Introduction

1In 2003, Irish poet Seamus Heaney declared that ‘what keeps a literary kind viable is its ability to measure up to the challenges offered by new historical circumstances’ (Heaney 2). Such ability has been a cornerstone of the pastoral mode since Theocritus wrote his Idylls, known for being the first pastoral texts. They consisted in a series of poems written for the court of Alexandria and based upon the shepherd’s song competitions in Sicily, depicting a nostalgic vision of the simplicity of life in contact with nature (Gifford 15). Decades later, Virgil, in his Eclogues, transposed Theocritus’ landscapes and shepherds and their ability to tackle issues regarding the court to ‘his deadly Roman times’ (Lilley 1). This first example of transmission from one context to another in the origins of the pastoral mode is essential to understand why it stood the test of time, and remains relevant as a literary mode. Indeed, authors have proceeded to adapt the mode thereby changing it slightly over time for it to persist. The process of adaptation is the reason why Sarah Hall’s Haweswater contains fundamental pastoral elements despite the fact that its publication postdates Theocritus’ Idylls by centuries. The novel fictionalises the construction of the Haweswater dam at the beginning of the 1930s. The reservoir was built in order to provide northwest English cities with water by flooding the valley of Mardale thereby prompting the inhabitants to relocate. The novel recounts the construction and its consequences on the locals and the valley they inhabit and focuses on a family of farmers, the Lightburns. More specifically, the novel focuses on Janet, the daughter, and her tragic romantic relationship with Jack Liggett, the representative appointed by the Manchester Waterworks Company to build the dam. Haweswater showcases realist and visceral descriptions of rurality in the Lake District, from the mountains that frame the valley to the ordeals that befall the farmers. As such, it contains many pastoral elements.

2However, while depictions of rurality constitute a pastoral landmark, scholars, such as John Dixon Hunt and William Empson (Dixon Hunt 13; Empson 23), have argued that the pastoral mode is protean and adaptable to the circumstances in which it is written. This constant re-formation and transmission of the literary conventions and ethos of the pastoral mode explains why it still exists. It seems that the pastoral mode is periodically adapted by authors for it to continue to exist. Nowadays, it continues to evoke rural life and its actors, putting into perspective the relationship between the human subject and nature, and using many different forms. However, despite its capacity to adapt to various contexts, something within the pastoral remains constant. Peter Marinelli states this paradox when he writes that ‘constancy with change is precisely the history of pastoral as an informing idea’ (Marinelli 12). Kathryn Gutzwiller goes further when she explains that pastoral has an inner structure ‘in a sense that it is formed again through the complementarity of a different but somehow analogous form and content’ (Gutzwiller 12). Therefore, a specific pastoral structure seems to be transmitted from one context to another. Deborah Lilley argues that, in contemporary British literature, the pastoral has shifted into new forms to picture and consider the disorienting effects of twenty-first-century environmental change (Lilley 1). The mode explores the interconnexions and interdependences that sustain ecosystems in an ethical attempt to question the readers’ responsibilities. The pastoral dimension of Haweswater partakes in the reassessment of our connexion to nature. Not only does the novel embody a pastoral sensibility, it takes into account the contemporary context of climate change and consideration for ecosystems. Haweswater presents the reader with a pastoral setting that is far from idyllic, and I argue that it offers a powerful and complex representation of how the pastoral tradition and contemporary concerns for the destruction of the environment intersect.

3What I aim to demonstrate is that Sarah Hall transforms and reconfigures the pastoral mode so as to transfer it to the present in yet another instance of transmission and adaptation. Hall’s subversion of the pastoral allows literature to investigate, question and reflect on the crises that the world is going through and our position as human beings embedded in a natural environment (Barad 393), thus offering an ethical representation of the environment and questioning our responsibilities as human beings. In doing so, the novel depicts various modes of transmission, within and outside the pastoral mode itself. My demonstration is divided in three parts, exploring how Haweswater displays the modalities of transmission of the pastoral mode to contemporary issues, some of which are literary. The novel showcases the transmission of pastoral values and the literary and political heritage they hail from, while featuring new modes of writing prefiguring the transmission of an ethical standpoint regarding the environmental crisis, leading to a reassessment of what it means to be human.

