The U.S. Fiction Today The Turn Toward Mark Shechner .As recently as five years ago, if a graduate student of .American literature were to write a disserta­ tion on contemporary .American fiction, the chances were over­ whelming that die student would incline toward die writing of one of .America's m inorities, or women’s fiction, or the leading “metafictional" writers, among whom were prominently num ­ bered Donald Barthelme, John Barth, William Burroughs (the eminence grise of A m erican m etafiction), Robert Coover, William Gaddis, William Gass, INSIDE^ ©The Life in Still Life, page 3 ©David M ason’s Buried Houses, page 5 [©Interview—J.H . Kunsder, The Geography of Nowhere, page 8 ©Book Ends, page 9 John Hawkes, and most especial­ ly Thomas Pvnchon, who, in light of his difficulty, his verbal zest, his encyclopedic range of refer­ ence, his touch of paranoia, and his reclusiveness, was widely hailed as the standard-bearer of the movement. If American fic­ tion had a forward surge that did not arise out of purely social imperatives—the women's move­ m ent or Black nationalism — surely metafiction was it. Of course, there was a political slant to some metaficdonal writ­ ing (Robert Coover's The Public Burning w a s anything but an exercise in purely stylistic audacity) but, on the whole, it represented an avant garde rather than a popular front. Metaficdonal wanting did not pro­ pose to transform society so m uch as the sensibilities of a select, literate few, who were priv­ ileged by education to have access to difficult texts. It did not call into quesdon the poliucal or economic order, but the solidity and knowabilitv of reality itself, a posture that was cheered—as it is tocUw—by those whose vision had been cleansed bv the imperium philosophicum that descended on R ealism the academy in the 1970s. William Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov were the patron saints of this new fiction, and it was hailed as being both technically radical and arusdcally visionary. It was en avant, promising not only more esoteric forms of liter­ ary' pleasure, but the liberauon of the spirit from all that was lockstep, linear, patriarchal, and especially bourgeois in the tradi­ tional novel. Seen from the distant perspec­ tive of the 1990s, metafiction—a term sometimes used inter­ changeably with post-m od­ ernism —appears to have pos­ sessed little unity from book to book or author to author. It was certainly not a school, though yvTiters, as they always do, took instruction from one another. It was not even really a tendency. Its unifying and defining feature, yvhich permitted critics to treat a vast and disparate assortment of yvriters as a movement, was a uni­ formity of rejection, a turn against those qualities that earlier generations used to dignify yvith terms like "mimesis” or "natural­ ism” or "realism.” Among practi­ ses U.S. Fiction Today, page 12 Thoughts on the Abrams/Culler Exchange Blindness and Paradox Allen Wood In the past decade or so, liter­ ary criticism has taken a highly theoretical (even philosophical) turn. Just as 20th-century art has been art about art, so in recent years literary critics have often concerned themselves less yvith what they have read than yvith philosophical theories about reading. These concerns are exemplified in M. H. Abrams' “W hat is a H um anistic C rit­ icism?” (Bookpress, May 1993) and the responses to it bv Jonathan Culler and Ted Undenvood (Bookpress, Summer 1993). Abrams writes in favor of “hu m an istic criticism ," and against an “anti-humanist” criti­ cism. The latter, which more often goes bv the names “post­ s tru c tu ra lis t” o r “post-m od­ e rn is t,” is largely inspired by some recent French philosophy, in particular that of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To a philosopher, of course, it is tempting to judge philosophical­ ly-inspired criticism bv the philos­ ophy that inspiied it. But this temptation should be resisted, as Culler’s article helps me to do. For just as great art has some­ times been inspired bv intellectu­ ally worthless aesthetic theories, so some very original and stimu­ lating literary criticism might be inspired bv some verv bad philos­ ophy. Culler's strategy in defend­ ing w hat Abrams would call "anti-hum anist” criticism is to devote a large part of his reply to b rin g in g o u t the “in h u m a n ” aspects of Robert Frost’s short poem “T he Secret Sits.” T he result is a practical demonstra­ tion that the style of criticism he favors can lx.- insightful and pro­ ductive. This much, of course, Abrams never denied. His aim was to question the theory that moti­ vates “anti-humanist” criticism, especially its intention to discred­ it any approach to literature that is “hum anistic” in the sense of “dealing with literary works as products of human beings com­ m unicating yvith other hum an beings about matters of human concern.” That the philosophical theories he has in mind do have som e such in te n tio n is clear enough. For the theorists sav such things as tltat texts are products not of human beings but of “lan­ guage” or "writing" in general, that the human author of a text is simplv a site for the operation of “language” or “yvriting" or rhetori­ cal tropes, or systems of power. These theories go far beyond Culler’s more modest attempt to show that we can also leant some­ thing by attending to the “inhu­ m an” (unintended, materially lin­ guistic, communicatively disrup­ tive) aspects of a text. They imply that to the extent that literary crit­ icism focuses on the text as the meaningful communication of a human author to a human audi­ ence, it has fallen victim to funda­ m ental philosophical illusions about what a literary text is and how it should be read. Culler comes closest to respond­ ing directly to Abrams when he uses the Frost poem as a vehicle see Paradox, page 4 Land of Little Rain W here ti ie Bi t ebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs Wallace Stegner Penguin Books, 227 pages, SI 1 Roland Shanks One hundred years after the American historian, Frederick Turner, declared the Western American frontier closed, Wallace Stegner, in 11lune the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, completed his fifty-year journey seeking to redefine the mvth of the frontier. His great success was in shifting the focus of the Western myth from the men and women who peopled the land, to the land itself, and in so doing he has imbued the land with a numimous quality. The frontiersmen, cowboys, loggers, railroaders, fish­ ermen, and sodbusters, with all their mythic qualities of rugged individualism, stoicism, and tough­ ness, are shown to be merely' play­ ers on the stage, shaped by and ultimately absorbed into the Western landscape. The people who settled the West brought their F.uropcan and Eastern .American cultures and dreams to this arid region, and the fine china and Victorian furniture that littered die trails heading west symbolized the cultural disjunction between their dreams and the land. Once there, they’yvere either run off by the land they sought to tame, or they were transformed by it. Where the Bluebird Sings is Stegner’s last book. On April 13, 1993, a short time after the book’s release, Stegner died of injuries received when he was sunck by a car in Santa Fe. This collection of essays, many of which have been previously published, spans his career and is largely autobiograph­ ical, as is most of his work. For any­ one seeking an overview of Stegner’s life and work, this is a perfect place to stai t. For me, reading Stegner is like going home. The land he writes about is the land that raised me, and I have visited many of the locations he describes. After the wanderings of his youth, which included tours of duty at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard, Stegner made his perma- see Little Rain, page 14 page 2 the bookpress Letters to the Editor Editorial Further response to the Abrams/Culler Exchange though in his discussion of this poem he explains that this word has become virtu­ As the B ookpress heads in to its ally obsolete to deconstructionists third year of publication, we would To the Editor: because contemporary insights into indi­ like to r e p o r t som e new dev elo p ­ In his comment on M.H. Abrams’ May vidual m en’s and women’s natures, their m ents, several of which you may 1993 article, “W hat is a H um anistic histories, and their relations to particular already have noticed. Aside from our Criticism?” ), Jonathan Culler (Summer 1993) quotes Mr. Abrams’ protest to a societies have made the concept of gener­ ic man virtually meaningless. Yet the new banner, with this issue we are introducing a four-column format, a rem ark of Jacques Derrida: “...to deal w ord “h u m a n ,” or som e form o f it, with a literary text as a ‘play of writing,’ appears thirty-eight times in Mr. Culler’s slightly larger typeface (Baskerville, for the cognoscenti) and other exclusive of the story, is to denude the analysis of Frost’s poem in such phrases design improvements. text of its human dimension.” as “human experience,” “the human con­ On the editorial side, our peri­ Mr. Culler’s comments on this seem to dition,” and “the hum an w orld.” Mr. patetic team of Michael Serino and be based on a misunderstanding, for Mr. Abrams’ statement does not imply, as Mr. Culler then concludes his discussion of “the hum an” by archly warning “that p h o to g ra p h e r Jan ice Levy, whose a rtic le on E d m u n d W ilso n ’s Culler evidendy thinks, that everything readers construct a [human] content for T alcottville ( Bookpress, N ovem ber that is hum an exists in the story while ‘we’ at their own risk.” These arbitrary 1992) elicited many favorable com­ everything outside the story is inhuman. Mr. Abrams assumes that the story is so shifts reveal that Mr. Culler feels privi­ leged to banish a word from the English ments, will do a series of essays and photographs this year on locations of intertwined with the other components language when deconstructive theory literary in terest in the N ortheast. of the text that their relationship may be requires and restore it to usage when the Also a new page of short reviews considered virtually organic. Therefore, analysis of a work of literature makes the called Bookends jo in s G unilla the human dimension not only exists in word indispensable. Feigenbaum ’s A Bite of the Apple as a the story but also pervades all other com­ Mr. Culler warns against giving a con­ re g u la r fe a tu re . We are p lan n in g ponents of the literary text. tent to “We” also because the structure of additional features, such as one on If a critic chooses to discuss these com­ the poem, as he understands it, warrants p o etry in tra n sla tio n , w hich will ponents separately from the story, he nec­ caution. The second line of Mr. Frost’s appear from time to time throughout essarily denudes them of their “human poem contrasts with the first line, and the the year. W hile we in te n d to stick dim ension,” just as Mr. Abrams avers. parallels between “the Secret” of the sec­ w ith o u r so m ew h at e c le c tic Meter and rhyme, for example, discussed ond line and the “We” of the first line approach, the inclusion of these and apart from the story of the poem, are make clear that “We” is to be taken as o th e r d e p a rtm e n ts will h elp to merely technical “inhuman” aspects of a being as em pty of “c o n te n t” as “the d efin e—but not to confine— the work of literature. Examined in the con­ text of the poem, they emphasize or illu­ minate a feeling, an action, or situation of a character of the poem ’s story, and thus participate in the hum an dim en­ sion. Note Mr. Culler’s comment on the rhyme and meter in Robert Frost’s twoline poem, ‘T he Secret Sits”: ‘T he rhyme and m eter enforce the parallelism between the human and inhuman cases.” Because of Mr. Culler’s misunderstand­ ing of Mr. Abrams’ conception of the relationship among the components of a literary text, much of his attack on Mr. Abrams’ humanistic criticism is irrele­ Secret.” Mr. Culler lists a num ber of “non-human structures and processes” that lead to the conclusion that “the Secret” is an “empty” “product of a sup­ posing,” a “rhetorical operation of fic­ tional positing.” When he begins his attempt to show that “W e” is the same kind o f empty product or operation, Mr. Culler confess­ es: “So far I have written as if the mean­ ing of ‘We’ could be taken for granted— as if it naturally m eant ‘m ankind’ or ‘humanity.’” This is the second time he speaks of accepting only “so far” what he has just written, and these admissions identity of the Bookpress. Though we did not publish during the summer, a most gratifying event took place this June: the formation of the Friends of the Bookpress. We sent out about 90 invitations to this first meeting, and well over half the people invited showed up to partici­ pate in a lively discussion about the future direction of the paper. A sub­ sequent fundraising appeal was met by an enthusiastic response, and the g enerous gifts o f o u r First Friends have helped to get the Bookpress off to a strong start for this season. In this vant. He concludes his discussion of the “inhuman” element in literature by say­ ing, “If one accepts, as I have done so far, Mr. Abrams’ distinction between the reveal that he reserves the right to desig­ nate any of his statements to be “as if ’ declarations whenever he chooses. Earlier he wrote: “Brief though it is... the like “the Secret,” and then proceed to demonstrate the contrast between “the human case” of line one and “the inhu­ hum an world of ‘characters like our­ selves’ and the inhum an world of lan­ guage and theory, it is hard not to con­ clude that the inhum an is a matter of poem offers a wry or even sardonic view of human activity and raises the question whether dancing around a ring is a dis­ maying figure for the human condition man case" of line two. Although Mr. Culler notes that “this poem...offers a wry or even sardonic view of human activity,” he withholds atuibut- great interest—even hum an interest.” or w hether there is a suggestion of a ing this view to the poet or to the Speaker Mr. Abrams does not make this distinc­ tion that Mr. Culler attributes to him, and Mr. Culler’s separation of the world happy community.” Frost’s poem states, “We dance round,” and when Mr. Culler refers to this danc­ of the poem, apparently because he is committed to the dogma that “everything that makes the poem or novel a work of of characters from the world of language, as if the story had no language, is illogical ing as “the human condition,” his words imply (if they have any meaning) that literature” exists outside of the story. To acknowledge the presence of a character and bewildering. In view of Mr. Culler’s exclusion of the “We” means, at least at this moment (in fact, not “as if’), mankind or humanity. It in this poem would lead to the recogni­ tion that this character is involved in story from the serious consideration of would be enlightening to see Mr. Culler some action—doing, thinking, or feel­ the “literary critic who seeks to analyze lit­ state forthrightly at the beginning of his ing—and Mr. Culler would end up deal­ erature,” it is surprising to find that he analysis of ‘T he Secret Sits” that “We” is ing with the story of the poem. expresses great interest in “the hum an” an “empty” “product of a supposing,” “a The human agent of the “wry or even in the literary text, a trait which most rhetorical operation of fictional positing” sardonic view” needs to be identified readers find inseparable from the story. This interest is especially surprising when Mr. Culler defends the recent “critiques of traditional humanism [which]...con­ test the notion that there is such a thing F rien ds o f tiie B ookpress as ‘the hum an’ or ‘humanity.’” Perhaps Mr. Culler’s analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘T he Secret Sits” provides some insight into what “the h u m an ” m eans to this deconstructive critic, as well as the rela­ tionship of “the hum an” to the “story” and of the “story “ to the rest of the textu­ al “body.” M. H. Abrams Martin Bernal Jonathan Bishop R. F. Cisne Jonathan Culler Ruth Darling Alfred Kahn Isaac Kramnick Alison Lurie Dan McCall James McConkey Margaret Nash The Secret Sits We dance round in a ring and suppose But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. Ann Druyan Joyce Elbrecht Lydia Fakundiny LeMoyne Farrell Benjamin Nichols Nancy & Andrew Ramage Carl Sagan Cushing Strout Mr. Culler begins his analysis of Mr. Frost’s poem by declaring his intention to show “how the hum an and inhum an dimensions of a work are related.” He Bryna and Harvey Fireside Eva & Roald Hoffman Phyllisjanowitz George M. T. Kahin Deborah Tall Gail & Zellman Warhaft W inthrop Wetherbee does n o t define the word “h u m a n ,” September, 1993 connection, the Bookpress has filed for incorporation as a non-profit organi­ zation, meaning among other things that donations to the paper will be tax-deductible. We are redoubling our efforts to meet expenses by means of local and p u b lish e r advertising, and we are applying for grants. It is our hope th at Friends of the Bookpress will assist our efforts by participating in fundraising events such as lectures and w orkshops, and by providing direct support. We urge you to join by com pleting the coupon on the back page of this issue. We would also like to thank the many readers who took the time to com plete and retu rn the survey we published before the summer break. In addition to proving incontrovertiblv that m ost of o u r readers buy books, but not boats (except canoes, perhaps), the survey results helped to suggest many of the technical and editorial changes we have begun to make. Finally, we would like to assure our readers that all these innovations and our continued growth (circulation in upstate NY is now at 15,000) do not augur a turn towards commercializa­ tion. As d e m o n stra te d by M ark S hechner’s lead article on the cur­ rent state of American fiction, and Alan W ood’s insightful contribution to the debate over post-modernism and deconstruction begun by M.H. A bram s in last M ay’s p a p e r, the Bookpress continues to extend serious discussion of science, literature, and the arts into the public dom ain. As evidenced by our new sidewalk racks, we shall continue to venture where no literary newspaper has gone before. because, though the poem can “offer” this view, the poem cannot itself feel the emotions that wry and sardonic imply. If Mr. Culler assumes that it is the reader who feels wry or “sardonic” in response to the arrangement of the various compo­ nents of the poem, he must make clear that the poem does not itself order this arrangem ent. That is the work of the poet. To fail to acknowledge either the Speaker or the poet as the human agent creating the poem’s “wry” or “sardonic” tone is to dehumanize not only the poem but these words as well. A tenet of Mr. Culler’s critical dogma is not to talk about what the poet does with a poem but to speak “about what the poem does or what particular elements of the poem do,” a tactic that enables see Letters, page 18 B Publisher and Editor-in-Chief: Jack Goldman M anaging E ditor: Joel Ray Design and Production: David DeMello Advertising Accounts Executive: David DeMello Development C onsultant: Richard Truitt D istribution: Olli Baker, Jo Kress. Scott Nash, Ken Mink C ontributors: Milly Acharya. Kenneth Evett. Gunilla Feigenbaum. Nick Gillespie. Mary Hood. Janice Levy,Kevin Murphy. Michael Serino, Mark Shechner. Jeff Schwaner, Alan Singer, Heather White The entire contents of T he Bo o kpress are copyright ©1993 by The Bo o kpress. Alt rights reserved. T he Bookpress will not be liable lor typographical error, or errors in publication except the cost to advertisers for up to the cost of the space in which the actual error appeared in the first insertion. Submissions of manuscripts and an should be sent. SASE. to: T he B ookpress. DeWitt Building 215 N. Cayuga Street. Ithaca. NY 14850 (607) 277-2254 September, 1993 the b o o k pr e ss The Life in Still Life page 3 Kenneth Evett It is one of the ironies of 20th-centurv culture that still-life painting, a sem­ inal force in m odern art and a genre that yielded masterpieces of abstract order and sensuous appeal, should now have fallen into disrepute, regard­ ed as an irrelevant exercise bv bored art stu d en ts o r used as therapy in senior citizen art classes. Vet today, after the years of incessant innovation that followed the revolutionary still lifes of Cezanne and the Cubists, after the abandonm ent of traditional Western standards of drawing, struc­ ture, and technique, after gigantism, ambiguity, aesthetic cannibalism, and the im penetrable flatness of the pic­ ture plane have become the all-toofam iliar cliches of the m odern American Academy, mavbe it is time for still-life painting once m ore to become an agent for change. Because it is g eared to intim ate hum an scale, offers a return to the innocent pleasure of contemplating the forms of the physical realm (espe­ cially the edibles and utensils that suv tain life), and permits arbitrary con­ trol over at least one segment of the environment, the genre can be used to reaffirm simple bedrock pleasures, as an orderly antidote to the violent chaos of the times, and a subversive activity against the banal rigidities of the modern academy. The objects used in still-life paint­ ing, though they d o n 't move about, talk back, or make love, nevertheless radiate a mysterious sense of presence and identity. Those apples, onions, oranges, cups, com potes, dead Fish, (lowers, books and bottles that make up the conventional cast of still-life characters have their own intrinsic, symbolic, and sexual meanings. When they are arranged together in con­ trolled setups, they may assume psy­ chic characteristics, become passive or aggressive, dejected or exuberant par­ ticipants in a visual dram a. What begins as a tableau of inanimate things turns into a lively theatrical perfor­ mance of idiosyncratic characters, their surrogate bodily parts—noses, nipples, and genitals—in view as thev press, threaten, snoop, cavort, or get along together on the still-life stage. These same characters may also function as discrete abstract com po­ nents in a m iniature, nonfunctional form of architecture. The im pinge­ m ents and openings between them provide a conceptual path of progres­ sion through space that is comparable to the organized rhythms of actual vol­ um es and voids in architectural sys­ tems. But the abiding appeal of still-life painting is that it glorifies m undane, evervdav objects by elevating them to a level of high abstraction. Still-life objects embody the elementary forms of geom etry—cylinders, spheres, ovoids, cubes, and pyram ids—and carry a full range of basic abstract properties. Axial direction, color, tex­ ture and contours are all involved when the initial setup is assem bled. The deployment of these components also requires immediate formal deci­ sions about the great abstract issues of painting: proportion, the tension between symmetry and asvmmetrv, the pulls and oppositions of like and unlike elem ents, and the overt or implicit geometric constructs (trian­ gles, rectangles, circles, or parallelo­ gram s) needed to organize the rhvthms on the surface and in depth. The color program of a setup mav evoke m oods that range from the claustrophobic gloom of Picasso's wartime still lifes to Van Gogh’s joyful high-intensitv visions of flowers. And, of course, those am enable still-life objects can be a rra n g e d bv sim ple num bers with musical connotations (duet, trio, quartet), or the basic con­ figurations of the alphabet, 0, T, H, V, X, can be employed to establish order. With such a wealth of abstract possibil­ ities, it is no w onder th at artists as rem o te in tim e and place as the Winter Still Life by Kenneth Evett anonymous genius who painted the still-life mural in the Tomb of Oserhat at Luxor, Z ubaran in G uadalupe, M orandi in Bologna, Caravaggio in Rom e, or W illiam Bailey in New Haven should have exploited the abstract potential of the genre. The French have made a national treasure of still-life painting, using it to celebrate the sensuous pleasures of life, to satisfy their love of lucidity, and occasionally to express their revolu­ tionary aesthetic impulses. C hardin, the quintessential French still-life painter, developed a m ethod in the 13th century that is valid to this day. Judging from the evidence in his work, he gazed upon the contents of his kitchen and studio with a receptive eve, selected the items that suited his iconographic and form al needs, arranged them together with deliber­ ate intent, and then studied the rela­ tionships betw een them as they lay before his eyes in the real world of space and light. These visual discover­ ies were realized with definitive marks and tones that carry a full measure of tactile and haptic significance. O f the many French painters who followed C hardin’s m ethod, none used it with greater profundity than Cezanne. In C ezanne’s old studio at Aix-enProvence, the domestic utensils used in his still lifes have been preserved. Now, invested with a kind of legendary glamour, they are lined up on shelves along the gray walls, and contem po­ rary examples of his transitory apples, oranges, or flowers are displayed on low tables about the studio. These artifacts rem ind us that Cezanne always em ployed the tradi­ tional content of Western art: still life, landscape, and the Figure. He gazed upon the forms of the visual realm with ardent attention and devoted his life as an artist to learning how to see and to realize his vision with responsi­ ble marks and tones. It is the tension g e n e ra te d by the c o n c re te n e ss of things in their relation to the spaces between them as their reality contends see Still Life, page 19 THE GOURMET FARM STORE the most unique farm market in the county OPEN 365 DAYS A YEAR 9 A . M . - 9 P.M. 1552 HANSHAW ROAD • 257-1765 Local Produce Fresh Cut Flowers Fresh Fruits & Vegetables Gourmet Specialty Foods Coffee Beans Local Baked Goods Beans, Rice, Grains, Nuts Dried Fruit & Specialty Flours page 4 the R o o k p r e s s O ff Cam pus At The Bookery The Bookery's Fall lecture series continues... Sundays at 4 p.m. in the lecture space in Bookery II Sander L. Gilman the G oldwin Smith Professor of Humane Studies at Cornell, W ill give a talk entitled "Freud, Race, and Gender." The talk w ill pre­ sent the argument of his new book of the same title, which concerns the anti-Semitism of Freud's Vienna and how the specter of anti-Semitism haunts the creation of psychoanalysis. Joanna Higgins w ill read from her recently pub­ lished book, The Importance o f High Places, a collection o f four short stories and a novella— tales of spiritual transcendence in generally humble surroundings. Higgins, also a children's author, is special projects creative w rit­ ing instructor in the Binghamton public school system. September 26 Howard Gordon assistant provost for academic affairs and social equity at SUNY Oswego, will give a talk entitled "Writing About Race and Romance." Gordon will also read from his new collection of short fiction, The African in Me, which depicts African-American life and its conflicts, from racism to romance, from the late 1950s through the beginning of the 1990s. Timothy Murray w ill discuss his new ly released book Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas. The book investigates how " the cinematic" invades our culture and identity. Murray teaches film, perfor­ mance, visual theory, and Renaissance studies at Cornell University. O ctober 17 The Bookery DeWitt Building, 215 North Cayuga St., Ithaca For more information call (607) 273-5055 Paradox continued,from page 1 for insinuating such philosophical mes­ sages as the purely Active character of the subject of knowledge and of “humanity” as something “we” all have in common. But this is hardly a vindication of the theories Abrams is criticizing. The real question is whether the insights of “a n ti-h u m a n ist” literary critics—for instance, Culler’s ingenious comments on Frost’s poem—are in any way behold­ en to the philosophical theories to which Abrams is objecting, or whether these insights could just as easily be accommo­ dated within “hum anistic” criticism as Abrams understands it. Surely nothing in “humanistic” criticism excludes the appreciation of the operations of rhetoric, rhyme, and alliteration, which C uller c h a racterizes as “in h u m a n ” aspects of the poem. Win1should it not be a function of “humanistic” criticism to muse, as Culler does, on the enigmat­ ic m etaphor “the Secret knows”? This metaphor may be "inhum an” in that it personifies what is not a person, but it protides no support at all for the post­ structuralist philosophical theories which tell us that such metaphors are justified because the person itself is a mere fiction. In fact, evert’ aspect of the poem which C uller characterizes as “in h u m a n ” belongs to the norm al process of human communication which Frost employed in writing the poem and which we interpret in reading it. Perhaps C uller’s com m ents on the poem will seem m ore interesting or edifying to people who hold certain philosophical theories about this process than to peo­ ple who hold others, but the comments themselves surely count as “humanistic" criticism in (what Culler himself calls) the “capacious” or even “tautological” sense in which Abrams uses the term. “Post-structuralist” or “post-modernist" philosophers have frequently pro­ claimed the demise of tire “subject,” and railed against attempts to understand what goes on in the world (or in texts) by reference to the conscious intentions of individual human beings. Perhaps they (or their literary followers) would charge “humanistic” criticism with the error of thinking that a text can express only that meaning which its author con­ sciously intended it to express. But it would be implausible to lodge such a complaint against anv type of criticism Abrams would be likelv to endorse. It was a fundamental tenet of the tradition of aesthetics proceeding from German idealism (about which Abrams has taught us so much) that artistic genius includes precisely the ability to embody m eanings in a work unconsciously. Further, the subsequent hermeneutic tradition has em phasized the way in which a text acquires meanings histori­ cally through its understanding by subse­ quent generations of readers. Post-struc­ turalist philosophers would be confused if they thought the points just m en­ tioned discredit any notion of subjectivi­ ty it would be worthwhile to attack. They may be trying to add some new insights along the same lines, but they d o n ’t make these insights easier to appreciate when they express them in hysterical hyperboles, denying of texts that they have any hum an author at all or exist within a world outside them, to which they might perhaps refer. As Abrams presents it, the difference betw een “h u m an istic” criticism and “anti-humanist” criticism is that the first is rooted directly in the experience of lit­ erary communication between writer and reader, while the second is criticism mediated, motivated, or even dominated by philosophical theories which under­ m ine this experience and alienate us September, 1993 from it. Abrams’ essay thus provokes the question: What role, if any, should philo­ sophical theories play within the activity of literary criticism? It also occasions outasking a second, related question: Why, in recent years, has so much literary criti­ cism felt the need to turn philosophical in the way it has? Abrams’ position on the first question, I take it, is that humanistic criticism has no particular need for philosophical the­ ory; it begins and ends with the human world to which (as Abrams reports) David Hume could always repair even when faced with his most alienating skeptical reflections. Abrams does not mean to exclude an important role for philosophical reflection on the activity of critics within philosophical aesthetics. He doesn't even want to exclude the reflections of “anti-humanist” critics as une avenlure du regard supplementing or enriching humanistic criticism, as long as there is no attempt to discredit or sup­ plant the standpoint of humanistic criti­ cism. And he views the choice of the human world as the starting point for criticism as something for which a critic is intellectually responsible, so that it is in need of some sort of philosophical defense, such as the one Abrams attempts to provide at the end of “What is Humanistic Criticism?” The burden of Abrams’ argument here seems to be simply that the “anti­ hum anist” critics themselves cannot avoid occupying the human standpoint. O f course, the critics do not deny this. They do want their theories to “subvert” the standpoint of communicating sub­ jects, determ inate m eanings, and so forth, yet at the same time they d o n ’t really want to replace this standpoint with a theoretical one. Their aim, as thev often like to express it, is to "put in ques­ tion" this or that aspect of the “human" stan d p o in t—which is, of course, unavoidably the standpoint of all of us. But at this stage in the dialectic Abrams wants to charge them with inconsistency. For they ueat their theo­ retical standpoint as “subverting,” hence overriding, the familiar linguistic and discursive practices in which they admit­ tedly participate. Is Abrams' charge cor­ rect? It often looks as dtough their dieoretical assertions do directly conuadict assertions they would have to be pre­ pared to make in everyday life. For example, the theoretical assertions that no text has a human author, that texts are products not of human beings but of “language” or “w riting,” would seem directlv to contradict the indignant (and far less theoretical) assertion that Derrida is the sole author of some text which another scholar has reprinted without his permission. But we must not forget die love affair these theorists have widi rhetorical ambi­ guity and indeterminacy of meaning. They are fond of employing (as well as theorizing about) a variety of linguistic devices, such as hyperbole, metaphor, and irony, whose function is to make it impossible to know what they are really saying or whether it could ever contra­ d ic t an y th in g else they m ight say. Besides, if the aim of their theory is not to reach truth (the whole notion of which they often “put in quesdon’j but merely to employ rhetorical devices which create an intellectually titillaung paradox, then why should they be bodiered at all by the charge of self-con tradicdon? In one respect there is really no dis­ agreement between Abrams and these theorists. Both apparendv subscribe to the skeptical view that the standpoint we inevitably adopt as human subjects can’t see Paradox, page 8 September, 1993 the BOOKTRESS page o To Have and To Hold T he Buried H ouses David Mason Story Line Press, 95 pages, $10.95 Jon Griffin It’s seldom one comes across as accom­ plished a first volume as Dadd Mason’s The Buried Houses, co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize. Mason, who was bom in Bellingham, Washington, received degrees from Colorado College and the University of Rochester, and currently teaches at Moorhead State University' in Minnesota. His work ranges from quiet, meditative hrics to dramatic monologues with a strong nar­ rative current, and from lucid free and blank verse to deft handlings of tighter forms—even a very fine pantoum. In addi­ tion, the book possesses the son of architec­ ture that gives it a roomy coherence without insisting that it is somehow till one poem or sequence. There are certainly weak spots in the book, but they mostly remind us how good the rest of it is. The book begins with a sort of erasure. ‘To a Photojoumalist” invites us not only to “Imagine a day no photographs/ were taken,”but to go a step further and imagine the events occasioning newspaper photos— fires and accidents, deaths and the grief of relatives—dissolving, undoing themselves to a calm whiteness. It is “A wav' of starting over” reminiscent of the “San Pantaleone” movem ent in Anthony H echt’s “The Venetian Vespers,” but quieter and more personal (Mason’swife Is a photojoumalist). The poem is a forgiving prelude to a theme that recurs more darkly in later sections of the book the loss, through death, displace­ ment, or mere familiarity, of tilings that had once been, or seemed, valuable. hi Mason’s memoiial for the navel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin, remaining in place and making a home are fraught with dissatisfactions: Weare the ones who settle and destroy, build and regret, wishing we could leave it, wishing the code would signal our migration. Toget out of the car, thank the driver and sling the moment's household on your back... But movement, here figured as a good, has its drawbacks too, since leaving the known is a sure route to loss. Of course, in the most fundamental sense, everything is leaving, all the time. Even the uaditiomil role of art in preserving a valued moment, or lifting us out of ourselves, is decidedly lim­ ited. “The Feast of the Rose Garlands” describes Rudolf II’s restless acquisition of artifacts, in particular his m onumental efforts to secure a fine Dtirer which, once acquired, refuses to stay in aesthetic place: “But gazed at long, even perfection dulls/ like dust above the town at noon.” It would be difficult to name a strongest poem in this collection. The chief candi­ dates are the longer narrative pieces, ‘The Nightingales of Andritsena,” “Spooning,” and “Blackened Peaches.” Mason, also a writer of short stories, has an excellent feel for the structure of first-person narratives, and his flexible blank verse effectively han­ dles the rhythms and quirks of his charac­ ters’ speech. ‘The Nightingales of Andritsena” is spo­ ken by a woman who, when young, learned of her father’s suicide while reading, and for whom language and loss have become intertwined, if not nearly the same thing. Divorced and middle-aged now, she survives as a translator and tour-guide in Greece. The poem recounts her brief infatuation with a client, a young American student with a much less conflicted relation to language, and a girlfriend to boot. The speaker is too self-aware not to see the absurdity of the situ­ ation, but also too lonely not to feel a little bitter. After she listens to the birds of the tide, her frustrations with both language the tension of my brother's weight on the rope. —"Small Elegies" Inevitably’, on a return trip years later, the beauty- of the mountains has become stark­ er, more chilling, against the backdrop of the writer’s memory’: The canyon is quiet: old November snow and the motionless granite. , Below us the creek bends darkly, turning awayfrom the blue. The mindfalls slowly, pressed like water to absolute clarity... —"Dry Granite" The deft syntactic idenufication of the landscape and the act of memory’is typical of Mason’s quieter skills as a craftsman, and also themaucallv apt. His willed engage­ ment with the landscape depends on another type of fall, into experience, or selfconsciousness—a psychic displacement that is rendered, in “An Absence,” as a literal move: ...Ifelt you rise andfall away in the blue vertigo ofglaciers. A sudden absence made thefirs and waterfalls more than themselves. 1knew I wouldn't stay. Now l live in another state with hillsfor mountains and less rain. You would Iwve lotted the small scale ofeverything here, and how pain comes early, stays late... The Old Treadle Susan Booth Titus and desire—how one tends to displace the odier—come to seem those of the young people too, though of course it is not so: For me it had all goneflat. I won't deny the music of the birds was beautiful, but I saw how we transformed it in our minds to what we had expected it to be. I saw the evening's mood envelope them, how what they had desired became a shell of words—ofempty captivating words. It angered me that I would think this way. I knew that l was spiteful, that thegirl had everything I thought I'd ever wanted, the thoughtlessness that comes with being young. A sense of frustrated possibilities, this time another’s, is one of the informing emotions of “Spooning.” The speaker has returned to his small hometoyvn to help settie his grandfather’s estate. He comes across a photograph of a glossy’silent-moyie starlet, also a native of the toyvn, yvhom liis grandfa­ ther had claimed to knoyv once. The speak­ er recoEects an eyening, yvhen he was quite young, on which she returned to town for a benefit He sneaked out to see the shim­ mering screen presence, but met instead a frail and cynical (albeit rich) shadoyv who, as it utms out, did remember the grandfa­ ther yvhen the boy mentioned him: him over the years as he attended her husband’s illnesses. The poem delivers fine, implicit psychological portraits of both the speaker and the doctor, and has several moments of quiet intensity-—even some­ thing of an epiphany during the husband’s final illness—to yvhich an excerpt could not do justice. Mason is in exceUent control of his materials here, the local color (the events occur in the rural Pacific Northyvest, between 1902 and 1964) emerging gradual­ ly dirough die speaker’s almost stoic narra­ tive. At the center of the book is a group of five poems remembering Mason’s older brother, yvho died in a fall yvhile mountain­ climbing. These brief poems evoke thejoys and exuberance of climbing, and the hor­ ror of the event itself: On the glacier I was looking up and looking into the crevasse. When the helicopter came l didn't want to leave him, though the storm- clouds rushing out of nowhereforced usfrom the peak. Flying out, I watched the darkened snow. My hands still felt,from earlier that day, The loss of a brodicr, yyith its attendant emodons and reflecdons, is the defining note of the book. It resonates forward and backward to inform silently the situations of manv speakers in odier poems, yvhere loss is also sometimes figured spatially, as geo­ graphic displacement, as well as temporally. Absence is what keeps us moving, for better and yvorse, or leaves us dying in place. As the book begins with a so n o f loss of experi- ence, it ends yyith a sense of movement less ominous than much that precedes it: Small dun-colored swallows, they've been away the whole relentless winter. Like them we can no longer call ourselves both honest and young. But I assume they know what it's like to be lost in endless circles and, suddenly weightless, sense which way to fly- As a poem celebrating a wedding, “Chautauqua” is appropriately hopeful, but what precedes it prevents its being merely hopeful. The dominant sense The Buned Houses leaves is, on the one hand, the dan­ gers of getting what we think we want, and of holding what we should release, and, on the other, die terrible brevity of the things worth saving. Jon G r iffin is a professor in the English Department at Ithaca College. Old Georgie McCracken. Is he still alive? Too scared to come downtown and say hello?... I knew he'd neverget out of this town. It is a striking scene, yvhere the conflict, between the speaker’s loyalty to Ids grandfa­ ther and his vague, uneasy sense that there’s some truth to yvhat the actress says, again focusses a recurring paradox—die dangers of staying in one place, and the compensating penalties of moving along. In “Blackened Peaches,” the longest poem in the book, a very old yvoman recaUs being briefly and diffidently’ courted by a yvidoyved country doctor yvhen she was six­ teen, and her subsequent encounters widi Fish Shack Susan Booth Titus page.6_____________________________________________ A Bite of the Apple the B OOKPWSS Cooks Tour of Europe Gunilla Feigenbaum New York, Septem ber 1993 T h an k G od th e sum m er is over. Those of us who are genetically or philosophically opposed to cooking at home—especially when the thermome­ ter is licking the 100-degree point—are apt to starve to death in the Big Apple. It seems that both restaurants and psy­ chiatrists’ offices close in August. One theory has it that many shrinks are m oonlighting as cooks these days in order to afford their Southam pton beach houses. In any event, New Yorkers in need of both therapy and a square meal face a severe crisis. As for tourists foolish enough to visit New York in that c ru d e st of m onths, they are clearly expected to bring their own picnic baskets. Ah, but this writer was able to live off the accumulated fat from a European trip, despite the several airplane meals it took to get there. Pioneers crossing the Great Plains in the 19th century could kill a buffalo o r two along the way and there was no shortage of air, so they arrived in the Wild West in better condition than your average tourist who’s spent eight hours in an oxygen allowance that certainly would kill the ubiquitous canary, in a space propor­ tional to such a bird, and eating a meal that probably was that bird but goes under the