Teaching Narratives: The Salt Path, Nature Cures and the Politics of Story

I could not have enjoyed Jennifer’s story of taking students to see a bonkers film more. However, even this totally wild story was upstaged by Susan’s comment which I am still laughing about. Stories tend to have a moral and a meaning and it is very clear what we need to take from these two hilarious tales. Then again, you can also always read texts against themselves, so perhaps the main take-away is that we could all have more fun and laughter by preparing for class a bit less….

Meanwhile, I’ve also been thinking about teaching with popular culture. In the wake of the recent scandal about the bestseller, The Salt Path (a book that has been on my ‘further reading’ for my Politics of Nature class from the start), I’ve been thinking about whether it might be interesting to address the controversy in class, and, if so, how. This blog is a slightly experimental attempt to think it through.

*

Inspired by Roxani Krystalli’s extraordinary teaching, thinking and practice, I have always included reading and discussion of disability and chronic illness right at the very start of my Politics of Nature module, in the second week of term, to signal its importance. This is for lots of reasons, including the ongoing prevalence of nature narratives about the ‘lone enraptured male‘ who bestrides mountains, has adventures and comes home for tea. Stories that overvalorise macho and rugged bodies, independence, solitude and the notion that any of us might not need care, or other people, are harmful for all of us who don’t conform to them (which is all of us at least at some point in our lives) but particularly so for disabled people. Students read Alison Kafer’s brilliant work, in which she argues that if we’re going to say that nature trails shouldn’t have disabled access for various aesthetics reasons, then perhaps we shouldn’t have footpaths or signposts or even steps up to the doorways of backcountry cabins at at all (why don’t abled people just drag themselves in through the windows?). By making visible all the work that routinely goes into making rural areas and the countryside accessible to people with normative bodies, she draws attention to the exclusions that are produced by objections to paths that could accommodate a wheelchair, or by tedious sneering at people who might use chairlifts to get up forbiddingly steep slopes, for example. This work really speaks to my students, one of whom said, ‘this really called me out on my bullshit’.

*

Stories have a moral and a meaning. I tell my students all the time about how I used to find this concept, that idea, the other reading, really difficult. And then I worked hard, and I really thought about it, and I wrote about it (without recourse to AI, natch) and I talked about it with others and eventually it got easier, it started to feel like second nature.

‘Why do you think I tell you those stories?’ I ask them, particularly if I’m teaching narrative analysis. They laugh.

We all like a happy ending.

*

When we teach about popular culture in our discipline, with our specific preoccupation with power, there are various things we can do with it. We can ask, ‘is this realistic? What does it help our students understand about how political institutions actually behave or how power relations really work?’ Or we can ask, ‘what sorts of politics does this artwork encourage us to buy into? What sorts of ideas is it promoting or asking us to consider?’ Or we can ask, ‘how does the form of this piece interact with power relations? How is genre and structure political?’ There is good disciplinary work in all these areas since the ‘aesthetic turn‘. Roland Bleiker influentially makes the distinction between ‘political aesthetics’ which is about how politics is represented in art and culture, sometimes leading to didactic art, and ‘aesthetic politics’ in which the aesthetic form itself attempts to craft or shatter political realities. As he argues, the lyrics of Born in the USA can be as progressive as you like, but if the music and performance make it sound like we should all immediately and aggressively punch a communist, then it’s not surprising if people come away with the wrong message. There is evidence, in later stripped down versions that The Boss performs, that he understands this point as an artist very well.

*

The Cold War is over, now, anyway, it’s been over for a long time and we all like a happy ending.

I tell my students I used to find the idea of ‘temporalities’ really confusing too, and the moment it all started to make sense to me was when I realised that ‘progress’ was not ‘reality’ but just another story we had been telling ourselves. When I was their age, I tell them, it was the Nineteen Nineties (Oh! The Nineties!) – and I was young and living the ‘end of history’ by studying Czech and living in the Czech Republic and I thought that the world was on a path to get better and better with all that democratisation and medical progress and economic growth and that this was the path we had always all been on and there was nothing more natural and inevitable than that. They laugh. I say, I don’t think you understand how much we didn’t notice that that story was just a story. It felt like reality to us. You don’t tell yourselves that story, do you? They laugh again.