The Transmission of Pastoral Conventions

4In order to fully grasp the ways in which the pastoral spans several epochs, it is necessary to explore the literary and political heritage it hails from. The pastoral mode is predicated upon a series of conventions that solidify pastoral values. Such conventions fashion the pastoral ethos, and are seldom kept intact. In Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, the most emblematic pastoral conventions are present though they are reworked and adapted to the contemporary context. Such adaptation is mostly apparent in two of the main pastoral conventions: the pastoral retreat leading to the differentiation between country and city, and the representation of pastoral characters.

5Terry Gifford theorises the pastoral retreat through what he calls the fundamental movement of the pastoral between retreat and return (Gifford 1). The retreat as a literary device describes the escape of a character to the countryside, fleeing urban anxieties. The aim of this retreat is to reflect upon the urban and the present through a detour in the idealised past of simplistic rural life. The return to the city is supposed to bring back insight. Terry Gifford indicates that the ‘fundamental pastoral movement [takes place] either within the text, or in the sense that pastoral retreat “returned” some insights relevant to the urban audience’ (Gifford 2). The pastoral movement is in itself an instance of transmission since insights are transmitted from the rural retreat to the urban return. Such transmission implies a clear-cut separation of country and city, on which the pastoral interlude relies. In his influential book The Country and the City, Raymond Williams summarises the implications of this distinction in the pastoral mode. He focuses especially on the ideas and associations pertaining to each space:

On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Power hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (Williams 1)

6Williams argues that despite the various transformations of the English countryside, attitudes to the country and ideas of rural life persist with extraordinary power. According to him, this gives ‘the English experience and interpretation of the country and city a permanent though of course not exclusive importance’ (Williams 2). The connotations attached to the countryside and rural life are particularly striking in Haweswater, which depicts a social and political imbalance of power between the two spaces. The novel takes place in a specific regional setting which problematizes the spatial, political and social contrast between country and city. The plot refers explicitly to an Act of Parliament from 1919 allowing the Manchester Waterworks Company to build the Haweswater reservoir in the valley of Mardale. Such decision illustrates the imbalance of power between national and local government. Emilie Walezak argues that including the administrative history of the region results in an assessment of space production:

The attention paid to the impact of national and local government decisions on the ways in which landscapes are named highlights the significant influence of politics on the environment. Space is being produced practically and commodified to serve the interests of the state in the organization of labour division according to territorial needs. (Walezak 2021, 152–153)

7The conflict that opposes the national government and the locals turns the Lake District into a ‘contested land’ (Walezak 2018, n.p.). This is particularly noticeable through the various references to the bellicose past of the region, notably the Roman conquest (‘the old Roman route’ (Hall 149) and the edification of Hadrian’s Wall, a defensive fortification which is referenced in the novel. The construction of the reservoir and the subsequent relocation of the locals are inscribed in the history of the region as another example of power struggle. Chloé Ashbridge explains that the novel is predicated on an imbalance of power between the city and the country when she argues that ‘while the dam will invariably serve the local community, it also communicates the way British metropolitan exceptionalism hinges on the marginalization of rural communities’ (Ashbridge 125). The marginalisation of the Mardale community is embodied on several levels in the novel, one of which is linguistic. Indeed, the frequent use of the Cumbrian dialect solidifies the contrast between country and city on a linguistic level and separates the characters. The dialect notably contributes to the geographical and cultural remoteness of Mardale:

Language as a social phenomenon is closely tied up with the social structure and value systems of society (Trudgill 2000: 8). This applies particularly to the North of England, which is commonly associated with images of heavy industrialisation, an economically and socially underprivileged population, and a barren landscape. (Schubert 73)

8In Haweswater, the disparity of accents between the rural community and Jack contributes to enhancing the social gap that separates them. This modulation of language determines whether a character will be heard or not, as is the case with Jack and Janet. Janet Lightburn embodies the locals’ plea and their attempt at resisting the industrial invasion. As for Jack Liggett, he represents the industry who is building the reservoir. Yet, both characters embark on a passionate, violent and visceral romantic relationship. Their antagonism is illustrated through their accents. When Jack explains the project to the population, his accent fluctuates so as to emphasise certain parts of his speech. Similarly, when Janet talks to him for the first time her accent is softened so that the two speakers are on the same footing. However, when she negotiates with him to give farmers more time to leave their farms, her accent comes back and compounds the difference between them:

