1Nicholas Royle’s Mother: A Memoir was published in 2020. Title notwithstanding, it is not a linear or teleological narrative that aims to recount the life of Royle’s mother from her birth to her passing in any kind of objective or sternly archivistic manner. It does not even hew to the expectations of memoir-writing and cannot fit snugly within such categories as life writing, creative non-fiction, or literary theory. It is a creative and experimental text which, while it revolves around Royle’s mother and the Royles’ domestic life, reaches beyond the confines of the strictly familial as the book also engages with such things as: the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, the English language and writing, or again with non-human animals. Thus, Royle’s memoir is not simply centred on the singularity of one person’s life or on purely human ontologies. In fact, the book keeps things moving and shifting, veering. As a result, it is haunted by a sense of disorientation and even of uncertainty as regards the stability of the ground itself as well as of spatial markers, such as cardinal directions, we use to organise and make sense of the world around us.

2In other words, Mother: A Memoir, through its disruptive and limits-defying strangeness and through its rebuttal of anthropocentrism, brings to light the question of how we make ourselves at home and of how to position ourselves in the world and, more particularly, in a world adversely affected by the ecological crisis. Indeed, from the very first pages of the book, Nicholas Royle owns that he ‘[has] found that writing about [his] mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth’ in ways that he ‘cannot pretend to fathom’—i.e., in ways that elude knowledge and mastery (1). Establishing this connection between writing about one’s late mother—i.e., writing about a past and known event that unfolded over short spatial and temporal scales—and writing about Mother Nature (the capitalisation dredging up Romantic idealisation of pristine natural landscapes) and Mother Earth (writing about the planetary on a global and geological scale, and not simply about the “environment”) involves, as this paper will show, unmooring any settled notion of spatiality. It also involves reckoning with the semantic void lying at the heart of such spatial markers as the four cardinal points. In the long run, opening writing about the past, known, and homely to writing about the planetary and unforeseeable entails disturbing other, but similarly deeply-entrenched and anthropocentred, deictic bearings such as linear conceptions of time and the prevalence given to a subjectivity that is based on a conscious speaking ‘I.’

‘The Westwardness of Everything’? Radical Instability at the Local Level

3The unmooring of spatiality is bound with cardinal directions and, especially, with the west. Royle notes that Wallace Stevens entitles one of his poems ‘The Westwardness of Everything’ and that, even though Stevens’s poem ‘has to do with Ireland,’ for Royle the poem is really about his ‘family’s relation to the West Country’ (Royle 95). In Stevens’s poem though, the west is bestowed a more portentous, mythical aura than Royle’s prosaic and pithy gloss of the poem suggests. According to literary scholar Daniel Tobin, in Wallace Stevens’s Irish poems, ‘the figure of the West in Irish myth and literature comes to resonate with the American myth of westwardness’ (Tobin 27). Put differently, in Stevens’s texts, cultural tropes of Irish westward, US-bound migration is likened to the US-American myth of the wild west. The broader westward migratory movement also acquires in the poems by Stevens an allegorical value as it becomes a figure for ‘imaginative transport’ and for the transfiguration of the self (Tobin 41, 42).

4In Royle’s Mother: A Memoir however, at least at the onset, the west is deprived of its deeply symbolic value: for the Royles, heading west has nothing to do with emigration to the New World, it does not involve crossing any boundaries or oceans, nor is it about a more figurative self-transcending voyage. Instead, heading west is about staying on familiar English soils and moving out of Greater London and into the West Country. In other words, it does not entail opening the familiar to the unknown and it does not involve moving from the smaller local scale to the much more complex global, planetary scale. The west has been tumbled down from its pedestal and the lack of sentimental, poetic, or symbolic meaning ascribed to westward migration is made clear by Royle’s bathic and thoroughly unpoetic statement that, if moving to the West Country was not immediately possible, then the Cotswolds would be ‘westward enough to get on with’ (Royle 95).

5There is thus a semantic bleeding which similarly operates along the east-west axis, and it could be said that this loss of meaning is, in fact, constitutive and foundational: even at the more manageable level of the local scale, certainty is not assured, and cardinal points already stand a risk of disappearing. For example, the Royles used to live in Cheam, a suburb of London which people around Royle often connected to a BBC TV series set in East Cheam. But as Royle points out: ‘[i]n reality there was a North and a West and a South but never an East Cheam’ (Royle 51). In Cheam, there simply is no East. If the east has already disappeared, at least in Cheam, the west may very well suffer a similar fate. Later on in the book, Royle remembers fondly that in his youth he would take walks with his mother and he describes ‘[a]ll the rambles up and down West Country footpaths and along beaches with their incongruous signs to “beware landslips”’ (Royle 205). In the West Country, no landscape can ever truly be familiar as footpaths and beaches may change all of a sudden; the ground appears to be anything but fixed. The memoir thus stages the possibility of a radical and uncanny loss of bearings even while still at home, a sense of displacement which is here connected to movements of the soil/earth and possibly also of the Earth.

