Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Cates Baldridge, author of Plowswords: Literature and the Agricultural Trap from Shakespeare to Coetzee

What inspired you to write this book? 

I was fascinated to find that so much of what I had been taught about the birth of agriculture was simply wrong, and fascinated too by the story that replaced those misleading early lessons—that of our species’ primordial turning-away from happiness before we knew what we were doing or where it would lead. Furthermore, I was surprised to discover that aftershocks of our Neolithic transition from foraging to farming could be traced not just in ancient writings, but in English literary texts of the past few centuries, and in authors whose anxiety over the practice of agriculture has gone largely unexplored. It was like looking at one of those eye-tricking pictures in which, from a seemingly mundane pattern, a startling image suddenly leaps out at you.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

What I learned is that even one of the most basic stories we have told ourselves about how we have developed as a species—and one that seemingly brooks no doubts or hesitations about its sunny inevitability—can garner troubling objections and even heretical denials from writers of genius. It was a revelation to discover just how often hunter-gatherers feature in modern fictions, and what levels of anxiety, ambivalence, anger, and secretive envy they produce within the works that conjure them. And I received a fresh reminder that, in the hands of deft and thoughtful literary artists, there is no such thing as a settled question, and no practice so ubiquitous that a world without it cannot be wistfully or even urgently imagined.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

Beyond my sharp surprise at the fact that agriculture still provokes frenzied defenses (where it should seemingly need none) and thoroughgoing denunciations (where it should seemingly suffer none), there were a series of smaller revelations that detonated at regular intervals. For instance, that Shakespeare was prosecuted for grain-hoarding, that Robinson Crusoe believes his cannibals eat nothing but human flesh, that Mary Shelley’s Geneva was famous for its gigantic defensive walls, that Heathcliff may be meant to be a Native American, and that J. M. Coetzee smuggled a contemporary book into Foe, his otherwise scrupulous re-creation of an eighteenth-century milieu. And, as I relate in my Conclusion, I was both surprised and chagrined at how my own perceptions of the world had been shaped by the supposed rightness and inevitability of a tilled planet.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

My sole anecdote involves one of those rare “eureka” moments when a literary critic gets to make not another clever argument, but rather a discovery of hidden fact. In Coetzee’s Foe, Susan Barton sells one of Foe’s books—entitled Packenham on Abyssinia—to get bread-money while on the tramp. This volume sounds as if it is straight out of Purchas His Pilgrims, and thus of a piece with Foe’s recreation of an eighteenth-century world. But coincidentally, a previous book of mine was about Ethiopia, and I didn’t recognize the title—if there had been an early-modern English expedition to Abyssinia, I would have read about it. A quick Googling of the title thus led me to a startling fact that I don’t believe anyone else has noticed—that the only book on Ethiopia by anyone called Packenham was published in 1959, and that its presence thus counts as the only obvious anachronism in Coetzee’s historical novel. Eureka indeed, considering where this discovery has led!

What’s next? 

In Plowswords I cautiously confined myself to canonical literary texts written in English. But the things I found—the frenzied defenses and tentative exploration of alternatives to farming, the marked ambivalences toward foragers who are supposed to engender only pity and fear—cannot be something that is confined to the texts, or even to the kinds of texts, that I have hitherto covered. Surely there must be literary works from other cultures—cultures for whom the advent of agriculture is a much more recent disaster—that also take up the themes that I explore. Thus I will be tentatively investigating literature residing at a farther distance from my comfort zone, where I will inquire whether those foreign soils are equally productive of anti-agricultural sentiments.