2 - Du Bartas Responding to Morton’s Milton: A Bodily Route to the Ecological Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
In The Ecological Thought (2012), Timothy Morton calls us to recognize the interconnectedness of all things by rethinking the relationship between cosmic and local. He points to Raphael's speech to Adam in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which compares Earth to the infinite cosmos, as an example of this ecological thought. An analogous cosmic viewpoint occurs in Guillaume du Bartas's La Sepmaine (1578). This hexameron both highlights and complicates ecocriticism's applicability to early modern texts. Whereas Milton's text responds to Morton's call by scaling Earth in relation to the macrocosmic, Du Bartas's does the opposite: it scales the cosmic to the hyperlocal—the observer's body. This earlier work thus offers a converse avenue by which to arrive at the ecological thought.
Keywords: Lucretius, dark ecology, macrocosm, senses, hexameron
If the purpose of this volume is to tease out the forms of ecology present in early modern France, then it seems we have our work cut out for us. First, what do we mean by ‘ecology’? Second, how does one even begin to look for this ecology in an era far removed from our own, where the concept risks anachronism? Timothy Morton modelled a possible means of addressing these challenges in his 2010 book, The Ecological Thought. Morton's title refers to a perspective on the natural world that he advocates in the book, and which I will adopt for the purposes of this essay. It is not unusual for Morton to use early modern texts to explain his theories. For example, he uses John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), a work that draws deeply on Renaissance sources, to illustrate the ecological thought. I wish to extend Morton's technique to one of Milton's primary inspirations and one of the most popular authors of the late sixteenth century, the French Protestant Guillaume du Bartas (1544–1590). In the following chapter, I will show how Du Bartas arrives at this ecological point of view in a different way from Milton. Whereas Milton employs a perspective that zooms outward from Earth, Du Bartas zooms inward, into the human body, in order to offer up a differently inflected view of the ecological thought.
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- Early Modern ÉcologiesBeyond English Ecocriticism, pp. 51 - 72Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020