Steward of the Ineffable: “Anxiety-Reflex” in/as the Nature Writing of Liu Kexiang (Or: Nature Writing against Academic Colonization)

Abstract

Wary of the myopia and stoicism that result when the lens of scientific thinking is focused on nature, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I fear this particular dry knowledge may affect my imagination and fancy, that it will not be easy to see so much wildness and native vigor there as formerly” (1858: 340). Nearly 150 years later, scholarly studies of nature writing struggle to comprehend, conceptualize, and assimilate the imagination, wildness, and vigor extolled by Thoreau, and to reconcile imaginative and affective nature writing with scholastic “dry knowledge”—the rational, logical thought and prose of academic discourse.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

(Thoreau 1983: 50)

Taiwan’s nature writers know that we can’t imitate traditional Chinese intellectuals of earlier times, ensconced as they were in their exclusive social circles, immersed in their own private worlds; there’s little common ground between us. We have to make concessions to this narrow little urban island culture, grope about for an appropriate new way of understanding … A new ecophilosophy must meet an urgent need—to be endowed with real-life applicability … When the criteria for observation are so complex, perhaps we must recognize that the so-called “anxiety reflex” exhibited in a nature writer’s works is an immanent principle; peaceful quietism is a castle in the air, a disavowal of and escape from reality.

(Liu Kexiang 2002: 4)