D.O.N.E.

So, it's been an incredibly long time since my last post, and a lot has happened. First of all, the BIG NEWS is that I am done. I filed my dissertation -- Placing the West: Landscape, Literature, and Identity in the American West -- a little over a week ago, and I have a nice little certificate that states that I "have completed all requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in ENGLISH." I guess that makes me a Doctor, yeah? Woohoo!

In other exciting news, I also learned recently that a pared-down version of my third chapter has been accepted for publication at Western American Literature, the big-time journal in the field.

Ironically, that third chapter was at the heart of the "dilemma" that I wrote about so long ago in my last post. I got over the quandary, and focused the chapter solely on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (putting her in the context of other Western women writers). The article is an even tighter focus, but one that sums up a lot of what the whole dissertation project is about. It is entitled "Erased by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Gender in Marilynne Robinson's West," and will take about a year to reach print. But in the meantime, I am dancing with much unexpected joy.

Perhaps at some point in the near future, I will do a retrospective here of the last few months and how I got to this point and how the book finally took shape (I know all you out there are waiting anxiously for the details). Now, though, I'm off to the land of thinking about anything at all other than Western literature. At least for a little bit. What a wonderful place it will be...

A Dilemma

So, I'm at work on my third chapter (or, at least, I'm approximating "work" on my third chapter), and I've come to a bit of a crossroads. As I've worked on the first couple chapters, and talked them over with my advisor and others, the project -- and the style of the project -- have come into a clearer focus for me. I've determined that I can lay out the framework and arc of the project in a general introduction, and that each chapter can subsequently serve as an illustration of such-and-such aspect of my argument. This eliminates what my advisor has called "throat-clearing" from the chapters. That is, it keeps me from re-iterating the general ideas behind place and space, placing, senses of place, and so on in each chapter. It, in turn, trims the chapters down to a more "lean-and-mean" fighting weight. This is all good.

Now, the conundrum: the current chapter is one that I've known from the beginning would be a hard one. I know what aspect of "Placing the West" the chapter is meant to illustrate -- the "politics of place," i.e. the ways in which, in defining a place as a place, individuals and communities define also people and activities as either "in place" or "out of place," thereby enforcing ideologies through the process of placing, blah, blah, blah. As far as the "westernness" of the chapter, this is where I was to discuss how the West, despite common perception, was and remains an incredibly diverse landscape, and that those of different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, etc. have a part to play in defining Western spaces as places.

As one might guess, that's a lot of rambling. Trying to cover the literary ground of race, gender, sexuality, and any number of other "identities" could easily devolve into a jumble -- not to mention, it would take me for-freaking-ever to write. Thus, in the vein of the more lean-minded style, I'm trying to pare it down, and I've determined that I can do it all from the perspective of gender, using primarily Marilyn Robinson's Housekeeping and Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge. Goody, goody gumdrops.

But where does that leave me with the idea of racial/ethnic diversity in the West? Will it be irresponsible of me to leave that out? At the same time, if I mention it "in passing" in the new gender chapter, will that seem dismissive? Or, if I go back to the previous model where I try and take all comers, will that just leave me lost and unwinding in a vast ramble? I've got a lot to say on the subject, at least from the theoretical/historical aspect; but I also have little in the way of literary representations by these "minority" subjects (though I can work with other writers who at least write about ethnic enclaves, etc. in the landscapes of the West). When I first imagined the chapter, that was my plan -- and I had all sorts of big talk about racial and ethnic enclaves, Mormonism, women in the West, homosexualities (ala "Brokeback Mountain"), etc. But it can't be done. I know that. And I also just can't bring myself to add another, separate chapter to the pile.

So, this is where I be. Hemming and hawing. And on and on and on.

[And, in so doing, I've apparently also come unraveled when it comes to writing organized, cogent blog entries. Sorry about that.]

A New Notch

Well, I've officially finished a draft of my second chapter. Slowly but surely...

In the process, I've also managed to pass the century-mark. I'm not so sure it's a good thing, but I've racked up a about 110 pages.

Of course, by the time I'm done editing for redundancy and long-windedness (at some point, in the very far future), I'll probably get it all down to 12. Or so.

