The Material Realism of Pastoral: The Case of Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002)
‘After the war he began painting with startling realism, almost photographic accuracy’ (Hall 39) declares the narrator of Haweswater about a painter who depicts scenes from the valley of Mardale in the Lake District. This comment mirrors Hall’s own aesthetics, as the novel showcases two of the most...
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| Publicado no: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicado em: |
Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Assuntos: | |
| Acesso em linha: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Resumo: | ‘After the war he began painting with startling realism, almost photographic accuracy’ (Hall 39) declares the narrator of Haweswater about a painter who depicts scenes from the valley of Mardale in the Lake District. This comment mirrors Hall’s own aesthetics, as the novel showcases two of the most quintessential elements of the realist novel: an omniscient narrator and recurring descriptions and inventories stemming from minute attention to detail (Hamon 1982, 19). Haweswater recounts the dispossession of a farming community as the valley of Mardale has to be flooded to provide water to the cities of the North of England. As such, it is premised on a pastoral ethos whereby it represents the everyday life of famers following what Paul Alpers calls the ‘pastoral anecdote’ (Alpers 22). The farmers’ lives and labour are memorialised through extremely detailed descriptions, so that the ordinary is what prevails in the face of the extraordinary event. Using the archetypal narrative device of the flood, Hall presents a material realist tale in which pastoralism meets realism. One cannot help but wonder how the pastoral can coexist with a realist aesthetics since the pastoral has been largely criticised for the idealisation of its representations (Williams, Barrell and Bull, Sales). Hall repurposes the pastoral ethos and delves into what Terry Gifford calls the post-pastoral (Gifford 479) thereby bridging the gap between the pastoral and realism. One step further, I argue that Hall’s realism partakes in the new-materialist turn represented by Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo and Jane Benett, as the novel discloses a reassessment of what it means to be an embodied human subject living within ecosystems. In Haweswater, to be human means being entangled (Barad 393) and trans-corporeal (Alaimo 2) by sharing a body with minerals, animals, plants and water. |
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