name “Chicken Imperial.” Blois, Loire Valley, France The first rule to eating in France is, bring a Frenchm an. People who say that the food in France is wonderful are always French. French restaurants often keep two kitchens, one for the French and one for the non-French and an “un table, s’il-vous-plait” instead o f “une table” will wake up the drunken cook in kitchen num ber two and h e ’ll create, especially for you, a steak au poivre from the sixth vertebra of an unknown mammal and cover it in Bechamel sauce imported from Greece by way of a ship that rounded the African Horn. Bring your own Frenchm an, and he’ll first consult the Guide Michelin, that bible of French restaurants. Our Frenchman found no three-star restau­ rant within driving distance and picked a two-star one, noting that there was essentially no difference in the food between two and three stars, only in the “over-all experience of dining.” What he selected was Grand Hotel du Lion d ’Or, an old stone mansion in a small town named Romorantin. The dining experience began with an aperi­ tif of Champagne Amer—champagne with a dash of Campari and a slice of orange—in the 15th-century court­ yard, fully appointed with trees, flowers and a fountain. Duly impressed by the Frenchness of our Frenchman, the pro­ prietors also served us goodies on the house, a silver tray with canapes decoated with mysterious morsels which urned out to be asparagus with fresh nchovies, raw meat in a veggie sauce, lgeon, and a salmon mousse, all made ■) look like colorful miniature objects a iree-vear-olri might mistake for matchox cars and run on the floor, chirping “tut-tut-tut” They were delicious. We were ushered into the dining room and Albert (our Frenchman) pointed out some of the features neces­ sary to rate two stars in Michelin, such as the silver cocker spaniel on the table, the butter dish in a pattern matching the exquisite floral china, which m atched the flower arrangem ent on the table, which matched the wreath intertwined in the chandelier, which m atched the hue o f the walls, w'hich m atched the waiter’s bow-tie. Eat your heart out. This is what we had: Frogs legs Vol-au-vent with cepe Calfs brain Lamb Sweetbread with chantarelles Duck in two parts (breast, then the leg, confit style) Burnt caramel mousse Apricots in a pastry in orange sauce Strawberries in raspberry sauce with a pas­ tryflute with hazelnut ice cream Soft amaretto biscuits in orange flower and honey sauce A plate of ten different kinds offruit tarts Most of this was disguised by sauces and decorated to look like something other than food, in case a non-French might wander in and correctly identify’ what was on the plates as edible and request “un table” for dinner. What did it cost? I have no idea. It was one of those establishments that believe the female psyche must rem ain unsullied by the mere m ention of money, thus their price-free, gender menu. O r maybe it is because they suspect that a woman w ould take o n e look, exclaim “But Henri! The college education for the children!” and walk out. Brussels, Belgium Despite what they say in France, the French food in Brussels is the best in Europe. Nowhere is the seafood fresh­ er, the sauces more cunning, and the foie gras creamier. And since Belgium is bilingual— French an d Flem ish— accents are the order of the day. (Flemish food, on the other hand, must be among the worst. It was developed by Protestants who believed that the most effective inducem ent for belief in the H ereafter was deprivation in this life.) O ne o f the best resta u ra n ts in Brussels, Les Brigittines on Place de la Chapelle, has no Michelin star at all. T he cook, who goes by the unlikely name of Mynv Dirk, says that he’d like to get one so he could refuse it. He claims the Michelin people are too snooty to award stars to non-French French cooks. The restaurant is opu­ lent in the old-world style, with dark, polished wood panelling and glowing 19th-century’ paintings of food and naked ladies on the walls, calling to mind such expressions as “peach skin” a n d “d im p le d fle s h .” We trie d th e Menu de Degustation, which featured eight courses at the price of—yes! No gender m enu!— 1.950 Belgian francs apiece (roughly U.S. $60.) The most surprising item was an appetizer which went under the name Escalope de Foie de Canard Confit, which turned out to be Foie Carpaccio. I have to admit, I have never awakened in the morning, stretched, sighed and said, “Oh, for a slice of raw liver!” but now I might. Alovsc Kloos, a restaurant nam ed after its owner and cook, is in a country house in the outskirts of Brussels. M. Kloos and his wife live upstairs. The restaurant specializes in wild m ush­ rooms, which M. Kloos picks himself, and in-house smoked ham. We had the sum m er m enu, five courses, each o f which used some wild m ushroom in the recipe—morels, chantarelles, cepe, and some unfam iliar ones. We also sampled the smoked ham, which comes in a vintage presentation— three slices of ham, each slice from a different year. The first was six months old, the next a year old, still leaving you unprepared for the savory thrill o f the last slice of pungent three-vear-old smoked ham. This will be another first, for both me and the A&P deli counter: “Sir! Half a pound of the oldest ham you've got!” All the food in Brussels looks like food, a sign that Brussels is indeed the cosmopolitan center of the European community7, and caters to all sorts of people, even Germans and the English. Copenhagen, Denmark Danes like to eat outdoors during the season they m isleadingly call “sum ­ m er”—the rainv months that punctuate the transition from one w inter to another. Thev sit in sidewalk cafes and restaurants, wearing their best summer garb, which is actually styled for the autumn elk season: substantial padded jackets, mufflers and caps, all in bright colors unlikelv to be found on an elk, an animal to which they otherwise bear an uncomfortable resemblance, espe­ cially when they cover their own layers of clothing with cocoons of wool blan­ kets, supplied bv the restaurant. No, I'm not kidding—Danish restaurants with outdoor tables offer blankets to their custom ers, along with the Tuborgs and the smorrebrods, those deli­ cious open-faced Danish sandwiches which are so difficult to eat with mit­ tens on. Hudiksvall, Sweden As one who is Swedish bv birth, con­ viction, and passport, and who spent her formative first 18 vears in Sweden, 1 can say that, generallv speaking. Swedes mostly drink their suppers. Thev con­ sume copious amounts of aquavit and beer, along with tinv portions of her­ ring. Foreigners will watch in stupefied wonderment as the Sw’edes skoal awav. If vou want to have a conversation with a Swede yrou have to use the small win­ dow of opportunity that presents itself between his first drink and his fourth. That gives you less than twenty minutes. (Before he drinks, the typical Swede is usually too shv and formal to speak at all.) Swedes traditionally adm ire for­ eigners (though w ondering whv on earth thev chose to visit Sweden) and grant them special privileges. You mav, for exam ple, safelv decline the third aquavit. In a state of relative sobriety, vou're thus able to observe a Swedish dinner from the first serving to the last. September, 1993 All Swedish meals start with herring. It comes in hundreds of preparations and any given meal will have a sam­ pling of at least half a dozen. Then there is the gravlax of course, and the Scandinavian shrimps, which are never frozen raw, but briefly dum ped in boil­ ing kegs of sea water right on the shrimp boats before they are frozen. T hen they are thawed, peeled and eaten. All of these appetizers are saltv, giving the Swedes an excuse to quench a powerful thirst before being confront­ ed with the main course, which is likely to be some bland meat preparation with a lot o f creamy sauce. Swedes d o n ’t care, because they are too drunk to notice. They often enjoy a brief recovery for dessert, which might con­ sist o f fresh berries—straw’berries, rasp­ berries, blueberries, or cloud berries, all of w’hich seem to be more flavorful in Sweden than anywhere else. Then they slap each other on the back, crawl home and rid themselves of the entire content of the dinner. Swedes, like other bovine creatures, have specially designed stomachs. Thev are able to absorb the nourishm ent from a herring in the short period betw een ingestion and ejection, enabling them to grow tall, strong, and blond. The Big Apple, USA Anyone wishing to dine French with­ out jet lag and with their suitcase safe at hom e, rath e r than on its way to an unknown destination, can of course find French restaurants here, complete with arrogant waiters and unrecogniz­ able food. There are even some French restaurants that have swallowed their pride and learned to treat their clien­ tele with the gentle'respect a hungryhum an being, willing to d ro p a few hundred bucks, deserves. (Though even here it helps to bring an authentic Frenchman.! I recom m end Lespinasse, in the St. Regis Hotel, 2 Fast 55th Street, for u tte r com fort in a Louis XV d ining room, and truly outstanding, innovative food. The prices m atch the best in France— Menu de Degustation, with five courses, is S69 and it’s almost worth it. T he only resta u ra n t I know’ th at claim s^to be B elgian is Cafe de Bruxelle, on 118 Greenwich Avenue, at the com er of 13th Street. It’s a rather simple, inexpensive bistro with Belgian specialties like Carbonade Flamande. The prix fixe m enu is S19.50. It won’t come close to French food in Brussels but thev do have a large selection of Belgian beer, and thev’re worth a visit if vou love weird beer. Thev even serve it au th en tically , in glasses speciallydesigned for each brand (“unless they have broken,” the w-aiter said). The best Scandinavian restaurant is “Aquavit” on 13 West 54th Street. Prix fixe m enu is S62. It has a chilly ele­ gance to it, and the food is better than what vou find in most places in Sweden. There are all the herrings to start with and main courses like snow grouse and Arctic salmon. It has mostly interna­ tional customers but now and then, for authentic flavor, you’ll encounter one of mv countrymen, on all fours, looking for the rest room. “4 Bite of the Apple " is a regular column by Gunilla Feigenbaum, our not-so-farflung correspondent who lives in New York City. September, 1993 the b o o k pr e ss page 7 Slouching Towards Suburbia Jeremy Bloom Eighty p e rc e n t o f e ve ryth in g ever b u ilt in America has been built in the last fifty years, and m o s t o f it is depressing, b ru ta l, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.... Thus James Howard (“Jimmy”) Kunstler begins his new book, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of A m erica’s M an-m ade Landscape. A pithy, gutsy volume that pulls no punches, Nowhere develops the idea that the lack of community we feel in America today is, in large measure, a result of having failed to build communities. Looking at how our towns and cities grew— from Long Island to Detroit to Disneyland— Knnstlerpoints out what he thinks are the mistakes that were made. He also looks to the future and some hopeful changes already in motion. I chatted with him on a warm summer day, sitting on the wide, carnival-painted porch of the spacious Victorian house in Saratoga Springs that he shares with his wife, writer Amy (iodine. A glass of frosty iced tea in one hand, he contemplated the cover o /T h e G eography o f Nowhere, with its vista of Long Island's suburban sprawl. J.H.K: I first wanted to call the book “Why America Is So Ugly." J.B: So we’re nowhere, and it's nglv. How did we get here? J.H.K: We had an incredible imperi­ al boom in the ‘60s an d '70s. T he interstate highway system was built and FHA mortgages enabled many people to buv new houses, l.ots of money was m ade off all this and the horizon seem ed lim itless. Few people were thinking of the consequences—partic­ ularly the unforseen repercussions and hidden costs. But incredible dam­ age was done to our culture, our spiri­ tual and our ciric life—to any notion of the common good. If we re to continue as a viable civi­ lization, we’re going to have to build places we can care about so that we can enjoy civic life once again. All that may seem abstract, but no m ore so than, for instance, the con­ cept of justice—which is very im por­ tant to Americans. J.B: This is very complex: questions o f natural law, aesthetics, as well as questions of efficiency and econom ­ ics.... J.H.K : Most people think of this problem only in terms of aesthetics. They drive down some gruesome com­ mercial strip like Central Avenue in Albany, and they go “ewwww, yuck..." J.B: If they notice it at all. J.H.K: I think they notice it. And I think they are quite justified in feeling that way. But the outward appearance of our landscape isjust a manifestation of deeper problems. We once had a sense of a communi­ ty as a place where people lived, did business, enjoyed public gatherings— all these connected experiences that used to make up our chic life. When our stomachs turn at these gru eso m e highway strips, w hat it com es down to is an ap p reh en sio n that we have thrown our civic life away. J.B: Do you blame the automobile for that loss? J.H.K: The autom obile played a large part in that destructive process, b u t i t ’s n o t the only facto r. Som e James Howard Kunstler reviews of my book suggested that it is only about the effects of the automo­ bile on the landscape—that’s not true. O ur troubled townscapes and land­ scapes are manifestations of our eco­ nomic predicament. We have come to the end of a 50-year-long, abnormal war-time boom econom y—W orld War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. From 1945 until the early ’70s we could sell our products to any country in the world, because after W orld War II all the other advanced nations were either bankrupt or bombed into ruins. In the 1950s, Japan and Germany c o u ld n ’t sell us cars. But then they started to catch up, and bv the mid’70s the Ja p an e se were successfully competing against us. Now, the indus­ trial jobs that gave our workers the highest standard of living in the world are gone, and they're not com ing back. The economy is not going to be the same as it was for the past 50 years, with people driving around to the malls buying Guns and Roses posters and plastic u olls. J.B: But how was the “destruction of our civic life," as you put it, the conse­ quence of that boom? J.H.K: U nintended consequences. O ne of the tragedies of ou r tim e is that people of the great bustling mid­ dle class—who used to be out in the public realm fom enting ideas and m eeting each other and being involved in cultural life—abandoned the cities and are now locked in their suburban houses. The analogue to that is the way the m erchant classes have been eliminated from our towns. M erchants in small towns and cities were the people who su p p o rte d all the civic institutions. They sat on library boards and school boards, and sponsored the Little League teams. We threw them into the garbage can so we could have K-Marts, where we could buy a microwave oven for S9 less than in a locally-ow ned store, but in the process we lost a lot more than S9 in public amenities. J.B: How did that happen? J.H .K : Mass m erc h an d isin g in America came about because of cheap transportation. Truckers pay less for gas in .America than they do anvwhere else in the world. As long as that’s the case, the huge m ass-merchandising corporations can rationalize their operation. You can’t do that in Italy, where gas is S4.50 a gallon and it costs S30 in tolls to drive 100 miles. You couldn’t be trucking around 5 tons of trolls every day if the governm ent didn’t subsidize the highway system. I’m not saying this was alto g eth er avoidable. But what’s really pathetic is the way people behaved contrary to their own best interests. The Rotary Club boosters did everything they could to get K-Mart to come to town. Then they stood there scratching their heads when all their fellow business­ men went out of business. We see this in Saratoga. In 1974, a special supplem ent in the Sunday new spaper was p u t to g eth e r by the Rotary Club and the C ham ber of Commerce, promoting the hell out of the new Pyramid Mall, saying what a w onderful adjunct to downtown Saratoga it was going to be. Well, 98% of the stores that existed in downtown Saratoga when the mall opened are gone now. J.B: In The Geography of Nowhere, you take an in-depth look at the destruc­ tion of mass transit in this country, and the corollary th at D etroit was given a chance to build smaller and m ore efficien t cars when the oil embargo hit in 1973, and basicallv... J.H.K: Thev blew it. J.B: Or didn’t see the possibility that things would change. We tend to look at the life we have, the economic envi­ ronm ent we have, as being inevitable, a “natural order." J.H.K : Maybe people are like Fish, they d o n ’t question the water that they swim in. J.B : Yet eco n o m ic choices were made that could have gone differently with different results. For example, greater reliance on alternative fuels, or electric cars. J.H.K: Changing the fueling of the cars isn’t going to solve our problems with the way people relate to place. T h e q u e s tio n is n ’t w h e th e r w e’re going to have solar cars, electric cars, or propane cars. I’ve been misquoted see Geography, page 16 PIANOS • Rebuilt • Reconditioned • Bought • Sold • Moved • Tuned • Rented Ithaca Piano Qebuildens (607) 272-6547 3104th St.. Ithaca Com plete rebuilding services. No jo b too big or too small. We treat your words with care. 0 Short-run Editions 0 Fine Stationery 0 Art Cards tor Galleries & Openings 0 Competitive Pricing High Quality Offset Printing FINE-LINE PRINTING (Next to the Ithaca T heater) 40V1/: West State S t.. Ithaca, NY 14850 Plume: (607) 272-1177 Fax: 272-2504 Prepare to learn two things: Prepare to learn a little science— the science of rela­ tivity, of cosmic forces, of rat brains and germs —all decribed in the nicest possible way. And prepare to learn a lot about the nature of science—to love the bumbling giant for what it is: science. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch liken science to the golem, a creature from )ewish mythology, a helpful and powerful, yet potentially dangerous, creature who might run amok at any moment. Through a series of intriguing case studies of scientific episodes, ranging from relativity and cold fusion to memory in worm s and the sex lives of lizards, the authors debunk the old view that science is the straightfor­ ward result of competent theorization, observation, and experimentation, asserting instead that scientific certainty comes from interpreting ambiguous results within an order scientists themselves impose. 128 pp., $ 19.95, cloth C ambridge UNIVERSITY PRESS page 8___________________________ Paradox the B o o k pr e ss continued,from page 4 be vindicated by any absolute theoretical (or philosophical) justification. Abrams’ position seems to be that for the purpos­ es >fhumanistic criticism this standpoint need noi be vindicated, beyond the purely defensive argument Abrams pro­ vides for it. The position of the “anti­ hum anists” seems to be that there is something to be learned about texts themselves bv constantly confronting the demand for such a justification and per­ ceiving its failure. The philosophical aporias infect the texts themselves, and by displaying this we can learn something about the texts as well as about the para­ doxical limits of the human standpoint. Why would literary critics want to take this latter position? My hypothesis is that this is rooted partly in philosophical problems about m odern culture and pardy in deep problems with the whole discipline of literary criticism. Literary study is theoretically problem atic in itself. People read literature, enjoy it, think a lot about it, and some of them sav brilliant things about it; but the intel­ lectual activity of commenting on literary texts has no clear aim in general and no record of systematic theoretical achieve­ m ent on which it could base fruitful methodological reflection. There is no valid argument leading from this state of affairs to skeptical conclusions either about the meaning of literary’texts them­ selves or about intellectual acdvity gener­ ally, but it is easy just the same to see how literary critics might be disposed toward philosophical theories that sup­ port such conclusions. Of more general concern is the other root of their view; a philosophical crisis about selfhood and society in the modem period which can also be played out as a crisis about liter- arv art and its criticism, about writing and reading. “Humanistic criticism,” as Abrams con­ ceives it, has the function of promoting and enhancing the intelligibility of the products of literary communication. This assumes that it is worthwhile to understand literarv texts from within tire “human standpoint. But in the modem period this presupposition of “humanisuc criticism" has been challenged from a number of directions. Freudian psycho­ analysis portrays us as psychologically opaque to ourselves in important ways; M arxian social theory depicts us as socially and historically opaque, and the human" standpoint as one that is com­ plied in a system of class oppression which wields power over oppressor and oppressed alike through ideological mys­ tification. Feminist and post-colonialist theories have extended this to gender, racial, and cultural oppression. The inward psychological) and outward (social) subversion of our self-compre­ hension is seen to operate in acts of human communication, and especially in the aesthetic and imaginative forms of communication found in literature. If this is right, then any study of litera­ ture undertaken from the human stand­ point, innocent of quite a far-reaching theoretical clarification, is naturally seen as victimized by or even complicit in social and psychological systems of self­ opacity, oppression, and unfreedom. The natural inference is that the study of literature is badly in need of theoretical insight and philosophical self-clarifica­ tion. Psychological and social theory shows us that we are, in effect, already strangers to ourselves; so it is no wonder that critics influenced by it ad o p t a standpoint that reminds Abrams of the view that extraterrestrials m ight take toward humans. Up to this point I find myself in con­ sid e ra b le sym pathy with the “a n ti­ humanist” theorists