studies,7 not only originated in Scotland but also
serves as a crucial cultural model that can be transferred to other contexts (1992,
185). Despite the absence of immediate conict in the time considered in this
book, the gure of the border remains an ongoing presence in the Scottish
literary imagination. Both ecocriticism and border studies understandably focus
largely on landscapes of destruction and borders characterized by violence and
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 25
conict (Lamont and Rossington 2007, 5). Scotland’s borders do not fall into
this categorization today: their material eects are more abstract, dispersed
and elusive. Even though they are characterized by violent histories (Bruce and
Terrell 2012; Shaw 2018), these histories do not re-emerge with the sameurgency
as they do for those borders and landscapes in which human and non-human
lives are immediately endangered. And yet, as Sassi suggests, a reading of
borders beyond crisis regions might oer a more comprehensive understanding
of bordering processes (2009, 146). If European border studies is indeed still
missing the aesthetic theorizations and political transformations that American/
Chicanx thought has achieved (Sassi 2009, 145), Scottish literature could oer a
critical vantage point for transformative and creative border theories.
In order to fully understand what Scotland can oer to a wider discussion
of bordering processes, it is necessary to relieve Scottish literature from the
restrictions of nationalist meaning-making, by moving beyond a state-centric
view of the border and towards a multiperspectival approach as suggested by
Chris Rumford (2012, 896). At a time when supra-national organizations like the
EU implement exible bordering practices and national borders are becoming
increasingly dispersed and invisible, Rumford argues, ‘we should endeavour
to develop an approach which does not rely on the assumption that important
borders are always state borders, representing divisions, and more importantly
which does not reinforce the tendency to always “see like a state” when viewing
borders’ (2012, 888). Rumford’s multiperspectival approach, which, rather than
simply reframing borders from the periphery, ‘is concerned with borders that
are diused throughout society as well as those at the edges’ (2012, 894), has
been adopted widely. Conventional state-centred investigations of the border are
increasingly questioned by critical border studies scholars who advocate for an
approach that regards the border itself as a ‘privileged point of view’ (Mezzadra
and Neilson 2020, xxi). Such a shi in perspective, they argue, allows us to focus
on ‘the making and instability of spatial and temporal limits and demarcations’
and remains aware of the far-reaching signicance of borders for political and
economic formations (Mezzadra and Neilson 2020, xxi). Borders, then, are no
longer understood simply as top-down or bottom-up constructions found on the
edges of nations, but as diused and dispersed across society and constitutive of
everyday practices (see Rumford 2012; Nail 2020).
Scotland, in facing the impossibility of seeing like a state and in reading this
impossibility as the special predicament faced by Scottish critics and writers,
fosters a literature that appears uniquely suited to such a multiperspectival
approach. According to Sassi, critical revisions of the nationalist paradigm
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination26
and the national border have involved an inquiry into ‘an integrative or
substitutive paradigm’ that could be found in a mode of thinking about borders
as multi-layered, mobile and dispersed (2009, 149). e status of the Scottish
border as a so border delineating a stateless nation and the consequent
‘internal diculty in delineating a monolithic idea of nationhood’ have led
to a better understanding of the multiplications of borders ‘along and across
regions, social classes, dialects and languages’ and the representation of such
multiplications in ction (Sassi 2009, 147). is dispersal of the border into
everyday life allows for an understanding of borders as ‘mobile and multiple’
(Nail 2020, 197). Looking at Scotland through a lens of cultural nationalist
readings has led to a neglect of such mobile multiplications, for example
in the exclusion of women from debates about the nation (Whyte 1995;
Christianson 1996; Giord and McMillan 1997). While the Anglo-Scottish
borderscape and concerns with national identity remain important to any
discussion of Scottish literary responses to bordering,8 and crucially structure
Scottish modes of thinking about borders, the literary works discussed here
draw the focus away from national and geopolitical borders. Even those texts
that refer to or are set on the national border can be seen to work their way
around a state-centred view by considering the manifold multiplications of
the border in everyday life and diverting, diusing or dislocating it. ey
mobilize a perspective of ‘seeing like a border’ to foster an understanding
of how borders have been congured in Scotland in connection with
environmental discourses.
Scotland is a country still understood to be dened heavily through its
environmental characteristics.9 While Sassi nds that the environment has
always been and remains a core component of Scottish identity, she argues that
this connection structures a post-national sense of space which is linked not
so much to geopolitical borders as anchored in geology and landscape (2005,
178). Despite the optimism of Sassi’s statement, the identity-landscape nexus is
not an unproblematic one, especially where critical issues such as access, land
ownership, and debates about conservation and land use are concerned, which
turn many rural areas, especially in the Highlands, into contested territory
structured by complex bordering processes (Smout 2000; Manfredi 2019, 3–4).
A conation of the national and natural not only risks depicting the Scots as
naturally and historically ‘closer to nature’ but, as Manfredi argues, may generate
exclusionary and essentialist forms of ethnoregionalism (2019, 6). Monika
Szuba and Julian Wolfreys nd such complications reected in the very naming
Conversations across Disciplinary Boundaries 27
of a bounded national entity that obscures internal dierences of the manifold
Scotlands that people experience in their everyday lives:
e name ‘Scotland’, in naming an undierentiated entity, fails to grasp,
precisely because it obscures (as do all such ‘national’ names) the many and
varying dierentiations understood as distinct places, regions, areas, cities,
geographical, and other locales, which though associated with the mastery of
the proper name, resist any such easy gathering.
(2019, 7)
Taking these risks into consideration is crucial for the development of a more
inclusive (post-national) sense of place through which territory-bound identities
are continually reinvented and adapted (Manfredi 2019, 208). An inclusive
environmental perspective on Scotland nevertheless poses for Manfredi, as it
does for Sassi, an alternative to nationalist readings of a bounded environment,
or what Brambilla terms the ‘modern geopolitical, territorialist imaginary’
(2015, 19). Manfredi nds examples of such an alternative mode of thinking
in the works of twenty-rst-century Scottish artists and writers who, through
acts of rethinking and reclaiming the land imaginatively, question ‘the origin,
destination and therefore propriety of that territory – our land, their land,
everybody’s or nobody’s land’ (2019, 7). Opening up a forum for debate which
situates Scotland in relation to larger issues of planetary import, these literary
works, Manfredi shows, establish understandings of environment, territory
and history as ongoing processes of ‘de- and re-aestheticisation, disinvention
and reinvention’ (2019, 9). Susan Oliver identies similar processes at work
in nineteenth-century Scottish literature, where the historical controversies
around Scotland’s borders aord an understanding of ‘country’ in which humans
are part of an integrative material environment and which presents Scotland
as ‘a complex but connected nation, where cultural diversity can be mapped
bioregionally as well as according to more conventional political, linguistic and
cultural borders’ (2014).
Environmental modes of thinking about borders characterize a tradition
of Scottish critical thought which, though said to have its origins in the
Enlightenment, has been eclipsed in ecocriticism by a foundation-myth tied
up with the English Romantic project.10 Tracing the origins of environmental
discourses in Scottish literature, Louisa Gairn outlines a decidedly Scottish
ecological tradition of writing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards
(2008).11 Ecological approaches, according to Gairn, can be ‘potentially liberating’
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination28
for the study of Scottish literature because they contribute to dissolving internal
divisions previously cast as inherent cultural failures and highlight the value of
Scottish ecological perspectives within globally relevant environmental debates
(2). Archipelagic criticism provides a further counter-discourse to the view
of Scotland as paradoxically awed, recasting its anomalies as aordances.
Connecting the lines of environmental thought and bordering processes
supports Sassi’s archipelagic reading of Scotland as ‘a post-nation, a meta-nation,
a geological nation’ (Sassi 2005, 183). By reading borders environmentally,
the literary texts in this book oer ways of re-making borders for our current
times that respond to Diener and Hagen’s plea that ‘[w]e must nd a way to
harness [borders’] ability to catalyze belonging and identity but diminish their
propensity for exclusion and the creation of “others”’ (2012, 27). Discussing how
borders and the environment are negotiated through ecocritical lines of inquiry
highlights how literature recongures the seemingly anthropocentric concern
of borders through an emphasis of our enmeshment in the physical reality of
the world.
3
Littoral
Borders in the littoral imagination: rhythmic and
materialrecongurations
Ecologically, a littoral zone is dened as an ecotone, a transitional area between
two ecosystems shared by their respective biological communities and can be
found on the nearshore area of lakes, seas and other bodies of water. Besides
describing an ecological contact zone, the littoral also constitutes a cultural and
literary eld of tension. Ecological understandings overlap with the cultural,
political, and literary imaginaries of coasts, beaches and shores. As such, it is
frequently caught between tendencies to romanticize shorelines as paradisiacal
spaces of leisure and a view of littoral spaces as precarious sites which bear
testimony to violent political realities. Beaches and coasts witness the destructive
eects of climate change and collect the otsam and jetsam evidence of global
environmental pollution just as they experience the tragic eects of globalsocial
inequalities when the bodies of refugees wash up on the shore. Frequently
delineating national borders, coastal geographies and their imaginaries are
sometimes instrumentalized to reinforce insular national identities and render
visible the violent actualities and eects of the policing of borders on a (supra-)
national level. e littoral consequently emerges as an acutely relevant form for
thinking through the connection between borders and the environment.
In this chapter, I examine the literary aordances of Scotland’s littoral zones
for an environmental reimagination of borders of all kinds, from the national,
to the cultural, to the borders of the human body. e material ambiguity of
littoral zones makes them uniquely suited to address the arbitrary, mobile and
in-between status of borders and to destabilize the foundations on which they are
built. Scholars and writers alike grapple with the conceptual diculties posed by
littoral imaginaries: the terraqueous quality of the littoral complicates attempts to
imagine it through a focus on either shores or waters. But it is also this in-between
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination30
status of the littoral that creates its special aordances as a literary form. In the
littoral, ontological certainties come undone. inking with the littoral oers
writers the opportunity to address the challenges of locating geopolitical and
social borders and to suggest how they may be transformed or rebuilt from
dynamic ground as our perspective shis with the tides. e inherent instability
of littoral zones is complemented by the temporal ux of the tidal ows that
blur the line of where the land ends and the sea begins, thereby challenging the
locational certainty of any littoral border. Focusing on the terraqueous materiality
of the littoral highlights the shiing sinuosities of fractal coastlines that make any
attempt at establishing clear-cut borders an impossible endeavour.
Before moving into literary terrain, I will outline central theoretical
perspectives on the littoral to assess the role of literature in dialogue with them.
To highlight what a literary perspective can oer to these wider theoretical
debates, I will theorize the littoral as a literary form which allows writers to
read borders through the environment. I will then move on to consider the
special aordances that arise from thinking the littoral through Scotland by
examining a range of literary works from dierent periods to nd out how the
littoral form has been mobilized within them to create a multiscalar analysis of
borders. ese examples are not meant to provide a comprehensive view of the
littoral across (Scottish) literary history but shall serve as critical vignettes that
indicate the consistently recurring interest in the form of the littoral in Scottish
literature. ey demonstrate the versatility of the littoral form which may be
adapted to dierent genres and socio-historical contexts while maintaining some
key aordances for addressing borders across time. Following this suggestive
transtemporal overview on uses of the littoral form, the second section of this
chapter will provide a detailed case study of Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners
(1933) which takes a closer look at the aesthetic potential of the littoral form for
examining borders through the environment.
Dening the littoral
In an essay printed in Helen Douglas’s visual portrait of the Hebridean tideline
during ebb and tide, Rebecca Solnit describes the seashore as ‘perhaps the only
true edge in a world whose borders are mostly political ctions’ which, however,
dees any notion of the legitimacy of ‘natural’ geopolitical borders ‘by being
unxed, uctuant, and innitely permeable’ (2001). In response to the visual
imagery of the Hebridean tidal zone, Solnit emphasizes that ‘the border between
Littoral 31
land and sea is not a Hadrian’s Wall or a zone of armed guards, it’s a border of
endless embassies of sandpiper diplomacy and jellysh exportation, a meeting
or even a trysting ground’ (2001). Littoral zones invite a questioning of natural/
national bordering processes because their iterative submersion provides them
with a special in-between status in that they belong to both/neither land and/
nor sea (Nail 2016, 3). is in-betweenness of mobile littoral environments that
continuously alternate their allegiances between land and sea constitutes littoral
borders as ‘aterritorial, apolitical, nonlegal, and noneconomic’ borders because
they can never be fully co-opted by either side (3). ey are not, however, lifeless
areas but quite the contrary: sentient life thrives in intertidal regions which have
a particularly high level of biodiversity. is ‘intensication of activity over a
border zone’ (Allen, Groom and Smith 2017, 6), together with the mobile quality
of the littoral zone, makes it a particularly productive site to explore borders
imaginatively – not as demarcation lines, but rather as contact zones that
demand critical attention to non-human as much as human agents.
Historically, the littoral zone has oen been equated with the coast, the beach,
or the shore and made to signify an ultimate natural border, a true edge as in
Solnit’s account above. For countries with coastlines, coasts and beaches oen
overlap with geopolitical borders and are therefore subject to strict regulations
of access policed at national and supranational levels.1 Due to the sinuous
materiality of shorelines, however, the exact location of such coastal geopolitical
borders necessarily remains elusive. Developing a concept of borderwaters, Brian
Roberts argues against the terrestrial bias underlying dominant understandings
of (geopolitical) borders (2021, 24) and instead demands an attentiveness to
how ‘sea and land are interlapping’ in the establishment of coastal and oceanic
geopolitical borders (28). e shiing and fractal environmental qualities of
coastlines, Roberts argues, challenge bordering practices by producing borders
that run counter to Euclidean geography and resist clear measurement:
[T]he fractal coastline produces non-Euclidean borders that are projected to
exist at a distance from the land out in the ocean, with their tangled and tortuous
shapes anchored to a non-Euclidean shore that is in constant spatiotemporal
ux as waves crash and recede, and as currents erode and deposit, producing
a fractal and innite array of temporally provisional coastlines attendant to a
littoral materiality whose fractal sinuosities and inlets evoke an innite spatial
length.
(129)
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination32
As a result, borders are frequently located oshore rather than directly along the
coastline and tend to incorporate seas and oceans into national territory that can
be owned and regulated (Gillis 2012, 159). For Roberts, however, this seaward
projection engages states ‘in natural-cultural, water-human collaborations
regarding their territorial boundaries’ that do not make their littoral borders any
less ‘geometrically grotesque’ (126).
At present, there remains a striking division between land-based research
focusing on the terrestrial formations of the coast, either framing the coast as
a geographical and political edge or attending to post-national archipelagic
perspectives, and scholarship in the blue humanities which aims to resist the
terrestrial bias of coastal studies by their shiing attention towards oceans and
seas. While both of these directions are indispensable to understanding the littoral,
especially from a socio-political perspective, they most oen cannot capture the
crucial in-between status of littoral borders. To truly capture the littoral as a
site in which environmental and bordering concerns overlap and to examine
what emerges at their intersection, what may be needed is a special attention
to the terraqueous materiality of the littoral zone. To develop an understanding
of littoral borders, then, we may follow the direction of border studies scholars
who argue for the border as a ‘privileged point of view’ (Mezzadra and Neilson
2020, xxi) and adopt a position of ‘seeing like a border’ in order to gain insights
into its workings (Rumford 2012, 895). is includes an attentiveness to what
Steinberg and Peters, focusing on the ocean, have termed ‘wet ontologies’ which
acknowledge the ‘world of ows, connections, liquidities and becomings’ (2015,
248) that becomes visible through the ‘turbulent materiality’ of the seas (247).
What is needed, then, is an invitation to such wet ontologies to transform, and
be transformed by, terrestrial matters. e writers discussed in this chapter make
use of Scotland’s environment and geography in order to develop a littoral form
of writing that may best be described as amphibious2 in its ability to draw on the
ontological uncertainty of the border between land and sea in order to address
and transform not just political but also social and material borders.
e littoral as a literary form
Ursula Kluwick and Virginia Richter dene littoral space as ‘a contradictory
and unstable signier’ which can take on a variety of socio-cultural, political
and aesthetic functions for dierent people and purposes (2015, 5), while
John Mack similarly describes the shore as ‘a neutral space, […] awaiting a
metamorphic role’ (2011, 165). e literary form of the littoral is thus not
Littoral 33
merely dened by setting its action near a shoreline. Rather, considering the
littoral as a literary form means inquiring into how actual places, geographies
and environments bring their materiality to bear upon literary examinations of
littoral zones. e form’s attentiveness to the terraqueous, shiing materiality
of the shoreline shapes the structure and aesthetics of littoral narratives. By
allowing the littoral to ow through every element of the narrative, the littoral
form brings together a conscious interest in actual littoral zones with formal
experimentations that expand the symbolic meaning and function of the littoral
as an aesthetic form to a material and socio-political dimension. According to
Solnit, ‘the seashore also suggests the border between fact and imagination,
waking and sleeping, self and other – suggests perhaps the essential meeting of
dierences, essential as in primary, essential as in necessary’ (2001). As a space
of metamorphic, contradictory and unstable meaning, the littoral zone appears
ideally suited to explore borders of all kinds through aesthetic means.
e literary works discussed here make use of the material, socio-political
and aesthetic dimensions oered by the littoral as a transitional contact zone
between land and sea to explore borders on all levels from the most ‘essential’
and ostensibly stable borders between human and non-human to interpersonal
borders based on gender, age, or ethnicity. New perspectives unfurl at the
intersection between borders and the environment within the littoral zone. By
focusing on the imaginative potential emerging from the environmental features
of the littoral zones at the centre of their narratives, they demonstrate how these
materialities may give rise to a transformative rethinking of bordering processes.
Rather than focusing on the landforms characterizing littoral space, Rachel
Carson points towards the importance of the watery elements that create the
shore, arguing that a true understanding of the shore must be aqueous:
Understanding comes only when, standing on a beach, we can sense the long
rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its land forms and produced the rock
and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the
mind the surge of life beating always at its shores – blindly, inexorably pressing
for a foothold.
(1998, xiii)
While previous critical engagement with the littoral has frequently tended
to focus more on the meaning and materiality of ocean-facing landforms,
the works discussed here emphasize the watery qualities of the littoral zone
highlighted by Carson. ey formally capture the rhythms of earth and sea
and engage the lively potential of water to transcend geographic and material
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination34
borders, including those of the body. In doing so, they make visible a world of
water in which multiple human and nonhuman temporalities overlap. Rather
than moving away from a concern with dry land, they transform the boundaries
between land and water to highlight their connectivity and show how a thinking
through the watery, transitional qualities of the littoral may produce a new, more
expansive understanding of human politics.
Literary works that make use of the littoral form develop a political perspective
akin to the notion of an aqueous ecopolitics as suggested by Cecilia Chen, Janine
MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis which considers water as a ‘political commons’
that includes all life on the planet past, present and future (2013, 6). Aqueous
ecopolitics thinks with rather than about water, continues to draw connections
between human politics and ‘politics as concerned also with the (imperfectly
surmised) interests of a squeaking, humming, chirping, and pheromone-
exuding non-human multitude’ (6), and as a result ‘might invite more humility
and careful listening – while annulling neither solidarity nor decisive action’ (7).
is aqueous political direction becomes visible in littoral writing both through
a foregrounding of the relationship between land and water as a primary
concern and the simultaneous encoding of such concerns on a formal level. e
aesthetics that results from the use of littoral as a literary form turns the works
discussed here into amphibious narratives characterized by a proliferation of
watery metaphors, a unique attentiveness to the materiality of water in relation
to land, and temporal structures and plots reecting what Carson describes
in the passage cited above as ‘the long rhythms of earth and sea’. Even when
the subject matter turns towards matters such as social regulations and human
politics ostensibly situated on terra rma, aqueous relations continue to structure
the form of the narrative. Amphibious narratives situate themselves at the very
border between land and sea to make use of the ontological uncertainties of this
physical and metaphorical site and converge human and non-human rhythms
and bodies.
Rather than presenting littoral zones as ideal spaces in which a pure dissolution
of borders may be realized without any disadvantages, amphibious narratives
carefully assess the potential of the littoral perspective by taking into account its
constraints as well as the opportunities it oers. While highlighting the potential
of the littoral form to engender new ways of thinking about social relations,
geopolitical borders and the legitimacy and exclusionary tensions of borders
of all kinds, the literary works discussed here also highlight the dangerous
political tensions and precarity surrounding the status of shores and their
waters as borders. Even though the literary form of the littoral enables writers
Littoral 35
to prise open a space of possibility in which borders may be reimagined as uid
and exible contact zones that can be moulded in a democratic fashion, they
necessarily recognize the political limitations of such an endeavour. e littoral
form, in this case, should be seen as a means to highlight how the materiality
of (Scotland’s) littoral environments reveals them as exploratory sites in which
alternative formations of borders may be explored and tested through literary
methods, but one which inevitably has its own limitations.
e littoral in the Scottish literary imagination
In 2020 and 2021, Scotland organized the Year of Coasts and Waters celebrating
and showcasing Scotland’s coasts and waterbodies through a diverse programme
that highlighted the role of water for Scotland historically and culturally as
represented in music, literature and art. Historically, David Worthington nds
that Scotland’s geography and location where ‘saltwater is never more than y
miles away’ (2017, 3) make it an ideal site for littoral explorations. Scotland’s
geopolitical/geographical borders are signicantly littoral in nature which leads
to locational and political uncertainties. On the coastlines, the political borders of
Scotland and the UK converge. Geologically, however, the coastal border around
Scotland is maybe the most frayed border of the UK, not just because of the
unruly irregularities of the sinuous shore of the mainland. e sprawl of dispersed
islands in almost every direction around the mainland furthercomplicates a
clear location of the border geographically and politically. Many islanders,
especially on Shetland and Orkney, have historically sought allegiances across
the North Sea, locating themselves outside of mainland Scotland and Britain
and stressing their connection with Scandinavia through their Norse past. To the
south, the terraqueous connections are not less pronounced: the Anglo-Scottish
border runs partly along several waterways. Beginning at the Solway Firth in the
west, the border converges with several rivers including the rivers Sark and Esk,
Liddel Water, the Kershope Burn and, nally, the Tweed before running into the
North Sea to the east. is intersection between political borders and littoral
zones creates a set of literary aordances that enable writers to engage with wider
debates about littoral borders and contribute new, imaginative perspectives on
how they may be reimagined. In the following, I examine a range of pertinent
literary works to indicate how the littoral form has been mobilized in Scottish
writing since the nineteenth century, paying special attention to the versatile
congurations of the form while working out its key aordances.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination36
Carol Ann Duy’s ‘River’ (1990) situates itself at the bend of a strategically
unnamed Anglo-Scottish border river, suggestive of the Tweed, which separates
two language communities. e poem examines the border through water
and considers how language changes into ‘a dierent babble’ as the river turns,
highlighting the overlap between natural and political borders captured by the
river and emphasizing the border-crossing ability of water. Able to speak all
languages, the rivers’ water ‘translates itself’ while ‘words stumble, fall back’ (99).
A border river, Edward Casey argues, should be seen as a ‘driing and shiing
border’ in which the meaning of natural and national becomes conated, turning
the river into an articial–natural hybrid (2020, 74). In Duy’s poem, the river
similarly takes on a hybrid role with political and linguistic meanings imposed on
it, but its uid instability is soon shown to undermine its bordering eect. A shi
in language alone signals the border in the poem, fastened through a sign nailed
to a tree next to the river, while the river itself resists its bordering function: the
border in Duy’s poem is an arbitrary political construct constituted through
conventions and signs. When communication appears to fail on the basis of
linguistic dierences, the speaker suggests that it may become possible aer all
by availing oneself of the connective quality of the borderwater. Rather than
relying on human language and meaning-making, thespeaker asks their readers
to imagine building a connection with a woman on the other side of the river
by ‘dangling your own hands in the water / where blue and silver sh dart away
over stone, / stoon, stein, like the meanings of things, vanish’ (1990, 99). e
linguistically established border may then be overcome through an embodied
allegiance with water, by becoming uent in more than one sense. e nal
evocation of words written ‘on the sand, near where the river runs into the sea’
(99) further highlights the volatility of borders built upon the fundaments of
human language which is subject to a continual deferral of meaning that can be
lost in translation.
Similarly set in the Borders region, though on the western end of the Anglo-
Scottish border close to the Solway Firth, John Buchan’s ‘Streams of Water in the
South’ (1896) explores in more detail the potential for ontological questioning
and material repositioning emerging from a littoral perspective which Duy’s
poem hints at. Buchan’s short story explores littoral borders and the possibilities
of crossing them through the relationship between the inhabitants of the
Scottish Borders and their environment. e Borders region as portrayed by
Buchan is characterized by an abundance of rivers, creeks, burns and other
waterways. e littoral perspective frames the story from its onset, in which a
ford swells up in the rain and turns into a raging river and thereby highlights
Littoral 37
the transitory and shiing quality of riverine littoral zones. e story centres
around the unique capability of the tramp Adam Logan to connect with water
and to cross (almost) every waterway that he encounters. Logan is nicknamed
‘Streams of Water’ by the shepherd because of his ‘queer crakin’ for waters’ (59):
he not only knows ‘every bit sheuch and burnie frae Gallowa’ to Berwick’ (59)
by name but also displays an intuitive understanding of the local streams, being
able to recognize them by smell and sound alone. His intimate relationship with
water is not merely conceptual but constitutes an aective and embodied bond
through which he is transformed whenever he enters a river or ford, becoming
‘straighter and stronger’ when in touch with their waters (58). On land, Logan
appears to the young rover narrating the story ‘so bent and scarred with weather
that he seemed as much part of that woodland place as the birks themselves’ and
hesilently merges with the non-human world and its elements, not disturbing
even the slightest bird by his uent movement (60). rough Logan’s deep
intimacy with waters, perceived by others as an increasing obsession, the story
reads the Scottish Borders region through its terraqueous qualities with ‘a
hundred lochs, a myriad streams, and a forest of hill-tops’ visible from the hills
where the ‘ripple of the sea’ is audible alongside the constant murmur of ‘the
rising of burns […] innumerable and unnumbered’ (67). When a ford swells
into a dangerous river, leaving the shepherds separated from their ock, Logan
is the only person able to cross it and get the sheep to the other side.
roughout the story, it becomes clear that Logan, prior to his nal and
fatal attempt to cross the Solway Firth, had never encountered a ford that he
could not cross. At the end of the story, Logan wanders farther o from his
local environment than usual and is encountered by a shepherd on the shore
of the Solway Firth. e shepherd explains to Logan that he is looking towards
the Atlantic Ocean, a saltwater estuary impossible to cross. ough Logan
perceives the smell of the Solway as ‘cauld and unfreendly’ (67), he is seen
wading determinedly into the sea the next morning in a fatal attempt at border
crossing. e aqueous border of the Solway is categorically dierent from the
other littoral borders Logan crosses with ease, not only physically, but also
conceptually. Choosing the Solway as the nal borderwater to be crossed, Buchan
taps into a literary tradition of writing about the Solway as a mobile, exible and
dangerously unstable border.3 Examining a range of Romantic literary works
centred around the Solway, David Stewart describes how the mobile littoral
landscape of the Solway prompts writers into adapting their ways of writing
because its environment resists the neat categorizations of the conventional
picturesque experience (2021, 42–3). Even though it is only encountered
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination38
towards the end of Buchan’s story, the Solway could be said to inuence the
form of the narrative in similar ways. e undulating rhythm in which the story
is told repeatedly returns to the acoustic and olfactory properties and sensory
experience of the dierent waterbodies of the Borders. e changing tides of
the Solway are evoked formally in a narrative otherwise temporally fragmented
and based around unexpected encounters with Logan, who, as a tramp, remains
a crucially mobile character to the end. Like Logan himself, whose mind is
‘aye rinnin’ on waters’ (1896, 66), Buchan’s story runs on water, exploring
the dierent ways in which the aqueous can be categorized, understood and
crossed. e tragic ending of the story transfers the ontological questionings
raised about the nature of borders, water and the connection between human
and non-human to the Solway and its double functioning as a natural/national
border that may be crossed by some and not by others. Logan’s impression of
the Solway’s smell as cold and unfriendly may be explained through its saltwater
materiality, unknown to Logan, but it similarly speaks to the political meaning
of the Solway as a border that comes with histories, processes and regulations
that could merit these adjectives, a national context merely hinted at vaguely by
Logan’s exclamation about his home in the Borders: ‘It’s my ain land […] and
I’ll never leave it’ (64). Exploring the possibilities of border crossings through
littoral zones and waters, the short story raises questions about how borders
may be recognized and by whom, who is able to cross them, how and why. It
points to both the potentiality of littoral zones to allow for the transgression of
borders and the limitations of uid imaginaries. In the end, Logan is buried on
his native hills where he lies ‘at the fountain-head of his many waters’ of which
many will ow into the Solway Firth. Aer his death, Logan’s body symbolically
and materially merges with the waters he loved during his lifetime and which
ow into and across the nal and only border he could not cross during his
lifetime (69).
Besides examining Anglo-Scottish borderwaters, writers also frequently
draw on the littoral form when attending to Scotland’s outer edges. By orienting
themselves outwards, such works make use of the littoral form to propose new
allegiances based on commonalities and stories inspired by shared littoral
environments. In the case of Scotland, this results in a literary fascination with
Scandinavia from the nineteenth century onwards which continues to inuence
discussions about Scotland’s national and cultural identity in the present. e
potential future of Scotland in the Nordic Council was discussed in the context
of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum (Little 2014), and writers like
Littoral 39
Mandy Haggith picked up on the historical connections between Scandinavian
countries and Scotland, as opposed to England. e Anglo-Scottish border
remains notably absent in Haggith’s Bear Witness (2013) which imagines a
newly independent Scotland in the process of redening its national borders
and identity. Instead, it is the North Sea border between Norway and Scotland
that is crossed by the protagonist and that is found to be easy to transgress
when the protagonist illegally smuggles a bear across on a boat. e action
continually moves between these two countries (and Romania) and the novel
consistently emphasizes the cultural and literary networks between them. A
similar engagement with the connection between Scandinavia and Scotland
can be found throughout Scottish literary history: from the adventure novels of
Jessie Saxby and John Buchan, to George Mackay Brown’s poetic novels about
the Orkneys and Margaret Elphinstone’s historical ction, to contemporary
environmental writing by Malachy Tallack.4 Navigating national identity
through oceanic allegiances rather than land borders and geopolitics, these
writers, as Elphinstone argues, ‘insist that we review Scotland on the map’ and
imagine it as ‘one of a network of far-ung islands linked together by seaways,
so that they become a cohesive cultural, if no longer a political, hegemony’
(2006, 110). Even though such projects of remapping and reforming Scotland’s
political, cultural and literary landscape do not always make use of the littoral
perspective, Claire McKeown outlines a literary tradition in which the littoral is
employed for a redrawing of allegiances across the North Sea, arguing that ‘there
is oen a specic emphasis on unifying Scottish and Scandinavian cultures
through a specic Northern landscape mythology, linked with a proximity to the
sea’ (2017). In those accounts that make use of the littoral perspective in order
to imagine Scotland’s connection with Scandinavia, according to McKeown,
the Scottish coast repeatedly ‘takes on the role of a bridge, providing a point of
comparison’ for both sides (2017).
Not all stories that imaginatively relocate Scotland based on its proximity
to Scandinavia make use of the littoral environmental perspective, but there
are some vital examples that demonstrate aordances of the littoral perspective
for an environmental renegotiation of borders, among them Walter Scott’s e
Pirate (1822). Scott’s novel, set in Shetland (Zetland in the novel) towards the
end of the seventeenth century, not only draws on the legacy of historical and
cultural connections between the Shetland Islands and Scandinavia, but makes
use of the littoral form to destabilize conventional borders more fundamentally.
In the nineteenth century, according to Penny Fielding, literature produced
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination40
in Shetland, regarded within Britain mostly as ‘a distant, wet, isolated and
unproductive outpost’, is able to foster a northward perspective that ‘challenges
the national geographic imaginary’ (2021, 273). Fielding connects this
perspective to Shetland’s ‘terraqueous condition’, outlining how the environment
gives rise to what she, inspired by Scott, describes as an ‘amphibious quality’ that
permeates all elements of Shetlandic life, from economy to literature (2021, 275).
In e Pirate, the cultural history of Shetland’s allegiance to Scandinavia,
rather than to Scotland or indeed the UK, is evoked through the terraqueous
environment of the islands and their geographical location. Most scholarship
on Scott to date has tended to focus on the inuence of historical and political
debates on his writing and in particular his negotiation of national and cultural
borders, thereby neglecting ‘the full extent of his contribution to environmental
literature and ecological historiography’ (Oliver 2021, 1). Scott’s mobilization
of the littoral form for a negotiation of borders highlights the meaningful
contributions of his writing both within and beyond its historical moment.
As a novel that is strikingly in tune with contemporary border studies and
environmental theories on the littoral, e Pirate invites an environmental
rereading of littoral borders historically and for the present.
Environmentally, as Susan Oliver argues, Scott’s novel creates a Nordic
connection through descriptions of ‘light eects from around the year in which
the Icelandic Sea connects Scotland with Norway to the East and Greenland
to the North-West’ which serve to present Scotland ‘as a location closer in
environmental character to the Arctic than to London’ (2021, 165). e location
and environmental characteristics of the islands embed the lives of Scott’s
characters into larger planetary relations beyond the national, allowing them, as
Oliver puts it, to ‘live in a marginal, maritime relationship with sea birds, oceanic
life, mythical creatures and forces of weather and water that surround and dene
their lives’ (168). In Scott’s novel, weather and water serve as exible and shiing
boundaries that blur conventional geopolitical and social borders. ey create a
watery landscape that resists any attempt at human intervention, and land-based
mobility is consequently limited when the land takes on an ‘impassable character’
with its ‘hills covered with loose and quaking bog’ that are ‘intersected by the
creeks or arms of the sea which indent the island on either side, as well as by
fresh-water streams and lakes’ (1822, 50). If any notion of a clearly distinguished
border between land and water persists aer this imagery, it is washed away by
the oncoming storm in which land and sea become indistinguishable: freshwater
mingles with the seawater swept in by the gale, turning ‘inland waters […] into
Littoral 41
sheets of tumbling foam’ (60). Land and sea, or land and water, are presented
as unstable signiers, describing a space of ontological uncertainty which
can rapidly shi from one to the other. In nineteenth-century Shetland, the
ontological uncertainty of littoral space ‘required particularly careful linguistic
management’, according to Fielding, as can be seen in the local avoidance of
the Shetlandic taboo word ‘sjusamillabakka’ to describe the space between land
and sea (2021, 286). Scott, on the other hand, makes use of the ontological
uncertainty of the littoral and consciously draws on the borders between land
and sea only to subsequently highlight their transitory nature. is ontological
questioning overlaps with the conceptualization of cultural borders when the
island’s environment proves resistant to the improvement schemes planned by
the Scotsman Triptolemus Yellowley who is repeatedly ridiculed for his plans.
In resisting Yellowley’s regulatory practices, the terraqueous environment forms
the basis for Shetland’s cultural dierentiation from mainland Scotland. In e
Pirate, Shetland is an in-between space which oscillates materially between land
and water and politically between Scandinavia and Scotland. e islands aord
a littoral perspective in which ‘natural’ borders that still appear xed in other
places can be undone and remade through their watery landscape.
As Scott’s novel demonstrates, engaging with the littoral requires a dierent
temporal rhythm of life, one in which pathways are continually performed anew,
not in a linear fashion but by meandering along and around the watery ways
created by creeks, inlets, streams and lakes, especially when the weather turns
the islands into a waterscape in which Mordaunt Mertoun struggles ‘through
brooks that were sending their waters all abroad, through morasses drowned
in double deluges of moisture’ which requires him to ‘perform a considerable
circuit’ (1822, 61). Instead of inviting regulation practices as proposed by
Yellowley, the weather-/water-world of Shetland remains uniquely inuenced
by the ever-present littoral instability of the environment which inuences the
stories that are maintained and created on the islands. Scott examines the literary
and imaginative aordances created by Shetland’s environment and geography
through his narrator:
[T]he imagination is far more powerfully aected by them [myths and legends] on
the deep and dangerous seas of the north, amidst precipices and headlands, many
hundred feet in height, – amid perilous straits, and currents, and eddies, – long
sunken reefs of rock, over which the vivid ocean foams and boils, – dark caverns,
to whose extremities neither man nor ski has ever ventured.
(39)
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination42
Littoral space in Shetland exists outside of human practices in this passage,
guring as a border between human and non-human, created by an ocean that
appears almost agentic and which operates in a space where human and non-
human creatures have no inuence. Scott had been inspired to write e Pirate
by the littoral environment of the Shetland Islands that he experienced rst-
hand during his cruise around the Scottish coast with the Northern Lighthouse
Commissioners in 1814, which took him along the coast of Shetland. Paralleling
the shaping of the clis, caverns and reefs by the ocean, the littoral environment
in turn shapes the imagination of the characters and directs the stories told on
the islands, just as it can be seen to shape Scott’s own novel.
Next to the coastline, the beach is a central setting for the plot development
of e Pirate: on the beach, the pirate Cleveland rst appears, a character who
will move the lives of the characters into new directions. e beach witnesses
the ‘heroic’ killing of a whale in which Mordaunt almost drowns but is saved by
Cleveland, another important turning point for the story. For the Shetlanders
in Scott’s novel, the sea not only provides food and economic opportunities,
but also supplies them with furniture, clothes and other treasures washed up
as otsam and jetsam from ships wrecking o the coast where the waters are
dicult to navigate. In this instance, the beach turns into a liminal borderzone,
a heterotopic space in which rules and regulations are suspended and in which
greed overrules morality. Shipwrecks are seen as almost fortunate by those who
inhabit the islands and who raid the beach for any items that might be of use.
e precondition for this to happen is the perishing of the original proprietors
of these items, which, under the guise of superstition, leads the pedlar Bryce
to refuse Mordaunt assistance in saving the drowning Cleveland ‘so that, there
being no survivor, [the wreck] might be considered as lawful plunder’ (1822,
387). Gender and class distinctions become irrelevant as all characters equally
loot the objects washed up on the beach, from pedlar to Udaller (the Norwegian
precursor to the Scottish laird). Filling their homes with the clutter collected
from the beaches, the interiors of their houses bear ‘witness to the ravages of
the ocean’ (221) and further blur the symbolic distinction between land and
sea by serving as a physical reminder of the littoral zone from which they were
collected. is practice of allowing the littoral to enter the domestic sphere and
witness the everyday lives of the inhabitants even within doors highlights the
crucial and all-encompassing inuence of the littoral in structuring the lives of
the inhabitants.
Diering from accounts that direct their attention towards Scotland’s
outer edges, be it in the south with the terraqueous Anglo-Scottish border or
Littoral 43
northwards towards Scotland’s coastal border, Sarah Moss’s Summerwater
(2020) draws the littoral perspective inland, away from the edges. Set in a
holiday park in the Trossachs on a single rainy day, Moss’s novel connects the
various perspectives of the makeshi community between the holiday makers
and the forest creatures through the materiality of rain. Chapters mediating
characters’ reections on issues as diverse as climate change, gender inequality,
Brexit, (inter)national politics, family life and mental health are alternated with
interludes highlighting the non-human world in an impressionistic and aective
way by detailing the geological history of the region, exploring the lives and
thoughts of wood creatures and pondering the sentience of trees. e result is a
truly polyphonic novel that gives voice to a variety of human and non-human
perspectives that the reader is invited to read as if they were in conversation
with one another. In its use of the littoral form as a connective element to break
down the borders of gender, generation, nationality, species and the body, Moss’s
novel may best be described as atmospheric, both in the literary and in the
meteorological sense.
Central to an expansion of the littoral perspective to include discussions
of the aqueous qualities of the earth beyond the shoreline itself, John Gillis
argues, is a recognition of land and water as ‘inseparable parts of an ecological
continuum’ of which we also form part (2012, 199). It is this continuum that is at
the heart of the weather-/water-world of Moss’s novel which highlights Scotland
as a country dened by water, not just along its coast, but also through its lochs,
rivers and ultimately through the cycle of weather that leads to its rainy climate.
is is reected in the form of the novel, its free indirect style of narration
and its structural organization around the shared experience of rainfall which
ows between and merges the otherwise clashing perspectives of human and
non-human characters. inking about the vibrant matter of rain (Bennett
2010, 53), its life and agency, Lowell Duckert argues that ‘by paying attention
to rainy texts, even if it means slowing down, we can imagine an ontological
approach to ecology that builds upon epistemological modes […]’ which may
provide responses to questions such as ‘What stories has rain told? What stories
can it tell? What “positions” can it still create?’ (2014, 115–16). As a ‘rainy text’,
Summerwater indeed explores these questions and makes use of the littoral form
to demonstrate how, as Duckert puts it, ‘living rain propels (non)human things
into new relationships and new material embodiments’ (115). Moss’s diverse
characters are put into relationships not simply through physical proximity but
through their individual experiences of rain which shapes their perspectives in
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination44
dierent ways. For some of them, the rain oers the opportunity to engage with
watery materiality on a bodily level:
She thinks of the blood pulsing on one side of her skin and rain on the other, the
thin membrane so easily opened, of the threads of blood in water. […] Leaves
utter in the wind and rain, the valves of her heart icker, currents of water
move in the loch below her running feet and rain lters through earth where
the roots of oak and beech reach deeper, spread wider, than the trees’ height.
ere are waterways through the soil, aren’t there, trickles and seeping, and the
branching streams within her body, the aortic river and the tributaries owing
from ngers and toes, keeping her going.
