Connor Harrison on John Fowles’ 'The Tree'

Think of a forest and what do you see? Trees, mostly, with leaves of summer above or autumn below (or the leaflessness of winter), birdcall, flower spray beneath oak shade, butterflies, squirrels, frogspawn. A pond with the treetops in its eye, a parental breeze. Foxholes or rabbit tracks or nettles. But, this is not a forest; this is an itinerary. These are images and sounds that exist in this forest, but not in that one. In the description of a forest, whenever anyone tries to recreate the environment, something untranslatable is lost, an expansive context, an experience. This is because a ‘forest’, though it can be imitated in words beautifully, is outside of language. ‘A forest,’ John Berger wrote, ‘is what exists between trees.’

This problem, this hermeneutics of nature, is at the centre of John Fowles’ The Tree. Published in 1979, The Tree is somewhere between the autobiography and the artist’s statement. Beginning with an account of his childhood among trees, and the opposing philosophies of his and his father’s – Fowles a rewilder, his father a pruner, a careful gardener – the text then comes to its central idea: humans bring too much of themselves to the natural world. We pigeon-hole and we taxonomize, so that the fullness of a forest is beyond our perception. ‘Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism […] Already it destroys or curtails certain possibilities of seeing, apprehending and experiencing.’ The Tree is a book of love coated in melancholy, an admiration of the tree beside a hopelessness in the face of capitalism. ‘We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited.’ It is this inability to trust the present moment that is antithetical to the life of a tree, or a forest. ‘As we watch, it is so to speak rewriting, reformulating, repainting, rephotographising itself. It refuses to stay fixed and fossilized in the past, as both the scientist and the artist feel it somehow ought to.’

Here we arrive at the paradox of The Tree and its conversation around how art interprets the natural world, particularly the ecosystem of the forest: at the same time Fowles is writing this essay on nature, he is explaining to us how ill-equipped writing is – alongside all art forms – at truly capturing it.

‘Nowhere are the two great contemporary modes of reproducing reality, the word and the camera, more at a loss; less able to capture the sound (or soundlessness) and the scents, the temperatures and moods, the all-roundness, the different levels of being in the vertical ascent from ground to tree-top, in the range of different forms of life and the subtlety of their inter-relationships.’

The art form he spends the most time critiquing for not appropriating wildernesses, though, is painting. For Fowles, European art history is mostly an avoidance of chaotic nature: ‘naturalistic artistic representation of wild landscape is entirely absent before the seventeenth century – and so rare then that one might almost say, before the advent of the Romantic Movement.’ His question is, why didn’t artists like Pisanello and Duhrer, who carried the techniques to depict the world accurately, do so when it came to, say, feral woodland, or an ancient forest? His answer: fear, blindness, an unwillingness to see nature as anything besides a garden, or a trap; an essentially Christian prejudice against ‘the then largely arboreal wasteland’, where disorder and secrecy reigned, ‘an immense green cloak for Satan: for the commission of crime and sin, for doubters of religious and public order.’

In regard to this quasi-religious mistrust of the arboreal: spend time alone even today in a woodland long enough, and you begin to feel, despite the apparent peace, something like fear. It is almost extrasensory, a kind of primal response. But if the rationale behind not painting forests was devilish, how can the many medieval representations of Hell be accounted for? These were reminders, visual aids to trust in the Lord, both metaphorical and literal in their warnings – surely it would have been simple enough for Pisanello to allegorise any Old Forest of Europe, to use the pretence of iconography, if he wished to depict one. If a crazed, untamed forest had appeared in any of Bosch’s hellscapes - still able to terrify now - it’s hard to believe his contemporaries would have noticed.

There is also the question of pride when it comes to landscape. An artist like Duhrer, whose representation of nature was steeped in a patient draughtsmanship – take for example his perfectly titled, ‘Great piece of turf’ from 1503 – might easily have drawn up a forest untouched by civilization. But the problem seems less to do with unease, and more to do with symmetry. The tangle and knot of wild growth offers an artist no room to demonstrate any skill in balance or craft, to utilise years’ worth of specialised training. And, as an extension of that, how many sixteenth-century patrons or customers would have been looking to purchase such a mess in engraving or painting? As much as isolation and symmetry might have been born from a human need to garden and normalise, there is the much more practical problem of an artist’s time; the choice between depicting apparently uncoordinated vegetation, or Adam and Eve pre-Fall, their symmetry both inbuilt and popular.

What Fowles suggests eventually shifted Western art’s perspective in regard to nature, is the camera. Though he has earlier disavowed its usefulness in the face of the natural world, he comes back to photography with a caveat: ‘In many ways painters did not begin to see nature whole until the camera saw it for them.’ The idea being that, until 1839, when the first photographs arrived, artists struggled to see wilderness completely, or ‘whole’, or to put it another way – the camera was able to capture nature more deeply, and with more truth.

The claim to photography’s verisimilitude over other forms is a dubious one, I think. ‘[T]his long-lasting inability,’ Fowles writes, ‘to convey the whole as truthfully as the isolated part – this failure to match the human eye (or the camera) in the ensemble, despite having equalled it in detail at least four centuries […] before the camera’s invention – is symptomatic of a long and damaging doubt in man.’ His idea of the photograph is one of accuracy, or perhaps even yet, of innocence. The camera does not select from nature as a painter would; it takes in everything within range, every leaf, branch, bird and cloud. Every realism.