We talk about the idea of the Anthropocene (‘I used to find that idea difficult, too’) and Anna Tsing’s contention that perhaps there is no happy ending for us now.

*

Narrative is about time. The point of a narrative is that events are ordered in time. No temporality, no narrative. The apocalyptic narrative that my students have inherited is another linear one with events strung out along time’s straight arrow, just like the story of progress that it has incompletely replaced.

We don’t have to tell stories in straight lines, though. There is really good work on crip time, queer time, grief time, trauma time, enduring time. Timelines that are fractured, stuck, recursive, fragmented, pooled, frozen.

Can we get our students writing in non-linear ways? Should we? Could this be a way of appreciating the aesthetics politics of linear and non-linear narratives?

*

Raynor Winn’s bestselling book, The Salt Path, told a linear story that claimed to be non-fiction. She and her husband, Moth, lose their house apparently through no fault of their own and at the same time he gets a life-limiting diagnosis of Corticobasal Degeneration, a progressive neurological condition. In the absence of anywhere else to go, they decide to walk the South West Coast Path. By the end – perhaps because of all that fresh air, exercise and the spiritual stimulation of natural beauty – Moth is doing a lot better.

We all like a happy ending.

*

In Week 2 of the class, I teach my students about ‘nature cure’ narratives. These are very familiar to many of us. I tell them that I first encountered the phenomenon in the children’s story, Heidi, which some of them are also familiar with. In this story, thanks to fresh air, exercise and the spiritual stimulation of the natural beauty of the Alps, one of the characters, Clara, gets up out of her wheelchair and walks. We all like a happy ending.

One of my students wrote a beautiful piece about how it feels to be a ‘lone exhausted female’ confronted by nature cure narratives, that preach nature as a means to ‘return’ to being abled, whilst she is confined to bed and to a struggling body. She draws on the class readings and her own research to critique the idea that illness and disability are ‘unnatural’ or that they can ‘simply’ be overcome by mind over matter and immersion in nature. Such narratives can be lethal in the way that they valorise ‘natural’ solutions over modern medicine, pharmaceuticals, vaccination. Alternatively, they can reduce medicine to the ‘moment’ of diagnosis which then miraculously leads to treatment that ‘restores’ the body to its ‘natural’ healthy state. Whether we under or overvalue medicine in these ways, we reinforce a binary between ‘natural’ health, or its ‘unnatural’ lack, in ways that erase long histories of struggle for diagnosis and for ongoing care for the frail and vulnerable bodies that we all, sometimes, have.

This student still comes to a conclusion. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s a joyful one: she is going somewhere with her story. Hiking in pure mountain air won’t cure her, but the plants she is nurturing on her windowsill will bring her consolation, connection, beauty and joy – maybe this is also a kind of healing. But it isn’t a cure.

Some of the best writers on disability and nature, like Nic Wilson and Polly Atkin, try to write without a redemptive, nature cure arc, without the happy ending, though still showing that nature is meaningful and beautiful, that it can relieve and console, without having to be The Answer. Polly Atkin nevertheless reveals the huge pressure authors are under to provide a happy ending, a redemption, a solution.

*

I wonder whether the backlash against The Salt Path is a bit overdone, really. The cliches, including the redemptive arc, were always there and therefore I’ve never really been interested in teaching with this book. There are more interesting books, books with better aesthetic politics. But after all – in a marketplace full of all those lone, enraptured males – it is a book about frail and ageing bodies, about vulnerability and pain, about indignity and loss. No-one claims that Moth is cured by walking the South West path, just that walking may have improved matters, which doesn’t seem entirely implausible.

Then again, the news that the author may have lost her home very much through a fault of her own – because she had embezzled money and taken out a loan against her house to avoid prosecution – and then made up a story to cover it up makes it all more interesting to me. This would have really been the intriguing story, though I know why she might not want to tell it. And naturally, it’s important to acknowledge that there are real people in these stories who, it seems, have every right to feel aggrieved.

Then again, wrongdoing is complicated and interesting and quite often engages my sympathies.