and critics, at least to the extent that their motivations are as I have just been portraying them. Where I diverge quite sharply from them, espe­ cially from the self-styled “post-m od­ ernists,” is over the role theory can and should play in confronting the problems of self-comprehension and self-opacity. The philosophical origins of this crisis belong to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, to the counter-Enlightenment and R om antic reaction in tern al to Enlightenment thought, particularly in Germany. What is now called “post-mod­ ernism ” was, in its philosophical sub­ stance, first articulated by “counterE n lig h te n m e n t” th in k e rs such as Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi, as well as the early Romantics, especially H olderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel, and partly too by the great German idealists (though the thought of Fichte and Hegel was far more a positive continuation of the Enlightenment tra­ dition than a reaction against it). The counter-Enlightenment tradition ques­ tions the Enlightenm ent’s reliance on reason, and its confidence in scientific systematicness, rational autonomy, and self-transparency as individual and cul­ tural goals. Hegel and Marx shared the counterEnlightenment discontent, but they saw alienation and self-opacity as challenges to reason which must be met by further extensions of reason. The project is either to recover or else to achieve for the first time a genuinely human stand­ point in which we may act with rational self-comprehension and self-uansparency. Hegel described as the “need of phi­ losophy” the challenge to overcome the bifurcation of life and reflection through rational comprehension. Marx found that theoretical understanding does not suffice, because the root of our self-alien­ ation is practical, so he recast the chal­ lenge as practical, and viewed the task of theory as one of clarifying and support­ ing a liberating practice. Hegel and Marx saw things this way because both were at bottom still on the Enlightenment rather than the counterE nlightenm ent side of m odernism . Those who call themselves “post-mod­ ernists” (a term whose sense guarantees its failure of reference) regard social and psychological obstacles to self-trans­ parency as objections rather than chal­ lenges to the Enlightenment project. Along with their counter-Enlightenment predecessors, however, they have no alternative project, but only some alter­ native version of the same project— though perhaps m uddled by doubt, ambivalence, and irresoluteness, or turned violently counterproductive by fear of Enlightenment liberation or overhasty emotional reactions against some of its imperfect or unripe manifestations. For counter-Enlightenment theorists in our time, the Enlightenment goal of liberation through self-transparent prac­ tice takes the warped form of trying to catch fleeting glimpses of the futility' of this goal, of the ways in which our lives as rational knowers and agents are hope­ lessly at odds with themselves, our com­ munication irredeemably deceptive and self-subverting. This reduces the Enlightenm ent project to an idle jeu d ’esprit, which neither enlightens nor lib­ erates, but only flatters the amour-propre of the theoretician who is clever enough to display insight into the inevitable selfdestructiveness of all thought and the vanity of all things human. The highest expression of this sense of self-alienated self-superiority is the attitude of irony, first theorized by the greatest of the Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel, and now openly advocated as a life-attitude by Richard Rorty, the most respectable con­ temporary Anglo-American philosophi­ cal representative of “post-modernism”. The marvelous advantage of irony is that you can mean what you can never say, say what you can never mean, communi­ cate knowledge you can’t have, and—in sum—be someone you are not. The objection to irony is that it is an abdica­ tion of responsibility. When it comes time for you to answer for yourself-—for your thoughts, beliefs, contradictions, or even your actions—you are always some­ where else. This makes it all too easy for counterEnlightenment thought to appear politi­ cally progressive. For being nothing and nowhere, it can always disown what exists and pose as its most radical critic. But the objective tendency of counterEnlightenment thinking is always conser­ vative or even reactionary, however pro­ gressive its proponents may be subjec­ tively. (“Humanism,” on the other hand, is never any more or less conservative, liberal, or radical than its conception of the human and its understanding of the human world. That there are endlessly many such conceptions accounts for die protean character of “hum anism ” in m odern history, to which Ted Underwood calls our attention, and also the danger of insipidity’which infects any allegiance to “humanism” as a political creed.) Friedrich Schlegel began as a radical republican, whose views about sexual morality and gender-identity' were far ahead of his time; but ended as one of the Holy Alliance’s leading ultra-reac­ tionary monarchists. There is symbolic truth here, just as there is in the recent scandals about the Nazi affiliations of “p o st-m o d e rn ist” h e ro e s M artin Heidegger and Paul DeMan (though considered in themselves these scandals are of no philosophical significance whatever). The uatth symbolized is this: at least in our European tradition there can be no politics of progress or libera­ tion which does not represent a positive prosecution of the Enlightenment pro­ ject of liberation through reason; and the chief danger to till progressive poli­ tics is that constant cultural shadow of reaction cast by the Enlightenment, that irrevocably modern tear and hatred of modernism variously exemplified intellectuallv in the counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism, “post-m odernism ,” and culturally-politically in all forms of fas­ cism and fundamentalism. Abrams reports D errida’s revealing admission that deconstruction cannot “esca p e ” w hat it “su b v erts” or even “supersede” what it “goes beyond.” One wonders in that case what Derrida could possibly m ean by “su b v e rtin g ” and “going beyond,” and also how these boldly named gestures are supposed to differ from resigning or reconciling our­ selves to what we cannot escape, or even apologizing for and rationalizing what we admit we can never supersede. Add to this the insistence of post-modernists that all the resources o f the Enlightenment are bankrupt—its reason is mere rhetoric, its science logoceruric metaphysics, its ideal of liberation mere­ ly a subjectivist illusion—and the whole business o f “d e c o n s tru c tin g ,” “d e ­ hum anizing,” and “de-fam iliarizing” begins to take on the aspect of a barren intellectual exercise which gives off the all-too-familiar musty odor of decadent hypocrisy. Allen Wood is a professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. September, 1993 1608 Drvrien Road Between Ithaca and Dryden on Route 13 Open Mon .-Sat. 10-6 Sunday 12-6 607-347-4767 ROUTLEDGE BODIES THAT MAHER O N THE DISCURSIVE UNITS OF SEX JUDITH BUTLER Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory o f gender by examining the workings of power at the most “ material’' dimensions o f sex and sexuality, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the “ matter" o f bodies, sex, and gender Developing more gender trouble across a variety o f philosophical, psychoanalytic, and fictional works, Bodies That Matter opens new questions in feminism, poststructuralism, and queer theory. 256 pp.. $49.95. cloth $15.95, paper September, 1993 the B QQKPress page 9 B ook Ends Sweet William byjohn Hawkes Simon & Schuster, 269 pages, S20._____ The new novel by Jo h n Hawkes, author of Blood Oranges and born at the head of a stable of writers who may be corralled under the term “mild misogy­ n ists,” is the a u to b io g rap h y o f O ld Horse, aka William, a thoroughbred too mean-spirited to race or stud, who is handed down a succession of meaner and flintier owners, until he comes final­ ly into the care of the “Master” and his trainer Ralph. We then spend manv pages listening with no growing appreci­ ation to Ralph’s recounting of his many sexual exploits with his comely sister Carrie as he attempLs to uain Master to ride a half-lame and increasingly impa­ tient William. What I suspect Hawkes is sating about the tension between free will or desire and the restraints of society seems obvi­ ous and none too original, nor are the human characters agreeable or memo­ rable, seeming only to exist, much like the stable doors and metal fences, so that they may be jum ped over, kicked aside, or smashed through. Yet these episodes are enjoyable and well-written, and William himself, to Hawkes' credit, is more than willing to cany the entire book on his back; and if you, deal read­ er, can champ that misogynous bit for one more ride, you might find in Old Horse's story some lessons that endure beyond the dirty stables in which they were bred. —Jeff Schwaner In a Country of Mothers A.M. Homes Random House, 275 pages, $22_______ Each era creates its own favorite tales of terrors, and in the last hundred years, since the advent of “Frankenstein” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” we have read scary novels about global destruction, invasion from outer space, monsters of genetic alteration, and the selling of hum an organs, to name a few. Mostly they are expressions of our suspicions about what scientists monkey around with in their labs. In her latest novel, In a Country of Mothers, A.M. Homes presents us with the “me generation’s” deepest fear—a shrink with her own destructive hang-up. The reader is first inuoduced to Jody, a young woman with your average cri­ sis—she is ambivalent about attending graduate school at UCLA. Enter Claire, a skilled and compassionate therapist/ with a deep dark secret: as a teenager she gave up a baby girl for adoption. It happens that Jody is an adopted child and Claire comes to imagine that Jody is her daughter. What the reader must accept is that Jody would choose to see a shrink in the first place, that a funda­ mentally sane person can be driven to total psychosis merely by the maternal attention of a health worker, and, most erroneously, that sitting through some­ one else’s therapy sessions is at all inter­ esting. The pace of the story picks up after the relationship between the two women has deepened beyond those boring ther­ apy sessions and, in the last quarter, it transforms itself into a page-turner. The author splits our sympathies evenly between Claire and Jody, an unfortunate choice, since a good thriller benefits from real evil, not just some watereddown version of karmic kinks. The jacket hails the book as a psychological thriller, but in the end, In a Country ofMothers is a radier pedestrian journey, skimming the surfaces of two wom en’s psyches. The ultimate threat isn’t death and desuuction, but the prospect of life-long guilt— the “me generation’s”version of hell. —Gunilla Feigenbaum Garbage A.R. Ammons Norton, 121 pages, SI7.95____________ A.R. Ammons has tided his new, long poem “G arbage.” This is a perverse move on his part: the poem is not garbage. After reading it, however, one is led to wonder if maybe it is, and to ask further what’s wrong with garbage any­ way. Everything becomes garbage sooner or later. There are people in our country who have to live off of it. T here are species of plants and animals whose lives are spent breaking it down, gaining sub­ sistence from it, and turning it into things that we don’t think are garbage, such as light, heat, oxygen, and food. We need garbage. We make it even- day. The tide is a dare: to publishers (imag­ ine an editor saving "we are so proud to present the public with Garbage”) and to readers who would like to take the poem seriously. Challenges to serious­ ness abound within the poem, which, som etim es, really is a b o u t garbage. Ammons' themes are aging, poeuy, and an interconnected universe. Within these themes his concern is often with what gets thrown away in the process of making, be it the making of a life or a poem, and with what happens to things that are discarded. The poem is rangy and crazy; read its chapters in any order that pleases you and you will come away with much to think about, as well as a newly enriched store of funny and pro­ found Ammonisms. —Heather White C hild of God Cormac McCarthy Vintage, 197 pages, S10.____________ Before All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian and Suttree, Cormac McCarthy had already arrived as a major novelist with his third novel. Child of God follows Lester Ballard as he’s evicted from his property and into our story courtesy of the broad business end of an axe. Rejected in almost every social encounter, Ballard responds with mur­ der, retaining the corpses in a mountain cave where he can speak and interact with them without fear of rejection. Despite his obvious weaknesses, necrophilia not the least among them, Ballard is one of the most sympathetic characters in recent American fiction. A scene where he shops for a dress and lin­ gerie for one of his corpses and has to enlist the help of a young female sales­ person evokes such empathy for his utter inability to communicate that your heart goes out to him despite the mor­ bidity of the situation. McCarthy is often compared, unfavor­ ably, with Faulkner; but “A Rose for Emily” and its Gothic themes not with­ standing, Faulkner could not have creat­ ed a Lester Ballard; nor, more to the point, would he have wanted to. Child of God is McCarthy’s Old Testament, com­ plete with flood, mean and stoic and impersonally his own. It’s less a buried literary gem recently unearthed, than a spiky cactus which has survived despite the drought of readers and which, so severe is its vision, almost seems not to need readers at all. —J.S. T he Changing Light at Sandover 560 pages, S30 Selected Poems 1946-1985 339 pages, S25 James Merrill Knopf____________________________ Defining what it is that makes James Merrill’s poems more than simply per­ fect is difficult. Their perfection, at any stage in his long career, is immediately conspicuous. Words seem to behave for Merrill in a preternaturallv obliging manner; rhymes and rhythms emerge so effortlessly and ingeniously that they seem inevitable. Merrill writes with equal aplomb in a multitude of forms, includ­ ing the more and less obscure tradition­ al ones, and those he makes up himself. A beautiful example of the latter is the stanza he introduces in his early poem ‘T he Peacock.” The stanza is composed of seven lines, of five, three, six, and eight feet, with a consistent pattern of off-rhyme. In its precision and employ­ ment of words that, disturbingly, don’t quite rhyme, the stanza is an apt figure for M e rrill’s work as a w hole. Underneath the sheen of the poems’ technical brilliance there often lingers a sense of menace and the possibility of disorder. Most commonly, that lurking unease is embodied as a loss, usually the death of someone close to the poet. Such a generalization belies the scope of Merrill’s subject matter; he is sophisticat­ ed, learned, and worldly, qualities attest­ ed to by the breadth of his poetic inter­ ests. However, loss and the recuperative powers of poetry' are central to his work throughout die SelectedPoems. These concerns, as well as peacocks, are also central to his 1983 book, The Changing Light at Sandover. O ne of M errill’s pastimes is contacting dead friends on his ouija board. His conversa­ tions with those in die bevond have been a source of poetic material for some time; the Selected Poems contains a num­ ber of poems about his experiences with the board. Sandover is an epic in three books in which J.M. and D.J. (Merrill and his companion David Jackson) learn the secrets of the universe from Ephraim, a Greek Jew from the year A.D. 8, and Mirabell, a bat who turns into a peacock. J.M. and D.J. are accom­ panied on dieir intellectual and spiritual journey by, among others, W.H. Auden and his friend Chester Kallman. Except for J.M. and D.J., all of the characters in the poem speak through the ouija board by means of an upended teacup, which Jackson touches while Merrill u anscribes the conversations. It is an extraordinary poem. The plot is less confusing than it sounds in paraphrase, although it is even more implausible and outrageous. All of what makes Merrill so particularly sadsly­ ing, in his intelligence, his taste, and his wit, is present. There are passages in Sandover that are as moving as any of his previous poems. Additionally, there is the enjovment of experiencing Merrill's genius for structural complexity in a book long enough to give it its greatest freedom. Reading the whole of Sandover is rather overwhelming, and not only because it is so long. The more carefully one reads, the more it becomes appar­ ent that the poem is equally rich in its minutiae as in its overall effect; there are in it depths and more depths of pleasure for the reader. —H.W. T he Wresti.er\s Cruel Study Stephen Dobyns Norton, 426 pages, S22.95____________ Readers of Dobyns’ Saratoga mysteries will find this big book entertaining but oddly threatening, like wrestling itself. Marduk the Magnificent, aka gentle Michael Marmaduke, mighty beacon of Good inside wrestling’s “squared circle,” is the master of the Bosom of Abraham, a hold that sends opponents tumbling freight-free into slumberland. After two gorillas climb down the side of a sky­ scraper and kidnap his virginal fiancee Rose White, Marduk, or rather Michael, must enlist die aid of his fellow wresders to liberate the damsel in distress. But what lies outside the ring are endless other rings where Michael’s authority and heroism are called into question. Finding his ability to act limited by those who created him — his manager Primus Muldoon, the shady Wrestling Federation — Michael realizes the real fight is for his own moral identity. But where is Rose all this time? And what about her sister Violet, and a strange encounter with leather-bedecked decon­ structionists, and the somewhat slimy Deep Rat, and a two-headed coin engraved with an angel’s face and devil’s face? Dobyns handles the myriad sub­ plots and themes in the same way that the wrestler Hulk Hogan handles Brutus the Barber Beefcake — none too deli­ cately. For all that, or because of it, The Wrestler's Cruel Study is a great exercise in hyperbole, illum inating the eternal struggle between higher concepts and chance falls, though in the end, Dobyns doesn’t quite succeed in making us for­ get that this fight was fixed by the champ himself. —J.S. page 10 the WOOKPRESS September, 1993 Finding Home: Michael Serino Photographs by Janice Levy To be at home in the world, once one has come to thefateful modem consciousness ofalternatives, requires a tremendous labor, an endurance of greatfear. — Wendell Berry Lately I have been thinking about settling in Ithaca. The frightening term for me in that sentence is not “Ithaca”—which, to be sure, holds its own terrors—but “set­ tlin g .” S ettlin g is so m e th in g I had never been tempted to do. The prob­ lem was not some objection to the idea of staying in one place so much as the fact that I have never felt truly at home in any of the places I have lived. Over the past two decades I have moved on average once a year, occupying 21 dif­ ferent apartments or houses in 9 dif­ ferent cities or towns. The pattern is due in part to factors common to any­ one associated with academic life: mov­ ing around during undergraduate and graduate school, then taking jobs at different institutions, trading up from one position to another. Other factors depended more on personal idiosyn­ crasies: restlessness, aesthetic consider­ ations, and, m ost im portant, an extrem ely low tolerance lo r noise. (Ironically, convenience has usually led me to live near college students, who are still at the age where they con­ fuse making noise with having a per­ sonality.) Another elem ent militating against perm anence was the fact that I equated owning a house with enslave­ m ent to a mortgage, taxes, and repairs. None of that for me, thank you: life is best lived simply, without high over­ head or long-term commitments. So why think about it now? One rea­ son is a sense of personal stability—a secure knowledge of the direction 1 want my life to take, framed within the context of a marriage that goes beyond happy and borders on the ecstatic. Another factor is the place itself: I find myself responding to the beauty of the region, the lives of the people, the val­ ues of the community (or some of them, at least; let’s not get crazy here). But at the heart of things is the feeling that there might be something worth­ while missing in my life in not ever feeling deeply connected to a place or its people, not feeling I have som e­ thing at stake in the long run. It is the realization that, since leaving the house and town I grew up in at the age of 16, 1 have been without a sense of rootedness, and that that rootedness might be a very valuable thing. There has been a great deal of litera­ ture, psychology, and sociology written about the American lack of rootedness in place and community, and I have read a great deal of it, but without regarding the question as a personal dilemma but merely as a factor in the understanding of our culture. The writer who struck me as being most eloquent on the subject was Wendell Berry, the novelist and poet who, after embarking on an academic career that led him away from home, returned to his native Kentucky to live as a farmer, continuing to teach and write but root­ ing daily existence in his relationship to his native soil. In collections of essays like A Continuous Harmony (1975), The Unsettling of America (1 9 7 7 ), a n d The Gift of Good Land (1981), Berry speaks for the values of tradition and continuity, love of the earth, and respect for its life. But while I fo u n d B erry ’s p ro se m oving an d many of his values worth embracing, I also found it difficult to identify with the essence of his position in that I, like so many Americans, found myself cut off from my own roots. The town I grew up in no longer contains any of my family or friends, and the urban “renewal” of the early 1970s changed the cityscape almost beyond recogni­ tion. H om e, as I rem em b er it, isn ’t there anymore. A relauonship to a place, I realized, might have much in common