from space to place
It's still difficult for me to try and actually SAY what it is I want to do with this project, but I need to start making an attempt. There are a lot of gaps, problems, and generalities here, but I'm hoping that in the process of having these pointed out to me and talking and thinking about them, I'll be able to address them. So, away we go...
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The experience of the West--and in many regards its history--is one of a progression from "space" to "place." Space in this instance stands for the open, unfamiliar, nearly limitless expanse of landscape present in the West, whereas place stands for the sheltered, secure, human-defined locations of "meaning" within and against that space. Space at once represents freedom, movement, and limitless possibility, but at the same time a terrifying emptiness, a vast unfamiliar terrain. Place is the familiar, the defined, the controlled and controllable; it means and represents shelter and security--knowability. On the other hand, it is the cessation of movement, the setting down of boundaries and borders.
In many ways, this can be said to be the progress of "civilization" in any territory, for any people. But what makes the West unique from my perspective is the sheer vastness and newness of that territory for those moving into it. In the East, places were cut out of the space of forested terrain using age-old methods. This was new, but at the same time familiar space. It looked like the landscape of memory and experience, and the tools, methods, and perspectives that were used to confront and tame that landscape were not unfamiliar.
But in the West, that territory beyond the timberline and opening up into the prairies and plains of the land beyond the 100th meridian, the American frontier confronted a landscape that challenged--and in many ways defeated--the familiar, the known, the business-as-usual methods and perspectives of an inherited approach and attitude. The openness, the aridity, the size, the shape--everything about this landscape--demanded new ways of thinking and new methods of living. In short, new adaptations were necessary if the Western spaces were to become American places.
Of course, this process--of turning space into place--is achieved by many means. There are the material means: settling, fencing, farming, building, urbanizing, etc. Each of these approaches to taming and defining the landscape required new approaches and new challenges. But what of the emotional and psychological responses to such openness and unfamiliarity? These required new ways of thinking--new stories. For in the stories we tell--about ourselves, our history, our landscape--we create familiar territories and we construct and define meanings; we impose order on the unfamiliar, and thus make a place for ourselves in the chaos of undefined space.
What I'm most interested in are these stories. The ways in which those in the West strove--and continue to strive--to make a place in these Western spaces through the stories they tell, and which have come to be told about them. There is no straight path through this territory, for these stories are not and never have been static. The needs of individuals and communities change, and so do the stories they tell to meet those needs. And in the West, especially, those stories find a way of taking on a life of their own, once again beyond our efforts to control. We may tell our tales to define a landscape, but the myths of those landscapes can come back to define us.
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That's a completely arbitrary place to stop, and of course I need to say more about what I mean about stories coming back to define us (what would my students say?), but that will have to come another time. But I hope this gives you (and me) some idea of where I'm at and where I want to go.
---
The experience of the West--and in many regards its history--is one of a progression from "space" to "place." Space in this instance stands for the open, unfamiliar, nearly limitless expanse of landscape present in the West, whereas place stands for the sheltered, secure, human-defined locations of "meaning" within and against that space. Space at once represents freedom, movement, and limitless possibility, but at the same time a terrifying emptiness, a vast unfamiliar terrain. Place is the familiar, the defined, the controlled and controllable; it means and represents shelter and security--knowability. On the other hand, it is the cessation of movement, the setting down of boundaries and borders.
In many ways, this can be said to be the progress of "civilization" in any territory, for any people. But what makes the West unique from my perspective is the sheer vastness and newness of that territory for those moving into it. In the East, places were cut out of the space of forested terrain using age-old methods. This was new, but at the same time familiar space. It looked like the landscape of memory and experience, and the tools, methods, and perspectives that were used to confront and tame that landscape were not unfamiliar.
But in the West, that territory beyond the timberline and opening up into the prairies and plains of the land beyond the 100th meridian, the American frontier confronted a landscape that challenged--and in many ways defeated--the familiar, the known, the business-as-usual methods and perspectives of an inherited approach and attitude. The openness, the aridity, the size, the shape--everything about this landscape--demanded new ways of thinking and new methods of living. In short, new adaptations were necessary if the Western spaces were to become American places.
Of course, this process--of turning space into place--is achieved by many means. There are the material means: settling, fencing, farming, building, urbanizing, etc. Each of these approaches to taming and defining the landscape required new approaches and new challenges. But what of the emotional and psychological responses to such openness and unfamiliarity? These required new ways of thinking--new stories. For in the stories we tell--about ourselves, our history, our landscape--we create familiar territories and we construct and define meanings; we impose order on the unfamiliar, and thus make a place for ourselves in the chaos of undefined space.
What I'm most interested in are these stories. The ways in which those in the West strove--and continue to strive--to make a place in these Western spaces through the stories they tell, and which have come to be told about them. There is no straight path through this territory, for these stories are not and never have been static. The needs of individuals and communities change, and so do the stories they tell to meet those needs. And in the West, especially, those stories find a way of taking on a life of their own, once again beyond our efforts to control. We may tell our tales to define a landscape, but the myths of those landscapes can come back to define us.
---
That's a completely arbitrary place to stop, and of course I need to say more about what I mean about stories coming back to define us (what would my students say?), but that will have to come another time. But I hope this gives you (and me) some idea of where I'm at and where I want to go.
posted by TRM at 9:46 AM
1 Comments:
This post, and your topic in general, keeps making me think of Westerns, Tony (films, that is). I have a hard time imagining that your dissertation could ignore film, since it seems as though it has been pretty instrumental in how we construct and conceive of "the West." I was thinking, in particular, that one place to start might be "Open Range." I say this for a number of reasons and primarily because it is interesting that it is a Western created in the 21st century, so there are some very obvious differences in how it conceives of "the West," and how it characterizes the "space" of the West as it is imagined, not as it is any more, even though (I would argue) it still seems to exist in some places--Davis, CA, perhaps.
You've probably thought all about this already, Tony, but I still felt like adding my two cents. One thing that might be important to recognize is how "place" and "space" are possibly gendered. In Westerns, at least, the open range is gendered male--it is a space in which male anxieties are expressed. "Space," on the other hand, seems gendered female--that is, in the West (and particularly in Westerns) those "places" that represent "shelter and security--knowability," are typically places in which some kind of household exists, usually formed around a wife or woman (although not always, and it might be interesting to see how some films/stories subvert that by creating male only communities). With that security comes responsibility, and as Westerns tell us over and over again, male protagonists need the open range and often choose it over a female gendered "place."
Another thought that occured to me--I don't know which texts you are looking at but Laura Ingalls Wilder might be a place to think about, if you decide at all to talk about the way in which "place" and "space" are gendered. Her novels both cement this idea of "place" as female (the household, sewing, cooking, cleaning, children) and yet in her final novel (and which she tells us over and over again throughout) she wants to go West while her husband wishes to remain rooted to the land he owns. In fact, they make an agreement--he'll be a farmer for two years, and if he fails he'll become a railroad man--the man who always moves West. Kind of a fascinating reversal from the stereotypes the Westerns present to us. Scott Simmon's got a book about this that might be helpful. Let me know if you want to take a look at it.
Alrighty, I'm done for now.
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