(2020, 18)
is passage highlights an understanding of bodies as permeable and
relationally connected to other bodies through water, similar to Astrida
Neimanis’s suggestion that we consider ourselves as ‘bodies of water’: ‘we leak
and seethe, our borders always vulnerable to rupture and renegotiation’ (2017,
2). Resembling Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners, which I examine in more detail
later on, Moss’s novel makes use of the shared watery materiality between bodies
in order to transform borders on a material level before addressing social and
political borders. rough the idea of a shared soaky material embodiment,
the above passage fosters an understanding of the non-human world as vibrant
matter, a world that has a life on its own that is deeply connected with ours.
e aqueous quality of human bodies is paralleled and explored through the
ubiquity of watery relations on what is perceived as solid ground or terra rma,
undermining the clear separation between land and water.
Even though scholarship on the littoral predominantly centres on coasts and
beaches, the term actually encompasses all sorts of shorelines, including those
of rivers and lochs which similarly present ecologically diverse environments.
More recently, historical scholars have argued for the value of considering inland
water routes as forming part of a littoral perspective (Worthington 2017, 8–9,
13). Scottish literary works such as Sarah Moss’s Summerwater expand the littoral
perspective as a space not just between water and land, but as a transitional zone
between solid and uid, earth and water. According to Gillis, ‘if we are to live
with rather than simply on our shores’ (2012, 198) we need to acknowledge the
uid nature of terra rma by adopting a ‘brown-water’ perspective (199). e
potential of such a brown-water perspective for rethinking conventional ideas
about borders is visible not just in the passage above but also in an interlude
focusing on the cultural-geological border of the Highland Boundary Fault
through a deep time perspective:
Littoral 45
e sandstone to the south was made by seasonal rivers carrying sand and
pebbles down from the mountains in the days of the rst plants. Was that water
brown with the sediment, did it foam? Have the sounds of rivers changed in all
those millennia? What was the riverbed, before bedrock?
(2020, 25)
Moving away from common accounts of the Highland line, Moss considers
the terraqueous geological history of this border and, by highlighting it as uid
rather than solid, asks us to consider how we might begin to rethink the nature
of the Highland Boundary Fault both on an environmental and on a political
level. e interdependency of these two categories is demonstrated through the
questions raised by elementary deep time perspectives: ‘In the beginning was
earth and re. Was there here, then? Was Scotland? Should the history of bedrock
comfort us, in geological time?’ (25–6). Compared with these watery geological
timescales, national borders come to appear insignicant and meaningless.
In a novel concerned with the violence that comes with nationalism and the
problematic divisions created by social and political borders, the suggestion of
a comforting potential of deep time imaginaries raises numerous unresolved
challenges. Could there be comfort in the idea that these borders are indeed
not ‘natural’ but constructed, not embedded in the make-up of the earth, which
means they may yet be remade in a more democratic and inclusive fashion?
Or does human action indeed appear ultimately meaningless in the face of the
earth’s history which may make tackling these challenges a futile endeavour,
a thought that would link this novel to other Anthropocene ction grappling
with the diculty of scale eects? Scotland’s terraqueous environmental history
functions as a vantage point for rethinking the political categories that structure
geo- and socio-political borders, a connection that repeatedly resurfaces
throughout the novel.
e experiences of the characters are embedded in a literary and cultural
tradition of thinking through Scotland’s waterbodies. Featuring a number of
references to historical, cultural and literary gures engaging with the littoral
environment of the region, Moss’s novel gestures towards a Scottish literary
and cultural tradition of thinking with and writing about the littoral in order
to address questions about national, cultural and social identity. By evoking
the literary and cultural history of the region, Moss inserts her own novel into
this tradition. e balancing of tradition and reinvention in which the narrative
engages suggests a literary interest in the littoral as consistent and recurring
beyond the use of the literary form by individual writers. Locating the holiday
park in the Trossachsnear Loch Katrine enables the novel to evoke the history
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination46
of the region, referenced also in one of its interludes: ‘Here was Bonnie Prince
Charlie and there was Mary Queen of Scots and Braveheart and Walter Scott
and Rabbie Burns and every Scot you’ve ever heard of, and if Nessie’s not in
this particular loch we have our own submerged monsters’ (97). e region’s
waters are saturated with stories that appear to frame and limit how they may
be understood. Aer considering the boats traversing the surface of the loch,
however, the narrative perspective is submerged through the imagination of
sunken coracles, canoes built from trees taken out of the forest, and the ‘cow-
ghosts’ of leather shoes worn by boys who disappeared long ago on the loch
(97). Human history and natural history merge as land and water become
intricately connected through human activities and natural processes. e loch
witnesses the cultural, literary and political, through both the stories in which
it is embedded and the untold human/non-human histories below its surface.
rough its polyphonic style, Moss’s novel is able to include larger, multispecies
narratives, producing layered perspectives on Scotland’s littoral zones. By
simultaneously incorporating and resisting any conventional framing of the
loch, Moss suggests a littoral perspective that is both thoroughly atmospheric
and urgently political.
Even though Summerwater may, at times, ‘[feel] unburdened, an escape
from history’ (Morrison 2020), shiing our focus towards the environmental
dimension underlying the novel’s politics shows that it is decidedly not
unburdened or escapist. e witnessing of violent histories and sudden
disappearances by the lake is not conned to the past but is repeated in the
present when Violetta, a Glaswegian girl whose family immigrated from
Ukraine, is bullied by two English children. e passage ends with the suggestion
of violence, followed by Violetta’s absence during the rest of the novel. A shoe
spotted near the shore provides the only clue to what may have happened. e
loch below the swing on which Violetta is last seen by the reader is the only
witness of the implied incident of ethnic violence. Violetta becomes another
child disappearing on the loch side and continues a history of disappearances
which, as the novel suggests, have been happening for centuries. In the end, all
of the connective qualities of the rain cannot erase interpersonal or interspecies
borders as easily as it might at rst seem, nor can they prevent the violent
events of the novel.
All of the indicative examples discussed here develop formal techniques
that are littoral in quality. Employing littoral forms of writing enables them
to rethink social questions from new perspectives and to explore the unstable
Littoral 47
boundaries between self and other, including on a material and bodily level.
Focusing on the materiality of specic littoral zones and their shared ontological
uncertainty, they conduct formal experimentations, allowing the littoral to
structure the rhythm and direction of the narratives in order to recongure
bordering constellations. is selective sample of literary works, while not
aiming to present a comprehensive view on the use of the littoral throughout
literary history, suggests a transtemporal resonance of the littoral form within
a Scottish context. e diverse formats of the literary works represented here,
encompassing poetry, short ction and the novel, highlight the versatility
of the littoral form and hint at the imaginative possibilities that unfurl at the
intersection between borders and the environment.
e case study selected for the nal part of this chapter captures the multiplicity
of formal arrangements that become possible by mobilizing the littoral as
a material, political, social and aesthetic form. Muir’s Imagined Corners
(1931) shows that the practice of mobilizing the littoral should not simply be
understood as an aesthetic rendering of a physical place between land and sea,
but as a formal exploration of the materiality of littoral zones that is attentive
to their multidimensionality. rough an amphibious aesthetics, Muir’s novel
transposes material and ontological questions onto the socio-political sphere.
As a result, the land becomes soaked by aqueous rhythms and philosophies
when the uid relations of bodies on land are made to interact with the watery
worlds of the ocean to explore the social congurations of human politics in
more detail. In Imagined Corners, Muir manages to nd a balance between dry
and wet perspectives and while the novel highlights both the dangers inherent
in thinking with the littoral and the precarious vulnerability of human bodies, it
also carefully navigates the positive aordances of Scotland’s littoral imaginaries
for transforming borders by tackling them at all possible levels, including those
of the human body.
‘We’re only separate like waves rising out of the one sea’: Willa
Muir’s aqueous materialism
Critical forays into Willa Muir’s life and writing have revealed the ways in which
her work engages with the social and cultural discourses of her time. ey
highlight Muir’s keen interest in social bordering processes by focusing on gender
relations (Christianson 1996; 2011; McCulloch 2009, 79–86), her engagement
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination48
with psychoanalysis, anthropology and continental philosophy (Christianson
2000; Lumsden 2007; McCulloch 2007), as well as her contribution to the
idea of a Scottish Renaissance (Bell 2004, 23–7) and to the wider modernist
movement (Bell 2004, 7; McCulloch 2009). Other critical accounts portray
Muir as a thoroughly cosmopolitan gure and focus especially on her travels
and her work as a translator of German-language modernist texts (Woods 2010;
McCulloch 2017; Lyall 2019a). Willa Muir’s rst novel, Imagined Corners (1931),
has consequently been understood as a literary text that is deeply involved in
human national and social politics, taking up discussions about religion, gender,
nationhood, cosmopolitanism, and modernity and exploring them within the
context of Scotland at the beginning of the twentieth century. Building on
Muir’s obvious interest in human politics and philosophy, I want to propose an
environmental reading of these politics that takes seriously the material relations
in which they are enmeshed.
e novel begins with the move of a young woman, Elizabeth, to the small
coastal town of Calderwick in North East Scotland aer her marriage to Hector
Shand whose family owns the local mill. Having trouble being accepted into the
smalltown community, Elizabeth desperately clings to her unfaithful husband
who ultimately leaves her in search of a better life abroad. At the end of the
novel, Elizabeth nally leaves Scotland herself together with her sister-in-law
to begin a new life in southern France. Detailing the lives of the inhabitants
of Calderwick, the novel centres on the experiences and thoughts of Elizabeth
Shand until her exiled sister-in-law, Elise Mütze (the ‘original’ Elizabeth Shand)
returns from France, aer which the novel begins to switch between Elizabeth’s
and Elise’s perspectives. e women exchange philosophical views about life,
including the position of women in society, mental illness, religion, music and
interpersonal relationships. While all of these debates might be said to focus
on matters of human interest, the littoral environment of Scotland’s North East
functions as a connecting point for their negotiation and crucially inuences the
direction of the plot and the thoughts of the inhabitants in manifold ways.
Despite being situated near a geopolitical border, the sea border of both
Scotland and the UK, the novel’s interest is not so much in national politics
as in the material and symbolic signicance of the coastline. Imagined Corners
examines borders not as physical dividing lines but explores their function when
they are dispersed across society and multiply themselves in the form of cultural
and social boundaries along lines of gender, class or religion that are reected
through the materiality of the littoral. Muir’s literary borders are best understood
Littoral 49
as imaginative constructs through which social boundaries are upheld. In many
ways, Muir’s treatment of the border anticipates some of the theoretical insights
of critical border studies (see Rumford 2012; Nail 2020) but also moves beyond
them by involving the environment as a constitutive agent in the creation and/
or destruction of borders. Focusing on the littoral materiality of the coast as
an in-between space connecting land and sea, Muir projects the environment
on discussions of socio-political and philosophical borders. Situated between
material reality and symbolic meaning, the littoral environment of the novel urges
a rethinking of political issues from an environmental perspective. Seemingly
human-centred concerns are environmentally inected through an emphasis
on the terraqueous material relations in which they are embedded, oering a
view on the political that goes beyond the human. By mobilizing the form of
the littoral, Muir’s novel oers a particular way of thinking through Scotland
and its borders as embedded in watery relations. At the centre of the novel is an
environmental engagement with borders through the relationship between land
and sea, uid and solid: through oceanic metaphors, watery references, tidal
rhythms and the dissolution of human corporeality, the narrative explores the
ability of water to reroute identity and undermines preconceptions of stability.
I want to begin my discussion of Muir’s work by attending to the material
context from which the novel’s engagement with the littoral emerges. Setting her
novel on Scotland’s North East coast allows Muir to draw on the metaphoric,
contradictory and unstable characteristics of littoral environments. e
material border between land and sea takes on an additional metaphorical
signicance in the novel when Muir maps conceptual and political boundaries
onto it: between townspeople and outsiders, repression and desire, religion and
spirituality, connement and freedom. At the same time, the novel retains a
sense of the physical materiality of the littoral which informs but also disrupts
such metaphorical uses. Following this discussion on the role of the coastal
environment, I outline how the novel shows socio-political borders to rely on a
reiteration of strictly regulated temporal rhythms which are, however, pervious
to the disruptive intrusions of non-human temporalities. While some parts of
the novel’s discussion appear to centre exclusively on land and others on the
sea, the conuence between them and the meandering streams of the narrative’s
engagement with a terraqueous material world and its dierent temporalities
suggest that land and water are not as separate as we might at rst believe. I will
pay particular attention to this overlap in the nal section, in which I consider
how Muir draws out the radical potential of uid matter to rethink human
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination50
corporeality and suggest how thinking with water may be seen as an ecofeminist
endeavour. While the focus here appears to lie not on the relation between water
and land but seems to shi the discussion entirely towards the aqueous, Muir
includes a negotiation of the limits of a purely watery perspective that is equal
to her criticism of a purely land-locked perspective. rough an amphibious
perspective, the novel suggests that what is needed for a rethinking of borders
is indeed a littoral perspective: one that shis with the ebb and ow of the tides,
neither fully submerged under water nor entirely dry.
Coastal environments between metaphor and materiality
e rst description of Calderwick depicts the coastal town from the view of the
sea as an almost paradisiacal space. is image is neatly woven together with
depictions of the beach as a place of middle-class leisure and entertainment,
layering dierent meanings and images of the coast. In early September, a day
on which the sea is still warm and inviting to bathers, the air heavy with the
‘oily fragrance of gorse blossom and the occasional sharpness of thyme’, bathing
tourists as well as golfers are sharing the space with sea larks and crows (1931, 1).
ese images of harmonious enjoyment, however, are revealed as fabrications
that resemble touristic postcards and brochures. e narrative simultaneously
declares the distancing of the local population from the coastal environment and
their assertion of ownership over it:
All this late summer peace and fragrance belonged to the municipality. e
burgh of Calderwick owned its golf and its bathing, its sand and its gorse.
elarks nested in municipal grass, the crows waddled on municipal turf. But
few of the citizens of Calderwick followed their example.
(1)
is reframing of the relationship between the burgh and its coastal landscape
aims to co-opt the environment into legal and political territory to be monitored
and regulated. Mineral, plant and animal lives are turned into assets of the
community that cater to the leisure industry alongside activities such as
golng and bathing. As the novel shows later on, the non-human resists such
easy attempts at co-optation, and they can only ever be achieved partially. e
absence of the citizens on the beach is telling because even though Calderwick is
situated on the coast, its inhabitants do not truly identify themselves as a coastal
community. Not only are they absent from beach activities, but the whole town
materially and metaphorically ‘turn[s] its back on the sea and the links, clinging,
Littoral 51
with that instinct for the highest which distinguishes so many ancient burghs,
to a ridge well above sea-level’ (1931, 2). is contrastive imagery initiates the
iterative metaphorical contrast between the land and the sea which runs like
an undercurrent through the novel and forms the basis for Elizabeth Shand’s
negotiation of her status within Calderwick. For Elizabeth, who, contrary to
the rest of Calderwick, ‘had a habit of turning her back on the land’ (116), the
land represents the community with its rules, restrictions and their judgements
which, rather than bringing people together, serve only to divide them. For most
of the inhabitants of Calderwick, the coastal environment appears undesirable
and when the townswomen complain about the wind intruding into the
town’s streets and rumpling their hair, it becomes clear that the unruly littoral
environment disturbs, rather than enhances, their neat and orderly lives (226).
Despite the township’s refusal to acknowledge their status as a coastal
community and their desire to turn away from the sea, the coastal environment
remains an insistent presence in the narrative. e littoral enters the narrative
in the form of slippery metaphors which tend to move the narrative away from
human politics towards broader material perspectives; it enables the most
radical moments of the novel and shapes (for better or for worse) the lives of
the characters. For Allen, Groom and Smith, the coast is not only an ecological
borderscape, but also a cultural and literary one, ‘a site of open-ended cultural
inquiry’ (2017, 2) in which ‘relationships and tensions between geography and
culture are felt intensely and are played out dynamically’ (5). On the beach,
where waves and tides continually shi the boundary between sea and land,
as John Mack argues, the quality of the littoral as ‘a neutral space, neither
properly terrestrial nor yet thoroughly maritime, awaiting a metamorphic role’
is particularly highlighted (2011, 165). Walking along the dunes, Elizabeth is
enchanted and transxed by the apparent wildness of the sea which she perceives
as liberating, showing her a world of vibrant matter and unrestrained desire:
e sand was rm and level; the sand-dunes had been curved by the wind as by a
slicing knife into clean, exact curves; the long tawny grass above was matted and
tued like the sodden fell of a weary animal. e land was still and quiet, but the
sea had not yet forgotten its rage. […] Elizabeth turned her back upon the land
and revelled in the recklessness with which the walls of water hurled themselves
headlong. Shock aer shock of the plunging monsters vibrated through her
until she was lashed to an equal excitement and hurled back again the charging
passion of the sea. at was the way to live, she cried within herself. Hector and
Elizabeth Shand together would transform the world.
(1931, 69)
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination52
As an ecotone, a transitional area between two ecological zones, the coast
functions as an in-between space, neither entirely unruly with its clean-cut
curves, nor entirely orderly in inviting the raging plunges of the waves onto the
shore. e metaphorical distinction between land and sea through the contrast
between stillness and rage in the passage above invites a psychoanalytic reading
of the waves as representing Elizabeth’s desires, especially when she is brought
to exhilarating passion by watching the hurling waves. At the same time, Muir’s
characteristically capacious, shiing prose suggests that a purely symbolic
reading would be too limited. e vivid description of the coastal environment
verges on the fantastic in the imagery of the grassy dunes resembling the body
of a weary animal, and the waves moving like reckless monsters suggests the
coast as a living, sentient organism capable of degrees of intentionality. But
theaective power of the passage shows that, for Muir, the power of the sea
is not simply fantasy or pathetic fallacy, but very much a material reality. Even
though a large part of Elizabeth’s ecstasy derives from her symbolic reading of the
sea, her experience is also visceral and registered in language that foregrounds a
densely realized, material environment: that of the North Sea, a dominant force
in the novel’s environment that is frequently described as agentic, even if it is a
force upon which parts of the community attempt to turn their backs. Even in
moments in which the novel’s collection of watery metaphors appears to cater
primarily to philosophical ideas of uidity, the actual material environment
ows through the cracks and disrupts the idea that water-inspired language
should ever be thought of as outside material relations. Ignorant of the ‘earth-
life’, the connection of all things in the universe in which Elizabeth believes and
that ‘inspired all poetry, all love, all religion’ and which is decidedly terraqueous,
Calderwick’s inhabitants try to turn the environment into ‘a desert of sand t only
for ostrich-like inhabitants’, ‘arid’ and ‘desiccated into conventions’ rather than
embracing the ‘spontaneous and natural’ perspectives aorded by the littoral
(1931, 244). As Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis point out, many philosophical
concepts would be dicult to conceive of were it not for water-inspired language
and thinking in watery metaphors does not preclude an acknowledgement of
the materiality of waters. Rather, metaphorical waters can be linked to corporeal
experiences (2013, 10). While not all such metaphorical language is helpful from
an environmental perspective, Muir’s use of watery metaphors is never purely
abstract but asks the reader to acknowledge the links between philosophical
ideas, social politics and the materiality of the world. As I discuss in more detail
in the nal section of this discussion, it is only in complementing symbolic
interpretations by an embodied and aective relationship with the coastal
Littoral 53
environment and the sea in particular, that Elizabeth is able to connect with
her bodily passions and temporarily regain the agency she has lost in trying to
full her assigned role as dutiful wife responsible for keeping her promiscuous
husband in check.
Elise Mütze, alternately called Madame Mütze/Mrs Dr Bonnet/Elizabeth
Mütze née Shand/Lizzie Shand, is only talked about as an absence from
Calderwick until she arrives in the town in the third part of the novel. When
she is nally introduced, she is portrayed as a person who is ‘too good to all
the creatures’, who worries about the well-being of the stray cats at her villa
in southern France before she leaves for Scotland, and who is fascinated with
the sea:
Madame turned slowly round and looked over the sea, marvelling as she still did
aer three years [in France] at the persistent blue of the water in spite of the grey
sky above it. In her childhood she had imagined heaven as a space of luminous
blue, […], and the magic of that infantile heaven still cast a glamour over the
Mediterranean; for the sea remains changeful and mysterious even to those
who are disillusioned about the sky. Yet although the sense of magic suused
Elizabeth Mütze when she looked at the blue sea her characteristic passion for
analysis insisted that a colour so independent of the sky must be caused by
minute particles of some kind held in suspension in the water. In another person
the analytical passion might have dispelled the sense of magic, but Elizabeth
Mütze had preserved them both; and on this dull day she wondered as usual
whether it was limestone or salt in the water that made this southern sea so
magically blue whenever one looked at it with one’s back to the sun.
(1931, 145)
e narrative here again consciously shis between the metaphorical and the
material, combining a sense of wonder with scientic interest and shiing from
the possible spiritual meanings of the mysterious sea to the physical properties
of its actual waters down to the level of minute particles of limestone and salt.
e aesthetics of wonder Muir employs in this passage resonates with the
writing of her contemporary Nan Shepherd (see Chapter 4). Like Shepherd’s
Martha Ironside, Elise connects aective and scientic engagements with the
non-human world, showing them to be interrelated rather than opposed to one
another.
While the Mediterranean Sea fosters a sense of wonder and a desire for
scientic understanding, and the Scottish beachscape invites bathing visitors
and birds alike, Calderwick’s ‘fair harbour’ (1931, 2) turns out to be not so fair
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination54
aer all. Characteristically, as Hector wanders down the docks, the harbour
is introduced as a site of labour that connects Calderwick to the wider world:
‘Elsa. Kjobenhavn. Copenhagen. Strange, clipped syllables were tossed along
the deck, and he listened to them with a vague pleasure in the strangeness.
Calderwick wasn’t the only place on God’s earth aer all’ (44). is impression
of the harbour as a dynamic and fascinating contact zone shis almost instantly
as Hector moves on and transports the reader into its mucky material reality:
He wandered round the dock, peering into the water. One corner, the corner
nearest to Dock Street, which led into the heart of the town, always used to be
foul with straw and oating rubbish, he remembered, a nasty, stagnant corner
which would be damned unpleasant to fall into. It was still as dirty and foul
as ever. On a dark night, he reected, it would be easy to come down to Dock
Street and walk right over the edge into that scum. When he was a child that
corner had always given him the creeps. He gazed into the murky water. Better
to drown in the open sea than in that stagnant muck.
(44)
Merging metaphorical meaning and material reality once again, the narrative
portrays the town’s harbour not as a thriving place characterized by the ow
of waves, people and wares, but instead as lled with scum, stagnant muck
and rubbish, which leads Hector to philosophize that he would rather face
the challenge of leaving Calderwick than drown in this ‘stagnant muck’. is
realization comes back to Hector later in the novel and informs his decision
to leave for Singapore. Even though Hector adopts a littoral perspective that
acknowledges the terraqueous materiality of the harbour, then, he cannot but
see Calderwick as static and unchanging and, signicantly, he sails for Singapore
not from Calderwick’s murky, stagnant waters but from Aberdeen (128).
Challenges to bordering are invited by the coastal environment in various
forms, not only in terms of the borders upheld by the community but also in the
form of a more radical questioning of the borders of the body and the human
more broadly. Even though a symbolic reading of the stagnant waters dominates
Hector’s thoughts, the narrative again resists a purely metaphorical reading
of the harbour’s environment. rough its vivid descriptions of the smell and
feel of the docks, the narrative insists on the real and material existence of the
waters of the dock. It is in this reality of the nasty unpleasantness of the harbour
with its dangerous edges, in which the minister William Murray loses his path
in a snowstorm and tumbles down, into the very corner that Hector fears, to
drown in the murky waters of the stagnant dock. e contrast between watery
Littoral 55
metaphors and the materiality of actual waters is highlighted in this scene which
directly follows a dream-like vision in which the minister had thought himself
steering on a wooden tea-tray along a yellow river both situated in China and
signifying to him the river of God (271–2). Directly before his death, dream
and reality merge in the minister’s mind: he is astonished at the ‘the force of
the elements’ and the snowakes that ‘pelted into his eyes’ but only in so far as
they resonate with the ‘torrent force in the yellow water of his dreams’ (273).
Too caught up in his dream-like vision, the minister does not watch his steps
as he approaches the quay. His rm belief in the body as ‘nothing but darkness’
and his concurrent conviction that ‘the body and the passions of the body could
darken the vision of the spirit’ (100) lead William Murray to turn away from the
corporeal experience and material reality of the snow storm which ultimately
causes his death.
Focusing on how the relationality of water ‘inaugurates new life’ and holds
‘the innite possibility of new communities’, Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis are
careful to point out that ‘water also reminds us that relationality is more than a
romanticized conuence of bodies’ (2013, 13). rough Hector’s reections and
Murray’s death, Muir similarly reminds us that actual waters, despite all their
connective, life-giving and radical imaginative potential, are not only subject
to industrial pollution, becoming ‘foul with straw and oating rubbish’, but that
water is also a potentially dangerous, life-threatening element outside of human
control. Elizabeth, looking towards the sea to regain a sense of connection, feels
that the waters have betrayed her by taking her husband towards the South
Seas, and by leading the minister to his death: ‘and if the sea in Calderwick
harbour, in his own town, can deceive and drown William Murray, why not?
Why not?’ (1931, 276). It is not, for Elizabeth, that William Murray drowns in
the passive stagnant waters because of his own actions, but rather that the sea
is agentic, actively deceiving the minister and orchestrating his death. ese
narrative interventions of the coastal environment ask us to rethink land-
locked perspectives along aqueous lines to gain new perspectives on social-
environmental relations.
‘Unpredictable and unforeseen’: porous borders and nonhuman
rhythms
at geography, borders and the environment are intertwined with social politics
in Imagined Corners becomes visible from its opening paragraph. e small town
of Calderwick is located geographically, environmentally and nationally along
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination56
the northern latitudes. Northernness becomes an environmental condition that
disrupts seasonal and diurnal rhythms, and such a position might even, as Muir
suggests with tongue in cheek, condition the Scottish character:
at obliquity of the earth with reference to the sun which makes twilight linger
both at dawn and dusk in northern latitudes prolongs summer and winter
with the same uncertainty in a dawdling autumn and a tardy spring. Indeed,
the arguable uncertainty of the sun’s gradual approach and withdrawal in these
regions may have rst sharpened the discrimination of the natives to that
acuteness for which they are renowned.
(1931, 1)
e overlap between these dierent modes of situating the narrative is signicant
for understanding Imagined Corners’s treatment of borders and how the novel
simultaneously relates and displaces questions of identity in connection with
the environment. Muir’s attentiveness to the natural light of the North East as
a shaping element of Scottish character echoes the importance of light in the
novels of Nan Shepherd (see Chapter 4). Like Shepherd, Muir makes use of
the aordances of Scotland’s geography and environment to suggest how this
local environment shapes particular modes of perception while simultaneously
resisting a nationalist framing of place. Muir’s novel oers a critically nuanced
reading of the symbolic connections between the environment and geopolitics
by drawing on the ambiguity and potential restrictions of dissolving borders by
reading them environmentally. Ideas about the possibility of rethinking national
and/or regional borders and identity through philosophical discussion enter
Imagined Corners through the gure of Elise Mütze who considers Calderwick
and its inhabitants through the lens of French and German intellectual debates.
While Elise contrasts Scotland’s ‘Celtic twilight’ with the direct light in Southern
France which highlights the ‘clear, rm contours of the land’ and ‘made her
beliefs sharp and concrete’ (1931, 147), this claim, rather than oering a contrast,
only seems to echo the ‘acuteness’ of the Scottish character at the beginning
of the novel, refuting the assumption that the environment could be read in
nationalist terms. Contradictions such as this one occur frequently throughout
the narrative and undermine the possibility of universal meaning-making.
In the novel’s negotiation of borders, the perceived solidity of terra rma is
representative of social restrictions. Gender, class and regional dierences are
structured around discourses about the connes imposed by the borders of
‘civilization’ that are reiterated by the novel’s psychoanalyst, Dr Scrymgeour, but
also taken up by the narration itself:
Littoral 57
Civilization, in binding us to one another with a solid wall, turns into ramshackle
structures the private dwellings of our spirits; we lean lopsidedly upon each
other and hesitate to complain of encroachment, or to refuse support even when
the rooree is cracking under the strain. We rely more and more upon the wall
of civilization to stave o collapse, and less and less upon ourselves. In fact, we
live so much upon the wall and so little in ourselves that we do not oen know
what condition our house is in, or whether it needs repair.
(1931, 130)
is metaphorical passage physically materializes civilization by reading it
not as a status maintained within secure borders against the savagery lurking
outside but as the border itself. More than that, however, the metaphor focuses
on the function of the border to conne people and keep others out. e novel
criticizes the behaviour of the ‘border guards’ of civilization who live ‘upon the
wall’, looking for potential threats from the other side of the border rather than
looking inwards at the problems and threats that exist within the community, the
internal ills of civilization itself. e passage echoes Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation
and Its Discontents (published in Germany in 1930) which discusses the tensions
that arise between communal life (civilization) and the individual.5 is tension
structures the novel as Elizabeth tries to nd her place in the small community,
an endeavour that appears impossible from the start:
Human life is so intricate in its relationships that newcomers, whether native
or not, cannot be dropped into a town like glass balls into plain water; there are
too many elements already suspended in the liquid, and newcomers are at least
partly soluble.
(1931, 2)
If the elements suspended in the water represent the townspeople with their
strict adherence to rules, Elizabeth takes the solid form of a glass ball. Being
partly soluble she is neither able to fully assimilate nor able to disintegrate fully
into the waters of the community. Together with the metaphor of civilization as
a solidly built wall, this metaphor of Elizabeth’s situation draws on the contrast
between solidity and uidity that also characterizes the juxtaposition between
land and sea in the novel.
e novel contrasts the solidity of terra rma with the liberating potential of
the sea through a negotiation of the heterogeneity of time. ‘e land’ is associated
with the community’s restrictions including the rhythms to which Elizabeth
must submit if she is to be accepted by them. Elizabeth sees the land as something
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination58
that is ‘still and quiet’ in contrast with the raging sea through which desire and
freedom can be explored and experienced (69). While the land is characterized
by economic rhythms that structure the life of the coastal community, the tidal
rhythms of the sea are both regular in following the moon phases and irregular
in being subject to climactic change and weather. Calderwick follows a purely
economic regime: the environment is transformed into products for consumption
and trade through industrial labour. e characters’ deliberate rejection of
environmental rhythms becomes even more striking in comparison with the
way other novels of the period, most notably Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song
(1932), structure the lives in accordance with seasonal cycles. Grassic Gibbon
highlights the plurality of overlapping temporalities by connecting natural
seasons to agricultural labour and linking the deep time of planetary history
with human history. Calderwick, by contrast, clearly favours ofa more clear-cut,
economically oriented temporal regime of absolute time which leaves no room
for local contingencies.6 Instead of showing an interest in the lingering summer
and the uncertainty of seasonal change in northern latitudes mentioned at the
beginning of the novel, the town’s inhabitants go about their business, because,
aer all, ‘the season for summer visitors was over’ no matter the actual weather
(1931, 1). e town is too preoccupied with ‘its jute mills, its grain mills, its
shipping, schools, shops, oces and dwelling-houses’ to break out of its daily
routine (1–2) and this static regularity of industrial rhythms is contrasted with
the uidity and unpredictability of non-human rhythms of life. Even the diurnal
rhythms of the sun, which the novel introduces to its readers as uncertain and
unpredictable at rst, are submitted to the illusion of an orderly economic
regime when Sarah Murray expresses her satisfaction that ‘[t]he orderly life of
Calderwick was keeping pace with the ordered march of the sun’ (7). e orderly
life mentioned here is centrally dictated by middle-class sensibilities rooted in
a rm belief in the institutions of work, marriage and family. ose characters
who, for various reasons, fail to comply with the pretensions of propriety resist
the demands of a Protestan work ethic, feel stied by the imposition of this rigid
socio-economic regime. Notably, these are also the newcomers or returnees to
the Calderwick who had the chance of experiencing life outside the connes
of the township. When Ned Murray returns to Calderwick, he is unable to
adjusttothe rhythms of the town and his traumatized mental state isexplained
by the vague reference to an ‘imperfect civilization’ (206). e border of
‘civilization’ which bounds the community is shown to be maintained in part
through these economic daily rhythms.
Littoral 59
Despite the resistance of the township, however, non-human temporalities
enter the narrative and engender transformative political eects. In considering
the major forms that structure social, political and aesthetic arrangements,
Caroline Levine lists temporal rhythms as one of the most common and
pervasive forms, describing how such forms are oen routinized through
repetitive temporal patterns and full a double function:
Terrifyingly, rhythms reveal opposing aordances: on the one hand, they can
produce communal solidarity and bodily pleasure; on the other, they can operate
as powerful means of control and subjugation. Whether imposing a temporal
order on bodies or labor, sounds or machines, rhythmic form has the potential
to do serious political work.
(2015, 49)
e opposing aordances which Levine identies map almost seamlessly
onto the interplay between non-human and human temporalities in Imagined
Corners. As Levine argues, ‘rhythms […] can be put to strategic ends and have
the potential to work with and against other forms to surprisingly transformative
political eect’ (52). Such transformative eects occur, in the novel, in moments
when non-human temporalities enter the narrative. Levine mostly employs her
‘rhythmic form’ in the plural, highlighting ‘the multiple patternings of time’
created by a plurality of converging temporal structures which ‘oen thwart
or compete with one another’ (51). As Christianson points out, Muir ‘uses
Bergson’s idea of motion and continuous change in the passage of time and the
ux of consciousness […] as an enabling image for Elizabeth’s state of division’
(2000, 93). Muir applies Henri Bergson’s ideas in her novel to attend to the
non-human. Drawing on Bergson’s uid concepts of time and consciousness to
highlight the multiplicity of coexistent temporalities, she connects her literary
engagement with temporal rhythms with her keen interest in the materiality
of littoral environments. e multiplicity of coexisting rhythms and their oen
contradictory and competing nature is drawn out creatively by Muir’s novel in
moments when uid non-human temporalities seep into and disrupt the orderly
and rigid dynamics of social and economic regimes of time. e narrative
explains the necessity of following daily economic routine by the fact that
Calderwick’s human inhabitants have civic and economic responsibilities that go
beyond those of the non-human occupants: ‘e larks, the crows and thegulls,
aer all, were not ratepayers’ and ‘[i]t is doubtful whether they even knew that
they were domiciled in Scotland’ (1931, 2). Any attempts of the inhabitants to
claim ownership over the environment are, however, shown as ineective: the
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination60
non-human cannot be bound by the regularity of economic, legal and national
frameworks. is contrast between human and non-human temporalities
is used to question the legitimacy of imposing civilizing structures on the
environment. In alignment with Levine’s ideas on the workings of rhythms,
Russell West-Pavlov calls for an attentiveness to the ‘immense heterogeneity
of temporal processes immanent to the world and its various human and non-
human (animal, vegetable, mineral) inhabitants’ (2013, 53). Recognizing the
various human and non-human actants which, through their interaction, create
a meshwork of temporalities beyond universal notions of time, West-Pavlov
claims, will enable us ‘to re-nd our own humble but exhilarating place within
this complex but democratic order of immanent ows of becoming’ (157).7
e narrative recognition of the multiplicity of converging temporalities and
non-human rhythms, which remain largely unacknowledged by the majority of
Calderwick’s inhabitants, means that non-human perspectives surface at oen
unexpected places in the novel and disrupt the regularity of societal rhythms:
in the narrative’s reection on whether boredom is a human aiction or rather
common to humans, animals and plants alike (1931, 81), and in Elizabeth’s
musings on death and the momentariness of human life evoked by the falling of
leaves in autumn (118–19).
ese convergent temporalities oer a more uid and environmental
understanding of place as made up of a variety of human and non-human forces
alike. e agency of the non-human emerges despite being either unrecognized
or consciously repressed. Aside from smaller, momentary intrusions of the non-
human, the narrative oers instances of a deliberate and detailed environmental
reframing of place through species histories and deep time imaginaries. In
contrast to the community’s wilful ignorance of such connections, Elise,
returning to Calderwick aer years of absence, appears particularly conscious of
the inseparability of human and non-human lives. is acknowledgement of the
non-human characterizes Elise’s perception of the world in her contemplation
of life sub specie æternitatis as she travels to Calderwick in an express train and
reects on the impressions of the outside world rushing by:
Children stop playing in the dust to wave a hand; startled small animals li their
heads; in one continuous movement she experiences countless disconnected
existences, bound to their environment and changing in nature, in occupation,
as that changes. ickly cultivated ground, lonely waste, wayside village and
spreading city all spoke to Elizabeth Mütze in their own voices as the train sped
on, and by the time that darkness fell she had become a passive listener.
(1931, 148)
Littoral 61
Even though the train moves in a linear fashion, Elise’s thoughts branch out
horizontally as the world unfolds in front of her eyes. e fast movement of
the train allows Elise glimpses of other lives that she begins to connect within
a relational meshwork of life. Instead of trying to interpret the momentary
snapshots of the scenes she perceives or using these impressions to philosophize
about her own life, Elise abandons her subjecthood by becoming a listener
and lets the world communicate in its own voice. She does not attempt to take
conceptual ownership of what she sees and refuses to order this impression
of life as mobile and ever-changing into a linear, teleological narrative that
would suit the requirements of absolute time. In Elizabeth’s perspective, the
reference to ‘the land’ predominantly functions as a guiding metaphor to
signify a land-locked mindset as opposed to a seabound perspective which
opens up to uid reimaginings of identity. For Elise, however, terrestrial
environments are not merely solid but uid, moving and changeable. It is
signicant that even though the reference to ‘the land’ does not always signify
an environmental understanding, the deep time perspectives they oer make
terrestrial environments indispensable for a rethinking of place that disrupts
anthropocentric patterns of thinking. As Elise looks down on Calderwick from
the rim of the elevated moor she views it through non-human temporalities and
rhythms, considering the manifold layers of human and non-human histories
that make up the place:
In the hollow beneath them lay Calderwick, with its spires and chimneys
pricking up through a faint haze of smoke, and behind it the plough-land, cut
into rectangles, titled upwards towards the rim of hills. e masts of shing-
smacks could be seen lying along the jetty; the little river owed invisibly along
the foot of the ridge on which they were standing. It was a spacious and peaceful
landscape, lled with light. Elise, as she looked at it, was divesting it of civilization,
restoring its forests, its swamps, its naked moors and sandhills. Unpredictable
and unforeseen, she was saying to herself, thinking alike of the new self she
had discovered and of the new character that humanity had impressed on the
landscape before her during the past two thousand – four thousand – she did
not know how many – years.
(244)
In this imagery the hills and river sit alongside human industry which is
described as a combination of chimneys reminiscent of industrial development,
agricultural plough-lands and shing smacks, reecting on dierent kinds
and levels of humanity’s imprint on the landscape. Revisioning this familiar
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination62
landscape through non-human temporalities reveals to Elise the incredible
impact of human habitation on the environment. Even though there is no
critical reection that would either add value to or criticize this development,
the passage nevertheless demonstrates that human history does not follow a
clear, linear and foreseeable development, but that it is more complicated and
unpredictable than such teleological linear views of history and time would
suggest. Against a community that tries to establish boundaries through orderly,
linear, economic rhythms, Muir includes non-human temporalities that are
allowed to speak for themselves in her narrative, oering a counter-voice to
anthropocentric understandings of time and place.
e potentials and limits of the aqueous imagination
Interweaving social, national and environmental politics, the novel turns from
terrestrial to watery matter to develop an alternative vision of bordering that
corresponds with what Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis conceptualize as an
‘aqueous ecopolitics’, a multispecies version of politics enabled by a thinking
with water (2013, 6). e novel’s engagement with water builds on the notion
that human and interspecies borders are porous and it explores our watery
relations in increasingly radical ways by imagining the solubility of selood
and human corporeality. rough her ctional experiments, Muir could in
many ways be regarded as a pioneer of an early strand of material ecofeminism.
Drawing together perspectives from a range of material ecofeminist theorists,
Stacy Alaimo argues that while their theories ‘take social constructions
seriously, by insisting that culture profoundly shapes what we experience, see
and know’, material ecofeminism is also deeply invested in exploring ‘how
nonhuman nature or the human body can “talk back,” resist, or otherwise aect
its cultural construction’ and ask us to ‘radically rethink materiality, the very
“stu” of bodies and natures’ (2008, 242). Human corporeality, biology and the
cultural construction of female bodies through natural discourses are central
to Elizabeth’s spiritual engagement with the aqueous. In contrast to William
Murray, Elizabeth does not believe body and mind to be separate: ‘I can’t think
of my spirit without feeling that it’s even in my little nger’ (1931, 100). In its
consistent attendance to the material world, Muir’s novel displays a distinctly
ecofeminist quality: Elizabeth’s growing awareness of her corporeality is central
to her ability to perceive and harness the energy of watery relations and to allow
her body to ‘talk back’.
Littoral 63
rough Elizabeth, the narrative takes a plunge into a watery form of writing
and develops a radical aqueous aesthetics that blurs corporeal boundaries and
rethinks agency in relational terms. In thinking with water to explore feminist
politics and its connection to cultural constructs of Nature, the novel establishes
a dialogue between human and environmental concerns and reveals them to
be deeply intertwined. ‘We’re only separate like waves rising out of the one sea’,
Elizabeth exclaims having been inspired by a night-time vision of herself as a
body of water (192). Neimanis proposes that a rethinking of human embodiment
along lines of water, that is a consideration of humans as bodies of water, ‘stirs
up considerable trouble for dominant Western and humanist understandings
of embodiment, where bodies are gured as discrete and coherent individual
subjects, and as fundamentally autonomous’ (2017, 2). is is indeed the case for
Elizabeth, who loses a sense of her body as a clear and autonomous entity. When
she masturbates in bed, she imagines a shadowy vision of herself hovering above
which she describes as ‘an overlapping of vibrations rather than a solid form,
and the vibrations extended beyond the farthest stars’ (1931, 174). is vibrant
notion of her body, characterized by physical sensations of pleasure, elicits an
understanding of her corporeality as uid through the visceral imagery of waves
and tidal currents:
One end of this shadowy projection had long, slow, full waves; that was the body
and its desires. At the other end were short, quick waves; these represented the
mind. […] e rmness of sandy soil, the coolness of short grass on the naked
foot-sole, the wet soness of driing leaves in a ditch, all the sensations her feet
had ever experienced, seemed to become a part of her again, and drew her down
through her feet until she was the earth and all that grew upon it. Her blood
ebbed and owed with the tides of the month and the tides of the seasons, and
she was no longer separate in her own body but a part of all life.
