Chapter Six
Steward of the Ineffable:
“Anxiety-Reflex” in/as the
Nature Writing of Liu Kexiang
(Or: Nature Writing against
Academic Colonization)
Nick Kaldis
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 com-
mon 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)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.