The rough edge of her accent had been kept in check up to this point, subdued, as if she had been conscious of not wanting to sound colloquial or compromise her position. Now it came back with fury.
—Yeh. I tek it yer dam won’t go up in t’blink of an eye. How long? (Hall 108)

9The asymmetry between Cumbrian dialect and Standard English emphasises the geographical and cultural binary between city and country. In the context of the novel, the distinction between country and city partakes in the redefinition of the pastoral since it allows for a study of each space. According to Raymond Williams, ‘we must not limit ourselves to their contrast but go on to see their interrelations and through these the real shape of the underlying crisis’ (Williams 297). I argue that this is what Sarah Hall conveys in Haweswater. This way, this pastoral convention is transmitted and adapted to the contemporary context.

10Another pastoral convention used in Haweswater is the representation of farmers and shepherds. The novel depicts a mosaic of characters that together make up the community of Mardale. According to Paul Alpers, ‘shepherds fittingly represent those whose lives are determined by the actions of powerful men or by events and circumstances over which they have no control’ (Alpers 162). The farmers of Haweswater have to abide by the rules of the water industry:

And it had already been authorized by an Act of Parliament some years before, in the spring of 1921. The Haweswater Act. So yes, a name had already been decided upon for the project. The Haweswater reservoir. The lake and the surrounding land had been acquired by Manchester City Waterworks under Parliament’s backing. . . . There was no higher authority. It was signed and sealed; a done deal, so to speak. . . . It was all fact, it was done and dusted. (Hall 50)

12The cultural gap that yawns between the national and the local is further embodied by the novel’s characters. As soon as Jack Liggett arrives in the valley, he is described as an intruder:

The first that the village heard of this man was a low throaty growl, the mechanical purr of a smooth engine, as he drove up the winding east lake road in his new car. The sound rose gradually above the movement of elements, the fussing of livestock. . . . And utterly incongruous with the environment in which it now found itself. (Hall 42)

13Jack’s arrival is announced by the sound of his brand-new sports car which clashes with his surroundings. The out-of-placeness of the car is enhanced by the use of the adverb ‘utterly’ accentuating the adjective ‘incongruous’. The sound of the car is compared to that of an animal (‘low throaty growl’) and then becomes an artificial and unusual sound. What creates the gap between Liggett and the community of Mardale stems from the focalisation that characterises the passage. Liggett’s arrival is perceived through the eyes of Paul Levell, the valley painter. The use of external focalisation creates a distance between Jack and the narrator, thereby enhancing the fact that he is an intruder. Additionally, the two men are contrasted through an ornithological metaphor. While Jack is compared to an exotic bird, Levell is compared to a heron:

He was dressed for a dinner, or a dance, like an unusual, exotic bird, its silk and sheen foreign in the cold landscape. . . . Levell hung back behind the wall, watching the scene intently, like a tall, silent heron scanning the waters. . . . He could not be in the right place, must somehow have become dislodged from his natural, metropolitan setting. (Hall 43, 44, 46)

14Jack’s outfit carries signs of his urban belonging. Its colours and materials solidify the strangeness of his presence in the valley. The ornithological metaphor reinforces the disparity between the two men and thereby mirrors the stark contrast between them, and the two cultural spaces they embody. The insistence on Jack’s foreignness highlights the contrast between the urban values he represents and the rural values he is coming to disrupt. This is apparent in Jack’s speech in which he uses a powerful rhetoric to justify the construction of the dam.

This was a city leading the way of modernity in the north, a city of new industry, a city which would roar out metals for the manufacture of cars, buildings, ships and armaments in preparation for the forthcoming war should there be one. (Hall 49)

15The anaphora of the word ‘city’ along with the accumulation of technical terms confirms the industrial domination of the city over the countryside which has to abide by urban rules and institutions. The contrast between the country and the city is solidified through the relationship between Jack and Janet and allows for a complex outlook on the conflict between the Manchester Waterworks Company and the inhabitants of Mardale.

16By situating the political and social conflict of the novel in a contested region, Sarah Hall taps emblematic pastoral conventions and adapts them to the present context, thereby enabling the transmission of the mode. Such transmission of conventions gives way to new modes of writing that refashion the core of the pastoral mode in order to adapt to the contemporary context.