(1931, 174–5)
In this passage, the human body becomes a node in a meshwork of relations.
Drawing on biology and neuroscience, Tim Ingold suggests that looking at the
human body as an organism that is not limited by the skin will make us aware
of its leakages and reveal that the body inhabits a ‘uid space’ characterized by
‘substances that ow, mix and mutate’ (2011, 87). In this space, the body becomes
permeable, part of a meshwork that encompasses littoral environments: ‘Every
line – every relation – in uid space is a path of ow, like the riverbed or the
veins and capillaries of the body’ (87). Muir’s contemporary Bergson describes
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination64
the nervous system as a transmitter ‘composed of an enormous number of
threads which stretch from the periphery to the center, and from the center to
the periphery’ (Bergson 1896, 45; Ingold 2011, 87). Elizabeth’s vision speaks
to this understanding of human corporeality when the ow and the rhythms
of her menstrual cycle are connected to the cycle of the moon and seasonal
change, showing that these human bodily ows are inseparable from nonhuman
temporal rhythms. e long and quick waves, as bodily sensations of female
pleasure, evoke the rhythms of neurotransmission which connect mind and
body.
rough her connection with water, Elizabeth tries to reclaim her agency
and self-condence aer a period of scornful gossip about her inability, and
unwillingness, to change her husband’s immoderate behaviour. Elizabeth’s
engagement with the sea is linked to this strained relationship with her husband
with whom she can only connect on a corporeal, instinctive level. Even though
she does not regard mind and body as separate, Elizabeth slowly realizes that
her relationship with her husband is based on bodily passion rather than shared
intellectual interests: ‘inside a room, in the world of talk, of articulate expression,
[…] Hector was trivial. Out of doors, with no roof but the sky, he was like an
impersonal force’ (1931, 175). As a result, Elizabeth repeatedly tries to locate
Hector in the material realm with which she can easily establish a connection:
ey were both wild and passionate; they wanted the whole of life at one draught;
they would sink or swim together. Images owed through her mind: in the air or
under the sea or rooted in the earth she saw herself and Hector living, growing,
swimming, breasting the wind together.
(50)
e metaphoric imagery in this passage moves between solid, gaseous and
liquid elements and infuses everything with water. Air, sea and earth are all
equally uid or solid for Elizabeth in this passage and in her mind, she moves
freely between these elements. rough this terraqueous imagery in which solid
and uid become exible concepts, the bodies of Hector and Elizabeth become
permeable and immersed in the relational meshwork of the world. At the same
time, Hector is indeed turned into an ‘impersonal’ force in such encounters,
de-individualized and disconnected from the actual person of her husband.
Increasingly, as Hector’s actions become more hurtful to Elizabeth, the two
gures merge into each other and the actual Hector disappears behind his own
creatureliness when Elizabeth notes that ‘his hair was like grass, his shoulders
[…] were mountain ridges’ (237). at this description of Hector in the most
Littoral 65
uid passages of the novel appears terrestrial rather than aqueous and returns us
to the mountainous solidity of the land is telling. While this metaphor serves to
remind us of unbreachable distance between Hector and Elizabeth even in the
uid space of her imagination, it also suggests that the sea cannot be conceived
of as entirely separate of the land but that they exist in relationship of a dynamic
interplay.
In such moments in which Elizabeth is successful in assimilating Hector with
the universe, she feels that an ‘invisible current owed apparently unbroken
around them’ (237). rough these explorations which are based around
the aqueous imagery of ows, the narrative imagines ways of harnessing the
‘disturbing potential’ of our unruly relations to water, which, as Chen, Macleod
and Neimanis discuss, allows us to ‘situate ourselves in ways that challenge land-
based preconceptions of xity’ (2013, 8). By tracing her connections with Hector
through their shared being as bodies of water, Elizabeth aims to overcome the
xed notions of their identity and relationship that the township attempts to
impose on them and their bodies. For Neimanis, ‘[w]atery embodiment thus
presents a challenge to three related humanist understandings of corporeality:
discrete individualism, anthropocentrism, and phallogocentrism. We also
note that these three “isms” are all deeply entangled, mutually enforcing the
claims of each other’ (2017, 3). In Elizabeth’s holistic visions, heterosexual,
reproductive and gender expectations lose their relevance, vanishing below the
material imagery of ows and bodies dissolving into matter. e challenges to
this phallogocentric logic resonate with the absence of motherhood in the novel
(McCulloch 2007, 90), Elise’s rejection of compulsory heterosexual reproduction
(1931, 215) and the suggestion of a queer ending of the novel in which fullment
and social change can be found outside the heterosexual matrix.
In describing Elizabeth’s ecstatic connection with the universe, Muir shares
in the modernist interest in holism which, rooted in the rst-wave feminism of
the nineteenth century, established ‘a critique of the atomistic individualism and
rationalism of the liberal tradition’, proposing instead ‘a vision that emphasized
collectivity, emotional bonding, and an organic (or holistic) concept of life’
(Donovan 2007, 65). Modernist visions of holism, as Bonnie Kime Scott suggests,
express a certain ‘hope that, by returning to the primordial, the semiotic, or
material, […] a dierent cycle of human nature may arise’ (2009, 222). While
availing itself of the radical potential of the material world, however, Imagined
Corners rather suggests that a simplistic return to the primordial would be a
step in the wrong direction. Elise strongly counters the holistic critique of
individualism and rationalism, exclaiming that her individual identity is exactly
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination66
what she would never surrender. Elise believes that, in losing herself through
her holistic spiritualism, Elizabeth relinquishes her agency and risks drowning
metaphorically in a sea of sameness:
Your universal sea out of which we all rise is too featureless for me. If I have risen
out of it, which is possible, I’m not going to relapse into it again. e separate
wave-top is precisely what I am anxious to keep. […] I maintain myself in the
teeth of all indeterminate forces. is wave-top, this precariously held point of
separateness, this evanescent phenomenon which is me, is what I live to assert
…. And should I like to know why you want to drown yourself?
(1931, 194)
e most explicit critical engagement and rejection of holistic ideals emerges
through a lengthy debate between Elizabeth and Elise about the material/
metaphorical power of the non-human world and its instrumentalization in
patriarchal constructions of Nature:
People who urged intelligent men and woman to go ‘back to Nature’ were
merely imbecile, in Elise’s opinion. It was no use trying to drive either oneself
or Calderwick back to Nature; if one wanted to drive anywhere it should be
towards a more enlightened understanding …. In short, civilized mankind was
what it was, good or bad, mainly through its own eorts, and might develop in
the most unexpected directions if it were encouraged to trust its intelligence and
to outwit Nature wherever it could. Elizabeth […] protested against the use of
the expression ‘to outwit Nature’. […] Nature was too strong, too cunning; one
had to lch from her the energy for one’s own purposes. Especially if one was a
woman.
(245–6)
In this passage the novel takes a step back from its imaginative engagement with
water and the material world, evaluating it from a critical point of view that draws
on the gendered dimensions of cultural constructions of Nature. For Elise then,
neither a deep ecologist ‘return’ to Nature nor a spiritual transcendence of it can
provide an answer because both perspectives overlook the gendered histories of
human relationships to the environment in which the domination over women
and the non-human alike has long been justied by linking them and portraying
both as irrational, instinctive and passive.8 Patriarchal constructions of Nature
occur throughout the novel to underline Elise’s criticism and are usually tied
to the superstitious beliefs she references, for example when Hector wonders
whether it is true ‘that a stallion or a gelding can swim for hours if need be,
Littoral 67
while a mare must inevitably ll up with water and founder’ (263) or when Elise
tells her family about her maid’s biblical fear of snakes (159). To ‘outwit Nature’
for Elise, then, means to outwit the cultural construction of Nature used to
legitimize patriarchal power.
Aer drawing out the radical potential of thinking with water, the novel
cautions about the limits of such uid imaginings. Even though ‘Elizabeth’s
world was in ux’, we are told that she is unable to consider this Bergsonian
phenomenon with a scientic distance and instead ‘felt as if she were drowning
in it’ (1931, 115). As in the drowning of William Murray, an overreliance on
watery metaphors is presented as dangerous and the dialogue between Elizabeth
and Elise functions to balance environmental experimentation with political
reality, reminding us that ‘although [Elizabeth] had turned her back on the land
it was still there, quiet and unshaken’ (69). At the same time, it is important
to recognize that the constructions of Nature which Elise criticizes, and which
Muir signicantly writes with a capital N, dier crucially from the littoral
materialities shaping the novel. Discussing the manifold possibilities water
oers for a rethinking of material relations and corporeality, Chen, Macleod and
Neimanis warn that ‘an over-emphasis on uid concepts can obliterate important
theoretical and material distinctions’ when the language of cross-border ‘ows’
disguises the regulatory mechanisms and material eects of borders (2013, 11).
rough dialectic intervention, Muir’s novel highlights exactly such theoretical
and material distinctions: the voice of Elise balances the narrative’s exploration
of uid concepts and watery materialities with a critical view on the political
realities that continue to structure the lives of both women. Even the more
radical explorations of human corporeality through the connection with the
aqueous cannot ultimately be thought of as entirely outside the realm of human
politics.
At the same time, it is Elizabeth’s perspective on the world, her view of the
universe as a meshwork of relations and her ability to recognize herself as a body
of water and to reveal the porosity of corporeal borders by entering into relations
with the nonhuman world, that bring about this balancing act in the rst place.
inking about the interconnections between human and non-human bodies,
according to Alaimo, ‘may catalyze the recognition that the “environment”, which
is too oen imagined as inert, empty space or as a “resource” for human use, is,
in fact, a world of eshy beings, with their own needs, claims and actions’ (2008,
238) and this recognition is exactly what the novel achieves through the littoral
form. While the critical interventions undertaken through Elise caution against
overstating the opportunities to rethink environmental relations explored by
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination68
the narrative’s engagement with water, they do not undermine their radical
potential. e narrative hints at the complexities of what is at stake and evades
making a didactic argument or advocating for any one truth. Elise’s view, while
ostensibly straightforward, is ultimately less rm than it might seem. Reecting
on Elizabeth’s ecstatic musings and fascination with the sea, Elise is reminded
of the religious feelings the chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony evoked in
her and concludes that ‘Elizabeth gets more out of hers than mass emotion […].
She hurls herself into it impetuously … But how alive she is! She goes on living
in me and excites me to rhapsodizing about choruses’ (1931, 218). In the end,
Elise admits, listening only to one’s own views, ‘one remained perched on a high
fence without any incentive to descend on either side of it’ (280). Together, she
declares, the two women may ‘clear away stones of prejudice and superstition
so that other girls might grow up in a more kindly soil’ (281). Even if, as Elise
claims, ‘one need not be completely submerged even by billows rising from the
sea’ (245), allowing oneself to be carried along with the waters may encourage a
rethinking of borders from the national to the body.
***
Like the critical vignettes discussed earlier, Muir’s novel makes use of the
terraqueous materiality of Scotland’s coastal edges to examine and recongure
borders through a littoral perspective. By shiing between the metaphorical and
material aordances of the littoral environment of the North East, Imagined
Corners (1931) shows human politics to be deeply enmeshed in and shaped
by the world. Rather than accepting and reinforcing a clear b/ordering of the
world according to societal norms and rules, Muir shows these b/orderings to be
embedded in watery relations and suggests how an environmental engagement
with borders may serve to recongure borders that are perceived as unjust and
exclusionary. While she draws heavily on watery language and metaphors,
Muir simultaneously remains aware of the limitations of philosophical notions
of uidity and cautions her readers that a purely aqueous perspective may not
bring the desired results. Instead, she reminds us that long-established social
borders are not easily dissolved. rough the interaction between Elizabeth,
who believes strongly in the liberating potential of a seabound imagination, and
Elise, who recognizes the force of the social norms that structure their life on the
land, the novel suggests that the most productive political eects may emerge
exactly at the point of connection between sea and land: in the littoral zone.
4
Planetarity
Writing the earth: planetarity as a literary form
e notion of planetarity has become of central importance to today’s
environmental movement and the conceptualization of the current geological
age of the Anthropocene in which humanity’s impact on our planet’s geology
and ecosystems has been widely proven and acknowledged. More so than
global andtransnational approaches, planetarity asks us to take agents beyond
thehuman into consideration and to expand our perspective towards the animal,
vegetal and mineral agents with which we share this planet. e Anthropocene
requires us to rethink our frames of reference and to adopt a planetary
perspective, but this imperative is accompanied by a range of conceptual and
practical diculties. As Timothy Clark argues, even though ‘[t]he planetary
scale of the Anthropocene compels us to think and act as if already citizens of
a world polity’, it is oen the opposite that happens when acknowledging the
environmental crisis becomes ‘a matter of political allegiance’ and of personal
opinion (2015, 10). Environmental justice has become a central theme in debates
about environmental governance, conservation, climate change and related
migratory movements, connecting environmental concerns and border politics
by demanding we look beyond national borders and take responsibility for scale
eects: the unintended eects of our actions on other parts of the planet. Part of
the diculty of conceptualizing planetarity has to do with the impossibility of
evaluating the eect even small, seemingly insignicant things may have when,
as Clark puts it, ‘the Anthropocene manifests itself in innumerable possible
hairline cracks in the familiar life-world’ (9).
In this chapter I will address the theoretical and conceptual diculties that
arise in the context of planetarity and suggest ways in which literature may
contribute to current debates. Even though I do believe that understanding
planetarity is not only a matter of politics but of the imagination, I am sceptical
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination70
to call what we are experiencing in the context of the environmental crisis and
bordering processes a ‘crisis of the imagination’ that haunts literature as Lawrence
Buell (1995, 2) or, more recently, Timothy Clark (2015, x) and Amitav Ghosh
(2016, 9) would have it. Rather than appearing overwhelmed by the burden of
having to nd better ways to communicate planetary realities, the literary works
I consider in this chapter engage with planetarity in creative, playful and critical
ways. ey make use of the aordances of Scotland’s geography, environment
and history for a rethinking of borders, from the geopolitical to the material,
along planetary lines. And while they grapple with conceptual challenges, they
do not provide neat solutions. Rather, they capture and embrace the messiness,
confusion and contradictions that come with adopting a planetary perspective
and invite their readers to engage in the sometimes-disorienting process of
making sense of their position on a shared planet.
In order to locate the potential intervention of literature, I will begin by
outlining current theoretical debates. I then propose planetarity as a literary
form that allows us to better understand the relationship between borders and
environmental concerns. Following this, I outline the particular aordances
of Scotland’s historical, environmental and geographical situation by looking
at a range of literary texts from dierent periods and how they develop a
planetary form of writing by thinking through Scotland. ese critical vignettes
highlight the key aordances but also the versatility of the planetary form which
has been mobilized in a variety of dierent ways to address the relationship
between borders and the environment. Aer considering the dierent literary
congurations of the planetary across time, I will use the second part of this
chapter for a case study of two novels written by Nan Shepherd, e Quarry
Wood (1928) and e Weatherhouse (1930), which will provide a detailed view
on how planetary methods of writing may be used to explore borders through
the environment.
Dening planetarity
In the twenty-rst century, the planetary is oen understood as a geographic
scale. Similar to the scale of the region, nation, continent or indeed the global,
it is described to encompass the planet as a whole. Scale is a useful concept for
acknowledging the impact of humanity on the planet in the Anthropocene. By
describing the unintended environmental eects of our actions on a larger scale,
the notion of scale eects helps us reconsider individual and collective human
agency in the context of the climate crisis. At the same time, scale should not
Planetarity 71
be misjudged as a purely descriptive term. Rather, scalar thought is implicated
in power relations that can become obscured if the term is used without
dierentiation. Using the concept of scale risks confounding the planetary with
the global, a term that has been criticized for its frequent use in the service of
neoliberal and imperialist agendas. Hannes Bergthaller and Eva Horn (2020)
dene the planetary as a theoretical subcategory of scale. In their book, scale is
the overarching concept that can be subcategorized in matters of the planetary
(which, for them, are mainly spatial) and matters of deep time (encompassing
the temporal dimension of scale). While this allows them to dedicate more space
to the individual spatial and temporal aspects relevant to thinking about the
Anthropocene, when considering the planetary as a literary form, deep time
cannot so easily be separated into a dierent category. In the context of the
literature of Scotland, which has oen been conceptualized as regional, rural,
or even provincial, the planetary can only rarely be understood as a spatial
category. Instead, planetarity oen manifests as a desire to explore local human
history through deep time imaginaries.
In his reading of Anthropocene literature, Timothy Clark makes use of the
concept of scale to propose a multiscalar methodology of reading literature
which suggests that we should read on multiple scales at once in order to make
sense of the manifold ways in which the Anthropocene manifests in our lives
and within literary texts (2015). In order to focus and direct such multiscalar
reading, Clark notes that we should ‘read and reread the same literary text
through a series of increasingly broad spatial and temporal scales, one aer the
other’ (97) and proposes three scales to be used for this purpose: the personal
scale of the narrator, the cultural scale that includes both historicity and spatial or
geopolitical location within a national culture, and the ‘larger, hypothetical scale’
of the planetary which encompasses the whole earth (99–100; 100). Reading at
this latter, planetary scale, according to Clark, constitutes an act of ‘unframing’
the rst two scales by making them appear incongruous and incoherent,
and by highlighting their shortcomings in understanding the realities of the
Anthropocene (104). Clark’s focus on scale is useful to detect the multiple
levels at which texts can be read within an Anthropocene framework. In case
studies, Clark reveals the recurrent limitations of environmental readings
of canonical texts which, he posits, have continued to privilege nationalist
readings or a focus on psychological exploration over an interest in developing
a truly planetary reading practice. However, despite the allure of multiscalar
reading and its promise to read across scales, and to derange them through a
consideration of the planetary as an act of unframing, there remains in Clark’s
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination72
work an articial separation between scales that is embedded in power politics
and value hierarchies: Clark dismisses critical attention to the personal scale
as ‘naïve’ (99) and a focus on the cultural scale as ‘methodological nationalism’
which disguises the damaging parochialism of particular texts (102). In the end
then, the desire to discover how these scales overlap and layer the experience
of planetarity is discarded. Instead, the scales of the local, national, global and
the planetary are played out against one another. Clark’s planetary scale only
ostensibly encompasses and layers all the other (more geopolitical) scales that
he oers. e shortcomings of thinking through scale become visible once the
limit is reached, when the reader needs to stop in their path and say, ‘now I’m
moving on to look at this other scale’, separating scales into categories with clear-
cut beginnings and ends.
While scale as a concept can be very useful, and multiscalar reading may
allow us to detect a range of dierent meanings in texts that have so far been read
only within a limited context, it is important to be aware of these shortcomings.
Reading the literature discussed in this chapter solely through scale would not
do justice to the explorative interventions of these works which aim to think
beyond scale by acknowledging that the multiple layers of planetarity cannot
easily be categorized and made to t neatly into geopolitical categories. e neat
separation into scales, these texts show, is neither possible, nor desirable. e
confusion that arises from the impossibility of thinking about the planet within
commensurable scales is embraced by these writers and turned into an aesthetics
that speaks to lived experiences of planetary realities. Criticizing the prominence
of scale in current thinking about the planet, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing develops
a theory of non-scalability to challenge ‘the false belief that both knowledge
and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales’ (2012, 523). According to
Tsing, scalability is connected to a neo-imperial, neoliberal mindset of endless
growth and leaves ruins in its wake because it erases heterogeneity, imagining
the world as ordered into ‘uniform blocks, ready for further expansion’ (505).
Tsing’s theory ts the creative practice of the Scottish writers considered here
who understand planetarity not as scalable form but instead show it to manifests
across and within conventional scales, unsettling and rerouting them.
e understanding of the planet as an easily scalable object has indeed been
described as a global, rather than planetary mindset by most critics. Clark notes
that the Anthropocene may best be understood as a ‘threshold concept’ that
crucially shis the categories through which we make sense of the world (2015).
As such, the Anthropocene oers an important potential for border crossings
even at the most fundamental levels: as the long-established borders between
Planetarity 73
cultural and natural history, human and non-human, self and other collapse,
the Anthropocene provides a chance to reconceptualize alterity and rethink the
epistemological foundations of borders. is includes a shi from the image of
the earth as globe to the idea of planetarity. e global model of the earth goes
back to the early modern period and, as Bergthaller and Horn note, ‘was both
the instrument and an emblem of the European expansionary project insofar
as it translated planetary space into manageable scale’ (2020, 146). Tim Ingold
criticizes the representation of the earth through model globes in geographical
education, describing how ‘[t]hough the sea is painted blue, the continental land-
masses are frequently painted in a mosaic of contrastive colours, representing
the territories of nation state’ and thereby paying attention to how human
society has b/ordered the world through discovery, expansion and colonialism
(2000, 214). e imagination of the world as globe oen necessitates a zooming
out to a perspective outside of the earth, rather than being grounded within it,
leading Ingold to claim that ‘the global environment is not a lifeworld, it is a
world apart from life’ in that the abstracted image of the globe cannot be related
to lived experience (210). As an alternative to the globe which comes with the
assumption of neatly separated scales, Ingold suggests reading the world as ‘a
nesting series of spheres’ which highlights the overlapping and multiplication
of layered perspectives through which the world is to be ‘perceived from within’
rather than outwith planetary inhabitation (211).
In border studies research, the concept of globality has become central to the
discourse of environmental governance because, as Amanda Machin notes, ‘the
environmental concerns of the Anthropocene spill over conventional political
borders’ and require transnational strategies to tackle them (2019, 2). Machin
highlights the problematics of thinking within rigid state borders in the context
of the environmental crisis and environmental justice in particular, pointing out
how such an insistence on state borders ‘serve[s] to maintain the violent social,
political, and epistemological exclusion of those who have most at stake in the
Anthropocene and bolster the continuation of the status quo’ (2). At the same
time, Machin also cautions against approaches that seek to eliminate borders
altogether: even though borders may be detrimental to the development of
environmental policies that are able to tackle the environmental concerns ofthe
Anthropocene, they are also vital in ensuring ‘a functioning democratic politics’
(2). e problem with the concept of the Anthropocene, Machin argues, ‘lies
precisely in its delineation of an undierentiated global identity’ which is why
doing away with borders will not provide a useful alternative to state politics
(3). Instead of seeking alternatives to democratic state politics, Machin suggests
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination74
an approach that resembles Clark’s conceptualization of the Anthropocene as a
threshold concept in that it treats the Anthropocene as a useful framework to tackle
dicult questions around governance, borders and democracy. For Machin, the
Anthropocene needs to be repoliticized in a move away from the image of a
homogeneous global species identity which ‘is best achieved through embracing
its potential to stimulate disagreement’ (3). e paradoxical and challenging
relationship between democratic state politics and the Anthropos then should
be understood as an opportunity for what Machin calls a practice of ‘political
agony’ which encourages political debate and an ongoing collective examination
and reinvention of borders (10). Responses to environmental concerns such as
climate change, Machin argues, ‘cannot be a matter of a unied policy based
on an illusionary consensus but rather must be a plural and piecemeal venture
that involves collaboration and contestation’ (9). In highlighting the necessity
and value of disagreement, contradiction and contestation, Machin’s notion of
political agony moves beyond the unied image of the globe criticized by Ingold,
Tsing, Bergthaller and Horn. Robyn Eckersley similarly addresses questions of
democracy and agency within the Anthropocene when she proposes a ‘geopolitan
imagery’ which ‘does not require any renunciation of national citizenship or local
identity [but] nonetheless puts citizenship and territorially based democracy in a
more critical and less exclusivist light’ (2017, 993).
By highlighting questions of citizenship, democracy and environmental
justice, scholars like Machin and Eckersley propose ideas that correspond with
postcolonial criticisms of the globe which crucially complement a concern
for the planet with social responsibility. In a paper presented at the Stiung-
Dialogik in Zurich in 1997, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak proposes the notion
of planetarity as an alternative to the globe, an idea that has since been taken
up scholars across disciplines. Connected to positions in the environmental
humanities, Spivak’s notion of planetarity forms part of a critique of imperialist
and capitalist modes of dominating the planet and takes up the idea that subjects
are formed through obligations but also rights to collective responsibility (2012,
341). In a more recent outline of her concept, Spivak takes care to dierentiate
this notion of planetarity from the ‘planet-talk’ of the environmental movement:
[C]ontemporary planet-talk by way of environmentalism, [refers] usually,
though not invariably, to an undivided ‘natural’ space rather than a dierentiated
political space. is smoothly ‘translates’ into the interests of globalization in the
mode of the abstract as such. is environmental planet-speak is the planet as an
alternate description of the globe, susceptible to nation-state geopolitics.
(2015, 290)
Planetarity 75
While supporting the sense of accountability central to an understanding
of humans as custodians of the planet, Spivak criticizes the particular use of
planetarity by environmentalists for catering to imperial capitalism anddisguising
their desire to save the planet in the interest of ‘good’ imperialism and ‘sustainable’
capitalism (291). is understanding of planetarity, Spivaksuggests, is actually
closer to the notion of globality which is focused on control over the planet,
rather than a recognition of its alterity:
e globe is on our computers. No one lives there. e ‘global’ notion allows
us to think that we can aim to control globality. e planet is in the species of
alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.
(291)
Spivak suggests here that invoking the planet involves an acknowledgement of
the impossibility of imagining the planet. e planet must be understood as a
form of alterity of which we are an integral part, rather than being positioned
outside it. Because we are part of the planet rather than outside of it, stable
categorizations always remain out of our reach (2003, 72–3). Despite being
critical of nation-state geopolitics as a whole, Spivak’s theorization resonates
with Machin’s criticism of rigid state borders as both scholars seek new ways
to think about borders, inter-personal ethics and democratic responsibility.
Similar to Spivak’s planetarity, stable categorization is not the object of
Machin’s political agonism. Rather, both of these ideas aim for a continual
process of contestation and reinvention. In contrast to concepts like ‘world’
or ‘global’, Spivak’s planetarity, as Hayley Toth suggests, ‘defers self-authority
and actualization, strategically un-mapping the planet in order to leave it open
to new social connections and political possibilities’ (2020, 459). is is only
possible because Spivak protests against dening planetarity in a uniform way.
Once the meaning of planetarity is xed, it becomes translatable, and is subject
to attempts that try to control and organize it in similar ways to the concept
of the globe. In contrast to the globe, the planet in planetarity is not mapped,
scaled or b/ordered, through a totalizing gesture, into a homogeneous, unied
object, but instead, as Jennifer Gabrys notes, resists representation and ‘remains
that which cannot be xed or settled’ (2018). is dynamic instability of the
planetary is also taken up by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer who describes Spivak’s
use of planetarity as a ‘uctuating gesture’ that seeks to disrupt meaning in the
same way that Derrida’s concept of diérance continually destabilizes and defers
meaning (2020). is is also why Spivak insists on the categorical dierence
between planetarity and globality:
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination76
[Planetarity] is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe. I cannot
say ‘the planet, on the other hand’. When I invoke the planet, I think of the eort
required to gure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition.
(2015, 291)
While Spivak thus invokes the planet as an alternative to the globe, the notion
of planetarity presented here cannot be understood as simply an alternative way
to describe the global, nor does it constitute a simple reverse of the global (2003,
72). Instead, it is categorically dierent from the globe, in that it resists stable
meaning: planetarity remains untranslatable and is therefore ‘not susceptible to
the subject’s grasp’ (2015, 291), which means it cannot easily be instrumentalized
by imperialist or capitalist agendas.
In being irresolvable, Gabrys claims, Spivak’s planetarity enables not only a
diversication and pluralisation of the human but also an inclusion of the non-
human into a consideration of the world. Similar to Ingold’s idea of spheres,
Gabrys points to the value of local perspectives which perceive the world ‘from
within planetary inhabitations’ (2018) to achieve this pluralization and to prevent
the risk of reducing planetarity into an evasive gure outside politics. e
notion of planetarity developed in these theoretical debates can best be grasped
by putting them in dialogue with literary texts. e literary works discussed
in this chapter are able to imaginatively explore planetarity by situating it in
local contexts without reducing its complexity and by developing experimental
methods of writing that capture the incommensurable contradictions inherent
in planetary thought. By inviting readers to engage in an open-ended process of
reimagining bordering processes through environmental engagement, literature
provides a collaborative testing ground in which abstract theoretical ideas can be
experimented with on the experiential level in a direct and imaginative fashion.
In this way, planetary forms of writing contribute to the theoretical debates
outlined here by locating the planet within the local, bringing the experience
of planetary reality closer to the reader without falling back onto a unied and
abstracted global view of the world.
Planetarity as a literary form
e literary works examined in this chapter, by situating the planetary within
a local ecological, cultural and temporal context and highlighting its relation
to human aairs and politics, oer a perspective that begins ‘from within
the thick of planetary inhabitations’ (Gabrys 2018). Writing about planetary
Planetarity 77
media, Gabrys suggests that such media ‘call attention to the dierences that
planetarity invokes, to the inassimilable, the incommensurate conditions of
planetary inhabitation than cannot and do not settle into one coherent or planar
object’, letting their narratives unfold in a form of collective engagement that
acknowledges the presence and agency of the non-human (2018). e same
could be said about literary experimentations and methods of exploring the
planetary through aesthetics. Édouard Glissant considers the possibility of
a planetary style of writing when he calls for the emergence of an ‘aesthetics
of the earth’ (1997, 150) and thereby provides an important link between the
philosophical, theoretical understanding of planetarity outlined above and its
use as a poetic form. In line with theorization of planetarity by critics such as
Ingold and Spivak, Glissant describes this aesthetics as one of ‘disruption and
intrusion’, ‘rupture and connection’, an ‘[a]esthetics of a variable continuum,
of an invariant discontinuum’ which resists ‘transforming land into territory
again’ (1997, 151). In short, Glissant proposes an aesthetics that captures the
challenges of meaning-making in the age of the Anthropocene by drawing
on the contradictory, irresolvable, confusing and sometimes unsettling and
discomforting aspects that come with thinking along planetary lines because
planetary thought resists being ordered into neat, easily understandable
categories.
Writing that imagines the planetary through Scotland can be said to take
up the theoretical and aesthetic challenge outlined here by addressing the
diculties of thinking about an incommensurable concept like the planetary on
a formal level, while at the same time situating the planetary within a distinct
historical, cultural, local and environmental context that helps their readers
make sense of their enmeshment in planetary realities. By situating planetary
thought within the local, such writing does not attempt to x and stabilize the
planet, but instead grounds the planetary in the local, understanding the local
as a node in the meshwork of planetary relations. In doing so, these writers are
able to welcome the confusion and discomfort caused by the planetary into their
texts in order to develop techniques that guide their readers in making sense of
these concepts without proposing a neat solution. Timothy Clark argues that
‘any literary representation of environmental issues – and which issues now
are not in the end? – over the past century at least, must be a representation
in part of this emergent human or planetary reality’ (2015, 73). Ursula Heise,
following Zygmunt Bauman (1993), criticizes what Bauman terms an ‘ethic of
proximity’ which focuses on local attachments and promotes a sense of place as
the basis for an ethics of responsibility for the planet that guides environmental
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination78
action and policy. For Heise, this focus on the local constitutes a form of
parochial essentialism by predicating a core identity generated through the
sense of place of one’s local environment (2008, 42). Heise thereby establishes a
border between the local and the planetary in arguing that these concepts, and
the concerns related to them, are somehow mutually exclusive. is articial
distinction, however, erases the lived experiences of planetary inhabitation and
is contradicted by writers for whom, to use Heise’s own terminology, their sense
of place forms the very basis for a sense of planet.1 As Bergthaller and Horn
note, ‘the local always needs to be viewed in conjunction with the planetary,
in light of the interdependencies between localities, actors, technologies, and
ecological processes’ (2020, 154), and, I would add, the planetary always needs
to be understood in conjunction with the local. By thinking through Scotland,
the writers in this chapter develop a conception of planetarity that emerges
from the qualities of Scotland’s local geography and environment, from the
earthitselfrather than from a perspective outside of it. In their understanding,
the local is not categorically dierent from the planetary but exists always already
within an understanding of the planet and vice versa.
Planetarity in the Scottish literary imagination
Eleanor Bell contends that debates on Scottish nationalism have traditionally
focused on the core–periphery model, in which Scotland gured as the
periphery that dened itself against an English metropolitan centre (2004, 48).
Negotiations of Scotland’s identity through this model are not only visible in
travel accounts but also characterize the foundational genres of nineteenth-
century Scottish literature: the national tale and the historical novel. Even
though these genres were frequently understood as narratives serving to unify
the nation, Ina Ferris argues that their plot, in which ‘an English stranger travels
into the hinterland, full of national prejudices, only to fall into a cross-cultural
romance that radically alters his perspective’, was not meant to reinforce notions
of Scotland as the undomesticated periphery, but was actually ‘directed at placing
in question certain English perceptions, and the kind of challenge it encoded was
typically reinforced by direct contestation of standard metropolitan readings of
the peripheries’ (1997, 208). e dominance of the centre–periphery model for
Scotland results in critical readings of Scotland’s culture and literature that are
continually reliant on dening Scotland through its national borders and against
England. Moving beyond the dichotomy between centre and periphery, Bell
Planetarity 79
argues, aords a reection ‘on alternative and possible future readings of Scottish
identity’ (2004, 48) beyond its status within the UK. Post-national archipelagic
writing presents one way of dislocating the centre–periphery model and
reimagining Scotland’s geopolitical borders from an environmental perspective
by reading them through a nexus of movement.2 Mobilizing planetary forms of
writing may oer another way to develop an alternative reading of Scotland’s
borders and identity by situating Scotland within the larger frame of planetary
habitation. By reading the local through the planetary and vice versa, the writers
in this chapter playfully work through the dominant dichotomies (centre–
periphery, England–Scotland, North–South) that have been used to read
Scotland through an established border paradigm. Instead of reinforcing these
dichotomies, however, they take recourse to environmental perspectives to build
alternative, oen fantastical, futures against which the presumed universality
and permanence of human bordering practices appears trite and insignicant.
By locating Scotland temporally, in relation to geological history, and spatially,
by focusing on geography and environment inuenced by its location in
northern latitudes, the writers in this chapter de- and reterritorialize Scotland
along planetary lines.
In connection with the centre–periphery model, localism and regionalism
have been dominant frames through which Scotland and its literature have
been read, sometimes with the result of painting a picture of Scotland’s literary
tradition as parochial, peripheral and ultimately insignicant.3 Scottish
modernism of the early twentieth century, for example, if indeed identied
with the wider modernist movement at all, has been dened as a rural form
of modernism opposed to the canonical urban modernism of the metropolitan
centres through which the movement has been primarily identied. Instead
of seeing this ascription of a heightened sense of locality as a hindrance to
situating Scotland in relation to planetary considerations, the writing is this
chapter suggests that local and regional perspectives present unique aordances
for accessing planetary consciousness through Scotland’s environmental and
cultural history. e continuous negotiation between heterogeneous local,
regional and national identities in Scotland, which are oen seen as irreconcilable,
makes writing through Scotland in the context of planetary realities especially
productive. Rather than subscribing to the idea of the local and the planetary
as binary oppositions, the writers discussed here understand the planetary as
an inherent constituent part of local and regional perspectives and vice versa.
While the form of planetarity can certainly be found in varying congurations
in Scottish literature, the texts engaged with here do not merely represent an
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination80
emergent planetary reality, but actively take part in shaping this reality through
the imagination.
Hugh MacDiarmid, a central voice in the negotiation of Scotland’s national
and cultural identity, not only tried to situate Scotland within European
modernist traditions but was equally preoccupied with capturing a form of
planetary consciousness that arises out of the local. In an author’s note to his
poem ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’ (1955), Hugh MacDiarmid writes:
Our consciousness is beginning to be planetary. A new tension has been set us
between the individual and the universe. It is not new because poets and entire
literatures have been lacking in the sense of the vastness of Creation, but new in
the response provoked in the writer in relation to his own language and his own
environment.
(224)
He understands this planetary consciousness in relation to an emergent world
literature which captures a new planetary reality that can no longer be denied
and must be expressed through a characteristic ‘multiplicity of souls’ and a
‘realization of the deep abyss of time’ (1955, 225). ese elements create an
ambient poetics that captures these new planetary perspectives. MacDiarmid’s
poem ‘e Eemis Stane’ (1925) presents its readers with a disorienting view
of planet earth as simultaneously seen from within and outwith planetary
habitation. e poem’s rst line roots us in time and space when we nd the
speaker in the ‘how-dumd-deid o’ the cauld hairst night’, presumably looking up
to the night sky aer the harvest has been brought in (27). Right aer, however,
we realize that in looking up, the speaker is simultaneously looking down, and
we are catapulted o the earth to be presented with an image of our planetasan
‘eemis stane’, an unstable stone, that moves in the sky. e disorientation
caused by this double vision is heightened further when the speaker tries to
recall some undened ‘eerie memories’, but they begin to fall up-side down
‘[l]ike a yowdendri’, a counter-swirl of fallen snow that dris up again from
the earth. is yowdendri both confuses the speaker’s memories and makes
them unable to read an inscription they discern to be ‘cut oot i’ the stane’ that
is the earth. While the poem zooms out of the earth to present its readers with
a view of the earth from space, the perspective that results is deeply unsettling
and disorienting. e view of the earth we get is not clear or stable, but the
use of Scots to describe the world as an ‘eemis stane’ defamiliarizes global
perspectives: it presents the world as both unsteady, variable like the seasons
through the adjective ‘eemis’, and as insignicant by describing it as nothing
Planetarity 81
more than a small stone in the universe. Amidst the metaphorical chaos of snow,
all semblance of clarity is lost, and we are le to wonder what words might be
written on the earth: an inscription of geological or human history, a poem?
Even without the disorienting yowdendri, the speaker admits, they could not
have read the words which were already buried under the moss and lichen of
history. In light of the immensity of the planet and universe, the poem suggests,
words become meaningless. e inscription in the stone cannot be read either
way, and even if it could, it would be incapable of expressing planetary reality.
In ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ (1925), MacDiarmid continues this interest in
planetary consciousness in developing a planetary poetics that considers
the planet simultaneously from within and outwith itself. Like ‘e Eemis
Stane’, this poem resists the lure of a global perspective despite zooming
out into the universe and looking at the earth as a ‘bare auld stane’ that ‘[g]
litters beneath the seas o’ Space’ (24). Instead, it defamiliarizes the earth: no
longer the planet of water, the earth is now a stone surrounded by the seas
of space. is is taken further yet when we are told that the earth is ‘[w]hite
as mammoth’s bane’ (24), a description more tting for the moon, and the
speaker admits that they are ‘dumfoun’ered […] Wi’ keethin’ sicht o’ a’ there
is’ (25). e spinning movement of the universe disorients speaker and reader
alike by merging planets, confusing impressions and preventing clear thought.
Rather than producing an abstracted view of the globe, the poem grasps at
the confusion and incommensurability of planetary reality. By imagining the
earth in conversation with the winds, the sea, other planets and the stars,
MacDiarmid invites the reader into a universe lled with unearthly music, an
image that is described as both frightening and fascinatingly beautiful. Borders
cease to matter, in relation to the timescale of the earth the transience of
human constructions becomes evident: in a futuristic view, the earth is ‘littered
wi’ larochs o’ Empires’ and ‘[m]uckle nations are dust’ (23). Time, seen in
planetary dimensions, will slowly erode these monuments of human life. e
local rootedness of the perspective here is only hinted at in this disorienting
poem through the use of Scots and the subtle connection between the stars and
the Cairngorms: looking at the Orion constellation and infusing it with life, the
speaker sees ‘[t]he colour o’ Cairngorm’ reected in the locks of the huntress
(25). In contrast to the vagaries of human constructions which have become
dust, the Cairngorms continue to exist in this planetary vision of the future.
Language and local environments are crucial to MacDiarmid’s understanding
of planetary consciousness and Louisa Gairn notes how his ‘earth lyrics’ (2008,
80) move between the universal and the particular:
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination82
MacDiarmid’s imagination vaults from scenes of Scottish rural life to other-
worldly vistas, swinging into orbit to gain a view of the earth from space,
whilst retaining a sense of specic individual experience, embedded in local
environments.
(81)
While MacDiarmid’s lyrics may be unsettling and disorienting, they are also
rmly grounded in the lived experience of local inhabitation.
Because of his prominent role in the movement of the Scottish Literary
Renaissance with its cultural nationalism, its promotion of vernacular Scots
and Scottish literature and culture more broadly, MacDiarmid’s work is usually
read in cultural nationalist terms. Despite his interest in national identity and
advocacy for Scotland’s literature and language, however, these poems express
his fascination with planetary perspectives. Scots, in the poems discussed
here, is not only a source of rootedness in contrast to a more ‘global’ English,
but Scots words for environmental phenomena, such as ‘yowdendri’, permit
the feelings of disorientation central to MacDiarmid’s planetary perspective.
