The Lost Frontier

Mark Asquith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623563356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The success of The Shipping News and the film of Brokeback Mountain brought Proulx international recognition, but their success merely confirms what literary critics have known for some time: Proulx is one of the most provocative and stylistically innovative writers in America today. She is at her best in the short story format, and the best of these are to be found in her Wyoming trilogy, in which she turns her eye on America's West-both past and present.
Yet despite the vast amount of print expended reviewing her books, there has been nothing published on the Wyoming Stories. There is appetite for such a work; the plethora of critical work on McCarthy's Border Trilogy indicates that the reinvention of the West is a subject for serious academic study. Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories fills this critical void by offering a detailed examination of the key stories in the trilogy: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), Fine Just the Way it Is (2008). The chapters are arranged according to western archetypes-the Pioneer, Rancher, Cowboy, Indian, and, arguably, the most important character of them all in Proulx's fiction: Landscape. Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories offers students a clear sense of the novelist's early life and work, stylistic influences and the characteristics of her fiction and an understanding of where the Wyoming Stories, and Annie Proulx's work as a whole, fits into traditional and contemporary writing about the American West.

1

Landscape

‘Every single thing I write comes from landscape’, Proulx claims.¹ The assertion is bold and simple and masks the complexity entailed by the conceptually slippery term ‘landscape’. To the contemporary ear it implies an aesthetic appreciation of the land with possible moral undertones; a term to be employed by observers enjoying a view from which they can depart, rather than an inhabitant struggling to make a living. It recalls the awe that characterized Proulx’s first reactions to Wyoming, subsequently articulated with great narrative irony by Mitchell Fair. For Proulx, however, this is scenery: landscape reduced to postcard sublimity and deployed by ‘localist’ writers to give a sense of exoticism and place to their dramas.² And there are fewer regions as rich in scenic iconography as the West. The early western novels of Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote are easily locatable through the description of endless plains, hoodoos, rolling tumbleweed, and cowboys in leather chaps. It is a visual grammar easily transferable to the screen: a shot of Monument Valley overlaid with a scratchy harmonica not only transports an audience West, but also evokes a hundred years of cowboy history.³

For Proulx, landscape is not something her characters move through, it is something they experience. As such there is a strong relationship between landscape and identity: ‘I am something of a geographic determinist’, she has claimed, ‘Geography, geology, climate, weather, the deep past, immediate events, shape the characters and partly determine what happens to them.’⁴ The story, in effect, grows out of the environment: her characters are moulded by the geography, climate and history of the region, allowing landscape to become the dominant character in her fiction. It is a view at odds with the modern penchant for the psychological novel, in which landscape is simply the mat unrolled by the acrobat before he commences his act. Consequently, critics have aligned her with an older tradition of ‘naturalist’ writers, such as Willa Cather, Ole Edvart Rolvaag and John Steinbeck, chroniclers of the rural dispossessed whose stories are set against brooding landscapes. For Cather and Rolvaag the story of the West is the story of man’s confrontation with an inhospitable environment; a struggle transformed by Turner into a process by which pioneers are transformed into Americans. In Rolvaag’s The Giant in the Earth (1927), the giant in question is not man, but rather a character trait of the plains; a conclusion reinforced by the novel’s full title: A Saga of the Prairie. It is the land that speaks first: the rustle of the grass crushed by the wheels of the pioneer wagons is simultaneously a voice of complaint and defiance, reminding us that the plains will be there long after man has disappeared. It is a message that echoes throughout Proulx’s fiction.

Such writing, Proulx argues, belongs to the ‘Golden Age’ of American landscape fiction (a period that fell roughly in the first half of the twentieth century) when the plot of a story was intimately tied to the location in which it was set. This period came to an end with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), in which the characters’ contempt for the authority of the natural world revealed a widening gap between urban and rural America: ‘a gap that is now a vast chasm’. Since this time, landscape description has fallen out of fiction because it has fallen out of everyday American lives. Most contemporary Americans, she observes, only come into contact with the natural world as they drive through it and then ‘the landmarks we look for and at are motels, signs, eateries, gas stations. The larger landscape is simply amorphous background.’ As a consequence, fiction writers have turned their backs on ‘what is out there’ in favour of ‘exploring the personal interior landscape’.⁵

There is, as there tends to be with such sweeping generalizations, nostalgia in Proulx’s evocation of a ‘Golden Age’ which ignores the huge interest in landscape writing that emerged in the mid-1990s under the umbrella term ‘ecofiction’. Its importance is signalled by the simultaneous rise of ‘ecocriticism’ (the inaugural meeting of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) took place in 1992 at the conference Western Literature Association, held that year at The Sands Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada – the year that Proulx’s essay was published) as an academic discipline designed to remind readers that human relationships with nature are not marginal, but at the core of many texts.⁶ Furthermore, as Proulx herself concedes, although landscape description has been disappearing from fiction it has re-emerged in the essays and non-fiction of writers such as Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez and Gary Snyder. These are not escapist works; rather they are concerned with man’s relationship with his environment. Berry and Snyder, the latter influenced by his interest in eastern religions, offer a spiritual relationship with the landscape (one in keeping with Native American tradition), which traces the disease of modern society to man’s dislocation from the land. Michael Kowalewski and Cheryll Glotfelty explain this unexpected popularity by pointing to the success of the environmental movement in increasing ordinary Americans’ awareness of the natural world, combined with an interest in ‘regional writing’ (writing which emphasizes its connection to a certain geography) as a reaction to increasing disenchantment with national politics.⁷

