On Jonathan Franzen's "The Problem of Nature Writing"

Sand Dunes, Prince Edward Island (Photo by John MacDougall)

Jonathan Franzen, in his absorbing “The Problem of Nature Writing” (newyorker.com, August 12, 2023), argues (1) nature writing should be evangelical; (2) in order for nature writing to succeed as evangelism, it must tell a strong story: and (3) without story, description of nature is tedious. I disagree with all three points. 

I love nature writing. I read a lot of it. I’ve never considered it a form of evangelism. To me, it’s quintessentially a descriptive art. If it helps to get people to care about preserving the natural world, so much the better. But, for me, that’s not its primary aim. Its primary aim is to describe nature’s beauty. For example, Robert Macfarlane’s description of the vast shingle peninsulas that jut from east England’s coastline:

There is exquisite patterning to the structure of these spits. They organize themselves in designs so large that they are best witnessed from the vantage of a falcon or an airman. At Dungeness, the shingle is arranged into giant floriate blooms. Orford forms itself in long parallel ridges, each of which marks a time when a storm cast up thousands of tonnes of gravel along the shore, and fattened the spit. These ridges are the stone equivalents of growth rings in a tree trunk. Aerial images of Blakeney show it to possess the complex beauty of a neuron: the long stem of the spit, and to its leeward a marshland that floods and emerges with every tide – a continually self-revising labyrinth of channel and scarp. [The Wild Places, 2007]

Or Edward Hoagland’s description of a wolf:

Her fur was in silver-fox shades and her head was larger than life. I stared at it the next day while she was being skinned. She had grim, snapping eyes set at a spellbinding slant, and a mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors. At the zoo you can watch wolves mouthing their meat like a cobbler turning a shoe in his hands or a tailor handling a bundle of clothes. Oversized as it is, the mouth can be used as a pair of hands. Wolves’ legs are long because they churn for a hundred-and-fifty miles in a line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles in another line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles, all their lives. Their shoulders are large because they fight with their shoulders. And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse. [Notes from the Century Before, 1969]

Or Redmond O’Hanlon’s description of an anglerfish:

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … [Trawler, 20003].

I relish such descriptions. My enjoyment has nothing to do with story. My enjoyment is sourced in the writer’s art – in that “mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” There’s no plot in landscape, only the contingencies of rock, river, and wild animal. Narrative in nature books is usually simple – a chronological telling of a hike or a canoe trip or a mountain climb. 

Franzen’s most annoying statement is that nature description is tedious. I could quote a thousand passages to show that it is not. Here’s one more, from John McPhee’s great Coming into the Country (1977):

Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.