Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 28

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Popular Culture Review

What happens to secularized notions of transcendental
"Otherness" in mass culture when the balance of power between man
and nature shifts increasingly in man's favor? In the following
discussion my response to this question will be based on three
interrelated premises: 1) In American culture the principal Other is
and always has been nature, within which Protestant splinter
religions, or spin-offs from Calvinism, are merely contextualized; 2)
The fundamental relationship between self and nature-as-Other
begins to change significantly around the mid-nineteenth century; 3)
150 years later, we are witnessing, especially in the ways nature is
perceived and programmed in nuiss m ^ ia culture, the emergence of a
new philosophical category of "Other" to take its place beside the
conventional systems of transcendental and dialogic. This putative
category I will call the internalized Other.
The secular history of nature-as-Other in American life has a
tripartite evolution. The first, or "Absolute Other" stage occurs very
early in American history, coterminous with the neo-Calvinist reign
of Puritanism, and takes two forms, secular (the intransigence of
nature—its "out-thereness") and religious (the omnipotent power of
God).
The sense of being in an unforgiving, relentless world-in-nature is
found everywhere in colonial writing—in Mary Rowlandson's
"narrative" of 1682, for instance, which concerns her capture by
Indians during "King Philip's War": "We began this remove with
wading over Baguag River: the water was up to the knees, and the
stream very swift, and so cold that I thought it would have cut me in
sunder. I was so weak and feeble, that I reeled as I went along, and
thought there I must end my days at last, after my bearing and getting
through so many difficulties." (qtd. in Baym et al. 160-161). One
finds the same consciousness of danger-in-nature, or the implacable
Otherness of natural environments, in William Byrd's simple prose of
a generation later: "The land we marched over was for the most part
broken and stony and in some places covered over with thickets
almost impenetrable." (qtd. in Baym et al. 290). In the writings of
early Americans like Rowlandson and Byrd (and William Bradford,
who had dubbed the coast of Massachusetts a "hideous wilderness" as
he gazed ashore from the deck of the Mayflower), nature's callous
indifference to human suffering rings a frequent and familiar note.