This, however, is not the kind of landscape fiction that Proulx is talking about. To begin with, the term ‘regional writer’ does not connote a brave new world of expansive landscape fiction in the style of Steinbeck, but rather a provincialism that is the literary kiss of death to writers seeking to engage a larger audience. As Kowalewski notes: ‘“Regional fiction at its best” is a blurb emblazoned on any number of remaindered novels.’⁸ Proulx is well aware of the ‘regional writer trap’, but inverts it to claim that she is in fact a ‘writer of many regions’, which, as it happens, are not that different in terms of ‘the economic situations and the beliefs of the people who live in them’.⁹ More significantly, as the term eco suggests, the landscape that appears in contemporary fiction is more likely to be the victim of human behaviour than its determinant. It has, as Proulx observes, been transformed from dangerous ground to fragile earth.¹⁰ To Montanan writer, Rick Bass, the destruction of the natural environment is the defining issue of our times. Yet his critique is small scale and domestic. His targets in stories like the ironically titled ‘Days of Heaven’ are urban outsiders who, like the ‘urban bumpkins’ lampooned in both Heart Songs and The Wyoming Stories, leave a trail of destruction in their wake.¹¹ Other writers, by contrast, have sought to highlight much broader abuses. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Sharman Apt Russell’s Kill the Cowboy (1993) have been instrumental in drawing attention to the environmental costs of unsustainable ranching methods. Others have confronted the implications of the ‘nuclear West’. Leslie Silko’s Ceremony (1977) compares the Native American spiritual relationship with the white world’s pursuit of uranium for nuclear weapons; while more recently, Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1992) has offered an account of her mother’s struggle with cancer (which she blames on nuclear testing), set against the gradually rising water levels of the Great Salt Lake: essentially the feminine body of both mother and mother nature has been contaminated and has now turned in upon itself.

The result of the ‘regional’ and ‘eco’ revolution is that writers hoping to re-establish the importance of landscape in their fiction are struggling with its cultural shift from oppressor to victim, combined with the danger of their work being branded ‘regional’. There have been plenty of attempts, but Proulx argues that even novels which seem to foreground the environment in the development of plot, such as Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) (in which she relocates King Lear’s division of his kingdom between his three daughters to a Iowa farm), present the land as little more than ‘a vague substance to be worked by agricultural machinery’.¹² More successful, perhaps, has been the use of the physical environment in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1981), which traces the lives of three generations of the Stone family living on the shores of lake Fingerbone. The town, like so many western towns, is dominated by its geography; the brooding mountains and the bottomless lake remind the residents of the fragility of their situation. The futility and transience of human endeavour is symbolized by the abandoned mines and quarries that ring the town: ‘There was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was … anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that Fingerbone was a meager and difficult place.’¹³ It is the lake that claims the lives of the grandfather and mother of the novel’s narrator, Ruth; a symmetry that highlights Robinson’s aim of offering a feminist critique of the traditional western narrative. For where the grandfather’s pioneering legacy is inscribed in the landscape and looms over the lives of his daughters, the mother’s contribution has remained silent and unremarked: women have no place in either the landscape or the West’s conception of itself.

In the novels of Montana writer, Ivan Doig, whose work seems particularly relevant to Proulx, it is possible to chart the transformation of the landscape from the brutal taskmaster to victim. The former is presented in his western writer This House of Sky (1978) and the first two parts of the Montana trilogy – English Creek (1984) and Dancing at Rascal Fair (1987); the latter is depicted in the final part of the trilogy, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990). Like Proulx, he is a trained historian and his earliest work reflects the naturalist credo that people’s lives are irrevocably bound up with their environment. However, although the plot of the autobiographical House of Sky may read like a Cather novel, the landscape is made relevant to the contemporary reader through the avoidance of cliché and abstraction. Instead, he engages in close observation combined with the kind of linguistic vitality – compressed and inverted syntax, neologism, noun-verbs – that brings to life the sinister semi-anthropomorphized landscape familiar in Proulx’s writing. When the contemporary West makes its appearance in Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, it is viewed with a mixture of nostalgia and pity rather than fear. Set in 1989, Jick McCaskill, the narrator of English Creek, is a retired rancher who is taken around Montana by his daughter and her estranged husband. The landscape of Jick’s youth is now eviscerated by mining companies, overgrazed by agribusiness, and poisoned by chemical companies. The independent ranchers have sold up, their children (like Jick’s son-in-law) unwilling to take on the hardship and responsibility of ranches, which now lie deserted. Their struggle is memorialized in ghostly cabins and the epithet ‘place’ – as in the ‘Catlin place’ – which become in Doig’s work part of an imaginative map that ties a family’s struggle and defeat to a particular piece of land.¹⁴