The Transmission of Alternative Modes of Writing

17Over the course of time, the pastoral has become obsolete and was deemed unfit to depict rural life, even while it keeps infusing contemporary production. Such transmission entails alternative modes of writing to update and rectify some aspects of the mode. Indeed, the pastoral has accumulated its fair share of criticism because of its conventions and its connexion to social and political issues. More specifically, the escapism portrayed in various pastoral texts has prompted critics to disqualify the mode as an idealised representation of rural life reinforcing some political status quo. Roger Sales argues that pastoral represents what he calls the five ‘r’: ‘refuge, reflection, rescue, requiem and reconstruction’ (Sales 17). According to him, the pastoral allows for escaping reality by finding refuge in an idealised and selective countryside allowing the text to rescue old values from the past. Such escapism runs the risk of perpetuating the nature-culture binary according to which humans and nature exist in perfect symmetry with each other. The pastoral is then considered as a reconstruction of reality supporting the prevalent political regime. Indeed, Raymond Williams also argues that the pastoral retreat is problematic. Nature is fixed into the image of a refuge and a sanctuary of resources to which human beings help themselves and in which they dwell for a short period of time, negating the right to existence of humans and non-human actants alike, and farmers’ actual working conditions. In addition to this, the idealisation and artificiality of the countryside solidifies a social order which not only justifies the exploitation of shepherds and farmers, but also makes it seem natural (Williams 75):

The psychological root of the pastoral is a double longing after innocence and happiness, to be recovered not through conversion or regeneration but merely through a retreat. . . . The pastoral longing is but the wishful dream of a happiness to be gained without effort, of an erotic bliss made absolute by its own irresponsibility. (Poggioli 14)

18This lack of responsibility towards the subject matter of pastoral is precisely what ‘new pastorals’—a term coined by Deborah Lilley—try to rectify. In the context of the contemporary environmental crisis, idealising the countryside as a space of retreat does not necessarily work, as John Barrel and John Bull argue (‘today more than ever, the pastoral vision will not do’ (432)). Thomas Rosenmeyer adds that ‘we can enjoy pastoral because it enables us to live, on our own terms, with a nature we have abandoned; pastoral relieves our sense of loss without forcing us to give up on our new gains as beneficiaries of the industrial age’ (Rosenmeyer 17). The pastoral is then described as a palliative that surfaces every time nature seems to vanish while exonerating our role in this disappearance.

19However, these worries were present and taken into account in the anti-pastoral tradition, which dates back to the origins of the pastoral itself. The aim of the anti-pastoral is to ‘expose the distance between reality and the pastoral convention when that distance is so conspicuous as to undermine the ability of the convention to be accepted as such’ (Gifford 120). Haweswater falls into that category, as it depicts the lives of farmers with an almost photographic realism, making agricultural labour and the social conditions of farmers visible. Mardale is far from a place of rural retreat, but stands for home and work for tenant farmers. The complexities of the land and the reality of farming practices is visceral, debunking any association of rural space with an image of a ‘green and pleasant land’ (Ashbridge 132). Janet Lightburn becomes familiar with agricultural practices and ‘the daily, impersonal violence of livestock’ (24) from a very young age. Her knowledge spans from understanding how to ‘pry open the mouth of an orphaned lamb . . . to introduce milk through a fake teat’ to the most efficient ways to kill livestock, as she can determine ‘the point on the side of a head to place the rifle barrel, exact inches from an eye, where the bullet will meet the least resistance’ (Hall 22). Indeed, the narrative voice argues that ‘there are no miracles in this dale’ (Hall 6). Hall also emphasises the physical toll induced by agricultural labour and therefore undermines the idealistic character of traditional pastorals.

She has spent too much time with the daily, impersonal violence of livestock and has laboured with heavy equipment too many times in poor light to come away unscathed. Her knees have been lacerated against a lifted plough and there are fingers which do not grow straight, but crook towards her palm like the bent bars of a cage. A broken rib from a frisky goat, its slight indentation in her stomach. Perpetually bruised or missing nails. Swollen ankles. These are accidents of minor proportions, unexceptional in the farming community. (Hall 24)

