Clarence Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Canon District (1882)
John C. Van Dyke, The Desert (1901)
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (1991)
Lawrence Buell suggests that one cause of the elimination of concern for the empirical non-human environment other than as symbolic is down to the privileging of the fictional discourse over nonfiction.
As an example, he refers to the term used in literary study to denote the nonhuman environment: setting. "Setting" implies that "the physical environment serves for artistic purposes merely as backdrop, ancillary to the main event" (Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995], p. 85).
From this perspective,
"attentive representation of environmental detail is of minor importance
even in writing where the environment figures importantly as an issue"
(85).
On the basis
of critical discussion of many American canonical works, Buell claims,
it is "easy to persuade oneself [...] that the literary naturescape exists
for its formal or symbolic or ideological properties rather than as a place
of literal reference or as an object of retrieval or contemplation for
its own sake" (85). In the face of this denigration of referentiality,
Buell offers nonfictional genres as a corrective, discourses which remain
"accountable to the object-world" (91).
This is not to reinstitute an unreflective nominalism and to eliminate issues of textuality, but to conceive of a discourse which has a "dual accountability to matter and to discursive mentation" (92).
Beyond the construction of narrative and of form, the nonhuman environment stands as "the court of appeal" (94). If such "environmental nonfiction shows itself ignorant of the known facts of nature, it does so at its peril" (97). This dual accountability "refuses to allow 'mind' or 'language' or 'history' or 'culture' to have its way over discourse unchecked" (102).
The
regions of the American desert West, as Mike Davis notes, "have few landscape
analogues anywhere else on earth. […] [T]he Victorian minds were travelling
through an essentially extraterrestrial terrain, far outside their experience,"
causing them to "eventually cast aside a trunkful of Victorian preconceptions
in order to recognize novel forms and processes in nature. (Mike Davis,
"Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country" New Left Review 200 [July-August
1993]: 49-73, 61-2.)
Timothy O'Sullivan's
pictures, it has been suggested, had "no immediate parallel in the history
of art and photography […] No one before had seen the wilderness in such
abstract and architectural forms." (Ann-Sargent Wooster, "Reading the American
Landscape," Afterimage [March 1982]: 6-8). Likewise, geologist Clarence
Dutton had to create a "new landscape language –– also largely architectural,
but sometimes phantasmagorical –– to describe an unprecedented dialectics
of rock, colour and light." (Davis, "Dead West," 61)
1. Dutton
2. Van Dyke
Van Dyke liked to present himself as the ideal composite of cultivated, urbane aesthete and Rooseveltian outdoorsman, as much at home in the Painted Desert as the galleries of Europe. This picture of self-sufficient nomad is somewhat compromised by the fact that many of his desert visits were made by train, he often stayed on his brother's ranch or in good hotels, and his knowledge of desert fauna was hardly sufficient to survive for long periods alone in harsh conditions.
"The perception
of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience […]. We see nothing but
flat contours; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out
that a stain of black or gray indicates the dark side of a solid substance,
or that a faint hue indicates that the object in which it appears is far
away. The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of
what may be called the innocence of the eye." (John Ruskin, quoted by Christopher
Newall, "Ruskin and the Art of Drawing," in John Ruskin and the Victorian
Eye, exhibition catalogue [New York: Harry N. Abrams in association
with the Phoenix Art Museum, 1993], p. 94).
3. Abbey
"Near
the first group of arches, looming over a bend in the road, is a balanced
rock about fifty feet high, mounted on a pedestal of equal height; it looks
like a head from Easter Island, a stone god or a petrified ogre. […] Like
a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the
tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here
not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the
cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's
possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the
bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper
tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as is it in itself,
devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories
of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if
it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal
mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet
somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock."
(Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 6).
"I've had this tree under surveillance ever since my arrival at Arches, hoping to learn something from it, to discover the significance in its form, to make a connection through its life with whatever falls beyond. Have failed. The essence of the juniper continues to elude me unless, as I presently suspect, its surface is also the essence. Two living things on the same earth, respiring in a common medium, we contact one another but without direct communication. Intuition, sympathy, empathy, all fail to guide me into the heart of this being –– if it has a heart." (Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 27).
"Despite the great variety of living things to be found here, most of the surface of the land, at least three-quarters of it, is sand or sandstone, naked, monolithic, austere and unadorned as the sculpture of the moon. It is undoubtedly a desert place, clean, pure, totally useless, quite unprofitable." (Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 29).
"There
are several ways of looking at Delicate Arch. Depending on your preconceptions
you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring
cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified cowboy chaps, a triumphal
arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geologic freak, a happening
–– a something that happened and will never happen quite that way again,
a frame more significant than its picture, a simple monolith eaten away
by weather and time and soon to disintegrate into a chaos of falling rock
[…]. There are the inevitable pious Midwesterners who climb a mile and
a half under the desert sun to view Delicate Arch and find only God ('Gol-dangit
Katherine where's my light meter, this glare is terrible'), and the equally
inevitable students of geology who look at the arch and see only Lyell
and the uniformity of nature. You may therefore find proof for or against
His existence. Suit yourself. You may see a symbol, a sign, a fact, a thing
without meaning or a meaning which includes all things. […] The beauty
of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true
to its own character, is equally beautiful. (There is no beauty in nature,
said Baudelaire. A place to throw empty beercans on Sunday, said Mencken.)
If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power
of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out
of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the
wonderful –– that which is full of wonder.
A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has
the curious ability to remind us –– like rock and sunlight and wind and
wilderness –– that out there is a different world, older and greater and
deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little
world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the
real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a
world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken
for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped
it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and
hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the
most strange and daring of all adventures." (Abbey, Desert Solitaire,
36-37).
4. Williams
"What
attracts me to the Great Basin archaeology is putting all the pieces together,
the complexity of the parts creating the whole. Artifacts alone have never
interested me. It's the stratigraphy that speaks. The human stories are
told within the layers of sediments." (Refuge, p. 184; quoted in
Campbell, pp. 54-55).
"A blank spot
on the map translates into empty space, space devoid of people, a wasteland
perfect for nerve gas, weteye bombs, and toxic waste. […] The army believes
that the Great Salt Lake Desert is an ideal place to experiement with biological
warfare. […] An official from the Atomic Energy Commission had one
comment regarding the desert between St. George, Utah, and Las Vegas, Nevada:
'It's a good place to throw used razor blades." (Refuge, p. 241)
Further Reading
Links
An Interview with Edward Abbey