Like the other writers discussed in this chapter, MacDiarmid’s poems draw
on Scotland’s cultural, political, linguistic and environmental aordances to
develop a planetary perspective. e local and environmental attachments of
Scottish writers, based on the specic literary-cultural traditions that foreground
locality and place-based negotiations of the world, allow them to resist the
global outlook encouraged by viewing the earth from space. By reading the
planetary in combination with an attachment to their local environment, that
is by thinking the planetary through Scotland, writers like MacDiarmid resist
scalar thinkingand the totalizing perspective of the global.
Jules Verne’s e Underground City (1877), alternatively titled e Black
Indies (from the original French title Les Indes Noires), is set in the ctional
Aberfoyle coal mines located below the Trossachs and recounts the story of
James Starr, an Edinburgh engineer, who is called back to the mines ten years
aer their exhaustion by his former foreman Simon Ford. To his surprise,
Starr nds that the Ford family still lives down in the mines and claims to have
discovered new coal seams. e discovery of a huge underground network of
caves which hold enough coal to reopen the mines is accompanied by curious
incidents and dangerous accidents which befall the protagonists, including the
draining of Loch Katrine into the caves in which a new mining community had
built a whole underground city. Verne’s fascination with planetary thought runs
through his oeuvre and centrally shapes his most popular works, from Journey
Planetarity 83
to the Centre of the Earth (1864) via Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) to
Twenty ousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). John Licheld describes Verne as
‘the rst “global” writer’ (2005) and his writing is indeed decidedly international
as characters of varying nationalities move across the world. I would go a step
further and suggest that Verne’s acute interest in the environment, geology,
physics and natural sciences make it possible to describe him as a planetary
writer. Lionel Dupuy cites Verne’s ambition to portray the earth in a collection
of ‘romans géographiques’ (2017, 9). rough these geographical novels, Dupuy
explains, Verne aimed to generate a ‘géographie universelle pittoresque’ that
oered his readers to explore locations as yet unknown to them (11). rough
an exploration of such unknown localities and by drawing on geographical,
geological, physical and astronomical knowledge, albeit oen in the vein of the
picturesque, Verne intended to compile a history of the universe, as he explains
in the foreword to one of his novels (cited in Dupuy 11). Verne’s negotiation
of the relationship between humans and the non-human world involves an
attentiveness to various forms of inhabiting the earth from an ecological
perspective and his Scottish novels are no exception to this.
e ecological consciousness Dupuy detects in Verne’s writing equally
shines through in e Underground City which Ian ompson describes as
Verne’s ‘most successful Scottish novel’ (2012, 139). As ompson points out,
Verne’s travels through Scotland in 1859 inspired him to not only record a
ctional account of his travels in Backwards to Britain (published posthumously
in 1989), but also set e Underground City in the Trossachs, the region ‘that
most stimulated his creative imagination’ (139). According to Garry MacKenzie,
‘Verne was a self-confessed Scotophile’ who ‘claimed Scottish ancestry’ (2017,
281) and ompson nds that Verne’s admiration for the writing of Sir Walter
Scott led him to write ve novels set at least partially in Scotland and to populate
the rest of his works with ‘no less than forty Scottish characters’ (2012, 138).
e inuence of Scott is most strikingly visible in a chapter in which the miners
travel above ground to show Nell, a child who grew up in the depths of the mine
and is rescued by the group, the beauty of the Scottish countryside. ese scenes
above ground connect the world in the mines to a planetary consciousness that
is aorded by Scotland’s environment and geography, both in a material and an
imaginative sense. e areas around Stirling were indeed perforated by mines at
the time Verne was writing, but as the novel moves above ground, it connects
this perspective with literary traditions that can be traced back to the mysticism
of the Ossian poems and the romantic and picturesque imagery of Walter Scott.
Only above ground, Harry Ford believes, will Nell be able to ‘perceive that the
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination84
limits of the universe are boundless’ (1877, 360). is belief is conrmed as Nell
exclaims that the sky appears so high that she feels as if she ‘could take wing and
y’ (367) and we are told that she ‘had now obtained an idea of the universe
– of the works both of God and of man’ (370). e brief qualication of the
universe at the end merges spiritual ideas with human activities: it represents
exactly the combination of human labour, represented by the coal extraction
below ground with its impacts on the earth, and romantic mysticism that make
up Verne’s planetary imagination. e ‘works of man’ equally refer back to the
role of literature in shaping reality, especially in relation to Walter Scott who
crucially shaped how Scotland was viewed from abroad. Verne’s admiration
for Scott is shared by his characters who enthusiastically quote from his works
during their journey, and it visibly structures Verne’s depiction of Scotland as
both a ‘country […] written in gigantic characters of mountains and islands’ and
uniquely characterized by violent histories that ‘dyed with blood these lonely
glens’ (1877, 372). Scott’s inuence is most graspable, however, in the location
of the mine below Loch Katrine, a popular tourist spot since Scott published
his famous poem e Lady of the Lake in 1810 and which Verne visited during
hisown travels. e world of Scott and the world of the mine come togetherin
the novel when, tragically, the bed of the lake gives in and the loch drains fully
into the mine, so that ‘there was not le enough to wet the pretty foot of the Lady
of theLake’ and ‘[t]here was nothing for it but to erase Loch Katrine from the
mapof Scotland’ (376). e erasure of Loch Katrine from Scotland’s geographical,
but also literary, map subtly implies the potentially devastating eects extractive
labour can have in a country whose environment is inextricably interwoven with
cultural and literary history.
ough Verne’s Backwards to Britain mainly discusses the coal-mining
histories of Liverpool and Newcastle, the novel also highlights Glasgow and
the Trossachs as an area full of protable coal deposits right below the surface
and relates the centrality of coal for warmth and light in Scotland: ‘all you need
to do in this generous land is dig a hole for perennial heat and light to gush
forth’ (1989, 126). Aside from these geological assets, setting e Underground
City in this area allows Verne to draw on the cultural and literary traditions of
Scotland which continued to fascinate him and which he felt were concentrated
in the Highlands, and particularly the area around Loch Katrine. e location
of the mine in Stirlingshire, rather than northern England, is thus of central
importance to illustrate how Verne develops planetary thought in this novel
by thinking through Scotland’s geographical and environmental aordances.
e centrality of coal for the story opens its planetary concerns. As Nathan
Planetarity 85
Hensley and Philip Steer point out, ‘[c]oal was the very engine of British
global power in the nineteenth century’ (2019, 64) and formed ‘the enabling
condition for an increasingly global imaginary’ (67). According to Eric Gidal,
the industrial and military developments in Scotland following the Act of
Union in 1707 ‘and the rapid transport of coal and iron ore by canal, railway,
and sea, alongside the production of textiles, ships, and locomotives throughout
the nineteenthcentury, positioned Scotland at the forefront of the carbon age’
(2015, 11). Coal, Hensley and Steer argue, takes on a central ‘structuring role in
texts that consider how bounded or localized systems of belonging – economies,
nations – might be transgressed, opened up, or otherwise superseded’ (2019,
67). is is the case in e Underground City which explores a subterranean
form of planetary habitation through the miners’ desire to live inside the mine
and their development of a whole city below ground. e original title of the
novel Les Indes Noires (the Black Indies) refers to the name given to English
coal mines and connects the narrative directly to global structures of power and
posits carbon capitalism as the engine of the British Empire: ‘these Indies have
contributed perhaps even more than the Eastern Indies to swell the surprising
wealth of the United Kingdom’ (Verne 1877, 280). Outside the bounds of above-
ground society, the miners are exempt from paying rent, tax or dealing with
other troubles of the outside world, including the Scottish weather, and develop
their own community of belonging based on an appreciation of the ‘soul of the
mine’ (308) and a shared feeling of belonging: for inhabitants with the ‘miner’s
instinct’, such as Simon Ford, their ‘whole existence is indissolubly connected
with that of the mine’ from birth to death (299) and they never desire to venture
above ground. e existence of coal creates a subterranean world that is a mirror
of the world above and extends even further than Stirling, stretching below the
seabed and the Caledonian Canal to the north and featuring a number of lakes
to supply the new city:
Of course the waters of these lakes had no movement of currents or tides; no
old castle was reected there; no birch or oak trees waved on their banks. And
yet, these deep lakes, whose mirror-like surface was never rued by a breeze,
would not be without charm by the light of some electric star, and, connected
by a string of canals, would well complete the geography of this strange domain.
(318)
e estranged landscape of lakes mirroring Loch Lomond and the Trossachs
above ground draws on an industrial aesthetic that surfaces at other points
of the novel, including Starr’s rst impression as he returns to the mine aer
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination86
ten years of absence that the countryside had turned into a desert. Instead of
the ‘more stirring, active, industrial life’, the county had, to Starr’s immense
disappointment, turned to agriculture:
e engineer gazed about him with a saddened eye. […] e air was no longer
lled with distant whistlings and the panting of engines. None of the black
vapors which the manufacturer loves to see, hung in the horizon, mingling with
the clouds. No tall cylindrical or prismatic chimney vomited out smoke, aer
being fed from the mine itself; no blast-pipe was pung out its white vapour.
e ground, formerly black with coal dust, had a bright look, to which James
Starr’s eyes were not accustomed.
(290–1)
In an inversion of the pastoral trope, traditional agriculture disrupts the industrial
scenery in this passage: rather than describing the adverse eect of the machine
in the garden, as theorized by Leo Marx (1964), the garden is overgrowing the
machine, the object of Starr’s nostalgia. e pollutive eects of carbon capitalism
so dear to Starr have been neutralized without a trace. e relationship between
extractive technology and natural processes is presented in a curious fashion
in the novel in the description of the caves. Aer Starr and the Fords nd the
location of the new coal seam through the detection of re damp, they blow up
the path with dynamite and enter into a subterranean world already magically
carved out for them: ‘there existed beneath the county of Stirling a vast tract, full
of burrows, tunnels, bored with caves, and perforated with shas, a subterranean
labyrinth, which might be compared to an enormous ant-hill’ (1877, 304–5).
e narrative invests some time to present this subterranean country as entirely
natural, comparing the tunnel system to the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and
stressing that they were created not by men and machine but through geological
processes:
[B]y an unaccountable retreat of the mineral matter at the geological epoch,
when the mass was solidifying, nature had already multiplied the galleries and
tunnels of New Aberfoyle. Yes, nature alone! […] Human termites had never
gnawed away this part of the Scottish subsoil; nature herself had done it all.
(317–18)
is is a convenient explanation that circumvents the need to address the
violent processes of extraction and the human impact on the earth involved
in mining: ‘tightly packed between these useless strata’ of sandstone and
slate that support the caves, ‘ran valuable veins of coal, as if the black blood
Planetarity 87
ofthis strange mine had circulated through their tangled network’ (317). e
subterranean lake country is so perfectly hollowed that it practically invites
extraction and habitation alike.
Curiously, carbon pollution is never thematized. Inside the caves we nd
‘calm fresh air’ and ‘[a] so and pleasant temperature […] instead of the strife
of the elements which raged without’ while ‘electric discs shed a brilliancy of
light which the British sun, oener obscured by fogs than it ought to be, might
well envy’ (341). e actual labour of building the subterranean city equally
remains invisible as the story abruptly jumps three years into the future. As
Karen Pinkus argues, ‘[c]ombustion is deferred, displaced’ in Verne’s novel
(2019, 243) and the technological optimism that shines through the narrative
leaves us, as readers of the twenty-rst century who are acutely aware of the
destructive eects of extractivism on our planet, feeling uneasy. Even though
the scarcity of energy resources is discussed early on in the novel and explained
through a lengthy excursus detailing the geological history of coal formation
that takes up almost the entire second chapter, the new Aberfoyle mine appears
to be inexhaustible and its depletion is deferred to the far future. At the same
time, some of the seemingly optimistic statements about extractivism voiced by
Starr and Ford feel too exaggerated to be taken at face value. When Simon Ford
exclaims that ‘it’s a pity that all the globe was not made of coal; then there would
have been enough to last millions of years’, Starr’s reply is not an agreement
but a word of caution against the destructive greed of carbon capitalism: ‘e
earth would have passed to the last bit into the furnaces of engines, machines,
steamers, gas factories; certainly, that would have been the end of our world
one ne day!’ (1877, 291). Again, however, the day of exhaustion is deferred
into the distant future and what could have turned into a erce critique of the
dire consequences of extractive capitalism remains vague and unspecic in
the end as the story turns away from such concerns and celebrates the utopian
subterranean city made possible by the discovery of new coal seams. Even
though Starr predicts a shi to hydraulics and electricity to take over the role
of coal in the future, the actions of the characters do not reect the fact that
fossil fuels are an exhaustible resource and Starr, suddenly infected himself with
exhilaration about the discovery of a new coal seam, turns into the embodiment
of the exploitative attitude of industrial capitalism: ‘[L]et us cut our trenches
under the waters of the sea! Let us bore the bed of the Atlantic like a strainer;
let our picks join our brethren of the United States through the subsoil of the
ocean! Let us dig into the center of the globe if necessary, to tear out the last
scrap of coal’ (322–3).
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination88
ese scenes heighten the risk that readers begin to conate author and
narrator by reading Starr’s arguments as representative of Verne’s own views and,
as a result, losing track of how Verne challenges his readers to work through the
contradictions and conicts inherent in planetary thinking. As Dupuy (2017)
demonstrates, Verne displays an ecological consciousness in his work and his
characters oen voice environmentalist views. A look at Verne’s Backwards to
Britain helps to contextualize his treatment of extractive capitalism and suggests
that we may not want to let the positive attitudes towards coal that Verne’s
characters in e Underground City express overdetermine our reading of his
work. As they arrive in Liverpool, the two French protagonists of Verne’s travel
ction are shocked by the misery they see in the docks where impoverished
women and children walk ‘barefoot in slimy black mud’, wearing only rags and
once precious hats which now look as if ‘they had nally come to rot’ (1989,
59). e owers on the women’s hats are barely recognizable anymore and seem
to be ‘held in place by that dank, grimy blend of fog and coal-dust so typical
of England’ (60). e ery atmosphere of Newcastle, or ‘Old King Coal’ as it is
nicknamed in the novel, impresses a nightmarish vision on Verne’s protagonist:
[H]e glimpsed a terrifying nightscape. e kingdom of coal was ablaze. Plumes
of re icked above the tall factory chimneys, these are the trees of this dirty
black region, and they form an immense forest, illuminated by wild, tawny
reections. A low endless moan rises from the pits, where relentless burrowing
takes place in the bowels of the coalmines that even unravel under the sea,
scorning the powerless waves.
(162)
In Glasgow, ‘the unpoetic details of an industrial city’ mirror those of Liverpool
exactly, ‘with public buildings blackened by soot and fog’ (131). e intermingling
between industrial aesthetics of extractivism and romantic imaginaries of the
environment that characterizes Verne’s depiction of Scotland as a whole is taken
up most explicitly when the travellers nd that the two monuments dedicated
to Walter Scott and James Watt not only stand side by side but ‘looked so very
much alike that the novelist might have been mistaken for the inventor of the
steam engine’ (131). All in all, then, Verne recognizes the central importance of
coal for the world economy of the nineteenth century. He does not portray it
as an altogether positive industry but equally addresses the negative social and
environmental eects of extractive capitalism.
As Jean-Paul Dekiss argues, ‘there is much in Verne that goes beyond
simple optimism’ (cited in Licheld 2005) and Timothy Unwin suggests that
Planetarity 89
Verne’s works reect on ‘the corrupting power of money […] rather than the
positive economic benet that can come only from a careful and thoughtful
sharing of natural resources’ (2005). According to Unwin, Verne’s ‘future is
less one of whiz-kid gadgets and machines than a less glamorous one in which
communities, societies, and nations have trouble managing the inventions
that the Industrial Revolution and its aermath have produced’ (2005). It is
the complex ambivalence about coal and the fact that elements of a potential
ecological critique come to nothing in the end that explain Pinkus’s uneasiness.
And yet, these contradictions, the oscillation between feelings of fascination and
terror in relation to the machine age, characterize Verne’s mobilization of the
planetary form. In Verne’s imagination, the planetary is full of contradictions
and disruptions that cannot be turned into a neat order, so much so that the
romantic plot that determines the happy ending of the story appears incongruent
with the novel’s engagement with carboniferous realities.
Verne’s novel, though not a traditional industrial novel, demonstrates the
viability of the form of planetarity for critical explorations of extractivism in
the late nineteenth century. Accessing planetarity through the local, then, is not
limited to environmental(ist) ction set in a pre-industrial countryside. Instead,
the inassimilable character of planetary thought distorts such categorical
distinctions and invites us to re-read Scottish texts set within industrial cities
to consider how they speak to the planetary by standing in opposition to
global systems of domination. Given its central position in the Scottish literary
canon and its strong focus on human social and cultural politics, one of the
most interesting literary works to revisit in this context might be Alasdair
Gr ay’s Lanark (1981). Gray’s novel, Graeme Macdonald notes, documents ‘the
corrosive eect that an aggressive and imperialist military-industrial complex has
had, not only in initiating processes of modern clearance and dispossession on
vulnerable local communities but also increasing environmental waste, pollution
and biohazards on an accretive, global scale’ (2012, 227). Gray’s Unthank, a
surrealist, subterranean city paralleling Glasgow, is curiously reminiscent of
Verne’s New Aberfoyle aside from the fact that Gray, unlike Verne, depicts his
city in an explicitly dystopian fashion. Entering Unthank through a mouth that
opens up in the ground, Lanark ends up in the Institute, a medical facility which
claims to cure patients from various diseases, including Lanark’s own aiction
with ‘dragonhide’, a physical expression of pent up emotions in which scales
begin to gradually cover the whole body and the patients lose their ability to
feel: ‘someone may start by limiting only his aections or lust or intelligence,
and eventually heart, genitals, brain, hands and skin are crusted over’ (1981,68).
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination90
When the disease reaches its end state, the person within the dragonhide is
lost and the whole body explodes, releasing large amounts of energy that are
harvested by the Institute which also uses the human remains for clothes and
food. While shocked and disgusted by the horrors of Unthank, Lanark realizes
at the end of the novel that Glasgow is no better: ‘Unthank […] may be bad but
the badness is obvious, not gilded with lies like here’ (552). Lanark returns to
Unthank and climbs to the Necropolis to watch an apocalyptic deluge ooding
the city, a spectacle that lls him with a feeling of exhilaration:
e colours of things seemed to be brightening although the ery light over the
roofs had paled to silver streaked with delicate rose. A long silver line marked
the horizon. Dim rooops against it grew solid in the increasing light. […] He
looked sideways and saw the sun coming up golden behind a laurel bush, light
blinking, space dancing among the shiing leaves. Drunk with spaciousness
he turned every way, gazing with wide-open mouth and eyes as light created
colours, clouds, distances and solid, graspable things close at hand.
(557–8)
e aesthetic importance of light and the spaciousness of the land in this nal
passage create a planetary vision of the world that resonates with the planetary
form of writing mobilized by all of the writers discussed in this chapter. Light
and vastness of space are two of the central environmental characteristics
that Scotland aords for a rewriting of borders along planetary lines and can
be found in the writing of Jules Verne, Eleanor Elphinstone, Malachy Tallack
and Nan Shepherd alike. Like them, Gray uses the natural light of Scotland to
both illuminate and defamiliarize the industrial dystopian aesthetics of Glasgow
and Unthank that much of the novel relies on. Instead, the claustrophobic
atmosphere that dominates much of the novel is replaced by a wondrous feeling
of spaciousness, familiar categories are transformed by the light and a new
perspective opens up for Lanark. At the end, then, what Macdonald describes
as Lanark’s ‘ecologically spent and democratically exhausted world’ (2012, 231)
is destroyed in a clear allusion to the biblical deluge sent by divine judgement
to end corruption and evil that also characterizes Unthank and Glasgow. Gray’s
novel moves between mysticism and realism, drawing on Glasgow and Scotland
as actual material places with real histories and defamiliarizing them in the
process of providing a social and environmental critique. e cautiously hopeful
ending of the novel evokes a planetary consciousness based on Scotland’s
geographyandenvironment that connects with the planetary form mobilized by
the rest of the literary texts discussed in this chapter, suggesting that the world
Planetarity 91
may be built anew aer the global capitalist system of exploitation has been
washed away.
Similar to the ‘eco-apocalyptic vision’ of Lanark in which humans are turned
into fuel to energize ‘a dark, decaying and poisoned world’ (Macdonald 2012,
230), Margaret Elphinstone’s A Sparrow’s Flight (1989) is concerned with
the devastating eects of energy production in the nuclear-industrial complex.
Elphinstone’s novel imagines a society arising from the capitalist ruins of
a nuclear fallout. e result is a seemingly pre-industrial world infused with
asense of enchantment that makes the novel appear almost like a fantasy novel.
It quickly becomes clear that what readers at the time and today would consider
to be everyday technology has become unknown and is perceived as dangerous
in this world. Equally, the nuclear catastrophe that befell the world is a hushed
topic that the characters understand as the result of ‘a kind of sorcery’ through
which powers of the earth were greedily harvested with the result of destroying
the source of life (1989, 84). In this world, the ddler Naomi travels north across
the debatable lands to the ‘empty lands’ in the company of omas, who is
looking to return home to join a traditional dance for which Naomi is to play
the music.
Familiar categories, patterns and structuring principles come undone in
Elphinstone’s post-apocalyptic world which, as Alison Phipps argues, challenges
its readers by oering ‘a counterscript to the dominant reality in Scotland’ (2012,
110). As Phipps points out, material objects ‘exert a dierent agency’ in the novel
that ‘results from the dierent orderings required for human survival “aer the
world changed”’ (110). e road on which omas and Naomi travel appears to
move organically which serves to further defamiliarize the land:
It was more like the sea. A long swell of hills, their curves smooth as a whale’s
back, birds circling over them, the cry of curlews desolate as the calling of gulls
over open water. It seemed one could follow those long undulations, slide down
into the troughs with the smoothness of a narrow boat, then rise up slowly,
carried by the moving swell of the land. Only this was not water, but earth,
stripped to its bones and carved to deceptive smoothness through ages of ice
and wind. It was land, but land limitless as the sea, an open road above the tree-
chocked lowlands that encircled it.
(1989, 32)
e road takes on an agentic and organic character, shaped by climactic
conditions rather than human hands and entirely in harmony with the
surrounding landscape. e land is infused with littoral qualities that lend it an
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination92
ontological instability which underlines its limitlessness. Readers may roughly
identify the direction of the journey from an island that might be Lindisfarne in
the east to the Solway Firth in the west. However, the estranged geography of the
novel suspends topographical certainties. e travels unlock a connection with
the past that haunts omas in dream-like visions that become so entangled
with reality that he has diculties locating himself not just geographically but
also temporally. Like the road, the past is uid and moving and appears to
omas like a parallel country that he inhabits at the same time as his present
reality: ‘I am in two countries, and they are too far away even to see that there is a
border’ (8). Even though the nations of England and Scotland no longer exist in
the novel and are barely remembered, the territorial conicts along the Anglo-
Scottish border are written into the environment and can be sensed by omas:
e hills presented no conict, because they were as they had always been. It was
down here, among lands which has once been dierent, that he had to cope with
two worlds. ere was something in this land that refused to resolve itself, like
two pictures of the same place that would not blend into one image.
(24–5)
e environment of the Borders records the violent battles of the past ‘between
the men of the north and the men of the south’ (25) and plays them back to
omas even aer the region has lost its status as a geopolitical borderland. e
borderland between England and Scotland thus serves as a foundation for the
novel’s destabilization of conceptual and physical borders more widely. omas
and Naomi’s journey leads them across the country north of Hadrian’s wall, an
even older and physical border that survives in this futuristic vision. e concept
of borders, however, is entirely baing to Naomi who cannot conceptualize the
purpose of a border wall:
‘What wall?’
‘It does what we do, only further south. It crosses the whole land, from one side
to another.’
‘No,’ said Naomi, considering. ‘It can’t do. What for?’
‘To divide one country from another.’
‘But why? e mountains do that. Land makes divisions, then people make
connection between them. A wall like that would be going the wrong way.’ (40)
In Elphinstone’s borderless world, the very function of borders is questioned
while conceptual borders between reality and dream, past and present, and
human and non-human become uid. As they enter the ‘empty land’, omas
Planetarity 93
declares that they have reached the border of his country, but lacking any physical
markers, Naomi, to whom the other side ‘just looked like more mountains, not
so very dierent to the ones they had crossed before’ (1989, 81) cannot make
sense of this declaration.
Naomi’s idealistic borderless vision of the world in which humans create
connections rather than divisions allows her to tap into a planetary consciousness
aer they arrive in the empty lands. Walking on the hills and looking down into
the valley of omas’s village, the unfamiliar surroundings disorient Naomi, but
they also shi her perspective beyond the human:
It was like stepping out of a magic circle into a dimension that had nothing to
do with the world she knew. e oor of the valley looked quite smooth from
here, like a spinning top. It had spun her out of one world into another, and there
was no telling where she was. She looked at the mountains opposite, trying to
remember their names. at reorientated here; there were still signposts, and
they only seemed […] to have changed.
(177–8)
e altered signpost suggests a reorientation of perspective from which Naomi
can explore the world from an alternative point of view. e landscape twirls
from valley to mountains, to the rough plateau, curving around and forming a
path ‘heading directly towards the moon’ (178) and Naomi feels that ‘[t]he sky
seemed to expand right down to her feet, encompassing her, as though space
had overowed its limits and reached down to touch the earth’ (178). Naomi
loses her identity in the vastness of this spatial expansion as a new world opens
up to her and encloses her within itself: she loses her colour and becomes no
dierent from the rocks. While the rocks ‘were silent and eternal’, however,
Naomi ‘was quick and transient’, and she feels like a small tune within the
overall music of existence (178). rough this encounter, Naomi understands
that ‘voicing the substance’ of the world through her ddle music should be one
of her central responsibilities in life (178). By losing herself briey, Naomi gains
a new understanding of her position and is able to relocate herself within the
living world of planetary relations:
e earth was alive, and it was the same earth, wherever she might be. ere
was a music to it beyond the range of human ears, but within the compass of
her body. She couldn’t hear it, but she recognised it, a vibration too vast for any
instrument, spinning out into space, the beginning and end of every human
tune, the sound of home.
(178)
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination94
Elphinstone’s mystical future-past version of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands
catalyses a dissolution of borders as structuring principles on a conceptual level.
e formal ambiguities and shiing quality of the narrative, together with the
estrangement of familiar categories and patterns, highlight the inassimilable
and incommensurable condition of planetary habitation. e narrative
embraces confusion and discomfort on the level of both form and content, and
it is through embodied and aective encounters with the intensely local that
the characters can recognize themselves as part of a complex and challenging
planetary meshwork.
An interest in processes of defamiliarizing topography and conventional
borders similarly characterizes Malachy Tallack’s Sixty Degrees North (2015)
and e Valley at the Centre of the World (2018). Even though Tallack’s
travelogue Sixty Degrees North was published three years before his rst novel,
he had already begun writing e Valley at the Centre of the World when he
started out on his journey along the sixtieth parallel, or line of latitude, and took
a break to write about his travels before returning to the novel. Because of the
overlaps in the writing processes, the two works inform one another in their
concern with planetary habitation and it is worth considering them together.
In his travelogue, Tallack describes his journey from Shetland along the sixtieth
parallel to trace the idea of the North by travelling through Greenland, Canada,
Alaska, Siberia, St Petersburg, Finland and Åland, Sweden and Norway and
back to Shetland. Locating Shetland along planetary lines, in a way that diverges
from conventional geopolitical frameworks, and connecting it to places such
as Greenland and Alaska, is, for Tallack, a way to create a meaningful narrative
about identity: ‘Sixty degrees north is a story […] about where – and perhaps
also who – we are’ (2015, 3). For Tallack, geography begins with planetary
habitation: it begins within us as we try to situate ourselves in relation to the
earth and the universe which, even as they appear stationary, are caught ‘in
ceaseless motion’ (13). Imagining oneself as situated within a celestial system
of constant motion, for Tallack, ‘is to be overwhelmed not just by a feeling of
insignicance, but of fear, vulnerability and exhilaration’ (13). He tells us about
a moment when he was seventeen and looking out of the window of his Lerwick
home when he attempts to imagine the places connected to Shetland through
the sixtiethparallel:
I imagined that I could see those places from above. I felt myself carried around
the parallel, lied and dragged as through connected to a wire. e world turned
and I turned with it, circling from home towards home again until I reached,
Planetarity 95
inevitably, the back of my own head. Dizziness rose through me like a gasp of
bubbles, and I fainted, briey, landing on my knees with a jolt on the bedroom
oor.
(1–2)
is mixture of feelings that result in being dizzily overwhelmed captures the
impossibility of imagining planetary reality which resists being neatly packaged
into graspable categories of thought and feeling. In attempting to imagine that
everything on our earth is connected, and that the earth is constantly turning
within a mobile universe, Tallack admits that ‘it seems somehow impossible that
we could be anywhere at all’ (2015, 14). At the same time, what guides Tallack on
his journey is the attempt to nd a sense of belonging, to locate himself against
the ‘unshakable feeling of exile and of homesickness’ that accompanies him on
his way (24).
It is in the categorization of the parallel as a kind of border that the narrative
becomes slightly tangled up in trying to distinguish the parallel as a more
‘natural’ border from the articial borders drawn by human histories. Even
though Tallack suggests that ‘it is possible to claim that the sixtieth parallel is
a kind of border, where the almost-north and the north come together’ (3–4),
the ‘border’ of the parallel remains unmarked and there are no preconditions
nor consequences for crossing it. Its signicance is removed from the divisive
function of a geopolitical border. Instead, Tallack focuses on how the parallel
connects places that are characterized ‘by climate, by landscape, by remoteness’
that make habitation challenging (4). To focus on the location of Shetland at sixty
degrees north, Tallack proposes, means ‘to assert that this is not just a forgotten
corner of the British Isles’, a peripheral remote place, but that ‘Shetland belongs
also to something else, something bigger’ (3). Rather than focusing on the sixtieth
parallel as an approximate line that aords an alternative mapping independent
of political borders, the bigger picture Tallack refers to is one of human history
in which Shetland ‘was at the geographical heart of a North Atlantic empire,
enclosed within the Norse world in a way that provokes nostalgia even now’
(3). At the same time, Tallack makes the contradictory suggestion that ‘[u]nlike
political or cultural geographies, the sixtieth parallel is certain and resolute;
it is impervious to the whims of history’, a reading that allows him to situate
Shetland as a central part of ‘the north’: ‘At sixty degrees, Shetland is as central as
anywhere and everywhere else’ (3).
While the sixtieth parallel may indeed not be subject to the whims of history,
however, it very much depends on the whims of both the earth’s motion and the
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination96
cartographer. Dierent cartographical projections may create slightly divergent
circles of latitude with varying degrees of distance between the latitudinal lines,
and while the position of the Equator may be stable, the parallels are not entirely
xed but subject to uctuations based on the tilt of the earth’s axis of rotation
relative to its crust. Tallack experiences the diculty of locating the line that he
describes as so ‘certain and resolute’ with the help of a map. He quickly realizes
that the reality on the ground is dierent and the line that appears so natural to
him and which he argues dierentiates climactic and environmental zones may
actually be just as arbitrary as other borders when encountered on the ground,
especially where it overlaps with the littoral zones of the islands:
e map showed a cave, over which my line appeared to cross, but from where I
stood the cave was entirely hidden. I walked north until I was sure I had crossed
the parallel, then retraced my steps. As I peered over the edge of a steep scree
slope, the map’s clean lines were shattered into stones and grass and waves. e
angle of the cli and the jutting rocks prevented any kind of certainty.
(2015, 12)
e comparison with a borderline may then not be entirely o in that the
sixtieth parallel, just as any other border, represents a construct based on
cartographical conventions, an imaginary line that is not removed from global
power relations, especially where the division between a Global South and
Global North is concerned. In attempting to replace geopolitical borders with
‘natural’ lines of latitude, Tallack’s travelogue reveals all geographical categories
as arbitrary constructs. e result is a story that attempts to locate the local
within the planetary more than the other way around, but Tallack’s travelogue is
equally a story about restlessness and mobility in which stability can only ever
be temporary. e paradoxes and contradictions that characterize the imaginary
of the sixtieth parallel result in a messy collision of environmental and cultural
mappings that is characteristic of the inherent challenges in imagining planetary
reality. In the end, there is no clear, stable location, but a continuous process
of locating and dislocating places in ways that are meaningful for those that
encounter and inhabit them.
Building on the insights gathered during Tallack’s travels, e Valley at the
Centre of the World (2018) imagines the planetary through the local by paying
attention to how the environment is infused with the human stories and
everyday struggles of a small community inhabiting a valley on the Shetlands.
Planetarity in this novel is mainly narrated and imagined through Alice, a writer
and initially an outsider who has been writing a history of Shetland for just over
Planetarity 97
three years when the novel begins, a history which will later bear the same title
as the novel. To Alice, the Shetlands are a perfect microcosm, the history of
which can easily be told because of their remoteness and the bounded nature
of the islands: ‘You feel your mind can encompass everything in it, everything
there is to see and to learn and to comprehend. You feel you can contain it,
the way that it contains you’ (2018, 26). Contrary to her expectations, however,
her writing project simultaneously expands and contracts, shis and changes
direction, until the focus is ultimately narrowed down to the small space of
the valley in which she lives. rough this intensely local focus, Alice is able to
integrate the non-human world into her history book and explore new angles
of vision: ‘She liked to see this place from new angles, to look at it from ground
level or even deeper’ (62). As she looks closer at ‘the shadowed nooks, the burn
banks, the ground beneath the heather stalks, the dirt and damp corners’ (62),
Alice’s perspective widens, and she feels that she can no longer contain the valley
as easily as she thought:
[H]ere in the mud Alice felt the weight of her own ignorance, and the enormity
of all she could not put a name to. […] e closer she looked, the more the valley
would expand. Whatever she held a magnifying glass to would grow to ll the
lens, whatever was minute would become momentous. Here, she was struck by
the vertiginous thought that the world beneath her was in fact innite, that the
more she looked at it, the more there would be to see, and that everything she
saw, every atom of it, was its own centre.
(62–3)
e ‘vertiginous’ immensity of the mesh of life on this planet echoes the dizzy
spell Tallack describes in his travelogue: the full extent of planetary reality is
conceptually challenging, if not impossible, to grasp. At the same time, it
is the relations between things, human and non-human lives, that matter. In
light of the innity of non-human life that Alice experiences in the thick of
planetary habitation, in the literal mud, humanity and its borders come to seem
insignicant and small as the valley expands. When everything and everywhere
is a centre, it is not just the centre–periphery relations underlying bordering
constructs that come to be dislocated, but the dominant position of the human
as well.
e works in this chapter pick up a range of cultural preconceptions
through which Scotland is portrayed as provincial or peripheral to the larger
frameworks of the nation or globe. ey draw on a Scotland dened by an
interconnected set of ecological and cultural conditions, which allows them
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination98
to infuse an earthy, material realism with elements of Celtic mysticism.
e results are texts characterized by irresolvable contradictions in which
common conceptualizations of Scotland and its borders are defamiliarized
through the connection with the planetary: the world is too complex and
confusing to be ordered into such neat categories as borders, be they physical
or conceptual. Taking into account these literary and aesthetic traditions, the
writers discussed here develop a planetary form of writing that thinks through
Scotland and works through the prism of the local in all its complexity. While
the selection of examples here can by no means serves as a comprehensive list
as to how the planetary form is mobilized in Scottish writing, it nevertheless
shows how writers of dierent periods have found value in conceptualizing
planetarity through Scotland. e imaginative potential of the form manifests
in the versatile congurations of texts to which it can be tted, from industrial
realism to speculative fantasy. In the case study that follows, I will explore
how Nan Shepherd, now considered a pioneer of environmental writing from
Scotland, develops a planetary poetics through which she encourages us to
continuously adapt our frames of vision. Shepherd attends to the intensely local
in order to garner an understanding of planetarity from within that embraces
the contradictions and messiness of planetary reality.
Borders ‘dissolved in light’: Nan Shepherd’s planetary poetics
With the increased popularity of the New Nature Writing and the rise in
ecocritical scholarship, Shepherd’s writing, in particular her non-ctional
writing on the Cairngorms in e Living Mountain, has been reappraised
in recent years by a wider circle of readers and scholars alike. Her work is
praised for the way it speaks to a contemporary interest in and concern for
local environments and geography and in ecological writing in the context
of the environmental crisis more widely (Lyall 2019b; Walton 2020). Gillian
Carter reads Shepherd’s writing as expressing ‘a kind of domestic geography
that maps borders and then transgresses them’ through its engagement with
landscape (2001, 28). Similarly, Carla Sassi explores the relation between the
local, the national and the global in Shepherd’s work and, nding that these
categories frequently become unstable, identies a planetary dimension in
the way Shepherd writes about the Cairngorms (2008, 77). Samantha Walton
puts Shepherd in dialogue with a range of contemporary ecocritical theories,
outlining how her writing ‘might oer new ways of relating to human and
Planetarity 99
more-than-human communities and reimagining humanity’s place on earth
in the context of the Anthropocene and the environmental and climate crisis’
(2020, 2). While these studies provide a valuable entry to Nan Shepherd’s writing
and contribute to a growing body of scholarship on Shepherd, they largely
focus on e Living Mountain and, if they mention them at all, only marginally
address her novels, poetry or essays. In this chapter I will be drawing on ideas
developed in e Living Mountain but focus mainly on two of Shepherd’s novels,
e Quarry Wood (1828) and e Weatherhouse (1930). While Shepherd’s non-
ction partially resists labelling through its formal instability and experimental
qualities, it is through the ctional and multiperspectival qualities of the novel
that Shepherd could really explore planetarity both formally and thematically
in a way that truly captures its contradictions and incommensurability. In
her novels, even more so than in e Living Mountain, Shepherd makes use
of the aordances of the Scottish environment in a way that contributes to
the development of a planetary poetics through which geopolitical, social and
material borders are destabilized and reframed. Her novels provided Shepherd
with a testing ground to play her ideas through thematically and aesthetically.
Attending to the planetary in content and form through a focus on the local
geography and environment of Scotland, Shepherd develops a planetary
poetics that not only allows for a reframing of Scotland’s geopolitical borders
but also constitutes a more fundamental examination of bordering practices
from a planetary perspective.
As I wish to show, Shepherd’s novels attend to disruptions as much as
connections, and her planetary poetics encourages reading practices that eace
totalities through a multiplication of perspectives and a dissolution of boundaries
from the levels of geopolitics to matter. Both e Quarry Wood (1928) and
e Weatherhouse (1930) present borders through the qualities of the Scottish
environment which allows them to question the basic premises underlying their
constitution, function, durability and their material eects. Reading Shepherd
from an environmental perspective, it becomes clear that Shepherd herself
could be described as an early ecocritic as well as a novelist. Not an ecocritic
who subscribes to the deep ecologist beliefs of some of her contemporaries but
indeed rather a deconstructive ecocritic before her time who, while engaging
with nature in an ecologically meaningful way, oen appears impatient with her
descriptions and ideas and who recognizes the continual slippage of meaning.
Shepherd’s planetary poetics is not always about comfort, but about confronting
and embracing contradictions and harnessing the potential of our discomfort
to rethink the frameworks through which we have previously understood the
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination100
world, but which have become inadequate. In this sense, Shepherd’s novels speak
to our contemporary planetary reality and can be read as part of a growing
body of Anthropocene literature. e planetary in Shepherd’s work does not
present the world as a holistic, integral whole but instead as full of incongruities,
asymmetries and contradictions. By nding ways of writing that follow a
planetary poetics and encourage reading from multiple perspectives at once,
Shepherd’s ction addresses the potential of new planetary connections and
possibilities that allow her to move beyond established bordering conventions.
Even though Shepherd seemingly writes from an intensely local perspective
by developing these ideas through Scotland, and the North East in particular,
a purely situated understanding of her works would neglect the potential
contribution of her interventions to theoretical debates around borders and the
environment.
Before looking at Shepherd’s ction, I want to briey outline the insights
that e Living Mountain can provide into Shepherd’s planetary method of
writing, in particular her view on perspectivity and the human literary subject.
Following this, I will examine the role that the natural light conditions of the
Scottish North East play in Shepherd’s planetary reframing of borders along
planetary lines. While natural light is mostly presented as a source of wonder
that allows characters to engage intimately with their material environment, I
will show that Shepherd’s multiperspectival writing style simultaneously resists
such straightforward interpretations. I will then move on to discuss the question
of historical agency that is central to debates on planetarity in the context of the
Anthropocene and discuss how Shepherd navigates the complexities of human
agency in her novels. Following from this, I will outline the idea of a fourth
dimension of reality that Shepherd develops in e Weatherhouse. I will suggest
that this dimension creates a planetary frame of vision through which borders
become exible and dynamic but also ambivalent and potentially necessary in
navigating our lives.
‘How the earth must see itself’: Perspectivity and the decentred
subject
e reections on perspective and perception in e Living Mountain provide
vital clues for understanding Shepherd’s approach to writing about borders and
the environment. Reecting on the value of experiencing a familiar landscape
dierently, Shepherd witnesses the landscape with all of her senses, letting her
eye travel across it very slowly several times:
Planetarity 101
is change of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things
that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. en static things may be
caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as alternating the
position of one’s head, a dierent kind of world may be made to appear.
