Birds in the literary imagination
Gemma Collard
My chosen topic for the research clusters is ‘bird worlds’, though I will be working collaboratively in the broader ‘atmospheres’ cluster. My interest in this area stems from having grown up surrounded by myriad bird species, with a father who can name them by call, and who builds model aeroplanes to share the sky with them.
The first article I came across was Kadrii Tüür’s “Bird Sounds in Nature Writing: Human Perspective on Animal Communication.” Though at first glance the title may seem to mark the article as a scientific paper, Tüür quickly identifies that the paper aims to highlight the importance of fiction (specifically nature writing) as a means of subjective documentation of bird species, which serves as an important addition to scientific notes on species. She also goes on to suggest that “inter-species’ communication is one of the zoosemiotic topics that needs to be reflected upon in the framework of the analysis of nature writing.” (p.588). The reason for this, she suggests, is that semiotics is inherently subjective; she makes no claim that we can understand the intentionality of birds, but instead suggests that there is worth in exploring the emotions evoked in humankind from our interactions with birds (and that this emotionality is unique to literature). Of particular interest to me is that nature writing allegedly often contains a visual component – as an amateur photographer and keen creative writer, I am inspired to try my own hand at nature writing, with a particular focus on birds. I feel also that having an image alongside writing may challenge authors to give a more accurate account, as if the image is there to be elaborated on, but also to remind an author of what is being expressed.
My second article is Barbara Holloway’s “The Logic of Birds”, which reads more like a piece of nature writing or a kind of eco-fictocriticism. She applies many of the characteristic techniques of nature writing that Tüür outlines in her discussion. Holloway’s description of small birds is fascinating – she captures the immense speed of their movements with the rushed prose that seems to barely document each action as it whirlwinds into the next. Holloway also makes powerful use of scientific papers and constructs her recollections of time spent with birds around quotes from such papers. To my mind, this is reminiscent of the way a literary critic might use a quote to support their assertions about a text. Can scientific backing allow us to overcome the limitations of language in capturing our experiences? I am certainly interested in this idea, and the sort of reversal that articles and fiction share in the space of nature writing.
References
Holloway, Barbara. “The Logic of Birds.” Southerly, vol. 64, no. 2, 2004, pp. 136–146.
Tüür, Kadri. “Bird Sounds in Nature Writing: Human Perspective on Animal Communication.” Sign Systems Studies/Trudy Po Znakovym Sistemam/TöId MäRgisüSteemide Alalt: Semeiotike, vol. 37, no. 3-4, 2009, pp. 580–613.