with a relationship to a person: attraction m ight lead you from one to another, but would not provide long-term stabil­ ity. If you simply move on evert' time you begin to have problems, succumb to boredom, or hear about something better, life becomes an unm em orable chain of faces and places, devoid of attachment or significance. Feeling at home might be as m uch the result of m aking a conscious com m itm ent to the life of a place as it is of a natural affinity with it. Yet it is so easy not to make that commitment, so comforting to read the daily paper and think, “T hey’re n o t my problem s, I ’m ju st passing through.” It is possible to live in a place for years without ever saying “I’m going to take my stand in this place, with these people” and join in a common struggle for a sausfying life. It is easy to believe that the parts of life one is responsible for are defined by th e walls o f o n e ’s h o u se , car, an d office. For many this has become the American way of life. Yet reversing th at tren d , even in o n e ’s own life, is no sim ple m atter. And while there has been m uch lamenting of the loss of rootedness in our culture, little has been said about how to reestablish it. Yes, there have been num erous calls for community participation and guides to grassroots involvement, but little has been written about the dilemma of the individual faced with the desire to establish a feel­ ing of belonging to a place he or she is n o t from . It was a pleasant coinci­ dence, then, that just as I was begin­ do at their best. As Sanders has writ­ ten, in the essay “The Singular First Person,” In this era o f prepackaged thought, the essay is the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record o f the individual mind at w o rk and at play. It is an amateur’s raid in a w o rld o f spe­ cialists. Feeling overwhelmed by data, random inform ation, and the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, we relish the spectacle o f a sin­ gle consciousness making sense o f a portion o f the chaos. In the preface to Staying Put, Sanders states his purpose eloquently: ning to think about this problem two books appeared addressing this very issue: Scott Russell Sanders’s Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Beacon Press, S20.00) and Deborah Tail’s From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place (Aided A. Knopf, S22.00). The authors write from different per­ spectives with d ifferen t stvles, but between them shed a great deal of light on both the importance and the complexity of the question of how to find a home in a rootless societv. Scott Sanders’ Staying Put is a beauti­ ful piece of writing. His spare, graceful prose carries his thoughts faultlessly from the personal to the philosophical and back again, weaving a fabric of understanding worthy of the richly tex­ tured fabric of hum an life. R ather than simplifying his complex subject m atter he proceeds calmly through it, establishing his footing securely on one level before proceeding on to the next. The book’s individual chapters, many of which were previously pub­ lished independently, do what essays This book...records my attem pt to fashion a life that is firm ly grounded— in household and community, in knowledge o f place, in aware­ ness o f n a tu re , and in c o n ta c t w ith th a t source from which all things rise. I aspire to become an inhabitant, one w ho knows and honors the land....I am always driven by a sin­ gle desire, that o f learning to be at home. The search is practical as well as spiritual. O nly by understanding where I live can I learn how to live. In this passage he points toward the essential term s th at will form the book's conceptual constellation: "household,” “com m unity,” “nature," and “spirit.” It is in establishing their interrelationship on both the practical and the theoretical levels that Sanders makes his most valuable contribution to the conversation about a sense of place. This concern is reflected in the structure of the book, which begins and ends with autobiographical reflec­ tions and develops parallel narratives moving, on the one hand, through the practical elements of house, land, and water and, on the other, through the abstract themes of settling down, seek­ ing foundations, and the life of the spirit. S a n d e rs ’ own h isto rv is o n e o f uprootedness, beginning with the sub­ mersion of his home ground following the construction of a dam and reser­ voir that flooded his part of northeast­ ern (Ohio. He records the loss of His childhood haunts—the river bottom along which he gathered nuts and berries, the fields he walked in, the river he skated on. He had left the area as construction on the project Geneva September, 1993 the BO QKPRESS Identity and Place page 11 neared completion and did not return until many years later. “My worst imag­ inings had failed to prepare me for this,” he writes of seeing the reservoir for the first time. For a long spell I leaned against the guardrail and dredged up everything I could remember of what lay beneath the reservoir. But memo­ ry was at last defeated by the blank gray water. N o e ffo rt o f mind could restore the riv e r o r drain the valley. I surrendered to what my eyes were telling me. O nly then was I truly exiled. T urning to the problem of how to develop a sense of being at home once again, he ch ronicles his years in Bloomington. Indiana, where he has lived for most of his professional life. He describes the “alchemv" bv which a house becomes a home: in buying and dwelling in the same house for almost two decades, repairing and improving it through time, he has developed a sense of attachm ent to the structure itself. to. W hile Sanders, at hom e in his world, reflects contemplatively on his place in it and reinforces his ties to it, Tall depicts the struggle to form that iniual bond to a place and say “this is the one I choose.” For this reason, and because the area she was writing about is the Finger Lakes region, her book was of particular interest, and I gen­ uinely expected to like it. But other contrasts with Sanders exist as well. While S anders’ style is poetic and spare, Tail s is poetic and florid. She is extremelv conscious of her identitv as “a writer,” referring to it throughout the text. As soon as I was o f age I w ent into exile. I fol­ lowed an Irish w rite r to rural Ireland, desper­ ate to live a life close to the land and far from middle-class niceties. I longed to escape indis­ tinctness, to feel the w o rld as unavoidably real, even if ferocious.... I’d spent my college years soul-searching and dem onstrating and trying to w rite poetry. Defiant, romantic, I landed on an Irish island, an outcrop o f rock and bog in the untamed Atlantic, a place still lo ite rin g in the nineteenth century w ith its heart exposed to weather. The island’s cli­ mate matched my Sturm und Drang. .. While in many ways satisfving, her life there was to last onlv five vears. She structure to embody and direct their relation to the region, and the reader can learn a great deal about these sub­ jects from this book. He or she can also learn much about the destruction of those cultures by the arrival of the white man, and about the treachery of the country’s early political leaders. But here Tall sets up the dichotomv that ultim atelv underm ines her attempt to feel at home in Geneva, for virtually everything that has happened to life in Geneva after the removal of the In d ia n s is d e p ic ted negatively. Seeking meanings from a vanished past and another culture’s worldview, Tall makes little contact with the actu­ al culture around her. Her narrative sings the praises of the landscape but condemns the culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in the almost com­ plete absence of people outside her familv in her narrative; for her, devel­ oping a sense of a place does not include a relationship to its people. In fact, when the local residents are m en­ tioned, it is either negativelv— These walls and floors and scruffy flow er beds are saturated w ith o u r m em ories and sweat. .. A fte r nearly tw o decades o f intima­ cy, the house dwells in us as surely as we dwell in the house. He likens this process to the process­ es of nature, to birds constructing their nests for support against the world’s perils. From his house, Sanders' rootedness spreads downward and outward, into the earth and toward the water. A knowledge of the natural world and the life it supports cem ents his rela­ tio n sh ip to the e a rth ; his re g io n ’s waterways connect him to the wider world, and the cycle of water from the skv to the earth to the sea connects him as an individual to the planet as a whole—and beyond. The rive r’s movement is an outw ard show of the c u rre n t th a t bears everything along. W earing a groove in the earth, it reveals the grain o f the universe. Q u ick o r sluggish, all creation is a flo w — rivers, mountains, trees, babies and parents, b u tte rflies and parrots, rocks, clouds, sun, Milky W ay— each part d ri­ ven at its ow n pace w ithin a single current. W hen I look in the m irro r each morning the face I see is familiar from the day before, yet subtly changed, shifted dow nstream , as the river sliding w ithin its banks alters m om ent by m om e nt." The flow of rivers gives direction to o u r lives, he says, and satisfies that deep-felt need also addressed by narra­ tive: “a shape and direction imposed on time. And so we tell stories and lis­ ten to them as we listen to the cours­ ing of water.” What holds Sanders’ relationships to all these things together is the strength of his com m itm ent to them. “Having made my choice, I feel wedded to this house, as I do to my wife and my neighborhood and my region.” It is a strength of character, a willingness to honor a relationship and work to sus­ tain it through difficult times. In our time such comm itm ent has become increasingly rare even in human inter­ actions; commitments to houses and neighborhoods are rarer still. P oet a n d essayist D eborah T a il’s From Where We Stand co n trasts with Sanders’ book in that it describes the process of seeking a place to commit Every molded mountain and tree-spoked hill­ side was alive, boldly beckoning me away from the tedium of my known w orld. I was slowly turning into a w rite r— nature was my ready muse, an invitation to fly. .. 'singing the w o rld in to existence’ as Bruce C h atw in lyrica lly describes it, obviously as attracted to the notion as I am— it’s a moving metaphor fo r a writer. Mine was a journey o f w rite rly admiration and appetite. I w ant, like o th e r w rite rs , to bind such mementos to the present through the con­ nective tissue o f language. Tall and her husband, poet David Weiss, cam e to Geneva, New York, m ore than a decade ago to teach at H obart and William Sm ith. At the same time, Tall was longing to estab­ lish a sense of being at hom e some­ where. The product of a fragmented suburban childhood, she found herself at odds with her environment from an early age ( “A stripped landscape is a grief for a dreamy child.”) and later began searching for some sort of spiri­ tual connectedness. This process was undoubtedly inhibited by what comes across in the book as a hvperdeveloped sensibility that reacts aversively to almost even- aspect of contemporary American culture. Small wonder, then, that she initially sought a home else­ where. Her description of that move establishes her persona in the book, and is worth quoting at length: returned to the US for more schooling and decided to make a place for her­ self in h er native land, at first in M anhattan and then, after another five vears, in Geneva, where the book’s narrative truly begins. But while one must accept her claim to have attempt­ ed to make a home in Geneva as sin­ cere, the attem pt seemed doom ed from the start. W hen the job was offered and we decided to come, the lake was w hat I kept telling my hus­ band, David, about, n o t the slightly seedy tow n that hung on to the side o f the campus like an embarrassing stepparent. .And later, Naively, o r perhaps nostalgically, I long fo r this to be a place where the natural w o rld still informs human life, a place whose community lives attuned to a beautiful landscape. This does seem naive, to be sure, and to anvone who has spent any time in Geneva and observed the impact of its depressed economy, highly unlikely. In fact, what she was looking for does not sound like any place in rural New York State, at least not in this century. But she was able to find som ething akin to the life she was seeking in the history and legends of the Native .American tribes that had occupied the area before the white m an’s arrival. Drawing a picture of this earlier way of living on the land is the particular strength of From Where We Stand. Tall is drawn to the ways of the Seneca and the Cayuga Indians who created a complex and meaningful mythological My neighbors are reticent, sedentary. They mumble and nod the rare times we pass on the road. N o one, as in my rural fantasy, has come by w ith a welcom ing plate o f hom e­ made cookies, w ith chat and advice, n o t to speak o f legends. By nightfall, th e ir houses give off the warm glow o f television. W e ’re left to our own devices. or condescendingly— In tow n, trapped in low-paying jobs, women spend th e ir money at tanning parlors. Their morals are old-fashioned, politics conserva­ tive, buc they long fo r the gloss of the up-todate, the stamp o f the middle class. O thers, the inner- and edge-or-tow n poor, seem to long fo r little. They’re plagued w ith alcoholism and obesity and indifference. Day in, day out, lines o f unemployed men fish fro m a crum ­ bling cement pier that once held a ro w of swank boathouses, old hats pulled down over their eyes, the view blocked. Not a very poetic bunch. By the end of the book it is evident that the attem pt to find a sense of being at home in Geneva has failed. The notion of comm itm ent so domi­ n a n t in S a n d e rs ’ book is e n tire ly absent here. Tall and her family move to Ithaca, justifying the move—in one of the most uncomfortable-to-read pas­ sages in the book—in the kind of lan­ guage so often used to justify, say, white flight from the cities: Like many, we made a decision based largely on o u r children's needs rather than ou r own. W e ’ve given up rural pleasures and purities in o rd e r to be in a neighborhood w ith o th e r young children nearby, W e've moved to have well-funded, progressive schools, music and dance lessons, plays, films, museums— all the activity o f a university tow n— and a m ore het­ erogeneous, open-minded community. Her rationalization that she has established a sense o f place in “the region” is unconvincing. Geneva and Ithaca are as different as two places can be, an d loyalty to the “F inger Lakes region” is meaningful only to an outsider with no grasp of the specifici­ ty of place; it is like claiming loyalty to “the tri-state area" in justifying a move out of the Bronx to Westchester and then to Connecticut. see Finding Home, page 13 page 12 the B OOKPRESS U.S. Fiction Today continued,from page 1 tioners of the metafictional availt garde, it was a turn against the unexam ined assumption that a text could ever actually reflect or recreate the world of experi­ ence. Among critics it was a turn against earlier generations of writers—Howells, Zola—who had tried to establish realism on firm intellectual grounds. A typical ukase of the 1970s—typical in its rhetorical conceit as well as its senti­ ments—is this by Robert Scholes from his book Metafiction and Tabulation, one of the leading sales brochures for the metafictional revolution. Decrying the reign o f w hat he called “em p irical notions of characterization so essenual to realistic and naturalistic fiction,” he declaimed: Proust's brilliant exposition of the paradoxical notion that we can truly experience life only through art is the death knell of the realistic-nat­ uralistic movement in fiction, though even today, fifty years afterward, a small school of neo-naturalists continues to write frantically, headless chickens unaware of the decapitating axe. In Scholes’ violent and overbearing m etaphor, writers who didn’t fall into line behind the Proustian epistemology were dead, though they continued to flap around in their own blood. ‘T he flat prose of sociological fiction,” Scholes continued, “is being abandoned to the sociologists, who, God knows, have need of it.” At the beginning of our own decade, that avant garde and the rhetoric that boosted it seem a trifle shopworn. Barthelme died an untimely death, rob­ bing the movement of its most beguiling and accessible voice. Reviewers have dealt harshly with the later novels of Barth, Coover, and Gaddis. And Pynchon, silent for seventeen years after th e asto n ish in g Gravity’s Rainbow, em erged at the beginning of the newdecade with Vineland, which did little to satisfy any aficionado’s hopes for one m ore sensational rom p through his fevered and abundant imagination. Vineland is a tired book: fiendishly clever in patches, but wearily m onotonous throughout. Whatever it is, it is not the performance through which an entire movement might find its justification. The test of any movement is whether it gives rise to subsequent generations, and metafiction in America looks to have been a one-generation blip, which took twenty years to cross our radar screens and then vanished. There may well be gifted young anti-realists waiting in the wings (William Vollman? Kathy Acker?), but the cultural moment is not favorable to their becoming anything like a force; they are rowing against the tide. What seems to be new in contempo­ rary fiction in America is likely at first blush to seem old, if not discredited: realism. That is a troubled and ambigu­ ous word, and for that reason it is sensi­ ble to keep the “r ” small and the concept modest, allowing the writers who mine that seam in our literature to sharpen their tools and define their methods as they go. There is no need to turn realism into just another bum per sticker, like William Dean Howells’ “truthful treat­ ment of material,” or even to recite with Henry James, ‘T h e only reason for the ex isten ce o f a novel is th at it does attempt to represent life.” Realism these days is a flexible prac­ tice, open to influences of every sort and boasting m ore flavors than Ben and Je rry ’s. T he hallucinatory realism of The Fourth Discontinuity The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines In this engrossing and lively book, Bruce Mazlish discusses the complex relation­ ship between humans and machines, pondering the implications of humans becoming more mechanical (our bodies increasingly hooked up to artificial parts), and of computer robots being pro­ grammed to think. Mazlish argues that just as Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud overturned our illu­ sions of separation from domination over the cosmos, the animal world, and the unconscious, it is now necessary to relin­ quish a fourth fallacy or discontinuity— that humans are discontinuous and dis­ tinct from the machines they make. Drawing on history and legend, science and science fiction, Mazlish examines how events and individuals have shaped the ways that humans relate to machines. 272 />/>., $30 cbtth Yale University Press Robert Stone bears little resemblance to the socially engaged realism of Louise Erdrich or the pointillist realism ofJohn Updike. All of them, however, share a devotion to the world they inhabit. To enter the groves of American realism and the thickets of fictojoumalism is to come upon an extraordinary fecundity, precisely where the critic may be least likely to look for it: on the New York Times bestseller lists and even the drugstore bookshelves. O ne finds writers like Stone, Erdrich, William Kennedy, the late Raymond Carver, Anne Tyler, Cormac McCarthy, Barn- Hannah, Jay M clnerney, Terry Macmillan, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Russell Banks, Jane Smiley, John Casey, Norman Rush, Amy Tan, and an older generation that includes Updike, William Styron, Walker Percy, Philip Roth, and Peter Matthiessen. This bounty of American writing emerged with little attention from the academy until quite recently. I hesitate to call this an age of gold—it lacks the great national themes and tow­ ering figures that commonly define gold­ en ages. Updike is m ore likely to be remembered as our Howells titan as our Hemingway. But it isn’t an age of brass either. It strikes me as an age of silver, short on grandeur but brimming with fresh talent. How should we account for this flower­ ing of Am erican realism in the last decade, when the reading audience for fiction apparently shrank? One obvious factor is that realism was always there and always had its practitioners and defend­ ers. John Updike, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Philip Roth, and the late Walker Percy' and James Baldwin have been major forces on the literary stage for four decades or so, and for one segment of the population, residing out­ side the academy, they have been the very stage itself. Some younger writers picked up the novel much as they found it, as though the visions and strategies of realist fiction had never experienced challenge or been called into question. Writers leam more from other writers than from the precepts of critics, which may be why some of what is new these days sounds much like what we have been reading throughout this centurv— why Jay Mclnemev recalls Fitzgerald (a resem blance he has cultivated), why Richard Ford and the late Raymond Carver sound like Hemingway, and why Louise Erdrich and Cormac McCarthv are so rem iniscent of Faulkner. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the new in American fiction represents no advance over die old. Erdrich’s Chippewa Indians and M clnerney’s cocaine yuppies are fresh, contemporary subjects, though that is not what the general student of lit- THE NEW HACKER'S DICTIONARY Second Edition edited by Eric S. Raymond This new edition of the hacker’s own phe­ nomenally successful lexicon includes more than 200 new entries and updates or revises 175 more. Historically and etymo­ logically richer than its predecessor, it sup­ plies additional background on existing entries and clarifies the murky origins of several important jargon terms (overturn­ ing a few folk etymologies of long stand­ ing) while still retaining its high giggle value. UA sprightly lexicon. ”— William Safire, The New York Times Magazine 544pp., $50 cloth, $14 paper The MIT Press CAMBRIDGE, MA FRAME SHOP Quality since 1956 t'o r .17 y e a r s , w e ’ve ta k e n th e artisan"s a p proach, giving time anti care to each piece o f art. We tlon't ta k e short cuts. We tlo offer oar custom ers the highest ipiality w orkm anship as well as a com ­ plete selection of m ats & fram es. Antique Print* Photos hy Loral Artist* 272-1350 1 1 1 W . Buffalo S t., Ith a c a , NY I September, 1993 erature wants to know when the question of “what’s new?” is raised. Two decades of metafiction—fiction that called attention to its own fictionality, subordinated depth to style and sur­ face, tended to play with its subject and dissolve every emotion and every belief into irony—did not pass without leaving a trace. It brought a new register into die American writer’s vocal range along widt a new freedom to conjure with history, and it brought a new theatricality to a genre whose standard moves had come to seem boringly predictable. As a work­ shop in techniques and maneuvers for writers who had not surrendered their claim to representing life but had grown weary' of the forms they had inherited, metafiction proved to be invaluable. The road U'avelled by Philip Rodt from Letting Go to The Counterlifeand Deception is a par­ adigm of how a tired form could refresh itself through the absorption of new free­ doms. Louise E rd ric h ’s and Maxine Hong Kingston’s intricate tapestries of dream, lore, myth, dailv experience, and historical fact mark them as writers in the wake of Italo Calvino,Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. All the same, there has been some­ thing like a renewal of the values realists have traditionally stood for, and some shifts in compositional emphasis that suggest a movement: a new awareness of voice and of language as the echo cham­ bers of history and tradition, a conscious­ ness of region and place, a revived ethnic and regional sensitivity, a new awareness of traditional folk narrative, a distinct political animus. Furthermore, move­ ments within society as a whole and the cultural order in particular have been instrumental in the emergence of this new realism. 1. Pressure from “below,” “outside,” or “the margin” These are sensitive terms that can be misleading, and not everyone to whom they are applied looks kindly upon the ascription of marginality. (Though in our time, there is a cachet attached to being marginal or, better, “m arginal­ ized,” with its clear implication of having been nudged into the corner bv the dominant, “hegemonic" culture.) One problem with the term “marginal" is that not every non-white or female writer buys it, since what the critic needs for the sake of moral leverage is not always what the writer needs for the sake of a broadlv-based readership. The famous com­ plaint raised years ago by Saul Bellow that he, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud had become the H art, Schaffner and Marx of literature has got­ ten an amen from other hyphenated writers—Maxine Hong Kingston, for one—who protest that ethnic labels falsi­ fy their American identities by re-packag­ ing them as exotics rather than, as the title of Gish Je n ’s recent novel brashlv puts it, typical Americans. Moreover, “marginality” assumes the existence of a stifling cultural hegemony whose existence grows increasingly prob­ lematic. In culture these days, pluralism is in the driver’s seat and hegemonv is on the run, but who are the hegemonic writ­ ers and how exactly is their fiction an instrument of their control? Updike, who has just finished his Rabbit tetralogy about the decline of America? Tom Wolfe, who diinks we are all at sea on a ship of fools? Philip Roth, who wraps irony within irony in die construction of his elaborate counter-lives? Be that as it may, it is true that a fair proportion of the new fiction, sometimes referred to as “neo-realism," emerges from social groups whose stories have September, 1993 not been told and who seek expression through the main media of cultural dis­ sem ination. T he list of new realists includes Hispanic-American, ChineseAmerican, Native-American, and Black or African-American writers, and while there is a long and rich history of Black writing in .America, most Black writers are still seeking to be heard outside their own communities. To this list must be added women, and it is no accident that some of the most provocative writing from within the “marginal" groups is by women: Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko among Native-Amencans, Maxine Hong Kingston (in her non-fic­ tion), Amy Tan, and Gish Jen among Chinese-Americans, and Gloria Naylor, Tern- Macmillan, and scores of others am ong Black writers. Realism is the medium of new voices. The social pressure for muckraking realism has fused with a revived interest in folk narrative as an agent of minoritygroup “empowerment.” With the eclipse of the “master narratives” that once dom­ inated .American culture, the poverty of myth in our lives has had to be filled by local and regional stories that give con­ sciousness to our group affinities and form to our identities. From this perspec­ tive, what Louise Erdrich and Leslie Silko do for Native American culture, Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston are doing for Chinese-American culture and Cynthia Ozick for Jewish-American. Their middle-American counterparts might be writers like Lain- Woiwode, Annie D illard, and Alice M unro (a Canadian, but apposite here), whose sto­ ries of the small town life—German Lutheran life in North Dakota, pioneer life in the Pacific Northwest, and Scottish Presbyterian life in rural Ontario—give the B o o k pr e ss voice to insular existences that hat e dieir own places, times, manners and morals, their own specific weight. The most spec­ tacular instance of this is the surge in Southern writing, led by Bam- Hannah, Lee Smith, Fred C happell, Alan Gurganus, Madison Smartt Bell, LamBrown, Kaye Gibbons, Jill McCorkle, Dorothy Allison, and others. Each of these writers is earn in g out the same enterprise in his or her own terms. No Balkanized America has so far been imaged forth, but these writers and artists draw their energies from local communities, even if thev aspire to be read by some as-yet-undifferentiated community of the whole. Seen from a different angle, this inva­ sion from the margins may look like a naiivist rerival. The stark similarities, in voice and in region, between L.ouise Erdrich and Lain- Woiwode, between Love Medicine and The Neumiller Stories, both about life in the rural enclaves of N orth Dakota, suggests n ot so m uch their differences as their mutual partici­ pation in the same social movement: a renaissance of regional consciousness and regional lore. Indeed, I would pro­ pose that the realist revival is a broadlybased movement in which Black writers and W hite, Native-Americans and Chinese-Americans, Southerners and Northerners, men and women alike are all tiring to reclaim .American voices and reinterpret American experiences for largely die same audiences. The literatures that we call by the vari­ ous names of surfiction, metafiction, and postmodernism look to Europe for their muses, rather than to native ground, and to the extent that these literatures are enjoying their own small revival, it is see U.S. Fiction Today, page 15 Finding Home continuedfrom page 11 But while I can only understand From Where We Stand as a failure to find a sense of being at home, it also points out som ething Sanders neglects to consider— the large extent to which the ability to maintain a commitment to a place d e p e n d s on luck. It was good luck for Sanders that he landed in Bloomington, bad luck for Tall that she landed in Geneva. Would Sanders have “stayed pu t" if they had to rn down the houses across the street and constructed a shopping mall? It seems unlikely. If he had landed in Geneva would he have stayed? Hard to say. But it is easy to practice virtue when the gods smile on you, difficult when they make things hard. The other lesson here is that those who value a sense of being at home but have lost their own roots have the luxury of picking and choosing where to settle down. If they take the com­ m itm ent seriously they will choose carefully and then honor their com­ m itm ent. Like Sanders, they should sincerely seek to engage with the land and the people of the place they inhabit. But, like Tall, they should make that decision not on the basis of w here they happen to land, but according to where they truly feel at home. .As for me, Ithaca is still looking good. Michael Serino is a writer and editor, andJanice Levy is a professor of photogra­ phy, both at Ithaca College. Holsteiner D ELIK ATE SSE N and IM PO R T G R O C ER page 13 PORTRAITS IN STEEL P hotographs by M ilton Rogogvin Interviews by Michael F risch This powerful book—the result of a collaboration between a cele­ brated documentary photographer and an oral historian—records the unsettling experience of workers who lost th eir jobs in the steel mills of Buffalo, New York, and had to fashion new lives for them­ selves. 55 b&w photos. $49.95 cloth, $28.95 paper At bookstores, or call (607) 277-221/ (credit card orders only, please) CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Sage H ouse, 512 E. State St.. Ithaca NY 14850 In the DeWitt Mall. Seneca & C ayuga Streets Onee-a-year Sale Aug. 10-Sept.4 Original prints Japanese prints Imported rugs jewelry SOLA' ART GALLERY Dewill Mall Ilhaca. NY 14850 Tel: (607) 272-6558 Hrs: M on. Sal. 10:50 - 5:30 BERTRAND RUSSEL A POLITICAL LIFE NADEiriAN* £IOTHW0RK Tapestry Bags by DEB WHITER Working Member Elegant and durable tapestry and canvas bags including totes, shoulder bags, waist pacs and pouches The hag that's imitated from $5 to $60 HANDWORK Ithaca Cooperative Craft Store 102 W. Slate Street., Downtown Open Everyday • 273-9400 ALAN RYAN Alan Ryan tells the story o f Russell’s “ oth er life” as social critic, polemical journalist, antiw ar activist, sage and gadfly. Taking readers on an e n te r­ taining journey through a career that included tw o spells in jail, Ryan dis­ cusses Russell’s m ost visible cam ­ paigns— against tra d itio n a l religion, against the First W o rld W ar, against nuclear weapons, and against the Vietnam W ar, as well as his lifelong defense o f liberalism in education, politics, and relationships between the sexes. T hroughout, he em pha­ sizes the high spirits, the aristocratic fearlessness, and the wonderful com ­ bination o f w it and intelligence that Russell brought to his political w riting and actions. 240 pp., $12.95 paper Oxford U niversity Press 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY page 14 Little Rain the B OOKPRESS continuedfrom page 1 nent home at Stanford University, only 20 miles from my childhood home. But more important, the stories he tells about his family and their life on the land ring true to me—and to many other sons and daughters of the American West. He describes his youth traveling with a father who was always moving, always looking for the next big opportunity, the bonanza, the “Big Rocky Candy M o u n tain .” As S te g n er’s family m oved from Saskatchewan to Montana to Salt Lake City to Reno to Hollywood and back to Salt Lake City, my own grandfather, with family in tow, was moving from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Susanville, California, to Reno to Sunnyvale, California. To read Stegner is to hear my father speak. Stegner gives voice to what my father, who like many Westerners was better with his hands than with words, could only feel—a true sense of the American West and the people who lived there. Stegner’s father never found his “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and nei­ ther did my grandfather. They were good men, like thousands of others, but the land is too big, too arid, to be reshaped by the dreams of mere men and women, and it wore them o u t The West can only be coexisted with; it can’t be conquered. Stegner defines the West as the area beyond a line where the annual rainfall drops below 20 inches, starting in Western Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas and extending to the Pacific. The Pacific Northwest and the coastal strip of California he considers subregions; while they have much in common with the rest of the region, each has one important dis­ tinction—in the case of California, its abundant people, and in the case of the Northwest, its abundant water. Stegner writes: the Western landscape is more than topography and landforms, dirt and rock. It is, most fundamen­ tally, climate— climate which expresses itself not only as landforms but as atmosphere, flora, fauna. And here, despite all the local variety, there is a large, abiding simplicity. N o t all the W est is arid, yet except at its Pacific edge, aridity surrounds and encompasses it Aridity is the true essence of the West, what defines the region and its people. In Where the Bluebird Sings as in all his writings, the land is the hero, not the peo­ ple who have lived there. From the desola­ tion of the high desert, to the grandeur of the Rockies, to the big sky country of the high prairie, Stegner shows us how the land has m olded a segment of the American population and shaped the American Dream. But I think he’s trying to show us more. He describes how man’s constant assault on the land has been the outgrowth of a fundamental misunder­ standing of our relationship with the nat­ ural world. We attempt to remake the landscape to fit our dreams, instead of aspiring to understand the land and deriv­ ing our dreams from it. The sixteen essays here are organized into three suites. The first recounts Stegner’s personal life, and the second dis­ cusses the land itself and his view of it. He concludes with a critique of Western writ­ ers and his own writing life. In the suite entitled “P ersonal” he includes three essays: “Finding the Place: a Migrant Childhood,” “Letter, Much Too Late,” and “Crossing into Eden.” Here he exposes the values that make him and his writing unique. In discussing his life grow­ ing up, his relationship with his mother, Upstate New York authors from SUNY Press EMILY DICKINSON, WOMAN OF LETTERS Poems and Centos from Lines In Emily Dickinson’s Letters Lewis Turco is Professor of English and Director o f the Program in Writing Arts at the State University of N ew York College at Oswego. “...beautifully written by all h a n d s .” — H. R. C oursen, Bowdoin College Buried in Emily Dickinson’s let­ ters are many lines that are stun­ ningly beautiful, as beautiful as any to be found in her poems. Lewis Turco has taken some of these lines and written poems from them, on them, and around them. In addi­ tion to the poems collected here, Turco has written an informative introduction and included several essays by feminist critics and other scholars who discuss various as­ pects of Emily Dickinson’s letters. “I think Dickinson would have been fascinated."— Constance Car­ rier, winner of the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Po­ ets, author of The M iddle Voice, and The A ngled Road 164 pages $ 12.95 paperback THE RESTORATIONIST Text One A Collaborative Fiction by Jael B. Juba The authors, Joyce Elbrechtand Lydia Fakundlny, live and work in Ithaca, N ew York; their fields are philosophy and literature respectively. “Author! Author! The Restorationist could best be d e­ scribed as a Feiliniesque staging of narrative voices on a fictional proscenium placed between the conventional backdrop of the tra­ ditional novel and the orchestral pit of academic criticism. An in­ tensely funny encounter between a property owner and a woman of letters who together turn an ante­ bellum house into a post-realist experiment. Verywitty, very care­ fully wrought, it sets into motion a dialogic process which explodes public and private spaces of the haunted house of fiction. A d e­ light to explore and make o ne’s own!"— Nelly Furman 436 pages$24.50 hardcover only State University o f New York Press c /o CUP Services • PO Box 6525 • Ithaca. NY 14851 6 0 7 -2 7 7 -2 2 1 1 Please add S3 shipping and handling fo r firs t book ordered, 50< each additional copy. M asterCard, VISA, Am erican Express accepted. M ake checks payable to SUNY Press. New York State residents, add 8% sales tax. and a favorite lake he used to visit, he shows us the basis of his feelings about the Western myth, the value of family, and his philosophy of co-existence with and respect for the kind. “Finding the Place: a M igrant Childhood” describes Stegner’s personal witnessing of the Western mvthic hero in his father, traveling the west seeking the “mother lode,” never living in one place long enough to call it home, to learn its secrets, to feel its poetry. Stegner draws from this childhood his insights about the Western culture and myth. Westerners do not sink their roots deeply in any one place, and though they try to portray this as the norm, as good, Stegner say's it is this disjuncture with place that allows Westerners to treat the land with so little respect At the same time, and with some irony, he portravs the Westerner’s alle­ giance to the region, to the mountains, the deserts, the high prairie, and the power the land holds over those who grow up there. He recounts his sojourn in the East, teaching at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard, and his relief at retu rn in g to the West, to Stanford University: It is not an unusual life-curve for Westerners— to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspec­ tive that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment Stegner contrasts the mobility, lack of commitment to place, and immaturity of the Western culture with that of the East, where people have lived in the same com­ munity for generations and where the communities have a culture and a histoiy. In “Letter, Much Too Late,” Stegner addresses his mother thirty years after her death, as he approaches his eightieth birthday, and writes of how the family’s relendess moving cemented his relation­ ship with her. She, like my own grand­ mother, played a central role in the family, holding it together, trying to build a home, civilize the kids, build a culture, cre­ ate a sense of community wherever a group of people stopped long enough to put up houses. But she was a perpetual vic­ tim, always being ripped away from what she had made by the hero’s quest for for­ tune. I hear echoes of my grandmother as she followed my grandfather through log­ ging camps and ranches throughout Nevada, California, and Oregon. Grandma used to tell stories of how, just about the time she started getting a home established, Grandpa would come home with a team of horses and start building a wagon. He’d never say very much, but she 'Etchings & Watercolbrs Susan “Booth ‘Titus 2 0 8 The Commons, 2 n d J‘ to o r, Ith aca, 97)' 148SO 607-277-2649 September, 1993. knew. Soon they would be off again on some new hunt for adventure and “the good life.” In “Crossing into Eden” Stegner discuss­ es his conception of the Western land, and the importance of wilderness for the human psyche. Not to be conquered but loved and respected, the land has power to renew the spirit and rerive the soul. Stegner writes of his favorite lake, the hike from the desert to the high mountain vallev, and the bigness as he looked back down on the desert, which made him feel insignificant. Different people respond differendv to that feeling. Some revel in it while others fight it, wanting to change the land to make themselves feel more important. In this piece Stegner’s conser­ vationist ethic crystallizes as he testifies for the need for wilderness in .America: The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years o f contact w ith the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls’ good, but leave no tracks. In die second suite of essays he brings together some of his best works on the Western landscape and its effect on peo­ ple who try to live there. “Thoughts in a Dry land,” “Living Dry,” “Striking the Rock," “V ariations on a T hem e by Crevecoeur,” and “A Capsule Historv of Conservation” define the West as Stegner sees it. Bits of the East and Middle West are buried here and there in the West, but no physical part of the true West is buried in the East. The West is short-grass plains, alpine mountains, gevser basins, plateaus and mesas and canyons and cliffs, salinas and sinks, sagebrush and Joshua tree and saguaro deserts. The East is radically differ­ ent, and the people who came from the East did not have a culture that let them live with and respect the Western land for its uniqueness. In the last suite of eight essays Stegner critiques Western writers, many of whom were former students or close personal friends. Part of the great legacy Stegner leaves is an impressive list of contemporary authors. As D irector of Stanford University’s Writers Program from its inception until his retirement in 1971, he passed on his orientation to an imposing list of students, including Tom McGuane, Ed Abbey, Scott Momadav, Tillie Olson, Robert Stone, Jim Houston, Larrv McMuruy, Ernest Gaines, Wendell Bern , Max Apple, Scott Turow, Nancy Packer, Phillip Levine, Eugene Burdick, Robin White, and Ken Kesey. Many of these writ­ ers have helped to mold the American environmental movement and the growth of a land ethic in America. In “Coming of Age: the End of the Beginning,” Stegner bemoans the fact that there is no good aide of literature writing in the West, one who can see past the drugstore cowboys, horse operas, and strong silent heros, to the spirit and power of the land. He then becomes that criuc, as he surveys die writing of several Western authors. In two essays, Stegner critiques die work of Wendell Berry. In ‘The Sense of Place,” he writes: I know about this. I was bom on wheels, among just such a family. I know about the excitement of newness and possibility, but I also know the dissat­ isfaction and hunger that result from placelessness. Some towns that we lived in were never real to me. They were only the raw material of places, as I was the raw material of a person. Neither place nor I had a chance of being anything unless we could live together for a white. I spent my youth 'see Little Rain, page 20 September, 1993 the B OOKPRESS U.S. Fiction Today page 15 continuedfrom page 13 largely confined to New1York Citv. The kev figures in this movement are Paul Auster and Kathy Acker, who are the curators of what remains of the inetafictional remnant, and for them and the writers around them: Lydia Dads, Lvtine Tillman, Karen Finley and Amy Hempel, to name a few, the European connection is the great umbilicus to inspiration. 