(1977, 10–11)
She suggests lying down, facing away and even bending over to look at the world
upside down as possible strategies to shi to a new perspective that will open
up a new view of the world. As a result of such perspectival shis, Shepherd
recognizes herself as part of the planet, being able to see with ‘unaided sight
that the earth is round’ (11). e adjective ‘unaided’ is signicant here because it
dierentiates Shepherd’s planetary perspective of the earth from the abstracted
view of the earth as a globe which, as Tim Ingold argues, ‘the world appears
as an object of contemplation, detached from the domain of lived experience’
(2000, 210). Instead of looking at the world as a globe, a perspective that is
necessarily positioned outside the planet, Shepherd’s attempt to decentralize
the subject and to attend to how the earth may see itself constitutes a planetary
practice, as described by Jennifer Gabrys, in that she attempts to understand
her environment ‘from within the thick of planetary inhabitations’ (2018). e
multiperspectivity that is created by shis of position decentres the human
subject as the focus of the experience. Moreover, it highlights that everything is
in relation to everything else and that the centre is actually nowhere to be found:
Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal
point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker.
is is how the earth must see itself.
(1977, 11)
e link to art in comparing the experience to the composition of a picture is
signicant and suggests that Shepherd’s attitude on perceiving the world from
multiple angles parallels modernist visual arts movements such as Cubism.
e move away from a xed viewpoint and the belief that an object can only
be properly understood when seen from dierent angles are part of a cubist
aesthetic that is similar to what Shepherd posits here as a more viable alternative
to traditional landscape art. As Carter argues, by adopting an anti-imperialist
stance and imagining the perspective of the earth instead of advocating for a
subject position based on aesthetic detachment, Shepherd breaks ‘the link
between vision, power and possession’ and thereby undermines discourses ‘that
promulgate conquest, domination and mastery’ over the environment (2001,31).
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination102
Passages like these that attempt to destabilize the primacy of the subject, and
together with the modernist style of Shepherd’s writing, break with the genre
of nature writing with which e Living Mountain is commonly associated, and
which oen, if not always, favoured rst person narratives in which the subject
can easily become the surveyor, or even conqueror of nature. Rather than
focusing on her personal connection to the natural world, Shepherd attempts
to move beyond her individual perspective to approach something beyond the
position of the human ‘looker’. Shepherd’s reconguration of the subject can
be understood as an approach to artistic work that is focused on dynamic acts
of becoming and emphasizes the necessity to look at the world from multiple
angles. Only in doing so, she suggests, can we begin to grasp that the world is
indeed not static but continually changing and exists beyond human terms. In
this light, it appears limiting to adopt a reading of Shepherd’s writing as bounded
by region, nation or gender. e reections on perspectivity, the positioning of
the human subject and the attribution of a subject position to the earth itself
in e Living Mountain can help us to understand the narrative techniques she
employs in her ction writing and which lie at the heart of her planetary poetics.
Written over the course of several years, e Living Mountain does not t
neatly into the category of nature writing due to its fragmented and experimental
form. Her non-ction allowed Shepherd to experiment with and theorize her
ideas about the environment and planetarity which we can see woven into the
fabric of her ctional texts on the level of form as well as content. rough her
novels, Shepherd brings various ways of seeing and understanding the planetary
into dialogue by bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives by characters
of dierent backgrounds who relate to the Scottish environment in dierent
ways. In Shepherd’s rst novel, e Quarry Wood (1928) we follow the journey
of Martha Ironside who comes from a rural working-class family in theNorth
East of Scotland to study at Aberdeen University to become a teacher. While
the bildungsroman form of the novel limits the narrative perspectives available,
as everything is ltered through Martha’s perception, Shepherd breaks with
the developmental structure of the genre. Rather than following a linear or
teleological development, Martha accumulates dierent perspectives over the
course of the novel which serve to complement rather than replace one another.
Shepherd’s second novel, e Weatherhouse (1930), revolves around the lives
of the inhabitants, mostly women, of the small, ctional community of Fetter-
Rothnie in the North East of Scotland in the wake of the First World War. e
Scottish environment plays a central role in both novels and Shepherd manages
to describe manifold ways in which the characters relate to the environment
Planetarity 103
they inhabit. Charlotte Peacock describes Shepherd’s writing as modernist and
‘kaleidoscopic’, characterized by ‘endlessly shiing perspectives’ and focused on
the exploration of fragmented identities (2020). is kaleidoscopic view, I would
argue, is the basis for a planetary poetics which allows Shepherd to portray the
environment as much as bordering processes, in Shepherd’s words, ‘in the very
act of becoming’ (1977, 10), as dynamic rather than static categories that are in
a continual process of reshaping.
(De)bordering: aective geographies and the aesthetics of light
e rst chapter of e Quarry Wood (1928) features a debate about the seemingly
insignicant and small material border of a garden fence which symbolically
introduces the novel’s treatment of borders:
e fence was not neglected from carelessness, or procrastination, or a distaste
for work. Still less, of course, from indierence. Miss Leggatt had a tender
concern for her seedlings, and would interrupt even a game of cards at the
advent of a scraping hen. But deep within herself she felt obscurely the contrast
between the lifeless propriety of a fence and the lively interest of shooing a hen;
and Aunt Josephine at every turn chose instinctively the way of life.
(4)
e comedy of Aunt Josephine Leggatt’s rejection of a garden fence in favour of
a more exible and ‘instinctive’ system that requires her to jump up at random
intervals to run out and shoo her hens away from her seedlings is characteristic
of Shepherd’s playful engagement with bordering practices. e refusal to put
up a fence, as Carter points out, ‘speaks of a gentle anarchy in a world governed
by property and propriety’ (2000, 47). While this may be an intervention with
an intensely local focus, it can also be understood as a speculation on the
function and purpose of borders that has wider implications for the novel’s
complex treatment of bordering processes. e clearly local and particular
focus of passages such as the one above represents one way in which Shepherd
will be seen to bring the larger and sometimes more elusive and experimental
passages on planetarity back to everyday experience, grounding the planetary in
the local. Not only does the passage serve to introduce Martha’s eccentric aunt,
who indeed does not care much about the restrictions of social decorum and
boundaries on the whole. It also lays out how borders will be understood in the
novel in a straightforward and realist mode before Shepherd dives into more
experimental modes later on. Instead of relying on the ‘lifeless propriety’ of a
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination104
material border that would serve to exclude the hens from the garden plot in
the interest of securing the seeds, Martha’s aunt chooses a more mobile and ad
hoc ‘policing’ of her garden plot that intentionally leaves room for transgression.
While the space around the garden is monitored and thereby constitutes a form
of border, the performative acts of policing are described as a comical game that
serves to ensure the survival of seedlings without restricting the hens’ freedom of
movement. Rigid, physical borders are rejected as lifeless in favour of a creative
and dynamic view of the space as a contact zone which, exactly because it is
continually renegotiated in direct embodied encounters, enables the productive
and aectionate cohabitation of multiple species in the space of the garden.
roughout, the novel privileges such a lively, aective engagementwith borders
that allows for dynamic encounters and cross-border movement.
e connection between this lively view of borders and environmental
readings of Scotland’s borders along planetary lines is made later in the novel
when Martha and her family debate the centrality of light for a geographic
reimagination of Scotland’s limits. In her non-ctional writing and in her novels,
Shepherd explores the idea of light and tries to describe its special qualities in the
North East: ‘Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere’, Shepherd
claims early on in e Living Mountain (1977, 2), in which she dedicates a
whole chapter to reections on ‘Air and Light’. What makes the natural light
in Scotland special, according to Shepherd, is that ‘[i]t is luminous without
being erce, penetrating to immense distances with an eortless intensity’ (2).
On a clear mid-summer day, the natural light allows the local environment of
the Cairngorms to expand and defy the rules of distance, to become spacious
in reaching beyond its own boundaries towards ‘the ends of the earth and far
into the sky’ (22). Natural light situates Scotland within a network of planetary
relations by allowing Shepherd to move back and forth between the local and
the cosmological. Its special qualities foster an experience of boundless space
and dissolve borders. Light and spaciousness are central elements in Shepherd’s
planetary poetics of the border.
In e Quarry Wood the quality of natural light frequently evokes feelings
of wonder, not least in the scene in which Geordie, Martha and her sisters
reect on the seeming boundlessness of Scotland under the gleam of the
Northern Lights. Martha is drawn out of herself by her experience of the
‘Merry Dancers’:
A shudder ran over Martha. Something inside her grew and grew till she felt
as enormous as the sky. She gulped the night air; and at the same time made a
Planetarity 105
convulsive little movement against her father. She was not afraid; but she felt
so out of size and knowledge of herself that she wanted to touch something
ordinary.
(1928, 18)
e aective tone of this passage draws on the sublime while explicitly
distancing itself from it: the feeling of enormity that Martha experiences is not
accompanied by the terror inherent in the sublime but characterized by a feeling
of incommensurable wonder. Martha feels part of something that exceeds her
being and only by anchoring herself on a local level of experience by touching
her father can she start to wonder about the meaning of these feelings. e
luminosity of the Scottish environment in this passage can be seen to evoke
modernist moments of being, though not quite in a Woolan sense. In a letter to
Neil Gunn, Shepherd describes her idea of ‘movements of being’ as an exchange
between the natural environment and a spiritual inner world and it is in this
more environmental sense that the moments of being in Shepherd’s work are
to be understood (cited in Peacock 2019, xi). As the family tries to understand
the phenomenon of the Northern Lights, they collectively reinvent a ballad in
which the ‘Arory-bory-Alice’ is said to bound Scotland to the north. As a result,
light becomes central to an alternative and playful understanding of the borders
of Scotland:
Martha said it over and over to herself: Scotland is bounded on the south by
England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice,
and on the west by Eternity. Eternity did not seem to be in any of her maps: but
neither was the Aurora. She accepted that negligence of the map-makers as she
accepted so much else in life.
(1928, 20)
is aective geography displaces geopolitical borders in favour of an
environmental understanding of Scotland that is expansive and insubstantial,
understood through the movement of the planet with the cycles of the rising
sun, the intangible and unpredictable waves of the Northern Lights and the
even less graspable spiritual category of eternity. Even though the ephemerality
of the Aurora as a legitimate boundary for Scotland is questioned by Dussie
who asks, ‘what bounded Scotland when the Aurora was not there’ (19), the
boundary is accepted unequivocally, allowing the initial sense of wonder to be
maintained. e reliance on non-scalable environmental categories that exceed
human systems of organizing space and encompass the planet itself suggests that
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination106
the boundaries of Scotland cannot quite be grasped except by aective and lively
engagement.
It is only the geopolitical border involved in the description of Scotland,
the Anglo-Scottish border, which at rst glance appears xed and cannot be
imagined into anything other than what ocial maps describe. For Carter, this
dierence between the dynamic and ephemeral nature of Scotland’s northern,
eastern and western boundaries and the xity of its southern border ‘would
suggest that England alone anchors Scotland in the material world’ and that
Scotland, consequently, ‘can only be read in relation to England because the other
boundaries are not chartered in atlases’ (2000, 53). Such a reading of thepassage,
however, underestimates the aective potential of the more elusive boundaries
and their formative role in delineating the lifeworlds of Martha and her family.
e family does not try to replace England as Scotland’s limit to the south,
accepting it as a geographical given and anchoring their reality on a national scale.
Nevertheless, ‘England’ in this case cannot be considered solely in geopolitical
terms, but is more accurately understood, similar to the other boundaries, on an
aective level: physically and conceptually distant from their lifeworld, England
remains no less abstract, maybe even more so, than the Northern Lights. is
overlay of geopolitical and aective terms of understanding their position in the
world highlights the planetary poetics ofShepherd’s writing which embraces
contradictions rather than trying todissolve them. e productive incongruity
between the frames of reference here highlights the imaginative potential of
adopting multiple dynamic perspectives rather than settling down on what is
most commonly accepted. is becomes even clearer when the Atlantic Ocean
isrst suggested as Scotland’s western border but rejected by Geordie’s claim that
in his story, ‘[i]t was a bigger word nor that’ (1928, 20). Rather than providing
the story referenced, the novel opts to oer half-remembered fragments that are
brought together and reinvented through debate which captures and embraces
the disproportionality between geographical denominations and aective
impressions. e coming together of multiple perspectives demonstrates not
only that the planetary perspective shis geopolitical borders and encourages
us to read them dierently, but also that the planetary can only really unfold
collectively, in the interaction between various human and non-human actors.
According to Laura-Lee Kearns, an ‘ethics and aesthetics of wonder would
enable us to greet and meet […] with an openness that seeks wonder instead
of fear and could potentially undermine dualisms’ (2015, 100). By reimagining
Scotland outside the dualistic perspective that would dene it in its relation
to England, or even in relation solely to human history, the alternative map
Planetarity 107
presented by Shepherd’s novel captures this creative openness. Drawing on the
conditions of light present in Scotland because of its latitudinal position and
geology, conditions which change how characters perceive their environment,
the novel facilitates the multiperspectival reframing of conventional geopolitical
borders and simultaneously suggests that it is the Scottish environment itself
which unlocks the imaginative possibilities that encourage a creative and lively
approach to borders.
e creation of hierarchies between ocial cartographic delineations
and more creative and intuitive understandings, or even between England
andScotland, is not what the novel leads up to. Rather, the coexistence of both
frames of reference captures the ethical undercurrents of the aesthetics of wonder
that characterizes passages such as the above. For Mireille Schnyder, the poetics
of wonder can best be understood as poetics of the border, with wonderment
dening a boundary experience in which epistemological borders are crossed
(2013, 112–13). e crossing of epistemological borders from the known into
the unknown can lead to what Kearns denes as an ethics of wonder in which
cultivating a sense of wonder forms the basis for ethical relationships with others
in that it refuses to totalize experiences and contain them within a closed system
(2015, 100). While the imaginative map of Scotland is internalized by Martha
as more truthful to her experience than the abstracted knowledge provided by
maps, she does not prioritize between experiential and conceptual cartographies.
Instead, Scotland’s position in relation to larger-than-national systems of deep
time, planetary movement and earthly phenomena is acknowledged alongside
the national geographies that Martha learns at school where she ‘repeated the
boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers
in Spain’ (1928, 20). Having crossed this border, Martha is able to read the
world from multiple perspectives at once, seeing herself simultaneously in an
embodied sense as anchored in a particular moment in time and space and in
an aective relation to the planet. Her initial boundary experience of wonder
establishes room for a creative engagement with borders and makes it possible
for Martha to understand the world on both an aective and a scientic level.
In Shepherd’s second novel, e Weatherhouse (1930), the quality of the
natural light in North East Scotland and the spaciousness of the landscape
return as central imageries through which Shepherd dissolves spatial and
temporal boundaries. is is foregrounded in passages that draw on the
particular qualities of Scotland and, in an inversion of nationalist perspectives
on land as conned or liberated by humans, describe it agentically, as ‘a
country that liberated’ on the basis of its geological history and its latitudinal
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination108
location:‘[m]ore than half the world was sky. e coastline vanished at one of
the four corners of the earth’ (9–10). In this opening chapter, Shepherd already
attempts to capture and layer contradictory perspectives in order to develop a
planetary outlook. e reference to a more commonly accepted geographical
framework of borders is hinted at by the reference to the ‘four corners of the
earth’, which is put alongside an environmental understanding of Scotland not
as territory to be limited through imperialist structures but, in Glissant’s terms,
as land that is limitless and connects Scotland to other parts of the planet. In
e Weatherhouse, Shepherd is able to mobilize the quality of natural light
in Scotland to unsettle minute boundaries on the smallest material scale by
seemingly dissolving substances:
On the willows by the pool the catkins were ued, insubstantial, their stamens
held so lightly to the tree that they seemed like the golden essence of its life
escaping to the liberty of air. Once, as the two wandered in the wood, they saw a
rowan, alone in the darkness of the rs, with smooth grey branches that gleamed
in the sun. e tree had no seeming substance. It was like a loy jet of essential
light.
(1930, 59)
In this passage, the landscape appears almost spectral to Lindsay on her walk
with Garry, real in the focus on the willows’ catkins, the rowans and the rs
which they encounter in their daily walks, and simultaneously unreal, at the
point of complete dissolution into light. at the trees are simultaneously
identiable and caught in the process of becoming insubstantial and turning
into something other than themselves resonates with Shepherd’s assessment in
e Living Mountain that changing one’s perspective will reveal ‘static things
[…] caught in the very act of becoming’ (1977, 10). Passages like the one
above appear almost unexpectedly, in the middle of conversations rather than
in silent contemplations. In between encounters, they insert the environment
into the narrative, bringing it into focus as something that is always in ux, just
as the narrative itself is constantly shiing its perspective and resisting static
interpretations.
Even though such scenes of becoming show humans to be enmeshed in
the environment, they do not work to promote a dissolution and merging
of substances into an integral whole in which boundaries are completely
suspended. When Lindsay walks outside under the full moon, she experiences
a similar sense of wonder at the spaciousness and seeming boundlessness
created by the light to that experienced by Martha in e Quarry Wood. Just
Planetarity 109
like Martha, Lindsay is astonished at how huge the night seems to her when she
describes leaving the house as an act of ‘escaping from the lit room into light
itself’ (1930, 29):
Light was everywhere: it gleamed from the whole surface of heaven, round a third
of the horizon the sea shimmered. […] She ran through the spruce plantation
and toiled up the eld over snow that was matted in grass; and, reaching the
crest, saw without interruption to the rims of the world.
(29)
e light of the full moon blurs the boundaries between sea and sky, and spatial
distances can be imaginatively overcome when Lindsay feels that she can see
beyond the limits of the coastal border on which she stands into immense
distances. As with Martha, the experience draws Lindsay out of herself. Even
though she tries to focus on being grounded on the earth through her feet,
Lindsay feels herself to be ‘lost in light and space’ with her ‘identity vanished’
(29). But this potential dissolution is only temporary and as soon as Lindsay starts
to move, she is surprised to ‘stumble[] with the rough going’ because she feels
that she ‘ought to have glided like light over an earth so insubstantial’ (29). e
feeling of becoming part of the light and the blurring of the boundary between
self and environment cannot be sustained on a practical, bodily level and the
ability of the land to dissolve borders remains a purely imaginative potential.
In scenes such as this, in which the world seems at the point of dissolving into
something insubstantial, the narrative abruptly returns to the material level,
halting a potential transcendence of the earthly. At the same time, however, the
narrative plays with the idea of what a dissolution and reshaping of substances
might look like to explore the imaginative potential of such a breaking down
of borders. Imagining the borders between self and environment, or substance
and light, as porous constitutes an intervention to borders on a conceptual level.
What results is a method of rethinking conventional framings of bordering
processes while simultaneously maintaining an awareness that political borders
and their eects are not easily dissolved.
e contradictoriness and inassimilable qualities of planetary consciousness
are captured in the additional meaning of light in e Weatherhouse. Light
acquires another meaning in relation to the war context that forms the backdrop
of this novel which highlights the sense of bewilderment and discomfort that
also comes with planetary thought in contrast to the more pleasurable feeling of
wonder invoked, for example, by the Northern Lights. While natural phenomena
of light trigger the imagination of a world without substances and boundaries, it
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination110
is also light that forcefully draws the violent trauma of the war into the narrative
when the eccentric Barbara Paterson is harshly judged by her neighbours because
she leaves the lights on at night despite by the potential danger of air raids. e
contrast between threatening, articial light and the wonders of natural light
becomes starkest aer a visit from Barbara Paterson to the Weatherhouse in
which she appears to intimidate the young Lindsay Lorimer. e narrative
directly contrasts natural and articial light in the framing of Lindsay’s journey
into the night as she leaves the Weatherhouse to run away from Barbara. In
her rst encounter with Barbara Paterson at the house, Lindsay feels her to be
‘towering over her’ (1930, 27) and describes her as a being more like a thing
than a person, as ‘an undisciplined and primitive force’, an ‘earthly relic of an
older age’ that disturbs the orderly propriety of the ladies at the Weatherhouse
(28). e radical energy that radiates from Barbara Paterson both exhilarates
and terries Lindsay. Before she runs out to catch up with Miss Barbara, she
imagines her out in the snow: ‘Lindsay had a vision of the white light ooding
the world and gleaming on the snow, and of Miss Barbara convulsed with
laughter in the middle of the gleam’ (29). Lindsay catches up with Miss Barbara
right aer she experiences the moment of temporary dissolution into the light
described above. As they walk towards Miss Barbara’s house, Lindsay realizes
that in every one of her windows a light had been le on, and her terried vision
alters her impression of Miss Barbara: ‘A spasm of terror contracted Lindsay’s
heart. Miss Barbara had clambered on to the next dyke. […] She stood there
poised, keeping her footing with an outstretched arm at the lights, a menacing
gure’ (30). Light is no longer solely understood as a radiating element of nature
that invokes feelings of wonder but instead becomes a potential threat as its
presence bears real physical danger to the characters. Lindsay is brought from
a moment of dissolution into the material world that is invoked by the natural
light illuminating the landscape back to her political and bodily reality, which is
endangered by a dierent kind of light: rst the articial light of the lamps, and
then the terrifying gleam of Lindsay’s vision. In this moment, the illumination
of the landscape which made her feel weightless and full of wonder is turned
into discomfort. Shepherd turns wonder into bewilderment when the light
turns into a terrifying gleam signalling a threat to Lindsay’s physical integrity
in a completely dierent sense, one that does not lead to a transcendence of
the physical, but a destruction of it. Even in her use of an aesthetics of light,
then, Shepherd is not looking to produce something consistent or universal but
instead layers dierent ways of seeing the world, present even within the same
Planetarity 111
character, seemingly asking: when does light allow us to transgress borders,
when do we embrace this transgression, and when is it threatening?
Planetarity and historical agency
e persistent materiality of political borders nds special consideration in
debates on historical agency which complement explorations of moments of
possible dissolution with references to political and individual responsibilities.
When Martha takes lectures in natural history, she gains an understanding of
deep time which widens her perception beyond human temporal frameworks.
is not only helps her understand her position within a mesh of life on a
shared planet, but also leads her to consider her role within human history
and to think about humanity’s impact on the planet and other lives. Martha’s
perspective multiplies as a result of her natural history lessons and she begins
to recognize and take into account non-human lives whose ‘incredible shapes
moved through an unimaginable past; and an unimaginable present surged into
one, humming with a life one had not seen before, nor even suspected’ (1928,
62). In her non-ction, Walton demonstrates, Shepherd is able to cultivate ‘a
“deep time” sensibility’ that relies on both ‘a feeling of wonder and openness’
and ‘an expanded sense of interconnection and kinship with the living world’
through the geologic directions her writing takes (2020, 108). e same is true
for Shepherd’s ction in which the expansiveness that deep time imaginaries
open up is not to be understood as an expansion in the sense of an imperialist
teleological development. Rather, the expansion towards the non-human
happens on a horizontal level as dierent human and non-human imaginaries
begin to form layers over the course of the narrative. Being more interested in
asymmetries and contradictions, however, the novel does not linger long on the
emerging image of a harmonious web of life. Again, the landscape intervenes,
distracting Martha from her history lessons and the wonders of geology and
creaturely life, drawing her back into the present landscape as shaped by human
activity:
Martha lied her head from the pages and looked out on those innitudes of
light. She was reading history that year. e slow accumulation of facts and dates
was marshalled in her brain […] and as she turned from reading and gazed
in that wide country gathering blue airs about itself; saw the farms and cottar-
houses, roads, dykes, elds, river, she was teased from her own inner stillness
by an excitement to which all she had been reading anent the press and stir of
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination112
the centuries contributed. Looking up, she thought suddenly, ‘I am a portion
ofhistory.’
(1928, 80)
e mere reading of history, then, is not what triggers Martha’s recognition of
her part within it, or the thoughts which follow from this recognition. Instead,
it is the gaze into the spacious landscape surrounding her, characterized
by ‘innitudes of light’, that shapes Martha’s planetary consciousness. e
understanding of her world through the geological time frames on a planetary
scale based on her reading of natural history reframes Martha’s perception and
enables her to think across spatial and temporal scales and to create new kinds of
knowledge. Planetarity in the novel is understood as both a temporal and spatial
category and the two are interwoven in Martha’s altered perception of the world
and the environment which she inhabits. As Bergthaller and Horn point out:
Planetary thinking must comprehend the particularity of the local along with
the Earth system as a whole – not in order to reduce the former to a subordinate
part of the latter, but in order to understand the emergent eects, the escalations
and causal cascades that bind them all together.
(2020, 154)
e return from the abstracted knowledge presented by her natural history book
back to Martha’s present suggests that the planetary is not removed from the local
but instead opens a new way of understanding the interdependencies between
social and cultural history and planetarity by situating the planetary within the
local. What the narrative strives for is therefore not a transcendence of the local
in favour of the universal nor a privileging of the local over the planetary. In
fact, this would contradict the idea of the planetary the novel develops which
could more accurately be described, in the terms of Bergthaller and Horn, as
a ‘[s]pherical space’ which ‘curves back on itself, enveloping and enclosing the
human, and bringing every place and every spatial scale into contact with other
places and scales – without, however, assimilating them to a single homogenous
and scalable space’ (2020, 152). Along these lines, the narrative unsettles the
assumption of the local and the planetary as separate categories, treating them
instead as nested layers that cannot be understood outwith their relation to
one another. e recognition of dierent time scales much larger than human
history astonishes Martha just as much as the pluralization of her present where
particular creatures inhabit the same space, some of them encountered and yet
never acknowledged: minute creatures that inhabit the air and everything around
Planetarity 113
her, making her realize the extent to which she is surrounded by unknown lives
that play out on scales as big and temporally extensive as tectonic shi and as
small and localized as the creatures inhabiting the grass blades of her present.
e reections that arise from Martha’s astonishment and fascination further
integrate the planetary within a specic social and cultural history. As with the
Northern Lights, it is again a landscape shaped by specic light conditions that
awake in Martha a sense of wonderous excitement that leads to a wider reection
on the world and humanity’s place within it. is realization that everyone,
including herself, is an agent forming history leads to an understanding of the
complex and unpredictable eects of historical agency:
She perceived that the folk who had made history were not necessarily aware
of the making, might indeed be quite ignorant of it: folk to whom a little valley
and a broken hilltop spelt innity and who from that width and reasonableness
of life had somehow been involved in the monstrous and sublime unreason of
purposes beyond their own intention. e walls that shut people from people
and generation from generation collapsed about her ears; and all that had ever
been done on the earth – all that she had read and heard and seen – swung
together to a knot of life so blinding that involuntarily she closed her eyes and
covered them with her hands.
(1928, 81)
e lack of awareness and comprehension of the farming community about the
impact of their daily actions on a larger scale is shocking and unexpected to
Martha who describes the unintended consequences of these local actions as
contributions to ‘monstrous and sublime unreason’. According to Kelly Sultzbach,
ecocritical readings of modernist works oen reveal discussions ‘about how
rural and metropolitan identity is inuenced by the global power dynamics of
warfare and the rise and decline of England’s imperial inuence’ (2016, 13). e
passage remains deliberately vague about how it is to be read in relation to the
socio-historical context in which the novel and the events it relates are situated.
Even though the novel predates the concept of the Anthropocene, coined by
Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stroemer in 2000, this passage speaks to twenty-rst-
century concerns, in particular in relation to the question of historical agency.
e diculty of imagining the unintended consequences of individual but also
collective actions that may appear small and insignicant, in this case the daily
actions of Martha’s local community, on larger geographical and temporal scales,
are recognized as one of the key challenges in understanding climate change
today. Scale eects, that is the sometimes unforeseeable and detrimental eects
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination114
that small-scale actions can have when considered on a larger scale, require us to
rethink our denition of agency as based on eect rather than intention. Looking
at the land shaped by human labour represented by the cottar-houses, farms and
elds, Martha recognizes that the natural world she looks out to is inseparable
from the events recorded by her history books and is able to draw connections
to her natural history lectures. Increasingly, Martha’s perspective takes in the
historical relations embedded within the environment she inhabits, moving
rst from a view of the surrounding agricultural landscape to a perspective of
the whole valley seemingly bordered by the broken hilltop and eventually to
a less easily describable view that goes beyond the situation of the characters
around which the novel revolves in order to situate them within complex and
contradictory planetary relations.
e recognition of such complex structures and relations of events, and
the attempt to look at their layered temporal and spatial dimensions, leads us
to consider the wider relations in which the story’s characters are enmeshed
and the relevance of their perspectives beyond the socio-historical context
in which the novel is situated. Martha is here not focused exclusively on the
history of her region, her nation or even her species but recognizes the pattern
of a relational ‘knot of life’ in which all of these other dimensions collide and
become layered upon one another in a non-hierarchical way. When Martha is
overwhelmed by ‘all that had ever been done on the earth – all that she had read
and heard and seen’, this includes her knowledge about natural history: the knot
of life, in including everything on earth, overwhelms her because it becomes
impossible to grasp the incommensurability of planetarity. Rather than sorting
the history that unravels in front of her into neat categories or a teleological
narrative of progress, Martha’s view attends to the relations between human and
natural history as shaped by multiple human and non-human actors. Instead of
describing what Martha perceives positively as a web of life, the narrative opts to
describe the mass of knowledge that opens out to Martha as a blinding knot. is
description highlights the impossibility of thinking on all scales at once when,
as Clark argues, ‘[a] certain scale must make up the fundamental structure of
any imaginable experience, or any model of the world’ (2015, 73). is challenge
in meaning-making and storytelling lies at the heart of planetary thought in
the Anthropocene. At the same time, however, e Quarry Wood expresses a
certain resistance to scale framing, ‘a strategy for representing complex issues in
ways that make them more amenable to thought or overview’ which, according
to Clark, runs the risk of oversimplifying or even evading complex issues that
cannot simply be understood as happening on one scale (74). Rather than
Planetarity 115
oversimplifying or oering any easy solutions, Shepherd’s novel resists such scale
framing by multiplying, rather than converging perspectives and experiences,
allowing them to sit alongside each other and encouraging dialogue between
them. In creating these dialogues but also in allowing her characters to live
with these contradictions rather than being paralysed by the impossibility of
nding a single clear path to navigate them, Shepherd appears to capture the
importance of the ‘continued struggle to try to understand heterogeneity with
humility but not futility’ which, according to Jill Tan, ‘is at the crux of a planetary
relational practice’ and which insists on fostering connections and building new
allegiances ‘in spite of shock, alienation, and discomfort’ (2020). e sense of
wonder Shepherd generates, then, might easily slip into a wonderment in the
sense of bewilderment and thereby manages to capture what Gabrys describes
as ‘the inassimilable, the incommensurate conditions of planetary inhabitation
than cannot and do not settle into one coherent or planar object’ (2018).
In e Weatherhouse, the trauma and violence of the First World War enter
the town with the arrival of Barbara Paterson’s shell-shocked nephew Garry
whose return home on medical leave is overshadowed by the horrors of war.
Garry is haunted by the memory of a visceral delirious vision: trapped in a shell
hole in the trenches, Garry began to identify himself with the corpse of a fellow
soldier who he desperately tried to haul out of the mud. His war experiences
leave him shut o to the imaginative possibilities the landscape holds for other
characters such as Lindsay. As Walton points out, Garry’s association of the
earth with his trauma ‘most viscerally addresses the diculty of reconnecting
with the land when the earth itself is visually and sensually associated with
traumatic experience’ (2019). Walking from the station to Knapperley, Garry
contemplates the landscape in a long scene, which, aer the turmoil of war,
irritates him in its silence. e absence of noise is perceived by Garry not only as
‘dumb’ and ‘graceless’, but also signies to him that the place he is coming back
to is dead and lifeless, far removed from and unaware of what happened at the
front (1930, 56):
Garry felt himself fall, ages of time gave way, and he too, was a creature only half
set free from the primordial dark. He was astonished at this eect upon himself,
at the vastness which this familiar country assumed. Width and spaciousness it
always had, long clear lines, a far horizon, height of sky; yet the whole valley and
its surrounding hills could have been set down and forgotten in the slum of the
war territory from which he had crossed. All the generations of its history would
not make up the tale of the ghting men.
(1930, 56)
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination116
e narrative picks up the aective perception of the vastness and spaciousness
of the country that is at the heart of the aesthetics of wonder when the narrative
relates other characters’ experiences. e reference back to this aective
dimension highlights the imaginative possibilities oered by the environment
in order to make clear that Garry is incapable of fully harnessing such potentials
because of his traumatic experiences.
Nevertheless, the countryside has a similar eect on Garry’s thinking about
temporality as it has on Martha as he reects on the marks humanity has made
on the landscape and contemplates the architectural remains that tell of a history
of violent conicts since the Picts and Celts: he sees in the darkness the ‘timeless
attributes’ of the land, and, similar to Martha, is drawn into the mass of history
he confronts, feeling ‘as though he had ceased to live at the point in time where
all his experience had hitherto been amassed’ (56). And yet he thinks in dierent
dimensions from Martha for whom the imagination of the planetary and the
whole of natural and human history turns into a blinding knot of life. Garry’s
worldview is limited at rst by the war to an imperialist anthropocentric mindset
through which he glories the destruction of the earth, including of human and
non-human life, as an act of creation:
e world he had come from was alive. Its incessant din, the movement, the
vibration that never ceased from end to end of the war-swept territory, were
earnest of human activity so enormous that the mind spun with thinking of it.
Over there one felt oneself part of something big. One was making the earth.
(56)
In this passage, Garry’s attitude mirrors the idea of war as a force of creation
promoted by the Italian movement of the futurism in the early twentieth
century. Wanting to rouse society and politics from the perceived stupor of
traditionalism, the futurist movement led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti saw
war as a form of ‘regenerative violence’ needed to revitalize politics and rebuild
the world (Berghaus 2009, 32–3). Similar to the futurists, Garry exhilarates in
what he perceives to be a creative human activity and the descriptions of the
sounds, movements and vibrations of the war zone resonate with Marinetti’s
image of an ‘orchestra of the trenches’ (cited in Berghaus 2009, 33). At the same
time, this passage does not simply address the creation of a new world order,
but also visualizes acts of creation on a physical, material level. e only history
the war-torn landscape reveals to Garry is a human history of violent conict,
primordial savagery and borders that divide, but it is also one in which humans
possess the agency to ‘make the earth’. Mirroring the farmers’ work in e
Planetarity 117
Quarry Wood, the ghting in the trenches is presented as a series of human acts
of making the earth, inuencing the environment in as yet unforeseeable ways.
At the same time, this form of making is a destructive rather than a creative
act. Garry’s masculinist worldview, and indeed the necessity for this kind of
thinking to carry out his duties as a soldier in the trenches, makes it possible
for him to reframe destruction as a creative act and to focus on the feeling of
power and agency his activities grant him in a situation not of his own choosing.
Like Martha, Garry recognizes himself as an integral actor in history, but, unlike
her, he does so from a position of mastery. Clark writes about the challenges of
the Anthropocene in which it becomes dicult to recognize the unintended
consequences of our impact on the earth, and argues that ‘the challenge becomes
to think the Anthropocene as a threshold at which humanity becomes a new
unprecedented agency en masse, escaping subjective experience of itself’ (2015,
60). It is this collective sense of an agency en masse, of becoming subsumed into
something bigger than oneself, that lends Garry a feeling of power and agency in
this situation, but which, as the novel progresses, will leave him feeling alienated.
Over the course of the novel, Garry slowly recognizes the limitations of
his world view as he moves from an experience of clear-cut lines to a more
heterogeneous understanding of life and realizes that boundaries are not so easy
to maintain aer all. At the same time, he acknowledges that a partial dissolution
of boundaries does not necessarily pose a threat to his sense of self but opens
up a new understanding of the self in relation to other human and non-human
lives. Whereas the clear black and white/us versus them divisions in war helped
him make sense of his own position, they also led to a de-individualization and
a loss of agency: in Garry’s dark visions of the earth ‘time and the individual
had ceased to matter’ (1930, 58) and he is unable to reconcile this feeling of
powerlessness with the deant vivacity of his aunt who he watches ‘dancing
alone on her kitchen oor in the middle of a world war, for no other reason
than that she wanted to’ (57). Similar to Martha’s Aunt Josephine, Barbara
Paterson does not care for propriety so much as for a lively engagement with
the world and dees the limits others attempt to set for her, no matter the
danger this might pose. However, the absolute and extreme loss of boundaries
between himself and other bodies which Garry experiences in the trenches as
he envisions himself dragging his own corpse out of the mud, rather than that of
his fellow soldier, shows that a dissolution of all boundaries may indeed not be
desirable but traumatic, connected to a loss of selood and agency. Even aer
being able to turn these experiences into a productive way of thinking about the
world, Garry still feels disconnected and his identity remains fragmented, and
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination118
he feels ‘angry at a world that would not let him keep his straight and clean-cut
standards’ (118–19).
Planetarity as the fourth dimension of reality
rough his experiences as a soldier, Garry has not only lost the ability to relate
to the environment in a positive way, but he also struggles to connect with other
people. It is only gradually that Garry is able to reframe his clear-cut dualistic
beliefs about morality, interpersonal relationships and humanity’s place on the
planet. At the same time, however, Garry’s traumatic relationship with the earth
during his time at war leads him to develop a more visceral experience of the
environment which adds an important layer to his later engagement with it. It is
this adding up of perspectives, a mingling of contradictions, rather than a simple
sense of overcoming the association of the earth with his traumatic experiences,
that make Garry a crucial gure in understanding Shepherd’s planetary poetics.
Garry oers the reader a new level of planetary thinking tied to dimensionality
rather than scale that is not available to other characters. Garry admits to Ellen
that the women of the Weatherhouse seem unreal to him aer coming back
from the war because they seem to be ‘a dimension short’:
You have three dimensions right enough, but we’ve a fourth dimension
over there. We’ve depth. It’s not the same thing as height, […] It’s down in –
hollowness and mud and foul water and bad smells and holes and more mud.
Not common mud. It’s dissolution – a dimension that won’t remain stable – and
you’ve to multiply everything by it to get any result at all. You people who live in
a three-dimensional world don’t know. You can’t know. You go on thinking this
is the real thing, but we’ve discovered that we can get o every imaginable plane
that the old realities yielded.
(1930, 114)
Aer the horror and trauma of the trenches, Garry realizes that they opened a
new perspective to him. is perspective, found in ‘hollowness and mud and
foul water and bad smells’, captures a material, bodily dimension of reality that
derives directly from the earth, its soil, water and mud. e instability, messiness
and incommensurability of this four-dimensional way of seeing speak to the
notion of planetarity and suggest that the planetary may be understood less as a
‘scale’ t han a dimension with which every imaginable scale needs to be multiplied.
Once again, Shepherd’s focus lies on the accumulation and multiplication of
Planetarity 119
perspectives, some of them importantly invoked by the material world itself, as
an integral part of the planetary imagination.
Earlier, Garry’s diculty in moving beyond black-and-white thinking is
visible in his growing anger and his obsession with exposing a young woman
pretending to be engaged to his friend David who fell during the war. He goes
on a mission to denounce her but ultimately realizes that things are not as
straightforwardly right or wrong as he had assumed, and he lets go of his rage. As
he looks down at the landscape again aer his realization of a fourth dimension,
it is captured ‘on the point of dissolution into light’ and Garry is led to think
about the interdependency between the land and ‘the people whom the land had
made’, whom he imagines to be ‘shaped from a stu as hard and intractable as
their rock, through weathers as rude as stormed upon their heights’ (1930, 112).
ese thoughts allow him to acknowledge the ability of the land not just to be
shaped by human actions but in turn to shape and inuence human character
and history. He muses that these people ‘at moments were dissolved in light,
had their hours of transguration’ (112). Even though Garry at rst appears
deadlocked in his worldview because of his traumatic experiences, letting go
of his rage allows him to experience the illumination of the landscape with a
sense of wonder that had previously been foreclosed to him. Being able to open
himself up allows Garry to harness the potential of the landscape to generate
new perspectives: he recognizes the interdependencies between natural and
human histories and begins to see the human as a part of, rather than apart
from, the material world. e experience of encountering the local landscape
afresh is what then allows him to reconsider the trauma he experienced in the
trenches. As a result, Garry begins to think about what perspectives this other,
unfamiliar and shattered landscape beyond Scotland’s borders may have oered
him and discovers that reality has shied and become four-dimensional because
of this encounter.
Having been able to articulate his thoughts about the four-dimensionality
of reality, Garry is able to shi his worldview as a whole: aer his recognition
ofthe fourth dimension, ‘[l]imits had shied, boundaries been dissolved’ andhe
acknowledges how everything ‘owed over into something else’ (118). is
leads Garry to reconsider his traumatic delirium in the trenches in which he
identied himself with another man’s dead body and which ‘haunted him like
the key note of a tune’ (118). e return to the sounds of the war zone through
a haunting tune recalls again the connection to futurist images of an orchestra
of war, though this time this experience is no longer framed as exhilarating
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination120
or liberating. e challenge for Garry in navigating his new perspective and
nding a balance between dissolution and solidity is reected in this haunting
tune which is described as ‘rude and perplexing, with discord unresolved and a
tantalising melody that uted and escaped’ (118). Shepherd’s writing again plays
with contradictions, capturing the diculties of navigating planetary realities
and the necessity to look at the world in a cubist way from multiple perspectives
at once, but also highlighting the material connections between the environment,
the planet and individual lives. e materiality of the mud and the dissolution
that characterizes Garry’s fourth dimension suggest that he is beginning to
recognize himself as part of the mesh in which everything is connected through
ows. As a result, Garry is able to reframe his experience in a way that explains
his identication with the other man’s body through their enmeshment in the
fourth, material dimension of reality. is helps him understand the material
enmeshment of all life in a more positive way:
[Garry] looked again at the wide leagues of land. […] He saw everything he
looked at not as substance, but as energy. All was life. Life pulsed in the clods of
earth that the ploughshares were breaking, in the shares, the men. Substance, no
matter what its form, was rare and ne.