Landslips: An Underground Passage

6Like quicksand—a figure of live burial as well as of turbulent soils and landslips—a landslip (triggered at times by wet sands) can engulf anything or anyone that falls or rests on it. The word ‘landslip’ appears one more time in Mother: A Memoir, in a passage where it is connected to memory/remembering, to language, and to the machinic. Despite being associated with the past—with, therefore, what is known, familiar, and archived—as well as with the machinic—with, thus, the programmatic, infinitely repeatable and, as a result, predictable—the word ‘landslip’ gives rise to the unforeseen and to the unprecedented following a chance encounter with a former neighbour of the Royles. That encounter between the long-lost neighbour and Nicholas Royle, then accompanied by his wife, years after the death of Royle’s mother turns out to be upsetting, unsettling, and moving all at once. The party reminisce about Royle’s mother and this exchange takes Royle back in a sense, or, perhaps more accurately, the exchange opens a chasm between present and past. Royle writes: ‘[w]ithin seconds she was remembering my mother. What a lovely woman she was—your mother. So kind. So good to talk to. Could have talked all day. The years since her death giving way. Massive and irreversible as a landslip’ (Royle 183; original emphasis). The segment ‘[t]he years since her death giving way. Massive and irreversible as a landslip’ is of particular interest. In this segment, the short nominal phrases, the lack of a conjugated verb—except for the non-finite gerund ‘giving’ in ‘giving way’—translate the sense of a temporal collapse. This sense of collapse is reinforced semantically by the non-finite gerund ‘giving way’ and the direct reference to a ‘landslip’, What gives way in the event of this encounter with the former neighbour is the clear-cut separation between the diegetic present and the past, Royle feeling that the years separating him from his mother’s passing have been suddenly washed away, without any clear sense of whether he was brought back or if, by dint of reminiscing, his mother was drawn forward into the present.

7In bringing his mother up and to mind, Royle and the neighbour create a landslipped, seemingly geological space where different temporalities intermingle indiscriminately, where the distinction between the immediate present and a not-so-distant past does no longer obtain and where a one-time spatial event such as a landslip is linked to a longer temporal one (to the spiriting away of the years since his mother’s death). Similarly, the narratological difference between the so-called ‘diegesis’ and the world of the reader is shaken askew by the italics in ‘What a lovely woman she was—your mother. So kind. So good to talk to. Could have talked all day’ (Royle 183). The italics tangibly bring to view and ear the telepathic voice of the neighbour even while drawing a parallel with the ‘landslip’ as both involve the tipping of a surface. The neighbour’s words rise up uncannily on the page, not restrained by quotation marks and not qualified by a reporting verb (such as ‘she said’), as if the words were not attached to a body. In fact, it seems like the agency and the singularity of the speaking subject has been swept away too in the figurative landslip, as hinted by the lack of personal pronouns in the extract (‘So kind. So good to talk to. Could have talked all day. The years since her death giving way. Massive and irreversible as a landslip’). The only agency is the landslip-like work of memory and mourning which, in this particular case, because it destabilises anthropocentric understandings of time, space, and subjectivity, and because it disturbs traditional narratological understandings of the literary, opens thinking and writing to the Anthropocene via the word ‘landslip.’ The disarrangement of spatial and temporal bearings could be read as effects which result from inhabiting the distorted scales of the Anthropocene, where different spatial scales, that of the local and global for example, come to interact as do different temporalities as a result of human activities.

8It could thus be argued that Royle’s writing partakes of the earthly in that the groundwork, or below-ground work of the noun ‘landslip’ brokers a passage between writing about his mother, and, but also as, writing about the environment (‘Mother Nature’) and writing about the planetary (‘Mother Earth’). The ‘landslip’ through its two iterations sheds light upon Anthropocene scale effects, it uncovers the foundational instability of the spatial markers we use to make sense of the world around us, and it already disinters an incipient, alternative form of enworlding produced by the mole-like work of a buried but active agency.

9For ecocriticism specialist Timothy Clark, scale effects place new and unprecedented demands on literature. Timothy Clark writes in his Ecocriticism on the Edge that ‘[s]cale effects in particular defy sensuous representation or any plot confined, say, to human-to-human dramas and intentions, demanding new, innovative modes of writing that have yet convincingly to emerge’ (80). Royle’s Mother: A Memoir rises up to these demands for an Anthropocene writing, and in fact it emerges because of, but also in and as a response to these scale effects. As this writing is bound with underground processes (landslips) which are not immediately visible to the naked eye, it is perhaps akin to the work of what Royle calls the ‘buried life of mourning’ and of the ‘buried memories’ which ‘come forth in a disinterring writing’—a writing which, like geological processes, disturbs and dredges up sedimented matter (1–2, 86; emphasis added).

