then he shows that an outraged community can stand up to its fears
of industrial ogres. This brilliant example of aesthetic perception
exemplifies, to paraphrase the well-known psychoanalytic process,
“regression in the service of the eco.”
To summarize, through the social and cultural act of writing, nature
writers increase awareness of the fact that society and discursive cul-
tural production are now irrevocably responsible for the continued
existence of that which is always to some degree otherto human-
industrial society, and, paradoxically, other to cultural production. Our
experience of nature is acknowledged by Liu Kexiang and many other
nature writers as being fraught with irreversible choice, permanent
loss, and a knowledge of the burden of being responsible for one’s fate,
as enacted in one’s representations of attitudes and actions toward the
environmental other.^21
This awareness is the origin of an anxiety one finds at the heart of
much Taiwan nature writing. Liu Kexiang speaks of this anxiety
(焦F8GH) as an “imminent principle” in a nature writer’s work
(Liu 2002). It is an anxiety that, directly expressed or left implicit, runs
like a shudder just beneath the surface of the words, a fear that notto
talk about nature’s beauty and mystery, notto turn it into an object of
discourse, notto symbolize our connection to its fragility, complexity,
and independence from us, notto do all this will result in a loss from
which no act of recovery, discursive, academic, or otherwise, will be
possible. Indeed, anxiety for many nature writers is a primary creative
impetus and an affectthat must be imparted to readers at all costs. It
is a state of emotional awareness that cannot be resolved through
generic conventions such as closure, parody, irony, catharsis, Deus ex
machina, or any other literary strategy. Nature writing, at its best,
creates and sustains unresolved states of anxiety.
This relationship to nature mirrors the state that existentialism
describes as humankind’s condition. Briefly summarized, it implies
that once we undertake sole responsibility for our decisions, actions,
and beliefs, humans are overcome by a permanent sense of anxiety.
For those who refuse to flee this state, unwilling to ignore or deny their
freedom and their responsibility, anxiety is a constant.^22 The world’s
current ecological crisis has indeed prompted a renewed existential
ethic among many nature writers, but layreaders and scholars are yet
to be swayed. These writers’ works warn us that the natural world
has, through technological developments and overpopulation, been
given over to man to either destroy—himself with it—or to preserve
against overwhelming odds. “Nature,” to paraphrase Sartre’s famous
formulation, “precedes essence.”
96 Nick Kaldis