Nature and Culture: A Comparative Reading of Selected Caribbean Novels

Abstract:

This article titled ‘Nature and Culture: A Comparative Reading of Selected Caribbean Novels’ examines the depiction of nature in relation to human culture in Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando (1965), Herbert De Lisser’s Jane’s Career (1972), Earl Lovelace’ The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) and Rene Maran’s Batouala (1922) to reveal areas where they show sameness in their attempts to evoke human culture with the undercurrent connectedness to nature. The research deploys the insights and poetics of Ecocriticism to the evaluation of the selected texts to demonstrate their signification of the interactivity of nature and culture in their interdependence and mutual constitutiveness in the Caribbean ecosystem. The involvement of man in the exploitation of nature and the effect that it has on the social texture of society is also part of the focus of this paper. The study is situated in the second wave of the literary development of the field, where the purview of Ecocriticism locates vestiges of nature in urban areas. It thus makes for the possibility of analysing works that are not necessarily interested in nature, since the selected texts had been written before the evolvement of Ecocriticism to examine nature-oriented works. In a careful survey of the Caribbean literary works that have been subjected to a comparative lens, the selected texts are found not to have been given nature-oriented attention in a combined form as done in this research. The texts argue that there is a confluence of environment and miscegenation, slavery, identity formation, etc in the understanding of Caribbean literature. This paper posits that writers should reinvent portraying nature, not as a framing device for human culture. This would serve as a stimulus for reorganising Caribbean political thought.