Friday, February 23, 2007

Western Place

Wallace Stegner has written, "Especially in the West, what we have instead of place is space....The principal invention of western American culture is the motel, the principal exhibit of that culture the automotive roadside. A principal western industry is tourism, which exploits the mobile and the seasonal. Whatever it might want to be, the West is primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else; and western literature, from Roughing It to On the Road, from The Log of a Cowboy to Lonesome Dove, from The Big Rock Candy Mountain to The Big Sky, has been largely a literature not of place but of motion."

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Doesn't this seem true? In our culture--both in America and in the visions and definitions of America that we send out to the rest of the world--don't we still emphasize the wide open spaces of our continent, especially of the West? This is part of who we are, or who we claim to be. We are the country of elbow room, of room to roam. On some level, even our conceptions of ourselves and our "American Dreams" are bound up with the idea of limitless possibility, of a kind of potential that is reflected in our landscape. "We" are not locked in to places of tradition and limit, whether those be literal places or social places. Anyone can be or achieve anything in America--or so we tell ourselves--because, after all, if we can't make it here, well, then there's always a there. This has always been our American idea, the one supposedly unique to us, for unlike other ensconced and established regions of the world, where everything has seemingly always already been owned or defined or put in its "place," we've always had more. Enough for everyone. Our ideas of ourselves and our possibilites are linked to our ideas of our open spaces. And from those legends of Davey Crocket and his ilk, who headed off into the woods, to Huck who decided to "light out for the Territory," to the endlessly westering Kerouac, to every American child (or hopeful immigrant, sold on the dream of America) who has ever looked out the window to an elsewhere of promise and freedom, the sheer vastness and space of this America has stood out.

But. But there is also--and always has been--a literature of place in the West as well. For all those who "lit out," there came a time of settling down (you know, the other side of the American Dream), and the need and desire to develop a sense of home, of shelter, and of belonging in these territories. These stories are at the center of my dissertation, and this process of placing is my focus. We persist in imagining--and selling--the West as open space, as still the territory of endless horizons and wide open landscapes. And perhaps this is true, in relation to many other areas, and perhaps this is still the primary allure of the West, in our minds and our films and our books. But this focus does tend to overwrite the stories of place, the identities and lives of the people who have made a home of the West, who have become a people of this place. These are the people who are not just moving through or constantly searching. These are those who have found what they want, and who have sought to live with the landscape, and to make a place from this space. Their stories matter, and for them their territories are not empty or undefined. They have marked them with their living. There stories have happened here.

I have written elsewhere of the way that the persistent views of the Western territory as empty has led to a kind of "dumping ground" approach to the landscape. Here it is okay to test nuclear weapons, or dump nuclear waste. Here it is okay to take what we will from the land itself, and give little thought to renewal or restoration. Here it is okay to dam and flood valleys, or to strip hillsides away for the minerals that lay beneath. These approaches rely on the perception of a land that is only open space, that is "not being used" or is "virtually uninhabited." And doing so not only often puts the people who are here in jeopardy (just ask the "downwinders" who continue to die of cancer as a result of nuclear fallout), but also ignores and erases the connections these "virtual uninhabitants" have to the landscape, to the places they have made and the stories they have lived in them.

Doesn't a literary and imaginitive tradition that emphasizes only the space of the West, and the limitless mobility that it promises, ultimately do the same thing?

I wonder.

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