‘In the west beyond the west’: Rewriting the West as a Place of Ecological Hope

10In his memoir, that ‘disinterring’ writing introduces a critical and somewhat defamiliarising disturbance as it opens thinking to vaster geological scales and, in the same movement, opens the homely/local to the global/planetary. The realisation of the interconnectedness between the singularity of one person’s life and the earthly comes with the ancillary appreciation that, in a radically changing world where the human has taken on collective agency as a geological force, it is necessary to explore novel ways to find one’s bearings. For if ‘finding one’s bearings’ is defined as ‘the awareness of one’s position relative to one’s surroundings’, finding one’s bearings logically entails thinking about our relation to the environment, typically and anthropocentrically construed as that-which-environs-us (New Oxford American Dictionary). Yet, the advent of the Anthropocene, because it subverts the illusion of the defining centrality of the human relative to space and because it forces us to think on scales that go beyond embodied perception, means that we must find other ways to apprehend the world and that we must explore other ways to find our bearings.

11This is what Royle does in the very last section of the memoir, which is fittingly entitled ‘Planet’, In this section, it is Royle’s ‘disinterring writing’ which, by setting in motion a series of oscillations between, on the one hand, the known and, on the other hand, the uncanny, unearths a wholly other scene/seen, out at sea, in a place located ‘[i]n the west beyond the west’ (206). This other scene/seen, which re-invents the west as a place of desire into a site of ecological hope, emerges as Royle lies in his bed in the early hours of the morning, unable to descry or comprehend his environment yet, in the fleeting moment before being properly awake and before consciousness has fully settled:

In my mind’s eye I see marine iguanas. Black on black. Hard to distinguish from the rocks. Washed over by rough surf. Waiting for nobody. In the west beyond the west.
David Attenborough recounts how the ancestors of the only sea lizards on the planet were in all probability arboreal iguanas in the rainforests of Central America who lived on leaves from the trees high above the rivers and about eight million years ago a small number were washed out to sea on rafts of reeds and ended up hundreds of miles away on the volcanic black rocks of the Galapagos archipelago. . . .

I feel my mother’s hands. In the electric light by the bedside lying on my left side. Through eyes almost closed. Moving into consciousness. A mess of iguanas. With forelegs like old people’s hands. Distended. Gnarled. At once puffed out and flattened. In the hours of darkness they retreat under boulders or into crevices. In the day they sometimes pile on top of one another. Bundling (sleeping in one’s clothes in the same bed as others): another word my mother loved.

Imagine Darwin’s jamais vu. Encountering them in 1835 he considered these creatures an affront to his own sense of being. He found them hideous and disgusting. Dirty black. Serpentine. Sluggish. Imps of darkness he called them. He failed to grasp many things about them. . . .

Darwin also of course never observed marine iguanas underwater. The larger males can hold their breath for fifty minutes or more. As long as a session with a psychotherapist. Long enough to read a remarkable poem with some care. Or get to the acnestis of a crossword. They swim down as deep as twenty metres to feed off the succulent fast-growing green algae flourishing on the volcanic sea floor. They criss-cross the slumbering green.

Imagine the jamais vu for the creatures themselves come to shore after the longest shipwreck in history. Here’s to life on the rocks with a more or less non-viable diet of seaweed! Amblyrhynchus cristatus: from the Ancient Greek for ‘blunt snout’ and Latin for ‘crested.’ Over millions of years the nose has squashed up so that they can graze better on the rocks and into crevices. To negotiate the seaweed their teeth and claws have become sharper. To deal with the salt they have developed a gland to excrete it. They sneeze a lot. They accumulate crusty white deposits on the tops of their heads like demented coke addicts. . . .

In my mind’s eye I am in this dreamless cold swirling world. Holding my breath. Holding on. Out of my element. Amazed such an alien feeling can last so long. Watching with mother. (205–209)

12The above-mentioned oscillations are materialised notably by the playful and alternating repetitions between the syntagm ‘in my mind’s eye’ (‘[i]n my mind’s eye I see marine iguanas’; ‘[i]n my mind’s eye I am in this dreamless cold swirling world’) and the nonce expression ‘jamais vu’ which has to do with ‘[s]omething recognised but strange. As if never seen’ (Royle 205). That sense of jamais vu has to do, in other words, with the uncanny but also with the possibility of fiction, as intimated by the ‘as if’ (in ‘[a]s if never seen’) but also, in the long extract above, by the fact the expression is inevitably prefaced by the verb ‘imagine’ in the imperative form (‘Imagine Darwin’s jamais vu’; ‘Imagine the jamais vu for the creatures themselves . . .’).