21Gifford identified another form of ‘prefix-pastoral’: drawing on the anti-pastoral tradition, the post-pastoral aims to go beyond the ‘closed circuit of pastoral and anti-pastoral to achieve a vision of an integrated natural world that includes the human . . . and possesses acute awareness of the culturally loaded language we use about the country, accepting responsibility for our relationship with nature and its dilemmas’ (Gifford 45). The most emblematic post-pastoral questioning of the mode is to be found in Hall’s redefinition of the idyll. The word idyll bears a particular significance in the context of pastoral writing as the title of Theocritus’ collection of poems. The word is used in its etymological meaning, eidyllion in Greek, which means a small picture and characterises a short poem of idealised description (Gifford 16). Indeed, if an idyll is a small picture, then it primarily represents a tiny section of reality. Hall rewrites the traditional idyll in order to question our perception of the natural environment and, in doing so, enlarges the small picture of the idyll into a larger one. She draws a landscape, mirroring the valley painter’s work by juxtaposing descriptive and pictorial vignettes of Mardale. She starts by describing the settlement, ‘twenty-five houses in the valley’, explaining how they ‘spread out as they progressed up the sides of the valley’ with ‘undulating’ fields further out in the valley basin, ‘steepening further out’ and ‘separated by the traditional enclosure of drystone walls’ (Hall 40). She then expands her description by including the mountain range surrounding the dale, to the road leading to the closest towns. She completes her picture with a focal point, the ‘stone, hump-backed bridge which spanned the river next to the church’ (41), drawing our eyes to the flowing of the water. Enlarging the initial pastoral description of the settlement, Hall offers a post-pastoral description of the region with ekphrastic precision that combines image and text and rejects preconceived notions of the countryside. The multiplication of vignettes enlarging the pastoral frame of representation allows for an experimental form of realism to emerge.

22One step further, the post-pastoral idyll is embodied in the relationship between Jack and Janet which is depicted through its intense connection to the landscape of the Lake District. The ‘tellurian pull’ (Hall 113) they experience towards each other springs from the valley and is brutally performed in its milieu. During his stay in Mardale, Jack’s night climbing leads him to experience a spiritual awakening through the violence he exerts on the landscape: ‘In the darkness, he has trained himself to listen . . . to a mountain . . . and aim at its face as if aiming at volatile levels of an imaginary human body with a knife, a fist’ (128). The anatomisation of the mountain creates a parallel with the brutality of Jack’s sexual encounters with Janet during which ‘there was always injuries’ (120). The connection between Jack’s climbs and his relationship with Janet is further detailed: ‘the fulfilment of a high climb and the sensuality of release as he flooded into her body, each brought a level of contentment above any he had reached in the past’ (147). The experience of night climbing is compared to the romance which further enlarges the borders of the pastoral idyll. Far from presenting the reader with an idyllic love affair in a luxurious landscape, the novel features raw descriptions which impart the pastoral idyll with violence and corporeal realism.

23Sarah Hall adapts the mode so as to rectify some of the outdated conceptions that it used to convey. In doing so, she reaffirms the secular heritage of the pastoral and offers new versions of the mode. Her post-pastoral approach also encompasses a neo-materialist conception of human and non-human entities that takes into account environmental concerns. Moreover, Hall’s pastoral includes a reassessment of what it means to be a human, embedded and embodied (Braidotti 5) in a vibrant natural world.

Ethical Perspectives

24A critical aspect of Sarah Hall’s version of the post-pastoral pertains to the inclusion of current environmental concerns, shown through the questioning of the relation between human and non-human entities. In early pastoral texts, the environment was considered as a constant figurative entity to which the characters only paid attention when it would shift or disappear. In What Else is Pastoral?, Ken Hiltner argues that ‘being human all too often means that we fail to become thematically aware of the natural backdrop into which we are born and against which we live our lives’ (Hiltner 7). This statement reflects on the pastoral tradition of representing the environment as a reservoir in which human beings dwell, and to which they help themselves. This conception of nature assumes that only living beings have power, and among living beings, human subjects find themselves at the top of an ontological scale (Braidotti 3). However, from an ethical standpoint, acknowledging that matter is vibrant and endowed with some form of life force does not align with the exploitation of the environment as an inert sanctuary of resources. This reflection is at the core of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. According to her, matter is constituted of ‘actants’, a term she borrows from Bruno Latour and defines as ‘something that acts or to which activity is granted by others’ (Bennett 9). Action is therefore not a privilege only attributed to the human subject. The ‘actant’ acts and wields agency because it is able to exert power. The notion of agency is also central to Bennett’s theory as she explains how what she calls ‘distributive agency’ (Bennett IX) works. Matter has an agentic capacity that is ‘differentially distributed across a wider range of ontological types’ (Bennett 9). What Bennett suggests is a redistribution of agency and, precisely, Sarah Hall’s post-pastoral Haweswater encompasses both human and non-human agencies, acknowledging the interdependent connexions between both. According to Melanie Ebdon, ‘romantic poetry called for a retreat to the pastoral, a withdrawing from the modern world, while the embodied, natural, human animal is revealed by Hall’s writing as a potential corrective mechanism for a future course via a reassessment of the human’ (Ebdon 32). Indeed, her vision of the pastoral includes environmental concerns leading to a reassessment of what it means to be human and to be integrated in a network of interdependences and entanglements. In Haweswater, the human being is not the only ontological type that can exert power. The Lake District is presented as a perpetually evolving and changing place, endowed with agency, as the repetition of the proverbial sentence ‘the land sucks back in what it once issued’ (Hall 22–23) shows. Its milieu is represented as pulsating as ‘altitude pools’ are said to be ‘vascular’ (185), and the earth itself has muscles that ‘cramp and pull’ (48). The adjective ‘vascular’ draws attention to a visual quality of the landscape as venous, but it also depicts it as a living organism, which could either be human or animal. This translation from non-living to living matter animates the land and highlights its vitality.