2. The market Fiction has always been a commodity, existing in the marketplace and subject to its law's. It arose coextensivelv with the bourgeoisie and was alwav-s a middle-class entertainment and middle-class consum­ able. What was unique about metafiction was that, during its heyday, it flourished semi-indepcndentlv of the market and made its mark through another econo­ my that raised its hand to support it: the academy. The laws of taste and value in the academy are opposed to those of the market: they are state socialist or ecclesi­ astical law's, in which value and the lan­ guages of value flow from the top down, from investilured taste-makers, the facul­ ty, to captive taste-consumers, students. As the outpost of the anti-hegemonic, the university becomes, almost by defini­ tion, the citadel of the anti-commercial, as it should be, though in being so it also relieves ail of the need to meet the tests of entertainment and popular approval. Realism, by and large, is a creature of the marketplace. It makes its initial claim to value (though not its ultimate claim to canonical status) as entertainm ent. Its first economic base is voluntary readers, not captive students. As a counter-institution that consumes culture in massive doses, die academy is also a counter-economy, which draws its sustenance from die dominant economy but dcplovx its intellectual and aestheuc resources against it. This division between two economies that operate bv different rules is explanauon enough of why, at a time when it has no obvious presence in American fiction, except perhaps through sci-fi and cyberpunk, post-modernism continues to thrive in die academy, where theories are as abun­ dant as basketballs in die NBA. Each economy has its own culture and history, the academic culture drawing its models largely from Europe while our novelists explore native ground. The avant garde is, almost by definition, the presence of Europe in America. Ijook to the heart of American criticism these days and you’ll find D errida, Lacan, Marx, Foucault, Adorno, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. Look to the heart of our fiction and you’ll find North Dakota, New Mexico, Oregon, and Louisiana. 3. Film If we are to look closely at the pres­ sure of market forces on literary forms, we are bound to see film as the most potent market factor of them all. Make no mistake about it; there is a Treasure Island a n d Hollywood is its nam e. Contrary to popular mvth, film has been the salvation of fiction, not its undoing. I would push this observation a step fur­ ther and sav that the current health of American ficuon is dependent substan­ tially upon the motion picture industry, for it ought to be clear that fiction in itself is not a profitable venture without subsidiary rights. T here just a re n 't enough readers to go aro u n d in America. The list of writers whose novels or sto­ ries have been made into films in the past fifteen years is virtually a who’s who of fiction. Here is a mini list of credits: William Stvron (“Sophie’s Choice”), E. L. Doctorow (“R agtim e”), R obert Stone (‘W ho’ll Stop the Rain?”), Joyce Carol O ates (“Sm ooth T alk”), Susan Isaacs (“Shining Through”), -Ann Beattie (“Head Over Heels”), William Kennedy (“Iro n w eed ”). Isaac Bashevis Singer (“E n em ies”), M arilvnne Robinson (“Housekeeping"), Alice Walker (‘T h e Color Purple”), Jay Mclnemev (“Bright Lights, Big Citv"). Bret Easton Ellis (“Less T han Z ero"), J o h n U pdike (“T he W itches of Eastwick"), Philip Roth (“Portnoy's C om plaint”), -Anne Tvler (T h e Accidental Tourist”), John Irving (“T he W orld A ccording to G arp "), William Burroughs (“Naked Lunch”), T. C oraghessan Boyle (“T h e Road to Wellville,” forthcoming), W. P. Kinsella (“Field of Dream s”), Larry McMurtrv (Texasville’V If money, markets, and the commodity status of art have any bearing on form and style, it is not bevond notice that it is the realists whose work is optioned bv the studios and made into films. (Make an exception for David C ronenberg's ingenious adaptation o f William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. But of course, as they sav in the studio boardrooms, “A rt’s nice, but what did it gross?”) Clearly the m oney for a w riter is in paperback publication, television adapta­ tion, and film, and all those factors favor a literature of swift and vivid stories, routinized apocalypses, and settings that are themselves vivid with local color. Neither requirement mandates realists as such, but they do favor those flashes of color and idioms of verisimilitude that were pioneered in realist fiction. Indeed, for an aspiring writer to set his or her sights on an avant garde career— to be, sav, a l=a=n=g=tt=a=g=e poet or this veal 's celebrated postmtxlern novel­ ist, is to surrender the possibility of mak­ ing a decent living, if not striking gold, from the labor of putting words on the page, and while there are always writers with the coutage—if that is what it is—to turn their backs on the big killing, the tug of money is as universal as that of gravity, operating on the literary culture as a whole, skewing die general direction of literature toward what might easily be converted into film. Writers are, as they have ever been, their own best commer­ cial exploiters, and the chance to sell out die dream of virtually all. The only ques­ tion is to whom one will sell, Hollywood or Hopkins. I don’t mean this to sound smug, since I scarcely disapprove of business or of artists making a living through it, and money aside, writers need audiences, The dead (siravaggw (from lirrrk fur man s Canam ggiof b\ Gerald Incandela and there is no writer who is wholly unaf­ fected bv the pressure of contemporary taste, or lack of same. If money were not an issue, fame, recognition, and the com­ mon hum an need for an audience would remain one, and film, however it may corrupt a writer’s words and distort his/her designs in the process of turning them into images, certainly gives the writer an audience. 4. A growing realization that prose can­ not “advance” without surrendering its identity as prose In an age of truly progressive arts like photography, film, video, and electroni­ cally-generated music, the capacity of prose alone to be polvsemous, multidi­ mensional, svnesihetic, and conscious­ ness-altering would appear to be limited. With those media now inexpensively available to artists to cam out the mod­ ernist project of deranging the senses and recycling consciousness, the pres­ sure is taken off prose to take the lead or even to follow suit. The modernist pro­ ject doesn’t need any more Finnegans Wakes or Cantos, and prose can go back to doing what it has traditionally done best: tell stories. Film, television, and video mav be thought of as the liberators of prose from revolutionaiy tasks that it never has performed with any great effi­ ciency. " 5. Class warfare This criterion needs to be applied cau­ tiously, but it seems that metafiction is finally a conceptual fiction that comes out o f and speaks largely to educated elites. It may be characterized as one of the social insignias of a mandarin sensi­ bility: status expressed as taste. At a moment in American history marked by the “disappearing m iddle" from our economy, there is simply not an audi­ ence large enough to sustain a literature that desires at once to “make it new” and also to make it big. One or the other must be sacrificed. A realist nevival might be thought of as the revenge of common sensibility, a demotic upsurge of taste from social orders that lack the leisure, and the will, to cultivate mandarin sensi­ bilities. The native mode of writing that most o f our novelists practice is pragmatic and experiential and represents a critique of abstraction of every sort. Does this sug­ gest th at fiction has su rren d ered its rights to the visionary and the apocahptic in favor of staving home and tending its own garden? In one sense, I think that is precisely the case, but we should not interpret that case too hastily. Formal conservatism does not always go hand in hand with conservatism of content. The visionary, the apocalyptic, and the radical can m anifest them selves in stories, images, and arguments, not in form or style. Indeed, with so much uibute being heaped these day upon the “subversive" thrust of postmodern writing, it can’t be emphasized enough that subversion doesn’t take the form of rupturing the text or “smashing hegemonic codes of discourse,” but in proposing new orders and visions that can be invoked within the range of common language. Writers know that instinctively; English profes­ sors will eventually catch on. Mark Shechner is a writer living in Buffalo and a regular reviewerfor the Bookpress. inoernmeall presents a new series in the Center for Theatre Arts: CINEMA OFF-CENTER September series: New Performance on Film and Video DOS coming to Cinema O ff-Center in October: WOMEN Exposing WOMEN 9 /7 Laurie Anderson’s CARM EN W ooster G roup's WHITE HOMELAND .enter COMMANDO 9 /1 4 Joe Gibbons' THE G E M U S (w ith Karen Finley) 9 /2 1 Charles A tla s ’ B EC AU SE WE M U S T (w ith Michael Clark) SON OF SAM AND DELILAH (w ith Dancenoise) 9 / 2 S> Samuel B e c k e tt d ire c ts E N D G AM E w ith Rick Cluchey and th e San Quentin Drama Workshop___________________ Tuesdays 7:30p.m. $2.00 Center for Theatre Arts Film Forum Pick up a Flicksheet calendar at the DeWitt Mall or in our theaters, or call 255-3522 for schedule information. LIKE a FILM ideological fantasy on screen, camera and canvas TIM O TH Y MURRAY Tim othy Murray investigates how the cinematic apparatus has invaded the theory of cu ltu re, weaving to g eth er the disparate ‘psycho-political’ fabrics o f cultural p ro d u c­ tion, psychoanalysis and politically m arked subject positions. The book analyzes the impact of the apparatus on a wide range o f cultural practices, and suggests that the many destabilizing traumas of culture remain accessible to us because they are struc­ tured so m uch like film. Responding directly to m ulticultural debates over the value of theory an d the aim of artistic practice. Like A Film addresses questions o f cultural iden­ tity, the role o f C o n tin en tal psychoanalysis an d philosophy, an d the ideological im por­ tance of artistic form. 288 pp., $49.93 doth $17.93 paper ROUTLEDGE Timothy Murray will he speaking on October 17 at The Bmkery's O ff Campus lecture senes. (See page 2 for details.) page 16 the ROOKPRESS September, 1993 From Where We Stand Probing other traditions—Chinese, Australian Aborigine, Native American— to discover the different ways people attach them­ selves to the land (or fail to) and why it matters, Tall considers the price Americans pay for their mobility and rootlessness. From Where We Stand is at once a celebration of human attach­ ment to place, a superb evocation of a particular place, and a per­ sonal chronicle of one woman’s striving to open herself to that place, to dwell in it alertly, so that she might at least know it and belong to it. 242 pp., $22 cloth Alfred A. Knopf New York A vailable at B ookery II DeW itt M all — Ithaca (607) 273-5055 Geography continuedfrom page 7 in some reviews as having said that the autom obile is going to disappear; 1 never said anything of the kind. I do think we’re going to have fewer auto­ mobiles in the future, partly because fewer people are going to be able to own them. But no am ount of redesigning the autom obile will give us our civic life back. T h e p o in t is to red esig n the hum an habitat so as to get places that are worth living in. J.B: In your book you describe how visitors to Greenfield Villlage, Henry F o rd ’s “old tim e Main Street USA,” like it very much, but can’t quite put their finger on why it feels good. Americans seem to instinctively like the old Main Street with its shops— without parking lots full of cars—but somehow, it’s not what we ended up with. J.H.K: People know how to make a good town. The problem is that their instincts and longings are in direct opposition to present building prac­ tices, laws, and regulations. J.B: In the book, you talk about zon­ ing as a prime villain. J.H.K: We invented zoning at the turn of the century, and it seemed like a good idea to have all these factories with their noxious pollutants go to their own part of the city where their dirt, smell, and noise w ouldn’t harm property values. J.B: Maybe this points at one of the roots of our trouble: rather than deal with a problem , we’ve tended to just put it somewhere else and pretend it’s not there. “O ut of sight, out of m ind”; last 50 years, we have ignored one of the most practical forms of cheap housing—apartments over stores. O ther than subsidized housing, the onlv kind of housing we’ve e n co u r­ aged, are single-family dwellings—sub­ sidized in a different way, by govern­ m ent policies and mortgage deduc­ tions. J.B: Where did the idea come from, that it’s “inhum ane” to let people live over stores? J.H.K: I d o n ’t know. We also think its inhum ane to have grocery’ stores in housing developments. I d o n ’t think I’ve ever seen a housing development in America that actuallv includes a cor­ ner store. J.B: But that m akes sense. As vou point out, the setback and lighting requirements would drop that corner store into the m iddle of a sea of asphalt and all-night mercurv-vapor lighting—not exactly a pleasant neigh­ bor. J.H.K; But you d o n ’t need the mer­ cury-vapor lights or even the parking lot. In Saratoga, we have corner stores without parking lots in the old neigh­ borhoods and they function very’ well; the people who operate them seem to be able to make a decent living. So it can be done. It’s a m atter of changing the zoning. J.B: In your book, you m entioned a strip mall in the Massachusetts town of Mashpee that had been converted into a kind of “town center.” J.H.K: Yes, they took this one-story strip-mall, built apartments on the sec­ ond floor, and turned the parking lot into a street by building on the other put all the obnoxious activities where thev’ll bother someone else. side of it and infilling it. By observing a few good rules of TRATTORIA TRE STELLE J.H .K : A fter W orld War II, it’s as though we decided that shopping was also an obnoxious activity in whose urbanism , they took a place that looked like now here and tu rn ed it into a place that looks like somewhere. proxim ity people were no longer J.B: What rules are those? Specializing in: Wood Fired Pizzas allowed to live. Zoning created the strip m all— which is an obnoxious place to shop. J.H.K; Well, for a place to have any’ civic vitality, it really helps if you have people living there. You go to a strip Roasted Seasonal Meats & Vegetables For hundreds of years, people had built their towns in a different way, with stores on the first floor and other mall at n ight and it’s a dead place, whereas a live downtown at night, like Saratoga, has people around and Wild Mushroom Dishes activities above: apartments, offices, all m ixed to g eth er. T h at was the basic pattern for the American small town, shops on the ground floor that come out to the sidewalk. The rules are reallv simple, the trouble is thev’ve been Italian Desserts and Wines and it’s not a bad pattern. People won­ der why small towns d o n ’t feel like they used to—it’s because zoning laws zoned out o f existence, except in places that are essentially antiques. J.B: Like Woodstock, Vermont. Courtyard Dining d o n ’t allow them to build small towns anymore. J.H.K; Yeah, or Georgetown (D.C.) or Beacon Hill (Boston), where peo­ If you look around America, you will ple feel a sense of community because 120 THIRD ST., TWO BLOCKS SOUTH, OFF RT. 13 notice a curious thing: every strip mall is one story high. We have a crisis of they can walk down a flight of stairs and out onto the street and buy a 607-273-8515 - OPEN DAILY, EXCEPT TUES. & WED. affordable housing in this country, and one of the reasons is that, for the new spaper, and then go back for breakfast, or go down the street to a An Elegant Gift For A Special Person W a ter fo r d crystal ^ Paperweights Clocks Plus stemware, barware, vases, candlesticks and bowls We are proud to be Ithaca's authorized Waterford dealer. The Plantation 130 Ithaca Commons • 273-7231 Thursday &Friday till 9:00; Saturday 10:00-5:30; Sunday 11:00-4:00 S U B S C R I B E XOW TO THE ’9 3 - ’9 4 S e a s o n the enter A s You Like It by W illiam Shakespeare Fefu and H er Friends by Maria Irene F orm s 'Hie Stran ge C ase o f Dr Jekyll and Mr IIyde adapted by D avid Edgar Mad Forest by Caryl ChurchUl D ance C oncert ’94- Red N oses by Peter Barnes Cornett llnioenity's Department ofTheatreArts 430 College Amnue A!! Seats W and 88 (607)*54-ARTS September, 1993 the B OOKPRESS page 17 of Nowhere Princeton University Press corner tavern and have a beer, or actu­ ally know the person they are buying their meat from. But our present artificial way of liv­ ing, created by zoning and govern­ m ent policies, isn’t going to be eco­ nom ically feasible m uch longer, because of the hidden costs. For example, every town and hamlet in America has to bear the expense of operating a mass transit line that runs onlv twice a dav, and onlv for people u n d e r 18. I t ’s called “a school bus fleet.” The costs are immense—we’re talking about millions of dollars for every small town in the country. T here’s no reason on earth those vehi­ cles couldn’t be used the rest o f the day for public transport, but thev’re not. We need to rethink some of these “settled" issues, or we're never going to have decent towns in America. When Robert Moses built his high­ way out to Jones Beach in the 1920s, he m ade the overpasses too low for busses, because he wanted onlv the people who could afford cars coming out to Jones Beach—in short, he was a snob. We p re te n d th a t w e’re th e m ost egalitarian countrv on earth. Yet, few countries segregate their people and activities as rigidly as we do. People who make less than S12,000 must live in this concrete can we call public housing; we can’t have any shopping or work places where people live. So everything is disconnected. T h a t’s n o t the way it used to be, when poor people lived right around the comer, or right upstairs from mid­ dle-class people, when all the children walked to school and played together. We pav a lot of lip service to being a democracy, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, we really don't allow democracy to exist. We d o n ’t want to live around people who are different. Forget racism— white people d o n ’t want to live around o th er white people who make less money. J.B: One of the standard arguments against the kind of planning that you advocate is that Americans won’t stand for governm ent interference in busi­ ness and private property. But you seem to be saying that most of the cur­ ren t situation is precisely because of governm ent interference in business decisions, from zoning restrictions to FHA-subsidized suburban tract-hous­ ing and government-subsidized high­ ways. J.H.K: Absolutely. J.B : So, as lo n g as th e r e is still m oney to be m ade, w hat’s going to change that? J.H.K: It’s changing already. I inter­ viewed a very interesting man nam ed Jo h n DeGrove, who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a major player in the revolutionary new land planning that’s going on down there. Thev now have what is called a “con­ cu rre n c y ” law, which req u ires the developers to do all the infrastructure work before they put in the develop­ ment, so they can’t just plop the hous­ es down and then say to the county, “Okay, here’s 7,000 new people, build schools for them .” Now the developers have to put in sewer lines, and do all the other things that were bankrupt­ ing m unicipalities. And as a conse­ quence you don’t have the same kind of development vou had before. Also, th e F e d e ra l g o v e rn m e n t is bankrupt. We’re out S500 billion from the savings and loan debacle; w e’re out several billion dollars from Hurricane Andrew, and that’s proba­ blyjust the first of many high-price dis­ asters w e’re going to suffer in the decade ahead. [We were speaking before the Mississippi flooding, another disaster magnified by Federal subsidies that encour­ aged people to build in theflood plains.] In an econom y with less m oney sloshing around, it’s not going to be possible to say “Go ahead, build your development on the beach, and if any­ thing goes wrong the government will pav for it.” So far we’ve postponed the reck o n in g by rolling over the debt. But we can’t keep doing it forever. J.B: And yet you are not—despite what some critics have said—a “zerogrowth” advocate either. J.H.K : T he question is not whether we're going to have developm ent— we’re going to have it. But the devel­ opm ent issues of the next decade are going to be different. What we’ve been doing in America is taking the functions of town life and sm earing them all over the country­ side. This has two consequences: it ruins the countryside, and it impairs the life of our towns. The towns that people like best are pedestrian-oriented, but we have built an in frastru ctu re th at serves only motorists. When we discover that our life, based on m otoring, is bankrupt­ ing us, we are going to build a differ­ ent kind of environment. A town is like an organism: it grows or it dies. The question is, Flow does it grow? W here does the developm ent b e lo n g ? W e’re g o in g to have to rethink those questions. Jeremy Bloom is a writer living in Albany. COMPULSIVE BEAUTY Hal Foster Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, Andre Breton, wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Qmjmlswf lifaut\. Foster reads surrealism from its other, dark­ er side: as an art given mer to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. Foster redefines the crucial categories of surrealism—the mar­ velous, convulsive beauty, objective chance—in terms of the Freudian uncanny, or the return of familiar things made strange bv repression. He considers the surrealist use of out­ moded images as an attempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a brief conclu­ sion Foster discusses the fate of surrealism today in a world become surrealistic. (impulsive Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American art history, it also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of mod­ ernism, the dominant accounts of which have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and tech­ nological development. Hal Foster is Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. 