Landscape and Memory
by Simon Schama
(Knopf, 652 pp., $40)
We rush across the gleaming surface of the ocean, moving rapidly but smoothly above the untroubled beauty of the dark waters. Jagged cliffs and wild surf, rugged hills and lush grass pass beneath us. Music plays. Finally we reach our destination, where the action begins. It may be a prison from which a psychopathic bomber prepares to break out, or a clearing where poor Scottish farmers will discover the hanged bodies of their chiefs, or a village where women will be impregnated by aliens. Whatever the details of the action that follows, the sequence of images--from any one of the fashionable movie openings of the last two years or so--teaches the same lesson: nature is the realm of purity and beauty, and man imports violence to this separate world from his own corrupt and frightening habitat, the city.
As soon as we recover from the state of easy receptivity that movies induce, we realize that we have bought a bill of goods with our $4 matinee ticket. We haven't experienced nature but an image of it, colored, framed and varnished to match our very human myths and assumptions. The lovely Scottish hills that William Wallace (or rather Mel Gibson) roams in Braveheart are not the natural habitat of purity and virtue. For a start, they're probably Irish; and they have been photographed from angles and in a light that makes them conform to an Anglo-American myth of mountain beauty. If we hadn't already seen too many Sierra Club calendars, we couldn't decode the animated calendar that the movie sets before us. What looked like life was art. The unbounded beauty of nature that lifted our hearts was a slick packaging job. Nature, at least in the movies, never escapes culture.
In his new book, Simon Schama mounts a formidable scholarly expedition into the bright heart of the Construct Called Nature. He carries the reader in space from Egypt to Yosemite, in subject matter from ancient stone cult images to Anselm Kiefer's all-too-modern scorched books, in time from the second millennium BC to the present. He examines an enormous range of individuals, telling their stories easily and vividly, from the sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini and the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who between them created baroque Rome's most compelling urban spectacle, the fountain of the four rivers in the Piazza Navona, to Gutzon Borglum and Rose Arnold Powell, who clashed over whether a monumental head of Susan B. Anthony should appear beside the male heroic heads that Borglum carved and blasted out of the rock faces of Mount Rushmore. Schama resets all his protagonists into the social habitats in which they flourished, re-creating a grand ecology of creative eccentricity whose niches include the hunting lodges of ancient Lithuanian forests, the palaces of the late-eighteenth-century Barbary Coast, Neapolitan gardens and French sacred mountains.
Schama's energy as a researcher never flags, even when he has to quarry material from impenetrably obscure texts, such as the now-forgotten Renaissance Latin work which first celebrated for a European public, in marmoreal Latin, the appearance and the habits of the Lithuanian bison. His commentary illuminates dozens of dark places in intellectual history as well as a museum's worth of images, from paintings and photographs to the prospects created by landscape architects. Reading Schama's book, in fact, resembles a pleasant experience of cultural drowning. The entire history of the Western tradition seems to pass before the reader's eyes.
Schama long ago established himself as one of the most learned, original and provocative historians in the English-speaking world. His career began with a dazzling social and political history of Holland in the age of the French Revolution. In The Embarrassment of Riches, he offered a massive, provocative interdisciplinary analysis of the culture of the Dutch elite in the Republic's seventeenth-century Golden Age. Schama trawled a wealth of verbal and visual materials from sermons, emblem books, household inventories and popular prints; he used them to trace the fault lines in the mentality of the Calvinist burghers who wanted to combine a lavish life-style with strict self-discipline.
Then Schama began to make trouble. In a minor book called Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) he committed a major act of transgression, trying to blur the borders between history and fiction, scholarship and imagination. He succeeded in tweaking the sensitive noses of any number of the guardians of orthodox historical professionalism. Loud did they wail and gnash their teeth at this talented young historian's refusal to equip his work with footnotes that would enable readers to distinguish between his inferences from the sources and his own inventions. Citizens, his most recent large-scale effort, a narrative history of the French Revolution that became a best-seller, made its author a celebrity, but it inflamed tempers among historians still sympathetic to the Revolution as effectively as Dead Certainties had among scholars to whom all revolutions are anathema.
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