25As indicated in the title of the novel, one element that highlights the vitality of matter is water. The novel opens with the proleptic flooding of the valley, borrowing from the flood fiction trope. Here, the agentic and destructive force of the water, made evident by the sounds it produces, is the emblem of the vitality of the valley. The prologue starts with ‘the sound of water slipping through the wooden spokes of the cartwheels . . . , like a slow, soft-washing hum’ (Hall xi). The alliteration on ‘s’ materialises the noise of water as it invades the farm. The sound experience is also mediated by polyptotons (‘sush-sushing’) and the mention of the water’s ‘tensile voice’. Then, water is compared to a musical piece: ‘it became like a music that is accidental, deeply beautiful and made only once. Somatic music that fills in space and time. A corrugated harp of orchestral rivers. Like the long end-verses of a ballad, he thought, when the key voice is joined and overcome by others’ (Hall x). The synecdochic description of water through sound highlights its vitality, and the adjective ‘somatic’ endows water with material consistency.

26The pastoral questions our relation to our natural environment and the ways in which our actions damage it. However, Hall’s adaptation of the mode goes one step further and erases the ontological boundary that separates non-human and human animals. Going back to the omnipresence of water, several characters in Haweswater exemplify the fluidity between different ontological types. Isaac, Janet’s younger brother, thinks that he ‘should have been a fish’ (Hall 77) and is said to be ‘caught between two worlds’ (75). The boy spends a lot of time immersed in the icy water of the lakes, so much so that he seems to develop aquatic features. His skin is ‘glowing white’, his hair ‘almost white-blond’, his eyes almost transparent if not for ‘a smudge of watery grey’, and ‘there seemed to be an air of dampness about him’ (56). Moreover, Isaac’s underwater observations are in stark contrast with the way in which the water company perceives water. Isaac is attentive to the ecosystems of the rivers and lakes, paying attention to every living and non-living entity. He compares the rocks to houses in a mirroring of the Mardale settlement, saying ‘the houses are filled with life even in winter, reptilian, marine, and the fish, sluggish in the near-zero climate. It is all worthwhile’ (75). Though slow, the winter water contains multitudes of entities that sustain ecosystems. In opposition to that, the Manchester Waterworks Company wants to ‘build water’, deeming that the water trickling down from the near mountains is ‘wasted in rivers’. According to them, ‘the water that presently sat in a little lake in the valley bottom was slothful, idle.’ (50). Hall’s descriptions of bodies of water are reminiscent of Astrida Neimanis’s theorisation of what she calls ‘hydrocommons’. Indeed, drawing on posthuman theory, Astrida Neimanis uses this concept to theorise the interbeing of human beings as bodies of water and non-human bodies of water. ‘Hydrocommon’ therefore symbolises the commonalities of bodies of water in a process of interpermeation and becoming (Neimanis 163). In Haweswater, the dispute over the repartition of water prevents its commonality. Such commonality is found in the omnipresence of water as a porous body enmeshed with the human body. The porosity of the bodies reaches what Stacy Alaimo calls ‘trans-corporeality’. ‘Trans-corporeality’ refers to a state ‘in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world’ (Alaimo 2). ‘Trans-corporeality’ does not only transform our relations with our surroundings, but also our ontological nature. On this continuum, human and non-human entities are seen to come closer and closer until they blend. The novel depicts becoming-water, but also becoming-animal and becoming-mineral. Janet’s thorough immersion in agricultural rhythms causes her to feel ‘the presence of the near mountains, the pressure of them within the valley’s space of air’, as she acquires an almost feral quality (Hall 10–11). Indeed, she is frequently compared to felines, like a lynx, when she saves her father from a ram, emitting a ‘throaty half-growl, half-hiss’ (28). Furthermore, it is said that ‘her smile was almost feline, contained. . . . Even her hair, blue-blonde and long and full, made him think of a lion’ (65), and during a tense episode with her mother, another feline metaphor is used when it is mentioned that ‘Janet had a wild cut to her. She had her father’s neck between her teeth and wouldn’t let go’ (66). Furthermore, the population of Mardale seem to blend with the mountains they inhabit in an instance of becoming-mineral. Ella Lightburn, Janet’s mother, is said to be ‘cut out from granite by the north wind itself’ (254), and the farmers of the valley are ‘people of kept stone’ (185), referencing both their strong connexion with the mountains and their stoicism. By endowing her characters with geological qualities, Sarah Hall gives incarnated shape to Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’ by showing that both human beings and the land share a body. What I refer to as ‘geological trans-corporeality’ is in fact a general principle in the valley.