316 fifi., $25 doth The MIT Press CAMBRIDGE, MA A Jew in a violently anti-Semitic world, Sigmund Freud was forced to cope with racism even in the ''serious'' medical litera­ ture of the fin de siecle, which described Jews as inherently pathological, sexually degener­ ate, and linked in special ways with syphilis, insanity, and cer­ tain types of cancer. Did Freud's internalizing of these images of racial difference shape the ques­ tion of psychoanalysis? Here a leading expert on the represen­ tation of race and gender answers this question in the affirmative. Sander L. Gilman argues that Freud dealt with his anxiety about himself as a Jew by pro­ jecting it onto other cultural "inferiors"—such as the woman. Freud, Race, and G ender explores Freud's complex reaction to the medicalization of concepts about race, as revealed in his informal com­ m ents and letters, as well as references to these ideas in his published writing. Challenging those who separate Freud's theoretical creativity from his sense of being Jewish, this fresh view of the origins of psycho­ analysis will interest historians of medicine, as well as a broad range of readers concerned with Jewish studies, literature, and the intellectual and cultural history of the fin de siecle. 296 pp., $24.95 cloth Princeton University Press Sander L. Gilman w ill talk on September 19 at The Bookery's O ff Campus lecture series. (See page 2 for more details.) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Freud Illustration from S ir Charles Bell s Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 1824 SANDER GILMAN, HELEN KING, ROY PORTER, GEORGE ROUSSEAU, an d ELAINE SHOWALTER “S h e ’s H ysterical.” For cen tu ries, th e term “h y ste ria ” has been used by physicians and laymen alike to diagnose and dis­ miss the extreme emotionality and mysterious physical disorders pre­ sumed to bedevil others—especial­ ly w om en. How has this m edical concept assum ed its power? What cultu ral p u rp o ses does it serve? Why do different centuries and dif­ ferent circum stances produce dif­ ferent kinds of hysteria? These are among the questions pursued in this absorbing, erudite reevaluation of the history of hyste­ ria. The widely respected authors draw upon the insights of the new social and cultural history, rather than Freudian psychoanalysis, to examine the ways in which hysteria has been conceived by doctors and p a tie n ts, w rite rs and a rtis ts , in Europe and North America, from antiquity to the early years of the twentieth century. In so doing, they show that a history of hysteria is a history of how we understand the mind. 488 pages, $30.00 cloth UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS w vs page 18 Two from Yale Lilian Russell as Offenbach's (In m l Duchess o f O ro islew . 1800 O pera in America a Cultural History John Dizikes This book is the Hrsl comprehensive cultural and social history of musical theater in the US from 1735 to the present day. John Dizikes tells how opera, steeped in European aristo­ cratic tradition, was transplanted into the democratic cultural environment of America. Cienerouslv illustrated and engagingly written, the book is a fitting tribute to its subject—as grand and entertaining as opera itself. 624 pp., $35 cloth William Harnett. UU McMs. HW? American Iconology New Approaches to NineteenthCentury Art and Literature Edited by David C. M iller This overview of the "sister arts" of the nine­ teenth century by younger scholars in art his­ tory, literature, and American studies pre­ sents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society- Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. 360 pp., $40 cloth Yale University Press New Haven, Conn. DOVER a SCORES Broad selection in stock. 4: All titles available. Telephone orders welcome. Most orders placed by 2 p.m. arrive the following business day. Call 272-8262 Fax (607) 272-2203 O ut of tow n, 1-800-HICKEYS I t HICKEY’S MUSIC CENTER 104 Adam s S t., Ith a ca (off R t 13 a t D e y) M F 10-6. T h 10-8, Sa 10-5 • M a io r C re d it C ards the B OOKPRESS IS AVAILABLE AT THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS THROUGHOUT UPSTATE NEW YORK Ithaca: ABC Cafe A&P Airport. 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Specialty Co. Skaneateles Library Sherwood Inn Auburn: Cayuga Arts Council Cayuga Community College Finger Lakes Photography Lincoln Galleries Nature’s Storehouse Schwemfurth Museum Seymour Library Weed.sport: Weedsport Library September, 1993 letters continuedfrom page 2 Mr. Culler to view the poem as self-con­ tained. The poem is not, however, a char­ acter in the imaginative world created bv the poet; the poem is the vehicle present­ ing that world, and it cannot Like action inside of itself. When Mr. CTiller declares, ‘It [the poem] becomes knowing onlv bv supposing the Secret.” I do not under­ stand what these words mean. When he rises to a vision of the poem “holding itself up to view as it makes a secret into the supreme knower,” I can onlv read what he says with wonder. Rhetoric is less strained and the poem is more human, m ore moving, if it is in te rp re te d as expressing the sardonic view of a Speaker who has become disillusioned with the hope that he could some dav undersLind the significance of human activitv on this small planet in a vast universe. Mr. Culler has an explanation whv it is better to speak about what the poem or its elem ents do than to attribute the poem 's characteristics to the poet: "Describing parts of the poem as doing this and th a t” and thus “treatin g [them]...as actors enables a critic to avoid tendentiouslv indentifv[ing] the poet's thought with every statement or implica­ tion that mav appear in his fictions.” Further, “A critical vocabulary could not be responsive to the workings of lan­ guage if it could onlv describe effects in the poem bv attributing them to the deci­ sions of the author.” I am sure that Mr. Abrams would agree that identifving every statement or impli­ cation of a literarv work with the author would be tendentious, and that a critical vocabulaiv that could only describe effects bv attributing them to the author's deci­ sions would be inadequate. Nothing Mr. Abrams has written justifies insinuating that his critical views are so doctrinaire that he can never talk about the effects created bv meter and rhvme, or the other innumerable workings of language, with­ out attributing them to die author's deci­ sions. When Mr. Abrams expresses a desire for acceptance of authors “as pur­ poseful agents capable of initiative, inten­ tion. design, and choice," he is objecting to the practice of treating works of litera­ ture as subjects, as selfcontained entities, as agenLs that can themselves initiate and create effects. Mr. C uller’s exclusive attention to the play of language in The Secret Sits” enables him to disregard the storv of this poem and treat it as if it were self-contained, but in my opinion his analysis of this poem reveals the inconsis­ tencies and confusions inherent in the dogmatic approach to literature of a deconstructionist. William TerwiUiger ProfessorofEnglish (retired) Ithaca College books,quality toys and puzzles, & superior stationary selections 44 Washington Avenue, Endicott, NY 748-8233 September, 1993 S till Life the BQOKPRESS page 19 Gil’s Book Loft continuedfrom page 3 with his powers of abstraction that gives dram a to his work, and it is his resolution of that tension that evokes a sense of ultimate harmony. In my view, it is Cezanne’s practice of seeing and doing that is far more im portant nowa­ days than the legacy of revolutionary vanguard influence assigned to him by conventional art historians. While no one can know what went on in his mind as he worked, it is my belief that the distortions that were later adopted as stylistic devices by the Cubists were possibly either inadver­ tent or inept, that they came about in the heat of battle while he was deeply engaged in a search for relationships among the forms. And it is mv guess that after he had arranged his setup with great precision, he moved very close to it to work, the better to see what was going on, and that the tilted axes, the m ultiple perspectives, the interrupted or coincidental contours came about partly because of his physi­ cal proxim ity to the scene, looking down on the setup, and partly because his attentive gaze moved through the a rra n g e m e n t inch by inch as his search led him from one area to another. Consequently, fragmented and dis­ connected segments appeared, but his years of study in the Louvre had condi­ tioned him to a deep awareness of classic M editerranean pictorial struc­ ture: a system in which in tern al rhythms echo the vertical and horizon­ tal framework o f the basic rectangle, and the visual energies of each form, the speed of its contours, its axial direction, tonal weight, color attrac­ tion, and texture are m aintained full force by responsible co n tro l o f all encounters and juxtapositions of the forms. This discipline sustained him in reaching a resolution of his own con­ tradictions and enabled him to pro­ duce paintings that have an aura of inevitable rightness and truth. It is wonderful that the simple act of selecting a few hum ble items of daily life, contem plating them , and defin­ ing their abstract relationships could have produced the range of still-life painting that flowered in the early part of this century. When Braque and Picasso appropriated Cezanne’s frac­ tured planes and reduced the world to tones of black, white, um ber, and ochre, direct references to the initial setup all but disappeared, but later, in Synthetic Cubism, they used their arrangem ents as points of departure for the invention of decorative forms of great elegance, organized with clas­ sic clarity and enriched with sophisti­ cated French color. Morandi, on the other hand, cosset­ ed his little flock of domestic items, moved them about on a table top, huddled together or apart, fully aware that the resulting changes of propor­ tion and the spatial intervals between the forms were momentous matters. Matisse, with his om nivorous eye for the sensuous charms of the physical world, used his seductive and witty sense of decoration as a counter to 20th-century angst, while Giacometti recorded his perception of alienation in ashen tones and marks that trace his eye movements between objects and their environment, thus building up a visual structure that fixes the object in space like a captured biologi­ cal specim en. By contrast, B onnard revealed the splendors of his bour­ geois environm ent with still lifes that are a pure affirmation of joy in the beauty of the world. And, of course, there were other painters who added their own contributions to this age-old painting style—Leger, Gris, and the English painters Nicholson, Hanson, and Sutherland. Given the preem inent achievements of all these artists, coupled with the current low state of the genre and the fashionable notion that the art of painting itself is dead, it may seem that still-life painting in p articular has nothing more to offer. Yet the beauty and mystery of the forms of our envi­ ronm ent remain, and the possibility of fresh individual perceptions of their abstract potential also rem ains. On these assumptions, implausible as it may seem, I am advocating, by exam­ ple, a revival of still-life painting as a corrective to the wayward floundering of contemporary’art. For such a creation to subvert the status quo and establish quality rather than novelty as an aesthetic goal, it should be based on direct observation of form s and portray them with unequivocal fidelity; no easy ambigui­ ties, no random titillations, just a barebones delineation of forms in space. In this condition of simplicity, the ideal m odern still life should provide metaphoric equivalents for the varied experiences of life and im ages of orderly progressions in space solely by artful arrangem ents of the forms. It should make use of the traditional powers of proportion, symmetry and asymmetry' to generate visual excite­ ment, and it should offer a wide range of formal subtleties as a true source of co n tin u in g aesthetic pleasure. If all these radical things were done, there might be some life left in still life after all. Kenneth Evett, professor emeritus of A rt at Cornell University, painted the rotunda murals for the Nebraska State House as winner of a national competi­ tion in 1954. During the 1970s he wrote art criticism for the New Republic. He has had ten one-man shows at the Kraushaar Galleries in Nezv York, and has recently been elected to the National Academy of Design. Quality Used Boohs... Records, Ephemera and Fine Art V 82 C ourt Street, 2nd Floor B inghanm ton, NY 13901 (607) 771-6800 Gil Williams, Prop. Classifieds BOOKS ART LESSONS SM ED LEY’S B O O K SH O P Ithaca’s feminist bookstore. Books and much more. 307 W. State St. (607) 273-2325 Drawing and Painting Lessons My studio or your home. Credentials: Teaching Artist Southern Tier Institute for Arts in Education, CSMA, Kaleidoscope (6 0 7 ) 257-5925Lew Dabe has over 3,000 out of print books on art, photography, architecture, antiques plus many other subjects. A t Serendipity II Antiques Rt. 14, Pine Valley, NY Large stock of Old Prints Plus eight Antique Dealers Open every day (717) 247-7285 Serendipity (607) 739-9413 Teaching all mediums, all ages, and levels Benn Nadelman (6070) 277-7544 PSYCHOANALYSIS W illiam W ittlin, M.D. Board Certified Psychiatrist Announces the opening of his practice. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adults, adolescents and families $ 10 for the first ten words One of Western New York States Finest Established 10 years Exciting Location Consistently Profitable Rome Celli RE/MAX W harton Associates 800-388-6654 CLASSIFIED RATES $.75 each additional word Classified will be entered with given capitalization and punctuation; boldface first words and italicized titles are acceptable. T he Bla c k A t l a n t ic Modernity and Double-Consciousness Paul G ilroy Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, Caribbean Studies, British Studies, To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in there camps, this bold book sounds a liber­ ating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Carribean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unre­ marked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism 320pp., $24.95 O nly W ords C atharine A. MacKinnon "If there is anything that only pornogra­ phy can say, that is exactly the measure of the harm that only pornography can do." —Catharine MacKinnon When is rape not a crime? When it’s pornography—or so First Amendment law seems to say: in film, a rape becomes “free speech.” Pornography, Catharine MacKinnon contends, is neither speech nor free. Pornography, racial and sexual harassment, and hate speech are acts of intimidation, subordination, terrorism, and discrimination, and should be legally treated as such. Only Words is a powerful indictment of a legal sys­ tem at odds with itself, its First Amendment promoting the very inequalities its Fourth Amendment is supposed to end. 112pp., $14.95 Harvard University Press T he Sc a r of R ac e Paul M. Sniderman and T homas P iazza Once it seemed so sim­ ple. For anyone who had a conscience, any­ one who had a heart, the issue of race was summed up in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But now the questions and answers aren’t so clear. What precisely is the clash over race in the 1990s, and does it support the charge of a “new racism,” more subtle and covert than the bigotry of a generation ago? These are the questions Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza set out to answer in this book. It is a brilliant artic­ ulation of how racial issues have become entangled with politics—who gets what through government action. 192pp., $18.95 page 20 Little Rain the B OOKPRESS September, 1993 continuedfrom page 14 envying people who had lived all their lives in the houses they were bom in, and had attics full of proof that they had lived. In “A Letter to Wendell Berry,” Stegner opens his heart to his former student; The more my admiration goes out to a man or woman personally, and not to some performance o r accomplishment, the harder it is fo r me to express. The closer I come to reticence.... When I quote you, as I often do, I am paying tribute to your verbal felicity, which is always there, but I am really quoting you for qualities of thoughtfulness, character, integrity, and responsibility to which I respond, and to which I would probably respond if they were in pidgin. In the last essay, Stegner discusses his own approach to writing, describing how his fiction, nonfiction, biography, and his­ tory inform one another. Much of his fic­ tion is autobiographical, and he has this to say about the role of the author in writing fiction: When we invent fictional characters, as when we invent gods, we often invent them in ou r own image; we create the unknown out of the materi­ als o f the known. The worlds that novelists create, even the fantasy worlds of space and backward o r forward time are made out of the details of the world we were bom into.... I do believe that the real world exists, and that literature is the imita­ tion of life.... He places his writing in the Western American literary landscape when he says: I have been trying to make natural chaos into human order, trying to make sense of an ordinary American life, for a long time now, more than fifty years. The West, in which I have spent most of my life, is not simply a retarded culture, though for a time [in the late 19th and early 20th century] it was. It is also a different culture from that of the literary capital [of the East, specifically New York City], a different culture with different drives and assumptions and prides and avenues of opportuni­ ty. School and college do sandpaper the roughness of the frontier, but the frontier leaves its tracks. My first fifteen years were migrant and deprived, my next fifteen aspiring and academic and literary and deprived, my last fifty-odd academic and liter­ ary and not so deprived. It is progress, of a so rt I suppose; but I am still the person my first fifteen years made me. I think Stegner would agree that like him, the West has matured, it has made progress of a sort, but despite this maturi­ ty, it is still the land it was in the beginning. In Where the Bluebird Sings, Stegner repudi­ ates the popular idea of the mythic Western hero: ruggedly individualistic, self-reliant, and given to violence in the protection of righteousness. In so doing, he gives us a key to understanding the depths of environmental controversies in the West, such as the spotted owl debate or the fight for wilderness protection. But to fight for the land or the owl we have to repudiate the myth and give up our dream of changing the land. To repudiate it is to say the Westerner is wrong; that all the folks who believe in the myth, who try to live the myth, all those TV shows and movies, are chasing a West that does not exist and never did. But once again Stegner points out it is the land that gave rise to that hero. To protect the land is to protect what is the true essence of the myth. Time and again, he explains that the land underpins the Western culture as it matures and creates new myths, that it The Sheepherder, by Thomas Hart Benton will persist long after the mythic hero has give our parents. Western culture was passed into cultural history. young then, he says, and the culture and To Westerners he says our relationship dreams our parents brought there weren’t to the land is a living, growing thing. He wrong, simplv m isplaced. They were makes us recall it was our parents and doom ed to fail in a place where gold grandparents who filled die ranks of the might be King, but water was God. The conquering armies and commanded the relationship our parents had with the land assaults on the earth. My grandfather was must grow during this and future genera­ a logger. He helped to open up the tions into a relationship “reinformed with Coquille River country in Oregon. He spirituality, art, respect for the earth, a probably logged a lot of spotted owl habi­ knowledge of good and e\il.” He urges us tat in the process. My grandmother, who to remember lived with him and cooked in the logging camps, came from a cattle ranch her something about the West's difficult becoming, grandfather homesteaded in the Washoe something about its mistakes and crimes, some­ Valley where he raised meat for the min­ thing about its spiritual birthright sold for a mess of ers of the Comstock Lode. Loggers, ranch­ pottage, something about its hope... That the ers, and miners; are there any others that Western experience is more than personal: it is we blame more for the rape of the West3 1 part of the process of civilization-building. think sometimes that like the children of murderers, our lives are consumed by try­ ing to repay the \ictim. Roland Shanks is currently a Ph.D. candi­ If Stegner admonishes us to respect the date in Natural Resources Policy and land, he also has the grace to help us for- Management at Cornell University. Become a Friend of the Bookpress * In Our New Location With Twice The Room * The Friends of the Bookpress are individuals interest­ ed in supporting the continued publication of upstate New York's only literary newspaper. In addition to providing financial assistance, members are welcome to participate in all aspects of the production and dis­ tribution of the paper on a voluntary basis. Other planned activities include workshops, conferences, and guest speakers. There will be at least one general meeting of the Friends each year to which members will be invited. The Bookpress is a non-profit corpora­ tion and, pending Federal approval, all gifts will be tax -d e d u ctib le . W ith y o u r g e n ero u s s u p p o rt, the Bookpress will continue to be a vital resource for w rit­ ers and readers in the upstate region. Enclosed is my gift to the Friends of the Bookpress: □ $500 or above: Life Member □ $250 -$500: Charter Member □ $100-$250: Sustaining Member □ $50-$100: Member □ $25: Student Nam e ___________________ ____________________ A d d re s s _______________________ _____________ P h o n e _______________________________________ fine rugs Under the Red Awning at 112 The Commons ♦ Downtown ♦ 273-7184