The Tree

I got to Fowles via Nicholas Hughes, who quotes him in his monograph Nowhere Far (Hughes, 2017:78) – “The act of observation changes what is observed;  though here the catch lies in trying to describe the observation” (Fowles, 1979:36-7). This of course is a particularly apt quote since it also describes a well-known photographic conundrum.

Fowles assembles an argument against the scientific analysis of nature. I don’t find the argument completely convincing, but Fowles writes lyrically on the key issues and indeed has provided essays for a number of photography books on landscape, for example by Fay Godwin. Hence we have nature not as “some abstract intellectual concept” … but … “an experience whose deepest value lies in the fact that it cannot be directly described by any art” (Fowles, 1979:36)

To some extent this is his point – he is attempting to write about something to which mere writing cannot do justice, but it is important to make the attempt to convey this in any case, since this is precisely where the value of his subject lies.

Perhaps we should start with his point (echoed by Tree in Wilding) that we suffer from “an unhappy legacy from Victorian science” (Fowles, 1979:34) which he compares later with the eighteenth century attitude (Fowles, 1979:39) – although importantly he does not seem consistent in this and the writing seems to suffer from its own shifting baseline syndrome, moving this way and that depending on the point under discussion.

Fowles sets out his stall, nevertheless, in opposition to a scientific approach to nature: cataloguing, defining (e.g. Linnaeus), focusing (note the photographic link) “acts mentally as an equivalent of the camera view-finder” (Fowles, 1979: 31). “The true wood … is the sum of all its phenomena.  They are all in some sense symbiotic … it is only because such a vast sum of interactions and coincidences in time and place is beyond sciences’s calculation (a scientist might say, beyond useful function). (CHECK QUOTE) “This addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield, has now infiltrated all aspects of our lives – and become effectively synonymous with pleasure … the modern version of hell is purposelessness.” (Fowles, 1979:56-7)

The issue here is an inability to properly represent complex systems. At this point an aside – there is a strong parallel here with the issues of post-structuralism (and perhaps other posts- as well). There is a need to step outside the system to represent it. One potential solution lies in AI and the use of randomness to step outside the processing loop and to some extent look at things from a different perspective.

Developing this further, the protest argument that there is “no planet B” is well known. The idea that we live in a closed system is a structuralist argument – look after the place as it is the only place we’ve got. Yet in an infinite universe there is a planet B (and C, D, …) with something very close to certainty. But a post-structuralist, open system points us towards a hybrid approach, re-using old technologies, “the old ways” of living in nature, looking back to move forward. Hence in a kind of environmental conundrum the structuralist argument collapses but simultaneously the problem can perhaps be solved.

Fowles feels that the move towards observing, classifying, and scientifically understanding everything minutely misses the point of “ordinary experience” which he compares in turn to “wild nature” (Fowles, 1979: 40-41). Explores the idea of omniscience (complete knowledge) as the ultimate disastrous outcome which kills the soul (art). Again his essay acts as a strange example of his point (an issue he appears fully aware of) – since he cannot write about it without naming it. “Naming things is always implicitly categorising and therefore collecting them, attempting to own them” (Fowles, 1979:33). Note that one of Fowles earliest and most famous books was The Collector. “Nowhere are the two great contemporary modes of reproducing reality, the word and the camera, more at a loss”

Hence trees are “infinitely other beings” (Fowles, 1979:62) but “As long as nature is seen as in some way outside us, frontiered and foreign, separate, it is lost both to us and in us.” (Fowles, 1979:81). We used to live in nature, now the meaning of nature has changed to non-human habitat – a structuralist approach where the meaning of the sign nature is defined as its difference from somewhere we live. Exploring post-structuralism, we might consider a hybrid approach which learns from past approaches to invoked a more inclusive approach to human and non-human habitat? This “art of living” with/in nature is perhaps what we have most lost and most need to relearn. Later there will be references to “hyper-distinct” (Fowles, 1979:92) features in a wood, “ultrahumanity” (Fowles, 1979:74) and to Baudrillard’s “temple of living pillars” which I think refers to the quote “Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances” (FIND SOURCE). Working with nature we would find “thirty acres of scrub and rough pasture … just as much cultivated, though not in the literal sense” (Fowles, 1979:26). In other words a reference to the cultivation of the landscape in the form of grazed pasture by other animals than us.

Perhaps the final learning point, though, is that while we cannot live without nature, nature can live without us. We may destroy our environment, to the point even where it is uninhabitable by humans, but it will go on in some form without us. “We cannot swallow the sheer indifference, the ultrahumanity, of so much of nature.” (Fowles, 1979:74) Further still, we once consider the Forest, as the mountain, as evil.

The other aspect of the book is time. “Trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times” (Fowles, 1979:11). This speaks more of atmosphere than of the aeons of evolution, about which Fowles says “the danger, both in art and nature, is that all emphasis is placed on the created, not the creation” (Fowles, 1979:51) and furthermore nature’s “only purpose appears to be being and surviving” – but here is the trick – it is a function of time and randomness.  What we observe is biased by survivorship!  Nature is the created, the survived, and hence the conundrum the author is wrestling with.

The Tree might just be a valiant but ultimately failed attempt to explain the wonder of the woods if it were not for the final chapter, a descriptive tour-de-force of a visit to Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, “a drama, but of a time-span humanity cannot conceive” (Fowles, 1979:90). These days we are asked not to enter the wood to help protect if for and from human incursion, yet it is celebrated diversely in art in literature (Whist Hounds inspiring the Hound of the Baskervilles) and music (e.g. John Surman). We are in a strange place where we can revere and observe this fantastic, iconic wood from the outside, as other, but dare not enter. The fear of the wood has become one of losing it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Beech, P. (2017). John Fowles’s The Tree is a humble revolt against ‘usefulness’. The Guardian. At: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jan/10/john-fowless-the-tree-is-a-humble-revolt-against-usefulness (Accessed 5.2.2023)
2. Fowles, J. (1979) The Tree. London: Vintage (2000)
3. Hughes, N (2017) Nowhere Far. London: Gost
4. Whyte, A. (2022) Walk: Wistman’s Wood, Devon. UK: Countryfile. At: https://www.countryfile.com/go-outdoors/walks/walk-wistmans-wood-devon/ (Accessed 14.2.2023)