Long Way Round

It's been a while. But fear not; I have been working. Since last we met, I have completed a 57-page monstrosity of a chapter, and I am working on another, leaner, meaner chapter as we speak. Here's a little something to blow the dust of this thing:

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It is often difficult to express a sense of place, to put words to the feelings of attachment and “at homeness” we may feel in relation to certain landscapes or locations. As daily life bustles on, people are seldom called upon to consider, much less articulate, the deeper meanings of our surroundings, the ways in which our home territories—and our own histories within those territories—shape our routines and perceptions. Whether urban, rural, or even wilderness, the landscapes we live within may be so familiar to us, that we fail to even “see” them, to recognize how their shapes and sights and sounds influence our ways of seeing—of defining and evaluating—ourselves and the wider world. Quite simply, there are few things in life that are easier to take for granted than the ground we tread everyday, the scenery that constantly surrounds us. Yet, as we may learn if we are in some way disconnected from our home places, there are also few things in life more important to our sense of self and well-being than a sense of place and placed identity. When we are, as Keith Basso has described it,

deprived of these attachments [to places] and find ourselves adrift, literally dislocated, in unfamiliar surroundings we do not comprehend and care for even less…sense of place may assert itself in pressing and powerful ways, and its often subtle components—as subtle, perhaps, as absent smells in the air or not enough visible sky—come surging into awareness. It is then we come to see that attachments to places may be nothing less than profound, and that when these attachments are threatened we may feel threatened as well. Places, we realize, are as much a part of us as we are part of them, and senses of place—yours, mine, and everyone else’s—partake complexly of both. (xiii-xiv)

Confronting the threat of change or of displacement, individuals thus become aware not just of their affinity for the comforts of home or the familiarity of the “local,” but of the central importance a sense of place—an attachment to a particular landscape, whether built or natural, and an awareness of one’s own relationship to the ever-accruing stories of that place—can hold for their definitions of self and their ways of seeing and simply being in the world.

Articulating a sense of place and evoking the importance of an attachment to place built upon a lived and storied relationship to particular landscapes is one of the pervasive themes of Western American literature. If it is difficult for people to express the complex relationship between identity, perception, and place, then it is doubly so when one’s place—one’s home landscape and regional identity—is often caricatured, underrated, or even overlooked by the machinery of mainstream culture. When compared with the heavily populated urban centers of American culture, or with the nostalgic values celebrated in visions of Main Street Middle America, or even with the verdant foliage of America’s wooded wildernesses, the expanses of the open, arid West are often perceived, at best, as sparse, marginal, and virtually uninhabited. Subsequently, those who would speak to the value of this landscape—to the stories and lives and meaning of a real, everyday West—do so in the face of a popular perception of the landscape as worth-less. Though such perceptions may make it more difficult to convey the message of a meaningful and placed sense of Westernness, they do lend a perspective and urgency to those speaking of and from the West, for faced with the threat of “no place,” their senses of place—their attachments to Western lands and landscapes—are thrown into relief, and, as Basso would describe it, “come surging into awareness.”

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.

Beginning by Erasure

Well, despite my many, many efforts to the contrary, it's finally happened. I've started on a chapter. I'm skipping the introduction for now, and my first chapter sets out to show how the West was perceived and represented as "empty space," and how those who sought to settle it -- the Great Plains, specifically -- had to struggle with both the real and imagined "desertness." I roughly imagine the chapter in three parts. First, I will venture to show how the West (again, specifically the Great Plains, but with applicability to the West as a whole) was perceived by many in the 19th century as a "Great American Desert," and how this perception (in tandem, of course, with many practical obstacles) served to hold back the settlement of the American intererior for several generations. Subsequent to that--and the heart of the chapter--will be a discussion of how this myth shifted to one in which the agrarian settlement of the Plains became a heroic, and national venture. The desert turned to garden. Here, I will look to the literature--Cather, Rölvaag, etc.--to show how individuals struggled practically and (more imporantly) psychologically with the "space," and how they sought to carve a place for themselves within the landscape. Finally, in a closing discussion, I plan to explore how--despite this shift in mythology from desert emptiness to garden promise--perceptions of the West have always retained a trace of "emptiness" to many both within and without. This is evident in treatments of Western landscapes as "dumping grounds"--that is, as sites for both nuclear tests and nuclear waste; as territories to be exploited by extractive economics; etc. For many, the West is still virtually uninhabited, and the tendency to erase the senses of place that have been created in those landscapes persists, "filled in" (again) with empty space.

And, if all that doesn't confuse y'all enough, here's a quickwrite I did a few days ago, to get me a back in the practice of expressing these ideas in writing. I'm not quite there yet...