(175)
e furrows with their clods of earth vibrating with energy recall the vibrations
and the mud of the trenches in which Garry perceived himself to be making the
earth. e parallels between these seemingly contradictory forms of making–
furrows versus trenches – and the implication that the breaking up of the
earth may bring death and destruction but also life and new growth highlight
Garry’s changed worldview. e paralleling of these two visions of life and
death, creation and destruction, further suggests them as both contradictory
and complementary. Garry’s focus on dimensionality highlights once again
that Shepherd’s writing is not simply interested in multiscalar perspectives on
a hierarchical level, scaling up and down and looking at each scale in turn. e
fourth dimension Garry introduces, in being characterized by foulness, mud
and bad smells, contrasts starkly with the aesthetics of wonder and light through
which other characters connect to the planet and opens a bodily connection
to the earth that is far from aesthetically or experientially pleasing. And yet,
as Garry argues, once this dimension of dissolution is experienced it can no
longer be neglected: every other experiential dimension must be multiplied by
it. At the same time, the dimension cannot be understood on its own because it
will not remain stable, it dissolves and shis and with it established boundaries
Planetarity 121
and ‘old realities’ become blurry. inking back to the planetary imagination of
Shepherd’s other characters, it may be Garry’s dimensional thinking that comes
closest to a truly multiperspectival planetary practice. Shepherd’s writing attends
to the multiplications of overlapping scales and asks us to read all of them at once,
rather than one aer the other, to recognize the interconnectedness between them
that is necessary for planetary thinking. Similarly, Garry claims it is impossible
to understand the three-dimensional world without multiplying it by a fourth,
a dimension that can never be fully understood itself and remainsalways out
of reach in its constant state of dissolution. e planetary remains out of reach
because it cannot be conceptualized in simple terms: its meaning continually
deferred and slips away.
For Garry, being able to reframe his feeling of dissolution to a recognition
of the energy of matter, as Walton argues, ‘occasions a new kind of ethical
and political relation of equality and mutual responsibility’ both in terms of
human and environmental relations (2020, 155). Towards the end of the novel,
this recasting of the fourth dimension as one of productive ows of energy,
or life, helps Garry to reach a balance between dissolution and solidity, and
counteracts his felt loss of agency aer the trenches. At the end, he turns to the
local environment again to engender a perspective that will help him heal and
reconcile the multiple dimensions of his experiences. He thinks back to the two
moments of being in which the landscape revealed new meaning to him, and
his visions of the land as ‘dark, solid, crass; mere bulk’ and later as ‘irradiated
by the light until its substance all but vanished’ are nally reconciled when his
perspective shis towards an inclusive, multiperspectival view of the world that
is ‘neither crass nor rare, but both in one’ (1930, 176).
***
e writing of Nan Shepherd is representative of a Scottish planetary
consciousness, as later described by Hugh MacDiarmid, in its method of
multiplying perspectives and drawing on deep time imaginaries in order to
highlight the presence of the planetary within the local. At the same time, as
I have tried to show, a purely situated reading of her writing would miss the
larger interventions of Shepherd’s work beyond Scottish and modernist studies.
Like the other writers considered in this chapter, Shepherd makes use of the
aordances of Scotland to develop a planetary perspective that reaches beyond
the national and historical contexts. rough her writing, Shepherd develops a
literary method, a planetary poetics, that thrives on contradictions and requires
continually shiing perspectives. is planetary poetics is grounded in, and can
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination122
only be understood through, her intensely local focus: planetarity, Shepherd
suggests, can only arise out of local environmental, geographical, political and
social contexts and needs to be understood in conjunction with them. rough
formal techniques of multiplying perspectives, Shepherd involves the reader in
the process of working through the questions posed by our planetary realities
while simultaneously highlighting that an unequivocal understanding of the
planetary ultimately remains out of our reach. e literary form of the planetary
as employed in Shepherd’s planetary poetics presents a practice of encountering
the planet from various perspectives of local inhabitation that complements the
more abstract conceptualizations oered by theory.
5
Territory
B/ordering the surface of the earth: reconceptualizing
territory through the imagination
e form of territory is fundamental to an understanding of borders, from the
geopolitical borders of states and district boundaries to those around farmed
land and private homes. In the widest sense, territory can be understood as
‘a bounded part of the Earth’s surface claimed and occupied by a particular
individual, group, or institution, including states’ (Rogers, Castree and Kitchin
2013). Rogers, Castree and Kitchin identify three dimensions of territory: a
material dimension ‘as in a stretch of land or sea’, a functional dimension ‘meaning
that some polity organizes the territory for particular ends’ and a symbolic
dimension ‘that links the territory to social identity’ (2013). Even though
territory is oen centrally understood through human spatial practices and
power relations, this multidimensional view of territory suggests that it cannot
be fully grasped outside of its material, environmental dimension. e ongoing
disagreement about the etymology of territory (dell’Agnese 2013, 117) captures
the relationship between the term’s use in connection to bordering practice and
its reference to the environment. Deriving from the Latin territorium, the two
root words that are suggested link territory to both terra, indicating the earth or
land, and terrere which means to frighten or terrify (Painter 2010, 1101) which,
in the context of borders, might suggest practices of deterrence to keep people
out of specic territories by fear or violence if needed. While the rst denition
for territory given in the Oxford English Dictionary highlights the centrality
of jurisdiction which relies on a clear demarcation of boundaries, the second
denition of territory as ‘[a] tract of land, or district of undened boundaries;
a region’ undermines this sense of legal clarity. Even though denitions tend to
focus on the bounded character of territory, new critical approaches increasingly
move away from an understanding of territory as static and unchangeable and
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination124
focus instead on the processes that lead to the construction of a network of
dynamic, shiing and overlapping territories that are nestled into one another.
As the literary works discussed in this chapter show, the material world and its
non-human agents are capable of subverting and redirecting interpretations of
territory as stable, highlighting it instead as a human construction within, and
cutting across, multispecies landscapes.
As in the preceding chapters, the writers discussed here make use of the special
aordances of Scotland in their aesthetic and discursive exploration of theform
of territory. Scotland’s historically complicated relationship with territory
is closely linked to the idea of land, in both an environmental and a political
sense, which renders discussions of territory in a Scottish context particularly
productive. As Camille Manfredi argues, ‘the idea that the people of today’s
Scotland are still deprived of the ability to “view”, “see” and imagine “their” land,
and most importantly to imagine themselves as part of it’ still persists today
(2019, 4) and is connected to a history of territorial instability. Manfredi further
highlights the importance of literature and the imagination for a decolonization,
or deterritorialization, of the Scottish land from which new conceptualizations of
the land, in both a territorial and an environmental sense, may emerge (4). While
Manfredi focuses on contemporary literary and artistic works in the context of
land, I will trace the wider form of territory through various works published
since the nineteenth century and consider how writers think through Scotland
in an attempt to get to the ideational foundations of the spatio-political practice
of territory. While the selection of works discussed in this chapter is in no way
comprehensive, I hope to show that territory as a literary, material and socio-
political form is more complex and versatile than commonly assumed and that
by paying attention to its structures through literary exploration we gain a new
understanding of one of the most fundamental bordering concepts of human
spatial practice. Before turning towards the particular situation of Scotland and
its literary negotiation, I will provide an overview over the form of territory from
a theoretical and a literary perspective to clarify the complexity of the form. e
critical vignettes that will follow this theorization will highlight the key aordances
of the form for discussions of borders and the environment from a transtemporal
perspective and show how the form has been mobilized in a variety of ways by
dierent writers. Following the theoretical and literary overviews, the case study
of John Buchan’s JohnMacnab (1925) pays close attention to how Buchan, as a
Conservative writer who was intensely preoccupied with territory in both his
political career and his literary endeavours, explores the aesthetic and discursive
potential of the form of territory through the philosophy of the challenge.
Territory 125
Dening territory
Building on the inuential terminology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
(1986), Joe Painter argues that ‘territory today seems to be ever more important’
even in light of trends towards deterritorialization and globalization that put
forward ideas of a borderless world, because ‘in political theory and philosophy,
the fashionable notion of deterritorialisation cannot be separated from a
correlative reterritorialisation’ (2010, 1090). However, as Painter points out, ‘the
nature of territory itself – its being and becoming, rather than its consequences
and eects – remains under-theorized and too oen taken for granted’ (1090).
In the following I want to sketch out the new theories on territory that have
emerged, especially with the increased interest in critical border studies, in order
to situate the role of literature within these debates. While territory may have
been discussed only little in theory, literary texts have been consistently engaging
with territory through creative means, exploring and questioning the form of
territory within their respective historical and cultural context and probing the
very nature of territory as a concept, practice and structuring principle.
e risk of understanding territory as a form that brings together
environmental concerns and borders lies in what John Agnew (1994) has termed
the ‘territorial trap’. is concept summarizes reactionary conceptualizations
of territory that draw on socio-biological and ethological theories in order to
naturalize it and assume territorial conict as instinctive, natural and inevitable
(Storey 2001, 13–14; Painter 2010, 1091). While territory is mainly used as a
legal term dening human control over land, from the mid-eighteenth century
onwards it has come to be used to describe the non-human animals’ practice
to demarcate an area for their group or species (OED, ‘territory’). However,
animal territoriality is frequently used to justify exclusionary practices and
violence. Statements such as the one made by Jacob Rees-Mogg who proposed
that Brexit signied the renationalization of sh, ‘now British sh and […]
better and happier sh for it’ (e Guardian 2021), are an example of such
practices which conate human spatial politics with animal territoriality in
an attempt to naturalize territorial borders. At the same time, this conation
highlights the importance of thinking about territory from perspectives that
take the non-human world into account and counter its instrumentalization in
reactionary political discourses. Research on territory has largely moved away
from ethological and socio-biological theorizations but this does not mean
that the environment should not matter in alternative conceptualizations of
territory.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination126
Conceptualizations of the border as dynamic, mobile and dispersed across
society in critical border studies have been accompanied by a questioning
of conventional understandings of territory (Delaney 2005, 65). Following
developments in border studies, territories are now understood to be more
‘more than static, inert things’ (Delaney 2005, 12) and the fact that territory
requires ‘perpetual public eort to establish and to maintain’ it has been
widely acknowledged (Paasi 2003, 111). While territory is still most frequently
understood in the context of states and international politics, the term is
increasingly used to ‘refer to any socially constructed geographical space, not just
that resulting from statehood’ (Agnew 2009, 746). Delaney nds that territory
can assume a ‘vast variety of forms’ (2005, 9) and that ‘[t]here are innumerable
complex territorial congurations and assemblages’ (4–5). Similarly, Edward
Said highlights that world literatures do not present territory as a bounded
entity but rather suggest a world of ‘overlapping territories’ and ‘intertwined
histories’ (1994, 56). is view corresponds with contemporary theorizations of
space, pioneered by Doreen Massey. Massey envisions space relationally as both
‘always-already territorialised’ and ‘a sphere of ows’, and posits that ‘ows and
territories are conditions of each other’ rather than opposites (2005, 99). Building
on Massey’s work, Elena dell’Agnese argues that taking relational approaches
to space, place and identity seriously ‘poses a philosophical challenge to some
of the founding assumptions of modern geopolitical discourse’ (2013, 115),
including those relating to territory. D’ell Agnese suggests that these assumptions
consequently need to be interrogated for a reconceptualization of territory
‘as a bounded portion of relational space’ (116) or ‘a cluster of interrelations’
(121). Rather than abandoning territory altogether, dell’Agnese suggests that
‘learning how to think relationally about it may indeed prove to be a powerful
political challenge’ (124). Her proposition to rethink territory in relational
terms as ‘porous, processual and unstable’ (122) easily maps onto environmental
approaches that focus on enmeshment, relationality and embodiment. Taking
a similar view to dell’Agnese, Painter equally urges a reconceptualization of
territory along the lines of relationality, suggesting that territory may ‘best be
understood as the eect of networked relations’ (2010, 1093) that involve ‘both
human and non-human actors’ (1096):
[F]rom this viewpoint territory is necessarily porous, historical, mutable, uneven
and perishable. It is a laborious work in progress, prone to failure and permeated
by tension and contradiction. Territory is never complete, but always becoming.
(1094)
Territory 127
is understanding of territory as a relational mesh that emerges through the
interaction between human and non-human practices beyond state power
extends Delaney’s view on territory as ‘an aspect of how individual humans as
embodied beings organize themselves with respect to the social and material
world’ (2005, 10) towards an inclusion of the non-human world as central to
such an embodied view of territory. If territory, as Delaney suggests, ‘is better
understood as implicating and being implicated in ways of thinking, acting,
and being in the world’ (12), environmental perspectives become a constitutive
part of the form of territory. Criticizing the fact that territory is conventionally
understood in connection with property and ownership rather than from an
ecological or democratic perspective, Paulina Ochoa Espejo suggests moving
beyond oppositional and exclusionary views of borders through a place-based
approach ‘that focuses on place and takes the environment seriously’ (2020, 3).
Suggesting the watershed as a new model, Ochoa Espejo shows territory to emerge
‘from located socio-natural relations, obligations, and institutions’ (19). e
literary texts discussed here provide some further inspiration in their attempts
to understand territory from an environmental perspective that conceptualizes
it as relational, processual, dynamic and interactive and complicates its political
and legal frameworks.
Territory as a literary form
Like the political, social, material and aesthetic forms dened by Caroline Levine,
territory can fundamentally be understood as ‘an arrangement of elements –
an ordering, patterning, or shaping’ (2015, 3). Examining territory not just in
politico-legal and environmental terms but from the perspective of literature
reveals the interaction between these dierent dimensions of territory and allows
access to the manifold processes involved in its creation. Dell’Agnese describes
territory as a ‘sticky’ device that remains ‘the most relevant organising principle
of today’s international system’ (2013, 116). Along similar lines, Agnew argues
that, because it ‘takes on an epistemological centrality’, territory is ‘absolutely
fundamental to modernity’ (2009, 746). Seeing the form as equally ubiquitous
and central as dell’Agnese and Agnew, Said points towards the important role
that literature plays in understanding, conrming and/or resisting the territorial
orderings of our world:
[T]he earth is in eect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually
do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination128
completely free from the struggle over geography. at struggle is complex and
interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about
ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.
(1994, 6)
e literary texts discussed in this chapter adopt a playful attitude towards
territory and explore it from a discursive and aesthetic perspective to get at the
very core of our territorial practices. While conventional conceptualizations of
territory as stable and xed may come closest to Levine’s form of the ‘bounded
whole’, literary engagements with the form reveal that in literature, territory
has always been understood in ways that rub up against such dominant
discourses.
At the same time, the goal of these writers is not to implode the bounds of
territory, even when texts present them as relational, dynamic and interactive
constructs rather than stable, unmoveable frameworks. Ochoa Espejo argues
that rethinking territory along environmental, place-based lines should not
turn into a dichotomous choice between ‘either closed borders or no borders at
all’ but move beyond such oppositional understandings of territory (2020, 2).
Similarly, as dell’Agnese acknowledges, relational conceptualizations of territory
cannot simply do away with borders altogether ‘[b]ut we must reconceptualise
both of them, rethinking territory as a bounded portion of relational space,
and boundaries as a tool to organise those relations’ (2013, 124). is shi
to understanding the boundaries of bounded wholes as organizing tools that
might be used to organize spatial power relations dierently leads us back to
the aordances of territory as a literary form close to that of Levine’s bounded
whole. Levine nds that ‘[i]f we imagine that our only option is to critique,
shatter, or resist them, we reinforce the idea that bounded wholes are always
and necessarily dangerous and successful, on their own terms, at organizing
experience’ (2015, 28–9). If we instead saw them as organizing principles, Levine
argues, they might be ‘put […] to work for strategic ends’ other than those for
which they are currently used (37). In line with these arguments, the literary
form of territory is not used by the writers here to create a utopian ideal of a
borderless world. Instead, these writers engage critically and creatively with how
territorial borders are drawn in order to suggest ways in which environmental
perspectives may serve to reshape territory.
In Levine’s view, we have been ‘so concerned with breaking forms apart that
we have neglected to analyze the major work that forms do in our world’ (9).
Territory 129
is analysis may be especially important for such forms as territory. As Delaney
puts it, because territory frequently ‘appears to be self-evident, necessary, or
unquestionable, it may obscure the play of power and politics in its formation
and maintenance’ (2005, 11). According to Delaney:
[F]or territory to ‘work’ eectively the basic principles of territoriality cannot
be seriously questioned. When they are, as when private ownership of land is
questioned, […] then the contingencies of territory are more clearly revealed
and the claims that these territorializations are necessary or natural features of
our life-worlds are more easily discounted. Territorial congurations are not
simply cultural artifacts. ey are political achievements.
(11–12)
It is in the examination of the political formation of territory that the central
aordances of territory as a literary form lie, as it allows writers to question
the ‘basic principles of territoriality’. Literature opens a creative testing eld
in which fundamental examinations of territory become possible, and which
may full, to some degree, Delaney’s call for an investigation of ‘the ideological,
metaphorical, or metaphysical world-views or assumptions that make certain
kinds of territories intelligible and the ways in which these representations are
deployed in eorts to justify (or critique) the workings of power’ (17). e literary
texts discussed in the vignettes and case study make use of the overlapping
organizing principles of territory and narrative. ey draw on the shared status
of texts and territory as bounded wholes and highlight the parallels between
the processual nature of reading and plotting land and text alike. ey play
with literary conventions to spotlight their connections with the conventions
of territorial organization. Most importantly, they do this by focusing on the
embodied experiences of characters moving through territory as both a politico-
legal structure and an enmeshed lifeworld that is shared with other species. Most
oen the form of territory employed by the writers in this chapter involves an
inclusion and/or negotiation of the non-human. Animals and the environment
gure either centrally or marginally in these texts and attest that territory cannot
be seen purely from a human perspective. e literary works discussed in the
following demonstrate how the ‘dense matrix of multiple overlapping territories
and territorial congurations’, which all have their own meanings and power
relations (Delaney 2005, 31), may best be unpicked through the creative potential
of literature which allows readers to follow characters as they move within, along
and across these congurations.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination130
Territory in the Scottish literary imagination
Scotland’s relation with territory remains complicated. As a nation-state without
clear borders, Scotland’s national territory has oen been perceived as instable
in a geopolitical and an imaginative sense with critics and writers bemoaning
the failure of Scotland to produce a unied literary tradition and sense of
national identity (see Chapter 2). As already mentioned, these tensions and
uncertainties should not be understood as a predicament but rather as a special
aordance that allows for a rethinking of borders along more relational and
exible lines. is view is central for the form of territory which benets from
these aordances, but there are some additional issues relating to territorial
conict on various scales that are equally central for writers who aim to explore
territory by thinking through Scotland: land ownership and the Gaelic notion
of dùthchas.
What the critical vignettes discussed in this section have in common is their
practice of understanding Scotland’s physical, political, legal and imaginative
territory through the contentious issue of land ownership. Manfredi nds
that even today ‘[t]here are few issues as fundamental and volatile as that of
land ownership and open access, particularly when set against the backdrop
of Scotland’s recent political and cultural re-examination, be it before or aer
the Scottish independence referendum’ (2019, 1). e issue of land ownership
is connected to debates on national territory and (de)colonization and, as
the literary texts discussed here highlight, contains a decidedly ecological
dimension. Land ownership in Scotland remains a contentious issue and is
increasingly considered in connection with conservation debates. Within and
outwith Scotland the myth of the romantic Highlands prevails and denes
Scotland’s territory through its environmental and geological characteristics. In
literary depictions of the Highlands from the nineteenth century onwards, this
distinction is oen mapped onto Anglo-Scottish territorial conicts. e forceful
and violent eviction of tenants from their own land in the Highland Clearances
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for large-scale sheep farming led to
the end of shared grazing rights according to the runrig system and included the
enclosure of open elds into managed territory. e connection between animals
(symbolic or actual) and territory in the context of the Clearances continues
to inuence literary and political debates on land ownership, land use and
conservation in Scotland. In this context, the Clearances equally contributed to
the myth of Scotland’s empty romantic landscape devoid of people which aects
Scottish land relations to this day.
Territory 131
e Gaelic notion of dùthchas, even if it may not come up explicitly in all of
them, informs literary texts’ engagement with Scotland’s territory. Dùthchas is
a term closely connected and opposed to conventional ideas of territoriality. It
is at once a legal system, a way of thinking about (national) belonging and an
ecological concept. Madeline Bunting argues that the complexity of the notion
of dùthchas makes it dicult to translate. While dictionaries propose ‘place of
origin’ or ‘homeland’ as suitable translations, this only captures a small part ofits
actual meaning:
It’s a collective claim on the land which is reinforced and lived out through the
shared management of that land. It is a right which is grounded in daily habits
and activities and it is bound up with relationships to others, and responsibilities.
It gives rise to the idea, identied by the scholar Michael Newton, that ‘people
belong to places rather than places belonging to people’. Gaelic turns notions of
ownership on their head.
(2016)
e organization of land ownership, or, as some would prefer, stewardship
over the land, formerly grounded in dùthchas ended with the Highland
Clearances. Because of its legal denition as ‘a system of customary law or
native title associated with traditional clan society and collective rights’ which
‘operated within Gaelic society as a form of heritable trusteeship of land,
largely on the basis of communal and familial land’ (MacKinnon 2018, 284),
the idea oen comes up in discussions of landownership that try to imagine
a dierent, communal way of engaging with land. Manfredi cautions against
discourses about land that instrumentalize the notion of dùthchas and present
it as a ‘natural’ right based on blood heredity (2019, 5). Considering inclusive
forms of thinking about territory, Manfredi instead suggests the potential of
a ‘prospective, forward-pointing Dùthchas’ and how it could inform future
engagements with land and its ownership in Scotland (6). In an analysis of
contemporary literary texts andartworks engaging with Scotland as a place
and environment, Manfredioutlines that such views are already present in the
creative practice of the writers and artists she discusses who present territory as
a relational meshwork from an environmental perspective (204). While Delaney
argues for a historically situated approach to territory because ‘seeing through
territory requires that we situate its manifestations in their historical specicity’
(2005, 20), Manfredi suggests that this is already embedded in post-devolution
literary engagements which ‘are reconciling past and present representations
of territoriality, as well as questioning the origin, destination and therefore
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination132
propriety of that territory – our land, their land, everybody’s or nobody’s land’
(2019, 7). While I do not want to trivialize the relevance of historically situated
approaches to the form of territory, I want to highlight that this is not the purpose
of the critical vignettes in this chapter. rough the vignettes that follow, I hope
to show that while the form of territory can be congured in dierent ways to
speak to the socio-historical contexts of the respective works, there are also some
key aordances that make the form of territory transferrable across history and
that are gained by the writers’ commitment to think through Scotland in order
to take apart and examine the very nature of territory.
e role of creaturely life for negotiations of territory within a Scottish context
is visible in a number of literary texts examined here that also draw on histories
of human displacement for intensive animal farming in which the exploitation
of human and animal connect, including John McGrath’s e Cheviot, eStag
and the Black, Black Oil (1973). e title of McGrath’s play draws on the
symbolic interplay between discussions of land ownership and the gure of
the animal. While for critics such as James Hunter, the ‘one creature which is
symbolic both of the ecological and of the social damage done to the Highlands
by the clearances […] is the sheep’ (2014, 92), it is not the sheep as a creature, but
rather the human introduction of large-scale sheep farming to the Highlands
for prot that has proven detrimental to both the Highland population and
the environment. Similar to Hunter, however, the play addresses the animal
as symbol on a discursive level without adopting a creaturely perspective on
territory on the aesthetic level. e symbolic animal and its relevance for
Scotland’s landscape aesthetics come up solely as references that are voiced by
an aristocratic shooting party who admire Scotland’s ‘rugged beauty’ (1973,
123), boast about the extent of their estates and wish they could formalize the
landscape into a painting following the example set by Edwin Landseer (127).
Landscape aesthetics and the role of animal symbolism are referenced shortly
aer Queen Victoria is shown to colonize the territory of Scotland through an
inversion of the song at the beginning of the play: ‘ese are our mountains/And
this is our glen/e braes of your childhood/Are English again’ (122–3). ese
verses highlight the territorial conict at the heart of the play which is concerned
with the emancipation of Scotland aer what is portrayed as a process of internal
colonization.
e hunting party’s statement, ‘We are the Monarchs of the Glen’ (128),
provides a powerful image through its reference to Edward Landseer’s famous
painting e Monarch of the Glen (1851) which connects the animal directly to
debates on territorial borders. John Morrison describes how the prominence
Territory 133
of animals such as the stag in the national imagery of Scotland ‘attests directly
to the absence of the people and culture that Highlandism purported to value’
and brushes over the violent territorial displacement of communities during
the Clearances (2003, 109). According to Morrison, the expansion of the deer
population in the Highlands reached ‘almost two million acres, oen occupying
emptied traditional croing counties’ which ‘were (and are) managed specically
to allow the very rich to indulge in a fantasy of hunting in a “natural” landscape’
(109–10). With the creatures of the sheep and deer, standing in symbolically
for the dispossession of the Highlanders, the shooting party’s placement of
themselves as the Monarchs reveals violent human territorial conict to be the
origin of a dominant landscape aesthetics that portrays Scotland as wild and
empty. McGrath’s play thus makes use of the non-human in a symbolic way
to underline his critique of land ownership in the Highlands. However, while
an inclusion of the non-human into a debate on territorial borders allows
for anunfolding of human–animal relations and the conceptual border that
hasbeen structuring them in the Western world to this day, McGrath’s reduction
of the animal to a mere symbol precludes a post-anthropocentric perspective on
territory. While the play criticizes the capitalist exploitation of natural resources
and the landscape aesthetic of the tourist industry, as Silke Stroh puts it, the
‘critique of environmental destruction is not the play’s main concern’ and ‘nature
is still not intended to “come into its own”’ but instead ‘remains a mere resource to
be exploited by an industrial economy; but this time it is a native, and preferably
socialist, economy, not an imperialist, foreign-dominated capitalist one’ (2010,
198). While the meaning and ownership of Scotland’s territory, in particular
the Highlands, is criticized in the play in connection with the environment,
these debates are thus not necessarily compatible with environmentalism. What
McGrath’s play demonstrates, however, is that territory in Scotland cannot be
thought without taking into account the non-human in one way or another.
In an essay suitably titled ‘e Land’ (1934), Lewis Grassic Gibbon sets out
to explore and dene Scotland’s territory against Northern England’s ‘tortured
wastes of countryside’, ‘alien geology’ and ‘deplorable methods of ploughing’
(81–2). Attempts to claim Northern England as part of Scotland, Grassic Gibbon
complains, present a ‘geographical impropriety’ that has ‘no aesthetic claim’ (81).
As a countermeasure, the essay proposes how e Land of Scotland Proper, both
in capital letters, should in fact be understood:
at is e Land out there, under the sleet, churned and pelted there in the dark,
the long rigs upturning their clayey faces to the spear-onset of the sleet. at is
e Land, a dim vision this night of laggard fences and long stretching rigs. And
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination134
the voice of it – the true and unforgettable voice – you can hear even such a night
as this as the dark comes down, the immemorial plaint of the peewit, ying lost.
at is e Land – though not quite all. ose folk in the byre whose lantern
light is a glimmer through the sleet as they muck and bed and tend the kye, and
milk the milk into tin pails, in curling froth – they are e Land in as great a
measure. ose two, a dual power, are the protagonists in this little sketch.
(82–3)
e dual power described here resists a reading of the environment in its
own right. Even though the sleet and the voice of the peewit contribute to an
understanding of the land in this passage, it is ultimately the peasants working
the land and the agricultural landscape characterized by clayey rigs and laggard
fences that are identied as the dual powers that dene e Land. e land
described by Grassic Gibbon in this essay is to be understood in a territorialized
rather than an environmental sense. Despite his criticism of destructive
environmental/agricultural change that is detrimental to both humans and their
environment, including large-scale sheep farming, it is the ‘rank cow-dung’
of animal husbandry that for Grassic Gibbon ‘is the smell that backgrounds
existence’ (86) and which can only be spread and cultivated in an authentic form
by ‘the aristocracy of the earth, the ploughmen and the peasants’ who are ‘the
real rulers of Scotland’ and ‘of the earth’ as a whole (86–7).
Even though non-human animals form part of the denition of the land in
this essay, they do so only marginally: birds provide the background music to
human action, farm animals provide the basis for peasants’ livelihood, but may
also disrupt it (rabbits) or fully replace humans (sheep). Grassic Gibbon is not
interested in developing a perspective on the land as a multispecies territory.
Instead, his aim is for this essay to reect his wider interests in promoting cultural
nationalism and the rights of the rural working class in Scotland. At the same
time, the way that the non-human sneaks into this essay, even if it is conned to
the margins, almost suggests that writing about the land without taking the non-
human into account in some way is impossible. Grassic Gibbon appears to notice
these non-human intrusions into his narrative mid-way through the essay when
he suddenly, and forcefully, tries to regain control of his narrative by declaring
that, while he does not endorse cruelty towards animals, human interests should
always come rst. Without the presence of the non-human, this essay would
be a dierent one. But even though Grassic Gibbon acknowledges the essential
presence of animals in agricultural practices in Scotland, notes the way the
fauna denes the region as much as its ora and cultivation through humans,
Territory 135
and describes the cruelties of meat eating, he denies non-human animals the
serious ethical considerations granted to humans. While the non-human world
is thus essential to dening e Land of Scotland Proper, non-human animals
are allowed to exist only as a de-individualized mass at its margins, a backdrop
to the human action that classies them, changes their habitat and leads to their
(local) extinction.
With a view of the Grampians, however, Grassic Gibbon concedes that this
‘untouched’ environment may represent ‘the real land’ in lower case letters, a
land that is understood not by ‘ploughing or crops or the coming of the scythe’
but on its own terms (90). Such insights, while important, only last a moment
before they are turned around and linked to ancient civilizations and their
‘great agricultural gods’ (90). Acknowledging the pre-existence of the non-
human on what is now Scotland’s territory – the bear, the eagle and the wolves
who witnessed the rst migratory movements (88) – Grassic Gibbon counters
romanticized perspectives of the Scots as particularly close to nature and
highlights that Scotland is not as conducive to ‘the wild’ as it is oen understood.
Calling himself ‘a jingo patriot of planet earth’ who is ‘mulishly prejudiced in
favour of [his] own biological species’ (95), Grassic Gibbon argues ercely that
‘Scots have little interest in the wild and its world’ (94–5) and proudly stresses
that what should be remembered of humanity is not our relationship to and
care for the natural world but rather ‘our great victory over nature and time’, the
achievement of ‘the men who conquered the land and wrung sustenance from
it by stealth and shrewdness’ (96). ‘Land’ is then not an environmental term
but understood from a territorial perspective in the traditional sense. Grassic
Gibbon’s focus in (re)conguring the land lies on class relations in the context of
land ownership and national identity in the emphatic delineation of Scotland’s
national territory rather than moving beyond these categories altogether. While
it is impossible for Grassic Gibbon not to acknowledge the non-human world
in some way when dening the land, his essay also highlights the limitations
of the form of territory when it comes to fostering creaturely perspectives
and providing post-national perspectives based on place relations rather than
identity categories. At the same time, the contradictions in Grassic Gibbon’s
essay highlight how the form of territory intervenes in curious ways. In both
McGrath’s play and Grassic Gibbon’s essay, it appears that the form of territory
necessitates a way of thinking through Scotland’s environment that disrupts the
ideological intentions of authors. Even though neither of these writers could
be described as environmentalist because they utilize the environment in an
anthropocentric way to promote a socialist sense of the land as belonging to the
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination136
Scottish people, these socio-political intentions clash with the formal eects that
arise from thinking territory through Scotland.
In contrast, Kathleen Jamie’s poem ‘Here Lies Our Land’ (2013),
commissioned to be placed on the historical site of the Battle of Bannockburn,
explicitly presents the land as a meshwork. Focusing on an environmental outline
of the land’s four cardinal points, the wind, sun, clouds, ferns, Northern Lights
and the sea come to dene the land as Jamie’s poem creates an environmental
map of Scotland akin to the alternative map in Nan Shepherd’s e Quarry
Wood (1928) discussed in Chapter 4 section ‘Borders “dissolved in light”: Nan
Shepherd’s planetary poetics’. Jamie’s map, however, is also a literary map of
Scotland as each of the qualities and expressions used to capture a cardinal point
is taken from its literary tradition. e poem subtly maps Scotland’s territory
on a literary level beyond the poem’s surface description of the environment
and as a result recalls other literary congurations of Scotland’s territory. As
Jamie explains in author’s note, a mythical perspective on Scotland as the door
to the fairy world is meant to be evoked by omas the Rhymer’s expression of
themagic road of ‘the fernie brae’ and the phrase ‘siller tides’ is to be understood
as a reference to Violet Jacob. Violet Jacob’s ‘e Wild Geese’ (1915) in
particular adds another dimension to the territorial perspective of Jamie’s poem.
e speaker of ‘e Wild Geese’, a native of Angus who has been in England for
many years, asks the ‘roarin’ norlan’ Wind’ to tell them of their home country.
e wind presents a view of the country from a perspective devoid of human
interference, telling the speaker about the ‘siller tides’ of the Firth of Forth,
the ‘rovin’ gulls that sail abune the Tay’ and the ‘Angus braes’ over which the
wild geese y towards the sea (226). e longing and homesickness the speaker
expresses are directly evoked by and directed at Scotland’s environment rather
than the people who inhabit or own the land.
Jamie’s poem, by stating that the land belongs ‘to none but itself’ with the
small folk being only ‘transients’ in its existence (2013), recalls Grassic Gibbon’s
protagonist Chris Guthrie who, in Sunset Song (1932), reects that while its people
‘lasted but as a breath, […] the land was forever’ (126). Contextualizing the lines,
Jamie explains that ‘the Scots may have “won” Bannockburn, but not the land
itself’ (2013), meaning that while the land may endure human inuenceand
even abuse, it cannot be owned in the sense of conventional territoriality.
Instead, Jamie oers an inclusive, relational perspective on territory by letting
the personied country itself speak: ‘You win me, who take me most to heart’.
e land must be ‘won’ then not in the territorial sense of ownership, but in the
building of a reciprocal relationship. Even so, Scotland’s territorial conicts are
Territory 137
embedded in the poem which was commissioned for the 700th anniversary of
Bannockburn and is carved on the rotunda of the moment and looking out to
the Robert the Bruce statue on its battleeld (Figure 1). But instead of presenting
us with a traditional territorialist poem that would t the occasion of the
anniversary of a Scottish national hero, Jamie opts for an inclusive perspective
on territory as place-based that dees exclusionary nationalist agendas. e
contentious debates of land ownership, which Jamie thematizes more explicitly
in other works such as her essay ‘In Fife’ (2015), resonate more soly in this
poem in accordance with its shi towards an environmental perspective on
territory that is both inclusive and relational. e form of the poem, carved
onthe rotunda, and its title, ‘Here Lies Our Land’, situate it within the land itself
as it becomes a physical, material presence that both marks and dees the idea
of territory, creating a eld of tension for the visitors of the site and the readers
of the poem to entangle during their encounter.
Jamie’s physical poem raises questions about what poems are and what they
can do in the context of territory, a question that may be transferred also to
Figure 1 Photograph showing a section of Kathleen Jamie’s poem ‘Here Lies
Our Land’, engraved on the oak beams of the rotunda on the site of the Battle of
Bannockburn, with the Robert the Bruce statue in the background. © all rights
reserved Doug Houghton.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination138
one of the literary genres that is conventionally seen as most close to territory
due to its close association with national identity: the historical novel. Walter
Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824) engages with issues of territory by projecting these
debates onto the formal level and experimenting with the generic form of the
historical novel. While still following a main plot that is resolved, if somewhat
clumsily, at the end to tie the narrative together into what seems to be a bounded
format that provides closure, the jumble of forms and uncertainty of narration
in Redgauntlet runs counter to the neat organizational structure of the historical
novel. Beginning as an epistolary novel, the plot eventually forces the narrative
rst to turn to diary entries and ultimately to authorial narration without,
however, resolving any of the temporal jumps and perspectival shis introduced
by the epistolary form until the very end. Even then, the tensions are not
resolved but the conclusion reveals the narrative to be a curated collection of
documents to illuminate the history of the Redgauntlet family provided to the
author of Waverley. e admission of the antiquary that the narrative must
remain incomplete and fragmentary despite the apparent closure provided by
the nal chapter contradicts the idea of the novel as an organic whole complete
within itself and points to the possibility of further narrative strands existing
outside of its bounds.
In line with its formal indecisiveness, Redgauntlet presents territory as a concept
that is plural, dynamic and uncertain on the discursive level. e negotiation of
territory takes into account the multiple overlapping levels of territorial borders
from the national territory demarcated by the overlapping of the Anglo-Scottish
border with the Solway Firth and the jurisdictional questions and territorial
conicts that drive the plot. Tired of the study of law, the young Darsie Latimer
leaves his adoptive family in Edinburgh to travel the Scottish Borders only
to involuntarily become involved in a Jacobite plot. Darsie’s familial relations
are unclear from the beginning of the novel and only resolved towards its end
when it turns out that Darsie has both English and Scottish relations. Besides
inheriting the English estates of his deceased birthmother, Darsie is revealed to
be the heir and representative of his biological father’s house, the Scottish House
of Redgauntlet. e uncertainty about Darsie’s identity and his family relations
are projected onto notions of national belonging that are negotiated throughout
the novel in the opposition between belief in the Hanoverian establishment,
shared by Darsie and his friend Alan, and support for the Jacobite cause that
can be found on both sides of the border. Aside from the legal consequences for
Darsie should he enter England before he is of age, which would put him under
the guardianship of his Jacobite uncle, the Anglo-Scottish border is presented as
Territory 139
a moving, dynamic border that is crossed for various reasons in both directions
by the characters of the novel. e instability of the Solway Firth, introduced in
the early chapters of the novel, underlines the instability of the national border
and symbolizes the uidity of identities. e blind ddler Wandering Willie
ascribes his (trans)national identity to the proximity of the Solway: ‘I am of
every country in broad Scotland, and a wee bit of England to the boot. But yet I
am, in some sense, of this country; for I was born within hearing of the roar of
Solway’ (1824, 95). Place and environment rather than geopolitical frameworks
become markers of territory for Willie, but for Darsie the conceptual distance
and physical closeness to England clash in his desire to get to know the country
in which he was born but which he is forbidden to enter:
ere lay my native land – my own England – the land where I was born, and
to which my wishes, since my earliest age, had turned with all the prejudices of
national feeling – there it lay, within a furlong of the place where I yet was; that
furlong which an infant would have raced over in a minute, was yet a barrier
eectual to divide me for ever from England and from life. I soon not only heard
the roar of this dreadful torrent, but saw, by the tful moonlight, the foamy
crests of the devouring waves, as they advanced with the speed and fury of a
pack of hungry wolves.
(175–6)
e threatening instability of the Solway corresponds to the threat awaiting
Darsie should he cross the border and expresses his strong feelings in relation
to the national border. Despite the possibility of crossing that is exercised
without much trouble by everyone else in the novel, the Anglo-Scottish border
and Solway present an eectual territorial limit for Darsie. is is not, in the
end, because he would not be able to cross physically or legally (even though
he almost drowns both times he enters the Firth), but because, conceptually,
Darsie has been taught all his life to regard territorial borders as xed, stable and
dangerous to cross. e contrast between Darsie and Wandering Willie, who,
as his nickname suggests, is a wanderer within and across territories, shows
that territorial borders must ultimately be understood as human constructs
reliant on consensus, constant performance and the belief that they matter. At
the same time, Darsie’s identity, as much as we may expect it to waver, remains
stable against his uncle’s attempts at persuading him to join the Jacobite cause,
suggesting that familial ties, hereditary rights and national aliation by birth do
not have to determine territorial identities but that allegiances may be built just
as rmly on less rigid ground.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination140
e sub-plot of the shers’ revolt through which Darsie’s kidnapping is
achieved opens another dimension of conict connecting territory with rights
around natural resources, and the locals’ concerns about shing rights are
embedded in larger discourses about agricultural improvements in eighteenth-
century Scotland. e shers are observed by Darsie in his rst encounter with
the Solway when he perceives their indigenous hunting practice, describing
them akin to ‘hunters spearing boars in the old tapestry’ (32). Later, the shers’
identity is linked to the liminality of the Solway itself when they are described as
‘amphibious deevils, neither land nor water beasts – neither English nor Scots –
neither county nor stewartry’ (228). eir indigenous practices and in-between
status clash with the more industrialized shing of a Quaker whose installation
of tidal shing nets enrages the local population because it reduces their yield.
e Quaker likewise condemns the indigenous hunting practices whose goal
he understands to be not sustenance but an enjoyment of needless slaughter,
which causes a ght about who is allowed to sh in the border territory, by what
means, and for what reasons: a conict that remains unresolved until the end.
e debate around ownership, shing rights and the use of natural resources
in connection with territory opens up a creaturely perspective that enjoys brief
elaboration in Darsie’s discovery of the Quaker’s love for animals. e Quaker’s
garden is inhabited by tame game animals who, as Darsie is surprised to learn,
are not meant for consumption but seen as pets that enjoy the protection oered
by the walls around the garden. e garden is therefore another territory in
miniature that adds an additional level of tension to the territorial struggle over
shing rights which the Quaker exercises for sustenance only. e garden’s walls
highlight the potentially protective function of borders in keeping the Quaker’s
animals safe just as the Anglo-Scottish border serves to protect Darsie from the
dangerous guardianship of his uncle.