13The alternation between moments of subjective, but mostly blind, perception (Royle is seeing things through ‘eyes almost closed. Moving into consciousness’ but never reaching it) and imagination wrecks traditional knowledge derived from objective, detached observation: while at first empirical knowledge is obtained through David Attenborough—knowledge which does not seem entirely assured since ‘David Attenborough recounts how the ancestors of the only sea lizards on the planet were in all probability arboreal iguanas’—as the writing unfolds, this kind of scientifically established information is subverted and re-inscribed in the paragraphs centred around imagination (‘Imagine the jamais vu for the creatures themselves. . . . Amblyrhynchus cristatus: from the Ancient Greek for ‘blunt snout’ and Latin for “crested”’). At the same time, the paragraphs dealing with Royle’s blurry-eyed perception are marked by intense feelings of defamiliarisation and by an implied experience of the jamais vu and never felt, Royle’s mother’s hand being implicitly likened to the forelegs of marine iguanas (‘I feel my mother’s hands. In the electric light by the bedside lying on my left side. Through eyes almost closed. Moving into consciousness. A mess of iguanas’). That experience of intense defamiliarization culminates in the ‘alien feeling’ which brings the book to its end. The text moves towards strangeness, towards an undoing of what is known, or was assumed to be known and mastered.

14These oscillations keep knowledge unfixed, destabilised, and shifting as does Royle’s prose, which alternates between shorter nominal or adjectival sentences (such as: ‘[m]oving into consciousness. A mess of iguanas. With forelegs like old people’s hands. Distended. Gnarled’) and longer sentences which are not hindered by any cutting punctuation such as commas (‘[i]n the hours of darkness they retreat under boulders or into crevices). This wave-like choppy prose produces transgressive forms of eco-aesthetic entanglements which cross both biogeographic borders and the species limit. It is in the interval of his writing’s shifts that a passage is brokered between the human and the non-human, and it is this disorienting alternation between perception and blindness, knowledge and imagination which allows Royle to become deeply enmeshed in these strange spatio-temporal contexts which include different temporalities (from 8 million years ago to 1835 to the present, Royle referring also in an unquoted passage to the current risk posed to the marine iguanas’ lives and world by climate change and human activities) and which also includes a multiplicity of points of view (Darwin’s and the marine iguanas’ respective ‘jamais vu’).

15This moment of enmeshment is first and foremost a moment of multispecies encounter and entanglement; the ending foregrounds multispecies knotting, or twining, as a way of making-kin which blurs the boundary between species. The impossibility to demarcate between species is initiated by the defamiliarisation of form touched upon in the preceding paragraph, and, more specifically, of Royle’s hand: the hand—‘[t]his hand,’ this precise hand that Royle sees ‘above the bedclothes’ turns, in the next paragraph, into ‘[a] wrinkled limb in the electric light in the squinting coming to consciousness never seen till now.’ The apparently innocuous variation from the deictic ‘this’ to the indefinite article ‘a,’ the shift from an identified ‘hand’ to a non-specific, not necessarily human ‘limb’ that is so strange it is as if Royle were seeing for the first time and, finally, the loss of a location marker—all of this ushers in the queering possibility that the un-sited, non-specific ‘wrinkled limb’ could very well be that of a marine iguana as well as Royle’s hand.

Conclusion

17To conclude briefly, Royle’s Mother: A Memoir is a 21st–century re-writing of the west which undoes all previous, mythical views of westwardness and westward-bound migration as tropes for self-betterment, and flights of imagination—mythical views which are, in and of themselves, romanticised Western myths about colonial expansion which, more often than not, entailed the destruction of ecosystems. Royle rewrites a mythical west as a fabulous non-place that is retained in the webwork of his writing and as a place of ecological hope, thereby showing that an alternative to ecocidal modes of imagination and dwelling already exists in literature. Besides, and in so doing, Royle’s memoir is a testimony to how writing and the literary can also act as forms of transformative and generative ecological mourning: while the still nascent, but growing, body of research on ecological mourning and ecological grief (see for example Barnett or Cunsolo and Landman) focuses on how we mourn actual non-human entities and species (such as glaciers or species that are extinct or on the brink of extinction) lost due to human actions and the climate crisis, Royle’s Mother: A Memoir shows that writing about the intimate (about one’s late mother) can turn into an intimation, and even an imperative, to ‘imagine’ alternative modes of relating to the other-than-human and of conceiving agency in the Anthropocene.