*

I was once at a workshop where we were discussing Elizabeth Dauphinée’s decision to publish a novel with an academic press as a serious intervention into understanding international politics for an academic audience. We all loved the book, but I raised the issue that perhaps this is not the right use of our skills and training as academics. ‘I’d love to give up my job and write novels,’ I said, not really thinking about whether or not that was true. ‘But there are lots of novelists already who are very very good at it. And aren’t we good at a different thing?’ I think it was Tim Edkins who said, ‘The thing about that is, that you’d write different novels from them, because of all the things you understand about politics. Maybe they’d be better novels.’

*

An early memory. I was in church and someone had sneaked in and nicked a handbag from the pews while its owner was up taking Holy Communion. And we all had to pray… for the thief.

For some people, I’m sure this prayer had its own redemptive arc: an encounter with the love of God, they hoped, would set this crooked life back on the right path. We all like a happy ending.

But I am the sort of student who has always done the reading, I’m sorry to say. So, I took the prayer to mean that even lives that are fizzing and crackling with their own brokenness are worth praying for, even if there is no happy ending we can plausibly hope for.

I am often (perhaps too often) on the side of wrongdoers because I am one and so are you. This message was brought to you by the Church of England and Hawkshaw St Mary’s CE Primary School.

*

A colleague and I are chatting about a student who has committed academic misconduct of an annoying and egregious sort, the sort where there is no doubt that they should have known better, the sort that screams desperation and fear. We agree that there needs to be a conversation with this student and we hope they might remember it for the rest of their days. It is important not to fuck this conversation up, for the student’s sake.

This is also being on the side of wrongdoers.

*

I recently had to tell a story of my own life and career and fit it into 50 minutes, which meant a lot of decisions about what to leave out. My friend asks why I mentioned the romantic relationship I had with him 30 years ago but not the short marriage to someone else that came a bit later.

He knows why. He is, perhaps, not displeased.

I say, the story is all in the narration, not the facts, baby.

This is a story without an ending, happy or otherwise.

*

It is interesting to learn about The Salt Path scandal when with my extended family, with whom I share a particular background and set of values. My WhatsApp and socials are full of enjoyable anger and condemnation, alongside, to be fair, some serious engagement with aesthetic politics. But my aunt, my cousin and I concur that we have all made up stories to cover up bad decisions and that we are more curious than than censorious.

*

In the UCL Art Museum, with my students, we think about temporality, modernity, the stories told by artworks. We look at a watercolour by Turner depicting the first steamer on Lake Lucerne and think about fossil fuels and progress and mobility and the industrial revolution and all the things it has given us like all those antibiotics and all that survival of childbirth and all those sterile surgical procedures and all that travel to see the world’s great beauty.

‘Would you still go ahead with it, if you could go back in time and stop it?’ asks one of the students to the group. ‘Would you still want the industrial revolution if you knew what it did and where it ends up?’

What sort of story doesn’t have a happy ending?

*

As well as Czech, I did French at University. I think (though I’m no longer sure of the reference) that it was Julian Barnes who observed that the English novel quite often ends happily with a wedding. Whereas it’s more usual for a French novel to begin as our protagonists embark on their marriages and the adventures and wrongdoing start there. They aren’t famous for their happy endings, those sturdy nineteenth century French novels. Everyone ends up poisoned or disgraced or guillotined or on a runaway steamtrain speeding in a very modern fashion towards a future that is accelerating out of control. If you’re lucky, perhaps your lover will steal your severed head and bury it.

*

One happy ending for a blogpost like this might be to get my students to read it and think about what familiar, generic narratives they are used to reading and what the politics of them are. I’d love to read critical book reviews of The Salt Path or other narrative non-fiction nature writing which engage with them not for their ‘truth value’ or whatever, but aesthetically, structurally, with an attention to power relations and politics. I’d also love for them to think about what it might mean to write non-linearly and how that practice itself might be political, in what ways, and how. I’d love to be able to tell you that what they have learned about politics makes their narrative non-fiction (or fiction or poetry) better in aesthetic terms.

Perhaps next January, I will be able to share some of that work.

We all like a happy ending, after all.