Thinking Fish in the Water Aquatic Life and the Environmental Humanities

Abstract

The intensity of the relationship between fish and water emerges forcefully in the small selection of English language poems that form the literary corpus for this essay. These well-known poems, dating from 1923 to 1983, include Lawrence’s aforementioned “Fish,” the poem on which I will focus most intensely, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” and three of Ted Hughes’s poems: “Pike,” “October Salmon,” and “Salmon Eggs.” Across these poetic works, fish are characterized by a tenacious vitality that opens on to an alterity at once ontological, epistemological, and temporal. These poetic pike and salmon, by turns aloof, sensuous, noble, fatalistic, and menacing, offer a telling unfathomability that captivates the poets as much as it estranges. It is precisely this unfathomability that makes the human attempt to grasp fish essence or fishness such a critical issue within animal studies and the environmental humanities. Engaging with aquatic life forces us to pose those crucial questions that Kari Weil formulates as follows: “how to understand and give voice to others or to experiences that seem impervious to our means of understanding; how to attend to difference without appropriating or distorting it.” Together Lawrence, Bishop, and Hughes attempt this work of engagement with fish being or what it is to live as a fish, succeeding, at times, in their efforts to “attend to difference,” but also failing frequently, and, more importantly, failing in ways that illuminate humanity’s efforts to engage with animal alterity as a whole.