In his interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist, David Hockney suggests the opposite when it comes to the photograph: ‘I think that too many claims have been made for photography: people claim that it records what the world looks like, that it tells you the truth, and so on […] they’re not good enough, or realistic enough.’ Later, he speaks directly of the camera’s relationship to nature: ‘I’ve tended to think that the camera can’t deal with landscape very well because a camera doesn’t really see space – it sees surfaces.’

Space and surfaces. Just because the camera lens appropriates something directly visible, doesn’t mean it has entered any deeper into its ‘truth’. Fowles seems to have taken the archival view of photography, the idea that it more honestly represents the world seen by the human eye, and in doing so, captures the natural world more completely. But if we are to capture a landscape at all, with any claim to ‘reality’, both space and time have to be taken into consideration. As Fowles knew, nature is the present in perpetual motion (part of the reason we struggle to appreciate much of it); it is, as he puts it, constantly ‘rephotographising.’ Or as Hockney says: ‘the moment rules.’

Time is, in a sense, the opposite of surface, the effacement of it, and when inside a forest, time changes. The human linearity – one that helps us to see photographs as more factual – is left at the tree-line. ‘I have always loathed flat and treeless country,’ writes Fowles, ‘Time there seems to dominate, it ticks remorselessly like a clock. But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous – never plodding, mechanical, inescapably monotonous.’ But if time is so integral to the experience of a forest, then the photograph will always struggle to image one as whole. The basic premise of ‘capturing’ the image is a refutation of time passing; it is a moment deliberately kept, and so in that sense, is the least-equipped representation of nature. Photographs are, as Susan Sontag writes, ‘a neat slice of time, not a flow.’ Hockney takes a dim view of Sontag’s work on photography (though the criticism seems a little disingenuous), but they both agree on how the still image is the death of the continuous moment. 'The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.'

Fowles’ quote on photography goes on: ‘In many ways painters did not begin to see nature whole until the camera saw it for them; and already, in this context, had begun to supersede them’ (my italics). Here, camera becomes educator, an artistic tutor to the painter. But while the camera’s invention is a continental fault line in art history, did it necessarily supersede painting? If the aim is documentation, an archival preservation of moment and image, then of course, photography succeeded; an encyclopaedia of surfaces. But in regard to nature and to the art of landscape, rather than superseding the painters, photography liberated them. ‘Almost all our art before the Impressionists,’ writes Fowles, ‘proclaims our love of clearly defined boundaries, unique identities, of the individual thing released from the confusion of background. This power of detaching an object from its surroundings and making us concentrate on it is an implicit criterion in all our judgements on the more realistic side of visual art.’

An Impressionistic interpretation of nature is, I think, a refusal of the photographic. A photograph is a snapshot in time, but not a memory; they can alter how we look back on life, or on our own image (I take a photo of myself, compare it to the mirror and see two uncannily different faces), but the experience itself does not coincide. Impressionism, on the other hand, might be said to be image as memory. Not the fine detail and intricate anatomy – boundaries are blurred, as Fowles says – but the subjective vibrancy. Time is not sliced here. Association between the eye and the passage of time keep nothing divided. Monet’s Waterlilies are a realism uninterested in the scientific. ‘The camera sees everything geometrically,’ Hockney says in his interviews, ‘whereas we see everything psychologically. There’s a big difference.’

And then there is the fact of colour. For the most part, photography lay dormant in its greyscale for almost sixty years, while the Impressionists developed the world entirely as colour. If we are to picture a forest, the first impression is of a colour, usually green. If it is a coniferous growth, then the green will be a year-round and deeply textured. Fowles’s belief that the photograph had begun to overstep painting, suggests that representation of a forest ought to be direct. But as Impressionism shows, indirection is often much closer to the experience of nature. The half-seen bird, the ruffled leaves, the distant brush of tall grass. An entire woodland might be conjured by one colour; a pool of waterlilies by a smudge.

The Tree is a beautiful book and a refusal to romanticise woodland. Fowles is adamant, and correct, in his call to treat nature as ‘useless’, to stop interacting with a tree only as a source of fuel, or personal growth. ‘It may sound paradoxical, but we shall not cease to be alienated – by our knowledge, by our greed, by our vanity – from nature until we grant it its unconscious alienation from us.’ He looks to a time when humans might interact with a forest, without imposing our own needs; when we might see nature as it is, and not as it exists for us. At the same time, The Tree is a call to stitch the human back to the wild. Which brings us back to Fowles’ problem: art’s inability to translate a complete nature. Since art, like science, tries to fossilize nature, then personal experience is the only option. If we are to understand the forest, we must enter ‘its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness.’ Fowles is asking us to leave our anthropocentrism at the door; to experience the arboreal without a modern knowledge. But it is in this way, for all of his cynicism towards nature as manicured, that Fowles is searching for that original garden of Western art, Eden; a garden that can only ever exist as text.

Connor Harrison is a British writer living in Montreal. His work has appeared at Lit Hub, New Critique, Poetry Wales, Review31, and Hinterland, among others, and is forthcoming in The Evergreen Review.