An Image of the Whole Round Earth Planetary Scale and Perspective in Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance

• Published in: The Powys journal Vol. 34; pp. 120 - 139
• Main Author: WOOD, MICK
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bridgwater Powys Society 01.01.2024; The Powys Society
• Subjects: 20th century; Diaries; Earth; Ecocriticism; Functional heads; Literature; Modernism; Modernity; Nature; Novels; Powys, John Cowper (1872-1963); Quotations; Reading; Romances; Writing
• ISSN: 0962-7057

1 I choose to start with this quotation because of the powerful sense of continuity ... of life on the earth (human and non-human too)' that Powys described - and wished to share - as he prepared to begin what he called his 'interminable Glastonbury book'.2 This sense of continuity and connectedness between human and nonhuman nature empowers Powys' best writing to engage creatively and insightfully with the question that, for the critic J. Scott Bryson, is 'central . . . for artists and intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century', that is: 'how humans could somehow render their experiences with a more-than-human world'.3 Coming under the loose collective of critical readings described as environmental criticism or ecocriticism, Brysons intervention highlights how contemporary critics of modernist and early-twentieth-century literature are beginning to explore the period's relevance by re-reading canonical texts and rescuing neglected figures - like Powys - from the margins. Exemplary of this is Powys' close attention to small-scale natural phenomena - from the insects and creatures of A Glastonbury Romance (see AGR 705-706; 813), through the beaches 'covered with tiny little pyramidal hills composed of minute models in sand of the sand-worms that threw them up' in Weymouth Sands,b to the close focus on ostensibly trivial details that Jeremy Hooker describes as 'Ditch Vision': a response to the life of nature . . . that [results] in a relationship between the human and non-human which confirms the value of each'.7 Equally vital, as I want to suggest, is Powys' sense of planetary scale, which signals, as it does in my quotation from the diaries, his writing's abiding sense that the human should properly be understood in terms of its fundamental connectedness with the natural world and the material environment of the earth. Sam Dekker, in A Glastonbury Romance, becomes 'vividly conscious of himself as one entity among all the rest, carried along upon the night journey of the voyaging planet' (AGR 937).11 As these significant examples show, Powys' sense of the planetary is crucial in suggesting how the imperative to write and therefore share a sense of 'continuity' between human and nonhuman can be understood, at least in part, as an attempt to ground the human figure in the natural world, not (only) through the familiar Powysian turn to sensation, feeling or experience, but through the myriad ways in which the human is 'actually and literally' a part of material nature. Raymond Williams notably reduces Powys to a proponent of 'country-based fantasy'in The Country and the City (1973), while Terry Gifford frames Powys as an escapist offering 'full-blown Nature worship' as 'an attractive alternative, opposition even, to the turmoil of the times, as pastoral had been before'.13 The culmination of this critical heritage, perhaps, is Matthew Hart's sense that the novel exemplifies 'counter-modern modernism, wherein excrescences like the empire and the city are only present in their radical absence'.14 To such readers, Powys' rendition of the natural world marks his disengagement from the pressing realities of modernity, resulting in critical dismissals that echo Vernon Young's reductive picture of a writer who 'retreated throughout our mid-century . . . intimidated out of thought by the mounting contradictions of [his] time'.