27Hall’s adaptation of the pastoral entails the transmission of an ethical position towards the environment: one similar to Isaac’s, which perceives and pays close attention to the entities intra-acting with us (Barad 396) and that questions our responsibilities as human beings. The most striking example of this transmission is evident in Jack’s behaviour in relation to place. He is first described as an invader who stands in stark contrast with the inhabitants of the valley, both through his urban lifestyle and his desire to capitalise on the natural resources of the region. But as his romance with Janet unfolds, he learns from her a different kind of engagement with place. This shift of understanding is most evident in the plotline that sees his demise. In his most arrogant phase, Jack commissions a local poacher to capture a Golden Eagle. His idea had been to acquire a ‘trophy bird’, to be ‘stuffed by the best taxidermist’, which he would use as ‘an effrontery, a snub to the class he had successfully bluffed his way up to, which would consider it gauche’ (Hall 199). The Golden Eagle is conceived as a token of his personal ambitions, but by the time the poacher returns with the bird, Jack is in ‘another incarnation’: ‘he walk[s] as if his shoulders were no longer holding up the pressed granite of the city’, ‘as if it had been a deal struck in another lifetime’ (200). Jack is then caught between his two incarnations representing two ways of dealing with the valley, either sympathy or arrogance.

Conclusion

28Hall’s adaptation of the pastoral mode to a contemporary context consists in a reassessment of what it means to be human beings embodied and embedded (Braidotti 5) in a natural environment. In doing so, several modalities of transmission are at play, both within and outside of the novel itself. In Haweswater, Hall vocalises a pastoral sensibility (Lea 16) by tapping into and reworking its most emblematic conventions. The ethos of the pastoral is effectively transmitted in that it is adapted from one context to another. However, her pastoral rhetoric is more realistic and visceral than that prevailing in original pastoral texts, drawing on both anti-pastoral and post-pastoral traditions. Hall thereby conveys alternative modes of writing, abiding by the ever-evolving nature of the pastoral. Finally, in Haweswater, human and non-human entities embody a vibrant matter that matters, precisely, as they partake in the sustainability of ecosystems. The novel erases the division between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, although it emphasises the self-division inherent in the plot of the novel. The valley is the locus of two conflicting ideologies: Jack is caught between two incarnations and Janet has to come to terms with her romance with Jack. Her attraction to Jack, despite her vehement opposition to the project he embodies, produces a powerful self-division, and enforced secrecy. Still, according to Dominic Head, this serves Hall’s purpose well, drawing a parallel with the self-division that—in various forms—pinpoints our contemporary ecological condition, as we react against the catastrophic environmental effects that we are also complicit with producing. After decades of transmission and adaptation, the complexity of the literary form and ethos of the pastoral allows writers to translate environmental knowledge into narratives that convey our contradictions and ambivalence towards environmental destruction.