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The historical impression of the Great Plains as the “Great American Desert” was one that held sway with many American settlers. This myth of the desert resulted from Stephen Long’s explorations (1820), and joined a long line of American perceptions of the unsettled West as howling wilderness. Whether the actual aridity of the plains was accurate is beside the point—so much depends on cyclical climate shifts and environmental hazards (droughts, locusts, etc)—but the story stuck. Perhaps the new settlers who ventured into this environment saw around them that these grasslands were no true desert, but many of them persisted holding on to the desert mythology because of their psychological and practical struggles with the overwhelming difference of the territory. It’s openness and seeming lack of shelter; it’s harsh weather; it’s sheer distance from the Eastern centers of familiarity and “civilization” – all of this overwhelmed many new to the region (or traveling through), and many conveniently used the mode of thinking and talking about the place that was already in practice to describe this feeling of alienness – that is, of a “desert” or “wasteland.” The desert perception may not have been a permanent, persistent, actual boundary, but the myth and the mental and physical struggles in a new landscape made it a psychological one.

Fight a story with a story. The mythology of barrier and impossibility was overcome only by convincing people that it was worth the challenge, by re-mythologizing the wilderness as a place of potential and national importance, and by making heroes of those who would take up the struggle – the yeoman heroes. The myth of the desert gave way to the myth of the garden, and this too struggled with reality. The plains were a difficult, unfamiliar, and challenging environment, and they did have “desert”-like qualities. Though not the howling wastes, the plains were still unsuited for traditional agricultural ventures. Those who settled it had to still overcome—in practice and in psychology—the sheer “spaceness” of it all. This is well represented in the literature of the time, in Cather and Rölvaag and others. The push and pull of the stories, and the struggles between the overwhelming landscape and the mythologized glory of triumph (of riches, of a “new start,” of founding a kingdom, etc.) all came together and clashed in the daily lives of these people, attempting to create a place for themselves. Some succeeded and some failed, but all struggled—both with reality and with mythology.

Even with the shift from the desert myth to the garden myth, and despite the success of settlers in eventually “placing” the plains, in creating lives and communities and histories in these apparently empty spaces (in finally creating “places to hide”), the perception of emptiness in the West persists. Perhaps it is promoted some by those within, to highlight their triumphs in overcoming, but it is also imposed by those without, who still seek to exploit the “wastes” – by extractive economics, or by nuclear testing, or by various other “dumping ground” philosophies (Vegas, prisons, etc). For many, the West is virtually uninhabited still, and those who are—in Terry Tempest Williams’ terms—the “virtual uninhabitants” must live with this perception, whether they fight it or accept it.

"Progress"

I've been thinking about how the idea/ideal of "progress" in the Western/Europoean culture and imagination is linked to the need to fill the empty spaces, to define and tame them. Whether these empty spaces are in the mighty books of knowledge, or on the globe itself (or, in the famous amalgams of the two, the "hic sunt dracones" on the maps of not-so-antiquity), Western thinkers, politicians, and explorers have sought to fill in the blanks, so to speak.

Often, of course, those blanks were not so blank, and so in order for the course of progress to make its way, it was often necessary to erase what was there to begin with, to imagine a space as space, as empty and void and in need of definition and settlement. This was, in the modern lingo, an incredibly imperial and colonial move, and a very successful one. After all, if a space is empty and void, then isn't it our God- (or King-) given duty to fill it up, to put it to use? To make it produce? In other words, to make it ours and subject to our way of thinking?

The obvious correlaries to this in history are those of the Age of Exploration and colonization by the European powers. But we have inherited these traits and ways of thinking, and continue to practice them in our "new" world. In terms of my project, the American West was--and in many ways, still is--seen as empty (or at least sparse), and it is a national project to put these spaces to use, to extract from them whatever we can, and to impose upon them certain definitions, that they might not be the "blank" spots on our American landscape. This is progress. To populate, tame, and define. In our terms.

I'm just thinking randomly here. This is an idea that just got its hook into me today, as I am trying to reconnect with my dissertation project. But I feel like it proliferates far beyond what I could do with it. For instance, don't many of us still think this way, even in our individual, daily lives? Don't we feel as if the only way we can be "making progress" or moving forward or growing up is if we are accumulating things, whether that's literal possessions or the stuff of knowledge. We have to know, to understand, to possess. We need to fill up the blank spaces of our minds and of our apartments. Progress.

What are the alternatives?