Two other novels set against the backdrop of the First and Second World
Wars respectively, address the animal in connection with territory by exploring
human creatureliness and animality. In Ian Macpherson’s Wild Harbour (1936)
an elderly couple ees their village to live in a cave near Ben Alder in the Scottish
Highlands when a war breaks out. In diary form, Hugh details how he and his
wife Terry manage the life in their cave from spring to winter aer which they
are killed by a group of hostile men. Conceptions about the remoteness and
wildness of the Highlands are picked up at the beginning of the novel to be at
once simultaneously denied and conrmed when Hugh describes their situation
in relation to the traditional Robinsonade. While the heroes of the Robinsonade
have the advantage of being situated in ‘tropical fertile countries’, however,
Territory 141
‘[s]peed and strength and alert senses wouldn’t avail a man much if he were ung
out in the Grampians to live by what he could kill and grow’ (12). Like Crusoe,
Hugh and Terry attempt to enclose the land surrounding their cave, but since
the Highlands are not a desert island but thoroughly inhabited and cultivated,
with their cave being surrounded by farmed plots of land, they face the danger
of being detected and their enclosure is necessarily limited. e conict between
wilderness and habitation structures the couple’s relationship with the land
as they negotiate the meaning of ownership and territory. e obscure threat
of a war that looms largely in the distance is reected in the plot through the
killing of animals and the evasion of other human beings who are universally
perceived as enemies. e rejection of human society and jurisdiction allows
them to understand the land as existing outside the politico-legal framework of
territory: ‘the callous earth, unchanged in war and pestilence, occupied time as
if there were no men’ (6). As they continue to build their domestic enclave in the
landscape, Hugh reects that they are unable to assert ownership over the land
in any way: ‘We occupy, but it is not occupied, nor ever will be occupied’ (44). At
the same time, they are unable to enter into an intimate, embodied relationship
with the land:
[e land] lies before me and my eyes that see it, and my feet that walk on it,
mark what we see and feel upon my brain, but what they view and what they
touch is not changed by them, nor aware of them. We are in the wild land,
but not of it; winds and beasts and the brown cladding moor are of it; to day
and every day they go, they return, and we, who shi and go, have comfort
andprotection but no home.
(44)
Unlike the non-human animals they encounter, the couple cannot move beyond
the intellectual divide between nature and culture and conceive of themselves as
part of the world they inhabit. e loss of home and belonging caused by the war
is expressed through the self-chosen exile of a couple who cannot let go of their
cultural preconceptions even as they decide never to return to human society.
Even though there are signs of habitation everywhere around them, Hugh
perceives the environment as categorically separate from society and entirely
untouched, and unchanged by its malevolent inuence: ‘We escaped into the
country where the sun and the moor existed by themselves; and in this place,
divorced from the land of men, we escaped from fear and unhappiness. We were
as the wild creatures of our wild country’ (89). As the story progresses then, the
couple feel themselves come closer to creaturely existence in a positive sense
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination142
which Hugh describes in the nal pages of his diary in which he expresses what
may come closest to a relational reframing of territory in the novel: ‘this land, is
ours, and we, tied to it as the wild creatures are, cannot escape from it by going.
[…] we belong to it, we have given ourselves up to it; no other abode can ever
break this strange allegiance’ (148). However, even as Hugh desperately tries to
nd solace in peaceful fantasies about a primordial nature, his nal reections
before they leave the cave throw a romanticized light on the experience that
does not t the tension that runs through the rest of his narration up to this
point. As much as Hugh may pretend otherwise, the war has destroyed any
sense of security and as desperately as he tries to access a world in which fear of
territorial violence and death can be escaped through a deeper connection with
nature, this ideal remains always just out of reach.
Like Macpherson’s novel, Robert Jenkins’s e Cone Gatherers (1955), as an
allegorical portrayal of the Nazis’ persecution of disabled persons, is concerned
with ideas about human morality and cruelty. During the Second World War, the
McPhie brothers are employed by the forestry commission to gather r cones on
the Scottish country estate of Lady Runcie-Campbell. e novel begins with a
description of the estate’s environment and the brothers’ role as cone-gatherers.
At rst, the estate is described not in property terms but from an environmental
perspective that takes into account the sounds, fauna, ora of the multispecies
mesh. Calum McPhie is not only able to climb the trees in the most agile manner
but can tap into an environmental consciousness and feel himself to be part
of the meshwork surrounding them: ‘He became an owl himself, he rose and
fanned his wings, ew close to the ground, and then swooped, to rise again with
vole or shrew squeaking his talons’ (9). is anity with the non-human world
also induces him to share in the suering of any creature and to free animals
from the gamekeeper’s traps, which forms part of the territorial conict on
which the novel centres.
Even though the novel appears removed from the conict of the war,
(territorial) violence enters the estate through the gamekeeper Duror’s deep-
seated hatred for Calum. Duror’s hatred is grounded in feelings and beliefs
that closely correspond with the justications of eugenic violence of the Nazi
regime. Calum McPhie’s is disdained for his vaguely described physical and
cognitive impairments: the gamekeeper describes Calum as ‘half-man, a freak,
an imbecile’ (21) and believes both brothers to be ‘sub-humans’ deserving of
violence and death (22). Gavin Miller connects Jenkins’s novel with Giorgio
Agamben’s notion of ‘homo sacer’, arguing that the subhuman status of the
brothers turns them into zoological ‘bare’ life that is in turn managed by Duror
Territory 143
as the embodiment of the biopolitical power over their bodies (2008, 24).
Building on the notion of biopower and concepts from disability studies, Miller
suggests that Jenkins creates a world which ‘constructs sympathy as disability’ by
allowing Calum’s empathetic character to challenge heteronormative patriarchal
ideals (28). e ideals of able-bodied masculinity that Calum contradicts are
upheld desperately by Duror whose incapacity for sympathy, as Miller points
out, ‘is the real cognitive impairment in the text’ (27). Outwardly denying an
approval of the Nazis’ persecution of the disabled, ‘inwardly, thinking of idiocy
and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-
gather’, Duror admits he approves of the barbarity of the gas chambers (1955,
21–2).
e power Duror exercises over the two cone-gatherers is rooted in his
position as the gamekeeper of a privately owned estate and his ability to convince
the landowners to share in his disgust for Calum in particular. Lady Runcie-
Campbell, initially reluctant to manage the cone-gatherers too closely, begins to
assert her right over the estate, asking the brothers to remove themselves from
the shelter of her beach hut during a heavy storm. Duror’s open accusations
about Calum’s allegedly ‘impure’ behaviour and abject body reach their climax
when he claims to have seen him masturbating in the woods. Duror’s actions
invite direct comparison with the Nazis’ Blut und Boden ideology as an attempt
to ‘purify’ the territory of the estate according to his beliefs, not just in terms of
religion and race but also able-bodiedness, health, sexual orientation and gender
identity. e gure of the animal and the notion of creatureliness of humans are
used by Jenkins to criticize violence against bare life in an allegorical fashion, of
which violence spurred by feelings of power based on territorial rights forms a
part. As a conscientious objector who gathered cones during the war, Jenkins
shows how rigid notions of territory, which regard it as a space to be kept
homogeneously ‘pure’, in a geographical but also politico-legal and nationalistic
sense as the parallels with the ird Reich are meant to express, ultimately lead
to political and eventually fatal physical violence. Within the larger, international
contexts of the wars, Macpherson and Jenkins retain an intensely local focus on
Scotland and explore how the historical and political congurations of territory
of the Highlands inuence the lives of their protagonists.
A more recent novel, Mandy Haggith’s Bear Witness (2013), equally moves
between international and local debates, but does so in the context of wildlife
conservation and environmental land use. Set in an alternative future of
Scottish independence, Haggith’s novel details the eorts of Callis MacArthur
to reintroduce bears to the contested territory of the Scottish Highlands.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination144
Building on the connection between animal imagery and national symbolism,
Callis attempts to present Scotland’s independence as a reawakening from a
‘great political hibernation of hundreds of years’ (115) for which the bear could
become a tting national symbol ‘signalling Scotland’s rebirth, embracing natural
diversity, symbol of courage and perseverance’ (205). Scottish independence,
as Timothy Baker points out, is a necessary precondition for the action of the
story which posits that ‘only an independent Scotland can make room for an
independent population of nonhuman animals’ (2019, 10–11). As the novel
suggests, the territorial reconguration of Scotland’s national borders aer
independence allows for a wider reframing of other territorial bounds such as
those of private property which determine the use of land in Scotland. In order
to accommodate the wild, Haggith’s novel suggests, humans must renounce
their claims to the land and reconsider territorial relations from a multispecies
perspective.
As Callis quickly realizes, however, land relations remain a contentious issue
in Scotland and the environment can only be accessed through the mediation of
tourist guides and benevolence of sympathetic landowners. Callis’s proposition to
reintroduce bears to sparsely populated areas of the Highlands meets with deep-
seated resentment over past colonial disenfranchisement by local politicians:
‘We don’t want to drive even more folk out of the Highlands due to fear of bear
attacks. We’ve had quite enough of Highland Clearances, or hadn’t you heard?’
(2013, 206). e emotive arguments of politicians and farmers that there is no
space for predatory animals in the ‘already crowded landscape’ of the Scottish
Highlands (206) reveal the image of Scotland as a nation particularly conducive
to the wild, an image that dominates contemporary rewilding discourses,1 as
fraught. Rather than being hindered by environmental conditions, the success of
Callis’s rewilding project depends on her ability to deconstruct dominant ideas
and mindsets about the meaning of Scotland’s territory and how it should be
used. e dependence on sympathetic landowners for the success of small-scale
rewilding projects on individual estates is portrayed as insucient and fuels
further disputes around access rights as right-to-roam activists protest the (en)
closure of an estate through fences and walls erected for the reintroduction of
lynx and bear. As an increasingly enthusiastic wildlife activist, however, Callis
is deterred neither by private landowners nor the politico-legal frameworks of
environmental policy and conservation and she resorts to direct action, rst
attempting to smuggle a bear from Norway to Scotland and eventually cutting
the fence of the private wildlife estate which allows one of the bears to escape
into the Highlands. e existence of bears in Assynt a thousand years earlier
Territory 145
convinces Callis further that territorial relations in Scotland need to be rethought
along environmental lines. As she looks ‘out of the window not just at hills and
moors, but at potential bear habitat’ (180), the landscape is recongured andthe
territories that characterize it in the twenty-rst century are highlighted as
recent constructions. is alternative view of territory is reected through the
form of the novel itself which plays with the merging of human and non-human
referents and shis from third person to rst person narration as Callis connects
with the living world around her and feels part of a multispecies meshwork.
While the examples discussed here cannot provide a comprehensive picture
of the treatment of territory in Scotland’s literary history, they indicate a
continuous concern with territory as a politico-legal and environmental form.
Across the diverse literary formats of poetry, drama, essayistic and novelistic
writing, the key aordances of the form of territory are mobilized in the texts
to unpick real-world territorial congurations. By highlighting the overlapping
of various territories, they make legible the power relations and politics that
condition territory and allow for a questioning of the legitimacy of territorial
congurations by thinking through the specic situation of Scotland with its
histories of national territorial conicts and the contentious issues of private
landownership that persist into the present. Animals and the non-human world
are highlighted as essential to any understanding and negotiation of territory
in most texts, while some adopt an environmental perspective to suggest a
reconceptualization of territory by taking the environment into account. e
case study for this chapter, Buchan’s John Macnab (1925), is a particularly curious
novel that may appear as a surprising choice. However, Buchan’s adventure novel
merges many of the concerns that characterize the critical vignettes and manages
to explore the ontology of territorial borders through the environment by probing
at the discursive and aesthetic congurations that underlie its construction.
Land ownership, adventure and the non-human:
challengingterritory with John Buchan
Despite holding a number of political and diplomatic roles and writing not just
novels but also poetry and short ction, John Buchan is mainly remembered
as a writer of popular ction. Most of Buchan’s novels display elements of the
adventure story and are concerned in some way with the struggle over territory.
In Buchan’s John Macnab a group of successful, middle-aged gentlemen discover
their collective boredom and need for excitement and decide to plot a poaching
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination146
challenge in the Highlands. Ex-Attorney General and Conservative MP Sir
Edward Leithen, banker John Palliser-Yates and Conservative Cabinet Minister
and Earl Charles Lamancha all complain that the war has le them with a deep
feeling of ennui, a tiredness of life. Sir Archie Roylance, a disabled veteran who
is pursuing the path of becoming a Conservative MP himself, tells them about
Jim Tarras who, equally bored by his dull life, used to challenge the owners of
deer forests to prevent him from killing one of their stags between certain dates.
Inspired, the three friends decide to draw up a very similar game: under the
collective nom de guerre John Macnab they write letters to three landowners in
the Highlands, informing them that they will poach a stag or a sh from their
estates on certain dates and challenging them to stop them. Like Tarras, they
would return the dead animal by the next day and the losing party would be
expected to pay £50 to a charity of their choosing. ey decide on Glenraden,
owned by the Raden family; Strathlarrig, owned by the American Bandicotts;
and Haripol, owned by Lord Claybody. Reluctantly, Sir Archie Roylance oers
Crask, his holiday estate in the Scottish Highlands, as their headquarters.
Alan Riach nds that Buchan’s novels are frequently situated within political
and physical borderscapes, ‘always on the edge of things, on borderlands between
nations, in remote valleys giving rare access to dierent political states’ (2009a,
172). Rather than focusing on state borders, John Macnab’s interest is in the
microscalar territorial borders of the Scottish hunting estate. While the larger
geopolitical border structures of the nation-state are implied throughout the
story, the main focus of John Macnab lies on an embodied experience of borders.
is experiential level is highlighted through the environmental encounters of
the characters who, even as they pay attention to the borders that cut across the
environments through which they move, are enmeshed in the land as a shared
lifeworld. e close attention to the non-human world in the novel creates a
perception of land from within, which leads to a questioning of the nature of
territory that is more subtle and exible than it might be expected from a novelist
mainly associated with imperial adventure stories. While I do not mean to claim
Buchan as an environmentalist writer with progressive ideas about borders,2
Buchan’s weaving together of environmental and bordering concerns in John
Macnab through aesthetic and social forms reveals a complexity of political
thought that deserves renewed attention, not least because of what it can tell us
about the form of territory.
is complexity is captured by the philosophy of the challenge that structures
the novel on both a formal and a discursive level: territory here is not understood
as a static category but as a construct that needs to be continuously (re)examined
Territory 147
through acts of (environmental) borderscaping. Engaging with borders through
a borderscape lens, according to Brambilla, focuses the attention on ‘practices
through which uctuating borders are imagined, materially established,
experienced, lived as well as reinforced and blocked but also crossed, traversed
and inhabited’ (2015, 30). Buchan’s novel can be understood as an example
of experimental, literary borderscaping in imagining territorial borders as
dynamic and permeable and inviting his readers to traverse and inhabit b/
ordered environments through his characters’ experiences. e relationship
between politics and aesthetics can be found at dierent levels of the novel’s
borderscaping that not only contrasts the bordering conventions of adventure
ction with an embodied experiencing of the material world of the Highlands,
but also provides a discursive political borderscaping in relation to Scotland’s
territorial histories that highlights the aordance of thinking through Scotland.
I want to begin by outlining the novel’s playful engagement with the
adventure mode to show how, by playing with the literary conventions of
the adventurenarrative, John Macnab merges a number of concerns relating
to territory in the context of Scotland, its environment and its borders: land
ownership and management, bordering and access, environmental aesthetics
and the materiality and physical experience of the environment. Following from
this, I will propose a focus on the narrative middle of the novel which will allow
for a reassessment of its environmental character by highlighting how Buchan’s
use of the adventure mode produces contradictory readings of the Highland land
and its creatures. e nal sections of this chapter will then focus on practices
of political and physical borderscaping that both highlight the aordances of
thinking through Scotland in connection with territory, as a category that is both
political and environmental, and the role of the non-human in the b/ordering
processes of the novel. As I hope to show, John Macnab provides a perspective
on territory that makes us rethink its structures and meanings as continually up
for debate and reconsideration.
‘It can’t be done – not in this country anyway’: Adventure and
disillusionment
Adventure ction is oen dismissed in literary studies as ‘formulaic genre ction
which any self-respecting literary culture leaves behind’ rather than something
to be taken seriously: ‘full of clichés, bogus action, silly heroes, and cheap thrills’
(Döring and Kübler 2021, 15). is can lead to an underestimation of the genre’s
potential aordances which is especially striking given its widespread appeal
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination148
with the reading population. As Tobias Döring and Martina Kübler nd, the
central element of transgression ‘allies the adventure quest not just to fantasies
of conquest, dominance, and power but potentially also to more subversive
ventures that renegotiate the bonds and bounds that make up our daily world’
(2021, 21) – and this includes the bonds and bounds of territory. As the case of
John Macnab shows, adventure, and maybe even more so a playful engagement
with adventure, may serve as a vehicle to discuss issues of land ownership and
to explore characters’ relationships with the local environment. e genre,
therefore, demands careful examination. e adventure mode through which
John Macnab is framed is crucial to how Buchan structures the relationship
between borders and the environment in the novel, both in the context of the
Scottish land question and in relation to the broader form of territory.
Not only are territory and the transgression of its borders a major driver of
the adventure plot in general (Döring and Kübler 2021, 19), but the borders
to be crossed are oen marked by environmentally inected discourses about
‘wild’ and ‘civilized’ nature. As Döring and Kübler outline, adventure ction
always involves ‘the crossing of a threshold and departure into some uncharted,
unknown space, wild and open, full of hope and promise, and beyond the strict
connes of everyday routines’ (2021, 15). is unknown space is usually portrayed
as ‘wild’ or ‘primitive’ in relation to both the environment and the indigenous
population. Margaret Bruzelius goes so far as to argue that ‘adventure as a genre
is unimaginable without an exotic “elsewhere” in which to locate the plot’ (2007,
40), an elsewhere that is usually presented as ‘a wasteland as poor and harsh as it
is beautiful, a place in which only a poor and hardscrabble existence is possible’
(41). is, of course, feeds into imperial ideologies and as Döring and Kübler
point out, ‘the adventure novel in anglophone literature proliferated especially
via the imperial and male quest romances of the nineteenth century’ (2021, 18).
Both the quest narrative and the imperial romance suggest a structural and
discursive telos that informs the forward thrust of the adventure novel to this day
and places a special importance on narrative endings. e journey developed by
the adventure plot oen follows ‘the disruption of the ordered home society’
with the aim to return it to its usual order and characteristically leads ‘through a
hostile natural world’ (Rigby 2005) which is perilous and full of ‘trials and tests
of courage’ (Döring and Kübler 2021, 23). It requires the hero to survive ‘amid
unexpected dangers’ (Baldick 2015) and to overcome serious ‘obstacles and
dangers’ to accomplish ‘some important and moral mission’ (Cawelti 1976, 39).
Territory 149
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the popular adventure narrative
was increasingly seen as ‘a tale of the past: archaic, conservative, colonial,
conventional’ (Döring and Kübler 2021, 15) and to some degree, and maybe
not entirely unjustiably, these labels have also been attached to John Buchan
and his work as a whole. As most of Buchan’s novels, John Macnab could be
read as such a typical adventure narrative in which the characters venture out
on a journey into the unknown (the ‘wild’ Highlands) to meet a challenge
(poaching a stag or a sh) and win a prize (y pounds). However, it is clear
from the outset that John Macnab is indeed not a typical adventure novel. e
Highlands of the novel are no longer understood as ‘wild’ or unknown but are
represented as thoroughly ‘civilized’ and managed, and there is no real danger as
the poaching challenge turns out to be no more than a game with no real stakes
at the end of the novel. e three Macnabs are already wealthy gentlemen with a
solid position in society which protects them from any legal, social or monetary
consequences. Neither is there a threat to the British social order as is the case
for many of Buchan’s other novels. e perceived threat to property and land
ownership promised by John Macnab is revealed to be a farce when the Macnabs
are discovered to be renowned members of the British establishment. e lack
of a larger purpose means that there is no opportunity for heroic achievement or
noble self-sacrice for the collective of ‘heroes’ which puts the novel in a stark
contrast with Buchan’s individual nationalist heroes such as Richard Hannay:
rather than being part of some bigger scheme with a moral goal, the call to
adventure in John Macnab consists in a self-interested desire for a relief from
boredom that has no deeper meaning. What John Macnab provides is thus not a
conventional adventure tale but a subtly satirical, tongue-in-cheek inversion of
the adventure novel.
is generic play has signicant consequences for the debate over territory
that is of central importance for the traditional adventure novel. Over the course
of the story, the Macnabs are gradually found out by the landowners but, as Lord
Claybody, the owner of the last estate on which they are all caught explains to
them, they were never in any real danger, neither from the others nor him: ‘I
couldn’t give you away. […] I am out to support anything which buttresses the
solid structure of society. You three are part of that structure’ (1925, 234). is
nal ‘revelation’ shocks the Macnabs but is of no surprise to readers. Instead, a
number of self-reective passages in the novel foreshadow and almost ridicule
the characters’ expectation of a real adventure when Sir Edward Leithen,
exasperated by his boredom, compares himself to a worker on strike: ‘I know
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination150
now why workmen strike sometimes and can’t give any reason. We’re on strike–
against our privileges’ (9). Tongue-in-cheek declarations such as this one are
complemented by more open discussions about the unassailable stability of
British society by the American Mr Bandicott:
In this country, once you start in on politics you’re xed in a class and members
of a hierarchy, and you’ve got to go on, however untted you may be for the job,
because it’s sort of high treason to weaken. […] I deplore criminal tendencies in
any public man, but the possibility of such a downfall keeps the life human. It is
very dierent in England. e respectability of your politicians is so awful that,
when one of them backslides, every man of you combines to hush it up. ere
would be a revolution if the people got to suspect. Can you imagine a Cabinet
Minister in the police court on a common vulgar charge?
(103–4)
What Bandicott complains about here ts with the philosophy of the challenge
that is advocated for by several of the characters, most prominently Janet Raden
who argues ercely that ‘people should realize that whatever they’ve got they
hold under a perpetual challenge, and they are bound to meet that challenge’
(126). Only if people take up the philosophy of the challenge, Janet proposes, will
they be ‘living creatures instead of mummies’ (126). e challenge to territory
and the transgression of its borders are depicted as a vital element for keeping
society from stagnating and ultimately serve to stabilize property rights. Even
though there is a tinge of nostalgia in the loss of real adventure, the novel equally
ridicules such nostalgia, pointing towards what is needed in the present and
future – a strike against one’s privileges in order to secure them.
e ending of Buchan’s novel, like the typical adventure novel, contains the
radical potential of the action and restores social order: the frame narrative
reveals the journalist Crossby to be the author of the novel’s narrative who aims
to tell the ‘real’ story of John Macnab which had been changed and fabricated
into a benign and safe version of the truth for the wider public. However, the
conscious and explicit play with features of the adventure novel makes us
question the relevance of this ending. Caroline Levine suggests that, rather than
overdetermining narrative endings and turning texts into unied wholes, it
may be more productive to focus on narrative middles which reveal ‘the ways
in which social forms bring their logics with them into the novel, working both
with and against literary forms and producing unexpected political conclusions
out of their encounters’ (2015, 42; cp. 40–1). By resolving the plot in an absurdly
pointless manner that questions the very idea of plot, and by foreshadowing this
Territory 151
pointlessness through self-reective passages at the beginning, Buchan’s novel
equally suggests we pay less attention to the ending and directs our attention
instead to the muddled action in its narrative middle. While narrative middles
may appear ‘undecided, transitional, vacillating, even cowardly’ (Levine and
Ortiz-Robles 2011, 2), in John Macnab’s case the narrative middle is the most
productive space to look for moments of transgression and disruption of form and
content. It is in the narrative middle that the novel moves beyond human politics
by bringing the environment into play, and it is here that the philosophy of the
challenge is thoroughly explored. By focusing on borders and the environment
on an experiential level of immediate and bodily encounters, the novel presents
territory not as an immutable structure with clear borders determined by the
imperial centre, but as the result of living border zones inhabited and shaped
by human and non-human agents alike. By attending to the narrative middle,
territory is revealed as a meshwork that is brought into being, and is continually
remade, through the (inter)action between humans and the non-human world.
While Buchan’s John Macnab does not attempt to provide an environmental
view of borders in the post-national sense and indeed closes o the potential
of such a reading through its ending, the novel nevertheless oers moments of
disruption that challenge the logics of territory and the legitimacy of turning
parcels of land into private property.
(De)territorializing the Highland landscape of adventure ction
In his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, Buchan describes a nightmare of his in
which the whole planet has yielded to the capitalist imperatives of the machine
age, and questions whether these developments will lead to a ‘perfecting of
civilisation’ or end in ‘de-civilisation, a loss of the supreme values of life’ (1940,
283). In a disenchanted modern world, traditional adventure no longer has a
place:
New inventions and a perfecting of transport had caused the whole earth to huddle
together. ere was no corner of the globe le unexplored and unexploited, no
geographical mysteries to re the imagination. Broad highways crowded with
automobiles threaded the remotest lands and overhead great-airliners carried
week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia. Everywhere there were guest-
houses and luxury hotels and wayside camps and lling-stations. What once
were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an
attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementoes.
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination152
e globe, too, was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour
of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.
(283–4)
As John Miller points out, these speculations about the future read like ‘a
remarkably prescient account of twenty-rst-century globalized economies,
overexploited land and homogenized experience that oers only the dismal
consolation of ecotourism as an ersatz, degraded simulation of romance’
(2009, 204). e anxieties central to this account can be detected in many of
Buchan’s works, including John Macnab. It is not the desire of the protagonists
to venture on a heroic quest to save the country or a damsel in distress that
leads the protagonists to begin their poaching challenge, but a shared feeling of
‘taedium vitae’ (1925, 2), a special kind of post-war ennui that leads them to seek
an adventure to stir up their comfortable metropolitan lives. is adventure is
ultimately impossible to realize in a world in which ‘wild’ places no longer exist,
at least not in Scotland.
e premise of the story, in w hich a few bored gentlemen in want of excitement
select the Highlands for their adventure, appears to frame the Highlands as a
theme park t for the amusement of the upper classes. Even before the characters
arrive in Scotland, common notions about the Highlands are rolled out for the
reader in the style of the traditional adventure romance: Scotland is presented
as a remote location, an empty landscape devoid of people ‘where you can do
exactly as you like’ (10), which is ‘mighty hard to get to’ and oers ‘nothing to
see when you get there’ (11). e ‘colonial aesthetic’ in which ‘land [is] kept wild
for the benet of the white adventurer’ which Miller (2009, 205) recognizes in
Buchan’s novels informs the adventure mode of John Macnab. roughout the
story, however, it becomes clear that this representation of Scotland is misleading.
As Riach argues, even though ‘Buchan implicitly endorses imperial authority’
throughout his writing and this is oen the focus of critical assessments of his
work, ‘there are other ways of reading Buchan’ that take into account his love for
the Scottish Borders and the Scots language (2009a, 179). ese loyalties, Riach
suggests, highlight Buchan’s ‘deeper connections to an earth he knew he could
never completely leave behind’ and provide a more complex picture of Buchan
and his work which shows that ‘his ctional creations open up the imagination
to the exploration of possibilities, loyalties that sometimes pull against the
centralizing authorities of imperial command’ (179). ese self-conicted
tendencies explain why the distinction between the representation and reality
of the Highlands remains riddled with contradictions. If the protagonists could
Territory 153
indeed do exactly as they liked, there would be no thrill in the poaching challenge.
In the end, however, they are able to do exactly as they like, not because Scotland
is a lawless country in which everyone can do whatever they like, but because the
protagonists’ standing in society protects them from any consequences. It is only
for the rich and powerful that the Highlands can be turned into a theme park,
whether in the form of the sporting estate or other endeavours. Rather than fully
subscribing to this idea, however, the novel plays with such conceptions of the
Highlands in order to worry them. Despite the initial claim that the Highlands
are devoid of people that could bother them, Sir Archie has to invent a case of
smallpox soon aer they arrive to keep their neighbours away from the house.
When he travels to Muirtown aer Sir Leithen’s successful poaching of the
salmon from Strathlarrig, the story of John Macnab is on everyone’s lips:
e shmonger pointed to a sh on his slabs, and observed that it would be
about the size of the one taken at Strathlarrig. e bookseller, who knew his
customer’s simple tastes in letters, regretted that no contemporary novel of
hisacquaintance promised such entertainment as the drama now being enacted
in Wester Ross. Tired of needless lying, Sir Archie forsook the ships and went for
a stroll beside the harbour. But even there John Macnab seemed to pursue him.
Wherever he saw a man with a paper he knew what he was reading; the people
at the street corners were no doubt discussing the same subject.
(1925, 138–9)
e reference to the bookseller’s desire for a popular contemporary novel
suggests the poaching challenge as both adequate material for an adventure
ction and dierent from such novels, which suggests they may have fallen
out of fashion. Rather than undertaking a challenge in a ‘remote’ part of the
world, the protagonists are consciously made aware of the social networks in
the Highlands in which stories are not kept secret but instead spread quickly
as is also demonstrated by the heightened presence of journalists. e fact that
Sir Leithen can easily invent the fake persona of a tourist looking for beauty
and camouage himself as a naturalist to mislead the post-mistress further
shows that the Highlands have long become a popular tourist destination rather
fullling the promise of being a ‘wild’ and undiscovered place.
ough Buchan was not unsentimental about the loss of ‘wild’ places, as his
nightmarish vision of a world without mystery indicates, there is more to the
novel’s engagement with discourses of wilderness, environmental encounters and
the non-human world than mere escapism, a simplied accusation oen made
about adventure ction. Terry Giord’s reading of the novel as a classic example
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination154
of the pastoral, and his conclusion that Buchan uses landscape descriptions only
for two purposes – when ‘necessary to the terms of action’ or ‘to advance his
romantic sub-plot’ (2013, 168) – cannot fully capture the complexities of the
novel’s engagement with the environment. Neither ‘the tidal waters of the river
and the yellow sands on which in the stillest weather the Atlantic frets’ that can
be seen from Crask (1925, 15), nor ‘the scent of wet bracken and birches and
bog myrtle, the peaty fragrance of the hills salted with the tang of the sea’ (16)
are necessary descriptions for the advancement of the story or its romantic sub-
plot. To get at the complexity of Buchan’s inclusion of the environment and its
non-human agents, it is necessary to pay attention to what Amy King describes
as ‘dilatory descriptions’ that ‘[owe] little or nothing to the advancement of plot
but that instead might even be said to still narrative progress’ because they move
‘against the headlong thrust towards closure’ (2011, 163). Because adventure
ction is oen centred on the suspenseful forward movement of its plot, such
dilatory descriptions, that are very frequently landscape descriptions, may seem
to run counter to the general structure and aim of the adventure narrative. is
disruptive capacity makes them particularly interesting to look at in a novel that
does not take the structure of the adventure narrative all too seriously. Buchan
strategically uses descriptive passages to feed into his satirical provocation and
to deconstruct the idea of wild nature in the Highlands. e above description
of the environmental character of the land, including the weather and its
scent, creates an atmospheric environment of sensations as experienced by the
characters and shared aectively with the readers that diverts from the forward
thrust of the adventure plot.
Looking for subversive, environmentalist qualities in the novel, Giord nds
it to be centrally concerned with the conict between an ‘authentic’ experience of
nature and its cultural construction and Giord diagnoses a disappointment in
the novel that ‘nature cannot be conceived except through the frames of culture’
(2013, 166). Examining the novel’s engagement with these frames of culture
through a focus on the tropes of the adventure novel, however, reveals how
Buchan consciously employs them to subvert dominant landscape aesthetics
which depict Scotland as a country dened by ‘wilderness’. ere are indeed
echoes of an adventurous ‘wilderness’ border between Scotland and England
in the contrast between Lady Claybody’s carefully designed garden ‘which with
crazy-paving and sundials and broad borders was a very fair imitation of an old
English garden’ and the ‘primitive walled garden, planted in the Scots fashion a
long way from the house’ which ‘was now relegated to fruit and vegetables’ (1925,
198). e description of the walled garden as more ‘primitive’ evokes the binary
Territory 155
between civilization and wilderness which has frequently been mapped onto the
distinction between England and Scotland. Both gardens, however, are cultivated
for domestic purposes, albeit for dierent ones, and they are contrasted with
the Highland environment of the estate. Lady Claybody’s supercial interest
in theenvironment as a source of articial aesthetic pleasure is criticized by
the novel when Janet notes that she ‘was an inaccurate enthusiast’ (198) and
forgivingly accepts the garden only because ‘in that glen the environment of hill
and wood was so masterful that the artices of man were instantly absorbed’
(199). Janet’s musings put a special emphasis on the absorption of the inuence
of humans on the glen. Even though it is less visible, the environment of the glen
is, however, in private hands which not only regulate its access but also change
the character of the landscape through their activities, most strikingly through
the keeping of deer. Just like the juxtaposition of the two gardens, the dierence
between here is one of degree and not kind. Rather than constituting any form
of untouched wilderness, the novel raises the question whether such perceived
wilderness can ever exist. As the disappointment about the impossibility of a wild
adventure at the ending reveals, ‘authentic’ wilderness does not exist – at least not
in Scotland. In the context of the Scottish Highlands, the discourse of wilderness
opens a contentious debate about land use and reinforces the idea of Scotland as
a country that is somehow particularly t for wilderness. As his engagement with
wilderness makes clear, Buchan was aware of these constructions of the Scottish
environment but rather than taking them on uncritically, he includes them in a
self-conscious way that makes us rethink the structures of meaning-making that
constitute the idea of wilderness and its transformation into territory.
Even though there are descriptions of the environment as ‘wild’, these
are explicitly ltered through the perception of individual characters. Janet
Raden, lying quietly in wait to catch John Macnab, feels Carnbeg sleeping ‘in a
primordial peace’ in which ‘[o]nly pipits broke the silence, only a circling merlin
made movement in a spell-bound world’ (71). However, the circumstances of
her presence contradict this view: she is patrolling among a dozen ghillies in
order to catch a poacher who is out to catch one of the stags that are at the centre
of the estate’s economic management. By contrasting the reality of the Highlands
with its private estates, local inhabitants and tourist economy, with the romantic
ideals of a primordial wilderness portrayed in adventure ction, the novel not
only highlights ‘wild nature’ as a cultural and literary construct, but also asks us
to reect on its own portrayal of the environment as a novel that consciously
draws on such literary and aesthetic traditions. e literary traditions that
inform characters’ attitudes towards the environment help the Macnabs in their
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination156
endeavour. Janet’s perception of the tinker boy Benjie corresponds with both her
romantic views of Glenraden and stereotypical representations of the Scottish
tinker as closer to nature. Janet looks over the landscape including Benjie and
his grey pony, perceiving it as ‘a scene of utter loneliness and peace’ in which
the two gures ‘seemed to have become one with nature, and to be as much
part of the sleeping landscape as the clump of birches whose leaves did not even
shimmer in that bright silent noontide’ (65–6). e integration of Benjie as
part of the landscape ts with his portrayal throughout the novel as one of two
gures who can move unseen through the land and across its borders because
of their thorough and embodied understanding of the environment. However,
Janet’s perception soon turns out to be an illusion: ‘Janet turned homeward with
a feeling that the world had suddenly become dispeopled. She did not turn her
head once, and so failed to notice rst one gure and then another, which darted
across the high road, and disappeared in the thick coverts of the Crask hillside’
(66). As part of the landscape, Benjie and his pony are turned into the lifeless
gures of a pastoral painting, living in a peaceful landscape devoid of people.
e reality behind this imagery is dierent, however, and Benjie is already part
of the ploy of the Macnabs moving behind Janet’s back rather than part of an
innocent background of landscape aesthetic.
Even though they cannot fully capture the material reality of the environment,
the novel suggests that literary representations can still express some truth about
our relationship with the environment. As Janet looks over Carnbeg, she thinks
back on her luncheon during which Junius Bandicott and her sister Agatha took
to quoting poetry and retelling local fairy tales, which ‘all seemed wrong’ to her
at the time because ‘this was not an occasion for literary philandering’ (72). And
yet, Janet feels that these tales also express a material reality and an aective
response to the environment when she is ‘forced to confess that nothing was
astir in the mossy wilderness’ as ‘except for more hinds and one small knobber,
living thing there was none’ (72). In line with Riach, Miller suggests that it may
be Buchan’s ambivalence that characterizes his work and ‘that provides the most
telling contribution of his political ecology’ (2009, 205). Buchan’s writing, Miller
argues, oscillates between ‘the contrary impulses to prune and contain nature in
making a home in the world alongside the desire for a broader imaginative home
beyond the connes of habitation, depicting the ongoing, urgent negotiation
of the human place in the biosphere’ (205). Attending to territory through the
lens of the adventure narrative with which Buchan plays further reveals that
the frames of culture, which Giord nds to be a hindrance to ‘authentic’
environmental encounters, are conscious reconstructions of the adventure tale,
Territory 157
turned on their head in a playful manner. Rather than moving beyond those
cultural frames, Buchan works through them and reveals the processes of their
literary and cultural construction. It is those cultural frames that crucially dene
territorial debates in Scotland in which the environment is turned into plots of
land to be owned, managed and cultivated according to aesthetic and economic
viewpoints. As a result, environmental tropes are re-examined and the borders
of territory are shaken up, even if only temporarily or partially.
e territorial borders transgressed in the novel do not demarcate
unknown places in which wild nature abounds, but the idea of entering into an
unknownand wild space appears to have been the fantasy of the three friends
who, in the end, realize that true adventure ‘can’t be done’, at least ‘not in this
country’, a Scotland that is thoroughly managed and in which there is no true
peril for them as upstanding members of society (1925, 234). Instead of simply
reproducing the adventure novel’s frameworks, the environment in Buchan’s
novel lies somewhere in between the magical landscape of poetry, romance
and fairy tale, the economically and aesthetically managed territory of the
estate, andthe physical reality of the material world. In merging those dierent
categories and blurring their borders, the narrative opens patches for alternative
readings that show how the novel pushes against narrative tropes about the
environment even as it makes use of them. e juxtaposing of wilderness ideals
and economic management, remote emptiness and networked locality, literature
and physical environment leads to a blurring of the ideological borders that are
necessary for the working of conventional adventure ction.
Mapping Scotland’s territory: history, politics and the environment
e novel resists a reading that underestimates the relevance of Scotland’s history
of territorial conict as a crucial aordance for its debate on land ownership
and territory by turning Janet Raden into a central gure that not only voices
the philosophical underpinning of the novel’s treatment of territory but is also
thoroughly connected to Scotland through her family history. We are told in
great detail that the Radens are connected to Scottish history as far back as the
time of Norse settlers in the eighth and ninth centuries, according to the older
Mr Bandicott and a Professor Babwater who, in a very loosely linked subplot, are
excavating and examining the remains of the ctional ancestor of the Radens,
the Viking Harald Blacktooth. Janet explains her lineage to Archie in connection
with Scottish history, which is, signicantly, a history of territorial conict. From
the First War of Scottish Independence under Robert the Bruce, to the Battle of
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination158
Flodden under James IV, to the Jacobite rebellions in the eighteenth century,
Janet recounts, the Raden family was involved directly in the territorial conicts
between England and Scotland until ‘civilisation killed them’ and ‘the re went
out of the blood, and they became vegetables’ (1925, 125) because the territorial
conicts were settled and their only claim, in the end, ‘was the right of property,
which is no right at all’ (125). Instead of hereditary rights, it is the history of
territorial conict, adventure and (male) heroism that Janet glories when she
argues that ‘people should realise that whatever they’ve got they hold under a
perpetual challenge’ because ‘[n]obody in the world today has a right to anything
which he can’t justify’ (125).3 Taking her lessons from Scottish history, Janet
proposes that on a fundamental level, territory is a cultural construct subject to
decay and needs to be continually justied, renewed and performed in order to
function, with ‘all power and property held on suerance’ (145).
Despite her lineage and the curious subplot of archaeological excavation
which suggests the family’s history, and by extension the history of Scotland’s
transnational history as embedded in the local landscape, Janet does not regard
history as sucient justication of their rights to own the land. Antiquarianism
and the search for an authentic Scottish history are connected to the fabrications
of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems when it is revealed that Janet’s grandfather
spent a fortune on the hunt for additional Gaelic manuscripts (101). e novel
explicitly undertakes its own fabrication of national and world history through
the invention of Harald Blacktooth who is said to have obtained his treasures
in Greenland and North America before the time of Columbus, a discovery
that would signicantly rewrite world history. Instead, Bandicott’s ndings
are entirely inconsequential and the pointless search for an authentic Scottish
identity reects the pointlessness of the adventure plot. Once the newspaper
stories claim John Macnab to be the ghost of Harald Blacktooth, the ridiculous
nature of the archaeological endeavour is made obvious and the novel’s rejection
of the notion of authenticity revealed. rough the Raden’s family history and
the excavation plot, the novel rejects the idea of a ‘natural’, identity-based right to
own land and criticizes attempts to legitimate territory through antiquarianism
or inheritance: territory cannot be understood by digging into or even blasting
the soil with explosives in the search for truth, but only through a borderscaping
practice that involves an active, embodied engagement with the environment.
Archie’s impression that Janet ‘tted most exquisitely into the picture of rock and
wood and water, that she was, in very truth, a part of [t]his clean elemental world
of the hill-tops’ (126) does not ascribe her with any natural right of ownership,
Territory 159
then, but positions her as a negotiating gure between politico-legal frameworks
and an environmental perspective on territory.