In many ways, Proulx’s Wyoming Stories set out to tell the family story behind Doig’s vacant ‘places’, while simultaneously acknowledging the parlous state (the pollution, pipelines and power cables) of Wyoming’s present. This requires a new conception of landscape, which is not a return to the pastoral nostalgia of the localists, who simply validate western mythology through the employment of clichéd symbols; nor is it a recreation of the magnificent, but culturally evasive descriptions of McCarthy; rather it is a more inclusive conceptual understanding that seems appropriate for the postmodern world. The problem is that we are fixated upon false dialectics – landscape/cityscape; beauty/squalor; past/present – without acknowledging, Proulx argues, that it is only possible to isolate the ‘wilderness’ in the mind. Everything, she argues, is linked – geography, bulldozers, black squirrels and jet trails – and nothing is ‘pure nor static’.¹⁵ According to this understanding, landscape becomes a social player rather than a backdrop; a protagonist in a dynamic form of cultural practice; a ‘verb’ rather than a ‘noun’; an agent of power, rather than a symbol of power relations.¹⁶ It becomes a dynamic cultural product, existing in a state of reciprocity with the inhabitants who live upon it: it moulds their lives even while they alter it. This more dynamic interpretation, however, implies a less selective view of landscape, one that recognizes that beauty and squalor are often held in a delicate balance; that landscape is both the Yellowstone Park and the Coke cans lying in the visitors’ car park.

Once we have acknowledged this broader definition, landscape ceases to be simply a picturesque but narratively irrelevant background and once again moves to the foreground as a major fictional presence helping to define both plot and character. It is easy to see the influence of the Annales School here; any community comprises a cultural landscape determined by factors such as geography, climate, economic trends and social conditions, which bring about slow, incremental change. This rejects a top-down explanation of social evolution in favour of the study of ordinary people interacting with each other and their environment over the longue durée. We can also see the influence of Proulx’s interest in contemporary photography, particularly the work of ‘topographers’ like Robert Adams and Mark Klett, whose panoramas combine traditional scenic views with unsightly features that remind us of man’s presence, such as billboards and oil pipelines.¹⁷ The latter’s mid-1970s project, re-photographing images captured in the original photographic Land Survey (a nineteenth-century attempt to capture Manifest Destiny through the lens), is of particular interest. It undermines the historical authority of the former by going ‘beyond the idea of the West as an exotic place out there’, representing it instead as ‘a place where millions of people live’.¹⁸ We can see the full implications of Proulx’s new approach to landscape in her treatment of U.S. Route 1 on the southern New England coast. Today it is a particularly depressing stretch of road, characterized by disfiguring signage and cheap motels. But it follows the more romantic wooded Indian Pequot path, a trail resonant with a history of conflict and betrayal. This landscape is not manicured to conform to the expectations of the viewer, but is a dynamic environment in which history, imagination and reality are in tension. The work of the writer, Proulx argues, is to remind the viewer of this more romantic past without falsifying the present.¹⁹

This intention can be observed in action in her panoramic description at the beginning of ‘People in Hell’ (CR); an opening that acts as a preface to the Wyoming Stories as a whole:

YOU STAND THERE, BRACED, CLOUD SHADOWS race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country – indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky – provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. (107–8)

Proulx’s breakdown of dialectics begins with the aesthetic distancing of the reader. In ‘Dangerous Ground’ she takes issue with John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s old-fashioned but surprisingly persistent definition of landscape as: ‘a portion of the earth’s surface that can be comprehended at a glance’. She quotes approvingly the argument put forward by Native American novelist Leslie Silko that such a definition ‘assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory he or she surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on.’²⁰ In the passage above we are at a moment when, according to Proulx, the viewer (who may be a character), the reader and writer ‘stand metaphorically in both the unwritten and the written landscapes and enter the territory on the page at the same time it is created in the mind’.²¹ Significantly, as the second person pronoun indicates, we are not an outsider viewing a landscape from a comfortable distance; we are in the midst of the weather and wind and planted firmly on the rocks, our response orchestrated by a narrator who possesses both acuity of vision and insider’s knowledge unavailable to the static reader.

Proulx seems to take her cue from Cather, ‘The wild country’ reminding us of the description of ‘The Wild Land’ at the beginning of O Pioneers! (1913): ‘The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.’²² There is an epic cadence to her description that momentarily raises us to a height suspended above the grime of the domestic tragedy about to unfold. The wind is not regional but the product of the rotating earth, and we experience a ‘spiritual shudder’ at the immensity of the distances contemplated. This is not a landscape to be viewed, but felt, the syntax and lexical structures mirroring the harshness of the description: it claws at the stomach, while a lexis of adverbs and adjectives – ‘shudder’, ‘queasy’, ‘rash’ and ‘mottled – suggest sickness rather than awe. This is ‘dangerous’ but ‘indiffer...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1  Landscape
• 2  Pioneers
• 3  Ranchers
• 4  Cowboys
• 5  Indians
• 6  Losers
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright