Customer Reviews

Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

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Although this is clearly a work in literary criticism, it is one that will appeal to those working in other areas. For instance, those working on Environmental Ethics will find a great deal of very information about how forests have been conceived in a great deal of the literature of the greater European world throughout history. Intellectual historians with an interest in how Europeans have conceived nature as a whole will find a great deal to interest them in this book that deals with forests in particular. But the primary audience is students of literature.

The narrative of the book runs chronologically to the dawn of written history to Frank Lloyd Wright, though the vast majority of figures discusses are writers, and of those primarily writers of nonfictional literature. Harrison discusses an immense range of writers and works, from the EPIC OF GILGAMESH to Chaucer to Dante to Shakespeare to Descartes to Rousseau to Wordsworth to the Brothers Grimm to Thoreau. Although Harrison's prose style is not exhilarating, I never found the book to be less than interesting.

Whether someone will find this interesting will depend on whether they want to know more about the way that forests have been conceived in European history. At various periods of time they have been view as scared, as dark places of fear, as resources for human exploitation, or as ecosystems valuable in their own right. Harrison does not touch upon all these aspects, but I don't think anyone interested in Western attitudes towards nature could help but find this book to be of the greatest help.

My old Cambridge tutor said that the only works of modern literary criticism he'd sell his shirt for were *Seven Types of Ambiguity* and *The Wheel of Fire*. For a long time I agreed. Then I read *Forests*. It is quite simply the most profound, the most moving, the best-written, the most important work of literary criticism of the late twentieth century.

My old Cambridge tutor said that the only works of modern literary criticism he'd sell his shirt for were *Seven Types of Ambiguity* and *The Wheel of Fire*. For a long time I agreed. Then I read *Forests*. It is quite simply the most profound, the most moving, the best-written, the most important work of literary criticism of the late twentieth century.

When I left to live in the Mexican High Sierra eight years ago, I had room for only four books - ones I could not live without: "Forests" was one of them. Through my many years as a mythologist and therapist, I'd not found any work to equal this fascinating, spiritual exploration into the real and symbolic forest. A long time ago, a student in landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia gave me a copy, requesting my opinion of it. Her wise and sensitive professor had made it required reading for his graduate students, and how many would be astute enough to recognize its importance?
Anyone with a true yearning to enter into the dark forest of myth and history, so beautifully explored by Joseph Campbell, will love Harrison's extraordinary revelations from the mythic past to the historical present, and emerge from the woods knowing that it's all part of the same mystery.

Harrison's work is pioneering in the sense that he delves into the human psyche as much as he does into the history of forests. By his definition, which is convincing, there are virtually no forests left in the world. For reasons the author explores, men for millennia have atacked forests and cleared them away. This destructive activity seems to have been universal, not wedded to a particular geography, culture or religion.

Harrison journeys through several epochs using the classical literature of the periods to illustrate his points. Frankly, his deeper medtitations that verge on philosophy and metaphysics were over my head. (One place he praises Heidegger for insights, in another he criticizes him. Nietszche ditto.) Nevertheless, the main thrust is clear: humans are at risk because they have denuded the world's landscape of the forests that up to now have provided the foundation for their culture, mores and myths.

What makes the book pessimistic, in my view, is that the behavior of humans over the millennia as illustrated by Harrison is overtly destructive and at the same time seemingly unreformable. Harrison makes a stab at optimism by, for example, praising the poetry of A. R. Ammons and the homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I admire them, too, but they have hardly taken the booboisie (H.L. Mencken's term) by storm. It's hard to know what comes next in human history given the looming desertification that is the current trend, but Harrison's work strongly intimates that the future is dicey for we humans.

A nice corollary read to Harrison's work is Leslie Marmon Silko's "Almanac of the Dead," written from a very deep Native American perspective.

There is a blurb on the back dust cover of my hardback edition by Bill McKibben, but McKibben's "End of Nature" is to Harrison's work as the Bowie Bay Sox are to the Boston Red Sox--not in the same league.

Harrison's book is exquisitely written, filled with both startling and subtle insights about how Westerners since the Greeks and Romans have imagined the nature and role of the wild places that lie always around the far edge of the cleared, cultivated, well-ordered places where civilized humans dwell. Harrison combines philosophy, history, and literature seamlessly. When you are finished reading this book, then read his later equally wonderful book: The Dominion of the Dead.

Why do we associate forests with magic, myths, transformations? This book is a meditation and a critical study of forests and man's relationship to them -- their natural form (botannical and animal), the property and ownership rights associated with them, and their role in literature and the human imagination -- from the early Greeks through the present day. Robert Pogue Harrison (the author) is a Stanford professor in the Italian studies department, but he is also a polyglot poetic spirit and philosopher, who reaches into shadows and pulls out sparkling insights.

This is the best book I've ever read. I read it in French translation (my language). Forests is a journey beyond civilisation, a journey to the source of culture. Unforgettable.

I was assigned portions of "Forests" for a research writing class. The writing is beautiful; the work as a whole is nearly overwhelming. Usually a difficult work does not have such a large payoff. The discussion on Walden in the fifth chapter is not to be missed.

Harrison explains that he is writing a "a physic history from which empirical history derives its inspiration." It is a history of the place of forests in the western psyche. For example, Harrison writes, "But why should forests haunt the mind like some mystical dream or nightmare that every now and then spreads its long, prehisotrical shadows over the ordinary clarity of things modern? On the basis of what "data of prehistory,"...does the forest become dense with associations and monstrous fears?"

His meta narrative is as follows: "Civilization define[s] itself at the outset over and against the forests." There has always been an antagonism between human culture centers and forests. Forests are a huge part of today's cultural memory.

His method is to scan works of culture, namely literature, for expressions of an attitude towards forests. His "ages" include your basic Greeks, Romans, medieval, Renaissance/humanism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernity.

Criticisms: Frequently looks at a bit of literature and concludes "forests were..." or "forests were becoming..." Harrison doesn't make explicit to whom they were "becoming..." That is, he is not too critical about the authors of his sources or the nature of their audiences. Did the limited reading audiences cut down the trees? If not, what were the concrete mechanisms of deforestation? He writes, here is the attitude, then, here is the scope of deforestation, there's no connection in between.
Harrison also has little respect for chronology; for example, Moses becomes an example of the medieval mindset.