“After all, anybody is as their land and air is … ”

Both Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein confront the need for belonging with a certain American ambivalence, one that can also be found in the novelistic tradition, but their complicated attitudes toward the land of their birth puts the English attitude that we find in George Eliot in sharp relief. The English novel after George Eliot turns increasingly to what has been called questions of agro-romantic values. The chapter looks specifically at such values in Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles); Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim); D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow and The Plumed Serpent); E. M. Forster (Howards End and A Passage to India); and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts).

Athens and Jerusalem

Autochthony is fundamental to ancient Greek notions of belonging to the land. While the motif had a negligible presence in the literature of European Christendom, it returns with some force in modern productions by Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce. Martin Heidegger too draws on pre-Socratic Greek thought on the theme of autochthony. But there is a parallel tradition of belonging to the land that begins in the Pentateuch. In Exodus, God speaks to Moses about a Promised Land. In medieval Europe, Meister Eckhart reads Exodus as providing a special, mystical understanding of God’s soul, one that intertwines promised land with the human soul’s creative capacities, and lays the foundation for theologically infused politics in the German tradition. In Alexander Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, and J. G. Fichte, nationalism is linked to Eckhart. In the twentieth century, Heidegger phenomenologically reinscribes earth, divinities, and dwelling poetically.

Ezekiel Reclaims the Promised Land

In the 1930s, T. S. Eliot examines what it means to be attached to native, sacred land. Eliot melds Tory politics, religious orthodoxy, classicism, and authoritarianism in a series of essays and poems. In Four Quartets, Eliot returns to what he calls “the life of significant soil,” that is, his ancestral village at East Coker and his spiritual home at Little Gidding. At Little Gidding, Eliot invokes W. B. Yeats’s failed paganism as if it were in fact the consequence of the Reformation’s rupture with the past. The poem holds out the memory of pious community in a rural village as the promise of Christian redemption in a time of war. Aligned with essays like After Strange Gods, it represents Eliot’s belief, like that of Brunner and Nandy, that no civilization can survive unless it is composed of one spiritually united people, rooted in one land.

Ezekiel Chastises His People

In 1864, Fustel de Coulanges argued that burial rites were the basis of the ancient city-state, a claim that harmonized well with late nineteenth-century anthropology. Like the Cambridge anthropologists who drew on Fustel, Jesse Weston held similar views about burial rites, and those views had a strong impact on T. S. Eliot. Drawing from Weston, Paul Deussen’s translations of the Upanishads, and other sources, Eliot presented the neglect of burial rites as equally central to the decline of modern culture, a perspective that dominates The Waste Land. Eliot connects the neglect of the burial of the dead—metaphorically, of the past of one’s civilization and hence the trigger of cultural decay—to a specific alteration in England’s own theological politics: the Reformation’s break with the past, which had haunted England ever since the “dissociation of sensibility” initiated by Cromwell’s and Milton’s era. Eliot’s response is the reimagination of promised land.

A Different Passage to India

Ashis Nandy, an Indian psychologist and cultural critic of the post-1945 era, has spent his career largely re-imagining “Indic civilization” as a Gandhi-inspired rejection of Western civilization and especially Western modernity. Very much like Brunner in his rewriting of German civilization, Nandy returns us to pre-nation-state Indian literary and religious texts, the interpretation of which he reconstructs in order to rescue the texts from modern revisionism that has been shaped by the “muscular Christianity” of the Raj. Further, Nandy understands Indic culture, reaching from Afghanistan to Vietnam, as a diversified yet unified entity, comprising a host of territories within one, supra-national civilization. In this sense, Nandy’s work echoes that of Brunner on the authentic, pre-nation-state German Reich, complete with its array of Volksgemeinschaften. But Nandy’s thinking is also reflected in the modern Hindutva movement of present-day India.

Blood and Soil

Otto Brunner was a follower of Carl Schmitt’s notions of political theology. He became a supporter of Hitler and a proponent of the Anschluss. His major work, Land and Lordship, is perhaps one of the most remarkable German embodiments of my argument’s contours. Brunner re-writes German history, so that the emergence of the Third Reich can be understood as a return to the pre-monarchy, pre-nation-state relationship of early medieval Germans to German land. Like other Blut und Boden writers, such as Knut Hamsun and Friedrich Griese, Brunner embodies populist nativism on a decentralized model of right and law, one that is compatible with a multi-territorial Reich, but not with the centralized state that arose with Bismarck.

Epilogue

The epilogue examines several ways of explaining our seemingly irreducible need for roots, for some sense that we authentically belong somewhere. The nostos of Joyce’s Ulysses famously recapitulates the nostos of Homer’s Odyssey. But is this millennial persistence of a sense of geographical belonging really, as we like to imagine today, at heart a product of local economic disruption that stimulates nostalgic fantasies? Franz de Waal describes the difference between the forms of belonging found in chimps and bonobos, one that determines how the different species define their social order. John Bowlby develops a theory of human psychological attachment that, perhaps, has ethological foundations in avian home-building. In his late interpretation of a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, Martin Heidegger recapitulates the theme that dominates his later work: dwelling on the earth is a poetic act of place-making before it is an instrument of domination.

George Eliot’s Spot of a Native Land

George Eliot reimagines what it means to belong to the land. In Adam Bede, Eliot explores both the importance of attachment to a rural life-world and the religious revival of Methodism. The too-earnest preacher of Adam Bede, Hetty Sorrell, is transformed into the too-earnest Daniel Deronda of Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. Here Eliot embraces the idea of a Promised Land for the diasporic Jews, with Daniel as a new Moses. But she also explores, in the novel’s competing plot lines, autochthonous attachments to the soil that emerge through blood continuities and long tenure on the soil. Eliot works out in parallel plots the moral deracination of Gwendolyn and the geographical deracination of Mirah. Daniel is the link between them. He has lived half his life as a spoiled, aimless English aristocrat, but then suddenly plans to live the second half as a migrating leader of his newly found people.