In the novel, territory is understood in a double sense: as a humanly dened,
geopolitically or legally bordered entity, and as a process in which land is
composed through the interaction of human and non-human agents. e
delineation of the estate territories is crucial for the poaching challenge of the
Macnabs: by constituting unauthorized hunting on private land, poaching only
becomes possible through the transgression of territorial borders. e territorial
b/ordering of the estate further creates a legal framework which prohibits the
free movement of the characters allowing land owners to classify any crossing of
their borders as aggravated trespass, a criminal oence as opposed to poaching
which, as Sir Edward Leithen explains, does not constitute an actual crime: ‘Deer
being ferae naturae, there is no private property in them or common law crime
in killing them, and the only remedy is to prevent trespass in pursuit of them or
to punish the trespasser’ (22). ese legal circumstances highlight the limits to
land ownership in regard to the environment, in particular its fauna, while also
stressing that the story relies on the b/ordering of land in order for its fundamental
concerns, the poaching of game, the excitement of the adventure, the questioning
of territorial rights and the ownership over the environment, to work.
is convergence of environmental and legal perspectives on territory is
negotiated throughout the novel and is introduced by the map preceding the
rst chapter (Figure 2). e map situates the story within a mountainous area
of the Highlands near the sea (the Atlantic as later detailed in the narrative)
but resists any real location outside the ctional world. While Sgùrr Dearg,
Sgùrr Mòr and Stob Bàn do exist in Scotland, the actual mountains are located
in dierent regions from Skye to the Grampians and most of the other place
names are entirely ctitious, though inspired by actual place names. While
the Highland location is crucial to the functioning of the hunting, or rather,
poaching plot, the adventure mode, and the negotiation of land ownership, real
locations are purposely le out, as are the borders demarcating the dierent
estates. At rst sight it appears as if natural features – the rivers Raden, Larrig
and Doran – may give some indication as to where the borders of the estates
may be situated, but the location of Haripol House south of the river, and of
Inverlarrig at their crossing refute this idea. e overlapping between Glenraden
Castle and the valley, equally named Glenraden, which, as follows from the
narrative itself, reaches into the territory of Inverlarrig, equally confounds a clear
location of their borders. Instead, the map shows the estate territories as owing
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination160
into one another by having the landscape join rather than divide the estates.
Criticizing the Desert Island model of territory which suggests that land can be
owned ‘by a unied people’ with the ‘unilateral right to control everything that
happens inside it and at its edges’ (2020, 6), Ochoa-Espejo argues that natural
features present a place-based counter-argument to territorial rights: ‘Looking
at territory through the lens of its natural features, it becomes dicult to think
of it as analogous to private property – or to simply state that a people “own”
the land, and therefore they can rule over it and exclude others’ (30). e
map highlights the environmental character of the narrative space: its cross-
hatchings create a mountainous relief that highlights the topographical features
of the landscape the characters will later traverse and reveal as uneven, steep
and boggy. Like the narrative, Buchan’s map asks us to imagine the ‘feel’ of the
landscape onavisceral level and understand the environment depicted as lived
in, rather than bordered. Rather than presenting readers with stable borders
that are marked on the map and on the ground through fences, walls, or other
constructs, the map foreshadows the representation of territorial borders as
borderscapes in which characters experience territory on the ground through
encounters with the non-human world.
Figure 2 Map of the Highland setting of the novel. From ‘Map to Illustrate the
Doings of John Macnab’ (1925). Reproduced with the permission of the National
Library of Scotland.
Territory 161
Creaturely transgressions: Non/human borderscaping
Non-human animals are both central for and peripheral to the bordering work
of the novel: they are at once the primary objects of the adventure plot, directing
the action of the human protagonists, objects to be killed and traded for pleasure,
symbols for the construction of masculinity (in the form of sportsmanship), and
agential creatures that resist and derail the plans of the characters and adventure
story alike. In the context of the poaching challenge, animals are objects to be
owned and slaughtered for pleasure and excitement. As Giord points out,
however, ‘their role as property is challenged’ by practices of poaching, and the
lack of clearly delineated borders or a legal framework beyond trespass reveals
the sporting estates’ management of animals ‘as redundant artice’ (2013, 167).
While animals are discursively framed as objects and symbols, they emerge in
sometimes contradictory ways in the narrative middle of the story. While this
text neither advocates for animal rights, nor attempts to get at an understanding
of the animal from a post-anthropocentric perspective, it does asks readers to
reect on the construction of the symbolic animal, in particular in a national
context, and suggests the potential unruliness of animals in relation to human
b/orderings.
As with the rest of this novel, these constructions are engaged more playfully
than seriously, as in the description of Crask as an estate with ‘the air of a West
Highland terrier’ (1925, 15). Beyond symbolic and prey animals, animals
abound in the narrative and are involved in the action in a variety of ways. e
animals inhabiting the Highland hills and glens appear more marginally, but
curious passages paralleling human and non-human action give a hint of an
understanding of an enmeshed landscape in which human and non-human
lives intersect. e chapter that details the very rst poaching attempt on
Glenraden opens with a longer dilatory description of the patrol assembling at
the gamekeeper’s cottage, going out into the night, before switching to the non-
human inhabitants with which they share the landscape:
Darkness gave place to the translucence of early dawn: the badger trotted
home from his wanderings: the hill-fox barked in the cairns to summon his
household: sleepy pipits awoke: the peregrine who lived above the Grey Beallach
dried down into the glens to look for breakfast: hinds and calves moved up
from the hazel shows to the high fresh pastures: the tiny rustling noises of night
disappeared in that hush which precedes the awakening of life: and then came
the ood of morning gold from behind the dim eastern mountains, and in an
instant the earth had wheeled into a new day. A thin spire of smoke rose from
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination162
Mrs Macpherson’s chimney, and presently the three wardens of the marches
arrived for breakfast.
(1925, 63)
e majority of the animals described in this passage are in some way
connected to hunting practices, either as prey or hunting companions, which
links them to the main action of the plot. e limits of this enmeshment are,
however,highlighted by the punctuation in the passage, which connects animal
lives through colons but closes o the human action by a full stop. ese textual
borders between human and non-human animals show that while animals are
central to an understanding of land as a shared lifeworld, they are not always
allowed to partake in the human action in any signicant way.
While animals move between subject and object positions, their capturing
requires signicant creaturely adaptation and attentiveness by the human
characters which in turn involves animals in the borderscaping process. While
the normative dimension of borders is discussed discursively in the novel, the
embodied encounters of the protagonists with their environment highlight in
particular the strategies and the connections between in/visibility, space and
power which Brambilla and colleagues identify as central to borderscaping
(2015, 2). Adaptation and in/visibility are central to Leithen’s endeavour of
poaching ash on the Bandicott estate which begins with him pretending to
be a naturalist taking photographs of the estate and ends with him locked in
the Bandicottses garage in the disguise of a tramp. More signicantly, however,
thechallenge of poaching from well-guarded estates requires a change of strategy.
Involving Benjie in the ploy because of his ability to merge with the environment
and move freely and invisibly within and across estates is a crucial part of this
new strategy. Benjie is described not only as having a thorough understanding
of the Highland environment and its non-human creatures but also as an expert
in strategies of creaturely adaptation: Benjie is an expert in reading the land
and his skills extend to predicting the weather based on animal behaviour and
craing whistles that can imitate the sounds of a variety of animals. His thorough
knowledge of the environment and its non-human inhabitants allow him to blur
into the landscape, making him the perfect accomplice for the Macnabs.4 Aside
from Benjie’s assistance, the mission also depends on Leithen’s ability to read the
environment and observe creaturely behaviour rather than relying on previous
knowledge. Acute attentiveness to the salmon’s actual movement patterns leads
Leithen to identify a stream for his endeavour which, at rst sight, had ‘looked
Territory 163
oily, stagnant, and unshable’ but turns out to be ‘one of those irrational haunts
which no piscatorial psychologist has ever explained’ (1925, 106). When Leithen
appears just about to fail the challenge, it is the unexpected appearance of an
otter in the stream that changes the outcome: Leithen cuts a wedge out his
salmon to give the impression that the otter had come back to claim his prize,
assuaging the suspicions of the landowners. e success of the challenge is owed
to a combination of the skill to pay close attention to the non-human and the
ability for creaturely adaptation: the discovery of the unexpected movements of
the salmon makes the poaching possible in the rst place, while the presence
ofthe otter, together with Benjie’s invisibility, is vital in making it a success.
Another kind of adaptation and in/visibility tactics is required of Charles
Lamancha whose poaching of a stag in the nal challenge relies on the expertise
in creaturely adaptation of his stalking guide Wattie Lithgow which Lamancha
is required to mimic. Wattie, like Benjie, is able to move unseen by both human
and non-human animals: when Lamancha sees ‘nothing human in the sopping
wilderness’, Wattie perceives the navvies and stops before they are detected (167).
e real danger of detection, however, is posed by the deer themselves who are
much more perceptive of their surroundings than the navvies. Moving close to
them can only be mastered with a guide like Wattie who moves instinctively
along fox’s tracks and who, ‘by his sense of the subtle eddies of air’, is able to
‘shape a course which prevented their wind from shiing deer behind them’
(170). While they remain undetected from the ghillies and navvies, it is a hind
that threatens to reveal their presence, acting as a non-human border guard of
sorts. e continual need to adapt their movements to avoid raising the hind’s
suspicion presents ‘one of the severest bodily trials which Lamancha had ever
known’ which requires them to move ‘on their bellies like serpents’ (170) and
to distract the hind by barking sounds from opposing directions (171). e
challenge reaches its climax when Wattie and Lamancha reach a waterfall, the
crossing of which almost spoils their hunt. Traversing the waterfall rst, Wattie
seems to turn into an amphibious creature, submerging almost fully into the
water and, when moving through the peat wallow on the river’s bank, ‘his face
seemed to be ground into the moss, and his limbs to be splayed like a frog’s and to
move with frog-like jerks’ (174). In an attempt to master an imitation of Wattie’s
expertly performed creaturely adaptation, Lamancha fully immerses himself
into the terraqueous environment around the waterfall, rst ‘dipp[ing] his face
so deep in the black slime that his nostrils were plugged with it’ and, when the
hind is alarmed by the sounds, lying down in the stream ‘choking, with the water
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination164
running up into his nose’ (175). Together with the misty weather which clears
up during their stalking and descriptions of the terrain as precipitous, rough and
wet, the novel’s attentiveness to bodily sensations, to wind, soil and water and its
vivid description of creaturely mobility draws its readers into the land itself and
presents territory from within planetary habitation rather than from an imperial
cartographical view. Lamancha fails to translate his memory of the map into the
moving, living lifeworld of his surroundings in which borders are constituted
through rocks, water and the movement of animals rather than abstract legal
frameworks. rough their creaturely movement, the characters realize an
understanding of territory in an environmental, rather than a legal sense and the
detail with which their embodied immersion into the land is narrated serves to
blur and fade the relevance of political and legal borders against the immediacy
of the living world.
As these examples show, strategies of adaptation, including creaturely
adaptations, are necessary in navigating the territory of the estate and moving
across the dispersed territorial borders of land ownership. e close encounters
with the environment these strategies include highlight territory once again in
a double sense: as a politico-legal structure dened by borders, and as a living
environment. Animals do not adhere to these borders, nor do borders appear as
signicant categories when viewed from within the land where the immediate
experience of the environment takes over the story. e encounter with the ‘auld
hero’, whom Lamancha and Wattie stalk, equally highlights borders as human
constructs that may overlap but are not congruent with animal territoriality: as
Wattie explains, the old stag is ‘no a Haripol beast’ but ‘a traiveller, and in one
season will cover the feck o’ the Hielands’ (172). Similarly, even though the deer
in the sanctuary are said to be as safe ‘as inside a barb-wire fence’ (183), there
are no physical borders such as deer fences to keep the animals on one estate
or another in this novel. e territorial defence of the estate centres not around
its outer borders but is determined by the animals’ movements, centring on the
spots in which they are found or can be moved. is dispersal of the border
demonstrated through the positioning of the ghillies across the estate, guarding
rivers and deer forests, is also revealed as destabilizing the actual borders of the
estate when Leithen is caught out by navvies on Haripol. Pretending to be a
landowner out for a walk on his own land, he accuses the navvies who are not
local to the area to be trespassing on Machray instead of admitting to his own
trespass. e casual nature with which Leithen succeeds in his deception reveals
territory and its borders as largely illusory, discursive constructs built upon
consensus. is is supported by the ending in which there are no ramications
Territory 165
of the protagonist’s border transgressions, and (estate) borders are ultimately
revealed as inconsequential.
***
Almost a hundred years aer its publication, Buchan’s John Macnab (1925)
enjoys a surprising and remarkable legacy. In 1976 the novel was adapted into a
television series written by John Prebble, and in 1996 Andrew Greig published
e Return of John Macnab, an updated version of the story which speaks to
the politics of Greig’s time by including debates about devolution, globalization,
therise of animal rights activism and the right to roam movement.5 Besidessuch
thoughtful engagements with the story, Buchan’s novel also lives on outside the
realm of ction in the form of the hunting challenge. Stripping the original
story of its political implications, commercialized versions of the ‘John Macnab
challenge’ provide a hunting experience in which the Highlands actually become
like a theme park in which the wealthy pay for access to participate in the killing
of animals. Today’s classic Macnab challenge requires the killing of a sh, grouse
and stag on one day and is oered on a number of Highland sporting estates for
prizes of £3000 per ‘sportsman’, oen in collaboration with the British Association
for Shooting and Conservation. International organizers of shooting trips like
Delaney and Sons further increase the popularity of the challenge beyond the
UK where it ourishes in various adaptations, including the ‘Ladies Macnab
challenges’, ‘e Ferrari Macnab’ or the ‘Royal Macnab’ hunting safari in South
Africa.6 e advertising of the challenges on You Tub e highlights the dierence
from John Buchan’s critical engagement with (Highland) territory. Discursive
celebrations of romance and adventure are accompanied by dramatic music and
visuals of hunters moving through rough environments to highlight that physical
endurance and sportsmanship are the main features of the challenge. At the end,
the successful hunt is celebrated in extravagant black-tie events at traditional
hunting lodges which evoke an air of nostalgia for a past age of aristocratic and
imperial glory (SauerundSohn 2016; e Field Magazine 2017).
Even though the modern challenges reference Buchan’s novel, and the 2021
Game Fair festival oered a screening of John Prebble’s television adaptation
of John Macnab (1976), the philosophy of the challenge is exchanged by a
focus on the Macnab as ‘a thrilling test of sporting skill’ (e Field 2021). e
commercialized legacy of Buchan’s novel that is created by hunting associations,
game fairs and Highland estates inherits little if anything of the subtle
interrogations of territory and critical potential of the original text by reducing
it to a story about a hunting adventure. Like the critical vignettes discussed
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination166
earlier in this chapter, however, John Macnab actively engages with Scotland’s
political situation through an environmental lens. Buchan’s novel uses hunting
and adventure as vehicles for a discussion of larger issues such as modernization,
land ownership, the representation of the Highlands and the nature of territory
itself through an attentive merging of legal, political and environmental
perspectives. Buchan’s understanding of territory as not just a legal framework
but a dynamic and shiing lifeworld experienced through mobile engagements
with the natural world does not strive to the completion of the challenge or even
a specic political agenda. e fact that the modern Macnab challenges simplify
Buchan’s engagement with territory in the way they do highlights even more
that, even if his tongue-in-cheek play with literary conventions may not present a
real challenge to the status quo, literature may be able to create ctional versions
of what Fiona Mackenzie terms ‘places of possibility’ in which ‘norms that had
previously conned political possibility are now unsettled and new imaginaries
congured’ (2013, 4). e manifold tensions that characterize Buchan’s John
Macnab highlight its potential as an experimental playing eld in which settled
ideas about territory may be challenged and new perspectives may be tested out.
6
Conclusion
Reecting on the persistence of borders across history and how they shape our
perspectives on the world in fabricating truth and presenting us with an invented
version of reality, Henk van Houtum (2011) wonders how, instead of trying to
do away with borders, we might begin to remake them. Rather provocatively,
van Houtum asks us to reect on our ability to dream borders dierently:
Do we dare to de-border ourselves, do we dare to embrace the untamed freedom
but with the preservation of certainty, comfort and ease? Do we dare to cross the
border of the imagined dark forest out there and enter the forest without fear,
or does the forest precisely exist because of our stories about it? Is a road to a
familiar openness thinkable, dreamable?
(2011, 59)
Literature dares its readers to do exactly this. While providing us with a
space that allows us to experience the freedom of de-bordering ourselves by
entering and immersing ourselves in the lifeworlds of a ctional realm and its
(human and non-human) characters, the storiness of literary works also gives
us comfortand certainty. By inviting us to reect on our assumptions about
the world, our own enmeshment within it, and the borders we draw, not just
between us and the world but between one another, literature has the power to
oer us thinkable, dreamable alternatives to the way borders, the environment
and the relationship between them are commonly understood.
As I have tried to show, the literary texts discussed in this book enter into
dialogue with the Scottish environment in order to probe at the b/ordering
structures that shape our world(views). By looking at three literary forms
mobilized by writers from the nineteenth century to the present – the littoral,
planetarity and territory – I detailed how writers make use of the geographical,
environmental and political aordances of Scotland to examine and recongure
geopolitical and social borders. By focusing on literary works that think through
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination168
Scotland, rather than from or about Scotland, I have tried to highlight the
literary aordances of a Scottish context for addressing the conuence between
borders and the environment without falling into methodological nationalism.
By reading borders through Scotland’s environment, I have argued, such literary
works can help us better understand borders as construed and maintained
through our stories and show us that they are consequently open to a shared
reimagination.
In proposing that literature can present a critical intervention in debates
on the relationship between borders and the environment, I draw on Robert
Eaglestone’s denition of literature as ‘a living conversation’ (2019, 6). In
treating literature as a living conversation, we allow it to enter into multiple
dialogues. I have focused on creating a dialogue between theory and literature
to highlight the contribution literary works can make to debates on borders
and the environment. rough the combination of critical vignettes and case
studies spread across two centuries of literary history, I have also tried to
establish a dialogue between literary works across periods and genres based on
their formal characteristics. What results from this, I have tried to show, is not
a one-sided conversation (in the sense of a development of each ancillary form
over time) but one that goes both ways: we can read Buchan’s mobilization of
territory through Scott, just as much as we can read Scott’s territories through
Buchan. e acknowledgement of this reciprocal relationship between literary
works requires another kind of dialogue: between the text and the reader. In this
Conclusion I will brieyelaborate on these multiple overlapping conversations,
enabled by literary form, that have structured my research.
Exploring theoretical challenges by putting theory into dialogue with
literature has helped me better understand some of the intellectual, political and
moral challenges of our time in relation to both borders and the environment.
While theory provides us with useful frameworks for an understanding of
borders and the environment, theoretical debates oen tend to remain on an
abstract level that is largely removed from real-world experiences. Literary
scholars like Robert Eaglestone and Terry Eagleton have proposed ways to
bridge this gap and highlight the value of literature to complement abstract
thought with experiential knowledge. Eaglestone’s builds on Terry Eagleton’s
argument that ‘[p]oetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience,
but with the experience of meaning’ (2013, 192). is, of course, depends on
how we approach and read literature. In contrast to theoretical classications,
Eaglestone argues, we might understand literature as ‘an action or cra that we
do’ rather than something we know: ‘Enjoying a walk is dierent from following
Conclusion 169
the map of its route; appreciating the owers of the hedgerow is not the same as
knowing their formal botanical names’ (2019, 5). Literature translates theoretical
challenges into experiences and infuses them with meaning. In contrast to
theory, as Wolfgang Funk, Irmtraud Huber and Natalie Roxburgh argue, literary
‘[f]orm makes experience relatable; it translates our being-in-the-world’ (2019,
8). Imaginative experiments with literary form can provide us with an additional
and versatile toolbox to broaden our understanding of borders and provide
us with imaginative visions of how borders might be construed dierently in
connection with the environment.
By combining critical vignettes with longer case studies in all of my chapters,
I have aimed to highlight the portability of literary forms and show how these
forms may speak to our present concerns about borders and the environment
even when they are found in texts published two hundred years ago. Rather
than tracing a teleological development, I was more interested in how literary
forms resonated with writers at dierent points in time. e constellations that
resulted allow literary works of dierent genres and periods to enter into a
conversation because of their use of form. ese constellations, as I suggested
in the introduction to this book, are not meant to be exhaustive but rather serve
as a starting point for an open-ended conversation. Reading literary works
through form, rather than socio-historical contexts, allows them to be put
to work in other contexts and to speak to our present moment. As Michaela
Bronstein has argued, literary forms make ‘an aesthetic appeal to the future
[…] that has political uses’ and for that reason they ‘are oen precisely the most
usefulthings about the texts of the past for the readers of the future’ (2018, 8).
For this aesthetic appeal to be harnessed for our present and for its political uses
to emerge, however, literary forms demand creative readerly collaboration.
In order to unfold their political potentialities, literature needs readers that
are open to taking part in their meaning-making because, as Rita Felski reminds
us, ‘[a] text’s formal properties […] cannot single-handedly decide or determine
its cross-temporal reach, which also pivots on the vagaries and contingencies
of its relations with many other actors – humans, other texts, institutions’
(2011,588). While I have tried to demonstrate the portability of the literary
forms that I have discussed, what we make of them and how we harness their
political potential to speak to the conditions of our present depends on our
creative engagement with literature through our reading practices. If we let them,
literary forms can help us better understand our present and shape our future.
Felski tries to get at this when she invites us to see literary works as co-actors in
their own meaning-making and asks us to inquire: ‘What does this text create,
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination170
build, make possible?’ (2015, 182). As I have argued, allowing the literary forms
and works discussed in this book to enter into dialogue with theory provides a
more nuanced perspective on the complex relationship between borders and the
environment than a purely theoretical or historicist approach. Even though I
open each chapter with theory, it is not theory that has led the conversation, but
literary form itself. Focusing on form has helped me to see the possibilities that
unfurl from aesthetic engagements with these topics and revealed the strange
agency of these forms in the oen-surprising eects they produce. Literary form
is only fully able to exert its agency and demonstrate its potentiality in relation
to other forms and to the reader. However, for this to happen, we need to give
literary form room to breathe.
When I began working on this research project, I thought it would turn
out completely dierent. With my background in cultural studies, I believed
that the most productive way to analyse the relationship between borders and
the environment would be a historicist approach. I wanted to nd out about
thehistory of this relationship and how it had developed since the nineteenth
century in relation to emergent structures of feeling and socio-political changes.
e decision to begin in the nineteenth century resulted from this historicist
framework. I wanted to include the works of Walter Scott, which I felt must be
formative for conceptualizations of borders as dynamic constructs in Scotland
and internationally, because that was what the scholarship I had read claimed.
At the same time, I always felt a slight discomfort with structuring my book,
containing research that was centrally concerned with the non-human world,
according to arbitrary human period markers. I struggled with seeing the
connection between bordering processes and environmental politics reected
in the literary works that I read. When I came across Caroline Levine’s Forms
(2015), I was therefore immediately taken by how literary forms allowed me
to see these connections in ways that theory and history did not. I went back
toliterary works that I had previously dismissed because I was now able to see
how they drew directly on the aordances of Scotland’s environmental, political
and geographical situation in order to recongure geopolitical and social
borders. Stepping back from the comfort zone of historicist analysis allowed me
to see the ‘surprising and unintentional political eects’ that, as Levine argues,
forms produce (2006, 627).
At the same time, adopting a new formalist approach, and combining it with
Felski’s postcritical reading practice (2015), required a dierent kind of reading
and researching than I was used to or trained for. Many of the literary works
I discuss in this book were serendipitous nds because looking for forms that
Conclusion 171
would articulate the relationship between borders and the environment would
not allow me the same kind of systematic compilation of a corpus that historicist
approaches would have. is does not mean that I did not have a (very extensive)
reading list, but it meant that I was required to take a step back from classifying
the works into neat categories. Rather than structuring my book according to
literary or historical periods, I now wanted to structure it according to literary
forms and I speculated upon which forms I might nd, basing these ideas again
on what I had learned from theory and history. As a result, I came up with forms
that I thought I might most likely encounter: periphery, scale, temporality,
land and the creaturely. As will be clear by now, these are not the forms that
I ultimately ended up with, even though some elements of them are visible in
the chapters. Again, I had made the mistake of structuring and predetermining
my reading, and when I turned to the literary texts that I had selected, they
resisted the categories that I had set for them. is meant that I had to take
a step back from the frameworks that had structured my reading and let the
literary works speak for themselves, to enter into dialogue with them to nd out
which forms (if any) they were making use of and how they were drawing on
Scotland’s aordances in the process. is led me to recognize that Willa Muir’s
use of temporality was part of a larger aesthetics that might best be described as
littoral. It made me listen to the resistance in Nan Shepherd’s writing to scalar
reading practices and to understand that what emerged from her works could
more accurately be described as a planetary form of writing. And it let me to see
that rather than employing a creaturely form of writing, or simply a form that
would express ideas about land, Buchan was merging those concerns through
the form of territory. By treating literary form as a method of thought, I allowed
room for forms to breathe and to lead the conversation into unexpected and
unforeseen directions.
Once I could identify a literary form, I was able to see it unfold in a range
of other works. ere are many literary works that I read which did not make
it into the book, even though they have very interesting things to say about
either borders or the environment. Most oen this was because they did not
develop a form that would articulate the relationship between borders and
the environment. Sometimes they did develop fascinating literary forms, but
these were not reected in any of the other works that I read. ere are other
texts that I put down because I could not see what forms were emerging from
them until I picked them up again later, having read the works of other authors
whose writing mobilized the same form in similar ways. As in John Buchan’s
John Macnab, discussed in the nal chapter of this book, there was no truth
Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination172
to be gained in trying to excavate hidden meanings. Instead, I had to give
the literary works I was reading the space to unfold their meaning or, in van
Houtum’s words cited earlier, I had to de-border myself and let go of my critical
assumptions. is process, which asked me to continually reect on the stories
and ctions that I brought to the texts I was reading, made me wonder how
oen our scholarly reading practices preclude the possibility of un-bordering
ourselves and of dreaming dierent borders. At the end of this process is a book
that presents a methodological intervention in (Scottish) Literary Studies and
the environmental humanities that I hope demonstrates the political and literary
merit of methodological approaches beyond historicism. is is an intervention
that I did not quite intend or foresee myself at the beginning and I was only able
to make it because I let the literature take me with it in a collaborative process.
But, as I like to believe, it was this approach that yielded the most productive
understanding of Scotland’s aordance for fostering literary imaginaries that
worry at and reshape the relationship between borders and the environment.
Notes
Introduction
1 For a documentation and critical reection of the new geographies created by
border closures during the Covid-19 pandemic which also highlight how the
new border geographies created by pandemic measures aected the drawing of
socialboundaries, see Fall (2020) and Wille and Weber (2021).
2 For a discussion of the future of the UK in the aermath of Covid-19 and Brexit,
see Behr (2020) and Lane (2020).
3 For a critical discussion of climate migration that attends to imperial legacies and
capitalist systems of circulating movement, see Nail (2020).
4 Notable examples of this desire to make sense of the pandemic through creative
engagement by Scottish writers include the Write Where We Are Now project
launched by Carol Ann Duy, the blog A Plague of Poetry: 50 Days of Poems
(https://pestilencepoems.blogspot.com), the National eatre of Scotland’s Scenes
for Survival series, and various contributions by Scottish writers such as Kevin
MacNeil (‘Hebridean Moon’, 2020), Kevin Reid (‘If I Get to Scotland’, 2020) or
Sarah Cameron (‘Fenced in’, 2020) to the Pendemic journal (http://pendemic.ie).
Chapter 2
1 Despite these new lines of inquiry, the arbitrary distinction between borders
and boundaries remains and poses terminological diculties, especially when
considered in relation to the environment. Since there is no consensus on the
dierences between these two terms, suggestions abound. Most oen, borders are
regarded as more stable and boundaries as more exible and liminal constructs
(Viljoen 2013). Considering the connections between bordering and environmental
discourses, Casey (2017, 2020) and Fall (2011) distinguish between borders
(human-made) and boundaries (rivers, mountains). is is an understandable
but unhelpful distinction when trying to make sense of the correlation between
borders and the environment. e most productive approach for an environmental
reading of borders appears to be Rosello and Wolfe’s border aesthetics approach
which considers borders as functioning on layered, overlapping and interacting
topographical, symbolic, temporal, epistemological and textual planes (2017,14).
Notes174
By incorporating the complexities inherent in denitions of borders and
boundaries alike, this approach renders a distinction between those terms
superuous and I will consequently use them as synonymous.
2 In outlining the new agenda of critical border studies, Parker and Vaughan-
Williams further explicitly urge an inclusion of, amongst others, environmental
planning, adding an environmental subdimension to the approach (2009, 583).
3 I am using the term ‘deconstructive ecocriticism’, rather than ‘eco-deconstruction’
because I want to highlight a deconstructive methodological approach within
ecocriticism conducive also to the methods of new formalism and postcritical
reading that I see in particular in the work of Clark and Morton. While
deconstructive ecocriticism destabilizes, I believe, conventional ecocritical methods
and terminologies, the term ‘eco-deconstruction’ feels less disruptive to ecocritical
thinking and more attuned to an ecological turn in deconstruction akin to
developments such as eco-phenomenology or eco-hermeneutics. Nevertheless, the
theorizations of eco-deconstruction by David Wood (2019) Timothy Clark (2012)
and Clark’s work with Philippe Lynes (2023) inform my approach.
4 For a discussion of ecological reading as a critical practice that considers all texts as
potentially environmental, see Kern (2000) or Morton (2014). Clark himself agrees
that reading such texts that do not have a clear environmental(ist) focus may be
precisely what is needed to tackle the ‘unreadability’ of the Anthropocene (2015,
63).
5 Seminal studies combining an examination of borders and the environment in
literature through an implicit or explicit archipelagic perspective include, for
example, Glissant (1997), Baucom (1999), Norquay and Smyth (2002), Smith
(2013), Brannigan (2014), Allen, Groom and Smith (2017), Noudelmann (2018)
and Ritson (2019). In an article focusing on the travel writing and ction of Robert
Louis Stevenson, I discuss the aordances of mobility for fostering an archipelagic
perspective which reveals the porosity of geopolitical borders (Ditter 2021).
6 Muir follows in the footsteps of G. Gregory Smith who, in 1919, developed the
concept of the Caledonian Antisyzygy to describe the contradictory nature
of a split Scottish psyche. While concepts like G. Gregory Smith’s Caledonian
Antisyzygy (1919) and the discussion of Scottish culture as a minority culture can
be productive in certain contexts, they simultaneously continue to pathologize
it as essentially schizophrenic and inherently lacking and inferior. Davis (1998)
discusses the roots of such predicament thinking in the Union of 1707; Bell
(2004), Schoene (2007) and McGuire (2009) all oer summaries and criticism of
the debates over these perceptions of Scottish culture. Published at the time of
the2014 Scottish independence referendum, the rst Supplement to e Bottle Imp
is dedicated to these discussions and explores new approaches to national literary
histories through cultural studies, area studies and transnational theories.
Notes 175
7 See, for example, Parker and Vaughan-Williams (2009), Brambilla (2015) and
Bossong etal. (2017).
8 Shaw discusses the renewal of debates on Scotland’s borders in the context of the
2014 referendum for Scottish independence which brought the border itself back
into focus (2018, 8).
9 MacLachlan criticizes Scottish writers’ instrumentalization of nature for nationalist
purposes and argues that Scottish literary depictions of the environment nd
themselves in a struggle between complying with and resisting a sentimental
national myth of a harmonious coexistence between land and people (1998, 189).
Withers (2001) shows how geography has shaped the Scottish nation through
territorial and historical knowledge and everyday acts that give shape to the
territory. Womack (1989), Jonsson (2013) and Hunter (2014) discuss the role
which the Highlands play in these constructions and how they were simultaneously
representative of an understanding of Scotland through its environment and
excluded from nation-building projects through internal processes of colonizsation
under the guise of improvement.
10 Romanticism was long regarded as a domain of English literature. Scottish
Romanticism, by contrast, has been dened as inauthentic, with Scotland being
regarded solely as the object, but not the producer of Romanticism (Duncan, Davis
and Sorensen 2004, 1–4).
11 For a historical perspective on the origins of environmental consciousness in the
Scottish Highlands, see Smout (2009) and Jonsson (2013).
Chapter 3
1 For a more detailed discussion of access regulations, surveillance practices and
attempts at segregation on the beach, see Kluwick and Richter (2015).
2 I borrow this term from Penny Fielding, who in turn borrows it from Walter Scott.
Fielding uses it to describe the coastal geographies, economy and social practices of
Shetland and the amphibious writing style of Shetlandic literature (2021, 275).
3 For a more detailed discussion on traditions of writing on the Solway, see Staord
(2017) and Stewart (2021).
4 e literary works that come to mind here include Jessie Saxby’s Rock-Bound: A
Story of the Shetland Isles (1877), John Buchan’s e Island of Sheep (1936), George
Mackay Brown’s Vinland (1992), Margaret Elphinstone’s e Sea Road (2000) and
Malachy Tallack’s Sixty Degrees North (2015). For an overview on Scandinavian
perspectives in Scottish literature see, for example, Margaret Elphinstone (2006),
Michael Stachura (2013) or Claire McKeown (2017).
Notes176
5 Muir not only studied, researched and taught psychology, but she was also a
translator of German-language writing. Given that Civilisation was one of Sigmund
Freud’s most widely read works, it can be assumed that she would have read
the book when it was published in German and that this passage is a conscious
reference to the work. is is far from the only possible reference to Civilisation,
and the concept of ‘oceanic feeling’ as a source of non-institutionalized, instinctive
religiosity which Freud develops at the beginning of this book might have inspired
Muir in her representation of Elizabeth’s spiritual engagement with the sea.
6 For a discussion on the homogenizing tendencies of absolute time that replaced
local times and obscured the connection between temporality and natural
processes, see West-Pavlov (2013, 23; 78–9).
7 In advocating for a view of time as a multiplicity of ‘immanent, entity- and
material-inhabiting temporalities’ (2013, 141), West-Pavlov builds upon the work
of Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of his theories. Being familiar
with Bergson’s concept of durée, Muir was able to transform his ideas creatively by
demonstrating how these temporalities may collide and redirect one another in the
lifeworlds of her characters.
8 rough this debate, Muir anticipates early ecofeminist debates about the histories
behind the association of women and the environment that can be found in the
early studies of Caroline Merchant (1983) and Val Plumwood (1993), whereas
Muir’s narrative interventions can be seen to anticipate more recent theories such
as those oered by Stacey Alaimo (2008) and Astrida Neimanis (2017).
Chapter 4
1 Heise operates with a method of moving between scales akin to Clark’s multiscalar
reading practice. While productive in some contexts, the term ‘glocal’ which Heise
employs, and which is oen used in Scottish studies to highlight the manifold
interrelations between local and global perspectives, thus cannot capture the
complexities of the planetary form developed by the writers discussed in this
chapter any more than the concept of scale. Its reiteration of distinct and scalable
categories such as the global prevents it from fostering the productively disruptive
collisions and achieved by planetary theorizations and writings.
2 I discuss this in more detail in an article for Nineteenth-Century Contexts in which I
examine the archipelagic quality of Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing by focusing on
the potential of mobility as another literary form that allows writers to recongure
borders through a mobile engagement with the (Scottish) environment (see Ditter
2021).
Notes 177
3 is includes cultural nationalist readings of Scottish national identity which, as
Bell argues, paradoxically tend to simultaneously condemn and claim parochialism
as a characteristic of Scottish literature (2004, 50). Central to this is Cairns Craig’s
assertion that Scottish literature is haunted by the threat of its own parochialism
which leaves writers and critics alike with a feeling of inadequacy (1996, 11–12;
discussed by Bell 2004, 50–1).
Chapter 5
1 See, for example, George Monbiot’s argument that the Highlands are uniquely
suited for rewilding projects exactly because of the Clearances and Scottish laws on
land ownership (2014, 99).
2 I agree with John Miller who argues that even though the careful attentiveness to
the environment in Buchan’s ction shows ‘an environmentalist at work’ (2009,
195), it nevertheless needs to be approached with caution because reading Buchan’s
novels ‘as a template for environmentalism would be deeply problematic in terms of
environmental and social justice’ (204).
3 is, of course, raises some questions and highlights the moral contradictions in
Buchan’s political views about imperialism which he believed was justied (see, for
example, Macdonald and Wadell 2013, 4).
4 While Benjie is one of the most active and central characters of the novel, it is
important to note that his representation is not always unproblematic, for example
when Benjie’s status as a Scottish tinker is described in some length and with
distinct racist undertones when Buchan rmly distinguishes Benjie, a white tinker,
from ‘gipsies’ who have ‘Romany speech or colouring’ (1925, 47).
5 For a comparison of Buchan’s novel and Greig’s rewriting from an ecological and
political perspective, see Giord (2013).
6 See, for example, SauerundSohn (2020), Fieldsports Channel (2012) and Bayly
Sippel Hunting Safaris (2020).
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borders
as contact zones 31, 33, 35–6, 38–9, 54
and identity
class 42–3, 48, 50, 56, 58, 132–3,
134, 145–6, 149–50, 165
gender 42–3, 48, 56–7, 64–8, 116,
143, 158–9
language 36, 82
race and ethnicity 46
religion 48, 54–5
sexuality 51–2, 62–8
bodily borders 44, 52, 54–5, 62–8
Highland Boundary Fault 9, 44–5
literary borders 2–3, 24–6, 35, 43, 45,
78–9, 81, 92–4, 105–6, 126, 130,
138, 147, 167–8
national borders 1–3, 20, 24–6, 35,
43, 45, 78–9, 81, 92–4, 105–6,
126, 130, 138 (see also national
identity)
‘natural’ borders 7–11, 30–1, 35–6
Buchan, John
John Macnab (1925) 145–66
‘Streams of Water in the South’ (1896)
36–8
Duy, Carol Ann, ‘River’ (1990) 36
ecocriticism
and borders 11–13
and deconstruction 4, 10–2, 99, 174 n.3
and Scotland 20, 26–8
Clark, Timothy 11–12, 23, 69–72, 77
Elphinstone, Margaret 39
A Sparrow’s Flight (1989) 91–4
Felski, Rita 13, 19, 169–72
Grassic Gibbon, Lewis 58
Sunset Song (1932) 58, 136
‘e Land’ (1934) 133–6
Gray, Alasdair, Lanark (1981) 89–91
Greig, Andrew, e Return of John
Macnab (1996) 165
Haggith, Mandy, Bear Witness (2013) 39,
143–5
Hall, Sarah, e Wolf Border (2015) 2
Jacob, Violet, ‘e Wild Geese’ (1915)
Jamie, Kathleen
‘Here Lies Our Land’ (2013) 136–8
‘In Fife’ (2015) 137
Jenkins, Robert, e Cone Gatherers
(1955) 142–3
Lanchester, John, e Wall (2019) 2,
16–17
Levine, Caroline 13, 15–16, 59, 127–8,
150, 170
literary form 13–19, 169–72
ancillary forms 4, 17–18, 168
littoral (see littoral as a literary
form)
planetarity (see planetarity as a
literary form)
territory (see territory as a literary
form)
and genre 102, 138, 150–1
critical vignettes 4–5, 18, 30, 70, 124,
168
new formalism 3–5, 13–19, 169–72,
174 n.3
postcritical reading 13, 19, 169–72
littoral 91–2, 139
as a literary form 32–5
danger and pollution 54–5
denition 30–2
lakes and rivers 36–7, 43–5
materiality 32–5, 37, 40–4, 50–5, 64–5
politics 34, 46, 48, 62
seashore 29–33, 37–40, 42, 48, 50–1
temporalities 34, 41, 45, 50–1, 55,
58–62
Index
Index194
MacDiarmid, Hugh
‘Au Clair de la Lune’ (1925) 81–2
‘In Memoriam James Joyce’ (1955) 80
‘e Eemis Stane’ (1925) 80–1
MacPherson, Ian, Wild Harbour (1936)
140–2
McGrath, John, e Cheviot, e Stag
and the Black, Black Oil (1973)
132–3, 135–6
Moss, Sarah, Summerwater (2020) 43–6
Muir, Willa, Imagined Corners (1931)
47–68
national identity 20–4, 26–7, 78, 135, 137,
138, 157–8 (see also national
borders)
Scandinavian Scotland 38–40, 94, 144,
158
Scottishness 24, 27
transnationalism 19, 22–3, 25, 38
planetarity
and scale 70–3, 113
and the global 72–4, 80
and the local 76–9, 80, 112
as a literary form 76–8
carbon capitalism 84–8, 89, 91
denition 70–6
materiality 108–9, 111, 115, 119–20
postcolonial theory 74–7
temporalities 71, 111–14, 116, 121
regional perspectives
Highlands 9, 43–7, 82–9, 130, 132–3,
140, 145–66
North East Scotland 48–9, 55–6, 68,
100, 102, 104, 107, 136
Scottish Borders 36–9, 91–4, 152
Shetlands 35, 39–42, 94–8
Solway Firth 36–9, 92, 138–40
Scott, Walter 46, 84
Redgauntlet (1824) 138
e Pirate (1822) 39–42
Shepherd, Nan (1893–1981) 98–122
e Living Mountain 98–102, 104, 108
e Quarry Wood 53, 56, 99, 102–8,
111–15, 136
e Weatherhouse 56, 99, 102, 107–11,
115–21
Smith, Ali, Spring (2019) 2
Tallack, Mallachy 39
Sixty Degrees North (2015) 94–6
e Valley at the Centre of the World
(2018) 94, 96–8
territory
and adventure ction 140–1, 147–51,
152, 154, 156–7
as a literary form 127–9
denition 125–7
dùthchas 131
embodiment 147, 154, 156, 160, 162–4,
166
Highland Clearances 130, 132–3, 145–66
land ownership in Scotland 130–2,
142–3, 144, 146, 151, 157–9,
164–5
nonhuman animals 129, 132–5, 140–3,
144–5, 151, 159, 161–5
wilderness 141, 152–7
transhistorical approaches 18–19, 22–3, 170
Vernes, Jules
Backwards to Britain (1989) 83, 84, 88
e Underground City (1877) 82–9
195
196
197
198
